If there were to exist within you, right now, emerging potentials that are lucid, awake and enlightened and know the shortest way for you to become enlightened, wouldn’t it be worth your time to learn to listen to what they have to tell you and to follow their recommendations?
Integral Deep Listening (IDL) is a form of Dream Yoga. It assumes that an increasingly awake waking identity in all states is our priority, because our waking sense of self is the executive consciousness that perceives dreams while asleep and makes decisions about when and if to interact in them. If your waking sense of self- the self that is reading these words at this moment – is living in a state of delusion, then when it wakes up in dreams it will experience, interpret, and interact with the dream in the context of that delusion. It will simply export its waking dream into and onto night time dreams, even when lucid dreaming. Your waking identity will have no choice but to colonize dreaming with its own consciousness to the extent that it is not yet awake. It will inevitably impose its waking dream on dream events and characters, thereby misperceiving and missing the wake up calls that dream characters and events intrinsically present. Therefore, the considered preference of Integral Deep Listening is to focus on lucid living regardless of the state of consciousness we are in at the moment. We need to learn to be awake now if we want to be awake within dreaming, lucid dreams or near death and mystical experiences.
IDL uses several tools to accomplish this. The first is interviewing personifications from our sleeping and dreaming states, dream characters, dream consciousness, the formless source of dreaming, which is aligned with the deep sleep state, the personifications of waking life issues, and our mental representations of those with whom we have waking conflicts. IDL emphasizes listening to dream characters rather than changing them or interpreting them, whether during dreams or afterward, when working with dream narratives, interviewing dream characters, and later becoming them at recommended times during waking life and while dreaming or deeply asleep.
This process is extended to our waking dream through the interviewing of those issues that are important to you today – your relationships, health, financial security, addictions and goals. As you interview personifications of your life issues you gain perspectives that include yet transcend how and where you are currently stuck, slowly expanding and thinning your sense of self. You are practicing a yoga of awakening, of moving yourself out of a state of relative sleeping, dreaming and sleepwalking.
The second tool is meditation, which is designed to rest the mind in its natural state. IDL does this through identification with emerging potentials that already are awake, as well as through naming and the use of breath as a centering aid.
The third tool is to learn to awaken out of the dream of your conditioning by using several tools, including identifying and transforming scripting, exiting the Drama Triangle, whether awake or dreaming, recognizing and transforming your cognitive distortions and effective goal setting. These tools are explained in Dillard, J. Waking Up.
When high-scoring perspectives, like dream monsters or a clamp that personifies the pressure of a migraine headache are interviewed we find that they are less interested in your agenda, such as learning to lucid dream, than they are in having you listen to them so that you will wake up. Interviewed perspectives generally appreciate being interviewed using the various IDL interviewing protocols, because they are more interested in being heard than in being told what their truth is or should be. They are interested in meditation because it is food, nourishment for them. They are interested in waking up out of the Drama Triangle because it is the antithesis of core qualities, such as confidence, empathy, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace and witnessing, that manifest life.
You can learn about IDL at IntegralDeepListening.Com. What you’ll find here are examples of using IDL to help wake up and a blog so that you can contribute your own examples of using the various protocols and tools to help you wake up. You will also find articles on various aspects of waking up, approached from an IDL perspective.