Joseph Dillard It is impossible to entitle this chapter, “Chinese Religion and IDL,” because China never separated religion from culture. China didn’t have a word or conception of “religion” as separate from other domains of life. Beginning with the Jesuits in 1579, Christianity could never gain a lasting toehold in China because there was little about the … Read more
Socrates, one of the founders of Western philosophy, lived in Athens, Greece in the 5th century before Jesus, making him a later contemporary of Gautama Buddha in India, and Laozi and Confucius in China. He was the teacher of Plato, who was in turn the teacher of Aristotle, who was himself tutor to Alexander the … Read more
What is Tibetan Dream Yoga? As we have seen in our discussion of Theravada, Buddhism is different from all other major religious traditions in a number of noteworthy aspects. It is based on the concept of interdependent co-origination rather than a rescuing force, deity, or avatar. In addition to not believing in an eternal soul or … Read more
Theravadin Buddhism, predating Mahyana and Tibetan traditions, is traditionally found in Ceylon and southeast Asia but now has a worldwide following. While it does not have a historical tradition of dream yoga, like Hinduism its entire structure can claim to be a profound form of dream yoga, differing from the Hinduism from which it evolved … Read more
Deep Listening to the Bhagavad Gita This essay provides an example of a methodology, Integral Deep Listening (IDL), that you are invited to apply to your own encounter with the Bhagavad Gita, a dream, nightmare, or life issue of your choice. Integral Deep Listening is a psychospiritual discipline whose purpose is awakening, or enlightenment. As … Read more
Hinduism And Shamanism: Similarities And Differences Dream Yogas typically possess many attributes that can be traced back to Hindu yogic foundations. Hinduism takes from shamanism many basic characteristics, including a three-tiered cosmology, a desire to find freedom in another state of consciousness, an emphasis on purificiation as a pre-requisite to move into higher states of … Read more
The worldview of shamanism is foundational to Hinduism, many traditional Chinese customs, Theravada, Mahayana, and Tibetan Buddhism, lucid dreaming, spiritualism, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and has influenced, albeit indirectly, Wilber’s integral AQAL as well as the psychological tradition of Freud, Jung, and Perls. In fact, there is little in our highly technological and intellectualized noospheric … Read more
Waking up, or becoming lucid, is a good thing. However, what we do once we are awake makes a very big difference. For example, conceivably you could become awake enough to control your blood pressure, your heart beat, and your digestion, but is that a necessary or a good thing? Is more control always better … Read more
If you want to learn lucid dreaming, please check out the excellent work of Stephen LeBerge, Robert Waggoner, and the Tibetan Dream Yoga resources on this site. My emphasis is on helping you wake up out of your waking dream first, since otherwise you will export your waking delusions into the way you experience your … Read more
Differentiating prepersonal from transpersonal psychosis Prepersonal Psychosis • distortions of identity, place, and time • confused disjointed, tangential sentences • delusions unresponsive • hallucinations unresponsive • absence of empathy • inability to integrate roles • inability to listen • chronic endogenous Treatment of Prepersonal Psychosis • medication • protection of self and others • interviewing … Read more