Integral Deep Listening is a phenomenological approach to personal development, and we both teach and encourage such an approach on our yearly excursions to swim with the wild spotted dolphins of Bimini. Phenomenological approaches encourage the suspension of assumptions, interpretations, expectations, and belief systems regarding what we experience in favor of cultivating an open-focused, receptive awareness which allows us to be touched more deeply than our cultural and social scripting normally allows.  For example, the word “dolphin” is a place holder or marker for an actual experience; functionally, our words stand for our experiences and actually replace experiences with purely subjective reproductions of them.  Such place holders can be immensely powerful.  The word “lemon” can make you salivate. The word “shark” can create the physiological reactions of the alarm phase of the “fight or flight,” or General Adaptation Syndrome.  But while such mental representations are powerful tools for comprehension and growth, they also disallow the full experiencing of lemons, sharks, and dolphins.  Our meanings get in the way of living now, and that stunts our development.

Integral Deep Listening attempts to compensate for the human addiction to meanings and the resulting blockage of raw, vital, and potentially transformative experience by not only encouraging the suspension of such meanings during dolphin encounters, but by asking, “If meaning-making, projection, anthropomorpization, and interpretations of dolphins are unavoidable, what framework is likely to do the least violence to their authentic natures while opening us to the greatest possibilities for personal development?”  To this end, IDL assumes that all experiences are best framed as wake-up calls.  What this means is that whatever happens to you and whomever you meet, including a dolphin, is best viewed as an opportunity to wake up.  “Waking up” means more than paying attention. It means to move toward integration of body, mind, and spirit, toward personal fulfillment, collective interdependence, and enlightenment.  Furthermore, IDL assumes that waking up can be usefully framed in terms of six core qualities that describe the round of breath, day, seasons, and the life cycle itself.  These are confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing.  IDL therefore asks of a dolphin encounter, “How can I use this experience to wake up?”  “How can I use this experience to evoke and expand these six core qualities associated with waking up within me today and long after this encounter?”  Many teachers, trainings, and excursions offer transformative experiences, but they rarely last.  This is because temporary states are not stable, habitual, lasting stages.  A goal of IDL dolphin encounters is to turn a marvelous temporary state of freedom, floating, light, and oneness into an ongoing life that is imbued with more of those qualities.  In order to do so we need to understand these six core qualities and how they operate.  We then approach encounters with dolphins within that context.  We then learn to approach all encounters with others in our daily lives in terms of those qualities.

What are these six core qualities and why are they of central importance?  First, there is  no one formulation that is best or that will work best for everyone.  What is important is that we transcend and include formulations that keep us asleep and experiment with using those that make sense to us and that seem to have a reasonable chance of waking us up.  Close observation of the breath reveals that it has six parts, an abdominal inhalation,  a chest inhalation, a slight pause at the top of the breath, a chest exhalation, an abdominal exhalation, and a longer pause at the bottom of the breath.  This cycle is mediated by the autonomic nervous system, which means that it is mostly unconscious, and can be observed during sleep in animals as well as humans.  It is also under the control of the central nervous system, which means that we have the ability to change the rate, depth, and focus of this fundamental life cycle.  Each of these parts or stages of breathing can be associated with life processes that, while evident throughout the cycle of breathing, are most pronounced at this or that particular stage.  Abdominal inhalation is rebirth and awakening.  It is new growth and new life.  Chest inhalation is aliveness, expression, and growth.  The pause at the top of the breath is a balance point between the alertness that inhalation brings by supplying oxygen to the cells of the body and brain, and the relaxation that each exhalation provides.  Chest exhalation is a letting go of life and energy and a detachment from them.  Abdominal exhalation is a more profound surrendering, death, and freedom.  The longer pause at the bottom of the breath is a space of deathlessness, openness, and clarity.

A little contemplation discloses that this same cycle can be observed in daily life, in the round of seasons, and in the round of life.  Consequently, the breath can be used to anchor many different realms of experience and collect and sort through many systems of meanings in a way that tie back to this moment and this breath.  It can be effectively used to direct experience in this moment, prior to the meanings that language imposes on life.

Each of these stages can also be associated with the six core qualities that are in turn associated with awakening.  Abdominal inhalation, as a primal awakening and rebirth, is a death-defying, fearless confidence.  It is the negentropy or building up of the universe that defies the law of entropy or running down predicted by the laws of physics.  We see this mindless, brazen confident fearlessness in the sprouting of a seed and in the brashness of baby animals and humans.  Chest inhalation, as the personification of aliveness,  is seen in human curiosity and exploration and finds its fullest expression in a life of selfless, compassionate service.  The pause at the top of the breath is not only the rare gift of balance in life but the wisdom that such balance both assumes and generates.  Chest exhalation is both acceptance of oneself and others and detachment from the drama of others, our circumstances, our thoughts and emotions.  Abdominal exhalation is the inner peace that freedom from those dramas produces within us.  The pause at the bottom of each breath is the objective witnessing of both internal and external drama as well as of the cycle itself.

When you free dive with wild dolphins you are much more aware of your breath than you otherwise might be.  This is because your ability to hold your breath translates into an ability to share the experience of the world that dolphins experience.  The best free divers have learned that thinking takes energy and that learning not to engage thoughts or feelings translates into longer diving time.  Consequently, meditation, which is most fundamentally a process of learning to witness or observe the contents of our awareness, is not only important to transformative dolphin encounters, but to developing the phenomenological perspective that allows us to be deeply touched by these extraordinary beings beneath the matrix of our linguistic meanings.

In using meditation to develop the breath control necessary to experience longer free dives with dolphins we can learn to follow our breath with our awareness and at the same time build a sense of unity with dolphins and with all creatures that share this cycle of breath, the associated stages of life, and core qualities that support all life in a foundational way.

What does it mean to experience life in general, and dolphins in particular, in terms of these six core qualities?  First, we have to consider what it means to experience ourselves in terms of these six core qualities.

What does it mean to be confident and fearless?  At worst, it means to foolishly ignore genuine danger.  At best, it means to identify with a definition of self that does not die and that therefore does not fear.  What would it mean to experience a dolphin in such a context?  What would it mean to experience your friends, associates, co-workers, and family in such a context?

What does it mean to be compassionate?  Compassion is different from love, because love has as its opposites fear and hate.  Compassion embraces both love and its opposites.  A good model of compassion is the sky, which gives of itself unreservedly to be inhaled for the sustenance of all living things and which also receives what is exhaled from the earth and its creatures with equal completeness.  At worst, being compassionate means to be enslaved by social conscience, by the “oughts” and “shoulds” of our childhood scripting.  At best, it means to give and receive completely and selflessly.  What would it mean to experience wild dolphins in such a way?  What would it mean to experience your daily life in such a way?

What does it mean to be wise?  Wisdom is different from intelligence, be it test-taking ability, street smarts, charisma, mathematical ability, or the mastery of this or that aptitude.  Wisdom is intuitive knowing.  It is the ability to be in the right place at the right time in order to say or do that which will awaken yourself and others. At worst, wisdom is self-righteous self-assurance, of the type seen in those who have mystical experiences and think their truth is the truth for others or in those who have had the good fortune to have money and status and believe that makes them special.  At best, wisdom is balance of body, mind, and spirit, in work and play, in self and relationships, in life and death.  What would it mean to experience wild dolphins from a space of such wisdom?  What would it mean to experience your daily world from a space of such balance?

What does it mean to be accepting?  At its worst, acceptance is ignoring important distinctions and betraying your responsibility to discriminate.  It is accepting things in yourself and in life, such as social injustice, that are not to be accepted.  At its best, acceptance is about not taking anything personally.  It is about realizing that life is not about you, that if you hadn’t been born but some other child had been, your parents would have treated that child pretty much the same way you got treated, if it behaved in a similar fashion.  It is to understand that the thoughts you think and the feelings you feel aren’t really about you; they are automatic programs that are highly predictable and are mostly about drama, not living.  Real acceptance gets you out of the way so you can hear and see dolphins, others, and yourself.  What would it mean to experience wild dolphins from a space of such acceptance?

What does it mean to have inner peace?  At worst, inner peace is lazy complacency.  At its best, inner peace is freedom from stress and drama. What would it be like to experience dolphins from such a perspective? What would it be like to shift your values in such a way that you routinely experienced your daily life from a space of inner peace?

What does it mean to witness?  At worst, witnessing is an insulating numbing and dissociating that protects you so that you can die more comfortably.  At best, witnessing is freedom from drama.  That drama is easily understood as the endless repetition of the three roles of victim, rescuer, and persecutor.  When you are in these roles when you experience wild dolphins you do not see them, you only see this or that role.  When you learn to witness, you no longer need to rescue dolphins nor do you see them as rescuers of the planet.  You no longer need to persecute those who hurt dolphins or their environment, nor do you need to see those who do as persecutors.  You no longer need to see dolphins as victims of the stupidity, greed, and cruelty of humans, nor do you need to see yourself as a co-victim of environmental degradation.  Can you move to such a perspective?  If you do, how would it change your ability to experience wild dolphins?  How would it affect your relationships with others and how you feel about yourself?

These six core qualities are together antidotes to the drama of victimization, rescuing, and persecution that keeps both humans and dolphins locked in a dance of mutual destruction.  Compassion and acceptance are natural antidotes for rescuing.  Wisdom and fearless confidence are the antidotes for persecution.  Inner peace and witnessing are the natural antidotes for the role of victim.  Integral Deep Listening develops these  antidotes through interviewing dream characters and the personifications of life issues.  For instance, if a participant in a dolphin encounter is afraid of sharks, that fear is given a color and that color is turned into a shape or form, like a ball or an animal, and is then interviewed in such a way that the fear is heard and the participant wakes up.  Repeated interviews within the culture of a group invested in outgrowing drama and embracing the core qualities creates an environment that allows participants to use their encounter with wild dolphins as a way to heal, balance, and transform their lives.

Meditation designed to develop the six core qualites is a great way to prepare for dolphin encounters.  Essentially, this approach involves observation of breath.  Here are some guidelines:

At the beginning of your meditation, set your intent.  What do you want to do and not do during your meditation?  What are you attempting to accomplish?

As you begin to center yourself, focus on your exhalations.  Exhale your thoughts and feelings with each exhalation in order to calm your mind.

During meditation, if you have thoughts, feelings, images, or sensations, exhale them.  If you have drowsiness or lack of focus and energy, focus on your inhalations to bring more clarity with additional oxygen.

Allow your abdominal inhalations to increase wakefulness and confidence.

Allow chest inhalations to increase aliveness and compassion.

Allow the pause at the top of the breath to increase balance and wisdom.

Allow your chest exhalations to increase your detachment and acceptance.

Allow your abdominal exhalations to increase your sense of freedom and inner peace.

Allow the pause at the bottom of your breath to increase centeredness and witnessing.

Here is a protocol for setting intention at the beginning of meditation.  Create your own.

Pre-Meditation Statement of Intent

Most people sit down to meditate without having clear intent.  Maybe it is to be a time of focusing or concentrating attention, to observe breath, to relax, visualize, get guidance, or enter a higher state of consciousness.  When meditators do not clearly set their intent, competing intentions, often out of awareness, conspire to disrupt the meditation period.

Rightly understood, meditation is a practice of bare intention, without content.  It strengthens and clarifies intent by preferring it to other aspects of experience, such as thought, emotion, visualization, sensory stimulation, relationships, or accessing different or higher states of consciousness.  Subsequently, IDL recommends that you begin every meditation session with a statement of your intent.

What follows is an example of a statement of intent based on IDL.  Use it as a source of ideas for creating your own.  When you arrive at something you like, print it out and read it over before you meditate until you can repeat it in your thoughts.

“I am here to meditate.

I am not here to

think,

problem-solve,

plan,

reflect,

contemplate,

or talk to myself in any way.

When thoughts arise, they are like clouds in the sky:

they aren’t about me.

With every out-breath I exhale whatever thoughts arise.

I am not here to experience the roller coaster of my emotions,

including bliss and ecstasy.

When feelings arise, they are like weather; it isn’t about me.

With every out-breath I exhale whatever feelings arise.

I am not here to watch internal TV,

to look at anything or to visualize anything.

When images arise, they seem inconsequential, like a mirage.

With every out-breath I exhale whatever images arise.

I am not here to explore sensations

of heat and cold, pain or relaxation.

I am not here to explore kundalini or chakra energies.

When sensations arise I will treat them as I do

when they arise when I am asleep or watching a movie:

they exist, but they are relatively inconsequential.

With every out-breath I exhale whatever sensations arise.

I am not here to go into trance or

experience altered states of consciousness, whether

sleep,

hypnosis,

samadhi,

the subtle,

causal,

or the non-dual.

If such shifts occur they are not about me.

With every out-breath I exhale whatever state arises.”

“I am here to become the sky.

As the sky I score ten, on a scale of zero to ten, in confidence,

because I as sky am fearless,

since I cannot die and nothing can hurt me.

I am completely awake and aware.

I inhale Joseph’s fear and unconsciousness.

As the sky I score ten in compassion,

because as sky I give myself completely to

humans, animals, trees, and minerals

for them to use me as they wish to live more fully.

I am compassionate in that I completely take in whatever they exhale.

I inhale Joseph’s selfishness and laziness.

As the sky I score ten in wisdom

because I am in all things and therefore know all things.

I am completely balanced between

day and night,

hot and cold.

I inhale Joseph’s ignorance and imbalances.

As the sky I score ten in acceptance

because I do not judge

my weather or color as good or bad

and do not judge what goes on above me or below, in the world.

I inhale Joseph’s non-acceptance, attachments, and addictions.

As the sky I score ten in peace of mind

because nothing affects me.

I am free.

I inhale Joseph’s stress and imprisonment.

As the sky I score ten in witnessing

because I observe the dramas of life and nature without identifying with them.

As the sky I am clear and empty.

I inhale Joseph’s enmeshment in drama and his cloudiness.

“Because I am the sky,

I am transparent and luminous.

I have no self, yet I am completely

awake,

aware,

and alive.

Because I am the sky,

I both respect the laws that govern life

and experience them with

joyful absurdity

because of their dreamlike nature.

Because I am the sky,

I experience the abundance of life

both within me and around me.”

“As the sky, I am prana.

I am breath.

I enter you and the cells of your body,

feeding them and

lighting your mind.

I leave you and become one with all.”

“Because I am these things,

life is sacred.
This moment is sacred.

Sky, as breath, breathes me now.”

The first part of this statement of intention defines meditation negatively, as the absence of each of the five skandhas, or components of identity.  By doing so, it gives awareness nothing to hold onto.  The nature of these five skandhas are elaborated in “The Five Trees and Meditation.”

The second part of the statement defines meditation positively and experientially, by asking you to become the sky and experience what life is like from its perspective.  While it is obvious that the sky is a metaphor for a perspective of pure witness, it is also a metaphor for the five other core qualities of enlightenment referenced here.  You are asked to experience yourself as each of them, from the perspective of sky.

The third part of the statement is based on the three refuges of Buddhism: “I take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma, and in the Sangha.”  “Buddha” means “the enlightened one,” or one who is fully awake, yet with no self.  “Dharma” means law, or organizing structure, or truth.  IDL sees these as perspectival: totally dependent upon one’s perspective. As a consequence the dharma is not only dreamlike; we are free to choose how we view it.  IDL recommends that whatever structures exist in your life, whether they are helpful or hindrances, be viewed with joyful absurdity.  “Sangha” is the Buddhist word for spiritual community.  In IDL there are two sanghas, your internal, or intrasocial support community, which you encounter and evolve through interviewing and application, and your external support community, made up first of peers and teachers in IDL, then by others who share its values and culture, and finally by the entirety of your waking identity and its social environment: all sentient beings.  To fully recognize and embrace these two sanghas is to experience outrageous, unlimited abundance.

The next part centers your sense of who you are in sky and as sky as prana and breath, not as your body, thoughts, or feelings, as you normally do.

The final part centers you in the sacredness of this moment and this moment and this moment as sky, as tens in each of the six core qualities.

At the end of your meditation it is important to set your intent for whatever comes next.  Ask yourself, “What thoughts and feelings are likely to come up or get in the way the next time I meditate? What can I do between now and then to reduce them?”  Do those things, and watch your meditation improve.

Anyone who has worked for many years in the treatment of addiction knows that treatment is complicated and multi-faceted and that the rate of relapse is high. The most effective solutions control the most variables for the longest amount of time, which basically means either voluntary or involuntary confinement for extended periods. Clinicians also know that prevention is far easier and less expensive in the costs to human lives and society as a whole, and that discrete addictions, such as smoking, are relatively easy to manage, if not treat, than are pervasive ones, like severe alcohol and drug addictions.

Addiction treatment must help the individual stop using drugs, maintain a drug-free lifestyle, and achieve productive functioning in the family, at work, and in society. Because addiction is typically a chronic disease, people cannot simply stop using drugs for a few days and be cured. Most patients require long-term or repeated episodes of care to achieve the ultimate goal of sustained abstinence and recovery of their lives.

A key insight of the two major Indian traditions, Hinduism and Buddhism, is that addiction is caused by attachment (upadana) and craving (trishna, tanha). In Hinduism the problem is defined as identification with an illusory self instead of the real self. In Buddhism, the problem is defined as identification with an illusory self.  There is no real self. In Buddhism, the fundamental addiction is to our sense of self, and all other addictions support it. The entirety of Buddhism can be thought of as an addiction rehabilitation program, with elective in-patient treatment (monasteries) recommended for those who really want to get well. Focus is placed on the underlying, root addiction, in the belief that when it is removed the cravings that associate all other addictions will end.

Clearly, these Indian traditions define addiction much more broadly than do contemporary Western traditions.  This is because Western medicine defines disease as deviation from social definitions of normalcy while Indian traditions define disease as normalcy itself.  In other words, the Indian approach to the treatment of addiction is a frontal assault on basic assumptions of what it means to be addicted and what it means to be healthy.  In the West, health means freedom from pain and societal adjustment. In these two Indian traditions, control by any form of attachment or craving is addiction, and the most fundamental of these is addiction to our sense of who we are.  The corollary of this is that we are controlled by our fear of non-existence. All other addictions are viewed as symptoms or secondary outpicturings of this core addiction.  Consequently, in the Indian perspective, pursuit of prosperity, health, and social status are addictions, whether they are supported by society or not, because they do not produce enlightenment or freedom from identification with a false sense of self.

The reason why this Indian definition has not been widely adapted in Western clinical models is that most people with addictions just want a return to “normalcy,” as does the greater society which underwrites much of the cost of treatment.  It is more than enough if only an addict can once again work, support a family, and not cause societal disruption.  Consequently, there is not much support from either social systems or patients for an expanded definition of addiction.  However, the high percentage of relapse associated with treatment using present models is forcing a movement toward broader models of addiction.

The model discussed here is not based on either the Western allopathic or the Indian models of addiction.  It is derived from a concept from Transactional Analysis, developed by psychiatrist Eric Berne in the U.S. in the 1950’s, called the Drama Triangle.

Transactional Analysis has developed its own choice-based model of treatment of addiction;

the one presented here is not derived from it.

We will call it the “Drama Model” of addiction, and it states that the core addiction of humans is not to substances, attachment, or craving, but to drama.  People can be dramatic, as when they act in a play, go to a masked ball, or exaggerate a point, and not be doing drama in the sense that it is used here.  Following Berne,

drama is a transactional game, which means it has a covert motivation and a payoff.  While all games are not destructive, those that are played within the context of the three roles of the Drama Triangle are.

In the Drama Model, substances, attachments, and cravings are not in themselves problematic; you can use substances and experience both attachments and cravings with or without drama.  Without drama, these are less likely to become addictive, although some highly addictive substances, like tobacco, are wise to avoid.  However, many things can be used or done beneficially when there is no drama accompanying them.  For example, there are many benefits associated with attachment to health and cravings for a balanced life. It is only when drama is introduced that they become addictive and harmful.  This is a threatening model to many clinicians and users, because it refuses to portray some substances or experiences as bad and others as good.  It does not because doing so turns them into persecutors in the perception of the subject or client, thereby putting treatment into the role of rescuer, and the entire model within the context of the Drama Triangle.  When you fight an addiction you are fighting with yourself.  When you fight with yourself, you divide your energies against yourself, alienating yourself from that part of your life force and internal resources that your addiction represents. In other words, you increase the likelihood that you will lose that fight, because you deprive yourself of resources you need to integrate, transcend, and include.

The Drama Model addresses addiction in three dimensions of life, waking relationships and behaviors, cognitive processes (thoughts and feelings), and dreams.  It views waking relationships and behaviors as the external, objective realm that is easiest to see and treat.  Cells and molecular behavior and treatment is also parts of this external, objective realm.  The intermediate realm, dealing with thoughts and feelings, is treated by a number of modalities, but most commonly and effectively with cognitive behavioral therapy.  The third realm, dreams, is by far the most internal and subjective dimension.  It is largely ignored for two reasons.  First, the contribution of dreaming to both the maintenance of addictions and to health is poorly understood, and secondly, no effective methodologies for working with dreams in the treatment of addition have been popularized.

Why would we want to eliminate drama in dreams? The waking residue of anxiety from nightmares and post-traumatic stress disorder nightmares, which can be extremely disruptive, undoing waking therapeutic progress, is well known.  For every nightmare and anxiety-provoking dream that we recall, how many remain below the threshold of awareness?  Do those not remembered have any effect on waking coping?  Whether we remember a dream or not the emotional residue of the state lingers, particularly through the activation of the General Adaptation Syndrome in the dream state, producing powerful hormones that measurably activate the parasympathetic branch of our autonomic nervous system, whether or not we remember a dream.  Secondly, the dream state tends to be regressive, meaning that we tend to use earlier, more primitive coping skills than we do in our waking life.  We are more likely to react than respond, and to get caught up in drama than we are in our thoughts or our waking life.  Consequently, dreaming reinforces drama and addiction, whether we remember our dreams or not.

How can we eliminate the drama in our dreams? It is a four-part process.  We can learn about the Drama Triangle and outgrow it in our waking life and our thoughts.  As a result, we are less likely to get into drama in our dreams.  Secondly, we can access and become parts of ourselves that are not addicted to drama and whose influence will free us from our own.  Third, we can practice dream incubation: we can set our pre-sleep intention not to indulge in our addiction during our dreams, whether or not we remember them.  This is a relatively simple process and one that can easily be added to any addiction treated protocol. Fourth, we can opt out of drama in our dreams while we are dreaming.  You will be able to tell if you are doing so by checking for drama in those dreams that you do remember. Let us look more closely at these four strategies.

In order to eliminate the Drama Triangle in our thoughts and feelings we must first become aware of when we play the victim, persecutor, and rescuer to ourselves in our own interior processes. Whenever we conclude that we are helpless or powerless we are in the role of the victim.  Whenever we think, “I’m stupid.” “I’ll never succeed.”  “I’m ugly.” “I’m not as talented as she is,” we are in the role of persecutor.  Whenever we beat ourselves up for succumbing once again to our addictions we are in the role of persecutor. Of course when we think such thoughts about others we are in the role of persecutor as well.  Whenever we indulge in our addiction or seek out a distraction to either run from it or numb us to it, such as TV, the internet, or sleep, we are in the role of rescuer. The problem with the role of rescuer is that it is disempowering.  It says, “I’m not OK for who I am, and I won’t be OK until I drink or eat this, talk to that person, read this book, or go to sleep.” Another way of telling if you are in the role of rescuer is to ask yourself, “If there was something I was avoiding right now, what would it be?”

Eliminating cognitive drama involves a combination of self awareness and cognitive-behavioral therapy.  You change how you feel by changing how you think; your thoughts themselves are no longer rooted in addiction to the Drama Triangle.The process of eliminating addiction to waking drama is similar. First you learn to identify when you are in the Drama Triangle. You also learn the price you pay when you build your life around drama.  The focus is shifted in the Drama Model from treating the addiction, which tends to turn the addiction into a persecutor to fight, to recognizing and choosing not to get into the Drama Triangle, wherever it appears in our life.  We cannot change what we are not aware of. The clearer is our awareness of the price we are paying for being in drama the more likely we are to consider alternatives.

Most people who suffer from an addiction cannot imagine a happy, balanced life without it.  This includes drama.  People who are addicted to the Drama Triangle, and that includes most of us, have a very difficult time imagining that they could have an interesting, exciting, fulfilling life without it.  Until this changes, their addiction to drama will fuel their addiction, whatever it may be.

How can you access and become parts of yourself that are not addicted to drama and whose influence will free you from it? Integral Deep Listening is one process by which to do so.  Developed by the author in 1981, you “become” or imaginatively identify with, characters from your dreams or the personifications of your life issues, such as your addictions, physical pain, an emotion like fear, or anger at someone or some life situation.  Some of these will score high in qualities that are highly correlated with an addiction-free life, such as confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing. Becoming these during the interviewing process awakens the potential for a non-addicted life, as approached from a specific innate potential perspective.  Repeated interviews strengthens the identification with an addiction-free identity as you become many different self-aspects that are not locked in drama.

These self-aspects make recommendations, which when followed, generally build trust in your ability to outgrow your addiction. One common recommendation is to become this or that self-aspect in one or more specific life situations: when you have the urge to use, while you are falling asleep, when you get anxious. Other common recommendations include meditating and recalling dreams to interview occasionally.  Such recommendations constitute a powerful feedback mechanism by which anyone can test the utility of the methodology for themselves.

Third, you can practice dream incubation: you can set our pre-sleep intention not to indulge in your addiction during your dreams, whether or not you remember them.  Reading over an interview before sleep is a common recommendation often made by interviewed self-aspects.  This is a relatively simple process and you that can easily be added to any addiction treated protocol.

Fourth, you can opt out of drama in your dreams while you are dreaming.  You will be able to tell if you are doing so by checking for drama in those dreams that you do remember. If you are being chased by a monster and are scared, you’re in drama.  If you are wandering around, looking for your lost keys, you’re in drama. If you are fighting or sad, you are probably in drama, which means you are feeding the life addictions that keep you from taking off in your life.

Description of a treatment protocol

Integral Deep Listening teaches clients to identify the Drama Triangle in the waking, cognitive, and dream dimensions of their life.  It also puts them in contact with aspects of themselves which are not addicted.  As they repeatedly experience becoming non-addicted parts of themselves they slowly grow into a self-definition that transcends and includes drama.  What this means is that cravings  diminish. At the same time  they begin to grasp how they not only could be happy without their addiction but how they are likely to be happier. This is not primarily a cognitive realization, nor is it primarily an emotional catharsis.  It is a direct experience of the living potential for an addiction-free life that exists within us right now.

One lady had smoked for over thirty years. One day she realized that she was dependent on cigarettes and nicotine.  While she undoubtedly had that thought before, this time it hit her in a way that caused her to stop cold. She never picked up another cigarette. However, thereafter she continuously had cravings. She wanted to smoke! While she didn’t give into the urge, she was basically a “dry drunk,” and therefore subject to relapse at any time. One night she had a dream, one that she had had many many times before. In it there were other people smoking, and she was smoking too. However, this time in her dream she thought, “I don’t have to smoke just because these other people are smoking. I made a decision to stop smoking. I’m not going to smoke.” She never had a dream of smoking again and what is much more significant, her cravings went away.

When I have told this story to others I have received comments like, “One in a million.” I don’t believe that. The principles discussed here do not have to be believed but they do have to be tested. You can perform simple experiments for yourself in your own life with your own cravings. See if you can interrupt them in your dreams. See what difference, if any, that has on your waking addictions.

Integral Deep Listening is only one element of what must be a multi-pronged approach to the treatment of any addiction.  What it can uniquely offer is direction of treatment by the inner compass of the patient and a depth of intervention through addressing the Drama Triangle in the three realms, that offers the possibility of reducing multiple addictions at the same time.

There is a common assumption among those seeking dream lucidity that lucid dreaming is always a good thing.  Consider for a moment who is in control once you become lucid.  Your stuck, confused, delusional waking sense of self now has a greater ability to change or control your dream landscape, always for its benefit, which means generally to its greater detriment.  By analogy, it is similar to Christian Westerners thinking that they could bring salvation and civilization to “primitives” when they basically colonized peoples.  The result was mayhem and mass suffering due to grandiosity and narcissism rationalizing great selfishness.

If course, colonizers never see themselves in those terms; chances are you have never considered lucid dreaming from the perspective of the inhabitants of the land you want to control.  When you learn IDL, that will change.

Your waking sense of self doesn’t understand anything any better just because it is lucid.  It is not automatically more empathetic, wise, compassionate, or accepting.  It’s just more free to use its lucidity to change, repress, avoid, and control better, if it so chooses.  You will observe this tendency in many lucid dreamers who can create literal dream experiences of flying, meetings with masters, going to other dimensions, or having cosmic sex.  They may then believe, and pronounce to others, that these experiences are real, when in fact they are a product of their own waking desires and intentions, which are now expressed while lucid in the dream state.  However, they remain stuck in their own limited waking world view, out of which they perceive lucid dream events.  Your limited waking world view doesn’t magically transform just because you are lucid.  Whether your perspective is that of Tibetan Dream Yoga, or of some other approach, it is still a limited waking world view that probably has little to do with the preferences, priorities, and perspectives of your own internal community.

Dream monsters, fires, confusion, or other deeply disturbing or trivial dream events are not problems to be eliminated.  There are not, as most traditions hold, “illusory” dreams and “true” dreams.  They are all true; the problem is with the perceiver, not the dream.  The problem is with you, not with the fact that you are not lucid in the dream.  The problem is that your waking sense of self misperceives regardless of what state it is in. This is because your waking perspective is partial; it assumes that it reflects the interests of your entire being, but how would you know?  How many other aspects of your inner self have you asked?  If you do learn to interview a representative cross-section on an ongoing basis, you can be assured that you will discover that indeed, your waking identity, regardless of how advanced and enlightened it considers itself to be, does not represent the interests of the broad majority of your greater identity.  This is indeed a problem, because such internal divisions contribute to your unhappiness and death.  Because of this fact, the focus of Integral Deep Listening is on waking up your sense of self in all states, not simply on dream lucidity, which is at best one process of doing so in one state.  The dream that you will wake up out of as you practice Integral Deep Listening is your dream of who you are and what your life is, whether you are awake or dreaming.  Dream lucidity comes naturally as you wake up now, as who you are.

Dream lucidity often means that you aren’t listening to a dream; instead you are changing it and colonizing it with your waking consciousness.  The exception is if you meditate in a dream or simply are awake and aware in a dream and observe.   IDL strongly endorses both of these approaches to lucid dreaming, regardless of who teaches them.

With IDL, you wake up, or become lucid, by interviewing other parts of yourself that do not share your waking stuckness.  You will find that many that you interview are much less stuck than you are in many significant life dimensions.  You will learn to interview dream characters both while awake and while dreaming. You will also learn to interview personifications of your life issues while awake.  By doing so you will internalize of “become” aspects of yourself that are not stuck where you are.  Consequently, your sense of who you are will expand.  Your chronically delusional waking identity will slowly heal, balance, and transform as you apply the concrete life recommendations supplied by these self-aspects.  Slowly, your sense of who you are will wake up.  Slowly you become more lucid in any and every state that you are in, without needing to force change or control any waking or dream event.

Tibetan Dream Yoga and dream lucidity use the dream state to leverage this process of waking up.  Lucid dreaming is sexy.  It has cache.  The ability to lucid dream reassures you that you are special and different and not as stuck as everyone else, when every lucid dreamer knows that in truth they are.  For those that feel trapped in the mundane circumstances of their lives,  or in a limited, aging, or sick body, lucid dreaming can bring new freedom. Despite these and other benefits, the ability to lucid dream in and of itself signifies nothing in terms of spiritual development.  We know this because children and criminals can have lucid dreams.  Lucid dreaming is an aptitude or skill.  We all know people who are very confused and out of balance who have amazing aptitudes and skills.  However, any approach to lucid dreaming that helps you learn to be in a meditative state while dreaming and/or to be a better listener to the wake-up calls that are to be found there, is valuable, regardless of what else it teaches.

IDL uses listening to the wake-up calls that our lives present to us in the form of life issues, health issues, “accidents,” dreams, nightmares, and interpersonal relationships to become lucid. From the perspective of spirit, they are all dream events.  It is unlikely that spirit discriminates like we do between waking and dreaming delusional states.  IDL encourages lucid dreaming as a subset of a broader, more general, and more important waking up process.  This is why IDL is a dream yoga.

Tibetan Buddhism, along with just about every other tradition, religious and otherwise, interprets dreams.  IDL holds that while dream interpretation is generally harmless, it slows down the process of waking up and can be positively detrimental to it, for a number of reasons:

• Your interpretations are generally wrong because they are partial.

• How do you know if other’s interpretations of your dream are correct?  This includes dream dictionaries, psychics, and spiritual teachers.

• Dream characters are symbols no more than you are a symbol.

• Dreams don’t require interpretation.  They require listening and application of what you hear.

• You can make disastrous life decisions based on wrong interpretations.

• When your interpretations don’t work you can distrust dreams and deride dreaming as delusional instead of recognizing that your interpretations and the projections of the interpreter are the problem.

For more information on these and other related topics, see .•

Click here for information about becoming an Integral Deep Listening/Dream Yoga Practitioner

I take on students for free who convince me that they have a personal commitment to using IDL dream yoga along the lines that are laid out below. The way the process works is that you write to me at Joseph.Dillard@Gmail.Com. Tell me why you want to learn IDL dream yoga. Tell me what you want to do with it. Convince me that you are worth my time, energy, and expertise. Visualize your life in five years and send me a description of what reality you want to create for yourself. Think big, yet be realistic. Don’t tell me that you are going to grow wings and ascend into heaven, so to speak. This work is about getting grounded and staying grounded, about being practical and growing within the current box you find youself in. This is not about escaping from yourself or your life; it is about transformation from the inside out, where you are, as who you are right now. You are already good enough. You are who the world needs. You are a unique conduit for life to express itself. If you don’t sing your song and dance your dance, all of the world will be impoverished through that lack.

IDL is about teaching you to listen to and follow the priorities of your own inner compass, as represented by the emerging potentials that you interview as dream characters and the personifications of your life issues.

The underlying assumption is that the priorities of your inner compass are authentic and organic; you grow your life from the inside out, like a tree and all natural life forms, rather than from the outside in, as we do when we make decisions solely from our waking perspective.

The key is your application of the recommendations that come out of the interviews. Why? Because this is an action dialogue with your inner compass. It shows you are listening by your actions. What that does in turn is move development from the realm of the intellect to the realm of beingness, with a secondary benefit of proving the method. The first builds trust in yourself; the second builds trust in the method.

The idea is for you to make a list of the recommendations that come out of interviews that make sense to you, to  then quantify and operationalize them in a way that your progress can be measured, and to work with them every day.

There are no claims that as a consequence of applying this dream yoga that your life issues will go away, but IDL does claim that by following this process that your ability to maintain your peace of mind and happiness in the face of physical, mental, emotional, and interpersonal challenges will steadily increase.

This email relationship does not claim to provide the depth you will receive from in-person participation in the four practitioner training modules or a paid Skype counseling service. How fast you grow, and how much we work together will be determined by your ability to listen to and apply in your daily life the recommendations of  interviewed emerging potentials.

I want to help you find and follow your own inner compass, not only for your own sake, but for those around you. Hopefully, you will share these tools with others and perhaps start  your own spiritual support community: http://www.integraldeeplistening.com/seminars/start-an-idl-dream-yoga-study-groups.

When you have a plan of service to others you would like to submit, contact me at Joseph.Dillard@Gmail.Com.

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 harmless but unhelpful

Transpersonal Psychosis

• history of intense meditation, fasting, vision-questing, etc.

• temporary

• exogenously induced

Treatment of Transpersonal Psychosis

• protection of self and others

• benign neglect: do not medicate!

• back off on the practice

• interviewing OK

Using IDL with Physical Illnesses

• interview the physical pain

• interview the virus or bacteria

• interview emotions

• sleep/dream incubation

• Sangha intervention

What is a Personality Disorder?

• early developmental failure

• failure of empathy

• inability to take the role of the other

• unresponsive to most talking, behavioral interventions, or medications

Personality Disorders and Integral Deep Listening

• inability to take autonomous roles implies a personality disorder

• the identification with autonomous roles that are not integrated, as in dissociative disorder, implies a personality disorder

• inability to take the role of the other

• unresponsive to most talking, behavioral interventions, or medications

Borderline Personality Disorder

• frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment.

• a pattern of unstable and intense interpersonal relationships,

characterized by alternating between extremes of idealization and devaluation

• identity disturbance: markedly and persistently unstable self-image or sense of self

• impulsivity in at least two areas that are potentially self-damaging (e.g., spending, sex, substance abuse, reckless driving, binge eating)

• recurrent suicidal behavior, gestures, or threats, or self-mutilating behavior

• affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood (e.g., intense episodic dysphoria, irritability, or anxiety usually lasting a few hours and only rarely more than a few days)

• chronic feelings of emptiness

• inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger (e.g., frequent displays of temper, constant anger, recurrent physical fights)

• transient, stress-related paranoid ideation or severe dissociative symptoms

Borderline Personality Disorder and IDL

• attempt to turn feelings of abandonment into a color and shape to interview.

• in interviews, look for characters demonstrating extremes of idealization and devaluation.

• attempt to access self-aspects that have a more stable sense of self.

• attempt to access self-aspects that are not impulsive.

• interview personifications of the feelings associated with suicidal behavior

• deal with emotional instability by interviewing it

• interview any feelings of emptiness

• interview anger

• interview dissociated self-aspects.

• interview the fear underlying paranoia – turn it into a color, shape…

Dependent Personality Disorder

• has difficulty making everyday decisions without an excessive amount of advice and reassurance from others.

• needs others to assume responsibility for most major areas of his or her life.

• has difficulty expressing disagreement with others because of fear of loss of support or approval.

• has difficulty initiating projects or doing things on his or her own because of a lack of self-confidence in judgment or abilities rather than a lack of motivation or energy.

• goes to excessive lengths to obtain nurturance and support from others, to the point of volunteering to do things that are unpleasant

• feels uncomfortable or helpless when alone because of exaggerated fears of being unable to care for himself or herself.

• urgently seeks another relationship as a source of care and support when a close relationship ends.

• is unrealistically preoccupied with fears of being left to take care of himself or herself.

Dependent Personality Disorder and IDL

• approach interviewing as a way to help the client make everyday decisions without an excessive amount of advice and reassurance from others.

• approach interviewing as a way to help the client assume responsibility for most major areas of his or her life.

• use experience of the support and approval of high scoring self-aspects as a way to overcome fear of expressing disagreement with others.

• use self-aspects scoring high in self-confidence to help in learning to initiate projects or doing things on his or her own.

• experiencing internal nurturance and support reduces the need to go to excessive lengths to obtain nurturance and support from others.

• experiencing self-aspects that care and are always there is intended to counteract feelings of discomfort or helplessness when alone because of exaggerated fears of being unable to care for himself or herself.

• the experience of internal support from internal self-aspects is intended to reduce the need to urgently seek another relationship as a source of care and support when a close relationship ends.

• is less likely to fear being left alone or loneliness.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder

•  have a grandiose sense of self-importance.  They exaggerate achievements and talents and expect to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements.

•  are preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love

• believe that they are “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions.

•  require excessive admiration.

•  have a sense of entitlement.  They make unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations.

•  are interpersonally exploitative.  They take advantage of others to achieve their own ends.

•  lack empathy. They are unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

•   are often envious of others or believes that others are envious of them.

•  lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others

Narcissistic Personality Disorder and IDL

•  Getting in touch with self-aspects that are autonomous is a great threat to the need for control behind their grandiose sense of self-importance.

•  Your first responsibility is to avoid falling into the drama triangle. If you are successful  they are unlikely to want to have anything to do with you because you can’t be manipulated.

•   Beware confusing their charm, charisma, and sociability for empathy.

•   Beware confusing their confidence with strength.

•  Beware of believing that if you only say the right words that they will return your kindness or realize that they are as wonderful as you think they are.

Paranoid Personality Disorder

• They suspect, without sufficient basis, that others are exploiting, harming, or deceiving them.

• They are preoccupied with unjustified doubts about the loyalty or trustworthiness of friends or associates.

• They are reluctant to confide in others because of groundless fears that the information will be used maliciously against them.

• They read hidden threatening or demeaning meanings into benign remarks or events

• They persistently bear grudges.  They are unforgiving of insults, injuries, or perceived slights.

• They perceive attacks on their character or reputation that are not apparent to others and are quick to react angrily or to counterattack.

• They have recurrent unjustified suspicions regarding the fidelity of their spouse or sexual partner.

Paranoid Personality Disorder and IDL

• IF you manage to get them into role, the object is to put them in touch with self-aspects that are not exploiting, harming, or deceiving them.

• Interview the personifications of doubts about the loyalty or trustworthiness of friends or associates.

• Since they are reluctant to confide in others because of groundless fears that the information will be used maliciously against them, encourage them to confide in self-aspects.

• When they read hidden threatening or demeaning meanings into benign remarks or events, attempt to ask high scoring Sangha members what they make of those interpretations.

• They persistently bear grudges.  They are unforgiving of insults, injuries, or perceived slights. Therefore the goal is to help them experience that how they view others is how they are viewing the part of themselves they represent.

• When they perceive attacks on their character or reputation that are not apparent to others and are quick to react angrily or to counterattack, interview their anger, if possible-it probably won’t be.

• Interview their fear when they have recurrent unjustified suspicions regarding the fidelity of their spouse or sexual partner.

Schizoid Personality Disorder

• neither desires nor enjoys close relationships, including being part of a family

• almost always chooses solitary activities

• has little, if any, interest in having sexual experiences with another person

• takes pleasure in few, if any, activities

• lacks close friends or confidants other than first-degree relatives

• appears indifferent to the praise or criticism of others

•  shows emotional coldness, detachment, or flattened emotions

Schizoid Personality Disorder and IDL

• If they show any interest, interview the feeling of being interested.

• Interview isolation.

• if any pleasure is demonstrated in something, interview it.

• The goal is to develop internal friends and confidants.

Schizotypal Personality Disorder

• ideas of reference (excluding delusions of reference)

• odd beliefs or magical thinking that influence behavior. In children and adolescents, bizarre fantasies or preoccupations.

• unusual perceptual experiences, including bodily illusions

• odd thinking and speech such as vague, circumstantial, metaphorical, overelaborate, or stereotyped speech.

• suspiciousness or paranoid thinking.

• inappropriate or constricted affect.

• behavior or appearance that is odd, eccentric, or peculiar.

Schizotypal Personality Disorder and IDL

• Beware of succumbing to the pre-trans fallacy with these people!

• They may talk about their dreams but they will avoid actually getting into role.

• Interview something they want from you, like food or money, before giving it to them.

Antisocial Personality Disorder

•  failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest.

•  deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure.

•  impulsivity, or failure to plan ahead.

•  irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults

•  reckless disregard for safety of self or others.

•  consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations.

•  lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

Antisocial Personality Disorder and IDL

•  Some of these people can get into role!

•  Interview their dreams.

•  Interview the pleasure they experience when they perform acts that are grounds for arrest.

•  Interview the pleasure they get from lying.

•  Interview the impulsivity.

•  Interview the aggressiveness.

•  Interview recklessness.

•  Dream interviews will address their irresponsibility and their repeated failure to sustain consistent work behavior or honor financial obligations.

•  Have them become a victim of their actions or irresponsibility and interview them.

Histrionic Personality Disorder

• is uncomfortable in situations in which he or she is not the center of attention.

• interaction with others is often characterized by inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behavior.

• displays rapidly shifting and shallow expression of emotions.

• consistently uses physical appearance to draw attention to self.

• has a style of speech that is excessively impressionistic and lacking in detail.

• shows self-dramatization, theatricality, and exaggerated expression of emotion.

• is suggestible, i.e., easily influenced by others or circumstances.

•  considers relationships to be more intimate than they actually are.

Histrionic Personality Disorder and IDL

• Interview discomfort of being in situations in which he or she is not the center of attention.

• Interview the recipient of inappropriate sexually seductive or provocative behavior.

• Interview emotions, regardless of how superficial they are.

• consistently uses physical appearance to draw attention to self.

• Use their suggestibility to help them get into role.

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder

• are preoccupied with details, rules, lists, order, organization, or schedules to the extent that the major point of the activity is lost.

• show perfectionism that interferes with task completion.  These clients are unable to complete a project because their own overly strict standards are not met.

• are excessively devoted to work and productivity to the exclusion of leisure activities and friendships.

• re overconscientious, scrupulous, and inflexible about matters of morality, ethics, or values.

• are unable to discard worn-out or worthless objects even when they have no sentimental value.

• are reluctant to delegate tasks or to work with others unless they submit to exactly their way of doing things.

• adopt a miserly spending style toward both self and others; money is viewed as something to be hoarded for future catastrophes.

• shows rigidity and stubbornness.

Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder and IDL

• Use the focus on correct task completion to stay in role

• Support the successful completion of homework by associating it with work and productivity.

Dissociative Identity Disorder

• the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states

• these recurrently take control of behavior

• an inability to recall important personal information, the extent of which is too great to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness

Dissociative Identity Disorder and IDL

• IDL views dissociated identities as self-aspects having needs and wants.  When these are respectfully considered the balance between autonomy and integration is more likely to be restored.

• Whatever identity is present can be asked to take a dream role or the personification of a life issue.

• Anything that is interviewed can be asked questions about any and all identities.

Possession and IDL

• IDL views possession as a form of dissociative personality disorder.

• In other words, the entity is best treated as an aspect of self, since IDL assumes that all beings are best treated as aspects of self.

• This allows fear of an overly objectified and dissociated self-aspect to subside, increasing the likelihood that a mutually respectful relationship can be established.

What Addictions May Respond to Integral Deep Listening?

• smoking

• sexual addiction

• gambling

• alcohol and drugs

• compulsive eating

• worry and obsessive thoughts

How Does Integral Deep Listening  Help Addiction?

• listens to the needs the addiction is attempting to fill

• activates self-aspect antidotes to the addiction

• supports disidentification with addiction

• supports identification with non-addicted self-aspects

• listens to the resistances to change

• supports other treatment modalities

Integral Deep Listening

Did you know that you can become stable in the non-dual and still have nightmares and persecutors in your dreams?  You can check this out for yourself by asking your favorite living master to tell you a cross-section of their typical night’s dreams.   If they are good reporters of their dreams, you will find all the qualities and themes that you were sure you were going to transcend by evolving up the transpersonal ladder.  How come?

While we develop more or less naturally from egocentric magical through ethnocentric mythic to worldcentric rational and pluralistic world views in our social and cultural evolution, this is not automatically paralleled by an interior collective, intrasocial and intracultural evolution.  While the internal individual consciousness of the self evolves along with the other three quadrants of the human holon, these are all quadrants of waking identity, not dream consciousness.  The dream holon evolves at its own pace, in response to dynamics that are at least partially independent of the waking self holon.

What this means is that evolving your dream holon involves much more than doing work on your shadow.  You have to move beyond such waking projections into your own intrasocial reality by practicing an ongoing phenomenological yoga like integral deep listening.  That means you need to take on a daily discipline of interviewing and acting on the reasonable recommendations of your dream characters and the personifications of your waking life issues.

The characters in your dreams typically do not view themselves as shadow.  That is a projection by your waking identity upon them.  It matters because their awakening, presence, and transformative effect on your daily life is conditioned by how you define them.  Another example would be the view that dream consciousness and its development is a subset of the individual interior quadrant of the human holon.  While this is indeed the case, it is true from the perspective of waking identity.  When you become this or that dream character, you discover that waking identity and its “human holon” is a subset of the dream holon.  Which perspective is correct?  The one you are identified with at the moment, of course!  Since you are chronically identified with your waking perspective, whether awake, meditating, or dreaming (as your “dream self”).

Your entire approach to the evolutionary-involutionary project is conditioned by the biases of your waking identity.  That is how it is in the classical sacred texts, contemporary spiritual communities, and in the integral movement itself.  We know this is the case because the viewpoints of dream characters are rarely consulted by any of these pathways to enlightenment.  Everything we do is interpreted by our waking identity, whether we are talking about dreams, politics, classical mysticism, LSD experiences, art, or the items on our “to do” list.  These are not monolithic interpretations because different subsets of our waking identity take on conflicting roles with different perspectives and world views.  While there is not only nothing wrong with interpreting our world from our waking perspective(s), – there is an inevitability about it – few of these are intrasocial or intrapersonal perspectives.  You can become as socially and culturally worldcentric, pluralistic, or even theocentric, and still not grasp, much less express, an intrasocial perspective on the world.

So what?  Is one really necessary?  Far more than simply disclosing the “shadow,” or repressed and then projected elements of your identity, a polycentric intracollective perspective is much more likely to speak for perspectives aligned with life itself. Why? Because such interviews sample, on an ongoing basis, the opinions of a cross-section of a greater identity that transcends and includes both shadow and waking identity.  You need this if you want to align your development with your own greater good.  Otherwise, you will do what your waking identity is sure is divine will, such as believe that your latest lover is your soul mate, or that your dream is telling you to move to Boulder, or that you need to buy stock in Apple.

Integral Deep Listening is phenomenological in that such assumptions by your waking identity about the subjects of your interviews, whether dream characters or waking experiences, are minimized.  It is a yoga in that it is an injunctive, empirically verifiable, psychospiritual methodology that is practiced daily.  It is integral in that it embraces AQAL.  It is listening in that it is primarily a questioning rather than an interpretive process.  It is deep listening in that it seeks to hear the deepest intentionalities of the other, whether that other is an emanation of your sleeping or waking dream.  This is not meant to imply that the external world is not real; it is only to say that what you know of the world is inescapably conditioned by your particular level of development.

IDL was developed by Joseph Dillard in 1980 out of the ingenious sociometric methods devised by J.L. Moreno, known best for psychodrama and all sorts of experiential approaches to personal development.  Moreno’s work was a precursor to both Perl’s Gestalt and the T-group, sensitivity training, Esalen-type experiences of the 1970’s.  IDL’s first incarnation was as Dream Sociometry, which is now a subtype of IDL, which is itself a form of Dream Yoga.

In Integral Deep Listening you either interview a character from a dream or take a waking life issue, such as financial worries, and allow those worries to take a color, such as blue.  Mimicking the dream creation process, you fill the space around you with that color and let it congeal, condense, or solidify into some form.  You don’t make this happen, you watch it happen. The resulting shape may be a cloud, a square, a toad, or a toilet brush.  You then interview it, using a structured protocol which is designed to disclose alternative interpretations, values and world views, and support transformation.  IDL does this in a number of ways.  One is through character identification, which involves dissociation with waking identity and the cultivation of the witness.  Another is through asking the character if it wants to change and if so, how.  Another is through asking the character to score itself, zero to ten, in six core qualities that are associated with enlightenment: confidence (fearlessness), empathy, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing.

The results are often experientially profound, revealing not so much that which was not already known but clarifying how and why you are stuck and what you need to do to get unstuck.  Neither the process nor the subsequent recommendations are prepersonal, because neither depend on belief.  You don’t have to believe in something or somebody to get results; instead you follow a repeatable methodology and draw your own conclusions.  However, the results are not primarily rational, but experiential.  They transcend and include the rational and the prerational.  You awaken on a core level in a way that differs from that evoked by the Big Mind process of Genpo Roshi based on the Voice Dialogue of the Stones, in that it transcends and includes a rational interviewing protocol.  Such voices elicited through IDL prove to be strongly autonomous without being dissociative.  The process leads to concrete recommendations regarding the healing, balancing, and transformation of three life issues that you initially choose.  This anchors the entire process to practical, daily matters that are of utmost concern to you.  You are both invited and supported in putting the process to the test in your daily life by following those recommendations that seem practical and worthwhile to you.  While everyone is free to draw their own conclusions, those who suspend their disbelief and learn to trust themselves describe results that are sometimes translational (balancing within a level of development) sometimes transformational, and often both.  Consequently, IDL is a genuine transpersonal practice which, when practiced daily, will direct and enhance your integral life practice.  When it is combined with meditation the results of both are synergistically accelerated.

Are dreams anything more than repressed shadow that is then projected as dream characters?  Wilber deals with dream images primarily as projections, as its, that are third person externalizations of oneself. The problem with such projections, as he makes clear, is a fragmentation of self and a loss of the life energy necessary for growth and eventual enlightenment. Integral Deep Listening views the concept of dream images as projections as a very helpful worldview.  Nevertheless, as one more projective interpretation, it needs to be suspended in favor of the phenomenological neutrality of integral deep listening. What matters most is not how we interpret our projections but how this or that piece of experience, for example a dream character, describes itself. When we do succeed in suspending our assumptions we find that both dream characters and personifications of life issues may describe themselves as self-aspects and may describe themselves as autonomous or both.

While there exist many roles that are entrained to support waking identity, there are many, many that are not.  We discover that many dream characters and life issue personifications are not broken off projections at all.  Instead, they are unrecognized or undiscovered potential self-definitions, qualities, or characteristics that we have not yet grown into.  There is also the occasional character who states that it is actually deceased Aunt Sally, Christ, or Buddha.  However, even Aunt Sally, Christ, or Buddha will usually say that she or he also personifies certain aspects of the dreamer.  So even “objective” and “external” dream characters generally are to some extent self-aspects just as “objective” and “external” people in our waking world are to some extent aspects of ourselves.

In summary, our reality consists of three domains: the objectively real, known only through our interpretations of our experiences, projections, and potentials that have never been a part of our identity and so are not and cannot be projections.  The first world consists of the external contexts that keep us bumping up against limits, propelling growth.  The second world is to be reincorporated. The third world is to grow into.

Our world view remains self-centric all the way up through the psychologically heliocentric experience of Atman, or self as God: sat cit, ananda (being, consciousness, bliss).  Just because our identification with self is extinguished in healthy causal structures (“nirvana” means “to extinguish) does not mean that we have evolved a polycentric, or intrasocial, collective identity.  Why should it?  There is little reason to believe that any spiritual tradition to date has evolved a practice of consistently identifying with internal, or intrasocial perspectives, a step that seems to be required to develop a polycentric, early personal, identity.

That is not the same as experiencing ourselves as interdependently co-originated with every sentient being.  In such a scenario a waking self remains the evolving, organizing center of that experience. This does not represent the end of evolution because development is driven by an exchange of identity between the experienced self and the experienced other.  We need both and it seems highly unlikely that we will ever outgrow this need, regardless of how much non-dual witnessing we do, because we will hopefully never outgrow our need to grow, to expand and transcend.  This explains why Zen masters still have monsters in their dreams. So the solution is not the abolishment of the self in the context of the other, nor is it to reincorporate all other selves into an ever expanding waking identity.  Both of these “solutions,” if they were indeed possible, would stop evolution.

IDL demonstrates that becoming emerging potentials support the movement of adults, as well as children, vertically through the various structures of consciousness – from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to pluralistic to vision logic, and on up into the transpersonal energic, subtle, and causal stages.  It doesn’t just help you translate, or stabilize and balance, on your present level more adequately; it creates structural transformation.  It does this by outgrowing contexts, by outgrowing experiential self-definitions, by outgrowing toxic patterns of interaction, and by outgrowing behaviors that keep one stuck.  It is a four-quadrant, psychotherapeutic yoga.

Every time you do an interview you are taking a subject of your awareness and turning it into an object of your awareness.  You are disidentifying with your present identity.  You are transcending it.  When you become perspectives that score higher than you do in six core qualities associated with awakening, you are temporarily experiencing an expanded state of awareness.  You start to see yourself from that broader perspective.  This is a transformational state; many, many approaches claim to provide state transformations.  With ongoing, daily identification with high-scoring potentials you become them; they become your waking identity.  You grow into your transpersonal potentials, and that’s real, lasting, genuine, verifiable transformation.

A reasonable question is, “Meditation has centuries of practice and experience behind it.  Integral Deep Listening does not.  Why should I believe that something that is new and relatively untested reliably delivers structural (stage) evolution instead of exciting, sexy, blissful, addictive states?” The answer is the same as the one Buddha gave: don’t believe it.  Instead, test it here or here in your own life and only keep what works for you.  If you do, you will see for yourself.  If you don’t make an effort to personally evaluate it, you aren’t in a position to objectively evaluate IDL.

With IDL you never get to pure subjectivity or pure objectivity  This is because you never stop dreaming, nor do you ever stop experiencing an exterior world of “otherness,” at least not as long as you are alive.  You never stop having subjects of awareness in the real world or in the internal world except for periods of clarity in meditation when you become relatively pure subjectivity and pure witnessing awareness.  At those moments you still remain the object of the conditioning contexts which predicate both waking and dreaming experience.  There is always a larger holon.

Traditionally, the goal of meditative traditions has been to turn those periods of non-dual awareness into stable perceptual structures.  However, that is a stance of waking identity.  It is not a stance of life as presented by many perspectives provided by emerging potentials in interviews.  This is not the stance of the contextual holons that condition your enlightenment.  We know this because dream images continue for advanced meditators.  There is something intrinsically important and essential about the generation of dream forms that does not get outgrown, although it can be stopped for shorter or longer periods of time.

Ken Wilber would probably say that the potentials in our dreams are expressions of higher structures that we are yet to grow into.  When we introspect these potentials we are not objectifying our present self because we are not yet identified with those unrecognized potentials.  Something else is happening.  To use Ken’s terminology, it is the objectification of our proximal identity by our overall self, rather than by our proximal identity itself.

What would Ken’s approach to drama, tragedy, and the mundane in his own dreams?  He might take the traditional approach, which would be that it is proof he is not stabilized at the non-dual or at some higher sub-level of the non-dual.  Ken has always been the first to state that he’s got more growth to do.  However, he might also see that this answer would put him on an endless squirrel wheel of always trying harder but never quite making it to non-duality while dreaming.  If he did so, he might conclude instead that perhaps the manufacturing of dualistic forms is intrinsic to life, whether asleep or waking; it is not something that can or should be outgrown, even though the ability to stop it or disidentify with it is a sign of freedom, transcendence, and enlightenment.

Another sign of awakening is the ability to address samsara as sunyata – illusion as emptiness.  In addition to the many other ways that he already practices this high art form, Ken would do this when he becomes the non-dual core of a dream lamp post or cockroach or critic, whether awake or while dreaming.

At stable non-dual awareness no subjects of consciousness any longer define your identity but they continue to define the context of your awakening.  As you continue to address them, the context of your awakening will expand.  You won’t have to wait for society to evolve amore supportive contexts.  You won’t have to wait for your internal, social-cultural scripted context to evolve, because it will no longer define you.

Objective social-cultural contexts will forever continue to condition your identity, as will internal, dream contexts.  That’s because both are holons, and there’s never a whole that isn’t a part of another whole. Dream contexts will never stop defining your dream identity and therefore incubating your waking moods, preferences, attitudes, and worldview.  Nor should they.  You need dream contexts to challenge your waking context, even after you are stabilized at the non-dual.  A common theme in the testimony of both interviewed dream characters and the personifications of life issues is that they exist to wake you up.  Is there ever going to be a time when you are fully awake?  Relatively speaking, definitely.  Absolutely?  Probably not.

What makes IDL different from other psychotherapeutic practices that promise transformation but deliver temporary advancement in state awareness?

It is a daily practice.  Daily practice is required for any approach to enter the qualifying rounds for genuine structural transformation.

It transcends and includes shadow work, the realm of most psychotherapeutic procedures.  It not only deals with reincorporating projections; it deals with growing into unrecognized potentials that have never been recognized or owned.

It does not diagnose, interpret, or treat; the healer within does that.

It mimics meditation in that it objectifies subjects of awareness and cultivates the witness through disidentification with waking identity

It creates multiple I-Thou “we” relationships.  Wilber states that this is often the missing piece in spiritual development.  We work on ourselves or work on spiritualizing life in general, but have difficulty with finding, forming, and maintaining sacred relationships.  IDL builds multiple sacred intrapersonal, intrasocial relationships.

It replaces phony compassion with authentic empathy.  It does this by first identifying and slapping down phony compassion.  We often see this in high scoring characters that demand that they have a low score in compassion.  This is because a high score in compassion would be interpreted by us as a grasping of real compassion when in fact we are practicing some version of social conscience.

Any integral life practice will benefit from including IDL for a number of reasons.  Who decides what integral life practice to undertake?  Clearly, it is waking identity, informed by the recommendations of authoritative others, such as Wilber and his texts: “Do the basic four daily; optionally, add one of the other five, either in short or long forms.”  Which ones you choose will also be determined by your waking preferences, preferences that you assume are aligned with your core, with your spiritual destiny, and hopefully with divine will.  But what if you are mistaken?  What if there is a different combination of integral life practices that will shorten your journey?  What if there is some other focus entirely that you need to take on as preliminary groundwork?  How would you know?

With IDL you rely on three sources of input for decision making.  You get the opinions of others that you respect and trust, such as Ken.  You rely on your common sense.  You consult emerging potentials that score high in core qualities associated with enlightenment.  This process is called triangulation. It increases the likelihood that your integral life practice will reflect your collective wisdom instead of simply being a product of your waking preferences.  Such sources of “subjective objectivity” are critical for setting and updating your daily integral life practice.

Integral Deep Listening is a phenomenological approach to personal development, and we both teach and encourage such an approach on our yearly excursions to swim with the wild spotted dolphins of Bimini. Phenomenological approaches encourage the suspension of assumptions, interpretations, expectations, and belief systems regarding what we experience in favor of cultivating an open-focused, receptive awareness which allows us to be touched more deeply than our cultural and social scripting normally allows.  For example, the word “dolphin” is a place holder or marker for an actual experience; functionally, our words stand for our experiences and actually replace experiences with purely subjective reproductions of them.  Such place holders can be immensely powerful.  The word “lemon” can make you salivate. The word “shark” can create the physiological reactions of the alarm phase of the “fight or flight,” or General Adaptation Syndrome.  But while such mental representations are powerful tools for comprehension and growth, they also disallow the full experiencing of lemons, sharks, and dolphins.  Our meanings get in the way of living now, and that stunts our development.

Integral Deep Listening attempts to compensate for the human addiction to meanings and the resulting blockage of raw, vital, and potentially transformative experience by not only encouraging the suspension of such meanings during dolphin encounters, but by asking, “If meaning-making, projection, anthropomorpization, and interpretations of dolphins are unavoidable, what framework is likely to do the least violence to their authentic natures while opening us to the greatest possibilities for personal development?”  To this end, IDL assumes that all experiences are best framed as wake-up calls.  What this means is that whatever happens to you and whomever you meet, including a dolphin, is best viewed as an opportunity to wake up.  “Waking up” means more than paying attention. It means to move toward integration of body, mind, and spirit, toward personal fulfillment, collective interdependence, and enlightenment.  Furthermore, IDL assumes that waking up can be usefully framed in terms of six core qualities that describe the round of breath, day, seasons, and the life cycle itself.  These are confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing.  IDL therefore asks of a dolphin encounter, “How can I use this experience to wake up?”  “How can I use this experience to evoke and expand these six core qualities associated with waking up within me today and long after this encounter?”  Many teachers, trainings, and excursions offer transformative experiences, but they rarely last.  This is because temporary states are not stable, habitual, lasting stages.  A goal of IDL dolphin encounters is to turn a marvelous temporary state of freedom, floating, light, and oneness into an ongoing life that is imbued with more of those qualities.  In order to do so we need to understand these six core qualities and how they operate.  We then approach encounters with dolphins within that context.  We then learn to approach all encounters with others in our daily lives in terms of those qualities.

What are these six core qualities and why are they of central importance?  First, there is  no one formulation that is best or that will work best for everyone.  What is important is that we transcend and include formulations that keep us asleep and experiment with using those that make sense to us and that seem to have a reasonable chance of waking us up.  Close observation of the breath reveals that it has six parts, an abdominal inhalation,  a chest inhalation, a slight pause at the top of the breath, a chest exhalation, an abdominal exhalation, and a longer pause at the bottom of the breath.  This cycle is mediated by the autonomic nervous system, which means that it is mostly unconscious, and can be observed during sleep in animals as well as humans.  It is also under the control of the central nervous system, which means that we have the ability to change the rate, depth, and focus of this fundamental life cycle.  Each of these parts or stages of breathing can be associated with life processes that, while evident throughout the cycle of breathing, are most pronounced at this or that particular stage.  Abdominal inhalation is rebirth and awakening.  It is new growth and new life.  Chest inhalation is aliveness, expression, and growth.  The pause at the top of the breath is a balance point between the alertness that inhalation brings by supplying oxygen to the cells of the body and brain, and the relaxation that each exhalation provides.  Chest exhalation is a letting go of life and energy and a detachment from them.  Abdominal exhalation is a more profound surrendering, death, and freedom.  The longer pause at the bottom of the breath is a space of deathlessness, openness, and clarity.

A little contemplation discloses that this same cycle can be observed in daily life, in the round of seasons, and in the round of life.  Consequently, the breath can be used to anchor many different realms of experience and collect and sort through many systems of meanings in a way that tie back to this moment and this breath.  It can be effectively used to direct experience in this moment, prior to the meanings that language imposes on life.

Each of these stages can also be associated with the six core qualities that are in turn associated with awakening.  Abdominal inhalation, as a primal awakening and rebirth, is a death-defying, fearless confidence.  It is the negentropy or building up of the universe that defies the law of entropy or running down predicted by the laws of physics.  We see this mindless, brazen confident fearlessness in the sprouting of a seed and in the brashness of baby animals and humans.  Chest inhalation, as the personification of aliveness,  is seen in human curiosity and exploration and finds its fullest expression in a life of selfless, compassionate service.  The pause at the top of the breath is not only the rare gift of balance in life but the wisdom that such balance both assumes and generates.  Chest exhalation is both acceptance of oneself and others and detachment from the drama of others, our circumstances, our thoughts and emotions.  Abdominal exhalation is the inner peace that freedom from those dramas produces within us.  The pause at the bottom of each breath is the objective witnessing of both internal and external drama as well as of the cycle itself.

When you free dive with wild dolphins you are much more aware of your breath than you otherwise might be.  This is because your ability to hold your breath translates into an ability to share the experience of the world that dolphins experience.  The best free divers have learned that thinking takes energy and that learning not to engage thoughts or feelings translates into longer diving time.  Consequently, meditation, which is most fundamentally a process of learning to witness or observe the contents of our awareness, is not only important to transformative dolphin encounters, but to developing the phenomenological perspective that allows us to be deeply touched by these extraordinary beings beneath the matrix of our linguistic meanings.

In using meditation to develop the breath control necessary to experience longer free dives with dolphins we can learn to follow our breath with our awareness and at the same time build a sense of unity with dolphins and with all creatures that share this cycle of breath, the associated stages of life, and core qualities that support all life in a foundational way.

What does it mean to experience life in general, and dolphins in particular, in terms of these six core qualities?  First, we have to consider what it means to experience ourselves in terms of these six core qualities.

What does it mean to be confident and fearless?  At worst, it means to foolishly ignore genuine danger.  At best, it means to identify with a definition of self that does not die and that therefore does not fear.  What would it mean to experience a dolphin in such a context?  What would it mean to experience your friends, associates, co-workers, and family in such a context?

What does it mean to be compassionate?  Compassion is different from love, because love has as its opposites fear and hate.  Compassion embraces both love and its opposites.  A good model of compassion is the sky, which gives of itself unreservedly to be inhaled for the sustenance of all living things and which also receives what is exhaled from the earth and its creatures with equal completeness.  At worst, being compassionate means to be enslaved by social conscience, by the “oughts” and “shoulds” of our childhood scripting.  At best, it means to give and receive completely and selflessly.  What would it mean to experience wild dolphins in such a way?  What would it mean to experience your daily life in such a way?

What does it mean to be wise?  Wisdom is different from intelligence, be it test-taking ability, street smarts, charisma, mathematical ability, or the mastery of this or that aptitude.  Wisdom is intuitive knowing.  It is the ability to be in the right place at the right time in order to say or do that which will awaken yourself and others. At worst, wisdom is self-righteous self-assurance, of the type seen in those who have mystical experiences and think their truth is the truth for others or in those who have had the good fortune to have money and status and believe that makes them special.  At best, wisdom is balance of body, mind, and spirit, in work and play, in self and relationships, in life and death.  What would it mean to experience wild dolphins from a space of such wisdom?  What would it mean to experience your daily world from a space of such balance?

What does it mean to be accepting?  At its worst, acceptance is ignoring important distinctions and betraying your responsibility to discriminate.  It is accepting things in yourself and in life, such as social injustice, that are not to be accepted.  At its best, acceptance is about not taking anything personally.  It is about realizing that life is not about you, that if you hadn’t been born but some other child had been, your parents would have treated that child pretty much the same way you got treated, if it behaved in a similar fashion.  It is to understand that the thoughts you think and the feelings you feel aren’t really about you; they are automatic programs that are highly predictable and are mostly about drama, not living.  Real acceptance gets you out of the way so you can hear and see dolphins, others, and yourself.  What would it mean to experience wild dolphins from a space of such acceptance?

What does it mean to have inner peace?  At worst, inner peace is lazy complacency.  At its best, inner peace is freedom from stress and drama. What would it be like to experience dolphins from such a perspective? What would it be like to shift your values in such a way that you routinely experienced your daily life from a space of inner peace?

What does it mean to witness?  At worst, witnessing is an insulating numbing and dissociating that protects you so that you can die more comfortably.  At best, witnessing is freedom from drama.  That drama is easily understood as the endless repetition of the three roles of victim, rescuer, and persecutor.  When you are in these roles when you experience wild dolphins you do not see them, you only see this or that role.  When you learn to witness, you no longer need to rescue dolphins nor do you see them as rescuers of the planet.  You no longer need to persecute those who hurt dolphins or their environment, nor do you need to see those who do as persecutors.  You no longer need to see dolphins as victims of the stupidity, greed, and cruelty of humans, nor do you need to see yourself as a co-victim of environmental degradation.  Can you move to such a perspective?  If you do, how would it change your ability to experience wild dolphins?  How would it affect your relationships with others and how you feel about yourself?

These six core qualities are together antidotes to the drama of victimization, rescuing, and persecution that keeps both humans and dolphins locked in a dance of mutual destruction.  Compassion and acceptance are natural antidotes for rescuing.  Wisdom and fearless confidence are the antidotes for persecution.  Inner peace and witnessing are the natural antidotes for the role of victim.  Integral Deep Listening develops these  antidotes through interviewing dream characters and the personifications of life issues.  For instance, if a participant in a dolphin encounter is afraid of sharks, that fear is given a color and that color is turned into a shape or form, like a ball or an animal, and is then interviewed in such a way that the fear is heard and the participant wakes up.  Repeated interviews within the culture of a group invested in outgrowing drama and embracing the core qualities creates an environment that allows participants to use their encounter with wild dolphins as a way to heal, balance, and transform their lives.

Meditation designed to develop the six core qualites is a great way to prepare for dolphin encounters.  Essentially, this approach involves observation of breath.  Here are some guidelines:

At the beginning of your meditation, set your intent.  What do you want to do and not do during your meditation?  What are you attempting to accomplish?

As you begin to center yourself, focus on your exhalations.  Exhale your thoughts and feelings with each exhalation in order to calm your mind.

During meditation, if you have thoughts, feelings, images, or sensations, exhale them.  If you have drowsiness or lack of focus and energy, focus on your inhalations to bring more clarity with additional oxygen.

Allow your abdominal inhalations to increase wakefulness and confidence.

Allow chest inhalations to increase aliveness and compassion.

Allow the pause at the top of the breath to increase balance and wisdom.

Allow your chest exhalations to increase your detachment and acceptance.

Allow your abdominal exhalations to increase your sense of freedom and inner peace.

Allow the pause at the bottom of your breath to increase centeredness and witnessing.

Here is a protocol for setting intention at the beginning of meditation.  Create your own.

Pre-Meditation Statement of Intent

Most people sit down to meditate without having clear intent.  Maybe it is to be a time of focusing or concentrating attention, to observe breath, to relax, visualize, get guidance, or enter a higher state of consciousness.  When meditators do not clearly set their intent, competing intentions, often out of awareness, conspire to disrupt the meditation period.

Rightly understood, meditation is a practice of bare intention, without content.  It strengthens and clarifies intent by preferring it to other aspects of experience, such as thought, emotion, visualization, sensory stimulation, relationships, or accessing different or higher states of consciousness.  Subsequently, IDL recommends that you begin every meditation session with a statement of your intent.

What follows is an example of a statement of intent based on IDL.  Use it as a source of ideas for creating your own.  When you arrive at something you like, print it out and read it over before you meditate until you can repeat it in your thoughts.

“I am here to meditate.

I am not here to

think,

problem-solve,

plan,

reflect,

contemplate,

or talk to myself in any way.

When thoughts arise, they are like clouds in the sky:

they aren’t about me.

With every out-breath I exhale whatever thoughts arise.

I am not here to experience the roller coaster of my emotions,

including bliss and ecstasy.

When feelings arise, they are like weather; it isn’t about me.

With every out-breath I exhale whatever feelings arise.

I am not here to watch internal TV,

to look at anything or to visualize anything.

When images arise, they seem inconsequential, like a mirage.

With every out-breath I exhale whatever images arise.

I am not here to explore sensations

of heat and cold, pain or relaxation.

I am not here to explore kundalini or chakra energies.

When sensations arise I will treat them as I do

when they arise when I am asleep or watching a movie:

they exist, but they are relatively inconsequential.

With every out-breath I exhale whatever sensations arise.

I am not here to go into trance or

experience altered states of consciousness, whether

sleep,

hypnosis,

samadhi,

the subtle,

causal,

or the non-dual.

If such shifts occur they are not about me.

With every out-breath I exhale whatever state arises.”

“I am here to become the sky.

As the sky I score ten, on a scale of zero to ten, in confidence,

because I as sky am fearless,

since I cannot die and nothing can hurt me.

I am completely awake and aware.

I inhale Joseph’s fear and unconsciousness.

As the sky I score ten in compassion,

because as sky I give myself completely to

humans, animals, trees, and minerals

for them to use me as they wish to live more fully.

I am compassionate in that I completely take in whatever they exhale.

I inhale Joseph’s selfishness and laziness.

As the sky I score ten in wisdom

because I am in all things and therefore know all things.

I am completely balanced between

day and night,

hot and cold.

I inhale Joseph’s ignorance and imbalances.

As the sky I score ten in acceptance

because I do not judge

my weather or color as good or bad

and do not judge what goes on above me or below, in the world.

I inhale Joseph’s non-acceptance, attachments, and addictions.

As the sky I score ten in peace of mind

because nothing affects me.

I am free.

I inhale Joseph’s stress and imprisonment.

As the sky I score ten in witnessing

because I observe the dramas of life and nature without identifying with them.

As the sky I am clear and empty.

I inhale Joseph’s enmeshment in drama and his cloudiness.

“Because I am the sky,

I am transparent and luminous.

I have no self, yet I am completely

awake,

aware,

and alive.

Because I am the sky,

I both respect the laws that govern life

and experience them with

joyful absurdity

because of their dreamlike nature.

Because I am the sky,

I experience the abundance of life

both within me and around me.”

“As the sky, I am prana.

I am breath.

I enter you and the cells of your body,

feeding them and

lighting your mind.

I leave you and become one with all.”

“Because I am these things,

life is sacred.
This moment is sacred.

Sky, as breath, breathes me now.”

The first part of this statement of intention defines meditation negatively, as the absence of each of the five skandhas, or components of identity.  By doing so, it gives awareness nothing to hold onto.  The nature of these five skandhas are elaborated in “The Five Trees and Meditation.”

The second part of the statement defines meditation positively and experientially, by asking you to become the sky and experience what life is like from its perspective.  While it is obvious that the sky is a metaphor for a perspective of pure witness, it is also a metaphor for the five other core qualities of enlightenment referenced here.  You are asked to experience yourself as each of them, from the perspective of sky.

The third part of the statement is based on the three refuges of Buddhism: “I take refuge in the Buddha, in the Dharma, and in the Sangha.”  “Buddha” means “the enlightened one,” or one who is fully awake, yet with no self.  “Dharma” means law, or organizing structure, or truth.  IDL sees these as perspectival: totally dependent upon one’s perspective. As a consequence the dharma is not only dreamlike; we are free to choose how we view it.  IDL recommends that whatever structures exist in your life, whether they are helpful or hindrances, be viewed with joyful absurdity.  “Sangha” is the Buddhist word for spiritual community.  In IDL there are two sanghas, your internal, or intrasocial support community, which you encounter and evolve through interviewing and application, and your external support community, made up first of peers and teachers in IDL, then by others who share its values and culture, and finally by the entirety of your waking identity and its social environment: all sentient beings.  To fully recognize and embrace these two sanghas is to experience outrageous, unlimited abundance.

The next part centers your sense of who you are in sky and as sky as prana and breath, not as your body, thoughts, or feelings, as you normally do.

The final part centers you in the sacredness of this moment and this moment and this moment as sky, as tens in each of the six core qualities.

At the end of your meditation it is important to set your intent for whatever comes next.  Ask yourself, “What thoughts and feelings are likely to come up or get in the way the next time I meditate? What can I do between now and then to reduce them?”  Do those things, and watch your meditation improve.

The first is interviewing self-aspects in your dreams while you are dreaming.

This practice is cultivated by making a habit of regular waking interviewing and by setting this intent while drifting off to sleep. Its purpose is to practice deep listening while dreaming as a way to integrate self aspects as they arise in consciousness, not simply by becoming them, but by respecting why they exist and in what way they serve as a wake-up call.

This second practice has two levels.  The first involves asking a dream character questions while you are dreaming and listening to its answers.  At first you will be limited to interacting with people, but then you will find yourself interviewing animals plants and then objects, like forks, doorknobs, and walls.

The second level involves actually becoming self-aspects as you are interviewing them in your dreams. This is assumed if you answer as the interviewed self-aspect instead of simply asking questions and listening to the answers provided by the character.

The third practice is carrying out self-aspect recommendations in your dreams while you are dreaming. Instead of doing what you want to do in your dreams you choose to follow the recommendations of aspects of yourself that score higher than you do in the six core qualities.

The fourth practice is to go to sleep observing your breathing and to continue that observation in the dream state. The round of breath is associated with the six core qualities. The purpose is to come to constantly watch a field of abundance, joy, and luminosity that is the outgrowth of integration of the six core qualities.

The sadhana associated with the deep sleep state involves carrying the fourth practice, above, into deep sleep.

(More detailed information is available in Integral Deep Listening and Meditation)

The role of leader of this group is to pick some aspect of IDL for discussion, and structure both interviewing and discussion. The role of leader is not to interpret or to impose a structure on the group. The method itself directs group process. Aspects of IDL for future group topics can come from the group itself. These might include some aspect of the Drama Triangle (interpersonal/external, cognitive (thoughts/feelings), or dreams), clarification of some aspect of the interviewing process, focus on concrete ways to apply self-aspect suggestions, or ways to evolve this or that of the six core qualities and processes.

Here are options for interviewing in presentations and in groups.

Demo Interviews. These are done either by the most senior student of the work or by a student as part of their training.  After the normal group input to the subject on their interview, the interview itself is critiqued by the group. As with all interviews, the subject chooses either the dream/dream character to interview or the life issue. In all cases, three life issues are provided.

Diad Interviews. Group members pair up and decide who will interview and who will be interviewed. There is generally time for only one interview in most groups. Allow forty-five minutes for the interview. The group reassembles and highlights of interviews are shared. Beware of the tendency to share the entire interview – there isn’t time. The best way to counteract this is to ask for specific information: “What recommendations came out of the interview? How can you apply them?” “What did you learn about how you are stuck and what you need to do to get unstuck?”  “What surprised you most about the interview?”

Directed Group Interviews. The group members are provided with pencil and paper and the interviewing format is read to them. Everyone works on a dream and one character or the personification of a life issue. In groups where all are familiar with both, the leader can allow participants to choose, but generally you will find yourself going with one or the other.

Discussion of Prior Interviews. Group members bring interviews to the group that they have conducted for themselves or with others and share them with the group as a whole. Discussion ensues. This format is generally preferred for the review of clinical cases in supervisory groups. It is often combined with a demo interview or a supervised interview by a student.

Regardless of the perspective from which we approach dreaming, most framings end up being either 1) interpretive, 2) investigate objective measures (REM sleep, EEG patterns, indications of lucidity, arousal, incorporation of waking stimuli, etc.), 3) emphasize data collection for comparative purposes (content analysis), 4) categorize types of dreams or dream patterns, 5) study personality traits of groups of dreamers (pain tolerance, anxiety level, creativity, expectations, etc.), or 6) compare dream content with other areas of human experience (literature, mythology, daydreams, channeled dispensations, hypnotic phenomena, hallucinogenic experiences). We find comparative methods, such as content analysis and pattern identification methods of various types, objective studies of brain chemistry, social studies of psychological characteristics of dreamers (recallers vs. non-recallers, creativity, physiological adaptation, cultural expectations, etc.), and subjective experiments which are phenomenologically based. Clearly, dreaming may be approached from a broad number of research methodologies depending upon our purpose. These approaches reflect the priorities of different quadrants of the human holon. None of these are inherently better than any other, but each is indeed superior for particular tasks.

For example, objective methods are superior when social consensus is important and when waking problem solving and application is desirable. Subjective methods, in particular phenomenologically based ones, are superior when self-exploration, which is largely independent of the input of others, is desired, yet one still desires the maintenance of some degree of objectivity. Phenomenological methods are also superior when the researcher desires to suspend reality claims to the best of her ability and when description is emphasized. Most approaches to dreamwork have tended not to be phenomenologically based in that subject dream experiences are generally not evaluated in terms of how these experiences appear to the dreamer herself, or to those aspects of herself that have a personal stake in the experience.

Researchers and interpreters inevitably read into dream accounts whatever it is that they are looking for. If we are looking for archetypes, we see archetypes. If we are looking for repeating patterns we are likely to find them. If we are Freudians, dreams are about libido and thanatos. If we are Jungians dreams are full of shadow, archetypes, and individuation. If we are fundamentalist Christians, dreams tend to be either the hand of God or the work of the devil. If we are scientific materialists, dreams are random epiphenomena.

Most dream research emphasizes the psychotherapeutic, physiological, or cultural nature of dreaming rather than the dreamer’s own reflexive awareness of their dream experience. Consequently, most dream research up into the twenty-first century has not been phenomenological in approach. Reading in our schemas, biases, and world views occurs not only when we look at someone else’s dream; we routinely do it to our own dream recollections. It can even be argued that this process is unavoidable, because we have no choice but to view the dream (and life itself) as Kant would say, through the schemas of our own subjective experience. While projection may be unavoidable, awareness of projection and attempts to reduce it are both worthwhile and important goals. Otherwise we will simply find in the dream what we are looking for and little more. We will simply go away from the experience validated in our own delusions.[/vc_column_text][leezen_vc_section_title heading_type=”h3″ title=”Dream Sociometry: A Phenomenological Approach to Dreamwork” title_transform=”capitalize” title_weight=”600″ alignment=”left” title_size=”20px”]

Dream Sociometry is an approach to dreamwork created by Joseph Dillard in 1980 based on the sociometric methodology created by psychiatrist J.L. Moreno in the 1930’s. Dr. Moreno, a younger Austrian contemporary of Freud’s, is most widely recognized as the developer of psychodrama. He also created the role playing procedures made famous by T-groups and sensitivity groups as well as by Fritz Perls and Gestalt therapy. “Dream Sociometry” means the measurement of dream social groups. It assumes that dream characters can be productively approached as if they are aspects of self which form internal social networks or “intrasocial” groups. The nature of these intrasocial groups is explored through a process of character identification, or structured role play. Preferences which are stated by each character in response to a structured interviewing process are noted in a grid called a Dream Sociomatrix. Elaborations of these preferences are collected in various Commentaries. Tabulations of this data can be used to form a visual presentation of the relationships of the various dream group members. This depiction is called a Dream Sociogram.

Dream group member explanations of their preferences are written as character elaborations in the Dream Sociomatrix Commentary. Dream group members are then asked if they could change the dream group in any way they want, would they, and if so, how would they change it? The resulting elaborations are collected in the Dream Commentary.

If, and only if, all dream group members arrive at a consensus on recommended changes within the dream group, these may be written as a Dreamage. A dreamage is used as a potent metaphorical tool for integrating and transforming consciousness.

Each dream group member is then asked the question, “If I were this dreamer, living his waking life, with all of his daily relationship, work, financial, spiritual, and health concerns, would I live his life differently? If so, how?” Responses are noted in the Waking Commentary.

Next the dreamer recalls some waking concern or worry. It doesn’t have to have anything at all to do with the dream. Each dream group member is then asked the question, “If I were this dreamer, this is how I would handle this life issue:” Elaborations are noted in the Life Issue Commentary.

An Action Plan is then developed. It consists of those waking life changes that have been recommended by dream group members which the dreamer is willing to implement in her waking life. These are charted and monitored on a weekly basis.

The Dream Sociogram is created and information about dream group relationships and their relevance to associated life issues are written in the Sociogram Commentary.

Each dream group member is now asked the following question: “The reason why I am in this dream and this dream group came together is…” The resulting elaborations are collected in the Dream Summary Commentary.

Dream Sociometry has been used in the treatment of agoraphobia, anxiety disorder, depression, relationship counseling, identity disorder, PTSD, and career counseling. For a full explanation of the methodology, see Dillard’s Dream Sociometry.

In the 1990’s the methodology was expanded to address waking dreams, whether manifested as personal life issues such as death, disease, financial, or interpersonal concerns. It also addresses other forms of waking dreams, such as social nightmares like 9/11 and global warming, and cultural dreams, such as religious, mythic, and literary themes.[/leezen_vc_section_title][leezen_vc_section_title heading_type=”h3″ title=”Outline of the Phenomenological Approach to Dreamwork” title_transform=”capitalize” title_weight=”600″ alignment=”left” title_size=”20px”]Phenomenological approaches to dreamwork have as an aim the minimization of the projection which is an unavoidable component of all interpretation. Paradoxically, most do so by trusting the validity of highly individual and subjective personal dream reports. What does it mean to rely fully and heavily on the dreamer’s own introspective reports of their dream experience? What does a thoroughgoing phenomenological approach to dream research look like?

The fundamental purpose of phenomenology itself may at times be the same as that of dreamwork, or it may be very different. Husserlian phenomenology has the goal of being “a rigorous science,” which aims to identify the recurring or essential structures of the contents and processes of consciousness. Phenomenological approaches to dream work share this methodological aim of carefully observing the contents and processes of consciousness. The Dream Sociometric methodology can be used for this purpose, particularly when one tabulates preferences, reviews elaborations, and studies associated patterns of intrasocial organization. Generally, however, dreamers will primarily use phenomenological methods when they desire a method which helps them to suspend their waking bias when they approach a dream. They are not content to always discover what they suspected all along to be true.

It is important to remember that what is being studied phenomenologically is the state of consciousness of the dreamer at the time that he investigates the recalled dream narrative. Inferences about dream consciousness are normally made, but they are only that – inferences. We are not working on the dream itself but rather on our memory of the dream. Consequently, dream phenomenology does not deal with dreaming in the strict sense. It deals with dream state residue, which may be similar or radically different from dream awareness itself.

A thoroughgoing phenomenological approach to dream research gathers introspective reports from other aspects of self in addition to the assumptions of waking identity and its dream identity, which is referred to as “dream self” to differentiate it from waking identity. In this regard it differs from Husserlian phenomenology, which relies on the introspection of the subject, who is generally assumed to be the researcher. This method breaks down somewhat when altered states of consciousness are being explored. Clearly, the “researcher” who is reporting on an acid trip is not the same as the researcher who is reporting on night blindness. The destructuralization of the researcher becomes more pervasive with Dream Sociometry, gestalt, and other such subjective approaches to dreamwork where there are many “subjects.” There are as many potential “researchers” as there are discrete internal identities with which to identify. In phenomenological dreamwork the monolith of identity is destructuralized and consciousness is observed from the perspectives of its relative components.

The Phenomenological Reduction

Each individual dream group member has its own distinct consciousness. This is not a theory or a hypothesis. It is a demonstrable fact that you are urged to explore until you yourself are convinced of its truth. The distinct consciousness of your dream group members are nonetheless generally and mostly self-aspects. They are, by their own testimony, not discarnate entities, extraterrestrials, gods, or devils. They are relatively autonomous internal perspectives of which you are aware, partially aware, or unaware. Some are prepersonal, some are personal, and some are transpersonal in their level of development. Based on their own testimony and that of other self-aspects, some are very healthy while others are either stuck, sick, or both. The “cause,” origin, or “meaning” of a particular dream group member is an entirely different issue from the nature of its individual consciousness. Interpretive and more projective approaches look for meaning and find it in what the character is assumed to symbolize. Phenomenological approaches, on the other hand, emphasize the consciousness of dream characters themselves, not symbolic meanings. The distinction between the consciousness of a particular dream group member and where it may have come from basically distinguishes phenomenological approaches to dreamwork from most other descriptive approaches. This step is called the phenomenological reduction (epoch`e). It is a methodological step of stripping introspective data, such as dream characters, of their status as mental facts occurring within a real world. For dreamwork, the “real world” is the real world of dream experience. Interpretive approaches tend to view this “real world” as a type of epiphenomena dependent for meaning and relevancy on the broader, more rational, more relevant, and more meaningful domain of waking consciousness. In other words, such dreamworkers search for what a dream and its contents mean to the dreamer and his waking reality. The dreamer approaches the dream narrative with his own set of biases. These form a set of assumptions, an inchoate set of hypotheses, if you will, that direct attention while both limiting and determining what he will and will not see in the dream narrative. So the mental facts occurring in the real world of dreaming are explored to see what relevance they have for the real mental (and physical) facts of waking life. This has been the case since before Joseph interpreted dreams for Pharoah. Phenomenology, on the other hand, suspends the presumed correlation between introspective data and a real world. Introspective data are not treated as reports coming from a real internal world. Instead, the data is examined and described in their own terms, regardless of “where they might have come from” or what they may indicate about reality.

Phenomenologically oriented dreamwork, then, does not attempt to base dreaming on its meaning for waking consciousness or to require that dream accounts say something real about dreaming itself. The consciousness of each dream group member is taken at face value. Relevancy is based on its subjective reports, not on what expectations, assumptions and intersubjective meanings waking identity wants or needs to read into each unique dream group member consciousness.

By suspending belief in any real world that the phenomenon “may have come from,” the phenomenological reduction removes from consideration both the (presumed) reality status of the phenomenon and any possible causal link between the phenomenon and something else. We are no longer assuming the dream group member is more or less real than waking identity. We are no longer assuming dream group member elaborations are more or less true than those of waking identity. We are no longer assuming, at that moment, that they are aspects of ourselves, guidance from God, random biochemical epiphenomenon, or any other particular pet theory. We suspend all such assumptions and then draw our conclusions from their self-reports. We then look for patterns within those self-reports. Those patterns and the correlations among self-reports give us a phenomenological foundation for understanding a dream and its contents.

Once engaged in phenomenological reduction, the dreamworker can neither attribute a reality status to the dream group member and its elaborations nor infer the existence of something else as either a cause or effect of the dream group member. Inferred relationships to dreaming, waking life issues, the universal unconscious, relevancy to life processes such as individuation, biochemistry, day residue, are all suspended. The dreamworking phenomenologist, if she is to be consistent, cannot even attribute reality to herself. Such assumptions are simply suspended. Neither the content that is experienced through character identification nor the subjective processes of experiencing the identification are regarded as either real or unreal; they are not regarded as clues to something real “beyond” them. This approach is radically at variance with most objective methodologies as well as interpretive approaches to dreamwork. It most closely resembles the four-fold negation of the brilliant Madhyamika sage Nagarjuna, which overthrows Aristotelian logic, by not accepting as a foundational premise the Law of the Excluded Middle.

What are the advantages of taking such a stance toward dreaming? There are advantages that are specific to dreamwork and other advantages that are profoundly supportive of the evolution of consciousness. The phenomenological reduction disengages waking awareness from its customary attitude of assessing dream group members, their attitudes, feelings, and behavior, based on how real they are or are not, how meaningful they are or are not to them. Instead, identity, now expanded through identification beyond previous waking awareness, is aware of the phenomenon itself – the experience of being the dream group member and being those attitudes, feelings and behaviors. This qualitative richness is observed and described now by the dream group member, not by waking identity. It is more accurate to say that it is observed and described by both waking identity and the dream group member fused as one. This act of observation and description occurs without the usual resort to waking concepts and categories of waking awareness. Such constructs as waking identity, Dream Self, and dream characters are based on some assumed reality status for both the perceiver and the perceived. We do not know if waking identity is more or less real than dream group members, if Dream Self is more or less real than dream group members, or if one dream group member is more real than another. Instead, all such judgments are suspended so that all states of consciousness and sentient beings may be placed on the same ontological footing. With the implementation of the phenomenological reduction, waking experience is no more or less real or illusory than dream experience. By loosening awareness away from the typical way that we describe things, the phenomenological reduction equalizes dream group phenomena, because they are no longer observed and described with an underlying motive of ranking them according to some hypothesized reality status. The phenomenological stance, when applied to dream groups, allows the dreamer to receive all dream group members and their attendant experience equally and in their fullness. The result is powerful in its spontaneity and numinousness. Both kratophanies and epiphanies are experienced in life-transformative immediacy. Interpretive approaches feel safer because they are just that – interpretations; protective mental screens are raised between the overwhelming immediacy of blinding light, overpowering energy, and humbling majesty. Fear keeps this door closed for most of us most of the time.

The result of the utilization of the phenomenological reduction with dream characters deprives them of independent reality, what Buddhists call bhava, or “own-being.” The more that we do so, the more we deconstruct our own reality and the more we experience the absence of beingness wherever we look within ourselves. It is replaced with sunyata, formless emptiness, devoid of either being or non-being. Make no mistake: this is a causal level transpersonal psychospiritual discipline if approached from a through going phenomenalistic perspective.[/leezen_vc_section_title][leezen_vc_section_title heading_type=”h3″ title=”The Eidetic Reduction” title_transform=”capitalize” title_weight=”600″ alignment=”left” title_size=”20px”]As we have seen, the suspension of dream reality claims is quite similar to what Husserl termed “the eidetic reduction” in phenomenological method. “With the eidetic reduction, the phenomenologist attempts to identify the essential structures of human consciousness, rather than the ephemeral content or the purely personal features of individual’s consciousness. In brief, the eidetic reduction is a method of imagining possible variations of the phenomenon under study. In Integral Deep Listening, the possible variations are imagined not by the experimenting dreamworker, but by the contents of consciousness themselves. Dream group members and the personifications of life issues imagine the possible variations. The gathering of varying subjective reports from various dream group members results in sometimes similar, sometimes radically varying introspective reports into the nature of experience in the recalled dream. Such variations in accounts are exactly what the phenomenologist is looking for. The Lamp Post disagrees with the Sofa, which disagrees with the Shitsu, and all of them disagree in their patterns of preferences with Dream Self.

For example, a dreamer recalls a dream of a burning building. She thinks, “Ah, this is about that argument I had yesterday!” This is a hypothesis formed by waking identity. It represents one of many possible perspectives. If she blithely assumes that her assumption speaks for the entirety of her identity, her investigation will stop. She has focused on the etiology and meaning of the experience rather than its consciousness itself. If, however, she were to interview various dream group members such as the fire and the building, she would probably experience a considerable amplification of her consciousness, not to mention her understanding. She might even discover that the argument of yesterday is only incidental to the concerns of her dream group members. She may come away wondering if her waking agenda is both uninformed and narrow, even disrespectful of the agendas of other aspects of herself.

Understanding of a dream, which is often the goal of our dreamwork, is merely insight, and insight will only take us so far. The amplification of consciousness itself, the transformation of limited world views, is an entirely different matter. Even if these other aspects of herself basically confirm her hypothesis, if she follows the IDL interviewing structure, they are likely to go on to elaborate how and why she loses her temper and make concrete suggestions about what she can do differently to resolve this internal conflict as it manifests in her relationships. In addition, it may suggest a dreamage, a consensus reorganization of the dream group, as a personal myth of higher order psychic integration. All of this is secondary to the potential that exists in the opportunity to own and reintegrate one’s beingness as building and fire. The consciousness of “fireness” is rich, fierce, and empowering. When totally integrated, consciousness is fundamentally expanded. The experience of being the building awakens new possibilities of who she is. These experiences far transcend both understanding and insight. That is because they involve identification, becoming rather than preferring the objectification of analysis. That will come later in the process.

If Fire and Building express opinions that are totally at odds from her own assumptions regarding what they are about, then her waking hypothesis about why she had the dream is not only disproven; she will probably approach it with amazement and new respect. Perhaps Building will say, “I need to burn down. I have to die in order to be reborn. Your anger is your attempt to avoid looking at your fear of letting go.” The argument of the day before is then perhaps viewed as a catalyst for the addressing of a much more fundamental issue for the dreamer. Perhaps Fire elaborates on the nature of that issue. It might say, “I purify in my uncontrollable aliveness and spontaneity. Because you cannot control me you are frightened of me. And so I come out in a perverted form, as an argument.”

Is this the “meaning” of the dream? Is this the “true interpretation” of the dream? Such questions miss the point. Phenomenologists do not seek to limit reality by forcing it into some box, no matter how beautiful and desirable it may be. Does a diamond have one “true” facet? Does a diamond have one “real” meaning? Do you have one “true” self? Does your life have one “real” meaning? The sad truth is that many people waste years trying to find both and therefore experience needless anxiety if they have neither. An even worse outcome is if they become convinced that they have found their true self and that they know their life’s true meaning. At that point they stop searching, because they have managed to repress the innate ambiguity and polyvalence of both self and life. True Believers, they have drunk the cool aid, and now they want everybody else to drink it too. Permissive and open-ended ongoing feedback from your self-aspects provides a both/and approach to life rather than an either/or approach. It first demonstrates that dream groups are polyvalent, that many forms personify varying purposes and norms, each valid within its particular context. There is no one correct meaning but many pragmatically expedient attitudes, feelings, and behaviors which are internally consistent but which may violently clash with other perspectives. From this experience we gradually draw the experiential conclusion that life itself is a dream that is created and experienced in very much the same way. We open to it; we relax into it. We withdraw all of our projections onto others and ourselves; we smile at our Atman project, our need for constant assurance that we are someone, that life matters, and that anything exists that has lasting value.

These words are not a negation of life or of purposive action within it. What you do matters; who you are matters more than you know; we need you to contribute your uniqueness so that we all may benefit from the extraordinary expression of spirit that you are. However, when you take yourself too seriously, when you attempt to grasp and hold life, you experience life as suffering. Misery is optional. Integral Deep Listening is designed to provide you experiences of legitimate, authentic internal perspectives that are not based on either suffering or misery.

We begin to see how the phenomenological method helps to unknot long-tangled waking assumptions and biases. They come to be viewed as presenting one alternative, one variation, of many possible introspective reports about life. We come to see waking identity for what it is: a habitual adaptive structure of thought and feeling which is developed to get out of our family alive, to pass classes in school, to make friends, to get a job, to get people to put up with us and maybe even love us. We begin to see that we have mistaken this arbitrary adaptive response to our particular environment for the entirety of ourselves. Instead of growing beyond it, instead of deconstructing our identification with it, we build the walls of our prison higher and deeper until we are the living dead. When you interview your dream group members you will find that many challenge or contradict the convenient myths constructed by your waking sense of self. Your sense of who you are will expand as a result. Important information and relevant perspectives will still be left out, valuable perspectives and recommendations for your integral life practice that are available from other self-aspects. This endless wealth of consciousness can be overwhelming; at some point we have to break away just to digest what we have grown into.

Two different levels of eidetic variation in phenomenological dreamwork

There are at least two different levels of eidetic variation in phenomenological dreamwork. The first regards the dream narrative. While the dream narrative provides both the phenomena, in the form of each dream character, and its interactional context, it does not provide the consciousness of the dream group member itself. This exists quite independently of the dream narrative. The narrative is a dead letter. Dreamwork that focuses on interpreting dream narratives is dream pathology; it is in the business of performing psychic autopsies. Phenomenological approaches feel more like the return to health after a long illness. You feel life that courses in its richness through your being; aliveness itself is electric, no longer taken for granted. Each self-aspect that you interview will have its own insights about who you are, about your waking life issues, and what to do about them. This information may have little to do with the dream. It will transcend and include the dream just as it will transcend and include your waking sense of who you are. Your dream group members exist independently of your dream narratives. They have needs and opinions that transcend the context of the dream account, which is, after all, the dream told from the perspective of Dream Self, as remembered when you awaken. It is told from your perspective, not the perspectives of other invested aspects of yourself. Each self-aspect has its own hypotheses about the purpose of the dream narrative. It has its own story, which for it is as legitimate as the story you tell yourself. As such, each dream group member has relevance as an object of phenomenological study in its own right, completely separate from the dream narrative.

The second level of eidetic variation in phenomenological dreamwork deals not with the dream narrative but with variations and similarities in the consciousness of dream group members. Regarding the dream narrative there are at least three sub-levels of eidetic variation. First, we have the account offered by your waking self, which remembers the dream. We generally mistake the narrative for the dream itself, as if it were the one true and accurate account, since, after all, it is what we experienced! Second, we have the accounts offered by the various characters in the dream. These are unknown unless interviewed. We are limited to the first dimension of the second level of eidetic variation in phenomenological dreamwork if we do not interview at least one of the characters in the dream. Third, we have the account which is a compilation of the perspectives of interviewed self-aspects and waking identity. This third dimension does not follow automatically from the second; it must be understood and made a priority. All three of these levels are relevant; all three of them are legitimate. What we usually do with the recalled dream is create a waking myth. What we can do with the accounts offered by the dream group members themselves is expand and transform our consciousness through identification. What we find with the compilation of all three aspects of the eidetic variation is a view of the intrasocial culture and intersubjective consciousness of those aspects of ourselves which manifest in a particular dream group. The third is most likely to present an accurate phenomenological rendering of the dream narrative because it encompasses the first two categories. The creation of the Dream Sociogram is designed to provide a window into this level of eidetic variation.

Imagining Eidetic Variations

When we apply the phenomenological eidetic reduction to dreamwork we have a method of identifying the essential structures of group consciousness. The eidetic reduction is a method of imagining possible variations of the phenomenon under study. In Dream Sociometry, this imagination takes two forms: 1) hypotheses, created by waking identity, as to a) the life issues of concern to the dream group and b) regarding their patterns of preference; and 2) dream group member identification itself.

Based on the testimony of at least some dream characters, specific dream group members are brought together by a common investment in one or more life issues. Notice that this statement is based on the phenomenological methodology, not on projection by waking identity. Because it is based on phenomenological data rather than waking assumptions, it is neither projective nor interpretive in the usual sense of these terms. That is, it does not reflect projections or interpretations by waking identity. It does reflect majority or consensus projections and interpretations by interviewed self-aspects. Therefore the phenomenological method does not eliminate the perils of subjectivity, it merely kicks the can down the developmental road, so to speak. The delusions of waking identity are infused, and thereby watered down, by the delusions of other self-aspects. Because English, grammar, and its associated network of meanings are creations of waking identity, interpretation and projection can never be dismissed entirely. Each dream group member is invested in some specific way in a particular issue or agenda which is shared by other aspects of self. Because of this common investment, the fate of each of these dream group members is inevitably bound up in what happens to the others and to the fate of the life issue. This is a state of interdependent co-origination and existence.

Waking perspective is only one of a number of world views that are equally valid in understanding the genesis of a dream group, its shared life issue(s), and their resolution. The eidetic reduction involves phenomenologically imagining variations on this perspective offered by other invested aspects of self. These variations are derived from elaborations elicited from dream group members by character identification. They are of two basic types:

1) Variations that no longer appear to be the phenomenon under study – counterexamples and limiting studies. This kind of variation helps identify the limits of the phenomenon’s essence.

2) Variations that still seem to be examples of the original phenomenon, even thought they include different features. This second kind of variation helps reveal the phenomenon’s essence.

The essence or eidetic structure of any phenomenon includes all of its features that cannot be eliminated by imaginatively varying the phenomenon. Such features remain evident throughout the imaginative variation process despite attempts to imagine examples of the phenomenon that would lack these features. The essence is arrived at through the method of eidetic reduction. It is an accomplishment rather than a pre-given fact.

For example, if a dream phenomenologist is studying dream group conflict, he or she would perform an eidetic reduction by first having an actual experience of dream group conflict, such as a nightmare. Perhaps she has the hypothesis that dream groups gather for conflict resolution. She then imagines a series of conflicts which are variations of that first experience. In other words, she would recall a dream in which conflict was either experienced within herself as Dream Self, or between Dream Self and another or other characters, or between two or more dream group members. She experiences a nightmare, a dream fight with one or more dream characters, or between other characters in the dream. Another alternative would be for another dream group member or members to experience conflict within themselves not shared by Dream Self. In any of these cases, she would then imagine a series of conflicts which are variations of that first experience by identifying with dream group members and noting their preferences and elaborations. Let’s say the conflict deals with flying a plane and crashing it. Some aspects want to fly. Other characters don’t. Some dream group members blame other group members for the crash.

Dream group members which do not experience conflict by the plane flying or crashing or which express no opinion about the conflict shared by other dream group members would be examples of the first type of variation. Perhaps the sky and the ground either do not experience the conflict or have no opinion about it. Their elaborations and patterns of preference help identify the limits of intrapsychic conflict for the particular dream group. Their presence and elaborations may establish counterexamples and alternative ways of dealing with life issues that are non-conflictual. Such characters generally provide, through identification, a metaphorical model of life without attachment to the conflict. If the variations become so dissimilar that they no longer seem to be examples of dream group conflict at all, then they are counter-examples or limiting cases. Dream group members who do experience conflict also limit the phenomenon’s essence by clarifying when, where, and why specific instances of conflict arise. Perhaps they indicate that this particular conflict only arises when autonomous, impulsive decisions are made by Dream Self that nevertheless have disastrous consequences for other aspects of self. Such a pattern could be associated with intoxication, impulsive sex, and other types of behavior that dream group members themselves associate with flying. The features that are not shared are not part of the essence of dream group conflict since they can be eliminated by the perspective of one or another dream group member which lacks those features. This is a further example of the first type of eidetic reduction variation. These variations may force the dream phenomenologist to alter her original hypothesis that dream groups gather for conflict resolution. They may go so far as to disprove the hypothesis itself.

These variations alter certain features of the first experience (the recalled dream) of the phenomenon under study, in this case dream group conflict. Dream group members may remember aspects of the conflict forgotten or unimportant to Dream Self. For example, they may remember that the plane is full of criminals. They may approach it from perspectives not shared by Dream Self; the plane may want to crash. When those imaginative variations that are similar enough to the recalled dream (the experience of the dreamer) to be experienced as examples of dream group conflict, then the features they share will be potentially part of the essence of dream group conflict for this dream group because these features have not yet been eliminated through the method of eidetic reduction. They remain shared aspects of dream group conflict for the dreamer and for all interviewed aspects of self.

Eidetic reduction is an experimental dreamwork method in the sense that a working dream phenomenologist must actually identify with many different dream group members in order to imagine a large number of variations of the phenomenon under study. He does so without knowing ahead of time how the phenomenon will appear to all these different aspects of self or what their patterns of preference will be. He does not know in advance which of these identifications will prove resistant to variation and which will not. Creating hypotheses about such findings is both important to the direction of questioning and humbling in its consistent exposure of the chronic myopia of waking identity.[/leezen_vc_section_title][leezen_vc_section_title heading_type=”h3″ title=”Summarization of the Purpose of the Phenomenological Method” title_transform=”capitalize” title_weight=”600″ alignment=”left” title_size=”20px”]Dream phenomenology aims at 1) observing one’s own intrasocial consciousness in order to identify and describe the basic structures of the processes occurring in intrasocial consciousness, as well as 2) directly experiencing the basic structures of the dream group members, their attitudes, purposes, feelings, behaviors and interactions that one is aware of through these processes. The first aim is subjective and is known as noetic analysis; the second aim focuses on the objects or contents of consciousness and is known as noematic analysis.

Dream phenomenologists do not have to focus on examining the consciousness of many different dreamers in order to arrive at statistical data or empirical generalizations about dream reports. Instead, each dream phenomenologist may observe his or her own dream experience and then imaginatively vary it by taking the roles of as many different dream group members as he desires. The dream phenomenologist is searching for structural patterns that seem constant across groups or sub-groups of dream group members. A further step is reporting any discovered patterns to other dream phenomenologists, who also undertake the method of imaginative variation in order to test and corroborate the reported essence. Of course, this method can be and has been extended to the phenomenological investigation of the waking dream, particularly through the interviewing of the personification of life issues.

A thorough-going phenomenological description of a dream would be a three-fold description of

1) the conscious processes that occur as the recalled dream is imaginatively identified with by its component dream group members, including any essential structures inherent in these processes (noetic analysis);

2) the dream group members themselves, including the essential features of each: attitudes, purposes, feelings, behaviors and interactions (noematic analysis);

3) the correlations between noetic and noematic properties.

This description, to be considered phenomenological, would also have to maintain the phenomenological reduction throughout, thereby eliminating presumptions and inferences about the relative reality of 1) waking awareness, dream self awareness, other dream group member awareness and 2), the objects of these awarenesses when they are each successively identified with.

• Phenomenological methodology foregoes explanation in favor of description while suspending judgments concerning the reality or illusoriness of either conscious processes or the objects of consciousness.

• Dream phenomenology is primarily a practice rather than a substantive theory. It emphasizes attentiveness to the processes and contents of recalled dream awareness. Through lucidity training combined with interviewing dream characters while dreaming, this can be expanded into a study of the processes and contents of dream awareness itself. It dispenses with attitudes that allow waking awareness and its concerns, assumptions, and biases to dominate reflexive awareness.

• Dream phenomenology brings to dreamwork an emphasis on observing one’s own consciousness closely, from a myriad of equally relevant perspectives. It supports the suspension of waking expectations and its associated reality judgments. The experimental procedure of eidetic variation clarifies the fundamental attributes of dream group member experience.

To date these fundamental attributes of dream group member experience have been found to include such qualities and foci as:

• emphasis on self-acceptance

• emphasis on autonomy and inherent self-worth

• desire for the fulfillment of self-aspect needs and wants

• movement toward integration, consensus, and greater cohesion

• the transitoriness and therefore relativity of fear and death

• preoccupation with the expression or resolution of one or more specific life issues

• predictability, based on the assumptions and expectations of each individual dream group member

Each of the above statements remain hypotheses based on Dream Sociometric use of phenomenological eidetic reduction. They are not statements of fact and in themselves have no reality. This is the essence of the phenomenological reduction as applied to dreamwork. As it is experienced, first the autonomy of one’s inner life is overwhelming, yet benign. Next comes an extraordinary growth in self-acceptance, followed by an increasing awareness of the dreamlike nature of life. As this experience ripens, the self-sense thins and core transpersonal qualities become normal fixtures of everyday awareness. These in turn thin into a growing awareness of innate abundance, joy, and luminosity. Life is sacred. These are not experiences of transpersonal states; these are adaptations to and awakenings into, the transpersonal as everyday consciousness.[/leezen_vc_section_title][leezen_vc_section_title heading_type=”h3″ title=”Imagining Eidetic Variations” title_transform=”capitalize” title_weight=”600″ alignment=”left” title_size=”20px”]When we apply the phenomenological eidetic reduction to dreamwork we have a method of identifying the essential structures of group consciousness. The eidetic reduction is a method of imagining possible variations of the phenomenon under study. In Dream Sociometry, this imagination takes two forms: 1) hypotheses, created by waking identity, as to a) the life issues of concern to the dream group and b) regarding their patterns of preference; and 2) dream group member identification itself.

Based on the testimony of at least some dream characters, specific dream group members are brought together by a common investment in one or more life issues. Notice that this statement is based on the phenomenological methodology, not on projection by waking identity. Because it is based on phenomenological data rather than waking assumptions, it is neither projective nor interpretive in the usual sense of these terms. That is, it does not reflect projections or interpretations by waking identity. It does reflect majority or consensus projections and interpretations by interviewed self-aspects. Therefore the phenomenological method does not eliminate the perils of subjectivity, it merely kicks the can down the developmental road, so to speak. The delusions of waking identity are infused, and thereby watered down, by the delusions of other self-aspects. Because English, grammar, and its associated network of meanings are creations of waking identity, interpretation and projection can never be dismissed entirely. Each dream group member is invested in some specific way in a particular issue or agenda which is shared by other aspects of self. Because of this common investment, the fate of each of these dream group members is inevitably bound up in what happens to the others and to the fate of the life issue. This is a state of interdependent co-origination and existence.

Waking perspective is only one of a number of world views that are equally valid in understanding the genesis of a dream group, its shared life issue(s), and their resolution. The eidetic reduction involves phenomenologically imagining variations on this perspective offered by other invested aspects of self. These variations are derived from elaborations elicited from dream group members by character identification. They are of two basic types:

1) Variations that no longer appear to be the phenomenon under study – counterexamples and limiting studies. This kind of variation helps identify the limits of the phenomenon’s essence.

2) Variations that still seem to be examples of the original phenomenon, even thought they include different features. This second kind of variation helps reveal the phenomenon’s essence.

The essence or eidetic structure of any phenomenon includes all of its features that cannot be eliminated by imaginatively varying the phenomenon. Such features remain evident throughout the imaginative variation process despite attempts to imagine examples of the phenomenon that would lack these features. The essence is arrived at through the method of eidetic reduction. It is an accomplishment rather than a pre-given fact.

For example, if a dream phenomenologist is studying dream group conflict, he or she would perform an eidetic reduction by first having an actual experience of dream group conflict, such as a nightmare. Perhaps she has the hypothesis that dream groups gather for conflict resolution. She then imagines a series of conflicts which are variations of that first experience. In other words, she would recall a dream in which conflict was either experienced within herself as Dream Self, or between Dream Self and another or other characters, or between two or more dream group members. She experiences a nightmare, a dream fight with one or more dream characters, or between other characters in the dream. Another alternative would be for another dream group member or members to experience conflict within themselves not shared by Dream Self. In any of these cases, she would then imagine a series of conflicts which are variations of that first experience by identifying with dream group members and noting their preferences and elaborations. Let’s say the conflict deals with flying a plane and crashing it. Some aspects want to fly. Other characters don’t. Some dream group members blame other group members for the crash.

Dream group members which do not experience conflict by the plane flying or crashing or which express no opinion about the conflict shared by other dream group members would be examples of the first type of variation. Perhaps the sky and the ground either do not experience the conflict or have no opinion about it. Their elaborations and patterns of preference help identify the limits of intrapsychic conflict for the particular dream group. Their presence and elaborations may establish counterexamples and alternative ways of dealing with life issues that are non-conflictual. Such characters generally provide, through identification, a metaphorical model of life without attachment to the conflict. If the variations become so dissimilar that they no longer seem to be examples of dream group conflict at all, then they are counter-examples or limiting cases. Dream group members who do experience conflict also limit the phenomenon’s essence by clarifying when, where, and why specific instances of conflict arise. Perhaps they indicate that this particular conflict only arises when autonomous, impulsive decisions are made by Dream Self that nevertheless have disastrous consequences for other aspects of self. Such a pattern could be associated with intoxication, impulsive sex, and other types of behavior that dream group members themselves associate with flying. The features that are not shared are not part of the essence of dream group conflict since they can be eliminated by the perspective of one or another dream group member which lacks those features. This is a further example of the first type of eidetic reduction variation. These variations may force the dream phenomenologist to alter her original hypothesis that dream groups gather for conflict resolution. They may go so far as to disprove the hypothesis itself.

These variations alter certain features of the first experience (the recalled dream) of the phenomenon under study, in this case dream group conflict. Dream group members may remember aspects of the conflict forgotten or unimportant to Dream Self. For example, they may remember that the plane is full of criminals. They may approach it from perspectives not shared by Dream Self; the plane may want to crash. When those imaginative variations that are similar enough to the recalled dream (the experience of the dreamer) to be experienced as examples of dream group conflict, then the features they share will be potentially part of the essence of dream group conflict for this dream group because these features have not yet been eliminated through the method of eidetic reduction. They remain shared aspects of dream group conflict for the dreamer and for all interviewed aspects of self.

Eidetic reduction is an experimental dreamwork method in the sense that a working dream phenomenologist must actually identify with many different dream group members in order to imagine a large number of variations of the phenomenon under study. He does so without knowing ahead of time how the phenomenon will appear to all these different aspects of self or what their patterns of preference will be. He does not know in advance which of these identifications will prove resistant to variation and which will not. Creating hypotheses about such findings is both important to the direction of questioning and humbling in its consistent exposure of the chronic myopia of waking identity.

Imagining Eidetic Variations

When we apply the phenomenological eidetic reduction to dreamwork we have a method of identifying the essential structures of group consciousness. The eidetic reduction is a method of imagining possible variations of the phenomenon under study. In Dream Sociometry, this imagination takes two forms: 1) hypotheses, created by waking identity, as to a) the life issues of concern to the dream group and b) regarding their patterns of preference; and 2) dream group member identification itself.

Based on the testimony of at least some dream characters, specific dream group members are brought together by a common investment in one or more life issues. Notice that this statement is based on the phenomenological methodology, not on projection by waking identity. Because it is based on phenomenological data rather than waking assumptions, it is neither projective nor interpretive in the usual sense of these terms. That is, it does not reflect projections or interpretations by waking identity. It does reflect majority or consensus projections and interpretations by interviewed self-aspects. Therefore the phenomenological method does not eliminate the perils of subjectivity, it merely kicks the can down the developmental road, so to speak. The delusions of waking identity are infused, and thereby watered down, by the delusions of other self-aspects. Because English, grammar, and its associated network of meanings are creations of waking identity, interpretation and projection can never be dismissed entirely. Each dream group member is invested in some specific way in a particular issue or agenda which is shared by other aspects of self. Because of this common investment, the fate of each of these dream group members is inevitably bound up in what happens to the others and to the fate of the life issue. This is a state of interdependent co-origination and existence.

Waking perspective is only one of a number of world views that are equally valid in understanding the genesis of a dream group, its shared life issue(s), and their resolution. The eidetic reduction involves phenomenologically imagining variations on this perspective offered by other invested aspects of self. These variations are derived from elaborations elicited from dream group members by character identification. They are of two basic types:

1) Variations that no longer appear to be the phenomenon under study – counterexamples and limiting studies. This kind of variation helps identify the limits of the phenomenon’s essence.

2) Variations that still seem to be examples of the original phenomenon, even thought they include different features. This second kind of variation helps reveal the phenomenon’s essence.

The essence or eidetic structure of any phenomenon includes all of its features that cannot be eliminated by imaginatively varying the phenomenon. Such features remain evident throughout the imaginative variation process despite attempts to imagine examples of the phenomenon that would lack these features. The essence is arrived at through the method of eidetic reduction. It is an accomplishment rather than a pre-given fact.

For example, if a dream phenomenologist is studying dream group conflict, he or she would perform an eidetic reduction by first having an actual experience of dream group conflict, such as a nightmare. Perhaps she has the hypothesis that dream groups gather for conflict resolution. She then imagines a series of conflicts which are variations of that first experience. In other words, she would recall a dream in which conflict was either experienced within herself as Dream Self, or between Dream Self and another or other characters, or between two or more dream group members. She experiences a nightmare, a dream fight with one or more dream characters, or between other characters in the dream. Another alternative would be for another dream group member or members to experience conflict within themselves not shared by Dream Self. In any of these cases, she would then imagine a series of conflicts which are variations of that first experience by identifying with dream group members and noting their preferences and elaborations. Let’s say the conflict deals with flying a plane and crashing it. Some aspects want to fly. Other characters don’t. Some dream group members blame other group members for the crash.

Dream group members which do not experience conflict by the plane flying or crashing or which express no opinion about the conflict shared by other dream group members would be examples of the first type of variation. Perhaps the sky and the ground either do not experience the conflict or have no opinion about it. Their elaborations and patterns of preference help identify the limits of intrapsychic conflict for the particular dream group. Their presence and elaborations may establish counterexamples and alternative ways of dealing with life issues that are non-conflictual. Such characters generally provide, through identification, a metaphorical model of life without attachment to the conflict. If the variations become so dissimilar that they no longer seem to be examples of dream group conflict at all, then they are counter-examples or limiting cases. Dream group members who do experience conflict also limit the phenomenon’s essence by clarifying when, where, and why specific instances of conflict arise. Perhaps they indicate that this particular conflict only arises when autonomous, impulsive decisions are made by Dream Self that nevertheless have disastrous consequences for other aspects of self. Such a pattern could be associated with intoxication, impulsive sex, and other types of behavior that dream group members themselves associate with flying. The features that are not shared are not part of the essence of dream group conflict since they can be eliminated by the perspective of one or another dream group member which lacks those features. This is a further example of the first type of eidetic reduction variation. These variations may force the dream phenomenologist to alter her original hypothesis that dream groups gather for conflict resolution. They may go so far as to disprove the hypothesis itself.

These variations alter certain features of the first experience (the recalled dream) of the phenomenon under study, in this case dream group conflict. Dream group members may remember aspects of the conflict forgotten or unimportant to Dream Self. For example, they may remember that the plane is full of criminals. They may approach it from perspectives not shared by Dream Self; the plane may want to crash. When those imaginative variations that are similar enough to the recalled dream (the experience of the dreamer) to be experienced as examples of dream group conflict, then the features they share will be potentially part of the essence of dream group conflict for this dream group because these features have not yet been eliminated through the method of eidetic reduction. They remain shared aspects of dream group conflict for the dreamer and for all interviewed aspects of self.

Eidetic reduction is an experimental dreamwork method in the sense that a working dream phenomenologist must actually identify with many different dream group members in order to imagine a large number of variations of the phenomenon under study. He does so without knowing ahead of time how the phenomenon will appear to all these different aspects of self or what their patterns of preference will be. He does not know in advance which of these identifications will prove resistant to variation and which will not. Creating hypotheses about such findings is both important to the direction of questioning and humbling in its consistent exposure of the chronic myopia of waking identity.