His fame, in India and in Tibet was such that in 1960 Professor Giuseppe Tucci, an eminent scholar and founder of the Is.MEO (one of the major institutes of oriental studies in Italy), invited him to Rome to collaborate in research at what is today known as Is.I.A.O, (Istituto per l’Africa e l’Oriente).

It was thus that Namkhai Norbu came to Italy where he contributed actively in the development of Tibetan studies in the West.

In 1962 he took up a post teaching Tibetan language and literature in Naples at the Istituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli where he worked until 1992.

From the mid seventies Namkhai Norbu began to teach Yantra Yoga and Dzogchen meditation to a few Italian students and the growing interest in his teachings convinced him to dedicate himself increasingly to such activities.

Together with a number of disciples he founded the first Dzogchen community in Arcidosso in Tuscany and then later founded other centres in various parts of Europe, Russia, the United States, South America and Australia.

For the first fifteen years of his residence in Italy Namkhai Norbu concentrated mainly on the Ancient History of Tibet. His works are evidence of his deep knowledge of Tibetan culture and are addressed to the young people of Tibet in order that their awareness of an ancient cultural heritage should not die out.The works of Namkhai Norbu are a significant reference point for these young people, whether they live in the Peopleâ€s

Republic of China or whether they are living in exile and represent the continuation of the cultural heritage of Tibet and its national identity.His studies have become so well known at an international level that he has an intense programme of lectures and seminars in the major centres of oriental studies and in universities throughout the world. Namkhai Norbu is widely recognized as a leading authority on Tibetan culture, particularly in the fields of history, literature, and Traditional Tibetan medicine and astrological sciences such as the Tibetan calendar.

Unbounded Wholeness: Dzogchen, Bon and the Logic of the Nonconceptual, written in collaboration with Anne Carolyn Klein, Oxford University Press, 2006

Tibetan Sound Healing: Seven Guided Practices for Clearing Obstacles, Accessing Positive Qualities and Uncovering Your Inherent Wisdom, Sounds True, 2006

The fundamental reality of mind is pure, non-dual awareness, rigpa. Its essence is one with the essence of all that exists.”

Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, founder and spiritual director of Ligmincha Institute, is an acclaimed author as well as a highly respected and beloved teacher to students throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe. Fluent in English, Tenzin Rinpoche is renowned for his depth of wisdom; his clear, engaging teaching style; and his ability to make the ancient Tibetan teachings highly accessible and relevant to the lives of Westerners. Author of:

The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, Snow Lion Publications, 1998

Wonders of the Natural Mind: The Essence of Dzogchen in the Native Bon Tradition of Tibet, Snow Lion Publications, 2000

Healing With Form, Energy and Light: the Five Elements in Tibetan Shamanism, Tantra and Dzogchen, Snow Lion Publications, 2002

“If a mode of inquiry is deemed empirical if it is based on experiment and observation rather than theory alone, then Buddhist “insight” (vipasyana) meditation can be regarded as highly empirical. Buddhist empiricism…is qualitative rather than quantitative, and it is primarily concerned with understanding and transforming conscious experience, rather than understanding and controlling the objective world that exists independently of it.”

Trained for ten years in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland, Alan Wallace has taught Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and America since 1976; and he has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives, including H. H. the Dalai Lama. After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he studied physics and the philosophy of science, he earned a doctorate in religious studies at Stanford University. He has edited, translated, authored, or contributed to more than thirty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture, as well as the interface between religion and science. He teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is launching one program in Tibetan Buddhist studies and another in science and religion. His published works include The Bridge of Quiescence: Experiencing Buddhist Meditation), Choosing Reality: A Buddhist View of Physics and the Mind, and Tibetan Buddhism From the Ground Up.

Alan Wallace is the president of the Santa Barbara Institute for the Interdisciplinary Study of Consciousness (http://sbinstitute.com).

For information about Alan Wallace, visit his website at www.alanwallace.org.

“The distinction between lucid dreaming as has become popularized in the west and Tibetan dream yoga is an understanding of the relationship dream lucidity has with our passage from this life into the next.”

Michael Katz, editor of Choegyal Namkhai Norbu’s Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light and author of The White Dolphin, is a psychologist who regularly lectures and leads workshops internationally on dream yoga and lucidity for personal growth. He has studied Ericksonian hypnotherapy, Reichian therapy, Gestalt, Embodied Dream Imagery, and psychodrama.

He has practiced Tibetan Buddhism and Dzogchen meditation since 1974. He maintains an archive of lucid dreamsarchive of lucid dreams see His website is:

“To paraphase Freud who called “dreams the royal road to the unconsious” we might say that dreams are the royal road to enlightenment.”

Evans-Wentz, trans.,The Yoga of the Dream State, The Yoga of the Six Doctrines

• Visualize and meditate on the Tibetan syllable “ah,” in the center of your body.

• Keep your awareness on it while you are falling asleep.

• Associate the visual letter with the sound “ahhh.”

• You will fall asleep with virtually full awareness.

• This will enable you to maintain awareness of the full presence of the state of natural light both while dreaming and while deeply asleep

Namkhai Norbu, Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light

1. Go through the day understanding all your experiences as being of the

substance of dreams.

2. Apply rule number one to specific people, objects, or states to which you feel desire and attachment. By recognizing them as a dream, you can weaken your attachment to them. “We say everything is a dream,” Wangyal adds. “Anything you’re attached to, anything that holds your mind, we emphasize that those things are dreams. When you have a cup of coffee, it’s dream coffee. Drive the dream car, meet with the dream boss, have a dreamlike problem. If you see everything like a dream, things happen to you like a dream, and what results will be like a dream too, and it won’t have such a strong effect. It’s a form of detachment. ”

3. As you’re lying in bed before going to sleep, review your day as if you were reviewing a dream. Observe how each action, person, object, or state of being-and your attachment to them-is like a dream. Then create an intention to stay aware during your dreams.

4. Immediately upon waking, review the night to see if you remember any dreams and whether you were lucid within a dream. If you were, try to generate a sense of joy and accomplishment about the practice. If you weren’t successful, then generate an even stronger intention to be more consistent in the practice during the next night.

• Before sleep, practice specialized breathing exercises designed to calm and purify your consciousness.

• Merge your mind with the mind of your spiritual teacher.

• Flying and shape shifting into other creatures

• Meeting with other sentient beings

• Visiting different places, planes and lokas (worlds)

Once one has learned to control themselves and what occurs within the dream state, monks use this state to deepen their spiritual practice as an aid to the attainment of enlightenment. These include:

• Communicating with yidam (an enlightened being)

• Practicing sadhana (a spiritual discipline)

A good example of a sadhana that one would complete in a lucid dream state is the Medicine Buddha Sadhana.  There are many versions of this and other Tibetan Buddhist sadhanas. A version by Thubten Gyatso is available at: http://www.fpmt-osel.org/meditate/medicine.htm

• Receiving initiations, empowerments and transmissions

The ultimate goal in Tibetan dream yoga is to “apprehend the dream” (attain conscious awareness) then dissolve the dream state. When you are deprived of physical stimulus (from the sleeping body) and conceptual stimulus (from the dreaming mind), you can observe the purest form of conscious awareness.

In the Great Perfection, however, the subjective view, that is to say, the mind which takes emptiness as its object – is not the ordinary of coarse mind described in the Perfection Vehicle of the Great Vehicle but a subtle mind. It is basic knowledge (rig pa), clear light (‘od gsal), the fundamental innate mind of clear light (gnyug ma lhan cig skyes pa’i ‘od gsal) which is the final status (gnas lugs) of things…

The fundamental mind which serves as the basis of all phenomena of cyclic existence and nirvana is posited as the ultimate truth or nature of phenomena (dharmata, chos nyid); it is also called the ‘clear light’ (abhasvara, ‘od gsal) and uncompounded (asamskrta, ‘dus ma byas). In Nying-ma it is called the ‘mind-vajra’; this is not the mind that is contrasted with basic knowledge (rig pa) and mind (sems) but the factor of mere luminosity and knowing, basic knowledge itself. This is the final root of all minds, forever indestructible, immutable, and unbreakable continuum like a vajra. Just as the New Translation Schools posit a beginningless and endless fundamental mind, so Nying-ma posits a mind-vajra which has no beginning or end and proceeds without interruption through the effect stage of Buddhahood. It is considered ‘permanent’ in the sense of abiding forever and thus is presented as a permanent mind. It is permanent not in the sense of not disintegrating moment by moment but in the sense that its continuum is no interrupted…

With respect to identifying the clear light in the Great Perfection: when, for instance, one hears a noise, between the time of hearing it and conceptualizing it as such and such, there is a type of mind devoid of conceptuality but nevertheless not like sleep or samadhi, in which the object is a reflection of this entity of mere luminosity and knowing. It is at such a point that the basic entity of the mind [clear light] is identified.

“Union of new Old Schools” in Kindness, Clarity, & Insight (trans. Hopkins)

First, the individual must become lucid or wake up in the dream state.

Second, the dreamer must overcome all fear of the contents of the dream so there is the realization that nothing in the dream can cause harm. For instance, the lucid dreamer should put out fire with his hands and realize fire cannot burn him in the dream.

Next the dreamer should contemplate how all phenomena both in the dream and in waking life are similar because they change, and that life is illusory in both states because of this constant change. Both the objects in the dream and objects in the world in the Buddhist’s worldview are therefore empty and have no substantial nature. This is the stage of contemplating the dream as maya, and equating this sense of maya with everyday experience in the external world.

Fourth, the dreamer should realize he has control of the dream by changing big objects into small ones, heavy objects into light ones, and many objects into one object. He should also experiment with changing things into their opposites (i.e. fire into water).

After gaining control over objects and their transformations, the dreamer should realize that the dreamer’s dream body is as insubstantial as the other objects in the dream. The dreamer should realize that he or she is not the dream body. While this realization is very difficult in normal waking existence, presumably it is quite obtainable in the dream since the dreamer who has control over dream objects could, for instance, alter the body’s shape or make the dream body disappear all together.

Finally, the images of deities (Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, or Dakinis) should be visualized in the lucid dream state. These figures are frequently seen in Tibetan religious art (thangkas) and used in meditation. They are said to be linked to or resonate with the clear light of formless “suchness.” They can therefore serve as doorways to Sunyata or clear light. The dreamer is instructed to concentrate on these images without distraction or thinking about other things so that the qualities of each of these personifications of the enlightened divine are internalized: You awaken through becoming one with them while lucid dreaming.