Lucid Living

[Giorgio Aguilar]

Luciddreaming teaches us to notice and appreciate the everyday beauty in our waking lives.

The more moments of beauty we notice, the more beautiful life gets, because life is made up of moments. The more deeply aware we are of the here-and-now, the richer our waking life becomes.

Why not wake up and live the dream of life joyfully and consciously? If we allow it to, lucid dreaming can help us to live a happier, more fulfilled life.1 CommentCrystalon January 23, 2022 at 6:29 pmGreat article ?

Due to several contributing factors, we are not as lucid in waking life as we would like to believe. For starters, culture has framed our minds. To a certain extent, we arrive in adulthood trained not for lucidity but for following directions and accepting a strict routine.

Also, our ability to sustain focus may be getting shorter every year, if we are to believe Noam Chomsky and other social critics old enough to remember what life was like before the television rose to power. Even sound bites in the popular press are shrinking every year. I do not doubt that our culture promotes, and profits from, the complacency and distractibility of its citizens.

We are also frequently unaware of our decisions as they are occurring. Much of what appears to be logical is actually decided unconsciously by the emotional centers of the brain. In short, we are mysteries to ourselves. We are human: imaginative and creative, as well as habitual and fallible.

We wake up to the possibilities all around us. We wake up to what lays behind our expectations. We wake up to the important truth that *I* am not center of the universe. We wake up to the beautiful and chaotic and the remarkable.

Many are frustrated about not being able to call lucid dreams when they want them. But when lucid dreaming is practiced in context, as a fruit of lucid living, our frustration vanishes and we are invited deeper into the perennial mysteries of the universe.

How do you define lucid living? And how to you go about, you know, living it? Comments are open (for a couple weeks, before the AI bots destroy my willpower and I close comments back down).

As you start behaving consciously, you will slowly start to see that your behavior is creating the reality you want. This is the power of conscious living. The relationship you develop with your subconscious mind truly is one of the most important things to be aware of as you strive to develop as a human being.

You might be wondering what this has to do with lucid dreaming. In a lot of ways, you can look at life through the same lens as you might your dreams. Your dreams are unconsciously driven by default but how much cooler are dreams when we take conscious control of them. I really think it's the same principle in life. You can live a lucid life, or you can live your life unconsciously. It all comes down to the relationship you develop between your conscious and subconscious mind.

YHouse, Inc. is a nonprofit institute in New York City devoted to innovative and transdisciplinary research, intellectual partnership, and public discourse tackling humanity\u2019s greatest questions on awareness, consciousness, and the future of intelligence.

After more than forty weekly blog posts, my "Lucid Living" blog will take a break, to allow me to write a book manuscript, tentatively titled "Science, Cognition and Contemplation". It has been a real pleasure, to write several dozen vignettes on topics ranging from science to philosophy to aspects of contemplative traditions.

As an astronomer, I am often asked how we can possibly understand such mysterious objects as black holes, distant in space, and the Big Bang, so very distant in time. The answer is simple: in the Universe, distant objects are often easier to understand than nearby ones.

In a very real way, you are much older than any of the rocks in any of the mountains you will ever encounter. Each living cell in your body is directly connected in an unbroken chain from LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, that lived about four billion years ago.

A few weeks ago I engaged in a fascinating conversation with Loch Kelly, a Buddhist meditation teacher, at the Rubin Museum in a program co-sponsored with YHouse. We were asked to shed some light on the topic of time, Loch from a Buddhist angle, and me from a physics angle. Interestingly, . . .

Last week I wrote about my astrophysics activities in the virtual world of Second Life. This week I'm looking back on another initiative that I started there, called Play as Being -- an exploration of what you are, by learning to turn your gaze away from what you have.

It is hard to predict the future. Twelve years ago, Second Life (SL) began to make headlines. There were predictions that soon business cards would not only list email addresses, but also avatar names, uniquely pointing to the animated characters in SL that represented the owners of the cards . . .

The most important lesson that I learned from scientific research has little to do with any of the fascinating results that I witnessed and contributed to in astrophysics and other fields. Nor is it related to the amazing tools and techniques that have been developed in the last few hundred years. Rather, it has been the training in dropping stories.

In the history of science, philosophy has always seemed to be detached from the rest of natural science. Yet phenomenology offers a unique perspective of understanding our experience and life, and this workshop aimed to find ways to bridge the gap between the scientific attitude and the phenomenological attitude.

Each apartment has been carefully designed to maximise views, with a focus on Queensland living and bringing the outdoors in. Residents will enjoy the convenience of been located just 850m from the Brisbane CBD and within walking distance of the Brisbane Cultural precinct. Lucid has a range of world-class facilities and has optimised the expansive Brisbane river views with a Sky Deck that spans the full width of the building.

Although within a dream we often experience the events either from a first person or third person perspective, the entire dream-space itself is a projection of the subconscious mind. We experience the illusion of being a separate entity within a dream, separate from other people we encounter and interact with, separate from the emotional and physical stimulation we feel.

The state of lucid dreaming occurs when a person becomes conscious within the dream state, allowing them to take complete control of what happens within the dreamscape. They can to erect buildings, master the art of flight and all sorts of extreme and exhilarating phenomena using only the creative forces of the mind, the imagination.

However when we are unconscious we are subject to the happenings of the subconscious mind and find ourselves out of control and a victim to whatever circumstances unfold. I believe both dream states to be beneficial and each have the potential to offer us many lessons and teachings, if analysed in the correct ways.

Atoms are largely just empty space; the subatomic particles that form them vibrate with such intensity that they give the illusion of stillness and solid matter. Between the blades of a fan lies mainly empty space, yet when the fans blades reach a certain speed, it gives the illusion of a solid, plate-like object.

Our senses perceive this vibratory energy in their own unique ways which then trigger the nervous system to relay the data to the brain where, via several cognitive processes, a sensory tapestry is created within our consciousness, informing us of the details of the external, energetic world around us.

For example colour does not exist outside of us, what exists is energy. This energy is converted into colour via the biological sensory portal we have chosen to label as eyes, therefore the very existence of our minds is fundamental for colour, sound and other sensory stimulation to be present at all.

Depending upon the culture we are born and raised in, our minds are programmed to perceive the world in a certain way. Many people seem to meander through this life very unconsciously, abiding the dictatorial social conditioning within their consciousness from birth, free from questioning and critical analysis.

This may be in the form of how their society operates, political ideology, religious belief systems, the expectations placed upon them as an individual etc. However, when the boat is rocked and the water breaks white, people tend to catch a glimpse of the world from an un-bias, raw, baseline outlook.

This perspective may be triggered via a traumatic event, a mind expanding travel experience, self study, psychedelic or spiritual experience. Or maybe it is a realization that cultivates over a longer period of time, using the tools and techniques of mindfulness, yoga, meditation, dream analysis, hypnotherapy, psychotherapy etc.

A lucid person becomes more conscious of what foods they choose to construct their body-mind from, what relationships they choose to invest energy in and grow from and where they choose to receive orders and authoritative demands from, if anywhere at all.

I believe everybody is capable of going through such an awakening at some point in their life. I feel as though everybody is upon their own path and will come to such an awakening experience when the time is right for them to digest and assimilate it. It is easy to judge others who act so unconsciously and often negatively, however know what they are going through is ultimately a series of lessons to direct them to acting from their higher self with benevolence.

We're community-driven. We're dedicated to sharing "the mindful life" beyond the core or choir, to all those who don't yet know they give a care. We focus on anything that's good for you, good for others, and good for our planet.

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