Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche: Dreaming in Meaning

"As mentioned earlier, there are two levels of working with dreams. One involves finding meaning in the dream. This is good, and it is the level of most of the Western psychologies that accord value to dreams. In both the East and the West, it is understood that dreams can be a source of creativity, solutions to problems, diagnosis of ills, and so on. But the meaning in dreams is not inherent to the dream; it is being projected onto the dream by the individual examining the dream and then is "read" from the dream. The process is much like describing the images that seem to appear in the ink-spot tests used by some psychologists. The meaning does not exist independently. Meaning does not exist until someone starts to look for it. Our mistake is that rather than seeing the truth of the situation, we begin to think that there really is an unconscious, a thing, and that the dream is real, like a scroll with a secret message written on it in code that, if cracked, anyone could read.

We need a deeper understanding of what the dream is, of what experience is, to truly utilize dreaming as an approach to enlightenment. When we practice deeply, many wonderful dreams will arise, rich with signs of progress. But ultimately the meaning in the dream is not important. It is best not to regard the dream as correspondence from another entity to you, not even from another part of you that you do not know. There is no conventional meaning outside of the dualism of samsara. This view is not a giving in to chaos: there is no chaos or meaninglessness either, these are more concepts. It may sound strange, but this idea of meaning must be abandoned before the mind can find complete liberation. And doing this is the essential purpose of dream practice.

We do not ignore the use of the meaning in dreaming. But it is good to recognize that there is also dreaming in meaning. Why expect great messages from a dream? Instead penetrate to what is below meaning, the pure base of experience. This is the higher dream practice - not psychological, but more spiritual - concerned with recognizing and realizing the basis of experience, the unconditioned. When you progress to this point, you are unaffected by whether there is a message in the dream or not. Then you are complete, your experience is complete, you are free from the conditioning that arises from dualistic interactions with the projections of your own mind."

from 'The Tibetan Yogas Of Dream And Sleep' by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche

Dreaming Upon a Winter Solstice

No Solstice, No Winter, No Sunshine. 

No People, No Planet, No Nothing.

The special effects of any dream

Depends upon specific causes

One is choosing to assume.

Have faith in oneself. 

Choose love.

The greatest special effect is 

Self-awareness.

Stars and Swamps

Awareness is self-aware. 

The rest—the stars and swamps, 

the quantum soups and salads—

appears to be this process of just that.

It’s as if within that blink of an absolute I,

—third eye of the only God in town

and only starry sky that ever sees itself—

silent Gary Cooper shoots High Noon,

that awesome seeing so magnificent

within itself there is a universe that doesn’t see

and evolution towards a being with a seeing

which is self-awareness as it is and always is.

A 3D Seventh House Spiritual

Muladhara core of earth the serpent rises from the root.

Subterranean organic movements in symphonic cellular division rising to the sea of songs sung in the key of life.

In-between that awareness

And this self-awareness

Is

The dream of being

Unaware

The quantum of refraction

Through the law of three

Becomes reflections

In the seven wonders of

The non-dual-one

Space. Sun. Half-moon. Diamonds. Pseudopods. Serpentine animals. The number nine.

It is natural for awareness to be self-aware.

The three dimensions of the third dream.

Love, compassion, and forgiveness.

Christ the middle way negative capability.

Death Valley. The Himalayas. Wine Dark Sea.

Kiss the idiot.

Kill the Buddha.

A thing of beauty never passes into nothingness.

The Word. Knowledge of the Sutras. Tantric Imagination!

In other words, being is the only way of knowing and dreaming is the only way of knowing it.

I’m Not Nothing Just Because It Isn't Known

I am me as we are world and you are my projection—who googles who?

Self-intent will dream a world the self will need to see myself in seeing through it. Earthshine. Quarter moon. Tao of self-awareness.

Being is the thread as sword is sutra as intent is self-awareness. In the presence of the mountain daughter.

While California keeps connected to the continent, Cold Mountain is my sky.

Blessed is the shaman of the High Sierras for her ouroboric tale is seeing through a glass darkly as the deep unknown is known.

My absolute mythology is all about an everlasting universe of bliss telling me that I’m not nothing.

Just because it isn't known doesn't mean it shall be known but also doesn't mean it's nothing.

Lucid dreaming is the love to love without a world of their conditioning.

Methuselah from Methuen is my crystal meth.

If dreaming is about which cave of cause has been selected, magic is the art of wild coincidence.

The echo of listening is not making a sound.

Deep Affectionate Silence.

Welcome to the Hotel Mahamaya

Spontaneity appears to be random because. No one knows the wild infinity of causes. One can say there is infinity of causes

or one can say there’s causelessness. Narrative becomes created as some causes are selected. Narrative is changed if other causes are selected.

This is called the art of dreaming. To change one’s dream, just drop its causes and assign some other ones. There is no other effort needed.

It takes ten thousand words to deconstruct a single one. The original preface is the preface written before words.

In conclusion being needs no introduction. And self-awareness is penultimate absolution.

Sacrifice delusion and dance dance dance like native being on the pure ground of the absolute.

Universal eternity. Ubiquitous infinitude. Only the knowledge tells the knowledge to the knowledge.

Action is never cause. Intention is. For action is the localized appearance of universal enlightening intent.

And on the way, to be the love to be, or be the fear of not to be, is not so much a question as forgetting.

Dream This

The dark night of the soul. The dark side of the moon. Conditioned dreaming is the shadow of a lucid vision. There is a necessary phantom but it's lost within this big soap opera.

The dark night of the sun. The dark side of the one. Remember as it is before your memory finds a way to forget. And so the mind is like this third wheel on the tricycle of the gods.

Memory is evolution's dirty little secret in the great intent of self-awareness. That memory so loved its memories it learned to live within itself. For memory is the mirror in which the self is self-aware.

And so dream on John Donne. The only knowledge is being and being is the only dream to know itself. For it is said never throw out the baby Jesus with the backwater.

Like the smoky pewter silver river that darkly reflects the going sky as everything on-shore becomes invisible. Like this thousand-year-old mummy cave hidden in a desert sandstone canyon. Like Venus glowing within the deep sleep of that midnight sky.

Revision. Like Venus burning.

Transformation. Kalifornia. The New York Times. They are a changing. To absolve oneself of all fixation is another name for nothing left to lose. In the meanwhile we will love. No sentence lasts forever. Every word is blowing in the wind. Look, forget I ever said anything.

The apocalypse is the color of bananas. The self-awareness of one isn't two. Everything has evolved into this right here right now. Blue.

Seeking. Finding. Disturbing. Troubling. Astonishing and amazing. Wonderful! I don't know how to end this, Thomas.

Renga in Paris

When approaching the valley 

spirit and its serpent winds, 

some head for the memorable hills. 

But electrical geography and biological transducers.

Emptiness and transformation. Hollywood and vine.

Awareness is beyond all taxonomic ranks.

Mirror mirror waterfall, who’s that unknown powerball.

Potentiality is nothing ordinary.

Third eye. Second wind. Heart heart heart.

Bare trees dancing in the sky with a rhythmic stillness.

Darkness descending from sweet glacial moraines.

Venus is sailing on her universal silver river.

Although it’s seen that nothing is really known,

an energetic trace of fear remains as

something once thought to be known.

And even though one knows it's nothing,

Christ it tastes like shit.

And so it's said that Buddha is a dry shit stick.

While the world is dreaming

to awaken, one is always kissing

the phantom of that opera.

Only love can know it's nothing.

The mind can only talk about it.

And so it's said that all you dream is love.

And love is a tale 

told by a fool 

signifying the absolute.

Dark Night of the Serpent

Love is the only cure. All else is placebo. 

Trees are my legs and the sky is my eye. 

Earth is where the heart is. 

No mind Shakti and the dark night of kundalini.

No mind Shakti and the dark night of the serpent.

Staying open as the sky while being grounded as the earth.

As experiential understanding of one's universality

breaks thru personal damming,

galactic waters overflow in disturbing then astounding waves.

Universal consciousness comes with a thermonuclear kundalini kick—

the artificial sweetness of the world is like the taste of steel

reflecting light without a warmth of color.

Body is the earth and spirit is the sky in which the earth is self-contained.

Witnessing is an affectionate attention

and not a discriminating, rational, or cerebral one.

Heart.

Not mind.

For no mind equals all heart.

An Enlightened Spiritual

Clear the flotsam in the Kundalini River with a sea breeze breath and downslope exhilaration.

Knots of popular conditioning are blown apart so softly love to love you.

The swamp of human fear and sadness is consumed by universal resting in the joy of as it is.

Becoming galaxies and superstring varieties of universes buddha no mind house of mirrors.

Slanted memories of castle times, beautiful days, and green grass tanglewood picnics never die but fade away as if they’re never born.

It's either fortune or truth. Red skies in the morning and night.

John Wayne and Monument Valley. Toshiro Mifune in Rashomon.

Now imagine the apocalypse to be one grand enlightenment.

Pure awareness being self-aware. That is all.