Dr. Bouklas & Friends
Episode 777
Topic: Being the Puppeteer of the Dream Space
Special Guest: Papa Giorgio
(loosely translated and neatly organized from the original French conversation during their meeting on 3 January 2016)
David G. Bouklas: It’s really nice to see you again, Papa Giorgio.
Papa Giorgio: Thanks, Dr. Bouklas. It’s always a pleasure to speak with you. Before you even ask, no, I didn’t bring pizza this time. I just brought this red wine.
David G. Bouklas: Dude. But you make the best pizza. It’s like the only really good pizza this side of France. Appreciate the wine, though. It’s delicious. You have good taste.
Papa Giorgio: Just playin’. I’ve got delivery on the way. And yeah, this wine is le bomb.
David G. Bouklas: Sweet. So, I know in addition to owning what is possibly the best pizza restaurant this side of France, you actually help local youths figure out their college majors and career paths based on personalized dream interpretation.
Papa Giorgio: Yes, I am the founder of Le Rêve Enfants, a specialized clinic for assisting teenagers and young adults. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I interpret their dreams. Basically what I do is teach my students certain techniques or guidelines that may allow them to overcome false, limited egoistic perceptions and enter a full world of free waking reality, abundant in joy, love, and peace. I allow them to learn, on their own, how to be the puppeteer of the dream space. Lucidity.
David G. Bouklas: That sounds like fun.
Papa Giorgio: It is fun to contemplate reality from the perspective of idealism and subjectivity, and talk of consciousness as an undivided whole. Imagining the world as a dream-like experience which might be subject to one’s will can trigger in us all sorts of exciting possibilities. However, it’s one thing to dream about a dream in this way; it’s quite another to knowingly dream the dream itself.
David G. Bouklas: Is it even truly possible, or is it just a fun and comforting idea? How can we get there when our everyday experience doesn’t quite correspond to this ideal?
Papa Giorgio: One approach is to attempt to directly alter our experience to conform to it.
*The Experiential Dream-Space*
Papa Giorgio: If it is true at all that reality is dream-like then it must be true right now. In the room you are apparently in, at this very moment. So look around. Furthermore, your own body and thoughts must themselves be dreamed, along with every other experience you are having. All of this must be arising within an open “dream space” made of mind, of awareness. All of this experience is “you”!
David G. Bouklas: It doesn’t usually feel that way though, does it? Why not?
Papa Giorgio: Even if we understand intellectually that everything is consciousness and the world is undivided, we still usually feel that there is an inner and an outer to experience, that we are “located” and separate, except during certain peak experiences.
David G. Bouklas: What is the nature of this feeling? Can we tackle it directly?
Papa Giorgio: I say we can.
*Stuck Thoughts, Incomplete Movements*
Papa Giorgio: I suggest this disconnect arises because over time we accumulate forms of “experiential debris” in our dream-space. The ideas we accept, the thoughts we have, the other encounters in the world whether passive or active – all leave traces which, when repeated and reactivated, gradually solidify. There are many implications of this, but the important ones at the moment are:
Stuck Thoughts. These are basically thought structures that have solidified in your space rather than naturally dissolve. These may be located in your body area or beyond. This sense of division between body and world is one such thought.
Incomplete Movements. These are intentions which were resisted or aborted before they followed through to completion. This might be a suppressed startle response, a decision to do something which you then halted by tension or a reverse intention, and so on.
Neither of these would arise or be a problem if we lived in open non-resistance. However, most of us are holding on to – identifying with – certain patterns in awareness, and this prevents the natural passing and dissolving of these structures. This leads to a sense of clutter and constraint (stuck thoughts) and tension (incomplete movements).
*Common Problems with “Getting Stuck”*
You Find Yourself Getting Stuck In Your Head
Papa Giorgio: Usually this is first impression people seem to get (being stuck in your head), and it can be surprising. People meditate, work on letting their thoughts pass and so on, get some success – all the while not realising they have circumscribed their world into this little area. It doesn’t really give any ‘content’ much room to arise and dissolve – no wonder people find themselves so “thinky”. They are effectively “clenching their being” constantly. And tense, unmoving patterns spew out thoughts, no matter where they are in the body-space.
Another side-effect is that they are living their lives in “blind-sight”. You are not truly out there in the world, you are only seeing it through a peripheral view, actually experiencing your thoughts-about rather than your direct-sensing.
*Attention is not a Torch *
Papa Giorgio: To get clear – because your “consciousness” is actually always everywhere – let’s call it “attention” for now. The problem you have is that your default “attentional profile”, its extent in space, has become defaulted and constrained to a certain area. You can temporarily force it out, but it’ll spring back for two reasons:
- You are trying to move it, when attention is not something that is to be moved – because it is not thing. The metaphor of the torch-light is incorrect, it is more like a 3-dimensional spatial filter, a “profile varying the intensity of experience across space”.
- You have accumulated structure/habit in your world where your attentional profile always settles into that shape, that location, probably with a ‘felt-sense’ boundary. Basically, you’ve ended up with a little “valley” in this area of your world.
David G. Bouklas: Fascinating.
Papa Giorgio: Okay, the three methods I described here are pretty much for this. First of all, adopt this assumption: Your natural state is to be completely open, without even an attention boundary – no localization.
Following the passive approach regularly (in which you don’t concentrate, simply let go), your tensions and division would eventually unfold by themselves, and your attention would become increasingly open. But this takes patience, and you have to do it every day, and you have to not mistreat yourself (by forcing and pushing) in between times, ideally.
The secret to doing this more deliberately is: You do not move your attention to an area of experience, rather you expand it to include that experience in your area of attention. The area you include doesn’t need to be adjacent – what you are effectively doing is “increasing the intensity of attention at that point” – but it’s initially helpful if it is.
So, next time you’re lying down, discovering you are constrained into your head area, let it be. Then feel out the tips of your toes, and include them. Gradually, feel out your whole body, bit by bit, in this way. Then feel out the space around you body, and beyond.
David G. Bouklas: So, I will expand my consciousness with this technique?
Papa Giorgio: Remember, you are not really moving or expanding consciousness – that is already everywhere, what your experience is and is made of. You are basically including aspects of experience more fully in attention, and eventually dissolving the boundary of attention – the habitual valley – completely.
*Switching Perspective*
Papa Giorgio: Now, this approach is focused on the content. It is possible to short-cut this by switching perspective to the background space in and of which content arises.
Once you know that you are really the whole space, you can just switch perspective to it. That doesn’t mean all the debris disappears instantly, but it stops being troublesome, you are opened-out, and the debris will even be slightly loosening during daily activity while you are in this mode. The author Greg Goode has referred to this as Standing As Awareness, in the book of the same name.
Another quick shortcut is to include in your attention an external sound, such as distant traffic. Sounds are more discrete than images, and so attending to a sound often draws you to, and releases you into, the silence surrounding it. Finally, including – not focusing, remember – the sensation of space just behind your forehead – where “your pre-frontal lobes would be” – can also help, since the thought-generation tends to occur nearer the back of your head-space.
David G. Bouklas: Interesting. Can you summarize?
Papa Giorgio: In general, then, we want to avoid deliberately narrowing our attention, and find ways to encourage and allow it to open up without force – since force tends to paradoxically fix the current pattern in place.
David G. Bouklas: Without The Force?
Papa Giorgio: No. Don’t misunderstand that. I’m using the word force as in having the capacity to do work or cause physical change. Think of it as energy, strength, or active power made operative against resistance, or perhaps as willful exertion with some desired effect. You don’t want to “overwater the plant.”
*Subtle Identity, Subtle Boundary*
Papa Giorgio: Although all held structures interfere with our direct appreciation of the dream-like experience, there are two particular ones which being subtle are often overlooked:
The first is the Subtle Identity. This is a sense of location, usually somewhere along the centre line of the body. It is a “stuck thought” which consists only of a felt-sense. It is where you feel “me” to be, even as you obviously experience it from outside – i.e. “me” is experiencing “it”.
The second is the Subtle Boundary. This often corresponds to what is perceived as one’s “personal space”. As with the identity, it is a subtle felt-sense, a three-dimensional structure felt as a subtle “wall” between one area of the dream-space and the rest. Again, it consists only of a located feeling.
The key to directly experiencing the undivided nature of your world is to, at least, recognize – and ideally, dissolve – these two structures.
*Releasing Held Structures*
Papa Giorgio: There are three general approaches to releasing these structures, ranging from passive to fully active:
- Passive. Simply lie on the floor each day for about 10 minutes. Completely let go to gravity, and allow your body and thoughts to move as they will. If you find your attention narrowed on some aspect of experience, simply let go of holding your attention. Let it roam as it will. Gradually, over quite a long period, your held patterns will unravel naturally. However, you will feel benefits of increased clarity almost immediately, as the most shallow structures evaporate rapidly.
*Investigative. In this approach, you actively sense out difficult areas and release them. Sometimes we know there is a particular problem that needs tackled, other times we might scan our bodies or larger space and seek them out. Either way, we approach this task with an open, relaxed attention. Having identified a particular stuck area, we “sit with it” and let it intensify and release into the background of its own accord.
- Active-Assertive. The more extreme version is to go straight for the desired result. Residual structures are accumulated over time, a deformation of the nature open, empty experience that we began with. Instead of gradually diffusing these structures, we can instead wilfully assert open space as our experience.To do this, we allow our attention to open out and be unbounded: expand into the whole body space, the room, and beyond. We take our stand as the background space in which patterns appear. We then simply assert – declare to ourselves as fact, summon the feeling of it being true – that we are experiencing complete open, structureless space.
You will immediately feel the contrary to this: it is not yet true and so you will be very aware of the elements of experience which are not open and empty. Reality will offer its counter-assertion! Regardless, you simply stay with this posture of assertion and sit with it. Gradually, the resistance will soften. With regular practice, you will rapidly approach a clearer more, open experience – the subtle identity and boundary will become particularly obvious to you, and soften subsequently. However, a sense of expanded space and looser division will be almost immediate.
Important: You are asserting the feeling of truth of this directly into the dream-space here, rather than merely thinking-about it.
Note that with the final approach, you are effectively overwriting yourself with empty space. As such, it is natural that you will encounter quite strong resistance and even a sense of existential fear. For this reason, it is probably better to start with one of the other methods, build up to this, and begin with only “light assertion” until you become acclimatized to the experience.
David G. Bouklas: The pizza is here! Forget this shit.
Papa Giorgio: Agreed. Let’s celebrate. Cheers!
Dr. Bouklas: Cheers.
Papa Giorgio is the owner of Papa Giorgio’s Pizzeria Ristorante in Western France and is the founder of the Le Rêve Enfants Dream Clinic