Andrew Holecek (Part 3) – The Remarkable Practice of Dream Yoga: How Lucid Dreaming Makes Sleep Endlessly Fascinating and Leads to Lucid Living (and Lucid Dying)
Lucid dreaming expert, author, “curiouist,” and integralist Andrew Holecek explains how lucid dreaming opens the door to a greatly expanded understanding of our minds, our perception of reality, and human potential altogether. If we consciously explore our night lives practicing dream yoga, we can learn how to discard our habits, purify our karma, and discover beyond a shadow of a doubt that we are co-creators of our experience. What we do in dream yoga is not limited to nighttime action; it weaves back into our daytime lives, and ultimately our experience of dying.
Andrew describes how dreams are a powerful way to discover emptiness and openness, and fall into reality—like falling into love—our primordial contraction cast away. Besides being a life-changing discourse on the incredible potential of dream yoga, Andrew Holecek’s cheerful, well-informed, easy way of talking and teaching about lucid dreaming—relating it also to the wisdom traditions, our sense of identity, lucid living, and human evolution—makes this a real pleasure to listen to. Recorded on April 13, 2022.
“Lucid dreaming is metacognitive dreaming: the next iteration of human evolution.”
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Topics & Time Stamps – Part 3
- What is our identity? Discovering the empty nature of reality (01:37)
- Our exclusive identification with form and extreme habituation to contraction (04:21)
- What we think of as self is really just a self-image (11:38)
- The transformation of consciousness into wisdom: not awareness of but awareness as (14:01)
- Where does the illusion of matter come from? These teachings are a radical challenge to our worldview, transcending but including our self-sense (15:29)
- Who are you really? Thou art that. This perception births tremendous love, tremendous altruism—when you realize there is no other (17:18)
- “Perfuming” your awareness with requests or questions to induce daytime popups, symbolic responses, and synchronicities (20:41)
- How lucidity relates to your sense of perspective (22:39)
- When the world becomes more porous, less reified (24:59)
- Realizing “I am a creative genius!” and a co-creator of our experience, and how we give away our power (27:41)
- Ontic plasticity: decentralizing and discovering the empty nature of our self (30:32)
- The filtering model: how we filter out aspects of reality that don’t feed us at our particular developmental level (37:22)
- Fear is the fundamental reason for our contraction away from wonder (39:13)
- Stage IV dream yoga is all about working with fear: fear of reality, fear of truth, fear of transcendence (40:11)
Resources & References – Part 3
- Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhist meditation master
- Milarepa, “phenomena are all the books one needs”
- Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, 2nd president of India, “Reality overflows our miserable concepts”
- Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell*
- Andrew Holecek’s website: https://www.andrewholecek.com
- Andrew Holecek, Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming*
- Andrew Holecek, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep*
- Andrew Holecek, The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual Hardship into Joy
- Andrew Holecek, Preparing to Die: Practical Advice and Spiritual Wisdom from the Tibetan Buddhist Tradition*
- Andrew Holecek, The Lucid Dreaming Workbook: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering Your Dream Life*
- Dream Yoga: The Tibetan Path of Awakening Through Lucid Dreaming (Sounds True audio learning course)
- Night Club: Where Meditators and Lucid Dreamers Meet, Andrew Holecek community
* As an Amazon Associate, Deep Transformation earns from qualifying purchases.
Andrew Holecek has completed the traditional three-year Buddhist meditation retreat and offers seminars internationally on lucid dreaming, the art of dying, and meditation. He is the author of many books, including The Lucid Dreaming Workbook, Preparing to Die, Dream Yoga: Illuminating Your Life Through Lucid Dreaming and the Tibetan Yogas of Sleep; Dreams of Light: The Profound Daytime Practice of Lucid Dreaming, and The Power and the Pain: Transforming Spiritual Hardship into Joy. Dr. Holecek is a member of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the author of scientific papers on lucid dreaming. His work has appeared in Parabola, Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Utne Reader, Buddhadharma Magazine, Light of Consciousness, and many other periodicals. He holds degrees in classical music, biology, and a doctorate in dental surgery.
Podcast produced by Vanessa Santos and Show Notes by Heidi Mitchell
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