AIMS: (1) Test whether dreaming holds a key to understanding assumptions that tacitly constrain our waking lives. (2) Quantify effects of Dream-Yoga-inspired procedures for exploring and surmounting constraints of the perception box. BACKGROUND: People spend a third of their lives asleep, usually oblivious to the opportunities for enhanced well-being that sleep offers. Over centuries,...
A classic set of eight similes of illusion (sgyu ma’i dpe brgyad) are employed recurrently throughout Indian and Tibetan Buddhist literature to illustrate the operations of cognition, its correlative perceptions, and experiences that emerge. To illustrate a Buddhist psychology of metaphor, the fourteenth century Tibetan scholar and synthesizer of the Dzogchen (rdzogs chen) or Great Perfection...
For Indian Buddhists and their Tibetan successors, the faculty of “mindfulness” (Skt. smṛti, Tib. dran pa) has been interpreted as the foundation of the threefold development of wisdom (study, reflection, cultivation). Such a model was, in Tibet, the hallmark of the gradual approach to awakening, whereas in the simultaneous approach, the state beyond ordinary mindfulness was emphasized. The...