Dream Yoga is an ancient lucid dreaming practice that views dreaming as a meditative path. In Tibet, this practice arose several thousand years ago as the Indigenous B npo culture blended with the Buddhist colonizers from India.

As such, Dream Yoga represents something very rare in the history of civilization: arguably one of the only Indigenous knowledge bases still intact within a state-level religious institution. While Tibetan Buddhism maintains the perspective (and all the trappings) of the priestly class, its practices are shamanic to the core.

At the center of the practice of Dream Yoga is the meditation that our senses deliver up a piping hot slice of illusion, and nothing more.

Not that illusion isn’t real; it’s as real as we believe it is. Rather, our senses and thoughts are reflections of a deeper reality that lives in a realm that cannot be known in the usual ways (reason and the chatty liguistic mind). This is the realm of transcendence, of non-duality, and of the clear light. Tibetan dream yoga practices are designed to help seekers open up to these realizations, not through metaphor or parable, but through the fire and ice of experience.

Me? I”m not there yet. I”m still playing around in the backdirt of transcendence, kicking up the treasures and the coprolites of illusion. But these practices are sound for anyone wishing to train their minds at any level, without the dogma. Dream Yoga is also a great antidote to the Western conquest of lucid dreams.

Here’s my title and abstract:

Nature Observation as a Field Technique: The Relevance of the Ecological Self for Anthropologists

This paper will present the practice of nature observation as a field technique for anthropologists. A blend of the work of naturalist John Young, archaeologist Paul Devereux, and psychologist Eugene Genlin, this field technique helps researchers heighten awareness, emotional intelligence, and the sense modalities that are usually suppressed by the default techno-rationalist worldview of Western culture.

Ecopsychologists discuss nature observation as crucial to the development of the ecological self; naturalists call it arriving at baseline consciousness. As a second-person (or intersubjective) data collection technique, nature observation can highlight the role of psychological projection in perception, as well as offer research potential for novel observations, inter-species communication, and perhaps a little experiential gnosis of the interface between mind and body, self and other, and spirit and matter. And, besides all that, it just feels good.

This technique is basically about sitting still and watching what comes up. And then, watch what happens on the outside. After twenty minutes, things start getting good. Animals acclimatize, natural rhythms are re-established, and thinking is much more clear as personal projections have been diminished.

You don’t have to be an anthropologist to appreciate how rewarding it can be to fully arrive in nature with your ecological self intact. You don’t even need wilderness to get lost in. Nature is all around us, after all, even in the most scrupulously maintained human zoos.

Update: here’s a simple primer for nature observation.