Lucid dreams, med­i­ta­tion, and hal­lu­cino­gens serve as bridges between states of con­scious­ness and reveal the pow­er of mind over matter.

“As a lump of salt thrown into water melts away…even so, 0 Maitreyi, the indi­vid­ual soul, dis­solved, is the Eternal—pure con­scious­ness, infi­nite, tran­scen­dent.” — The Bri­hadaranaya­ka Upanishad

Mys­tic wis­dom reveals uni­ver­sal truths that exist out­side the intel­lect, and can be obtained only in the spir­it realm. Mys­tic aware­ness becomes avail­able with dis­tance from the intel­lect and cor­re­spond­ing sense of self. The amount of pro­cess­ing sim­ply to nav­i­gate one’s every­day indi­vid­ual expe­ri­ence requires pow­er­ful cal­cu­la­tions and ener­gy. As such, liv­ing in a con­stant state of mys­tic aware­ness is unfor­tu­nate­ly not prac­ti­cal for nav­i­gat­ing the phys­i­cal world. Yet, we can cer­tain­ly become more aware of the truth about our inter-con­nec­tions by giv­ing greater atten­tion to insights shared by mys­tics. We can also pri­or­i­tize some time each day to take a break from all our pro­cess­ing and, in a calm, appro­pri­ate space, learn to devel­op mys­tic awareness.

No mat­ter what we come across in that time and space, we will at least ben­e­fit from access­ing a more self­less realm and stop burn­ing so much ener­gy on judg­ing our­selves. We should, instead, learn to embrace all of who we are, appre­ci­ate our var­i­ous flaws and mis­takes, and see how our imper­fec­tions con­nect us to the per­fect­ly chaot­ic com­po­si­tion of life.

The Upan­ishads are ancient San­skrit writ­ings that com­prise part of a larg­er body of reli­gious texts known as the Vedas, text that informs core ele­ments of Hin­duism as well as Bud­dhism and Jain­ism. These writ­ings are con­sid­ered “author­less”. The date of their ori­gins remains in ques­tion, although some schol­ars have placed the ear­li­est writ­ings as far back as 800 BCE. As ear­ly philo­soph­i­cal texts, the Upan­ishads are extreme­ly pre­cise in describ­ing a con­nec­tion between the phys­i­cal world and the spir­it world.

We believe that once we begin to dis­tance our­selves from the demands of our ego-tech­no-cen­tric eco­nom­ic sys­tem, we will free up space to pur­sue a more mys­ti­cal rela­tion­ship to the nat­ur­al world. In small ways we can uncov­er the con­nec­tions between peo­ple in order to arrive at a more spir­i­tu­al­ly awak­ened existence.

When we sleep we enter an entire­ly dif­fer­ent space in real­i­ty. Dream Yoga describes a tantric process, in the realm of lucid dream­ing, typ­i­cal­ly taught as a trans­fer of enlight­ened expe­ri­ence from a teacher to a stu­dent. One of the first sen­sa­tions prac­ti­tion­ers of this type of dream­ing often report is the chal­lenge of learn­ing to fly dur­ing their dream. Per­haps this com­mon, ini­tial expe­ri­ence of Dream Yoga reflects humanity’s fas­ci­na­tion with flight. Maybe it’s a fea­ture of a shared desire to exceed our species’ phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions. In any case, dream flight reminds us that we’ve entered an enhanced plane of exis­tence, in which the oth­er­wise impos­si­ble becomes achiev­able. In a lucid dream, the dream­er delib­er­ate­ly arranges the envi­ron­ment and their actions by their own active choice. In Bud­dhist tra­di­tions, the dream state is taught to be just anoth­er pass­ing state of con­scious­ness, or illu­sion of the phe­nom­e­nal world. Sim­i­lar to how a rain­bow reveals the col­ors with­in the vis­i­ble spec­trum of light, so too can dreams reveal what we might not yet be able to explain.

How might we trans­fer the wis­dom of Dream Yoga’s mys­ti­cal state into prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tions to soci­etal chal­lenges? How might we take proac­tive con­trol of our envi­ron­ment through enlight­ened expe­ri­ence? There are var­i­ous path­ways to unfold the lay­ered pro­jec­tions that com­prise real­i­ty. How­ev­er we access that unfold­ing of self and sen­so­ry per­cep­tion, we dis­cov­er that we are all con­nect­ed to a mys­ti­cal cos­mic force. The soon­er we col­lec­tive­ly come to that real­iza­tion, the soon­er we will be able to begin cre­at­ing the next chap­ter of human achievement.