As Beki, the owner of Chantry Farm says in her interview, the land first appeared to her in a dream, whilst she was a Buddhist nun in an intensive retreat being trained in Dream Yoga.
The Tibetan teachings on Dream Yoga involve developing lucidity – awareness, during dream. Cultivating the ability to recognise, without waking up, this is a dream! That’s a first stage.. In the ‘Kagyu tradition’ Dream Yoga forms part of a series of meditations designed to develop a deep understanding of how we ‘are’, how we exist, including our relationship to the ‘outer world’ of appearances, and also, what happens when we die. These profound practices require foundational training, but, perhaps since ‘science’ caught up with lucid dreaming, there is a massive interest on this particular ‘yoga’ in the West, regardless of Buddhist teachings on it.
We all dream, and there are plenty of accomplished lucid dreamers who find ‘recognising dream’ – lucid dreaming, is a spontaneous ability. Often from childhood. Yet lucidity can always be cultivated and enhanced. Yoga means ‘union’ – a profound uniting of mind and body – consciousness and the material world – to understand profoundly the way things are! Yoga also of course, more commonly means the methods used for mind body harmony – but the original goal (somewhat lost now?) is very profound.
Buddhism has an extraordinary amount of different techniques to assist anyone on the journey to ‘awaken’ from confusion, – from a state of not understanding the way things are, to being Enlightened. Eighty four thousand teachings (!) to suit various individual temperaments. As the Buddha’s teachings spread around the planet, the focus, the way it manifests, changes in emphasis. We’ve seen interest in the practice of ‘mindfulness’ go ‘mainstream’ in the West, but strangely within the mindfulness movement, sleep and dream, which we do for about 1/3 of our lives (!) is often ignored. Yet awareness in dream is a helpful indicator for how aware of our projections and delusions we really are. We imagine plenty of things in waking state which aren’t true.. All levels should be taken seriously by anyone attempting mastery of their own minds. Sleeping, with the liminal states before and after, and also of course dream itself, is ‘bonus time’ for us to become aware. Its a potential portal to accelerated understanding of our own minds and the apparently external universe – which includes everyone else! Working with Dream starts with simply being able to recall what we have dreamt. This is where Wolstonbury Dreaming aims to help. Basic but sacred steps towards a richer life. A greater understanding of how our minds work, day and night.
Tibetan or Vajrayana Buddhism is big on Pilgrimage and Sacred Ground too. The dream Beki had of Chantry Farm included the appearance on the land of a reincarnated Tibetan meditation master, Jamgon Kongtrul. Jamgon Kongtrul the First, revered as a sort of Leonardo figure in Tibet, lived in the 1800s and designed the structure for the 3 year retreat which Beki was participating in. He also composed a text – “Sacred Ground” in English – , which describes the arising of sacred places, with inner and outer correlations. Many pages are devoted to advocating pilgrimage.
Dream Yoga in Buddhism is also used as a ‘rehearsal’ for death. The way we ‘lose’ consciousness is similar in dream and death. Except of course when we die, our physical body and its usefulness is finished. We’re not going to wake back up and carry on using it. There can be continued awareness at the time our physical body ceases to function, but, as it is when we fall asleep, for many its’s a complete black out until confusing appearances arise.. In Tibet, the art of dream and dying whilst retaining consciousness has been taken to impressive levels: The term ‘Tulku’ is used to describe accomplished meditators who maintain enough awareness after death to navigate ‘the Bardo/interim stages’ and thus select, with that awareness, their next rebirth. Any of us who instead just ‘black out at the wheel’ are left to the winds of our ‘karma’ . Still, here we are, n this fortunate life, so we didn’t do badly last time around!
More good news is that although its not possible to teach traditional Tibetan Dream Yoga to anyone who stays here just for a night or two, there are a lot of contemporary workshops and excellent teachers on Lucid Dreaming available, including online resources – and we plan to have short retreats here. Charley Morley and Robert Waggoner are two very experienced and competent teachers if you are interested to look online. Hopefully they will both teach here in the future too! Lucid Dreaming exists as a great tool for developing profound awareness, but most lucid dreamers who aren’t also practicing Buddhism don’t usually make the link to what happens when we die. Its fun to fly for sure, but there’s a lot more to it than that..
A large part of the foundational teachings in Buddhism which precede Dream Yoga are to deepen understanding of how things happen in our waking state. What causes things to happen the way they do? Buddha gave many teachings on the law of cause and effect – aka karma. Its a biggie! Yet oddly again, karma is often missing from much ‘mindful’ or awareness practice. We need to be mindful of what we do, what we think, and what we say. The law of cause and effect rules science and the material world (for example a tomato seed always grows into a tomato, not a peach) but the Buddha made very clear it needs to be applied to what we do with our lives, every second of them. Life is certainly dream-like, but there are ‘laws of cause and effect’ operating in our waking state which we are not (usually) able to ignore. The more subtle karmic laws – even down to how we think, also require mastery and awareness if we want to be completely free of all suffering and fully able to help ‘others’.
Still, given we all dream, there are some great opportunities to make good use of them! It can be so much fun, and also, as ability deepens, it can also become incredibly profound and certainly improve many aspects of our waking state – not least in helping us overcome illusions of separateness. There are two main necessities for the majority of humans – who do not spontaneously become lucid – to start out:
First is the aspiration to do it! – To become aware in our dreams, and secondly, good dream recall. Dream recall is simply being able to remember dreams on waking. There are some times of life we seem more able to do this, than others. Did you notice when you recall more dreams, or less? Children tend to have a vivid dream landscape which they often recall and naturally wish to talk about. Its one reason children are very welcome to dream on Wolstonbury, there is even a specific Wolstonbury Dreaming podcast for them. Dismissing them with ‘its just a dream’ is such a shame.
So as Buddhism moves around the planet and through time, it adapts focus to suit the people of the place. If Wolstonbury were in Tibet, circa C10, out walking the hill you might meet an adept ‘cotton clad yogi’ – the famous nettle soup loving meditation master, Milarepa. He had mastered dream awareness to the point he could fly through the sky in waking state. Why do that? To demonstrate what is possible when delusions cease – how playful it can get.. that the laws of cause and effect are not ultimate laws, they are relative to a material world full of concepts – to those of us stuck in the relative world of concepts.. The more rigidly we hold concepts, the more rigid the world appears. Everyone in the West knows of Jesus, who also reportedly demonstrated ‘miraculous ability’, he spoke of union with divine omnisience. Milarepa sang to his students “He who feels no difference between dream and waking, has reached the realm of true practice.” Clearly, as most of us can’t fly in the daytime, that state of awareness is some way off.. and he commented on that too
“I see this life as a conjuration and a dream. Great compassion rises in my heart for those without a knowledge of this truth”.
Given he taught random people he met in the hills, perhaps what he would say were you to meet on Wolstonbury, would be another of his famous instructions to a small group of disciples
“Remember Your Dreams Tonight”.
There is much more which could be said about Buddhism and Dream Yoga, but one thing which Wolstonbury Dreaming personifies, is that this opportunity, this unusual place we can all visit to take an inner and outer journey, only exists as it does, due to the remembering of a dream!