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Prayer for You
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More Awakenings on Lucid Dreaming
To celebrate the independence of my home country, the USA, I am gleefully expressing how grateful I am for the political freedom that permits me to be a funkypagantantric freak. Thanks a million, America!Among the many radical wonders that have been possible for me to explore here in a way I could never have done had I been born in, say, Afghanistan or Bulgaria or Uruguay, is the LUCID DREAM. In an article I wrote a few months ago, I referred to this phenomenon as one of the "Seven Unsung Wonders of the World": The lucid dream is the True Grail. It's an ecstatic gratification of the seemingly impossible quest to be both awake and asleep simultaneously. At the pregnant moment when your conscious mind manages, against all odds, to be born inside the dream stream, you're in the best of both worlds. All the supercharged sensations and thrillingly surreal alchemy of the astral realm are available as usual, but you can also respond to events with concentrated bursts of willpower imbued with noble intention. Recently I discovered a beautiful statement of the relationship between the lucid dream and political freedom. It appears in the introduction to Kenneth Kelzer's excellent book, The Sun and the Shadow: My Experiment With Lucid Dreaming. In a gesture that makes perfect sense to me, Kelzer dedicates the book to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin. He explains: "I do not ordinarily think of statesmen and parapsychology in the same context. Yet, I [have] felt welling up inside of me a tremendous debt of gratitude to these people from our national past. I strongly realized my good fortune to have had the leisure time, the education, the professional background, and all the cultural resources that supported me in writing a book such as this, a book that may seem esoteric or farfetched to some. I realized with deep appreciation that a field of endeavor such as lucid dreaming could only come to fruition in a culture where intellectual, social, and academic freedom have been highly valued and jealously guarded for centuries. The expanded psychological freedom of the lucid dream state is an outgrowth of the freedom of our American social and political matrix. |
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© 1995-2008 -- Rob Brezsny. All rights reserved
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