Waking mind is like the insouciance of a drunkard staggering across a battlefield where bullets whiz by all around him but who is somehow protected from it all by his blissful indifference.  That is waking mind.  It is so totally a fiction (the sense that we are separated from everything around us) that it can only be maintained by the constant validation of other people (our sense of being part of society).   Only by all of us reassuring one another that we are separated individuals – by constantly picking at and annoying each other, just as we constantly pick at and annoy ourselves to stay awake – can we jointly uphold the fragile structure of waking consciousness.  Our society assures its continuance by setting its individual members upon each other like ravenous dogs.

When society dissolves because of e.g. war or disaster, everything becomes like a dream, since it’s out of control.  Waking makes for more control than dreaming, but with a concomitant loss of awareness and joy.  Over the next century, as the environment and civilization deteriorate, society will collapse and everything will spin out of control.  That is to say, waking consciousness will dissolve back into the dream from which it emerged at the time of the invention of agriculture.  The human race isn’t going to be able to muddle through this one, as it has always done.  Nor will there be any miraculous salvation:  no one is going to be raptured up into the clouds to sit next to Jesus; and December 22, 2012 isn’t going to be any improvement on December 20th.  And certainly the corporations, governments, and materialistic scientists who got us into this mess aren’t going to get us out of it.  Each individual human being will then be at a crossroads:  either lighten up and enter into lucid dreaming as your everyday mode of awareness; or enter into a nightmare. 

In the same way that waking consciousness grew out of dreaming, lucid dreaming – that is to say, dreaming in which the dreamer knows that he or she is dreaming – is an outgrowth of waking consciousness.  Lucid dreaming is humankind’s next step in the evolution of consciousness – New, Improved, Lemon-Scented Consciousness.  It’s also our only hope for survival as a species. 

Lucid dreaming allows us to take a pause for reflection on the dream plane:  to make it stop happening for a moment to critically evaluate and redirect the experience, instead of being wholly caught up in it, forced to be constantly shifting and adjusting ourselves to it, as our hunter forebears had to do.  Hunters had to more or less go with the flow, and they were better or worse hunters as they were able to be flexible and quick to see and grasp opportunities and avoid pitfalls as they arose.  They were nimble, but not very capable of planning, organizing, or thinking things through.   If there was an easier way to do something, they probably wouldn’t have been able to figure it out (not enough separatedness).

What happens in lucid dreaming is that we preserve the thought forms of waking consciousness, but without the importance.  That is to say, lucid dreaming is waking consciousness without the driving urgency, the constant uptightness, the sense of a separated, suffering succotash of a self.  We still have a self, symbolized by a body thought form, while we are lucidly dreaming; but that body is a great deal lighter and less separated than our waking body.  It can fly, for one thing. 

The point is, as all lucid dreamers soon realize, that the thought forms of waking consciousness can be activated in the dream state once they have been cut loose from their importance.  Lucid dreaming is what waking consciousness could be (and will be) like when we get rid of our importance.  To do lucid dreaming consistently we will have to come to a general conviction in our daily lives that nothing is all that important. 

It is the purpose of the practice of magic to make everyday life more like dreaming – to release the fixation on a separated, suffering self.  This is accomplished by cultivating the practice of lucid dreaming while we are asleep, and by going to trees or nature spirits every day while we are awake.  The doorway out of wakefulness into lucid dreaming is what magicians term sensory thought forms, and what cognitive philosophers term qualia:  that is to say, shifting attention from thinking to feeling the world around us.  This entails quieting down our minds and listening to sounds, feeling the breeze on our skin, seeing the plants and the clouds.  It’s what mystics refer to as “suchness” or “thusness”; but really all it involves is just shutting up the constant stream of mental chatter long enough to see – hear – feel what’s going on in the now moment – i.e., to do what we do when we’re dreaming while we’re awake.  The “Following Feelings” chapter of my book Magical Living describes how to do this.   The practice of recapitulation (to be described in a later Magical Almanac article on William Butler Yeats’ theory of reincarnation) is also extremely invaluable in releasing the obsessive fixation of waking consciousness; releasing our obsessive grip on everyday life and the people around us. 

The goal for us as individuals is to merge dreaming and waking – to be as light and unencumbered while awake as we are while dreaming; and to be as rational and clear-thinking while dreaming as we are when we are awake.  The goal for us humans as a species is to make lucid dreaming our everyday awareness, in the same way that our hunter-gatherer ancestors made waking consciousness their everyday awareness at the time that agriculture was invented. 

The purpose of Buddhism – at least insofar as I understand it – is to get a few exceptional people fully enlightened.  The purpose of the practice of magic is to get the mass of people somewhat enlightened – i.e. enlightened enough to save the human race and the earth.  No major upheaval in present society would necessarily be required to make this shift, unless humankind stupidly proves to be incapable of responding short of a total crisis.  There are probable realities which go either way, which we as individuals can choose or decline to participate in, by believing what we choose to believe.  All that’s required to save humanity is for most people (not necessarily all) to lighten up just a little bit.  We don’t need everyone to don sackcloth and ashes and take to caves and become enlightened; nor do we need everyone to fall in line and believe as we do.  All we need is for most people to become just a tad less greedy, selfish, suspicious, intolerant, closed-hearted and shameless.  Just for most people to lighten up a teensy bit is all that’s required for the human race to enter into lucid dreaming together. 

            In the state of lucid dreaming everyone instantly knows the truth, so pretense is impossible.  By contrast, most of what transpires in waking consciousness is a pack of lies:  people are talking about one thing, but what is really going on under the surface is something altogether different.  It isn’t like that in lucid dreaming – what we see is what we get.  There’s no room for phoniness because those importance coverings don’t exist in lucid dreaming – that agreement is more important than truth. 

Yes, Virginia, Truth does indeed exist.  All that’s necessary to find it is to cut through all the yada-yada nonsense of our decadent, degenerate society and listen to what our hearts are telling us.   We magicians do this by going to trees and nature spirits for validation rather than to our fellow humans. 

To enter into lucid dreaming from a position which starts from being awake is the same thing as astral projection.   Talented dreamers have a facility for astral projection, and this can be the quickest way for them to go.  But it would take most people too long to learn astral projection; it’s easier for them to come at it through lucid dreaming.  This is a better path for people who think too much, since it minimizes thinking.  We have to start from being asleep, and then beckon our separatedness thought form to come to us without its covering of importance.  If the covering of importance comes too, then we wake up.  That’s why so many of us find it difficult to maintain ourselves in a state of lucid dreaming without waking up:  one must be calm in a lucid dream, otherwise one tends to beckon importance.

            Lucid dreaming is not something essentially different from waking consciousness, only we get to it from a position of being asleep.  When we start out from a position of being awake, we call it “everyday life”.  What do you suppose the horseless carriage is?   Or the radio, TV, airplane, space rocket, computer?  They are all wild, crazy dreams.  A hundred years ago that’s exactly what we would have considered them.  And that’s all they are – dreams.  Humankind just incorporated that dream material into waking consciousness.  That’s the sort of thing waking consciousness is good for:  to originate dream material of that sort.  That kind of business requires slow, patient development over generations; and the dream plane is too unstable and mutable to do that kind of stuff on.  The dream plane is too here and now.  Since dream consciousness is more timeless than waking consciousness, it doesn’t allow for the detachment that a sense of past (history) and future (planning) can give.   We need a greater sense of separatedness to be able to do things that slowly.  That’s why it is so difficult to do things like dial a phone number or read a sentence in a normal dream – these activities require a greater degree of separatedness than normal dreaming affords, to be able to bring that kind of minute detail into focus.

            That’s the genius of waking consciousness:  we lose scope and agility, but in return we get focus and a methodical way of getting at things.  Waking consciousness is much more clearly focused and delimited than dreaming, even if we all become extremely myopic and uptight in the process. 

The practice of magic is about turning our everyday waking lives into lucid dreaming, cultivating a somewhat “altered state of mind” as our everyday mindset.    As we do this much of our sense of separatedness dissolves and we feel more inner peace and oneness with our world.  Spirits start talking to us, as they did to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.   Our everyday life becomes more like dreaming – i.e., more magical.  This is the road that each of us must travel as individuals; and which the human race as a whole will have to follow if it is to survive and prosper.  It is the road of entering into a state of lucid dreaming from a position which starts from being awake (instead of asleep, as usual).  This means understanding that waking consciousness is lucid dreaming; and the only reason we can’t see that is because we must keep up the pretense that what we’re doing is “real” and important.  Therefore we can’t see that it’s all just a dream. 

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