Ep. 50 - Lucid Dreaming + Buddhism w/ Robert Waggoner

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To dream bar, check out the AppleCama mail flavor. My favorite, tell 'em Noah sent you. All right guys, thanks for listening and here is the episode. (upbeat music) All of a sudden, I'd go to sleep at night and the entire night would be nothing but blue light. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. Synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. This is synchronicity. (upbeat music) Welcome to episode 50 of Synchronicity. My guest today is Robert Wagner. You may remember Robert from just a few episodes ago where there's a couple episodes ago.

Couple? No, a few. A few episodes ago where Robert discussed some of the practical implications of lucid dreaming and what lucid dreaming is for a nice little overview. Today is a much more in depth conversation about some other things you can do related to spiritual practices. We're gonna go with that term with lucid dreams and also some of his personal experiences which is what I find most interesting. I love to hear people's experiences with dreams so lucid dreams even better. But first, we're gonna get to some other stuff. Guess what, guys? I, and girls, ladies, women, men, fellows. I was a guest on a podcast.

This is not a regular occurrence but I'm trying to go on some more. I like, if you haven't been able to, if you've been a regular listener of this podcast, I got a very lovely comment on YouTube today of someone who listened to, I put these podcasts on YouTube too because some people use YouTube. And once in a while, I'll get a comment from a listener and usually very positive, but this person really, really did not like me at all. He said, oh, really happy to see Lorenzo from the psychedelic salon on, and I'm paraphrasing here, on a podcast, nice to hear him on other podcasts, but geez, this guy interviewing shut up already.

Enough with the talking. Thanks, guy, appreciate it. I'm glad you took the time out of your day to tell me that you enjoyed that he's on a podcast but that I suck. My point is, is that in case you haven't been able to tell by now, I enjoy talking. So I did that on Corey Allen's wonderful astral hustle podcast. Go check that out. It's on MindPod Network. He has his own website, Corey Allen, Corey-Allen.com. Find it on iTunes, all places you would wanna find podcasts. I had a really good time talking with him about lots of cool stuff. And yeah, I really had a good time on it. He's a great interviewer.

Not an interviewer, it's just a conversation. That's really what it is. That's why it's so good. So if you wanna check that out, cool, I'm there. Okay, I'm getting right to the episode with Robert this week because I'm super excited for you guys to hear it. First off, I wanna say there's a great book that just came out by David Nick Turn called Awakening from the Daydream. And it ties in nicely with what I'm gonna talk about and relate Robert's Lucid Dreaming experiences with, which is the six samsaric realms in Buddhist cosmology. And these realms relate to, I've talked about them before in the podcast, but they essentially, they relate to six, either depending on how you want to look at it, actual realms and also states of mind that we can go through throughout our life in days.

So these realms are the god realm, the jealous god realm. You know what? I have an idea, quick, mid, chain. Gonna do it here. I have a really awesome Alan Watts talk that I'm gonna play for you that explains the six samsaric realms. And then I'm gonna jump back in and talk a little bit more about Robert, and we can go from there in this particular episode. I think this is gonna be cool. Also, I will remind you, syncpodcast.com/watts. Go there, you'll get taken to this Alan Watts Foundation shop. Use the code S-Y-N-C, all caps at checkout, you get 30% off your first order. So if you like what you're about to hear, do that, and you get 30% off.

Also, if you wanna become an affiliate and get sponsored, let's say you have a podcast, let's say you have an email list, let's say you've got social media, hit me up. Noah@syncpodcast.com, going to get that rolling for people who are interested. Okay, I'm gonna cut me out and put in Alan Watts and I'll be back in a second. This seminar about birth, death, and the unborn is gonna be a discussion of the Buddhist philosophy of change. And I'm gonna start out by going into the very tricky and difficult question of the Buddhist view of birth and death and the doctrine which is ordinarily understood as reincarnation or rebirth.

It's a curious thing that many Westerners who become interested in Hinduism or Buddhism do so because of this idea of reincarnation. They like it. It gives a more satisfactory vision of individual history and development. Then the two possibilities that would normally be open to Westerners to believe in. On the one hand, you've got the choice of the Christian view, which is that you live in this world once and in this four score years and 10, your eternal fate is settled. Or you've got the possibility of the materialistic view, which is that you only live once and when you're dead, you're dead, that's that.

You're a flash of consciousness between two eternal darknesses. Intelligent people in the Western world never felt very happy about either of these two prospects. And therefore there's a certain tractiveness about the idea, which seems to be the point of Buddhism and Hinduism, that you are a soul on a pilgrimage and that from some extremely obscure origin you began as some sort of animalcule and worked your way up step by step through all sorts of forms of life. And finally, you have the privilege of appearing in human form. And once you've got there, you have an opportunity to develop to the highest spiritual position.

You must remember that according to both Hindu and Buddhist doctrines, the human form is a very privileged position. For there are according to both of them because they share a common cosmology, six domains of beings. And if you visualize the wheel of life with its six divisions at the highest top division, there is the realm of the devour. Devour is a word from which we get the word divine and equally the word devil. Devour means though originally a god or more correctly an angel. Angel is a better Western translation of devour than god. Immediately opposite the devour world at the bottom of the circle, there is the Naraka world of beings in torment, of the absolute, this is the dimension of the world which is the screaming mimis, which is experience in the form of horror.

The devour world is the experience of being in the form of bliss. And between these two poles, there are all kinds of ranges. There are, for example, the Ashuras next to the devours going clockwise around the wheel. And the Ashuras are, they are a wrathful beings. Ashuras is the incarnation of divine anger. Then next to the Ashuras going around are the animals, all animals whatsoever. Then again we get to the Naraka at the bottom, the place of the purgatory we'll call it. Then coming up again, there's the world of the Prata who are frustrated beings and they are represented iconographically as having very large bellies and very tiny mouths.

That is to say, an immense appetite with very little means of satisfying it. They are a sort of spiritual bottleneck. And then coming up between the Pratas and the devours is the world of the humans. And this is understood to represent a sort of middle position. You can be liberated from the human state because the devours are too happy to be liberated. The Ashuras, too furious, the animals too dumb, the Narakas too tormented and the Pratas too frustrated. You need not take this as a literal account of various kinds of being in the universe. You can take them simply as a depiction of various states of the human mind, of the moods you can go through.

They're all really in your own head as we shall see later on about many other things. But these are the six worlds of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology. And the notion is that one reincarnates again and again through the six worlds. This is the popular idea. There you go, Alan Watts just said a great job of describing these realms that exist. So it's interesting about this and how it relates to this episode. So you heard at the beginning the little teases is Robert's talking about this blue light that that was his entire dream. And immediately when he was saying this in the episode, I was like, you know what?

This reminds me of something I read in two books. One is "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" by Sogeal Rinpoche. And the second is this book I've been reading by Pono Rinpoche, which is "Mind Beyond Death." And I just finished and it's amazing. I highly, highly recommend it. So it reminded me of two things that I was reading about that, which is when you are in the Bardo state after death and you're in the Bardo of becoming, it's called, you get attracted to a series of lights and they each correspond to one of those realms that Alan Watts was just talking about there. And the one that corresponds to the human realm is a blue light.

I believe it's described as like a pale blue light, which is interesting 'cause that's the color of Earth really. But anyway, I thought that was really interesting when Robert was talking about it and he goes on to describe several other experiences he's had. And then he actually talks about Tibetan Buddhists who he's met, who like Lama who was saying, like, this is really advanced stuff. This is dream yoga. Very interesting stuff. I love it especially now that like the two Venn diagrams, one circle is Tibetan Buddhism and the other is dreams that they are able to overlap in such an awesome way.

That's pretty cool. That's really cool. So, I don't wanna give anything else away. I know this has been a long intro. We had a little interlude from Alan Watts. It's cool, the Alan Watts Foundation, happy to unveil some more talks for free. Also, little teaser here, little recommendation. If you're part of the MindPod network, mailing list, email list, I was given away a free talk. So, what you just heard there, you can hear the full thing. It's about 43 minutes. Sign up for that email list. And let me know when you sign up and I'll get that out to you. Actually, you don't have to let me know. Just sign up for the email list and you'll get that.

That's my promise to you. So, without further ado, here is again, Robert Wagner. (upbeat music) Cool. Thanks for coming on again. I'm happy to. You know, this area that I hope we're gonna talk about communicating with an inner awareness is really an important area and a lot of people don't get it and a lot of lucid dreamers have yet to experience it. So, let me tell you what's happened since the last episode, which came out two weeks ago. Okay. So, I had, so I sent out an email every week to what I call the Synchronicity Community, which is, you know, people sign up for my email list and talk about the podcast and, you know, write a little blurb, sometimes longer, sometimes not.

And this one wasn't particularly long. It's like, hey, we talked about some stuff, you know. And people wrote, people typically write back depending on the subject matter. And I got, I mean, a very large response considering that this wasn't like a long, I sometimes I ask a question or something, but, you know, it was just pretty much a regular email that it was going. It was like, admittedly it was a little rush, but the response was phenomenal. So, I had two people write in and tell me their lucid dreams. One for the first time ever, had never done it, saw his hands pop in front of his face and I'll tell you an interesting thing that happened in that story.

But another person wrote in and said specifically that lucid dreaming was a huge part of their spiritual practice, that it's something that they had started doing since they were 17, that meditating in lucid dreams was particularly interesting. They wrote a whole, you know, and I think it was Jeremy, it was his name who wrote to me. And I wrote back, like that was really cool. Like I couldn't equal what he had just read me. I was like, that's really awesome. But I'm trying to give it justice now because he wrote in and then also my aunt who lives in California was visiting. And she came to stay with us on Saturday and Sunday, stayed overnight.

And I don't think she knew anything about the podcast. I don't think she knew anything about lucid dreaming. But she said she then that night before had her first lucid dream with, yeah, and my son, my five month old son was in the dream. And she said what woke her up to the fact that it was a lucid dream was that he was like, he was like naked, but he was off the bed. And she's like, this is too weird. This doesn't make sense. And then she was like lucid. She remembers like going, looking at some art, some guy behind a bar and she wanted to get his card. Like so I haven't lucid, I've been intending to lucid dream almost every night before I go to sleep.

I'm concerned that everyone else is getting the benefit of this. (laughing) So that's like, how do I lucid dream? No, I'm kidding. But I just thought that was really interesting that so many things just by virtue of talking about it started sprouting up in a lot of different ways. So yeah. Oh, that's great. No, that's great. And I'm happy for the person who had their first lucid dream and the spiritual guy in Germany or whatever, meditating in a lucid dream. You can do profound things. And, but when I talk about it, I sound like I'm crazy or starting to lose my mind. (laughing) I know it goes, but whatever.

But when people experience it and keep doing it and doing it, they're just like, oh my God, this totally blows my mind. But anyway, that's great. This whole area, it's so ripe and I don't understand what's gonna catch it on fire. I think it's gonna have to be like how the Beatles went to India and started to meditate.

Yeah, and now everyone does TM.

Now everyone, 30 years later, everyone meditates. It's gonna have to be something like that. Some actor or actress who in a lucid dream, heals himself of some ailment or does something incredible. And then everyone will be talking, "Well, let's lucid dream it, let's lucid dream it."

It was interesting about that. I actually heard this guy flying Lotus. He's like a musician, producer, makes music. He said that he made contact with Tom York, the lead singer of Radiohead in an astral projection/lucid dream. And that's how like they met. And then like, Tom York brought him on tour or something. It was such like a weird off story. No one paid any attention to it. It was like right under the radar and like totally dismissed. But I know what you're saying. Like, I do feel like this is something. Well, regardless, we're talking about it. So we're doing our little part. (laughing)

Exactly, exactly. But anyway, yeah, another some, you know, bringing up that reminds me of another story, a guy from New York City becomes lucidly aware when he sees this deceased drummer that he knew from another rock and roll band. The deceased drummer comes over and tells the guy that his future is in drumming. And he's going to teach him the secrets of drumming in the lucid dream. And so the guy wakes up and he's just totally, his mind's blown away because this was a famous drummer who either had an overdose or something, whatever died. The next day the guy thinks, okay, I'm going to go down into Manhattan to this music shop and look at the drum sets there and all.

He walks into the music shop. He's looking at the drum sets. And then walks in the former partner of the deceased guy, the head of the musical group. And he starts talking to this guy about how they're looking for a drummer and would he be interested in joining their band and their drummer. And the guy goes, you know, this one lucid dream has totally effing changed my entire life.

Yeah.

And I'm not part of a band that's really happening and yada yada yada. He says, "Whoa."

Yeah. (laughing)

It's just like, wow.

So that's great, this flying lotus story. I'll have to check that out if you have the links to it.

I'll send it to you.

I'll send it to you.

I'll have it. Good.

So, okay. So let's talk about what is going on. How can, how to lucid dreams interact with spiritual practices, quote unquote.

Right. So lucid dreaming again is a tool. It's a tool of aware relating. When you're consciously aware in the unconscious or subconscious dreaming, you can do anything. You can fly around to have fun. You can have lucid dream sex. You can try to emotional heal or physically heal your body or whatever. But you can also do spiritual practices. So for example, some people meditate. Some people in a lucid dream, they stop what they're doing and they sit there and begin to meditate. And I'll tell you, it'll lead to profound, utterly profound experiences.

Like what happens when you meditate in a lucid dream? Do you meditate in waking life?

Right, right. Yeah, so I have a meditation practice and this is an important point. There's different types of meditation practices. For example, some people might just chant one mantra over and over. - Of course, yeah.

Other people might empty their mind. Other people might follow their breath or observe thoughts and let them disappear. So anyway, for me, meditating involves emptying the mind. So this happened to me probably 20 years ago. I was having a lucid dream. I remembered a friend had asked me if I'd ever meditated in a lucid dream and I haven't up to that point. So this is probably around 95 or something. I stopped in the path. I sat there in a lotus position and I was looking straight ahead and began to meditate by emptying my mind. And then it was the most incredible thing. All of the sudden, it was like the imagery, the dream screen, the dream projection just started to be ripped away and brilliant white light came shining through the rips just like a movie theater that someone was just ripping away parts of the screen, just ripping it away, ripping away.

And so then I thought that made me come out of the meditation because it was so profound and this light is shooting into my eyes. Then I thought, well, maybe I could close my eyes and see what happens. So then I close my eyes in the lucid dream, begin to meditate by emptying my mind. And I'll tell you, within 30 seconds to one minute, I was having the most profound, transcendent meditative experience that I've ever, ever had.

Yeah.

Now, nothing important thing about this. I talked about this one time in a webinar that I was doing with Michael Katz, who's a dream yoga teacher in New York City and some other people. And this Michael Katz, he said in the Zojian tradition, my experience is exactly what's supposed to happen.

Yeah, I was gonna, I know what you're saying. I literally am reading about this in a book called "Mind Beyond Death." Continue, continue not to cut you off.

Yeah, yeah, so think of that. When you empty the mind, you realize that the mind is the projector, the projector of experience. But when you empty it, what happens? All of a sudden, that kind of base awareness, this invite begins to shine through because the contents of your mind and your self-ideation are disappearing.

Yeah.

And so Michael Katz, he told me, he thought it was amazing that in my first try at meditating in a lucid dream, I'd accomplished this.

So that's just just one example of some incredible experiences that people have.

I mean, like I was saying, that is something I am reading about. They're talking about Bardo states. Dreaming is one of them. I mean, that's in, I'm reading it's Tibetan. It's Zogchen, Vajrayana.

Right.

And what you're describing as emptying the mind is actually referred to in Tibetan Buddhism as Shamatha meditation. It's that is, and it's different than something say like Vipassana, which is insight meditation or meta, loving kindness meditation. There are different forms, but emptying the mind is like basically the first thing is I understand it that you're taught in these schools because it's, you know, it's like the base level thing. So what's fascinating to me about this is, I'm reading about all this stuff. Maybe I'm probably doing it at some point. I just don't remember any of it, who knows?

But what you're describing is referred to as the ground luminosity. And this is the shining light that after you die, essentially you have supposedly many opportunities to realize that this ground luminosity is exactly what you're talking about. This is the base consciousness. This is actually the emptiness merging with the ever-manifesting projections of the mind we were talking about. And if you can recognize it, then you have the ability to determine where you would potentially be reborn if in a different realm for the benefit of all sentient beings. So the reason, I mean, this is my hypothesis, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

In a dream, especially if you're in a lucid dream in your experience, you don't have a physical body, right? And this is something that can be a hugely limiting factor for someone trying to like realize the true nature of mind. Like if this is all emptiness and projections of mind, but we're touching this table and I'm speaking into this microphone, yeah, it's not as convincing as if you're in a dream and are able to do it, and I mean, it's mind-blowing that you have the experience in a dream like that, but in some ways, I'm not surprised because it would kind of lend itself to that. So, yeah.

Well, it definitely lends itself to it. I think what happens, and this is why I try to get across this idea that lucid dreaming is not about control, because the sailor does not control the sea, neither does the lucid dreamer control the dream. So when I began to empty my mind and this meditative experience, the projected mental overlay, the projected mental energy all responds. When you empty your mind, when you let go of all that projected mental energy, then it's exactly like you say, this ground luminosity, you know, some people might call it rig-pass.

Right, right.

But it appears as this extraordinarily brilliant light. And so the beautiful thing about this is that in lucid dreams, you can practice this. And I have a good friend, Claire Johnson, who had a story in my second book, Lucid Dreaming, Plain and Simple. And she said that she's been practicing meditation so much in her lucid dreams, that now in her waking life, when she meditates, what used to take her 20, 25 minutes in the waking state to get to a certain depth, because she's practiced it and had such profound experiences in her lucid dreams. So frequently, now in four or five minutes, she says she gets to this incredible state.

What used to take her like 25 minutes. And so that's part of it too, is that in lucid dreaming, it may help to kind of open the gateway, open the pathway more clearly, more quickly, more totally. And so that then when you do it in the waking state, it's more possible and much more easy.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense that you can hone a craft in a lucid state. And I mean, I remember also in that book, you were talking about the swimmer who was able to look at himself from multiple different perspectives. And thus hone his, he was like a terrible swimmer and the coach was like, you suck. He was like, you shouldn't. And then he was like, he lucid dreamed and like, really focused in on the intricate moment of like what it felt like when his hands hit the water. And I think, again, I love the Tibetan stuff because they talk about like picture in detail, this particular emanation of a Buddha, like look at this specifically and detailed.

And then in a lucid dream, when it's purely mental or whatever you want to call it, it's not physical, corporal reality, you have the ability to look and study at these things. I mean, that's why I think, I think there's six Bardo states and one of them is dreaming. Like they, you know, what we refer to as dreaming. That's a big part of it because there is a real opportunity to, you know, use consciousness. And I read something last night and I had never heard this before. So I use the term consciousness pretty freely and pretty openly to refer to God knows how many things. And I was reading last night in this book.

I'm so, I am giving it away this week is a book giveaway. I'll probably do it again. It's such good. This guy, Pono Brimpoce. So great. But he was talking about the difference between what we refer to is consciousness. It's our momentary, you know, perception of this continuous stream of events. And what he refers to as wisdom in this is in Tibetan Buddhism is different than consciousness. This is the actual, the base level reality. They call it like the alpha wave, Dharmakaya. It's like this, there's a whole name for it. But essentially there's a distinction between clearly seeing wisdom and then what we experience as consciousness.

And I thought that was pretty interesting. And I was wondering what your thoughts are. How, how do you, are there changes in consciousness? And if so, what are they from waking life to? 'Cause I'm very, here's what I'm driving at. Especially since the last podcast we to get together. I think the more you talk about the more you investigate these other places, dreams being a huge one of them. They start to proliferate in a lot of different ways. People write to me about this stuff. Relatives are having dreams. My wife has been having really vivid dreams. I think there is a link. I think, I really, really like the idea of dreaming as we do it commonly.

Just being a similar thing to what we do in waking life. And that the same types of things, while not in the, you know, I can't take off and fly here. The same type of quote unquote magical things that can happen can also take place in this reality. So what, have you had experiences of that that validate that or, yeah.

Well, so it's interesting, if you can imagine this, in lucid dreams, and I write about this in my first book. I began to meet this recurring dream figure who is this Asian guy with very strange kind of radical looking hair. And in my lucid dreams, he was kind of teaching me and encouraging me, especially around 1995. So by that time, I've been a lucid dreamer for 20 years. And what I realized is that the lucid dream reality and the dream reality were propped up by my beliefs and expectations, my focus, my intent, and also this larger awareness that I found that you could communicate with in lucid dreams.

But altogether, all these forces went together and helped to create the lucid dream experience. They helped to create the dream experience. And to me, it seemed like they helped to create this waking reality experience. And so then I wondered, well, how do you go beyond lucid dreaming? And I realized, oh, to go beyond lucid dreaming, you have to let go of your beliefs, let go of your expectations, let go of your self-history, let go of basically the attachment to this self-view, this self-ideation. And then this is what began to happen. When I began to think about this really deeply in '95, all of a sudden, I'd go to sleep at night and the entire night would be nothing but blue light.

And I remember the first time this happened. I woke up and I looked at my dream journal and I thought, what do I put in my dream journal, blue light? Nothing happened. I mean, you know, there is no mean, no action, no pod, no anything, just blue light the entire night. And I wanted to tell you that I had never studied Buddhism because of all the kind of translation issues involved. It just wasn't my thing. And so this kept recurring, this blue light the entire night. One morning, I go down to the breakfast table and my wife, Wendy, is there. And this is waking reality. She goes, she looked really concerned.

She goes, "Robert, what's happening to you?" And I go, "What do you mean?" And she said, "Well, last night I woke up "and I look at your face." And she said, "I've never seen a person "in such utter bliss before." And I said, "Well, I'm trying to understand "the true nature of reality "and it's really, really wild experiences." And so then what happened is that a few weeks later, after a few more blue night nights, one night I become lucidly aware and a lucid dream. I'm kind of in this bubble and there's these two beings who are taking me through this totally interesting space. It's like a space that has different properties than this three dimensional earth reality space we have.

Anyway, they get me to this spot. It's kind of, I'll just call it kind of like a white temple. I'm now there able to walk around. I'm lucidly aware. I come around the corner and here's this being composed of blue light. So imagine, imagine you're looking at a being. It's, you can look right through it because it's composed of blue light. It has a little white sash in its left arm. It has a trident, three pronged, whatever. And I start to laugh. Is it a blue light God? Is it a blue light monster? What is this all about? I just started to laugh. And then I think, well, what do I do here? And so I'd customate up whenever he was at some gate or whatever, and he had whatever.

He always tried to get beyond it. So I just thought, okay, I'll try to get beyond this thing. I go running right towards it. So I'm gonna try to get beyond it. And right as I get up parallel to it, there's this incredible kind of inner explosion. And what I woke up from that lucid dream, I felt like each cell of my body had somehow been changed by this experience. There's just this intuitive knowing that on a cellular level, I was changed by this. But then, so a little bit after this, just to make, I'm gonna end up this story. I'm going to sleep one night, and my larger awareness tells me that if I truly want to go the full distance, I might cease to be.

And I told it, I go, look, I'm 40, whatever at that time or whatever I was. I go, look, I've come this far. I don't care if I cease to be. I want to go the full distance because all of this, otherwise, will just be some tragic comedy, treat reality that I'm involved in. And I remember that moment, Noah, I turned over in bed and looked at my wife. And I realized that she was a mental construct, just like this Robert Wagoner ego is a mental construct. And that was really a powerful moment. But I go by larger awareness, I want to go. So that night, and this is really hard to explain, and I'm bringing it up in my first book.

But that night, if you can imagine awareness, aware within awareness. And what's interesting here, feeling does not exist, but what does exist is knowing. And each little awareness has potentially the knowing of all the awareness.

Got it, yeah.

So aware within this work. So this experience happens, then boom, it stops. I'm standing there in this kind of dark area that's relatively typical in some groups of dreams. And there's a guy in a robe there. And I ask him, was that a lucid dream? And he goes, oh no, to enter a lucid dream, go here. And I step into the space that he points to. And now I'm hurtling through this tunnel of light. And there's geometric symbols every now and then, I'm hurtling through this tunnel of light. And then I know I need to go up. If I'm going to enter a lucid dream, I go up. And I enter a lucid dream. I actually come up through the floor of this lucid dream.

And then after the lucid dream, I wake up. So when I woke up, I thought, okay, there's a lucid dream, there was a tunnel, there was a guy who was standing there who answered my question. But what was that awareness, within awareness, at the very beginning? And it was three years later, I'm sorry, three years later, I was at an association for the study of dreams conference in Hawaii. And Tinsen Wangil Rinpoche, who wrote the Tybet and Yogas.

Yes, yes. - Sleepy dreams. He was there because his book had just come out. And he began to talk about the Buddhist view of dream yoga and the ultimate practice was an experience of awareness by awareness itself, a non-dual experience.

That's right.

And I about fell over. I thought, well, this is the first time I've heard anyone even come close to talking about this experience. So anyway, that's how deep a person can take it. But in that example, without we talked about first of meditating and emptying the mind, that gives you kind of a taste of what happens if you agreed to voluntarily cease.

Right. So, it's trippy.

It's really trippy, but I wonder what, you touched on something that I think is really interesting. When you're talking about looking over at your wife and realizing that she is a mental construct and it's a conception of what's going on in much the same way that you are and I am. And this is something that I think there's a lot of ways to come to this realization. A lot of people in the '60s and then on, psychedelics was a really easy and quick way to do it. Maybe you wouldn't be able to retain all of the wisdom and knowledge because it would be so different. But this is something that I also kind of intuitively feel and know, I think there's a big distinction there like you pointed out, that regardless of how solid or real this reality seems, it is very illusory.

There are things and I think that's why I call this podcast synchronicity and this is something that Jung tapped into. He was like, listen, is maybe not the way we think it is. Like these are not just random things that happening and we can kind of prove that to some extent and sure, maybe it's anecdotal. Maybe it doesn't follow the rules of empirical science and the laws of averages, but we have enough proof and inner knowing here and experiences to say this is something going on. Then, let's say you're not satisfied with that. If you wanna go read anything from thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago, up to the current day, people are talking about this all of the time.

This isn't like some, and it's coming from different parts of the world. There's no like, this isn't like a con being pulled on people. So if we're, and I agree, I think we are these projections and constructs and we like to experience reality as a sense of self and that's, I think, why a lot of people have a big fear of dying. And I know that's certainly one of my fears around death is like, do I continue? Am I gonna be me? Am I gonna know that I'm Noah? And the more I read about it, the less, I don't wanna say fearful I get of it, but the less convinced, I become more convinced that, A, there's something that happens.

I'm not really, not that I need that needed to happen, but I like the thought of something continuing 'cause there's some logic to it, seemingly. But also, it can kinda strip away the idea that you have to be something. You have to be Noah, you have to be Robert. And there can be this awareness that's aware of itself that carries on. And I think, I mean, this then gets into very important questions like, well, what do we think the meaning of life is? Well, then why are we choosing? Let's say this is, and I am of the belief, personally, that we incarnate knowingly. I don't think this is like some random thing where someone like forces it upon us and like, oh shit, now you're a, now you're a Noah, good deal with that.

I think this is some larger part of, I don't wanna say consciousness, but this knowingness, this experience, that wants to experience an aspect of itself and kind of, we are the emanations of that happening. So like, what do you think? Having, I mean, you have now transcended just from the lucid dreamy stuff. Having experiences like that, and I think the blue light stuff is very interesting. If I'm not mistaken, in Sokyo Rinpoche's book, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, he talks about when you're about to reincarnate this blue light, this actually, I think it's the human world. It's the world where you become a human, you're drawn to a series of lights that correspond to the six samsaric realms, and I believe blue is human.

So you are definitely potentially touching on that, but my point is, it's like, what do you think is going on now? Why are we here? What is going on?

Right, right. So, a person really has to look at this in very a broad framework. And again, you can use lucid dreaming if you want to as a tool to do this, but what happens, and especially what's happened to me, and normally I don't talk about this, I'm going to write a third book sometime about dream yoga and lucid dreaming, but after '95, after this experience, I began to have lucid dreams in which I sought out past life aspects of myself. And this is something that a person can do in a lucid dream. Now, the thing of it is, this is actually a little bit of a dangerous practice, and so if you're mentally unstable and listening to this podcast, do not do not do this, because, and I want to tell you why.

So for about nine months, every time I became lucidly aware, I sought out a past life aspect of myself and had a lot of success with it. But then what would happen was, in Buddhism, they talk about seeds of a value, or these kind of seeds of past five, we can call it karma. It's not really punishment, it's more education, but desires or attachments and versions and that kind of thing. But anyway, what would happen is, as I began to do this practice, during my waking day, I could literally, at a subliminal level, here, one of these past life aspects. And so here's an example of how, why say that if you're not mentally stable, this could really be troubling.

So imagine this, here I am, it's a middle of the afternoon, I go to my local store, Fairway, I'm there in the store, like I've been a thousand times before, I'm pushing my card, and as I'm pushing it along, at a different level of awareness, I can hear a little bit of a commentary by a past life aspect. Then, when I turn the aisle, and suddenly, here's the 60 feet of meat market under glass, I hear this other aspect of myself go, oh my goodness, they keep cut up dead carcasses, they have a cemetery here where they store their food. And I'll tell you, that is not a Robert Wagner thought. That did not come from my street of consciousness.

And so that's what I was saying, that if you start to wake up these kind of seeds of awareness, then sometimes you'll realize that they have their own view, their own commentary on experience. I think that's fascinating. But in the bigger picture, it seems like to me, what we're doing here is that beings want to be. I mean, energetic beingness just simply wants to be in form. So form is emptiness, but emptiness is also form. It wants to bubble up and be expressed, and then it wants to take that knowing, that burning, and use it for further growth and development. And so I think what's happening here is that we're in an educational system.

We're learning about creativity, we're learning about growth, we're learning about fulfillment, we're learning spiritual lessons. And at a certain point, when we've learned enough, then we go on to other dimensions that are beyond the physical. Yes, yes, yes, yes. And so it might take a lot of lives. It might, you know, who knows. I want to say that I had a brother, David. In my family, there were five of us boys in my little sister. But my brother, David, I was the youngest boy. So he was number two in the family. He developed multiple sclerosis, and he died around when he was 57, 58. The night before he died, I became illusively aware, when I saw a friend of mine who lives in San Francisco, who's a Vedic astrologer, and I saw another guy who's a scholar of dreams, and I became illusively aware.

And they took me into a room, and you know that backwards swastika that you see in Buddhism? Yeah, so imagine that you walk into a room, and there's tables set up in that backwards swastika, and sitting at them were all the incarnations of my brother, David, and he walked into this room. And there's like 200 people from various times and eons. Most of them were basically peasants, pretty poor looking people. Some of them had tattoos, all different cultures, all different races. And I walked amongst them, and then I looked to my friend, who's a Vedic astrologer, and also a Buddhist, and I asked him, where do we sit here?

And he goes, well, I guess the only place available here at the very center of the cost lines, which is basically kind of the hub of emptiness, if you can imagine that. But when I woke up, I was just stunned, and also I woke up, and got a phone call an hour later that my brother, David, had passed away. But so what I'm saying is, this issue of reincarnation, it's in my first book that I wrote, I had a chapter on lucid dreaming and past lives, but my editor took it out. She said there'd been some Pew survey that showed only one in four Americans believed in past lives. And so she was taking it out because the book was also going to be too long.

But I want to tell you, if you have the experience, you begin to see it, and it becomes so much more real and so much more acceptable. Yeah, I mean, I agree with so much what you've just said. And I think, I mean, it's huge. Also, I'll point out that I think there is typically a function, because a lot of people may be asking, well, if you're even the Pew research, right, well, I don't believe in past lives. I don't believe in reincarnation. That's just food. That's just your imagination believing in that. I think there's people who say that. But I think there is a functional element of us not being able to remember past lives.

Let me tell, just as a thought experiment for people listening and myself, let's say you died dramatically in one of your past lives. Do you want to experience that right now? Do you want to remember what it felt like to die? Maybe you had a whole family, maybe you had tons of families. Maybe you were an alligator and you had a family and you got, who knows? My point is, is there is some aspect. And I think in Buddhism, they talk about once you enter your future mother's womb, you forget, you begin to forget this process of dissolving that happens at death, then starts anew as reemerging and you forget these things.

And I think what you also mentioned about hearing aspects of yourself is something I had a transcendental experience that lasted about three, four months after I took LSD when I was 20 years old. I was, I mean, I used the word tripping to describe a very complicated process, but I was basically tripping for three months and obviously I don't know LSD was in my system. I didn't take any after that, but, and I experienced a lot of different things. And among them, very interesting things started to happen. There's a lot of homeless people on the street who were seemingly schizophrenic or were talking to people who weren't there, would start to come up to me and start to talk to me and they'd start, hey, like, you know what I'm talking about, I see you see what's going on and I was like, oh, shit, like they're not doing this to anyone else.

Like they're just specifically, it was, it was really crazy. And I also was able to hear distinct voices in my head that were clearly not me. And luckily, and for the grace of God, whatever it is, I knew that it wasn't me, Noah, thinking these things, they were coming from outside places, which is, you know, you say that to someone like, you say you can sound like a crazy person, but if you know how to process these things and potentially where they're coming from could be past lives, you could be tuning. It's like a radio, your mind, I really believe, is a radio. And if you turn the signal in certain directions, you can pick up stuff that maybe isn't being, I mean, I think our reality and I think quantum physics back this up is an embedded reality.

You know, when people talk about 11 dimensions in quantum realists, they're all like folded on top of each other. It's not like they're stacked in like a neat little way. So I bring this up because when you talk about this reality being an educational place, this is something that I've heard Ramdas talk about it. He talks about, you know, the difficulties in this life is the sandpaper that kind of like smooths out our being so we can then progress. I believe in a lot of interesting things. I'm going up to New York in a week. There's this guy, Tom Kenyon, he's a sound healer who I got tuned into pretty synchronistically a while ago, and he is essentially a channeler and a medium, which is not something I typically provide a huge amount of stock into.

I am not willingly, but I've seen him. He is a communication with these beings called Hathors, which are supposedly from the fifth dimension and they're made of light and sound. And it sounds totally fucking crazy, but I'll tell you one of the most profound experiences I've ever had was going with my friend who is not someone I would say is particularly spiritual. I'm not interested in that. We went to one of these things in a big auditorium in the Javits Center in New York. And he is like a five and a half octave vocal range. So regardless of whether you believe he's actually channeling something, you're hearing like other worldly sounds and he's doing all these chants.

And I will never forget, like at the intermission, these things are like four hours long, two hours, we're walking outside and I'm a very, very avid marijuana smoker. And I have never in my life felt anything. I felt like I had just smoked like, I don't know, 50,000 joints. I was like floating and I'm like, we just sat and listened to this guy. And we were just like walking. So it was like a theory. It was the only way I can describe it. So I do think your concept of viewing this place as an educational place. And I think ultimately I boil it down to two things. I think we're here for the benefit of our own enlightenment.

And that own enlightenment serves the larger goal of benefiting all beings everywhere. So I love that you hit on all of those things. It's pretty cool, man. You know, in this second book, I wrote Lucid Dreaming, Plain and Simple, which I wrote with my co-author Carolyn McCready. In the final chapter, I put in a thought experiment that I hope people will do in order to show them that even waking reality is a mental construct. And so I'll just tell people what it is, if you don't mind. So it's very simple. So here's all you have to do. Sit down and think of a characteristic that you have that you're totally neutral about.

You're not good at it. You're not bad at it. You don't really like it. You don't really hate it. It's just a neutral characteristic. Like let's say Joe, Joe realizes that, comedically, he's neutral. He's not a great comedian. He's not a horrible comedian. He's just right there in the middle. He doesn't think about it very much because it's just not his thing. So then I tell Joe, I say, "Look, Joe, five times a day for just a minute or two, tell yourself that you're the best comedian in your state, that you're the funniest person in your town and see people laughing at you, you know, laughing with you.

You say something funny." And just imagine that for a couple minutes, two or three minutes, about five or ten times a day. Do this day after day as kind of a meditation practice. Yeah, I'm the funniest man in town. Yeah, people love me. Yeah, I'm laughing. People are laughing with me. This is great. I'll tell you, within three days, you'll find yourself in a checkout line at Target and you'll say something and everyone will burst out in hysterical laughter. And you'll be sitting there thinking, "That wasn't even funny. Why are they laughing?" And it's just like you're saying. People on a deep level, as some quantum level, are picking out this mental energy that you're putting on this neutral construct that you're a comedian, that you're hilarious.

People are picking it up. If you continue this practice within six or seven days, people will laugh hysterically. You won't even say things and people will start to laugh just in your presence. You know. And that's just because you put mental energy into a neutral construct and then you see the world around you respond. And that's when you realize that, "Oh, Jesus Christ, this entire thing is a bloody mental construct." Yes. And you've got to do the practice to see it. Well, I mean, excellent. I'm totally doing it. But I think if you want proof of that and you're not going to do it because you're lazy, look at Donald Trump.

What do you think Donald Trump has been telling himself for 50 years? I'm the best. This shit is not tacky. It's awesome. I'm a great businessman. I'm really good at this. People love me. I'm going to be president. Oh, he's gotten pretty far with nothing, so if you don't believe it, it's definitely a thing. That was funny. You know, I did want to mention something else that is probably '97, '98. I've been reading the books by Jane Roberts called "The Seth Material," which is also channeled material. Cool. And the thing about it is the ideas stand on their own. Exactly. Either the ideas have value or not, whether it comes from Stalin or Hitler or, you know, who knows what, you know, the ideas have value in and of themselves.

And whether it's her subconscious mind or whatever, I just don't care. I just add value. So anyway, I went to a conference about her. She had passed away by that time. I went to a conference about her and people talking about all their experiences and all. Anyway, at the end of the conference, I'm going out to my rental car and I'm throwing my luggage into the trunk. And all of a sudden, I feel my neck being extended. And then I realize my voice has changed. And all of a sudden, my solar plexus chakra, and I never think of chakras. I mean, chakras are just too lucky. It begins to spin counterclockwise.

And it literally spins counterclockwise for almost 30 days. And I'll tell you, during that 30 day period, I was in this altered state. Occasionally, I'd ask my wife to hold my hands because literally I felt like I was going to begin to float. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's how powerful sometimes, but that's what I like about this idea of just even going to Tom Kinjin saying, just hearing them out, just listening to the ideas. Sometimes an idea has energy and sometimes that energy can really transport people. That's right. If you want to play around with it in your own self, just do my little practice.

Definitely. You're the funniest person in town. Do it 10 times a day within three days. People be laughing at totally stupid stuff, you say. And you realize that it's being broadcast at some other level and people are picking it up and responding to it. And so that's when you begin to realize that your experience reality is a mental construct. There's this famous Buddhist dream yoga master in the Zojan tradition, Dawa Yeltsin. And his heart teaching was basically vision is mind, which basically means experience is mind. Mind is emptiness. Right. Emptiness is clear right, clear right is union, union is great bliss.

And so the first thing though is you have to realize that experience is mind. Your personal experience, the global experience is all connected to mind. And then once you let go of mind, then you realize that emptiness lies at the heart of all of this. It's underneath and behind all of this charade, this illusion, this facade. And then when you get to that point, then you begin to have experiences of clear right and can really take it far. But it's a tough, tough one practice. When my first book came out, Lucidini Gateway to do it herself, within a few months I got an email from Buddhist Abbot and he told me that he had gone to a dream yoga monastery for three years in Asia.

And he said reading my book taught him more about dream yoga than what he had learned in three years. And he said when he read my book, he realized what the monks were trying to teach him. Yes, yes, yes. But he was just too dense to get. But when he saw me talk about Lucidini from kind of a Western perspective of going deep, then he goes, cried, I get it. Well, this is something that Jung talked about a lot, is that we experience other cultures and other societies from our own lens, no matter how much we think we embody that, we're not from there. So when monks are trying to teach, that's why I'm excited about where we are with Buddhism right now in the West, is we're in second, third, sometimes fourth generation teachers who grew up in the West.

Like that book I keep referring to mind beyond death. This guy is talking about like data drives and like not, he's not like full blown neuroscience going into Buddhism, but he's like being able to use analogies that make a lot of sense. And I think that what you're talking about, being able to bring up things that line up for, I was having this conversation with my buddy, Corey, who has a podcast called The Astral Hustle on MindPod Network, which is the podcast network I run. We're having this conversation and he, I've lost my train of thought. What was it? What were we talking about? So he was able to translate some Buddhist concepts in Western terms that people could understand.

Shit. You know what? It's gone. It's gone. It'll come back to me right when we're done recording, I'm sure. But yeah, damn. It's going to be something that completely related to what we're talking about. But oh, well, it happens. This goes back to me being an avid marijuana smoker. So there's a trade off with everything. Okay. So let's sum up and wrap up. I mean, this conversation has been such a clear evolution of the first one, which is more of kind of the practical experiences introducing. This is right in the wheelhouse of the stuff I'm interested in when we're talking about the intersection of dreams and reality.

We're talking about being able to use dreams and lucid dreams as a tool to potentially investigate concepts and awareness. When we're talking about potentially the meaning of life, which is why are we here? What is this all for? Is this just some imagination games or is there some purpose behind it? So if you could leave listeners with one major thought, the most important thing you can think of, something everything up into one God's, it doesn't obviously have to be the most important thing, but something you would really like to communicate that you think is valid, what would that be? You know, just getting across this idea that you and your larger awareness, you and your larger awareness create the experienced reality that you experience.

And by changing your mind, you can change that experience. So you can do that little experiment I suggested or whatever, but changing your mind will show you that the experience changes. So you and your larger awareness co-create this experience, change your mind, change your experience. Love it. All right. We'll definitely do a part three and hopefully a part four and a part five. I think there's a lot of rich ground to cover and it's really been fun getting to hear your personal stories and like your perspective on this stuff because I think it's, you know, you seem to have an incredibly valuable experience to share, which I think is ultimately what we do.

So thanks, man. Thanks, Noah. All right. We'll talk to you. Bye bye. Okay. Audience. Thank you. What an episode with Robert Wagner. What I think I'm going to do that for every episode at the end here. Give a little, give a little a cappella performance for you guys. Thank you for listening. Robert, right? Yeah. I want to have him on again because to be clear and Tibetan Buddhism, people train decades to get this stuff in their heads and how to manipulate dream states. It's like a practice. It's one of the dream yoga is a practice and Robert can do it with ease. So that's cool whenever you get to talk to someone like that.

A lot of synchronicities for me personally throughout this episode and just, you know, dreams and stuff. I'm interested in people I've been talking to. So I always appreciate that. Thank you to everyone who has donated to the podcast. I really, really, really appreciate it. You know, everybody's life has oscillations of abundance and not abundance, we'll call it. And so for the people who have contributed off setting some of the cost of the podcast, I really appreciate it, especially these past few months. So I have some really cool guests coming up next week. I think I'm recording like four or five podcasts.

So I think that's going to be good for everyone. And thank you to everyone who rates and reviews the podcast on iTunes and Stitcher and wherever else it is that I don't even know about Google Play. I really appreciate it. It helps the podcast. We're trying to do some cool things with it's affiliate stuff. Like, I don't want to have this show be sponsored by, you know, Chico's. I don't know why I keep using the example of Chico's. I don't even know what fucking Chico's is. I think it's a shop for ladies wear at the mall. I don't know why I'm using it. Chico's probably great. Don't mean to bash Chico's at all.

I'm not doing that. But, you know, I want to have these shows brought to you by if someone's going to sponsor or there's going to be a deal for a show, I wanted to reflect the content of the show, which is why I'm happy that we're doing Alan Watts Foundation as a sponsor. So, I'm trying to build out an actual system for that. This is a side thing. It's related to MindPod Network. But I'm trying to make this stuff work for everyone in a way that is not only supportive of the listeners, but also the people who helped get this content out having these conversations. Because I think there's a win, win, win in this for everyone.

So, we'll see how that goes. That's a little bonus for listeners of the show. We'll see how that evolves over the next few months and years, talking to some cool people about this. And I think it's going to be cool stuff. So, thank you. Rambling on at the end here. That's usually something I do at the beginning. But I'm excited. I like podcasting. It's fun. I will see you next week. I will pin-of-view movies, cartoonity violence, and man alive alive. This episode of Synchronicity was brought to you by EatDreamB.com. Pick up a delicious dream bar flavor for you and your family today by visiting EatDreamB.com/Sync.

That's S-Y-N-C. And thank me later as you sample the delicious array of wonderfully crafted, dream-inducing, health-promoting, relaxation-optimized dream bars. Once again, eatdreamb.com/Sync. Thanks for listening. Lincoln Tech provides career training that keeps America working. At Lincoln's my wide campus, you don't just sit in the classroom. You train in fully-equipped labs, work with industry-leading technology, and learn the skills that hiring managers are looking for. With personalized support and connections to top employers, your future in fields like advanced manufacturing with robotics, automotive, electrical, HVAC, and welding starts the day you enroll.

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