The dreamer's introduction
Ha, where to start.. hmmm.. I guess I'll start off with a bit of background. Dreaming is what got me into the mysteries in the first place. I was 12 when I first discovered lucid dreaming and after a few months of trying they became a regular occurrence. I ended up having one where I was flying and all of a sudden it hit me "what if there's a realization in waking life that unlocks it same as realizing you are dreaming lifts the limits of the dream world?"
This was almost 16 years ago and since then I have been immersed in spiritual exploration of every corner in the occult sphere. I won't bore you with a detailed chronological description, but I'll say I've stuck my nose into every Western Occult system to come across my eyes and ears. Many were disappointing, to say the least.
I'll go a bit into the most prominent parts of my journey up to this point just to give you an idea what vibe collected over time.
My late teen years were mostly spent on chemognosis -- psychedelics and disassociatives were my flavours of choice. It was a rather intuitive and shamanic period albeit I spent countless hours reading traditional occult systems. There was a lot of wondrous experiences during that time, both with drugs and without, but eventually I decided I needed a structure to take a deep dive into. I think it was Lon Milo DuQuette who said that starting an initiation system was like digging a hole to the middle of the Earth, and if you keep bouncing around you just end up with a bunch of shallow holes. There's some truth to the opposite of this, eclectic practice gives a great aerial view, but I needed to see the depths before returning to a broader approach.
I spent a good number of years trying to decide on which system I wanted to take a deep dive into and eventually settled on Thelema. Aleister Crowley is a controversial figure to say the least, him and I diverge on a number of attitudes, but I couldn't deny the greatness of his exploration. He was a Great in the occult scene, anyone with open eyes can see that.
For almost four years Thelema became my every breath. I read through about 10,000 pages of material and practiced daily without end in sight. Everything from ceremonial rituals to the mediation exercises -- it consumed me and transformed me like no other system before. There was a person who initiated me to begin with but left me to my own very early on.
I must point out that I never ended up joining any of the living A.'.A.'. lineages, take that as you will. I do see a great benefit for anyone to join one, but for me personally I was going at a pace comparable to a hurricane. I felt like going through the grades formally would only slow me down.
I met my HGA very early on, made great strides in the practices, and completed higher grade exercises in quick succession. I should point out that my work career took a similar path. I dropped out of school twice and ended up self-learning at a speed which landed me a high paying corporate developer job many years sooner than my former classmates. I may sound like I'm bragging but if I'm honest I wasn't blessed with any natural talents growing up aside from a tenacious will power which refuses to give up and an ability to process great amounts of information very quickly. I was a quick learner, nothing more and nothing less.
Near the end of my Thelemic dive I went through a very deep depression lasting two years, I developed a bodily anxiety which landed me in the hospital. I feel like taking the Oath of the Abyss ahead of schedule was a contributing factor. Yet luckily, and I really mean it was sheer luck that got me through, I had a satori -- a sudden enlightening realization. To describe it would be frivolous and worthless, so it will suffice to say that in a single moment my depression and anxiety went away. I was finally free, and suffering became an insignificant factor in my life.
At this point I felt the need to find a system revolved around this realization. This is when Vajrayana Buddhism, and more specifically Dzogchen, came into my life. It was like a song which that was harmonious to me in a way that Thelema didn't match. The a switch-over was a bit tedious, the terminology and symbolism was drastically different, but I took to it like a fish to water.
This time I wanted to do things officially in parallel to my own exploration so I searched for a Guru and a lineage which I could take refuge in. I ended up becoming a student of the Dudjom Tersar, a Nyingma lineage of Vajrayana with a strong Dzogchen Yana.
My new Guru quickly realized that I wasn't as fresh as most, and is under impression that I must have been a vajrayana practitioner in my previous lives. He bent a number of rules to give me practices and explanations which are typically ment for students who had already received the empowerments.
This was an unbelievable boost to my meditations and rituals, but I am under little liberty to discuss the details of my initiation at this point -- one day, but not today. Early on he introduced me to dream yoga, which is a lucid dreaming approach to the vajrayana initiation. In a way my journey had come full circle to the point where I had started -- dreams.
He tasked me with three initial objectives. First I needed to regain lucidity in my dreams -- which I had lost long ago from lack of practice. Second I would need to master how to switch the scene and place in my dreams to where I wanted. Third I was to transport my dream body to the pure realm of Oddiyana to take the body empowerment from Padmasabhava -- the great enlightened master who brought Buddhism to Tibet and in the Nyingma school often considered to be the second fully realized historical Buddha.
At the time of writing this, January 2018, I have spent a year as a student of my lineage and have consumed thousands of pages of tantra alongside my prescribed practices. The past month has been fully focused on the dream yoga tasks. I have completed the first and regained my lucidity. My lucid dreams are not yet fully regular but they have started to come back.
As for the second and third task, I had originally expected them to be a piece of cake. Most times when I had practiced lucidity everything came easy to me, like flying, evocation, etc... But to my surprise switching the scene fully was more difficult than expected. On my last attempt I had failed to switch the scene whole, but at least managed to switch the time and weather from stormy night to sunny day.
I should point out that I have also become a bit of a student to Jung's writings on dreams, the collective unconscious, symbols, and archetypes. In parallel with my dream yoga quests I am also analyzing my unconscious through Jungian depth psychology. The journey of meeting the archetypes in my unconscious has been amazing, terrifying, and deeply transformative. Currently I am making my way through volume nine of Jung's collected works.
Well... This has been a much longer introduction than originally intended so I will end it here. I ran a pretty successful occult and magick blog on Tumblr before but I would prefer to keep this and that seperate so I won't name which blog I ran. It's been abandoned by now anyways.
I welcome you to witness my journey unfold, through the depths of the unconscious and on the path of dream yoga.