Pointing out instructions by Padmasambhava

This needs to be in more places on the web.


To introduce this by pointing it out forcefully: it is your very own present consciousness. When it is this very unstructured, self-luminous consciousness, what do you mean, "I do not realize the mind-itself"? 

There is nothing here on which to meditate, so what do you mean, "It does not arise due to meditation"? 

When it is just this direct awareness, what do you mean, "I do not find my own mind"? 

When it is just this uninterrupted clear awareness, what do you mean, "The nature of the mind is not seen"? 

When it is the very thinker of the mind, what do you mean, "It is not found by seeking it"? 

When there is nothing at all to do, what do you mean, "It does not arise due to activity"? 

When it is enough to leave it in its own unstructured state, what do you mean, "It does not remain"? 

When it is enough to let it be without doing anything, what do you mean, "I cannot do it"? 

When it is unified, indivisible clarity, awareness, and emptiness, ness, what do you mean, "It is affirmed and unaffirmed"? 

When it is spontaneously self-arisen without causes or conditions, tions, what do you mean, "I can't do it?"

When the arising and release of thoughts are simultaneous, what do you mean, "They do not occur together"? 

When it is this very consciousness of the present, what do you mean, "I do not recognize it"? The mind-itself is certainly empty and unestablished. 

Your mind is intangible like empty space. Is it like that or not? Observe serve your own mind! 

Empty and void, but without a nihilistic view, self-arisen, primordial wisdom is original, clear consciousness. Self-arisen and self-illuminating, it is like the essence of the sun. Is it like that or not? Observe your own mind! 

The primordial wisdom of awareness is certainly unceasing. Uninterrupted awareness is like the current of a river. Is it like that or not? Observe your own mind! 

The dispersing discursive thoughts are certainly not being grasped. This intangible dispersion is like a hazy sky. Is it like that or not? Observe your own mind! 

Recognize all appearances as self-appearing. Self-appearing phenomena are like reflections in a mirror. Is it like that or not? Observe your own mind! 

All signs are certainly released in their own state. Self-arising and self-releasing, they are like clouds in the sky. Is it like that or not? Observe your own mind!


Karma Chagme. A Spacious Path to Freedom: Practical Instructions on the Union of Mahamudra and Atiyoga (Kindle Locations 1354-1361). Kindle Edition.

Do Buddhas think?

https://www.lionsroar.com/ask-the-teachers-18/

This is an interesting piece, because of the very different answers that various Buddhist teachers give to the question "do Buddhas think?"

One teacher:

As I understand it, the awakened mind includes thinking; it’s just that the thinking is necessary, functional, and discerning rather than indulgent, unnecessary, and addictive. Without attachment to thinking, silence and peace are available. In not grasping after thoughts and taking them to be me and mine, there is freedom instead of bondage.

Buddhas plan, but don’t engage in worry. They make decisions but are not swayed by self-centered emotions. Buddhas are immeasurably creative but not interested in fantasy. Buddhas think but are not caught up in their thoughts, and do not mistake their thoughts to be who they are. They are present in the midst of thoughts arising, and use thinking as a way to benefit all beings.

This is a position I've heard many times: the thinking is reduced to the essentials. Direct! Necessary! Functional! Sounds very... Zen. Obviously you couldn't function without any thought, right? How would you know what to do?

The second teacher agrees:

The short answer is, yes, buddhas do think. However, I have a bumper sticker on my car that says, “Don’t believe everything you think,” because so often we identify with our thoughts and set up a self there.
...
“Who is it that notices these thoughts as wholesome or unwholesome and responds for the benefit of all beings?” This is an example of how a buddha or bodhisattva thinks. 

But I think these are wrong. This has all been mapped out by the Dzogchen tradition. Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche (TUR):

What this really means is that we should repeatedly look into what thinks. We should recognize the absence or emptiness of this thinker over and over again, until finally the power of deluded thinking weakens, until it is totally gone without a trace.

But this is not how a Buddha practices; this is how a beginner practices. Recall from the first quote:

They are present in the midst of thoughts arising, and use thinking as a way to benefit all beings.

Dzogchen talks about three stages of capacity:

Within this method of [cherdrol], "liberation through bare attention," there exists a minimal mental activity; we turn our attention to the thought as soon as it arises and recognize it as a thought. ... Although this may have become a largely automatic process, there still exists a small time gap between the arising of the thought, the becoming aware of its presence, and the recognition of it as a thought, on the one hand, and its dissolving again, on the other hand. For the beginner this practice is appropriate, but later it will become a fault if it is not transcended. 

At the next stage, the thought disintegrates as soon as it arises. Patrul Rinpoche illustrates this process with the example of drawing pictures on the surface of the water. The picture disintegrates as soon as it is drawn.
... 

With the third stage, even the distinction between arising and liberating or dissolving is transcended. ... Thoughts liberate as they arise; their very arising is the process of their liberating. This is the method proper to Dzogchen, and all else is but preparation.

When thoughts liberate simultaneously with their arising, they are no longer "thoughts" at all. This is very hard for the mind to understand. TUR again:

As conceptual thinking diminishes and finally vanishes, what is left to cause us to wander in samsara? The very basis for samsaric existence is none other than conceptual thinking.

This is what the third teacher (also a Dzogchen master) indicates:

By definition, a buddha—one who is free of the suffering of existence—does not have a grasping mind. Since a buddha does not grasp, a buddha does not have thoughts. 

A buddha’s perception is pure awareness, or rigpa, which is not a product of the moving, thinking mind, but is direct perception. Thought can never experience the true nature of mind directly, so in Dzogchen, thought is not encouraged since it will not liberate us from suffering. And while conventionally we could agree that the thought to benefit another is preferable to the thought of jealousy, in order to achieve full realization one needs even to be free of positive thoughts because of their involvement with the grasping mind.

The hardest part about getting here is that it seems very clearly impossible to function without thoughts. Therefore, we set up this idea that in the awakened state, we will have only the necessary thoughts. But this belief ultimately prevents us from seeing what lies completely beyond thought.

Radical skepticism, revived

Radical skepticism gets a bad rap. Sure, it's possible to question everything about your reality, but what's the point? Countless freshman philosophy majors and enterprising potheads have done just that, and look where it got them. Better to face up to the cold, hard facts!

But maybe they simply didn't know how to wield the tool properly. Let's take a trip down the rabbit hole and see if we can't do better....

Ompha, Lompha

Young Earth creationists believe that the earth was created in the past ten thousand years. According to their so-called Omphalos Hypothesis, dinosaur bones and other seemingly-old artifacts were planted there by God as a test of our faith.

As ludicrous as this may strike you, it contains no logical contradiction. In fact, there is no way to disprove that the universe sprang into existence, fully formed, last Thursday. Mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell takes it one step further (as mathematicians and philosophers are wont to do):

There is no logical impossibility in the hypothesis that the world sprang into being five minutes ago, exactly as it then was, with a population that 'remembered' a wholly unreal past.

But why stop there? For all we know, this may all have appeared freshly in this very moment. But while such a claim is not logically impossible, it is certainly very improbable. Right?

To help answer that, let's look at a technique called Bayesian inference.

Bayesian inference

Suppose I am hiding a coin from you. I tell you it is either a (US) penny or nickel, and you have to guess which. What kind of evidence would help you decide?

If I tell you that there is a US president on one side of the coin, that is no help at all, because it applies equally well to both coins. Whatever you thought the relative odds were before, they should remain unchanged after.

On the other hand, suppose I tell you that I flipped it and it landed on its edge. Both coins can theoretically do this, but because the nickel is thicker, it is probably more likely to land that way. Depending on how much more likely, this evidence should nudge your bias toward the nickel to a corresponding degree.

So we see that evidence is one crucial component in determining your beliefs. The second, equally important piece, is something that we hinted at earlier: your pre-existing bias, technically known as your prior.

If you're like most people, you probably started with the assumption that both the penny and nickel were equally likely. And why not? In lieu of any information, this seems like a reasonable starting point. But you don't have to start at 50-50. You might look up some stats on the number of pennies and nickels in circulation, and use that ratio as your prior. Or perhaps you know that I secretly love pennies, and use that to inform your initial bias. It's totally up to you.

Whatever your prior, you must combine it with evidence, to get an updated bias (called the posterior). You can either stop there or use this posterior as a new prior, to be combined with further evidence (generating yet another posterior), and so on. Over time, as the evidence accumulates, any mistakes in your initial prior will get ironed out.

In this way, Bayesian inference is a formal framework for doing something that's already very natural to us. We may start off uncertain about something, but we allow the weight of evidence to bring our beliefs into closer alignment with reality.

Let's apply this to our question about the past.

Evaluating the past

First let's try to pick a good prior.

Basic physics tells us that fully-formed worlds are very unlikely to just pop into existence. Therefore we should a priori be very biased against this possibility, right? Unfortunately not: we could only have learned about physics in the past, which we cannot trust without resorting to circular reasoning.

Okay, what about Occam's Razor? It tells us that we should prefer simpler theories to needlessly complicated ones. But this is a statement about preference, not likelihood. Moreover, it runs into the same problem as before: when, exactly, did we collect evidence that justifies the Razor?

Try as we may, we cannot logically justify any particular prior. So let's throw up our hands and start at 50-50. The evidence should settle it, right?

Well, this picture I took yesterday seems like pretty good evidence at first. But remember that our hypothetical sudden-world is designed to provide such fabricated evidence. So this supposed "picture from yesterday" fits both models equally well, and it is therefore of no use. By design, neither is anything else. Drat!

A final attempt might be to say fine, let's accept that maybe the world sprang into being five minutes ago (or whenever you began this exercise). But since then, you've been collecting evidence that justifies your trust in physics, Occam's Razor, and the rest. This ought to restore your faith, right?

But notice that you can repeat the thought experiment right now. How do you know that this is not the first moment? When you try to work out the answer, you will find that your supposed "evidence from the past five minutes" goes out the window just like our supposed "picture from yesterday." So this approach fails, too. There's nowhere to get a grip!

Strange as it may seem, we are not rationally justified in saying that a real past is "more likely" than a fake one. It certainly feels like the real past is more rational, but this is an illusion. For now, simply notice how powerful this illusion is. We will return to it later.

Choosing our beliefs

We do not necessarily need to rely on reasoning to choose our beliefs. Discussing a different skeptical hypothesis, physicist Sean Carroll points out:

There is no way to distinguish between the scenarios by collecting new data.

What we’re left with is our choice of prior credences. We’re allowed to pick priors however we want—and every possibility should get some nonzero number. But it’s okay to set our prior credence in radically skeptical scenarios at very low values, and attach higher prior credence to the straightforwardly realistic possibilities.

Radical skepticism is less useful to us; it gives us no way to go through life. All of our purported knowledge [...] might very well be tricks being played on us. But what then? We cannot actually act on such a belief [...]. Whereas, if we take the world roughly at face value, we have a way of moving forward. There are things we want to do, questions we want to answer, and strategies for making them happen. We have every right to give high credence to views of the world that are productive and fruitful, in preference to those that would leave us paralyzed with ennui.

Russell also recognized this:

Skepticism, while logically impeccable, is psychologically impossible, and there is an element of frivolous insincerity in any philosophy which pretends to accept it.

In other words, given that evidence cannot help us, we might as well pick whichever belief is most helpful. And our commonsense notion of time is the most helpful of all.

But is this really true? Have you ever been genuinely free of the belief in a real past, in order to make a fair comparison? Is such a state even possible or desirable? Wouldn't you be like a proverbial goldfish, totally unable to function?

As it turns out, that is not what it is like to be free of conviction about the past. It is entirely possible -- though not easy -- to drop your belief in a literal past while retaining the ability to function as though it were real. You can (and should) try to enter that state right now, but unless you've cultivated exceptional facility with your most subtle mental processes, you will attain at best a vague facsimile of it. Something deep inside you is unwilling to genuinely and completely let go. It protects itself by telling you "well, our belief is the best one anyway!"

The authentic state of not-knowing belongs to the purview of mystics and contemplatives. It is unfair to expect mathematicians, physicists, or even philosophers to find the time to explore it properly.

The future

Let's visit another oddity. 18th-century philosopher David Hume popularized something called the Problem of Induction. Roughly, it goes as follows.

It seems painfully obvious that the past provides good evidence for the future, right? But why do we believe this? Well, it has certainly been true in the past. Okay, but so what? We'd like to say "... and therefore it will be true in the future," but then we are assuming what we set out to prove. There's that nasty circularity again! So we cannot justify our belief that the past will continue to provide evidence for the future.

Thus, the fact that the laws of physics have faithfully operated for billions of years gives us no reason at all to believe that they will continue to operate even one second from now [1]. As before, notice how ridiculous and illogical this feels, despite being impeccably rational. This is a powerful clue, if used properly!

Unfortunately Hume, too, loses his nerve before fully taking on board the implications:

Should it be asked me whether I sincerely assent to this argument which I have been to such pains to inculcate, whether I be really one of those skeptics who hold that everything is uncertain, I should reply that neither I nor any other person was ever sincerely and constantly of that opinion. I dine, I play backgammon, I converse and am merry with my friends and when after three or four hours of amusement I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold and strange and ridiculous that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any further. Thus the skeptic still continues to reason and believe, though he asserts he cannot defend his reason by reason.

The nature of reality

It does not stop with time. Consider the hypothesis that this world is a simulation -- and further, that its creators are clever enough to hide all evidence of this fact from us. Then, by assumption, there is no way to test the hypothesis, and we are again free to discard it on the basis of practicality, even if not on pure rationality. In fact, there are an infinite number of strange and seemingly-pointless possibilities that we can cut away with one fell swoop in this way. This can make us feel supremely confident in our default worldview. But there is at least one strange possibility that comes away unscathed.

Consider the hypothesis that the world is a dream of sorts. This possibility may seem inconsequential, as with the previous examples: if the dream behaves exactly as a physical world would, then there's no point in pursuing the belief further. On the other hand, if it actually is a dream -- and moreover, your dream, in a sense -- then your participation might be pivotal in gathering evidence of the fact. How might this work?

In a nighttime dream, naively questioning your surroundings is often insufficient to expose the dream's unreality. In most cases, the dream will fabricate an explanation that -- despite being nonsensical from a more awakened perspective -- will nonetheless suffice to quell your suspicion. Nothing to see here, move right along! To expose the sham, you must question the dream in just the right way, at which point you might become lucid.

So how does the analogy extend to this reality? How would one question it in "just the right way?"

The mind doth protest too much

You might begin by noticing how illogical it is to feel so dead certain about the past despite having no rational basis for the belief. Next, watch as your mind tries to wriggle out of this accusation: "well, such a belief is evolutionarily adaptive, so it's probably embedded deep in our ancient limbic system, beyond the reach of higher cognition...." Bam! In a finger snap, circular reasoning again magically restores your faith: I believe in the past because the past made me do it, duh. Whew! Nothing to see here! 

This should trigger a great deal more suspicion in you than it probably does.

If you were to sit and grapple with this conundrum very sincerely -- not just thinking harder about it, but experientially penetrating the very heart of the discrepancy -- you might have a mind- and reality-shattering "aha!" moment, not unlike what Zen Buddhists call kensho or sudden awakening. It might reveal that you've been taking life utterly for granted [2], subtly (but erroneously) assuming that you have the slightest inkling of what it is and how it works. Side effects may include an overwhelming flood of gratitude, awe, wonder, love, joy, and humility, beyond what you believed possible. There may even be insights about the nature, purpose, and evolution of this dream, though they may be hard to prove or even communicate via the standard channels.

Why is it impossible to prove that the past really happened, or that it's even likely? Sure, maybe this is all just sophistry and there's a perfectly reasonable explanation. Or maybe something much more curious is going on, right under your nose but hidden by a cleverly self-protective veil.

If this all sounds like too much for you, well, then, luckily you have the option to continue to blindly trust your default beliefs. And why not? After all, some Very Smart Scientists have assured you that being too skeptical would be "ridiculous," "frivolous," and "paralyzing." And who are you to question that? Nothing to see here, move right along....

[1] http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2012/10/problem-of-induction-explained-simply.html

"It’s a good test of whether someone has actually understood Hume’s argument that they acknowledge its conclusion is fantastic (many students new to philosophy misinterpret Hume: they think his conclusion is merely that we cannot be certain what will happen tomorrow.) ... [But] if Hume is right, the belief that the sun will rise tomorrow is as unjustified as the belief that a million mile wide bowl of tulips will appear over the horizon instead. We suppose the second belief is insane. But if Hume is correct, the first belief is actually no more rational. ... 

[T]he onus is on these defenders of “common sense” to show precisely what is wrong with Hume's argument. No one has yet succeeded in doing this (or at least no one has succeeded in convincing a majority of philosophers that they have done so)."

[2] Notice that to take something "for granted" can mean either to be unappreciative of it, or to logically presuppose it. Here it takes on both meanings: we are quite confident that we've been experiencing life for a long time, which is why this moment feels so mundane. And now notice that "mundane" means both "pertaining to physical reality" and "tedious, repetitive, dull." Again, this is not a coincidence.

Tying some things together

In quantum mechanics, until a superposed system entangles with you (i.e., information about the system reaches you), you are not entitled to say that it is in a definite state. In a meaningful sense, the place you call "the world" comes into definite existence only when it comes into contact with you.

A key lesson from Mahayana Buddhism is that the world you think you are passively experiencing is actually a world that you are fabricating. Listen to a sound. It seems like it is happening to you, right? Well, it turns out that if your attention becomes precise and subtle enough, you'll discover that you are constructing that experience out of a slew of assumptions and habits.

In both of these descriptions, the word "you" is central, but what does it really refer to? Who or what are you, exactly? Discovering the answer to this question is, of course, another crucial issue in Buddhism. Who is fabricating the world? What is that without which no world exists?

A common meditation to learn first is breathing meditation, where you passively observe the sensations of breath. With practice, you may learn to passively observe other sensations as well. The pinnacle of this kind of practice is to be the silent observer of your entire field of experience. This is sometimes called "bare attention"; a kind of raw perception supposedly without interpretation.

But in such a practice, there's a subtle activity that's not privy to observation: the very effort required to artificially separate oneself from the field of experience. And until that subtle effort is released along with the rest of the field of perception, it is impossible to uncover even subtler forms of identity.

When the subtle effort of distancing "oneself" from perception finally subsides, it becomes clear that the whole radiant field of experience is experiencing itself. Listen to a sound again, and notice that the experience is a sort of energetic phenomenon. This energy can manifest as sound, as color, as smell, as thought, etc. You are not a separate self experiencing this energy; "you" are the energy itself, contorting itself into a form called "my human perspective." The whole experience you call "the world" is made of you.

The task before you is to discern how exactly you play this game of hide-and-seek. You are all that exists, and yet you form yourself into a perspective that seemingly doesn't know or believe this. In fact, in most incarnations, it flatly refuses to even consider such mystical nonsense.

Sooner or later, though, the game will be up.

You've probably heard of superpositions in quantum mechanics.

In the Schrödinger's Cat scenario, the cat is said to be in a superposition of alive and dead, and we're asked to note the absurdity of a cat that is somehow both alive and dead (which isn't exactly what a superposition is, but never mind that).

Thanks to a phenomenon known as decoherence, it's not really feasible to put such a macroscopic system into the kind of superposition that's useful, the kind you can exploit. So maybe we never have to worry about such a cat.

But you might still wonder: what if some far future technology allows us to do so? There's every reason to believe it's theoretically possible. And what if we put a human into a coherent superposition? Or, as quantum computing professor Scott Aaronson suggests, upload their consciousness into a quantum computer, where we would keep it coherent?

Instead of using the macabre example where the human lives or dies, suppose they simply either see a red or blue light. And suppose you leave the experiment running for five minutes. At the end of it, the subject will report having seen only one colored light for the past five minutes.

Imagine being such a subject. Imagine seeing one light turn on and stay that way for five minutes. At the end of it, you'll have a memory of having done so. And it will be an authentic memory, right? All that time really happened.

But now switch back to being the experimenter. Are there really two subjects, each seeing one light? There are various forms of the many worlds interpretation of QM, but the modern ones suggest that worlds split only when there's decoherence. Here there is none.

From the outside, we can say (in a precise and provable way) that there was no definite state for the light or subject during those five minutes. Nothing "really" happened. But the subject will find that absurd.

Is their memory reliable? Did it "really" happen? It depends on whose perspective you take.

You don't know that you're not in some elaborate quantum experiment right now. What is real to you may not be for others who you may even one day meet.

Noticing existence

Finally, a post on practice instead of philosophy. I need to do more of the former and less of the latter right now.

One instruction for practice might go something like this: simply notice existence.

This is a tricky instruction for a few reasons. First, what is "existence"? And second, who is noticing it?

The first place my mind goes is to the world's existence. "Yes, the universe exists. So what?" But that isn't what we're looking for. One useful tip is to consider: what if the world is a simulation or dream? I can't know that it exists. So it's not the world's existence that I should be noticing.

Next, I might ponder my own existence. But again, all the details I think of as "me" may not really exist. My body, thoughts, and memories might also be simulated.

As you eliminate possibilities, you find yourself working your way back toward that which is asking itself to notice existence. It's hard to pinpoint that thing, but it clearly exists. It's easy to confuse it with the thoughts it is producing. In fact, even to call it a "thing" or "it" is misleading. It's somehow sitting "behind" all the things that it can point at.

It is trying to point a finger back at itself, but it always comes up short. It always ends up pointing at something or another: this thought; that sensation. This becomes frustrating, as it (you) forgets what it's supposed to be looking for. Maybe at some point it gives up.

If you don't walk away from the practice at this point, something interesting can happen. You simply notice that "the light is on." Instead of noticing any of the particulars of experience, you notice the simple fact that you are experiencing. Your entire field of experience is lit up, quite unlike if you were dead.

You cannot stop experiencing, even if you wanted to. The whole field is just there, shining brightly. Even if you close your eyes and plug your ears (which is actually very useful here), you will find that the shine continues. Nothing in particular is shining, but somehow a light is still on. You're not dead, are you?

At some point you may begin to sense that it is not you noticing this light; the light is noticing itself. In fact, noticing is not something this light does; it is what the light is. There's nothing for you to do, and there's nothing for it to do. Its mere existence is enough.

The hard part of this practice is the "so what?" that can arise. The mind starts chattering, looking for the significance of this most obvious fact. The suggestion given here is to not listen to the mind's tricks. Just rest and allow the light to shine.

Your true nature

In a nighttime dream, you believe yourself to be a character wandering around as an isolated subject in a fundamentally external and threatening world. The only way to see through this illusion is to become lucid, at which point you discover that the whole of "reality" -- all the sights, sounds, textures, etc. that constitute the dream -- are made of the light of your own mind. Not "you" as in the character, but you as in the dreamer -- a being that exists beyond the confines of the dream.

With increased lucidity, you discover that you do not occupy a position sitting behind the character's eyes, observing all this light. Instead, you are the light. "You" are distributed throughout the entirety of the apparent reality. And with still further awakening, you discover that the storyline of the dream is not something happening to you (perpetrated by your subconscious mind), but instead something you are actively doing. You weave yourself into a fantastical adventure and then embed yourself in it as an apparently localized, isolated subject.

Once you see this clearly, there can be no doubt. You are free to weave and re-weave realities as you see fit; to lose yourself in them for arbitrarily long periods of "time" (another devious invention of your making, not necessarily present in all dreams); to generate apparently external beings who ruthlessly mock you for questioning reality; to rediscover the truth (it's infinitely delightful every. single. time.); and to rinse, lather, and repeat to your heart's content.

By now you may have suspected that what I'm saying applies not only to nighttime dreams, but to your present one as well. Just as you would at night, you find this idea to be utterly preposterous; not even worth a second thought. You will devise comically useless tests to "prove" that it's false. Look how internally consistent this place is! Look at all the external evidence! I'm not clever enough to invent this place! Well, your character certainly isn't, but You are.

If you really want to become lucid, you will have to dig really deep, and not turn tail at the first sign of difficulty. You will have to ignore all the warning signs: "Do Not Enter! Nothing to see here! Don't be ridiculous! The scientists would have found this out already! Sciiiieeeence!"

So how do you do it? How do you become lucid? That's too big a topic to cover in one post, but here are some hints.

First you must understand, intellectually, that many radically skeptical hypotheses are not meaningfully unlikely. If you try to prove that it is "unlikely" that this is a dream, you will find yourself presupposing that it is not, in one sneaky way or another. This is circular reasoning, and utterly bogus. Similarly: did the world suddenly pop into being one moment ago, or is the past real? Any way you try to establish a real past, you will find yourself subtly assuming one: "we know (from past experience) that the world just doesn't work that way!" If you find yourself resisting this point, sit down and look more carefully and honestly. Philosophers discard these hypotheses not because they are unlikely, but because they are (apparently) useless.

Once you understand that, recognize your extreme reluctance to genuinely consider the conclusions they suggest. "Fine, I cannot prove that a real past is more likely, but I know deep down that it is, dammit! I can feel it!" While belief in a real past may be useful for practical reasons, you go further and take it 100% literally. Just as in a nighttime dream, this utter (unfounded) certainty is what kills any chance of becoming lucid.

The next step is to understand, intellectually, that the world around you is made of your own mind. You can accept this even as a materialist, by substituting "my own mind" with "my own neurons firing." Every sight you see, every sound you hear, every thought you think, is your own mind, illuminated. Just listen: what else could that experience be than your own mind?

Once you understand that your experienced world is made of your own mind, your mind will immediately follow it up with "but obviously there's a real world out there, causing it." This is the crucial moment. It is not obvious, and purely rationally speaking, it is not even likely. If you can grok the fact that the apparent world is your own mind, and simultaneously grok that there is no reason to take the standard explanation literally, then there is the possibility of becoming lucid. In Eastern traditions, this is known as awakening. It is simple, but it is not easy.

Now you might wonder: if the Buddha was lucid, why wasn't he flying around with superpowers and such? And now for the punchline: this is your dream. The Buddha is an idea you planted to remind yourself how to wake up. Instead of waiting for "others" to wake up and prove it to you, why not do it yourself?

---

Sometimes you get the sense that life is magical or miraculous. You generally squash this idea as irrational, but it's closer to the truth than you know. The Light that constitutes your dream comes from beyond it, and in a sense, the whole point of the dream is to awaken to this fact.

So close you can't see it

So deep you can't fathom it

So simple you can't believe it

So good you can't accept it

-- Tibetan Buddhist saying