Quote:

---

Icelander said:
I'm reading a book on Lucid dreaming and one of the ideas they put forth is that we are also dreaming our waking state, basically because we are taught the dream by culture and all past generations and by our collective expectations.  Now is some ways this idea is attractive and I'm willing to entertain it as a possibility but I have one sticking point.  If all this is true then where did the dream come from initially?  Why and where did we first get these expectations and begin this cultural program?

Help me out there.  Any ideas?

---

Well, I'd have to say once our brains were developed enough to think symbolically and with language. Why did people first start culture? Perhaps survival benefit. People stuck together and then projected their expectations on one another, roles were divided from chief to beggar, and thus culture was formed. Now my question: Is there anyway to wake up out of this dream?

Quote:

---

Ped said:
>> If all this is true then where did the dream come from initially?  Why and where did we first get these expectations and begin this cultural program?

I suppose the answer to this question hinges on how it is to be approached.  If you want to look at it from an ontological starting point, then the dream must necessarily run much deeper than the mere topographies of cultural memes.  All that is within our field of experience, including colours, shapes, sounds, smells, feelings, knowledge, abstraction, memories, hopes, can probably be reasonably defined as having a dream like quality.  I suppose we would attempt understand the origins of such a dream in exactly the same way we'd attempt to understand the origins of a conventional night-time dream: by scrutinizing the contents, attempting to tease out what buried truth they might reveal about ourselves.

It is telling, I think, that we live in a world which seems to be trying to alert us of the dream like quality of our experience.  Ever since we were children, we heard the song Row Row Row Your Boat, which is a simple tune conveying profound spiritual advice: to relax, be gentle, and to regard life as 'but a dream'.  We can find a similar theme in movies like Hook, where a grown-up Peter Pan awakens to a world of imagination and possibilities that he'd previously forgotten, or The Truman Show, where the protagonist discovers that his entire world has been a contrivance, or The Matrix Trilogy, where Neo awakens to the many layers of matrices which constitute reality.  We can even reference the Bible, wherein Adam and Eve eat from the "Tree of Knowledge", and immediately their sense of Eden evaporates, a cruel world of suffering and toil taking its place.  If we regard our experience as dream like, then we can point to thematic phenomenal appearances like these and conclude that they have something to tell us about ourselves, our nature, and the nature of being.

So that would be the ontological approach.  Another approach might be a purist-pragmatic one, which would regard culture as an emergent property of a kind of group mind.  Picture a school of fish moving together in unison, manifesting the appearance one large supra-form which moves about almost as though it had a singular consciousness of its own.  Culture is like this.  It is a phenomenon with no definable locality in space or time, and it has its own fluid dynamic.  Very dream like.  It might be helpful to look at things this way, as this dislodges us from the hypnosis of culture and places us in an observational mode.  Then again, depending on your disposition this might constitute a kind of fall from grace, like Adam & Eve falling out of Eden.

Just a couple vectors for you to consider.

---

Quote:

---

Icelander said:
So that would be the ontological approach.  Another approach might be a purist-pragmatic one, which would regard culture as an emergent property of a kind of group mind.  Picture a school of fish moving together in unison, manifesting the appearance one large supra-form which moves about almost as though it had a singular consciousness of its own.  Culture is like this.  It is a phenomenon with no definable locality in space or time, and it has its own fluid dynamic.  Very dream like.  It might be helpful to look at things this way, as this dislodges us from the hypnosis of culture and places us in an observational mode.  Then again, depending on your disposition this might constitute a kind of fall from grace, like Adam & Eve falling out of Eden.

This makes some sense to me.

---

Quote:

---

Icelander said:
So that would be the ontological approach.  Another approach might be a purist-pragmatic one, which would regard culture as an emergent property of a kind of group mind.  Picture a school of fish moving together in unison, manifesting the appearance one large supra-form which moves about almost as though it had a singular consciousness of its own.  Culture is like this.  It is a phenomenon with no definable locality in space or time, and it has its own fluid dynamic.  Very dream like.  It might be helpful to look at things this way, as this dislodges us from the hypnosis of culture and places us in an observational mode.  Then again, depending on your disposition this might constitute a kind of fall from grace, like Adam & Eve falling out of Eden.

This makes some sense to me.

---

trippy

Quote:

---

circastes said:
If it is a dream, then all sorts of weird shit could have happened to bring the present state about. It would never have began... dreams never do, you are always in the midst of them.

Certainly time and causality are cultural programs. Does anything have to begin, or is that just culture talking through you?

It's a good question you ask.

Something Robert Adams said about life being a dream was, how do you know the dream hasn't just begun? I guess he was pretty aware of his programs and that made more sense to him. But I guess when you think about it the past is only a creation of your mind...

Interesting stuff.

---

Quote:

---

hatsom_gotem said:
if it's universal consciousness, say the idea it's consciousness shared through different physical bodies, group mind. then there is no need for reincarnation because it is all the same mind still.

---

Going by yogic philosophy it's the mind that continues & reincarnates through different bodies, so if the mind is continuing & taking form again then it is reincarnation happening, group mind or individual mind, its all mind taking form as body

Quote:

---

Icelander said:
How do you know?

And who seeded their consciousness?

---