Facilitators:  Charlie Coon and Ron Marshall

“Lucid Dreams and Consciousness”

“If you were to say, I want to become a lucid dreamer, how should I go about it? The first lesson in there is about how you develop dream recall. After you’ve got a sufficient level of dream recall you start studying your dreams for the dream signs; what’s dream-like about them? You then start doing exercises that use your focus in your mind on your typical dream content, becoming more reflective and developing your ability to have specific intentions that you carry out in the future and so on.”

---Stephen LaBerge

This is a program I recently facilitated at the Pillar Institute in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Lucid dreaming may have a very significant role in the future awakening of consciousness.  To dream lucidly simply means an awareness while dreaming that you are dreaming.  The "flying dream" is an a type of lucid dream.  The Awareness and the dream itself are the two polarity players.  Similarly, in waking life, awareness (the recognition of "I am") and the external reality form the polarity.  These relationships are basic to the meaning of consciousness, and at the individual level involve nothing more than an intention and persistence!! Stephen LaBerge is a pioneer in this field, and other names are Robert Waggoner and Robert Moss.  These persons and their works are easily found on the internet...

                                                                                   

"Let the great soul incarnated in some woman's form, poor and sad and single, in some Dolly or Joan, go out to service, and sweep chambers and scour floors, and its effulgent daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will get mops and brooms; until, lo! suddenly the great soul has enshrined itself in some other form, and done some other deed, and that is now the flower and head of all living nature."

---Ralph Waldo Emerson, Spiritual Laws

I attend an Emerson discussion group in Colorado Springs, and we are currently reading the "Spiritual Laws" essay from which the above is excerpted. The life force, or the Light, within the human being, and within the work being done, are on display!  Perspective is everything... When we place ourselves close to the mops and brooms, we probably feel drudgery and pain. Emerson allows us to see through the elevated perspective of the eyes of Dolly and Joan, and the Light appears. The Polarity view would say that both perspectives are necessary and that, in reality, one perspective does not exist without the other.  

Would Emerson agree?

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

---T S Eliot, Burnt Norton

Polarity and the still point....where opposites exist and do not exist.  Isn't this the place we need to find in all of our lives?  The partners must be present for the dance, but we rest in the stillness.  Applications are everywhere.  If only one of the partners fills our consciousness, the dance does not take place and neither does the stillness and the rest......

Polarity in Play!

Polarity in Play!

To get this blogsite started, the concept of polarity is the centerpiece.  The Torah quote above provides the basic Formula for polarity.  In the writing, The Kybalion by the Three Initiates, which portrays the teachings of the legendary sage, Hermes Trismegistus, we find:  "Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites; like and unlike are the same; opposites are identical in nature, but different in degree; extremes meet; all truths are but half-truths; all paradoxes may be reconciled.".  These fractal iterations of the basic Formula amplify the meaning of polarity...a very simple and profound topic, and a critical aspect of our consciousness...

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Polarity relates to who we are as human beings, and is the structural pattern of the universe and all its sub-sets and components.  Polarity is evident in the holistic modern sciences: quantum mechanics, fractal geometry, dimensionality, left-right brain hemispheres, and gender differentiation.  A continuing, or even occasional, awareness of polarity contributes to a more satisfying and joyful existence.  It eases the stress resulting from our attempts to base our knowledge and understandings upon a flood of information, facts and concepts--which are both gifts and burdens of our modern age.  An awareness  of polarity is no less than an awareness of our consciousness, and is available to each of us to experience.

Recognition is the key!

The title of this blog, "Polarity in Play" is a play on the word "Play."  The two opposites, which

make up the poles of a polarity (light and dark, masculine and feminine, above and below, foreground and background, spirit and matter,, and what you can name as your own polarity!,  are in a playful dance with each other.  Their relationship may be attractive or antagonistic, but the poles are inextricably and always related to each other.  There is a unity or wholeness or Oneness which, upon reflection, always envelopes and contains any  polarity.  

 There is, in our time, an urgent need for a recognition of consciousness.  Polarity is perhaps the most powerful of entryways. I will leave it there for now--revisions and extensions to the above will undoubtedly be necessary, but this is a start. I hope that contributions from those of you who make up the interconnections (synapses and dendrites) of an internet consciousness will help to build dialogue based upon your own polarity of Being and becoming.

Shalom,

Charlie Coon