Try this little experiment – Breathe in… Now breathe out… Just follow this cycle passively and as you do so, ask yourself “Am I the in-breath or am I the out-breath?”

The fact is that neither can exist without the presence of the other. Left only comes to exist through right, hot only by virtue of cold, light emerges from darkness and so forth, polarity is a fundamental truth of our world, so what should we regard as real?

No state in the Universe is constant, the in-breath becomes the out-breath, night becomes day, hot becomes cold, the only thing that can prevail is change…

In meditation we learn to focus our attention on the the gentle flowing of the breath and in doing so, we learn to become the change. Where change prevails, there is no place for the mind to attach and label, here we can start to dissolve the dualism in our consciousness…

The deeper truth we are being exposed to here is not always apparent at first, what in fact we are contemplating, in truth, is the essential nature of paradox. Between future and past, between waking and slepping lies the infinite now, the eternal dream, where time and space conduct themsleves in a controled chaos, this is the true essence of our being.

The quest we must follow, however, leads us not just to recognise this place, but ultimately to accept and fully embrace this constant state of flux. Only then can we come to live as, and not just inside of the Universe, but the cost is not cheap, we must come to embrace death, for otherwise, life would simply cease to exist.

So the next time you feel pain, know that it is why one has pleasure, loss preceeds gain and terror will some day give way to awe, this is the Dao, or to put it in the words of the briliant Mr Miyagi “Wax on…Wax off…Breathe in…Breate out”

I don’t want to enter into a dissection of the laws of thermodynamics, not the least because the subject largely alludes my own understanding, but I do want to point out to a certain feature, specifically, the second law, which states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, because isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium —the state of maximum entropy (yes straight of Wikipedia, that one), but what exactly, or at least what roughly does that mean (let’s not get too daring in our demands)?

In essence, what it means is that systems decay, they naturally tend to a state of disorder and if left to do so, the Universe itself would simply, gradually fall apart at the seams, being reduced to nothing more than stardust, given a sufficient period of time. In fact, this second law is thought to be what gives time an arrow or direction, but we won’t get into that right now.

Currently, I lean towards a more Chi Kung based  approach to induce lucidity, something I can say for certain will be the path most people will start to use in the future. From what I hear, Bob Bruce is making some noise about the same approach and any of you who have attended any courses or talks with the IAC (International Academy of Consciousness) will be familiar with their bio-energy approach, something I highly recommend.

As well as my more raw approach to lucid dreaming, I am also a firm advocate of technology. My view is if it helps improve your understanding of things without too much cost, then it is simply a case of textbook maths, use it. In this case, I was employing my own mix of dream herbs, some of which happen to come in capsule form… therein lies the controversy…a pill…?

Let’s make something clear, there is no such thing as drugs, there are only words and the cultural model you apply to them. Take for example, the native plants of the Amazon Forest used by the indigenous peoples to cure and heal, they are commonly referred to as the medicine, as they should be!

The very same plants, pscilocybin mushrooms and DMT containing vines are regarded by the Western governments as  Class A drugs, which by definition are not even allowed to be studied without having special licence, the likes of which can be a real headache to get.

Let me break that down for you, the very thing that heals your soul is being banned by your oppressive paternal system to keep you ignorant and hungry for the stale milk from its breast! Maybe it’s high time you saw through the illusion of language and considered these matters with a little more objective insight…

As it happens, on the weekend, we were not employing any Class A substances but the very appearance of a pill or two certainly caused a social speed wobble or two. If you haven’t taken the Red Pill approach, I suggest you do, I have been working on a new formula recently and it looks like we have something very powerful on our hands, the only thing we need is to lift the taboo on this terrifically effective approach and then surely there will be more of us to share the awake of the dream…stay alert

Now, without trying to offer any kind of definition of imagination, let’s take the stance that what I am alluding to is the question of agency, whether or not the apparitions of the dream are sentient in their own right?

Free will is probably the most hotly debated topic in consciousness studies and will likely remain so for some time to come but let us at least, adopt the position that we have the illusion of free will suffice to differentiate ourselves from purposeless computer mechanics.

Armed with a sense of self and an inquiring mind, with which to direct it, does offer us a unique opportunity to explore the dream world and for those of us with the more lucid capabilities, this offers perhaps a unique insight into the human mind.

As an avid lucid dreamer, I am continuously looking for ways to validate our experience with some degree of objectivity but the word subjective just keeps getting thrown at this science, time and time again.

Psychological evaluation eternally suffers from this disposition, yet psychiatric evaluation does not remain a nebulous of ambiguity, certain criteria do indicate specific pathologies, suffice to allow them to be targeted (to some degree) with appropriate medicament.

As a medical practitioner of some degree myself, I do have to have a degree of insight into mental faculties and if in doubt, I could perform what we call a mini mental status exam (MMSE for short). This is a simple test (as opposed to its older brother, the MME or mental status, the system used to diagnose mental illness) that one might use in order to evaluate someone’s basic mental function, i.e. whether the subject is operating with sufficient intellectual insight into their environment to be considered psychologically able or not.

It’s a simple test, just 3 questions to orient your person is all is needed. As an example, I might ask “What is your name? Who is the president of the USA? and What is the capital of France?” or I might try “What is your date if birth? What is the weather like in London today? (or any other locale they inhabit) and What is your door number on your street?”                                                                                                                                                 Hopefully, you get the idea here.

OK, the experiment…I wondered, as a means to investigate the dream figures that wandered my dreams, how would they respond to my probing of their sanity, how well would they be oriented?I ventured forth and decided to test…

The results were, to say the least startling… A few years ago, not so far in the past, I had the pleasure of listening to my esteemed colleague, Robbert Waggoner, as he touched among a number of peculiar aspects of lucid dreaming but there was one that stood heads and shoulders above the rest for me…literally…

For those of you who have not read his superb essay “Gateway To The Inner Self”, I suggest you do so…                                                                                   It is an incredible investigation into the world of lucid dreaming that charts some of his more mature voyages, showing an adept ability to explore the wonders of the dreaming mind. Not expressing any particular school of thought or adherence to any particular belief system allows him to tackle matters in a terrifically objective way and one of the stones he un-turns is left as a very intriguing mystery, he refers to them as the “drunken sailors”

Sitting in the lecture theater, not necessarily in anticipation, he finally came to talk about a bizarre incident he encountered several years ago, when he tried to probe a dream figure to alert her to the fact that she was dreaming, something we have all tried (and often failed). On doing so, she seemed to go into a kind of frenzied like response, gazing through him, with her head making a kind of repetitive wiggling motion, hence the term he coined…

I sat there celebrating in the kinship, someone else, without my prompting them had triggered this bizarre response of the “dream figure frenzy” as I have come to term it.

Now, I for one, am careful not to contaminate my experiment with expectation, much as I can avoid it and hence I had not been overly vocal about my findings prior to someone else actually reproducing them before I brought it to public attention and now I had some evidence of a similar situation from a very credible source.

Allow me to summarize my own experience here without swamping you with detail…Dream figures, so far as I can see, tend to behave themselves pretty well in their given environment, whether that be a juggler who happens to throwing balls in the air or a more sophisticated exhibitor, like a friend you know from the waking world engaging you in a conversation but when you apply the MMSE, so far as I can see, they seem to short circuit, that is they tend to seem quite disorganized in their behavior, often exhibiting the dream figure frenzy response!

I had tested this prior to reading Robert’s book (although I didn’t term it until after) a great on a large number of time of respective subjects and really did not expect the results I found. On the contrary, I expected them to “know what I did” as I was still operating what I now regard to be a rather naive materialist model (i.e. the brain contains the mind), I have since abandoned this view.

I am aware that the sharing of my findings on the net does undermine any potential future investigators using the MMSE approach by steering their expectations but I cannot help to feel that the risk is worth it as there may be something more fundamental afoot here. I might compare it to the light switch test of lucid dreaming – we know when you try one (or any other electrical device for that matter), they tend to fail. As to why, we do not know. Some people might “blame the net” for spreading this rumor and fueling the outcome but does that really stand up?

I think not, I know of far too many incidents of people discovering this themselves incidentally. The light switch phenomenon is one which does require a much wider spot light and I do have my own theories about this. Incidentally, I did bring this to Robbert Waggoner’s attention one day as we chatted in my kitchen, he seemed perplexed that we hadn’t really challenged this phenomenon before either….?

My conclusion on the curious incident of the persons in the dream has actually amounted to a metaphor that I would like to share with you in conclusion. Picture this “You are at a murder mystery type night of entertainment, beside you sits someone who has introduced himself as a doctor. One of the guests meets rather unfortunate circumstances during the dinner and dies mysteriously. The doctor reveals that, based on his observation, this may be a case of poisoning…”

In character, you decided to investigate the matter and ask about for any clues, eventually finding yourself engaged with the doctor. He reels off a few lines about his observations but not sufficiently satisfied, you dig a little deeper. As it happens you happen to know a little bit about pharmacology and present some ideas to the doctor only to be met by the abrupt pat on the arm and a rather embarrassed face saying “Sorry, I am not a real doctor as you know, I am just an actor playing the role and don’t really understand your question…”

The dream figure seems to adopt a similar role playing like stance with a kind of looping like behavior model, one which so long as he is allowed to play is very good at it but once you try to break context (MMSE), they seem to short circuit!
I don’t expect everyone of you to have this experience all the time (light switches work occasionally too) but could this “dream figure frenzy” be a repeatable phenomenon of lucid dreaming, one which writes a new and interesting chapter not just in this elusive subject but in our theory of mind at large….

I won’t say I became lucid parse, more of a semi lucid state was achieved. Just as I flew into the arms of eternity, I had enough insight to make a decision. Instead of screaming in terror, I folded my legs into a sitting position and surrendered completely to the moment, accepting its conclusion as an inevitable fate that had been set upon me.

I recall nothing much more than a total absence - no impact, no crash, no passing of time. An empty awareness, a brilliant stillness came over me, a bathing in the non passing moment..

I awoke from the moment to my waking world, as I ordinarily know it. The place I had just visited however, was not an unfamiliar ground to my being…
Meditation is a subject that all too often gets a bad name, not the least because it is so greatly misinterpreted by those who know the least about it and yet feel the need to to snigger at the very thought of it.

What is meditation? In essence, it is an exercise in awareness, a centering of one’s attention in the present moment. This is not something that can be grasped intellectually but only experienced directly and non conceptually.

To try to understand this is equivalent to a whole number trying to observe infinity, it cannot be done. One must give up being a number to know what lies beyond, a total detachment of self is what is required.

This requires a deep acceptance of what is, a willingness to let matters be exactly as they are and not as the grasping mind so desperately desires them to be. It is this place of surrender where no form or concept resides, no song or silence prevails but only a deep awareness of being aware, nothing more, nothing less, nothing at all but pure awareness.

That place is neither here nor there, past nor future, it is always and everywhere deep inside all of us at every moment and when we connect with it, we become still to our anxieties and worries, we fall into the arms of every moment., even death, as I experienced, holds no fear…

I recently had the pleasure of listening to somebody I admire greatly, the inventor of “free running” Sebastian Foucan. A philosopher and an athlete with the spirit of Bruce Lee running through his veins, I really resonated with what he spoke about. The essence of free running is commitment to the moment, following the course of your process with relentless forward motion.

There is a certain Zen motif to this kind of flowing action, something I am very much an advocate of, not just in combat but in life in general. When we flow like water, we eventually become a river rushing to the sea, the place where all streams connect, the source of ultimate power!

Although we may try to grasp the feeling of flow, we must approach with trepidation the use of our minds as they are made up of concepts, discrete objectives which easily allude to the illusion of independent orchestration…

Although a river may be made of many particles, it is the relationship of all of these perfect parts that forges the flow of unbroken continuity.

The mind ordinarily does not exhibit such clarity in its process, often it becomes tangled up in the meandering undercurrents of our critical thinking. Unresolved conflict and insecurity parade the streets of the mind and it is these obstacles that ultimately surface as decisions we have to face in our lives, they are the birth place of indecision.

If we are to seek perfection in our practice then we must not become prisoners of patience but instead must seek to be ever present in every moment. This is only possible by sweeping aside the internal dialogue that needs to placate our every move. By doing this we no longer think the thought, we become the thought, a single continuous flowing action…

This is something we experience when we dream, a matrix of pure experience where we free run through our desires, uninhibited by the intrusion of asking whether or what, why or when. In the words of Master Yoda, “Do or do not, there is no try”

Dreaming teaches us that every moment can be a perfect evolution of the last, a synchronous harmony that beats with the heart of nature but this beat has no predictable rhythm or rhyme, it is not foretold nor can it be predicted as some concept of mind for it is chaos.

Trying to approach this conceptually is like asking to know infinity from a distance, it is simply impossible; instead one must learn to become the moment. When we deeply awaken, we learn to be aware within the flow of the dreaming mind and it is here we come to know the place where thought becomes action, where we become the event.

In time we learn to direct the action from our inner selves, the place of knowing, the very essence of our nature, this is how great power can be achieved and wondrous accomplishments can be realized. Our greatest creativity flows from this source and when we come from this source with our intentions, we become one with the Universe.

Let your spirit become the tide of your experience, let go and flow, then you will realize all that you are capable of….

Stands to reason, yet here we are, a hyper evolved species with the intellectual insight to question the meaning of our own selves and much to our dismay we seek answers in our mind, a latent event on the ladder of our time.

Our ancestors were in no doubt about our origins, they worshiped the Sun and how ironic it seems that we regard such practices today as the act of a primitive mind. Apparently we know better than these savage pagans, we worship a God that refuses to reveal himself outside of the conjecture of those who chose to endorse blind faith as a motif.

Let’s try our ancestral view on for a moment, what would life be on this planet without the Sun? Surely I don’t need to answer that question so let’s try this – would our planet even exist, were it not for a star going several times super nova, are we not, in fact, the children of the stars?          It seems preposterous to adopt our own contrived notion, born out of our own latent anthropomorphic psychology over the facts as they are.

We are not incidental in the Universe, we are no more of a cosmic accident than the Cosmos itself, much as some neo-Darwinist might have it said otherwise. Look around you at the wonder of nature, nothing so intrinsically complex could have been seeded by pure random chance, I know this for a fact because I have been back to the beginning…

No, this is not idle arm chair speculation about the Big Bang, I am talking about the journey we are all capable of making, back to the deepest part your your self, something that can only ever be approached intellectually but never reached in mind because this is not a concept, it cannot be known as such.

Take a look at your hands, follow them to your feet, now feel your gaze sink into the ground beneath you, notice how you may sometimes feel separate from the ground but the truth is that you grew from the ground, just like every other organic being on this planet. Being human does not exclude you from the biosphere, much as some rather naive speculations might suggest. We are the children of the planet, the planet is the child of the stars and the stars of the Cosmos itself, everything is connected, you just have to feel it.

So where do I sign up, I hear you shout?                                                                                                                                                                                                                  The answer is simple, it’s already in you, in the matrix of yourself, your body is your heritage. Follow the blood cells in your veins and they will take you right back through time, to the place of your birth, don’t buy into the cheap thrills of your mind and all the pseudo-psychic nonsense being pedaled as a solution in today’s spiritual mess. The answer is in you, this is physical, this is the code in your DNA, the very language of space and time itself, follow your body, it will take you home….

The magic of being human is our ability to plan and prepare as well as to be able to remember and reminisce, something made capable by the X factor in our species, the mind, but contrary to our common view, it is not here that we find the illusive now, the mind simply acts to bookend this event and hence if we are to find true perfection in our performance, we must learn to look deeper.

Try this exercise for me – cast your mind back to a memory from some time ago…now try to anticipate some random future event in your life, take a moment to think about it….. OK, with this exercise complete, try the same with your body… Of course you can’t, your body is only ever in the now, it cannot be in the future or the past, it is only ever exactly here in the present moment.

Although we habituate the ever flowing present moment, for most of us, it is the past or the present that we attach to and this is because most of us live in our minds. What most of us do not know is that there is a deeper aspect to our selves, our true selves, the inner witness that does not judge or tie up events with the prejudice of our biased notions, we call it the higher self, the subconscious, even God. It is part of us and we are part of it, continuously drawn to its wisdom, we call this intuition and it is the flame that burns deep in our consciousness. 

Most of us are so drawn into our minds that we never truly feel the gravity of the inner self but to experience it is to know it. Between the self and the circumstance lies the mind or the ego but the self can see through the illusion, the now, it can see directly and it is this direct vision of the present moment that we seek to know through martial arts practice. 

Eons ago, the molecule gave rise to the monkey, the monkey to the man and the man to the mind but somewhere along that road, we as a species became consumed by the wonder of our own imagination and it would seem that many of us are simply lost in there, fueling a world of conjecture and speculation. Now nature beckons us to make that journey back to our origins and to do so, we must reconnect with the body, it is here we may approach the inner self.

The inner witness does not practice one style or another, he is neutral at every moment, reaching only for the tool that is required to fit the job at hand, nothing is done in excess and nothing is lacked. This was Bruce Lee’s vision when he spoke about Jeet Kune Do, a realization of the self that would transcend the ego of various systems or styles of martial art. 

I grew up in a world where karate was still karate and Kung Fu was (to my generation) a separate system. We were taught to believe that one should chose a system and know it sufficiently to handle any situation but this was sorely exposed to be a terrific falsehood in the year of our lord, 1993. This was the first ever licensed mixed martial arts event that the Western World was ever exposed to, it was called the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) and the result was shocking, a little Brazilian wrestler known as Royce Gracie dominated the event and went on to hold that title for some time afterwards. What was particularly curious about him was the way he fought or perhaps didn’t fight, at least not as we knew it, he pretty much didn’t punch or kick!

Here we had a humble man, tying up his opponents with their own limbs with what he called “Gracie Jiu-Jitsu”  we were witnessing the fully realized martial artist, he was not practicing any particular style, it was his style, it was his inner self that was performing, this was a direct expression of the self and hence the name (Gracie, his birth name). This was what Bruce Lee had envisioned when he shod his Kung Fu robes for his iconic yellow track suit, he was no longer practicing his traditional Wing Chun, he was simply Bruce.

The only way, we can grow as a spiritual being is to let go of the egoic mind and find the stillness of the inner self. All knowledge is available to us in here, there is no indecision, just pure acceptance. Race driver Ayrton Senna used to speak of being “above consciousness” when he drove, athletes call this “peak flow” . Bruce Lee described it as “feeling and not thinking”. It is the inner architect that we seek in this experience, the direct vision that only exists in the now, something that cannot be approached intellectually, it simply has to be experienced directly.

This place is in you, it is in all of us but it can seem so far as to not exist for so many of us but it watches over us and guides our every decision if we are simply mindful enough to listen. The deepest secret of martial arts is to surrender to each moment and let matters be exactly as they are, not to question as to question is to hesitate and it is hesitation that takes us outside the now. The primordial force of the Universe is energy, a constant flux that we are enmeshed in, our purpose is to find our current in this motif and to flow with it to our ultimate truth. All you ever need to know, you already know, you simply have to know this to be true…all is exactly how it supposed to be, it could be no other way, you simply have to accept this and learn to see from the deepest part of you, then you will be a fully realized self, you will be happy.

The way I look at things is that we are in a constant state of reflection, taking information in during day time and reflecting on it at night, this is what dreaming acts as, a place of reflection.

The way I look at things is that we are in a constant state of reflection, taking information in during day time and reflecting on it at night, this is what dreaming acts as, a place of reflection.

In a word…nothing!

Emptiness is a word that many of us feel uncomfortable with, why would we strive to be empty? To be empty is to become a well of potential, one that may be filled when needed with whatever it is we seek to know.

I am speaking of a state that is so profound that it is only ever experienced and cannot be truly grasped in intellectual concept. When we talk of emptiness, it is hard to conceive of how anything could be truly empty, physics won’t allow a space to be truly empty, there would still be ground zero oscillations, so what is empty, when I say that “I” am empty?

It is something deeper than matter, deeper than mind that I hold up to you, my essence, my being, my spirit if you will. To be empty of attachment and intent is to be truly aware and it is this state that I strive to achieve when I balance my posture against my opponent’s will, it is here that I find the true intention of his actions, not biased by the delusions of my own prejudices.

Meditation is the key to holding this space and this can be a hard task for us Western minded folk, but fear not, help is at hand. I discovered my inner place of rest in a float tank some years ago and I want to share this secret with those of you lucky enough to have access to such technology.

Flotation is the royal road to relaxation and I have the privilege of being a member of the UK’s largest center, www.floatworks.co.uk .They have an incredible set up and I am glad to see them making such progress in bringing this practice to public awareness, in the way that they have for the last few years, my own interest being prompted by them.

Meditation comes in many forms and is the key to any kind of self development and anything that helps you center your awareness is welcome at my table. There is an old Eastern sentiment that “the center of everything is nothing” Perhaps but of of nothing comes everything, the choice we make is how to bring the events into our awareness, start empty and learn to know things as they are, not as you want them to be…