The Mystery

The report entitled 'Analysis And Assessment Of The Gateway Process' was penned in 1983 by US Army Lieutenant Colonel Wayne M McDonnell. McDonnell was commissioned to explore the Gateway Experience in the 1980s, at a time when US intelligence agencies were deeply interested in various forms of psychic research. The report explains how consciousness is created through the brain's processing of energy in the physical world and transforming it into what McDonnell compares to a hologram.  McDonnell portrays the universe as 'one gigantic hologram of unbelievable complexity'. The universal hologram is made up of interacting energy fields in motion and at rest, and contains all phases of time - past, present and future. Holograms formed by the human mind are 'attuned' to the universal hologram, McDonnell asserts, with the right hemisphere receiving energy from the universal hologram and the left hemisphere translating it into what we know as consciousness. By chan...

Dark energy, the mysterious form of energy that makes up about 68% of the universe, has intrigued physicists and astronomers for decades. Dark energy has been noted as 'the most profound mystery in all of science'. With advanced technologies and newer experiments, scientists have found certain clues about it and an international team of researchers made the first putative direct detection of dark energy. They noticed certain unexpected results in an underground experiment and write that dark energy may be responsible for it. The XENON1T experiment is the world’s most sensitive dark matter experiment and was operated deep underground at the INFN Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso in Italy. The finding also suggests that experiments like XENON1T, which are designed to detect dark matter, could also be used to detect dark energy. Everything we see – the planets, moons, massive galaxies, you, me, this website – makes up less than 5% of the universe. About 27% is dark matter and 68...

All of us dream whether we remember dreaming or not. We dream as infants and continue dreaming until we die. Every night we enter an unknown world. We may seem to be our ordinary selves or someone completely different. We meet people whom we know or don't know, who are living or dead. We fly, encounter non-human beings, have blissful experiences, laugh, weep, and are terrified, exalted, or transformed. Yet we generally pay these extraordinary experiences little attention. Many Westerners who approach the teachings do so with ideas about dream based in psychological theory; subsequently, when they become more interested in using dream in their spiritual life, they usually focus on the content and meaning of dreams. Rarely is the nature of dreaming itself investigated. When it is, the investigation leads to the mysterious processes that underlie the whole of our existence, not only our dreaming life. The first step in dream practice is quite simple: one must recognize the great poten...

There are four main foundational practices in dream yoga. Although they are traditionally called the Four Preparations, this does not mean that they are of lesser importance and are to followed by the 'real' practice. They are preparatory in the sense that they are the foundations upon which success in the primary practice depends. Dream yoga is rooted in the way the mind is used during waking life, and it is this that the foundational practices address. How the mind is used determines the kinds of dreams that arise in sleep as well as the quality of waking life. Change the way you relate to the objects and people of waking life and you change the experience of dream. After all, the 'you' that lives the dream of waking life is the same 'you' that lives the dream of sleeping life. If you spend the day spaced out and caught up in the elaborations of the conceptual mind, you are likely to do the same in dream. And if you are more present when awake, you will also f...

It is said that the practice of dream yoga deepens our awareness during all our experience: the dreams of the night; the dream-like experience of the day; and the bardo experiences after death. Indeed, the practice of dream yoga is a powerful tool of awakening, used for hundreds of years by the great masters of the Tibetan traditions. Unlike in the Western psychological approach to dreams, the ultimate goal of Tibetan dream yoga is the recognition of the nature of mind or enlightenment itself. Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche is an acclaimed author as well as a highly respected and beloved teacher in the Bön Buddhist tradition to students throughout the United States, Mexico and Europe. Fluent in English, Tenzin Rinpoche is renowned for his depth of wisdom, his clear, engaging teaching style, and his ability to make the ancient Tibetan teachings highly accessible and relevant to the lives of Westerners. https://www.youtube.com/embed/tKjD7uddaXk

Dreaming is different from waking consciousness. First, the dreaming brain cannot access and incorporate complete episodic memories (i.e., memories of actual events in our lives), so the associative exploration of dreams is limited to semantic and nondeclarative memories (i.e., memories related to general world knowledge and those acquired and used unconsciously, respectively). In other words, while imagining and planning during wakefulness is normally based on recalled events, narrative construction during dreaming is based on semantic associations of these events, giving dreams their metaphorical quality and allowing for a more expansive investigation of associative links.  Second, the neurochemical modulation of the brain is altered during sleep, and especially during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, when the release of norepinephrine and serotonin in the brain is shut off while levels of acetylcholine reach their peak in regions such as the hippocampus. These shifts bias memory ...

In the book 'When Brains Dream', dreams appear to be part of this ongoing memory processing, and their occurrence and content can predict subsequent memory improvement. While there is a vigorous debate over whether the actual conscious experiencing of dreams while they occur serves a function, we believe that it does, and that it is similar to that proposed for waking consciousness. Antonio Damasio, in this 2000 book 'The Feeling of What Happens', argues that consciousness provides two critical functions to the human brain: to construct narratives and to feel one’s emotional response to them. Together, they give humans (and presumably other conscious animals) the ability to imagine possibilities, evaluate them, and thereby plan future actions. Our NEXTUP model of dreaming (Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities) proposes that dreaming serves a similar function. Specifically, we argue that dreaming allows the sleeping brain to enter an altered state of conscious...