Exploring Consciousness: Old Habits and New Horizons 73century BCE, the whimsical Taoist sage Chuang-Tzu—renown for his
parable of the dreaming butterfly—further mused that “...someday there
will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream”
(Walsh & Vaughn, 1992, p. 196). A virtually identical sentiment has been
echoed by Tibetan Buddhism, which asserts that the physical reality we
ordinarily perceive is ephemeral—essentially a collective dream—while a
vacuous (empty), pure or primordial awareness beyond all appearances is
fundamental (Wallace, 2007; 2009; 2012). Indigenous Australians posit a
similar belief through their notion of the “Dreaming” or “Dreamtime”
(Elkin, 1938) as the formlessness that precedes and persists beyond the life
of the individual. More recently, a notion of coexisting relative (explicate)
and absolute (implicate) realities has also gained traction within quantum
physics (Bohm, 1980), lending support to these and other ancient
cosmologies. As such, the empirical identification of lucid dreaming in the
West—wherein dreamers frequently report experiences that seem more
real than waking life—forces us to re-examine our crude definitions of
consciousness and the complexities of our interrelationship with ourselves,
the Earth and the universe (Atlas, 2017).
In spite of the movement towards philosophical pluralism incited by
post-modern critiques of science, as well as advances in neuroscience,
physics, and an increased interest in spiritual technologies from the East
and indigenous, shamanic cultures, present-day Western society continues
to operate within a distinctly modernist, naïve, monophasic paradigm. As
noted above, Westerners tend to believe that so-called “ordinary” waking-
life is the sole, real world. Similarly, Westerners presuppose that dreams,
as well as hypnagogic (Maury, 1848) and hypnopompic (Myers, 1903), or,
liminal phenomena—such as hallucinations that occur during the onset of
and emergence from sleep—are unreal, thereby quickly dismissing their
events as “only a dream” (Boss, 1958; 1977; 1982; Craig, 1987).
Conversely, a polyphasic paradigm (Laughlin, 2011; Walsh, 1993)—
such as those assumed by the vast majority of indigenous traditions
throughout the world—allows for the inherent existence and validity of
multiple, non-ordinary and contemplative states of consciousness and
subtle dimensions of selfhood, as well as for their impactful significance