Balancing ongoing RCs & psychological health
I have a question about how to balance work leading up to a DILD and work involving grounding in the here-and-now for psychological purposes. I'm sure there's a way to balance them but I've personally had a lot of trouble finding it.
Perhaps the most effective DILD induction method I know of (at least for me) is developing a kind of continuous RC based on an overall sense of whether I'm dreaming. This leverages the fact that I often know the answer to the question of whether I'm dreaming before I try to do a typical RC, and in fact trying to reason about it is less reliable than that first sense of direct knowing. For instance, in a dream I might reason with myself that there can be pink elephants walking on the ceiling because I have a friend in China and thus I must not be dreaming since the situation makes sense. :roll: But if I develop a familiarity with how my dreams "feel" for lack of a better term, I can check with that feeling and immediately know whether I'm dreaming regardless of how much sense the dream is or is not making. It takes a lot of initial work with dream interpretation but I find it definitely worthwhile.
The one problem I have with this approach is that it has me putting a mental layer on my experiences. I'm admittedly a little bit baffled about how to explain why that's a problem without referring to the Enneagram, so my apologies if doing so is a bit confusing. This tendency to put a mental layer on things is a cognitive error that practically defines Ennea-type Five; rather than experiencing the world as it honestly appears, Fives add mental commentary and models to what they encounter, thinking all the while that this is "insight". A typical example is a Five who thinks about what psychological model fits the person with whom he or she is talking; while that might provide some relationship between the person and the model, this mental noise actually prevents the Five in question from engaging in an honest and open manner with the other person.
Type Fives get caught up in these mental analysis games, forgetting the world for the sake of their mental commentary. It becomes an ongoing habit since Fives are often more comfortable with their mental models than they are with the messy, demanding world as it is. The problem with this strategy is that it's actually this evasion of reality that causes Fives to feel the sense of anxiety that they aren't skilled enough or prepared enough to engage with life. Their need to know everything before taking action is something they need to let go of in order to develop authentic confidence and fulfill their Basic Desire of being useful, capable, and competent and of having a place in the world.
The challenge for me is that this ongoing awareness of whether I'm dreaming seems to act in large part as a kind of mental commentary. I've noticed fairly frequently that when I practice this regularly, I (as a Five) go down the Health Levels. This is a much more severe problem when I'm trying to practice MILD.
I know this isn't an unavoidable problem. Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche in his book The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep refers to this constant awareness of all experience as a dream as being a path to enlightenment, which is in many ways the same goal as increasing one's psychological health as measured by the Enneagram. So clearly there's a way for even type Fives to experience reality with this awareness of its dreamlike nature without losing a sense of immediacy to experience. I'm just baffled about how one goes about doing so.
Does anyone have any insights into this that they'd be willing to share?
