Do I have this right?

[GHOST S34]

tell me if this sounds good, or if I'm just over complicating things. So your conscious is your awareness, this is the part of Lucidity, and for all intensive purposes is you, as you think. Your sub-conscious is the guy that deals with all the little stuff that you don't think about in your head. You mind would be like the hard drive that stores EVERYTHING that ever happened and that you have ever learned. your body would be your body. People say you use only 10% of your brain, would that be the total consciousness of all the space you can use? So when you try to gain lucidity you start by breaking yourself, or your conscious from your body. Then you get to dream. In the dream you try to break from your sub-conscious (which can't reason which is the reason some dreams are so weird) into your normal conscious. That is when you realize its a dream. But to gain full lucidity you need to further break your conscious from your mind, the grandmaster. once that happens everything is Lucid right? knowing how this works will help me sleep at night (pun) thanks.

[Adam24]

People either dont know the answer to what your asking or, like me, dont want to spoil it. So i will answer your question with a question. Where is the mind located? When you try and work out the answer, do your best to think freely, and not with language.

[jarrhead]

I simply couldn't understand it. lol But think of the body as the computer case, if that helps any.

[Sloth Face]

Is the mind in the brain? Of course, the brain is just meat that happens to store things and control muscles and what have you...I've often wondered to myself the answer to that question.

[Dannon Oneironaut]

Is the mind in the brain? Of course, the brain is just meat that happens to store things and control muscles and what have you...I've often wondered to myself the answer to that question. Use your mind to observe your mind and see where it is. Where is it? Where are its boundaries? Can you extend your mind into your big toe? Or your heart?

[Darkmatters]

*sigh* philosophical conundrums! Ok, I don't have any answers, but I can speculate and ponder a bit.... Where is the mind located? Interesting to think about. Of course it's just electrical activity in the brain, and it seems to be centered in the head. Is that because that's where the brain is, or is it because your head is the headquarters for your most important and most directional sensory organs? Between your ears, behind your eyes.... how could "you" seem to be anywhere else? Can you put your awareness in your heart or your big toe? Well certainly you can center your attention on any area of your body... partly by just thinking about it and partly because every part of the body has some nerve connection with the brain. But in a sense you can also center your attention on anything in your surroundings... the senses cast a net around you of awareness, so that your nervous system effectively encompasses everything you can see and hear and feel and smell... hell maybe everything you remember or can think about. But is centering your awareness on something the same as being aware within it? Can that even be answered? Thinking happens in the brain, but it suffuses everything throughout your body and even your surroundings and memories and ideas. All carry the light of awareness. In fact ,the instant you think about something, your awareness inhabits it and suffuses it. And that's true whether the thing you're thinking about is a real object or just something imaginary. I read a bunch of Carl Sagan books over the last few months, and I forget which one I read this in, but he was talking about the sense of 'self'. The I... or the Identity (Id entity?). Apparently there's a specialized part of the brain that creates this sense, and the 'lower' animals don't have it. So... does that mean they go through their entire lives as in a dream (non-lucid of course)? Sometimes we do as well... I Know I have days when I 'got up on the wrong side of the bed" or "my mind is still asleep". What do we really know about 'reality'? The epistemologists never got past "I think therefore I am"... but most of us are pretty sure there's a real world 'out there' and that it's pretty much like what we see hear and feel etc... when there's a brick wall in front of you you're not likely to try to walk through it, and if you do... better reach for the aspirin. The senses provide datastreams via nerves to the brain, which has mechanisms to correlate all the data into a sort of 3-dimensional CGI Matrix world. Add to that what we "know" from memory or by being informed by other people or watching the news or whatever... it all get added to the gestalt, and our reconstructed world inside the mind becomes fairly complete. What's really interesting is the patchy nature of that construct.... we don't have all the data all the time. Sometimes a person might be standing right behind us but we don't know it until we hear them and it gives us a start, then we add them to the gestalt. So reality is essentially very similar to dreams... we use the same mental mechanisms to construct both worlds... the only major difference being that while awake the data is coming in through the senses and based on actual objects that are 'really there', while in dreaming those streams are cut off (apparently some mechanism in the brain is responsible for actually shutting off sensory input while in REM) and the gestalt-building mechanisms are free to create imaginary scenarios. Tibetan buddhist masters (who are expert lucid dreamers) say that to become lucid in dreams, you must realize that reality is like a dream, and dreams like reality... where as most people (In the west) think of dreams as nothing more than silly fantasy episodes and believe that material reality is absolute. Ok... sorry for the long and rambling post... you guys just hit my philosophize button!

[bewareofit1505]

*sigh* philosophical conundrums! Where is the mind located? Interesting to think about. Of course it's just electrical activity in the brain, and it seems to be centered in the head. Is that because that's where the brain is, or is it because your head is the headquarters for your most important and most directional sensory organs? Between your ears, behind your eyes.... how could "you" seem to be anywhere else? Can you put your awareness in your heart or your big toe? This is the same reason why when people get tagged on facebook, it's their faces that get tagged, because that's where people's sense of "I" is located. Great post, btw.

[Dannon Oneironaut]

This is the same reason why when people get tagged on facebook, it's their faces that get tagged, because that's where people's sense of "I" is located. Great post, btw. Most people, if they saw a bunch of pictures of ordinary naked bodies without the faces or heads, would have a hard time identifying themselves.

[jarrhead]

I could identify myself pretty easily.

[GHOST S34]

ditto. so many weird scars.

[Tiklish]

Yes, you're over-complicating things

[Dannon Oneironaut]

It may be true that most people feel that the mind is in the head. But when people in America point to themselves they point to their heart. In Japan when someone points to himself he points to his nose, yet in Japan they feel that their mind is in their navel area. For me, I feel like my mind is behind my whole body, as if my body is the surface of my mind. When I do the WILD technique I let my body sink into my mind as I relax. The more meditative or relaxed I am I can feel like my mind is behind the room, or behind the field. (by behind the room or field I mean on the same side of my body that my mind is on). And it is as if my mind is the center of my existence and my thoughts, and my body, and my environment is off in front of my mind. I was thinking about this, and what many of your experience is with where you percieve your mind to be, and perhaps it IS because of our eyes, ears, nose and mouth is on our head, and our brain is in our head, but our whole body has sensation, I just think that we are turned off from it most of the time and distracted by our thoughts. I think that most people mistake thoughts for the mind. Thoughts are emanations of the mind. Also, the more lost in thoughts you are the less body consciousness you have. During sex, your whole body feels good and your mind is not in your head. I think that is why in spiritual traditions of the east they have disciplines like Yoga and Qi Gong and Tai Chi to develop body consciousness to liberate the mind from the head.

[Darkmatters]

Very profound. I think that most people mistake thoughts for the mind. Thoughts are emanations of the mind. Interesting. Then we're still left with the question 'what is mind?'. There are some very intriguing pages on F. David Peat's website dealing with the issue of the mind and consciousness. It's been a while since I looked at them and I don't remember which one it is, but somewhere in there is a paper about the point where consciousness rises as energy from the material of the brain. Thought emanating from matter. Ok, I didn't word it very well... he does a much better job. These are the thoughts of a leading physicist. From reading ETWOLD and in this forum and from paying more attention to both my dreams and waking life I'm starting to really understand that in waking existence the ego is "me", but in dream and in meditation we come into contact with the deeper self... the part of ourselves that's normally buried in the subconscious but that has much more intuitive knowledge than the conscious mind does. The conscious mind is more like an interface with reality... specially designed to interact with the physical world and things we might encounter in it. So it's like a Graphical User Interface that has only slight connection with the complete contents of the deep programming of the computer... but in sleep we bypass it and go directly into that deep programming. A very imperfect metaphor of course. Normal dreaming is like exploring a cave system drunk and half asleep using only matches for light, but in lucid dreaming it's like you're sober and wide awake and brought a spotlight.

[Dannon Oneironaut]

And we have to ask ourselves if one needs a brain to have a mind. Many animals don't have brains or nervous systems, ie. sponges, corals, and single celled organisms. But these beings must have consciousness of some sort, being alive and all. And what about plants? Plants have demonstrated that they have consciousness. Some people theorize that all matter has some degree of consciousness, and this makes sense on some level since all matter is energy in crystallized form. But the gross consciousness that we are aware of in ordinary waking life probably does depend on a brain. According to Tibetans, who specialize in consciousness studies, our gross consciousness is dependent on our brain and when our brain dies we blackout. Then we slowly become aware of a subtle consciousness that can be likened to the consciousness in dreams.

[Naiya]

The 10% of your brain thing is a myth... The conscious and subconscious parts of our minds are permanently intertwined, IMO...for example, I cannot consciously control every detail of my dream even when I am lucid--I must rely on my subconscious mind to take care of the details and keep the environment relatively stable while I focus my attention on the few things I want to alter. Pesonally I don't see it as one or the other having control or needing to separate from the other or having dominance over the other--I see them as an interconnected web, each relying heavily on the other to function as a whole.