Core Concepts of IDL

Awakening

Buddha means “the enlightened or the awakened one.” As such, “Buddha” stands for your awakened, enlightened life in the world. All yogas are disciplines whose purpose is such enlightenment, regardless of their religious background or spiritual preferences. Dream yogas view life as a dream; to become lucid within that dream is to wake up within it. IDL emphasizes waking up in your waking identity in your waking life, because that is the self you carry into your dream state, for better or for worse. To wake up in your dreams is not necessarily to be awake in your waking life; to wake up in your waking life is also necessarily to be awake in your dreams.

An AQAL Understanding of Enlightenment

“AQAL” stands for “all states, all lines, all quadrants, all levels, all types and refers to the integral world view of Ken Wilber. It asks, “What does enlightenment look like not only when awake, but when dreaming and deeply asleep?” “What impact does enlightenment have on other secondary or provisional states, such as trance and non-physical existence?” “Is there a separate development line for enlightenment, perhaps the self line, alongside the lines for cognition, empathy, kinesthetic sense, musical ability, communication skills, and so forth? Or is enlightenment the top of all lines? Or is enlightenment an attitude? Or is enlightenment a special, specific state of consciousness? Or is it all of these?” “What does enlightenment look like in the four realms of consciousness, culture, behavior, and relationships?” “Can you have enlightenment at any level of development? If so, what does say, late personal enlightenment look like? What does early transpersonal enlightenment look like?” “Does enlightenment evolve as contexts evolve?” “Is there a feminine style of enlightenment that is different from a male style?”

What Enlightenment is not

What is this clear state of consciousness that, in some ways, is the destination of transformation? Setting enlightenment as our goal ensures that we won’t get there! This is because the seeker is that which is being sought, and enlightenment transcends and includes all dualities, including that between the seeker and that which is being sought.

While enlightenment is usually associated with the following characteristics, by themselves they are unreliable indicators of the enlightenment of the individual expressing them. Here’s why:

Psychic Ability

Great psychics can be, and often have proven to be, morally depraved.

Oneness with Nature

Mountains, dogs, and infants are one with nature. Are they enlightened?

Oneness with God

Lakes, cats, and infants are one with God; they are not enlightened.

Love

From the perspective of the moneylenders in the temple, was Jesus being loving? Love is a highly subjective measurement. Also, very loving people can still make huge mistakes or be very foolish.

Long Life

Historically, enlightened people don’t seem to live any longer than most other people.

Good Health

Enlightened people can and sometimes do suffer from physical health problems.

Resurrection from the Dead

Most enlightened masters live normal life spans. Few resurrect.

Ecstasy and Bliss

These are signs of spiritual opening. While they do maintain a state of mental clarity and purity, enlightened masters don’t walk around in a state of constant ecstasy or bliss. They have work to do.

Ability to Lucid Dream

Children and criminals have reported the ability to lucid dream. Are they enlightened?

Wakefulness in all States

If you are awake during a dream but don’t know what it means, are you awake? If you think you know what it means but haven’t asked the other characters in the dream what it means to them, how do you know you are awake? If you were completely awake, wouldn’t you know their perspective?

Trustworthiness

Masters are not alive to live up to your expectations. Because you will tend to put a Master on a pedestal, they will almost inevitably disappoint you.

The End of Pain

There is an important difference between pain and suffering. While misery is optional, heightened sensitivity, which is often experienced as pain, is a byproduct of evolution. The more you evolve the more sensitivity that you will have to both pleasure and pain. As it is pointed out in Ecclesiastes, “In much wisdom is much grief; and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow.”

The End of Limitation

What is freedom but the end of limitation? But this is only one side of the coin of enlightenment. The other side is increasing responsibility. In Mahayana Buddhism this is expressed in the Bodhisattiva vow: “May I attain Buddhahood for the benefit of all sentient beings.”

The End of Evolution

Enlightenment is about learning a way to look at life that keeps us from getting in the way of our evolution as individuals and as a species. Enlightenment is hardly the end of personal human development.

So, what ARE the characteristics of enlightenment?

• Ability to witness – to continually watch yourself go by.

• Increasing disidentification with your body, emotions, mind, and soul.

• Becoming increasingly aware and awake in waking, dream sleep and deep sleep.

• Constant awareness that waking life shares the reality and many of the characteristics of dreaming — without thereby discounting waking life.

Balance between doing and being, between affirming and letting go.

ª Constant thankfulness.

• Not taking things personally, because there is no real or lasting self to get defensive.

• Enjoyment of life.

• Embracing the extraordinary nature of the ordinary. While many masters have emphasized union with the ordinary nature of things, others have tended to seek ecstatic states full of visions, flames, and epiphanies. These are basically levels of enlightenment, with the former being higher transpersonal enlightenment and the former lower to mid-transpersonal levels of enlightenment. We normally think of waking experience as being ordinary in comparison to dream experience, which seems extraordinary. But waking experience is really extraordinary, overlaid as it is with all of our judgments and preconceptions and filtered through our pragmatic desire to find a “use” for everything. Enlightenment moves us beyond the extraordinary presence of words, language, ideas, emotions, and desire to embrace the ordinary experience of each moment openly, fully, and without qualification.

• Has evolved to late personal or above on all major developmental lines.

• This means that the enlightened are intelligent, morally worthy of respect, emotionally healthy and maintain mutually respectful relationships with all others, based on high order empathy. It does not mean that they are necessarily physically coordinated, charismatic, or mathematical or musical prodigies.

• Demonstrate profound compassion, wisdom, and peace of mind.

Manifest grace in their beingness.

A willingness to make mistakes, fail, accept responsibility for them, and move on, all in the service of spirit.

• High-order empathy: the ability to take the role of all others, in any state, and know your life from their perspective.

• Thinks its ridiculous that people view them as enlightened!

• Live a life that is an expression of grace rather than karma.

• Dedication to service to all sentient beings in all dimensions.

• Outstanding patience, perseverance, and determination.

• Good luck; life flows!

• Extraordinary mental focus.

• Challenging to be around. You would feel challenged to be more and do more. This could cause you to feel unaccepted and self-critical, but that would be your own projection.

• Inspiring. Awakens the best in you, but may also trigger your fears of failure, rejection, and abandonment.

While “enlightenment” is often used to refer to the pinnacle of development, it is clear that enlightened masters are not perfect in all lines of development. Upon closer examination we find that enlightenment refers to the completion or fulfillment of one line of development: your sense of who you are. When enlightened your self-sense becomes another tool, like your hand, a transparent concept that no longer defines your identity.

Think of enlightenment of a never-ending process of waking up. Just as there are levels of dream lucidity, escape from life illusion, and suffering, so there are levels of enlightenment. One of the worst forms of grandiosity you can have is to think you’re enlightened and then to proceed to inflict your brilliance on others. Integral Deep Listening, one form of dream yoga, is dedicated to two goals: helping you wake up out of your own, self-created and maintained life dream, and to help others to listen to those aspects of themselves that will help them to do the same.

Most World Views are Self-Centric

common sense world view

Our sense of who we are is based on the feedback we received as children from our senses and our environment. They told us that we, our waking sense of who we are, are the center of our experience. This is a geocentric world view, as defensible as was the Ptolemaic world view, by the data of our senses and our cultural surround. However, there exist heliocentric and polycentric world views as well. These are not supported by our senses, but we now know that this is because our senses create a world view that is useful but is partial, incomplete, and delusional. IDL interviewing is designed to demonstrate to you, to your satisfaction, that your common sense world view is geocentric and is not designed to wake you up. It is designed for you to function well within the context of a sensory definition of who you are.

scientific-humanistic world view

The scientific world view is superior to the common-sense world view because it gathers information from instruments that extend the senses, such as telescopes, microscopes, and electron microscopes and submits that information to the court of reason. Because reason is a belief system that transcends pre-rational belief systems, reason is superior to most common sense and religiously based belief systems. It is not either-or; ideally, science transcends and includes the best of pre-rational belief systems. Humanistic world views are also superior to the geocentrism of the common sense world view, because they are world-centric. This means that they are pluralistic and egalitarian, extending personal rights to all others. One’s sense of self is expanded to include the well-being of a greater group of others.

However, neither the scientific or the humanistic world views are completely free of a geocentric bias. In fact both tend to organize reality in terms of the needs of waking identity. Both tend to view themselves as the pinnacle of enlightenment, the state of utopia toward which civilization is growing. However, Wilber’s AQAL model makes very clear that the scientific and humanistic world views are personal level world views; they are not transpersonal. They are not world views that transcend and include a separate, limited self.

deity-centered world view

Since at least Freud, we have known that deities are at least partially projections of our own disowned potentials. Consequently, while worshiping deities evokes the sacred presence of our emerging potentials, it makes them so “other” that we cannot integrate them.

monotheistic world view

Wilber identifies three different concepts of God. As ourselves, God is a state of enlightenment or non-dual level of awakening. As a person, we can have a loving personal relationship with God. As the transcendent Other, the Creator of the Universe, we can stand in awe of the sacredness of our greater identity.

A Theocentric World View is a Delusion that Creates a Dualism Between the
Sacred and the Profane.

In IDL, interviewed emerging Potentials rarely advocate for a theocentric or deity-centered world view. They rarely talk about God or turn unity and oneness into deity. This may be because from the perspective of high scoring potentials, there does not seem to be a dualism between the sacred and the profane, although there certainly is dualism in the perspectives of those emerging potentials that score low in the six core qualities.

Hindu yoga world view

Traditional Hindu yoga names various sorts of disciplined paths to oneness with the divine: karma, or work, yoga, bhakti, or devotional, yoga, jnana, or wisdom yoga, raja, or meditative yoga, kundalini, or breath yoga, hatha, or body yoga, and dream yoga. All of these are viewed as legitimate ways of becoming one with the sacred.

DL Dream Yoga and Traditional Dream Yoga

While traditional dream yogas teach lucid dreaming as a precursor to waking up in all states, IDL Dream Yoga teaches waking up in one’s waking life as an evolutionary precursor to waking up in other states. The first emphasizes lucid dreaming while the second emphasizes lucid living.

Buddhist world view

While Western monotheisms emhasize salvation through oneness with God’s law, Buddhism emphasizes salvation through oneness with the Dharma, which is an understanding of spiritual law that is non-theistic. While the central concept of this law in the West is salvation, in Buddhism it is interdependence. IDL is less interested in external value systems like Christianity and Buddhism and more interested in you finding and following your inner compass and the value systems of emerging potentials that score high in core qualities of being awake, or enlightenment.

lucid dreaming world view

Lucid dreaming tends to promolgate a world view of freedom. It says that when you wake up in a dream you are free from the constraints of the physical world and of the moral and ethical constraints of your waking culture and society. You are free to attempt miracles or rehearse difficult, frearful waking activities, because you cannot die in your dreams and no failure is real in a lucid dream, because it is clearly seen to only be a self-created dream. People who equate enlightenment with freedom and who feel limited by their waking circumstances tend to be attracted to lucid dreaming for this reason.

A world view centered on waking identity is a narcissistic delusion that creates suffering.

Your sense of who you are excludes those emerging potentials that are not part of who you think you are. No matter how enlightened you become, this paradox remains the same. Consequently, waking identity is always relatively narcissistic, and its exclusivity and partiality creates suffering. While the grosser forms of suffering are mitigated as waking identity incorporates into itself more aspects of its larger identity, its sensitivity becomes increasingly refined, causing the lack of incorporation of emerging potentials unperceived and not experienced before to become a major cause of suffering. An example of this is St. John of the Cross’ “Dark Night of the Soul.” Because this is part of the human condition, those who claim they have outgrown narcissism are to be viewed with skepticism. It is possible however, and indeed the destiny of humanity, to outgrow identification with any one definition of self, and with it, a major precondition for suffering. IDL addresses this issue by providing the opportunity to interview any non incorporated entity, experience, or feeling and thereby expand their sense of self to include it. At the same time, this inclusion successively thins the definition of self until there is no longer identification with any “real” self, just functional “selves” or “roles” that change based on how light moves through form.

World Views and the Drama Triangle

The world view of the Western Allopathic tradition emphasizes Mosaic law, Greek rationalistic dualism, and scientific (empirical) humanism. It emphasizes good over evil, right over wrong, Godly over sin, the scientific over other alternative paths. It tends to identify with the rescuer position in the Drama Triangle and the “Good” in the Socratic triune. Its integration in IDL dream yoga is through identification with those emerging potentials that personify compassion and acceptance, aliveness/service and detachment.

The world view of the shamanistic-Chinese traditions emphasizes societal stability and the balancing of natural forces. It emphasizes harmony over chaos, balance over imbalance, yang over yin, and loyalty over selfishness. It tends to identify with the victim position in the Drama Triangle and the “Beautiful” in the Socratic triune. Its integration in IDL dream yoga is through identification with those emerging potentials that personify inner peace and witnessing, freedom and clarity.

The world view of the Hindu and Buddhist traditions of India emphasizes enlightenment, liberation, and life as an illusion. They emphasize liberation over karma, enlightenment over dreaming, wisdom over ignorance, and purity over impurity. They tend to identify with the persecutor position in the Drama Triangle and “Wisdom” in the Socratic triune. Its integration in IDL dream yoga is through identification with those emerging potentials that personify wisdom and confidence, balance and wakefulness

The Nature of Reality as Disclosed by Integral Deep Listening

When emerging potentials are interviewed, they express opinions that reflect their world view. If enough are interviewed, you begin to observe patterns of agreement, just as you can back away from a forest, puzzle, a quilt, or a painting and observe meanings and connections that were previously hidden, due to your subjective enmeshment with trees, puzzle pieces, individual quilt squares, or individual painting elements. This is the phenomena of “The Blind Men and the Elephant.” While such patterns are not the only, nor are they the best, meanings and perspectives on reality, they are essential, and gaining the ability to take such perspectives provides a flexibility, adaptability, and informed decision making that is unavailable to those who cannot or do not have access to them.

The reality that is thereby disclosed is polycentric and aperspectival. It lacks self or permanent selves but does possess processes and qualities that appear to transcend and include selves. While this may be an artifact of the interviewing process, which uses qualities to access preferences, even without such questions, patterns of underlying processes and qualities are observable in the responses to the other questions in the protocol. This reality is transpersonal, in that it transcends and includes faith and reason. Faith involves the suspension of disbelief in the phenomenological method while the phenomenological method itself, which IDL uses, is rational.

IDL exposes a polycentric, interdependent world view in which no perspective is privileged over another.

When you become this or that self-aspect, it is the center of the universe. Its perspective is experienced as the real, authentic, valid, and appropriate perspective at that moment. When many emerging potentials are interviewed one discovers that all are valid, given the premises from which they see the world. This is called aperspectivalism. This multiplicity of valid, authentic perspectives creates a sense of self analogous to a diamond, with each facet throwing of light in a unique and ever-changing way, with no facet privileged over any other. Diamonds are, however, more or less clear and flawless, meaning that hierarchy exists even within a polycentric, interdependent world view. Clarity and flawlessness is inherently superior to cloudiness and flaws in diamonds. (But even this determination is relative; diamonds themselves probably do not care.) High scoring emerging potentials represent perspectives that transcend and include those of lower scoring ones.

The most inclusive perspectives do not differentiate between dreaming and waking experience.

You and I need to differentiate between dreaming and waking experience because we need to test reality in terms of person, place, and time. You need to know who you are and who and what these other people and things are around you. You need to know where you are, the century you are living in and what day it is. You need to know when it’s time for lunch and where the food is. The Sacred doesn’t need any of these things, as is demonstrated by the routine breaking of all three of these reality principles in your dreams by spontaneous, non-rational, shifts in identity, location, and time. Consequently, to approach life from a perspective that reflects the priorities of the sacred, remember that the distinction between dreaming and waking is arbitrary, created by predictable changes in biological states and out of a need to maintain a stable waking sense of self in order to adapt to physical and social demands in the waking world.

An injunctive method is emphasized more than the via positiva or via negativa because it involves an empirical, testable method.

An injunctive method says, “In order to get that, do this…” An IDL example is, “In order to learn to meditate, become high-scoring emerging potentials.” Following such instructions is emphasized by IDL because it is not based on faith or authority, but on a repeatable methodology that you can test for yourself. However, there are aspects of the via positiva in IDL, such as the assumption that your dreams can help you heal, balance, and transform and that practicing deep listening to your emerging potentials is helpful, and that dream characters and external reality are at least in part emerging potentials, There are also aspects of the via negativa in IDL, such as a lack of metaphysical claims about God, the reality of beings that visit in dreams, or the soul.

The Nature of the Sacred

What is the source of life for Earth? Essentially, it is the sun. All the matter that makes up your physical body, the Earth and all its forms, originated in the great gas cloud that condensed into the sun and its solar system. (However, all elements heavier than oxygen, such as the potassium in a banana, originated in a supernova far more ancient than our sun.) The light of the sun falls on all parts of the Earth that are exposed to it. The sun does not care whether clouds block its light or if too much sunlight makes it impossible for things to grow. The sun would not be affected if Earth and all its creatures ceased to exist. It would continue to be itself.

So it is with the sacred. It is too compassionate and universal in its caring to be concerned about our mundane affairs. This is a good and necessary thing. If the sun were affected by human actions, as some sources believe (sunspots), it would surrender the objectivity it needs to be a dependable source for all life. The sacred does not care whether you live or die. Contrary to what most of us were taught in our birth religions and also by most of the sacred teachings of history, the sacred does care whether or not you get a sunburn or die in the desert. Similarly, the air does not care whether it is taken in by a criminal or a saint, a snail, an oak leaf, or a porpoise. The universe does not care whether galaxies collide. While this may sound like a nihilistic, uncaring, meaningless approach to the sacred, it is not. A lack of caring is not the same as uncaring. A lack of emotional involvement is not the same as meaninglessness. The sacred is not callous and insensitive but rather so compassionately selfless that it transcends and includes all feelings and all preferences. The sacred cares too much to be fickle and to change its course based on the immediate needs of humans. To do so would be to fail to provide the steady light, love, and presence that feeds all of creation. It is positively grandiose to think that the sun generates more or less sunspots based on human action or that planets and stars change their course or brightness based on how someone behaves.

None of this is meant to imply that you cannot or should not have a personal, loving, intimate relationship with the Sacred. There is nothing more personal! Anything that works for you to create such a relationship – prayer, service to others, meditation, dance, exercise, nature – these sorts of things are regularly and often recommended by emerging potentials for exactly this purpose.

The sacred encourages the cultivation of the six core qualities confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing) because they are correlated with it becoming aware of itself, with the sacred waking up to itself. The more awake you are the more transparent you become. This means that the less afraid, the more compassionate, the more wise, accepting, at peace, and witnessing you become, the more freely and fully the sacred is able to experience itself through you. The sacred wants you to wake up so that you will disappear in any disruptive sense, which is what happens as you cultivate the six core qualities and processes. The more awake and transparent you become the more the sacred is able to become aware of itself through you.

Consequently, IDL dream yoga is not primarily about human evolution, lucid dreaming, or spiritual discipline. It is primarily about dissolving limited definitions of self which block the awakening of the sacred to itself. IDL is about learning to look at life from the perspective of the sacred.

The Sacred as evolving, waking up in and through us

Life as Self-Created Dream

Not only will your dreams teach you a lot about life; your conclusions about dreams and dreaming will teach you a lot about how you view yourself from the inside out. They will teach you which quadrants you prefer – behavior, social and system interaction, cultural and interpretive values, or the development of interior consciousness – and which you neglect, how you view altered states, which level of development reflects your center of gravity, and which lines of your development are strongest and weakest. Those who ignore, repress, or discount dreaming and its implications for their sense of self and their waking life are not simply impoverishing themselves and slowing their own development; they are demonstrating where and how they are stuck in their development.

People and external reality are objectively real, yet hopelessly subjectively conditioned.

This view is not idealism or solipsism because it recognizes that others are autonomous. Things don’t go away just because you close your eyes. An understanding that life is a self-created dream is a statement of emotional and mental maturity. It reflects an individual who is confident and self-assured enough to handle ambiguity and a constantly shifting sense of self. Those who are threatened by this concept misrepresent it. They hear it as a denial of the external world rather than for what it is: an acceptance of the obvious. What you know of others, your world, and yourself is subjectively conditioned by your social and cultural scripting, by your language, and by the very categories by which your mind structures information, as Kant demonstrated some three-hundred years ago. These contexts create a secure structure upon which to build an identity and a life. If they are not shed, they create a secure prison that eventually suffocates us to death.

You can only know in others those qualities and characteristics that you project onto them.

To say that you create your world is not to deny its objective reality. It is simply to recognize that all you can know of me, all you can understand of these words, is dependent on your past experience and the factors that condition your perception. As you recognize that reality, you gain the ability to both outgrow your limiting preferences as well as to identify with perspectives that are less dreamlike and more real, because they represent the consensus dream of a broader cross-section of your greater identity.

Everything is best seen as a wake-up call.

Whether you interview a dream, a waking life issue, a waking object or being, an entity from a near death experience, a physical pain, or a past-life memory, interviewed emerging potentials tend to state that their purpose is to help you wake up. “Waking up” means to consider this or that experience from a perspective or perspectives that transcend and include your own, and to incorporate that new, expanded perspective, into your own.

Dreaming

Dreaming, as normally experienced, is regressive in at least three areas:

You are in a delusional state in that you think you are awake when you are dreaming;

You are delusional in that you think you are dealing with objectively real others when you are actually dealing with aspects of yourself;

You are delusional when you think you have no choice but to dream the dream.

When you dream you think you are awake, so you think you are your waking identity. However, your identity while dreaming is a surrogate of your waking identity, which IDL refers to as your “dream self.” This is to differentiate your waking identity, which cannot fall from great heights without injury, die and resurrect, or turn into other people or animals, from your dream self, which can.

Both your waking view toward dreaming as well as your experience of dreams while you are dreaming is more or less delusional to the extent that the three conditions above apply.

Because dreaming is regressive for waking identity, you normally undo much of your waking progress while dreaming.

Because you experience your dreams in a delusional, regressed way, you misperceive what is happening in your dreams. Because you do so, you reach wrong conclusions which activate the fight or flight response and undermine your physical and mental health. So if you went to an inspirational workshop or saw a therapist today, it is likely that because of the three delusions that you operate under when you are dreaming, most of what you learned, most of your waking commitment, motivation, and inspiration, will not survive intact through the night. Its potency will be diminished while you are dreaming tonight; you are likely to awaken in the morning having slid a bit backward into your old comfortable stuck self.

The state of dreaming itself is not regressive; it is the perception of the state by waking identity that is regressive.

Just because your delusional dream self misperceives what is going on in a dream it does not follow that the dream itself is a delusion or that it is regressive. Do the other characters in your dreams tonight think they are not part of a dream? Do they think that they are real instead of being aspects of you? Do they think that you have no choice but to see them as you do? For the most part, the answer is either, “I don’t know, because I have never asked them,” or simply “no.” When you interview your dream characters you will usually discover that the dream is perceived in a very different way from the delusion-based assumptions you make about it, both while you are dreaming and when you wake up and think about it. Most of your dream characters will not see it in ways that are nearly as delusional and regressive as you do. So who is dreaming? Who is more awake, you or your dream characters?

Your body can’t tell the difference between waking and dreaming perceptions.

When you are dreaming your body is paralyzed so it will not act out your dreams while you are asleep. However, that does not keep you from assuming that snakes, monsters, fires, and falls in dreams are real events, causing your body to enter what Hans Selye called the General Adaptation Syndrome. This means that it pumps out adrenaline and other catecholamines that can be so strong that they mimic a heart attack. These powerful hormones are meant to be metabolized through fight or flight, but while dreaming instead sit in cells like battery acid, slowly wearing down and wearing out the systems you need to survive. This happens whether or not you remember the dream. If it happens night after night, what do you think the result is likely to be for your physical health?

Dreams are Best Understood as Wake-Up Calls.

Interviewed dream characters will often state that they exist to wake you up and that this was the fundamental purpose of the dream.

If you miss dream wake-up calls they get louder and externalize.

Ignored dreams get louder, which means that they become more emotionally intense and threatening to your sense of self. Unheeded dream themes tend to become nightmares if the underlying life issue has not been resolved. Unheeded nightmares can externalize as physical health issues, waking drama, interpersonal problems, “bad luck,” or “accidents.” This is not to imply that all such events are missed wake-up calls, only that this is a fruitful way to conceptualize them. We don’t know what they “actually” are.

Dream stress undermines waking development through the intrusion of regressive emotional tone. Therefore, the reduction of dream stress is important to growth.

Dream stress is primarily caused by the chronic misperception of dream events by dream self. If you want to reduce dream stress and its consequences for your waking life, you need to first learn to dialogue with your emerging potentials while you are awake and then take that ability into your dreams.

In terms of anxiety level and depression, the consequences of the fight-or flight syndrome are similar for waking and dreaming.

When you get stressed and activate the sympathetic branch of your autonomic system you move into fight or flight. First you actively resist, then , if resistance does not work, you move into a chronic survival mode. If that fails, you move into exhaustion mode, typified by a seeming revival in one last attempt to overcome your circumstances. When this fails, your weakest physical system goes first; if you have a predisposition toward depression or anxiety, dream stressors such as nightmares amplify those emotional over-reactions, diminishing the quality not only of your waking life but your ability to make healthy decisions for yourself and those that you love. The fact that your body can’t tell the difference between waking and dreaming perceptions means that what you do in your dreams tonight is going to affect your physical and mental health tomorrow – whether or not you remember any of them. If that is the case, doesn’t it make sense to listen to what they are saying to you? Doesn’t it make sense to stop misperceiving what is happening to you while you are dreaming?

Misery, Suffering, and Karma are Therefore Optional.

When you listen to wake up calls you reduce drama in your life and dreams. You have fewer accidents and bad luck, get along better with others, are more likely to attain your goals, are less likely to get sick, and are less likely to have either waking or dreaming nightmares. You are more likely to have good luck and experience “magic” in your life. “Magic” is defined as being in the right place at the right time in order to say and do that which awakens the highest in others and yourself. Life flows, with synchronicity, in a serendipitous, yet structured and organized, fashion.

Both reincarnation, as envisioned in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and our response to Near Death Experience life reviews are dependent upon how we perceive our lives – what meanings we project onto our history. This is the mechanism for the transmission of karma. If you change the meanings that you assign your life dream by viewing it from different perspectives, you wake up to new meanings that transcend and include your previous, more limited and painful interpretations.

How you treat others is how you are treating those aspects of yourself that they represent.

Why is it so difficult for people to grasp the concept that the way that they treat others is how they are treating that aspect of themselves that the other person represents? What is it about humanity that keeps us chronically adept at ignoring, justifying, denying, rationalizing, avoiding, and fighting to not see, accept, and apply this simple, life changing key to maturity?

The main reason that most people maintain the convenient conceit that they can think and feel and act in any way that they like toward others without any consequences – as long as they don’t get caught – is that they have never taken their dreams seriously. It doesn’t matter that dreams cause nightmares; it doesn’t matter that they spend some eight years of their life dreaming if they live to be eighty; it doesn’t matter that there are powerful implications for depression, anxiety, and mental health for unaddressed, chronic disturbing dreams. It’s obviously better to repress what we don’t understand. Looking at the uncomfortable and bizarre world of dreams doesn’t help us pay our bills and raise our kids. However, those who do and pay attention to what is going on when they are dreaming learn several things. First, that their dreams are mostly self-creations, which means that everything and everyone in them are functionally aspects of themselves. Secondly, that how they treat people in their dreams is how they are treating the aspect of themselves that those people represent. If you hate someone in a dream you are hating that part of yourself. If you’re scared of a monster in your dream you are not only scaring yourself; you are scared of yourself. Think about that. Is that wise? Is that healthy? What level of development would you say that a person was on if they did that when they were awake? Third, that because they believe that they are awake when they are dreaming, this delusion has powerful consequences. Their bodies physiologically respond as if they were awake; they reinforce reactive emotions and delusional beliefs. Fourth, functionally life is a dream, in that you never know anyone; you only know your mental conception of them. You only know who you think that they are, and you are almost always badly mistaken about that. Consequently, you move through your life shadow-boxing with aspects of yourself, with your own mental representations. How you treat others is how you are treating yourself.

Once you thoroughly understand this principle you can no longer do what most people do: follow the golden rule because of some religious teaching and then continue to sell out in your waking life by working for people, businesses, corporations, or nations that treat others in ways you would not want to be treated.

Signs that you don’t get this are first and foremost any behaviors associated with the Drama Triangle. If you blame yourself or others you are in the role of persecutor. You are persecuting yourself and you either don’t realize it, don’t care, or can’t stop. You are announcing that you are functioning on an early personal level of development at best and much more likely mid prepersonal. If you seek rescuing by money, love, or some savior you are not even functioning at mid personal. You are rescuing yourself, guaranteeing that you will soon experience the delights of self-persecution and victimization. If you waste your time feeling helpless, powerless, and victimized you are probably functioning at mid prepersonal. You are victimizing yourself and don’t know or don’t care. How can you claim any significant level of spiritual development for yourself if you are doing such things?

If you don’t understand what it means that the way you treat others is how you treat the aspect of yourself that they represent, you’ve just admitted that you’re functioning at a pretty low level. Anyone who claims to be on any sort of spiritual path, whether new ager, evangelical, mystic, psychic, or devout follower of ecological and human justice, but who does not understand and follow this principle in their own lives is grossly overestimating their level of development. You cannot be at healthy late personal without “getting” this, much less at transitional or on any transpersonal level of development.

But there’s hope. If you want to grow quickly, there are few ways that are quicker and more powerful than grasping and consistently applying this core concept. Doing IDL interviews allows you to experience the truth of it, not simply to cognitively grasp it, which is not enough.

Which would you rather do, downstream crisis intervention or upstream prevention?

Even when you do IDL interviewing and application in response to a crisis you will receive responses that focus on long-term prevention. While you are focused on eliminating the present problem, the sacred is focused on you hearing the wake-up call it represents so that it doesn’t need to repeat. Rather than providing a temporary band-aid, IDL gives you the tools to avoid future crises. Are you listening?

Waking identity rarely consults its broader intrasocial community.

As stated above, this is either because you lack the necessary skill set or you have other priorities. You think you manage your life just fine without having to take the time to listen to emerging potentials. You are not convinced that anything of real value to yourself and your life will come that will justify the time and effort. Or, it may be that you believe that you do so and call it consulting your intuition, meditation, or interviewing, when you use your intuition to validate your waking biases, meditation to avoid listening to yourself, or lack the degree of development in the empathy line to become emerging potentials during the interviewing process and objectively comment on your life from that perspective.

Seeing dreams as symbolic projects preconceived meanings onto them rather than listening to them

Viewing dreams as symbolic is an excellent strategy if you want to find what someone else thinks they might mean instead of listening to what they themselves say they mean. Symbols are both projections and discounts. They are projections in that someone has to predetermine what something really means. They are discounts because it reduces a person or a thing to what it represents to someone else, which says nothing about how it experiences itself. To find out what that is you have to stop interpreting and listen to how a character interprets its own experience. There is a place and a time for studying symbology and applying them to dreams, however it has little to do with learning to deeply listen to yourself.

Individual dreams emphasize either healing, balance, and transformation or some combination of them.

Get in the habit of asking yourself, after you have finished an interview, “How does this dream address healing (or balancing or transformation) in my life?”

The gift of dreaming is to provide objectivity

This gift is mostly wasted because waking identity does the interpreting both during the dream and afterward, when awake, if it remembers it.

A phenomenological approach to dreamwork combined with a sociometric methodology reveals an intrasocial reality.

Such suspensions of waking assumptions are indications of a phenomenological approach to dreamwork in particular and life in general. IDL thereby creates an open focus approach to life, in which respect and trust replace projection and fear. In order to see certain realities, you need certain tools. To fully understand and appreciate the place of Earth in the heavens the telescope first had to be invented. To develop a microbial theory of disease the microscope first had to be invented. In order to perceive and appreciate the intrasocial dimension of human experience Dream Sociometry had to be invented. There are probably other tools, perhaps better ones, that reveal the same data, but the point is: if you want to evaluate the data revealed by space, viruses and bacteria, or by intrasocial communities, you need to pick up the proper tool for the job and follow the appropriate injunctions.

Lucid dreaming, despite its ability to awaken us to new potentials for growth, freedom, and creativity, can amplify narcissism while extending waking power and control into the dream state. As such, it tends to be a form of psychological colonialism.

Dream lucidity may move your waking sense of control and freedom to a broader level, regardless of what level of development you are on. But what about the evolution of your dream consciousness? Your dreams are comprised of interacting elements reflecting early to mid prepersonal levels of group development. We know this because dream groups lack a unified self sense. There is only the self sense of you in the dream and that of other personalities in the dream. There is no unified dream sense of self. At best, dream lucidity moves dream consciousness from early and mid prepersonal to late prepersonal by the imposition of a unified self sense on the group by your self in the knowledge that it is dreaming. If you wish to evolve dream consciousness beyond this, as opposed to developing your waking identity and self lines, you have to form an early personal consensual social relationship with other parts of your internal community. Meditation is a great help in doing so; interviewing emerging potentials speeds that process up.

Personal life nightmares, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, and societal nightmares, such as wars, are best viewed as the externalization of ignored wake-up calls. They may be interviewed sociometrically just like any dream.

If you want to reduce waking nightmares you need to learn to assume that they are wake-up calls that need to be listened to, not fought or repressed. You then need to learn a method that will allow you to hear what they are saying to you. Both IDL interviewing and Dream Sociometry are powerful ways of understanding both personal and societal nightmares as wake-up calls.

Waking Identity

Unless you understand and use a method of listening to emerging potentials, such as Integral Deep listening provides, you will naturally assume a form of psychological geocentrism. You will assume that your identity orbits around your waking sense of self. The facts of life will confirm this delusion because they are not taking in any data to dispute it. Historically, this has been the stance of true believer, rationalistic humanist, and mystic alike. Mystics experience their dissolution of identity within nature, deity, or formlessness as something that happens to them and which they perceive and interpret from their waking identity. Consequently, while they may indeed possess a God-centered, “heliocentric” world view, it is still centered on their sense of self, their waking identity, which is now their immortal soul or Atman, one with God, All, or Brahman. This is a soul-based version of geocentrism. Unless there is a dialogue with other emerging potentials spiritual development remains an autocratic and totalitarian affair in that it does not reflect a consensus course based on the consideration of the preferences of other, broader, aspects of your greater identity.

Your waking identity is who you think you are, whether asleep or dreaming.

As indicated above, you are trapped in the world view or perceptual framework of your waking identity. This term is not synonymous with ego. Your ego can be transparent and you will still see the world from the perspective of your waking identity. You can dissolve your ego entirely without ever choosing to share control and power with one other member of your intrasocial community, awake or dreaming.

Your waking identity is partial. It becomes a tragic source of suffering to the extent that it does not consult other legitimate internal perspectives.

Because your waking identity is a subset of the larger contexts in which it is embedded, it is and always will remain partial. This partiality is in relationship to larger external contexts, such as the external social-cultural contexts of enlightenment, as well as larger internal contexts, such as the intrasocial and intracultural contexts of enlightenment. Waking identity continuously incorporates these at it grows, only to find itself in a broader context. Regardless of how evolved waking identity becomes, its responsibility is to consult with and internalize those broader contexts. If it does so externally and not internally, it can evolve externally; there will be a tetra-mesh for the self in its evolution in the world, that is, there will be growth in behavior, social ineraction, values, and consciousnes. However, the more transparent waking identity becomes, the more it is required to consult internal perspectives and to tetra-mesh with them. Mystics have shown that one can reach the causal and the non-dual without doing so. You can repress and deny the perspectives of your internal community and become an enlightened waking identity. What you won’t accomplish, however, is integration with your larger identity, because you haven’t consulted it. Therefore you merely assume that you know what it needs, what is true for it, and what its agenda is. There is no replacement for interviewing emerging potentials that are not identified with your waking identity, regardless of how highly developed you think that you are. If this is not done, at some point your development will come to a screeching halt.

Waking identity rarely consults its broader intrasocial community.

Therefore, your waking identity rarely represents the interests of your greater identity.

The consequence of either position is that you remain at war with yourself and that you are cut off from sources of innate creative potential. The first consequence sabotages growth while the second limits your potential. You pay a huge price for choosing to stay comfortable in your habitual waking delusion that says that you are handling your life just fine.

As a consequence, waking identity is generally working against its broader interests although it is generally certain that it represents them.

How could waking identity not be working against its broader interests if it has no idea what they are? How could it know what they are if it never consults or listens to emerging potentials? It thinks that listening to itself, respected others, and reading books is all it needs to do to be informed as to its broader interests. This is the common mistake of the entitled, from monarchs to CEOs to mystics and gurus to parents; they are sure that they both know and represent the needs and the wants of the governed and that therefore they do not need to consult with their own emerging potentials. This is both ignorant and arrogant.

Waking identity resists valuing or listening to other emerging potentials because it is by nature asleep, dreamwalking, immature, and threatened by power sharing.

This is the default position that IDL recommends that you take toward your own waking biases. You can trust yourself to turn off the alarm clock, to not record a dream or, if you do, to discount its meaning; if you do interview a dream, to then not follow recommended life changes. This is not being cynical, pessimistic, or even self-critical; it is being realistic. Who you think you are is the world view that you have at the moment. If you thought another one was better, you would adopt it. Consequently, your waking identity is defined by an enormous amount of inertia. It resists change, other points of view, and power sharing. If you assume that to be the case then you will be prepared for your endless rationalizations, excuses, and justifications for why you don’t need to listen deeply to yourself.

Why and How you are Stuck

Most of what you call listening is not listening at any depth.

The self-talk that you do during the day is called “roof-brain chatter.” You are listening to your conscious thoughts and to those fears, hopes, doubts, sadnesses, and angers that bubble up from within you, generally in response to external events. All of that is very superficial stuff, and you are so familiar with it that it is highly predictable and boring. None of that involves deep listening to full-bodied, relatively autonomous emerging potentials, parts you rarely encounter outside of your dream life. When you do you most likely repress them as quickly and as completely as you can so that you are not distracted from your waking agenda. What you hear and see, whether awake or dreaming, is what you have been conditioned to see. You misinterpret most of that. You miss the rest.

Failure to listen results in poor decision making.

Listening is key to making good decisions. If you are unable to deeply listen to yourself, because you do not have a method, or unwilling, because you are afraid or have other priorities, you will make poorer decisions than those that learn and practice this skill set. In time the difference in life competencies will cause deep listening to become a common practice, because not to do so will place one at a societal disadvantage. However, right now, in the culture of the early twenty-first century, almost everyone makes equally poor decisions because they don’t listen to themselves. Most see no clear or obvious adaptational advantage in learning to do so.

Seeing dreams as symbolic projects preconceived meanings onto them rather than listening to them

Failure to deeply listen results in an absence of the intimacy you seek.

Deep listening creates respect as well as empathy. These two characteristics are important aspects of intimacy. As you learn to listen deeply to your emerging potentials you grow in your respect and empathy with others. The result is that you have a greater capability of forming intimate relationships with others.

The drama triangle represents a relative lack of the six core qualities. It defines a lack of wakefulness and a lack of inner peace. There is no enlightenment in the context of the drama triangle.

Awake or dreaming, when you play the roles of victim, persecutor, or rescuer, you are in conflict with yourself. The consequence is a life of very interesting drama and little real growth. Other words for drama are self-delusion, maya, dukkha, and karma. IDL teaches you how to identify drama in your life and how to stay out of it in your feelings, thoughts, interpersonally, and in your dreams,

Getting Unstuck

There are parts of you that are not stuck and will model that state for you and give you practical, useful recommendations for life change as well if you will only take the time to listen to them.

Getting unstuck is a process of healing, balancing, and transforming.

If you transform without healing, your transformation will not last because it lacks a solid foundation. If you transform without balancing, your transformation will not last because it will not be broad enough. If you balance without healing you will be the walking wounded. If you balance without transforming you will stay stuck where you are. If you heal without balancing your life you will not have a broad enough foundation to transform. If you heal without transforming you will also stay stuck. For lasting change all three are required. IDL provides all three.

Individual dreams emphasize either healing, balance, and transformation or some combination of them.

Get in the habit of asking yourself, after you have finished an interview, “How does this dream address healing (or balancing or transformation) in my life?”

The gift of dreaming is to provide objectivity

This gift is mostly wasted because waking identity does the interpreting both during the dream and afterward, when awake, if it remembers it.

There are emerging potentials that are enlightened right now.

This may be one of the most difficult concepts of IDL for people to grasp. They are sure they know themselves. They are sure they aren’t enlightened. They are convinced that if they are going to find enlightenment it will be from some inspirational teacher or book or workshop, but certainly not from listening to a bunch of bizarre and random emerging potentials. However, if you will follow the injunctions of IDL, you can test this principle for yourself. You do not have to believe anyone. If you will interview your emerging potentials you will quickly meet some that are more enlightened than you are. One would think that would be a solid indication that they would are listening to and cooperating with. However, it is a testament to the depth of human delusion that this conclusion rarely sinks in.

You can access them right now without going into an altered state.

IDL does not involve closing your eyes (although you can if you wish), changing chairs, hypnosis, channeling, mediumship, or entering some other state of consciousness. You can experience beneficial and profound interviews by interviewing yourself on your computer or with pencil and paper. Both approaches require that you keep your eyes open to type or write. The key is your ability to get into role and to answer questions in role. Once you learn how, you can shift back and forth easily between your waking identity and this or that self-aspect, just as you do mindlessly and habitually between your roles as student, worker, eater, driver, and so forth.

Real listening requires the suspension of phenomenological assumptions.

Phenomenological assumptions include: “This won’t work.” “This is stupid.” “I know what these symbols mean already.” “Dreams aren’t real.” “Dreams are real.” “I’m not going to hear anything new or that will help…” Such assumptions tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies. You find what you are looking for. You end up validating your stuckness. This is good if you want to stay stuck but not so good if you want to change.

The more complete the identification with the “other,” the more transformational the experience is likely to be.

IDL works to the extent that you are willing to stop playing your habitual role of waking identity and instead immerse yourself in this or that interviewed element of a life issue or dream. If you do not want to do this, do not believe it will work, or lack the ability to do so, then IDL is not for you.

Because identification is state-specific, records of interviews must be read over and interviewing needs to be made into an ongoing spiritual discipline or yoga, if those states are to be turned into higher stages of development.

States are temporary while stages are permanent. It is relatively easy to create experiences of being, consciousness, or bliss. It is relatively easy to learn to lucid dream or to learn Wilber’s integral perspective. What is difficult is to turn these temporary states into permanent developmental stages. When you interview emerging potentials in IDL you access temporary states that heal, balance and transform. To turn those states into habitual perspectives, world views, and ways of being in the world you have to repeatedly return to them and become them in different real life circumstances.

You are less likely to get new information from an interview than you are to get a new perspective on how and why you are stuck and what you need to do about it.

The object of IDL dream yoga is not to get new information or insight. While this may happen, the object is to expand and thin your sense of self so that you are more awake and to maintain that expanded, thinned sense of self.

On some level you already know what you will hear. What is both different and priceless about what you do hear in IDL interviewing are the priorities, the emphasis, and the perspective on how to live your life.

You can spend years learning what not to do and who not to be. Most people do exactly that. Or you can learn, and teach your kids at the same time, how to get in touch with your inner compass and receive practical suggestions about how to find yourself, wake up, and avoid pain and suffering.

Design

Consideration of AQAL

Any model of transformation in the 21st century needs to take into account Wilber’s AQAL model (all quadrants, lines, levels, states, types). This is because of its inclusiveness and because it represents a cognitive attainment of the post-personal level called “vision-logic.” This is Wilber’s name for the stage between the egalitarian and pluralistic emphasis of late personal and the emphasis on unity with energy, nature, control, purification, and psychism that is associated with early transpersonal experience. Cognition leads the other lines. Vision-logic provides a framework for comprehending the entirety of the developmental arc without discrimination against any level. This must be done before the self-sense gets anywhere close to stable transpersonal development, regardless of how many transpersonal states the person has experienced. Therefore, while not based on Wilber’s model, IDL attempts to take it into account and uses it as an evaluative criterion for the evaluation of its assumptions and methods.

IDL is Ethical

IDL takes an ethical stand. It is moral, but not in the usual sense. It does not say what is good or bad, better or worse, based on the Word of God, scripture, or spiritual teachings. It observes the six stages of breath, discovers what processes are associated with each stage, and then derives qualities from each of the stages and processes. Rather than being absolute goods, these qualities are evolving vectors of development. They are not fundamentally ethical, in that they do not exist to teach morality. These ethical preferences are themselves meant to be outgrown, as are all preferences. By “outgrown,” we mean, “used as tools,” instead of being viewed as “real” or absolute truths, realities, preferences, or goods.

IDL Provides an Internal Moral Compass

In addition to the six core qualities of breath providing vectors for ethical development, identification with emerging potentials provides the direct, personal experience, as opposed to an abstract moral teaching or principle, that how you treat others is how you are treating the part of yourself that they represent. What follows from this experience is a practical conclusion that you don’t want to treat others in a way that you don’t want to be treated, because if you do, you are simply abusing myself. Parents, teachers, cultures, and religions have for ages attempted to instill an internal moral compass within children and the general population, for many obvious reasons. The results have been spotty, irratic, and unpredictable. IDL does not attempt to ethically parent others. Instead, it allows people to have their own direct experience of this principle through the interviewing of emerging potentials.

Emerging Potentials

There are emerging potentials you can access right now that are enlightened.

This may be one of the most difficult concepts of IDL for people to grasp. They are sure they know themselves. They are sure they aren’t enlightened. They are convinced that if they are going to find enlightenment it will be from some inspirational teacher or book or workshop, but certainly not from listening to a bunch of bizarre and random emerging potentials. However, if you will follow the injunctions of IDL, you can test this principle for yourself. You do not have to believe anyone. If you will interview your emerging potentials you will quickly meet emerging potentials that are more enlightened than you are. One would think that would be a solid indication that they would be worth listening to and cooperating with.

You can access them right now without going into an altered state.

Dream Characters are Emerging Potentials

Whatever else dream characters may be, they are at least in part emerging potentials. In a narrow sense, emerging potentials can be dream characters, discarnates, the personifications of life issues. In a broader sense, emerging potentials can be any waking person, animal, or thing. This is not an idealism or solipsism that says only the self exists. It states that while real people and things exist apart from ourselves, all we can know of them are those values and associations that we project onto them. When we look out we are essentially looking within, into a mirror. We see ourselves.

Emerging Potentials are personifications of intentions and perspectives that are legitimate and authentic, but that are often different from our own. Dogs, clouds, and people are signifiers. They personify values. That is why we can love them or murder them, based on the values we project onto them. One group of soldiers are family, to be protected, while another group are vermin, to be exterminated.

Emerging Potentials Are Often Highly Autonomous

If you interview characters in your dreams you will find that some will be of strongly different opinions from your own and don’t care that you don’t like it. For example, you may be afraid of spiders that are crawling all over you in a dream. But when you become the spiders themselves, as well as probably all the other characters in the dream, there is no fear. How come? Your fear is part of the self-reinforcing constellation of your waking identity, which is only a minor part of your greater identity, which contains an unlimited multiplicity of perspectives, most of which are not afraid. So what?

Would you like to learn to not be unrealistically afraid? Would you wish that for your family and for your country? Do you think that the world might be different if people were not unrealistically afraid? People arm themselves against us because they perceive us as a threat. Even if we have given them ample reason to – we have hit them or some country close by in the past we don’t see ourselves as threatening. Why, we are peace loving, generous, and caring. Why can’t those other people see that?

Who has the realistic perspective? What if both are delusional? What if both have a piece of the truth? What if the members of families and governments developed the ability to see how their own cherished beliefs are delusions? What then? What if you were able to come to see how your own most cherished beliefs are delusions? What then?

IDL Interviewing Integrates and Broadens Your Sense of Self and Stops Dissociation

Contrary to a common fear of mental health professionals, the autonomy of your emerging potentials rarely interferes with your normal functioning or overall psychic stability. You are not going to fragment your personality, lose your “ego strength,” or turn into a glob of trembling protoplasm by becoming emerging potentials. It might be interesting if you did, but no such luck. You aren’t trancing out when you do these interviews. This is not hypnosis or tripping out in some altered state of consciousness. You remain quite aware and quite “you” the entire time you are responding as a giant squid or a toothpick. You get to witness yourself being delusional, absurd, and generally having a good time while maybe, just maybe, growing a lot.

When you listen to emerging potentials you find that they are relatively autonomous.

You are made up of innumerable perspectives. Each of these world views is congruent, given its own premises and positioning in relationship to your life. This congruency has inertia, or internal integrity, which is experienced as autonomy when a self-aspect is interviewed. You will meet ferociously independent, opinionated, and prejudiced aspects of yourself that are just as certain that they are right about their beliefs, opinions, and assumptions as you are of yours. However, in the thousands that have been interviewed over some thirty plus years, none have risen anywhere close to dissociation in their autonomy. No one goes into trance. No one forgets who they are. No one surrenders their autonomy simply because they grant autonomy to other emerging potentials. While this is possible, and may happen if a person has a predisposition, anyone can prove to their own satisfaction that the interviewing process of IDL is highly integrative, not deconstructive of self. Paradoxically, listening, and the disidentification with waking identity that it implies, strengthens integration because it defuses internal conflicts that, in their extreme, could spin off into dangerous autonomy if not listened to.

How is it that interviewing an unimportant minor object in a trivial dream can support enlightenment?

The characters that you interview have no “own being.” They are not really what they appear to be. Their identity is a place holder for a certain perspective, viewpoint, world view, and embedded, non-germinated potentials. When you become this or that character you imbue it with your level of development in all four quadrants: your level of consciousness, your values, your world view, your behavioral repretoire, your relationships. Those animate what previously was almost nothing. However, when you do so, the perspective of the character is more or less different than your own. This is because its perspective on life is different from your own. Therefore it almost always represents a “value added” perspective on your life: it has the advantages of knowing you and your reality, because it is you and is part of your reality, but it is more. It sees your reality more or less objectively

Why Interview Emerging Potentials?

Other names for emerging potentials include self-aspects, sub-personalities, roles, symbols, ghosts, demons, gods, extraterrestrials, objects, and people. Any and all forms that you experience in any state of consciousness are considered by IDL to fundamentally be emerging potentials, regardless of whatever else they may be.

To refer to something as a self-aspect is not to negate or ignore its experienced objectivity and autonomy. If I appear in your dream I am probably an aspect of yourself, but it could be that I got bored and wanted to talk and decided to have an out of the body experience. If you meet me on the street, I am probably really me, but all you will know of me are those qualities and characteristics that you project onto me. Therefore I am mostly, in practice, an aspect of yourself, regardless of how objectively real I am. IDL moves beyond the dualism of self vs. other by considering all to be emerging potentials, which is more important, interesting, and helpful than whether it is really part of you or not.

Because everybody and everything that you experience in any state is known only through the mediation of your interpretations and projections, this is the common default position and lowest common denominator of all experienced phenomena. However, when you go to interview an emerging potential you lay this assumption aside as well. you do not know if a dream character is a self-aspect until you ask it. It has three possible responses. It could say it is, it is not, or it is some combination of the two. If you do not believe it, you can ask follow-up questions to see if its testimony is credible. you can check out what it says with peers in the method and with other emerging potentials.

Power sharing with other emerging potentials promotes healing, balancing, and transf?ormation.

It is not surprising that the result of identification with emerging potentials is the incorporation of their competencies into an expanded sense of self. The more that this is done, the less internal conflict exists. The more balance you are likely to experience within your sense of self and in your mirrored external world. All this lays an excellent foundation for your development into the next phase of your personal evolution.

Self-aspect identification is inherently therapeutic because it expands waking identity to include a previously excluded or unrecognized relevant perspective.

Previously excluded perspectives do not have to be disowned or shadow. They can be unrecognized potentials that have never been owned. Therefore, they have never been disowned. They are not “shadow,” because they are relatively enlightened. IDL does not assume that any emerging potential is disowned shadow. It suspends such assumptions in favor of simply listening to how each self-aspect views itself.

A phenomenological approach to dreamwork combined with a sociometric methodology reveals an intrasocial reality.

The interpretations and recommendations of emerging potentials provide subjective sources of objectivity.

Emerging potentials, even if they are people in your waking life or members of the White Brotherhood, are still subjective, to the extent that what you know of them is dependent upon your own framework of meanings. Emerging potentials are autonomous and objective to the extent that they do or say things that are independent of your preferences and expectations. Amazingly, you will find that emerging potentials from your dreams and those that are personifications of your life issues are often more honest, and therefore more “objective,” than real people are.

You share power with other emerging potentials when you become them and when you attempt to apply their recommendations in your waking lives.

You move from the realm of platitudes and conjecture into the realm of lasting transformation when you take the recommendations of your emerging potentials seriously and put them to the test in your waking lives. Not only do you test the method, you increase your trust in yourself, integrate and expand your identity, and speed your development. You transform your self-governance from a waking dictatorship into a consensual democracy.

Respecting and listening to your emerging potentials increases your ability to hear others.

If it is the case that how you treat others is how you treat the part of yourself that they represent, then the corollary is also the case. How you treat your emerging potentials is how you will treat those who personify those same attributes. The more you learn to listen to other aspects of yourself the more likely you are to listen at depth to others, with the result that you will assess their intentions and capabilities more effectively.

IDL Exposes a Hierarchy of Processes in Which Behaviors Transcend and Include Others

Emerging potentials generally are more awake than you are because they represent perspectives that are broader and more inclusive than your own. They are generally more alive than you are because their behavior is not conditioned by the energy available to a physical body. They are generally more balanced than you are because their perspectives are more inclusive than your own. They are generally more detached because they need less than you do. They tend to be more free because they are less dependent on physical senses and resources, feelings, thoughts, money, or the opinions of others than you are. They tend to be clearer than you are because their world view is broader and less complicated. For these reasons, emerging potentials tend to support these processes and your evolution into them, as individuals and as a species. Consequently, it is wise to listen to such emerging potentials. They make more reliable friends and sources of guidance than many people.

IDL Exposes a Hierarchy of Values in Which Qualities Transcend and Include Others

Emerging potentials generally are less afraid and more confident than you are because they do not have to eat and they cannot physically die. They are generally more compassionate because they can take multiple perspectives when you cannot or do not. They are generally more wise because their perspective includes your own as well as theirs. They are generally more accepting because they accept themselves as well as you, while your acceptance of both is often either lacking or conditional. They tend to be more at peace because they generally have more of these core qualities than you do. They tend to witness more of the drama of life than you do because they personify perspectives that transcend and include your own. For these reasons, emerging potentials tend to support these qualities (confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing) and your evolution into them. Consequently, it is wise to listen to such emerging potentials. They make more reliable friends and sources of guidance than many people.

The Six Core Processes and Qualities

[The six core qualities are based on the six parts of every breath.

Whatever self-aspect you become when you meditate, your beingness is anchored in each stage of your breath. This provides an anchor or a touchstone, a place to be at every moment, first in the foreground of your awareness, then in the background, as the beingness of your self-aspect becomes who you are, in the fullness of the six core qualities.

The six core processes are based on observing the six parts of every breath.

You can not only associate each of the six core qualities to a particular part of your breath, as you have seen above, you can associate this or that self-aspect to each part of your breath. This can deepen and broaden the The Sacredual beingness you experience when you meditate.

Emphasize inhalation to become more alert, combat daydreaming and drowsiness.

When you are alert you are not daydreaming or drowsy. You feel alive, focus, and centered. Emphasize your inhalations whenever your thinking becomes fuzzy or aimless when you meditate or want more clarity in your mind.

Emphasize exhalation to amplify relaxation

When you are deeply relaxed you think less and are far less emotional reactive. The sympathetic, or fight and flight, branch of your autonomic nervous system is deactivated while the parasympathetic branch is activated. Emphasize your exhalations whenever you want to calm your mind, not only during meditation but at other times.

Emphasize the pauses to reduce pain.

The pauses between your inhalations and exhalation are spaces of clarity, centeredness, and emptiness. From this perspective you can witness the drama of your life and experience the growing and deepening balance between your inhalations and exhalations. You will become more deeply relaxed while becoming more alert at the same time. You can use them to dissociate yourself from any physical sensation or discomfort, including pain.

Emphasize abdominal inhalation to wake up and build confidence.

If you want to use any part of your breathing to feel more awake and confident, your abdominal inhalation is the natural place to do so. If you need a boost in either as you go through your day, focus on your abdominal inhalation. If you feel sleepy when you meditate, focus on your abdominal inhalation. If you feel doubtful, confused, worried, or scared, emphasize your abdominal inhalation.

Emphasize chest inhalation to feel alive and compassionate.

If you want to use any part of your breathing to feel more alive and compassionate, your chest inhalation is the natural place to do so. If you need a boost in either as you go through your day, focus on your chest inhalation. If you feel lifeless or de-energized when you meditate, focus on your chest inhalation. If you feel self-absorbed or guilty, emphasize your chest inhalation.

Emphasize the pause at the top of the breath to experience balance and expand wisdom.

If you want to use any part of your breathing to feel more balanced and wise, the pause at the top of each breath is the natural place to do so. If you need a boost in either as you go through your day, focus on the pause at the top of each breath. If you feel more mentally alert than relaxed when you meditate, focus on the pause at the top of each breath to bring yourself back in balance. If you feel more relaxed than alert, emphasize the pause at the top of each breath to bring yourself back in balance. If you want to increase your sense of knowingness, of being in the right place at the right time right now, focus on the pause at the top of your breath.

Emphasize chest exhalation to let go and amplify acceptance of yourself and others.

If you want to use any part of your breathing to let go of your preferences and feel greater acceptance, your chest exhalation is the natural place to do so. If you need a boost in detachment from the drama of life and your mind as you go through your day, focus on your chest exhalation. If you feel blaming or self-critical when you meditate, focus on your chest exhalation.

Emphasize abdominal exhalation to amplify inner peace and freedom.

If you want to use any part of your breathing to amplify inner peace and feel a greater sense of freedom, your abdominal exhalation is the natural place to do so. If you feel strung out or trapped by your job, relationship, or life’s pressures, focus on your abdominal exhalation. If you want to deepen your sense of inner peace and freedom when you meditate, focus on your abdominal exhalation.

Emphasize the pause at the bottom of the breath to amplify centeredness and witnessing.

If you want to use any part of your breathing to amplify centeredness and your ability to stand apart from the drama in your life, the pause at the bottom of your breath is the natural place to do so. If you feel scattered or enmeshed in the drama and karma of life or your mind, focus on the pause at the bottom of your breath. If you want to deepen your meditation and cultivate the witness, you could do much worse than to make the pause at the bottom of your breath your ally and support.

Integral Deep Listening cultivates these qualities through repeated identification with emerging potentials that self-score higher in them than you do.

Higher scoring emerging potentials are generally experienced as being more awake in this or that core quality than you are. Whether a self-aspect is Jesus Christ or a toilet brush does not matter; what matters is how fully it discloses the six core qualities. IDL is fundamentally not about this or that emerging potential or this or that state of consciousness; it is about using these identifications and their recommendations to awaken to a fuller expression of the six core processes and qualities, because together they form a working definition of wakefulness and enlightenment.]

Why are there six core processes and qualities? Why not five or seven? What makes them “core?” Why are they “qualities” instead of attributes or states? Why are they invoked in almost every IDL interview?

There are six core qualities because there are six major parts of every breath.

Breath can be observed to have six parts: abdominal inhalation, chest inhalation, the pause at the top of the breath, chest exhalation, abdominal exhalation, and the pause at the bottom of the breath. Observation of breath is said to be the process by which Buddha attained enlightenment. It is your core, observable, stable, physiological process. It has the benefit of being governed by both the central and autonomic nervous systems, meaning that it bridges waking and non-waking control. Because breath is central not only to life but to your interdependence with all forms, breathing is a core human function. Consequently, qualities associated with each of the six stages of the round of breath are core aspects of humanity.

The six parts of the breath can be associated with the round of a day, a year, and the life cycle.

This is done by observing the processes or states associated with each stage of the round of breath. Abdominal inhalation is analogous to waking up, a seed sprouting in the spring, or the fearless spontaneity of a baby. Chest inhalation is analogous to being alive, growing, getting about the day’s work, spring to summer, going to school, finding work, and raising a family. The pause at the top of the breath is analogous to the balance or stability you experience when you have your daily routines flowing smoothly, summer, and when your life ripens into stable, habitual productivity. Chest exhalation is analogous to letting go of the concerns of the day in the evening, after you are through with your day’s work, with autumn, and with retirement. Abdominal exhalation is analogous to going to sleep, to the onset of winter, and to death. The pause at the bottom of the breath is analogous to dream and deep sleep, to winter, and to life after death.

The significance of these analogies is that they integrate the various aspects of your life with every breath and with every IDL interview.

Six core processes can be associated with each stage of the cycle of breath.

These are

abdominal inhalation: awake,

chest inhalation: alive,

the pause at the top of the breath: balanced,

chest exhalation: detached,

abdominal exhalation: free, and

the pause at the bottom of the breath: clear.

Processes are action states while qualities are values. Processes describe external individual and group behaviors; qualities describe internal individual and group values. Processes, or what you do, tend to be generated by qualities, or the values that you hold.

Qualities can be associated with each stage of the cycle of breath.

These are abdominal inhalation: confidence, chest inhalation: compassion, the pause at the top of the breath: wisdom, chest exhalation: acceptance, abdominal exhalation: inner peace, and the pause at the bottom of the breath: witnessing.

Becoming the six core qualities

When you ask a self-aspect about each of the six core qualities you are observing the various aspects of your breath and life from the often novel and insightful perspective of that self-aspect, say a lion. Because you are identifying with that lion, you are amplifying within your consciousness its world view, perspective, and experience of the core qualities. This amplification is a state awareness and does not last, but it does not completely go away either. The expansion, if only occurring during the interview, diminishes thereafter but leaves its mark as a slightly expanded sense of self. This is one reason why it is important to return to the self-aspect during your daily life and become it again and again. We recommend a minimum of 61 seconds a day for at least 22 days. You are amplifying confidence, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing, as core qualities of awakening and enlightenment, within your everyday awareness.

The six core qualities are core aspects of enlightenment.

Enlightened awareness includes fearlessness because, having no body, or self, the sacred cannot die. Therefore, it is not fearful. It is what we would equate with supreme confidence. Enlightened awareness also includes compassion, which transcends and includes love. Love has as its opposites fear and hate while compassion transcends and includes both love and its opposites, fear and hate. Enlightenment also includes omniscience, or wisdom, unconditional acceptance, inner peace, and witnessing. The sacred has other attributes as well. To balance and integrate these will bring us a long way along the road to continuously living in a space of wakefulness.

Are the core qualities real?

IDL does not consider the six core qualities to be ultimately real. Your awareness of them evolves as you develop. In time you transcend them. However, they are real enough on transpersonal levels of development that involve oneness with energy, compassion, and formless witnessing. Work with them to move your sense of self and center of gravity into the transpersonal, and then be prepared to let them go as your wakefulness transcends and includes them.

What is “soul” for IDL?

IDL does not use “soul” to refer not to an eternal reality, but to those emerging potentials that allow for a continuity of existence when you go to sleep, when you become something else in a dream, and when you die. The Buddhist understanding of soul is instructive. Buddhists do not consider the soul to be real or eternal, but merely an aggregation of five interdependent factors, sensation, thought, emotion, perception, and consciousness. Permanent identity places an artificial limit on wakefulness. What looks like permanent identity is more likely a dream-like persona that arises repeatedly in certain contexts. For example, you may have a house as a recurring dream character. Does that mean that the dream house is “real” in the sense that it has a permanent identity independent of you? No; it means that your dream house arises in the context of life issues in which it is useful or appropriate. If you think of your sense of self, or anyone’s sense of self or soul, more along these lines, you will begin to see that permanence is an artifact of context. Change the context and permanence of identity disappears, only to be reanimated at will when you put the same CD back into the player or run the same You Tube video.

There are principles of design associated with each core quality & process

Awake

For IDL, wakefulness is associated with rebirth, enlightenment, and learning to see everything and everyone as a wake-up call, an opportunity to expand and thin your sense of self.

Alive

Aliveness is the opposite of entropy, the second law of thermodynamics, that states that all matter is moving toward randomness, compelled by mindless inertia. Negentropy is another word for evolutionary processes, the building up of increasingly complex structures and processes that possess increasing capabilities for not only awareness but aliveness. IDL examines component holons of this aliveness in the form of dream characters and the personifications of life issues which, in the final analysis, include everything and everyone.

Balanced

A medical and scientific understanding of balance is homeostasis. The advantage of this concept is that it views balance not as the absence of conflict but as a productive balancing of conflicting interests. The atmosphere presses down on us at some 14 pounds per square inch; our cell structures have evolved a structural integrity that pushes back at exactly the same amount. This is not an absence of conflict, but a precise evolutionary balancing of conflict in such a way that higher order structures and processes can be built on top of this conflict. The point is that what many call “shadow,” or internal conflict, does not need to be fought or integrated as much as it needs to be accepted and balanced. Internal conflicts are necessary to build higher order developmental levels. Conflict is your friend; ask, what are the processes and qualities I need to develop to balance this conflict, not irradicate it? We see this same concept in the developmental dialectic. The status quo is not transcended until conflict as antithesis is embraced rather than repressed or ignored. When you fully understand balance you will see that conflict, pain, ambiguity, and confusion are teachers. They are good things, to be respected, listened to, and supported. IDL does so when it takes a conflict, gives it a color, fills the room with that color, watches it congeal into some shape, and then interviews it.

Detached

While the glorification of detachment from one’s senses or sources of life impurity will lead to access of unusual states of consciousness, those are not to be equated with stable higher level development. Detachment is more likely to lead to significant imbalances in development that in turn slow down and fixate growth. These caveats are necessary to state up front because so much of “spirituality” focuses on detachment as a key to enlightenment. IDL emphasizes detachment from your normal waking sense of who you are through identification with emerging potentials that are normally not part of your self sense, like toads or the Eiffel Tower. This sort of detachment is infinitely more valuable than detachment from chocolate, the internet, sex, or any of the other Seven Deadly Sins.

Free

Freedom is another over-emphasized and poorly understood aspect of wakefulness. As Chris Christopherson famously wrote, “Freedom is nothing left to lose.” It is only through limits and confinement that we can recognize freedom in the first place. Ultimate freedom means not only freedom from pain and limit, but freedom from growth, happiness, and love. To understand freedom you must first learn to experience it as your projection onto your circumstances rather than as a valid definition of circumstances themselves. Circumstances are neither free nor imprisoning; you get to choose how much of one or the other you are going to experience in your present circumstances. That’s freedom! When you do IDL interviews you will regularly run into emerging potentials that are simply not defined and confined by circumstances that you are. You will experience relative freedom when you take on their persona and look at the world from their perspective. If you want to experience freedom, do IDL interviewing and learn to become this or that emerging potential in confining life circumstances.

Clear

Clarity is a way of describing a space of unmanifest potential that is empty of mental, emotional, or structural forms of any kind. Consequently, it has also been called “empty,” but in the sense that a plenum is empty or the universe, which is full mostly of dark matter, is empty. Think of this clarity as luminous, like the interior of a diamond, or like the night sky. Think of it as overflowing with unstructured aliveness, rather like a fish oblivious to the water in which it swims or ourselves, generally oblivious to the sea of air in which we “swim” and constantly take in and expire. IDL uses identification with emerging potentials that score high in witnessing as a way to access and amplify this core characteristic of enlightenment in our everyday mind.

Confidence

If you were not afraid of getting hurt or dying, would it change how you lived your life? Of course it would. The immediate objection is that without such limits you would become a narcissistic, grandiose control freak who would run over the rights and interests of everyone else. But suppose that you not only were not afraid, but were mature enough to not misuse that fearlessness? What then? Certainly you would be willing to take more risks and relax into your life. You would learn faster because you would be willing to make more mistakes. You would grow faster because you would be that much more involved, engaged with life.

Compassion

If how you treat others is how you are treating that aspect of yourself they represent, you won’t be loving or compassionate because you are expected to be or because that’s how you learned to be. You would be that way because first, it was the only rational thing to do, and secondly, because it made you feel good. In this sense, compassion is both selfless yet acting in one’s own self interest. The dichotomy between these two disappears.

Wisdom

Socrates was said to be the wisest man in Greece because “he knew that he didn’t know.” Similarly, when you grasp truth, you understand that there is no Truth, but only continuously broadening moments of greater knowingness. These provide increasing opportunities for humility, because they serve as constant reminders of how little you do know and how much more there is to know.

Acceptance

Acceptance is not a passive allowing of whatever happens to happen. It is rather an ability to place value not on preferences, likes and dislikes, but on the simple presence of what comes up within and without. Without the dictatorship of your preferences you can allow everything to be whatever it chooses to be and respond in kind. Preferences still exist, but attachment to them does not.

At Peace

Peace is another quality of wakefulness that is commonly misunderstood as the absence of conflict, stress, thought, or emotion. But how can you have peace if you are continuously on guard against the possibility of invasion by these qualities? Clearly, peace must transcend and include conflict, stress, thought, and emotion. It must be a space in which you do all these things but without a disturbance to your equanimity. Wouldn’t that be amazing? Peace involves the toleration of ambiguity in preferences, ideas, feelings, relationships, roles, truth, and love.

Witnessing

While witnessing during the practice of meditation is the cultivation of objectivity, witnessing during waking life is an interplay between identification and objectivity. You must identify with a role or a task to complete it well, yet you will do it even better if you can watch yourself in that role or while you are completing that task. First you learn to watch yourself; then you learn to watch yourself watching yourself. Then you learn to watch yourself from various other perspectives – others, objects, emerging potentials. This is polyperspectivalism, a type of witnessing that allows you to both become and watch at the same time.

Generating personifications of life issues

A waking life issue is a concern, challenge, or opportunity. You interview the personification of a life issue in order to access one or more perspectives that will help you heal, balance, and transform your life. The interviewing process is meant to mimic the dream creation process. When you go to sleep you take the concerns, feelings, thoughts, and intentions of your previous day into your sleep and dreams. These combine with the priorities of other aspects of ourself to generate dreams. (This is an interior collective theory of dream creation. There are other theories from the perspectives of other quadrants.) You mimic that process when you interview life issues.

Dreams are assumed by IDL to begin with intention, such as avoiding failure, generally a mixture of waking hopes and fears (a hope to avoid failure but a fear you won’t), inner, unrecognized hopes and fears (desires to please the parents in your head and a fear you won’t), and the perspectives of emerging potentials that for one reason or another have an investment in that particular issue. Intentions take form first as feelings, then as interacting images that convey or represent the circumstances of the intention. If it is a hope, images that personify that hope are generated. If it is a conflict, images that personify that conflict are generated. Following this example, IDL takes an intention, the resolution of a life issue, and identifies the core feeling or feelings that it evokes. When you turn the feeling into a color or colors you are giving your feeling form in an abstract sense. Surrounding yourself with that color is designed to amplify its presence in your awareness so that you feel it strongly, increasing the likelihood that when you watch it swirl, congea, and condense into a form, mimicking the dream creation process, that something will spontaneously arise.

The sacred does not differentiate between dreaming and life as a dream. Therefore one can interview personifications of waking life issues to equal effect as interviewing dream characters.

You can check out this principle for yourself by conducting interviews on both dreams and life issues and then compare the results. What you are most likely to discover is that both are excellent ways of accessing perspectives that help you wake up. From the perspective of interviewed emerging potentials, there is no distinction between waking and dream reality.

Meditation and IDL

For IDL, meditation is not thinking, feeling, imaging, sensing, or going into an altered state of consciousness. It is witnessing all of these things. There is not only nothing wrong with any of these activities; meditation typically makes use of all of them to leverage you out of your identification with them. Nevertheless, while they are helpful tools and processes, they are not meditative awareness itself. IDL is designed to help you to understand, appreciate, and use this distinction to enhance your meditation.

Meditation has huge benefits for body, mind, and the sacred.

Meditation has been shown to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke, improve the immune system, improve concentration, work and school performance, reduce worry and emotional lability, and strengthen the six core qualities. Your emerging potentials are typically in a meditative state of consciousness; when you access them you not only experience such states but integrate them into your waking sense of who you are.

You have access to countless emerging potentials that are meditating right now.

Who can best teach you how to meditate? If meditation is primarily about cultivating the witness, wouldn’t you want to learn from someone who scored ten on a scale of zero to ten in witnessing? If meditation is about cultivating inner peace and wisdom, how about learning from someone who scored ten on a scale of zero to ten in inner peace and wisdom? What if they also scored tens in acceptance, compassion, and confidence? What if this teacher knew you better than anyone else possibly could? What if you had access to an endless number of such teachers, do you think you might learn a thing or two about meditation? This is what makes IDL meditation superior as an approach to meditation. It is not meant to replace the creativity and objectivity of teachers of meditation, but to speed your practice by accessing your inner compass as a way to direct the integration of those teachings in your life.

By accessing emerging potentials you gain direct experience of what it means to meditate.

What if you had the ability to actually merge with those teachers, to experience what it was like to be them when they mediate, do you think that might help you learn to meditate? This is what IDL offers – your own personal access to meditational instruction that is tailor made for you and that you will never outgrow. It will always teach you the next step you need.

Meditation enhances IDL.

Meditation is high-octane fuel for your emerging potentials. It helps heal your imbalanced, low-scoring ones, it helps balance your various lines of development, and it strengthens the influence of important potentials personified by this or that high-scoring self-aspect.

Meditation amplifies the six core qualities,particularly the “night” qualities.

Meditation is especially effective at enhancing your ability to witness, or to watch the drama of your life go by without getting caught up in it, and in deepening your sense of inner peace. You will also grow in your acceptance of yourself and others, your wisdom, compassion, and your confidence.

Meditation is “thanatomimetic.”

In order to be reborn you have to die. Meditation is practice at dying. The more profoundly you die when you meditate the more seeds of rebirth you plant. IDL is one form of dying to self, since you have to lay down your waking identity in order to pick up another identity. Meditation speeds up this process by providing another powerful way of dying to yourself.

Your difficulty meditating springs from your addiction to your thoughts, images, sensations, feelings, and to zoning out through drowsiness or trance.

The easiest way to break these addictions is to first identify and then practice becoming emerging potentials that are not addicted. They will show you how.

Your difficulty meditating springs from your addiction to your ongoing baseline of activation.

Smokers are addicted to maintaining a certain amount of nicotine in their bloodstream. High stress individuals are addicted to maintaining a certain intensity of thought, feeling, and action. Overeaters are addicted to certain feelings of comfort when they are eating and feeling full. Lonely people are addicted to the need for companionship. If you continue to do, feel, and think those things that feed your addiction you will stay addicted. If you become emerging potentials that are not addicted, you will naturally outgrow your addictions.

IDL enhances meditation

Emerging potentials that score high on the six core qualities are awake and relatively enlightened. They are, relative to you, in a state of meditation. When you become emerging potentials that are naturally in a meditative state you experience what it is like to be in a meditative state, if only for a short period of time. The more that you do this the more you gradually grow into a habitual dwelling in that state of mind.

IDL amplifies the six core qualities

The six core qualities are markers of enlightenment, one of the major reasons to meditate. By amplifying these six core qualities in your consciousness through IDL you are amplifying meditative consciousness.

The six core processes are based on observing the six parts of every breath

Emphasize inhalation to become more alert, combat daydreaming and drowsiness

Emphasize exhalation to amplify relaxation

Emphasize the pauses to reduce pain.

Emphasize abdominal inhalation to wake up and build confidence

Emphasize chest inhalation to feel alive and compassionate

Emphasize the pause at the top of the breath to experience balance and expand wisdom

Emphasize chest exhalation to let go and amplify acceptance of yourself and others

Emphasize abdominal exhalation to amplify inner peace and freedom

Emphasize the pause at the bottom of the breath to amplify centeredness and witnessing.

Integral Deep Listening cultivates these qualities through repeated identification with emerging potentials that self-score higher in them than you do

IDL turns meditation from a practice into an ongoing state of consciousness

As you grow into the six core qualities gradually, organically over a period of months, your awareness becomes more meditative. It takes on many of the qualities that define a meditative consciousness, blurring the distinction between sitting practice and everyday mind. The goal, of course, is for there to be no difference, for the meditative mind you can access in effective meditation to be your everyday mind. Meditative practice generally leads development. You use it to anchor your awareness in broader definitions of what it means to expand and include. Then you use your waking life to anchor that new breadth in more effective practical action.

IDL reduces your addiction to your thoughts

The more that you identify with emerging potentials that identify more with being than the doingness of thinking, feeling, and other forms of doing, the less addicted to your thoughts and feelings you become. You still think and have feelings, but they no longer define who you are, nor do they keep you awake at night or tug at you to give them attention.

IDL reduces your baseline of activation

You are probably much more reactive mentally and emotionally than you either need to be or than is good for you. For example, you probably think you need to be more fearful or cautious than you need to be. But how do you learn that it is safe to let go of fears that have seemed useful in the past? Becoming emerging potentials that are good at letting it all go will slowly but surely ease you into doing the same.

IDL turns the mundane into the sacred

Would you like your life to be filled with a sense of magical wonder? Would you like to feel thankful, appreciative, and prosperous all the time regardless of how much stuff you have? Would you like to feel as if every breath you take is precious and sacred? Would you like to be able to laugh at yourself and the drama of life more? The six core qualities provide a foundation for the emergence of a sense of transparency, which means that you no longer feel that life is about you. Life events affect you much less. You will also feel an increasing sense of joy at the crazy wisdom of life. All of these are elements of the sacred, and they will grow within you the more that you practice IDL.

IDL Provides a Structure for Finding and Directing Your Integral Life Practice

You need methods that allow you to find and sign on to your own vision of who you are and where you are going, and to do it in a way that is universal enough so that it resonates with others. Facebook is an easy but more superficial way of doing that. Open Forums are a more difficult but less superficial way of doing that. Developing an Integral Life Practice is a personal way of doing so. Integral Deep Listening, as a structure for finding and directing one’s integral life practice, is designed to generate an ILP that grows as you grow.

What does an IDL ILP look like?

Students of IDL are taught to identify five year, one year, six month, and one month life goals in the following life areas: health, nutrition, exercise, career, education, family, love relationship, leisure, money, spiritual development, and sex. They then contemplate what it would feel like to fail at attaining these goals. They give that feeling or those feelings a color or colors, fill the room with them, and watch them congeal into a form, which they then interview. What they are doing is getting a consult from an aspect of their inner compass on their priorities. Why do so? How do you know that your priorities reflect those of your inner compass? Do you want to pursue goals that do not reflect the priorities of your inner compass? Wouldn’t that expose you to unnecessary and counterproductive inner conflict that would tend to sabotage your pursuit of your goals? Aren’t you likely to experience less resistance to your integral life practice if you are pursuing it in a way that reflects the priorities of your inner compass?

Personal development is best pursued by waking identity setting goals and submitting them to evaluation by trusted and respected emerging potentials.

It is not enough to set valuable and important goals, like stopping smoking or losing weight or exercising more, in the assumption that these goals support your highest good and that therefore you will be supported by God and all the angels in heaven. God and all the angels in heaven may have other priorities, but you won’t know that until you ask. If you don’t, you are just assuming. When you ask you are likely to find that your emerging potentials have a different agenda. It is not that they disagree with your goals; it is that they have other priorities. If you remain ignorant of them or choose to ignore them, then you are working on different priorities than your inner self. Is that more or less likely to provide you with the support you assume you are getting? Is it more or less likely to get you to your goal?

Practice Triangulation

Decisions are best when they take into account three perspectives: those of waking identity, using its best common sense; those of trusted and respected others; and those of high scoring emerging potentials. This is referred to in IDL as “triangulation.” Decision making becomes like a three-legged stool. You need all three sources of verification. Without any of them you no longer have a stool; you have firewood. Most people depend on only one, the opinions of others, whether they be parents, church authorities, bosses, spouses, or elected officials. Some have developed enough self-reflection to add common sense as a second criteria. Very few use the third: consultations with high scoring members of their intrasocial community.

Community

Waking identity rarely consults its broader intrasocial community.

This is either because you lack the necessary skill set or you have other priorities. You think you manage your life just fine without having to take the time to listen to emerging potentials. You are not convinced that anything of real value to yourself and your life will come that will justify the time and effort. After all, aren’t you only wasting time listening to imaginary fabrications of your own consciousness?

This is a question that is asked in almost every interview. “Character, why should I listen to you if you are simply a product of my own imagination?” The answer is generally something like, “Do you score as high as I do in these qualities of enlightenment that you seek?” “I am more awake than you are, that’s why.”

When you consult your broader intrasocial community you move from a waking autocracy or dictatorship to a consensual, democratic form of self-governance. The result is the same as is found in waking political structures: the potentials of a state as a whole are enhanced when the competencies and abilities of its individual members are enhanced.

You need to move from a totalitarianism built around the desires and perspectives of waking identity to a consensual democracy built around power sharing with other emerging potentials.

The common model of self-governance at this stage of our evolution as a species is autocratic. We think consciousness revolves around our waking preferences and world view. Our common way of looking at ourselves is not only narcissistic and grandiose but autocratic and dictatorial. How could it be otherwise if we do not acknowledge the existence of other emerging potentials, much less take the time to listen to them? The consequences are the same for internal development as they are for authoritarian societies: safety and stability are gained at the cost of growth and innovation. You are comfortably in control, but stifling your own development. The future of human evolution is through something like IDL interviewing.

The best way to turn experiences of higher states into a stable higher stage of development is to practice consistently identifying with emerging potentials that are already stabilized at a higher stage.

You do this when you read over an interview before sleep and become this or that interviewed emerging potential; you do this when you become the character at specified times in your waking life, such as when you get angry or scared or when you are giving a speech or procrastinating or about to indulge your addiction, whether it is smoking, drinking, sex, computer, TV, drama, arguing, or blaming.

Other people are best approached as if they were characters in your waking dream.

When you assume that the people in your life are characters in your waking dream you are taking responsibility for the fact that you don’t really know who they are. You are allowing yourself to be comfortable with the fact that your assumptions about who they are and what they are doing are largely delusional if not profoundly mistaken. Consequently, you are more likely to ask questions instead of assuming you know, just as you are taught to do in the IDL interviewing process. You are taught to suspend judgment about why the world is as it is and why people do and say what they do. You are also more likely to listen instead of react. You are more likely to stay out of the Drama Triangle and to first recognize and then outgrow your cognitive distortions.

As you treat others you are treating that part of yourself that they most closely personify.

If all you know of me are the assumptions, values, and perceptions that you project onto me, then I am basically an aspect of yourself inhabiting your waking dream. However, you can interview me as an aspect of yourself and re-own those qualities that you project onto me. As a result, you are likely to project less and listen more. You have a chance of hearing something other than the echo of your own biases being validated.

Your havitual waking interpretations are best suspended in favor of the interpretations of various interviewed emerging potentials.

You are constantly talking to yourself, analyzing words and situations and coming up with interpretations. If this worked, you wouldn’t be stuck. It is not that waking interpretation is not useful, only that it is partial. You need other tools. But to pick up another tool, say a screwdriver, you first have to stop using that hammer in your hand. In order to benefit from IDL you have to lay down the hammer of your waking identity so you can pick up the screwdriver of getting fully into role and staying there for the duration of the interview. Other emerging potentials are pliars, drills, and plumber’s friends. Whatever tool the situation calls for you have at your disposal.

People who think they are “integral” tend to be at a mid to late prepersonal level of development in relationship to their intrasocial community.

You may be (but probably aren’t) at a high transpersonal level in relationship to the development of your self line. However, even if you are, that says nothing about your level of development in relationship to your own intrasocial community, the 90{be93f16b5d2e768a85ea81ebc8356f268811d3908838ae6233aa33d012b25ec9} of your iceberg self of which you take “core samples” when you do IDL interviews. Chances are, even if you are a lucid dreamer and can stay awake while you are dreaming and deeply asleep, that you are still only at late prepersonal in your level of development in relationship to the developmental arc of your larger, intrasocial self. Maintaining lucidity in dreams is equivalent to the main task of late prepersonal development: awakening to a sense of self. It is not any more than that. To develop beyond that, one needs to be an awake member of their dream groups, which means not just being awake or meditating in your dreams. It means talking to your emerging potentials while you are dreaming, understanding and fitting into the group dynamics, and working to carry out the group’s agenda both while dreaming and in your waking life. Do you do this? Do you know of any enlightened masters who have done this or who currently do this? If not, this is strongly implies that regardless of the level of self-line development, waking identity of the most advanced spiritual masters is only at late prepersonal (at best) in relationship to intrasocial evolution. Most of the rest of us are at low to mid-prepersonal from an intrasocial perspective. In other words, we have yet to begin to wake up in the dream realm.

Consequences

Whoever you are, regardless of your degree of development, you have the same basic set of challenges to address. You get to figure out how to relate to your body, your mind, others, and the world. What IDL is designed to do is continuously increase your tool set for addressing these life challenges. It does so by generating more sources of support, strengthening your confidence that you are on a life path that reflects the priorities of your inner compass, providing powerful strategies for problem solving, and progressively thinning your sense of self so that you are less in your own way. The result of all this is an integration of the sacred and the profane, of the spiritual and the secular, of inner and outer. Here are three qualities in particular by which to evaluate your growth.

Abundance

Abundance is much more than the absence of scarcity. It is also much more than the absence of the Drama Triangle. The cultivation of fearless confidence as you awaken out of who you are not, compassion as you share your aliveness with your greater self, wisdom as you realize that as you treat others you are treating those aspects of yourself that they represent, growing acceptance of both yourself and others, deepening peace of mind, and the ability to stand back and witness the drama of your life create an experience of abundance that is independent of your physical circumstances, others, and your health.

Think about what your life would be like if you had a consistent, strong sense of the abundance of life. What would be different? It wouldn’t mean that you were blind to scarcity or deprivation, only that they would no longer define or limit your life or your appreciation of living. It wouldn’t be so much a matter of thereby attracting abundance into your life, because you wouldn’t be experiencing a lack of it in the first place. So you wouldn’t be focusing on abundance in order to not experience scarcity; you would not experience scarcity because what would be the overwhelming reality for you would be abundance.

Cosmic Humor

As you continue to become emerging potentials that score higher than you do in core qualities of wakefulness your sense of self thins out. It becomes more transparent. This is because your emerging potentials, while having strong preferences and autonomous world views, have no permanent self like you may think you do. The more transparent you become, the more humorous become all thoughts, feelings, and actions that support the existence of an illusory self. It is not that you or life becomes any less important; in fact, the opposite is the case. What makes living important is abundance, cosmic humor, and luminosity for their own sake, because they reveal the sacred in the present moment.

Imagine for a moment that regardless of what happened you didn’t personalize it; you didn’t make it about you. How would that change your world? Imagine that in addition to not personalizing life you viewed your natural tendency to do so as humorous. What difference might that make? Again, do not imagine that this is a trivialization of life or a minimizing of the reality of pain, suffering, or genuine tragedy. Instead, think of it as freeing you up to act with more compassion and involvement, because you are helping yourself to get free, to wake up.

Luminosity

When unlimited potential is experienced as clear and empty, it also has a luminosity that places mundane, everyday experience somewhere on the far side of rich. Neither being nor non-being, it is the ground out of which both arise. This luminosity speaks to the quality of the moment, like a great wine or fine chocolate, cute child or playful dog. Everything becomes inherently rich, and moreso all the time.

Consider for a moment how your life might be different if each moment had such a deeply satisfying sense of pleasurable richness, simply for being what it is, nothing else. Would it turn you into a useless, unmotivated slug, indulgent in the pleasure of each moment? While some may fear such an outcome, the exact opposite is what actually occurs. You seize each moment with an open hand and open heart, accepting whatever fear, sadness, anger, puzzlement, or confusion might arise. These things never go away, but your attachment to them does. They are part of the luminous, playful, abundance of your rich life.

Evolution

The story of human development to this point is largely about humans developing a conscious awareness of themselves, mostly mediated by language. With that knowledge come decisions about whether your actions are congruent with your newly formed self-image or not. “Does this outfit match my shoes?” “Is my personality likeable?” “Did I screw up?” “How am I doing?” Such concerns were not, and could not be, issues before you developed a self-sense, as can be observed in young children and most animals. Humans are now in the process of fleshing out the entirety of the arc of self development, from unconscious prepersonal to conscious witnessing as transpersonal causal and non-dual awareness. This is evolution by and for the self, meaning waking awareness.

The prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal stages described by Wilber are primarily descriptions of the evolution of waking identity.

By and large your conception of your past, present, and future development is a picture painted by your waking awareness and that of innumerable prior generations. For the most part, it does not take into account the perspectives and priorities of emerging potentials. There are important exceptions. Muses, channelings, meditation, drugs, and revelations are traditional and powerful ways that humans have gotten in touch with emerging potentials, However, the priority of humanity has been to build a strong sense of self and see the world in terms of its needs so that the self is safe, productive, and comfortable in the world.

A broader description uses the developmental dialectic of thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

Prepersonal, personal, and transpersonal stages are built around the evolution of the self line, which integrates the other lines, including cognitive, moral, emotional, aesthetic, kinesthetic, communicative, empathetic, and the spiritual. The developmental dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis is not built around the self line. you see it demonstrated in the Dream Sociograms created by the patterns of preference of intrasocial groups that are not centered on waking identity (the self line).

Evolution beyond identification with waking identity is not merely transpersonal consciousness; it represents an entirely new cycle in the evolution of consciousness.

While stages of unfolding will continue once the self is made transparent through causal and non-dual stabilization, it will most likely be mediated by a dialectic meditated by the larger self, of which waking identity will contribute one perspective and one pattern of preferences. This larger self sense is an intrasocially mediated, polycentric self-sense that is revealed by the sociometric method and the IDL interviewing process.

IDL, particularly Dream Sociometry, provides a foreshadowing of what that future evolution may look like. It is polycentric, with growth tending toward those perspectives that transcend and include all preferences. Dream Consciousness, the part of your greater identity that creates your dreams, is the perspective that is most likely to create such non-preferential preferences. It is further assumed that this will be a moving target: regardless of how transparent your identity becomes, no matter how unified your intrasocial society becomes, there will always exist voices that are more identified with preferences in relationship to those which are less so. There will be stages or levels of unfoldment of the intrasocial self, just as there are for waking identity. I have speculated about some of these in Dream Yoga and the Evolution of Consciousness.

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