A few years ago I came across a book called Lucid Living by Timothy Freke. It’s a tiny but powerful book that you can read in one sitting. The purpose of the book is to unlock an ultra awake state within you that is similar to lucid dreaming.
Lucid living is becoming aware that your life is also a dream that is being dreamed by one collective energy known as “awareness”. I know it sounds crazy and a little bit like the matrix but once I finished the book, I felt like everything the author said really resonated with me.
The book is broken down into seven insights that slowly present the idea that life is not what you think it is. By the end of the book your head might possibly explode, but it is definitely worth the read. Let’s start off with covering his first insight.
Life is a mystery
If you honestly think about it, our entire life is truly a mystery. We’ve spent thousands of years trying to figure out what the purpose of life is but we still haven’t found a concrete answer.
Most religions try to give us the answer but how do we really know if it’s all true? The only thing we know for sure is that we are born and then we die. The universe is so massive and it’s literally impossible for a human to understand the true meaning behind it all.
The author also mentions that so many of us go through life acting like we know exactly what’s happening when we don’t. We never question anything around us until we experience something like falling in love, a close encounter with death or even an experience with a psychedelic drug.
The thing that made me question everything was when I first discovered my hidden ability to control my dreams. When I was young, I thought dreams were something that just happened to us and we couldn’t control them. I never knew there was such a thing as lucid dreaming. That made me realize that you can’t always believe what you’ve been told.
The overall message from this insight is that you should take the time to become conscious of your surroundings and question your reality! Everything you’ve been told growing up might not be true at all and it’s up to you to uncover the truth. Now let’s move on to the second insight.
Now is all you know
Every night when you go to sleep and start dreaming, things aren’t what they seem. We get so caught up in our dreams that we think they are actually happening in real time. It’s only when you wake up in the morning that you realize those events weren’t actually happening at all.
This same thing can be said about our waking lives. We are so engrossed in our waking life acting like we know what’s happening but we have no clue what’s going on. The only thing any of us can be sure of is what we’re experiencing right now. Even our own past memories can’t be trusted because our memory is fallible according to the author.
We can’t be absolutely sure about anything we’ve heard in regards to the meaning of life when we were growing up. There is no way to 100% prove that those beliefs are true or else there wouldn’t be so many different beliefs and religions.
Many things humans believed from back in the day have changed over time based on new discoveries. What if everything we believe right now is changed by a discovery in the future and people look back on our beliefs now and laugh? Why couldn’t that be possible?
The only thing none of us can question is our experience of the present moment. The author encourages the reader to really examine their lives by paying to attention to what they are experiencing right now. If this doesn’t make sense to you right now don’t worry, it’s kind of a lot to digest but it will make sense in the end. Now let’s move onto the third insight.
You are not a person
That sounds pretty insane but just think about this for a second. When you’re dreaming, you appear to be a character inside of a dream. But that is only your “apparent identity”. It’s not who you really are at all. It’s your awareness that is dreaming the dream. Your physical body is lying in your bed while your awareness moves around in the dream world.
This exact same concept can be applied to our waking life. There is likely an awareness controlling this body while it hangs out in a completely different realm. When we refer to ourselves we say that we have a body and a mind. Our body ages and our minds become sharper over time.
But there is something in us that remains the same from when we are a child up until we die. It is our awareness. Awareness is in the constant background of all our experiences. Right now we are an awareness witnessing a flow of different experiences.
This would be called our “permanent essential identity”. In the flow of everything we experience, we appear to be a specific person with a name and a race. That is called our “apparent identity” but it is not who we really are. It’s just who we temporarily appear to be.
When we dream, the person we are when we are awake disappears from our awareness and we become a new person in a different dream world. Our essential identity always remains the same but our apparent identity changes every single night!
It’s only when we have a lucid dream that we realize we’re the dreamer witnessing the dream. The main message that the author is trying to tell us here is that in order to live lucidly, we have to apply the same concepts to our waking lives . We have to realize that we are awareness witnessing this ever changing moment and that we are not actually people at all. Now we move onto the fourth insight.
The world exists within you
In our dreams, we appear to be a dream persona in a dream world. But like he mentioned earlier, we are actually an awareness and the entire dreamworld exists within us. In waking life, we appear to be human beings but we are an awareness and the life-dream exists inside of us. Let’s take a minute to answer some basic questions about our existence.
Right now we are experiencing our thoughts and the world of the senses, we can all agree on that right? We all think that our thoughts exist within our own awareness and the worlds exists independently. But how can that be the case? The author explains here that if we actually pay attention to what is happening right now, we will see that we experience the world as a series of sensations.
There are visual images, tactile feelings, background sounds and ambient aromas. All of these experiences have to exist within awareness. Every single thing we are aware of exists inside of awareness or else we would not be aware of it at all. Awareness is mentioned many times throughout this book but what is it exactly? The author describes it as this:
“Awareness isn’t something within your experience. It is an emptiness that contains all that your are experiencing”.
We all appear to have physical bodies in this world but we are still an awareness and the world exists inside of us. You know what’s even crazier? None of us actually exist inside of time. We witness the flow of time through our awareness but our awareness is outside of time. Time is a man made construct and awareness doesn’t abide by time at all.
To put it in simple terms, there is one big massive energy that is having an experience through each and every one of us. We are all one being and not separate like we think. This is what the fifth insight will go into more detail about.
All is one
We all trick ourselves into thinking that we are only one of the characters in our nightly dreams But in actuality, every single thing inside that dream is being imagined by one dreaming awareness. This same thing can be said about our waking lives. We all appear to be separate, but we are actually different characters being imagined by one awareness. That is who we really are.
The author then asks the reader to think about the answer to two questions which are:
1. Do all humans have different mental and physical characteristics from each other ?
2. Is our essential identity as humans any different even though we don’t share the same mental and physical characteristics?
The answer the first question would have to be yes because all humans are different in some way. None of us look exactly the same or think the exact same way.
The answer to the second question would have to be yes because our essential identity is awareness and we all experience life the same way. Our physical bodies are all born into this world and then they die, this is true for everyone. As awareness we are all one in the same despite our differences in looks and beliefs.
We are just experiencing the world from different perspectives. Now onto the fifth insight.
You are a paradox
Our identity is truly paradoxical. We are the source of life and we imagine ourselves to be a specific person within life. As long as we continue to look at ourselves as separate from everything around us, we will continue to remain unconscious. The author says that ability to lucid live can only happen when you become conscious of your paradoxical nature.
In order for that to happen, there are a few core beliefs that need to be changed. The first belief is that we are a human being living within a world. But the truth is we are an awareness and the world exists within us. The second belief is that we appear to be a person in time.
But we are actually a permanent presence witnessing the ever changing flow of appearances. The third belief is that we are separate are all separate from one another. But we are actually an awareness experiencing existence from a particular point of view.
Lucid living makes you feel truly empowered because you realize that you have the power of the entire universe moving you forward in life. Everything we experience in life is showing us something about who we really are just like in a dream.
We are continuously dreaming up new situations that will give us the opportunity to become more conscious. Lucid living will make you engage with your life in a completely different way. You will be excited to find more ways to awaken to who you really are. However, there is one final piece to living life lucid and it is the final insight.
Being one is loving all
Now we reach the final insight and this is what really ties everything together. This insight is all about love and how we need to look at it differently. Typically we only love people who are in are immediate circle. It could be your family, friends or a significant other.
But when you come to the understanding that we are all one, that’s when you can experience love without any limits. The massive illusion of separateness leads to nothing but suffering and selfishness. When conflicts happen in our daily lives, it is never between us and someone else. It is always us against ourselves.
If you hurt someone, you are only hurting yourself. This is why lucid living is so important. It will make you stop and think about how you should treat other people who come into your life. If you live your life showing love to anyone and everything around you, you will experience nothing but love in this waking dream. This is a short but powerful insight that made perfect sense to me.
It always goes back to the old saying that you should treat others how you want to be treated. It’s really that simple. All of the insights mentioned in the book had quite a big impact on how I looked at everything in life. I really think that if everyone adopted the idea of lucid living, it could change the entire world for the better. If you get a chance to check out his book, let me know your thoughts in the comments.
