Thread: What are you reading?

I just started reading The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep by Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche and Mark Dahlby. It includes practical applications for lucid dreaming, very exciting to me!

Spoiler for Bits of the book and "THE FOUR FOUNDATIONAL PRACTICES:

In Tibet, new leather skins are put in the sun and rubbed with butter to
make them softer. The practitioner is like the new skin, tough and hard with
narrow views and conceptual rigidity. The teaching (dharma*) is like the butter,
rubbed in through practice, and the sun is like direct experience; when both are
applied the practitioner becomes soft and pliable. But butter is also stored in
leather bags. When butter is left in a bag for some years, the leather of the bag
becomes hard as wood and no amount of new butter can soften it. Someone
who spends many years studying the teachings, intellectualizing a great deal
with little experience of practice, is like that hardened leather. The teachings
can soften the hard skin of ignorance and conditioning, but when they are stored
in the intellect and not rubbed into the practitioner with practice and warmed
with direct experience, that person may become rigid and hard in his
intellectual understanding. Then new teachings will not soften him, will not
penetrate and change him. We must be careful not to store up the teachings as
only conceptual understanding lest that conceptual understanding becomes a
block to wisdom. The teachings are not ideas to he collected, but a path to be
followed.



THE FOUR FOUNDATIONAL PRACTICES

Changing the Karmic Traces
Throughout the day, continuously remain in the awareness that all experience is
a dream. Encounter all things as objects in a dream, all events as events in a
dream, all people as people in a dream. Envision your own body as a
transparent illusory body. Imagine you are in a lucid dream during the entire
day. Do not allow these reminders to be merely empty repetition. Each time you
tell yourself, "This is a dream," actually become more lucid. Involve your body
and your senses in becoming more present.

Removing Grasping and Aversion
Encounter all things that create desire and attachment as the illusory, empty,
luminous phenomena of a dream. Recognize your reactions to phenomena as a
dream; all emotions, judgments, and preferences are being dreamed up. You can
be certain that you are doing this correctly if immediately upon remembering
that your reaction is a dream, desire and attachment lessen.

Strengthening Intention
Before going to sleep, review the day and reflect on how the practice has been.
Let memories of the day arise and recognize them as memories of dream.
Develop a strong intention to be aware in the coming night's dreams. Put your
whole heart into this intention and pray strongly for success.

Cultivating Memory and Joyful Effort
Begin the day with the strong intention to maintain the practice. Review the
night, developing happiness if you remembered or were lucid in your dreams.
Recommit yourself to the practice, with the intention to become lucid if you
were not, and to further develop lucidity if you were. At any time during the
day or evening it is good to pray for success in practice. Generate as strong an
intention as possible. This is the key to the practice.