My mind won't be quiet!!!

When I attempt WILDs, My inner monologue won't be quiet or I drift off into something other than doing a WILD.

Can anyone give me a way to keep myself focus? Thanks

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i would work on meditation. just try to calm your mind, don't force anything. what usually happens to me is the inner monologue breaks down and slowly fades.

Why silence the inner monologue? When the dream begin to develop, you aren't going to be able to maintain your focus AND succeed. The nature of the process simply won't allow it. Also, meditation that requires you to quiet your mind DOES have its place, but it is not in lucid dreaming. Meditating to be aware is better suited for lucid dreaming, because that would help prepare you to consciously observe the falling asleep process and enter the dream consciously rather than TRYING to induce something to happen. Trying too hard, which is easy (weird right?), is bound to send you spiraling to failure. So instead, work on consciously observing your thoughts, feelings (emotional and physical), and enjoying the process with no regard for where it may take you. Allow yourself to be distracted, but be aware of the distraction.

Your consciousness needs to become a leaf; floating to and fro, wherever the breeze takes it, with no concern for the final resting place. Just enjoy the flow of the mind.

I got that alot... Everytime I WILD it just won't shut up! What I do is just sleep. Not sleep completely but I sleep for a minute but my concious wake up. This makes the colour kicks in. And my mind is completely blurred out.

Let me try explaining this more... It seems confusing.

So basically you sleep you feel like you are sleep other than relaxing and closing your eyes your mind has that sleeping feeling... but remind you mind that you are looking black blur. and look at it. and sleep. but always concentrate and one point.

There is a great book I have started to read called dream yourself awake. It explains meditation techniques to both relax yourself and increase awareness... the dual goal for WILDS. I think it might help.

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You need to meditate and breathe. Get a tape that has benoural beats to help you relax. Its easy within a week you can relax, fall asleep and dream.

The mind is naturally noisy. Don't let this upset you. Instead, accept that this is the nature of mind. When it comes to WILDs do a little meditation by focusing on one thing only. If you find yourself getting lost in other thoughts, simply and gently bring your attention back to the thing you were focusing on in the first place. The mind will have a tendency to get lost but bring your focus back as many times as it takes with patience and without expecting any results. Before you know it, you will enter the phase state that gives rise to lucid dreams, OOBEs and other altered states of consciousness.

Summerlander wrote: The mind is naturally noisy...

i disagree, i think that naturally the mind is quiet and peaceful, but conscious control makes it noisy.

You're mistaken. there are many unconscious processes that you are not aware of. The mind is always busy. this isn't necessarily science. Even a Buddhist monk will tell you this. The stillness of mind is a state that you acquire with effort. Not an easy one.

Scientifically, consciousness has no control. The unconscious processes determine how one feels and how one is likely to act. Free will is an illusion.

I think the mind is naturally abuzz with thoughts too. Only when you relax and think about it are you truly aware of it, but it was always going on in the background of our conscious day the whole time.

And without it, you won't dream at all. The visions and feelings and sounds that you hear IS the 'mind's chatter'. Without it you are in a meditative state and not dreaming. It takes a 'noisy' mind to dream, but a subconscious noisy mind.

And that's why dreams are important to remember because they tell us what is on our mind's whether we know it or not when awake. We can learn a lot from that noisy subconscious we have and dreams have a way of making it more vivid than a day dream or a thought we carry when awake.

I concur with that. Well said, Hagart! 8-)

I concur with your concur. 8-) 8-)

:| :mrgreen:

lumencryster wrote:

Summerlander wrote:The mind is naturally noisy...

i disagree, i think that naturally the mind is quiet and peaceful, but conscious control makes it noisy.

Ego makes it noisy. Our interpretations and decisions and questions and concerns.

Ego is moved by the unconscious quicksands beneath it. It is a surface agent and has no control, only the illusion of possessing it. Interpretations and decisions are pre-decided unconsciously. Once they emerge in consciousness, the ego mistakenly claims them to be its own creations. The ego is a puppet driven by the fears and desires that are felt and which stem from the lizard brain.

Summerlander wrote: Ego is moved by the unconscious quicksands beneath it. It is a surface agent and has no control, only the illusion of possessing it. Interpretations and decisions are pre-decided unconsciously. Once they emerge in consciousness, the ego mistakenly claims them to be its own creations. The ego is a puppet driven by the fears and desires that are felt and which stem from the lizard brain.

Then that would suggest that we can never change who we are, if we have no control over the ego and the unconscious mind. Is that not what you are saying? Which is incorrect regardless of whether that's what you meant. Maybe correct in theory, but not in actuality. I agree that ego stems from fear and desires, mostly fear I would say, but the way you stated all of the above makes it seem that one cannot change their nature.

It is correct in actuality. :mrgreen:

The waking ego only has the illusion of control because, from the waking perspective, decisions can only be seen to emerge in the light of consciousness. The truth is that the stimulation for a fully formed decision starts at the roots of the unconscious brain, where there is no thinking and reactions are stimulated beyond our control.

What I am saying precisely is that we have no free will. Scientific experiments have already demonstrated that relevant motor areas of the brain light up before we even become conscious of the desire to move a limb.

When people decide to change their ways, it may feel to them that they are acting on free will but they are not. Their will, which is not free, is determined by several causes. These range from being environmental, genetic, to being psychological. If I decide to check this thread, it is because I feel like doing it. The memory of having been here and enjoying this discussion provides me with enough information to form a decision that will ultimately make me feel good. But if I suffered a blow to the head that made me forget this site even existed, I cannot possibly make the decision to peruse this thread.

My decision is always biased by what the lizard brain has brought forth, how this reaction has affected the emotional brain, and how these emotions steer the more complex noetic cortex.

In other words, past events can determine your behaviour, your genome can dictate how you are likely to act upon certain conditions, your upbringing can help to build a set of ideas or beliefs that you hold etc.

Imagine someone who has smoked for twenty years and then decides to stop. You may say that the smoker quit the ciggies out of his own free will. But on closer inspection we see that this is not true. Apart from noting the obvious motives for quitting, which are: fear of health deterioration, fear of dying, wanting to smell good, wanting to attract someone, putting an end to coughing fits, wanting to keep young and fit, wanting to economise etc. (all of which give rise to impulses that cannot be possibly set in motion without a mind holding a model of conceptual reality); we also observe one peculiar fact: the smoker only quit after twenty years. If the smoker had free will, what stopped him from quitting before? Why didn't he quit after ten years into smoking? Was he not free to do so? Where is free will?

The answer is simple. He couldn't do it prior to his day of resolution because he did not feel like it. His guts and psychological state did not grant him enough will power and thus the motivation was not there. He was destined to smoke for two decades through no fault of his own. He never had control just like he didn't have it when he was first influenced into smoking by his mates as a teenager and just like he did not have the power to decide to be born.

The concept of free will itself is nonsensical and the more we look at it, the more plausible it is that we live in a deterministic universe. If you had free will, you'd be free to know what you will be thinking or deciding next. That's not the case though. Everything that you decide is based upon how you feel and this is determined by the primordial regions of the brain.

Your motor cortex, your most primitive brain in evolution, influences motor movements and other things that do not require thought. It contains the medulla oblongata which is responsible for how your heart functions and controls involuntary breathing.

The next brain layer is a system that derives intuitional and emotional behaviour. It is known as the limbic system.

Then we have the upper layer, the neoencephalon, which is our most recent evolutionary cephalic development. It deals with higher processes, but, without the roots, it is nothing - hence the reason why a good blow to the medulla oblongata can render a person unconscious.

You can decide, but you can't decide on what you are going to decide. Often people can behave in ways which are even inexplicable to themselves and hence why many times you hear them saying "I don't know what came over me!" You don't really decide. It is an illusion. Every decision you make is a product of cause and effect. This cosmic kerfuffle pre-dates you by billions and billions of years and is a natural manifestation since the Big Bang that gave origin to our universe.

Summerlander wrote: Everything that you decide is ***based ***upon how you feel and this is determined by the primordial regions of the brain.

I agree. Based. Not determined by. I don't see the universe as deterministic, I see it as a probability distribution. What we decide certainly is based off our unconscious minds, our memories, experiences, feelings, and plenty of things we aren't consciously aware of. But there are few or no 1's and 0's in this distribution. Nothing is for certain, one way or another. Even if I only have .0999% control over my entire life, that means the universe is NOT deterministic because there is still that small probability of free will in the distribution.

To claim that there is NO SUCH THING as free will, that free will is DEFINITELY an illusion, just seems incredibly dogmatic. Even if science seems to favor that position now, scientific theories are improved and disproven every day. We recently discovered that our perception of the size of the universe must be incorrect, because we discovered a structure in space that couldn't exist in the understanding of the size of the universe we currently hold. (I'll be happy to link the article if you are unfamiliar with the discovery)

My point is that I don't agree with what you are saying, partially because of how dogmatically you present it. You simplify something as complex as free will in the human condition with a single viewpoint, in order to bring yourself to a place of "certainty". Well no matter what you believe, being so dogmatically certain about anything just allows for arrogance and ignorance to creep in.

Summerlander wrote: It is correct in actuality.

Many many people have told me this of various religions. With the basis of evidence that was once social norm, as many scientific theories are social norm now. Everything has the potential to be incorrect or correct, proven and disproven. We can never *be *certain of anything, and convincing ourselves of certainty is surrendering to ignorance.

So while I accept that you may in fact be correct, I'd give it a 50% probability at most.

There are quite a few fallacies in your argument where you give me the impression that there is much for you to learn about the scientific method. But I won't go too much into your flyspeck knowledge of how science really operates. What I will point out, which is somewhat more relevant to this topic and far more enlightening, is the misconception you have clearly derived from your confused reasoning.

Newtonian laws operate perfectly well on our level of reality and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you need a cause in order to have an effect. Even a probabilistic framework, such as the one described by quantum theorists, is incompatible with free will. People who have worked at CERN would dispel many myths I suspect you uphold right now.

In the most simplistic way I can describe to you what is going on with the quantum realm I will offer you a fitting analogy. All the potentials in the quantum field are all the possible vibrations that all the strings of a guitar can propagate. But they can't all sound at the same time. If you had a finger for every guitar fret and you pressed down on all of them, you'd only get notes from the highest at the plectrum stroke. In a similar fashion, the wavefunction system of the quantum world contains peaks and troughs that can add or cancel each other out.

The whole thing is weird, granted, because Newtonian laws don't apply, but it is very natural and experimentation has produced outcomes that have a priori been predicted by scientific theory. There is, therefore, nothing magical about that level of reality as some believe. It's every bit as natural as the level where classical physics apply. And predictable! After all, without quantum theory we would not have invented the transistor, one of the most important inventions in the world.

Now, back to free will...

It cannot arise even in the quantum realm because this one is also governed by laws and, believe it or not, has its limitations as regards collapsed states. Quantum elements still effect one another and the origins of a particular observable (or measurable) effect can be just as mysterious when it comes to tracing it as determining the cause of a particular mood we feel via introspection.

Even if we had an immortal soul, a scenario proposed by many and I really feel that such isn't the case, we still would not have the power of free will if with a soul we have the same perception and the same level of perceived control. A soul would still be forced to make choices based on how it feels.

Everything appears to indicate that free will cannot be, and, in the face of the logic we derive from the observations we make, it really sounds nonsensical. Everything about nature, with all its mechanical complexity, defies that kind of freedom in favour or directed will in a deterministic universe. The whole thing just renders free will absurd.

I know this appears to oppose the way we run things, conveniently one might say, with our ethics and judicial systems, but, before ethics were born, before the age of God... even... a cold and indifferent universe already was. The way we conceptually view the world bears one flaw: we erroneously believe, in our egotism, that we are the authors of our decisions and actions.

The truism of no free will is not only undeniable, it's inescapable. Does this mean that we should give up all control? No, because we hold that illusion very close to our hearts. Accepting the non-existence of free will may eradicate the guilt of wrongdoers, it may logically remove the praise from high achievers, but it won't stop our ways and won't stop us from deciding what the best course of action is regardless. The thing that society wants the most is a system that works, a utopia that is fair and favours the good ones.

We shall reward high achievers in order to motivate them into further success, and, in the same vein, we will punish wrongdoers and rehabilitate some of them in an attempt to influence their behaviour for the better. After all, people are who they are due to many factors that range from their biology to what they have been exposed to throughout their lives. Another counterargument to what you said earlier regarding change, yes, in a deterministic world where free will does not exist change can still take place because things are in motion and effect one another.

People can still change if they want to. Someone who develops an interest in music may still learn the piano and gradually develop new neural pathways that in time will facilitate practice and make the playing of music feel more natural. But we must question where the motivation to learn about music came from. Something aroused an interest for music and the playing of the aforementioned instrument in the individual.

Then we have criminals who narcissistically stick to their ways no matter what as they think they can outsmart everyone and believe they are in control. If someone won't change and refuses to abide by humanity's rules, whilst committing atrocities, then we can view them as bad seeds. If a human being is incompatible with civility, he or she can be made an example of in a court of law.

Anyway, I'm beginning to feel like Joey from "Friends" telling Phoebe that there is no selfless good deed. Back to the real topic, the mind is naturally noisy but meditative states allow us to block the awareness of that mental noise, giving us a profound sense of stillness of mind where we can feel at one with the universe.

By the way, in my earnest opinion, this post will elicit a response from KylePK, even if the response is a refusal to post, which would be to prove a point against my argument but would only end up confirming what I've stated in the first place.

If science has unravelled certain truths for us, it isn't in the slightest arrogant of its spokespeople to reiterate to the nescient, agnostic or layman, every once in a while or when the opportunity presents itself, what has been discovered - especially if the intent is to proliferate knowledge throughout the world and encourage its search. My thirst for it is insatiable, you see?

And apologies in advance for the humour, I had no control over that either! :mrgreen:

all this physics and quantum physics - I hear it used us much that I have started to listen to all of Richard Feynman's lectures on the subject - all 20 of them and find it interesting. One day I might be able to add to a discussion on that subject but for now all I can do is read as I dont fully understand the topic