 Philosophy is often associated with dull, academic rumination, but authentic philosophy isn't safely theoretical. It is live and dangerous.
It is a profound exploration of the great mysteries of life and death, an heroic adventure to excite the soul. Philosophy is extreme sports for the mind. It is for those who relish the rush of exhilaration as they free fall into uncertainty. The buzz of alert concentration as they scale the mountain of imagination, seeking out a higher view. The thrill of anticipation as they wait to ride a swell of insight as it surges up from the depths – always hoping for the big one. Some people dismiss all philosophy as abstract and irrelevant. But authentic philosophy can utterly transform our understanding of who we are and what it is to be alive. What could be more concrete and relevant than that?
A stand-up philosopher
I see myself as a stand-up philosopher. I want to reinvigorate the ancient tradition in which philosophers were travelling street-performers who wandered from place to place, challenging people's prejudices and opening their minds to new ways of seeing the world. A stand-up philosopher is an intellectual provocateur, a conceptual artist whose gallery is the mind, an entertainer with the covert agenda of undermining an audience's preconceptions. He is similar to the more audacious of stand-up comics, except a stand-up philosopher trades in wisdom, not wise cracks. As a modern-day stand-up my mission is to make philosophy fun, funky and fashionable. After all, what could be more entertaining than to have someone so utterly transform your understanding of life that you find yourself experiencing a completely new reality? Now, that's magic!
Changing how you think will change how you feel
What we experience depends on how we think. You are reading this article right now. It's easy to take that for granted, as if there were nothing remarkable about it. But free yourself from your habitual assumptions, think in a more expansive way, and you will see that what is happening in this moment is quite extraordinary. I am inscribing black marks on white paper in my here-now and you are interpreting them in your here-now. And via some mysterious process no one truly understands, ideas which are forming in my mind are also arising in your mind. Two human beings are meeting across time and space.
So here we are – you and I – communing in the nowhere-notime of the mind. I am writing this article to invite you to share my enthusiasm for some extraordinary ideas with the power to transform confusion into wonder, the mundane into the miraculous, the numbness we call 'normality' into a state of awakened enlivenment. Because changing how you think will change how you feel. And when you really understand these ideas you will feel very good indeed.
These ideas are fully explored in my new book Lucid Living, in which I set out to entice you into a new way of thinking that will completely transform your experience of living and leave you in love with life. I want to shamelessly seduce you into experiencing a reality-shift that will (quite literally!) turn the world inside out. This is a little book with grand aspirations. It is based on my live stand-up philosophy gigs, although being a book it is more sit-down than stand-up. It will take you less than an hour to read, but it could change your life for good.
Awakened consciousness
At the heart of the philosophy that I explore in Lucid Living is the seemingly outrageous claim that it is possible to experience an awakened state of consciousness in which it becomes obvious that life is like a dream. This awakened state is comparable to 'lucid dreaming'. Lucid dreaming is the experience of dreaming, but consciously recognizing that you are dreaming. The awakened state is the experience of 'lucid living'. It is being conscious that life is like a dream right now.
When you dream lucidly you discover you have two natures. On the one hand you appear to be a person in your dream. But you are also conscious that really you are the dreamer. Lucid living is the same right now. It is recognising that, whilst you appear to be a person in the life-dream, in reality you are the awareness within which the life-dream is arising. Let me make this very clear. I am not suggesting that the person you appear to be is imagining the world. Quite the opposite. The person you appear to be is part of the life-dream. But this is not who you really are. You are the life-dreamer.
When you dream lucidly you see that everything and everyone in your dream is an expression of your own deeper nature as the dreamer. In the same way, if you live lucidly it becomes obvious that as separate individuals we are all expressions of one awareness which is dreaming itself to be everyone and everything. This is our shared essential nature. We appear to be many individuals in the life-dream, but actually we are one awareness. And to recognise this is to be consumed by a wonderful experience of all-embracing love. Because when we realise we are one with all we find ourselves in love with all.
I am not saying that life is like a dream to dismiss the world as an irrelevant fantasy. The world is beautiful beyond words to describe. I am not rejecting life as some sort of pernicious illusion, nor denying the horrors and wonders of existence, nor advocating a state of detached indifference. Quite the opposite. Waking up is appreciating how magically mysterious and profoundly poignant existence really is. It is when we are unconsciously engrossed in the life-dream that it becomes a nightmare. But when we wake up and live lucidly we find ourselves in love with life in all its awesome, multifarious splendour.
The idea that life is like a dream is not some quirky 'spiritual' theory to be blindly believed or cynically ridiculed. It is a self-evident fact which my new book helps you check out for yourself in the immediacy of your own experience of the present moment. Because the truth is staring us in the face but we don't see it. Through schooling, the media, our parents and peers, we have been culturally conditioned into adopting a web of opinions through which we view reality. We see only what the web of our opinions allows us to see. It obscures the true nature of life like a veil, giving us the illusion that we know who we are and what life is. It may be comfortable to live in the false security of this consensus pseudo-reality, but we pay a high price. We stop feeling really alive.
Unpicking the web of opinions
You know what it's like with a love affair. At the beginning it feels special because your lover is a delightful enigma to you. But over time you start to think you know who your lover is. You lose sight of them. You relate to your fixed idea of who they are. You weave them into your web of opinions and the magic goes out of the relationship. Well, it's the same with your relationship with life. The more you lose touch with life as it is and inhabit a conceptual virtual-reality, the more the magic goes out of existence. You stop loving life and settle for getting on with it. Life goes dead on you.
Lucid Living systematically unpicks the web of opinions and brings life back to life. It takes you on a journey through seven life-transforming insights which will help you experience living lucidly for yourself. And when you do, you will discover that you are more than you can possibly imagine. At the centre of the web of opinions you have created so painstakingly since childhood is the assumption 'I am a person'. By challenging this pivotal idea Lucid Living unravels the whole web and reveals what we really are. And that changes everything. It is like waking up from a dream.
Throughout my life I have experienced intense moments of awakening when the web of my opinions has dissipated and I have found myself living lucidly in love with all. At first it was like stumbling upon an exquisite beauty spot that no one else had heard of, only to discover that I couldn't find it again the next day. The seven insights in my new book Lucid Living are like a simple map which I have refined over the years through my attempts to develop a way of thinking which leads me back to that beautiful viewpoint. And now I've found a route that works for me, I'd like to take you along too, because I have a hunch you will love it there as much as I do.
Copyright 2005 by Timothy Freke. For more information visit his on-line philosophy centre: www.timothyfreke.com
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