About the Mailbag category

Post your questions to @Andrew and the Night Club community.

Some questions posted in this thread may be answered during a live Q+A Session (#resources:questionars). If your question gets answered during a live session we’ll be sure to let you know :slight_smile:

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Not sure if you addressed this on the last day of the Sedona retreat but during the retreat you briefly mentioned pharmaceuticals in relation to sleeping and dreaming/dream yoga. As someone who has tried a lot of the recommended pills including melatonin, sleep teas and some prescription medicines, to little success for dreaming, I’d like to hear if you have any suggestions for promoting dreaming. Galantamine after waking up after 5+ hours also doesn’t seem to work for me for remembering dreams. I’ve also tried CBD oil with no success.

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Hi @_Barry, I noticed that @Allison started another thread inspired by your question. I’m going to post something(s) over there. Thanks for bringing this up!

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Hi @Andrew! I have a bunch of questions. Hope there aren’t too many, but I tried to craft them so they wouldn’t take too much time for you to answer.

The first few are general ones about the webinar and guest interviews in general:

  1. My first question is about the timing of the webinars. This question is totally selfish because I live in Thailand and can’t attend them live because they take place in the middle of the night here. So I’m wondering if there’s any chance that you can move one of the webinars per month to the evening if it would also be of benefit to others. I assume that there’s a good reason that the webinars take place in the afternoon (international crowd?), but I also guess that some people in North America can’t attend webinars during work hours. Anyway, I’ve been happy watching the recordings of the webinars so far and understand that whatever works best for the majority of the community is best.

  2. Are we going to get to listen to any of the guest interviews live? Either way, can we pass along questions for you to ask the guests? (I guess you would need to let us know before you conduct the interviews so we could pass our questions to you in time.) I’m sure you’re the most qualified person to ask your interviewees questions, but I think it would be nice it it worked out to have a few questions from the community to make it more personal for us. (I also think that knowing at least a little of the upcoming guest calendar might inspire some of us to read books by your guests before their interviews.)

  3. If you are taking questions for guests, I have one for Stephen LaBerge: Based on the science that you and others have conducted on lucid dreaming since “Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming” came out, is there anything that you would change in your book? Are there any lucid dreaming methods that have been tested since publication that you’d now recommend or are there any ones in the book that have turned out to be less effective than you once thought?

Questions for the next webinar:

  1. I’ve never read any of Ken Wilbur’s books. Which book of his would you recommend I start with to learn about integral theory?

  2. This one might sound random or at least esoteric, but I think you might be able to clear them up as a doctor. My questions are about bardo yoga and were sparked by your mention of research on thugdam in the first webinar. In 2012, I had a chance to see a great meditator in thugdam. I was at Tai Situ Rinpoche’s monastery in India and the retreat master died and was in thugdam for three days. We were allowed to go to his room as get within about 5-6 feet of him. His posture was similar to Tenga Rinpoche when he went into thugdam, but he was shirtless. His skin looked youthful and he looked serene. I was very inspired but the experience also sparked a couple questions that I haven’t had the opportunity to ask anyone about.
    A. Could a regular corpse stay in meditation posture after rigor mortis if it was put into position before its onset? (So is seeing a corpse that’s able to stay in meditation unusual in itself?)
    B. When I saw the retreat master, it was his third day in thugdam and it was May and it must have been about 95 degrees out. Still, he didn’t emit any odor that I could smell. Would his corpse have started to smell by then if he wasn’t in thugdam? Is not smelling anything a sign of anything unusual or a miracle?
    So I’m wondering whether just seeing a corpse that’s able to stay in meditation posture and not smell bad is potentially unusual (“a miracle”), or if we need scientists to measure the hearts and mental activity of meditators in thugdam to prove that something unusual is happening.

Thanks for your time on all of these questions! I really appreciate it!

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Great questions, @Evan .

We’ll seriously try to do one Webinar each month at night – and state why – good point.

Interviews are not live – just too hard to coordinate that. But yes, you can submit questions for our guests in advance. We’ll be creating special categories in our Community that will allow you to post your questions for specific interviews.

Great questions for Stephen – will keep them and try to ask him.

Thirty to choose from, re Ken’s book. Maybe “A Brief History of Everything.”

I’ll answer your good last question on my next webinar.

Thanks for your participation!

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Hey Evan, for an introduction to Ken Wilber’s work, @Andrew’s suggestion of A Brief History of Everything is excellent. Alternatively, a shorter work to start with would be The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction. Another possibility would be The Essential Ken Wilber: An Introductory Reader. Or if you prefer an audio format, you could try the superb 10-CD interview set Kosmic Consciousness, published by Sounds True.

~ArthurG

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