Authors: David Jay Brown,Rebecca McClen Novick
RMN: Do you see death as an adventure, or are you afraid?
Allen: I’m a little scared, yeah, but I’m not afraid to admit it.
DJB: What do you think it is about death that you’re afraid of?
Allen: How about entering a realm where there’s twenty-nine devils sticking red hot pokers up my behind and into my feet. (laughter) Maybe I’ll turn into a big prick with this little tiny asshole.
DJB: Do you think that the fear of death could be the fear of non-existence?
Allen: Well, no, that wouldn’t be so bad. It would be the fear of existing again, in another life. Popping up again, like pop goes the weasel, and being stuck with whatever hard-on you started out with. You could have an obsession and think, oh, I should have cut that out long ago! I should have stopped lusting after pretty boys long ago! (laughter) You’re born into a universe with nothing but pretty boys and you get stuck there for another 100 years until you realize, uh oh, you’re going to die. Something like that. I’m not quite up to the adventure yet (laughter) but on the other hand.......
DJB: Do you have a personal understanding of God?
Allen: Yes. There is no God.
DJB: There’s no question about it?
Allen: No. It’s a big mistake. It means "6,000 years of sleep" as Blake said. It means a Judeo-Christian-Islamic control system. It means war and centralization.
DJB: What about the concept of God as a state of consciousness?
Allen: Too easy. Why do you need a concept of God when you’ve already got a concept of a state of consciousness? Why do you have to add God onto it? It’s sneaking in a centralized state of consciousness, it’s sneaking in a metaphysical CIA. In an open universe, nothing is closed in, no judgment of beliefs, just infinite possibilities of roles to role-play. If God made everything the way it is, then it’s already done and it’s pre-ordained all the way, so there’s no movement. God means stasis, as Burroughs points out. When you consider the whole notion of God, that’s what it comes to, unless you redefine God so that it doesn’t mean God anymore.
DJB: Well, what if you define God as being the notion of a greater organism of which we’re all tiny cells or parts?
Allen: You still have this one greater organism that started everything and knows where it’s all going.
DJB: Not necessarily. It could be evolving itself, just as we are.
Allen: Then it ain’t God, the omniscient, omnipotent etc...
RMN: If you don’t believe in God, do you believe in love?
Allen: Perhaps it’s a uselessly out-worn four letter word that substitutes for awareness to cover all cruel facts. But you have to first agree with people how you want to use the word. You know, a word doesn’t mean anything by itself, there’s no built-in intrinsic meaning, it’s just how you want to use it. It’s an abstraction like, "What is the truth?" It’s a semantic blind-alley. It doesn’t have a meaning except that which you assign to it, and if people don’t agree on the meaning then you’re going to have endless feuds over nothing, which is what happens all the time. A student and I spent time with Burroughs in 1944.
We got into an argument about what is art? If we carved a walking-stick and put in on the moon, where nobody saw it, is that art? Or does art have to be social? So we took the argument to Burroughs and he said, "Art is a three-letter word. If you guys will agree on what you mean and how you want to use it, then you can use it. But to say that it has an absolute inherent meaning one way or an absolute inherent meaning the other way, that’s a semantic problem and ‘tis too too starved an argument for my sword." You ask a large question using a large word which can mean anything, and then expect somebody to give you a sensible answer. Now, if you had said, what do you think of love? or how do you see using the word "love" for the experience of wonder at the sight of a sunset? Then I might be able to find an instance where it was used well, or I might not and I’d have to invent one. If I couldn’t invent an instance and I couldn’t remember any instance where the word was used will, I would say it’s probably not the right word.
RMN: Well, I’m glad I disappointed you and got such an answer! (laughter) Talking about the nature of wordplay, I read in a lecture you gave that you believe it’s possible to teach inspiration. How do you do this?
Allen: Inspiration means breathing in. The process of breathing is or course, central to meditation practice, but it’s also central to poetry. You have thoughts which are mental and impalpable, like heaven and then you have body, which is ground or earth. So when you speak, the breath comes out as a physiological body thing but it’s also a vehicle for the impalpable thoughts of the mind. So, you could say that speech joins heaven and earth, or synchronizes mind and body. Exhalation or expiration - as in "he expired" - is the vehicle on which poetry comes out whereas inhalation or inspiration, takes in. So, you can say that certain kinds of poetry like Shelley’s famous romantic poem, "Ode to the West Wind" has a certain elevated unobstructed breath about it; unobstructed intelligence, unobstructed production of images, unobstructed self-confidence, unobstructed majestic proclamation.
RMN: So you’re saying that if people can learn to first breathe properly, they can then stimulate their imaginations?
Allen: To be a good example of what they call ‘poetic inspiration’, is to be alive with this physiological (exhales breath) attitude. A sense of a proclamation echoing to the outside space with no difference between the outside space and the inside space. So you teach inspiration by teaching people both meditation and spontaneous improvisation, a sense of self-confidence, the notion of unobstructed breath and also how to allow their minds to speak out loud without thinking in advance. That’s the way poetry is taught at the Naropa Institute. You can also cultivate or point out the notion of the space in the room so that somebody can talk loud enough so that the furthest person in the room can hear.
You need a panoramic awareness of the space around you, rather than looking inward and mumbling. So, it’s maybe hyperbole to say you could teach inspiration. You can teach the physiological posture of it, but that’s only half the battle. One of the teachings is about proclamation - to mouth the syllables in an interesting way. If you listen to Dylan records or Kerouac’s recordings, you’ll hear an intelligence in the actual pronunciation which is the difference between a mumbling poet and a poet who actually enjoys the language in his own mouth. If you listen to the recordings of Ezra Pound you’ll hear that sense of elegant imperial mouth.
RMN: William Blake actually sang a lot of his poetry.
Allen: Yeah, he actually sang "Songs of Innocence."
RMN: You put that to music didn’t you?
Allen: Yeah. There was a record in 1969 called, "Songs of Innocence and Of Experience." It’s out of print now, but it’s going to be re-issued next year.
DJB: Cool. What else have you been doing?
Allen: Well I collaborated with Philip Glass on an opera, Hydrogen Jukebox, putting together poetry and music. I’m working on a record with Hal Wilner and with Fransesco Clemente on a series of books. I’m teaching at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado and at Brooklyn College, and I’m writing a lot of poems. I’ve just about got another book ready and am also coalescing my journals from the ‘50’s. Another project called History of the Beat Generation drawn from my lectures over the years. I’m also trying to raise money for the Naropa Institute, the Buddhist school formed by Chogyam Trungpa in 1974. Within it is the school of poetry. We asked Trungpa if we could call it the Jack Kerouac School of Poetry, but it sounded a little boring. So then June Waldman said, well, he’s dead, so he’s disembodied. So now it’s The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. And then will people misunderstand? Yes, well, that’s permissible. (laughter) They’ll just have to ask what it means.
DJB: Do you still feel guilty about not doing enough?
Allen: Always. It’s a workaholic problem. (laughter)
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Waking the Dreamer
with Stephen LaBerge
Stephen LaBerge is the first scientist to empirically prove the existence of the phenomena of lucid dreaming. His work has developed this technique into a powerful tool for studying mind-body relationships in the dream state and he has demonstrated the considerable potential for lucid dreaming in the fields of psychotherapy and psychosomatic medicine. His book on the subject,
Lucid Dreaming
,
Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming
and his more academic
Conscious Mind, Sleeping Brain
have received enormous popular interest
Born in 1947, he obtained a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Arizona. At the age of 19 he began graduate studies in chemistry at Stanford University, but in 1968 took a leave of absence to pursue his research interest in psychopharmacology. In 1977 he returned to Stanford to begin studies on dreaming, consciousness and sleep, and received his Ph.D. in Psychophysiology from Stanford's Graduate Special Program in 1980.
He has taught courses on sleep and dreaming, psychobiology and altered states of consciousness at Stanford University, the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, and San Francisco State University. Currently, Stephen is a Research Associate in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University, and Director of Research at the Lucidity Institute; a center he founded to further explore the potential of lucid dreaming. Here he is developing user-friendly technologies such as the DreamLight® to help people to learn the art of lucid dreaming and disseminating information on the conscious dream-state through a quarterly newsletter.
Stephen 's energy and enthusiasm for his work is highly contagious and he has a way of dissecting information so as to always speak to the heart of the matter. His large eyes and animated features reveal an impish, child-like spirit and at the same time, an extremely sharp and analytical mind.
This interview began at the Lucidity Institute on July 8, 1992, and was completed on the evening of the same day, in the impressive grounds of Stanford University. In the evening after-sunset glow, Stephen addressed the questions of why we sleep, where we really are when we think we 're out of our body, and the spiritual implications of taking responsibility for our dreams.
RMN
DJB: What was it that originally inspired your interest in lucid dreaming?
Stephen: I had been interested in lucid dreaming, in a way, since my childhood experience. When I was five years old they had these adventure serials and I would go to the matinees. I had the idea, after a particularly fun dream where I was an undersea pirate, wouldn’t it be fun to go back to that same dream and continue it as in the serial? Nobody told me you couldn’t do that sort of thing, so that night I was back in the same dream, and I remember doing that for weeks. I would have the experience of seeing the surface of the ocean far above me and thinking, I can’t hold my breath this long! Then I’d think, but in these dreams I can breathe dream-water. (
child-like laughter
) That was all, at that point, that I made of the lucidity, in the sense that I knew it was a dream and that I could have fun in it. It wasn’t until my early twenties that I became interested in the mind.
At that point I was interested in the natural world and assumed I was going to become a chemist or something like that, and when I came to Stanford in 1967 I was a graduate student in chemical physics. Being in the Bay Area in those days, you can imagine what kinds of things I got interested in (
sly laughter
) which told me that there was a world inside that was of as much interest as the world out there.
I took a workshop from Tarthang Tulku, a Tibetan Buddhist, at Esalen and I was surprised at the topic of the workshop, which was essentially asking us to maintain consciousness throughout the twenty-four hours. Tarthang’s English was limited at the time, he’d just arrived from India, and he would repeatedly say nothing more than, "This dream!" and laugh. He was trying to get us to think of our current experience as a dream and to see what it had in common with the nocturnal experiences and the day experiences.