The Malleable Light

Very short post here but I figured it was worth mentioning.

Two nights ago (I think Sunday night) I had gone to bed and was listening to AmbiScience™ – Bundle Pack 2 – Shamanic Meditation Low Pitch (Isochronic tones at 4.5HZ) with Leaving Terra overlayed. I think it was about 11 PM when I laid down.

I listened for awhile and ended up falling into a light sleep, got tangled up in my headphone cords and woke back up. The headphones had fallen out of my ears  so I put them back on and closed my eyes. Literally a few seconds later the blackness behind my eyes turned into 3D blackness (blackness with depth to it). My vision became crystal clear (can’t describe)  and tiny white points of light were rushing in at me and passing through my head. This lasted for about 1 second and was gone.It kind of felt and looked like I was flying through deep space with galaxies passing by and through me.

I really don’t know what this was and nothing else happened for the rest of the night but I wanted to have this written for reference.

David Mathis Dreams, Meditation Hypnagogic Hallucinations, Isochronic Tones, Meditation, Universe

Anyone who has been around meditation or the exploration of consciousness scene long enough knows about binaural beats and how they can be used to coax the brain into specific rhythms. I have been using a wide variety of beats for about two years now including Hemi-Sync, Brain Sync and a few others. I have have produced some objective results using beats in regards to faster learning, more intense focus and with lucid dreaming and OOBEs.  The thing is,  it’s hard to know if the results are being manifested from my intent or  if the beats play some part. I tend to think that binaural beats do work based on the research that has been done at the Monroe Institute, however without personal experience to back it up I can only consider it a likely possibility.

A few months ago I was looking through the iPhone store  for applications to dynamically generate binaural beats and I came across the term isochronic tones. Interesting! I quickly headed over to Google and started reading about this new technology. Wikipedia defines them as:

Isochronic tones are regular beats of a single tone used for brainwave entrainment. Similar to monaural beats, the interference pattern that produces the beat is outside the brain so headphones are not required, but since isochronic tones are more pronounced, the stimuli is even stronger. They differ from monaural beats which are a sine wave pulse rather than entirely separate pulses of a single tone.

The reason I was looking for an app to generate beats was because I got tired of having to depend on one implementation to generate some kind of result. I would rather just have an interface that allows for frequency adjustments and dynamic track overlays. I found a few iPhone apps that would do this, but the tracks were always limited and were of very poor quality, to the point of being a distraction. Then there are so many apps of this type within the store that it seems more like a get rich scheme rather than designed to actually do anything.

Last night curiosity got the best of me so decided to try out the AmbiScience™ series. The application I bought is called Pure Meditation | AmbiScience™ by By Tesla Audio Sciences. I think it ended up costing me a whopping $2.99. What sold me on this product was the fact that it uses the isochronic tones that I have been wanting to try and the track names sounded interesting with names like Lapis Lazuli, Fire Opal, Amethyst, Topaz, The Android’s Dream and many others. As you might have guessed, it lets me pick a frequency and then lay tracks over the top, which was my original goal. Full description here.

So what did the pudding taste like? This morning around 6 AM I ended up using Shamanic Meditation Low Pitch (Isochronic tones at 4.5HZ) with a Brown Noise overlay. The track volume was at 100% and the tone volume at 75%. The iPhone volume was set at about 8. The product allows for a 4.5 – 9 HZ frequency with a choice of binaural beats or isochronic tones. I was laying on my right side and I began to use a concentrative type meditation. The goal at first was to have no thought and then I progressed to just focusing on the tone. The brown noise track basically sounded like a soft wind.

My wife was sitting in front of me holding the baby and I remember hearing him occasionally. Within about 10 minutes he started fading and I felt a floating sensation. I shifted my focus away from my body and upwards and felt myself float up through the ceiling of the room and out of the house. I drifted up higher and off into the sky and then started spinning head over heal  back down into the house. The entire time I was consciously aware that I was in an altered state and could hear the tone the entire time. I had pretty good control over this experience. I like the sensation of flying so I ended up flying all over the sky above our house for several minutes.

I shifted my focus back to my physical body and found myself laying in bed staring at my wife holding the baby. I decided to end the experience and reached up to take the earphones off and my hands passed though my head. I discovered that I was still in the altered state and had actually been looking at her through my closed eyelids. I simply focused on coming back into phase with my physical body, felt gravity and knew I was really back. I opened my physical eyes and my wife was in the exact spot and position that I saw her in while in the altered state.

I found this experience interesting  in that the isochronic tone seemed to have locked me  into this altered state because I had to really focus on pulling myself out of it. This is a very good sign! Perhaps I will be able to repeat this again. We shall see.

David Mathis Astral Projection, Books & Media, Lucid Dreams, Meditation, Progress Astral Projection, Brainsync, Hemi-Sync, Isochronic Tones, Lucid Dreams, Meditation, Shamatha Meditation

I came across Charles T. Tart a few days ago while reading out on the My Big TOE forum. My impression of him after watching his “Reflections on Meditation” is that he is very intelligent and adds some interesting perspectives on many topics that I have been researching and experimenting with (such as spirituality and exploration of consciousness). His approach is not based on any specific practice but upon his own experience with a multitude of different practices.

He explains that humans as a whole are dummies when approaching meditation and that there are many gaps in our knowledge of the subject.  He makes the assumption that we all (video watchers and everyone in the room with him perhaps?) would like to know more about meditation and his goal being to help people become smarties when it comes to meditation. He asks the question, “Has there been any progress in the meditation field in the last few hundreds years?”

To make progress in meditation he suggests that we have to know what it is, how to measure the outcome of doing it and how to measure movement toward these outcomes. He then points out that humans are restricted to a subset of reality and within that subset there is an even smaller subset of things that are subject to logical definition. By being in the human realm we have limitations on understanding and then on top of that there is state specific thinking. This makes ideas about meditation in this state of thinking and in this reality more difficult to describe or define. Additionally he brings up the fact that there are different ideas about what meditation actually is.

He breaks meditation into three basic types, two of which are sitting meditations and the third is done throughout the day. This to me alone makes the video series worth watching. I have to admit that when I got into meditation I was completely confused by the term and rarely (if ever) know what someone means when they tell me that they meditate. It’s much like the confusion I experienced growing up in the Catholic church when someone told me to go pray or that they were praying.

Here are the three basic types of meditation as defined by him in the series:

1. Concentrative meditation (sitting). Which is to put the mind on one thing and when it wonders away come back to the one thing.
2. Mindfulness meditation (sitting). Buddhist Vipassana for example. Rather than holding the mind fixed on one thing,  three qualities are striven for in the naturally occurring flow of experience.
   1. The quality of clarity that is the pay closer receptive attention to what goes on from moment to moment.
   2. The quality of breadth, instead of only paying attention of the things we likes, we pay attention to the whole flow of experience
   3. The quality of equanimity.  Instead of getting caught up in “I don’t like” or “I want more”,  we just let things happen as they want to happen as we pay clear and broad attention to them.
3. Mindfulness in life meditation (non-sitting). Like Vipassana, but performed in everyday life rather than being a sitting meditation.

He feels that the third type may be far more important in that few people ever get in trouble sitting on a meditation mat which lead him to consider the possibility that  mindfulness is needed much more in daily life.

Moving on he talks about people living in an illusion and how it’s often translated into the world isn’t real. He argues that the world is real but our perception of it is so distorted that the world we live in and take to be the real world is a highly illusionary kind of world. I visualized this as absolute reality being filtered by local “physical matter reality” consciousness causing final perception of reality to be reduced to a relative reality warped by emotions, thoughts, ego, history etc. He is not suggesting that abstract thought is a bad thing, but when we don’t know that abstract thought is abstract thought, we end up living in an illusion, which is what meditation seeks to do something about.

He defines meditation as controlled attention practices. Instead of letting our attention be controlled by what happens to us and our conditioned reactions being brought up by what happened to us, instead deliberately take control of what we are going to do with our attention. Basically he is saying not to get caught up in a thought loop which causes us to miss out on what’s actually happening in the present moment.

Going back to the question of progress brought up earlier he goes on to speak about how he feels that Shinzen Young  is making some progress with meditation by using languages that are specific the the culture that he is teaching in. He has some very interesting mathematical equations for suffering  and satisfaction. He also talks about a computer coach that Young has developed that helps people with common problems that may come up with meditation.

In conclusion he feels that we are slowly making progress with meditation. With meditation he doesn’t feel that the one size fits all school of thought is the best approach for teaching people meditation. He concludes that we must define meditation terms more precisely and figure out what specific controlled attention practices should be applied by what specific kind of people under what specific type a circumstances in order to get a lot of work accomplished in an efficient way.

I have included a link to the first video out of a series of 9 below. I will work on getting the videos added to this site in the future.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fajlmzsu6A

David Mathis Meditation, Techniques Charles T. Tart, Shamatha Meditation, Vipassana Meditation

This is a short lucid dream experience that I had a few days ago. It seems that perhaps the lack of sleep helped to trigger this event. I can’t be absolutely sure though.

The last two weeks have been rough as far as sleep goes. Our son Gabriel was born on June 20th (Father’s Day) and since then we have been getting adjusted to his sleeping patterns. This basically means that we have not been getting much sleep.

It was Thursday night and I had finally fallen asleep at about 1 am after Gabriel had been up crying and eventually fell asleep.  As I drifted off I cleared my mind and I noticed that after about five minutes a sinking sensation within me. I then noticed that I was still aware (as in I had waking consciousness), and my body had sunk into the mattress.  This to me indicated that my awareness had shifted and that my physical body was sleeping and my awareness was separated from the physical body data stream.

I set my intent on moving over to where my wife was sleeping in the bed next to mine and instantly I found myself floating up and across the room and over to her. I floated over her and gently landed on the bed next to her. She seemed to be confused and not herself and I remember pointing at myself sleeping on the other bed and I was telling her that I was in two places at once. She still seemed confused and didn’t answer.

I decided to leave the room and floated downstairs. When I arrived downstairs I found myself in an unfamiliar room and staring at static on a TV that was sitting in the middle of the room. I must have stared at the TV for a few minutes and then I floated back upstairs.

When I was back upstairs I lost most of my awareness and drifted into the middle of the room against the wall and felt myself spinning. The more I spun the less awareness I had until I finally lost all awareness and ended up dreaming.

David Mathis Astral Projection, Dreams, Lucid Dreams Astral Projection, Dreams, Lucid Dreams