The Malleable Light

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

I started my journey for spiritual growth about 1.5 years ago. From the beginning I have intuitively known that I need to quiet the incessant cacophony in my head to make any real progress. This has been a real challenge with so much work all the time. I have been searching for a practical meditation technique that only retains the active components needed to be effective without any added nonsense. The Buddhist meditation was close but didn’t totally connect with my personality.

I am not going to claim success, because I just don’t have enough experience with this technique to do that however I do know that Thomas Campbell’s meditation technique showed some positive results last night on the first try. I really liked when he said that humanity is just a wrinkle in the fabric of consciousness and by using a simple mantra we can create enough background noise to remove the wrinkles leaving only pure consciousness. He has a way with words that I can relate to. Eckhart Tolle almost had me there but not quite. The funny part is that I have been saying all along that the mantra itself didn’t matter but I missed a vital component.  I think the key was that I was using real words that were attached to meanings and that was creating thoughts. Last night for the first time I used an alternating mantra of sounds with no meanings. Each manta contained 5 syllables with only the third syllable changing which created resonate meaningless complex sounds which I kept coming back to anytime thoughts would arise.

I went to bed tired at about 10:30 PM and put on my headphones and started listening to Brain Sync Dream Wave Meditation to block out background noise and then started the mantra ah-lum-bar-dee-dum – ah-lum-baa-dee-dum over and over.Within 10 minutes all I could hear in my head was bar-baa bar-baa. 10 minutes after that all physical sensory perception was gone and I was a single point of consciousness floating in 3d blackness. I could feel a surge of energy flowing through my body and my heart felt like it was racing prior to this. I ended the meditation session and went to sleep.

I woke up at 2:30 AM itching and could not seem to go back to sleep so I got up and went to the restroom and then came back to bed and listened to some random music for a few minutes until I started getting sleepy again. I put on Brain Sync – Brain Massage this time and started the mantra again. I fell asleep within a few minutes.

Around 4:00 PM I woke up in vibrations and instinctively exited my body and was standing in front of my house in the dark. I must have teleported there. This was the first OOBE followed by 2 more. The first one was interesting and I will just say that I was creating my surroundings just by thinking about what I wanted. I will not get into too many details. I had a second OOBE but I can’t actually remember what happened, only that it occurred.

The third OOBE was the most interesting of the three. I was standing on the top of some building that stood alone in some remote country landscape at daybreak. I was thinking to myself about how I had always wanted to project into space. I figured I would give it a try. I thought about flying into space and instantly was projected upward at and incredible speed and stopped at an unknown altitude in complete darkness. With my mind I asked to see the cosmos and suddenly at what appeared like an altitude of about +50º to my right appeared the Milky Way Galaxy with the Moon sitting in front of it. I was so crystal clear and beautiful that I can’t even describe it. I found myself back in waking awareness right after this and then went back to sleep  and had no other experiences.

I would like to point out that if you are going to use Thomas Campbell’s technique for meditation then you will need to read his trilogy My Big TOE. Although I explained his technique above, there is a lot of reading material that leads up to that technique and prepares you for how to effectively use the technique. The main part is adjusting the attitude. Like I said, Eckhart Tolle get’s very close to the exact same message but comes across in a slightly less direct manner. Thomas Campbell is a nuclear physicist and is one of the main guys that helped Robert Monroe invent Hemi-Sync and start the Monroe Institute. He was also one of the main players participating in their exploration of consciousness.  It’s no surprise to me that the technique worked so well.

David Mathis Astral Projection, Meditation, Progress, Techniques Astral Projection, Astral Projection Techniques, Brainsync, Buddhism, Consciousness, Eckhart Tolle, Flying, Hemi-Sync, Meditation, Progress, Techniques, Thomas Campbell

I hope this post doesn’t make Emmy jealous, but for the sake of consciousness research I must write.

I fell asleep at around 11:30 PM last night and as I fell asleep I tried to clear my mind by observing thoughts without becoming attached to them. Around 5 AM I woke up and ran to the bathroom and then came back to bed and began trying the same techniques in an attempt to astral project. I was tired and my mind was not really coherent so I started trying to push thoughts away. I realized what I was doing and then began allowing my thoughts to drift in without resistance. I was surprised at some of the random thoughts that were entering my mind.  For example a fleeting thought of a specific trip to McDonald’s with my Dad when I was a small child entered my head. These thoughts came and went for 10 minutes or so and during this time frame vibrations were felt several times.

Around 5:30 AM I felt the sensation of myself being bouncing around inside my body. I knew what this was because it’s happened before so I envisioned myself violently bouncing back and forth and within couple of seconds I felt a release and I floated up into the ceiling and things went completely black. I suspected that I was stuck in the ceiling so I thought about standing in my backyard and as I did I felt movement as I drifted from the roof area of my house down into the backyard.

While I was standing in the yard I had full waking consciousness. I knew my name, address etc. I knew that I was either asleep, in some altered state of consciousness or in another reality. I stood there for a minute and let it all soak in. My quality of perception was very good this time and the quality of vision and my senses was superb, equal to or better than waking life.

I looked around and the first thing that came to mind was that I needed to validate and collect evidence. This is where reality fluctuations came into play. I had the idea of floating over to my neighbors house and looking around inside. The idea was that if I ever go inside her house I might be able to identify something I saw in this state. I probably need to rethink my methods of validation.

I floated over to this window that doesn’t really exist in waking life (reality fluctuation) and I pressed my head against the screen in the window (another reality fluctuation, it’s too cold for open windows). Inside I could see her getting a small girl ready for school. She glanced over in my direction at one point but she didn’t seem to notice me there. I was at the window for about a minute and then things shifted.

I found myself standing on the front porch of a house with her on the street I grew up on as a child. She was pissing off the front porch in an attempt to put out a cigarette that she had just thrown on the ground. This was all to funny for me so I asked her if she could see me? She nodded and said yes.  I laughed out loud and asked her “You know you are in my dream, right?”. She didn’t really answer, either she was a dream character or she was just drifting in unconsciousness, it’s hard to say.

She took off running towards the house where my dad lives and jumped into this truck that I have never seen before. This is the part Emmy will like. I jumped in behind her and asked her if she wanted to have sex just to see how she would respond. She agreed to this, but as we started undressing darkness faded in and I found myself back in bed. I question my level of lucidity at this point because I know that I would not cheat in waking life.

I lost lucidity because in my mind I really thought I was awake, but I should have known that I wasn’t because someone out back was mowing the lawn. It’s unlikely that someone would be mowing the lawn at this time of year and at this time of morning. Still this wasn’t enough to make me realize that I was sleeping and the dream continued for about another hour before I finally woke up and wrote this.

The conclusion here is that I was either in the RTZ with extreme reality fluctuations or I was having a lucid dream. Either way I had full waking consciousness. Emmy, you have my permission to have dream sex with anyone that you want.

David Mathis Astral Projection, Lucid Dreams, Meditation, Techniques Astral Projection, Astral Projection Techniques, Consciousness, Dreams, Lucid Dreaming, Lucid Dreams

I have not been sticking to my commitment to write a bi-weekly progress report so I will just do a monthly report instead, unless I am seeing a lot of activity and then I will just let the posts speak for themselves. I continuously try to consciously induce the out of body state but as I have stated so many times in the past, being busy in waking life puts a damper on any real progress. I have been meditating every night using a modified Shamatha meditation technique where I am actually laying down rather than sitting up and I have been reading Astral Dynamics and doing energy work.

The meditation is interesting but I think that laying down while meditating is probably not the best idea because I end up drifting off to sleep. I have been experiencing rushing noises right before drifting off that can only be described as the noise you might hear on a radio when the dial is between stations. I posted a video Rushing Noises / Sleep Paralysis Sounds in the video section that somewhat represents what I hear only mine are much shorter in quick bursts that fade in and out.

Astral Dynamics is great and is the best OBE guide available in my opinion. I have finally decided to just read the book rather than stopping when I don’t feel like I and progressing with certain exercises. The book states that one must understand tactile imaging and be able put it into practice to get the most out of the book however if I never read the book because I pause at every hurdle then I know for sure I will not get anything out of the book . I was able to get my hands on a wonderful Astral Dynamics overview Robert Bruce On OBEs thanks to ubikmonroe. I highly recommend this book and even if you don’t buy in to any of this, it’s a trip and worth the read.

That’s all for now. Thanks for dropping in and reading and I wish you the best of luck in your spiritual endeavors.

David Mathis Astral Projection, Meditation, Progress, Techniques Astral Dynamics, Astral Projection, Astral Projection Techniques, Meditation, Progress, Rushing Noises, Shamatha Meditation, Sleep Paralysis

Firstly I want to again thank David for helping on this quest as I do not know if I would be projecting already if not for joining the malleable light  I’ve had a few minor events lately but nothing worth of mention till now..

An hours worth of continuous projections you ask? I think I did experience this, and I’ll tell you why later. I believe I could have probably kept going longer if not for needing to remember the experience and therefore choosing to wake up before projecting when close to awake at the last stage.

This is not all fun and was a little scary at a few points but I survived and learned much about controlling the experience and how to switch environments when in a projection!!

Firstly how this occurred.. I have finished most of my university degree, only a few weeks clinic and a few weeks external hours left.. My Mrs and I decided it was time to eliminate our 6 1/2 months child’s nighttime breastfeed.. Other than she’s old enough to not need it, it’s just making us – particularly my Mrs too tired as there may be more than one feed… Anyway.. tonight/this morning was the first day we eliminated the feed.. so my Mrs tried to put her to sleep when she woke around 3am, then me, then both of us (while we chatted with the light on) then the Mrs again. After about 1 1/2hrs (she’s quite stubborn) she fell asleep then us.. basically we were up for quite a while, which I believe helped bring on this experience.

It felt like moments.. soon after laying down (though I must have been asleep so can’t be sure – but) after what felt like a continuous stream of consciousness – I began to feel vibrations then felt and heard my ears popping (which I’d never experienced before).. I knew what was happening so went with it.. My astral body almost moved itself out of my physical – I didn’t even have to try – I just went with it. The aim was to roll out of bed, out and onto the floor…

When I landed on the floor I couldn’t move – the room was dark and my vision poor – Then I could feel someone on top of me. “Great!” I thought as I thought it may be my Mrs. on top of me and she was in the mood for some astral sex – i like that! 

I still couldn’t see well and aimed for some more vision.. I could see as if through a small slit – it could be my Mrs. but not sure.. Then my mind questioned “What if it is not my Mrs. and its something more sinister?”… I had some minor fear… I asked to see who it REALLY was… I was now enjoying the experience less as not only could I NOT MOVE.. it may not really be my Mrs. on top of me!!

I wondered about dark entities I had read about and wondered if when I looked that I would see a vampire or similar just about to bite down on my neck instead of my Mrs..

When I got more clarity it was still dark (it was mid-morning) and who I saw was the Gene Simmons character from the 70′s band KISS though with a tiny body and big (but not full sized, head). After just now looking on the net it shows that his character was “the demon” so not sure what that says… anyway I started to feel fear again but instead of panicking I thought “I do not want this to be happening” and tried my best to send this being some love and light and I was free!!

The scene changed and I felt like I was projecting again.. I will say here that for almost every time except one (later) – each time the scene changes I either do it deliberately by spinning/twisting turning or similar or I feel like I’m back in my body and doing the last part of the projection again with stepping my legs out etc…

As said I had multiple experiences.. the first few were projecting into the room I was sleeping in.. after the idea from the first experience – having sex with my Mrs was the best thing I could think of now, which IS very nice, and that became my goal as she was in the first few projections.. strange alterations in the scene etc ie. Her character changing into other characters, which I even tried to stop, meant I never got very far with that goal. (The character changed shape but the rest of the scene was stable which was interesting – different than in my dreams).

Sometimes I projected into the room and it was dark, sometimes a light would be on.. one time I turned the light on (and it worked)… – usually if I projected or spun and altered the scene and it was very dark I projected/spun again as I didn’t want to project into the dark after my experience with the KISS character..

Often I was flying.. In the most interesting group of events I projected into the bedroom, flew outside and it was daytime… I figured I was in the area where I lived.. I thought about validating the projection experience so looked around closely for markers and areas I could recognise later… In one particular direction I noted I flew higher over a little hill and almost on the top of this rise nested amongst the houses was a frangipani tree (I view this our Mine/Mrs. flower – another story) and just past that another plant which I though I would recognise in it’s location/proximity to the frangipani but can’t remember the type now… just past those to the right was a house with a large flag hung over it’s brown painted wooden fence…  the flag was on it’s side, blue and with a half moon crescent (laying on it’s back) and some other symbols (all in white) .. most which I can’t remember now.

Then I remember projecting here again later (so I think this exists somewhere).. I took the same flight path past the same plants and eventually found my way into a house/barn/room. There were animals.. pigs (small ones).. geese or similar and others.. I had floated in here and a few in this room weren’t too happy.. I wasn’t supposed to be here.. The person most bothered by my presence looked like a man but had a face that resembled a pig (in ways without the pig nose) – I took this as the person in control of these animals – I noted a few other ‘people’ that had faces like animals – they didn’t seem like good people .. I didn’t want to bother anyone too much so decided to leave through a different entrance. I flew past a few beings that did the old “wooo..” ghost noise but I didn’t take too much notice and kept going…

In one other scene I wanted to visit my parents (they live 7hrs drive away)…  one time earlier I had seen some of my family (my Mum with my son and Mrs. etc) but not my Dad, and he was the main one I wanted to see.. I projected again and when outside my current house I saw the same things.. The rise of a small hill with houses, the frangipani etc.. I figured I needed to travel in the general direction of north to find my parents and once I’d established that direction I flew off – actually this is were I ran into the pig man house I think..-

Anyway the way I appeared at my parent’s house was different. The conscious stream was not as strong.. It was sort of like I was seeing dark then opened my eyes, and I saw myself flying towards my parent’s house.. My daughter (6 1/2 mths) eventually appears there and I’m carrying her while standing at the top of the stairs. I want to give her an experience of flying so I jump off the stairs (hopefully I’m in the astral), fall for a little (which was a bit scary) and then manage to fly while carrying her…  she rolls over while in my arms and we can again see the outside of my parent’s house.. I fly over and land on the steps and my Dad is there.. it now seems that I somehow hit my daughters head on something – maybe while flying – (though i didn’t) – and she had a little bruise on her head that my Dad helped me attend to..

That’s about the main bits. It was much more amazing than it reads. The feelings. The realness. The people. The flying:)… The continuous projections and the spinning was also fantastic.. It was truly awesome.. The only real scary bit was with the Gene Simmons character at the start.. otherwise this was the most cool projection experience I have had to date…

I believe most of 4:30-5:30am this morning was spent projecting..

The mentioned area outside my house I was visiting might be like what I experienced on some level as it was repeatable… Lets see if anything can be used for validation.. Pity I won’t be flying around my neighborhood in real life anytime soon to find out!!

Peace,

Dean

Dean Keune Astral Projection, Techniques Astral Projection, Flying, Techniques

I woke up early this morning at 4 AM and per the lucidology videos and for the first time ever I had enough clarity to consciously wake up and keep perfectly still. Nicholas Newport claims that if a person is able to wake up without moving then they should be able to slip right back into sleep, the trance state or an OBE. Before I woke I had been dreaming that I was back in my childhood bedroom that I had shared with my two brothers growing up. In the dream they are both sleeping in the same bed across from me and but they were grown and for some reason were annoying the crap out of me.

I laid in the bed across from them in the dream trying to fall asleep “while already sleeping” and suddenly I woke up. Perhaps it was the fact that I was dreaming of falling asleep that prevented me from moving when I woke, but I made a conscious decision not to move for the sole purpose of attempting an OBE.

I recall laying in my real bed thinking mostly about staying perfectly still and then 5 seconds later the vibrations hit and I found myself in sleep paralysis. Almost instantly I was back in my dream, however I was now lucid and I knew what was going on. Strangely enough, at the same time I was seeing my current bedroom too. I was not flipping back an forth between dream state and waking consciousness, It seems that I was actually thinking in duality between my dreaming consciousness and my expanded ethereal consciousness.

A few seconds later I noticed in my dream state that the bed sheets where not completely coving my back which caused me to feel unprotected and fear set in. My consciousness then shifted to my dream state and I remember being in paralysis trying to break free by swinging my arms back and forth over my chest. My consciousness suddenly shifted back to my ethereal body and my dream body at the same time and I could see my dream arms sitting still while another set of arms were moving back and forth across my chest passing through my dream arms. I think that the moving arms were perhaps my real time double’s arms.

I never woke up but instead the vibrations stopped and I went straight back into the dream and lost real time consciousness. The fear of not being covered up in the dream caused an abrupt end to the experience. It seems to me that I was conscious on 3 different levels during the experience. I was seeing my dream, my real room and my real time arms moving pretty much all at the same time. I think that if I could have continued the experience and kept the fear at bay, my real time body, including the arms that were moving, would have exited and I may or may not have remembered the OBE. Perhaps the strong fear emotion was the reason I remembered any of it. This also suggest that when I woke up, any projected doubles must have been reeled in at that moment.

You can read more about dual consciousness “mind split” by reading Astral Dynamics by Robert Bruce.

David Mathis Astral Projection, Dreams, Lucid Dreams, Techniques Astral Dynamics, Astral Projection, Astral Projection Techniques, Consciousness, Dreams, Lucid Dreams, saltcube.com, Sleep Paralysis, Techniques

It’s approaching the beginning of September and it’s time for my bi-monthly progress report on lucid dreaming and astral projection attempts. I have not had any new experiences lately but there is a new lucid dreaming approach that I would like to try. It’s something I thought of today at “Mighty Fine Burgers” here is Austin while I was consuming a years worth of bad cow karma.

I have noticed there are two things common in dreams. Some dreams reoccur regularly and that things I think about mostly during the day (especially with high emotion) show up in my dreams. Taking these two things into consideration I think I may have found an easy gateway into lucidity which usually transitions into astral projection.

I am going to start writing down these reoccurring dreams and then begin to think about them several times throughout each day. While thinking about them I am going to imagine that I am becoming lucid in the dreams. In addition to just thinking about or conceptualizing becoming lucid I am going to try to actually experience it as if it is happening in my mind. I think that by doing this the reoccurring dream will merge with my waking thoughts of lucidity and I will become lucid within my dream. Once this happens I will will myself out of body and I should find myself lying in bed in the vibrational state.

Regarding “Mighty Fine Burgers”, they are not mighty fine and will probably cause you to die prematurely of a massive coronary if you eat them all the time.

David Mathis Astral Projection, Lucid Dreams, Progress, Techniques Astral Projection, Astral Projection Techniques, Dreams, Lucid Dreams, Progress, Techniques