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