How To Astrial Project

[xxx-The_Cookie_Demon-xxx]

Dose anyone have any good methods on how to astral project?  

[Fiddlers Green]

Do you wish to project your persona into another place (astral plane, for sake of consistent naming)?
Or do you just want to project your conciousness beyound your physical form?  

[xxx-The_Cookie_Demon-xxx]

Both, do you have any methods for either  

[Fiddlers Green]

Step one: Find someone who has done this before in your area to walk you thru it and make sure nothing goes awry.
Someone trustworthy.
This sort of thing, projecting the self beyound the physical, is not something I suggest doing alone and with only written instructions. sweatdrop  

[xxx-The_Cookie_Demon-xxx]

ok Thx for the advice  

[Darin Rosewood]

Fiddlers Green

Step one: Find someone who has done this before in your area to walk you thru it and make sure nothing goes awry.
Someone trustworthy.
This sort of thing, projecting the self beyound the physical, is not something I suggest doing alone and with only written instructions. sweatdrop

Question: How to go about finding someone in your area who's done it before. I live in Maryland, and very little of anything out of the ordinary happens around here, and very few people I know are interested in this kind of stuff, fewer still have any experience with it.  

[TeaDidikai]

Darin Rosewood

Fiddlers Green

Step one: Find someone who has done this before in your area to walk you thru it and make sure nothing goes awry.
Someone trustworthy.
This sort of thing, projecting the self beyound the physical, is not something I suggest doing alone and with only written instructions. sweatdrop

Question: How to go about finding someone in your area who's done it before. I live in Maryland, and very little of anything out of the ordinary happens around here, and very few people I know are interested in this kind of stuff, fewer still have any experience with it.

Networking.

As for AP, I suggest ARE as a resource.

The other means used in my path are usually ecstatic in nature. But there is also a prohibition against AP.

Baba > My Curiosity.  

[Fiddlers Green]

Darin Rosewood

Question: How to go about finding someone in your area who's done it before. I live in Maryland, and very little of anything out of the ordinary happens around here, and very few people I know are interested in this kind of stuff, fewer still have any experience with it.

First, research the type of projection you are desirous for.
Second, trace who, historically practised it.
Also, see what the historic methods were of doing this.
Now, match the historic group to modern inheritors or the usefull props to their current owners and start there.
This may require travelling.  

[Morphenius]

Quote:

Dose anyone have any good methods on how to astral project?

Yes.

wink

Seriously, I'm personally coming to wonder how much of astral projection is a form of semi-lucid dreaming. This is the same conclusion that Dr. Stephen LaBerge of the Lucidity Institute came to in his research on lucid dreaming:

Out-of-body experiences and lucid dreams.

Most techniques for inducing astral projections are in almost perfect parallel to the methods of inducing lucid dreams from a waking state described in a variety of literature, including LaBerge's Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming and the older manuscripts on Tibetian dream yoga. Pretty much all of them have a specific format:

• You have to want it. Just being faintly curious or only occasionally working on it won't do you any good. You have to actually work for it on a daily basis.
  
• You need to work on recall. People like Robert Bruce claim that poor memory is simply a function of the out-of-body experience (OBE), but various others including myself have found that working on dream recall helps immensely with remembering one's experiences while "astrally projected."
  
• Get plenty of sleep. If you're tired while you try to induce, you'll probably just fall asleep. Napping helps. (Again, LaBerge has something to say about the power of napping and why he thinks it works. The most powerful technique seems to be waking yourself up one hour before you would normally get up, doing your morning routine for an hour, and then going back to bed while doing some kind of induction technique.)
  
• Learn how to concentrate on just one thing at a time without intention. Learn how to just look without either allowing your mind to wander or trying to influence what you're looking at. Meditation practices can help with this.
  
• Watch your hypnagogic imagery as you fall asleep. (That's the imagery that flashes before your eyes while you're falling asleep.) Don't try to stare at it. Learn to watch it with "soft eyes." Just watch. If you do this too intentionally you'll shatter the imagery and break your induction.
  
• Get used to reading something, looking away and then reading that same thing again first thing once you get out of bed. This is important because when you finally do "astrally project" you'll probably think you're walking around physically. In an OBE there's a tendency for written words to swim around and change when you look away and then look back at them. This will help test whether you're actually out-of-body.
  

Best as I can tell, anything extra is unnecessary and usually based on some kind of religious belief. I've been getting about one OBE a week doing this and the frequency is increasing. It's a skill you can harness - with daily effort.

I hope that helps! biggrin  

[TeaDidikai]

It's an interesting idea Morphenius, but I disagree with some of the assertions.

For a start- the kind of feeling experienced is very different between dreams and the overarching expression of the Otherworld- not just in OBE, but in other workings.

Granted I only have shared experiences to work from in this- but having done lucid dreaming for a very long time and having some of the more "interesting" works (past and present) as a point of reference there is a completely different sensation to me.

The best I can do to describe it would be to say the feelings you spoke of when you shift "in line" is more akin to Otherworld expressions than lucid dreaming. Or- at least the resonence you gave off.

On the otherhand, Lucid Dreaming feels more like a bridge between dreaming and "out of line".  

[Eshmasesh]

I have a question too. surprised
I don't know that much about astral projection, though.
Is it necessary to be asleep in order to astral project, or can you but yourself into the state through meditation?  

[Pelta]

Morphenius

Best as I can tell, anything extra is unnecessary and usually based on some kind of religious belief. I've been getting about one OBE a week doing this and the frequency is increasing. It's a skill you can harness - with daily effort.

Your post was very interesting and informative, but sort of along the lines of what Tea was saying, do you see any difference between Astral Projection/OBE and Otherworld journeys?

Coming from an Otherworld tradition, I've experienced that walking around this world is very different from exploring the Other. Nor do I see it as lucid dreaming as there is a very subtle shift in consciousness between dreaming, even if you are controlling it, and exploring.  

[Morphenius]

TeaDidikai

...the kind of feeling experienced is very different between dreams and the overarching expression of the Otherworld...

missmagpie

do you see any difference between Astral Projection/OBE and Otherworld journeys?

Oh dear. Well, I'll be much better capable of answering these comments if someone would be so kind as to tell me what this "Otherworld" is! My initial guess had been that it was another name for the astral plane, but your question, missmagpie, has now placed me in a state of pretty much perfect confusion. burning_eyes

My guess would be yes, I probably view them as the same because I don't usually view the astral plane as being layered (i.e. as being "planes"). I tend to view each experience in the astral as its own "pocket," so to speak. I'm coming to term these "dreamscapes" because of their fundamental similarity to dreams.

Right now, there is really no test that you can do to make sure that you're not dreaming. The Tibetian Buddhists have used this fact as a path to enlightenment for several millenia. They conclude that everything is a dream, and that by recognizing the illusory nature of reality by seeing that "all is mind-stuff" you can break out of the cycle of death and rebirth. They insist that the afterlife is itself a dreamlike state, and that therefore you need to master lucid dreaming while still alive in order to properly navigate the afterlife.

I bring this up because there's a fundamental similarity between all forms of experience I'm aware of. People live in complete worlds. I personally suspect that this is foundational to how the human mind thinks. Consider, for instance, that when you look down at your keyboard what your eye actually sees is just light of various intensities and colors. What your fingers feel is just pressure and temperature. (If I recall correctly, the nervous system has different signals for those two aspects of "touch.") There is nothing inherent in the nature of those nervous signals to suggest that what you see and what you touch are the same. That coordination is purely mental. It's part of the cognitive construction of the complete world around you.

In other words, you're in a dreamscape right now. You aren't experiencing anything physically real. You're experiencing your mind's synthesis of experience into meaningful patterns that form a kind of hologram - an experience whose parts make sense only in the context of the whole. (If you experienced the same pressures and temperatures of the keyboard but saw a piece of tinfoil instead, you wouldn't think you were touching a keyboard.)

The key difference between the physical world and dreams is that the dreamscape formed of the physical world is given impetus by the physical senses. In a dream, everything is a creation of the mind.

So where does astral travel fall? I'm honestly not sure. Experimentation done pretty much constantly since the 1970's suggests that the various forms of ESP are functions of how the subconscious mind operates. The subconscious mind appears to be fundamentally nonlocal in its means of processing. In other words, it isn't limited by space or time. The brain, in fact, may very well be more like a radio tuner tapping into certain frequencies that form the mind rather than a hard drive as most neurologists assume.

When the conscious mind is highly active, certain signals from the subconscious mind are harder to receive. This is why there's usually a need for trance to tap into certain aspects of fortune-telling, magic and so on. (I don't think this is a strict requirement, mind. There appear to be patterns to magic that can be understood consciously and navigated like laws of nature. They just seem to require cooperation with the subconscious mind.) So when you're asleep, you're more likely to tap into the natural abilities of the subconscious mind. This has been more than verified by the Maimonides studies on dream telepathy back in the 1970's.

What I propose is that when you're dreaming, you aren't actually in a total sensory deprivation state. Your physical senses are largely shut down for sure, but you're still receiving information in the way of flickering thoughts, global themes and so forth. Hence effects like precognitive dreams, shared dreams and the like.

Therefore, astral travel may very well be equivalent to dreaming. The difference is how much your dreamscape is formed by the paranormal perceptions received while in that dreaming state.

In short, I'm applying Ockham's Razor to question the idea that there's a second body that leaves the physical body.

Mind you, this doesn't invalidate the experiences whatsoever. What I'm suggesting is that these other worlds, these other dreamscapes you experience have a powerfully subjective element to them. This is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing because it gives you tremendous freedom to explore the way your mind works, but it's a curse in that if you take "astral" experiences at face value you may very well be missing the point of what actually was communicated.

For instance, the Maimonides dream laboratory did a particular study in which one person was set in a physically isolated room that was electromagnetically shielded as best as they could. Once he started REM, a group of people did their best to telepathically "beam" a Van Gogh painting into his mind. Upon being awoken, his reports made it very obvious that he had received the telepathic message - but it was also equally obvious that his mind had altered the message to fit the dreamscape he was experiencing. The world around him started melting and twisting in bizarre surrealist fashion and the sky's colors turned the same colors as those in the painting's sky. Never once did he actually see the painting during his dream.

This same effect happens in normal daily consciousness, too. There are many experiments on the nature of selective perception and confabulation that have more than verified that what people expect to experience and remember has at least as much effect on their experience as the actual sensory data they receive from their bodies's senses. For instance, one study brought a group of subjects to sit in the psychologist's "office" to wait for further instruction. After about a half-minute they were brought to different rooms and asked one by one what they remembered in the "office." They all accurately remembered aspects of the room that were fitting for an office (the desk, the chair, a photograph of kids, etc.) but completely failed to recall things that didn't fit their concept image of an office (like the skull off to one side.) Some of them even remembered things they expected to find in offices that weren't there at all!

My point is that when you're doing astral travel, there are several different possibilities:

• You're actually going to these other worlds in some version of an astral body.
  
• These other worlds exist, but you're just receiving information about them while you're in some kind of trance or sleep state.
  
• There are floating fragments of ideas, experiences, memes and so forth that you pick up and build into complete worlds in the same fashion in which you build an entire dream from the thought of, say, a potato.
  

There might be other possibilities, but my point is that you can't really assume that the first one is true - or even that if it is true, that you're accurately perceiving these other worlds.

So to sum up, I tend to think that if there are astral worlds separate from the physical world, these worlds are just that: dreamscapes. They aren't "layered" in any particular fashion. The same basic rules of perception seem to apply to all dreamscapes - that everything has a subjective quality to it, that ultimately anything is possible, and that expectation plays a very important role in what the dreamscape holds for you.

One question I'm currently trying to explore is this: Why is there such a strong impression that the physical world is fundamentally different than other dreamscapes? One detail I can point to is the fact that we can read and reread the same thing without having the words swim around or change into glyphs. Also, flickers of thought don't seem to change the physical world around us. Why?

My working hypothesis is this: This is every bit as much a dreamscape as any other, but there are roughly six billion dreamers in this one. The dream as a whole is affected by the thoughts of every dreamer equally. So on the whole, reality is democratic. Gravity works because six billion people say so, and then children grow up experiencing this gravity as being immutable and come to believe that it's an inherent part of this dreamscape. Thus their vote gets added to the gravity meme and the cycle continues.

If this is the case, and if shared dreams are really possible (which some anecdotal evidence suggests), then there is an objective existence to some other worlds. They would be defined by the presence of other dreamers who implicitly "vote" on the nature of the dreamscape. This would offer an explanation as to why certain dreamscapes in astral travels have a kind of consistency and stability that spans beyond the ability of an astral traveler to influence to any great degree.

This hypothesis is fairly straightforward to test: Have lucid dreamers get together at a predetermined place, travel to a world of their mutual creation, do some experiments during this lucid dream, and then upon waking compare notes about their experiences. Unfortunately, this is a one-way test: It can potentially validate my hypothesis, but there is no way it can disprove the idea. I'm not sure the idea can be disproven, actually. (If anyone can think of a way, I'm all ears!)

Anyway, I'm rambling. Does that answer your question, missmagpie?

TeaDidikai

...the kind of feeling experienced is very different between dreams and the overarching expression of the Otherworld...

missmagpie

...Nor do I see it as lucid dreaming as there is a very subtle shift in consciousness between dreaming, even if you are controlling it, and exploring.

Just a quick point: No one can win an argument based on the idea that someone has a foolproof way of verifying when one is not dreaming. Dreams can feel like anything whatsoever, and they tend to be very suggestible. If you have a recurring dream about "the Otheworld" which you expect to have a particular form because of your induction method, you'll consistently have the impressions the two of you are describing.

Mind, this doesn't prove anything. You both may well be right. I'm just pointing out that arguments based on the idea that you can distinguish between dreaming and not-dreaming are never going to work. Any test you can devise to test that you're dreaming is a test you can dream a result to!

(The one potential exception is with the reading test - but I don't know why that test produces the results it does, so I'm not ready to say that it's honestly impossible to dream of reading the same thing several times.)

Eshmasesh

Is it necessary to be asleep in order to astral project, or can you but yourself into the state through meditation?

Honestly, I don't know. Every time I've successfully induced an OBE from meditation, it has worked because I fell asleep in the process. confused

The two pieces that seem to matter most for inducing an OBE are that (a) you need to let your body "shut down" somehow and (b) you need to retain waking consciousness. You can potentially do both of these through meditation, but experience and readings suggest that meditation works ultimately because it keeps the mind alert while you're falling asleep.

I suggest you pick up a copy of Adventures Beyond the Body by William Buhlman. It's one of the most lucid accounts of the OBE and induction techniques I've yet encountered. Most other systems are steeped in theoretic baggage, but Buhlman largely seems to keep to his experiences and the reported experiences of others with whom he has spoken.  

[Morphenius]

TeaDidikai

The best I can do to describe it would be to say the feelings you spoke of when you shift "in line" is more akin to Otherworld expressions than lucid dreaming. Or- at least the resonence you gave off.

Oh! I think I just made sense of this. When you're talking about when I "shift 'in line,'" do you mean to refer to when I Connect through the ZPF as per our last get-together?

(To others not privy to the details of that discussion: The matter of "Connecting" is essentially the content of the essay I'm still to write. I promise I'll explain eventually, hopefully sooner rather than later. For now I apologize if I lose people.)  

[TeaDidikai]

Morphenius

TeaDidikai

The best I can do to describe it would be to say the feelings you spoke of when you shift "in line" is more akin to Otherworld expressions than lucid dreaming. Or- at least the resonence you gave off.

Oh! I think I just made sense of this. When you're talking about when I "shift 'in line,'" do you mean to refer to when I Connect through the ZPF as per our last get-together?

Yep. That would be what I am talking about. 3nodding