Korpo

When looking at other people's dreams recently, I noticed something:

Some dreamers and OBErs report being very uninhibited, while others report being not able to discover the faults in their own thinking and the reality they encounter.

I think these two types of experience happen because of the energy body one happens to be in while having the experience.

If you're having an uninhibited experience, where emotion leads directly to action, like a violent outburst, I think you're in your astral body. I'd also say Monroe's early adventures happened like this, and he reports how he couldn't control his urge to have astral sex.

Human consciousness usually is operating as a mix of energy bodies on the physical plane. The combination of etheric and astral body give us sensation, the astral body feelings, and the mental body governs the whole with thoughts and beliefs.

On the other hand, when you're experiencing an astral dream or even an astral projection, you can seem strangely uninhibited like you never would during the waking state. I'd say this is because the inhibiting effect of the mental body is gone and the experience is purely astral. Released from this limiting influence the astral body acts according to its unfulfilled desires.

Then again, many people report that they couldn't get lucid because they accepted the logic of what was happening around them, even if absurd. This is the realm of the mental body, and its mark is that the mental body of its own can consider ideas about the truth, but not determine their truth. Or to put it another way: The mental body often takes reality as it observes it without challenging it because it does not have the necessary sense to pick up on it.

This leads me to a different notion of lucidity, and I want to combine it with what Kurt said about the energy bodies: In order to become lucid and graduate from a certain energy body, one has to overcome the perceptual bias of that energy body. If you reverse this, this means that when trying to master a body you will still be susceptible to its perceptual biases.

In the case of the not-yet-fully-developed astral body (Kurt names this "the adhibhautika body") not being lucid means being a slave to one's desires and the needs of the astral body. Experiences may be cathartic or may contain acting out on desires.

Lucidity in the astral body then means being able to stay focused and in control. This both requires a relatively low level of unfulfilled desires and also fully developing the faculties of the astral body. This is the first time people then experience more and more lucidity. They feel like in charge of things and will recognise their dreams and APs as such because they start to see through the illusion of being their desires and emotions.

Many people then report a drop of lucidity or lucid experiences. This is not because they lost something, but because they gained something. More and more the lower mental plane becomes accessible and more and more experiences of the mental body become the focus.

The mental body is driven by habitual thinking and ideas about the truth. The limiting factor here is believing that one's ideas about the truth constitute the truth.

From the standpoint of dreams and experiences the main problem seems no longer to be the lack of inhibition, but the inability to detect the inconsistencies in the environment and the inability to break out of one's own faulty logic. Also people don't understand why suddenly their level of lucidity seems to have dropped.

Since you now have a body where lucid experiences are likely (the astral one) and one where they are unlikely (the mental one) poorly understood changes in lucidity and faculties can happen. One night you're fully lucid and the next one you barely seem able to walk, or you cannot see and such. Only later in developing the energy bodies you may be able to recognise which body you are in, and even experienced projectors may not have spotted this.

Growing into full lucidity on the mental plane is much more challenging than it is on the astral plane. Lucidity on the mental plane is associated with what the theosophists call the causal body. It means throwing off the tyranny of black-and-white-thinking, strong likes and dislikes, judgement, habit of thought and expectations on the reality you're creating.

Like the astral body, this mastery is a gradual process. Even when you have mastered the astral body as a vehicle of consciousness you will have emotions, and occasionally an emotional outburst. Control is like between well-behaved horse and skillful rider - not total, but significant.

Similarly, the control of the mental processes is not total, but will become stronger until finally a certain point is passed, and the tendencies of the mental elemental will gradually be depleted of their energy. Quiet and peace will arise more often. Agitation will lessen. One starts to get a real taste of what liberation could be like.

When you look at dreams and dream bodies you might be tempted to just assess what you cannot do but either want to do or think you should be able to do. That's looking at reality from the perspective of ideas about the truth. But if you look at your own reality from what's actually happening, and keep on spotting these little signs of progress, you might get a picture of yourself as a learning and growing entity moving through important lessons, both physically and nonphysically.

Those dream bodies might at times seem like bucking horses, but don't get discouraged, and don't depreciate your own experiences. There's more to them than you might realise right now.