OBEs with the Body Awake?

[Alienor]

I've come to realize that "hallucinations" are what I refer to as "Focus overlay experiences".

I totally agree

I had just the other day a conversation with two spirit beings: I thought I had heard someone talk and went to check, but could not see anyone. Then I was made aware of the two spirits presence and told them, that I thought I heard someone talk. They said, that would happen quite often, that people do hear or see snippets of the astral. They continued, that in the past in more "native" cultures, when someone did hear or see stuff, the "shaman" would go and have a look, to see what was there. Now in modern times, people who hear or see stuff get called "crazy"

[dreamosis]

"Focus overlay" as hallucinations make sense. Some focus overlay may be astral bleedthrough, some focus overlay may be subconscious bleedthrough.

I've begun to think that human beings really never stop dreaming. Maybe our subconscious minds are always playing games of association with images. Some "crazy" people may just be people who are dreaming while awake all the time, with their subconscious superimposing dream images over what they see with their physical eyes. Some "crazy" people may actually just be seeing the astral, but what if it's more a mix of both -- they're seeing subjective dream images and the etheric and the astral, just like we do when we project.

[Sinera]

hallucination = focus overlay

I'd agree, too. It gets nearer to the implications of hallucinating.

Many people define hallucinations as (or even equate it compeltely with) delusions or illusions. I did once too, but I do it differently now.

First we need to ask then again: What are illusions anyway? For me, now, every THOUGHT FORM that enters the mind stems from a level of a REALITY - be it experienced in hypergogia, dreams, lucid-dreams or semi-dream states, daydreaming, meditative states, letting phantasy flow in waking state, subconscious thoughts and memories that just "pop-up" uncontrolled, every image or concept i willfully create in my mind, etc....

And don't we "see" these (our) thought forms ourselves "in the astral" to prove this? Yes, the astral is "thought responsive", if we "imagine" a thought (form) in RTZ or elsewhere it immediatley can emerge and we really "see" and experience it there.

Thus, every phase or focus of attention tuned into or astral level projected into or dimension of mind/body or however you might call it in fact IS per se a level of REALITY for me.

Level of Reality = Attention Focus Level.

So, in my view, if we still view hallucination as something rather PATHOLOGICAL -- and we must because it's something that causes people "mental problems", with many of them even ending up with regular visits to their shrinks (or even worse: in the nuthouse) -- it has to be defined differently.
Not by illusion (for me there are no real illusions since "ALL" is reality now) and not as seeing something which "isn't real" but only by something that belongs to another level of reality.

What makes it problematic or pathological is the fact that these generally hallucinating people cannot DISTINGUISH between the different levels of REALITY
It might be they suffer from (in psychological jargon) a lack of "latent inhibition" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_inhibition), so they receive inputs from several "realities" at once - but cannot differentiate.

Example: You are standing in the street (in "real") and imagine or suddenly "see" a funny yellow elephant with wings on the street. The street and your surroundings are still "real" and belong as usual to the material dimension you inhabit.
Your "reason" tells you that the yellow winged elephant does not belong to this material dimension, but is rather a "thought form" and/or an element of another dimension of reality.
The "insane" or "mentally disturbed" person cannot tell it apart. It thinks it is the same level and attributes the elephant to the material dimension.

(Of course, every person can cause these hallucinations by taking substances or inducing it by meditative methods, too. But still these experiences might not be hallucinations then but just "insights" if you are still able to attribute them to the different levels of reality.)

To sum up: For me the attribute needed to characterize or define the term HALLUCINATION is not ILLUSION in the first place (or not at all!), but rather CONFUSION / MIX UP (caused by influx of different levels of realities at once).

Makes sense? Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe I'm hallucinating about this.

[dreamosis]

From observing mentally ill people, and contemplating mental illness from a spiritual perspective, I don't see the problem as just the fact that they're perceiving other worlds or levels of reality.

Many mentally ill people on the street will be talking to invisible people. From a spiritual perspective I see two possibilities: (1) they're talking to real, out-of-body beings; (2) they're talking to fragments of their own ego which they perceive as absolutely real. I have no idea which might be more common, but both could be equally destructive.

Also, there are people who snap not because they saw another level of reality, but because they gained an insight from another level of reality that they cannot handle. For instance, when I was 16 I had a conversation with my girlfriend's brother who saw what I believe were astral spiders everywhere -- all over his friends, the place they were hanging out, etc. He was high on heroin. He was telling me about because he was certain that, although he was on a drug, that that specific time he had seen something very real. He observed these "glowing insects" as he called them on his friends, on himself, and in the environment and it left him shaken for weeks. He was scared to even tell me about it. And I've heard similar stories of people seeing Negs on hallucinogenic drugs.

...There's a passage in Dion Fortune's Psychic Self-Defense where she says you should never share psychic information with someone who really has no way of acting on it. I think a lot mentally ill people see things that they have no coping skills for. The problem isn't so much that they see things, or even that they can't categorize what they've seen, but it's that they don't have a way of healthily responding to it. A healthy response in this case, of course, requires correct contextualization...

Also, though, I feel it should be noted that with hallucinations happening while the body is awake, the perceptions are/can be/may be potentially very different. What you see of the etheric or astral, while in the physical, doesn't necessarily look the same as it would if you were in the etheric or astral itself. I think possibly that we're more subject to beings' valences (the images they project of themselves), for example, when we're perceiving in the physical or using clairvoyance with the physical eyes.

[Korpo]

He observed these "glowing insects" as he called them on his friends, on himself, and in the environment and it left him shaken for weeks. He was scared to even tell me about it. And I've heard similar stories of people seeing Negs on hallucinogenic drugs.

Yet I think that this tells more of the people having the experience in a subjective way than about perceiving an objective reality. There's also always the issue of translating the energies perceived with suitable symbols, which in my opinion often goes terribly wrong. It's not enough to be clairvoyant - without understanding the information is so distorted, it's no good. I think therein lies the danger of hallucinogens - they open up the perception without supplying understanding or a way to translate experiences.

Cheers,
Oliver

[star]

Making "awake" projections is more about learning how and less about anything else. Its like when your throwing a baseball, if you think too much movements can become jerky and awkward.

A big reason why people meditate without expectations is becuase it helps you get out of your own way. So, if you can stay happy and confident and run this through your body without any sort of expectation you can have mystic experience without cutting yourself off, and can learn more about how these things tend to happen, especially if you turn your third eye inward and watch.

My first concious projection I was just sitting in a chair and attempting it, and I popped right out of the top of my head, and I did "hear" a pop! too.

[dreamosis]

Yet I think that this tells more of the people having the experience in a subjective way than about perceiving an objective reality. There's also always the issue of translating the energies perceived with suitable symbols, which in my opinion often goes terribly wrong.

...I think to "truly" perceive Negs or anything else from another world, while you're in the physical, is a matter of becoming comfortable with something you could call perceptual overlap. Where you just get "bleedthrough," I think, what you perceive will tend to be a simulation -- that is, a representation, a symbol.

But as far as astral spiders go...enough people have had this perception of them as spiders/squids/insects that I think it's fair to say that that resembles their actual anatomy pretty closely.

[CFTraveler]

Just to be contrary, the spiders I have seen look more like scribbles than spiders, but behaved like spiders in the way they moved around. Creepy.

[dreamosis]

What do you mean looked like "scribbles"?

[CFTraveler]

If you ever saw the cartoon Foster's home they have an episode called "The trouble with scribbles" which is a spoof on the old classic Star Trek "The trouble with tribbles"- in the cartoon the scribbles look just like what I saw. And, I saw the 'spider' before the cartoon, so it wasn't influenced by the cartoon.
ps. you start to see the scribbles around 4:30 in the video I linked.