Hello everyone, I'm new here but it feels good to be around like-minded people. I thought I would share my experience with all of you as well as my theorycraft. (I draw my ideas primarily from personal experience, Robert Monroe, and Robert Bruce) I wrote it up this morning. I would love a discussion or any insights about my experience or theories. Enjoy!
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So, two nights ago I had a series of Astral projections off of my mother’s couch. (I’m visiting family for another two weeks or so.) I want to share my experience(s) here so that everyone, myself included, can understand more how all of this works and what techniques can be helpful in facilitating separation of mind and body.
I was up until about midnight thirty two nights ago, actually watching videos on magic and astral projection before I went to bed. (This really helps. Getting yourself into the right state of mind and setting your intention significantly increases your chances of having a successful projection exit. Also, I’ve laid off alcohol for about 3 weeks now, and marijuana about 10 days. My dream recall is back in full force as well, which is also important.) When I awoke about an hour later, I realized I was in sleep paralysis and shortly after I was able to project-float out of my physical shell. A better way of putting it would be that my point of consciousness was able to wander away from my body. Now because I’m still a noob at this (not a noob with lucid dreaming, however), my experience was rather low-powered. I’ll explain.
I don’t recall the events around the first exit-projection. Only that I found myself in the living room on the floor in close to total darkness. A great indicator that you’ve successfully projected rather than just having fallen into the dream is the fact that the amount of light around me in the astral was equal to the light in the room in the 3D, which is to say almost completely dark, but not fully. If you project during the day, it will be light upon exit. If you project in pitch black, it will be pitch black upon exit. The intensity (or lack thereof) of light is one of the only close-to-perfect constants upon projecting. Because your astral body does not perceive with “eyes” and has its own unique sets of perception (that translates into, “sight,” “sound” etc..), what you “see” around you may not look the same as what you see with your physical eyes. It is in fact one of the trickier things about objectively determining if you are in a dream or actually still in the room with your physical body. Light radiation, however, and for whatever reason, is almost always consistent between the 3D and the astral realm closest TO the 3D. With a dream however, you can go from a pitch black room to a fully illuminated dreamscape.
When I floated out, I found myself on the ground in the living room. When I tried to move around, it felt like the air was molasses. Moving was difficult and my senses weak, (another indication I wasn’t in my dreamscape), but there WAS enough to perceive. I remember looking at my astral hands in the semi-darkness and being able to see transparent fingers and palms moving around as I swished them back and forth to experiment. As I stood there with such limited sensory perceptions staring at my hands, I had the thought to myself, “I really am going to have to learn to metaphorically crawl in this dimension before I’ll be able to walk, let alone fly. I’m like a toddler here.” I do not recall much else after with this first projection. I might have gone outside briefly, but shortly thereafter I found myself back in my physical body pondering what just had happened and I noted I was still enveloped in sleep paralysis.
Now I know from personal experience and the books I’ve read that sleep paralysis is the ideal condition for a projection exit. We all experience sleep paralysis every night before we completely fade off, but most people have lost enough consciousness by then than they don’t remember that phase of “falling asleep.” All an astral projection really is is the ability to hold your mind awake while your body “falls asleep.” It is essentially a state of deep relaxation and trance. It is among the states that the mystics have sought over the years; the state that monks get into when they meditate (if they are adept at the practice.) So I decided I wanted to do it again with a more fully conscious exit, as the first was essentially unintentional. Now, most people that have experienced sleep paralysis (most of us I’m sure), will tell you that it still feels like you can move your “limbs” around but your physical body doesn’t move. This is because your mind is currently more phased into your etheric body rather than your physical body, but it is still not energetically charged enough to separate. (Master practitioners will usually tell you we have an etheric body and then an actual astral body, and perhaps more other subtle bodies… but that’s a more complex subject for another time.) What all of this means is that you’re essentially one step away from a full conscious exit-projection, but you have to know how to utilize the sleep paralysis to your advantage and it requires a focusing of thought and intent. (When one “drifts off” and their mind falls asleep, our souls seem to know how to instinctively charge the etheric body enough to exit the physical, like the spider who just builds a web without being taught. Learning to do it consciously with our own mind-field takes practice.) In my case the other night, I didn’t feel I had enough focus or energy to project outward, so I did something I’ve never done in this state before: I breathed deeply. Heavily. Somehow my instincts knew I could charge up my etheric-energy body this way. So I laid there for maybe one minute breathing in as deep as I could and then out 2/3 of the way, repeating one or two dozen times. Now, this breathing technique is one I’ve been practicing for a while in waking life; I’ve just never combined it with sleep paralysis before. When one does my breathing technique when waking, it creates a powerful rush as soon as you stop that floods your body with energy so positive that you can’t help but both grin and relax. It no doubt, “raises one’s vibration.” So interestingly enough when I finished breathing, the normal “rush” came onto me… but in the form of vibrations above my head. I could feel them (and “hear” them), buzzing above me. My current theory is breathing magnifies and/or opens up your crown chakra, allowing energy to pass through it into the rest of your physical or energy body. At this point my mind shot back to a reference I had read in a book on astral projection years ago I’ve read a few times. I essentially used my mind’s eye to “pull” the vibrations down from my crown into the rest of my body. I “imagined” them washing over my body in a series of waves, and then like clockwork, down the vibrations came. When they hit the middle of my back, I felt some electric pain, but they washed through the rest of my body without consequence. (In the past when I’d get vibrations, the electric pain in my back was too intense to be able to project outward and would normally end the experience for me. My current theory is that when energetic meridians in your energy body are blocked. the energy can’t flow properly. I suspect I’ve done some work to clear those meridians over the last few years, in particular the last few months, and while my “pipes” in my midsection aren’t fully cleaned out, at least they are no longer fully clogged. This is why I felt pain, but the energy was at least able to pass through still and reach the below my waist.) After the vibrations flooded me, separation was easy and no work on my part. I literally floated out of my body and found myself on the floor in the living room again, rather than the couch. Moving was easier this time, like someone had mixed some water with the molasses in the air, making it less viscous. I still felt low-powered. I am after all a noob… but the first exit projection felt like I was a phone with 1% battery life left, which is why when the “battery died” I found myself back in the physical having done nothing to recall myself on my own. This second projection may have felt more like 3% battery life. It was enough to experiment more for a moment.
Now, here’s the other issue with the astral realm: staying in the Real Time Zone, or RTZ for short, is a challenge for a non-focused, non-experienced mind, and I am NOT experienced wandering around in the Real Time Zone, at least consciously. When I fall asleep consciously, I *usually* slip into the dream-realm very quickly. One could assert your dream realm is your INNER spacescape, while the actual Astral is an OUTER spacescape, and there are MANY layers to the outer spacescape, the Real Time Zone (RTZ) simply being the one closest to the 3rd dimension of planet Earth and our known universe. It is called the RTZ because the perception of time passes “normally” here (relative to waking life), and because objects and locations mirror the physical to the observer. This does not mean when in the RTZ that perceptions of the third dimension are always accurate. Because our etheric/astral bodies have no actual physical eyes, nor ears to perceive sensory inputs, it takes training for a conscious mind to learn to “perceive” accurately out of body. Again, much like a toddler. (Our astral bodies are actually much better at perception when trained properly as they can “see” in 360 degrees among other things.) At first, assuming you are in the Real Time Zone, you might perceive someone who is sorting mail as playing with cards. That kind of thing. But parallels CAN be drawn, and the more one practices, the better one becomes at translating and honing in perceptive experiences. It seems the further you get from your physical body, the more likely it is for reality to distort. Again, at least at first.
ANOTHER problem is that as you move away from your physical location, it is easy for the astral dimensions on the fringes of the Real Time Zone to get muddled with 3rd dimensional perception. This means, especially in the case of a low-powered projection, that before you know it you’re not in the Real Time Zone at ALL, but are instead now in an astral dimension that only has elements of the RTZ in it, relative to your location. The best rule to follow if you’re trying to stay in the Real Time Zone is, “once things stop looking familiar, drop back in and try again.” Usually when you first exit your body, the ROOM you projected out of will be a VERY close match to the physical room your body is laying in, while the levels of light radiation ought to be SPOT ON, and the further you move away from your body, or the longer you stay in the astral, the more muddled the Real Time Zone becomes with the astral realms. If I had a stronger energetic charge upon exiting, I could probably fly around the entire city in the RTZ without the astral dimensions that are just next-door muddling my perception too much. If I had an even STRONGER charge, I could fly around the globe, or even go to the moon, Mars, or beyond. (Experienced projectors can do this. Think of exit-projection like unplugging your phone from its charging cord as a crude analogy. You only have a limited amount of time before the phone shuts off. Or in the case of a projection, reality starts to distort.) All of this is why (during my second projection), as soon as my etheric/astral body left the room my physical body was in, I found myself in a different locale. My mother lives in an apartment on the 2nd floor and I had made the choice to go outside to look around. As soon as I floated through the (closed) window behind my body I was on the first floor in a neighborhood with houses, standing in grass under a VERY bright moonlight. I had essentially shifted into an astral plane of some sorts. It was different than a dream, however, in the sense that that I still could barely move around and that when I looked at my hands again, they were still transparent and barely visible to me, as if I was a ghost. If it had been a dream, things not only would have gotten brighter, but I would have been able to move much more freely. (Speaking of bright, I remember trying to look at the moon which was bathing the land in bright moonlight, but every time I looked up it vanished and I couldn’t see it. A strange occurrence…) Again, a dream turns your mind INWARD and an astral projection turns it OUTWARD. Your INNER world is yours to manipulate like a god. The OUTER world is layer after layer of shared spacescapes and you can’t manipulate the environment just by thinking about it. There are far more variables at play. From what I have read, when projecting OUTWARD, your mind TAKES you to different locales that match your thoughts more than it does MANIPULATE your current locale, as it does in an INWARD dream.
By the time I got outside, the molasses-air was VERY thick once again in the sense I could barely move. It kept getting worse until I couldn’t move most of my body at all and was “stuck” in the spot I stood. In fact, where my right arm was supposed to be, it looked like it had become a tree branch. (A symbol for being stationary?) But then I tried to move my right astral arm and could feel motion and see the transparent hand moving through the tree branch, so it was almost certainly a symbol to represent that I could no longer move.
Now, someone less experienced with conscious exits may have panicked here. I couldn’t get back to my body via movement of my etheric/astral body. I couldn’t go anywhere. I fortunately have a lot of experience consciously projecting INWARD into the dreamscape and a lot of experience lucid dreaming, and one thing that remains constant with both an inner and outer projection is that you are tethered to your body. While “climbing back in” to your body can wake you up gently, (and I’ve had a little bit of experience doing it in the past), I knew how I could *shoot* back to my body instantly: A VERY sharp breath inward. One that will move your chest and jolt your bodies’ frame. So I did exactly that and was literally back in my body in an instant. I felt very relaxed and even a little amazed, but very calm. (Which is also fortunate. Fear and even too much excitement will stop an exit projection. Essentially, if your heart center is over stimulated, it makes projection hard. Once you are OUT you can be stimulated FAR more, but to exit, you must remain calm.)
I decided I wanted to try one more time, so I did the breathing technique again, felt the vibrations above my crown chakra and used my mind’s eye (imagination) to “pull” the vibrations down through my body. I think I felt the pain in my mid-section again, and this last time I “rolled” out of my body instead of floating upward. I was on the floor in the living room a third time in an almost completely dark space yet again. I’ll spare you all the details of my last projection, but I will say that the entire apartment held up well this time, so I must have been able to stay closer to the Real Time Zone as I wandered 50 or so feet from my body. I went into my mother’s room and talked with an essence of her astral body briefly, went into the room where I am staying and heard music, (I don’t sleep in there because the bed sucks for my back compared to the couch), and overall the power-level of the projection was about the same as the second exit, which is to say stronger than the first exit, but still low-powered. The air I moved through did not get more viscous this time before I decided to do another sharp breath inward to return to my body and ponder all my experiences. It’s important to drop back into your body before too long; otherwise you might slip into a dream INWARD or too far into an astral plane OUTWARD and then forget the entire experience. It takes practice and repetition to be able to go further and further and still remember everything from beginning to end. The same applies for the *longer* you are out for and because I’m a noob, I WANTED to remember, and decided to end the experience as soon as I felt I had enough data for the night.
I checked the clock and it was only 2:03 AM. This means it took me about an hour to fall deeply enough into a sleep-state after laying down (12:30 to 1:30 ish), and I was fortunate enough my body fell asleep quicker than my mind. By waking up a few times and repeating the projection-exit experience, I was able to make sure my mind DIDN’T fall asleep. After my third experience I took about 20 minutes to ponder everything and write the highlights down so I didn’t forget, and then I went back to bed and drifted off normally… and I dreamt of eating a lot of delicious sub sandwiches of different types.
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