This is hardly new - at all. But the more I expect of a practice, the more I want something out of a practice, the more I am focussed on a result, achieving a state or getting anywhere at all, the less result I get. Oppose this with sleep, where a lot of my experiences happen. Detached from control, expectation and resulting strain, things happen by themselves.

Be it meditation, trance practice, anything - the more I expect to come of it, the less happens. But if I do it just for curiosity's sake, fun, or without expecting really anything to come of it, "unexpected" things can happen. A lot of things happen to me, but they are outside of direct ego control. Just reviewing the nightly experiences of the last years has filled me with a lot of enthusiasm, and also increased my appreciation for dreams, dream recall and spontaneous experiences.

If I go to energy work and I want something to happen really hard, it also gets hard and strained effort, harder and harder. Willing a muscle to relax is almost a paradox in itself. Yes, the energy can be modified, but the harder I set my mind on the result, the harder it is to get there. It gets a fight of the conscious vs. the body and subconscious, where will tries to accomplish things alone, resulting in strain and mental tiredness. At the same time I am sure that my body and subconscious contain great potentials that remain untapped because they do not lend themselves to coercion.

Maybe, just maybe, if awareness observes the processes that are not really its own, the energy of awareness itself brings them to finish. Energies dissolve and finish. Maybe this works better if awareness "lends itself" to the processes by observing them instead of trying to will and control them. Maybe the processes themselves know their own balances and just need "attention". Just speculating.

Everything seems to have its own balance, and maybe "borrowing" awareness makes it aware of that and brings it back to that. Weird concept, but I think it has promise.

Reviewing my past efforts at out-of-body adventures and other similar pursuits, I can only say that expectations of what should happen, how it should happen and what is important and what not, has turned out to be extremely limiting, but hard to overcome.

Oliver