quote:
Once you have acquired the desired state with Gateway (Focus 10) how does it goes from there ?
Since you have gotten away from the exercices (ping pong etc...)what exactly do you do from there (Focus 10)? How does it evolves to the exit?
Is it just placing your awareness in the crow area for exemple, just looking at the brow to get the 3D blackness ??
As to your questions, I feel the process is not quite so cut and dried as you think. After a *lot* of practice I have pretty much reached the stage where I can hold myself at the various mental-focus states originally labelled by Monroe. Though please bear in mind I always said that I don't have any natural talent for this kind of thing. It always seems that each step takes me ages of trial and error. What I'm getting at is perhaps I'm not the best of yardsticks.
I doubt you will get to a position where you are at Focus 10 or Focus 12, and so forth, stuck as to what to do next. The process is largely one that starts flowing and will continue to flow if you let it. You see, a lot of the work I've been involved with is learning how to try and slow the process down. And the same has been true with a number of people I've been in contact with.
The various mental focus states come about like motorway signposts. In the sense that from Focus 10 you get a sensation of mental movement like you were travelling. As you travel you become enveloped with particular mental scenarios that have certain qualities about them. The tendency, I found, is people will generally either pass through a state, or get zapped out of it.
I no-longer think about placing my awareness in any particular region of my head. The simplest way I can explain it, is I just shift my focus of attention into the region of my mind. Okay, I still find that far easier say than to do. And it's one of the last remaining hurdles I face in my quest to project at will.
The key element to achieving this, I found, is getting your mental focus away from the backs of your physical eyes.
The Gateway Wave-1 CD acts for me now as a kind of mental primer. In that first I'll listen to it a couple of times, and go through a mental rundown of the like I describe in the sticky-post. This acts for me as a kind of mental stretching exercise. Just like dancers do, for example, to warm-up their muscles before a performance.
Oh, one mental rundown I found particularly effective is to imagine you are in a small audience and Monroe is facing you a short distance away, on a stage, verbalising the instructions.
Another exercise I often do is imagine a shape, any shape it doesn't matter. Perceive that shape in mind for a few seconds then shift your focus of attention to the backs of your eyes. So you are looking at the backs of your closed eyes. Then shift your focus back to within your mind and perceive the shape. After a while you will perceive a distinct shift in focus. Once you recognise the shift, then practice holding the mental shift within the mind. This is a bit tricky because you'll probably have these little blank moments; during which your mental focus will slip to the backs of your eyes again.
Once you can hold that mental focus, next you simply feel what you are presented with. You might say, "Just blackness". But if you perceive more closely, you might get the idea that all is not quite jet black. Again, when I say "blackness" I'm speaking of a situation where you are not simply trying to focus on the backs of your eyelids and all you are seeing is some kind of residual vision.
You might perceive an area of greyness, or other areas that are lighter than black. These may seem to come and go at random. Once you become more adept at doing this, you will have fewer of those annoying little blank moments where your mental focus drops back. As such, there will come a point where these inner effects will capture your attention
to the extent you are no-longer focussed on the physical body.
This is Focus 10.
In other words, Focus 10 is basically the same state as when a person becomes engrossed by a movie on TV. Mental attention has been captivated to the extent where there is no-longer any sensation of the room the person is sitting in, the sofa they are sitting on, or their physical body which reclines on the sofa.
In obe terms, you are no-longer aware of the room you are laying down in, or the bed you lay on, or your physical body laying on the bed. Your entire mental focus has been captivated by what is going on within you, mentally. As I say, this is Focus 10.
Next comes Focus 12 where you will find that the areas of lighter than black become more distinct. The blackness can take on a velvety or a liquid quality, or you may perceive all kinds of other textures. You might perceive outline drawings of all kinds of shapes; or what seem like faces of people or animals; or whispy foggy colours that appear to swirl around you. As this scenario develops there comes a sensation of mental movement; a kind of forwards progression that takes you onto the next phase.
Each transition tends to be fairly seamless in that one will naturally flow into the other over a period of several seconds. However, at first, progress will probably be scuppered again by the physical eyes in that they tend to try and snatch glances of the various effects you are perceiving. Once you can get the eyes out of the projection equation, you should be able to effect a seamless and controled transition from Physical to Astral.
At first, though, chances are you might perceive a forwards mental movement and next instant you might see some fleeting Astral scene: at which point your protective sense of awareness kicks in and zaps you back to Physical. Which is frustrating, but at least it confirms you are making progress.
There can also come a period where you go through what is a frustrating phase of, "hindsight realisation". This is where a person enters, say, the Focus 12 state... but because it is all very unfamiliar they obviously cannot recognise it. Finding itself in unfamiliar territory, the protective sense of awareness promptly zaps the person back to Physical. At which point they suddenly realise, in hindsight, they projected to an unfamiliar state.
HTH
Yours,
Frank