Keeping it SIMPLE, EASY and FUN

[leavesofgrass]

The biggest challenge for all of us who are working on projection, phasing, whatever you want to call it, is to keep things simple. When I read through most of the posts here on the AP blog the thing that most jumps out at me is that most people, whether new at this or experienced, are constantly making it more difficult than it has to be - myself included!

So lets think about all of this in the most simple, straight forward way possible.

We are all working hard at getting into the non-physical. We want it so much. Often times we want it too much and thats the problem. Each of us enters the non-physical every night when we go to sleep and even during the day when we are day dreaming or thinking about things. So if we enter the non-physical several times each day without even trying then why is so darned challenging every time we try to phase or project? Well, the reason it is so challenging is because we are trying way too hard and that tension does not allow the process to flow freely. And when the process is not flowing freely we tend to force it a little more which creates even more tension which makes it all even more difficult. And so the downward spiral continues. Then we start beating ourselves up for not being able to phase or project when we want to or as often as we would like. Then we buy books and go online searching for answers in the form of the latest and greatest technique. Most of us are like dogs chasing our tails in this never ending loop.

When we look at those around us who have had the most success they have one thing in common and that is the ability to keep things simple. Frank Kepple and Tom Campbell come to mind. But its not that easy because when we keep things simple we get bored and for most of us there is nothing worse than boredom! But learning to not only accept but to embrace that boredom is actually one of the keys.

So here is my attempt at making this as simple and as easy as possible. And if it gets too boring then get yourself some binaural beats or a light machine like the Laxman or the Proteus (we are having an interesting discussion on these things on another post)....because these tools can make things a little more fun. But dont change your approach and dont over complicate it. Keep the approach straight forward and simple and repeat it every day. Keeping it simple and practicing day after day consistently is so important and yet so overlooked. Follow these steps without any fear, belief or expectations and you will be projecting sooner and more often than you ever thought possible. Or, good luck catching your tail.

(1) Do not practice before bed. You have had a long day and you are tired. You will get frustrated.

(2) If you can, the best time to practice is early in the morning before work, say around 5am. But if waking up early makes you tired or irritable then dont do it. I leave it up to you to find a time that suits your lifestyle and your schedule. Just know that early morning is best because your mind and your body are in the ideal state for practice at this time....and why not take advantage of that? Why make things more difficult than you have to?

(3) Now that we have established when to practice the question is what to do. First off, dont practice trying to phase or project...just practice for the sake of practicing. Repeat that sentence to yourself a few times because its very important. In other words, drop all of your bliefs and expectations of what phasing-projecting should be like or what kind of experience you are going to have, etc. Just drop it all.

(4) Lay down on something comfortable such as a lounge chair, a couch, a bed, etc. The key here is to make your body super comfortable. If you need to stretch, roll your neck around in circles, etc. then go for it. Spend 5 mins in your comfortable position just stretching, relaxing and getting really, really comfortable.

(5) Close your eyes and dont try and do anything...just do as you would if you were laying down to take nice, restful, peaceful nap...let yourself start to doze off....dont try anything, dont expect anything. Just relax and start to doze off....let the body do what it does naturally and dont get in your own way!

(6) Now, as your body starts to do what it does naturally, which is that it will fall asleep if you lay in a comfortable position and really relax...then what will happen is that you will enter the hypnagogic state where dream like images start to come up.....thats great because these dream like images are the non-physical reality you are trying to access! But remember, dont try anything specific and dont force it! You are now more than halfway there without even trying. Nice job! Give yourself a pat on the back.

(7) As these dreamlike images start coming up if you just let yourself fall into them naturally, which is what I am suggesting here....then you will find that you get "sucked into them"...in other words, your main focus of consciousness will begin shifting or phasing from your physical waking consciousness to the non-physical reality....this is great! Let yourself fall into these dreamlike images and every time you will feel "pretty deep" then pull yourself back to waking consciousness....the only way to describe what it feels like to be "pretty deep" and then to "pull yourself back" is to actually try this several times and see for yourself...its not complicated and you will see what I mean in no time flat after just a little bit of practice. So practice this Yo-Yo-Ing back and forth between letting yourself get sucked in and then pulling yourself back.

( Do this at least once a day for an hour and you will notice that as each week passes, if you have done your practice, you will notice that you are able to Yo-Yo deeper and deeper without losing awareness. In other words, the first few days you will Yo-Yo at a pretty shallow level and then when you let yourself try and go deeper you will have gone too deep and will not be able to pull yourself back at which point you will officially be napping and you will wake up at the end of your practice and say "darn..I feel asleep!" and that is the wrong attitude. Remember that falling asleep is part of the practice as long as you really tried to Yo-Yo as you were falling asleeping. Now the next week it will get easier to Yo-Yo and you will go deeper before falling asleep but you will still fall asleep. Who cares. This is part of the learning process. Now after a few weeks of this you will be pretty good at Yo-Yo-Ing and you may even be able to Yo-Yo back and forth throughout your entire hour long session and never lose awareness...this is great. You are on the right track.

(9) When you can Yo-Yo back and forth for your whole practice session and go deeper and deeper without losing awareness then what will start to happen is that you will get snippets of the non-physical where you are actually "there"...in other words you will have Yo-Yod yourself so deep that you merge with the dreamlike imagery but you are fully aware...whereas before once that would happen you would fall asleep and lose awareness. Now you dont. Great! But, at this stage you will maintain awareness and make the transition and then you will get excited and say or feel to yourself "great, I did it!"...and then bang that will snap you back to your regular waking consciousness. This is ok...let this happen a couple of hundred times and eventually it will stop happening and you will just be in the non-physical with full awareness. And you did it all by letting body follow its natural course into sleep...which is the non physical. Now eventually you will be able to access the non-physical without even sleeping but dont worry about that for now.

SUMMING UP 1-9 ABOVE

-Practice for an hour each day
-Yo-Yo yourself deeper and deeper
-Have zero beliefs or expectations
-Eventually (say 60 days of straight practice) you will be phasing into the non-physical like its nothing

Now once you get good at phasing into the non-physical continue to maintain that passive-curious state of mind where you have zero fear, zero expectations, zero beliefs...just let each experience show you whatever its going to show you. Dont analyze it. There will be plenty of time for that later. Get a few years under your belt of just getting really good at going with the flow of things. As for me, I am still in this stage of development where I go with the flow of things. I used to have all kinds of bliefs on how things should be, I would have expectations on what would happen, I would have fear....all of it! Then when I would finally get into the non-physical I would start questioning everything....when I stopped doing all of these things it all got real easy. And so I hope this helps some people out there. Phasing into the non-physical is all about what not to do and not at all about what to do.

Keep it simple.

Cheers, LoG

[Bedeekin]

Nice well written article... however there are a few things that jump out that actually totally contradicts everything I understand and have taught over the past 20+ years. It's your article but I just can't let this one go. 

(1) Do practice before bed. If so take a short nap earlier in the evening. Also there is no harm in trying before sleep as it will increase your chance of experiencing one. Why decrease your practice?

(2) If waking up early does make you irritable this is good. It means you have woken before REM.. which means your chance of consciously entering the Non-physical is greatly increased.

[Lionheart]

 K eep  I t  S imple S tupid

Step 1: Close your eyes, Relax, Release, Let Go and ALLOW what happens to happen.
Step 2: Passively Observe everything
Step 3: Question it afterwards.

If you can do these 3 things, you can Phase. Yes, this is easier said than done for the first time. But, after you learn how to relax, release and let go, you will find it's easy. This can be achieved any time of the day or night.

I personally do a progressive Relaxation ritual of my own starting at my eyes, which is the hardest part to relax. I say to myself my eyes are relaxed, relaxed, relaxed, my eyes are relaxed. When I do this I focus completely on the relaxing. I then go to my jaws, which are normally tight as well, my ears, my nose, my mouth, then work myself down to my toes. I relax every finger and every toe with complete focus individually. This whole procedure takes less than 5 minutes. You will immediately feel the difference though and you will see that because of this time spent relaxing, you have already started into your Trance state.

From here I can either count to 300, do a Mantra, or just start shooting basketballs into nothingness, etc. All these things are keeping my mind completely away from any physical focus. Last night I used the excellent Binaural Beat MP3 by Jurgen Ziewe named OM found here. http://www.multidimensionalman.com/Multidimensional-Man/Free_Deep_Meditation_Sounds_-_Binaural_Beats.html

When the 30 minute MP3 was finished I was prime for Phasing. I just continued to NOTICE and ALLOWED my chosen scenario to materialize in front of me. At first it started as just a light sparkling, then it started to create shape. i could see objects, then I could hear things. At this point I stayed the course and kept observing, ALLOWING the scene to keep morphing in my view. This is very important. Sometimes people see a light flicker and immediately their Focus is destroyed. They question what was that, am I really seeing it, is it real, all kind of things that destroy what you have just built up to. The key here is to ALLOW it to become a full blown scenario. You will know when it's time to join the scene. Like I said, question it after it's over. Enjoy it now! 

[mindflood]

At what point in your relaxation do you know your ready for phasing?

[Xanth]

Step 1: Close your eyes, Relax, Release, Let Go and ALLOW what happens to happen.

^ This...

This is all that is required to become a successful projector.

Simple, eh?

Everyone tries to make it so complicated... but in the end, that is all projecting is about. 

[Astralsuzy]

You are right Xanth, ap is supposed to be simple.  That is all there is to it.  You can do an ap technique, imagine something or place or you do not have to.  I like what Bedeekin says.  Do practice before bed. If so take a short nap earlier in the evening. Also there is no harm in trying before sleep as it will increase your chance of experiencing one. Why decrease your practice? 

[Lionheart]

At what point in your relaxation do you know your ready for phasing?

The entire process is Phasing. I know I am successful when I am enjoying the fruits of my labor! 

[Astralsuzy]

Sometimes I do not read everything.  I am sure yours is good Lionheart, like the others. 

[leavesofgrass]

Hi Bedeekin,

Thanks for your comment. To each their own I say. So I appreciate your points.

I only mention that practicing before bed is not a good idea, especially if you are a beginner, because the odds are stacked against you. The odds are stacked against you in the sense that the physiology of the body is not in the best state to phase-project at night heading into sleep. I think we will all agree that coming out of sleep in the very early morning is probably the best time to try and phase-project. So if we flip that on its head then naturally heading into sleep at night is the least advantageous time. But again, to each their own. If you want to practice at night go for it.

Also, to your point about waking up irritable being good. I would respectfully disagree from the standpoint that we are all here in this physical reality to first and foremost take care of the things we need to do here. So if by waking up early you are irritable, which to me means not pleasant to be around all day because you are tired, then you should rethink your strategy. Because who wants to be around a tired grump in the physical all day? Not me.

This leads me to one last point I forgot to mention in the article. And that is that phasing-projecting is much easier if you have all of your affairs in order in this reality. In other words, phasing-projecting will only get you so far if you are using it as a means to escape from this reality.

Cheers.

[leavesofgrass]

I am happy to see the discussion taking shape. I think we all agree on the main theme here which is that 90% of people make this far too complicated than it has to be.

Thanks for your input Lion. The relaxation is so important and I think people overlook this and simply want to rush through it and rush right into phasing. Of course this wont work. And why rush through relaxation? Its nice to feel completely 100% relaxed.

I will say that for me I sometimes actively visualize and I sometimes do not. In fact I find it easier to let my mind generate whatever material it wants to and then simply go with that. As opposed to try and actively visualize something. Because the second I am trying to actively visualize something then I find I am perhaps "wanting" it a bit too much and this of course causes problems. So for me I think why visualize when my mind is going to do that for me? Its just where I am at now and that may change with more practice and experience.

Finally, I agree that most of the points in my article....such as whether or not to do the practice before bed or whatever....are debatable....because we all have our own feelings on these things. And thats great. But if there is one thing I want to really stress it would be mastering that Yo-Yo technique of letting yourself go deeper into the non physical and then pulling yourself back and then doing that over and over again....there is no easier way to have a fully lucid phasing experience than getting good at this Yo-Yoing. Again, just some metaphors that I find useful....take what you will from it, or nothing at all, and have fun!

Cheers.

[leavesofgrass]

Hi Mindflood,

You asked at what point in your relaxation do you know you are ready for phasing?

For me I know I am on my way when I am so relaxed that I start drifting off to sleep and the hypnagogic dream-like imagery starts coming up. Also, it will start coming up at a faster and faster pace as you get deeper and deeper. In other words, the imagery will start to overwhelm you. If you can maintain awareness through this stage you will pop over into the non-physical without even trying.

Best of luck.

[mindflood]

usually when i get to the point where scenes are playing before me or images come i am half conscoious and my awareness has checked out. I try getting to that point during the day, i can get my body very relaxed but my mind will remain very active,im an anxious person and my mind is always racing with thougts,. Once i get relaxed i sometimes try to day dream something but my creativity runs out and i return to analyzing and questioning.

[leavesofgrass]

Hi Mindflood,

Im not sure if youve ever tried very early morning projection. But, if you have an active mind this could be the ideal time for you to try. Wake up after 4 hours of sleep and try your practice at that time and it should make things a lot easier. I know that for me these early morning practices are what got me over the hump so to speak. And then once I was able to project at will during the early morning sessions, and got a sense of what the whole process was like, then it became much easier to do it at other times of the day....and for the exact reason that you mention which is that its harder to quiet the mind and even to relax the body to the extent that we need to in order to project once the days activities have taken a hold of us.

Hope this helps.

[Lionheart]

But if there is one thing I want to really stress it would be mastering that Yo-Yo technique of letting yourself go deeper into the non physical and then pulling yourself back and then doing that over and over again....there is no easier way to have a fully lucid phasing experience than getting good at this Yo-Yoing. Again, just some metaphors that I find useful....take what you will from it, or nothing at all, and have fun!

With all this talk of Yo-Yos and Yo-Yoing, I took that straight to heart and used it, but in a different way.

I used a Yo-Yo as my visual target. It instantly gave me the sinking and rising feeling. I've done this in the past as well while I was experimenting with different visuals, but had forgotten how good it worked.

Last night it led to me seeing a hole opening in front of me, then I saw the room I was in perfectly and could feel myself moving forward into a Real Time Zone projection. But, this isn't what i wanted to do, so I changed my setting to my beach scene, "safe zone" and just relaxed on by the ocean for awhile. I wasn't too adventurous last night to begin with.

Thanks for the rehashing Leaves!  

[Barnowl]

some great tips here...awesome stuff.

Thanks for posting

[leavesofgrass]

Hey Lion,

Thats great about the Yo-Yo!

I will give that a shot as well and see how it goes.

I guess you could try it one of two ways.

First, you could just be the person playing with the Yo-Yo. Or, you could actually imagine yourself as the Yo-Yo going up and down and also rotating around while going up and down. I think I will try both!

Cheers, LoG