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This is my last post.

I had a lot of good times (in forum dimensions) here. Lots of good people. But I have to learn to live in the real world now. The idea of magic is dangerous. Fantasy and emotion can get away, and delusion destroys.

I'm growing up.

I've had my share of OBEs since I started a year and half ago. I've had OBEs "more real than real". I've had a dream of a past life that I was able to confirm the details of by looking up the historical facts - and several uncanny details at that. But I'm finding myself lately leaning more and more toward viewing OBEs and the sort as physiological phenomenon rather than truly supernatural.

I can't make claims for other peoples' experiences, one way or the other. This is about my own experiences. As amazing as some of them are, I still doubt everything.

Is there ever a point where you stop doubting and accept something as real? At what point does that come? Or is it healthy to remain doubtful of everything? You can't live by uncertainty, but at the same time, I don't like the idea of self-delusion. I'm gullible by nature.

Maybe skepticism and curiosity go well together. Maybe if I'd accepting OBEs as real the first time I experienced one, I would have lost interest a while ago. Sometimes, though, I can't help but to wonder if my inability to have belief in something doesn't hold me back from experiencing more.

This morning I had waking paralysis for 30-40 minutes. I was laying on my stomach for the whole time ... I would go in and out of lucid dreams where I could still see my body exactly as it lay on my bed in real life. My point of view was always the same, but the surroundings around the bed shifted with the lucid dream.

I tried moving my arms several times ... I felt my arms moving, but I could see that they weren't. It was strange. It was like I had ghost arms. Eventually, I tried rolling and spinning. It was hard to get spinning at first, but eventually I could spin around pretty quickly. I still couldn't get out.

Eventually, I woke laying in the same position. It took me about 10 minutes to get all there and actually move around.

If you made a 30-day program to ensure the best chance of success for having an OBE - and given that anyone who did it had the discipline and dedication - what would your program be?

Would your program include relaxation exercises?

Would you include energy-raising exercises?

Would you include trances as a cornerstone?

Would you recommend a certain diet?

Would you recommend certain times of the day?

Would you recommend mantras or affirmations?

Would you recommend prayer or rituals?

Would you recommend sexual abstinence?

How likely do you think the average person would be to have success if they tried your program?

Here are some personal goals I have with OBEs (some of them are obviously more long-term than others):

* Develop a working model to document areas of consciousness from the ground up using personal experience.

* Experience and understand the Monroe Focus levels from 3-21; likewise, for Frank's Focus levels 2-4.

* Access and accurately report information gathered from the universal data stream.

* Investigate the existence of energy (subtle) bodies and their correlations with the physical body.

* Successfully perform and report an objectivity validation experiment using the RTZ. Do the same using other areas of consciousness.

* Visit and report back on the geographical appearance of Saturn.

* Hold a meeting of two or more individuals in Frank's FoC-3 and report back.

* Develop non-invasive technology to aid or trigger stable states of expanded awareness.

* Develop personal methodology to reliably induce states of expanded awareness at will (or with necessary planning).

What goals do others have? I feel it's important to document and "ground" my experiences to best explore and communicate my experiences while in C1, and I think stating my goals is a good starting point.

I have created a website/forum for young writers (though pretty much anyone can participate). It's bare-bone right now, but it's all functional. I'd be honored if you took a look and decided to participate.

youngwritersforum.net

Question:

What is lucidity? Why do we become lucid? When we do become lucid, why does it happen, and why isn't it the way we always are? Why is it that lucidity is easily lost and generally doesn't last very long?

Have you ever wondered if death is just like a dream, you'll forget, or not have lucidity? Is lucidity a property of physical-life/brain logic?

Why do we have to fight to maintain awareness, and is it the same way when you're dead? If it's not, is the lack of awareness/the need for lucidity due to having a physical body?

[Think Logically, Live Intuitively: Seeking The Balance]

Think Logically, Live Intuitively: Seeking The Balance
by J. R. Madaus

Book Description
When Madaus, a library director of twenty years and now computer network executive, suddenly finds himself experiencing expanded states of consciousness that lead to out-of-body trips and spontaneous healings, he immerses himself in all the available information on extraordinary phenomena. His journey not only leads him to all the known scientific findings, but also to The Monroe Institute where a series of programs convince him that a balance between our head and our heart is the key to successful living. Think Logically, Live Intuitively is both a humorous and insightful spiritual memoir, and an astute critique of our modern culture and its short-sighted materialism.

There are only a handful of "Body, Mind & Spirit" books I like and this is one of them.

This book is relatively new, having been published in 2005. If you're a fan on Monroe, then this book has some familiar territory.

Madaus has a Ph.D. - but on the cover it doesn't say he does. What a breath of fresh air to have a writer in this genre who doesn't try to sell books by using a Ph.D. for credibility! Madaus comes straight out and says what his degree is in, and that he is a librarian. An honest start to a straightforward and honest book.

I found Madaus's recounting of his experiences at TMI (The Monroe Institute) the most engaging part of the book. He never discusses how to reach different states, only his experiences with them. It's a fascinating read (although it's hard not to be jealous at how much of a natural he was and how quickly he progressed).

The book is divided into sections for each broader topic. Overall, the book is clearly the work of a well-read professional librarian in it's ordered structure and in how the author comes across. More importantly, Madaus writes in a clear and succinct way, so the book is easy to read. Madaus is also personal and lacks the trappings of ego some other books have.

This book held a lot of insights, as well as it kept me entertained (I found it a "page-turner" of the genre).

Relax the Ego. Face yourself and know yourself. Identify your Ego and learn to relax it. The most powerful magic that can be done on earth.

There are clues to recognizing the Ego. You know that avatar of you on WoW, that level 43 orc warrior? Well, if technology keeps up, Teamspeak is just the very tip of the iceberg. Full immersion into a computer game. That avatar has more than just your voice, you can see through its eyes, move its body, be it.

Now step back. You're playing a game. That avatar isn't you, is it? Well, in a way it is – it has your voice, and it acts as you desire it. So maybe it is you. Maybe you get lost playing, forget you are playing at all . . .

Step back again. That person reading this – that's your Ego. Just a step back from an avatar.

Want to project/phase/explore infinity? Well, then let's step back . . .

I believe that learning how to relax is the most important key in the overall goal of conscious projection or phasing.

I've taken some steps back from my attempts to give myself the time to be able to just relax deep enough, to be able to do so without excitement, without anxiety. After today's session, I thought I would compile an article on the most important things I've learned so far. This article might be a little obvious in some ways - or it might seem that way, but it's easy to overlook some of these things or think they aren't important.

This article doesn't cover relaxation techniques. Maybe someday I'll revise and expand it to cover more area, but this is what I have learned so far.

---------------------------------------

TIME

Try to choose a time for your session that can be consistent one day to the next. In this way, you establish the purpose of the session in your mind. This also allows you to impress that this as a time to be left alone. No interruptions. This is a time when you can set aside the work day, the phone, family, friends and any other distraction. This is your time. You have nothing to do and nowhere to be.

ENVIRONMENT

It is desirable to have a space set aside for your session. The bed is associated strongly with sleep (and, for some, other activities which are beyond the scope of this article). A couch, or a chair where the legs can be elevated, is preferable. Even a few blankets spread over the floor make a good space. No space is the wrong space, so long as it is the most comfortable for you. Choose your space and let it be the right space without worrying further on the matter.

You need a quiet place. If you cannot get away from noise, consider white noise (i.e. a fan, Hemi-Sync CDs,) or earplugs.

Lighting should be as dark as is comfortable, from pitch black to a subtle glow. Being able to be choosy with lighting might not be a luxury. In this case, consider an eye-pillow. If that's uncomfortable, no worries. Any light condition will still allow a state of relaxation.

Keep the temperature comfortable and warm. If you use a fan as white noise, turn it away from you so that it does not directly blow on you.

POSITION

You might not even know what "comfortable" means to you and your body at first. Experiment. Move around to find what feels best. Once you have found the most comfortable position, try to keep that position throughout the duration of your session (but allow yourself small adjustments and so forth). Scratching itches is allowed. Don't worry about them.

The position of the arms and legs is an important factor in how you lay. If your arms are spread out you have a different alignment then if your arms rest close to your body – by alignment I mean it affects how your head rests, thereby your neck, and how your breathing is freer or more obstructed. One position for one person is probably not superior to another position for another person, so the position of your limbs needs to be experimented with.

Different surfaces affect how you lay as well; for instance, lying on a couch will be different from lying on a bed.

Having your arms resting on your body is probably not a good idea, as it puts pressure (no matter how light) on organs and bones. It may also ground you.

Pillows are also an important consideration. Having a pillow may be less desirable than lying without one; lying without a pillow may also reduce the tendency to fall asleep. It also affects the alignment of your spine.

EYES

While your body as a whole needs to be deeply relaxed, one key part of your body may be especially important – your eyes. Where your eyes are focused (or not focused) may influence things greatly. Relaxing your eyes might be difficult at first, so take care to learn how to relax your eyes; be patient in this endeavor. There are no expectations, no time limits in how long it ought to take to learn this relaxation.

BREATHING

Let yourself breathe naturally and freely. Some people recommend certain methods of breathing. Generally, in a state of relaxation your out breaths are longer than your in breaths. There is no need to control your breathing, however, and the less you try to breathe the better. Let your lungs breathe you.

TIME FRAME

Always give yourself as much time as needed to learn to relax completely and effectively. Allow yourself time to relax without any expectations whatsoever to have any kind of experience.

Relaxation sessions should be kept short – probably on average 30 to 45 minutes for longer sessions. This helps impress on the mind that you are relaxing and not sleeping (unless you are accustomed to falling asleep and napping all within such a short time frame). Keeping sessions to a limited time also helps reduce frustration, and adds a level of discipline – impressing on your brain that this time is set aside for a particular purpose.

FINIS

For the first part, I just let my mind wander a bit, get relaxed until I'm nice and comfortable. On this occasion I had briefly slept beforehand, so I was already relaxed and in a good state of mind.

I did the noticing exercise to start off, just took notice of things, tried to keep aware of my location on the consciousness map, so to speak. I recognized being in Monroe's Focus 3, drifted through passively noticing until I entered Monroe's Focus 10. At this stage my subconscious offered me something helpful, something simpler than my usual rundown.

I saw an old wooden chest, similar to one you might expect having pirate booty in it, but smaller. I reached out with imaginary hands - I strongly desired to reach out and touch the chest. I imagined feeling it, and then I imagined how it swung open, how the gravity of it turning back on its hinges felt in my hands. Inside the box, I picked up and examined, felt each object. I was so engrossed that I soon found myself in Frank's FoC2!

Unfortunately, FoC2 is a bit tricky on the awareness. I didn't startle myself out of Focus 2, but instead I stayed there, got a bit too involved with it, and wandered off into a dream where I kept trying over and over to get into FoC2, although I was already there.

I think my sense of touch is much more appealing to me than I realized – it really drew me in, so much that it felt like while I was reaching out to touch things, really wanting to touch them as though they were real, they reached back in a sense and pulled me in.

I also learned that simple minds need simple rundowns ...  

I woke at 5AM and couldn't go back to sleep for a while (usually I fall right back asleep). I finally fell asleep, and then woke again. I thought I heard my roommate walking around outside my bedroom. I looked at the clock and it was 8:15AM or so, so I thought maybe he was getting up early for work.

I kind of dozed off and began hearing other noises and voices and such. They were pretty eerie, but I didn't let it bother me too much. After a while, I could start looking through my eyelids at stuff around the room. My body started feeling buzzy and weird.

I was too cozy too even get excited about the possibility of OBEing. I just became passive and observed things as they happened. When I started feeling like my consciousness was fading, I let it happen. But I didn't lose awareness. Right then I felt like I was being sucked sideways, and got pulled out of my body onto the floor.

I stood up thinking, I did it! My room seemed creepy, though. I can't really explain it, just a lot of weird voices and presences. I just ignored it, and decided for validation I would look at the clock. The clock looked just like my clock, but the time kept changing every time I looked at it from a different angle.

So I went to the door and decided to see if I could walk through it. Nope, I just slammed into it. I thought, well, I'll try that again later.

I decided to head back to my body so I wouldn't forget this experience. Looking back to the bed, the perspective seemed skewed so that my room looked twice as long as normal. I ran down the room and saw my body sleeping on the bed. It was weird looking at myself. I tried to do a belly flop into body, but I bounced off the bed. I was wondering how I was going to get back in when I spontaneously opened my eyes, awake again.

Unfortunately, I went back to sleep again after that, so it blurred my memory of the event to the point where I'm not absolutely sure if it was just a false awakening that led to a false OBE. During the experience, though, I do remember being aware and thinking clearly. On the other hand, I also thought to myself, if all OBEs are this creepy then I don't know if I want to have anymore. But right now I think that's craziness!Memories of this kind of thing are surreal, though, after being awake for several hours.

Anyway, that's my first full-body exit and romp, and first experience initiated from an (I think) conscious state.

Also, something of note is that for the previous two nights, I've said silent affirmations to myself a few times before I fall asleep, and again if I wake up in the night. I think affirmations, or setting your intent really does help.

I know it's awfully juvenile of me, but that headline ...  

Also, from all this coverage of late, the Vatican strikes me as obsessively traditionalist. Frighteningly so. It's a perfect example of stagnancy.

"Rat" in German = advice, for those who don't know. But it's still funny in English (if you're the wicked sort).  

One thing that strikes me as odd about all creatures that exhibit behavior that we can understand is that the young always have such an exuberance about life. Just watch a baby warthog go prancing and playing about in one of the most vicious ecosystems in the world and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Thinking about this, I've gotten to wonder how it is that the young are so playful and happy while the adults behave quite differently. I don't think it's entirely because the young are naive and don't have a lot of responsibilities. I think maybe it's also because they're new, and so they remember better than the world-weary what everything's about.

I get the feeling this is the attitude of the non-worldly, to be playful and joyful, excited, curious, to marvel at the world; to have patience and soak up the experiences of the moment.

I realize that I might seem a bit fluffy. I do realize that there are predators. That baby warthog might have some mishaps at the waterhole and its crocodiles - but that's part of what makes this existence so grand. What would the world be without the dangers, the disease, the famine, the hardships to temper the beauties of the world?

Anyway, sometimes I get the feeling that doom and gloom is just an adult fantasy, something that results from being in this earth system and focusing so hard on avoiding hardships that you start forgetting.

In any case, being young is definitely something of a phenomenon.

First let me say I'm fairly aware of my dreams in waking conciousness. I remember nearly all my dreams, and so I can't help but try to find some coherency between dreams, some meaning.

Here are a few consistencies about dreams I've found:

1) There are usually four or more dreams each night.

2) There are recurrent dreams, dreams that either occur exactly the same as before, or nearly the same differentiating only because of a choice you made in the dream.

3) There are recurrent dream locales, and when you are in these locales, they are very much alike between one dream and another. If you try writing a list of places you've been in dreams, you'll find redundancies, not only general but in the specific details of the locations.

4) If you become lucid in a dream, usually you are not totally aware at first (ie you say and do things you wouldn't do if you were more aware) and you lose awareness very easily.

5) Even at a level less than lucid, you can change the dream plot. For instance, you can make a dream character do something different, make something happen out of nowhere, find your clothes after forgetting to get dressed for dream school.

6) Dreams are never completely sensible. Random stuff that makes no sense happens no matter how previously solid the plot and events and atmosphere was.

Consistency is a first step (in my mind) toward forming meaning. If dreams mean something, they should be more than random feedback of data your chemical computer processed during the day (but I do believe this "feedback" occurs in dreams, it just does not seem to constitute dreams).

But if dreams do mean something, then why are they almost always so cryptic? Yes, there are dream dictionaries - but who comes up with these anyway? And how universal are dreams? Are themes and elements common enough to mean the same thing for every person. Most likely not.

Do dreams mean anything beyond subconcious musing? So far, I'd say probably not, at least not in any supernatural sense, and no more than grocery shopping means something.

Are dreams the same as projections? This is a commonly discussed topic, but in my experience they are merely related, and not too closely. Dreams seem to be subconcious meanderings. If the reality of something is defined by the accuity of the sensual depiction (or how "real" it looks, feels, etc.) then dreams are much less real than projections.

Transitioning from a dream to an OBE, I have found that every time when I become aware in a dream, the dreamscape has an artificial feel and appearance to it. I also find that once I realize I am dreaming and decide to fly, or move somewhere else quickly, the dreamscape has a very distinct boundary, almost as if the dream is contained within a diorama or a box. Sometimes it is even difficult to exit this boundary, but upon exiting it becomes clear that I have departed something relatively artificial.

Has anyone else experienced this dream boundary? It's also very distinct in a series of false awakenings, where you wake from one dream into progressively more "real" feeling spaces.

[Angel]

Maybe some of you will get the humor in this. It's neither entirely serious, nor entirely flippant.

A CYNIC'S MYSTICAL TERMINOLOGY

Angel – The metaphysical equivalent of a butler.
Arch Angel – A bright, fuzzy image used to acquire mindless believers; an excellent costume for assuming instant authority on all things.
Astral – A metaphysical location where the only certainty is that everything is uncertain.
Astral Projection – (Also OBE, NDE) A trance/sleep/injury-induced hallucination that reminds people that it wouldn't be a hallucination if it didn't seem absolutely authentic.
Atlantis – Ancient city used for training guides and medium respondents.
Demon – Entity that causes others to disagree with you.
Evil – The opposite of whatever views you happen to eschew.
Fortuneteller – One skilled in the methods of stating the obvious in vague and general terms.
Forum – An exchange on the Internet used for testing how gullible people are.
God – The prime defender of one's ideals.
Grey – Usually a malignant alien presence bent on irrationally subverting the human race, or building complex paranoid triangle schemes.
Guide – An entity useful for relieving oneself of the burden of finding things out for oneself. Sometimes, a genie. The mystic title for an adult's imaginary friend.
Ki/Chi – Imaginary and invisible weapon for playing Asian-oriented games during recess.
Love – The proper response when confronted with anything scary.
Magick – A way of spelling to renew a term that has long lost its credibility.
Meditation – Contemplating how well one has managed not to think about anything ALSO: A great excuse if one is caught napping at work.
Medium – One who uses a bizarre spelling for their pen name ALSO: A method for one to obtain credibility without having a PhD.
Mysticism – A school of thought that allows adults to play make-believe while maintaining a straight face.
Neg – A scapegoat ALSO: The prime entities over which chronic victims obsess.
Psychic – A person with extraordinary powers that manifest only in the absence of critics.
Shamanism – A good excuse for ingesting ethnogens.
Wicca – A role-playing group created by A. Crowley slightly more respectable than D&D groups.
X – The single most valuable letter for spelling guides' names.

maybe thought process during those activities is stimulating it. Chakras get stimulated from all sorts of activities besides direct manipulation.

MacTombs, that is wonderful that you found your guide.  I myself recently connected with my Pleidian spriritual guide as well.  Can you please get your guide to talk to mine to verify that it is really who she said she is.  

With Pleidian Love And Light [],
Taalnar

Thanks Mactombs, that's great info that I was thinking of looking up myself.

I knew the poles commonly (in geological time) reversed themselves, so I wasn't really perturbed by the 2012 prediction - though it's good to know the facts.

I find that a lot of this is true, however I would like to add something:

There is one excellent teacher to writing: PRACTICE! And in order to know if your work is good or not you have to have people read it, don't read the thing yourself. An author is often more critical of himself than other people (except publishers and agents, because those go overboard far too much in my opinion)