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If this is the one I'm thinking about, a lot of things don't make sense. Firstly, you never see the guy hand the card in and get the cash. Secondly, he won $1700-ish didn't he? Supposedly shops can only pay out up to $500, anything over that you need to go to a centre to collect. Yet this guy supposedly cashed in the card for the full amount at the shop.

Finally, such cards are easy to produce (i.e. produce a fake one and pay the guy out of your own pocket for the sake of the trick). You could easily give a guy a fake card, he genuinely believe he won, then let him in on the trick, give him the cash and film him happy with it. He's not really going to complain.

I'm reading a good book suggested by catmeow which is really opening my eyes on a lot of tricks I couldn't figure out.

Hey Selski,

If beliefs feel right, why not try following them – for a while at least? . As argumentative and sceptical as I can seem, even I go through phases of belief over objective proof. I've actually been going through a period recently of contemplating blind acceptance in certain things – although things  usually comes up to stop this – so perhaps I'm not ready for that again yet .
If something feels right to you, then go with it and see where it takes you. You could always go sit on the fence again later .

The Gravity Hole is a hoax:

http://www.galaxgazette.com/articles/2004/05/17/news/news06.txt



It got me interested first time I read about it though .

[It was the feeling and sensation of becoming a non-body, becoming almost like a small circular disk in the centre of the body]

An example is the saying of Kether/God being a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. If you attempt to visualise such a paradox, it will produce a certain feeling. The feeling it invokes is the point. What that feeling means is up to personal interpretation .

Really?  

I've never heard of that before, but here are my words trying to describe an experience I had just a couple of nights ago... (highlighted for clarity).

I was aware of my physical body (dream body) and was being taught to focus away from the body. This was not through focusing on the ceiling or anything like that, but it was to focus in a central way, central to the body without actually focusing on any one part of the body. It's impossible to describe this lesson. There were no "teachers" as such, but I knew I was being shown how to have an OBE. It was the feeling and sensation of becoming a non-body, becoming almost like a small circular disk in the centre of the body. Once I'd got that 'feeling' I then instintively knew that I'd separated or removed all association with the body. I could then go...

...I reached for that feeling again of being a centred circle, found it, and popped out of my dream body again.

Woohoo!  It seems the lessons being shown me during my dreams are actual lessons that others have learnt and written about.

:woot:

Sarah

Reading that brought up a memory of something which used to happen to me as a child . Although it was a horrible feeling back then . The best way I can describe is I became a tactile concept. Like a shape, "I" could feel myself in that shape, pushed to the edges. Next to me was an infinitely large thing. I couldn't see it as such, but I could feel all of it. In comparison I was a tiny thing, as small as an atom. I could feel the difference in size between this object and I, and this difference and the feeling it evoked seemed to push me down, shrink me smaller and smaller. It's very hard to convey what this felt like.

I like to be able to understand what is being talked about..lol.  And no one said others cannot be interested.

I was hoping you would explain, how am suppose to hear an unspoken word? Do you mean emotions?   I know you said something about duality.. but that doesn't explain it.. or does it?  Hope to hear some kind of explanation.

I think a lot of things like this shouldn't be taken literally . I guess it's meant to invoke an abstract idea/sensation/emotion.
An example is the saying of Kether/God being a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. If you attempt to visualise such a paradox, it will produce a certain feeling. The feeling it invokes is the point. What that feeling means is up to personal interpretation .

I have a lot of experiences where cats are aggressive towards me   I usually have to grab them tightly and stop them attacking me. What does this mean . I have had experiences where they aren't too .

I've also had experiences where I was a wolf living with a mate and puppies in a strange tent like structure, and an interesting lucid dream where I lived in a castle and bred/trained dragons.


Intrestingly, my only encounter with something I could call a neg had the form of a cat. THis was about 10 years ago, and i was exploring ruins OBE. I saw a cat and picked it up to stroke. ALmost immediately it went for my neck, my vision faded and the cat seemed to start growing (Sucking energy?). It's shape changed to that of a blob attached to my neck, growing insize down towards the floor as it fed.

Hi Mustardseed,

You need to have the image hosted somwhere, and then you put the url to it between [ img ] [/ img ] tags (with no spaces).

1) H or I (I can't be more specific because I've never counted)
2) a b c
3a) a b c f
3b) a c d e f
4) a b c d
5) a b d
6) a b c d e f g
7) a d e g
a b c d e f g h

Id say the first question might be a problem as it will lead to estimations and even people putting a higher OBE count than they have experienced.

Say if you percieve a tree, the word "tree" isn't associated with it until thinking links the correct concept with the percept. You don't consciously think in words, "it's tall, it has leaves & bark - It must be a tree". The thought linking the two is before language exists, and what creates the language.

A psychedelic experience (long ago) saw an interesting phenomenon. Each object looked at would fragment into many layers. The object could have been a tree, cup or anything. Each layer represented an imposed concept upon the object.
Say for example a cup. One layer attached to it would be an emotional layer. You might not think we have any emotions about cups , but we do, and it helps shape our perception of what one is. Another layer would be a conceptual understanding. This includes everything on an intellectual level we know of cups. Every association we have made between cups, thoughts, ideas, words. Another layer is an aesthetic layer, the shapes and forms which create our perception of what is and what is not a cup.
Other layers dealt with expectation and time perception etc.
Under all these layers was an object.

I came to a realisation that we don't see the things we look at; we see an imposed lifetime of concepts. I.e. once everything is removed, the object just 'IS'.
I've always seen this as a goal of meditation. People speak about living in the now, but even 'not thinking and doing' still sees this processing and interpretation of objects around us i.e. we are still caught in the past (due to perception).


This is what I was getting at in regards to emotions and which is what Stookie stated better than me .

OH..WICKED COOL!!!! it is colored for a split second!!  How awesome, thanks for that Jing!

For the record.. I did not read the caption first.. hence my excitement....durrrrrrrrr.. :nerd:

Its better than most optical illusions .

I found this site about auric vision.  Don't know how authentic it is but it makes an interesting read, explaining a little about the use of colours to stimulate auric sight, what the aura looks like normally, what it looks like in dying people etc.  It's an interesting site, well written:

http://www.mastersinthemaking.com/articles/aura.shtml

The one problem I with this page is an argument I've heard a few times, including from Robert Bruce. While the author agrees the aura matches complementary colours of objects looked at, which implies retinal fatigue. They argue it cannot be retinal fatigue because the auras appear almost instantly rather than after a period of staring.
I suffer from something called HPPD and one of the symptoms of this is everything imprints on my eyes instantly, so I see retinal fatigue off every object (auras). I also see a lot of other trailing colours etc, but these seem independent of the retinal fatigue.
My experience of this, and that of other HPPD suffers seems to counter this argument. I have either gained the ability to see auras off all objects instantly, or there is something more at work. Interestingly, some prescription drugs have produced these effects permanently in people too.
This is an area I really need to look into more deeply, as my current theories as to how this occurs is more opinion right now. My own experience seems to suggest that natural filters in the brain (which disregard non-essential information) are either damaged or changed, so seeming retinal fatigue happens a lot quicker than it should.
Practicing meditation/energy work and other 'noticing' exercises created the same effect over time. i.e. You look for something, so overtime the filters realign to that. This produces a feedback mechanism, the more you look, the more you see, so you look more etc.
I got caught up in this for a few years and I really did live in an existence dominated by visual and perceptual hallucinations.
What this suggests for auras, I have no idea, I'm just saying a condition I suffer from directly counters a central argument as to why auras (or at least auras as explained by a lot of people) are not retinal fatigue.

Edit:

I'm not sure if this is going off topic slight, but it's an idea I've had regarding auras and their mechanics.
Something I've become increasingly interested in is synaesthesia, especially recent research and findings in this area. I'm going from memory here, but if people are truly interested I can find sources of these research projects.
Firstly, it seems everyone has synaesthesia. We utilise it for many tasks ranging from creativity, to interpreting sounds, language, math, distance and various mental constructs. In most of us, this processing happens below a conscious level, so we use the results of it whilst being unaware of the processing. People who are deemed to 'suffer' from synaesthesia are actually consciously aware of parts of or all of this processing.
It seems that there is a correlation between sound and colours in people deemed synaesthesiac. In experiments, such people were made to choose a colour which represented a played note. There was a staggering correlation between all experiments. Low notes were darker in colour, and high notes where increasingly light (i.e. high notes being white-ish colours).
These experiments also tested people not consciously aware of their synaesthesia, and the results once again showed this pattern. We can assume from this that there is some internal mapping between sound and colour occurring which is common to all of us.
Next. It seems we pick up infinitely more information from minute body language changes than we consciously perceive. I guess this could be a product of social evolution (pre-speech language) which remains with us now, although as we tend to use language to the exclusion of all else, we miss a lot of information, or pick it up subconsciously and take it as intuitive knowledge i.e. we simply have forgotten how to interpret these things consciously.
If we look at experiments into synaesthesia which shows at a base level all sensory information interacts, is it too far outside the realms of possibility that people sensitive to synaesthesiac processing actually interpret the colours of this subconsciously gained information? I.e. whereas people subconsciously look at another person and gain certain feelings/ideas of that person – this helps us form opinions, or gives more sensitive people an emotional response. In a synaesthesiac, this subconscious processing could produce colours which are then seen/experienced as an aura.
This would give some grounding to what auras are/how they are seen.

If you wish to move things slightly out of the physical. One could suppose that certain information from the group consciousness is used by these mechanisms to produce the aura.

Due to awareness raising techniques, people who are usually unaware of the subconscious synaesthesiac processing could become more aware to it over time – hence seeing (increasingly defined) auras.

Very cool optical illusion below which relies on retinal fatigue .

http://www.johnsadowski.com/big_spanish_castle.html

Hi guys and girls. If the universe was created, what was before it?, if there was nothing before the universe was here, where was the nothing?, if God created it, where was God and what or who created God?

The problem with questions such as these is that they might have no meaning outside of human perception. Evolution has produced the brain we perceive the world with. We don't see the world (universe) as it is, we see it in the only way our brain can perceive it – and this might be very far from the 'truth'.
So when we consider such questions, we are considering them through potentially flawed perception (which is why the answers they suggest might seem impossible).

I've always seen emotion as a biological mechanism which we pick up whilst incarnated here i.e. it is a product of evolution and biological action.
The reason non-physical beings might understand emotion is because they might have incarnated here (or a similar place) at some point, or simply interpret the intention of that emotion. This can be seen in other areas such as non-physical beings having perceived gender.
I think emotions can hint at greater 'constructs', such as people stating Love is a universal force. I think the concept of love is greater than the emotion, the emotion being something we have linked to this concept.
If you meditate you will notice there is a layer of 'knowing' below words e.g. such as when you move a body part, you don't consider how such an action will be carried out, you just know, and so it occurs. Thoughts are the same. If you watch the mind closely you notice you already know the content of proceeding thoughts. Words are a mechanism of communication, but it seems we have gotten into the habit of thinking in these words to ourselves, instead of being aware of the 'knowing' (I think a lot of people mistake intuition for this).
Where I'm going with this is, I see no need for emotion with this 'knowing'. This exists in itself. I see a clear division between it and emotion in myself.
Because we are so entwined with emotion in a biological body, we tend to filter all things through it. So I think when we touch things deeply, we can mistake the emotional response with the actual touching.
You might be interested to look into what Buddhists call 'The Middle path'.

Edit:

Just to add something to this, I think people mistake sensualism for spiritualism. The pleasure they receive from their perception of what is spiritual usually encompasses positive and pleasurable emotions. So their pursuit of spiritual truths usually lies within the pursuit of these emotions/sensations. It does not have to be this way.
I think the universe is infinitely bigger than this.

Thanks for your explanation, Jingo - it's actually the clearest of all the texts on focus levels I have read!  

(Yay, Vilkate is confused no more!)

It seems a lot of people either misunderstand the whole focus level thing, or over complicate it . With the phasing model, all there is is consciousness. Different states and locations simply relate to different points on consciousnesses long spectrum. Some of these have had focus levels attached to them .

More or less 20 days.
I have done 40 sessions , 2 sessions per day.
I did 11 sessions of Intro to F10 then moved to the next tracks.
I did 11 sessions of Advanced F10 , now I m back working with Intro to F10 in the morning and Exploration, sleep at night.

I had the 3D blackness , body asleep , 2 times last night with Exploration sleep and last week with Advanced F10, however most of the time, I will feel very relaxed and I have hypnagogic imagery (deep trance in Robert Bruce Parlance)

ADDED: I have also to mention that during one of the session I had the illusion that I was carrying a bottle, it felt real on my hand, but I realized that it was an illusion.

My own experience of this is keep up the routine. I've been using the F10 exercises from Wave 1 for around 5 years now. My use is sporadic, I'll not use them for months, and then I'll use them twice daily like you (into to F10 and advanced F10).
I've moved on to the other CDs, but I keep coming back to Wave 1 as I believe a solid foundation in F10 will pay dividends down the line.
Each year I noticed a marked difference in my perception of F10, and now I can reach that state near instantly by going through the count up procedure. Although I've added my own visualisations to this, such as after energy breathing, I maintain the perception of my body being pure white energy. Then, when I tell each body part to sleep, I move my astral hands to that area and flick a switch I visualise there, turning that part of the body off (it no longer being white) and taking all awareness away from it. This is just to reinforce the commands really.

Something you can try in this state is to visualise a swaying from side-to-side motion. I usually use something I got from Robert Petersons book. I use tactile visualisation to make it feel as if my arms are outstretched on each side of me and my hands are gripping bars. I then slightly pull with my right (or left) visualised hand, then immediately pull with the other. This produces a convincing swaying visualisation which I increase by pulling hard with each visualised hand. If this is maintained it almost always brings the vibrations. I do find it takes a lot of effort to maintain though, especially as one nears the vibrational stage.
This visualisation should be tactile i.e. you don't have to visualise your hands, just feel it as if they were doing this.

Time will also help. Such as if you keep the same routine up for 2 months, you should be noticing difference that 20 days wont bring to you. If possible, add 15 minute daily meditation to this routine too. I've found that 2 Hemi-Sync sessions a day and meditation can produce quite profound results.

I've been trying to keep an open mind, expecting ANYTHING to happen, trying to remove all concepts of "body" and "vision", etc. so something new can happen. The main reason I started this thread was because my experiences weren't coinciding with what was "supposed" to happen. Mainly, that my body isn't asleep during every projection. I know that when people talk about that happening, it's more "advanced" projectors. Maybe the reason why most don't experience it is because they immediately think it's not possible. My experiences have gone up in numbers and control since getting rid of expectations - and they aren't what I ever expected.

I know that many "rules" that authors have created for beginners were holding me back. Not that they were wrong, but I was reading into it too much. Sometimes you have to take a step back and go with your gut.

My view of this is increasingly don't categorise things, don't make assumptions, don't have preexpectations.
Even things like differentiating between OBEs, AP, LDs, semi-Lucid dreams can create barriers. Just take each experience on the merits of the experience itself.
I've experienced AP while still aware of my body, and AP while having no body awareness.
I've also experienced how reading too much into author's models of OBE/AP can create barriers. Their models might work for them, but each of us is different and each of us must find our own way. Places like this can share experience, but nothing beats first hand experimentation and an open mind.
If something's not working for you, try something different, or change the thing you are trying. Also, rely on your own intuition in these maters and have confidence that you can achieve your goal (in this case projection). Doubting your ability to do this can stop it from happening.
Just go with it. Let go of expectations of what you think will happen, and just experience what does happen.

Also, be aware. Something I have learnt is that so much passes below our awareness because it is so subtle. External sensory input drowns out so much internal experience. Simply look for it in a playful, aware mind state.

simply observe the darkness (look out into it) and focus on your breathing. Exclude anything else but those things.

This is what I did but so then what ?
My breath felt exceptionally loud and for the blackness nothing happens except  the elusive thin gray forms swirling.
When the track ended I stopped my CD player I wasn't in F10 but still I closed my eyes and was able to have the 3D blackness but it faded away a couple of minutes later.

How long have you been using the CD for? Specifically the introduction to F10 / Advanced F10 tracks?

Every time people start speaking about all these focuses I feel confused. I don't get their idea and have doubts whether or not it is the reason I have occasional troubles with projectiong.  :confused:

Focuses were coined by Robert Monroe to describe different states of consciousness. They were simply a way of allowing certain states to be discussed independently of personal belief or experience. Such as C1 is baseline consciousness (awake, normal day-to-day). F10 is a 'mind awake/body asleep' state. F12 seems to be a state of expanded awareness (not dissimilar to the 3D darkness) and increased hypnogogic imagery. Higher focus levels describe specific places, such as F27 ("The Park") is a place were people newly crossed over into death meet up with guides and loved ones etc. We might experience such places differently due to outlook and belief, but the purpose of such places are the same, and the focus terminology gives common ground to discuss these places/states.

If you find focus levels confusing, don't use them. They are simply a belief system as with anything else . I perhaps like them as they are more specific than a lot of spiritual terminology, so they suit my mindset.

Edit:

F levels might also be more appropriate for people using or who have used the gateway CDs from the Monroe institute.  These CDs use a variety of techniques to entrain brainwave states which allow access to these F levels i.e. so F10 means something specific to someone whose entrained this state through the CDs, whereas others it's a more general term of 'mind awake/body asleep'.

Just to add, when 'watching' you can move your focus to different areas and feel the sensations there. Such as, if you feel like your body has expanded, move your awarness around the periphery of this expanded sensation - see how far it extends etc. But keep the mind clear (such as in a relaxed aware meditative state).

It depends what you're trying to do . I discovered that mixing meditation techniques and OBE attempts was a bad thing to do. The reason for this is OBE attempts usually require and/or produce hypnogogic imagery, and mixing techniques saw an increase in hypnogogic imagery during my meditation practice – which disrupted attempts to clear the mind.

If you experience such symptoms as these during OBE practice, the best thing to do is just focus on them Impassionately . By this I mean don't feel excited or any other emotions, and don't have expectations, just simply feel and watch. I usually use awareness of breath to keep my mind clear during such times, and put my attention on the strange sensations.

Edit: impatiently should have been Impassionately

Hey all, lately when I am meditating and sometimes just out of the blue my body feels like its expanding, my arms and legs feel enormous. The room/space I am in feels very small like I fill the entire place. What does this mean?

It means at such points your awareness of your body is nearly totally removed (i.e. your body is so relaxed it is almost asleep). During these times you will notice a lot of strange sensory perceptions . It's a good sign.

Hi mindxplorer,

You'll find much talk about '3D blackness' when you read up on peoples OBE experiences. Usually before the vibrations kick in I get the 3D blackness, and it's like my mind becomes super focused (there's a feeling to this, but its hard to explain).
As you become more experienced with the F10 state you'll notice interesting phenomenon regarding body perception - things such as melting into chairs, your hands melting together, or body parts seeming to be bent in weird positions. This is simply due to reduced sensory input causing tactile hallucinations and is a good sign.
Regarding what to do now, I find that I can 'push' the feeling of focusing I get – it almost feels like an (upwards) excitation.
I guess for now, experiment with this state. Recall what it felt like when your are next in F10, and if you reproduce it, simply observe the darkness (look out into it) and focus on your breathing. Exclude anything else but those things.

I just came across one of the most profound quotes I have heard:

"Where self exists, there is no God
Where God exists, there is no self."

Guru Nanak Dev

It's from the Sikh religion.

Think about it outside of the most obvious literal meaning .

Anyone else have any favorite or inspirational quotes?

http://www.wakinglifemovie.com/ an absolute must..

I agree with this. It's a very interesting and beautiful looking film.