Messages

In my opinion, it's a matter of how you feel and what you think. The parable of Mara attacking the Buddha as he attempted to attain enlightenment illustrates this pretty well. Life will not be perfect, but your reactions to life can be.

One possibility is that young kids (<6 years old) are in a theta brainwave state on a permanent basis, which for adults is the meditation/sleep range.

My guess is sleep paralysis. Your reaction is what a lot of people experience: crying for help, not being able to move, and feeling terrified. This can happen in a dream or in the border state between sleep and waking.

The good news is that you are perfectly safe, even if your subconscious doesn't believe you are.  You can use this state to astral project or lucid dream.

[snip]

I've used self hypnosis to enter a trance to facilitate lucid dreaming and astral projection, and I also practice vipassana meditation to study my mind. The difference I see is that in meditation my awareness can increase dramatically, allowing me to see the subconscious processes that fuel my experience of the present, while entering a trance through hypnosis feels more like sleep. As the Buddha taught, you should follow what you know to be true based on personal experience rather than blindly following tradition.

Wow, thank you for the suggestion. I've heard that noise being described here when I'm at that half awake, half asleep stage.  I intend on really trying this out.  I'm totally blind so when I can find a suggestion that involves as little visualization as possible, and relies more on the auditory, it peaks my interest.  Has anyone had success with this so far?

You don't need to use visualization. The best object is the one that your mind is naturally drawn to, which for sighted people is visual phenomena. The general strategy underlying all these different techniques is to focus the mind off the physical world until it is completely detached from it. Sleep makes this easier because this process happens naturally, but the drawback is that you can lose awareness. Try sleeping for seventy five percent of your usual time, then wake up for 15 minutes, and fall back asleep using your favorite technique.

If you want to effects without doing too much just learn hypnosis. It is the same as meditation. Its all about an intense inner focus. Milton Erickson was the best so look it up and I'm sure you'll be happy with what can come from it.

Meditation can actually produce very different states than hypnosis, depending on the type of meditation. This webpage gives a pretty thorough breakdown of the various states you can achieve.

I got about halfway through The Power of Now before deciding it wasn't for me. I Am That is similar, but more dense and (IMO) more elucidating.

Just because OBEs can be induced this way by stimulating certain parts of the brain does this mean they are not really real? That they are just caused by the brain and an illusion?

Stimulating the brain can cause old memories to pop up, but that doesn't make the memories false. It's like tinkering with a video camera and judging reality by the resultant image displayed on a TV screen - that doesn't tell us much about what the camera actually sees.

Consciousness is far from being understood. We can't explore it without being prosecuted (drug use) or labeled as crackpots (astral projection). We haven't reached a point of consensus on what consciousness is, so testing it is out of the question.

This page describes a condition that might be what you have. Whatever it is, I hope it gets better soon. I will be sending you good thoughts. 

The basic technique is to focus on one thing, usually the breath. Sit comfortably but alertly, and be gentle with your mind as it seeks to wander. There is an old analogy of training an animal: a leash too short makes it restless and anxious, and a leash too long makes it forget what it is tied to.

Hi saki. Patience and acceptance are great virtues which I hope to have some day.  Look through the Permanent Topics and FAQ sections to find a method that you like, then give them a few months of work to see if any results happen. My favorite technique is to do a progressive relaxation while in bed before falling asleep, then phasing (look for the noticing exercise on that page).

You have already crossed the starting line if you can remember your dreams! Don't think of this as being difficult to do, or it will be. Thought, intention, and attitude has great influence on your ability to astral project, and your experiences in those states.

This might be the hypnopompic state of sleep-to-waking, if it doesn't happen at other times when your eyes are closed. It's basically a trance state that your body naturally enters during the sleep cycle. You can use this to OBE or project without the trouble of having to induce the state yourself.

Are you trying to heal mental or physical problems?

All my life I've had this feeling that I am in a coma; just a shadow of myself.  You know the expression, "no one's home?"  I feel like I am not all there.

Depersonalization disorder, maybe?

e-sangha is the most active Buddhist internet forum, you may find an answer there.

My favorite technique is to use sleep and dreaming as pathways to astral projection. I devote myself to dream recall and lucidity rather than AP per se, because if I can do the former, then I will be able to do the latter. Don't get too discouraged when you have already made steps to your final goal. It's the process itself that should be fun, not the arbitrary goal posts along the way.

Rupert Murdoch's MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace's home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.

It has been apparent for at least two weeks that all bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet were being censored but we decided to wait and see if it was just a technical error before drawing any attention to the problem.

Now there is little doubt that MySpace has deliberately filtered out Prison Planet, preventing anyone from accessing the site via the social networking giant.

Read on for the evidence...

I will try. 

A mattress cover might help. It stops the dust mites from living inside your mattress and producing huge quantities of waste, which contributes to eczema.

There is a lot that happens in the process of reaching AP. Dreams will become more vivid; you'll lucid dream more often; you'll have better dream recall; the hypnagogic and hypnopompic states will lengthen or appear for the first time; you'll learn to enter a trance, or a deeper one than you have before; you might feel energy effects and other unique sensations. Those are just a few of the mile posts I can think of.

It took me about a year, but it wasn't as if I went from falling asleep normally to APing, with nothing in between.

athough i have two brothers, a mom, and a dad, i grew up alone as a child with little attention, always playing by myself, and talking to myself. im 15 now,i never had a girl friend, i have problems in school with excessive talking and being the class clown by doing stupid things to make people laugh all to get them to notice me, and mostly all my hopes, dreams, and plans for my life is envolved with getting attention from other people and it's a problem, is there any way i can get rid of my need for attention, please im out of options

It's normal to go through a period of heightened self-consciousness (and self-criticism) around your age. Everyone -- everyone -- has these sorts of hangups, it's what makes us human.

How long have you been practicing? Can you enter a trance?

Awareness + imagination + sleep. There are many techniques, but they all require those three elements.

It looks to me as though you have already accomplished a lot, but you are getting discouraged because you are looking for a classic AP/OBE experience. Keep practicing and watch for the little steps that lead to your final goal.

Read up on phasing in the FAQ and Permanent Topics sections. It could be what you need to go beyond the vibes state.

Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley

That's the most recent biography written about him.

We have to know what consciousness is before we try to understand its many states, otherwise it's like trying to define a word in a foreign language.