Messages

Oh yeah, Welcome to the forum Rye. I think you will be an inspiration.

LOL Thanks.

Well, "per aspera ad astra..."

Last night I dreamed someone commented I needed a haircut. But it was probably me.

Oh yes, as for the subject of confirmation, I have a feeling that I know where I was (in the dream I reported previously) and I´m going to go off and look for it now I´ve been reminded. There was a sort of a small square and a red brick archway...

Here´s something.

Hi, Xanth -

I was feeling a bit down as a went to bed, after an afternoon of beer and cigarettes, so I did something like praying -

About 5 O´clock I woke, unintentionally, then went back to sleep. Then I dreamt I was walking the streets of Barcelona. There was no ´leaving the body´ moment like I´ve had in other dreams. I´ve been walking the streets of Barcelona a lot lately, I live about an hour from the city. It was dark, there was no-one about. I was amazed at the detail, how I was looking at masonry, brickwork, paving, colour, imperfection, wear... all the tiny little detail that you see in life was there. Then in an alleyway I thought, ´Why am I walking when I could be flying?´ - and on my third, willed, attempt I lifted off and rose up above the level of the rooftops. I flew around a bit, but I lost control of it. I was passing through buildings and walls, I seem to remember being dragged very quickly through a room and seeing furniture. Then I cut out completely, and I think I woke.

I had in mind to try to identify the skyline as the Barcelona skyline, which means spotting one or two of its distinctive features: the Agbar Tower, the Sagrada Familia, but I wasn´t able to.

Said I´d keep you posted.

Best wishes.

Rye.

   

Right. It´s an epistemological quagmire. You start to understand why they write these paradoxical haikus in Zen.

Practice first, theory later.

Peace.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fFbeSykaJk

You ought to know that I keep a pet sceptic on a chain, and I take him everywhere.  He´s called Mephistopheles, and he bites, but he keeps me grounded.

 

That's perfect.  The problem though is that you use phrases above as if you did.

Sorry.

Would you care to venture a guess as to why experiences independent of the observer very rarely happen (if at all?).

When we´re born into the physical world as infants, we don´t recognise anything around us or know what anything is. It takes time for us to create coherent semantic structures based on our sense-data. We accord these with what we read as other consciousnesses... this is an apple, etc... developing a consensus, collective reality.
That´s on the physical plane. On the non-physical plane, thought takes a more active role, becoming a creator principle. The laws determining phenomena in the non-physical are less conducive to the collective sharing of experience. Physically-conditioned beings, we´re all at sea in the astral.
Alternatively, all OOBE´s are confabulations of the subconscious+conscious mind, and dreams are the emergent property of re-equilibrating neurochemistry. They´re just dreams, but I can use them to collect social status and build my sense of separation and importance, special snowflake that I am.

I prefer to believe the first one but I can´t write off the second without validation

Good day.

I don´t know (what a dream is).

Robert Monroe, in ´Journeys out of the Body´, writes about comforting a sick boy while projecting. Later, in a projection, he encounters the astral body of the boy, who has since passed on. The boy asks him, ´Where do I go now?´
Later on, Monroe reads in the newspaper that a local boy has died after a protracted illness. The reason for reporting this would seem to be to suggest the boy Monroe meets projecting and the local boy who´s died are the same boy, although Munroe doesn´t try to prove it.
On another occasion he visits a family who are aware of his presence and considers contacting them in real life.
In both cases he is looking for a logical or causal connectivity between physical and nonphysical experiences that are independant of him as observor.

Thanks for your insight... My mind is open on the subject, and by open, I mean empty. Everything I´ve read - Lobsang Rampa, Robert Munroe... - I´ve subsequently forgotten

At some point you´ll have to ask for confirmation from another consciousness of shared experience, like the shared dreaming in the movie Inception; or two points of contact between the physical and non-physical (two points required to make a line), like Madame Blavatsky asking her Indian friends to project over to London to read the Times. Putting aside what is ´real´ (Nabokov wrote´reality´ only makes sense put in inverted commas) you have to determine the relationship between the physical and the non-physical: even if the entire universe is all dreamt up by me and I´m the only consciousness.

Put another way, I´m not just interested in having more vivid or meaningful dreams, but I want to enhance my current ´reality´. I want to grow towards the sun, I want to move to the next level of existence. If this is part of the way then it´s part of the way. If it isn´t, then it isn´t, I don´t mind.

But I´m not losing sleep over the philosophy...

Hello Xanth.

Thanks for the reply.

I see your point. There was most definitely a moment of great effort followed by a feeling of, ´yes, I´m free... up and away´.

I see it as an introductory experience.

For several weeks to several months I´ve been consuming the literature on the subject, so, from a prior perspective, I doesn´t surprise me to have ´dreamt´ about it since it was what I was thinking about during the day.

What was most indicative, I feel, of how ´real´ (or perhaps rather, authentic) this experience was, was my state of mind afterwards. Fully awake, I was aware of being connected into something. I made the conscious decision to close that faucet... I can´t walk around all day having music playing in my ears...

I´ll let you know how it all progresses in this post.

Meanwhile, here, it is raining.

Have a nice day.

Hi, I´m new to this forum so forgive me if I´m not spot-on with the protocol.

I´ve been filling my mind with stuff about AP for several weeks now, doing as much reading as I can. It all began with flying dreams, what got me interested.

Last night I think I dreamt of an OOBE. I most definitely experienced climbing out of my body, and then flying, or falling, through the air (like skydiving) surrounded by drones. No recollection of looking at my sleeping body, or my then surroundings. The whole experience lasted about thirty seconds, but it felt very dreamlike, not especially lucid.

What do you think? It was a dream?

Let me add something here - on waking, for a couple of minutes I was hallucinating beautiful violin music, pipes, some vocals...

I was extremely happy and blissed out about this experience despite the fact that I was experiencing auditory hallucinations. I decided at some point to let go my fear of madness, just accept everything with love and wonder, that sort of thing

Buenas dias... Rye.