any tips for KEEPING focused while in astral?

[Gandalf]

The last time I became lucid in a dream I dismissed my immediate enviroment by placing a desire to go 'higher' as it were. I found myself in a lift that was going up... (I didnt conciously think of this but what a great way to envisage the process of focusing on a higher level!)

Anyway it didnt work because when I got out of the lift i was back in the same lucid dream locale again... oh well!
Anyway, I was fine for a while then I felt that irritating pull back to physical wakefullness... I always get this before I can do anything meaningfull.

However this time i managed to resist the first surge of this pull by grabbing onto a banister and holding on for dear life.. after a few moments I found to my delight that the pull lessoned and vanished and I was free to carry on! This is the first time I have been able to resist the pull...yeah!

But then a few minutes later it came back and this time I couldnt resist it...
whats going on? I wasnt frightened and there didnt seem to be any bodily functions to bring me back.... was my failure simply a lack of will?
Perhaps I just need to practice resistance and 'holding on' when this occurs.
Any tips to keep focused are appreciated....

On another point has anyone came across this phenomenom:

Upon getting the 'astral screen effect' (focus 21?) Sometimes I find that the scenes are switching at a phenomenal rate too quickly to be able to focus on anything... i have noticed that it is conected with my thought processes, ie my mind is whirring round so fast that the astral screen is doing likewise...
its probably to do with the fact that I am so excited about getting this effect that my mind is flying through countless thoughts of where to go what I should do etc... the screen looks like its doing 5000 frames a second all with different scenes!

I guess the idea is to slow your thought processes down but I have found this impossible.. if you wake up in such a state you might as well quit that time round.. unless anyone has any tips for slooooowing down!


Doug

[SpectralDragon]

Usually, I found I was having the opposite problem...I was going to the astral when I didn't want to, having been "pulled in" by several beings. However, I feel this is related.

Depending on the type of work you were doing, a being might or might not have liked what you were trying to accomplish. Since your astral body is seperated from your physical body, there is a way to thus influince the connection to your astral body. If this connection is being tampered with a forced retrieval occurs.

Secondly: I am not sure if you believe in or talk to "spirit guides," however they might be able to provide some info.

Third, I would suggest trying to broaden your use of "astral tools." A sword, for example, is not always a weapon. It is a tool. Once, I used this tool to break out of a layered dream. (dream where I kept waking up.) You will find that upon finding a tool that is not of the creation of your own mind, one of two things will happen, an initiation, or a ritual. It's the ritual tools you are looking for. If an initiation occurs, bail.

The tools can be used for this: focus, resistance.

Focusing on a tool that is astral made and not of the creation of your own mind "grounds" you more into the astral, especially if the focus is possession. With this newfound focus you can then resist these tamperings of your experiences and journeys. after a time the astral will become more distinct to you and the need for the tool will be less and less.

I suggest you read this: http://www.astraldynamics.com/biography/?BoardID=94&BulletinID=390 (even if you don't like the idea I am presenting this is a fascinating story, one which I have had the privaledge of going through myself ) Please note the focus he had after the event.

[Frank]

Douglas:

In reality there are no levels, there is no higher or lower. Consciousness simply is. All that changes is our perception. The dream environment is entirely subjective and very literal. You expressed a desire to go higher so you did. You say it didn't work but from my point of view, I say it worked perfectly. The dream environment is a very literal realty. It would help you to perhaps think more in terms of widening your range of perception, rather than going up and down in a linear fashion.

Manipulating the dream environment has the effect of manipulating our physical reality. People can have what they call a "pre-cognitive" dream, for example. It's not so much that the dream in itself was acting as a kind of forecasting tool, the person in question was simply allowing themselves a demonstration of how the dream environment creates our physical reality.

There will be some facet or other of your personality that is fighting the experience, therefore, causing the typical kinds of effects you describe. In an effort to give you a perspective, I myself have experienced this kind of scenario loads and loads of times. Well, in the beginning that is. I would bet my one-hundred euro to your cent that the cause is something to do with fear and/or doubt. To me it sounds like doubt, from what you say. Although I wouldn't discount the fear aspect entirely.

Fighting doubt, or fighting fear (or fighting anything for that matter) doesn't work. It may go away for a bit, but it will keep coming back to haunt you. Holding onto the banister was a classic graphical representation of a battle between one facet of your consciousness and another. Your intellect is saying yes, let's go for it. But another more conservatively inclined part of your personality is expressing doubts (for whatever reason). All these types of mental expression are very NORMAL to experience once you switch focus.

The act of engaging our inner perception makes us aware of the multi-faceted nature of our personality. It is one thing reading about it in a book, but experiencing it hands-on is a different matter entirely! Because you are immersed in subjective reality, there is no taking a step back from a situation and being able to reflect objectively. So the tendency is you get locked in a subjective graphical demonstration of the conflict. Only by coming back to physical, can you then step back from the experience and look at the matter in a detached (i.e. objective) way.

This comes back to the post you placed a couple of weeks ago on the Bruce Moen experiences. The switch in perception we initiate is the same switch in perception that occurs when we shed our physical. The only difference being you can't switch back to physical focus. But the actual switch in perception process is the same. I was engaged in a debate on another thread where a member was attempting to argue there were differences between switching focus to initiate an obe experience, or switching focus in a physical-body death (or near death) experience. Nope, there are no differences at all. I've studied perception or focus switches at length, and the only differences that occur are directly due to a person's expectations, which are of course related to beliefs.

Following the disengagement of physical focus, people enter what is known as a transition experience. Now, Monroe attached different focus numbers to this area of consciousness (people say focus "levels" which I dislike using because there are no levels). Namely, focuses 23, 24, 25, 26 & 27. He was correct in his method of interpreting these areas as focuses of consciousness, but he did go overboard in the numbering! Bless him. Anyhow, there is no need to make such finely tuned distinctions and it is very confusing for beginners. Monroe was a perfectionist and I fully understand where he was coming from, after having traced his non-physical footsteps at length. So no-one think I'm trying to make out he was wrong. No, in a sense Monroe was being far too correct.

In reality, it is sufficient to call this whole area of consciousness a "transition area" to which there can be attached just one focus number. In terms of the natural staging of transitional events in consciousness, I call it focus number 3 (Note: my focus 1, would be all of physical reality the same as Monroe's focus C1).

Within this transition area of consciousness, people are engaged in shedding all the belief constructs they subscribed to during their experience of engaging physical focus. Many people, however, through faulty thinking or through sheer lack of knowledge about the process, enter the transition area entirely subjectively. In other words, they don't actually realise they have disengaged physical focus! This, as I am sure you can imagine, causes a person a lot of conflict and confusion. To the extent where they become locked in a state where a large part of their personality is attempting to continue physical life as per normal. But this, of course, is impossible hence the conflict.

As you have experienced first hand, mental conflicts are something you subjectively engage in as part of an overall graphical representation. The people who are locked in a debilitating transitional experience, are also subjectively engaged in their very own graphical representations of whatever their conflict happens to be. The only real difference between your experience and there's, is you can re-engage physical focus where they cannot.

From studying a large number of cases, I see that people who have difficulty tend to have an underdeveloped intellect. I'm not saying these people are stupid. They may well be extremely intelligent as far as their physical life is concerned. It's just that during their physical experience their intellect became a kind of slave to their ego consciousness. Even if these people would have had some non-physical experience, rather than expand their intellect to encompass the true nature of it, they chose to engage in all manner of mental contortions to reference the nature of the non-physical experience to physical matter reality.

Of course, once they disengage physical focus they tend to become immersed in a myriad of mental conflicts to the extent where it can take the equivalent of hundreds of years of time for them to work through (because there is no re-engaging physical reality to get them out of it).

What it all boils down to is they enter the subjective reality of the transition experience with no objective knowledge of what is happening. So they begin to flounder.

With yourself, for example, as you are steadily introducing your intellect to other areas of consciousness, when you disengage for the final time, you will already have knowingly initiated the very same process (however many) hundreds of times. So your intellect immediately recognises what is going on. In which case, you should pass through the transition area with no difficulty.

Faulty thinking, mistaken beliefs, and the like, are the causes of all inner conflicts (to a lesser or higher degree depending on the individual). They all have to be dealt with before the wider perception experience becomes more as we would like it. Fear and doubt can (and often does!) place people in all manner of weird and whacky circumstances. The whole answer to the question of how to deal with these kind of difficulties is way beyond the scope of this post. However, my up and coming book expands greatly on what I touch on here.

Suffice to say, fear never lurks in the background ready to strike out unexpectedly. Only people who try to mask the symptoms of fear, have to live within the gloom of delusional oppression caused from such self-limiting beliefs. And, unfortunately, for many people, the Universal Laws of creation are founded on the concept of free will. So you are allowed to ruin yourself by taking a fragmented, torturous approach if you absolutely insist on it.

The way I eventually overcame my own fears and doubts, was to take SLOW steps. Every few steps I would stop and reinforce to myself that experiencing this reality was something I wanted to do, something I felt joyful about. In other words, create a short statement that you can believe in, something that makes you tingle with joy when you read it aloud to yourself. Then repeat it within the non-physical environment.

The statement you create has to be in your words, because the words have to resonate with you in a joyous and harmonious way. But to give you an idea, here's an example of what I would typically say, "I breathe in the atmosphere of this wondrous place and experience the joy and the beauty of my inner being. It is my privilege to perceive the true reality of consciousness. As I do so, I become at peace with myself knowing that all of consciousness is forever open for me to experience.

When I say, "breathe in" I intake a few breaths just as if I were within the physical. Speaking of the physical, you could try saying a statement worded like this a few times a day within physical reality, as the statement would be equally valid. After a while, you'll find you no longer have to say anything to yourself as the attitude you are attempting to engender simply becomes you.

It is doubly important for you to realise that while practising this art, you must be centred and calm, neutral in thought and emotion, whilst being in an overall condition of relaxed attentiveness. That is the optimum state. The other important aspect for you to realise is we are not puppets. We all create our own reality in accordance with our beliefs and expectations, and no one is imposed upon without his or her consent. All limitations we come across are merely choices the individual in question has placed for their experience.

Fortunately, we are now experiencing the inklings of a far more enlightened age. Where more forward-thinking members of the non-physical research fraternity are quickly realising how they too can break free from the chains of Dark Age doom and gloom, which still haunt this topic today.

Naturally, the thrust of my work is to reflect that new way forward.

HTH

Yours,
Frank

[anonymous57]

Shouting "clarity now" normally helps me stay in an LD/OBE/whatever. Makes everything more detailed too.

[Gandalf]

excellent post Frank, and thanks everyone else for replying as well, very interesting..

I have had a heart to heart with myself over the last day or so and I have to admit it (there is no point in denying this to myself any longer) that there is still a vestage of fear lingering somewhere inside. It is not doubt.

I have up until now been in denial of this since I liked to think of myself as past that stage, but in truth this is not the case.

The problem of why my lucidity levels are always just that bit below par is due to the 'saftety mechanism'. my lucidity stays at just below that point, above which I would have 100% of my faculties and therefore 100& awareness of whats going on.. in that situation I still freak slightly and zap back.
This is why I keep getting zapped back, my lucidity 'tests the waters' every now and then and rises slightly, but it gets to the cut-off point where I gain an almost full realisation of whats going on and fear zaps me back.

I have made progress however and perhaps I just need time to get more used to non physical reality.. I have had some striking experiences already, such as the 'green fields' experience where I believe I contacted my 'astral family' or other significant people.
The fear issue is ingrained and therefore a long term issue, I probably shouldnt let it worry me too much but just let it fade bit by bit over time..

Douglas

PS I will try the affirmation.. that sounds like a good idea