My Phasing Progress

[Xanth]

My progress lately has been slow due to not really finding much time to practice, however, I have been trying!
Anyways, I've been taking the time in the mornings between my many snooze alarms to get a bit of phasing practice in.

My snooze alarm is pre-programmed to go off again after 9 minutes.
So it's a good tool, I believe, because it allows me to practice and if I fall asleep, I know I'll be awakened soon after so I can continue practicing.
And if I do manage to phase, I'll be awakened soon so I can try to perfect the process.
Well, my issues lately have surrounded my ability to remain conscious while I phase.

This morning, and even earlier this week, I awoke from a night of sleep with the intent to do some phasing practice.
So I'd get comfortable again and just start with a simple "noticing" exercise.  Soon enough I'd find myself within a dream... I take this to mean that I have phased, but I did so and remained unconscious during the experience.  My phase this morning had me driving around a local mall.  What frustrates me is my inability to remain conscious of the phasing.  In essence, I'm phasing directly into a dream instead of a fully conscious projection.

I have discovered lately that I have a main trigger in a lot of my recent Lucid Dreams that cause me to go Lucid.  That trigger strangely enough, is my kitchen stove.  I think tomorrow morning I'll try to phase to a kitchen location where a stove is present... and have that trigger my lucidity.

I'll keep everyone updated on my progress.

Is there anyone else who has this particular problem?
Not being able to remain conscious upon successfully phasing?

~Ryan

[CFTraveler]

I was going to say what you already said in other words in your post- you can phase just fine, the lucidity thing is the problem.
Are you doing any standard-lucidity-inducing things at other times?

[Xanth]

Are you doing any standard-lucidity-inducing things at other times?

Right now, I'm just trying to keep my mind busy while I phase so it stays conscious.
Apart from that, no.

Any suggestions?

~Ryan

[CFTraveler]

The usual stuff- reality checks, keyword-keeping and affirmations, (especially the questioning of my own conscious state).
I find that sometimes when something has been done and left, it's good to start at  the beginning- you'd be surprised at how well some 'obvious' stuff works, especially when you have left it behind for some time, precisely because it's so 'obvious'.

[solarity]

My progress lately has been slow due to not really finding much time to practice, however, I have been trying!
Anyways, I've been taking the time in the mornings between my many snooze alarms to get a bit of phasing practice in.

My snooze alarm is pre-programmed to go off again after 9 minutes.
So it's a good tool, I believe, because it allows me to practice and if I fall asleep, I know I'll be awakened soon after so I can continue practicing.
And if I do manage to phase, I'll be awakened soon so I can try to perfect the process.
Well, my issues lately have surrounded my ability to remain conscious while I phase.

This morning, and even earlier this week, I awoke from a night of sleep with the intent to do some phasing practice.
So I'd get comfortable again and just start with a simple "noticing" exercise.  Soon enough I'd find myself within a dream... I take this to mean that I have phased, but I did so and remained unconscious during the experience.  My phase this morning had me driving around a local mall.  What frustrates me is my inability to remain conscious of the phasing.  In essence, I'm phasing directly into a dream instead of a fully conscious projection.

I have discovered lately that I have a main trigger in a lot of my recent Lucid Dreams that cause me to go Lucid.  That trigger strangely enough, is my kitchen stove.  I think tomorrow morning I'll try to phase to a kitchen location where a stove is present... and have that trigger my lucidity.

I'll keep everyone updated on my progress.

Is there anyone else who has this particular problem?
Not being able to remain conscious upon successfully phasing?

~Ryan

generally everyone who falls asleep has this problem , so yep, remaining conscious is of course the hardest part, but, as to "blacking out" at that specific point in focus, I can't say. I actually thought of making a program on my laptop that plays a sound/rhythm/sequence every 30 minutes for a duration of 3 seconds or so as a means to try and keep conscious awareness easier. Well, I actually have made the program, just never really tested it out. It plays any .wav on a customizable duration with a timer, so basically you just put the ms duration and path of the .wav file and hit start nd it'll do its thing. what else was I going to say.. I forgot.. hmm oh yeah, I also am finding it hard to find adequate times to phase, in the morning I'm usually more focused on getting more sleep than actually phasing. I'll probably have to change my sleep schedule so it'll actually give me a decent amount of time to practice in the morning.

[Psilibus]

Sounds like you are tired. Are you getting enough restful sleep? Probably a dumb question but...

I can relate to what you are saying. I was having so much difficulty projecting recently that I quit posting here (to the relief of some, perhaps  ) and had to focus on reorganizing my time. I was just too tired. Working graveyard shifts, keeping up with the kids, working hard in the garden, dealing with finances, cooking and cleaning, etc. I'm sure you know what I mean considering you are giving yourself nine minute time blocks for your practice!

I like what CFTraveler says but the obvious might not be so obvious (duh to me).

BTW - I have used the snooze alarm trick for many many years but only for dream to lucid dreaming. Works like a charm for that, keeps my mind right in between sleep and awake. I never really use that time to project. I suppose though the "practice" time is good.

[Luckilee]

Seems like everyone has been taking a bit of a break, myself included. Although I have still been trying most nights, just not having much luck - I keep getting more and more physically uncomfortable until I just give up, roll over, and go to sleep. I've had a bit of abnormal stress lately, which I'm sure is at least a partial cause. Oh well, persist and conquer.

[Xanth]

So, I took some more time this morning between my snooze alarms to see what I could accomplish.
I had four snooze periods... the first three I managed to get back into the last dream I was having, however, I wasn't able to remain conscious through them.  I just ended up continuing what I was doing in the dream.

I was trying to phase to somewhere particular, my kitchen, because my stove/oven tends to be a consistent Lucid Trigger for me. 
But I feel it was a small success being able to phase back into my dream rather consistently.

~Ryan

[CFTraveler]

I think it is a success.  If you keep going back to a dream this tells me the dream scenario is a stable constant- therefore, it's there for a reason, and that's for you to find out.  If you maintained lucidity during these 'chapters', then it is a phasing success- to a dream environment.

[Xanth]

I wanted to share this meditation experience I had yesterday afternoon as I was meditating.
http://unlimitedboundaries.ca/2010/09/17/todays-lunchtim-meditation-%E2%80%93-sept-17-2010/

I meditated a bit at lunchtime today during which I had an epiphany that I would like to share.

My goal in mind was my usual, I wanted to try to passively observe myself falling asleep so I can learn to catch it.
I had a thought earlier in the day, and I realized that I just wasn’t keeping my mind active enough while falling asleep… I don’t know why I never really thought about it before, but it just kind of hit me hard at that point and finally sunk in.

I began my meditation around 12:40pm… sitting at my desk, back straight in my chair, my feet flat on the floor and my arms resting naturally on my desk. After a few minutes, as I started to relax, I’d notice my upper body falling forward slightly. This is my sign that my body is relaxing enough and is falling asleep. Points would come when I’d realize that my head is almost touching my desk due to falling forward so much. I’d straighten up and refocus. This happened twice.

After the second time, I thought to myself, “Hmmm, I need to get my mind more active” and I decided to engage my mind more by starting a rundown. I chose a location nearby, down at the lakefront on Lake Ontario. It’s a cliff that overlooks the lake and beach. i visualized myself standing around up there watching the lake and the waves beat up against the sandy beach… and I still found myself drifting off a bit, it was much better than before in that I was able to catch it happening… so that’s definitely progress!

I decided to increase the activity a bit… and I got to thinking about Astral Pulse Island. I wanted to incorporate that into my rundown somehow… so I looked out at the water and decided to take a jaunt out there to see what I could/would find on the Lake!

I floated off the cliff, down to the beach below where I had a boat waiting for me. I jumped in an started paddling out into the open water. What happened next wasn’t part of my script, nor could I control it. I had gone out only a few seconds when the boat started tipping! It would tip left and right, then it went upside down, and righted itself… it just kept doing it. It felt like I was in a tumble dryer. I tried as hard as I could to control it, but once it started, it was very hard to stop it.

I decided to jump out of the boat and swim back to shore. This stopped the “tumble dryer” action from happening, thankfully. I floated back up to the initial cliff I was on before and just started walking instead. At which point, someone called me and I had to go do some “office stuff”. >_<

So that was a pretty random experience for me, and I’m hoping to be able to duplicate it the next time I meditate at home or practice my Phasing. I think I was pretty close to stepping into the rundown though, it started to have a real feeling to it. The tumbling was definitely real, I FELT it as if I was actually there.  This all ended around 25 minutes later.

Anyways, I just wanted to share that.

Any thoughts on the uncontrollable aspect of this visualization?
Or anything else that I experienced?

[CFTraveler]

Well, here is one interpretation:
The boat is your vehicle- your body/mind.  The water is the matrix of your subconscious mind.  You are observing yourself falling asleep, and representing it as such- the boat tips, you are surrounded/under water, the subconscious content of your mind is overwhelming.  You retreat, upright the boat, now you are conscious again- then it tips again, and you right it again.
I would say this is a fight you are having with your subconscious- awareness wants to stubbornly maintain itself only at waketime, it just doesn't want to go there.  Your subconscious may be winning (that is, you are going 'in') but you are fighting yourself.
I don't know why this is- is there something in your subconscious you don't want to see/experience?  Some repressed memory, something unpleasant?

If you can ever replicate this event again (and I seriously have doubts it'll happen the same way, due to the spontaneous way it came about) it may present you with a different challenge- it would be interesting to see what happens.

[omcasey]

Brilliant.... wow

[Xanth]

I didn't think of it as a challenge at the time.  I think that next time I'll face this one head on.

Thanks CFT

[CFTraveler]

Brilliant.... wow

Not really.  I just learn from others that are smarter than me.   

[Xanth]

Tom Campbell (http://www.my-big-toe.com/forums/index.php) talks a bit in his books and lectures about "Belief Traps" and how they can trap us into a certain way of thinking or trap us into ignoring something fundamental to our journey here.

I was thinking about that yesterday and trying to figure out what kind of belief traps I've been trapped in over the past little while.  In a post I made back at the end of December (How I Came To My Beliefs - http://unlimitedboundaries.ca/2010/12/29/how-i-came-to-my-beliefs/), I made the distinction that there was a point where I didn't know that I was allowed to believe something that ended up being very important towards what I needed to know in order to progress.

I've noticed that this is a Belief Trap... and it's one that I've still been trapped in for a while as well.  I have to thank Tom for opening my eyes to such information and to realize that I am allowed know certain things in order to progress.  I notice it a lot in others now too, it's those times when people post questions on the Astral Pulse asking if it's okay if they do so-and-so.

As I've been progressing along my non-physical path as of late, I've slowly been coming to the conclusion that a base knowledge in meditation is a prerequisite for learning how to explore the wider reality.  This isn't something I learned from Tom, it's something that I've been slowly coming to terms with myself over the last few months.  However, Tom's "Belief Trap" ideas were the catalyst for me to understand this.  I needed someone to tell me that I was allowed to know this, as strange as that might sound.  I can apply and confirm it by looking at my own past experience as I've spent the last 15 years of my life learning how to meditate.  Through that time, I never once considered how that has helped me along my current path of experiencing the non-physical.

Well, the truth is that it has greatly helped me.  This is why and how I found Frank Kepples Phasing exercises so much easier to do and learn from when compared to the classic separation OBEs (aka Monroe-style), because, in essence, they ARE meditation exercises.  I just took it for granted that certain things that I did when using the Noticing or Rundown exercises were normal and that everyone just automatically did them too.  Well, they're not.  They're something I've learned to do over the last decade and a half.  Stuff like learning how to quiet your mind (surface thoughts), fully relaxing the body upon command and being alone with your consciousness.  These are skills/tools that one *needs* to learn if "conscious exit" projections is on their list of things "to do".

To do a conscious exit by Phasing, you have to meditate to get into the proper state first.  Sure, we have a couple of "exercises" which you can do to assist you to get there, but they're not really "exercises", they are "meditations".  They're designed to assist you to discover the act of quieting your thoughts and focusing your mind towards a single intent.  A byproduct of that is, when you get deep enough and good enough, the "point of consciousness" experience that Tom talks about.  This is, in essence, phasing to Focus 21 (the void), which is the Phasing/Projection experience.  That's exactly what we're doing when we practice Noticing or Mental Rundowns.  We're quieting our mind and focusing it upon a single intent.  That intent takes the form of "noticing the blackness" or "visualizing a scene".  <– They become TOOLS to move our consciousness away from this physical awareness and our physical senses... taking us to the "Point of Consciousness".

So, if you want to experience the non-physical in all its larger glory... put down all your preconceived notions about methods this and techniques that, and just learn to be alone with your consciousness.  Master yourself before you try to master the larger reality, for that is the real journey.  The non-physical is only a small part of your being... and the fact you're here in this physical reality in the first place is proof enough of that.

http://unlimitedboundaries.ca/2011/03/25/meditation-a-requirement-to-exploring-the-non-physical/

[Xanth]

I'm kind of surprised nobody has commented yet... or maybe I shouldn't be that surprised. 

I mean, most people come here with the desired goal of learning how to have an astral projection or at least to look into what an astral projection is.
Of the people who want to learn, they generally want the fastest and easiest way to go about doing that.  The fastest and easiest way to learn to Project is to practice it right after waking up from a sleep of any length (can be 5 minutes or 5 hours, it doesn't matter). 

Other than that, if you want to be able to just sit down at any point of your day and have a solid chance at projecting, then you're really going to have to learn to meditate.  This is what I consider to be a base requirement for learning conscious exit projections.

Meditation is about learning to control your mind and taking your thoughts down to a single thread.  Then remove that single thread from everything that is physical around you.  Remove your physical awareness and senses from the equation.  This requires you to really focus... not in the sense of "forcing" it, but in the sense of "letting go" of everything that's physical. 

It's not about what you have to do, it's about what you don't have to do.  You have to let go of your beliefs, your awareness, your senses... just let them drift away.   How you go about doing that is entirely up to you.  There are a myriad of meditation techniques out there to assist you to attain that single point of consciousness. 

[Pauli2]

I found this old post about phasing by Frank. It kind of how it's for me -> http://www.astralpulse.com/forums/welcome_to_astral_consciousness/phasing_bruce_moen_style-t2922.0.html;msg118652#msg118652

[Xanth]

The big downside, well for me that is, is you don't have the same kind of direct, 1st-person experience of actually being within the Astral.

That's my "big downside" as well.
I don't want to perceive the non-physical... I want to experience it in all it's full, subjective glory of actually BEING there.
And as Adrian points out, in essence, it's just remote viewing of a non-physical location, which is how I describe it. 

In any case, what I'm talking about in my previous post is that if you want to do that... and if you want to do it from any time during the day, then meditation towards the "Point of Consciousness" state is definitely your first priority to learn.

It can take a while to learn how to do it and hold it stable.

[Astral316]

I've always sort of conceptualized meditation as the "weight room" and projection attempts as the "muscle show." If a scrawny dude walked up to me and asked how to win a model competition, I wouldn't teach him how to pose like Mr. Universe because the underlying talent is honed in the training. I would rather show him around a gym and teach him how to use the equipment...

[Xanth]

I've always sort of conceptualized meditation as the "weight room" and projection attempts as the "muscle show." If a scrawny dude walked up to me and asked how to win a model competition, I wouldn't teach him how to pose like Mr. Universe because the underlying talent is honed in the training. I would rather show him around a gym and teach him how to use the equipment...

I like how you think. 

I see beginners coming to the forum time and time again... and they're making the same mistakes that other have made before them.
I recognize those mistakes and 9 times out of 10, they revolve around something very simple that meditation will solve for them if they just take the time and have the patience to learn.   Take some deep breaths and realize that you don't have to projection *RIGHT NOW OMG!!*.  LoL

[Boom]

Xanth,

I think beginners (like myself) who start reading up on this stuff, get really overwhelmed with the possibilites of what Astral projection is.  I've read alsorts of stories that you can do what you want in the Astral world, fly, materalise beauitful women and have sex with them, time travel, talk to deceased people, have a greater awareness.  Basically the Astral world sells itself as an alternative reality that is perfect.  In fact, I've read stuff about the Astral that has made me wonder a couple of things:

1. Why governments, military etc hasnt jumped onto it in a big way.
2. Why those who convince themselves that this is the afterlife, dont just kill themselves.
3. Why most people who can Astral Project dont spend

So its no wonder that beginners just want to get there. They want to get there now! Then when they try these "Learn to Astral Project guides" and Binaural Beats etc, I guess they just expect it to happen. Then of course it doesnt. Eventually they get bored of the whole idea and dismiss it for a load of rubbish and move on.  Most of us sem to have this natural desire to go to an alternative universe. Its why games such as World of Warcraft are so addictive for many.

I might be guilty rushing into AP myself. But I can understand how it is definatley useful to learn to meditate first. Which is what I'm working on now.