The Resurection of Robert Bruce!

[personalreality]

I've kind of been torching RB a little bit lately.  Not in any kind of mean-spirited way or anything.  I have just been addressing that I used the RB methods for a long time and never had much success.  By that I mean that I never got out of the body, but I did develop energetically and I learned the trance state very well.  For that I am ever grateful to RB.  AD taught me mostly all of the skills I needed to progress in my practice.  However, I still wasn't finding success.  I have some theories about why.  Anyway, I finally found my break through Robert Peterson, whom I regard very highly now.  I like his writing style, it's a lot like the style of the first AP author I ever read, the little known John Magus (Astral Projection and the Nature of Reality).  Very personal, anecdotal. 

RP gave me something that RB didn't, which was what I call Q-Mind (the quiescent state of mind).  That was the little trick that I didn't find in the spectacular creation that is Astral Dynamics.  Well.  I have to give it up to RB because it was there all along, I just didn't see it.  That's my theory anyway.  I think I was so engrossed in all the information presented by RB that I overlooked it.  He describes it as a flickering state of consciousness.  To be honest, RB describes my experience much better than RP.

In the throws of desperation though, RP's Q-Mind seemed to be the only piece of the puzzle I was missing.  It turned out to be the piece with the black dot that was the eye of the polar bear in a blizzard in hindsight.  Why do I say that?  Because I read about it in AD like a thousand times.  That's about the number of times I read AD (not in it's entirety, but different parts over and over).  Like I said though, RB's description is a lot close to my actual experience.  It's a shame I couldn't see the forest through the trees.

SO I got the new edition of AD a few weeks back and never really read it much.  I kind of just wanted it for sentimental reasons being that the original was so important to me, but also because RB kept saying that there was a lot of new info in the new edition and I figured I'd get around to it for leisure at some point.  Well, someone just responded to a post of mine the other day and suggested that I look at a section in RP's 'OBE', the chapter about fantasy traps.  So I did.  It wasn't terribly helpful, it didn't really address the questions I had (it did a little bit).  BUT!! What it did do was make me think, "Hmmm... I haven't read the AD stuff about the actual out of body experience since I finally achieved my first out of body experience.  Let's have a look!"  So I picked up my un-thumbed revised 10th Anniversary edition of AD and gave it a casual flip to find the post exit tutorial sections and this sentence just jumped out between the blur of pages flipping by, "Holding a Flickering State of Consciousness".  That was it.  It was there all along.  Looking back, I remember something about it in the first AD.  I just overlooked it.

So, I humbly retract my burning of RB.  I still stand by my exit method (it's working for me), and I still feel my point that we're getting to caught up with techniques is valid.  But RB gave us what we needed, we just missed it.  I will say that I think RP described it slightly better from a theoretical/technical standpoint.  RB's is just closer to what I experienced.  SO for anyone having trouble there's no need to buy another book if you already have AD or the new AD.  Just look for RB's description of the flickering state of consciousness!

Whew! That was a lot of babbling on my part.  Please, everyone in the forum (who I appreciate so very much) excuse my long windedness, as I know you've been putting up with it a lot lately.

Rusty, aka Personal Reality

[lee46]

Thanks a lot for the advice!! I'll look for that section tonight to read it, but I must say also that I'm loving RP's book, I started reading it today and I just can't keep away from it, I guess it's just the way he describes the whole thing.

[Greytraveller]

personalreality

For what its worth, here is my critique of Your critique of Robert Bruce.
The golden rule of the out of body experience is that what works for one person may well NOT work for another. I have yet to read a book by an author with which I either agree with 100% or disagree with 100%.
Robert Bruce is no exception to this. He has strong and weak points. So your criticism of him is fair AS LONG as you occasionally mention some of his stronger aspects.
No one person has all the right answers pertaining to OBEs. Bruce is insightful in some ways (he is very good at stressing the importance of techniques and repeated effort). IMO he lacks in other areas (I do NOT accept his theory of the mind-split effect during an OBE.)

High Regards   
Grey

[Xanth]

personalreality

For what its worth, here is my critique of Your critique of Robert Bruce.
The golden rule of the out of body experience is that what works for one person may well NOT work for another. I have yet to read a book by an author with which I either agree with 100% or disagree with 100%.
Robert Bruce is no exception to this. He has strong and weak points. So your criticism of him is fair AS LONG as you occasionally mention some of his stronger aspects.
No one person has all the right answers pertaining to OBEs. Bruce is insightful in some ways (he is very good at stressing the importance of techniques and repeated effort). IMO he lacks in other areas (I do NOT accept his theory of the mind-split effect during an OBE.)

High Regards   
Grey

I agree 100% with this.
I too haven't read a book that I fully agreed with.
I've taken bits and pieces of what I've read and mixed them with what I've experienced and that's how I've come up with my flavour of belief.

[personalreality]

I've mentioned several times that RB taught me everything I know about trance induction now.  And for that I will be ever grateful.  My only critique, and I don't know if this is lost in all my rambling, is that I feel like there wasn't enough focus on the state of mind needed to achieve an OBE.  Granted, what works for you is what works, but I still think there are some common threads among the various ways each of us achieves OBEs.  By that I mean that some of the sign posts along the way are the same, though our method of travel may be different.  So, for me, I couldn't find the last sign post before liftoff in AD (at first, I did find it recently, though not as in depth as I would have hoped).  I felt it was important to share that with others who are having trouble.  Otherwise I agree with everything you both have said, I would hope that it was obvious to most people that no one author has the answer.  Unfortunately I don't think that's always the case. 

It's also interesting that you mention the mind-split effect because I agree with you very much so grey.

And, I want to stress for anyone else reading this post,  I do not in any way mean to say that RB's AD isn't a useful book.  In fact its kind of my AP Bible.  It contains so much useful information in regards to all of the stuff building up to the actual OBE.  His trance training and energy work is invaluable and he presents the subject in a very easily understandable way that makes it easy for people with out much metaphysical background.

[Stookie]

I've gained a lot of good advice from Robert Bruce, some of it I've been skeptical of, but that's OK - I think you need to be a little skeptical of everything regarding AP.

While I don't really care for books by Bruce Moen, I've gained a lot of insight about AP just by trying to understand where he's coming from. If you read Monroe's earlier books, you can see how he had changed his thinking and views of things over the years. If he would have stayed with only what he had learned in the first book, he would have probably been more "new-agey" with assumptions, and less scientific and concrete. Not that he had it all down pat, but that no one does and you always have to be changing your thinking and beliefs to push forward.

I know that as soon as I start to take something as a rule to how AP should be done, something else proves me wrong. Nothing is set in stone.