Why Phasing Method needs to be renamed.

[astralm]

It seems to suggest there is such a thing as a non-phasing method.  This is not the case.  All methods are phasing, in fact the act of phasing is what makes an obe (or projection, or whatever you call it) an obe.  Therefore all methods work to achieve this phasing.  The only difference is where you phase to.  In "traditional" obe techniques such as rope, log roll, "goto door", floating upward, etc, etc, all you are doing is local phasing.  That is phasing somewhere "close" to your physical body.  With something like the Frank Kepple phasing method you are doing the exact same thing only distance phasing.  It is all the same. No matter your method you are using intent mixed with imagined sensations to switch (or phase) your focus from PMR to NPMR.

This I think is important for two reasons.  First reason is I read people talk about local and distance phasing like they are different experiences.  I have ran into several threads on if phasing even counts as an obe.  Of course it does, the phasing is what makes it an obe, you are just phasing somewhere (by phasing I mean changing the focus of your consciousness) probably not in local 1 (or RTZ, or whatever you want to call it).  Second point is often, especially new learners, treat traditional obe techniques like they are something other than phasing.  I read a funny post about an interview by Campbell where he states people often read Robert Monroe's Journeys and then go try to roll out of their bodies all night.  This will get you nowhere.  People think they need to learn some magic trick where they roll out of their body without moving or even being aware of their body.  Of course this isn't going to work.  You are simply thinking about having the focus of your consciousness roll out of your body, which (just like any phasing technique) causes your intent to be outside your body and leads to a phase.  Even if you are "in" or at the same location as your body when you project you are still phasing, as you are no longer in PMR, you must necessarily not be in the same place you were before phasing.

This leads me to something else.  Several authors write about "partial projections" or getting a limb stuck.  This is crap, you don't even have arms and legs in NPMR so the notion you can get stuck because you didn't fully create your astral arm is nonsense.  I believe there is two reasons this sensation happens.  First is the fear barrier, you see your body floating outside where it should and so your natural response is to hold on with anything you have left.  In other words you create the sensation of being stuck.  The second has to do with what RB (Astral Dynamics) calls the mind split.  Now I think the theory behind the mind split is either very poorly explained or just plain wrong, but the actual experience of it is real.  Xanth and Frank and many others I have read talk about how your focus is never fully in one place.  This is true, everyone has experienced it.  Just think of a time when you were half asleep and you were having a dream but at the same time you were also in your bed and aware of your body.  This is what I think sometimes happens when you do what I call local phasing projections.  The closer you are to your body the harder time your mind has with accepting the phase and you end up with a split focus, Eventually one wins out and either you are off to have an adventure or back in your body.  This I think this is much more likely than the complicated shadow memory multiple feedback mind-split RB talks about.

So to sum up my belief is all projections are a "phasing method" using the same tools (intent and sensations or perceived sensations) in order to cause a change in "where" your focus is.  Hopefully some will find this helpful.

EDIT:  This post is to help clarify how phasing relates to "traditional" or local obe projections.  I do believe the concept that all obe's are a form of phasing is the best current model we have for understanding obe, I however cannot take credit for coming up with the idea myself.  Many people (probably going back thousands of years) have thought of obe in this fashion.  The modern term phasing is thought to be coined by author and TMI founder Robert Monroe.

[Raymond]

Have you experienced being 'stuck' before?  I have quite a few times and it feels incredibly realistic. No, its not me attempting to phase while thinking that will happen or even allowing for the possibility.

Sometimes its the head that doesn't want to 'separate' usually its the legs or torso. A number of times its accompanied by rather severe pain in the stuck area, e.g Sciatic Pain down the butt and Hamstring, very painful sciatica I should say. Now I have never suffered from that in the physical reality so....??

I'll go on to say that I'm almost always able to separate in the end, it seems to require a deeper and more fuller 'state' of mind which I accomplish by temporarily stopping my separation technique while focusing on sinking sensations and/or vibrations. Then I tackle the separation again and ....Pop....I'm out

Oh and fear is definitely not causing that for me.

[astralm]

Have you experienced being 'stuck' before?  I have quite a few times and it feels incredibly realistic. No, its not me attempting to phase while thinking that will happen or even allowing for the possibility.

Sometimes its the head that doesn't want to 'separate' usually its the legs or torso. A number of times its accompanied by rather severe pain in the stuck area, e.g Sciatic Pain down the butt and Hamstring, very painful sciatica I should say. Now I have never suffered from that in the physical reality so....??

I'll go on to say that I'm almost always able to separate in the end, it seems to require a deeper and more fuller 'state' of mind which I accomplish by temporarily stopping my separation technique while focusing on sinking sensations and/or vibrations. Then I tackle the separation again and ....Pop....I'm out

Oh and fear is definitely not causing that for me.

I did not say getting stuck was not real, I said you don't get stuck because you "haven't generated part of your astral body".  I also did not say it was always caused by fear, though it seems odd that you say you are experiencing intense crazy pain but fear is not an issue at all.  If I was experiencing intense pain all the time when I projected it would surely be a cause of fear and anxiety for me.

As Xanth often says it is all within you.  If you think you must have limbs after you project and that those limbs will get stuck then they will.  You are consciousness and once you are in NPMR you are consciousness without a body.  Any body you take with you is your own creation.

Lastly, yes the sensations associated with local phasing or obe projecting, are quite different and more intense than distance or traditional phasing.  This I talked about why I believe this is already in the original post (split focus, RB mind-split).

[FuzzyQuills]

As Xanth often says it is all within you.  If you think you must have limbs after you project and that those limbs will get stuck then they will.  You are consciousness and once you are in NPMR you are consciousness without a body.  Any body you take with you is your own creation.

...So you're saying... I can turn myself into a hedgehog by simply thinking it?! COOL!!!

[floriferous]

Perhaps it would help to see where the term phasing came from on the Pulse. As I understand it Bob Monroe coined the term at TMI and Frank Kepple who used hemi-sync cottoned on to the term in the early 2000s on the Pulse.

At TMI we teach a model of phasing levels of consciousness. At one end of the spectrum is C1 waking consciousness and at the other is being fully in spirit after you graduate from this earth life system. In between are all manner of states of awareness including day dreaming, light meditation, coma, deep meditation, mystical experiences etc... Thy all come under the bracket of phasing. So even if you are at work thinking about what you want for dinner tonight you are slightly out of phase with the physical. A very small part of you is not in the present andwith your dinner instead, as it were. With meditation and other practises you are just moving further and further out of phase with the physical. OBEs are very much out of phase because you generally have little to no awareness of the physical.

So I think the definition may have changed a little on the pulse based on Frank Kepples approach but at its core it remains the same

[Xanth]

It seems to suggest there is such a thing as a non-phasing method.  This is not the case.  All methods are phasing, in fact the act of phasing is what makes an obe (or projection, or whatever you call it) an obe.  Therefore all methods work to achieve this phasing.  The only difference is where you phase to.  In "traditional" obe techniques such as rope, log roll, "goto door", floating upward, etc, etc, all you are doing is local phasing.  That is phasing somewhere "close" to your physical body.  With something like the Frank Kepple phasing method you are doing the exact same thing only distance phasing.  It is all the same. No matter your method you are using intent mixed with imagined sensations to switch (or phase) your focus from PMR to NPMR.

This I think is important for two reasons.  First reason is I read people talk about local and distance phasing like they are different experiences.  I have ran into several threads on if phasing even counts as an obe.  Of course it does, the phasing is what makes it an obe, you are just phasing somewhere (by phasing I mean changing the focus of your consciousness) probably not in local 1 (or RTZ, or whatever you want to call it).  Second point is often, especially new learners, treat traditional obe techniques like they are something other than phasing.  I read a funny post about an interview by Campbell where he states people often read Robert Monroe's Journeys and then go try to roll out of their bodies all night.  This will get you nowhere.  People think they need to learn some magic trick where they roll out of their body without moving or even being aware of their body.  Of course this isn't going to work.  You are simply thinking about having the focus of your consciousness roll out of your body, which (just like any phasing technique) causes your intent to be outside your body and leads to a phase.  Even if you are "in" or at the same location as your body when you project you are still phasing, as you are no longer in PMR, you must necessarily not be in the same place you were before phasing.

This leads me to something else.  Several authors write about "partial projections" or getting a limb stuck.  This is crap, you don't even have arms and legs in NPMR so the notion you can get stuck because you didn't fully create your astral arm is nonsense.  I believe there is two reasons this sensation happens.  First is the fear barrier, you see your body floating outside where it should and so your natural response is to hold on with anything you have left.  In other words you create the sensation of being stuck.  The second has to do with what RB (Astral Dynamics) calls the mind split.  Now I think the theory behind the mind split is either very poorly explained or just plain wrong, but the actual experience of it is real.  Xanth and Frank and many others I have read talk about how your focus is never fully in one place.  This is true, everyone has experienced it.  Just think of a time when you were half asleep and you were having a dream but at the same time you were also in your bed and aware of your body.  This is what I think sometimes happens when you do what I call local phasing projections.  The closer you are to your body the harder time your mind has with accepting the phase and you end up with a split focus, Eventually one wins out and either you are off to have an adventure or back in your body.  This I think this is much more likely than the complicated shadow memory multiple feedback mind-split RB talks about.

So to sum up my belief is all projections are a "phasing method" using the same tools (intent and sensations or perceived sensations) in order to cause a change in "where" your focus is.  Hopefully some will find this helpful.

FINALLY!  Someone else who "gets it"!  Good job.  

You're 100% correct.  There really is only phasing.

I'll go into more detail tonight when I have more time.

Perhaps it would help to see where the term phasing came from on the Pulse. As I understand it Bob Monroe coined the term at TMI and Frank Kepple who used hemi-sync cottoned on to the term in the early 2000s on the Pulse.

At TMI we teach a model of phasing levels of consciousness. At one end of the spectrum is C1 waking consciousness and at the other is being fully in spirit after you graduate from this earth life system. In between are all manner of states of awareness including day dreaming, light meditation, coma, deep meditation, mystical experiences etc... Thy all come under the bracket of phasing. So even if you are at work thinking about what you want for dinner tonight you are slightly out of phase with the physical. A very small part of you is not in the present andwith your dinner instead, as it were. With meditation and other practises you are just moving further and further out of phase with the physical. OBEs are very much out of phase because you generally have little to no awareness of the physical.

So I think the definition may have changed a little on the pulse based on Frank Kepples approach but at its core it remains the same

Actually, they mean it in the same way.  Here is an excerpt from the Frank Kepple page Gandalf put together: http://www.astralpulse.com/frankkepple.html

Monroe was an electronics engineer by profession, and it so happens that I too graduated in electronics, so I understand where he was coming from when he talks about phase relationships. You can have two voltages present on the very same wire (you can have many numbers but for this example we'll have just two). To all intents and purposes, those two voltages are mixed, but at the same time they are separated. What separates these two voltages is the phase-angle relationship between them.

[astralm]

@floriferous
I apologize I should of had something in the first post but I got caught up in the what causes being stuck part (which I never intended on having when I first started writing the post) and forgot to add a disclaimer.  I never meant to imply this was some wild new idea no one had thought of before.  I do agree with you phasing has become a little confusing I think on the internet in whole.  Frank Kepple's method is great but like I said I think calling it the phasing method has added confusion to the basic truth that Obe is phasing, end of story (even your regular old lift out obe).  I also agree with you about the day dreaming, I was just going for a little more powerful example with the half dream/lying in bed scenario but it is the same idea.  It is odd because there is so much out there on how everything is connected and the same but somehow there is a huge disconnect to the fact this applies to a regular old roll out obe projection.  I just wanted to help clarify that, if you go about your traditional obe projections as if they are different and don't involve phasing you will (at least in my view) have a much harder time and create unneeded barriers for yourself.

I will add a edit to the original post about previous work on this idea.

@Xanth
I look forward to reading your more detailed response tonight, and congrats on passing 10k posts.

[floriferous]

I suppose I see where the confusion arises because if you look at the Pulse forum description for Astral Consciousness it lists phasing alongside meditation and OBEs implying it's an alternative method rather than an umbrella term for them all

[astralm]

I suppose I see where the confusion arises because if you look at the Pulse forum description for Astral Consciousness it lists phasing alongside meditation and OBEs implying it's an alternative method rather than an umbrella term for them all

And I think it is just naturally confusing also.  It is easy to understand Frank's distance method is phasing.  It is common sense you are here, then there, you phased.  Most of the time with local phasing it doesn't intuitively feel like you went anywhere, or any phasing took place.  When you phase at (for lack of a better term) your current physical position, it is hard to naturally grasp the phasing part of that.  It doesn't stare you in the face like it does with Frank's method.  Just think how long Monroe took to figure this out.  I might be wrong but I'm pretty sure he hadn't figured it out yet in JOB, and he had over 10 years experience with obe at that point (going off memory here, haven't read JOB in a number of years).  Then compound all that with the fact we have separated phasing methods from traditional methods and yeah you have a pretty nice confusion cocktail.

[Xanth]

I suppose I see where the confusion arises because if you look at the Pulse forum description for Astral Consciousness it lists phasing alongside meditation and OBEs implying it's an alternative method rather than an umbrella term for them all

Yeah, those first three forums really need editing/changing/merging/SOMETHING.  LOL  They're a bit... too strange for my personal liking, but I don't want to change too much around here. 

As for "phasing"...
I think what's made it confusing is all the "OTHER" information out there on projection. 
Let's face it, we're never going to have a firm agreement from the entire community on what these experiences are. 

I try to work it one person at a time. 

[Xanth]

Ok!  So here we go.  

It seems to suggest there is such a thing as a non-phasing method.  This is not the case.  All methods are phasing, in fact the act of phasing is what makes an obe (or projection, or whatever you call it) an obe.  Therefore all methods work to achieve this phasing.  The only difference is where you phase to.  In "traditional" obe techniques such as rope, log roll, "goto door", floating upward, etc, etc, all you are doing is local phasing.  That is phasing somewhere "close" to your physical body.  With something like the Frank Kepple phasing method you are doing the exact same thing only distance phasing.  It is all the same. No matter your method you are using intent mixed with imagined sensations to switch (or phase) your focus from PMR to NPMR.

You're quite correct.  The only correction I'd make is this "local" vs "distance" phasing (which you do address later on ).
At no time while projecting are you ever projecting into this physical reality.  Never.  If you're in an environment which you recognize, such as your bedroom... the closest analogy is that it's a replica created from a myriad of sources, but quite extensively from your own experiences.

Essentially, this makes what most people call a RTZ (real time zone) a label of purely (incorrectly) observation.

Even extending that thought... PMR = NPMR in all aspects of experience.

This I think is important for two reasons.  First reason is I read people talk about local and distance phasing like they are different experiences.  I have ran into several threads on if phasing even counts as an obe.  Of course it does, the phasing is what makes it an obe, you are just phasing somewhere (by phasing I mean changing the focus of your consciousness) probably not in local 1 (or RTZ, or whatever you want to call it).  Second point is often, especially new learners, treat traditional obe techniques like they are something other than phasing.  I read a funny post about an interview by Campbell where he states people often read Robert Monroe's Journeys and then go try to roll out of their bodies all night.  This will get you nowhere.  People think they need to learn some magic trick where they roll out of their body without moving or even being aware of their body.  Of course this isn't going to work.  You are simply thinking about having the focus of your consciousness roll out of your body, which (just like any phasing technique) causes your intent to be outside your body and leads to a phase.  Even if you are "in" or at the same location as your body when you project you are still phasing, as you are no longer in PMR, you must necessarily not be in the same place you were before phasing.

Exactly.  

The label people give to an experience is usually based on a number of factors... all of which are relatively subjective and meaningless.  

The only important factors are:

1.  Are you in a reality which isn't this physical reality?  AND
2.  Are you aware of that fact?

That's it.  How you go to that reality or what environment that reality is has no bearing what-so-ever on what label your experience falls under.  
IT IS A PROJECTION.  That's it, there is so sub dividing this.

This leads me to something else.  Several authors write about "partial projections" or getting a limb stuck.  This is crap, you don't even have arms and legs in NPMR so the notion you can get stuck because you didn't fully create your astral arm is nonsense.  I believe there is two reasons this sensation happens.  First is the fear barrier, you see your body floating outside where it should and so your natural response is to hold on with anything you have left.  In other words you create the sensation of being stuck.  The second has to do with what RB (Astral Dynamics) calls the mind split.  Now I think the theory behind the mind split is either very poorly explained or just plain wrong, but the actual experience of it is real.  Xanth and Frank and many others I have read talk about how your focus is never fully in one place.  This is true, everyone has experienced it.  Just think of a time when you were half asleep and you were having a dream but at the same time you were also in your bed and aware of your body.  This is what I think sometimes happens when you do what I call local phasing projections.  The closer you are to your body the harder time your mind has with accepting the phase and you end up with a split focus, Eventually one wins out and either you are off to have an adventure or back in your body.  This I think this is much more likely than the complicated shadow memory multiple feedback mind-split RB talks about.

All this body part stuck nonsense has one source: You think you're a physical being with physical arms.  It's all self-created delusion really.  LoL

Don't even get me started on Bruce's "mind split".  

So to sum up my belief is all projections are a "phasing method" using the same tools (intent and sensations or perceived sensations) in order to cause a change in "where" your focus is.  Hopefully some will find this helpful.

Eventually, the only conclusion one can come to if they continue this line of reasoning is that *EVERYTHING* is a projection.
I said above that PMR = NPMR.  This is true in every single respect.