Firstly, a hello to any who remember me. It has been quite a busy summer, but hopefully I'll be visiting here a bit more often now.
I think my main intent in this post is to simply lay out the recent past and present condition of..well, everything, I suppose, in my own mind as I haven't had much time for reflection of that sort. It seems to me that other than reflections at material occurances on a daily basis, I haven't made many useful self observations recently - and too many of those have been melancholy. The need to rid myself of a tendancy to these morose reflections is foremost in my personal advancement, I believe.
Back to the intentions of the post however, any observations are, as always, very welcome.
I think I've made some leaps in my abilities at inducing trances since my last visits when I was still at that barely-competent stage. I can now induce a light trance often within moments of attempting it..and I can work my way in to deeper trances with more successes than failures. I don't usually get into the deepest states, but - well, rather than using "deep" and "light" as descriptions, I'll just mention the effects - I usually notice tingling in my fingers to begin with. Upon focusing what awareness I can muster to this tingling, it spreads through my hands and a warmth of tingle spreads through my body. My feet and hands are most sensitive. Using breath awareness and such, I usually end up feeling the blood pulsing through my veins, again mostly in my hands and feet. Every now and then I can feel my actual heart beat, but I end up straining with so much of my will to feel it that I stop breathing before too long and upon returning to my natural breath, the awareness of heartbeat fades.
As for practice, I do it pretty regularly, because lately it seems I haven't been able to get to sleep without I do my trance work to relax me enough.
Since this is already too long, I'll just throw in the observations that a few times, rarely, I've had small beginnings of the vibrations that are supposed to be exit signs, but no amount of willpower and effort has done much to make them grow.
I also need to work on MBA a little more. I can certainly move my awareness about, but for example when I'm trying to use awareness hands on my feet at the same time, the left hand seems to gravitate to my right foot with my right hand and it takes a lot of effort to get either hand to go back to the left foot, and if I succeed, it's usual a both or none sort of thing. And as for my awareness hands, it's probably presumptuious of me to call them that because they're far too feeble to be hands. I can slowly and haltingly move awareness through my body, but as for moving it through space that I'm not in, which is necessary for exit, no such luck. The logical parts of my brain don't seem to grasp the concept of moving my awareness out of body.
As for my "shadow memory," I still don't remember dreams frequently, but the ones that I do recall are certainly much more vivid than most I can remember, and I still have one that I had a few days ago in detail that would make for a nice scene in a movie(and quite a lot of action, at that). But nothing I've done so far has been much help in bringing any sort of regularity to my dreaming or remembering spontaneous OBEs.
Sorry for the length of my post, but we'll blame it on my lengthy absence.
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