Astral Projection, OBE’s and other spooky things.

My most memorable astral experiences happened over several periods when I was around 11-12 years of age. At that time, we lived opposite a park that jutted out into the harbour. My bedroom (which I shared with one of my brothers) had big windows that opened onto the park so, for most of the year, we had the windows fully opened each night which made it feel as though we were camping under the stars.

During these periods, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find myself rising out of my body and floating towards the roof. On the roof, there was always a male figure waiting for me. His shimmering astral body remained transfixed. He never turned to acknowledge me and never said anything. I intuitively felt his silence had something to do with his need to concentrate his energies so I remained silent as well and for the first minute or so I’d look out over the park, harbour, lights, moon, clouds and stars and drink in the awesome beauty. Everything was buzzing with energy. Everything was electric, vibrant and alive. When the time was right, he would rise up into the night sky and I’d follow.

This is what happened almost every night over a period of a week or two then it would stop and start-up again several months or a year later until the visits petered out completely.

With each visit, the guide/teacher seemed to be showing me something. I could recall some of the experiences the next morning but most I couldn’t. One night he showed me something so mind blowing I begged him to let me remember it the next day but rather than explaining why I couldn’t, he showed me a colour I had never seen before and intuitively urged me to memorize it. The colour was a primary colour but not red, yellow or blue; it wasn’t a secondary (mixed) colour either. It was totally new so I spent a minute or so burning it into my mind. Hopefully, this would trigger the memory of the thing I was so desperate to remember.

When morning came, I recollected the experiment but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall the new colour. How do you describe red if red (and its derivatives) doesn’t exist in your world? How do you describe something if there are no words that that suggest it?

The lesson was learned: it wasn’t possible for a person in a reduced conscious state to grasp that which can only be perceived in a full state of consciousness. This has major implications for everything we think we know about the metaphysical realms and one of the reasons there’s so much confusion.

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Dear Chakra,
It seems you have experienced an archetypal situation, specifically a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. The male of your customized myth has brought you an image of your future understanding.

On a physical level of explanation OBEs and NDEs have been traced to a lack of oxygen in the human brain. The brain personifies these activities in the subconscious wherein they become labeled by social memes, creating a mythology that can explain how one thinks and feels about personal physical changes in the growth and development of individuality, synthesis and metamorphosis.
The myth is the chemical activity made sensible. Most metaphysics has as its source subconscious dealings with physical changes.

Or the scientists who have a lot invested in their version of a materialist paradigm have found ways to dismiss phenomena they really do not understand and should be agnostic about. When a Dutch cardiologist first started catalogues NDEs and OOBEs, his collegues and the scientific community dismissed the experience as incredibly rare, nearly non-existent. IOW they dismissed not merely the interpretations of the experience that might challenge their paradigm, but that people were experinecing these things at all. There is tremendous resistence to anything that challenges current models, and anything that remotely goes against materialism itself, will be resisted very hard, but sure they can come up with sober sounding dismissals.

Actually I should have worded it as ‘phenomena that SEEM to contradict their paradigms’ since they tend not to notice how their own paradigms shift and incorporate and cannot be falsified.

How does that explain group NDEs where everyone sees the same angel and what ever else?

I don’t see positing a physical description of these phenomena as any lessening of the explanatory value of these experiences. Mind and matter are complements, not opposites. I simply trace the experience back through the social (memes, archetypes) through the personal (qualia) to the chemical (neuron routes).
Dan, everyone can see the same angel because everyone has the same chemical trajectory for sensing both physical and .subsequent mental phenomena. Taking certain drugs can give some these transcendent experiences. The white light and tunnel experienced in NDEs are archetypes.

Could you have been simply lucid dreaming which would explain the shiny man (Alice In Wonderland effects) and the loss of memory?

Chakra, as an adult, have you ever tried to meditate your sober, wide awake consciousness to an astral plane?

What does experience do to teach us about the self, Chakra? Most answers I’ve seen to this question say that the self is the constant that holds sway throughout the whole flurry of experiences. But then again, many would say that the self doesn’t exist. David Hume, for example, would have us believe that there is no self, just the whole bundle of experiences we go into and come out of. Maybe that is the constant. Maybe the self is just the flow of experience.

Reminds me of a dream I had once–a man (a wizard) who took me on a flight throughout the neighborhood (symbolic of astral projection?)–and though he uttered a few words, he never laughed (despite my best jokes :smiley: ). My impression was that he was a different kind of being who didn’t process humor. Do you suppose your man’s silence represents the kind of being he was and what that says about his style of communication?

:frowning:

Did he turn you to a bumble-bee?

Full consciousness would imply the having of every possible experience.

Every experience should be at least representable in physical form, though it doesn’t mean it always will be. I wonder how Chakra’s experience of seeing a new color would be represented? Did his ethereal body have a fourth cone type in the retina?

Future understanding? It certainly seems like it.

Five years later, when some other entities made contact with our little group (nothing to do with astral or lucid dreams), we were told we each had a particular gift or talent. I was hoping ‘love’ was going to be one of them and I’d be given it. My mother was all about love, love, love so I wanted to impress her but it was not to be. My talent/gift was ‘understanding’.

Understanding? WTF! Understanding is so boring. I was pretty disappointed at the time but years later I had to acknowledge that understanding (or attempting to) is perhaps my key characteristic.

Good call Ierr.
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On competitive spirituality.

youtube.com/watch?v=1kDso5ElFRg

youtube.com/watch?v=cyc_MnHX8FI

I haven’t gathered the sufficient empirical proofs but I would argue that the criterium is valuing power; lets say a combination of will, need, desire, necessity, the amplitude and density thereof in a given field determines whether this field, or context, or paradigm, or reality, is merely one subset of the main existence or if it is the main existence of which other realities are subset.

So, if you astral travel and truly lose your heart to some phenomenon there, it may be that you continue to exist astrally (I wouldn’t call this “live”, as I don’t know what it is) but die, physically.

I think probably the average lifespan of a period and place depends on how quickly life gets boring.
In early Biblical times, life was rather more interesting than it is for the average citizen now, who lives about as long as an Ancient Athenian, and we live a lot longer than medieval Europeans or people stranded in the desert for generations on end.

Isn’t consciousness life?

That’s one of those things I can’t prove.

Ahh. You’re interested in the theory - the philosophy of self; I was referring to the experience of Self. That’s the point I was trying to make: there comes a time in our search where we have to put the intellect aside and explore consciousness through consciousness itself.

What are we seeking? Some will say knowledge and others, meaning, but I don’t think that’s really what’s driving us to seek. I think we’re seeking the EXPERIENCE of being fully alive… fully conscious human beings. We ARE human beings. We know the human part of the term too well but what about the being part? The god consciousness part?

What I learned – beginning with those early AP’s – was that we are consciousness and like love, the best way to learn about consciousness (the Self) is through direct experience. So I didn’t come away with information about how many levels there are or how each one operates. I’m not sure if that’s even possible because it’s so amorphous and so much overlaps, but I’ll try to clarify your questions about ‘self’ in the next post.

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Heheh. I love that dude. This is a video he did of my town (cringe… laugh… cringe… I know some of the people he mentioned, too :blush: ). Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as hippie as it used to be. It used to have real character until the middle-class mom & pop investors moved in and trendified it almost out of existence. I’ve had to move further into the valley so I can practice my naked Satsang sessions and raise my kundalini without the police being called.

youtube.com/watch?v=yZ9AC95LV9s

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Part 2: The intellectual stuff:

If “philosophy is just a by-product of misunderstanding language” as Wittgenstein said, then it’s 1000 times more applicable to metaphysics. The proverbial silent master is silent for a reason; that’s where Truth is (metaphorically speaking). Any genuine guru/teacher will tell you the more he/she says, the deeper into the mind the student goes and the further away from the Truth he gets. That goes for everything here as well.

If you clarify what ‘self’ they’re referring to, then both views could be correct. The big Self (capital ‘S’) is one’s essence. Some may call it God within, spirit, Buddha/Christ consciousness etc. The little self (small ‘s’) is the false self/self-image/ego – aka Joe, the Democrat and plumber with a wife, two kids, a dog and a mortgage. If we use the actor/character metaphor again, the big Self is the actor and the little self is the character he plays.

The big Self would be that which, in your words: “is the constant that holds sway throughout the whole flurry of experiences”. It is the eternal Witness. The little self is that which the ancient masters (and Hume) say doesn’t exist.

Animals don’t have a little self (aka an ego, self-image or self-identity). They act according to their genes and conditioning, that’s all. There’s no mental story that goes with it. When genes and conditioning urge humans to act, however, our theories about cause and effect (along with the semantics of language) compel us to attribute actions to an actor, feelings to a feeler and thinking to a thinker. To do this, we create images of ourselves in our head (self-images) and then credit that image with all of our thinking, feeling and actions. For the most part, we do this unconsciously by the programming of language.

He’s an example: Someone may say “Jack is growing his hair” but that’s not true. Jack is not doing anything. Hair is growing; that’s all. Why is Jack (the self-image) given credit for something his body is doing automatically? Similarly, we say things like “Jill hurt her leg” but that’s not true either. Jill didn’t smash up her leg with a hammer; her body fell down the hill and a leg broke.

The false-image/ego/identity is just an amorphous, collage of mental images and personal stories one collects over time. This holographic mental self-image needs to be reenergized continually to give the appearance of something real and we do that by our neurotic obsessive-compulsive thinking. Directly or indirectly, every thought we have is used to refresh the image we have of ourselves and stop it from fading away. Every thought or feeling somehow refers to ‘I’, ‘me’ or ‘my’ and even when it’s about others, it indirectly relates back to the false image by linking to ‘my’ beliefs or ‘our’ opinions.

This is why masters prescribe meditation and silence. This is why they point to the ‘here and now’… presence… the pool of stillness in which one can peer into and catch his own reflection.

A well known Zen verse says: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." Notice it doesn’t say “I” chop wood and “I” carry water. There’s no personhood, no false self-image, no ego, no identity, no story and no actor present; just a body acting and a mind silently observing.

PS: I really liked your last sentence, gib: “Maybe the self is just the flow of experience.”
If you meant the big Self then it sounds spot on to me. No things, forms or nouns; just verbing.

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I was talking with a guy online that was only able to do 5 minutes of meditation a day.
He could barely focus. I think it was in many ways genetic.
What if enlightenment was at least partially genetic?

Also i dont want to talk sh-t about ego because ego saves a lot of people too.

Ok, fair enough. But I had to jump into this conversation somehow. :wink:

Yes. You might even say that the human part of us is seeking whatever evolution designed us to seek: food, shelter, love, and maybe even knowledge and meaning. But the god part of us is just that part that is an extension of the universe itself. What drives that part of us to seek is the laws of nature themselves. And as a pantheist, I believe the laws of nature are what drive the universe (and all parts therein) to continue experiencing.

I anticipate your response.

I hear what you’re saying, but I think truth is just whatever we make up. I think the deeper into the mind the student goes, the closer he comes to his own truth (or that of the master if he’s just a intellectual receptical). But you did say “metaphorically speaking,” didn’t you? There is a “metaphorical” truth that can only be heard in silence.

There’s many ways to conceive of the self. I always like to bring things back to basics. I always ask: what is the self to the average Joe? And I think: it’s whoever Joe sees when he looks in the mirror. This reminds me that there is always an intricately connected physical aspect to the self, the body. If someone says, “Who did this?” and you say, “It was me,” you point to yourself–that is, you reference your body.

You say that the big Self is one’s essence. And this works with the self-qua-body (though maybe not in the way you intend). Essences are typically projections of our concepts of things. The essence of my coffee mug is given to my coffee mug from my projecting the concept of my coffee mug from my mind. I see it, I recognize it as “my coffee mug”–that is, I project my concept of it onto my visual image of it. The process is no different for Joe looking at his reflection in the mirror. He projects his concept of “himself” onto the image of himself that he sees. This, for him, becomes his essence.

I think the revealing of the big Self underneath the small self comes from our ability (more easily exersized by some than others) to push aside all the peripheral aspects of our self-concept (that my name is Joe, that I am a construction worker, that I am a father, etc.) and still recognize a ‘self’ when we look in the mirror–that is, that despite how we do away with all the peripheral aspects of ourselves, we still can’t help but to recognize a “person” there, even if it’s just a blank canvas.

I’m even skeptical that the big Self exists (at least in term of how I’m interpreting you); I’m used to thinking of everything as projections of experience. Whatever this constant that holds sway throughout the flux of experience, I think at best it recurs than actually holds sway. As a concept, it can’t just remain in the mind at all times. Therefore, as a projection of experience (a concept in this case), it recurs rather than just stays constant through time. Every time I think about myself, the same concept comes to mind, the same name. It’s the same way that matter seems to persist through time. A rock, for example, seems to be a constant, but it is really a network of billions of atoms all going through flux–the electrons buzzing around the nucleus, and the protons and neutrons in the nucleus themselves fluctuating as waves–but maintained in a system that repeats and reinforces its prior states–recurrence–and the overall effect on a macroscopic level is a virtual constant, a rock.

Well, I think this again has to do with the body. Attributing a cause to an effect usually involves identifying an object which caused the effect. Because of the body’s intricate connection to our concept of self, we easily find an object to call the “actor” or “feeler” or “thinker”–the cause of the acting, feeling, or thinking.

I suppose, but again, I think we identify Jack and Jill with their bodies (at least partially).

This is true. To express a thought or a feeling, we must say “I think…” or “I feel…” The dread of our self-concept fading away is an interesting topic that one might want to bring up with someone like iambiguous (or not want to if you’ve had the experience :laughing: ).

This would be a new concept of ‘self’ from what I’ve been talking about. Since I don’t know it that well, I wonder whether it can even be called a self. I mean, I can imagine just having experience–a state in which there is no projection of self of any kind, just whatever’s there in the moment–are we calling pure experience a form of ‘self’?

Well, that’s sort of what I was getting at, except that to call this a ‘self’ seems more like a need to hang onto a label than anything else; but really, I would think all that exists is just whatever’s being experienced in that flow. Unless we actually start thinking about the self during the flow of experience, I think there would just be ‘stuff’ (i.e. whatever’s being experienced).

I’d be really disappointed if the path to enlightenment was limited only to meditation for long periods of time. I know what you mean, though. In my past attempts at meditation, I started with 15 minutes. Then it got reduced to 10 minutes. Then 5. I reeeally can’t focus that long. I’ve got ADD (or so they say). That’s why someone wrote a book about meditation for the ADD mind (I forget the title).

It’s what we’re born with. It’s how we’ve survived. Though the devoted Buddhist might ask: what’s wrong with death?

Here’s a man without a self

i.imgur.com/jiF83t5.mp4
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