Lesson 17: OOBE as a tool for self improvement

Way back when, in another lesson, I stated that it was possible to correct personality problems using OOBE. I came to these conclusions when I had several things happen to me.

1) I was faced with several memories that had been locked up that needed to be faced.
2) I had a few problems of my own that I needed to correct to save my marriage. and
3) I accidentally stumbled on some of these principals during OOBE.

Now, I understand that just about any good meditational course can do the same things that I am about to share with you, and if that vehicle makes you more comfortable, then by all means, use meditation to do this. However, I think that OOBE when combined with some meditational techniques can bring results far and away better than what is capable of being achieved with meditation alone.

I would like to make one disclaimer here. There are some problems that are physical and chemical rather than purely emotional. When in doubt, see a competent mental care professional to see if this is something that needs other techniques to treat. Do not rely solely on meditation or OOBE to cure you of your mental problems. A "shotgun approach" is usually best.

That said, let me tell you why I think that OOBE can help with some kinds of problems.

1. The personality problems that you may be looking at can be seen as being outside of you. They can be an entity that exists only on the Astral Plane, and as such can be looked at objectively and countered.

When a problem manifests, rather than staying nebulous, it's easier to see what brought that problem to be, it's easier to see the stages in it's development and thus, it's easier to correct some of those factors so this does not happen again.

An example: You have a problem with money. When you have it, you spend it like water, without regard for bills you have to pay, or anything other than your instant gratification. When you don't have it, all you can do and think of is how to get more money so that you have more and more. You CAN budget, but sticking to a budget is so hard that most times you don't even try.

The causes for this kind of behavior could be many. However, while APing, you meet a person that calls itself "The Greedy Boy". You realize that this boy is the person in your psyche that deals with some of the problems you have with money. In talking to and examining him, you discover that he is made up of parts of you who feel unloved, who find self worth through possessions, who was told by your parents that only rich people are happy. He was taught, in effect, that the person who has the most toys will be happy.

Now, on a conscious level, we all know that is complete and utter bullhockey. However, this person is made up entirely of these parts of you who learned this. With this knowledge, you can formulate a plan.

First, you can start by loving yourself. You would be amazed at the number of people who don't love themselves and who, in fact, feel that they deserve all the bad in their lives because of being bad people. You can also take inventory of your life and understand that you have a lot of possessions, ones that you treasure, so you don't need to get that other possession over there because you already have four of them that do the same thing. You can start a program of self programming that sets up patterns in your subconscious that state that while having nice things is important, buying things simply for the sake of having them only clutters up your house. It is so much nicer to have a house to put all your possessions in, rather than buying another possession simply to put it into storage.

And so on. Slowly, (and it will be slowly) the impetuous that keeps that boy alive in the subconscious will start loosing it's hold, and that boy, the greedy one, will have the "life" taken away because those sections of your personality that deal with it will no longer be operating. It may take years, but it will happen. I went through this myself once upon a time.

Remember, the Subconscious works with you. It creates manifestations of itself and aspects so that you can see problems and deal with them. They are all there in the back of your head, waiting for you to look at them and start correcting them.

However, not all of the negative aspects can be "cured" or even should be. That greedy boy may also control your ambition, your drive to get more money so that you can purchase more things. It may control a part of you that is also miserly, which relates to the savings you have in your sugar jar. So, how do you correct the negative parts without damaging those parts that are necessary? Answer: You don't.

Unfortunately, whenever you make a change in one area of your psyche, no matter how minor, the results of that change will reverberate for a while. Many different areas will be affected and you can't help that. The best thing you can do is to do as little damage as possible. You must acquire a skill in firefighting (as I call it) in which you wait for consequences of your actions to manifest, and deal with the resulting mess then. There are some things that you can do to head off problems before they occur, but that is mostly a matter of thinking through the consequences before they become problems.

In dealing with your own psyche, you have a little more leeway to make mistakes and corrections than you would if you were dealing with someone else's mind. So, learn yourself first, then start correcting things in your own head.

Another thing that can help you is that you will be able to detach purely learned responses from yourself and analyze them better. For instance, you will be able to take the fear of small places that you learned from being locked in a closet for two hours when you were 4 and look at it with the eyes of your perfect self. In other words, the phobias and problems you picked up directly as a result of living this lifetime will be looked at with the eyes of your soul, the one that you take with you when your body finally ceases to function.

2. Instead of trying to take on too many problems at one time, like most of us do in our daily life, by manifesting a personality problem on the Astral Plane, and dealing with it there, you can work on THAT problem to the exclusion of all the others.

I point this out because it's hard to work on giving up smoking while trying to loose weight, while trying to do a good job at work, while taking care of your children, while fixing the house and etc ad neausium.

So, working on it in a way that all your attention is directed to one goal is much more efficient than trying to do fifty things at once, and you get better results.

There is also this; You all know about computer modeling, in which a program is built that models the actions of a situation so long as all the factors are there to allow the computer to calculate what may be going on. Well, on the Astral Plane, you can refine this to just about any extreme. Note, I have never tried this, but I do know about it.

Basically, if you had a problem that had manifested on the Astral Plane as an entity, you could "build" a copy of yourself there, complete with the problem that you wanted to get rid of. From there, you try different options and techniques until you get the results you want. Then you go on to put that solution into practice on yourself.

The reason I have been hesitant about trying this myself is because the AP is a wish fulfillment environment. You have to be REALLY careful to NOT want the problem gone with no other repercussions because that is what you would wind up getting, and you wouldn't know what process brought you to the finished product of "no problem".

3. When a problem manifests as a splinter personality, you can spend more time with that "person" to correct the problem rather than using a quick patch for now, and working on it more later.

That's one of the major problems here; that lack of time for doing what MUST be done. Everyone else has expectations of us, and we have responsibilities and commitments that we have to fulfill. Taking two weeks off work and going out into the woods to contemplate your navel is usually seen as being selfish by others, irregardless that it is needed for your mental sanity.

4. Since you are working in an environment that the subconscious is pretty much in charge of, you can speak to it in the language it understands and bypass the couscous filters that may skew the fixes you are trying to get it to take.

What I mean by that is from a self-empowerment seminar I saw as part of an infomercial once, but it rang true and I use it.

If you drew out your mind, you would have the Conscious mind in the front of the room, and the subconscious mind in the back. This is the visual to use for this example, not the one that I use all the time. In the Conscious mind, there is a guard that is you. He stands there, getting all the information coming in, and takes it into the back room and files that information into the correct place so you can remember it.

He does not do anything to that information other than file it, and sometimes add on bits of what he thinks of that info, kind of like notations. So, as you are "programmed" while you are younger with "you are stupid" he files it, and files it and files it.

Pretty soon, he starts getting affected by what is in that subconscious room. All the stink from that "you are stupid" comments comes wafting out all the time and he starts believing it.

So, thirty years down the road, when you realize that you are NOT stupid, and start taking in positive reinforcement to counteract that first programming, he takes that positive reinforcement that says "I am a smart and capable person", takes it into the back room, and notes something like "This is nice, but not true" and undoes all the work that that positive reinforcement tried to put in place.

This is why it usually takes 10 times as many compliments to counteract one negative statement from another person. Simply chanting things over and over won't do, so we have to get tricky.

Using AP as a tool for improving yourself bypasses the guard at the door, and puts the information DIRECTLY into the filing cabinets, to be stored. It would be nice if we could edit and delete that information in there, but unfortunately or fortunately, our minds don't work that way.

So, we put the information that WE want in there, in the proper cabinets, right up front, or stapled to other documents to correct bad habits. Now when we think "that was stupid of me" we also get "so I'll think next time and it won't be so bad" or "Gods, I really NEED that cigarette" we get "but I made a promise to myself to quit, and I won't let a stick of weed control me."

It can be really effective when it's done properly.

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Okay, having shared my wisdom on this subject with you all, I'll swap to another topic for a while.

Here I'm going to talk to you about Astral Combat.

This is probably a topic that you will never need, but you should be aware about it anyway since it is a possibility.

First, you need to know a few ground rules.

1) Your body cannot be harmed from this, and you cannot die unless you want to.
2) The person with the strongest Will, wins.
3) If you encounter a wall you can't get through, stop trying. There is probably something on the other side you don't want to know about.
4) If something hurts you on purpose, hurt it back.
5) If you can see it, you can hurt it.
6) Keep it simple stupid.

Each of the above rules of thumb are necessary to keep things in perspective. Rule #1 is one of the prime rules that I have been telling you about for a long time now. This cannot hurt your body or kill you, unless you want it to hurt your body or kill you. Belief is everything on the Astral Plane, and if you believe yourself injured, you will be. Since this IS on the AP, your body is safe and cannot be harmed by any force on the Astral Plane.

Rule #2 is also one of the basic rules. So long as you KNOW, to the bottom of your soul, that what you are seeing is real or true, or that THIS effect WILL take place, you are okay. It's when you are doubting that you get hurt, as several people can tell you.

Rule #3 is one of those "duh" rules. It should be obvious, but you would be amazed at how many people out there completely ignore it. These walls are called Shields or Wards. There are two purposes to these; one is to keep things out, another is to keep things in. Either can be used for either purpose, but Wards are usually on a place, while a shield is on a thing. If the shield is keeping something contained, do you REALLY want to let it out? You need to think about it a while. If it is something or someone you care about, then by all means do so, but if you have no clue what is behind that shiny wall you can't walk through, then leave it alone. There is a reason it's there in first place. Make no mistake about it, most shields and wards are made to be impenetrable from one side, and permeable (to a point) from the other. If it is a containment shield, then there will be weak places and vulnerabilities on the side you are on. So, you could break it open if you wanted to. But you need to think first. There is usually a reason that it is there.

If it is to keep things out, then do you REALLY want to meet the person that constructed it in the first place and have them fighting you? Or possibly set off his traps and get hurt from them? Or get stuck for a while by something else?

Generally, it's best to leave that kind of thing alone.

Rule #4 is something that I debated a long time about, and most Wiccans can't get through their head. Most things on the Astral Plane will not bother you unless you are looking for trouble. Most times, in fact, they will be of the opinion of "live and let live". However, if you are doing nothing to provoke an attack, and something jumps up and hurts you, hit it with everything you have. You can envision lightning bolts from your fingertips blasting it, you can see it simply being grabbed by an invisible force and pulped, and so on. Think of Hollywood special effects to get some ideas. Most things that hurt you intentionally on the Astral Plane are not your friends, and they are not going to be reasoned with. Like I said, live and let live is the general rule for most beings on the Astral Plane.

Rule #5 is a corollary to the previous one. No matter how far away in the Astral Plane a creature or entity goes, if you can see it in your mind's eye, you can hurt it, and in the cases of purely astral beings, possibly kill it. If a boggle jumps up and savages your leg before you have a chance to react, and then runs away, follow it with your mind's eye, see where it goes, the environment around it, and hit it with everything you have. Distance does not matter on the Astral Plane, nor on any physical plane so long as you are traveling astrally. Follow it and give it what it deserves. You may have to watch out for traps or possibly a creator of whatever it was that hit you, so keep that in mind.

Rule #6 should be obvious. When you have the choice between doing a ritual at your astral temple to cause harm to another being on the Astral Plane, one that will involve several hours in trance here to do, or to just send fire from your eye sockets to fry the little bastard, need I tell you which to choose? There is less that can go wrong with frying them than there is with a huge ritual. Plus, reaction time, while it is speeded up, is still critical. There are techniques that a skilled magician could use to wipe out the "back trail" connection between the act and the person attacked, so usually if you don't hit it within the first few moments, you may not get another shot.

Now, please understand that I am not telling you this to scare you. 99.998% of the things on the Astral Plane will never bother you or cause you a moment's distress, but it's that other .002% that can hurt you unless you know about it and take some kind of precaution. It's like locking your doors at night, it may not stop a robber or rapist, but it will slow them down long enough to call the police.

With that end in mind, let me tell you about a few basic precautions you can take.

Shields and Wards: Like I said above, generally a Ward is on a place, a Shield is on an item or person. All it is is a force-field like from Star Trek, Star Wars, or just about any other Sci-Fi show out there. It is generated out of your own bioenergy, and usually appears like a solid egg of light around you. The more you believe that nothing can get at you, the more that will be kept out. You can control them, make them thicker or thinner as you wish to, and it's always responsive to your will.

A ward is usually designed to protect a place, like a house or sacred ground. Some people like to put traps on those wards so that if they are violated, the trap (spell) goes off and hurts the person who breeched the wards. Normally, once constructed a ward is not tied to anyone, unlike a Shield, which is tied into the person who cast the shield. Wards are designed for long term protection, and are tied into the elements or into intangibles like electrical fields.

All you have to do to create these is have a good imagination. Imagine and envision and will a sphere of light around the area to be protected, see it building thicker and thicker, then attach it to the power source that will fuel it. The ward or shield will alert the caster when someone is trying to breach them, and the caster can take action at that point. That's what you need to know about them, but if you want to know more or want to get more elaborate, talk to someone who is really into ritual magick and I bet they will be able to give you all kinds of rituals and spells to help you along.

A Levinbolt is the basic weapon of the Astral Plane. The best description that I ever read is that a levinbolt is a torpedo of pure magickal energy. A beam of light, lightning from your fingers, flames shooting out of your mouth are all versions of this. The visual does not matter, just the effect.

Some people on the Astral plane use weapons, and the most common one in my experience is a Sword or something similar. Usually it will be glowing, and it only exists on the Astral plane. But because it's a Sword and sword shaped does not mean that it can't reach out from multiple dimensions away and hit you. It can and I have done it multiple times to others.

As a last resort, you can always wake up. Remember that, run. There is no cowardice, no shame. He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. These creatures are most times nuisances, but there is the one time when it's something more than a pest. If you run, you are safe, if you stay, you may be in a coma. Your choice.

As to the Police; there is a group that call themselves "Guardians" who do various things. Some of them guard specific weak spots in the boundaries between planes, so all the monsters from another world don't pour over into our world and cause havoc, some seek out and destroy those entities that have already crossed over to our world, some do so only on the Astral Plane, others do various jobs that I don't know about. Think of the Police, Firemen, Special Forces, FBI, and any agency or group who protects the general citizen, usually by putting their life on the line, and you have a handle on this group. The only thing that they do that the police agencies don't is that they use magick and astral Projection as one of their tools in their job.

Yes, I am a Guardian and the reason I'm so practiced is that I go out and hunt down those entities on the Astral Plane that like to hurt others. That's one reason that I warned you all off the Sept 11 problems because I knew that with all the dead, there would be a LOT of those creatures hanging around waiting for a tyro of a projector to come and try to help, and they would wind up munched for their trouble. Just a few things to keep in mind.

End of this lesson, and I would like to thank Kelly Stimac, my co-worker who created the picture above for all of you. He did that in about an hour and he does this professionally as well. You can find his homepage at http://dreamscapeproductionstudios.3dup.net and I advise everyone to take a look. His pictures and animations are beautiful.

Okay, assignment time.

To keep: I want you to think of a list of personality problems that you want to get fixed. Try to creatively solve some of them in the Astral Plane.

To turn in: Your results from the above assignment. List the problem, your idea, steps you took, and outcome (even if it is "outcome pending")

To read: At least one complete document on The Fivetrees Website (and by this I mean one of the Grimoires, completely through.) Their address is http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/3567/ and there is a wealth of information on there. This is a site that exists for support of Guardians, suggestions and advice can be shared, as well as being able to ask for information on some problems that are occurring that the guardian in question may not be able to get around.

Stars light your path

Daven

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