Lesson 3: Meditation in depth.

Last lesson I pontificated on the various means to getting into a trance state, citing meditation as the easiest to maintain, and the safest. Now we are going to talk about different sections of meditation, examples of what happens as well as using hypnosis and guided meditations as aids to gaining and maintaining a trance state.

Let me define what a trance is first. Several different people have put the definition of trance as a hypnotic, cataleptic, or ecstatic state. Now, this can apply to any number of different conditions in the human body, like being under the influence of a drug or alcohol, daydreaming, or sleeping. For the purposes of this class, a trance is defined as the state between waking and sleeping, where the mind is somewhat awake with focused ability to function, while the body is relaxed for sleeping.

Herein is the distinction: A trance state is a state in which there is a self-willed "release" from the reality you interact with every day. You don't see anymore, you don't hear anymore, you don't feel anymore, so forth and so on. Does this sound familiar? It should, you do this every night.

Yes, you go into a trance every time you go to sleep. You pass through the trance state into the unconscious state, but you come back up into the trance state often during sleep as well. Medical researchers are calling this state of trance the "Alpha brainwave" state. It is the same state that is invoked in hypnosis and guided meditations.

Now, since this state is self willed, meaning that you put yourself into this state, how can it be a hypnotic state, which someone else puts you into? Good question. A "hypnotic" state is nothing more than a co-operative effort between the hypnotist and the subject. It puts you into a relaxed state, usually through words and visualizations and allows for a high degree of suggestibility. This involves giving up some control to the person who is usually called the hypnotist, allowing them to lead you to this state, rather than going to this state for yourself.

If you ever want to know what it is like to be hypnotized, go to sleep sometime and pay attention. Right in that time when you relax your body, and your mind starts drifting is a hypnotic state. Why do the scientists call it "hypnotic" rather than something like "the pre-sleep state"? Who knows? I don't. It's one of those things that scientists do, naming the same object or state twenty different names. I guess it was to differentiate it from a self-willed sleep.

But you know what? Self-hypnosis tapes and guided meditations do the exact same thing to you. You may not realize it, and there are not usually any suggestions to quack like a duck, but it's the same process, the same feeling, and the same state. Because of that, hypnosis is a good tool for use in achieving a trance state and staying there for an extended period of time.

However, you may not have a hypnotist handy whenever you want to practice, and they cost a lot of money. So, what other alternatives to hypnosis do the Astral-Projector-on-a-budget have available?

Guided meditations: These are wonderful things. A whole sequence of sayings, affirmations, feel-good thoughts, and suggestions for yourself. They are designed to be used in a group setting, so there are no specific suggestions of "You must give me all your money and treat your mother Karen with respect and goodwill" (said sotto voce). Instead, the suggestions will be more along the lines of "you feel good about yourself, the world around you, and the people you meet." The suggestions will be general in nature, rather than specific.

What's the flaw in these types of tools? Well, you need to listen to them. Both hypnosis and guided meditations need to be listened to, while you cooperate with the person doing the speaking to achieve the trance state you wish to.

Obviously, this will not work too well for those who are deaf, or ones who have problems hearing, or speak another language. So, the best option is to construct your own "guided meditation" for use on yourself.

Doing it this way will be ultimately more powerful for you. The visualizations, the sights, the feelings, and the attitude of the whole meditation will be custom made for you, and you alone. For that reason, those who use meditations as a daily part of their lives tend to have about 3-10 different sets of meditations that they use over and over to allow them to achieve a trance state. This is important because without achieving this state and staying in it, conscious OOBE will not be possible.

Some general themes of the meditations used are listed here:

Suggestions to relax
The feeling of a safe environment around you
Lack of distractions from the world
A sense of comfort and love
Pictures and visualizations of a scene that is pleasant for you
A descent of some kind.

Each of these parts comes into play, and can be useful in maintaining trance. For some meditations and some schools of thought, sounds can be important in maintaining this state as well as anything you come up with. One group who thinks that sound is important to the mind and memory is the Native Americans and the Whale totem. The Whale holds all the knowledge there is to know, and it accesses that knowledge through the songs it sings. (This is taken from the Native American Medicine Cards; I have no idea what NA spiritualism says in this in general.)

Given this set of generalities, let me share with you my personal meditation that I use. I will post it here. Take a look at it and read it. Look for those 6 general aspects of all meditations in there. Then go back and look at the Flame and Shadow Guided Meditation I gave you all last lesson and see if you can find those same 6 themes in it.

The best part of this is that once you know the general shape of what your meditation will be, you don't have to read it out loud. You can follow it all in your head to it's conclusion, without ever having to disturb your meditation or your environment around you. No tape recorders, no .wav files, no anything except your own imagination and willpower.

Now, lets say that you get into the trance state and are completely relaxed. How do you maintain that state over time? There are a few things that will help you but ultimately it's your will that will decide whether or not you maintain that state.

Tool number one: Visualizations. Seeing pictures and environments in your head. Imagining it and making it real around you, from the sights, to the smells and the sounds. Feeling the heat from a lazy summer day, hearing the drone of bees and sensing the humidity in the air, just before the thunderstorm. Making that environment real around you in every way imaginable.

This takes some doing, and not everyone can achieve this complete mastery of visualization. I have not yet, although I have been practicing for multiple years on being able to achieve this. Sometime soon, perhaps. I have gotten close, however, which is a tremendous step forward. And I have had this fantasy environment "snap" into focus around me at different times, showing me that I was now projecting out of my body.

Here are some hints I can give you about this tool to maintain trance: Don't get to detail oriented. If you get caught up in making every snowflake different, and forget to include the cold, then something is wrong. Start from the general and work your way down to the specific when doing this. Make it day, make the sun shining, make the wind blow, make the wind cold, make the trees sigh around you, then make the snowflakes around you different. Going the opposite way, from the specific to the general only frustrates you and makes it seem as though it's too much bother.

Next way of maintaining trance: Hypnogogic images. Watch that pretty light show there behind your eyelids. ;-) That is the hypnogogic images. It is theorized by some (most notably Dr. Donald DeGracia, who's work we will be studying later), that this hypnogogic light show is a gateway to the Astral Plane. Watching the lights and looking at the patterns can open a window in you to other worlds.

Basically what he recommends is that you look at the lights. Those lights will form random patterns in your eyes, and you watch them. Rather than visualizing something in your head, he believes that if you watch the patterns long enough, you will start seeing images form in those patterns and in the darkness behind your eyes.

I have experienced this phenomenon myself, and can only say that what he describes in his class on CompuServe is accurate. I have not yet projected from that state of watching the hypnogogic images into a true projection episode, but with practice I hope to be able to do so.

The advantage to this kind of maintaining of trance is that you are passive. There is nothing that you have to do or think of in order to remain in this state. At most what you have to do is to keep reminding yourself why you are looking at this light show, and keep mentally jerking your mind back on track until it becomes automatic with no further thought required.

The next means of maintaining trance is thinking about one thought to the exclusion of everything else. In this method of maintenance, you pick a thought or problem, and you think it through to its logical conclusion. You acknowledge that there are associations and sidetracks that you could take, but you set aside the digression for later in the meditation. This is how many who meditate and come back with answers to problems go about it.

For instance consider this problem of why you feel restless in a relationship (this is only an example). You would start with the problem, define the problem by asking questions of you like "Why do I feel restless" and "who is causing the restlessness in me" and "am I to blame for the restlessness or is it someone else?" From there, taking the answers to the preceding questions, you would narrow the problem down until it is as exact as possible for you to define.

Once the problem is defined and the questions asked, you would start thinking about different solutions to that problem. Let's say, for example, that in the above question, it was finally defined, as "I am restless in this relationship I am in now because of what I am perceiving as a threat from my significant other and I am embarrassed at their 'clinging' to me." Once you have reached this level of exactness, you can start finding solutions to this problem by thinking about "if-then" scenarios.

Now, this is not to say that every meditation needs to be this introspective, but it will help if you know yourself as well as you can before you start projecting out of your body. There will come a time when your fears, hopes, hates, and all the sludge you pile up in your life will personify on the Astral Plane and challenge you; get past it or stay in your body. This concept is called the Guardian at the Gate. And you MUST defeat it in order to continue to progress. We will talk about this concept more in a later lesson.

Okay, having said all of that, let's talk a little about "conscious meditation" or being able to meditate while physically active.

"You can't do that" you say? You can't meditate while doing something with your body because you have to be physically relaxed in order to ignore the body? Yes, that is true, but I beg to differ in some of the substance of this statement. You CAN meditate while doing something physical, but it takes some doing.

For example, have you ever been walking outside and let your thoughts drift? Suddenly, you are where you wanted to go with no memory of having crossed the intervening space? That's an example of conscious meditation. Martial Artists are a group that uses this technique.

Martial Artists have a series of prearranged movements that they do called "katas". This sequence of movements have stances, punches, kicks, blocks, strikes with other body parts, movements from point A to point B, motions and many other elements to them. It is part of the practice that each and every one of the Martial Artists go through to train the body and discipline it. Some of the most well known katas are the motions and "dance" the people who practice Tai Chi do. It is slow and graceful and beautiful. But there is a bigger purpose to these movements than you suspect.

I'll give you the simplest example that I know of, from my own days of taking Martial Arts.

I'll have to explain some of the terms since the movements and the strikes and blocks are in Japanese and will mean nothing to you unless you know what stance they are talking about.

Look West. Step out to West into zenkutsu-dachi (this is a stance. Basically, the stance position is weight forward on the left leg bent at the knee, with the right leg extended behind you. The feet are shoulder width as seen from head on, and about twice shoulder width front to back. Most of your weight is distributed as 60% front leg, 40% rear leg. Feet are at a 45% angle to your hips and your back and spine are straight) and execute a left hand gedan ude-uke. (Here's a block. It's called a "Down block" since you are blocking downward. Ultimately your closed fist winds up over your knee, separated by about 2 inches. It blocks low kicks and sweeps them to the outside. Either hand can execute it.) KIAI (this is a yell.)
Right foot steps forward into zenkutsu-dachi (see above) and execute a right hand chudan zuki. (Reverse punch. Punching hand slams into the solar plexus and the opposite hand counterbalances the power by pulling back to the hip.)
Look East (over right shoulder). Right foot steps clockwise 180 degrees (end facing East) into zenkutsu-dachi (see above) and execute a right hand gedan ude-uke. (See above again)

There is more to this. The point of my showing you this is to let you know just how complex this process can be. Bear with me a few moments longer. I'm trying to make a point.

If you wish to see more of the above example, I got it from http://www.ryu.com/ryu-cgi-bin/search_item/:CD_kata?Taikyoku_1_Shudokan

Once these movements are mastered, then the student practices constantly (over a period of months) until they can start seeing the opponent they are supposedly fighting against. At this point they are not thinking about the individual movements any longer, but thinking instead about how they are supposed to be doing the kata. From this, and with a lot more practice, they don't even have to have their mind on the kata anymore, just on whatever problem they are thinking about. It's a very Zen state.

Let me elaborate on the stages that are occurring here for a moment: In the beginning, not only is the student learning the above movements, but they are also concentrating on technique, proper stances, balance, memorizing the movements of their body, correct punches, correct blocks, correct transitions from one stance to another, and many more things, like hearing the teacher.

So, while they do these katas, they seem jerky, unsure, sporadic, and sometimes they have to do the same movements over and over again. From there, as they learn the kata, they can free up sections of their mind to deal with other things, like the visualizations. Because all their concentration was taken up with just LEARNING the kata, now they free portions of their mind to worry about their imaginary opponent, and perfecting their movements and their strikes and blocks.

Seeing how this relates yet? As the body and mind learns something repetitive, the mind is freed to start focusing on other things.

After they move through this transition point, to a point where the kata is so firmly locked into their muscles and their brain stem that they don't have to think about the kata at all anymore, they can meditate while doing the movements. And some of the results from meditations like this can be spectacular.

This holds true for any repetitive action that your body has learned to a point where it is reflexive in nature, from running to breathing. After a while of doing an action over and over again, the body knows what is supposed to happen now, and the mind can wander into other areas of thought and consciousness. I know someone who meditates to dishwashing like this. The movements and actions are no longer the focus of what she is doing, but the rhythm is what is important.

A mild example of this can be seen in highway hypnosis. Your body knows how to drive a car and it shuts the mind down so that it can drive. The driver becomes less and less alert and "spaces out" for a while, while the body drives on autopilot.

So, knowing that this kind of action is possible now, shows how much practice they have when Native Americans go on a Vision Quest out into the hinterlands and the Native peoples of Australia (g'day) go into the Dreamtime. The dances and the movements are learned by rote, like multiplications tables, and the motion is translated into a meditation.

Now, I don't advise this for everyone. It is a hard place to get to and you HAVE to practice the movements to whatever you use as your device for this kind of meditation constantly. I am only informing you that it is possible to do this kind of meditation. Come to think of it, it kind of explains what happened to Dave when he flew out of his body while cooking. I have never had the experience of OOBE while doing any of these exercises, but knowing the state of mind that is invoked during some of them, I can see it happening.

That's enough for now. We will pick up from here next lesson and talk about lucid dreams and how to get them. Now, on to another section of the Astral Plane, the Might-have-beens.

Okay, first in order to understand Might-have-beens, you have to understand my theory of time and space. So, once again into the realms of the unknown.

A might-have-been is a theory I thought of when I read Madeleine L'Engle's work called "A Swiftly Tilting Planet". Basically, a might-have-been is a world where you chose to go right to get to where you are in your life now, and someone else (a version of you, exactly the same as you right up to this "split") chose to go left into an entirely different future. Understand me, I believe that a version of us makes every possible choice there is to be made at any decision nexus. They know our life story, they have the same experiences, but when that decision nexus comes, they make a different choice than we do, and that spawns a new world. Usually, they can't see into our world, and we can't see into theirs. But through Astral Projection, we can look into their life and see what "might-have-been if only I had chosen __________".

Daven's Decision Tree of Might-Have-Beens

Each decision that is made spawns many different realities, where those decisions were either not made, or different decisions were reached. For instance, as a mild example, making a decision this morning to tie your shoes resulted in your shoe staying on. However, in the might-have-been where you decided not to tie your shoe, you fell on your nose. From there, there are many third and fourth order results we could talk about, and even the possibility that it warped back into this reality, because the difference was negligible.

The tree in the illustration only shows how complex it may be. For instance, you are on root portion A, and want to get to branch I in a few days. However, you can't see ahead more than just a few inches. How do you know where to turn to get there? What forks do you take to reach your destination? And how do you know you reached it even when you did?

Perspective is what shows you how this falls together.

Once you get the perspective of the Gods, you can see how the timelines fall together, how to get there from any one decision, and what some of the outcomes are of those decisions. But we can do this as well, here and now. Planning and thinking about the outcomes of our actions can result in us gaining a piece of this perspective. And we can always gain this perspective from OOBE and dream traveling.

Some of the experiences you will read about in books on OOBE describe different worlds where things seem to be similar, but are somewhat or somehow different. This is because these authors somehow stumbled into a MHB (might-have-been). Remember, not only your decisions create different worlds and versions of you, but other people's decisions do so as well.

For instance; you are living your quiet life, going along doing your normal routine, and someone shoots you with a gun. That is a different reality than if he had decided to seek professional help rather than pick up that gun, and that one is different than the MHB in which a co-worker spotted this person cracking up and called the cops. It's not just you, it's everyone who make decisions that affect reality. And for every decision reached, every other possible path is chosen and a new world is spawned.

Scary, huh? This is the power of the Gods, to create and destroy worlds, and we have it here and now, simply by our decisions.

However, the worlds where there are minor differences, ones that are spotted after a great deal of looking, are usually the ones where there was a minor decision change, or one where the change was really recent. Like a world where Clinton decided not to run for President might only have a few differences in the lives of the average citizen. Ones that would be hard to see from the perspective of a visitor. This would be a very close MHB and I can give you all kinds of examples from my own life. For instance, I recently met my wife again on the AP, and she told me about her world in which she and I did not move to Texas due to her work forcing us there, but instead stayed in Atlanta where I was comfortable and continued to work for her company there.

To make a long story short, in that world, I was not nearly so involved in Wicca and Religion, was not teaching, but was raising my daughter and helping out at her school. I did not have a day-job. My wife there was a manager of a group, and was making about $40,000 per year. As opposed to here where this kind of teaching is what I enjoy doing the most and well as having a day job.

Sometimes it is educational and interesting to look at these close MHBs simply to contrast it with where you are now. It is a reality check to make sure that you don't get too far off into despondency or depression or even too egomaniacal. I have used it this way from time to time to make sure that I made the correct decision for me at the time. There are regrets, especially when you see a version of you doing better than you are doing, but then you realize that in other ways, you are so much better off than your counterpart.

The next level of MHB is the "Similar world" in which some historic event happened differently or not at all. Take any event of the 20^th century. Now change it enough that it would have long-lasting repercussions. Like JFK not getting killed because his assassin was captured before he fired the shots, or WWII occurring but about 100,000 more Jews being saved than were in our reality. These are the kinds of changes that would shape an entire world, and all of history right down to Modern Day.

There are examples of this too. I know of a young spirit who decided she liked to live in the Edwardian times in America. She moved into that reality, created herself a body, and began living. Well, things happened and in the course of her lifetime, she managed to keep some of the major financial institutions from financing the Nazis, saved many more Jewish people, mitigated the war for Europe, and replaced the Rockefellers with her family. Now, granted, she was operating from a place of superior knowledge of what lay ahead, and she had help from others who knew what she also knew, but there were some aspects of the situation that she could not affect. Such as killing Hitler before he rose to power. That would have changed too much, and there was no basis on which to build some kind of estimate of what might happen given the power vacuum.

Is there an entire world-shaping historical event, one that was so massive that it changes all of civilization forever? Yep, those exist too. I have personally been to and met with people who live in a universe where Jesus of Nazareth was nothing more than a fisherman and who's cult died very soon after he did. And believe me, the entire world that results from that is an interesting one. There are so many changes that I can't even begin to list them all. The Native Americans mostly have control of the American Continents, there was not the push for expansion because the Roman Empire never fell, there was never a "Burning Times" and the Jewish nation is only one religion among many, mostly contained to keep their genocidal selves isolated from those who only want harmony. Several technological advances we have don't exist there, and several mental sciences that don't exist here are commonplace there.

I can give you one final example of a set of MHBs. I know a person named TJ. To date, I have had 5 different encounters with versions of her where most things are similar to one critical nexus, the meeting of her husband, and that's where things start changing.

The lives I have seen with her include:

Her as a pregnant member of the FBI, working with the Secret Service and keeping President Clinton from being killed in which she is killed instead and her twin children being taken from her prematurely.
Her going undercover for a year in South America, returning and retiring from the FBI prior to the assassination attempt, then founding her own security company and eventually selling it for about $40 million dollars.
Her meeting her husband and studying to become an accountant and encouraged her husband's interest in programming, as a result of that he invents email, and begins working for Microsoft. From licensing fees, they become very wealthy. The main motivation for this shift is because she had seen some of the other versions' problems and she didn't want to die.
She works for the FBI, gets assassinated on an undercover assignment into South America and against the Drug Lords there. Leaving her husband there a widower and alone.
They go through the FBI set of circumstances, learn Martial Arts (which at that point was an interest and a hobby, not a lifestyle) and begin teaching and setting up Martial Arts schools. Her husband gets invited to be part of the United States Karate Team and go to the Olympics where he wins a Gold for individual and a Gold in Team competitions against all odds.

Most of the rest of my time with TJ tends to be different side paths off these main branches. I call them "versions" like the software companies do. There is a version in TJ version 5 where after the medals are won, they get discovered and have to go into the Witness protection program. And there are other spin-offs from each of these. I have known TJ for many years at this point, and I found her while she was about 4 years old. I made a haven for her and protected her, taught her while she lived her life in full in the universes she comes from. But at that one junction of finding her husband, meeting him for the first time, things changed for her. I know about most of the paths in her life, and I am proud to call her a friend.

One thing that tends to happen when you investigate MHBs is that you don't have time to look at every MHB there is for any one decision. So, the tendency to find the "good" versions and look at them exclusively is something that is very tempting. I know of many bad versions of me, ones that are suicidal, depressed, divorced and so on, but I try not to look at them too often, because it brings my mental attitude down. I try to focus on the ones that are positive, mainly because it gives me hope in my own life.

Knowing that there is a version of me who is teaching Martial Arts, a version of me that is a programmer, a version of me that is on American Gladiators, and so forth, is encouraging and it makes me strive to be a better person. It makes me want to equal their achievements in my own life and to do the best I can here.

Might-have-beens can get confusing if you think about it. It's one of those life experiences that you just have to live through to believe it, and in some cases you can be assured that no matter how closely you think the consequences of your actions out, you may be sure that you did not see them all.

I read a book that took this idea and ran with it. I read this years after I developed this theory and integrated it into my life, so it was a shock to see some of my theories and beliefs confirmed independently. The book is called "One" by Richard Bach. Get it and read it if you want to explore this concept further in depth.

Daven

Assignment: Write your own meditation. Use the 6 themes above and give it in a format that will lend itself to reading aloud to a group of people. Read out loud a few times to make sure it sounds correct.

Try to think of times and places when it would be possible for you to meditate while doing some physical action, and no fair using the same example I used, Ann Cheers is the only exception to this. She is already studying Tai Chi and it uses this same vehicle. But, Ann, I still want you to think of another example for me. Write it down in your journal and think about it. What could happen if you decided to meditate while doing this action? Write down any observations and thoughts on this to share with the rest of us.

Next: Think of a major decision you had in your life (these will be shared so make it non-embarrassing) and try to work out the cause and effect of taking different decision at that point. Where might you be now if you made a different choice?

Last, I want you to extend your Dream Journal into a Dream/AP journal. Any incidents that are different enough for you to remember, I want you to write down in this journal. Make note of time, place, how you were laying, moon phase (if you know it), what happened in as much detail as you can. Any other factors that you can think of as contributing to the overall projection, I want to hear about those as well. This will be your journal of Dreams and AP. Keep it up to date. We will be discussing some of the entries in these journals from time to time. The more exact you can get this journal, the more progress you will make.

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