Astral Projection Guide • (8) Part Eight

Tips • Tricks • Warnings

Lucid Dream Backup

I have had a great many reports of vivid dreams and heightened lucid dream activity (L.D.) from people doing the energy/chakra training exercises. This is happening far too frequently for it to be coincidence.

The energy/chakra work increases the level of energy flowing into the energy body and heightens awareness and memory of the dream and OOBE state. It is a shame to waste all this energy on uncontrolled dreams, so I suggest L.D. be used as a secondary goal. This will give you OOBE experience earlier, in the form of L.D., and help keep your interest high until you learn how to do the conscious exit.

Lucid Dreaming

To become Lucid in dream you need to program yourself with a trigger to make you realize when you are dreaming, in order to take control over it, i.e., become lucid. The best way of doing this is by getting into the habit of doing frequent reality checks during your daily life.

Reality Checking

A reality check is when you stop what you are doing and check the reality level of your situation. This is simple to do. Every time you do a reality check.

Ask yourself:

1. is this a normal situation, is there anything strange about it?
2. Can I fly? Try floating up in the air.
3. Try closing your eyes. This is a dead giveaway as you cannot close your eyes in astral form.

Note: This reality checking must become habitual to be effective. When you do a reality check during a dream, you will realize you are dreaming and can take control of it. It is then important to affirm to yourself. you are going to remember everything. Tell yourself over and over, ” I will remember this when I wake up.”

L.D. Trigger

The key to success with reality checks is to have a good trigger for it. This should be something you would normally do many times a day. This can be any kind of habitual action, but here are a few ideas:

1. Time: Every time you look at your watch, do a reality check. An electronic watch is a good aid. Set the timer to beep hourly. When it beeps, do a reality check. * A wrist watch, beeping hourly, is the most effective
2. Hands: Every time you notice your hands, do a reality check.
3. Smoking: if you smoke, every time you have a cigarette, do a reality check. You will usually find yourself reaching for a cigarette during the course of a dream, if you are a habitual smoker.

Note: it takes time to make your trigger habitual, usually a few weeks. It also helps to do a few affirmations before you go to sleep, e.g., “I will remember to look at my watch”

When you become aware in a dream, L.D., you should already be in a communal dream pool. If you want to try changing this to a real time projection, try and become aware of your physical body. If you can sense it, you may be able to return to a time location near it. This is difficult, though, and may end the experience completely, i.e., forcing a return to the waking state. I suggest you enjoy the L.D. for what it is. Communal dream pools are very colourful places and usually lots of fun. You will see all kinds of weird and wonderful things there and have all kinds of adventures.

Note: To improve your memory of the L.D. don’t forget to remind yourself constantly during the L.D., to remember it all. Changing Your Reality Location If you don’t like the dream pool you are in, or are in a real time OOBE and want to enter a dream pool, here are a couple of ways to do it:

1. Look closely at your hands and watch them melt. (This is worth doing just to see the melting hands phenomenon).
2. Spin around until you become disoriented.
3. Visualise a place you would like to be. (instantaneous travel). This will usually move you to a dream pool similar to your visualised target destination.
4. Fly straight up, as fast as you can. If this fails to shift your reality location, at least you will experience space flight.
5. Fly away fast, close to the surface, until you find a place you like. The blurring of speed will cause a reality shift.
6. Walk into a mirror, picture or painting. This is the same as VRP (virtual reality projection).

These techniques all trick the subconscious, through disorientation, into moving you to another reality location.

The Astral Form In Motion

Many people have motion problems in their first few projections. Simply getting across a room in the right direction, can be a major accomplishment. This lack of control is simply because they are unfamiliar with astral form. It is like being in zero gravity. You have to learn to move all over again. When you project in real time, you are just a point of consciousness with a poorly constructed etheric shell surrounding it. Motion is provided by thought – not muscles.

Astral Momentum

There is a type of momentum in astral form that causes most of the problems. This causes you to continue moving for a while, after you decide to stop. This may take you through a wall or a ceiling etc. This impetus is 59 caused by the thought you used to cause the motion. If it is too strong, or too prolonged for the action, you will move too quickly or too far. Only practice teaches you how to get about with any degree of accuracy and grace.

It really is quite a comical process, learning astral motion.

I remember learning to move about my home town, in my youth. I would start by trying to navigate through my house, usually ending up stuck in the roof, for a while. Then I would run down the road, trying to build up speed and take off like a plane. I would get airborne for a while, but could never quite clear the roof tops of the surrounding houses. I would often float unintentionally into strange houses, blundering about like a drunk in zero G. I seemed to be endlessly apologising to all these strangers in passing, as I floated in and out of their houses.

How To Move

To move about in astral form, simply – DO iT. Do not think about what you are doing, just DO iT. Be aware that motion is provided by your mind. You have to will yourself into motion, to change direction, and to stop.

This is the best advice I can give you on this. It really has to be learned by doing. Have fun.

When you have learned basic motion, do not try anything too ambitious for a while. Stick close to the surface and learn to get around your local area first. practice varying your speed until you gain some control over it.

Learning To Fly

Learn to fly the same way as you learned to move, by using your mind. At first you may find something very much like gravity affecting you. You may get yourself into the air only to find yourself slowly arcing back to earth again. If you persevere you’ll find yourself moving in a series of short flight hops. This is caused partly by habit and partly by the basic motion problem in general.

You sink back to earth when your motion causing mental action falters. This causes your flight impetus to stop and the gravity habit then pulls you down.

You may find yourself, as I did, trying to fly by running down the road and leaping into the air. This is not necessary. Focus your will into floating up into the air. Then use your will to provide motion, same as with basic motion. There is NO gravity affecting you in astral form. Convince yourself of this and you will be flying in no time.

Speed

The three speeds as defined by, S. Muldoon, and commonly accepted, are a basic guide only. These are:

1. Walking speed.
2. Motor car speed.
3. Instantaneous travel.

I think these three speeds were a sign of the times back then. These would have been the only types of speed known to most people. Today, movies, computer games and air travel have thoroughly prepared our minds to accept much higher speeds.

With practice and good mental control, you CAN vary your speed to your purpose, from walking speed to supersonic speed. This is a big problem for the beginner though, the control of direction and speed. It has a lot to do with how stable the projection is and how experienced you are at applying your will to motion.

Instantaneous Travel

It is generally accepted that if you can visualise a destination you can project yourself there instantly, at the speed of thought.

* I have found this to be highly unreliable*

I find this instantaneous method usually projects you straight into a subjective location created by the visualisation of your target. You may appear to be at your destination but you will usually find many discrepancies between the real location and where you are.

Instantaneous travel is very like VRP. By using your visualisation powers to travel with, you will not actually travel. You will create a subjective copy of a destination and enter it.

Long Distance Travel

I have found it more reliable to follow the surface for short to medium distance projection of up to a few hundred miles. Even this can be difficult as it is easy to fall into the Alice effect while travelling. All you have to do is break concentration once and you will slip into a dream pool. Strict mental control must be maintained at all times when travelling in real time.

It is not really practical to follow the surface for a long distance. For example, a country on the other side of the world from you is 12000 miles away. You would need to travel at about 64 times the speed of sound to reach there in 15 minutes. At this speed in the atmosphere, everything blurs and clouds and surface features cause disorientation and a corresponding reality shift. Any real time objective aspect of the projection will then be lost.

Note: Newbie projectors can normally hold themselves in real time for only a few minutes. Therefore, any long distance travel is limited by the real time part of a projection.

To travel long distance you need to study geography.

You have to be able to recognise continents, oceans, countries, states and cities. You also need to study a map of your target area and note any landmarks. To project there, after this is memorised, you must go into orbit and re-enter over your target. As you approach the earth you must adjust your approach and aim for the geological features and landmarks around your destination.

Orbiting the Earth

To enter orbit is a little more difficult than it sounds. Getting up there is easy, you just go straight up, but stopping when you get high enough is difficult. Most people, myself included, tend to blast themselves straight out of the solar system, sometimes right out of the galaxy. To avoid this, it is important to control your speed during the ascent.

It is easier to project to the moon first, as a way of entering orbit. This gives you a large visual target you can project to in moments. Once there, it is a simple matter to head back to Earth, enter orbit, and circle until you are above your target. In space, away from the atmosphere, there are no problems with speed induced blurring.

How Far Can You Go?

There are * NO * limits to distance, destination or speed. You can travel to the most distant galaxy. The speed of thought is infinite. It is like folding space and moving without moving. If you can see something, you can be there….as quick as that. In comparison, the speed of light is that of a snail. I often go out into deep space, where the galaxies are just tiny smudges in the distance, to think and meditate. That is easy, but the trick is getting back for a conscious re-entry. Unless you have a good knowledge of astronomy, which I do not, this is difficult. Following the silver cord, if you can see one, is not practical at that kind of speed, though it will give you a basic direction to go in.

To return from a long distance projection, tune into your body and become aware of it. Then try moving part of your physical body, i.e., a finger or toe. This will return you to your body, and end the projection with full memories of the OOBE.

Future Wind

There is a strange phenomenon you will come across, from time to time, while you are projecting. I call this “Future Wind.”

You will be OOBE’ing somewhere, minding your own business, when all of a sudden you will feel an irresistible force. You will feel yourself being moved against your will, usually backwards, by this force. You can fight it for a while but it will grow steadily stronger until you are blown away; over the rooftops, up into the sky and….into the future.

Then, after a while, you will come down in a different place….and time. Often it will be somewhere mundane, maybe a domestic setting of some sort. You will be released there and left to wander about… confused. You may even meet people you do not know, yet, and they will be just as confused as you are.

This may be an actual scene out of your future life, it may be a symbolic vision, or a mixture of both. You may be an invisible spectator to this scene, or you may merge with your future self, and see out of your future eyes for a while.

This can also be a scene of an important future event. It could be a disaster, natural or otherwise, or something unusual or exciting on the world scene. These type of events usually have a lot of energy surrounding them, and this may be part of the reason for the vision.

The only explanations I can give for this are:

1. The intervention of your higher self: For some reason it decides that now is the time to show you something from your future.
2. Clairvoyant interference: Your Brow chakra has become clairvoyantly active and has turned into a future setting. Your point of consciousness is caught up by this vision and projected into the vision.
3. A combination of both of the above – this is the most logical.

Symbolic Visions

There is another aspect of this wind that is very similar to the above but the vision you experience is symbolic, or has a symbolic aspect, rather than an actual future event or scene.

Note: I would like to warn you about the symbolic aspect of visions. If you don’t understand the nature of symbolism it can cause great harm to your life. This warning applies to all clairvoyant visions in general, whether experienced in astral form or not.

For example: You are taken, by a future wind, to a scene in which you see yourself winning a lot of money. You are sitting at a table checking your lottery ticket with the results. You see the prize money is $18 million. You check your numbers, or ticket, and find you have the winning ticket. You feel all the excitement, the surge of adrenalin, dreams of wealth come flooding into you and your heart races with excitement.

After this vision, you start buying lots of tickets. You also start to make decisions that affect your life with a “When the money comes through” type of attitude. This can cause irreparable damage to your life! You lose your drive, your initiative, your ambition, i.e., you stop trying. This imparts a “Cargo Cult” type of belief system on you, a belief that everything will be given to you – with all the negative aspects this primitive belief system has.

This can cause you to mark time in your life, instead of living it to the full.

* What you may have missed, from the symbolism of the above vision is: The amount of money may be unusual for that lottery draw. $18 million is an odd amount of money and may be a rare event. This is what I call a SiGN POST – a date stamp of a future event. This means that when your local lottery has a prize of the above amount, something important is going to happen in your life or in the world around you. If you know how symbolism works, during the vision you would have been able to pick up more information about this coming event. The setting, the symbols, the connections to you, the action and the sequence of events in it, are all important aspects of its meaning. Misunderstanding a vision can ruin your life. Only experience and the intelligent application of logic can teach you how to interpret a symbolic vision. Until you have this experience, it is best to treat any sort of vision with caution.

Some possible reasons for a symbolic vision are:

1. You are being given a warning or guidance by your higher self.
2. You are being given proof there is a future, a destiny, a meaning, a purpose to your life.
3. The sign post of this vision may mark a good or bad event in your life.
4. You may actually win the lottery. Personally, I would always make sure I had a ticket in the draw, just in case, but I would not depend on it.

Future Wind Example

I left my body and was moving about my home, getting my sea legs. Suddenly, a force moved me across the room. I tried to fight it but it grew stronger until I was blown out of the house and up into the night sky. A short time later I was brought down again, outside my home. I was just left standing there in the middle of the road. In front of me stood a refrigerator. It was just sitting there in the road with its door open. I examined it and could tell it was not working. Behind it was a massive red brick wall, 40 feet high and twice as wide. There are no REAL brick walls in this street. Then I noticed my wife was standing beside me. I turned and said hello to her.

She just said goodbye, very coldly, then turned and walked away. Perplexed, I watched her walk away. Oddly, instead of walking to our home, she walked away from it and off into the distance.

Being experienced with the symbolism and nature of visions I knew what this foretold, the end of my marriage. I could not understand it as we were only recently married and very happy together.

To decipher a symbolic vision it is necessary to analyse it and break it down into its parts.

The six significant aspects of this vision are:

1. The sign post… (the date stamp of the event) * The refrigerator that did not work.

The connections… (something, or someone, in the vision that connects the events to me). *

1. My wife.
2. It was outside my home.
3. I was there as me.

2. The symbol… (the basic nature of the coming event)

* The large brick wall. This symbolises a barrier or an end to something. This was the only actual symbol in the vision, but other parts of it were by nature or action – symbolic.

3. The symbolic action… (this signifies the meaning of the vision) * My wife’s cold goodbye.

4. The symbolic modifiers… (these modify the symbol or, in this case, the symbolic action in the vision).

a) My wife departed in a direction away from our home.
b) She walked away until she disappeared from view.

5. The sequence of events:

1. The broken fridge.
2. The large brick wall.
3. My wife’s actions.

OR: When I saw the broken fridge (sign post) I saw the brick wall (symbol) and my wife (connection) said goodbye and left (symbolic action) in a direction away from our home, until she disappeared (symbolic modifiers)

The timing and sequence of a vision is important to unravelling its meaning. It is important to break a symbolic vision into its 5 basic parts and to note this in your journal, while it is still fresh in your mind.

Note: There may be more than one modifier to each part of a vision.

Hindsight

A year after I had the above vision, we moved to another town. The day we moved, we had to borrow a refrigerator from a relative. Ours had broken down and was in for repairs. The borrowed fridge did not work either. After ours was repaired, this other fridge sat on our porch for two and a half years, waiting to be collected. I remembered the vision clearly, and knew this fridge was the date stamp of an upcoming event. I also knew what the event was, but honestly could not see it happening. One day, though, they came and collected this fridge. A week later my marriage ended. Suddenly, permanently, and for no foreseeable reason.

Looking at it in hindsight, it is crystal clear what the vision meant. It was as simple as it was accurate. Most symbolic visions are this simple. Be very careful not to read too much into vision otherwise the true message in the vision will be obscured.

Always break a vision down into its parts.

Ask of each part:

1. “What is it in itself?”
2. “What does it do?”
3. “What is its simplest, most basic, symbolic meaning?” Write these answers down and then apply common sense and logic to them. This will give you insight into the true meaning of the vision.

Mirrors

Mirrors, historically, are magical devices used as doorways to other worlds. There are also numerous superstitions and old wives tales concerning their effect on the recently departed. After a person had died, all mirrors in their home were covered. This was so they could not see their lack of a reflection and be shocked. Another reason for this was to prevent them from being accidentally trapped in a mirror.

There is some logic to this if you look at the mechanics of projection. Death, in the early stages, is very much like a powerful real time projection. The biggest difference being the lack of a living body to return to.

Spirits are normally held close to the physical dimension, in real time, for a week or so after death. This is until the supply of etheric matter that binds the spirit to its physical body runs out.

During this time it is normal for the spirit to wander among relatives and loved ones, saying goodbye and coming to terms with their new state of existence. This goodbye process, eases the psychological trauma of death, and helps prepare the spirit for the next stage of existence.

What can happen with mirrors, is this: A new spirit can inadvertently enter a mirror. If this happens, they enter a mirror world in the same way a projector enters a picture through VRP. Once in a mirror world they usually do not know where they are, or how to get out of it, and can be stuck there for the duration of their real time stay. This will not interfere with the journey of the soul. It will just cause confusion for a few days until it enters the next stage of existence. This can though, make their last days near the physical world very confusing and interfere in the natural goodbye process.

This, I believe, is where the old superstitions came from. Therefore, in the light of my understanding of projection and the death process, I think the covering of mirrors after a death is a VERY good idea, for the benefit of the deceased. This is best done for two weeks, to be sure.

A Better Goodbye

It is possible to communicate with a recently departed spirit during its real time, post death wandering. This can be done by leaving a letter, uncovered, for the spirit to read. They can also hear you, so talking to them is also effective. I think a good practice would be to have goodbye letters, from all the people that loved the deceased, stuck to the wall in the spirit’s old room. Leave the letters open, with all pages clearly in view, to make reading easier.