onebir

I don't think he's a fraud. But I'm not sure he's selective enough approving people to teach his material - in part thanks to the huge industry he's spawned. And I think the material in his books would be difficult to learn correctly on your own - at best many years work, at worst somewhat dangerous (there's some debate about "chi-packing" here somewhere).

Haven't managed to read this whole thread, so apologies if it's mentioned above, but there's a chapter in "The Head Trip" about sleeping in two shifts. I read it a while back so don't remember the details, but thought the book as a whole was very interesting. I'm looking forward to the commoditisation of neurofeedback technology (nearly there, but with a few glitches, in Neurosky's products.)

After a relatively dream-free 40ish years, I'm suddenly getting quite a few. Risking boring the hell out of everyone, I'd like to report them & related non-events. I remembered a certain taobum with a relevant nickname had checked my profile & felt a strange urge to contact him. I waited a few days and pm'd him. It turns out he'd had a dream of being outside a house, with a vague impression of a piano. There's a piano in my living room. So far, so inconclusive. Then he reported a dream about a frog: This had some significance to me at the time: Perhaps I also need to 'lose my venom' to rejuvenate. And then: My interpretation: the present situation presents great risks. But I am not a specific target and can avoid them by confining their possible angles of approach, and staying vigilant. I must spend this time preparing myself. The world will eventually become safer, but will remain basically insane. The will offer gifts to tempt me. They will be exaggerated, commercial, and tawdry - but ultimately harmless. I had a couple more fragmentary ones this morning. The gist of one was to be nicer to my Dad, but I've forgotten the details already.

I've also noticed some previously mild sensations can become unpleasant during meditation (& some other experiences). I came across this theory on an ayahuasca forum in the writings of redgreenvines; he called it 'framing'. But I think the Buddhism includes a similar concept (which I've unfortunately forgotten the name of :s). In an extreme form, the world can appear to stop. (Or maybe it does stop? This happened to me once, and shocked me so much that I put it out of my mind and didn't mention it to anyone for a decade.) Practicing equanimity through unpleasant circumstances may help; I think this is one reasons vipassana meditation emphasises it so much. Otherwise reactions to odd experiences & stirred up emotions can prevent progress... maybe by continuing my ractice the experiences will start to happen more and more often... till the point that I will be more conscious of my fear... if they happen with too much of a space of time between them.. I kind of forget about the eperience of fear... cheers..

Been trying to figure out how I fly in dreams. I think it's sometimes superman style - without extended arm - & sometimes carpetless flying carpet style In one dream I was flitting about like the angels in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' - but giggling all the time. For the next couple of days I couldn't help giggling when ever I thought about it. I have no idea WTF that was all about, but it was actually the best fun I'd had in a long time. (Which is in a way quite a sad thing, come to think of it... )

Thanks - interesting stuff. (You're right about the web design tho - what were they thinking! EDIT: )

[quote name='White Wolf Running On Air' date='03 June 2012 - 03:30 AM' Most folks don't seem to recognize dreaming or 'astral projection' etc as valid for spiritual development in my experience // or perhaps it is difficult to comment on such more of a shamanic path? for myself I believe they are quite important showing us what we are unable to process in our waking state + we are able to experience things this reality doesn't allow easily eg: flying I'm a bit torn about how much attention to pay to them I find the happier I am the easier it is to fly? love has wings? It's great, but I haven't noticed a happiness link... Indeed, and how to direct it towards any aim, when most of the time you don't realise your dreaming...

It was pretty scary. It turns out someone I knew from the forum about the treatment I'm going through died in the last few days. He was quite young and we think his death was due to the hospital doctors denying him the medication we're using. (The therapy was developed by a biology professor, not a medical doctor, & is unconventional in several respects, so it's very hard to get clinicians - who've been taught they know everything - to follow it.) So true, and a very relevant to my current feelings. But easier said than done eh... Funnily enough, my Dad shaves pretty much every day, but recently one day he didn't. I was surprised to see his white stubble. So perhaps indeed, he was looking in on my darkness... My perception was that there was nothing left to fear. They'd been gripped by a kind of paranoia, and I could feel it was over. I think the world is about to spiral into a deeper economic and political crisis; I need to make some preparations for this. I also have to start moving on in some ways. Mental instability, mainly in the form of lassitude, and anxiety, has been a great obstacle for me. I've also realised the ball was double-wrapped in opaque and transparent layers: similar to medicine packaging (eg box and blister pack)... And many pills are oval with a short code or word written on them. So this may (also?) be a reference to medicine. (I've seen the effects decades of anti-psychotics etc have had on that friend: as far as I can tell a modest reduction in symptoms with no long-term improvement.) Thanks for dropping by and commenting, BTW - it's much appreciated

I'll have to look into that Thanks!

This has happened to me a couple of times now & I wonder if anyone recognises the experience. While falling asleep, the visual images I've been presented have seemed so bizarre that I've been jolted wide awake. The first time the image was a pulsating 3D fractalish thing, more recently it was an infinite field of tesselated cartoon faces. Like most people I get some interesting hypnagogic imageary, but these seemed so out-of-the-ordinary for me I immediately woke up thinking "WTF"! I was able to get to sleep without too much trouble both times, and I'm not distressed by these experiences. But I am curious...

There's another kind? :s Maybe that'd be better - thanks!

Hehe - I knew it was boring I can remember some lucid dreams, where I've deliberately gone flying, but not many non-lucid ones like this...

You could feel pain AND couldn't feel breathing? When I've had similar experiences, my impression has been one of losing access to feelings in my physical body which eventually get replaced by feelings from the dream body (generally sketchy, occasionally remarkably 'real')... But it's also possible that your speed of perception increased & your breathing was insignificant over the time-frames you were perceiving in. (It seems like perception occurs in frames or chunks of ~1/20s & we assemble these in a part of the brain that can get suspended during meditation & other non-normal states.) My experience (so far ) is that the feeling of dying is an illusion. But 'going for it' may not help you - it might just jolt you out of what's happening. My suggestion would be to just try to observe and stay calm.

I've had a few odd ones, particularly recently. Where would be a good place to post about them (if that's 'on topic' enough to be ok)?

General discussion it is. (WWROA you've seen 'em...)

Risking thread hijacking, I have a vaguely similar story. I was walking on a street in China and saw two Uighur youths. Uighurs are a Muslim minority that faces a lot of discrimination from Han Chinese. I had have quite a bit of sympathy for them, but outside Xinjiang they're often involved in street crime. And true to the stereotype one of them was trying to grab a very old lady's purse from her bag. It was actually a little comical - he was tall and she was tiny, so he had to walk stealthily behind her with his knees bent. Also inconguous: there were a lot of people around (as usual in Chinese cities) but no-one was paying any attention. I have no known fighting ability, no-one was likely to intervene if a fight broke out, the youths were likely carrying knives. I didn't want the old lady to lose her wallet, and I didn't want the Uighurs to get arrested. I'd seen one arrested nearby and there was excessive use of force (which I hadn't tried to prevent). I was quite conflicted and tagging along behind for a minute. Then without really knowing what I'd do next I walked up next to the pickpocketing youth and for some reason said "Hello kid, how're you doing? What're are you doing there" (你好小朋友，你怎么样？你干什么呢？) The term I used for kid 小朋友 (little friend) is only used by adults talking to little kids, and this created enough comedy that his mate cracked up. This distracted the pickpocket, and he gave up. That was lucky. Edit: thinking back, I realise that the precise reason I did intervene was that the youths didn't carry a lower energy. I addressed them as children because they seemed playful like children. So this post was actually quite off-topic. Ah well...

I think I read there's a Daoist temple in Cebu (EDIT: yes, there is.) And (based entirely on documentaries I vaguely remember) seem to be a lot of other mystical (/fraudulent) practices etc going on in the Philippines. Have you personally come across anything interesting?

Funny thing is, I think vipassana uses that point precisely because it's unlikely to cause weirdness. At one vipassana course I did a student mentioned to the teacher that sensations in his third eye were tending to draw his attention up to it, and she told him to bring it back down. It's not the easiest spot to focus on. It helps to have pants with an elasticated waistband (won't find that in the meditation manuals ) and/ a sense of the pulse in the abdomen (which I now discover is a symptom of 'Abdominal Aortic Aneurysm'. :s Thanks google, you've made my day...) OK - so it's following where the mind happens to be aware of the body, but not trying to focus on a particular point? That's also a vipassana going to sleep practice - which I haven't been doing. Perhaps there's a reason they recommend it! Sounds quite funny - but perhaps it wasn't in the context of the experience?

You mean 28th May? It can be a bit disturbing... I shifted to the dantian meditation based on astralc's dantian observations & suggestions that I'd been concentrating too high up - in the hope of taming (or even eliminating) these phenomena...

This does sound very very similar! I don't remember it cycling - and I'm glad it didn't because I think that could've been quite stressful!

I've been doing dantian meditation for about a week now. Last night I slept badly, and once again got jolted awake when psychedelic imagery started emerging (a kind of fractal mountain range, looked like it was generated by very out of date technology ). It was much less shocking, I went back to sleep and was able to go through it into what I think was a lucid dream. (I say 'I think' because I don't recall actually thinking or realising it was a dream. However, I don't remember 'losing consciousness' as I was falling asleep. So I think there was some continuity of waking consciousness right into the dream, and the reason I didn't realise or think 'this is a dream' was simply that I already knew...) In the dream, I was reading a book filled with paintings: wild, moving, abstract art. And listening to beautiful synchronised music. I can't remember the last time I looked at an art book (years ago at least) & for the most part I find music annoying. So I guess this was my mind's workaround for the 'shock of the psychedelic hypnagogic': literally 'framing' it as something to be admired without getting scared or otherwise involved. (Now why didn't I think of that... )

Interesting. I don't think I'm at the white light stage ;-) EDIT: thinking about why I assumed seeing a white light is 'more advanced' than seeing psychedelic imagery, I realised I was thinking about the Shulgin Scale From Plus Two: "you still have some choice as to whether you will accept the adventure". So I guess my reaction made it a Plus Two (minus) trip ;-)

The sleep paralysis was scary, but I felt like I 'saw it off' & there quite a few accounts of similar experiences. Really it was the bizarre hypnogogic images I wanted to discuss here. These weren't obviously undesirable about their content (a writhing multicoloured fractal & a sea of moving cartoonish faces). I think what shocked me about these was their psychedelic quality (bright, moving, stretching to infinity); most of my hypnogogic images are fairly hazy & dark. That just "didn't seem right". Perhaps I just need to get used to the idea that I might occasionally get a pre-sleep acid(-free) trip...

I've been doing vipassana for 'real-world reasons' (to help me get over a series of somewhat - but in the grand scheme of things not very - disastrous life-events & their emotional hangovers). Unlike some of the dyed-in-the-wool vipassana people, I'm don't think vipassana is the only path to 'liberation'. But it's what I'm now used to, and offers a supportive practice environment with access to retreats and teachers at very little expense. So I'll stick with it. That said, vipassana is a body-awareness meditiation, so I can't see how fixing awareness on the dan tien would be inconsistent with it. I've often spent the first 10 minutes or so of meditation sessions focussing on the point under my nose - particularly when concentration's been a problem. Based on what you've said, perhaps using a dan tien focus would be a good idea. I'll give it a go for a few weeks

Thanks These entity encounters really sound like fairy stories - until you have one yourself. ;-) Recently I've been doing quite a bit of vipassana meditation; it's not exactly a centering meditation, but it's all about staying in the body, so I guess it's similar enough. At various times I've done a fair bit of yoga & Yi Quan, but I can't correlate these 'events' with any particular practice (or intensity of practice). If I get another 'visual incongruity', I'll try to remember your tip not fixate on visuals too much. Perhaps that way I'll get a closer look