08-16-2025, 05:57 PM
Introduction
This part of the series is likely to be the last and isn’t for everyone. It will not be easier reading than the prior threads and this isn’t of interest to most people. I often lament that most niche information, which might be anything from science to hobby topics, is either very shallow or written for people that have already made that topic their life. The main groups appealed to are those just passing through town or those that have bought a house. I’m aiming for something that will appeal to, and maybe benefit, the bohemian wanderers that have been hanging around these topics for a while or perhaps some that found themselves thrust into it against their will. The former may have a more leisurely experience since they’re going at their own pace, but the latter have more motivation since they have a problem that needs solving. I'm writing what I would have liked to read when I started working on this and leaving out much that I found to be fluff.
There are dots that some might connect from here, past what I’m covering. I’m not offering a cosmology to interpret your reality through. I don’t feel the need to convince anybody about that. It is my view, based on a combination of scientific study and personal experience, that everything is mind. That's far more complicated than just new-age woo, but there's no room for that here. We share a space, a sandbox, where many minds contribute to the formation of physical reality. That much is undeniable. It’s not just humans, but a complex energetic ecosystem. Some, many, sleep through this reality the same way they sleep through their dreams. Real in one moment, but forgotten in the next. Those that are sleeping quietly don’t shape the dream, or reality, they just react to it. What is beyond this? Who put us here? What does it mean? Those are all questions I think you have to answer for yourself.
It’s often claimed that the reason for esoteric practices not being easily accessible to the masses is that there is the potential for harm. It’s just too powerful, some say. You can survey the discussions about Kundalini awakening and find many that say it can be far too much for people that aren’t prepared. I don’t know the details about Kundalini awakening or Transcendental Meditation, not enough to comment on them beyond acknowledging there are reports of them being harmful. I do know that even just a brief brush with intense synchronicity can lead to psychological distress in some individuals. I did weigh the potential for harm, as carefully as I can. This has been stewing in the back of my mind for quite a while, so it’s not a frivolous decision. Most of that was aimed at reducing the material to as small a package as possible, but safety also played a role in what to include and what to leave out. Some commentary is included specifically to address the potential for harm and to attempt to mitigate it. A considerable amount of information is provided just to provide context for the things one might experience while progressing through the process.
I have included links at the end to some discussions with people that research adverse psychological impacts from meditation, real researchers that also provide assistance to those suffering from it. It’s very real and it happens. I have no incentive to minimize these potential adverse effects and have no financial conflicts of interest that might paint my opinions. Adults should be competent to make informed decisions about what they do with their life and their body.
I think everyone needs to know when to be content. If you can’t be content this kind of hobby probably isn’t for you. It’s going to be boring or it’s going to be an explosion of unintended consequences. For all practical purposes this is just a process for learning how to enter lucid dreams from a waking state of deep mediation through intense visualization exercises. The exercises are just that, exercise. They’re working your brain better than the word jumble app on your phone, in a more targeted way, and through that process new dimensions of thought emerge. I have described some of what you might experience and how to dive deeper, but the change of mental states are mostly going to be self-evident when they start to happen. It’s just a matter of spending time doing it, but these steps are what I found to be the most effective for the specific purpose of entering this dream state and fully retaining conscious function. Recognizing the states and being the observer is just a natural thing in this process.
I have witnessed, over the past five years, an increasing number of people having unplanned experiences that they’re clearly not ready for. Not entirely physical experiences, but also things that lean toward metaphysical or spiritual. I don't always know what set the process in motion, but can see the results playing out across time for the individuals involved. Some I have observed at a distance, some on a more personal level, but the important thing is that these aren’t just people out doing drugs or getting involved in the occult. It's even fed by interactions with AI these days, increasingly. These are mostly people just living their lives normally prior to the experience. I believe that this is accelerating or, if not in a constant state of acceleration, it’s coming in increasingly more intense waves. I don’t know why this is happening. I just know that it seems to be happening. There’s an obvious tension, often intentionally stoked, that most people have either noticed or are blinded to by being wrapped up in it. That underlying tension, perhaps, it’s part of the problem. Cognitive dissonance is another contributing factor. I think some of them, maybe some unicorns, might find meditation helpful and something they find a rewarding pursuit. Beyond the simple meditation, there will be fewer people that this is of interest to.
This will be starting out with simple meditation practice, steering into what could be considered soul alchemy at the novice level, and finally shifting to psionics briefly. This is a really ambitious range of topics to cover, particularly as briefly as I hope to do it, but they’re also all quite connected and follow an organic progression of the skills. The meditation leads into the alchemy and the alchemy leads into psionics. I’m using psionics to describe any and all mind over matter interactions, abstract or indirect methods of gathering data (remote viewing, divination techniques like dowsing, clairvoyance), action at a distance, and mentalism. Psionics would also cover anything that falls under the umbrella of magic though some systems of magic, or some subset of the practitioners, would reject that idea that altered states are involved.
This is art. You can memorize the steps and you can understand the semantics of the language used, but that will not make you an artist. You will become an artist when you start performing the art. The initiation process for many secret societies that eventually teach these sorts of things include a great deal of what I consider to be mostly art history. Art history, the history of the craft, is certainly valuable context for any artist. An artist though, is not a credential or qualification. An artist is a person performing the art.
I’m not an initiate of any order, nor do I belong to any kind of secret fraternity. I don’t have a guru or guide, but the list of people I could thank for their contributions to my education is too long to even start. In my opinion most of the secrets kept by these orders are convoluted justification for their existence, are in keeping with traditions that are no longer meaningful in current times, and/or provide information that can actually just be obtained elsewhere. I don’t think there should be gatekeepers, not when this kind of control over the mind isn’t as simple as learning a secret handshake or doing a secret ritual. Most people just don’t even care. If people want to do the work, they should have a path to do so. I’ve not seen any group, in all my life, that did a good job screening for bad people. Keeping these kinds of secrets doesn’t seem to stop bad people from using the principles for their own ends. Sometimes it seems to be that the bad people are the gatekeepers.
I have no affiliation with the any authors or people producing content, but do find their some work to be accurate on the points in which my personal experience overlaps with theirs. There are people that have a number of books or other media on topics ranging from what amounts to manifestation like popularized in The Secret to more nuanced instructions for most of what I’m covering here. They go far deeper into the paranormal aspects and beings and things that are not in my wheelhouse. I'm writing only about things I experience, including only information I have obtained or vetted on my own. I don’t endorse any author's opinion on anything beyond the methods that may have been adapted here, but neither do I feel a need to disagree with anything specific off the top of my head. I will have a list of things that you can look at and consider for yourself linked at the end. Much of what I’ve read was things I already knew or was aware of, but some of those things were still rather mysterious to me. I was able to follow the process and confirm that the explanations were true in practice. These particular methods and working through them was what finally got me over the hurdle of entering deeply altered states while retaining conscious thought. Only a limited amount of what they all cover is within my direct experience, but there are perhaps parts of their methods that have been adapted here.
I’m presenting the bare bones of what I have found to be the prerequisite skills, or habits, or practices, to progress. I had years of experience, thought I didn’t know it at the time, following practices that can be found in some of the most demanding esoteric systems. It’s just the way I think and the way I operate in the world, not something I was doing to follow a system. My experience made the process quite smooth for me and I think there are probably others in a similar situation, maybe this is just the little nudge they need.
The bare bones I offer are going to be the most benefit to self-directed learners or those with some kind of experience in the area. When I was first doing these practices I was also putting myself through various tests of my self-discipline. Fasting, sleep deprivation, altering my bodily functions through application of will. I have no doubt that these practices, as I already covered a bit in prior threads, increased the speed of my progress. I don’t endorse any of that and don’t believe it’s required, but for me it was an accelerator and I had been unwittingly preparing myself for that kind of performance under stress for a while. I do some of my best work at 24-36 hours of sleep deprivation. I also do some crappy work in those hours if I’m lacking discipline in other areas of my life. I had serious issues with sleep for many years, so I consider this to be turning lemons into lemonade. It has a cost, so I don’t advise anyone to do it… but it works. Fasting was also very effective starting in the 36-48 hour range, for facilitating progress. All of this provided good confirmation for my thesis when covering the use of rituals and rites to induce altered states. Everything presented here has been tested, personally. It doesn’t mean it’s the perfect method for everyone, just that it’s a method that does indeed work.
I hope to provide enough that anybody that wants to put in the time and effort can get results, but not dictate the path beyond that purpose. There’s plenty of room for adaptations, either your own or something you pick up from other sources. The key is that everything, no matter whose methods or how involved they are, are just tools to get you there. You can already do this. It’s part of what you are. You can built whatever you want on top of it.
The harmful side-effects of this process can fit fairly comfortably under the umbrella of what you might hear about UAP ontological shock. It can cause a disruptive reordering of the way one thinks of reality resulting in feelings of disassociation, depression, cognitive paralysis, or mania. The signal may be amplified for those listening, but so too is the noise. Part of this process helps with gaining control over emotions, but it’s a continuous process. If neglected, or worse if ignored, the ebb and flow of unchecked emotions will create an imbalance. This imbalance will be dry tinder for psychological adverse effects. It is a continuous process that doesn’t aim to make you perfect, just make you better than you were the day before.
There is no absolute in this material world, not in these methods, not in rituals. Explore, adapt, and breathe. There are many paths and many destinations. You’ll follow your path and arrive at your destination in your time. If it’s not your path, you'll change it.
Meditation
You can find meditation guides all over the Internet for free. I’m not going to provide a specific link for a specific system (aside from the fairly pragmatic Gateway Experience which is effectively a guided meditation series), but I’m going to cover what I think most of them should have to best equip you to achieve the goal we’re aiming for here. The goal is 5 minutes of “blank wall” meditation. How you get there isn’t super important, just that you are able to get there and have a consistent method for getting there. This “blank wall” meditation is simply holding a totally blank visualization without any intrusive thoughts, no mind wandering, and no consciously noticing environmental stimuli. Some methods will have you start by literally sitting in front of a blank wall and starting at it. There is no right way, only the way that works for you.
For this part, all parts really, there’s lots of room for deciding what works best for you. As mentioned when covering earlier parts there are many techniques that can be mixed and matched. The only thing you can’t do is lie to yourself about the effort you’re putting in, not if you want progress.
Key parts of meditative practice:
Breathing - Focus on breathing is helpful for keeping the mind on a narrowly defined task and eliminating wandering. I start a session with square breathing if I’m having trouble getting my mind under control, but there are no rigid rules. If your mind wanders, you can always return your focus to breathing. Breathing patterns help shift the body into relaxation states, but they also help as a focus. Square breathing or box breathing is often suggested as inhale, hold, exhale, hold, for 4 seconds each. This is comfortable for me and is restful.
Relaxation - We’re talking about two things with relaxation. There is the relaxation of muscles and the relaxation of the brain. Most practices incorporate a process for progressive muscle relaxation which also serves as a focus after or during breathing practices. I suggest using these progressive techniques, at least at first, because whole body awareness becomes more important in later stages and you will eventually be getting your body into a “sleep” state. This progressive relaxation typically starts at the toes and moves upward along muscle groups. This can be done however it works best for you. I find focusing on the body part, flexing the muscles a few times to improve blood flow, and then allowing another 10 seconds of focus before moving to the next, works quite well. The longer you spend, the more relaxed you should find yourself at the completion of the process.
Stillness – Stillness of the mind is the hardest part for many people. We live in a busy world with lots of distractions. When your mind wanders, don’t dwell on it. You simply return to focusing on breathing. If that isn’t helping you can go back to progressive relaxation. If both fail to work then a guided meditation may provide some training wheels to start out. The Gateway experience, at focus 10, is suitable for this.
Your body positioning in the early stages of this practice should be however you’re most comfortable. Many practices insist on certain postures or positions, but I don’t think it’s critical for getting to 5 minutes. If you have trouble relaxing in a sitting position then reclining may help. If you find yourself falling asleep when attempting meditation then sitting up more may help. If you’ve ever fallen asleep with your head totally unsupported, that’s probably a decent position to start in. For me being reclined with my head supported works best, but I’ve had success being only slightly reclined with my head unsupported. The unsupported position works well if you’re having difficulty not dozing off as it will most often trigger you to wake up when your head drops. Getting enough sleep will be a real help here. Comfort is important, you know better than I do what you’re comfortable with. You just don’t want to be comfortable enough to doze off. Find a balance when you’re first starting.
Some people make meditation a part of their morning routine, waking up a bit before their normal time. You may remember that in the lucid dreaming portions I covered bifurcated sleep patterns to help increase the likelihood of lucid dreams. For people that spend a significant amount of time in meditation, this bifurcated sleep pattern is sometimes replaced with a shorter sleep cycle and a period of meditation. Many of the functions your body performs during sleep are also done, though mostly to a lesser degree, during deep meditation.
Whenever you choose to do the meditation, the setting shouldn’t be much different. You want a place where you will not be disturbed. You want a place that is comfortable for you to be in whatever position you plan to be in. Low light is ideal, but if that’s not dark enough then a sleep mask may help. You can set a timer for the maximum amount of time you intend to spend in that session. These are all just a place to start and when you get to practical applications of psi you may find yourself using very different methods. They may be much more brief and take place wherever you happen to be. First, you have to learn to crawl.
If you use a guided meditation, like The Gateway Experience (link at the end), you are only partway to the finish line when you first reach the blank space. I think getting to focus 12 is probably far enough. Many people will use the tapes and end up losing themselves in the last stretch. That is progress, but next you need to be able to get into this state without the aid of a third party. It does help to know that state and The Gateway Experience helped me over that hurdle. After you can do it with the guided method, work on making that guided method into an entirely self-guided process. Adapt it, remove parts you don’t need, add parts you find helpful.
Everything that happens, no matter how it disrupts your efforts, should become part of the flow. If your mind wanders there is no need for self-reprimand, just an immediate return to focus on breathing. Later on you will have other things that can refocus your attention, but in these early stages breathing is the easiest. If a car horn breaks your focus, back to breathing without cursing the person responsible. As you practice more these intrusions will drag you out less frequently and eventually won’t even be blips on your radar.
How long will it take to get to five minutes? I have no idea, but it probably won’t take too long if you’re following a schedule. You can experiment with binaural beats, white noise, or whatever for audio. This is particularly helpful if you have environmental noise to block out. A few times a week, even just 15 minutes, should get you there in a reasonable length of time. The Gateway tapes run around 45 minutes, I think. Two or three times a week with them would be a good effort for most people, enough to keep it fresh but not burn out before you get the results you’re looking for.
Many people simply stop here, extend their meditation time, and are quite pleased with the results. That’s perfectly fine and if this little section helped get somebody there, then I’m happy to have provided help for just one person. Maybe you stay with this for a while and come back to move on to more intensive practices.
Soul alchemy
Five minutes of meditation was easy, right? Maybe not, but it was a pretty easy section to write. I encourage people not to just stop at five minutes of meditation. If you’re keep a schedule and practicing several times a week then you’re likely to find these more advanced efforts aren’t something you have the stamina to be do every session. As you work on these parts it’s good to keep the schedule, but do just what you feel is reasonable. If you do serious intense practice once a week, or once a month, doing some basic meditation on the rest of your scheduled days keeps you sharp. With effort, that work can be condensed into just a few minutes prep to keep you fresh even if you don’t have much time for deeper sessions.
What is soul alchemy and what are you expected to get out of this section? Soul alchemy is loosely just the transformation of the soul or self. Consider it a holistic self-improvement program. There are various spins on it and many of the occult groups had their own sort of twist. Fluids, elements, electricity, archetypes, and so on. They often want you to learn about fire, water, earth, salt, and so on and so forth. For my purposes this is the first part of becoming the observer.
I’ve read about these systems, but I’m by no means an expert on them all. What I can say is that knowing the Kaballah or some metaphorical rubric from whatever system is pretty meaningless context as far as accomplishing the nuts and bolts of the process. I think the main benefit to these systems is that they lay a foundation that many will find helpful once they begin navigating this space. If you’ve read the previous threads you may remember that I spoke about embedding ideas in the subconscious for later use. These schools are hammering these ideas into the subconscious in such a way as to allow for ease of use later. There’s more to it and these systems often use the education as part of their own story or to build their lore, but it has does have real benefits too. Part of the benefit is probably belief, but that’s not the only way.
The first part of thoughtfully changing something is observing the state that it’s in. This process is no different. This section should see you progress from passive meditation to becoming an observer in your own body. This line is very fuzzy in shallow lucid dreaming, but will sharpen more and more as you practice waking exploration of altered states. It will still be a wide line, but things will be clearer. I can’t stress enough that you need that first five minutes of meditation and it’s of great benefit to practice extending that time even when not doing these more intense practices.
If you’ve done the Gateway Tapes up to focus 12, I believe you will have already done the energy bubble. This practice is slowly expanding on the concept of the energetic body. The physics of your bioelectrical fields, your consciousness as a non-local phenomenon, is irrelevant here. This isn’t about projecting energy here, but about exploring a full range of senses. You are doing this to embed this perception, this sensation from focusing on any part of your body you select, into your subconscious. You’re not really learning here, you’re remembering. All of these pathways, the entire net of neurons, has been with you all along.
A session working on this will start with your relaxation process and entrance into the meditative state. Once there you will choose a body part or a spot on one. I’m going to use your big toe since this is where the progressive relaxation often begins and it seems like as good a spot as any. You will be shifting all of your consciousness, behind that blank wall of meditation, into your big toe. You are focusing on it, feeling every nerve, every fiber. You may experience strange sensations, phantom feelings, and this is normal. You want to start feeling everything, tiny things, while your mind remains clear and the rest of your body is in sleep-like state of stasis.
As this becomes easier, start to move this spot around your body in different sessions. You want to feel different spots, how they’re different, how they’re similar. At some point, when you feel comfortable that this is routine and can be performed at will, you will be shifting your perception outward. You will enter this state and shift to the spot you select, and then you will begin to use that loci as your perceptual window into the world around you. You will be looking at the world from the perspective of your big toe (to use my example). This is a combination of visualization and physical perception that you’ll be integrating.
I recommend before your early sessions with this portion that you, quite literally, spend a few minutes with your head in the exact location as your big toe will be during the session. You should spend a few minutes observing everything from that perspective. You want to remember the angles, how things look, how things sound, and any other perceptual sensation that you typically observe from the seat of your consciousness. This is typically behind the eyes in day to day life, so we’re just moving our seat of consciousness to where we intend to translocate it to during the session.
So, you have done all this and now you’re in the meditative state and you’re “in” your big toe. You are now going to look around. You are going to map the room, the corners, the walls, the doors, the furniture, all with your consciousness, in your toe, and all in a way that is spatially appropriate to your perspective there. There is no goal other than exploration and practicing the translocation of the seat of your consciousness. You will get comfortable with this and move to other spots on your body.
This is building an energetic framework, a concept, in your mind. Your body, the material that makes it up, is a biological machine and you are examining that machine in great detail through this process. You’re examining it from the inside rather from the outside, learning to map sensations to a broader tapestry in your mind. It’s all networks and pathways, but both the science that explains it and the metaphysical concepts that have been created to describe it are poor substitutes for experiencing it.
Becoming the Observer
I consider this to be where becoming the observer really starts to happen, though we are just building on what has already been done. For me, this part of the practices are where the observer started to emerge as a distinct cognitive domain. I had touched that state in lucid dreams, but it was fleeting.
So, onward. You are now your big toe (or whatever other spot you choose to translocate to).
You have practiced focusing into different spots on your body and using that as the hub for your perceptual tools. What does that mean in a practical sense? It means you have been quieting your mind and body until you sense the subtlest energies that interact with your body. You’ve been learning to listen from those locations on your body, to watch from them. In that process you have also established that these energy channels exist.
At this point you have probably already been doing energy exercises during your induction, even if you didn’t know it. The Gateway Experience has that built in to the system from the start, but even if you’re just doing breathing exercises you’re working with energy. Every breath and every moment in between, the transfer of matter (and other energy) is happening. Molecules are moving through cell walls, wastes are being pushed out. This is happening in your lungs, but this is only the most easily observed of the energy moving into and out of you. You are being bombarded with energy from all directions and you are pushing energy out in all directions. Through your skin, in your organs, in your very bones, is an ongoing flow of energy in varied forms.
All of these flows are bidirectional. If you haven’t already then you should include awareness of these flows, following them and thinking them through, in your meditative state. Oxygen exchange through the lungs, nutrients through the lining of the stomach, all of the processes. Even your bones are constantly being dissolved and renewed, nutrients and waste flowing in and out. You should include the sphere of energetic influence around you. An easy energetic influence to recognize is heat. You are constantly sending thermal energy into the world around you, you can feel it captured in the pillow beneath your head or cushion at your back. Electrical fields surround you, your body literally emits photons, and there is the field of your consciousness extending outward as well. This is science fact, not new-age spiritual belief.
Now that you have become more intimately familiar with the overlooked aspects of the perceptual tools found all over your body, you can recognize that you are as much a field of energy as you are a composite of physical matter. The field of energy extends beyond the borders of your body. One could consider this outer field somewhat like the atmosphere of earth. It’s a lighter portion of you, less dense. It doesn’t have well defined margins at the outer limits and, though there is clear distinction between some things that are outside versus things that are inside, there is a mixing zone where the inside and outside can be energetically commingled.
This is very real and no competent scientist would deny these energetic interaction exist, but I’ve given you a glimpse of it through a different lens. Just chew on it, add it to your meditative awareness. You can’t see them all, but there are fields of energy surrounding everything and there is constant interaction between them all. We’re essentially swimming in energy and are part of that ocean.
Now you’re going to translocate outside your body. This starts in exactly the same way as the prior exercise. You will be mapping your environment, but you’ll be doing it from a location outside your body. For the first time, your full physical body will be part of this mapping process as an object. I chose a corner of the room to start with. You’re going to do all the same things you did when looking through your big toe, but now from the corner of the room. Wave to your big toe, see it down there, attached to your foot… and there you are restful in your chair or bed.
As you’re doing these exercises and meditating, over time, you’ll probably notice that your memory is getting better. You’re observing more and retaining more of what you observe all the time. To expand upon my practice I started doing these exercises using locations further away, remembering isolated locations I’ve been, and building them in my mind. This is not just how things look, but the smell, the temperature, the wind through the trees, and the full experience of that location. They don’t have to be real locations even, but real places are a good start. Even the smallest things should be observed in the finest detail, everything visualized as if totally real.
Interesting things may start to happen here for you. Subtle changes to how you see the world, how you interact with the world, and how the world responds to you. One of the things that may be helpful during this period is practicing other aspects of self-discipline that can be rolled out in day to day life. As you’re getting more familiar with feeling energy, you should start to recognize when things are a drain on that energy. Discipline over emotions, if it hasn’t yet, will become important to you as you advance in these practices.
This emotional discipline isn’t robotic indifference… it’s logistics, management of a resource, and responding to the things in the most energy efficient way possible. Whatever you want to consider that resource, as attention, as ki, or any of dozens of names that have been used for it, you need to manage it or the outside world manages you. There are people that will do their best to engage you in ways that drain your energy, wear you thin, and their motivation is mostly irrelevant. Later on, should you choose to specialize your pursuits toward the psychological aspects of these metaphysics, you may come to have a more nuanced view of these vampiric entities. To start with, you just need to control how much energy you put out and when you do it.
As you learn to become the observer in your mind during your practices, you will gain more ability to become the observer in the material world. It still takes some effort, but you will start to learn to disengage with rapid emotional responses. Your heart may still race when you get angry and you might still blush if you trip over your own feet, but you will observe these things more than respond to them. You’ll also probably start to get angry less and trip over your own feet less too. These physiological responses though, like hormonal releases and the associated direct physical responses, are much deeper and harder to modify. Many of those responses have a really good reason for existing and you want that system to function autonomously. What you don’t want, every time something happens, is to be locked into a programmed emotional response pattern that causes loss of agency.
You should be mindful of these responses.
When you’re doing this translocation exercise you may not appreciate it, but you have done something quite remarkable. You have learned to engage in intense concentration under conscious direction while also being in a meditative state quite similar to sleep.
I can’t tell you when you become the observer, but you’ll know. If you’re not sure, keep practicing the translocation exercises and find one that speaks to you. Go to another place, built it and map it. When you’re sure that you’re the observer, you’ll be the observer… just remember the only thing you can’t do is lie to yourself. You will notice a definitive change of the state, though you may not recognize it until after the experience. Transitions are hard to retain memory though, contiguous memory. You’ll work it out and you’ll get better at it.
The Observer Takes a Walkabout
While everything here is presented roughly in the order in which things happened for me, it may not be so for you. You may find advancement in some area that makes your journey slightly different from mine. This is sort of a checkpoint though, because until this part of your practice becomes reality then you’re largely limited to what has come before. As mentioned already, there are still great benefits even from what you’ve already accomplished up to this point. All the benefits of meditation, in addition to a greater ability to charter a course for yourself through the trials of day to day life.
At some point prior you may have had an experience where, without your effort or intent, you find yourself having very detailed excursions into thought. Your visualization may become like a fully formed dream. Detailed and effortlessly so, just like a dream. It may have been something that you even had to overcome by returning to breathing exercises and returning to your meditative state. Once you are the observer, you will not get lost in these dreams (as much, lol). Those states are exactly what we’re looking for.
All of the work with translocation, with lucid dreams from prior parts of this series, all have helped you learn to distinguish the differences between perceptual states. Now, armed with all this experience, now having learned how to become the observer, you will begin to willfully enter these spontaneous excursions. This was mentioned before as WILD, Wake-Induced Lucid Dreaming, but more critical is that this is a gateway to much deeper altered states. In a very real sense this is inducing symptoms normally associated with schizophrenia, realistic experiences that are not happening in the physical world but appear real in the moment. The observer remembers though, where they are.
To assist with learning to walkabout the concept of portals will come into play. The meaning is quite literal and basic. A portal is something one can pass through to enter another space. The concept of portals isn’t new, but I hadn’t recognized the as such until I read a description of them and how they tend to present. I was aware of the phenomenon from my direct experience with it, but they defined it quite well and had obviously spent time studying them. I was able to then confirm the properties through my own practices. It was a “duh” moment for me, should have been obvious.
There is a whole discussion that could be had here about how consuming information prejudices outcomes, questions about if I was merely led to conclusions which were seeded by some author or if you might be by reading what I write. Suffice to say that when you become the observer, your opinion about whether or not these sort of subconscious biases can be recognized and overcome will probably change. The portals existed before I read about them, but I was at their mercy for the most part. I recognized the effect and tried to counter it, but others provided some key details about how they work and they became a tool rather than a hazard. I don’t even recall which puzzle pieces I needed and found in the works of others, but I came out the other side with a better understanding of the framework.
Portals are artifacts in these spaces that may present as normal objects or look like some version of a portal from culturally relevant memories. To those drifting through these spaces like ghosts, and without the experiences you will have at this point, portals are environmental hazards. They will often exhibit a sort of psychic gravity that draws you in. Your attention first, then everything else, until eventually you find yourself somewhere else.
I don’t have an explanation for why these occur organically in these states. I would guess it’s got something to do with the way the subconscious works creating dream states. You don’t need a portal to move, nor do you have to be drawn in by them when they show up. To study them, you of course need to find one.
To find one, you simply have to observe. After entering your meditative state you will be visiting one of the places you’ve been working on building. Not just a snapshot of that space, but a moving environment with all the things you would find there. The sounds, the sights, the smells, and all the other feelings that go beyond the five sense. How it makes you feel, in a holistic sense. You’re just going to remain there, until you reach the observer state. The dream flows on its own and you are fully aware, observing as it unfolds. You may end up in other spontaneous dreams that just sort of fade in, just follow along.
You may remember just the start of this effortless state and find yourself waking up a short time later. That’s okay. You will simply do it again in your next session. You may also find yourself becoming the observer again in the same session, realizing that you had lost yourself in the lucid dream that you created. It’s difficult to recover in this latter situation in the early stages, often knocking you out of the state. It’s okay. You just go back to the original place you translocated to and observe.
At some point you, as the observer and fully aware, will recognize a portal. You task here is simple. Let it happen, but observe. The portal may draw you in, but you’re just going to follow it. You want to be maintaining your observer state as long as you can, into whatever portals arrive, to wherever they go. You are both learning about portals here and also practicing the maintenance of the observer state through transitional phases.
If you just can’t manage to come across a portal, you can try to make one. I would suggest figuring out what you want to make a portal. Something easy for you to recognize, simple enough to remember in detail, and you seed that idea as you enter your meditation. Keep up with the same object before the sessions. If that doesn’t work I have no further advice except to continue exploring.
It would be a lie to say it’s easy. I’m part of the crowd that says anyone can do this, but the reality is that there are probably large portions of the population that can’t really do it. Not because it’s not possible, but because they would never put in the amount of effort required or they have other things going on. It could even be more complicated than the hours of practice, including modifying deeply held beliefs. If you think something is impossible, it may very well be.
Being the observer is still new at this point, but every minute you are in that state you’re learning more and building the coherence that state achieves. The observer is not subject to the gravity of portals because it’s separated from it, detached. You just don’t get pulled in. That’s it. If you want, you can be. If you want, you can make the portal send you wherever you want. If you want, when you reach a certain level of mastery, you can skip the portal all together.
Once you're at this level there is no map, not for you. You make your own map. You’re going to need to learn how to put your oar in the water and steer, but you know where the river is and can get there pretty much whenever you want. The sky is the limit.
Applications
At this point you can do all the sort of things you might in lucid dreams. This method is harder than doing lucid dream protocols, but the success rate on lucid dream protocols is often disappointing if you’re really looking to explore. Once you learn to reach the state through meditation, your success rate will probably be close to 100%.
As you have worked on this process and advanced you’ve become capable of seeding these experiences from your conscious mind. This gives you the ability to prepare for anything with a live-fire exercise. A dry run for anything you might have to one day face in the flesh, but without consequences. Have a difficult task you have to complete? Why not run through it a few times, as the observer in a dream, to get comfortable with the task? Some might say this is merely a psychological technique, but I lean more toward it providing a fertile soil for the outcome to eventually take root in. Those energy fields are funny things. That’s just my opinion, but pretty much every organization out there recognizes the value of training that simulates a real event. That is undeniably beneficial when used properly to prepare for an event.
There’s also therapeutic potential, akin to hypnotherapy or even psychedelics, revisiting events that are troubling through the lens of the observer. The observer has learned to detach from knee-jerk emotional responses. I would suggest that it could be a powerful tool for erasing the ghost of past trauma when used correctly, desensitizing the subconscious through exposure to the event in highly realistic dream states. I believe that Castaneda’s shaman had some aspect of this in their training materials for initiates, but I don’t recall the details. Learning to recognize a variety of signals and separate them from noise, in various states of consciousness, could also help some people deal with conditions that would otherwise be labeled as schizophrenia. I only offer my opinion, not an endorsement or suggestion that these are practical.
Practical uses aren’t that exciting and I don’t need to add a ton about them. You can build a memory of whatever you like, which becomes easier and easier as you build it over time. It can greatly enhance the toolbox for creative design. Your mind is the most powerful sandbox for creativity, and cheap to use. This would extend to the arena of egregores or tulpas, persistent thoughtforms. You spent a lot of time learning to listen to different parts of your body, but that also taught you how to stop listening to other parts. When you have something causing pain, it may be worth a few minutes of your time to focus on listening to somewhere else on your body. It’s all energy flows, electrical impulses to your brain. There’s far more potential, but you should see it and act on it as your intuition guides you. Fight addictions, resist temptations, push through fatigue, shrug off stress, all potential benefits of properly applying mental discipline.
The more exciting applications, for most people, are paranormal applications. I have little advice to offer in the nitty gritty of how to apply this to things like divination or remote viewing. I would suggest that for divination a drop into your observer state and connecting with your tools on that level is beneficial. At some point, when I figure out a good reason, I will literally be getting into this state while holding my dowsing rods. I will do this a few times before using them, being quite deliberate in forming my connection with how they look and feel. When the time comes to use them in the real world I’ll be dropping into a state as quickly as possible in the field, seeding my intent to find the specific object, then going about the task. Joe McMoneagle, perhaps the most famous remote viewer after Ingo Swann, does difficult math in his head to get into the state that he remote views in. I would say that those complex math problems are serving the same purpose as the intense visualization I've outline in these methods.
I don't have any advice for people that want to channel and I don't think it's a good idea for anyone to do it really. Likewise, I have no advice for making contact with the other side or any types of entities. It's not fear, just respect. I don't knock on doors unless I really need to speak to whoever might be behind them. If you were to be suffering from intrusive channeling experiences or similar disruptions of some kind, I would suggest that learning to become the observer may be an avenue to gaining control over these disruptions. The observer state is similar to the concept of a magic circle in that it provides a barrier between you -in this case a part of your mind that retains cohesion in altered states- and outside influences. There seem to be a number of concepts that were popularized in magic systems that may have been derived from exploring altered states as the observer. In this space it's more a magic sphere, but the concept is quite similar.
With something like reading tarot cards I would go through my deck, mentally, in the observer state. Everything about them, what's on them, how they look, how they feel in your hands, should be part of that process. That would be a process that I would initially do during a few sessions over the course of a few weeks or whatever timeline seems to work with what my schedule is. You’ll know once the connection is made, fully memorized and persistent. You can feel it. After that, the same kind of process as with dowsing would likely be useful. A brief drop into the observer state, a quick seeding of the intent to perform the task, and then going about the task itself. If done properly, in combination with the other skills available at this level, you could do an entire reading without a physical deck. It's actually a pretty interesting idea and I'm wondering now if anyone is already doing it.
The thing is, the observer has powerful intuition. A creative person, as the observer, will intuit much more than I can offer here about how this fits with their pursuits. I don’t know much about tarot or divination, but I would expect the practitioners to see where it might be useful.
At this point you have a buffet of options for exploration. The next step for some may be to use this as a launchpad to explore astral travel. I have insufficient experience to offer much advice there. The exercises with translocation may make it less jarring though, less of that old ontological shock. That’s works on the very same principle I mentioned for using these states to prepare for an event. I have heard a number of methods to initiate astral travel, but have nothing to offer on which is better or which don't work well. I think the more time you spend exploring this space, the more likely that astral travel will be an organic extension of your experiences... if it's meant to be and what you're looking for.
Conclusion
Is astral travel real or just in the mind? That’s for you to decide. I know that some people suggest that remote viewing is a sort of observational astral travel. I think there is evidence that even if the connection isn't that simple, they're exploiting similar underlying mechanisms. There have been some stories of impressive hits with remote viewing. I know of one, that I vetted at the time it became "proven", that seemed pretty spot on from years ago. Some other interesting hits from history could be explained away and sometimes are only one small part of a larger set of session notes, but some remain interesting. There’s even less evidence of astral travel accurately describing the scene at the time of the visit on record, to my knowledge. I’ve heard many stories, but most were off the cuff and trust me bro. The remote viewing community, the public face, has been full of carnival barkers since Ed Dames.
The only person that really matters is you. There’s little point in trying to change a person’s opinion on the matter. Experience changes opinions better than anything one could say. There are all kinds of books that dance around different methods for all kinds of paranormal and spiritual practices. Jacobo Grinberg wrote about the lattice of reality and how to change it in an academic way. Jung wrote about his journeys into the mind. Religions have various esoteric and mystical sects. From stone tablets and temple walls to NY Times best sellers and self-published Amazon authors there are thousands of works that are all providing different paths to the same place, in different words and from different perspectives. They’re all compelling to their target audiences, but mostly for reasons that are aesthetic or ideological. They're a matter of picking the metaphors you like best. You can decide what you believe about all that, but you don't have to decide in order to find the place they're talking about. You can get there with practice.
I tend to like a story of cosmology from a very long time ago. People I’m told were primitive managed to develop a belief system that incorporated quantum mechanics and the Many-Worlds Interpretation. A metaphorical belief system based on smoke and mirrors, which also seems to fit within the technical constraints of a physics model that wouldn’t show up for thousands of years. They may have been on to something, but it's also just a really impressive system of metaphors that weave a cohesive story. There are a lot of good stories out there though, so I've not settled on one just yet.
There are a lot of little things I left out, but you’ll discover them in your own time if you choose to practice.
One last thing, in the interests of keeping perspective if things get overwhelming, is that nothing is changing in this process except you and your perception. The world, the energy in it, whatever thing that creates existential dread that may be hiding under some rock you turn over, is all nothing new. You existed in the world with it before and you will continue to exist with it in the world tomorrow. The dishes still need to be done, your cat or dog still needs to be fed, there are still too many good books to ever finish reading, and there are still flowers waiting to be smelled. Synchronicities didn't start happening because you're the next messiah, you just started to see that there's a whole lot more information in your environment than you previously took the time to notice. Nothing has really changed except your perception, seeing millions of little things you never paid attention to before. Keep that all in mind. It's all just a change of perspectives.
I don’t recommend buying anything from anyone and I don’t endorse the views of any of these people when it comes to what anything means or what cosmology they adhere to. There is interesting information all over the place and you should consume it responsibly. I just grabbed a few different links with interesting information. There's a lot out there, but a lot of junk.
https://www.youtube.com/@cheetahhouse2125 Evidence based resources for meditators in distress
https://archive.org/details/cd-2-3-one-month-patterning Gateway Experience archive
https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00JC3TMBY John Kreiter OOBE guides and alchemy topics
https://dariusjwright.com/my-mission/ Darius J. Wright OOBE and testimonials from experiencers
https://philosophyandartcollaboratory.org/neidan Eastern take on soul alchemy
https://www.alchemywebsite.com/Texts_spi...hical.html Library of alchemy
https://www.alexandria.wiki/explore A digital library of Alexandria
