As Above, So Below

Yesterday morning I was reminded that we’re in the “Dog Days of Summer” now while on the last few miles of my run. It’s hot in the evening, it’s hot in the afternoon, and it’s even warm at 5 in the morning. Even with the gradual heat-up we experience nearly every year, it still takes time to adjust to weeks of 100+ F degree weather. The 15-mile run was awesome and I feel great overall, but I’m still a bit tired a day after. Continuing my exploration and quest into conscious out-of-body experience in this state is not ideal. This word comes up a lot. But I forge on and make small connections that make up the gestalt nonetheless.

Out-of-Body Techniques by William Buhlman: Target Technique.

I’ve done this one once before, and I don’t think I understood the purpose at the time until today. After doing the basic prep, I fired up the track and followed the guided process. You start out by visualizing floating on a cloud to relax and begin the session. From this simple imagery, you are prompted to imagine walking up to your house, carefully inspecting your front door, grabbing the handle, and entering.

You then select three targets and begin immersing yourself in them: what it looks like, what it’s facing, size, shape, how it feels to the touch, sound if any at all. You’re encouraged to use all of your senses while interacting with the objects. This time I chose interesting things around the house, and I was particularly fond of and stuck on the third object: the Day of the Dead Cat and Dog Succulent. For the record, it’s the cat one (though I’ve seen dogs like it too…). I like this one in particular because it has so many things going on, which I find basically perfect for this exercise. Visually it’s high contrast, both man-made and organic (there’s a succulent in it), tactile since it’s ceramic, and full of sensory opportunity. I can do all the things I need to do with it to become completely immersed. See it, touch it, feel the temperature of it, even hear it.

I made it a point this time to get laser-focused on becoming “one” with the Day of the Dead cat succulent, and I noticed something I hadn’t before. As I got deeper and deeper into my focus on the object, I felt myself fade away. It’s the kind of fading you feel when you’re falling asleep, but I was conscious the entire time. I’ve felt this before while foolishly believing I was inducing lucid dreams. After last week, I understand that I don’t induce anything. What I do is observe, if I consciously make that my choice.

As I “faded” and could no longer detect my physical body, I began feeling high-frequency vibrations arise from my legs, which quickly took over my entire being. Now, I know it sounds contradictory. Feeling vibrations after losing sense of the physical body might seem strange, but I don’t think it is. What I was feeling wasn’t coming from my physical body. I’ve made that mistake before. This time, like other times, I could feel my left hand and arm float up by themselves, but unlike other times, the vibrations would stop in that region. In fact, anything that felt like it was floating or “detached” showed up that way.

This went on for a while as I maintained my concentration on the object. I felt the urge to “sit” deeper in the moment, and as I allowed myself to do that, I could feel myself rising above and curling forward. The hard part was keeping my attention on the object while all this was happening. Every time I turned my focus to what was happening to me, I snapped back to where I started. Good news is, after a few rounds of this, I got pretty good at jumping right back into those moments.

Eventually I got tired of this weird dance of splitting my attention. I was spending way too much mental energy trying to hold everything together, and in doing so, repelling the very thing I wanted to happen. In that moment, a quiet voice of intuition entered the “chat”: just trust yourself. So I did. And now I no longer had to focus on the object. I could simply observe and ride what was happening. That sounds easy, but it’s not. Getting to this state of mind took serious re-training. Maybe I’m just dense, but I’m glad to have added this skill.

Now I’m rising and coiling over my physical body more and more. I have yet to get clear vision during these moments, but I began perceiving my surroundings as low-fidelity, blurry grayscale structures. It was slow going, not at all like spontaneous OBE. Everyone is different with this process. In the past, I would work hard to suppress my excitement whenever any stage of this occurred. That never helped. It usually collapsed the experience. This time, I didn’t suppress the feeling. I brushed it aside and kept observing, like I was watching paint dry.

I felt like an insect emerging from a cocoon.

And just like that, the track ended, and I was back in my physical and very fleshy body.

An Epiphany

Kim and I were talking about all of this. Or rather, I was talking at Kim while she patiently listened and nodded along. She’s the best. As I was describing everything and musing on this and that, it hit me. I know how to do this. I’ve done it before, many times.

A lucid dream is an altered state of consciousness. It just has an unfortunate name. Kind of like how “remote viewing” isn’t at all what it sounds like. A lucid dream has more in common with projection than with what most people call a dream. I bet over time, as we learn more about altered states of consciousness, we’ll realize that all such states are related, or even the same in one way or another. And more importantly, they exist on a gradient of altered state of consciousness experiences rather than as standalone phenomena.

Simply put, an altered state of consciousness is an altered state of consciousness. Your grip on awareness determines the kind of experience you’ll have. Just like waking consciousness, what we believe to be our baseline, varies depending on all kinds of factors: physical and mental health, alertness, sleepiness, sobriety, influence of substances, and so on.

Simply-simply put, altered state of consciousness is a gradient of non-physical matter experiences that mirrors our physical matter experiences.

Simply-simply-simply put: as above, so below.