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A lot of practitioners tell you to not fall asleep when meditating and to bring back focus when you feel sleepy. On the other hand, I find that inducing sleep through meditation helps me lucid dreaming or have a lot of thoughts going on in my mind when I sleep. It's like I'm in a state so relaxed that one could consider sleep, but since I meditated right before sleeping, my stream of thoughts is still going on, continuing on the dreams realm. Have you ever had such experiences, and if so, do you think it's any helpful? Any specific material/book is appreciated on the argument, as I would like to know more about this.
When I feel like falling asleep during meditation during the day, it's lack of sleep kicking in. I use those opportunities for lucid dreaming if I can fall asleep for that time... and leave meditating for later. The body just have to get its way...
Falling asleep completely shouldn't happen during meditation provided you sit up straight properly, unsupported by a backrest or wall. Classic hatha yoga also permits lying on the floor in the corpse posture (shavasana) while meditating, and Bardon even suggests a couch if I remember correctly but I would rather say lying down on a hard floor is great if you want to play around with
because the discomfort will wake you up again after some time. My own meditation go-to book is Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated (classic Buddhist samatha meditation) as well as his Practice Guide.
Of course there's the debate on what constitutes meditative states and what trances. It also depends on what you want to get out of your chosen method. For many including purist me, it's mental clarity, an empty mind free of streams of discursive thought, and you have to watch yourself like a hawk all the time for intrusive thoughts and guard against dullness and drowsiness, which takes discipline and determination; trances, on the other hand, require you to relinquish control, or go with the natural flow of your consciousness. Perhaps that's the main difference - meditation is about processes (or their cessation), trance is about experiences and informational content but like I said, it all depends on your definitions and your preferences.
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Forgot to add: when trying the corpse position while lying on the floor, it's important to keep the palms of your hands UP since that will make it harder for you to doze off completely.
Falling asleep completely shouldn't happen during meditation provided you sit up straight properly, unsupported by a backrest or wall. Classic hatha yoga also permits lying on the floor in the corpse posture (shavasana) while meditating, and Bardon even suggests a couch if I remember correctly but I would rather say lying down on a hard floor is great if you want to play around with
because the discomfort will wake you up again after some time. My own meditation go-to book is Culadasa's The Mind Illuminated (classic Buddhist samatha meditation) as well as his Practice Guide.
Of course there's the debate on what constitutes meditative states and what trances. It also depends on what you want to get out of your chosen method. For many including purist me, it's mental clarity, an empty mind free of streams of discursive thought, and you have to watch yourself like a hawk all the time for intrusive thoughts and guard against dullness and drowsiness, which takes discipline and determination; trances, on the other hand, require you to relinquish control, or go with the natural flow of your consciousness. Perhaps that's the main difference - meditation is about processes (or their cessation), trance is about experiences and informational content but like I said, it all depends on your definitions and your preferences.
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Forgot to add: when trying the corpse position while lying on the floor, it's important to keep the palms of your hands UP since that will make it harder for you to doze off completely.
Wow, thanks a lot for all the information. Now that you speak about trance, I think I wrongly called my state meditation, while it's indeed a trance state. What I like to do is to let my stream of consciousness flow as I lay down to sleep. That's actually very different from the meditate state, in which I try to cancel out thoughts completely. I'll surely look at your recommendations.
Unfortunately, I don't have access to the Practice Guide, but I guess I'll just find it on the web. I don't know who Brandon is, more than anything.
Franz Bardon's contribution to meditation isn't all that interesting, I only mentioned him because his Initation into Hermetics is still considered influential. Obtaining access to the Library is easy btw (Bardon, however, isn't):
The main reason why I prefer empty-mind meditation is that I've become disillusioned with words and their limitations, with the running commentary in my head concerning unrelated things that keeps me from experiencing the world directly. What got me so curious about not-thinking/thought silence long ago was this quote:
"The internal dialogue is what grounds people in the daily world. The world is such and such or so and so only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such and so and so. The passageway into the world of shamans opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off his internal dialogue" (Carlos Castaneda, The Wheel of Time)
Could it be that we're too distracted by our own discursive thinking to notice what's really going on around us? That's what I'm trying to find out, and the results have been positive so far.
It really depends on what you want to achieve. Some prefer drugs or trance to experience other worlds or explore different modes of being, and I've had some adventures with those as well, esp. when drumming. But even with these methods, I feel that words spoil everything. Verbal accounts of mystical experiences never succeed in describing completely what really went down, often sound overblown or trite, or fail to capture all the nuances. Was Castaneda right when he claimed that our world is but an edifice of our own verbalised thoughts? Right now it looks to me as if he'd been a bit exaggerating but I'm in the middle of finding out for myself.
A lot of practitioners tell you to not fall asleep when meditating and to bring back focus when you feel sleepy. On the other hand, I find that inducing sleep through meditation helps me lucid dreaming or have a lot of thoughts going on in my mind when I sleep. It's like I'm in a state so relaxed that one could consider sleep, but since I meditated right before sleeping, my stream of thoughts is still going on, continuing on the dreams realm. Have you ever had such experiences, and if so, do you think it's any helpful? Any specific material/book is appreciated on the argument, as I would like to know more about this.
Well, really it depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you wabt to lucid dream, then yes, perfect. However, different states will require you to stay awake.
I love going into a trance and then falling asleep from there. I’m pretty bad at meditating (read: undisciplined) so trance is my starting point for astral/lucid/hypnagogic anything.
Verbal accounts of mystical experiences never succeed in describing completely what really went down, often sound overblown or trite, or fail to capture all the nuances.
