usecases for meditation and astral projection

[newChemist]

Hi there!

Some of you will maybe recognize me from my research I am starting regarding the left-hand path (and don't worry, that's still going as strong as ever), but I also am doing some digging on meditation because as far as I am aware, that is one of the most fundamental and widely used skills regardless of the subfields of occultism you choose. And I also am doing a bit of digging on astral projecting. To be honest, I don't even fully know why I am doing it. A long time ago I heard about it and was the major reason I tried my hand a bit at meditation, but that interest remained rather short term, and also was quite a bit younger then.

Anyways, I was wondering what some of the important practical usecases are for meditation mainly, but also astral projection. I also am lowkey curious about what role meditation and astral projection play within left-hand-path activities, but regarding that, I am planning on writing a dedicated post on LHP-activities in the near future to get a better grasp of what I am exactly getting involved in

thanks for reading my post!
stay safe and take care!

 

[IllusiveOwl]

Meditation is just sitting still and waking up. Your thoughts are a never-ending cloud of novelty that captivate your monkey-self and keep you in a cocoon of braindead logical stupidity; if you recognize this, you can over time learn in a mental-muscle building way to disregard your thoughts and enter a state of unaltered awareness, solar consciousnes.

Meditation is a fundamental skill, a launching pad for your hyper-aware consciousness. Astral Projection from this state is natural and profound, like a bird waking up in a shell, you just kind of break through by yourself, but if you don't meditate you'll never learn to stir, before breaking out.

If that doesn't make meditation sound interesting, I can't do anything more but hit you with a stick.

 

[HoldAll]

You might find this thread enlightening as far as meditation is concerned:

A Structured Approach to Meditation

What is your approach to meditation? A way to structure it would be: 1. Objective (detachment from thoughts and feelings, working with a certain energy like vajrayana meditation deities, set-up for astral projection etc) 2. Method physical (position, breathing rhythm, incenses, music, mantras...

wizardforums.com

 

[Missterry]

Have you heard of the Gateway Experience? It is a course developed by the Monroe Institute, the one founded by the famous Robert Monroe, who wrote all of those books on his experience with astra projection.

At one point the CIA got involved and some of their officers and agents took the Gateway Experience course. If you want to read up on some interesting usecases for meditation and astral projection, the CIA's use of meditation and astral projection can't be beat. The CIA eventually released their report regarding their Gateway Experience in documents to the public, but with one page redacted.

The Gateway Experience course is still available at the Monroe Institute. Today it costs several thousand dollars to take the course. It was a live-in course, meaning students need to fly to the institute, live there for a few weeks, and take the course.

Fortunately, the Gateway Experience can be found free online. It was uploaded to Archive dot Org:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

 

[Shade]

Meditation is the highest form of self discovery and connecting to the energies around you, its the purest and most base form of connection to your higher self to recognize what energies you want to connect to fulfill a role or in what way to better self develop. you can even ask out loud what it is you want to know and meditate on it daily.

Zen is the fundamental practice to quiet the mind as mentioned above and Holdall linked a guide.

Also you have energetic meditation where you consciously feel the flow of energy and focus on that to better manipulate the etheric or metaphysical. If you are drawn to LHP you most likely will feel it in the lower part of your body first. But not always, we all have “gut feelings” and this is more the mid region which also can be a good starting point. Spirit is more top down and middle is heart outward. For stubborn rebellious people top down can sometimes be easier. .For empathetic people heart region May be easier.

tldr: meditation is indeed fundamental, what you want to gain from it is up to you. See above posts.

 

[newChemist]

Have you heard of the Gateway Experience? It is a course developed by the Monroe Institute, the one founded by the famous Robert Monroe, who wrote all of those books on his experience with astra projection.

At one point the CIA got involved and some of their officers and agents took the Gateway Experience course. If you want to read up on some interesting usecases for meditation and astral projection, the CIA's use of meditation and astral projection can't be beat. The CIA eventually released their report regarding their Gateway Experience in documents to the public, but with one page redacted.

The Gateway Experience course is still available at the Monroe Institute. Today it costs several thousand dollars to take the course. It was a live-in course, meaning students need to fly to the institute, live there for a few weeks, and take the course.

Fortunately, the Gateway Experience can be found free online. It was uploaded to Archive dot Org:

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Yes, I have heard of the Gateway Experience and the CIA's involvement with the gateway experience. In fact, learning about that fact made me want to actually take learning about occultism seriously. I already was somewhat interested in the field but did not dedicate myself to it as I am now. I had tried looking up the Gateway Experience course online, but failed, and so did I for finding the CIA's released documents of it. Now I know it can be find at Archive dot Org, this should help out a lot. (I assume the actual link is archive.org right?)

 

[Missterry]

(I assume the actual link is archive.org right?)

Yes, that's the link and website. I embedded the link to the course in my post for you. Just click on the words 'The Gateway Experience'.

I found the CIA's report a while ago by googling. I read it, found the redacted page, but unfortunately did not save them! With some time, you will find those reports.

 

[newChemist]

Meditation is just sitting still and waking up. Your thoughts are a never-ending cloud of novelty that captivate your monkey-self and keep you in a cocoon of braindead logical stupidity; if you recognize this, you can over time learn in a mental-muscle building way to disregard your thoughts and enter a state of unaltered awareness, solar consciousnes.

Meditation is a fundamental skill, a launching pad for your hyper-aware consciousness. Astral Projection from this state is natural and profound, like a bird waking up in a shell, you just kind of break through by yourself, but if you don't meditate you'll never learn to stir, before breaking out.

If that doesn't make meditation sound interesting, I can't do anything more but hit you with a stick.

Yes! This is exactly why I posted this thread to begin with, because this is exactly what I struggle so much with. Maybe it has to do that pretty much for the entirety of my life, I have been active mainly in STEM-related fields, where the sentiment that the material world is the only world, reigned supreme. And "of course" the logical mind is the only one we really take into consideration and sort of take that as the basis for what it means to be human.

Could you maybe elaborate a bit on what you mean with "elaborate awareness" and "Your thoughts are a never-ending cloud of novelty that captivate your monkey-self and keep you in a cocoon of braindead logical stupidity."

Are you saying there are different kinds of consciousnesses at play? And that if you disable the "normal" consciousness, that another one will open up which is capable of different things or something?

 

[HoldAll]

Could you maybe elaborate a bit on what you mean with "elaborate awareness" and "Your thoughts are a never-ending cloud of novelty that captivate your monkey-self and keep you in a cocoon of braindead logical stupidity."

I quote from Culadasa's "The Mind Illuminated" (p. 140), on the inital difficulty of focussing on the breath and the problem of mindwandering:

At the root of these problems are the various types of spontaneous movements of attention described in the Prelude. We place our attention on the breath, but the mind produces distractions. Alternating attention scans these distractions for something more interesting, important, exciting, intense, or novel. Interest and importance are judged according to the perceived ability to increase pleasure or decrease pain, cause happiness or unhappiness, or improve or threaten your physical well-being. When something captures attention, the breath is abandoned and forgetting happens. When attention tires of one distraction, it moves to another, usually through chains of association. This kind of mindwandering is the main obstacle you’ll work on at this Stage.

And that's what @IllusiveOwl meant. This three-ring circus in your head is frequently called 'monkey mind', the normal state of consciousness everybody experiences without even noticing. And when you try to make that circus leave town, oh boy… another quote:

While motionless and breathing deeply, begin to withdraw the mind from any thoughts which arise. The attempt to do this inevitably reveals the mind to be a raging tempest of activity. Only the greatest determination can win even a few seconds of mental silence, but even this is quite a triumph (Peter J. Carroll, "Liber Null & Psychonaut").

And that's no exaggeration as everybody who's ever tried empy-mind meditation will readily confirm. We take inordinate pride in our ability to think, in my opinion, but when it comes to the ability of not-thinking, we all are mental invalids, figuratively speaking.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 5:24 PM

And identifying with the monkey mind produces a monkey self who'll insist it's the One True Self or even your Soul, an illusion of the first order we are so enamoured with that we are unable to imagine life without it.

 

[Taudefindi]

the inital difficulty of focussing on the breath and the problem of mindwandering

As someone with ADHD, regular meditation is something very hard to do, reason why I always do my meditation by pairing it up with some movement.So rather than becoming "empty-minded" I become "single-focused" with body and mind becoming one.

It usually is dancing, shadowboxing or simply swinging in place.It can be done while doing exercises like martial arts or yoga too.I think in the end what matters is that you can do something to quiet your mind, it doesn't matter if that means emptying your head of thoughts or focusing all of them into one single thing.

As long as it doesn't wanders around, it will work.
Plus, we have to get up with the times.I'm sure most methods of meditation always took into consideration just the regular person, not someone with actual difficulty to focus, so you adapt to what feels feasible to you.

 

[IllusiveOwl]

Could you maybe elaborate a bit on what you mean with "elaborate awareness" and "Your thoughts are a never-ending cloud of novelty that captivate your monkey-self and keep you in a cocoon of braindead logical stupidity."

I'm assuming you meant "Solar Consciousness". This phrase is used to describe the Alchemical Gold state, the Hindu Moksha, the Buddhist enlightenment, Zen's Beginner's Mind. It is pure awareness, experience that you are so submerged in that you are one with it, with all. It makes the circus of a civilization we live in unbearable, and our thoughts feel like a dim television screen we've been stuck to (your thoughts come one, after another, after another, after another. They are endless commentary your consciousness is staring at, rotting the same way your brain does when you watch Friends or Seinfeld for 3 hours straight.) It isn't something you lock into immediately, you grow into it over time as you get used to it and value it. I can promise you, you are asleep, and the state of Solar Consciousness is waking in the dream.

Are you saying there are different kinds of consciousnesses at play? And that if you disable the "normal" consciousness, that another one will open up which is capable of different things or something?

Your normal consciousness is reality put through a number of filters, because you are presently asleep. These different states of consciousness are similar to states you experience when you get up in the morning: reality is the same, you simply become more lucid, aware, and in control.

To answer your question though, yes, you will become capable of more extraordinary things the more you refine your consciousness with meditation.

Your mind is a blunt bar of iron, with intention you can use Meditation to focus your mind into a blade that can cut through anything.

Perhaps you will one day discover, even, that you are not human. That you may accomplish things no "human" could. Who knows.

 

[Rowan Otherwise]

I use meditation to enter a hypnotic state, where imagined characters can offer useful insights into any and all subjects, depending on the character.

It's up to you if you would call them daimons, demons, or imaginary friends. No matter how you slice it, I highly recommend this use case.