I went to my local Borders and scoured the new age section (what an awful generalization of so many different subjects on their part) and finally found the little subsection of AP books.  I looked through a couple different ones, Astral Dynamics (RB), Astral Voyages (Bruce Goldberg), Journeys Out of The Body (Monroe), etc., etc.  I ultimately chose a book called, simply enough, Astral Projection (and the Nature of Reality) by a guy names John Magnus. 

Most of you probably have never heard of it, he seems to be a one-hit-wonder. However, his book was really good for my first experience (I really chose it because I liked the cover the best).  The only method he really gave was to try to maintain awareness while to went to sleep at night, and unfortunately I could never stay awake.  With little success I moved on and didn’t think about AP for a while.

Eventually I got interested again and bought RB and Brian Mercer’s 90 Day Guide to AP.  As interested as I was, I couldn’t ever make myself stick to the schedule and I eventually lost interest and moved on to other metaphysical/philosophical type things.  Then, about a year ago I started working at a metaphysical bookshop and one day came across Astral Dynamics. I wasn’t even going to buy it at first, but I was really interested in developing my sensitivity to subtle energies, especially in respect to being able to feel the vibrations of crystals and gemstones.  Crystals are a focus of my store and I always had customers asking me to help them pick the right one for them and I had seen my boss hold crystals and “feel” which one had the most intense vibrations and I wanted to do that.  It was recommended to me that I do some kind of energy work, like Tai Chi or Reiki.  I Googled energy work and came across the Astral Dynamics site and saw the NEW section.  I liked what I saw, so I bought AD and reading it completely renewed my interest in AP.  

I started practicing immediately.  I followed RB’s methods completely and I practiced everyday.  Within just a few short weeks of doing RB’s methods I started to see results.

My typical procedure went like this:

⋅ Deep Breathing (couple minutes)
⋅ Progressive Relaxation
⋅ Deep Breathing
⋅ Hand and Feet Stimulation
⋅ Deep Breathing
⋅ Energy Bounce Arms, Legs, Body
⋅ Deep Breathing
⋅ Full-Body Circuit
⋅ Deep Breathing
⋅ Trance Induction (with falling sensation)
⋅ Deep Breathing
⋅ Energy Center Stimulation
⋅ Deep Breathing
⋅ Energy Body Loosening
⋅ Exit-Procedure (usually rope method)

I usually did all of this sitting in a reading chair.  It isn’t a recliner, it’s cushioned, and has a high back for good neck and head support.  For much of my practice with this technique I had good results.  Nearly every time I practiced I would experience very intense exit sensations, like rapid heart beat, fluttering eyelids, rapid shallow breathing, rushes of energy in my torso, etc. But for some reason I could never exit.  I would feel trance symptoms, like the feeling of floating and I would think that my “astral body” was separated and was just stuck and I would strain and try to force myself to float away but all I ever wound up doing was tensing my muscles and ruining my trance.  I got tired of always getting that far and never getting out and so I decided to lay off for a while and see if taking a break helped.  

After a couple months I decided to try again.  I bought the new edition of AD, thinking that there might be some new info in it that could help me.  I started my practice again and I got the exact same results.  I didn’t know what to do so I performed a magickal ritual to show me the direction my practice needed to go in order for me to successfully AP.  That ritual brought me back to Astral Pulse Forum which started me on the road to success (this was about 1 and 1/2 months ago).  

Now, before I move on and tell you what combination of things brought me to success, let me tell you what was ‘wrong’ about my old methods.  There wasn’t really anything wrong with the RB methods, there was just something missing. What was missing was a description about the state of mind needed to get out. RB does describe it but then presents SO MUCH other material that you get distracted from what I feel is the most important aspect.  What was wrong with this approach was that as a novice I hadn’t yet discovered the subtleties of going on the drive that is AP.  The simple error on my part was putting too much effort into the techniques themselves and less effort in achieving the right state of mind.  I feel like RB left the importance of state of mind out of Astral Dynamics. I think this because, like I said before, experienced projectors tend to neglect the subtleties when teaching because they are second nature to them.  I’ll bet that when you do the online school, particularly because it uses the “Journeys Out of Body” Hemi Sync, that RB and his fellow teachers get the point across of the importance of state of mind.

What did I finally do right?

When I finally came back around to the Astral Pulse Forum, I stumbled on Frank’s phasing method. It wasn’t entirely Frank’s method that I was interested in. What I was curious about what how he was able to phase/project by just “noticing” when all these years I had been doing all kinds of techniques and processes and energy work and exercises with no success. It occurred to me that there was something different going on here, something that didn’t come through in AD. I was really at a loss as to what to look for and where to find it so I just started to go through the authors that I hadn’t read before. I got Robert Peterson’s first book and realized that I actually had read part of it online years ago. But back then, the part I read didn’t make as much sense because I was still focused on the the technique, not the preparation. This time around when I read one particular chapter of his book it all clicked into place.

I had been coming to this realization for a while through years of contemplation on Astral Theory, but it never really solidified until recently.  I had basically been coming to the same understanding as Frank.  My ultimate error with the RB material was that I took it very literally.  I thought that I was doing what I was doing because I had an Astral Body that I literally needed to separate from my physical body.  Now I don’t want to say that we don’t have energy bodies, what I’m saying is that any energy bodies we do have (besides the etheric, the one that shares out body all the time and keeps us alive) don’t exist here in our physical body per se.  I think that when we project, it’s not that our normal awareness copies itself out from our body into an astral double that was generated for that experience, but rather our awareness shifts to a “subtle body” that already exists at a different vibratory rate than our physical body.  I also don’t really believe that we ever truly inhabit out physical body, we are just focused here.  We exist simultaneously through all of the vibratory frequencies of existence.  To me, its like our physical body is just transmitting sensory data to our consciousness that exists somewhere else.  To project is less a matter of “phasing” to a different frequency and more about out consciousness changing the input source of sensory data.  

Another, slightly less important, revelation I had through this whole process was that every one of these different vibratory realities is relatively physical.  By that I mean that to the awarenesses that inhabit that space, it is like what we describe as physical.  We only describe our reality as physical because any time someone does experience something else, it’s always at a vibratory rate that’s higher than this.  For some reason we assume that we are at “the bottom” of the spectrum, but I don’t see any reason to assume that the spectrum isn’t infinite in both directions.

So why is this relevant?  Because it means that the trick isn’t in literally shifting your awareness into an astral double generated by your body.  Though the “physics” behind the process may indeed be what RB describes, for all intents and purposes this idea is just misleading.  What is important is being able to “disconnect” the input of sensory data from the ‘physical’ body and change it to the ‘astral body’.  SO!  How does one do this?

Mostly by dissociation.

Here is the short and sweet method that got me out: