Michael Saganski

Well here it is… day 90! It’s a little melodramatic because I haven’t been following the program to a T the last few weeks. I’m also not going to be making any drastic adjustments now either; the 90 days has been an evolutionary process.

My practice has basically evolved into 2 meditation sessions: one in the morning, and the other in the evening. I avoid eating anything at least an hour before, as well as drinking anything other than water. I find a shower in the morning helps wake me up, otherwise I’m not awake enough yet and fall asleep too easily. I seem to get better results sitting up instead of lying down. I generally start off with some breathing exercises for relaxation, followed by some forms of energy work (body awareness). I then clear my mind with the use of a mantra, and may either stay with it or attempt an exit technique. If anyone wants more specifics feel free to ask me.

My sessions don’t seem to be as productive as they were a few weeks ago either, I think I’ve hit a bit of a dip… which is natural from what I’ve heard from other people who meditate regularly. The important thing is to meditate through the slump, taking a few days off as a break just makes things worse. I’ve found some free local meditation classes which is helping me stay inspired and motivated. I’ve also officially registered for the Gateway Voyage at TMI in August, which I’m super excited for.

While I haven’t had a full blown OBE yet, I’m not discouraged. In fact I now know that I have opened the door to a life-long spiritual practice for me that will only get better with time. Several of my core beliefs have been modified or rebuilt, and I feel like a different person from the inside. I also feel like I understand myself and my place “in the universe” a lot more, it’s like I’m more self-aware of my thoughts, feelings, and motivations. I opened myself up to my intuition, which I’ve never done before… and am starting to identify the information I get from it instead of ignoring it.

One new abnormal event that’s happened to me that hasn’t been mentioned yet is I’ve experienced the ability of parallel thinking. That is, I’ve actually been able to think two thoughts at once while in a meditative state. It basically happened by accident, since I was actually trying to clear my mind but had lost my grip on the mantra. The thing is, my mantra was still going and yet I was also perceiving/interpreting images in my mind’s eye. I then became self-aware of both my focus on the mantra as well as the interpretation of the images.. after a short while they both stopped as I broke both trains of thought.

As far as the actual OBE exit techniques, a problem with my process had been identified to me. The reason I wasn’t liking the exit techniques and why they seemed to pull me out of the meditative state was because I had associated the technique with my physical body. As I would focus on the technique, my awareness of my physical body would increase. So instead of going deeper “inward”, I was coming back “outward” to my body. I have to thank Selea for this. The solution to this appears to be focusing on visualization… associate the exit technique with a visualized body… not my own. Theoretically at some point I should be able to shift my point of consciousness into that imaginary thought-form by “feeling” for it. Wow.. that sounds vague to me even as I write it but at my current state of spiritual knowledge I believe it to be possible.

I also had a little bit of confusion with visualization because I thought it had to be in the 1st person.. but really 3rd person is ok and is actually more natural.

I’ll continue to post my progress and any major trials/events. My ultimate goal has changed into more than just having an OBE, it’s about evolving and understanding my consciousness as much as possible. The experiences I read about excite me to no end. Where this will go, I’m not sure yet. I’m playing with the idea of developing my psychic/intuitive powers to the point of being able to help others. I think that would be pretty cool.

Thanks for reading my posts and I give a special thanks to everyone that has provided feedback. It was of immense help to my progress.

The light at the end of the tunnel for this 90-day trial is arriving, and with it many mixed feelings. While I haven’t had a classic-OBE yet, I’ve definitely experienced many paranormal events. I’ve had much better results with focusing on meditation rather than any sort of complicated exit technique, so I will definitely be taking a different approach after the 90 days are up. This trial has opened up a whole new world for me to explore, which is amazing in itself.

With summer starting over the past couple of weeks I’d be lying if I said I was able to do all of the exercises in a strict fashion each day. My daily schedule is quite a bit busier when it gets nice outside, so I’ve had to fit in what I can here and there. This is probably slowing down my progress but balance in life is important too.

I’m signing up for the Gateway Voyage program at The Monroe Institute in August, which I’m really excited for. I hope to make some additional breakthroughs and speed up my progress there. I’ll be sure to post about my experiences here.

Right now, I can fairly easily get visions/dreams in the astral while meditating. I don’t have much control over what I see yet, but it is a start. I seem to lose some of my self-awareness while the visions come, which makes it seem more dream-like… but I’m still somewhat aware of my physical body too. I want to continue with this and see if I can gain more control over what I experience. Being able to clear my surface thoughts has become easier with practice, which I think is what quickly leads to the imagery.

The exercises and writings in MAP haven’t had any sort of drastic changes as it did during the first 45 days or so. Robert Bruce discusses some of the finer points and possible problems or experiences that you may encounter, which are nice validations for what I’ve been experiencing or having problems with. It just feels like the exit techniques he recommends undo all the energy and meditation work I do during each practice session, so it almost feels detrimental to what I’m trying to achieve. I’m not sure if that’s how it’s supposed to be or if I’m doing something wrong, or if his methodology isn’t the right one for me.

I had a very interesting experience last night, at around 4 am. I had woken up from a dream but had not opened my eyes yet, and I felt a distinct presence in my bedroom. I used to be skeptical of the idea that we can detect “presences” without using our 5 physical senses, but I definitely FELT something/someone close to me.

So I naturally decided to open my eyes. I wasn’t fully awake yet and the room was fairly dark, but I saw a human-like form or figure approach me at the side of my bed. I became a little scared but then my vision blanked out and I felt like it merged with me. How do I even begin to describe what that feels like? I just knew it at the time. The typical OBE sensations of vibrations, tingling, whooshing noises were there. I also briefly saw some random colors/patterns and felt some pressure in my head. I was so confused as to what was going on I thought to myself “WTF… am I being possessed?”. It happened very quickly.

I regained my vision and apart from the tingling/buzzing I felt relatively normal for maybe a second. I then saw ANOTHER form/figure, but it was more of a diffused sphere this time. It approached me hovering over the foot of my bed, and then merged with me as well. The tingling/buzzing/whooshing happened again with a loss of vision and head pressure. After a second or two (I think) I regained my vision and the tingling/buzzing reduced in intensity. I mentally said “Hello?” still wondering what was going on, but didn’t get much of an answer (I might have heard myself say “hi” but I might just be making it up in my head). I then began to realize what had happened and decided to see if I could go for a conscious OBE exit.

The trouble was I was so scared/excited that I wasn’t able to focus and just decided to log it in my notebook and stay awake for a while to solidify the memory. It’s a good thing too because I know that if this had happened before I learned about OBE’s I probably would have brushed it off as a dream, forgotten about it, or whatever. Maybe it has happened in the past and I know even know, I’m guessing it probably has. Even now as I write this I can hardly believe it happened.

It’s possible that the affirmation I used before going to sleep may have played a role. This week’s affirmation in MAP for evenings is related to waking up in the middle of the night for astral projection. I think it’s pretty clear to me now that the forms were two of my energy bodies, like the etheric (real-time zone) and astral. You guys can correct me if I’m wrong though.

If only I had waken up during the beginning of the projection instead of the end! Oh well, this experience was still huge for me. I think it has tremendously helped at chipping away my old belief systems.

I also now see much more validity to Robert Bruce’s AP model (mind-split effect, energy doubles, etc.). It’s just a matter of focusing my conscious awareness in those other bodies. I still don’t quite understand how all of Robert Bruce’s model fits in with Robert Monroe’s focus levels, but I do feel like they’re both “right”.

Over the past couple weeks I’ve noticed a recurring idea that’s come up in a couple of the books I’ve read about OBE/consciousness, and a couple videos. It’s the idea that our conscious intent has the ability to influence random results (this is a huge part of Thomas Campbell’s Big Theory of Everything). Now that I know to pay attention to synchronicity I’ve had a bit of an idea come up… I’d like to prove this for myself!

How this is possible is a bit complicated (I don’t even fully understand it myself yet), but a full understanding is not required in order to use it. I’ve done the classic “intention manifestation” of finding pennies and have had some success at it, but I think I’ve come up with a faster method to get quicker feedback for better practice. It’s still just an idea, and I’m not even sure it’s going to work… but I’d like to give it a try.

The basic idea is that I will code a program that generates pseudo-random numbers over time and plots them on a graph. Now, the distribution should normalize given enough samples. BUT, if this whole idea of placing conscious intent to get what you want is true, I should be able to skew the results consistently and in the manner in which I want. If this is really possible, I should be able to “practice” and get better at affecting the random results by placing my intent more correctly.

Apparently there have been studies done that are similar to this idea that have been successful. I think the problem is that the results are subjective. People will always be able to block their perception of reality through their belief systems, so it will be fairly easy to disbelieve results like this (randomness, getting lucky, etc.).

I’ll try to work on coding up a basic program over the coming weeks. If it works well and I’m able to prove this for myself, I may release the program to the public on this web site so that anyone can give it a shot if they so desire.

Life did a good job at kicking my pants this week. I really had to push hard to find times to sit down and do the exercises, and it was usually not the optimal place or time. Today being the weekend I was able to get a great session in and still found that I had made progress throughout the week!

It’s pretty amazing at just how deep meditation can get, and I know I’m still only scratching the surface. I’m finding it easier to get into a trance state, and it also happens more quickly and at a deeper level. All it takes is steady practice.

I would say my main trouble right now is relaxing too much and going off into dream imagery too easily. Once I get too deep into it I find it hard to focus my mind on anything for particularly long, which includes any sort of OBE exit technique.

In some ways I’m sort of feeling a fork in the road between meditation and OBE’s. It’s almost as if I’m at a level where the two are becoming mutually exclusive. In other words, when I meditate too deeply I can’t focus on doing an exit technique… or if I focus on an exit technique my body/mind tenses and resists it to the point where I can not keep a focused mind either. Perhaps it’s just a lack of focus on either side. In MAP, Robert Bruce says OBE exit work is a very fine balancing act and I am really starting to see that.

I just thought of another way of looking at it. When I meditate it’s like I’m focusing into my consciousness, while an OBE exit technique requires focusing outside my physical body. Both techniques require focus, and either way leads to the same result – disassociation between mind and body. Which means understanding that I am more than my physical body, i.e. that my mind is not my brain. And that is the whole point of this 90 day trial.

Right now I just seem to be feeling much more success and progress with focusing inwards, rather than outward. I haven’t had any mind-blowing experiences such as floating over my own physical body, but my belief systems have been slowly chipped away with unusual experiences. My body seems to resist any sort of external focus, and absolutely loves focusing inward. Perhaps yogic meditation or Robert Monroe’s Phasing/Focus Level system is a better path for me than the classic OBE techniques?

One example from today happened while I was meditating. I lost focus for a period of time and started seeing dream imagery, but then quickly realized that this had happened and regained awareness. I came back to staring at the back of my eye-lids, but for a second or so I saw a very distinct dark form stand out from the backdrop. It was extremely unusual from what I normally see with closed eyes, and it kind of felt like a presence. That is a very exciting thought.

A question I have for people is should I be encouraging the dream imagery while meditating or should I be resisting it? I can see benefits to either strategy. I know that Bruce Moen talks about balancing between the perceiver and interpreter; he thinks that cutting out all non-physical perception is a mistake. Perhaps I should practice his strategy of slowing the image process down.

So another week has gone by with what I think has been steady progress. No OBE yet but that’s ok, I have a ways to go yet!

My third eye chakra has been feeling quite active lately, especially when I do any sort of meditation, body awareness, deep thought, or energy work. It basically feels like a throbbing, with the intensity being different depending on what I’m doing. Sometimes the throbbing can be quite intense when I’m working on an exit technique.

Generally, I’ve felt a tightness in upper body during exit techniques. At first it was mostly my head that would feel like it was getting “pulled”, but now it’s mostly my chest/heart. It’s like  I’m trying to pull away but my physical body is holding on too tightly. I sometimes have my inner voice telling me it’s not possible.. right when I’m about to do it! This is counter-productive and something that needs to be worked on. I have to believe I can do it before I will ever let myself let it happen.

I have now jury rigged a headset with Audacity recording my voice. I’m finding that I get a lot of random imagery when I’m in a deep meditative state, so I’d like to record some of it with my voice when it happens, otherwise the memory is lost quite quickly. Stopping the meditative state and writing it down just isn’t practical. Perhaps I can figure out some sort of pattern or meaning to what I’m seeing if I analyze enough of it.

I now regularly feel falling sensations when I sometimes go too deep in the trance state and regain awareness, which is sort of a “mini-obe”. Learning to just relax and let go of any expectations seems to provide the best results. I could have swore I felt one of my “astral” fingers move inadvertently on two separate occasions, which shows that I’m starting to have my energy body loosen up.

Other interesting occurrences include my guides thwacking me on the back of the head when I asked if they were around, haha. Also, during one session I am pretty sure I experienced a very weak form of astral sight because I was able to see my arms and legs with my eyes closed. There wasn’t any spectacular detail, just shiny blue lights among the blackness that took the shape of where I would have expected my legs and arms to be.

My dream awareness has not improved all that much lately, as it just hasn’t been on my mind as much. There’s been a slow but steady improvement in my dream recall, but it really depends on the quality and quantity of sleep I get that night.

So about a week has gone by with trying OBE exit techniques, and I am making progress. It seems like there won’t be any major changes to the day by day practice according to Mastering Astral Projection. The only thing that changes is a different exit technique to try every couple of days.

Fundamentally though, all the exit techniques are pretty much the same. The basic idea is to focus your awareness to a point in space outside your body. My favorite so far has been the basic rope technique, where you imagine yourself climbing a rope upwards from your body.

A major roadblock I’ve hit is that I have a hard time keeping my mind focused on climbing the rope for more than maybe 30 seconds. I’m getting better at catching myself wandering with my thoughts, but sometimes it really surprises me. One minute I’ll be practicing my exit technique, and the next minute I’ll realize that I had been daydreaming and I don’t even realize how I lost track/focus.

On the other hand, I’m starting to notice a distinction between some of the daydreams. Some of them are clearly my own subconscious mind worrying about various aspects of my life (the ego, I guess). However, others can be rather – weird. I’ll sometimes “see” people I’ve never met before quite clearly, in a situation that seems beyond what my own mind could come up with. Maybe they’re just symbolism/metaphors created by my own mind, but they seem so random and out of place. If you are familiar with the perceiver/interpreter concept by Bruce Moen, then I think I may be getting better at non-physical perception without letting my interpreter run away with the thought (which I have noticed as well).

One time while I was meditating and realized I had lost focus, I actually saw (not visualized) myself go through a dark tunnel (1st person viewpoint) when I regained awareness. That was pretty cool, but also VERY subtle and easy to miss/forget. I really had to stop for a moment and think: “Holy crap, what was that? REMEMBER this Mike…” because I find a lot of my “daydreams” while meditating are not actively stored by my memory – they slip away quite quickly.

Depending on your definition of OBE some of you might say I’ve already been successful by the experiences I’ve just mentioned, and my lucid dream in the past. Through my readings I’ve discovered just how broad “out-of-body” really is. The classic floating above your physical body in the real-time zone is actually only a VERY small subset of the continuum of consciousness. I’m very interested in exploring all of this quite a bit further.

In my search to improve the focus of my mind and self awareness I’ve stumbled across traditional Yoga. I’m not talking about the physical fitness program you see in the West, but the original and true Yoga. The Yogis figured all of this consciousness “stuff” out (including OBE and more) thousands of years ago! One particular site I like is SwamiJ.com, because it has a huge wealth of free knowledge on this topic.

In MAP, there are optional exercises in the 90 day program. I’ve substituted some of those for exercises I feel would be more beneficial to me, based on what I’ve learned from other authors. I’ve been listening to a Hemi-Sync track once a day, which I absolutely love. I try to be as present and aware as possible throughout the regular happenings of my day, and I’ve extended the time I practice mind taming each day. I usually do breath awareness for mind taming, but I’ve recently been experimenting with repeating a mantra.

I’ve been noticing a gradual shift in my overall world view as well. I find myself becoming less materialistic, or at least am noticing just how materialistic the culture is where I live. There just isn’t any balance, mostly everything is about exterior facets of life with very little emphasis on the interior. But it’s the interior that actually matters, because everything else is just temporary.

I think that if more people realized that consciousness is eternal and that the whole point is to have it evolve and grow in knowledge, then there wouldn’t be so much focus on materialism and so many of our problems would go away.

Heh, sorry for getting a little carried away there.

I’ve finished reading the Afterlife Knowledge Guidebook as well as The Secret of the Soul. The Afterlife Knowledge Guidebook is absolutely fantastic and I am starting to incorporate its exercises into my daily practice. I’ll be writing about my experiences with it as well.

I flipped through The Secret of the Soul as the writing didn’t appeal to me that much, much of it was testimonials about things I already knew about or concepts that seemed more rudimentary than Monroe’s Focus Level system. I’ve also been casually reading about traditional yoga (not the physical exercise), Thomas Campbell’s online material, as well as the posts made by Frank Kepple on the subject of phasing.

Today’s main OBE exit technique was to imagine climbing a rope downwards. While doing this I felt intense pressure on top of head, like a vice, which later moved down to my third eye and then stayed there. Pressure stopped as soon as I stopped the exercise, although a mild throbbing was felt afterward. This pressure was very intense and made it quite difficult to focus on climbing down the rope.

The pressure was a downward pressure, almost as if my the act of imagining the downward climbing was pulling my etheric body. But for some reason I guess it didn’t want to let go… I also think I started to feel my heart chakra flutter but my excitement and awareness of it quickly made it stop.

Here it is, week 6! This is the week where I finally get to do some OBE exit techniques. This week will focus on Robert Bruce’s “Rope” technique, where you visualize and feel a rope above you that you use to climb. I have tried this method before in the past and have found it to quickly put me in a mind awake/body asleep state.

From the first couple sessions I’ve done already it’s apparent to me that I still need quite a bit of work on taming my mind. I find it hard to focus on one thing (ex. climbing the rope) for longer than 30 seconds, if that. I feel like this is the hardest part for most people, losing focus is so easy in this day and age.

I’ve read that it can take months/years of daily meditation to effectively quiet the mind. It’s clear to me that it’s probably going to take that long for me as well. I used to be quite aloof and lost in my own mind (and still am at times) so I have quite a bit of ground to cover.

So having an OBE in 90 days might be a bit of a stretch. I’ll give it my best effort though. This is probably why many people give up on the process. Luckily, there are many other benefits to this daily practice so I’m going to continue regardless.

On a bit of a practical note, I used to find the egg timer quite useful for pacing the various daily exercises. Now that I’ve done them so many times they are now memorized, and find it more beneficial to just keep my eyes closed and do the exercises at my own pace. This prevents me from breaking my trance state to reset the egg timer for the next exercise.

Over the past couple days I’ve felt quite a bit of tension at the top of my head while doing the exercises. I’m not sure if this is an energy build up or if this some part of my mind resisting the process. Maybe I am not relaxing enough beforehand, I’m not too sure.

One benefit to losing focus and going into a day dream while I meditate is that I’ve become much more aware of the “snap-back” feeling you get when you “wake up”. It literally feels like you’re falling or snapping back into your body. If you’ve ever had a dream where you’re falling and then wake up you’ll know what I’m talking about. The astral projection model/theory would suggest that it actually IS your subtle/energy body snapping back into alignment with your physical body.

In any case, becoming more aware of the subtle changes that occur between the awake/dreaming state is probably pretty key to becoming successful at OBE.

Well, things keep getting a whole lot more interesting.

Progress generally feels like 2 steps forward, 1 step back, but every few days I am able to get into a slightly deeper trance state. This basically means a reduction in sensory input, which is part of the process in dissociating from my physical body – I need to keep my physical senses from rooting myself into focusing on the physical. I am able to feel a tingling sensation and a heaviness in my arms and legs fairly easily, but my chest seems to take more effort (especially since I am focusing on my breath).

During a couple of my meditation sessions I’ve had the urge to see if I could communicate with my “guides”. I’d openly ask if they were “around”, and I have gotten confirmation. The type of confirmation is just on the edge of what my analytical/left-brained/atheistic mind can accept – energy surges through my body, eye twitches on demand, and an internal dialogue that feels almost imaginary. The experiences can be interpreted as real or made up, depending on what you believe.

I now see that our beliefs are what limits us, and is what also limits our experiences. It’s sort of a catch-22 because in order to experience something profound you have to believe it to be possible in the first place – that can make it hard for skeptics, when self-fulfilling prophecies come to mind. I feel like I just need to keep an open mind to slowly chip away at my limiting beliefs and concepts. Patience, persistence, and practice will expand my capabilities over time.

A lot of these self-realizations I’ve been having have caused somewhat of a belief-system crash, as coined by Bruce Moen in the Afterlife Knowledge Guidebook. Some of my old limiting beliefs have been dissolved and this has caused me to lose part of my identity/ego. This “loss of self” can be tough on the mind and I know that I need time to heal and reintegrate my new beliefs into a more accurate model of reality. This is hard! (whoops, I suppose that was an affirmation…)

Even if I don’t have an OBE from this trial I’ve already had enough experiences to further pursue meditation and the exploration of consciousness. I now realize that an OBE is just a subset of the larger reality that can be experienced by consciousness. I almost feel like this trial is morphing into something more general – the evolution of my consciousness – rather than to just attain an OBE.

I’m thinking about going to The Monroe Institute for their “Gateway Voyage” retreat. I have their Gateway Experience CD’s which I think I will start listening to regularly instead of the Lucid Dreaming track provided in bwgen. I’ve been a little disappointed with bwgen so far when compared to some of the other binaural beat tracks I’ve tried. I’m going to be focusing on “CD 1 Track 2: Focus 10″ for now until I get good at achieving that state.

I have been absorbing quite a bit of material on consciousness this week and I feel like I should slow down a little, especially with the belief system crash. I’m getting the feeling that I should be working on experiencing more, rather than just reading about it. The books are only pointers. Reality is subjective so it’s up to me to see what is really true or not.

That being said I am now interested in reading the “My Big Toe” trilogy from Thomas Campbell. He worked with Robert Monroe at the very early stages of the creation of Hemi-Sync. I particularly like his model of consciousness and reality, especially the mapping of entropy with love.