John Stone's Storefront

John Stone's Blog; Q&A on Lucid Dreaming and Out of Body Travel

• Sacred Chants

  2008 May 04

  Sacred Chants of World Religions
  

• Balancing Darkness

  2008 May 04

  Question:
  
  I'm not sure what you mean about "purification". I have read and have been told that one must be careful about astral projection because of the "evil" that may be encountered in the different planes of existence, and that you have to prepare and brace yourself with “guides.” Being brought up a Catholic, I have to admit this does scare me. Let's just say that developing psychic abilities was looked at as touching the "darker side" of life and the world of the devil.
  I know that there are people that practice black magic—that does frighten me because I don't know if I would be able to recognize those people. The devil does show himself in all shapes and I don't really want to encounter him in all his glory or open doors that I won't be able to close. Perhaps the purification you speak of would arm someone with protection?
  I just feel that our minds have the power to explore and visualize a lot more than we are now able to do. If we could develop that ability, the ability to grow spiritually, well then maybe our lives would be fuller.
  
  Reply:
  
  Purification is the process of facing and releasing fear, what Buddhists sometimes call identifying our suffering, so it is the process of bringing that into the conscious mind so that it can be understood and healed.
  
  Since we already astral project unconsciously, we are also already facing dark entities. But it is still important to be careful when cultivating this kind of consciousness, not because we will necessarily be exposed to greater dangers, but that we need to move slowly so we don’t get ahead of the transmutation process. We have to gently expose ourselves to the awareness of our own darkness; else we can become overwhelmed by it. It is for this reason that I don’t believe in consciously putting a lot of effort into inducing out of body travel. When you simply focus upon the purification aspect, and relinquish control to a higher power, the super conscious experiences will take place in the proper time. That way, we may add them into our lives while maintaining an emotional balance.
  
  

• Purification

  2008 May 02

  Question:
  
  I did not quite realize that it might be a "process" involved of finally attaining a state of "conscious" astral projection. It seems like if it would not be known on the conscious level and that I would never remember that it had actually occurred—well I guess I would say, ‘what is the point?’ My understanding after reading up on this topic years ago, was that both people would be "aware" of meeting the other person.
  
  Reply:
  
  Well—what I would say to that, is that we are Mostly unconscious beings. If you have done much reading about astral travel and things related to higher consciousness, you probably have read about alternate realities and parallel lives. We actually experience much more of ourselves on a completely unconscious basis and most of us have little knowledge of the why behind our actions.
  I was once told by the spirit world, that (because of hostile energies in the earth) the majority of our soul has already fragmented off—by the time we reach the age of one year old!
  So I would say that we all have hidden abilities and talents, most of which we may never have knowledge of, unless we really spend a good amount of energy in the attempt of pulling these fragmented pieces back to ourselves.
  
  Now there are many people that make lesser attempts at astral travel, that are able to have an experience or a few experiences by the use of mental techniques. This however does not open the door to regular travel and experiencing ourselves in our fullness—or just getting a taste of our wholeness. If we are interested in the latter, the route of spiritual purification is required, as our fear must be transmuted in order to really stay open enough to ‘give ourselves’ over to a higher power. When we reach this place in our lives, our travels take a turn and we begin to experience ourselves in other realities.
  
  We have to rearrange our conscious minds so to speak, to emotionally handle the energy of experiencing conscious lucid states on a regular basis. I was once shown within a lucid experience, of hundreds of dream experiences that had never reached my consciousness. I had no memory of the experiences before that moment.
  The gift of tasting our fullness can be an extremely blissful, though emotionally overwhelming if occurring frequently. Attaining regular travel requires us to release an immense amount of our Unconscious fear. It’s also challenging to wake up after a deeply profound experience, without the fuller sense of ourselves, and then be faced with a greater consciousness of what we might become while here in our earth stay.
  
  If you think that you don’t grow and process things unconsciously, you might think back to yourself many years ago and become aware of how you have changed in the period since. How you came to understand things, attained knowledge that was once foreign to you. This is the process of growth, of learning first on an unconscious level—we have to do a lot of things in order to survive, things we may not know the reason for—then years later we understand.
  So even when we are awake in our everyday lives, we are still co-creating unconsciously, still working things out and understanding first on the unconscious level, then experiencing ourselves as conscious.
  We can even be shown our future, or possible futures in these unconscious realms. And if we are open enough, we make adjustments in our thinking, so that we can be better prepared for their manifestations in the future, again, completely on an unconscious basis. People with a high consciousness, high enough that they aware in these realms and can consciously see these possible futures are called Visionaries.
  
  And then there is a whole other issue related to interacting with others in these realms. When we gain consciousness during an out of body experience, we are going to be conscious in the realm that is most pertinent to our own growth—the same goes for whomever we visit. We often visit the unconscious fragments of our friends and loved ones.
  Though it does happen, there is a low chance that we will both reach consciousness in the same realm, in the same space of time, in the same moment. It’s just more likely that we will be meeting unconscious fragments of our friends over conscious ones.
  
  So you might see, regular conscious out of body travel is not really for someone with a casual interest.
  
  

• Astral Projections

  2008 May 02

  Question:
  
  I would like to ask you a question about astral projections—I read that in a university study, someone actually astral projected and were able to tell the researchers exactly what a certain person was doing miles away and what was in the room where he was staying.
  I’ve also read that if you want to "contact" someone via astral projection, that your spirit or soul can leave your body and travel to the person, that their astral body can meet yours.
  
  Reply:
  
  While it is possible to visit a place in the earth and be able to ‘report back’ to others about objects within a room, it’s a bit difficult to actually coordinate for many reasons.
  Out of body experiences are highly spiritual and can be deeply moving. When we reach such states of being, we are pulled toward what is most needed by our soul. And that often does not include what our ego may think to be the most important thing at the time. Rather than traveling to the site of our conscious preference, we might instead visit a different place, friend, deceased loved one, etc.
  This incongruence between what our soul wants and our ego desires is what limits the expansion of our day-to-day awareness. When we become conscious in these higher dimensions, what our ego once thought important, might no longer even exist in our conscious minds.
  The incongruence is also a factor in why we don’t remember nighttime experiences—we all have out of body experiences and visitations, we just don’t remember them. When we can release the ego’s agenda, we become much more conducive to consciously experiencing ourselves in the frequencies of higher dimensions.
  
  When we enter an energetic realm of a place we know in the earth, it can also appear quite different, as there are always more things/objects, etc., than exists within our present dimension. So it might not appear exactly as it is in the earth—there could even be additional rooms that do not exist in the third dimension.
  
  We all can and do connect with each other on a daily basis—distance is no barrier. In a split second we can send a fragment of our being to a friend or loved one, sharing our thoughts and feelings. For most people this remains in the unconscious realm, though as we work our way toward a higher consciousness, we actually do get glimpses of these visits. People that are good at unconsciously doing this are called intuitive.
  If we are asleep when this occurs, it is also possible to be fully present, fully conscious. Of course this does require a lot of spiritual purification—we must have a very high consciousness and presence to be able to remember these experiences.
  
  

• Hello

  2008 Apr 26

  Questions and answers about lucid dreaming, out of body travel and other spiritually related topics.
  
  For more information about me, my writings, books, classes and teachings, visit:
  www.consciousdreaming.org
  John Stone
  
  To ask a question, send mail to dreamclasses@yahoo.com