I did not do any meditation today. I settled for a few hours in the sauna instead, as it’s been a physically intense few days and it would have been hard to stay awake otherwise.
I had a very vivid dream last night. It was unique in the sense that it was very long, focused, and entirely about ferrets. You can listen to my half-awake recording of it here.
Someone I work with asked me if I meditate today. They weren’t someone I associate with meditation, nor had I ever mentioned it. In that sense it was a nice, subtle signal from someone it is a thing people do and are interested in. They didn’t have much experience, so we didn’t discuss it in more detail.
I’m still slowly working through Bruce’s book, trying to understand his framework of the energy body and various zones. A few quotations have stood out to me thus far.
Consciousness naturally reflects a copy of itself outside the bounds of the physical body, either while it sleeps or during any kind of OBE. This reflection is like a subtle energy echo, containing a complete copy of consciousness, mind, and memory, reflected into a subtle body (a discrete energy vehicle) capable of supporting its existence outside the bounds of the physical body/mind. This process never ever leaves the physical body/mind empty and unguarded.
Bruce implies there is an entirely independent memory within each body beyond the physical. He tells a fascinating story at one point where his astral mind and physical body/mind perceive each other and there is a form of feedback. He gets ahead of himself somewhat and doesn’t use enough diagrams to elucidate the various notions, but I may also just be having some trouble understanding the underlying concepts
The mind-split effect is the biggest cause of OBE failure. It leaves no memory of what went wrong when OBE exits fail. Time and again it turns successful OBE exits into seemingly failed OBE attempts, and this thwarts the natural learning process, as it does not allow projectors to learn from failures and improve results with practice. Because of this, people focus most of their efforts on projection methods, searching for just the right technique to launch them out of body. Projection technique is important, but it is not the most important aspect of achieving successful OBE exits.
He’s makes some passing comments and I generally suspect refining one’s ability to dream recall (which generally coincides with lucidity) may be paramount to strengthening whatever muscle allows the cascading layers of memories to reintegrate. It’s been general encouragement for me to maintain a dream journal moving forward.