I am so sleep-deprived during the work-week these days that for a while now, when the weekend comes, I do not have enough willpower to set up conditions for a proper indirect method. I am so tired to wake up to the alarm clock on the only day I can practice the Phase (and sleep!) and even if I do, it seems like I do not have enough strength (both physical and mental) to enter the Phase and/or hold this state for a relatively long time and I feel tired for the rest of the day.
So, at some point, I was kind of forced to switch to the deferred version of the direct method and have had quite a success with it. I go to bed and sleep as long as my daughter lets me. Then I send her out, do a short washroom/drinking walk, lay down while still feeling very sleepy, think about my intention to get into the Phase and my action plan, then start lazily to perform one technique (phantom wiggling, observing images, or attentive listening) while observing the lapses in consciousness.
You may notice those lapses every time you fall asleep. You lay down, think of something, then your breathing calms down, your body relaxes and one of the following may happen:
– your breathing becomes ‘sleepy’ breathing (if you pay attention to how you normally breathe and how you breathe when you wake up or fall asleep, you will see what I mean).
– your logical thinking may be gone and suddenly you notice that you are thinking about something weird and illogical.
– you start seeing images in front of your closed eyes. This gets more and more elaborate once you start paying attention to it. For me it turned from fleeting faces of people, into short action movies.
– you start hearing sounds, voices or conversations.
The idea of the direct method is to notice those things and once you catch such a lapse, you bring your consciousness back to normal. Every next lapse will be deeper and one of those may eventually let you separate and get into the Phase on your way out of it.
Today I realized what Raduga was saying about the techniques themselves not being important. Once you can catch those lapses of consciousness when falling asleep, you do not need techniques. You lay down, keep noticing the lapses and try to separate when getting out of one. Eventually you succeed and that’s all you need – lapses and separation attempts.
Back to business. Today I was awakened at 8:44, then I lay down and started doing everything described above. I started with phantom wiggling but it didn’t work and I stopped. I started noticing all the things above and eventually was able to separate. Every time I separate using the direct method, I feel vibrations first and then the resistance when I am standing up out of my physical body. But it is not painful anymore, just hard to do and takes strength. So, I sit up in my own bed, climb over the bed rails, open the window (for some reason it was hard to open), and fly with my new raven-flying technique (see my previous post). I am hovering for a while and then start circling above a nice forest meadow, landing eventually. Now I can feel my claws digging into the earth and I can see every blade of green grass of the meadow…
I got out eventually but fought to get back. I went through the same separation feelings and stood up in the corridor (what’s with me and the corridors these days?). It has wooden walls and carpeted floor. I started running along the corridor which keeps winding and turning. As I attempt to deepen my experience, I laid down on the floor and looked at the carpet trying to grasp its detailed ornament. Interestingly enough, I could see the carpet very clearly in all of it’s details but I could not see the walls, they were quite blurry. Then I tried to deepen the Phase state by diving down through the floors and stories but for some reason I am flying slowly and start loosing the state instead of deepening it. I decided to get back to my plan of action which was to get some medicine for one of my health problems. I walk into one of the rooms and it looks like a pharmacy with 2 ladies selling medicine. I ask one for a pill, she gives it to me, and I swallow. Will keep you posted on the results.
I was able to get into the Phase for the 3rd time this morning. When I stopped my experiments, the time was 9:45.