Stranger wrote: ↑Sat Aug 31, 2024 1:17 am
From my experience with lucid dreaming and OBE I can say that in these states there is not much discontinuity and we remain mostly on the same level of spiritual development, or best case going may be just about 1.5 level higher. By just going out of body or into lucid dream we are not guaranteed to enter into the realms beyond the "simulation". Whether in waking or dreaming state, in the body or out of it, we can still be within the "simulated" reality or outside of it, and it depends mostly on our current level of spiritual development rather than whether we are dreaming or sleeping, incarnated or discarnate. Yet lucid dreaming is still a useful practice in a sense that it helps people to break from being too much identified and entangled with the physical level of reality, and to step into the realms beyond the sensory world. Dream yoga (lucid dreaming) has been part of the Tibetan tantric practice for ages, yet it was not found to be a spiritual panacea, but only one of the instrumental tools in the spiritual toolbox.
Right, lucid dreaming and OBE (or 'astral projection', 'astral travel', etc.) by itself does not allow us to remain creatively conscious within the higher octaves, it only loosens some sensory constraints and the soul substance becomes more pliable. We basically reach the
personal astral world, a projection of our desires, preferences, ideas, etc. In earlier times, this may have been different, a more effective way of communing with spiritual worlds, but now it no longer helps much because our cognitive constitution has evolved. You may not have seen this post, but Seth Miller characterized it as follows:
In the case of the astral dream, when we meet this guardian we encounter patterns--essentially sympathies and antipathies--from the untransformed part of our astral body. In an etheric dream, we meet the projections from the etheric body in a kind of default way: experiences (even our own actions within the dream) happen as if to us, not as actions freely taken by us as is possible when we are awake. But in the astral dream the Ego has just awakened to itself, and the possibility now exists for the Ego to experience a whole sensory panorama, through the stimulation of the astral body, that is no longer bound by the rules of waking life. In other words, “one’s wildest dreams” can literally be fulfilled as experiences within the astral dream.
In a sense, the astral dream is a kind of training ground for higher spiritual perception. The lower guardian poses us this question: What will you do when you awaken into the world of the spirit? The guardian is asking us, and providing us with an opportunity to demonstrate, the extent to which our Ego is capable of infusing the astral body with its Higher Will. If a lucid dream is thus used as a kind of playground for the fulfillment of desires that arise from habits within the astral body, we prevent ourselves from gaining access to higher spiritual perception, remaining satisfied with our own projections instead of opening to the vast spiritual world available beyond the mask raised by our astral body. We kid ourselves if we think that what
happens in our dreams is private, known only to us. This inner space of the dream, particularly the astral dream, is like the foyer of a grand palace: so filled with potential wonders that it is possible to get lost there, mistaking the entrance for the inner sanctum.
Such dangers--for they are dangers to spiritual development--have been well-known throughout the esoteric traditions, from the ancient Greek’s imputation “Nothing in Excess” to the Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz to the teasing rituals of the African Bushmen to the yogas of
ancient India. The astral dream is a sign that the Ego is waking up to its higher nature, not that its mission is accomplished.
So the 'astral dream' is
not what we are speaking of with higher cognition that remains conscious during sleep, but at best only a kind of preparation for the latter. Here are the sorts of experiences that can be discovered through remaining creatively conscious during deep dreamless sleep:
GA 218 wrote:What is called the Threshold of the Spiritual World has to exist for the reason that the human being must first prepare himself to have this feeling, the feeling of having lost that support which the physical body affords, and to bear that anxiety in the soul which is caused by his facing something entirely unknown, something indeterminate.
As I stated, this feeling of anxiety does not exist for the ordinary sleeper; it is not in his consciousness, but he does pass through it, nevertheless. That which constitutes anxiety, for instance, in every-day physical existence is expressed in certain processes, even though they be subtle processes of the physical body: when man senses anxiety, certain vascular activities in the physical body are different from what they are when he feels no anxiety. Something occurs objectively besides what the human being feels as anxiety, restlessness, etc., in his consciousness. This objective element of a soul-spirit anxiety man experiences while he enters through the portal of sleep into the sleep state. But with the feeling of anxiety something else is connected: a feeling of deep longing for a Divine-Spiritual Reality that streams and weaves through the cosmos.
If man should experience in full consciousness the first moments after falling asleep—or even hours, perhaps, in the case of many persons—he would be in this state of anxiety and of longing for the Divine. The fact that we feel religiously inclined at all during the waking life depends first of all upon the fact that this feeling of anxiety and this longing for the Divine which we experience in the night have their after-effects upon the mood of the day. Spiritual experiences projected, so to speak, into physical life fill us with the after-effect of that anxiety which impels us to crave to know the Real in the world; they fill us with the after-effect of the longing we bear while asleep, and they express themselves as religious feelings during the waking hours of the day.
But such is the case only during the first stages of sleep. If sleep continues, something peculiar occurs; the soul exists as though split, as though split up into many souls. If the human being should experience this condition consciously—which only the modern initiate can completely behold—he would have the sensation of being many souls and consequently think that he had lost himself. Every one of these soul beings, which really are merely shadowy images of souls, represents something in which he has lost himself.
...
You can see the reciprocal action between being asleep and being awake! On the one hand the human being, in his longing for the Divine during the first stage of sleep, experiences that which induces him to develop religion during waking life. If this religion is developed during the waking life—and it was developed through the influence of the initiates—it has its effect again upon the second stage of sleep: through the after-effect of this religious mood the soul has then sufficient strength to bear the sensation of being split—at least to exist at all amidst this plurality.
...
During this second stage of sleep the human being acquires, not a cosmic consciousness, but a cosmic experience in lieu of the ordinary physical consciousness. As stated before, only the initiate goes through this cosmic experience consciously, but everyone has this experience in the night between falling asleep and waking up. And in this second stage of sleep the human being is in such a state of life that his inner nature carries out imitations of the planetary movements of our solar system. During the days we experience ourselves in our physical body. When we speak of ourselves as physical human beings, we say that inside of us are our lungs, our heart, our stomach, our brain, etc. ... this constitutes our physical inner nature. In the second stage of sleep the movement of Venus, of Mercury, of the sun, and of the moon constitute our inner spirit-soul nature... In the second stage of sleep, between falling asleep and awakening, that which occurs in the spirit-soul part of our being consists of these circulations of the planetary movements in astral substance, just as our blood circulates through our physical organism during the day, stimulated by the movement of breathing. Thus through the night we have circulating within us as our inner life, so to speak, a facsimile of our cosmos.
...
After this experience, we enter the third stage of sleep. In this third stage we have an additional experience—of course, the experiences of the preceding stage always remain and the experiences of the next stage are added thereto—in the third stage is included, what I should like to call the experience of the fixed stars. After experiencing the circulation of the planetary facsimiles we actually experience the formations of the fixed stars, that which in former times, for instance, was called the images of the Zodiac. And this experience is essential to the soul aspect of the human being, because he has to carry the after-effect of this experience with the fixed stars into his waking life in order to have the strength at all to control and vitalize his physical organism at all times through his soul.
It is a fact that, during the night, every human being first experiences an etheric preliminary state of cosmic anxiety and longing for the Divine, then a planetary state, as he feels the facsimiles of the planetary movements in his astral body, and he has the experience of the fixed stars in that he feels—or would feel if he were conscious—that he experiences his own soul-spiritual inner self as a facsimile of the heavens, of the fixed stars.
The above will immediately sound like some theoretical model when looked at from the outside, as mere speculative informational content about 'higher worlds experienced during sleep'. Alas, there is no easy way to show that it is born from fully conscious intuitive experience within the spiritual worlds. This content cannot be properly evaluated in isolation from the rest of the core spiritual scientific communications, just as we cannot properly understand the functions of the lung without also considering the brain, heart, liver, kidneys, etc. It all holds together as a living ideal organism. Nevertheless, we can at least remain open to the fact that there are mysteries of the Spirit beyond what we have already experienced and which play an intimate role in structuring the Earthly flow of existence. By becoming more intuitively and imaginatively conscious of these factors, we truly overcome the 'dualistic' cognition and understand the Earthly-sensory realm, with all its lawful metamorphoses of nature and culture, as one and the same with the Spirit world, the only World there is or could be. The whole thought of the sensory world as a 'simulation' simply loses meaning for us, except as the loosest of metaphors to help anchor the intuition of how our inner movements structure the perceptual flow.