Making Dreams a Reality. Prophantasia: Experiences, Musings and related Madness

Second Life By this time it was coming to the end of the summer and with the changing of seasons came a much greater change within me. Body and Mind       "It's not that you are what you eat... You are what you don't poop."      - A wise friend.   I developed a very peaceful attitude to the world. From the beginning of my practices I had took it upon myself to try to adhere to the Buddhist Eight-fold Noble Path. I had been doing this for many weeks. I gave up bad habits of the body and was working also to let go of the bad habits of the mind. I stopped eating meat, I stopped biting my nails and so on and so forth. The process of giving up corporeal matters came quite easily with some resolve. As for the process of letting go of negative mental habits... I made rapid initial progress but from my contemporary standpoint I would summarise: The process continues.   Before all of this I was a strong proponent of science as the primary means t...

Moulding the Wax "The mind of man is not passive wax upon which experience writes its whimsical will. It is an active organ which moulds and coordinates sensations into ideas, an organ which transforms the chaotic multiplicity of experience into the ordered unity of thought."       - Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy".   This post is dedicated to defining a set of guidelines to highlight the perils of taking on beliefs about oneself and world at large by examinations into the mind by the kind of waking lucid dreaming I've written about up to this point. I offer these in the hopes of making known the proclivity of people to attribute some greater authority to the meaning of perceived visions and their interactions. In doing so, they fall victim to a kind of cognitive blind spot where somehow because the workings of your imagination are experienced to come "from the outside" - greater credence is lent to their meaning which impacts upon the observer...

Intervention Away From The Divine On being open minded. My days by this point tended to consist of carrying out my job then completing my tasks and getting something to eat before spending most of the rest of the evening exploring these waking dreams. I also spent a good deal of time exploring various psychological and Buddhist literature to try to find clues to the phenomena I was experiencing - hoping for at least a similar account to what I had experienced. Up to that point I considered myself a person purely of science and strongly dismissed any notion of the prospect of higher beings or magical thinking for lack of any evidence - despite experiments even having been done to verify claims of such. Unfortunately, I slowly became drawn towards the Buddhist descriptions of strange attainments achieved through meditation. The descriptions of the abilities are steeped within mysticism and I foolishly became sympathetic to the prospect of treating their possibility from an agnostic stand...

The Initiation of a Dreamwalker "Suddenly I myself became possessed of a kind of augmented sight. Over and above the luminous and shadowy chaos arose a picture which, though vague, held the elements of consistency and permanence. It was indeed somewhat familiar, for the unusual part was superimposed upon the usual terrestrial scene much as a cinema view may be thrown upon the painted curtain of a theatre."     --  "From Beyond" by H.P. Lovecraft. The next day I was well swept up by my curiosity and resolved to explore this strange dreamscape. I sat once again in quiet focus and produced the prescribed conditions for this weird portal to manifest. Once again, it appeared with the same qualities as it had previously and I proceeded to investigate. This time I had a friend with me during the experience who was sitting quietly and observing. I spoke to him about what I saw (I asked if he could see it - obviously he could not). The strange series of shifting hieroglyphic...

Entering the Imaginarium "Don't believe everything you read. Especially The Mirror."       -- The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus After some time experimenting with the previous discoveries I began to focus my efforts on the aspect I had developed which gave the impression of darkening my environment. I thought that it may have presented an avenue for greater exploration and so my practice then proceeded to sit in concentration in my dimly lit meditation area. This area was actually enclosed with no windows so the only light was either by the array of dim-able spot bulbs set into the ceiling or by candle-light. To create a steady source of light I set the dimmer switch to roughly 20-30% of maximum brightness which provided suitably low levels of darkness for experimentation but still enough to see everything in the room and even read by comfortably. I focused on creating the perception of darkness within the environment around me. Since I had been practicing this fro...

Playing with Fire (and Shadows) "Do not try and bend the spoon, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth...there is no spoon. Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself. " -- The Matrix.   If you are just starting to read my blog and beginning with this post I really recommend you start with the earliest post instead on Kasina meditation since this is more or less a development of aspects where the context does have a degree of dependence on the earlier materials.   After a time following previous developments that I had thoroughly started to enjoy by now, I started to embark on another pursuit. As I would sometimes sit in meditation in a well-prepared space with low-lighting but for some candles I would often stare into the flame and after a while the area around the candle would start to take on a kind of dream-like quality which I just presume was a kind of dissociation of the senses. I started to notice errors in ...

Hyperassociation “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it.”      -- Bertolt Brecht.   In my practice of building up the ability to imagine by various practice there came a point where the action of actively trying to produce things to imagine was offset by a desire to think of a subject and allow for my imagination to itself then generate an accompanying image. Simply put then it is rather than say "I want to imagine what an apple looks like" I would instead prefer that I think "it is tasty" and see what is brought into my imagination. A discussion of cultivating this aspect is here which ties into Buddhist philosophy with the activity of "mindfulness". I think it is interesting to segregate the regular discourse of mental activity which typically, from my own experience, prescribes that something should be thought about (imagined) with the notion of turning this slightly around on it's head and instead letting the im...

Next steps in the cultivation of abilities. At this point I had been practicing Kasina meditation for three weeks for long periods during the day and made progress while discovering the various aspects and side-effects. I gave up this practice after this time in favor of another technique that may have played a role in strengthening the abilities for the various phantasias. This was "metta meditiation". I will describe my experience and the justification for why I think this potentially played a role. For those who may be interested in repeating similar steps I will certainly say that this is not my attempt at prescribing some particular way of achieving these things but, in my view, is just an outcrop of any practice that serves to continuously push yourself to build up the capabilities of your imagination. To this end I will also be adding my own thoughts on why these exercises may be useful so the reader can take these ponderings in the abstract and form their own methodol...

Kasina Meditation and Prophantasia Six years ago I started practicing a form of meditation called Kasina meditation. This form of meditation comes from the Buddhist tradition. From this practice and activities relating to it I developed my imagination to a degree such that I possess the ability of "prophantasia" which is the ability to project, in a controlled manner, aspects of my imagination outwards in such a way that it overlays what is perceived as the external input from my senses. For example, this means I can imagine what an apple might look like and see it in such a manner that it takes the quality of having a clear external presence within my surroundings instead of just within my own mind. This journey into exploring my mind was a long one and came with many surprises. The purpose of the earlier parts of this blog is to try to record these experiences with a generally neutral tone to which then I will add my own conjecture and opinions while also trying to stick t...