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There is nothing on this site to buy. The author of this web site is a beginner, not a guru. He has taught himself the relevant skills at a beginner level only, and as someone who has recently done this, he hopes to help other beginners while he is fresh from having just done it. He has a lot of experience as a beginner, having been a beginner since 1970.

UNWORLDING

Table of Contents Introduction: Unworlding the Art Form Formerly Known as "Oooobeeeey" --------------

Part One: Philosophy and Method -----------------------------------------------------------What Beliefs are Good For -----------------------------------------------------------------------------What is the Nothing and Why Does it Matter? ---------------------------------------------------The TV is On, Don't Look -------------------------------------------------------------------------------The Path: the Short and the Long of It --------------------------------------------------------------The Religion Trap and Why it Exists -----------------------------------------------------------------IMP: The Instantly Malleable Personality ----------------------------------------------------------Reincarnation: the Facts --------------------------------------------------------------------------------How Can Everything Be Equally Unreal? ----------------------------------------------------------Something Tells Me --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------What's Wrong with Attachment to Results? ------------------------------------------------------The Final Word on Soul Aspects, the Loosh Eaters ----------------------------------------------Where Is the Center of the World? -----------------------------------------------------------------How to Wake up from the Dream ------------------------------------------------------------------A New 3D Map of the Worlds ------------------------------------------------------------------------The Most Methodless of Methods: the Breath of Flight ---------------------------------------

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DEDICATION The art of a hunter is to become inaccessible... To be inaccessible means that you touch the world around you sparingly. You don't use and squeeze... To be unavailable means that you deliberately avoid exhausting yourself... It means that you are not hungry and desperate, like the poor bastard that feels he will never eat again and devours all the food he can... A hunter knows he will lure game into his traps over and over again, so he doesn't worry. To worry is to become accessible, unwittingly accessible. And once you worry you cling to anything out of desperation; and once you cling you are bound to get exhausted or to exhaust whoever or whatever you are clinging to. --Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan In learning to unworld for the first time, to increase the frequency of results, or to overcome a dry spell, your mindset is of key importance and method is not. This explains beginners' luck as well as the providential confidence brought by experience. Statements patterned after A and B below are wrong even when they seem true on occasion. A: "If you do X you will not be able to unworld." B: "If you do Y you will be able to unworld." It's not what you do; it's who you are. And it's not who you are; it's who you manage to be. Even intent is useless since we don't consciously know the location of our own magic buttons. Mindset, on the other hand, is something we can do something about, and fortunately it is the backbone of every successful unworlding experience. Example: "If you don't practice enough..." Wrong. Good try, but wrong. This is not the Olympics. We're trying to do something we do in our sleep every night, but just to do it with a bit more awareness. Forget the work ethic, as we develop a picture of what the right mindset is. Why do some people get it right the first time they try, and then fail daily for months? Why do some people literally stumble onto unworlding with no practice? In a field of endeavor where the notions of progress and methodology are just notions, and where subjectivity trumps science, where it's a law that all things are equally unreal, where goals held by the endeavor's practitioners are phenomena considered impossible by a large proportion of people, I've found that all techniques are practically equal. Not that techniques of unworlding should be trashed; we need our vehicles to get from here to there. But while the map is not the ground, it's also true that the vehicle can't use the map without the driver's participation at every stage of the game. Map or no map, the unskilled navigator literally has to stumble in the dark long enough to find his own way without being put out of commission. Without a key, most drivers would fail, and a little stumbling can be discouraging.

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It is a rare mindset, that elusive magical attitude, that ever actually gets the hoped-for results. Meanwhile, evidence is piling up that all experiences are unworldings. In common language, everything is a dream; or as science now believes, everything is a function of a collapsed probability wave. And here we sit with our fingers in our brains, knowing more about it than any number of scientists who try to do everything the hard way on purpose. There are many valid reasons why the types of dreams most sleeping people usually have don't happen to be the types of dreams that unworlders want to have. These perfectly good reasons for the existence of discouragement stand up on their own merit while the methods developed to knock them down are inherently unreliable. In the end, it doesn't matter what unworlding method you use, because if you have the right mindset, you can practice unworlding while you walk down the street or while you eat your breakfast. In fact there are even some people who find it hard to stay focused in the real world, who unworld without wanting to. And among those few hypnotists who are actually famous for their abilities, no schoolroom on earth could have taught them more than a small fraction of the savant's ability. An intuitive knowing made those rare individuals the masters of other people's states of mind. Fortunately, it's much easier to learn how to influence one's own mental state than it is to influence and build an intended mindset in another person. Most people can create a reasonable facsimile of their own custom mindset once they know exactly what mindset they seek. But the question remains: what is the one set of mental conditions that, as an ideal, literally guarantees the practitioner entry, at will, into non-ordinary realities? This book is dedicated to you, because only you can create, uncreate, and re-create custom worlds for yourself to inhabit. This remains true, no matter what you read in any book on unworlding including this one. But speaking of mindset, here is the dream I had immediately after I wrote the above diatribe in the middle of the night after a few hours of sleep. I quote directly from my dream journal: 2017-01-08 8:30 pm [To bed. Intent-o-genda is to merge with Whirly (my higher self) and experience all of my chakras/dream bodies from his perspective.] 2016-01-09 12:35 am [To bed after writing a new dedication for Unworlding.] 12:55 am "GongGong Gets It Right"

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[Background: This afternoon as I was the first to leave a birthday party where I was terribly bored, the last person I spoke to was 10-year-old GongGong, who was just arriving with a friend. As a very small child, GG had been socially inept, beaten routinely by his father and bullied by all his peers because he never knew what to do or say in order to join in with the group. His first real friend, my son, was instructed by me to let him into the clique and stop making him out to be a misfit. By now GG is a normal, happy kid with lots of friends. The following dream is also about Whirly, who was known for years as Stumped-No-More the Fearless Fiddler, an ancient, crippled, homeless, mystical musician who I encountered in the best dream I ever had, over 35 years ago. Like the dream I had in 1980, this was a very unusual dream and words don't do it justice.] At the birthday party, it's misty, foggy, I can barely see. I merge with GongGong. I pick up two drumsticks and start banging on a drum, a fast perfect solo. I am amazed at my sudden proficiency because I--GongGong--am making truly beautiful music. The rhythm falls out of me effortlessly in a beautiful, flowing outpouring of raw passion. I continue with unabated perfect self-expression in a state of ecstasy for about two minutes or so, until the music I am making is no longer drum music, but a variety of instruments channeled straight from soul to atmosphere. I become lucid enough to know that my wife will notice me sobbing ecstatically, but I don't care. I am somehow transported to a nice, spacious old apartment that I have just moved to (new place = new mindset). I really like this place. I find myself wandering aimlessly, looking at furniture I haven't used yet. The place is black and white--old white plaster walls, high ceilings, and very dark old wood trim and old-fashioned dark-stained furniture, all old and funky but comfortable and clean. There's a knock on the door which surprises me because I'm new here and don't know anybody. I open the door cautiously, wanting to see who it is before opening it all the way. It's a woman about 35-40 years old, dowdy, with shoulder length, auburn, wavey hair. Workingclass type, not the intellectual or artiste sort that would appeal to me. She says something about three things they want me to do with them. I don't get exactly what she's referring to, but I hear a loud TV from an open apartment door to the right of my door. I figure she's inviting me to watch a World Series or the like, and I tell her thanks, but I don't have time for TV. By the time I'm done saying this, she's already gone and I can hear her walking into her apartment saying something to her roommates which I assume is derogatory toward me. But I'm unaffected by this, and just glad she didn't insist. I'm back alone in my awesome studio ready to create something, so what shall I create? I see a long, narrow dark-colored desk and can't wait to sit at it and write something, but what? Oh Yeah! I almost forgot, I have to write down the dream I just had about GongGong! It's

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amazing how quickly I forgot about it. I see that there's no desk lamp on the bare desk, so I look up and see a light fixture directly above the desk on the ceiling. I head over to the wall to switch on the light, and wake up, my face wet with tears.

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UNWORLDING: THE METHODLESS METHOD OF ASTRAL PROJECTION To my mind, successful astral projection is not so much to do with finding the right technique, but is all to do with achieving the correct degree of mental understanding. For me, realising that the physical-body springs forth from the Mind, and not the other way around, was a major turning point which led to my making a big leap forward in my development. --Frank Kepple, Astral Pulse Forum, February 15, 2003 The purpose of this website is to serve as a guide and summary reminder to the many folks caught in a struggle to "get out of their body". Whether it is your goal to have OBEs or "out-ofbody experiences," "astral projections," "lucid dreams," or "phase experiences," this is the place to come for the simplified nuts and bolts of how to break through into the new worlds you long to experience. Basically, what we're all looking for is a methodless method, a simple knowing and doing that, by virtue of its own raw factuality, puts us over the edge, and that works for anybody who invests time and effort into it. In this vein, let's start with the basics: in what direction to adjust your beliefs before you start, so you will not be like those who are doomed to fail. The cast of characters in this attempt: a body, a mind, a world... and they are all the same thing. The mind does not dwell inside the body and the body does not dwell inside the world. The world does not dwell within the universe and the universe does not dwell within reality. When you realize the truth of this, you will automatically reject from a deep level most of the techniques out there, because they get you tied up in the delusional hope of "leaving the body". Delusional not because it is unreal--it is very real--but because it is no longer about somehow managing to do impossible-sounding things. You will experience new confidence when you stop believing the distortions being pushed by... ...new age writers ...wanna-be gurus ...people who practically fall "out of their body" with little or no effort ...people who worked hard to learn the skill, but have a hard time figuring out what they did because they didn't really keep track and/or lack skills of observation and/or description ...seminar hucksters, most of them well-meaning and good-intentioned, i.e. sincerely wrong, and the rest of them just plain after your money. I am here to remind you that you experience expanded worlds every single time you go to sleep, so all you have to do is slow down the process and learn to notice what's going on so

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you can go to sleep a little differently, making small adjustments till you get what you're looking for. My main interest is in helping people like me who want to explore the nature of reality by exploring reality itself, first-hand, in expanded states of consciousness that are completely natural and which do not involve any strange beliefs, chemicals or illegal activities. Fortunately there are some simple ways of most effectively going about this search for usable mapmaking experience, and that's what I describe on this website. In fact, if you would like to skip the rest of this website and start now, I'll give you the secret up front, and if you find that you need more information, come back and get it. Here it is: make sure you experience many awakenings every day. You can put yourself into many little sleeps by lying down with a dark mask over your eyes and doing some deep breathing exercises. Assuming that most people would like more information, let's move on to the interesting theory and slightly expanded practices that I will teach on this site. The first thing to do is to reject the notions of sleep, dream and death. We do not inhabit realities or environments of being, because these places are not places, but rather states of awareness which change depending on what we focus our attention on. No, we do not sleep, we do not dream, we do not die; these convenient and popular shorthand terms are only for people whose interest in the phenomena is superficial. We who wish to consciously navigate states of reality expanded beyond the superficial, habitual limitations will eventually learn to get over the mass delusion that keeps us returning to the same reality every day. We have to pay attention and notice that we create our experiences and experience them as we create them. We literally breathe our physical world into existence. We believe our personal sense of reality into being. But no, I am not going to make you responsible for trying to force your own belief systems to change and then blame you when this doesn't happen. What I'm going to teach you is a simple, physically accomplished process, a process which takes place in the reality that you already know, and it's not that much different from what we already do. Without a lot of overly detailed instructions, I will teach you how to teach yourself how to recognize the tiniest of movements away from typical reality and this practice will develop its own momentum depending on how much interest you invest into it. Unlike complicated rituals, the methodless method I teach gives small results quickly and you will accumulate success and confidence starting immediately, probably whether you realize it or not, at first. Instead of sending you on a wild goose chase to experience that amazing transcendental experience just like the ones you are always reading about, I am going to teach you a few simple physical actions which will get you over the hump and out of your so-called dry spell. You will stop using the term "dry spell" when you realize that you know how to do this and only your willingness and interest in actually taking the time can stand between you and your goals. Best of all, what I will teach you is easy to do. A lot of gurus will foist a lot of extra steps on you and make it sound hard. The problem is not that it's hard. The problem is that you've inherited the belief that it's hard, and literally no one

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who teaches this skill for money is going to tell you any different because their expanded ego and budget need you to achieve your goal of experiencing expanded realities as slowly as possible! But instead of focusing on your wrong beliefs and trying to change them, all you have to do is choose a positive, productive direction to go in, using a few simple actions. Does this all sound like an info-mercial or a come-on? Well it isn't, because I have nothing to sell. The whole answer is right here on this page, so keep reading. Your body-mind-world is a little stuck, as you know; that's one reason you--or parts of you-want out of it. But what you really want, if you're like me, is to expand into a greater reality. Bigger, better, freer, more interesting, more amazing, more otherworldly, more transcendent, more relevant, more... whatever. Your goals and beliefs are none of my business. Is any part of you tired of self-appointed gurus with big egos telling you what to think? I am, and that's why I kept looking through the OBE literature till I found the basic framework for THE OBE induction strategy, so you and I can custom-design our own inductions depending on our own needs, interests, beliefs, and personalities. Not that it matters to your progress whether or not you believe me, but you found this website because your world, your reality, is ready to change into an expanded world. You want so badly for that to happen that you are actually listening to a man on a soapbox, the internet's most overabundant resource. I do not apologize for trying hard to help you get what you want. You are more than ready to create new worlds and you probably don't realize how easy it is. So let's get started on exactly that.

MY BELIEF SYSTEM Unlike every other half-baked noob out there, let me assure you that I am only a half-baked noob and also unlike the rest, I will not lie and tell you that I have no dogma or belief system to espouse. Before I present the simple actions you can take to relieve yourself of whatever it is that shackles you to what we are still calling "reality," albeit euphemistically, I will summarize my beliefs here and expand on them throughout this book. If you skip this section, it will still be here when you come back. The real answers are in the next sections of this chapter. This part is strictly philosophy, the mechanics underlying how reality works, why things are the way they are. There is only one thing in the universes that is real, and that is awareness. Everything is made of awareness. Awareness is infinite, in fact awareness is infinity itself. Physicality, commonly thought to be "the 3rd dimension," is actually the third harmonic of awareness. We cannot experience raw, pure awareness as individuals. There is only one soul, and that is awareness. To experience any reality as an individual, you have to shut out the part of infinity that is not you. Thereby losing track of the better part of an infinity of awareness, but that's OK, because we've already ended up as individuals. For better or worse, that's what

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we are, though sometimes it's a nightmare, fortunately it seems nothing except awareness itself is permanent. So in order to be individuals, we do without the rest of the universe; the world is all "outside" of us. That separation is the second harmonic of awareness. In its many ways, as the first overtone of awareness, 2ness creates the worlds. Of course the fundamental harmonic of awareness is Oneness or awareness itself, the pure stuff, but it can't be split up into us. The purpose of awareness having seemingly describable aspects (harmonics of reality which co-exist with the source infinity) is so that infinite awareness can examine, perceive and experience itself. So awareness can experience being individuals instead of only being infinite and pure awareness. Which is necessary or you couldn't call it infinity to begin with. Infinity has to be capable of literally absolutely everything as well as absolutely nothing. Thus it cannot be properly described. Otherwise, infinite it is not. The fourth harmonic of awareness is order, which is experienced in many ways, one of which is time, the ordering of moments. 4ness covers all orderings; it is Order itself. After that, there are several more harmonics of awareness, which will be discussed in later chapters. The conscious mind and the physical body, as well as the real world or consensus reality, are all the same thing. When you reconfigure the mind, you change the world and as OBE'rs like to say, you might even "leave the body". We do this every time we go to sleep. The conscious mind is generally configured to be some unique-to-you, habitual combination of 2ness, 3ness, and 4ness: individuality, physicality, and time. If you change the configuration a little, you feel like a different person; the world looks different to you; you might even experience expanded states of being. If you change the configuration (shift the definitions, connections and structures) enough, you will experience expanded states. For example, we will learn how to experience an expanded awareness called The Nothing, which is the Door to Everything. We'll get to that. First you have to learn how to have any expanded awareness experience at all, and the philosophy needed for that is next to nothing. The basic common elements of the human form are as summarized above. Then along comes 5ness, which is change. Fiveness or change/fluidity/motion is the doorway to the higher realms of the ordinary human experience: 6ness through 8ness. Nineness is your escape vehicle. Your completed dreambody; your escape vehicle from this stifling reality zone.

YOU SHOULD DO THESE TWO THINGS For now, just let me state that the highest of the seven overtones of awareness (harmonics 2 thru 8, which correspond to the seven chakras) is 8ness. And 8ness is expansion, among other descriptions, which in this practice could be characterized as the ability to relax no matter what. This is one of the skills you should be nurturing 24/7, so anything you do that helps you achieve this--except of course mind-altering substances--can become part of your practice as

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desired. For example, sitting down and not thinking about anything for 20 minutes twice a day. Some call it meditation, a scary word to many. It isn't necessary unless you literally don't know how to stop talking to yourself and relax your mind, in which case it might be more than a little helpful, bordering on essential. But don't fall for anyone's associated religion: do not drink the Kool-Aid. The other thing you should probably do, in addition to the activities detailed below, is to write down everything that happens to you in expanded realities such as what we call "dreams". The act of keeping a dream journal in detail is at least as important as the details you keep. Just the act of caring enough about expanded realities to pay attention to them is largely what reconfigures your intent to become conscious of expanded reality environments. So for most people, the dream journal is not optional. The exception is someone who remembers everything they dream without writing any of it down.

YOU REALLY SHOULD READ THIS PART Notwithstanding the fact that I do in fact have a belief system which I've developed over the course of 60+ years and intensely enjoy believing in, it's doubtful that you need to study or understand it in order to proceed with your own efforts. And I will not ask you to delete, whole hog, your own belief system. Nor even to know what it is that you really believe, deep inside. Unlike the obstacle mongers, I will not ask you to do irrelevant things in order to achieve your goal. But I will ask you to stop using all the currently popular terms for that thing you think you can't do. You should not call our endeavor... ..."OBE" (because we are not in a body, so we should not be trying to escape from one; our body is just the complementary inner partner of our outer world). ..."LUCID DREAM" (because everything is a dream; the experiences we crave are not earthshatteringly special in this regard, nor are they difficult to attain). ..."DREAM" (everything is a dream; all experience is on the same spectrum. I still use this term, so when I find a better one, I'll have to rewrite this whole book. For example, this sentence: "Life is a dream too.") ..."PHASE EXPERIENCE" (unless you're an electronics engineer or a physics enthusiast, you probably don't even want to know what this term is supposed to mean). So what are we gonna call this thing? Welcome to unworlding.com, where we learn how to do "unworlding". Our plan here is to stop being stuck in any particular reality. Instead we plan to learn how to experience expanded reality. I will not replace "OBE" with another meaningless acronym. Since I want to experience

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expanded realities that's what I'll say. Expanded realities. Altered states of awareness of the sober kind. For short: unworlding. We do it every time we go to sleep. We do it when we die. Unworlding is the most natural thing in the world. One of the most fulfilling steps toward accomplishing it consciously and on purpose is to stop listening to the gurus trying to make it sound hard. As a final philosophical point, I want to urge you to try and become lucid during the waking dream we call "real life". This just means that you should find yourself continuously wondering how this awesome, ridiculous, unbelievable world we seem to inhabit together could possibly be anything other than a dream. This action, if frequently undertaken with sincerity, will spill over into the nightly excursions we mistake for random brain farts.

THE FOUR STAGES OF UNWORLDING Finally, as promised, here are the activities you need to practice daily, in four main stages, to accomplish unworlding. This is a practice which you should do over and over, hopefully every day. The more times you repeat this simple exercise, the more quickly you will become proficient at dissolving the world we think we know and experiencing expanded states of being. Starting with stage zero--the one that makes the other three actually work--do these things when you're ready to begin a practice session:

STAGE ZERO: MINDSET --Lie down in any position and close your eyes. Use a dark mask if you want, but no other gadgets are allowed. I consider earplugs a worse distraction than noise, because needing them trains you to notice distractions. Instead, the right attitude is to not let noise affect you. This is a matter of deciding that, without exception, other peoples' noise doesn't affect your state of mind. You can sit in a chair if you prefer, and it doesn't have to be that comfortable depending on how sleepy you are and how motivated you are. --Take several deep breaths. If you manage to get more air than you want, so much the better; but lie down before you fall down. Enjoy the buzzy sensation from breathing more than you're used to. Enjoy the way it relaxes your mind and body. --Relax your mind and body. The mind is not in the brain, but since most people think it is, if you pretend your brain is a muscle and relax it, the result can be interesting. Relax your whole body, especially your eyes. Don't overdo the notion of bodily relaxation, as that would be a matter of focusing on the body and the body is not our focus. Trying hard to relax is a contradiction in terms and is anti-productive.

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--Stop talking to yourself. This is essential. --Detach yourself from hoping or longing for results. Approach this session as a dry run, just a learning of certain key activities. Know that your effort will pay off at the right time, and then proceed with detachment, focus, mild curiosity, enthusiasm, and confidence. None of the steps listed above as part of Stage Zero should take very long at all to establish as the background for what will follow. If you find you are totally incompetent in any of the activities listed, practice it separately. But these are quick steps to check off a mental do-list, not to be dwelt on painstakingly during the session, or else you'll either get bored, discouraged, distracted, or go to sleep. At this point you are ready for the next step.

STAGE ONE: NOTICING With your eyes closed and doing nothing, see with your mind instead. You think there's nothing to see with your eyes closed? Stop thinking that! Remember, you are supposed to be not talking to yourself. Notice with your attention, not your eyes. With your eyes closed, your field of vision is a full sphere, 360 degrees, completely unlimited. Pretend for a second, stop worrying about it, and things will develop quickly. Especially at first, it is two steps forward and one step back, so if you lose images--and you will do so constantly--it means you got somewhere, not don't drop the torch, just plow forward. For me it's mostly images at first, but if I try harder to Notice, there will be images and aurages of all kinds. Aurages are the aural version of images: sizzling, buzzing, clicks, rattles, thumps, voices and other heard but not "real" things. Images: dots and smears and fogs and patterns, even whole scenes. What the heck: feelages... sensations of movement, sensations of hot or cold, wind on the back of your neck, whatever. The sky's not the limit, there isn't one. The expanded worlds of sensation are all perfectly normal and it's just a matter of noticing them more than usual. You don't have to create these images and there is almost no visualization involved. The universe is a great wall of intensity, you are being barraged with infinity at all times without having to create one drop of it. You will learn to gradually open the filters that keep you safe in a rigid reality, and Notice a bit of what's really out there. With your 5+ senses' usual playground ignored, awareness has a way of selecting its own display effortlessly and automatically from the infinite resources of the remote mind. Your job is to notice this stuff, no matter how vague it is. If you can't, then you are not finished with Step Zero: Mindset. For example, if you talk to yourself too much, you won't have enough focus of attention to Notice something that isn't physically there. But don't beat yourself up over it and don't start over. Just stop talking to yourself and refocus on what you're doing. Do it with intent and when you're more or less steadily sensing things without your physical senses, especially without your eyes or ears, then you're ready to move on to the next step.

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Don't get carried away and don't be too hard on yourself if you're new to this. If you stay in Stage One Noticing too long, you might bore yourself to death, because these Noticings are extremely easy to conjure up and most of them aren't too vivid or interesting right at first. You'll find that there are actually two stages to Noticing, so keep it interesting by moving on to the second stage of Noticing as soon as you can. First stage is Forced Noticing. Initially you might almost have to imagine that the blackness of your closed eyelids is not just pure black. Almost. Sometimes, especially if you get the Mindset really right and jump into bed with enthusiasm to leap into the Unworld, you will skip this stage and go directly to the second kind of Noticing, which is Spontaneous Noticing, in which fleeting, insubstantial images appear almost effortlessly. But if you find images overwhelmingly big, 3D, full-color, and selfsustaining, you've probably passed over Spontaneous Noticing too and landed in the Projection Room (see below).

STAGE TWO: CLIMBING THE BEANSTALK I have renamed Bob Monroe's "rundown" as popularized by Frank Kepple, so it's now called "Climbing the Beanstalk" or "Beanpole" for short, even if your Beanpole activity is not related to gardening at all. Your personal Beanpole can be designed by you in advance, and memorized by doing a few dry runs. And I encourage you to rename it anything you want if "Climbing the Beanstalk" doesn't pique your interest. Your Beanpole is a set of imagined activities. "Visualization" is the wrong word; it doesn't matter if you mentally see yourself doing these things or not, though you probably will to some extent. Do not focus on perfecting the imagination, just run through it with a usable Mindset (see above, Stage Zero). For example, last time I ran through my Beanpole jumping, doing flips, hanging from my knees on poles, banging and drumming on things to make sounds for me to hear, I stayed awake a little longer than usual and, oddly enough, I had two lucid dreams that night. A sense of spontaneity and improvisation is often in order; anything that tells your dream bodies to "Wake up, I am not going to sleep bored seeking unconsciousness, I want to play!" Some people might need less mental horseplay to keep them awake. One excellent and level-headed YouTube teacher just counts backwards from 300 at the rate of his breathing. When he quit drinking coffee, he reported a relative dry spell. I told him he had to talk to himself a bit more, so he started counting at the rate of his heartbeat instead of the slower rate of his breath, and his practice picked back up again. Counting only works for me if I can think of a reason to get excited about it, so my Beanpole is more complicated. Unless you're a real natural at this stuff like the guy who only has to count to keep himself awake, the activities you choose for your Beanpole should engage your 5+ senses. For example, if you imagine bouncing a ball, then eating a hot dog with ketchup and mustard on it, then drinking cold water, you will have engaged the five senses as well as a sense of motion

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and a sense of hot and cold. Not to mention doing something repetitive, which is also important, because it allows you to sneak up to the border of sleep without scaring it away. The melodramatic, easily bored part of your conscious mind is useless to you at all stages of this enterprise and a somewhat repetitive, not too interesting Beanpole routine will help put this useless portion of the conscious mind to sleep while keeping the friendly, relaxed, happy, spontaneous, playful part of your conscious mind awake to see what is going to happen. And your Beanpole routine should be long enough that you won't have to repeat it over every few seconds, unless you really want to. Mine's a little longer because I am easily bored. This balland-hot-dog routine would not be for me since I'd have to get out of bed and brush my teeth after eating a hot dog, so I will give my own real Beanpole in another article, which is considerably more interesting, transcendent, and engaging. Hint: it involves cheese and wine instead of hot dog. Personalize this stuff. All of it. You need confidence to unworld, to function in the Unworld, and to do anything worth doing once you get there. Might as well start with the confidence bit while you're in the early stages of preparation. Plan from the start to have fun and go all out. Intend to make mistakes and you'll learn twice as fast. The activities you choose to imagine as your Beanpole should be interesting and engaging to you, but not so interesting and engaging as to divert you from the purpose of the exercise, which is to allow you to drop into near-sleep and stay there for a period of time. If you find the Beanpole activity too interesting, or if it reminds you of the mundane obligations you're trying to escape temporarily, you won't approach sleep; if the activity is not engaging enough, you will fall asleep too easily and stay asleep too long. The eventual result of this exercise is to keep you hovering in and around the borderline of sleep. Repetitive practice is needed in this area. Developing the ability to navigate near sleep without plunging into deep unconsciousness is the main goal. Short lapses into sleep are what we're looking for. The shorter the better, so that you can experience anywhere from five to twenty awakenings in a single session. It's a fact of life that whatever we try too hard to catch up with, we push away from us. So the Beanpole allows us to approach near-sleep tangentially, instead of getting in sleep's face and scaring it away. We tell ourselves that we are imagining some Climbing-the-Beanstalk activity, and we do that instead of generating resistance, which is all we would accomplish by telling ourselves we are going to go nearly to sleep while somehow keeping the mind awake. So we don't talk about sleep very much in these parts; we prefer to reframe sleepings as...

STAGE THREE: AWAKENINGS For every lapse into sleep there is an Awakening, and it is the Awakening that is most important. Upon Awakening from any lapse of consciousness, short or long, remain still with your eyes closed and immediately ask yourself, "What Just Happened?" and whatever it was, recall it in excruciating detail. Dictate it into a mental dream journal. Then go back to your

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Beanpole. Since I am slightly experienced now, I can get up and write it down in detail and lie down and go right back to the Beanpole and have another awakening. Doing it this way kinda flies in the face of the Discouragement Fraternity who are trying to tell you to lie still for three hours and wait for your guardian angel's permission to do what you know how to do in your sleep. In short this sort of thing increases your confidence level for later on when your further afield and your guardian angel is caught napping. What you will find is that during the lapses, which will hopefully last only seconds or minutes, you are experiencing expanded environments of awareness. What you are doing is learning to approach the unknown with your mental eyes open. This can take a lot of purposeful awakenings to accomplish, so daily practice is a necessity for most people. You will have many tiny but interesting and relevant experiences, and you will get better and better at it until you are accomplished at expanding the environments in which you are able to experience awareness. You cannot possibly over-estimate the importance of paying close attention to "What Just Happened" when you experience a sudden Awakening from any lapse or change in consciousness. In fact, this is a good way to induce lucidity (remembering who you are, where you are, what you were doing a minute ago) in a dream. What you're looking for in the Awakenings stage is a spontaneous switch of perspective from the Beanpole, in which--possibly after a short lapse in awareness--you will suddenly realize your awareness has changed from an imagined, memorized set of activities, which you were probably experiencing as a vaguely imagined, pretend scene in the third person--watching yourself as a "he" or a "she"--to a spontaneously generated scene that you are experiencing first person, as "I". A beginner might not quite Notice this happen for a moment or two, thus the "lapse". If you do go to sleep and seem to get nothing out of it, don't beat yourself up for it. Just adjust your Beanpole imaginings to something more lively, something that will keep you from diving under cover of the first cloud of deep unconsciousness that you see out there on the fringes of the expanded environment. Some people get a whiff of unconsciousness and automatically go that way, out of lifelong habit. But who knows, next time you fall asleep, you might have the most memorable experience of your life. Who's to say you won't? AN EXAMPLE FROM MY EXPERIENCE When I read the above methodless method in Frank Kepple's writings (FranksPosts.pdf, available free from Astral Pulse forum), I knew he was barking up the right tree because I had recently had a similar experience myself. In my case, I was confined to a hospital bed with a dark mask over my eyes because of an illness that gave me non-stop headaches. So I was not thinking or talking to myself, because it hurt to do so. Therefore I was in the Spontaneous Noticing stage all the time, seeing images

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almost constantly, with regular quick dips into the Projection Poom, which is Beyond Noticing. I let this happen on purpose, encouraged it, because I wanted to get my money's worth out of this trip to the hospital. I was not hallucinating; I could stop the images at any time by talking to myself or someone else, or just by opening my eyes. At one point I saw with my mind a ridge of soil a few inches high, and decided it would be more interesting if it were a very tall dike with me standing on top of it getting ready to jump off. So I just changed my perspective and it became a tall dike. What impressed me was that, once I was standing on top of the tall dike, looking over the precipice gave me butterflies in my stomach. This surprising spontaneous feelage told me that I was already having an experience of expanded reality, very close to a true switch to first person perspective, so I jumped off the precipice. More butterflies, big time. A real experience, not just visualization. I landed in some soft sand. There were people walking around in this sandy place, and there were some ancient buildings made of stone. I had the tiniest lapse of consciousness, and then... I'm a woman, and I am going somewhere specific, looking for a certain building. I look at the building on my left, the steps up to the door on the side of the building, and the writing on the wall next to the door. I can read the writing, but I can't get it to stick in my mind long enough to memorize it... Wait a second! What just happened? It was a switch to first person perspective in a spontaneous vision with me as full participant. It took me completely by surprise, as the lapse of consciousness was miniscule, almost unnoticeable. In fact, I did not "fall asleep" in order to experience this other world where people walk around in the sand. It happened too quickly. But from the feelage of butterflies in my stomach, to the flight down, to the switch into the expanded environment, to the switch back and the "What Just Happened," the experience was transcendent and real. It was Beyond Noticing and even beyond the Projection Room. I wasn't the slightest bit sleepy or dreamy when it happened. It happened effortlessly. It took me by surprise. There was no reason why I should have tried to experience "leaving my body" in order to have this experience; such a superfluous mental obstacle would have prevented the experience entirely. These experiences come in great variety. With each added Awakening from an experience of expanded environment, you will develop greater confidence. It is this confidence from personal experience that ultimately gives you the prolonged, transcendent, expanded reality experiences you crave. Not reading another book or attending a seminar by some guru who has his own marketing division.

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That's about all there is to it. I know, you wanted it to be harder, more abstract, less doable. Because, unlike the methods suggested by others, this one is doable. And now that you have something to do, it's up to you to do it. It is not at all about "getting out of your body." It's all about retraining your attention a little bit at a time to make your dreams capable of coming true so that when you are ready to expand your awareness, you will do so, and you'll Notice it when it happens, and it will be counted as a success on your journey. That's how you will learn most quickly and easily to experience expanded realities.

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WHAT BELIEFS ARE GOOD FOR We have done ourselves a great injustice in this field of unworlding by using terminology that is as close as possible to the things we think we know but at the same time, it is terminology that we take for granted without actually having any understanding of it. Here is an important example that should be near and dear to everyone's heart: "mind awake, body asleep." This phrase, invented by the great pioneer of unworlding Robert Monroe, is comprised of four glosses. A gloss is a word that refers to something without saying what it is. Sort of a slight improvement over "ya know" or "whatchacall". I understand and appreciate people's need to communicate with each other efficiently without always analyzing all their terms first. We know what we're talking about when we use these four terms--supposedly. Problem is, the terminology we're stuck with then limits us to saying things that aren't quite true when we start talking about new experiences in unknown territory. So because we first mention "body asleep," we then have to talk about "getting out of the body". And worse, the supposed strategy becomes abbreviated as the acronym "MABA" which is completely devoid of any ability to explain itself, and then we wonder why we aren't attaining our goals. Because of wrong terminology, frustrated students of "OBE" all over the world are trying to pry their minds out of their bodies and many gurus gleefully sell them methods for doing just this. Methods which usually only work for the person who discovered the methods and people a lot like him. For a reason: the way the method is explained, which boils down to naturally misapprehendable terminology. So instead of talking about minds, bodies, sleeping and waking up, we should be talking about specific real things which relate directly to our goals. That's why people are wrong when they say we need to eliminate all beliefs. Most people need to eliminate most of their beliefs, but only because their beliefs are wrong, as evidenced by the results they're getting. When you find the beliefs that get you where you want to be, I wouldn't throw them away if I were you. All experience is 100% personal, so while I also will suggest certain strategies that I am fond of, you will have to find your own way to some extent, no matter how good my suggestions are. I am having some success at finding the belief system I need in order to talk myself into having abilities that sound impossible but are coveted by a great many people including me. I am presenting my simplified picture of the basic elements of reality because it works for me. If it doesn't work for you, then keep searching. But as you do, I think you will bump into my "harmonics of awareness" everywhere you turn, because these things are, in fact, the basic building blocks of reality and you won't be able to escape them. You can't drink water without ingesting hydrogen and oxygen.

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Why academics seem to be looking for a solution that is intricate, abstract, and technical, I don't know, unless it's because the money's better? Let's start with some basic, simple, easygoing facts. The mind does not dwell in the body, the body does not dwell in the world, the world does not dwell in the universe, and the universe does not dwell in infinity. We're fond of maps as an aid to navigating the unknown, but we have unfortunately fallen for the old trick of mistaking the map for the territory. This is natural because maps are about places and even in our dreams we project qualities of place as descriptions of qualities of being. But states of mind are not places. The mind cannot be contained in something because it is not made out of matter. So it is not "in" the body, nor is containment of mind by body a halfway decent analogy. The mind is real and the body is real and it's possible to experience a process of separating the mind from the body. I know because I've had the experience myself. But what is mind? It's not a thing. The mind in its most basic form is a channel, portal, or filter for awareness. A so-called OBE exit then actually consists of separating awareness from the body. Becoming not aware of the body. Removing attention or focus from it. This is a key process that "mind awake, body asleep" just glosses over. In fact, the method is supposedly something like, first you "get to" MABA (as if it were a place), and then you "leave" the body (as if you were "in" it to begin with). Can you see why it's so hard to accomplish our goals? We need to define all our terminology first, before pushing methodologies on our students, poor things. OK, so what is a body, really? It certainly is not a container. Anything you pour in at one end will soon be coming out the other end in a digested form as something we hope to never see again. It's ridiculous to assume that a "spirit" enters and leaves a "body". I won't even try to define "spirit" or "soul" in this chapter, but we'll tackle all these hairy notions eventually. For now, I would like to know what a body really is, and we have already agreed, I hope, that it is not some sort of high-tech tupperware for awareness. But we're after the essentials, the elements, the basics, not the details. We don't want anything like, "It's a liver plus a spleen plus a brain..." We want a single simple statement that is true about the body as a whole. That's what basics are. I can only give my opinion, and if it were the same as everyone else's, then why bother? So here goes. A body is mostly 2ness + 3ness + 4ness, in varying quantities of each, according to the configuration of the individual who claims said body. With a dash of thisness and thatness thrown in, according to taste and habit.

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What the--!!! Yes, I must confess: I am starting with the conclusion: that there is such a thing as elements of reality. How could there not be? Then I am giving names to these so-far undiscovered elements. Then I am going in search of what these names refer to. For example, I have decided that 7ness has to do with information. I call it wisdom or knowingness for short, but for even shorter, I call it sevenness or 7ness. Kinda like Taoists call infinity "Oneness". I call it "awareness" but even that is just a description. For each element there are many "just descriptions" which hint around as to what an element of reality is without actually pinning it down. Because, as harmonics of infinity, they can't be pinned down. But... starting with the conclusion? That's not scientific! You are correct. I am not a scientist. Scientists like to make things difficult and I like to make things simple. I'm more like an inventor than a scientist, and inventors like to reinvent the world in their own terms, because it helps motivate them to discover new ways of doing things that they would never become aware of, if they were trying to be someone else and think someone else's thoughts. Would you rather wait for physics to come up with a simple explanation that you can actually understand? You wouldn't? All right then, you're stuck with me. I am about to define the nature of experience for you in terms you will be able to understand. The nature of reality is really simple, and it explains everything, even politics. Even how to unworld. The body manifests twoness or individuality, and the world is its complimentary partner in this dichotomous behavior. In order to be a separate person, first we need a notion of separateness, which is 2ness itself. This gives us identity. Then to prove we actually exist, besides the identity or separateness provided by twoness, we need something more solid that that. We need solidity. And we need a framework, an explanation, so we can understand what's going on. But in terms of twoness, infinity as we know it splits up into you and the rest of the world. Your body and your world, the latter separated from you by the largest organ in your body, the ever-moving skin. As bodies, we are skinjobs crawling the earth. Not high tech tupperware for awareness. Besides having an owner--which is you, which is 2ness, your identity--your body has solidity. Its parts can be touched, measured, photographed. This is what junior scientists might call the three dimensions of length + width + height. In my opinion, solidity is when the parts (2ness) connect to each other (3ness). Another description of 3ness is agreement or belief. In the world of consensus, reality is solidified by people agreeing about it. That's why scientists, using the scientific method, insist on gathering evidence to support their hopes and beliefs (theories and hypotheses): if no one

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agrees with them, they might not get paid. Agreement and physicality are the same thing. If many people agree that X just happened, then maybe X just happened. Good chance of it. But collect descriptions of X from each of those many witnesses, and all hell breaks loose. As it turns out, we agree on very little when we go beyond glossing over everything in order that we can agree to agree. But in order to express our very identity and establish our self as a force to be reckoned with and remembered, we need a relatively solid format to do it with. And that instrument is the body. Which we then assume is the be-all and end-all of reality, in spite of the fact that nothing short of Groupthink and Hivemind can prevent most people from disagreeing with each other about pretty much everything. Which, unfortunately in our overpopulated world, seems to be good enough for most people. But identity and solidity are not enough. On top of 2ness and 3ness, we need a good dose of 4ness, and once again your local amateur scientist probably already knows that the so-called fourth dimension is time. Well "dimension" is a confusing term to us laymen, when referring to anything you can't measure with a ruler, so unlike advanced physicists, I don't use the term "dimension" except when measuring stuff with a ruler, where it makes sense. For example, a two-dimensional image that possesses only length and width but no depth is in reality a three dimensional object with a thickness or depth equal to zero. So let's keep dimensionality where it belongs: in the physical world, the 3D version. That is 3ness. Physicists who talk about nine or ten dimensions might know what's going on, but they ain't telling. Not in a way that's going to help most people. On the other hand, "time"--the ordering of moments--is in fact one of the most important descriptions of 4ness. Not the only one. Fourness amounts to order, arrangement, hierarchy, value, that sort of thing. With awareness or infinity split up into separate parts (2ness), which then connect to each other (3ness), to understand and use all this we need for these connections to exist in some kind of system or arrangement or framework: 4ness. The body for example is comprised of not just "you" (2ness) and "meat" (3ness), but also many processes and formations (4ness) so it all sort of begins to make sense, at least long enough to encourage us to keep trying. In the end, the body has its many mysterious and unfathomable routines and habits, without which it would not be "you" or "meat" for long. Unlike awareness, the body is a temporary thing. But it is you, or at least it represents you in the physical world. But, you say, none of this information is going to help you "get out of your body". Did I happen to mention that you are not IN a body to begin with? In order to get what you think is you out of what you think your body is, you must replace the notion of "high-tech tupperware for awareness" with a belief that will help you get that experience you crave. And I'm telling you, a body is youness made solid and put into working order so you can have a life: a collection of memories, a string of moments, a bundle of habits. What I'm trying to get

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across is that your body is not what you assume it to be. It is unfathomable and unknowable, and please don't cut it open to prove me wrong. Our so-called solid reality never holds still for one second. The moment is the least apprehendable phenomena that awareness ever came up with. The harder you chase it, the quicker it gets away. But I know what you're saying. All this theoretical jibber-jabber is neither here nor there. So maybe what we should be trying to do is to limit the description of the body to the matter at hand. Rephrasing then, "What do we mean by 'body' when we say "mind awake, body asleep"? Ah heck, that's easy. The term "body" is completely redundant within that phrase. It was just used by Monroe because it sounds good. He said "mind" in the first part, and therefore it sounded clever and even elegant to say "body" in the second part, because then his slogan is symmetrical. Monroe scores again as a highly intuitive knower of people. The self-made man strikes again; the professional broadcasting executive knows how to market an idea: with a great slogan! Fortunately, his books were worth marketing. Unfortunately, his marketing slogan got us all into a big stew of frustration. What else is there, besides a body, that could ever hope to fall asleep? Was Monroe implying that normally our mind falls asleep at the same time our body falls asleep? Well maybe he was, but he was implying wrong. Because minds can't fall asleep. A mind, by definition, is aware. It is awareness itself. Awareness is not limited by time, so when the mind appears to have been asleep, it's just that it actually transcended the time or 4ness wherein our bodies happen to be stuck, which it does routinely and effortlessly, like the flip of a switch, thus appearing to not generate memories for a period of "time". But the mind doesn't sleep. If it were not aware, it would not be awareness. So when we go to sleep, what really happens? Monroe assumed that the body goes one way and the mind goes another. They separate. Or more likely, the body just lies there and rests while the mind goes somewhere else. Not so. This is the stew of frustration all over again. Minds don't go anywhere. Bodies do, except when they're sleeping, hopefully. The analogy of the mind going somewhere is fine for seasoned journeyers who fly around any "where" they want because they already know how, but for beginners trying to obtain the skill of unworlding for the first time, the notion of going somewhere is nothing but trouble. So obviously, we have to define sleep with a better analogy, at least. Otherwise the mapmakers will continue to get our money at the new age bookstore while our minds continue, naturally, to go nowhere. States of mind are not places, they are experiences. Experience is the function of awareness. Experience is a function of the body too. "Real life" is when the mind and body experience stuff together, stuck to each other by the rules of the physical world. Unworlding, which we used to call OBE, dreaming, or phasing, is an experience not limited by the rules of the solid world that our body appears to dwell in. And what do these rules give us? Solidity, agreement,

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connection, communication, memory, association, imagination, thought... 3ness is the law when the body is awake, and 3ness gets turned way down when the body goes to sleep. The general situation when the body is asleep is to act as if we have NO experience, with some seemingly random leakage which we call "dreams". So instead of saying the body goes to sleep, we should be talking about the mind having an experience, because the body and whether or not it is asleep is irrelevant to awareness when awareness is experiencing something that is against the physical rules. Speaking of the nature of experience, what normally causes us to be aware of the body and its accustomed environments? The 5+ senses. Without sensation, we are asleep or unconscious. There is your simple answer. So all we have to do is go to sleep... Wrong! That is exactly our problem. "Mind awake, body asleep" would have us doing the only thing our mind ever does anyway--being aware--while paying close attention to the thing that we don't want to have any awareness of at all: the body. That's the very definition of an unsuccessful attempt at unworlding. Which, among scads of wanna-be OBE'rs in these times of rampant escapism, is the status quo. "Wish I could get out," "Wish I could get out easier," "Wish I could get out more often." Blame the techniques; this field is still in its infancy. These techniques, including the wondrous and ubiquitous MABA, are screwing us up by putting all our efforts on the body, the very bit of tupperware we are trying to escape from, when the only way to escape from it is to effectively forget that it exists. If I lie down, intending to go to sleep... guess what? That's what I do! I'm good at going to sleep, I've been practicing for several decades. And the guru gets off easy by saying I just did it wrong, I was supposed to go to sleep "but". Well, this tail-chasing abstraction has given me the run-around long enough. What we have to do is to stop thinking about the body, and the way to do that is to give the 5+ senses something to do while we ignore the thing we don't want to be aware of: the body. Knowing as we do that awareness is the veritable fabric of the universes, when we give the tools of awareness (the senses) something to do, they will give us experiences. With the body completely out of the picture, these experiences will not be limited by the body's rules, and the environments that these experiences create to happen in will not be limited to the physical world. Experiences of expanded awareness are thus a function of bypassing limitations that only apply in the solid world. To bypass these limitations, all we have to do is ignore the solid world since it has no jurisdiction in the rest of the universe. Anyway, the core process of existence--its fundamental element--is awareness, and if we try to put the body to

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sleep in any way whatsoever, the body will generally tend to obey the awareness that drives it, by going to sleep the way it's accustomed to going to sleep. So the concept of going to sleep, like the body it belongs to, must be completely ignored in order for the practitioner to develop any reliable abilities in unworlding, unless you plan to spend ten years at the beginners' level by using a hit-and-miss method that shouldn't work at all. The short version: "going to sleep" is a physical phenomena and that's not what we're all about, so forget about going to sleep. You will go to sleep when you need to. Do I then think these unworldings, formerly known as OBEs, or "experiences of expanded awareness," are only imaginary? Self-hypnosis? Lucid dreams? Hell no! I think EVERYTHING is imaginary, except awareness! Awareness dreams up everything in existence for its own amusement. Such is my belief, and I am not alone in this. Solidity happens to be one of the important elements that give us our sense of whether or not something is real. As any journeyer will tell you, some experiences are more real than others. So the first thing you have to get rid of is your guru, who profits from your inability to have experiences of expanded awareness prolifically and proficiently and profusely and profoundly. Experience is 100% personal, and you must be willing to separate your desired and useful belief system from what you assume is real to other people, in order to begin learning to experience the unknown. To do this, you have to spend a lot of your precious time noticing things that are not necessarily real from every possible perspective, replacing the usual objects of your senses with non-solid phenomena, stuff that others don't, won't, and can't see, hear, feel or otherwise sense. So lying down and closing your eyes is a good idea, but intending in any way to go to sleep is a bad idea. To experience beyond the limits of physical reality, ignore physical reality and keep the 5+ senses very otherwise busy a lot of the time, night and day. Notice every experience of expanded awareness, especially those that nearly slip between the cracks because they were so unexpected. Forget the body and do not try to go to sleep. Ignore the notion of sleep completely and focus on paying close attention, being aware, Noticing. Believe what you must believe in order to dismantle the world you are used to. For example, stop what you're doing and thinking many times a day to wonder how you ever managed to get stuck in such a long and solid dream. This odd sort of behavior rubs off on the even stranger belief systems you have inherited from the pushers of physicality as the be-all and end-all of existence.

If you must continue studying the techniques of "OBE" teachers, here are some pitfalls and booby traps to watch out for: --methods that focus on the physical, such as sleep paralysis and extreme relaxation;

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--methods that focus on going to sleep, such as "mind awake, body asleep"; --pronouncements of when or how it has to be done or can't be done, such as "meditate or else"; "vibrations first"; "gotta clean them chakras," etc. Additionally, the finely honed techniques of someone who has been unworlding for years or decades is not the technique which that person used when he was learning the skill. Watch out. He is presuming that he knows how beginners should do things, when in fact, unworlding has become easy for him and he can use, or recommend, any technique that makes his book more marketable, and still be totally convinced of himself in spite of barely remembering how he learned the skill himself. He might even think of the field as an exclusive club, while consciously or unconsciously feeding you information that will prevent you from joining him in the inner circle, whose members are able to sell books and seminars. Who needs the competition? Worst of all is the teacher who began unworlding spontaneously, without effort. These lucky Joe-Bobs have no idea how someone else should go about learning to unworld, unless they heard it somewhere or read it in a book. In this vein, here are some things that don't matter, IF you have an understanding of what unworlding really is: --body position; --time of day; --noise in the environment; --whatever "bad habits" you think you have that make you less "spiritual"; --how other people--including I--think you should or shouldn't go about it; --etc. In other words, never listen to the naysayers, never never never. What makes you able to unworld at will is your ability to believe you can, and your desire to do so, and the amount of time you actually spend--daily--enthusiastically pushing awareness into new shapes with the physical senses as your tools of perception. The firmness of your intent is a kind of selfconfidence that comes quickly with practice, but is easily softened by reading and studying and letting all the gurus confuse you. In fact, looking for another internet guru or book to read is usually an excuse to not do the practice, which is just you slowing yourself down or stopping yourself completely. It's normal to be afraid of losing your mind, but you must be willing, in theory, to do so. There's nothing to fear unless you're already crazy, in which case you have

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nothing to lose anyway. In summary, then, let me briefly remind you of how to set the stage to learn unworlding with the greatest efficiency. At all times of the day and night, no matter what else you happen to be doing at the time, actively and honestly wonder how you ever managed to find yourself experiencing such a big, wild, scary, wonderful, infinitely varied and detailed dream, and try to remember what it was you told yourself to do, when you last thought about what you should do upon finding yourself in such an expanded state of awareness. This is called "becoming lucid" and you can fearlessly practice it all day and all night. Final word of wisdom: one drop of real confidence, one drop of unfeigned desire, or one drop of joyful anticipation is worth more to your actual progress than an oceanfull of effort invested in the wrong direction.

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WHAT IS THE VOID? "To fully understand the void, it is important to realize that it does not only occur at the end of the transition process. Rather, the void constitutes a space of nothingness that exists in between all OBE environments. It is the invisible glue that permeates all conceivable environments you could possibly encounter." --Frederick Aardema, Explorations in Consciousness, p. 276 The 3D Void, also known as the Void or the three-dimensional darkness, is said to be a launch pad into any other state. Why? Let's think about it in terms of what makes it what it is. Because it's three-dimensional, it's placelike, its 3ness is turned up high. But because it doesn't present itself as being one thing or another, it has no identity, or very little, so we can surmise that its 2ness is turned way down. Those little white dots of light people sometimes see in the void are the vestigial traces of 2ness that barely show up there. And it is this very nothingness that makes it a sponge for anything. As a sort of vacuum, it attracts whatever state you are closest to achieving, intentwise. We all have our hopes and dreams and fears and phobias and fantasies and what-not. Well, when you stand in the Nothing (the 3D Void), whatever you have next in line, intent-wise, in your innermost innards, that is the thing that is automatically sucked into the Nothing with you. So, if you're not sure what you have lined up in intent, go stand around in the Nothing and you'll find out. Naturally the analogy of things getting sucked into a place are incorrect. Nothing travels anywhere. This is good, because it means that results are instantaneous. What you intend... IS. No lag, no travel time. The Nothing is the ultimate sci-fi portal, the Door to Everything. As the way to everything or anything, the Nothing has as its chief elements two things: connection and motion. Or motility, as they say in digestive science. That means it's high in 3ness and 5ness. The fact that it lacks identity and organization just means it's low in 2ness and 4ness. As the embodiment of nothingness, the Nothing is easy to miss, easy to pass through without noticing, or to mistake for something mundane. A common thing to mistake it for is a nonexistent thing I'll call "OBE blindness". Often when people first experience a state of expanded awareness, they don't see anything. They assume they are blind, habitually interpreting their experience in physical terms. But in fact, they are in the void. Not only does the Nothing lead

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TO all possible states; it's also where you end up coming FROM on the way out of any state. Sometimes too quickly to notice, but I have experienced it in this way. The other common mistake is to assume that ending up in the void is the end of the expanded awareness experience. You think you're laying in bed with your eyes closed when in fact you're in the Nothing and could theoretically have any experience you want, if you were better prepared. Awareness of the physical should never keep you from trying to unworld. Mistaking the Nothing for blindness that is common at the beginning or the end of the unworlding experience has made it easy for me to miss the convenient opportunity it affords to experience next anything I want, or more accurately, whatever I happen to have lined up next in intent. One time, my first thought when I ended up in the Nothing was, "Oops I got too excited and it's over," because my lucid dream scene had blinked out when I ecstatically drove my bicycle over a cliff. Seeing nothing but blackness, I opened my eyes and that was that. When I could have chosen to see anything. Live and learn. Another time I had a classic OBE exit, which began in a blind state. I didn't even know I had woken up in the Nothing. I thought I had awoken sitting up in bed, so I lay down, slid out of the bed like a greased eel but in slow motion, and only then, when I never hit the floor next to my bed, realized I was having an experience of expanded awareness. I couldn't see anything. I was in the Nothing, because I had gone into an expanded state gradually in a relaxed way so I didn't shoot through it. Since I barely had heard of the void at this time, I said, "I need to have vision," according to the Buhlman "clarity now" school, while simultaneously recalling what I had intended to do if I ever found myself in an expanded state, according to the Michael Raduga school. Being in the void, the intent I happened to have lined up perfectly and manifested the first item on my preplanned agenda: looking in a mirror. There was no struggle to make myself see, and I didn't have to walk, fly or float the rest of the way to the mirror; from the Nothing my intent just slid into place and I was looking in the mirror without ever having to struggle with making myself see. Because my well-formed intent involved seeing something specific. There was no coincidence involved. The blindness of the Nothing easily merged into a mirror because blindness and mirrors are both manifestations of the void. Another time, I woke up in the Nothing, but again didn't know I was in it. I knew I was wearing a mask in bed, and wondered why I could see a large, fuzzy spot of bright white light. But this time I told myself not to open my eyes, and then by focusing attention on the light, expanding sensations ensued and I went into the next state that happened to be lined up in intent. Which turned out to be nothing at all--a blank intent--so I floated around more or less at random. But it all starts in the Nothing including the physical dream of waking up in bed when it's over. The bed and closed eyes and bad breath and lethargy and that whole scene is just a physical symbol of the Nothing.

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Another time, I was involved in a dream brought to me by my duplex 4ness dreambody Nitpicker and Potwatcher, who were building fences and wanted to get paid. When I went inside to find them some money, a party was going on and a very tall man, a guide aspect in the guise of new age guru Bruce Moen, whose hat brushed the ceiling, was trying to get me to look at the Nothing (the blank ceiling) instead of the party state full of people. One of whom managed to get me to look in a mirror by engaging my most reliable aspect--paranoia--and I was shocked to see by my outfit that I was my most relaxed aspect, Limberluck, my 8ness dream body, who worries not and flies a lot. The intent that the Bruce Moen aspect instilled in me in this way came to fruition when I immediately went outside and decided to pretend I was dreaming. On a lark I hopped into the air and to my great surprise, flew over the top of a building. Of course I remembered who I am (became lucid) and when I got myself calmed down, I started automatically doing the things I happened to have in intent based on all the reading I'd been doing. With no mirror to dive into, as prescribed by my intent-o-genda, I dove into the ground instead. Nothing happened--I had experienced the Nothing and my vision disappeared--so I "closed my eyes" and tried it again, as I'd been taught, and this time when I dove into the ground I got the sensation of motion I was hoping for. This led me to a prolonged experience where I continued manifesting items from my intent-o-genda, items which I'd managed to get lined up in intent somehow. In this case, where was the Nothing? When I tried to dive, I went into the Nothing but since I didn't know I was at the Door to Everything, I manifested the first thing lined up in intent: doubt. The dive failed; I didn't feel that I'd gone anywhere, just went blind. But I overcame the doubt and got another chance when I closed my blinded eyes and dove into the ground again. No wonder I'd been instructed to close my "astral eyes" before attempting to go through a wall, a window, a mirror, or into the floor or ground. The Nothing is the Door to Everything, and one way into the Nothing from any ongoing dream plotline is to close your eyes and imagine some action that means "travel" to you. From place to place we go, by accessing a variety of states without going anywhere. It is helpful to know that there is no travel needed, and to know that when you close your eyes in a dream, you will be in the Nothing forthwith, with instant access to anything and Everything. I didn't know this, but it worked. After a period of activity which seemed both travel-like and untravel-like, I regained plot vision in a new state and went about manifesting the next item in intent. And before all that, the mirror. Which deepened and altered the experience even though it didn't quite get my attention engaged all the way. Another time, I was deeply engrossed in a deeply engrossing plotline state watching my 6ness dream body--a female aspect--demonstrate going up and down on a gymnastics device she'd invented, when everything came together spontaneously and I was unexpectedly catapulted into the Nothing at a high speed, like being shot out of a cannon. I had a strong sensation of movement straight up, got too excited, and had no idea I was in the Nothing, so after

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indulging in a great deal of excitement and euphoria and feeling the rough vibrations and feeling my cheeks flap in the wind, I forgot who I was (lost lucidity) and woke up in my dream again. In the above experience, the Nothing resembled the static of a television with no station in tune. The white dots on the black background--which is the classic description of the 3D Void-were smeared into streaks by the sensation of quickly shooting straight up past them. Remember, the Nothing is 3D; they call it the 3D Void or the 3-dimensional blackness for a reason. But I don't like to use terms that imply placeness, as they are limiting. Another time, a plotline included lucidity from start to finish, starting and ending in the Nothing, not a 3D blackness this time, but a place of solid, billowy, brownish-gray clouds. The clouds gave it that 3D quality while there was no other visual feature to it except for some bland colors and soft light. The Nothing can also mix into another state, and it doesn't have to be black. White's cool. Or a reflective, shiny layer like a window, mirror, or glossy paint, body of water, or even a glass container or plastic bag, it's all the Nothing shining out at you. The Nothing is absolutely key to our experience and nobody even knows about it yet. Not like they should. This is Fred Aardema's big contribution; even Frank Kepple failed to grasp its key importance to the extent that Fred has done. Fred Aardema relates experiencing the void as if it were a broken mirror. In other words, he had a scene in his scopes, then the scene literally shattered into big shards like a sheet of glass, with the scene still painted on the glass shards that flew apart, with the area of blackness between the shards growing larger as they flew apart. A graphic display of how the Nothing underlies every state. Frank Kepple had a favorite approach to the void that involved seeing a closed blind made of rotatable slats, like a Venetian blind. When you open the blind by rotating the slats, the darkness appears between them, growing larger until the thin edges of the slats are facing you and all you see is the blackness that stands perpetually behind everything. I experienced a slatlike entry into the Nothing just the other day. I had laid down in the afternoon to do some unworlding exercises (Noticing and Beanstalk Climbing, which turned into deep sleep). In a dream that was very close to being lucid, I looked from above at a rectangular screen as a group of young boys marched up to a huge metal slatwork on the ground, yanked it open with military precision, and scrambled down through the resulting black gaps into the darkness below. A bunch of juvenile delinquent chimpanzees followed them down; I merged with the monkeys and found myself in the void, the 3D blackness. Of course seeing only blackness, I thought I had woken up from the dream and opened my eyes, not realizing I had attained lucidity in the Nothing.

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This is how lucidity tends to come: before or after a dream segment, mistaken for "waking up". In Michael Raduga's world, you've woken up in the phase, there's nothing to do but get back out there and have another experience. But we tend to think we're in bed awake. I know better since my two classic OBE exits were experiences where I woke up in bed having no idea that I was already "in the phase" but when I "moved my body" I found it was not the body I had expected it to be. One time the Nothing was a big picture window with a huge aquarium behind it. I didn't get this one at all; the man behind the aquarium who was taking care of his tropical fish was wearing a black eye patch. There's your void. Highly symbolical, but it led to a Big Dream. Starting with a tunnel (a covered sidewalk) pointed out by a guide. OK, by my ex-wife. We dream together all the time. There's nothing unusual about the Nothing interposing itself symbolically right into plotline content. It will lead from one main portion of a dream to another, or else as usual into or out of the experience altogether. A huge dream I had not long ago involved a big screen blocking the way into the back half of the bank in the mall. It was made of black clouds of exactly zero thickness, it was going to be a movie screen for a movie entitled "Darkness," and it was a time portal, it led to a different day. Best of all, my higher self Whirly (my 9ness dream body) showed up as Curly of the Three Stooges and put on a funny show about being afraid to step through it. White voids are common. The other day I was in the Library, a place I go when Climbing the Beanstalk, and my 4ness dreambody--which is comprised of two workers who are always found together so I call them the Dichotomous Duo--were helping me apply for official access to the Library (also known as the Akashic Record and thought by Monroeites to be in Focus 27). Then my granny Amelia popped in wearing a long tan coat covered with gridlines, that is, Frank's slatwork. I didn't get it, so she tossed the Nothing onto the Circulation Desk countertop to my left, trying again to show me the void, but all I saw was the little points of light, symbolically, as a plastic bag full of bird seed. Unfortunately due to my non-lucid condition, I mistook the little points of light for kitty litter, and once that feat was accomplished, I was sure I could see big clumps in the bag with the bird food stuck to the outside of the turd-clumps. But being a tough and tenacious granny, she isn't one to give up easy. She tried again, this time asking me if I wanted a drink. That's her main modus operandi, trying to get me to ingest energizing liquid nourishment. I looked at the bottle she'd placed on the countertop. It was a used rum bottle, indicating altered states, and it was full of the little points of light. I again mistook the points of light for bird seed, but gazed long enough at the clear bottle full of little brown seeds and popped into the void this time. It was easy to mistake it for a large sheet of plywood with an obviously very thick (3D) coat of glossy white paint on it. The shiny white object filled my entire visual field. I became engrossed with a threedimensional ridge of dried paint along the bottom edge that looked like a place where

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masking tape had been painted over or something. The mind spontaneously creates symbols for things we are not prepared to see. Such as the so-called real world. What happens when you gaze out in front of you with your eyes open, relax your eyes, and stop talking to yourself? You see the Nothing with the world superimposed on it. This super accessible experience of unworlding is eerie, and cool, and so generically ubiquitous that we don't even notice it. The Nothing--the Door to Everything--is absolutely everywhere. It seems to fit between each of our moments like some kind of glue that holds each succeeding world together, when in fact it is sitting behind those moments and we see pieces of it when we slightly defocus the vision of the world that we normally cling to. The Nothing is the screen upon which threeness creates the world, in pieces like jigsaw puzzle pieces that fit together due to the influence of 4ness, the rules. One of my favorite unworlding experiences took place when I was Noticing and had an Awakening into a first person perspective wherein the experience became totally selfgenerating with me as an active participant. I was looking at a black screen with Nothing on it but a small yellow X up at the top right corner, same place as the one we use to turn off a Window on a computer. The X had a way of floating around on the screen instead of being fixed to one spot. It would drift off the screen and I would lose my lucidity, forget who I was, drift into sleep for a second. Then it would drift back onto the screen and I would remember who I was (regain lucidity). This was shortly before one of my conscious separation experiences. So, after a review of my own experiences both lucid and not, I will have to agree with Fred Aardema that the Nothing is in fact the Door to Everything as well as where you go when leaving any particular state.

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THE TV IS ON, DON'T LOOK To turn that magnificence out there into reasonableness doesn't do anything for you. Here, surrounding us, is eternity itself. To engage in reducing it to a manageable nonsense is petty and outright disastrous. --Carlos Castaneda, Tales of Power We live in a long, recurring dream. Each moment and each day is a new snapshot through the same bit of holographic film. We call this the real reality while we call the other realities we experience at night when we're asleep "just dreams". The fact that your recurring reality and mine are radically different 99% of the time never seems to get through to us. While a hundred people live in a hundred separate realities, we gloss over our differences as much as possible and then we have popularity contests to determine who will have the authority to rule over us during those times when we can't agree with each other. Political and religious leaders understand better than we do that we are not able to deal with the fact that reality shortchanges most of us all the time. Consensus reality never quite matches what's really going on over here in my neck of the woods. Its purpose is to enforce consensus; not to enforce reality but to compromise it for the sake of the group. Reality is that we don't actually agree about much of anything. Not everyone is as sensitive to interpersonal differences as I am. Many people gravitate

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toward commonalities with the norm, things to like about the world as we all supposedly agree it really is, things for us all to enjoy together, etc. I find groupthink, or what I call the Collective Average, as boring as boring could be. If I wanted agreement on a mass scale, I... well, uh, er... well I don't. I don't want that at all. Why would I? My purpose in being here is to learn how to escape from here. That's just the way I'm put together. When the TV is on, it will be watched. Nearly everyone in the room finds it hard not to look at it and listen to the sound it makes. Our consensus world is just a big, three-dimensional TV. I am trying to get it across to you that this is not an analogy. It is a literal fact. You and I are literally addicted to this life we keep waking up in. Life? I meant to say dream. Life is a long dream, a recurring dream. Yours and mine share the human form in common, and some other things, details major and minor, but in general we are free to never agree with each other, to never share the same reality, and as long as we don't interact, we will never notice that we live in separate worlds. Each individual expresses his own basic troovammickle, which is just a highly complex configuration of twoness that dictates at a core level what you are and what you are not. There is no way to know who you are at such a core level except by extrapolation: by looking at what you have done, where you have been, etc. A pattern can be detected, a pattern made of many interweaving patterns. You can change some of your sub-patterns some of the time, but you cannot change your troovammickle at its basic level without changing who you are. And if you change who you are, those who know you will experience losing you. In their world you have died or moved away or stopped speaking to them or become someone else. You and I are not individuals, we are awareness playing roles. The roles have no awareness. Awareness is really just animating lifeless, meaningless roles. Awareness can merge with anyone's troovammickle equally. The infinite worlds are just a vast unlimited playground for awareness to do anything it wants. The details mean nothing in the face of infinity. That doesn't mean awareness can't enjoy itself in a transitory way. That's why "we" individuals seem to exist. Because pure, infinite awareness would be neither aware nor infinite if it didn't include means for experiencing itself. None of this makes sense from the common perspective, which is that we all live in the same world. From a more realistic, but highly unpopular perspective, we none of us live in the same world. The consensus part of reality is created by limited agreement, the intersections among our separate worlds. Your body, mind and world are simultaneously created by your troovammickle. The troovammickle is like a bit of holographic film, and awareness is a light shining through the film. You as an individual are what is projected, but you as awareness are pure awareness. Each of us is created by the same awareness. We don't have separate souls; what is separate about us is our individuality, our twoness, our troovammickles. We all share the same soul. No other soul has ever existed or ever will, because soul (awareness) is not subject to separation, agreement, or time. If we would stop clinging so viciously to the notion that we each have our own soul, all our problems would be solved instantly. But we cling to

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the problems that separate us because that's the way we are, as individuals. The ego, the notion that "I am I and not someone else" begs to be fed, nourished, pampered, assuaged, built up and enthroned. Our purpose in coming back to this recurring dream every day is to make sure our individuality is not lost to eternity. But life is a TV show. It is broadcast from a remoteness which is only an abstraction to us. It exists for reasons we do not care much about, most of us, as we grope blindly through a world made of our own cares, our personality of unconscious motivations. In fact it seems quite apparent to someone like me--who hasn't watched TV regularly for almost half a century--that television is literally the source of much of what we hold dear, take for granted, live for, die for, cherish, hate, and on and on. Consensus reality does not create TV and TV does not create consensus reality. They create each other simultaneously. The mass media in its many forms feeds us what we already believe; the nightly news and our beliefs about the world create each other. Moment after moment marches on, day after day, year after year, and we never catch on to the obvious: if not for our agreements about this world we visit so compulsively, life would be indistinguishable from one person's bizarre dream populated by two-dimensional cardboard characters who rarely do anything sensible. This life is addictive because we do not understand it. If we understood our motivations, we would be shocked and overwhelmed and disillusioned. Enlightenment, I'm guessing, is not all cookies and ice cream. It is depressing, at first, to realize that none of this matters. It's hard to come to terms with it. And if you just want to be a common unworlder who joins a facebook group about out-of-body experiences to complain about your dry spells, why even try to come to terms with it? But in my opinion, if you want to spend more time experiencing the unknown and the infinite than you spend here trapped within the human form, there will come a time when you have to make a choice. The TV (the consensus world) is on because everyone is watching it. If you leave it on, you can still learn unworlding to some degree. But if you want to walk through walls without going to sleep first, you will have to learn how to walk into a room where the TV is on--by which I mean, wake up in this world--and somehow make it through your days with barely a glance at the TV, even though it's always on. Frank Kepple talks about a slat effect. This is especially comforting to me when I am forced to be in a crowded place like a mall. When the sheer infinitude of unknowable and mostly uninteresting information assaulting my senses overwhelms me, I find it entertaining to turn the world into an animated painting on slats, and then rotate the slats out of the way so I can see the Nothing behind the slats. Since the slats are two-dimensional, they have no thickness, so they cannot be seen edge-on. To make it even more fun, I imagine as I rotate the slats back to face me again, that they have painted on them something I would never have guessed. Since this is such an ephemeral experience for me, I do it over and over.

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What's strange is that this works. You don't see it with your eyes, but you can see it with your mind if you silence the internal dialog. It is striking, even to a beginner like me. Not everyone would understand wanting so badly to not join into this earthbound circus. I don't mind being a visitor. But it is so much more interesting to see through this mess of misunderstandings, what little bit I can. I am grateful for that little bit.

THE PATH: THE SHORT AND THE LONG OF IT Many of the self-improvement plans popular today rely upon will power and self-control to overcome human nature and raise us to the level of our so-called higher selves. But it is dishonest to ask a human being to overcome its true nature. It cannot be done. Nor should it be asked of any being. We all know this. We feel it in our bones. That is why most selfimprovement plans do not work for us. They dishonor our bodies' human nature by seeking to suppress it. And, if you truly believe that you are human, even a human with higher and lower natures, then a life plan that characterizes part of you as unacceptable feels abusive and wrong. There is nothing wrong with human nature. --Nanci Danison, Backwards: Returning to Our Source for Answers Not that I'm an expert, but my two words of wisdom for today is as follows: to get where you're going, get on the shortest, easiest path you can find, and just follow it to the end. If the path itself is your hobby--making you a "hiker" of sorts--it doesn't matter which path you choose as long as you have adequate supplies and equipment for the journey. But then there's those plentiful folks who are stuck waffling between infatuation with path or with goal, and can't decide which is the goal. These folks will alternately inform you that the

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path is the goal and then they'll pull a switcheroo and tell you what the hell your stupid goal should be and how you should be getting there. But that's OK, confusion sometimes overhauls the best of us. There is certainly something to be said for the deification of every word of wisdom that turns up anywhere, in spite of obvious contradictions to the contrary. Paradox is built into every valuable perspective and straight lines to the goal are usually too good to be true. That doesn't mean we should waste as much time and energy as possible. As the wise man once said, the more you spin your wheels, the more mud flies in the face of the poor sap who got himself stuck behind you. That doesn't mean that just anybody should set out on the longest path they can find without the personal inner resources to get to the end of it, just hoping for the best. Not everyone was born to be a Hiker. But before we go down into the bottomless pit that this topic could become, let's ask ourselves: is it possible to just get to the point? Well, maybe. Since gurus have to eat too, long paths seem to be quite popular among those who can afford a guru. But that was yesterday's point. Today's point is more positive, among other things. In fact I think it's downright sexy. And that topic is... Why the hell don't we just get on with the program of just being who the heck we are? In fact, I am about to assert that our destiny--which is kinda hard-wired into our configuration, our filtering system--is tied up in being who we are. In learning to unworld, the more you sniff around for useful tidbits of information, the more likely it is that you are going to come across the bottomless pit of a sneaky, sly movement that aims to inflate our natural inborn sense of obligation to improve ourselves--or what the heck, even transform ourselves altogether--or else as a form of enlightened punishment from on high, we will kinda go to hell, in so many words, for not trying. This is actually becoming more and more popular a perspective among new agers, due to the fact that more and more of them are decrepit if not half dead and awfully worried about mortality, whereas 30 years ago they were just hangin' out, groovin' with the vibe. There is a trend among the most established students of unworlding--the ones in the know--to believe and preach that we go to hell when we die. Not all of us of course. Marketing new age books would not be possible without hope to shine through the threats. So naturally, only some of us--those who don't try hard enough to change our stinky animal nature and fix our battered and damaged and hopeless, broken psyches--will die and transition over to an afterlife that simply mirrors or even amplifies on whatever it is about ourselves that our new age leaders can best get us to resent, regret, and fret about while floating in an ongoing stew of self-improvement. The possibilities are endless, as the mind of man is always happy to make much ado about needless noise. Fortunately, I got some of this noise out of the way early in life, having experienced head-on

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the Jesus Movement of the early 1970s. Let's just say that I embarrassed myself enough as the head Jesus freak at my high school to teach me a lifelong lesson--often forgotten but just as often recalled--regarding the notion of fixing oneself in time to avoid a regrettable experience in the afterlife. Some of the potentially best OBE writers are unfortunately stuck in this point of view now: what you do in this life creates a custom-made afterlife for you, where you will be stuck until someone retrieves you, apparently forgives your sins, and sends you to the Park to hang out with Bob and Nancy Monroe in super dooper country-club-esque bliss for eternity. Yeah, well... Like I said, I learned to recognize the screeching of evangelism the hard way in the early 1970s. The needless pain of almost two of my brief teenage years mired in churchfulness prepared me for this noise. And then one day I gave myself permission to just be myself and stop trying to hang on the cross where Jesus hung. I got down off that cross and proceeded to experience three months of unabated bliss: a rare thing for any introspective teenage boy. At the time I called it "upsliding". In fact, it was quite necessary for me to invent upsliding because backsliding was making a fool and a wreck out of me and it might have killed me if I hadn't found the back door out of backsliding and gotten free just in the nick of time. It's all about recognizing the pattern. I won't spell that pattern out exactly, because that would be another whole book. I can only speak from experience: it's easy to get sucked into believing everything you read as soon as you decide that this field is valid and people's accounts of their unworlding experiences are not made up fairy stories. Then we fall into a "hook, line, and sinker" state of mind where a book is so great that it is gospel. The problem with that is that unworlding is a subjective experience. Well to be exact, all experience is subjective, because the only object in the universe is pure awareness itself. But we'll get back to that, because it's really the punchline. What I'm trying to prepare you for, in case you're not already in the know, is that people and their vestigially humanoid illuminated gurus will try to confuse you as to whether you are learning a skill because you find it interesting, or becoming more spiritual because you'd better, or else. With learning unworlding as some sort of embarrassing, childish side effect, similar to the stain left by a little wet fart that was really good for your health but messes up your whole day. I mean, meditation teachers actually warn that we should ignore phenomena and experiences, and just meditate for the sake of meditation. Fine, I can live with that, as long as you keep your meditation teacher away from me so I can shut off my internal dialog for my own damn reasons. My friends, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the only way you will ever succeed in improving yourself is to stop tempting the most gullible portions of your psyche with promises

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of "transformation" and instead, efficiently be who the heck you already are so you can start enjoying life. You will create nothing but dry spells in your unworlding practice by trying to be Sam Spiritual. If you want to learn unworlding, I recommend that you concentrate on unworlding and don't let the religionists suck out the very essence of your motivation to get it learned. I assume that, if you're still reading this, you are not of the Hive mentality. Those folks don't have the stomach for this flavor of talk. They are busy networking with each other, selling the Kindle books they should be emailing to each other for free, and getting on with the program of converting the last corner of new age thought into a profit-making industry. But to be perfectly honest, many people who want to learn unworlding think we are prisoners of the way things are, also known as "the real world," and secretly don't WANT to become leaders of some transformation of consciousness which of course will land the righteous ones in golden thrones like mini-Popes passing out precious droppings of new age pabulum for high fees till the end of their days. My main point is this: the path to success is by way of your own portal, flowing through your own filters, seeing through your own lenses, expressing your essence via your own configuration. Any attempt to short circuit who you are due to fear of a punishing afterlife... any attempt to get there through a series of self-subduing self-improvement programs is going to slow you down considerably because it will make it very hard for you to do anything but sit around feeling like you are lost and getting loster. Whereas the belief system I'm developing climaxes with "relax no matter what". So pick your poison: Be who you are, or go around poking holes in yourself trying to let out the nasty dirty stinking ego, while just causing yourself to bleed to death. I suppose there are advantages either way. Here's what my friend Paul said to me back in 1973 when I had been depressed in Jesus so long that I could no longer hold my head up, even in church. He said, "If Jesus wanted you to grow, would he water you or step on you?" I promptly went to church--I was the janitor so I had a key--and prayed to Jesus for the very last time. I asked permission to never speak to him again and he granted me permission to do that very thing, flat out, no holds barred, without hesitation, and we've been on great non-speaking terms ever since. Based on this one and only sincerely heartfelt prayer of my whole Christian experience, I can say that Jesus is a great guy, because he kept his promise and never bothered me again. Not that it's been a bed of roses. Upsliding didn't keep this earth from being a prison planet for me-the-unwilling, who managed to get stuck here somehow. Now about those great OBE writers like Jurgen Ziewe, Bob Monroe, Bruce Moen and others who talk about the many "hells" that people end up in when they die. Temporarily, of course, until a graduate of one of The Monroe Institute's thousand-dollar seminars saves them and takes them to a proper heaven like Monroe's Park in Focus 27.

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The punchline is this: when these relatively competent, well-meaning, well-spoken, good citizens of the astral realms come back from their journeys having experienced seeing many souls stuck in many hells and delusional religious heavens of their own making, they aren't making it up. They just can't tell the difference between subjectively witnessing a convincing 3-dimensional reflection suffering in hell... and awareness suffering in hell. Because awareness doesn't suffer in hell, and that's the part they don't get. When we go through life, we have many patterns or habits. Every single one of them generates thought forms or is generated by thought forms, or both. These thought forms are reflections. They are dynamic, 3-dimensional, self-generated, observer-animated wax museum reflections which take on a life of their own and even interact with each other to some extent. When someone's there to observe them. Such as unsuspecting unworlders who show up looking for someone to save. Of course everything has awareness, because everything IS awareness. These reflections, if they even exist outside of the viewer's experience, exist because it's an infinite universe and everything is real, within infinity. But everything is also unreal. And that's the kicker. Infinity is a sly and slippery thing. It will always have the upper hand because pure awareness, and only pure awareness, knows how to handle the paradox inherent in everything. The rest of us will always be confused. But fortunately, suffering is always transitory. When a person dies (if we really die), his awareness rejoins infinity without losing a single iota of anything anybody would ever want. Karma as a system of reward and punishment is nonexistent, although awareness obviously is not finished experiencing cause-and-effect or the infinite repercussions of human actions; not this year. But there is no such thing as a person going from life to life to life in order to burn off his sins; or from life to hell to heaven; or from hell to focus 27; etc. By the time a person dies, all his thought forms, good and bad, have already gone to thought form repositories. Where they could easily mistaken for people stuck in heaven or hell, and retrieved by TMI-trained retrievers and taken to TMI-created Focus 27, where they are dissolved into a powder and sold as instant snake oil back here on earth to whoever is willing to pay a hundred dollars for a CD or thousands for a seminar. No wonder Frank Kepple chose to disappear when faced with the realities of marketing his hard-won wisdom. When he found out what really happens to us when we die, he was afraid to say it in a book that people were expected to pay for. Unlike me, he didn't care to spend the rest of his life being thrown out of every forum on earth for not toeing the line of convention. He cared about having friends and he liked people. When he figured out the way things really work, he had no reason to hang around the OBE community of consensus. Suddenly he was free. Nothing exists except awareness, and awareness is infinity. So there is only one soul. A person is just phenomena, just experience. Identity has no reason to survive death. The purpose of

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identity is to live a life. Over and over with varieties if desired, but it isn't identity that desires and suffers, it isn't identity that is aware. Only awareness needs to survive death in order for us to have eternal life. We personalities are automatons, robots. Our emotions and experiences, our choices and changes of mind, and our hopes and our dreams are just phenomena produced for the entertainment of the awareness that mistakes itself for us in a transitory fog of forgetfulness. Life is awareness dreamings, just reflections. When the dream is over, it's over. But because awareness trumps time, and not the other way around, and because awareness is infinity, there is no question of freedom of choice, ever. There is no such thing as suffering except as transitory phenomena. Life is awareness dreaming about possibilities.

THE RELIGION TRAP: WHY IT EXISTS The word "religion" comes from ancient root words meaning "tied back." Knowing that, I could cut this article short right there, but I don't want to be short with anybody. I used to have a cynical attitude about religion, but when I found out where religion comes from, I mellowed out a bit. It's not like I've never gotten stuck in the whirlpool of religious zeal. The sixth harmonic of awareness comes right after 5ness, and as such it is the antidote for fiveness. All of the harmonics have an antidote, because each one is a whirlpool from which we seek to escape, sooner or later. Since 5ness is change, 6ness is where we go when escaping from having 5ness run our life. This is the same thing as learning to use 5ness as a tool instead of a toy. Many other descriptions exist for sixness. Simple, balanced appreciation can instead be expressed as gratitude, enjoyment, fun, social interaction, sexual desire, curiosity, and on and on. Obsession, fanaticism, or religious zeal is just another way to give free rein to the fifth chakra and see where it takes you when it becomes your whole life. Unbalanced, overly

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focused monopolization of your energy by any of the overtones results in an unbalanced life and corresponding inabilities in other areas, due to lack of energy in ignored areas. With all your energy being dumped into religious feeling, it's perfectly normal for your life to fall apart. Then comes burnout and the worst kind of depression, which your fellow religious zealots will tell you is "backsliding". As a veteran upslider, let me assure you that the balanced use of sixness as a tool is a wonderful thing. Appreciation and gratitude never hurt anybody. And in fact, the act of balancing sixness is equivalent to escaping the sixness whirlpool and landing in the 7ness whirlpool: wisdom. You can never get too much of that, right? Don't count on it.

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IMP: THE INSTANTLY MALLEABLE PERSONALITY Know the rules well, so you can break them effectively. --Dalai Lama XIV We read and write books like this because we want out. If you want a malleable reality, or--in anticipation of the real thing--even a reasonable open-

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door policy at the prison of your choice, then the trick is to feed the right amount of energy to all seven dream bodies to make good your midnight ride to freedom. Being a reflection of oneness itself, you are infinite, but as an individual stuck with a personality, you only have access to part of your infinite resources at any given time. So any extremes have to be avoided as you parcel out your limited supply of energy to the seven people who make up your being. These seven dream bodies or chakras are the 2nd through the 8th harmonics of awareness, and to match the chakra numbering system they can be called the seven overtones of awareness. The overtones of awareness are the same thing as the harmonics of awareness without the first harmonic--which is the fundamental, so it can't be an overtone--and the ninth harmonic, which is the body of air, which forms spontaneously from the seven chakras whenever they're working in balance with each other. I don't want to use the term "chakra" very much because there is so much traditional mumbojumbo attached to the word, most of which is useless. It's more interesting and relevant to our purposes to realize that the people we meet in our dreams, and the people we are in our dreams, are usually one or more of our seven chakras, which I like to call dream bodies since that's how we routinely experience them, instead of as "chakras," whatever those are. It is essential to become able to merge with these dream bodies from either the waking or the dream state when the opportunity presents itself, and the information in this book will help you develop the attitude and personality of someone who is ready and able to do just that. Fortunately, merging with one's own selves is natural, not a matter of trying harder and harder, but a matter of being yourself and walking around obstacles. If you want a malleable reality, you need a malleable personality. I call that personality the IMP, which stands for instantly malleable personality. Beware the urge to try and change yourself into someone else other than who you are, based on what I am about to say. Selfimprovement is impossible since we are what we are, we change all the time anyway based on nearly infinite and ever-changing influences, and we literally cannot focus on what we need to be ready and able to do in any watched-for magical moment of choice if we are caught brooding about what's wrong with us or trying to control the massive flux that is the self. The universe is not broken, and neither are you. You don't need to be fixed. Nor am I about to launch into a diatribe on the necessity for eschewing negativity. How you feel is not something you should try hard to control, it's something you accept and work with. Accomplishing that is not a matter of changing who you are so that you will become a master of the universe in the future. It's a matter of relaxing, right now, no matter what. Big breath, another, what a relief. What we are after is malleability NOW, not a new set of rules. Let that sink in. Becoming fluid vs. mastering some set of rules--that's adaptability vs. obedience-they're almost opposite concepts. There is a progression in this practice of learning to become a capable unworlder, although it's not a progression of self-improvement, trying to see how beautiful everything is, eating the

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right foods, thinking the right thoughts, or building a pious image on Facebook. Those restrictive obsessions are for people who are embroiled in physicality, the 2-3-4 mind. We who would unworld seek balance in each aspect of our being, and fortunately there are only seven main aspects of our being to get into balance. When we escape the whirlpool of one core element of reality, we escape into the whirlpool of the next. But there is a final whirlpool beyond which the human form becomes a tool instead of a prison, a vehicle for free exploration of the universe. That whirlpool is the seventh and last dream body, also known as 8ness, the seventh chakra, the crown chakra, the color violet, the seventh overtone of awareness. The IMP: an instantly malleable personality. My IMP is called Limberluck. I dream through his eyes fairly often, though not often enough. Limberluck is a happy-go-lucky, unattached wanderer. He is curious about everything without caring too much about anything. He is naturally happy because he never asks himself whether he is happy; he's too busy enjoying himself to wonder whether or not he is happy. He has no needs. He is relaxed. He doesn't seek satisfaction; he assumes it, and goes from there. He can fly, and loves to show off this skill to anyone who happens to be around to witness it. Or to no one at all. He can be recognized by the way he dresses, so recently with a lot of focus on my dream life, I have taken to looking in mirrors when people treat me oddly in a dream, and a couple times this has led to a change in attitude due to noticing my casual mode of dress, and even lucidity (remembering who I am). In other words, if someone gives me a funny look and I run over to the nearest mirror to see what their problem is, I might say to myself, "OK, no problem," and merge with Limberluck, go outside and fly around for a while. 8ness can be described as relaxation, expansion, freedom, etc. Its prerequisites as a concept are all the other overtones: duality, attachment, order, change, appreciation, and knowing. We don't literally live in one mode and then suddenly graduate to the next, however each mode or overtone has built into it a familiarity with each preceding overtone. So what does it mean to balance all seven dream bodies? Since it doesn't refer to progressing through a program of self-improvement. It means to balance the seven dream bodies with each other. 8ness is relaxation and freedom; it is also cooperation. Think about it. Those three words --relaxation, freedom, and cooperation--refer to the same core state. The same element of reality from different perspectives. The same harmonic of awareness. And then grok this: 8ness needs no antidote. Why would it? Once we find a kernel of peace, what's there to fix? And oddly enough, we find peace by quitting the fixing game. But how do we know the right amount of energy to give each dream body? Simple. Give them all the same. You have access to a finite amount of energy at any given time, so just split it up seven ways and parcel it out. Yeah but, how do you do that? That sounds really hard!

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It's simple. 8ness encompasses the other notions that precede it. If you can relax no matter what, then you are at the threshold of freedom, because when you put this ability to practice, all your aspects are already in balance, or you would find it impossible to relax for some reason. We don't want to set out to adjust the environment so that there will be no more reasons to be unable to relax; that's the slow, painful way to learn unworlding. The fast way is to just plain evict these reasons from your mind, ignore any potential distractions and annoyances in your environment, and unworld the right way, with power. As yourself. If you practice relaxing no matter what consistently enough, you eventually will spontaneously merge with the body of air and fly or whatever you want. This is why so many people say you have to meditate or you won't be able to unworld. But practicing some meditation technique is not in itself the point. The point is to balance emotion, attachment, time, flow, enjoyment, and wisdom. This is done by relaxing no matter what, which is a matter of robbing from pools of energy usually monopolized by emotion, attachment, and order, generally expressed as a noisy 2-3-4 mind, and distributing the excesses thus captured for recycling among all seven dream bodies. It's not that any of the dream bodies including 2ness, 3ness, and 4ness are bad or wrong, but extreme monopolization of your limited energy by any one of them will keep you from being able to merge with 8ness, the ability to relax no matter what, your instantly malleable personality. To merge with the body of air, you have to bring yourself along with all your innate abilities. This is easier than it sounds since it's just a matter of relaxing, no matter what. This isn't done by thinking about it. It's done throughout the day as challenges present themselves. It's done in the practice when you lie down and close your eyes and give your 5+ senses something unique to pay attention to. If you can't do it, you won't unworld. But that's OK. That's why it's so nice here in prison. Have some chocolate ice cream instead, and make sure you enjoy it.

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REINCARNATION: THE FACTS Seasoned journeyer Frank Kepple, during his last days as Frank Kepple, was becoming more and more interested in going places that he was not sure he would return from. The facts about Frank's disappearance or demise are not available to us, but possibly unrelatedly, he had grown increasingly interested in the one unworlding experience that Robert Monroe had reported which threatened Monroe's health. Apparently there was a depth or distance away from the physical that, as Frank repeatedly stated during his final days, gave you 20 to 60 minutes to get back to the physical or else you wouldn't be going back. Do not fear: getting to this state of unworlding cannot happen accidentally. What this has to do with reincarnation I don't know, but it seems like interesting background for my next Frank Kepple gem of wisdom, which is another cryptic remark he kept making during his last days as Frank, which was this: within infinity, there are infinite versions of each of us. Now, as we all know by now--and Frank also constantly reminded us of this too--time has no hold on infinity. Quite the opposite; while time or fourness is all about rules and restrictions, when it comes to what time can and cannot do, it's infinity that writes those rules. Being god, the universe, and infinity all wrapped into one seamless, borderless, limitless Whatever, awareness wordlessly trumps literally and absolutely everything, including its own overtones such as time. Add to that the fact that many journeyers including Frank had experienced "other lives" when they were unworlding. We also know that Frank eventually denied the existence of reincarnation as a literal fact when he was near the end, calling it a misinterpretation of what was really going on. He kept saying that there are infinite versions of each of us due to the nature of infinity, and they are not past or future lives, they are simultaneous lives. But it's not clear at that point whether he meant that each separate person lives infinite versions of the same life, or whether each separate person has a separate life but the same soul. I opt for both: each person template creates infinite variations and one soul--infinity itself--projects infinite person templates. The person is not the awareness that animates it, which is why the person can seem to die while awareness lives on forever: the awareness that animates every person and every possible variation of each person is exactly the same. Now for what I don't believe. Reincarnation and its evil twin karma exist as ideas for approximately two reasons. 1. People

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who have near death experiences and other mystical experiences such as unworlding report the phenomenon of reincarnation as factual based on their experience, and 2. Religions report the phenomenon as factual based on dogma. Item 2 is easily dealt with, but I won't waste a lot of science or logic on it. Dogma is essentially an opinion, so what's to disprove about it? I will use emotion and opinion to fight emotion and opinion. Religious organizations require funding. Guilt is an emotion, an outgrowth of the primal emotion fear, and the reincarnation-karma partnership offers a solution; whether true or not, it does make that offer. People believe in reincarnation because it assuages the guilt which they don't otherwise try to control since the guilt was put in place by parents, and emotional attachments in the traditional cultures that spawned the old religions prevent people from questioning their parents' word. In contast, Americans live in a cynical world where you don't have to believe in anything and you put your elderly parents in warehouses for the dying instead of caring for them in your home, so questioning the religious beliefs of your parents is second nature by now in uncultured melting-pots like America. Similarly, in traditional cultures, karma is presented as universal law, so to question it is to question the Creator. Americans once again have no experience with tradition, having grown up in front of televisions as economic units feeding the Machine of capitalism upon which America is founded. So, lacking religion to explain the existence of our natural guilty feelings, America came up with the New Age, and preachers took to the press. As emotions go, guilt is an obsession, a compulsion dictator, and a self-feeding, selfmaintaining, self-sustaining machine. So are all emotions, but at the same time, all emotions can be gotten under control. Tackling an emotion head on and taking one's power back from it is one way, but it isn't the way touted by any religion on earth, because religion requires funding. If you send the patient home cured, you've lost a customer. So you don't want a dogma which offers an achievable solution to karma. You want a belief in 10,000 lives. The priest class has to eat, so... keep 'em comin' in the door and send 'em home wanting more. That is financial security for the priest class. People who write new age books are the priest class of the new age religion, which is based on the more profitable aspects of the old religions, because people want to be paid for writing books. This is a relatively new phenomenon, thus the term "new" age. In the fairly recent past, if you wanted to be paid for your opinion, you'd have to either preach it from the pulpit, serve it up with a sword, or put your opinion in a bottle and call it medicine so people had something to take home with them while you skedaddled to the next county. Nowadays you can work from home; that's even better! The advent of the personal computer and the internet made it easy for people like me who have an opinion to launch themselves into the ether as new age prophets, self-appointed and paid via Kindle or PayPal or YouTube. The

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internet is the ultimate platform for the time-honored system of mail-order: buying stuff from a guy with no face and possibly no physical address, and just hoping for the best because his ad appealed to you. And what could be more appealing than a series of books saying exactly what people want to hear, the very bookly manifestation of the principle of reincarnation: ideas that won't go away. Which is another bit of evidence that people use to promote reincarnation: the idea won't go away. I don't accept this as evidence. What I do accept is that the priest class needs to eat, so religion must be somehow sold, not given away. Taking advantage of the fact that emotion is what makes the world go around is not unique to the priest class or new age writers. No sane culture would accept capitalism, but we are not sane, we are animals and we thrive on taking from each other, grappling with the herd to gain status and eat better than the passive nerds on the fringe of the herd. New age writers take with great finesse and for the most part they are quite sincere in their beliefs. That's about as nice as I get with these folks because they foster so much misery and eternal wheelspinning by encouraging people to feel bad so they will come crawling back for the same answers in a new set of clothes, that is, the next book in the series. It's not malevolent, unless needing to eat is malevolent. Decide that for yourself when you choose which shark you will allow to eat you: the nice one or the mean one. They're both hungry, so the meat of you goes to a good cause either way. I liked NDE experiencer "Ms. NDE's" YouTube lectures so much that I bought her book. In her videos, she soothingly rants on about how life is not a school and there is no such thing as karma and reincarnation is completely optional; in fact she "was told" (and that makes it true?) that she herself is finished reincarnating. Great, methinks, an NDE book that I might actually be able to read! But the harder I try to focus on it, the more I feel I am in church guzzling pre-digested swill. Every other word is capitalized and it's all karma-this, karma-that, evolve evolve oh Human Race, your Light Being resides inside of you, the universe evolveth as thou evolvest, blah blah blah blah. Ms. NDE, who confesses to having been a money grubbing lawyer before her brush with the infinite, had the good sense to get out of the professional rat-race of lying for a living and figured out, consciously or sub-consciously, how to stay home and create a more relaxed income at a more relaxed pace, doing what she does best, lying. And I don't mean to be ungentle; but she got my $10 for her kindle book by misrepresenting her opinions on YouTube in info-mercials purporting to be reports of experiences, so she can take my words any way she wants, because I don't pity liars. This leads to the other reason we believe in reincarnation and its bedpartner in hell, karma, which is that people return from unworlding and near death experiences reporting reincarnation as fact. Good people, reliable people, nice people, people who are not lying as such. Even Ms. NDE is not lying as such, but being wrong by accident is similar to lying in some important ways. Since many purveyors of new age snake oil are not lying as such, we must try to identify what it is about these otherworldly experiences--experiences which they really

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have had--that causes its experiencers to become deluded. And why can I assume they are deluded? See part one above: if capitalism says it's so, it is not so, it is a fabrication for the purposes of advertising in a competitive market where one's product must appear and sound more appealing than some other person's product. And capitalism is selling us reincarnation in the form of thousands of books, so we can safely (not scientifically, just safely) assume that reincarnation is begging to be debunked just like the next brand of miracle soap that makes you look younger.

Reincarnation is a product, and guilt sells soap. We must move on now to real experiences that seem to be the actual source of the rumor that the priest class draws on for evidence to back up its dogma. This monologue must move on, before my audience decides I'm just angry. Well, anger is not the point, I just don't like capitalism because it turns beautiful things like food, art, music and mystical experience into products that must be inflated with BS in order to sell more units. And yeah, I guess ruining food, art, music and mystical experience for a fast buck kinda pisses me off. Be that as it may, people I like including Ms. NDE do come back from other worlds believing they have re-experienced reincarnations. This happened to me once: in a dream (non-lucid OBE) I lived the whole life of a man who eventually died outside a gathering-hall where he was not allowed inside because at the end of his life, his society had rejected him. I don't remember the experience in detail, I just vaguely recall vividly living his whole life and how discouraged and betrayed he felt when he died. I actually remember his enjoying these emotions, gobbling them up like candy. Does that mean I was him in some other life? I honestly don't have an opinion, based on being the person who had the experience. Part of me wants to believe in reincarnation for the same emotional reasons I've mentioned above. But sometimes I prefer logic. So let me attack this as logically as I can. Writer after writer says, "I saw this person when I was in an unworlded condition, merged with them, felt all their feelings, saw obvious connections with my current life, and now I believe 100% in reincarnation because I experienced it for myself." Similarly, NDE'rs tend to experience a life review, re-experience all the icky things they did which they feel guilty for from their victim's point-of-view, and if they have a good memory like Ms. NDE, they might even get to walk around in someone else's skin long enough to come away with a 100% belief in reincarnation, because they experienced it. So I played football with my cousin when I was 10, that makes me a football player? So I wrote a wee computer program while drinking too much coffee, that makes me a programmer?

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So I was elected captain of my high school prayer meeting, that makes me a better Christian than the others, or a lifelong Christian, or a Christian at all? Dude, I was the worst Christian in the room, maybe that's why I was elected! I am here to tell you that the universe as we know it is a vibratory phenomenon. As the new agers know only so well, this has been gospel for a long time. What they fail to do is to consult any vibratory science for halfway usable analogies. Can any new age preachers even explain what a vibration is? I can. A vibration is a change from equilibrium which tends to propagate itself through a medium. Due to some natural tendency such as perhaps elasticity of the medium, when some disturbance triggers a change from equilibrium in one direction, the change itself produces its opposite phase change. In other words, if you bounce the ball, it bounces back. If you stretch a rubber band and release it, it snaps back. The energy that snaps back and hurts your finger is the energy that was originally used to stretch the rubber band to begin with. In a relatively loss-free situation like sound waves which travel very far and fast, a tweaked group of molecules rebounds back toward where it started, travels past equilibrium due to energy stored in its motion, and continues bouncing back-and-forth many times. Meanwhile, the back-and-forth motion (not the originally tweaked group of molecules but the phenomenon of vibration that passed through the group of molecules and tweaked them) keeps going at the speed of sound, tweaking group after group of molecules, reflects off of surfaces that are reflective, resounds within shaped chambers tuned to resonate at that frequency, changes directions, and eventually dissipates. Pure awareness or infinity or Existence Itself is the fundamental of reality, but I doubt that the fundamental of reality is a vibration. Rather, it is the medium, the equilibrium that gets tweaked. Pure Awareness is disturbed by something (by awareness itself, no doubt) and vibration is twoness, that two-component thing we call duality. I proceed to posit a harmonic structure for my elements of reality, because vibrations do that, they form harmonic structures. And we get a progression up through higher harmonics; the new age lovers of progress and higher vibrations should eat that up, right? Something else that vibrations do is to resonate when they reflect and get trapped within containers of certain suitable shapes that fit their natural frequency. For example if you have two violins set close to each other and tuned together, and you draw a bow across the D string of one violin, the D string on the other violin, untouched by bow or human hands, will vibrate in sympathy with the disturbed string. It does this because it is the perfect container for that vibration. The vibration fits with its length, tension and other traits comprising its "shape" as a resonator. It reflects the sound wave that travels through the air and touches it, setting off a big response with a small signal. That doesn't mean the two violins are reincarnations of each other, I hope.

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Similarly, if you blow over the top of an open beer bottle, the whistling sound it makes is the frequency of vibration that fits in that bottle due to its length and shape. Because the sound fits in it, the sound reflects in the container in such a way as to self amplify, thus the air in the container resonates. Then there's those convoluted plastic pipes that you whirl around. A sound is produced at the resonator's natural frequency, and the higher tones you produce if you twirl it faster are the harmonics of that frequency. If the tube had no natural frequency--if it were not a resonator--there would be no harmonics because there would be no fundamental frequency to start with. When two people resonate with each other, they don't need all that science to know that they fit together or at least get each other for a few minutes, days or years. Resonance is something we feel because it's basic to our reality. Resonance is a vibration thing, and our world is built on vibrations: the harmonics of awareness. When an unworlder gets to the Other Lives zone of his subjective experience, he is able to merge with other folks and experience their lives through their eyes and other senses. He remembers their memories as if they were his own. Why? Because the configurations of the two, the "shape" of their psyches, is similar enough that they vibrate sympathetically. They resonate together. I suppose a really talented unworlder could merge with someone he doesn't resonate with, but the world is perhaps waiting for someone that talented to want to write a book. This point--reincarnation is resonance--is so simple that I think beating it to death would do nothing for my health. I've been sick for two weeks and it's four o'clock in the morning, why am I up all night writing free books to give away on the internet? For the money? No, I have nothing to gain by showing people the simple answers for free. I think I just like being right. When people nearly die, even if the machinery of modern medical science says they did die, and if they then come back to tell about it, what they actually had was an unworlding experience. They experienced the edges of a world that is beyond what we prisoners of the body typically know. But only the edges of it. If they had truly died, they would truly not have come back. The experiences they have are qualitatively not much different from other unworlding experiences. The NDE is potentially much more intense and long-lived as unworldings go, for the obvious reason that the 2-3-4 mind/body/world is temporarily not fit to be experienced. The tables have turned: so what happens when an individual is suddenly trapped in an unworld instead of being trapped in the everyday world as he normally is? Suddenly his beliefs kick in and manifest as real as real can be, he experiences his life over again in terms of whatever things he thinks, at a deep level, that he should feel good or bad about. He sees everything from the other person's point-of-view, and like anyone else who is unworlded, can merge with anybody he wants in order to experience even more memories, but will tend to merge with someone he resonates with because it's only natural.

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None of this is required; every NDE is different. Which kinda says right there that every NDE is subjective. Not a good place to drum up a bundle of retail reality, or is it? I guess it is. Because if you've been to Nepal and I haven't, and you tell me that all Nepalese children have six fingers, I will believe you because I haven't been to Nepal. Silly example, I know. But there is a line beyond which a belief system cannot be stretched. That line, for me, is that almost dying makes some person's opinion about reality more true than mine. Here we have some truck driver or some lawyer who never thought twice about the nature of reality coming back from a near-death experience which reeks of every trait of subjectivity and emotionalism that could ever be packaged together into a single kind of experience, and suddenly they have met the infinite and I haven't? Their opinion is pure gold gospel and mine is not? Hell's bells, I have met the infinite continuously for several decades, and throughout most of that time I have thought long and hard about these matters. I have paid close attention to this sort of thing for many years, and I have something that many of these NDE'rs don't have, when it comes to conjecturing about the nature of reality: I am experienced.

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HOW CAN EVERYTHING BE EQUALLY UNREAL? I've mentioned elsewhere that not all beliefs are bad, but the wrong ones can be. There is a faction that says we should have no beliefs, that they are all irrelevant and the whole notion of having any beliefs at all is just wrongheaded. I've said this attitude is also wrong--in fact it is a belief--you should look at the results you are getting and then change your beliefs till you start liking your results. What is a void of beliefs good for? Nature abhors a vaccum, so if you have no beliefs, you are a blank slate, fair game for the first belief-monger who comes along with something to fill your hole with. You won't be without beliefs for long. Wouldn't you rather choose your own, from among those that will do you no harm? But it is true that everything is equally unreal. This is one of those things you will realize when you spend enough time thinking about what infinity is and how it would have to work if it is, in fact, infinite. I can't do that for you, but I can present a new overarching "law of unreality" to help you when you get overloaded by the onslaught of infinity, and that law is this: everything is equally unreal. This notion can take the heat off, but at some point it becomes a belief in itself. That's OK, you can do what you want with it. No one forces you to believe anything, hopefully. Like I said, look at what results you get, and make adjustments accordingly. Take for example the belief that reincarnation is a trap imposed by evil "lords of karma," to enslave you, blah, blah, blah. This sounds like fun, what everyone needs to pump up their selfimportance is a real imaginary enemy. One that malevolently messes with your immortal soul when you die! Heck, if you're gonna believe in reincarnation, you might as well believe it's a conspiracy while you're at it, eh? Why not! For me, personally, I would prefer to keep in mind what Frank Kepple learned after spending his first five years of "astral travel" fighting bad guys out there. He suddenly realized that the bad guys were created spontaneously by his belief in them, and he was able to walk away from them and focus on much more interesting and less repetitively predictable notions instead of robotically self-fulfilling fantasies of being the noble warrior fighting the evil overlords of sin at the cosmic level. If you believe in reincarnation, there's nothing to prevent you from experiencing reincarnation. "Paying off karma?"--same story. Pay off as much karma as you want, they're your lives if you, as pure awareness, decide to experience them, all in a row, obligatorily. Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks. And hey, why don't I decide, why'll I'm at it, that these nasty lives as a prisoner are foisted on me by the lying, deceiving lords of karma? All these interpretations are open to us, but to me the best place to start is to reject the interpretation of reincarnation to begin with, and hope, when that fateful day arrives, to enter the expanded

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reality after physical death with the belief that I am free to explore infinity forever and free of any restrictions at all. What might happen to me if I enter infinity as a freelancer, not at the effect of duality, but instead using duality as a properly balanced tool? That is, the ability to tell things apart, period. People who preach duality religions, no matter how much sense they make or how appealing they are, have gotten stuck in the very first chakra--duality--and you might consider not following their example. That's why you don't want to walk around without your own belief system, in my opinion. Sure you want some flexibility, but that's part of it. That's balance. On the other hand, there's nothing worse than an overzealous lust for moderation. I can't stand it when I can't or won't make up my mind. We really must remind ourselves from time to time that everything is equally unreal. When I was ready to begin trying to learn the art of unworlding--not that I called it that yet--I framed the preliminary and prerequisite period of my self-training as a project to record my baseline belief system in detail. The belief system which I had developed over a period of 59 years on earth. I finished this record before I allowed myself to start the practice, and this was motivating in itself. By the time I'd written a whole book of drivel about what I already knew I believed, I was chomping at the bit to learn unworlding. Whatever it was that I did happen to believe at the time, I was relatively quickly able to have some impressive experiences of expanded awareness, and after a year I found that unworlding as a methodless method was going to be my new interest, vs. searching far and wide for a guru even better than Frank Kepple. As for my duly recorded belief system, it had not been shattered, as I thought it might be, by my first several-to-many unordinary experiences, including an aborted dip into religious waters. In many ways, my belief system was reinforced by having many small and large experiences of the unknown during my first year. But isn't this what happens to everyone? We attract what we resonate with, end of story. Remember the masterful Frank Kepple fought demons and goblins for his first five years, because he had no one to guide him, no internet forums to ask questions on, so he didn't realize he was just manifesting his fears, emotions, and beliefs (twoness or the first chakra). When he did realize this, everything changed quickly. He was too smart to keep warring with his own shadow indefinitely. When you set out to learn how to experience expanded states of awareness wherein you, and you alone, manifest your own reality environment, it is your beliefs, emotions, thoughts, fears, etc. that will manifest instantly and effortlessly in that environment. Do you really want to start out with no beliefs? I don't think so. I would take a close look at what your existing beliefs are, maybe make some adjustments, but for the most part, do acknowledge that as sentient beings on earth, we do have beliefs. Go into it knowing sort of what to expect, and what that is, is more of you than what you ever saw in any other mirror before.

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When the blank canvas upon which we create our environments, experiences, and circumstances happens to be infinite, then every possible and impossible thing will be found there. Why fight this? Beliefs are just beliefs, just filters, like sunglasses, to keep infinity from all blasting you at once. Someone else has his own beliefs. You and he might barely intersect on your respective rampaging romps through reality. You should expect to always be misunderstood and disagreed with once you become responsible for the knowledge that everything is equally untrue. It could drive you crazy to try and deny the basic flexibility of reality when the fundamental element of our existence is infinity, that is, awareness that can't be limited or defined. No one is going to believe anything you say, and if they do, it will be for reasons of their own. No one ever gets it. You have to stop caring to a certain extent and detach from any and all opportunities to get emotional about other people's experience of you. If somebody who has taken Robert Monroe's books too literally believes they can go into Astral Environment 23547 and save trapped souls from astral hells, heavens and other belief systems, and brag about it in public and make their accounts unassailable and uncritiquable by claiming that they are possessed by pure unconditional love, OK. Let them have their beliefs. They are working out their karma, right? Or so they think. More power to them! The twodimensional reflections that they are saving from hell are not harmed by their busybody manipulations, and neither are you. There is an element of reality to everything, due to the law of unreality: Everything is equally unreal. The complement of that statement is pretty easy to figure out. That doesn't mean you have to drink the kool-aid every time someone offers it to you. What's to stop you from making your own decisions about what to believe? Then you can have experiences of expanded awareness that resonate with you strongly instead of you just wimpily wandering around infinity waiting for someone else's take on the ineffable to sneak up and bite you on the ass. What about the great disbeliever Carlos Castaneda, who caved in to his Catholic upbringing in the end and developed a teaching that our identity gets eaten by "the Eagle" if we aren't good and proper warriors with no hang-ups, blah, blah, blah. It's a great fairy story, and his books are worth reading too many times, same as Monroe's. But in the final analysis, it's the results they got that inform us of their intent. And what they got was money, fame, a beautiful compound to live on with their doting admirers and true believers, and expensive products to sell that made them rich. Not that Monroe wasn't rich already, but Castaneda certainly did well for himself, with nothing particularly non-physical to show for himself but a rich tapestry of multi-level, barely questioned deception. My personality is opposite to Castaneda: I cannot tell a lie. But my belief system isn't that far off from his. He never mentioned reincarnation, for which I admire and respect him. I waste considerably too many words on it myself. But it is--along with its evil conjugal twin Karma--a

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core belief of the ancient Hindu religion which gave birth to Buddhism, Sikhism, Sufism and Goofism. People need a reason to keep on waking up in this overgrown mess hall called earth every day; they could, if they wanted to badly enough, just die in their sleep. Why even keep waking up in this earthly dream? Isn't it obvious that the earth is a prison or a mental institution for those who haven't yet figured out the secret password to escape it? Castaneda did a good thing by extracting a lot of good useful philosophies from a variety of sources, leaving the moralism out of it, and trying to get people interested in approaching unworlding as a skill instead of a religion. Where he messed up was to present it as a nearly impossible skill to learn, in expensive mass-produced hardcover books that made him a millionaire. Which effectively made him another preacher getting rich off the beliefs, fears, thoughts, and emotions of human beings wandering like ghosts on the surface of an imaginary planet. And once he was as rich as snot, he was just another ghost like the others, passing fake money around and waiting to die. There is nothing about your nature that you need to overcome. Simply unworld. Do it the easy way. The gurus all preach the same religion: effort and more effort, complication and danger, buy my brand, get yours today, before it's too late! No. It's easy. Unworld or don't, I don't care.

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SOMETHING TELLS ME And then I realize there's something that's been bothering me, and that something is there is nothing there. --song written by the author's 7th chakra in a dream Guides, guardian angels, soul parts, dream bodies, higher selves, other lives, role models, soul mates... the "soul retinue," as I call it, is a most distracting influence on what some of us ostentatiously and/or euphemistically call "the practice". This topic is about stepping outside the subjective zone while getting involved with hypothetically existing others, so there's some tendency to quibble with oneself about what approach to take and how seriously to take it, because we don't want to go to some foreign land in another universe and immediately piss off the natives. And worse, who's gonna advise us when we can't decide how to go about dealing with the first imaginary playmates we've had since childhood? Especially when the likelihood seems strong that they are only imaginary in someone else's mind? In the process of unworlding, it's possible to merge with other lives, dream bodies, etc. and it's no longer so obvious where one should draw the line between oneself and another person. Here is how I make peace with the menagerie of related entities, whether they are all aspects of me or whatever, without having to truly make sense of it in terms of possessing Monroe's gold-plated "knowns" to replace what were once happily flexible opinions: --There is only one soul, it is infinite awareness, and we are it. --Everything is equally unreal. --Don't drink the kool-aid. Now that you know what to think, do, and say, let me serve up the kool-aid that is available from this fount of knowledge, and you can do what you want with it. There are three kinds of hypnotherapist. One, the new age kind. Most of these are all about guided visualization and relaxation, incense and new age music, all of which just make me want to go home and be my own hypnotist without the annoying distractions. Next we have credentialed, professional, clinical hypnotherapists. The only one I ever spoke to was so rude to me on the phone that I dismissed this entire group as well. Possibly an overreaction on my part. The third group consists of Milton Erickson M.D., founder of the American Society of

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Clinical Hypnosis, who was probably the real "don Juan" of Carlos Castaneda. Erickson was in a class of his own, and no doubt there are others who belong to this class, but I don't know who they are, possibly because they don't need to advertise. Assuming that such hypnotherapists actually still exist now that Erickson has passed on, the practitioners in this latter class are well aware that there is such a thing as the remote mind (my terminology) which is, among other things, a repository for everything we have ever experienced, accessible in perfect detail once you experience the relevant expanded state of awareness. That state is so far beyond what the conscious mind offers as "memory," it's not even worth comparing the two kinds of memory. The remote mind can also be tapped into during a competently accomplished self-hypnosis effort in such a way that the subject can experience the intuitive discovery of answers to problems that he could never hope to solve with his own conscious mind. The remote mind can speak in codes and riddles that only the most intuitive hypnotherapist would be able to interpret. One method suggested for accessing the remote mind in a self-hypnosis session, according to Erickson (but in my words), would be to look in a mirror and tell yourself to go away till the problem is solved. This can result in a hypnotic trance with full amnesia. What about semi-related otherworldly stuff that highly professional, clinical hypnotherapists would not dare to mention openly, for fear of tainting their reputation? I have experienced at least one undeniable instance of dreaming about the future and having it come true shortly thereafter. It only takes one event of this shocking accuracy to alter your beliefs permanently, though I have had a few other striking instances of premonitions, but normally I have no feel for ESP, I seem to be as immune to the stuff as any true skeptic, without meaning to be. In general, things changed when I started looking for participation from outside of myself. This is the part where you want to open your mind slowly or suffer the whiplash of sudden religious fervor. This is the time to not drink the kool-aid. When you open the door to "the others" your sanity could fail along with your belief systems. Getting back to "things I have seen." I have seen the aura of one human being, with precise and unsolicited independent confirmation. Later I found out the person whose aura I had seen was a psychic healer who had dissolved a friend's troublesome wisdom teeth. Not some stranger's wisdom teeth; my best friend's wisdom teeth. Someone who doesn't lie to me. And then, one day in about 2004 I was on a long distance phone call to an old friend who patiently listened to me whine about no one responding to my ad seeking a roommate to share the rent. Then my friend was going on about how I should trust my guardian angel, blah blah blah. I listened politely since she was doing her best to be helpful, poor thing, and that's what I get for complaining: now I have to listen to advice from this psycho basket case, blah

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blah blah, and finally after making me promise one more time to turn it over to my guardian angel, she finally managed to say goodbye and hang up the phone. I hung up the phone, and before I had taken my hand off it, the darn thing rang. It was a stranger answering my ad, who moved into my house the next day, always paid his rent on time, shared interests with me without being a pest or a bother, and helped me quit smoking cigarettes by making a speech less than six sentences long that he never had to repeat a second time. I had tried to quit for 25 years. I have not laughed about guardian angels since. Nor paid hypnotherapists. Nor do I pray to people I can't see. I just can't, and what is it about being non-physical that should make someone more trustworthy than anyone else? And yet, as the story goes, Robert Monroe had unworlded so many times that he was bored with it, when he turned over the subject matter of his journeys to some unknown guide whose presence he barely suspected, and the rest is literary history: two books that were the only books worth reading in the new age bookstores for so long that I stopped going into those places altogether. Bored no more. And yet... I seem to have outgrown those books too. Even Frank Kepple, who held new age foo-foo in considerably more contempt than I do, and had never meditated or done energy work... his guide was named Harath. Harry for short. Frank had started out skeptical, but later insisted that guides expand the scope of the unworlding practice immeasurably. And yet... shortly before his disappearance, Frank started grumbling about whether he thought his guides were anything but aspects of himself. The following glossary of imaginary and unimaginary playmates is not well researched, since I have recently cured myself of senility and thenceforth have wisely decided that I don't care what other people think about stuff that can't be proved anyway. Here are my opinions:

--Guides and guardian angels are supposed to be objectively separate from us, but my opinion is that each individual is separate from each other individual, so this is nothing special. No matter how advanced they seem compared to yours truly, they can always turn on me or give bad advice, and as a soul no one is more advanced than anyone else because we all share the same soul. While of course claiming I'd just misinterpreted their telepathic communication. But I have a guide named Mouse, for example, who inhabits secret places and thus knows me better than I know myself. I'm waiting for him to tell me his real name before I start taking him too seriously. Actually I think he might be my 7ness dream body; see below. As for the word "angels," most of what these dudes do for me, like turning off the electricity without warning

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to keep me from spending six more hours on the computer when I could be experiencing states of expanded awareness, is relatively annoying and obtrusive. That's probably why we'd rather think they are separate from us.

--Soul parts are aspects of the individual that bear certain identifiable traits, attitudes, and

abilities. The ones who seem to get the most attention are those that have been repressed, cast aside, evicted, abused into silence, etc. These can become the subject of "soul retrieval" or "self soul retrieval" if you are inclined toward fiddling with your insides. Personally I consider all such entities to be 2-dimensional reflections which could be safely ignored if you would only just relax a bit and have more patience with yourself, and if you can't, then these soul partners could just be welcomed back effortlessly and nurtured part-time... if they behave themselves. The problem with getting obsessed with rescuing parts of yourself is that it's easy to become embroiled in self-improvement as a religious obligation. At which point your practice of trying to learn unworlding could become subverted into trying to figure out what's wrong with you that keeps you from being able to unworld. Pilgrim beware: unworlding does not have to be nigh on impossible. Why would you want to add unnecessary obstacles? This is a complex and controversial topic, so I've continued the discussion of soul parts, or aspects of the self, in a separate chapter.

--The "negs". Possibly the worst terminology ever thought up by the unworlding non-

community. Anyone who's done any research knows that the negative entities that sometimes appear in states of expanded awareness are your own fears and beliefs reflecting your expectations of them. Once I was attacked by a beautiful actress after she suggested I make love to her. I saw a blemish on her skin and this triggered something in me that turned the woman into a huge hideous monster that tried to eat my soul. I fought valiantly, but when I spontaneously, sincerely, and fervently wished that I could help her, she turned back into herself. The plotline changed and she showed me her invention, which, when I paid close attention to it, ushered me into a full-blown experience of transcendent lucidity. The negs are not to be feared; only fear makes them temporarily seem real. We have nothing to offer them by playing their silly games. The only thing the negs need from us is a better name.

--Dream bodies are pure harmonics, the overtones of awareness, the chakras. I have met these fellas--some of them girls and/or women--over and over in my dreams. For example, my duplex 4ness dreambody a.k.a. the "Dichotomous Duo" or more formally known as Nitpicker and Potwatcher. They are always dressed for work and have appeared as a pair of engineers, laborers, moving men, janitors, and librarians, not to mention Tweedledum and Tweedledee. My 5ness body, the dream usher, is called the Green Ripper. He shows up offering to take me someplace in a pure white vehicle, and his main job seems to be ushering me into the Nothing which is the door to everything. Fortunately for him, I don't carry a gun. I am a newbie, still automatically afraid of the Nothing for some reason. My 8ness body, corresponding to the 7th chakra or crown chakra, is called Limberluck. He is a mellow, street-dwelling fellow who takes nothing seriously and loves to show people how he can fly. For the body of 6ness, see below.

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In awakenings I often recall encounters with a dream body. Oftentimes the dream body was trying to get my attention with a kick to the head or something, resulting in awakening with a hypnagogic twitch or a jolt of the vibrations in a body part. Or else we might trade first person perspective back-and-forth between us.

--Higher self: mine is called Whirly. He appears as a cripple with amazing abilities; as men of unassuming authority who exude absolute silence; and as swirling images which are tunnels to the unknown. I used to call this guide Tiger, but I no longer have opinions about power animals since I grew up watching Mighty Mouse cartoons and eating white sugar for breakfast, not playing in the mud outside the medicine man's teepee chewing on scraps of dried buffalo hide, so why should I pretend I could ever be a shaman? The higher self or future self is composed of all seven overtones or chakras in a balanced state. Obviously a future self since I am not there yet, but nothing prevents a hypothetical future SuperMe from visiting the real me in experiences of expanded reality. This is also called the ninth harmonic or 9ness. It is a vehicle you can ride to total freedom and other transcendent states of being.

--Other lives: this is when you merge with a different individual and live all or part of their life from their point of view. The ability to merge with other individuals is so convincing--because you are truly merged and really see from their perspective--that the belief in reincarnation has grown up around it. Other lives also include simultaneous lives in this reality as well as other realities and parallel universes. I once lived the life of another person in a dream, more or less from start to finish. When you've had enough experiences like this, you tend not to want to use the word "dream" for experiences of expanded awareness, because you become painfully aware that other people belittle dreams and don't have any idea what they are.

--Role models: those people who blow us away with their amazing navigational abilities and then, since only the good die young, tend to get lost at sea while living on as an inspiring memory of opportunities lost. We wonder the rest of our lives what made them so much more amazing than us, and experiment naively with being just like them. My dead friends join me in experiences of expanded reality all the time. The ones who aren't worth having for role models, well they don't usually die young. That's how you tell them apart from the real thing. The only one of my dead friends who is no role model is the one who probably would be alive today if he had never met me.

--Soulmates: the one I meet in expanded states of awareness appears differently almost every time, as women of a variety of ages, and I pursue them diligently until the dream ends and I wake up next to my wife, who I used to think was my soulmate, till we both realized we weren't dreaming. The dream soulmate is the body of 6ness and usually appears as a member of the opposite sex, though sometimes I have to check before I start making out with "her". I call mine Cwahacoy, which stands for "crush who also has a crush on you". A downright rare thing in the real world, at least until they legalize polygamy and/or one-day divorce

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proceedings. We might call this our "female side" if we are male, and if we were somewhat more inclined to new age terminology. The "love yourself" crowd has yet to get through to me; I am more inclined to look forward passionately to the day I can manage to put up with myself. A final reminder: There is only one soul, it is infinite awareness, and we are it. Everything is equally unreal. Don't drink the kool-aid. Be who you are.

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WHAT'S WRONG WITH ATTACHMENT TO RESULTS? Experiencing expanded states of awareness relies on your ability to re-deploy some of your energy from its accustomed parasitical over-consumers--2ness, 3ness, and 4ness, where dwells the physical mind-body-world--and give this energy to the other harmonics of awareness instead. Not because the lower chakras or overtones are broken or maladjusted, and the higher harmonics are not higher in the sense of being better or more spiritual, they just need more of your energy than what you normally give them in order to do their magic. They are simply neglected, misunderstood, unexperienced, and very patient until you notify them that you are aware of their existence. At which time they go to work trying to get you to wake up and notice them. This process of unworlding starts with the dream usher 5ness or change, continues on to various forms of 6ness such as curiosity, which is just appreciation for you know not what, and proceeds to the highest harmonics. Sevenness is wisdom, intuition, understanding what's really going on; 8ness is expansion or relaxation: when your parts cooperate with each other. We have gone over this before and we will go over it again. What makes the physical world so solid? So prisonlike? The answer is simple: 3ness. We sense the world into existence. The 3rd harmonic of awareness is the antidote to separation, thus it is connection. As individuals we are separate from the rest of the world, separate from each other, and our livers are separate from our spleens. What creates the world--makes it real--is seeing it, hearing it, feeling it, tasting it, smelling it; feeling motion, hot and cold, etc. Sensation and perception are 3ness. Our 5+ senses connect us to the surroundings, to other people, to parts of our body. That's what makes reality real. What makes some things more real than others? Generally speaking, since we live in a consensus reality, agreement among reality's various participants tends to concretize said reality into something believable, credible, something we can agree about. Threeness connects us to each other in a somewhat common reality, a collective average made up of individuals. What happens to disagreeable sorts of people who are always spouting unpopular opinions? Marginalized. They are said to "live in their own little worlds". These notions are all related, and "relationship," by the way, is another description of 3ness. So is attachment. When we're attached to something, we don't want to let it go. We don't want to be separate

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from it. We cling to it. Are you seeing the pattern? Threeness has many descriptions, but it is one thing: the third harmonic of awareness. Also known as the 2nd overtone of awareness, or the second chakra. By the way, before I forget: the reason there are two systems of numbering for the elements of reality is twofold: 1) in music science, it's done that way; harmonics can also be called overtones and the numbers are one off; and 2) the overtone numbers correspond to traditional numbering of the chakras, while the harmonic numbers correspond to traditional meanings of the numbers as per traditional numerology. When learning to unworld, especially when engaged in the exercise called "Noticing," a common complaint of the beginner is the tendency of images, aurages and feelages to disappear as soon as you focus on them. Well, as Frank Kepple used to say, when the untrained observer sees something non-physical with his mind, he tries to follow it with his eyes. But when you engage your physical eyes, it instantly re-creates the physical world, erasing the image. To get unhooked from the physical world, you have to see with your mind and keep the eyes relaxed. Frank Kepple liked to say look "up" into the mind. Any attempt to directly confront images will dissipate them; you have to go around the back way. You will learn how this works only by doing it. I like to imagine the mind having a 360 degree scope, and look--with my mind, my awareness-behind my head where my eyes cannot follow. The idea being to ignore the eyes completely, in any convenient way that works for you. I don't mean to do this in a rigid way. Anything that keeps you from relaxing will re-engage the physical senses. There's a way of noticing images, aurages, and feelages without being attached to them. As soon as you glom onto something, you are putting too much energy into 3ness, and "putting too much energy into 3ness" is the very definition of being physical. Not that expanded realities aren't real. But they are not as solid as the realities we create by consensus and then practice experiencing over and over by consensus using all 5+ senses. That's why we crave expanded reality experiences. The rules are less important, we can do stuff like fly and create cheese, wine and chocolate just by thinking about it. So what you have to do is put a lot of time and attention and focus into sensing and perceiving stuff that most people would agree is not there. This is a practical exercise, you are not sitting around waiting to hallucinate a whole chapter out of a Castaneda novel. You start with nothing and expand on that. You will learn to notice images once you give up the notion that it's hard. What could be easier than starting with nothing? One of the most common bits of advice given to beginners in the field of unworlding is to not be attached to results. Why does this work? We try and try and try, and just prolong the dry spell. It isn't about trying hard. Making it hard is making it solid, engaging too much 3ness. Stiffened muscles don't get you into a fluid dream body. Rigid expecations of what an unworlding is like will just kill the process. When we stop trying, suddenly something clicks, if there's anything there that's actually ready to click. Things can fall into place when there is a

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flowing, accepting quality to your state of mind. That's why, when you start noticing, you have to accept, thus notice (be aware of) ANY change in the static darkness you expect when you close your eyes. This takes a little discipline at first, but you'll find it's pretty easy if you stop thinking, hoping, doubting, expecting, and evaluating. Which is not hard if you know how, and learnable if you don't; they call this learning process "meditation". But for the most part, the answer is simple, a matter of definition: attachment to results is attachment. Attachment is something we do too much of, and that's one of the reasons we're prisoners in the Earthville Mental Institution. We're here to learn how to use our minds to create the reality we want. We're all here for the same reason. If you are one of the few that realize this, you aren't crazy, you are on your way out of the crazy house; while the true believers in "reality" will be shackled to this rigid state of mind for a long time, until they lose their mind like you've done. I like the methodless method for "waking induced lucid dreams" or "WILD" as taught by "Billy Bob" on the Dreamviews forum. His main point, which he considers an advanced point that most people miss, is that you don't want to lay there trying to force yourself to have a lucid dream. He says you want to forget about dreaming altogether, or your hopes will be completely dashed. What he suggests is pretty much the same thing as the methodless method of unworlding taught by Frank Kepple. Focus on something else, like your breathing, or an imaginary activity, so your intent to unworld can engage itself. Intent doesn't need help creating reality. You just have to get out of its way. The conscious mind trying to force the remote mind to experience expanded states of reality is kind of a self-cancelling idea. Billy Bob gives a great analogy for the resistance generated by trying too hard and being attached to results. Let's say the experience you desire is a wild bird, and you are you, and your intent to have this experience is bird seed that coats your whole body. If you sit quietly and wait, the bird comes to you. If you sit there shouting, "Here bird! Here bird!" what do you think will happen?

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THE FINAL WORD ON SOUL ASPECTS, THE LOOSH EATERS The main problem with the idea that soul parts have no awareness is that awareness seems to be left out of it. And you can't leave awareness out of anything, because everything in the universes is made from awareness. So you can't just say that Joe Blow's unwanted aspect was abandoned by awareness and left to work out its karma in some repository for unwanted aspects. Elsewhere I have said that "reflections have no awareness" or something of the sort. Can I even say this? Doesn't everything have awareness if everything is made of awareness? One convoluted and inapprehendable answer is found in a contorted attempt on the part of Robert Monroe to explain away his unworlding discovery "loosh" as some sort of love or something. A point that he wasn't able to make clear since it was BS; he just didn't want to have loosh in his world, so he tried unsuccessfully to explain it away somehow. In the world of new age philosophy, when you run out of other BS rationalizations to fall back on, just change the subject to pure unconditional love and your audience will not be able to disagree with anything else you say. What is loosh? Loosh is the act of feeding off someone's used emotional energy. Aha! Now we're getting somewhere, since this thread of thought is based on the notion that everything is supposedly energized by awareness and nothing else; here is a something else that something else prefers as its source of energy instead of pure awareness. The philosophical problem being, some aspect goes to some hell and suffers for eternity (since I deny the notion that aspects can be "saved" by retrieval). Well, within infinity, certainly there must be room for a little bit of eternal punishment? Especially since there is no need to bring time into it; so what is actually so eternal about it anyway? Just turn the time off. OK, but that's only part of it. The notion of this karma-enforcing repository being an ongoing experience of real people who actually dwell there is subjective, that part is brought to it by the third person experiencer who observes it with his own awareness of solidity and time functioning to some extent. As it turns out, I imagine, there is such a thing as entities that are not aware, and these are aspects of the self or individual. They are just reflections. They are not simplistic reflections of physical light in a physical mirror, they are reflections of parts of one's psyche in a multiverse, a multidimensional, infinite set of parallel and unparallel universes. While of course there is room within infinity for entities to suffer endlessly for being rotten or evil or useless, it is not necessary; it serves no purpose. So it is left up to images only to do this, because we seem to expect it, so we--as infinite awareness--have dreamed it up. The hells and heavens and karma traps experienced at great length in book after book of OBE adventures do truly exist, but the units in them, their inhabitants or even prisoners, are not awareness experiencers; they are loosh eaters. They thrive on their own karma. They play out endless tapes of emotional waste

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and other dualistic karmic flotsam. They exist because they're needed in order for infinity to be complete. What else would you do with useless crap? Relegate it. Put it away somewhere. The joke is on the new age retrievers who spend all their unworlding time trying to rescue the reflections from the places where they belong, just because--as reflections of real entities-they appear to be realistic, they interact with the rescuer's awareness and beliefs, etc. Some of them can even provide information that checks out in the real world. Do we then assume that they are as real as the people they look like? That's called the "hook, line and sinker" approach to developing a belief system. Unworlders are guilty of this all the time. So how do I deal with the apparent contradiction of saying that everything has awareness, while claiming that lost soul parts are not suffering and don't need to be rescued? Simple. While the first harmonic of awareness is the creation energy within everything else-including bugs and rocks, deadly sharks and deadly volcanoes, heavenly guardian angels and demigods on high--unwanted and useless aspects of the self which split off to inhabit belief system hells, heavens, etc. instead feed off of the second harmonic of awareness, which in one of its descriptions could be called "emotional waste," but I call it loosh because Monroe started this rumor and was not able to bring it to a beautiful resolution. Someone needs to finish his thought instead of eating whole everything that Monroe says he unpacked from one of his precious ROTEs. Even some people who knew him hate the notion of loosh. At first he hated it himself, till he managed to explain it away as "love" without managing to make and sense of it. Well I've always liked the idea: someone, somewhere, uses the rejected emotional energy of earthlings as manure on its garden. What we don't need, and think is stinky, others elsewhere use as food or money or fertilizer or something. Why not? I've improved on that description now, making it a beautiful description: the split-off reflections which are ejected from our psyche, repressed, etc. are loosh eaters exclusively. They have no awareness whatsoever, nor do they experience time. They are literally twodimensional (limited to 2ness) reflections which appear animated because they eat the same unwanted energy over and over. What's more, if they get a third dimension--that would be you, encountering them on one of your journeys--they come to life for you as seemingly real individuals and you waste your time trying to take them someplace where 2D entities can't remain. As soon as you stop paying attention to them, they disappear. This is where it pays to understand the harmonics of awareness. Karma, good/bad, punishment/reward, paying off one's sins, it's all duality-oriented. It's twoness stuff. It's all done with smoke and mirrors. In order to have physical-like reality, a reflection must get connected to something--that's threeness--and that is you, giving them your energy, your agreement that they are real and substantial, which is what they thrive on. So you haul them off to Monroe's "real" heaven in Focus 27 and when you get there they've already

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disappeared mid-flight. Or, if you are more tenacious than that, you actually get them to the Park or Focus 27 and its Reception Center, some Reception Center workers appear to take the poor sap off your hands, and you write in your book that the nice astral people appeared to the poor sap as his doting grandparents so he would believe them and go along with it. Uhhh... errr.... what's to say that the poor sap's grandparents didn't appear to him so that you, the wanna-be rescuer, would believe in them and go along with it??? And go away! These chameleons of the soul reception center are your guides, fooling you, so you will go on with the business of minding your own. Let's get real, folks. Everything is equally unreal. Emotional energy is not timelike; that's out of order. First comes 2ness, then 3ness, then 4ness. Emotional energy, either going in (feeling of emotions, sometimes in an endless self-perpetuating loop) or coming out (loosh; i.e. rejecting emotional replay in favor of simply expressing once and letting go or just good old-fashioned letting go) doesn't know what time is. Time knows emotion, but not the other way around. In this system, there is no such thing as eternal suffering because emotion exists in a dimension where solidity (3ness) and time (4ness) do not fit. But what about so-called "self soul retrieval"? I've already gone over the psychological aspect of this, which boils down to "get a life" or "get a hobby," whichever one you're able to handle. (Personally, I prefer hobbies.) But do 2-dimensional loosh-eaters consuming emotional waste also account for one's own rejected soul aspects dwelling in the consuming depths of the dark side of the remote mind? I think you know the answer. Get a life, or get a hobby. I am presenting unworlding as the pasttime to beat all pasttimes. Your past is someone else's fertilizer, it doesn't matter how many times your 2-dimensional lost soul part replays a tape, since soul parts can't experience time, they can't experience suffering. Memory is 3ness and time is 4ness. Endless repetition of old tapes is just an image in a mirror playing with itself.

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WHERE IS THE CENTER OF THE WORLD? Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers. --Voltaire The earth revolves around the sun, but the world revolves around you. The individual is in fact the only person in his world. Everyone else is two-dimensional until you, the creator and therefore the center of and awareness of your world, interact with them. And when you stop interacting, they revert to reflection status. Three-dimensional (interacting) beings only ever remember some portions of the same events. Say you and Biff both dreamed that you read the same book. I'm using "dream" creatively. You both remember doing this in your respective waking worlds, but in fact all experience is a dream or vice versa. Unworldings are dreams. When your brother-in-law knocks your teeth out, it's a dream. When you wake up in the same bed every morning, it's a recurring dream. It's a law of my universe: All experience is on the same spectrum. So you and Biff both dreamed that you read the same book... you dreamed this with your 2-34 minds. Biff says one thing happened in the book, you say another, you both walk away shaking your heads thinking the other person is crazy. This isn't some aberration, this is the typical state of our affairs. This state of barely agreeing with each other about almost everything is the daily bread and butter of reality. It makes laws and lawbooks and lawmakers necessary. Before that it made religion necessary, but government is now our religion, since

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Law and Religion split up some centuries back. Not that the split is really complete; they still share the same bed more than they let on. One of my favorite parables from Carlos Castaneda is when he tells of an apprentice sorcerer who lived with his teacher and his teacher's cohorts, a group of sorcerers. Based on their first encounter, the apprentice was afraid of one certain member of his teacher's group, and avoided him fastidiously. In fact, they had never had a conversation despite living for years in the same hacienda. One day, the apprentice's teacher informed him that one of his cohorts-the fearsome one--didn't actually exist. For years, the teacher and his cohorts had taken turns dressing a certain way, holding a certain posture, wearing the same wide-brimmed hat covering part of their face. But because the apprentice had always been so careful to avoid interacting with the scary sorcerer, it was easy for his teachers, who were all Indians, to play an extended prank on him, even though they didn't all look alike and weren't even the same height. We make lots of assumptions based on very little information, glossing over as much as possible and filling in the blanks with our expectations and assumptions. How else do you think the human race can manage to survive while purposely encouraging each other to get stupider every year? (Or "marketing" as it's euphemistically called.) It's simple: things are not how we assume, not as they appear. This is really a good thing, because if things are as they appear, then we are screwed. Fortunately for us and the worthiness of eternal life itself, we are just dreaming. The seeming permanence of our world is a matter of the 2ness, 3ness, and 4ness dream bodies hogging more than their share of the individual's energy. But what happens if your 2-3-4 dream does end, for whatever reason? Do you believe for one second that this world you're experiencing now continues to be the solid one, while you float around as a "soul" or unit of "spirit," whatever that is? No, of course the form you occupy upon the self-destruction or death due to rigidity of the 2-3-4 mind is then the real one. It's what you're aware of, it's what you experience, so it's real. But in all factuality, I am here to inform you that death--your death in your world--is not going to happen at all. Death is a mental invention that helps us deal with and explain the disappearance of others from our world. Here are some things that are not real: --the future, including your own death and afterlife; --the past, including your own personal history, ancestry, and memory; --other people, including your parents, family, friends, and enemies; --technology, including the junk you haven't finished paying for yet;

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--progress, including self-improvement, evolution, and science. I'd say that's a pretty good start on rolling back the curtain so we can see what's actually there. So let's keep on rolling it back till we can see even more clearly... roll, roll, roll, roll, roll, OK it's all rolled back, now what do you see? The Nothing. Who exists? You do. Who are you? Awareness unlimited, pretending to be an individual. Does Joe Schmoe over there exist? No, it's you that's aware; it's you that exists. Your awareness of Joe Schmoe exists, as images, thoughts, perceptions, 2ness. Do you exist in Joe Schmoe's world? Only if he notices you. Do you have a past together? Only if you invent one together. How does that happen? Time is not an absolute, it is one of awareness's highly robust, capable, yet optional toys. You are in general probably unaware of its possible near absence from your experience, because like 2ness (individuality) and 3ness (memory), you are habituated to time or 4ness (ordering) so thoroughly that you don't believe time can be transcended. Awareness cannot be divided up into individuals, because it is infinity. But it can pretend-because it is infinity--and that it does: it pretends, and the result is WE, an infinitude of imaginary playmates entertaining each other throughout all of eternity, with the 2-3-4 mind's outsides representing themselves as a fairly decent planet in an infinite universe. We extend the illusion of physicality beyond the earth's surface at great expense, effort and danger, but what the heck, it's better to shoot rockets to the next star system than it is to shoot missiles at

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each other's imagined differences, a.k.a. "cultures" and "nations". I'm all for space travel, the more the better. They should send whole armies of ass-kickers to whatever other planet can be found for them to conquer instead of this one. As an individual already stuck in the illusion of separate existence, you possess a handy device to further empower the self's specialized talents. This is helpful in part because the 2-3-4 mind is so dad-blamed greedy, childish and stupid that it has to be tricked into giving up its monopoly on your energy. So in order to break its stranglehold on our reality, we must believe it exists, hunt it down, and chop off its thousand superfluous energy-sucking appendages. Then we escape into 5ness, change, and the ability or energy to initiate change, which is intent. The environment of infinity we perceive when we escape from 4ness (time) is the Nothing. The 5ness dream body that we merge with and/or see as if it were a separate being, a dream character, or a guide is the dream usher. The body of 5ness is also the 4th overtone of awareness or the 4th chakra, and it uses the color green in dreams. So you could say that the 4th chakra as a dream body ushers us in and out of the 4th chakra as a place symbolic of the state which is a doorway to everything, and that place is the Nothing. I never had the faintest clue that the 5ness dream body existed from reading any new age or old age literature about dreams, chakras or anything else, until I read in Fred Aardema's book that the Nothing (which he calls the void or the 3D blackness) is experienced before and after every other state. OK, that was an attractive notion and he got if from his experience as a long-time unworlder, so I started looking at my dream journal, and everything fell into place. This has been mentioned in greater detail in an earlier chapter. But dream bodies are not parts. We talked about soul aspects already; those are the loosh eaters, the reflections of our parts which exist in loosh repositories where they eat the same emotional energy over and over, or spend their own hoarded good or bad karma to their unaware hearts' content, etc. Our dream bodies are not parts of the individuals that we identify ourselves as. They are overtones of awareness itself, and there's only one of those. It is infinite and so are its overtones. So they are definitely not parts of you; in fact they are perspectives of infinity itself. Our seven dream bodies including the 2ness, 3ness, and 4ness dream bodies which I'm always berating, are as powerful as power itself. When you merge with one or more of your dreambodies, your state of awareness changes, and there is no mistake, no making it up. Escaping your typical state of 2-3-4 mind is unworlding. When it comes to discussing our seven dream bodies, I am lucky enough to have never studied up on the chakras since the traditions about them are mostly religious propaganda designed to sell tickets to heaven to the owners of non-existent souls that fear non-existent death. And we're all lucky that the new age book writers, having little time for gaining experience outside of marketing their books, don't know about the seven dream bodies. This means we're breaking new ground, and I certainly appreciate the gravity of the situation and my responsibility as a reporter in this new field of study.

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That's why it makes me so happy to report that at the height of their powers, my dream bodies tend to take on the appearance of important new age religious leaders such as Lily Tomlin, Leslie Nielsen, Dan Aykroyd, and the Three Stooges, to name but a few of the distinguished visages who have condescended to take a moment and grant me a gesture in my dream worlds. The Dream Usher (5ness dream body) is a special case. Well they all are. I am obsessed with 5ness right now because its representatives are so frequently found participating in my dream experiences, sometimes as both the dream usher and the Nothing. I want to avoid giving out the impression that 5ness leads to a next state or 6ness in some kind of a self-improvement program. That's not how it works. The dream usher is Change in its essence, an element of reality itself. All experience is a dream. We have the more familiar "dimensions" or elemental experiences 2ness, 3ness, and 4ness which comprise the bulk of the 2-3-4 mind. When we take energy from these, and give it to 5ness instead, it's only because the 2-3-4 mind happens to be using up all our energy and that's why we're stuck in the whirlpool and can't get free. The dream usher is the next whirlpool, but why get stuck there? Don't do it on my account, just to make my ideas look beautifully symmetrical. Once you have the fluidity granted by 5ness, why not use your newfound fluidity to remain unstuck and learn quickly how to balance all the chakras at once? I did get stuck in 6ness when I thought I had 5ness somewhat figured out, and it was gruesome, I'm still paying for that mistake. The higher harmonics spin very fast, they can really grab you and siphon off all your energy fast. That's why you should get the basics whittled down to size first, or else you might (for example) waste a perfectly good life preaching religious dogma when you could have been a true mystic having actual mystical experiences instead. The higher harmonics have a different feel than the lower ones. While the lower harmonics build the human form from scratch, the higher ones accomplish the fine adjustments that enable you to start using the human form as a tool instead of a toy. In this sense, 5ness is the doorway to the upper levels of the human form. It's like the opposable thumb, the fifth finger, the one that's different. It can leapfrog us into new experiences quickly, even if we have previously gotten stuck in 4ness and its predecessors. What I'm trying to tell you is that the conscious mind cannot design its own solutions. Solutions have to be divinely-inspired like mine. So I have previously given special attention to 8ness, the 7th chakra or dream body, intending to not lead anyone through some imagined progression that must necessarily hold in everyone's case. It is the quality of 6ness, for example--and not some position between 5ness and 7ness--that leads awareness from 6ness to 7ness. This quality is then enveloped somehow within the higher chakra. The states build on each other. I don't mean to plug you into some rut of prerequisites. You can start backwards and study your approach to balancing these energy centers--giving them each their fair share of your energy--without regard for any

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mental system of progress. But 5ness... the dream usher... the Nothing, the state changer, the intent that's needed to spark things off in a new direction... what is it, in our normal and non-dogmatic experience of groping blindly through the learning of this unworlding skill, that actually does lead in and out of dreams? Becoming aware of something leads us into dreams and remembering who we are leads us out of dreams. What is this really? What is it that so often coincides with remembering who we are in a dream and waking up somewhere else, in our bed or just before a false awakening or in... lucidity. The dream usher, the act of becoming aware, the act of remembering who you are, is lucidity. So what have we just learned that can be put into practice? Don't seek lucidity. Seek the personalized signposts of your dream usher. As an example, I will give some details below of last night's dream, which could have and should have become lucid, but there's no use crying about spilt milk. As usual I woke up in the kind of lucidity where we are in bed with our eyes closed knowing who we are but no longer believing in the reality of the dream state. We need to learn how to achieve lucidity without embracing the 23-4 mind's BS automatically, thus chasing the desired state away. Lucidity should work both ways. Seek the signposts of the dream usher. If you miss them during the dream, that's what the dream journal is for. Make note of the signposts in the dream journal and you are much more likely to see them next time. That's why the dream usher is becoming so real to me in my dreams right now: because I'm taking an interest. With you as the center of your dream universe (obviously) and with you as the center of your physical universe (theoretically), what's to keep the two worlds from merging completely? The dream usher has no interest in robbing energy from your 2-3-4 mind until you do. You have to desire to lose your own mind, in some real sense that some entrenched part of you is totally against doing. Because inertia and momentum of every habit including bad, stupid ones develop automatically, we have been given the beauty of 5ness, the energy to initiate change: intent. You can't attack lucidity head on, you'll just scare it away. The status quo fully intends to assert itself, according to the laws of physics. You have to wrestle with the symbols which are energetically invested in things you want to keep, the things you want to change, and the things you want to reclassify due to changes in your beliefs. Take for example last night's dream. Since I wrote it down, I can talk about it. I can attach intent to it. I can say "I want more of this." Because if you don't care, neither do your dream bodies. If you do care, you are very lucky, because your dream bodies, unlike your bloated, lethargic, overemotional, greedy 2-3-4

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mind, know how to care effectively. They know how to get your attention. They know how to say, "Here, bub, just merge with me," and you will eventually do just that, if you stay on the path and don't make it too impossible for yourself. In last night's Big Dream, my silent companion and I and an anonymous group of people were standing around in the downtown City Park at night looking at the dark sky. Another companion had recently departed our company under some sort of emotional circumstances and was riding a jet pack in the sky writing us letters in the sky. His communications as well as subsequent appearances of multi-colored line drawings of light, and a huge UFO that flew right over us, were all communications and invitations from dream bodies. The silent companion is probably always a dream body, though I haven't solidified my theory about the true identity of this most ubiquitous of dream partners. The dark sky was the projection room, and the darker everGREEN tree standing in front of the dark sky, behind which these strange events kept appearing, was the Nothing, the dream usher. Then in a final scene, a small man-the dream usher, who I have named the Green Ripper, due to the way he finally got me to acknowledge his existence--showed up in a white ambulance and showed me a lineup of neon lime green plastic toys, and asked me to identify which one represented the alien presence I had seen earlier. As is par for the course in my case, since I'm a beginner, the dream usher's demand was so pinpointedly aimed that it made me lucid--in my bed with my eyes closed--which is really the Nothing, though the 2-3-4 mind is keen to glom on to this state for its own purposes and lie to you, telling you that you have woken up in your bed with your eyes closed. Repeated instances of this experience should tell you to expect more from yourself. You have to place in your intent-o-genda a better plan. For example, "When waking from a dream, assume it is a false awakening, imagine any scene, and move into it when the scene stabilizes." Better than "any scene" would be the scene of your dreams. Why not? Might as well grab the chance when it presents itself and add a scene to the aborted dream--a lucid one that could be the doorway to the dream you remember the rest of your life. As for the white ambulance, my dream usher is always trying to get me into a white vehicle to go someplace, since it is the purpose of the dream usher to usher me from dream to dream, from state to state. The white vehicles are his domain, the Nothing. The lineup he was showing me--his 4th chakra color, the neon lime green--was the exact same color he'd used to introduce himself to me once, when as the Green Ripper he sucked my essence out of me as a green fog and I watched my body shrivel up and go down a bathtub drain. And asking me to identify an alien presence was all about getting me to recognize my dream bodies and thus the possibility of merging with them. The dream journal is all about noticing. Noticing--becoming aware--is where it's at. Noticing can take place after an event; time is not boss in these here parts. If I hadn't noticed the above dream, how much good would it have done me? The beauty of all this is not my description

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above, not my conclusions, some of which could be wrong. The beauty of it is the fact that the experience was noticed at all. Noticing is where it's at. Meditation teachers will tell you to ignore experiences, because they speed you out of the churchfulness of the offering plate and into self-administered freedom. Who needs an afterlife when we already have eternal life, and when we, as awareness, exist perpetually with no dependence on the contribution of time anyway? It's the same new age teachers, the ones who are always droning on about the importance of the afterlife and uncomfortable--I mean unconditional--love, who keep saying that there's no time outside of the body. Which is it gonna be, then? Eternity as the creator and any damn thing you want to create, with or without the involvement of time? Or living out the same stuck belief systems as everybody else, just in case they're right... in spite of the fact that their religions are consistently creating a world that is determined to drive itself off a cliff?

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HOW TO WAKE UP FROM THE DREAM As we know from earlier chapters, the Nothing which is the door to Everything is a portal in and out of every experience we have, no matter how finely you break experience down into its variably-sized bits. For example, you might experience transitioning through the Nothing on the way in and/or out of a so-called dream or other unworlding experience. On the other hand, right now with physical eyes wide open you might simultaneously open your mind's eye and see the Nothing staring you in the face while you read this. It's quite a sight, a mindbender, since they're both there and both real. A certain amount of Noticing sessions will prepare you for this experience. I'd call this an open-eyes version of Frank Kepple's slat effect, the sort of thing I vaguely recall Castaneda writing about. Making the transition in or out of the Nothing is what triggers lucidity. Lucidity is a knowing of who and where you are. And now you're thinking, Yeah, but, isn't lucidity just when you know you're dreaming? Well no, not according to the dictionary, and not according to what you must realize if you think for a second that the word "dream" is just a gloss, a word that refers to a real thing but does not actually refer to what that thing really is. I promised to do away with glosses like "dream" early in this tome, because they lead to all kinds of false assumptions, and let me tell you, doing away with the word "dream" is more challenging by far than doing away with the word "OBE" for example. That's because everybody knows we really dream, it's a totally universal experience, albeit ill-defined and variously interpreted. But unworlding is still only believed in by maybe a third to two-thirds of the population. So it's a little easier to rename. So far I don't have any idea what to substitute for the word "dream". Lucidity has nothing to do with dreaming. It is the act of waking up and remembering who you are. That is a transition state, the act of going from one state of awareness to another. Which is why beginners, upon becoming lucid in a dream--i.e. realizing who they are--tend to simultaneously wake up in bed with their eyes closed. Not realizing that they are in the Nothing, and that's why it's dark! The "eyes closed" thing is just an interpretation of the Nothing that the 2-3-4 mind is fond of; the Nothing is the reality behind the experience, and the closed eyes thing is just a gloss for the same experience. You need to know this so that next time you wake up from a so-called dream, you will know what is accessible to you at that moment: infinity! Granted, it is at this point that we so often desperately need to jump out of bed and pee. So let me tell you a story, and it might help a little. All my life I have had less bladder control than the people around me. All night I am up and down from the bed, peeing maybe six times every night. I even went to a urologist once to see what was wrong with me, and after he

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tortured me enough to make me swear off urology, he informed me that there was nothing wrong with me that was detectable to modern science. So I said, "Maybe it's psychological," and he replied, "Well I can't help you with that," which I mentally translated to, "My golf game awaits, get off my table and pay me." This problem never seemed to get any better until I started my unworlding practice. But I had an idea, and oddly enough it worked. I tried not peeing so often while awake. And guess what? After a few days of teaching my mind that my body was able to experience a steadily expanding bladder without hourly trips to the bathroom, it wore off on my sleeping attitude and I stopped waking up to pee every hour or two. Several times I even slept through the night without waking up at all. Which totally screwed up my practice, because we need awakenings in the night; they are the lifeblood of the unworlding practice. So I hope that helped. Train your bladder to be less sensitive, the easy way: by doing it while you're awake. As Michael Raduga reminds us, when we wake up from a dream, we are already "in the phase," that is, unworlded. Contrary to popular belief, it's easy to learn to stop moving and opening your eyes when you wake up. You should focus on remaining still vs. not moving since the contrary conscious mind misinterprets negative commands as "do whatever you were told not to do". This simple practice of getting into the habit of remaining motionless during the transition to the blackness of the closed-eyes thing, i.e. the Nothing, did in fact lead to my first two classic OBE exits. Then I forgot how to do it due to various distractions (my practice is only a year old, remember) and there have been no more classic OBE exits. But I don't care, because who needs to see the inside of my astral bedroom? I'm after a more transcendent experience, personally. I certainly enjoyed floating around my bedroom, but the subsequent experiences were a lot more exciting, even though some OBE purists might have called some of them lucid dreams. At this early stage of a practice, it is very misguided and anti-productive to care whether it is a "lucid dream" or an "OBE". You must have some gratitude for what you are given. That's how you develop a proper attitude of 6ness so that it will keep happening. But people think it's hard to learn how to stop moving and stop opening the eyes upon awakening. The answer is the same as all my answers: more practice of a simpler, more basic kind. Stop obsessing about trying to "have an OBE" or about trying to "have a lucid dream" and stop counting the days, weeks, and months between experiences as a "dry spell". The term "dry spell" needs to be rejected entirely and replaced with honest interest in the path itself. Get more involved in learning the steps between awake and asleep, put more passion into it, and the need to keep score will stop messing you up. Learning to unworld is easy if you keep it simple, but we make it complicated because some part of us doesn't actually want to do the work. Some part of the mind (the part I call the Voice of Idiossification) keeps telling us that the work of actually doing the practice--vs. reading or writing or thinking about it--is the mental equivalent of digging ditches. Kinda easy in a way, but excruciatingly boring. Well if

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you're not interested, then don't do it. If you are interested, then do the work of making sure you experience many awakenings during the day and some at night too, when your idiossifier would rather be deeply unconscious. Of course it isn't boring at all; the voice of idiosiffication is a liar and a trickster. It is the conscious mind trying to keep you from chopping off its thousand useless appendages, a collection of which it is quite proud. Some of my tiny experiences of expanded awareness during daytime awakening sessions were plain and simple experiences of watching myself go to sleep and wake up in discrete, countable stages. I mean this literally. Here are some "little sleep" excerpts from my dream journal, so you won't think I'm exaggerating: 2016-02-20 2:30 pm [LS1] "I thought ____ meant..." [Something about owning other subsidiary patent rights associated with Monroe's Hemi-Sync; woke up resolving to make a quick check on Google Patents for Monroe's heirs. In reality, I wasn't aware that I was interested in hemi-sync.] [LS2] Repeat of prior LS but without the symbology, I am instructed, shown by doing, to take the journey down and out away from body awareness through shades on a continuum keeping a constant thread of awareness from step one to the next. I experienced (and saw as rectangles of successively darker grays) going deeper and deeper (i.e. further from body awareness) through five successive discrete steps, not slow but in about two seconds, boomboomboomboomboom. I actually experienced this, arrived at the fifth step where I had no contact with the body, and awoke directly from there to the notion that this was the same message as that intended to be conveyed by the last LS. [Note: my first classic OBE exit came a week later.] 2016-03-09 9:30 am [Meditation, better late than never.] [Tired of repeating mantra so much, tried only using mantra when thoughts popped up. This made the meditation much more interesting since it's not about the mantra which I've had so many decades it's like just more noise.] [not asleep] Lost awareness of body. Visual field is like a black computer screen without the computer. Conscious awareness is a small X on the screen (literally). The X is at far upper right corner of screen but trying to wander off screen. I keep pulling it back. When it starts to wander off screen I start to lose consciousness. Finally I click the X mentally and wake up, i.e. become conscious of the body in the chair. [I was not asleep--head was not slumped down--all above is literal. Progress toward maintaining consciousness at the edge of sleep. This was not

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a planned visualization or a hypnagogic image, it was deeper than that.] [NOTE: my second classic OBE exit came the next day.] Once you've learned to wake up without moving or opening your eyes, the next thing you should do is to assume you are in the Nothing, the door to everything, ready to go anywhere you want. Reinterpret that black, buzzy place as the Nothing, the door to everything, and forget the odd notion that you are lying in bed with your eyes closed with a dry mouth having to pee. Change your mind. At this point, wondering what to do next is the death of the experience. By now you should have already repeated your plan of action over and over to yourself and written it in your journal every night before you go to bed. This is how you get something lined up in intent. Once a planned action is first in intent, it manifests automatically as soon as the conditions are right. With no plan of action, something seemingly random or automatic will manifest because it will just happen to be the first item on the Intent Agenda. Therefore I am changing Michael Raduga's excellent terminology "plan of action" to "intent-ogenda". Because it is the existence of a plan to take action that automatically gives birth to that action--engenders it--via intent--once the conscious mind has gotten turned down an appropriate degree, but not all the way off. Often when I wake up, especially if a dream plotline had been interrupted by anything including lucidity, I will be in the throes of energy sensations such as vibrations, the sound current, and most pronouncedly, the ability to generate big, full-color images instantaneously by just wishing it. This state--the Projection Room--is fun to hang out and play in, or it can be the doorway to the Nothing which is the doorway to everything. Monroe called it Focus 12, with the Nothing or the 3D darkness or the Void being Focus 21, and lucid dreaming where thoughts instantly manifest being Focus 22. One time I got out of bed and retained this strong imaging state for about 20 minutes while walking around the room, hanging out at my desk, opening my eyes for a second and then closing them to find the ability to generate images still there, undisturbed. The images were life-size, full color, and three-dimensional. I even turned a light on. I was not writing much down because language kills this sort of thing, so the only image I remember is a big 3dimensional spiral of colors swirling around my whole body in broad swaths of red, white and blue. I don't think anyone considers getting out of bed when this stuff hits them, but I did and found out it had no effect on the state I was in. Another time I got out of bed in a similar condition, but immediately got hooked on negative images. I could have stopped it by opening my eyes and keeping them open, but who wants to waste an opportunity. It takes positive and negative to make the world go around. I considered being afraid, but this didn't sound like much fun either, so I just watched unemotionally and kept changing the channel so that the images would not be upsetting to my tender sensibilities. I mean these were horrible, gross and grotesque images, such as flesh being

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stripped from human faces, monsters with rotten flesh falling off them, bugs crawling out of people's eyes and ears, etc. Full size and full color. Occasionally I was given a break from it by viewing a procession of human automatons walking down a road in one direction, completely expressionless, in a fog. None of this had to make any sense; I just enjoyed being able to experience expanded states of awareness by keeping my eyes closed and not talking to myself. In terms of what I've written in this book of a philosophical nature, I'd guess this was an experience of my "repository wherein dwell our least useful aspects," the reflections of our least desirable parts. Maybe we could call this "Focus minus 23". Ideally, however, when you wake up with images cranking out of you unbidden, it is the time to do some full-blown unworlding. In the last two nights I've awakened from dream states with vibrations, sound currents, and images, but not having a clear plan of action due to the fact that my attitudes are in flux right now, I didn't actually know what to do next. It occurred to me later that there is nothing wrong, idealogically or otherwise, with using one of the many "OBE exit" techniques that I've read about and even used. In the past I've slipped out or fallen out of bed and floated instead of hitting the ground; in the past I've rolled "out of my body" and floated around the room; why not? I should not let the ideal of unworlding or "just phasing out directly without any exit strategies" stand in the way of having an experience when the door is standing wide open. And here is where I got that message. Recall that I call my higher self "Whirly" and let me inform you discreetly that I've been able to generate the image of a spiral ever since I did a vision quest in about 1982 that resulted in my being able to do so. Also keep in mind that my intent-o-genda for months has been to experience a meeting with my entire soul retinue. And finally, keep in mind that what spurred the writing of this present book was my rejection of spending all my time trying to say impressive things on an internet forum where people were using their real names and trying to out-spiritual each other by saying impressive things and name-dropping who they know in this field. New age networking in the guise of a forum that is supposed to be there to help beginners learn unworlding. So in a way, unworlding is a bit of rebellion on my part against the new age book writers who never manage to get across that this skill is easy to obtain, if only you will just put in the requisite time and focus on any worthwhile technique long enough to get 'er done. My excitement was caused by finding the bare bones of that worthwhile technique: the generic version. Anyhow, this is how I realized I should not be closed to using techniques that involve "leaving the body" even though I hope to stop using such limiting terminology in general. Last night I was almost lucid and dreaming that I was looking through a vivid, full-color brochure printed on bright, slick, white paper showing group photos of people in internet social circles who were planning to get together and meet each others' physical bodies. When I got to the group photo of my social circle, the leader of the group was labelled with the name "Roll Roll" and after his name I read the words, "I don't whirl." That's when I woke up vibrating and able to generate full-color images at will, but unable to remember my intent-o-

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genda because I had to pee so bad. With this in mind, I have devised a simple classic OBE exit technique that I plan to use next time I wake up in an expanded state of awareness but seemingly parked in my body. This seems like a good way of climbing the beanstalk at those times when the state of awareness is practically begging for a classic out-of-body scenario. That doesn't mean I plan to float around in my bedroom. That is something I have no intention of doing, ever again, hopefully. Twice was disappointing enough and I've done it three times. I don't need to gaze upon my body drooling on its pillow. I do not seek validation of the reality of expanded realities because I had one ESP dream which was so excruciatingly accurate that I have not needed any other validation than that. The following method of climbing the beanstalk is based partly on a more complex set of instructions taught by Bob Peterson, the OBE writer and book reviewer, on his youtube video. It also partially includes the method of Michael Raduga in which he stays with a technique for mere seconds before cycling to the next technique if the first one doesn't work for him. We're looking for the Nothing which is the 3D Void and is the doorway to everything. Let's say you wake up in the Projection Room. You're able to generate distinct, full-color images easily. So here's what you do. Grab an image and move it back and forth and up and down. This ensures you have control of it in two dimensions. Next you make it get smaller and larger while imagining it is moving farther away and then closer to you. This ensures you have control of it in three dimensions. At this point, you rotate it slowly to left or right or back-andforth, then try to merge with the rotation by grabbing it with your attention and intending to cling to it fiercely. If you feel yourself rotating, imagine the first item on your intent-o-genda, hopefully something you don't do in your bedroom, and you should be there instantly, hopefully still lucid. If you don't merge with the rotating object immediately, then elongate the tunnel into three dimensions and since you're already clinging to it, just pull it toward you so that you enter it and it moves over and past you. This is better than trying to move into it since you just experienced not being able to roll, so assume you're not quite mobile and move the image instead. While the tunnel moves past you, imagine performing the first item on your intent-ogenda. This should spark off the transition to an awakening within the Nothing or beyond it in your intended destination within expanded awareness. If you wake up and are not in vibrations with the ability to instantly generate full-color, highdefinition images, keep your eyes closed and just listen for the sound current that creates the world. It's always there; some people blasphemously call it tinnitus. When you listen to it in an unworlded or nearly unworlded state, it gets louder. Stop talking to yourself, stop doubting and worrying about what to do next, and you'll probably notice various sensations which you can call vibrations. You will probably notice, the same as when you are Noticing, that the

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blackness of what you imagine to be your closed eyelids is not blackness at all. Once you can generate images at will, then proceed with climbing the beanstalk as described above. Either that or get out of bed and pee, write in your dream journal, and try again next time you wake up. Who's in a hurry, anyway?

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A NEW 3D MAP OF THE WORLDS

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The reason I have labeled my map of reality with Robert Monroe's Focus areas is to assist unworlders in moving on to the new terminology presented in this book. But it's not just about terminology. Like Monroe, I am an inventor or innovator, and I'm not just pushing new terminology; no more than Monroe was. I like his categories and I respect his many primary contributions to unworlding. If his terms were good enough to keep, I would keep them. As a matter of fact I am keeping the notions behind his focus areas for the most part and just changing their names, because his terms categorized real experiences, and that's what I'm all about. But his names are too drab and numbery. Numbered states make people think you have to experience certain states in a certain order. His numbers were meant to be random, but they're still numbers and numbers are inherently soldier-like, all in a row and drab. The terminology lacks color. And most importantly, I am determined to insist consistently that people stop saying "out of the body" and replace that inaccurate, misbegotten terminology with something sustainable such as "unworlding" and the wordier but more descriptive descriptions such as "experiences of expanded awareness". Sustainable because it is consistent with fast, easy learning of a simple skill, while the term "out of body" sends unsuspecting beginners in the wrong direction with their critical initial efforts. Monroe was my idol for years, but I don't want an idol. I want to get unworlded. My newest idol, Frank Kepple, explained Monroe's terms better than Monroe did. He also provided a new set of "primary focus areas" which I will also mention briefly. Unfortunately his P1, P2, P3, P4 (or FoC1 etc.) overlap with Monroe's numberings, instead of starting fresh from an understanding of how vibrational systems work. For example, Frank's P4, where all the nonphysical models of everything exist as raw configurations, is just pure twoness and fourness with the 3ness turned way down. Since Monroe was a sound engineer who experienced and talked about vibrations and phasing, he should have devised a system in accordance with sound and wave analogies. I don't know why he didn't, because ancient philosophies still do. For example, Sikhs base much of their philosophy on "Ek Ong Kaar" which translates literally as the "sound current that oneness uses to create form". Or the older Hindu "OM" which refers to the same thing. Sound is a wave, a duality or dichotomy, a two-part phenomenon comprised of a positive and negative impulse. Many scientists understand that everything is a wave. That's a large statement. It means that infinity is a wave. And it is; the wave aspect of infinity is twoness, and all the other aspects or harmonics of awareness are infinite because the source of everything, awareness, is infinite. Probability waves are a key concept of quantum physics, which hinges on the awareness of the observer causing the collapse of probability waves into solid form. In discussion of quantum physics, I've even heard harmonics mentioned.

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And then in the seemingly solid object we mistake for a body, we have, located together near the heart chakra, a pair of lungs and a pair of double valves called a "heart" which pump some of our precious bodily fluids around. Pumps are pulsers, wave makers. Electricity is also about waves. An electrical engineer friend informs me that acoustics (wave science) and flow dynamics are pretty much the same thing. What does he know? He's just electrical... No, dude, it's all the same thing. Everything is a symbol of everything else. It's pretty obvious that the world is created by a pulsing current or unsteady flow of some source energy. That world is also a dichotomy, with the individual and the world he experiences facing off as a pair. Dig down into the individual and it splits into a pair also: the body and the mind. You can't get away from twoness. It receives its energy from the Source, Oneness or Infinity, which is really just pure awareness, and twoness is all the parts of all the worlds. Just their partness, their separateness from each other, their identity. Therefore I have depicted the weird little blind alley where we deploy our oddly incompetent physicality as a resonator or sound blaster driven by the greater reality as its source and eventual place of return, with the sound produced by the resonator creating the world, complete with froth. The froth's just the mental noise caused by humans who are obviously out of control. As Frank Kepple was fond of pointing out, the physical world is a final destination, a dead end, not a portal to a great beyond of larger realities, but an offshoot of, and a creation of greater realities. So it seems apparent to many who lack imagination that this is it and that escaping this earth-bound condition by unworlding seems anti-intuitive to most of those who are stuck here. To get away from this stuckness, we seek experiences that serve as a portal out of the stuckness and lead toward unstuckness, a less rigid, less punishing reality. This does not take us beyond earthness but back through the Tunnel, analogically speaking, to where our source energy came from. It's very hard to discuss all these states and conditions without referring to them as places, but I refuse to cave in and use terms like "out-of-body". The terminology is important and it should be carefully enough chosen that it naturally becomes more accurate with use, not less. Monroe's Focus 3 (relaxed with less body awareness) and Focus 10 (all focus inward with no body awareness) are two phases of Frank Kepple's "Noticing". I have now divided Noticing into two parts, and like any other state we discuss, either or both can be skipped over by chance or design. For the beginner it's best to know all the steps so he doesn't get lost. Noticing starts out feeling forced. You think it's not going to work--you don't see anything-then you realize you're talking to yourself, so you make yourself stop. You see something and your physical eyes try to follow it, which stops the extended vision again. You calm the eyes and immediately you see a light patch, or a series of vague dots or patterns, or a whooshing

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shadow blowing across the screen out of the corner of your mind's eye, it doesn't matter what. The Voice of Idiossification tells you these vague sightings have no value or interest or reality, and you have to make yourself stop listening to that voice also. So in Focus 3 we have to force ourselves to notice (become aware of inner, non-physical, "unreal" sensations) because all our lives we have been taught the opposite. Most teachers of unworlding make a big deal out of relaxation, but beginners tend to focus too much on their bodies, and in the process of trying so hard to not feel their bodies, many people end up with a rigidity and motionless numbness that you could hardly call relaxation. Frank Kepple was the first to suggest that we lighten up on the relaxation bit. When you lie down in a dark room, close your eyes and stop thinking, that right there is pretty darn relaxed, and if that statement is not true for you, then you should practice relaxation separately until you are good at it and can relax your body and mind instantly no matter what's going on around you. Otherwise it distracts from what's important, and let's face it, some altered states of consciousness take place traditionally in the opposite of a relaxed state. Real hypnotists also know that relaxation is not an inherent part of true hypnotic trance, so let's just stop making extreme relaxation an obstacle to our goals. We relax automatically when we stop trying so hard; it's instinctive. After a period of Forced Noticing, if all goes well, you will go into a revery in which relaxation comes naturally and you are not forcing anything, just watching images, maybe hearing aurages or feeling feelages, and not really unaware that your body exists, but completely ignoring it. The sensations arise spontaneously, and you don't have to fight to stop the internal dialog. If you don't watch out, you'll lose consciousness. To prevent this, you begin Climbing the Beanstalk, some pre-planned visioneering (not strict visualizing) routine that will keep you focused on what you're doing. Without getting you to scare the wild bird away by shouting for it to come to you. This is Spontaneous Noticing, formerly known as Focus 10 or "Mind Awake, Body Asleep". You've invested the effort to get this far, so don't ruin it by checking to see if your body is asleep. That's why we need to get rid of the old terminology. Your goal is to notice the images, aurages, and feelages. The more you notice, the more there is. The exercise I call "Climbing the Beanstalk" or "the Beanpole" for short, is your customdesigned imagined journey through the neck of the resonator, through the tunnel, to the place where the tunnel feels real. This happens by itself. Suddenly you feel something strangely familiar as your 2-3-4 body-mind-world literally dissolves. You feel as if you are being physically squeezed by the Tunnel, maybe claustrophobic. Or you feel hot, or you think your heart is beating too fast. Or you think you're paralyzed or can't breathe. Or you suddenly fear losing your mind or you think someone's in your house or a ghost is sitting on your chest. Oops! You thought about your body when your physical processes were trying to institute sleep paralysis, now you're awake and aware of your body being in paralysis. As always, thinking about the body energizes its need for attention and the result is a hopefully short experience of the waking sleep paralysis. I won't go deeply into sleep paralysis, except to put it

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in context. Most people have seldom or never been bothered by it because it doesn't frighten them, so they just glide through it--through the Apnea--in a split second and they're out of the tunnel into an expanded state of awareness, completely unaware of the body and not hindered by any physical sensations anymore. The problem with those of us who don't seem to notice sleep paralysis is that we might try to back out of the Apnea. This results in waking up with that choking feeling. This happens to me all the time, whereas anytime I go into the Apnea unconsciously and get really stuck there with the paralyzed feeling, I tend to be deeply enough into an expanded state that I just carry on as if I were dreaming that I tried to shout and could barely mumble, or tried to kick a bad guy in the face and only kicked the wall enough to wake me up with a sore toe, or something like that. But the other morning after a long night's sleep and several uneventful Noticing sessions, I experienced the Apnea consciously, and went into a short lapse of consciousness which led to an immediate awakening in an expanded state of awareness, the Projection Room, my new name for Monroe's Focus 12. The Projection Room is awesome. This is the third kind of noticing: Beyond Noticing. The forced or even spontaneous visions within the tunnel are nothing compared to the Projection Room. Like any other state, it can occur in a dream, lucid or not. But before I move on, I have to say more about the Apnea, also known as Reality Apnea. This refers to a state in which your typical 2-3-4 reality is choked down, slimmed down in the narrow part of the Tunnel, to the point where those parts of your 2-3-4 mind which can't deal with the expanded awareness conditions beyond the Tunnel just get left behind. While this is perfectly harmless--we do it every night when we go to sleep--it can be scary at first to do it without being comatose. The reason for this--I know from previous experience--is that the mind feels it is under attack. Which explains all the scary monsters that people see in sleep paralysis states. I mean, what if you were crawling through a tight, narrow tunnel hoping to get to a big, beautiful cavern, but just before you got out of the constricted throughway, you felt hands all over your body ripping your thousand extra arms off so you would be small enough to get through? You'd turn back, no? But how? The tunnel's too tight, you can't turn back! That is what the 2-3-4 mind experiences if it manages to stay awake for this part of the process. And it doesn't like the feeling of losing parts. It feels like this, exactly: "You are your mind as you know it. Keep going and you lose your mind. Turn around and you save it." So quite often I wake up trying to turn around and go back, choking, taking huge deep fast breaths in a panic. I am gradually learning to instead feel the physical sensation of entering the final stretch of the Tunnel--the Apnea--and trying to appreciate and enjoy the sensation and wait it out. What's going on at this point is actually a tuning of the configuration in terms of how much of

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your energy is going to twoness (duality, emotion, thought, belief), threeness (connection, association, agreement, attachment), and fourness (order, time, system, arrangement). The 23-4 mind is very greedy ("doesn't play well with others" including its own higher selves), trying to hog all the energy for its own routine-addicted use. It fights hard to remain in its comfy, cozy, boring, predictable reality. So you--awareness--suffer the result of being firmly and solidly stuck, overly emotional, thinking too much, and plagued by rules and regulations all the time. "Physical" as they say. But there is more than one kind of reality. The 2-3-4 mind is your conscious mind, your physical body, and your physical world, all created simultaneously. This configuration is an energy parasite that has gotten you trapped in the Earthville Mental Institution where such parasites are allowed to indulge themselves in a sort of Reeking Thrashing Pile of Humanity. But it's all we know. So naturally, when you first start to learn how to escape from this safe haven, your 2-3-4 mind is going to scream bloody murder, "I'm losing my mind! I'm turning around! I'm going back!" You wake up in a panic not knowing what just happened. But I practice Noticing, I try to experience many repeated Awakenings in a day, so I have witnessed the whole process. Not nearly enough times to solidify the skill, but at least I halfway know what to expect. And it's not that the panic occurs every time. What often happens is that the system knows what to do and turns 2ness, 3ness, and/or 4ness down just at the right time, you skate through the Apnea without even Noticing because without the requisite energy feeding through 2-3-4, you will not actually experience the Apnea at all. With perfect timing--that's what you're trying to develop into an intuitive art form--the conscious mind gets turned up a little as soon as the Apnea is past--also known as lucidity, which I prefer to call Awakening--and you ask yourself, "What just happened?" because as far as you know, you might have been asleep for five minutes or an hour. Ideally, it was only seconds, and you are now in the Projection Room. You look around, still Noticing (because the lapse of consciousness was only seconds long or less), and you notice that the walls are melting, metaphorically speaking. You just know you are in a special state of awareness. If you think (wordlessly or nearly so) of seeing a spiral, you see a spiral. It appears immediately, in full-color, high resolution, and with added features that your conscious mind did not expect. So I will describe what happened to me that prompted this whole chapter. This was not by far my most interesting, prolonged or dramatic experience of the Projection Room. It is my most recent, and most importantly, when I woke up in that state, I knew What Just Happened. That's how we learn the way. Focusing on achieving these little successes in the first months and years of practice is a thousand times more productive than obsessing over the Experiences we hope to have on purpose once we are well into the practice and know the map by heart. Without the little learning experiences, the Big One probably won't come at all unless you have a really awesome near death experience or something. I'd been practicing uneventful Noticing sessions all night, which meant several times, because that's how many times I had to get up to relieve my nervous bladder. Each time I just lay back

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down, did some Noticing, and went to sleep. Finally, when I'd had around 8 hours of sleep or a little more, I got back into bed after a final pee, and lay down thinking I'd never get back to sleep. I felt wide awake. I closed my eyes and started Noticing, and of course started drifting into unconsciousness immediately. I am still a beginner, no doubt about it. Then I felt this weird sensation. In fact it kinda woke me up a little, because I'd been in a bit of a lapse. So this memory had a kind of unconnectedness to it, but fortunately I made a strong mental note of it at the time, because an hour later I had to rely on that in-context memory of this whole thing having even happened. Memories of experiences in expanded states of awareness fade very quickly when the 2-3-4 mind gets its stranglehold back. I felt this sensation of heat and pressure in my chest area. Without any real awareness of my physical body. Which would be--you guessed it--5ness. The heart chakra, not the physical heart. This was a strong and distinct sensation, but it was almost as if I had dual consciousness, both first person and third person. It was not a static sensation, but a growing, building sensation. One of my dream bodies must have been sending me the message that I had nothing to fear, because I was quite obsessed with the notion that this growing condition was very familiar. And then I blinked out and shortly after that awoke in the Projection Room. This was not something I had expected, visualized, or tried to experience. It was a complete surprise and the memory of it faded in less than an hour. Once past the Apnea, I noticed that I could feel the famed Vibrations (which I usually can feel whenever waking up directly out of a dream, but I consider The Vibes an indicator, not an engine; I ignore them). I could easily hear the similarly indicatory Sound Current and if I listened to it, it would instantly get a lot louder. I remembered the content of my new Climbing the Beanstalk routine, which was to see a spiral and then try and move it around. I'd tried this plenty of times earlier in the night and had found it was easy to see partial and somewhat fuzzy spirals at odd angles floating around, but they all had a mind of their own. That's spontaneous Noticing. (Forced Noticing is when you almost--but not quite--have to pretend that you even see something.) But now, after passing through the Apnea, this state was beyond Noticing. As soon as I thought about seeing a spiral, one appeared, fully formed. It was a complete spiral in light shades of white and gray; tight, well-defined lines, not the fuzzy, mooshy, darkish spiral sections I'd seen earlier. It was directly in front of me, right where I'd imagined it, and it was absolutely motionless, as if nailed down. What's more, whichever one of my dreambodies or guides was in charge of this event had indulged a well-aimed sense of humor and overlaid the spiral with a cross-hair, equally well-placed and high-definition, as shown in the illustration.

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The next step in my beanpole was to move the spiral to the left and to the right, in order to demonstrate that I had control of it in two-dimensions. I imagined it moving over a ways to the left, and it did this so smoothly and undramatically that I was almost underwhelmed. I thought about moving it way over to the right and it again went exactly where I wanted it to go, so easily that I was almost disappointed. The next step would have been to rotate the spiral, see if I could merge with it and transition to an even more expanded experience, and if not, to elongate it into a tunnel by drawing it towards me. Then I planned to enter the tunnel, go through it, and come out in a new experience. Unfortunately my wife started shouting at dogs downstairs so I decided to get up and write it all down while I still could. The rest of the states of awareness shown on the drawing are well-known to anyone who reads books on unworlding, except for the Nothing, which we've covered in earlier chapters. So I'll try to be brief. The Nothing, which Fred Aardema explains well in his book and which Frank Kepple discusses quite a bit, is also called the Void or the 3D Darkness. As Dr. Aardema explains, the Nothing is the doorway to all other states. It is the standardized transition zone, also Monroe's Focus 21. When transitioning into or out of any state, you go through the Nothing, whether you're aware of it or not. Its existence is well proven to me by the frequency with which it appears in dream symbology. Experiences of expanded awareness that seem to take place in real earth environments are called RTZ or Real Time Zone experiences. This is Robert Bruce's terminology. Robert Monroe called it Locale I in his first book. These experiences are not more or less real than anything else, and they are not of the same world as your body, whether you see your body sleeping in its bed or not. If they were in the same world as your real sleeping body, you would experience them with your physical body, not floating around the room. We do not enter and exit place-like experiential environments. We create an experience and the body needed to experience that creation, from the same configuration and at the same time. The 2-3-4 mind, for example, is the body, mind, and world all reflecting the same configuration at the same time. So if you experience a body, mind, or world that is different from the typical 2-3-4 mind--for example if it seems like you're in your bedroom, but you can fly and the walls are the wrong color and your wife has three heads--you are not in the same world just mistaking your wife for someone else because your astral body is stupid or something. The Real Time Zone is not The Physical World as seen from some astral body. And it is not a single place, it is a type of experience that seems to you like your accustomed waking experience in

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some ways. But the 3-headed wife thing... get it? The RTZ just is not accounted for by astral distortion or some similar pitiful excuse. You are having an experience in which your wife has three heads. Don't worry, it's bound to change soon. What I call the 2-3-4 mind-body-world-or the conscious mind, physical body and physical world if I must--Robert Monroe called C1 consciousness. Remember to pay as little attention to Monroe's unintended numerical order as possible. There is good reason to change this system. There is not some linear progression from Focus 21 to Focus 22 to Focus 23 etc. I can't stress this enough so I probably won't get the point across. I think my new 3D map gets several good points across, one of them being that the Nothing gives equal access to every state of awareness, there being no status seeking in this field once you get at least 2000 miles away from The Monroe Institute or out past Hawaii, whichever comes first. With the exception of the internet, which knows no boundaries when it comes to people seeking to advertise the idea that they know or knew someone important in this field. But who cares. The drawing doesn't really show it, but when you go through the small end of the Tunnel--the Apnea--in either direction, you can get squirted out like a watermelon seed pinched between two fingers, due to the pressure that the Apnea has to put on you to keep you from screaming in terror and trying to crawl out of the Tunnel backwards. The result of the momentum that got you into the Tunnel to begin with is that you can end up literally in any state of awareness when leaving the Apnea itself, sliding through any intermediate states so quickly that you don't notice them. Like when the alarm clock goes off and you go from deep in some alternate universe to "gotta get to work," making the transition so suddenly that it almost ruins your whole life. The point being, don't get caught up in doing the right thing in the right order. That which seems to be happening is usually the train you should be on. Mental quibbling kills it all. The dreamworld or Monroe's Focus 22 is a self-created environment of awareness experiences that automatically reflect your individual configurations. This happens most automatically if you don't know who you are--you aren't lucid--but if you do know who you are, you might find it's not as easy as the lucid dream books say it is, to take control of the dream plotline and manifest any circumstances you desire. The purpose of the dreamworld is to mirror your configuration as an external environment for you to experience, so if you want to change your environment, it's a matter of changing what you have lined up in intent. Intent is the energy that changes things, that creates a new circumstance or condition, and change is fiveness. Of course to have any ability to manipulate 5ness you have to know something about 2ness, 3ness, and 4ness. (In Synfonemia, the numerical progression is meaningful.) So in a sense, Intent incorporates not only the 5ness that it is but all the crap you went through to get a handle on 5ness. Not that you are supposed to take Progress too seriously. That would be allowing 4ness to gorge itself on its favorite idle pasttime, comparing and judging yourself and

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others. To illustrate the role of 5ness (the energy of Intent) in all this, take for example our experience with the Tunnel. Starting from 2-3-4 mind we begin Forced Noticing by robbing a bit of 2-3-4's hoarded energy and giving it to 5ness instead. Without a special effort to focus intently, nothing will happen. When this succeeds, there is a lot more flow and a lot less rigid structure, i.e. "my eyes are closed so I can't see a damn thing," turns into, "I sort of saw some dumb little thing." This becomes Spontaneous Noticing when the noticed sensations take on a little life of their own and 5ness gets even more of 2-3-4's usually wasted energy. Normally wasted upshoring the ego, reacting to fears and beliefs, thinking too much, etc. At this point if you just watch the images you might go to sleep, so you begin visioneering a premeditated Climbing the Beanstalk routine to keep 2-3-4 from abandoning you entirely. This engages all 5+ physical senses in stuff that isn't really there physically, and at some point during this exercise, 5ness takes control, shoots you through the apnea, and you wake up from a little dream after a lapse of consciousness. It's all about giving 5ness the controls--because 5ness is fluid and all about change--without throwing away the actual useful skills that 2ness, 3ness, and 4ness have to offer. Then there are the Loosh Repositories. This is my personal contribution to the unworlding philosophy, surpassing Frank Kepple's understanding, and he spent a lot of time there without noticing that if you don't observe a 2-dimensional entity (reflection), it has no awareness or volition except to repeat its imprinted activity, if anything. Also called Karma Traps, where good and bad karma comes after being "earned" by unsuspecting do-gooders and do-badders who waste their lives thinking that all their shadows stick to them somehow. And Loosh, relatedly enough, is rejected emotional energy which, being properly expressed (and "expressed" means "gotten rid of") by the original owner, becomes a hoarded condiment of those who prefer to eat fertilizer. Loosh eaters abound in these places, which Monroe called Focus 23, 24, 25, and 26. They have no awareness. Here we have Monroe's Belief System Territories where reflections of people who have died in some parallel world somewhere reflect within the heaven or hell of their choosing: the blank zone of a dead atheist's belief system, the Rutting Pile of the sex addict, the Smoking Den of the dead smoker, the bad karma of a Hitler, etc. These are reflections of people's habits, beliefs, karma, and expectations. They are two-dimensional. They are real and they exist. But these entities are not suffering, they don't have sentience or awareness, because they are just reflections, and you need 3ness and 4ness to exist in a way that allows you to suffer, experience time, have ambitions, etc. When a retriever comes along in his well-meaning astral retriever's outfit and starts talking to the reflection, the reflection suddenly seems to be real, knows things about its life on earth, and might even allow its would-be rescuer to take it to Monroe's Focus 27 Reception Center, where Reception Center employees dressed as its relatives or associates or whatever it takes to make a believer out of it will whisk him away and send the retriever back to where he or she came from.

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Which is the whole point of the R Center gambit, because the real name for the R Center is the "Reflection Center". You see, from the perspective of the R Center employees, the retriever is a 2-dimensional relfection of his good but myopic intentions, he doesn't and maybe can't see that it is his interaction with a mere reflection that got the retrievee to act real, and when the employees of the Reflection Center pretend to be the retrieved image's favorite aunt, it is so the retrievee and the retriever will both go away. This is just nature taking its course, there's nothing particularly unusual about it including the fact that most of the participants can't tell what's actually going on. Just as frequently, the mere reflection either can't be talked into leaving the Loosh Repository or Karma Trap where it belongs, or else it lets itelf be dragged away, and while the retriever's back is turned, it slips loose and is sucked right back to its rightful place in the universes. Just nature asserting itself. The so-called "negs" also inhabit these zones, which Frank Kepple called "Primary Focus 2," where thoughts, emotions, and beliefs instantly manifest. He knew their habits well, having spent five years early in his unworlding career fighting bad guys which were birthed from his own mind. When he figured out what was going on, he stopped fighting them and they stopped fighting him. But his P2 contains all the thought-responsive non-consensus realities including the heavens and hells, dreamland, etc. There is really no reason to try and enforce a strict delineation between the various kinds of places found within Frank's non-consensus (individually created) P2. Frank's P3 is supposed to be a consensus reality, but not of the unpleasantly strict type found in our physical reality. Frank called the physical reality P1 and included the RTZ therein as its borderline, but since we're not talking about places, there is no point in thinking this way, and Frank knew that. His P3, on the other had, was a big deal to him. He was certain that P3 was a true experience of permanent consensus realities similar to P1's physical kind, without the psychotic inhabitants and without the stinking rules needed in the physical world to keep the inmates from biting each other. Here we have Monroe's Focus 27, a "real" consensus reality where the Reception Center [sic] accepts dead people [sic] and on and on. Just let me say that at this point we have to face the fact that our leaders in the field of unworlding are the least objective of anyone as to how their experiences should be interpreted. I prefer the same explanation I use for so-called reincarnation: people experience what they resonate with. For example, in what I anticipate will be my favorite state of awareness when I finally learn how to achieve it: the Library, formerly known as the Akashik Record. I expect this contains a "record" not of every real thing in history, past, present, and future... but a record of every possibility. Which I imagine I will still find interesting, and I don't think I would have any

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choice, because plain and simple, nothing is real except awareness. Nothing. Robert Monroe, Bruce Moen, and Frank Kepple have all reported very different experiences of "Focus 15" or the timeless zone, so I don't take this experience any more seriously than any other experience that is accessible to anyone who knows how to--purposely or accidentally-alter the configuration of his awareness profile. Turn 4ness way down, and presto! Timelessness. It's too simple for words. I've experienced that too. Accidentally, of course.

THE MOST METHODLESS OF METHODS: THE BREATH OF FLIGHT "The most durable lines that a man of knowledge produces come from the middle of the body," he said. "But he can also make them with his eyes." "Are they real lines?" "Surely." "Can you see them and touch them?" "Let's say that you can feel them. The most difficult part about the warrior's way is to realize that the world is a feeling. When one is not-doing, one is feeling the world, and one feels the world through its lines." --Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan Search through any number of in-depth discussions of meditation, yoga, exercises intended to have any effect on so-called emotional or spiritual well-being, and keep track of how many of these discussions don't take up the matter of breathing, somewhere along the line. Better yet, don't bother. There probably aren't any, and if there are, they are only a few. This is because any breathing exercise you attempt for more than a few seconds will radically alter the way you feel. Unless the exercise has you breathing the way you already do. But if you change the way you breathe, you change your world. And this is because twoness is what creates us as individuals. In the physical world, we are created by a variety of reflections of the so-called Sound Current, which is twoness itself,

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splitting infinity into parts. All of these things are wavelike, two-part processes: --breathing: two lungs functioning with an in-and-out pumping motion; --heartbeat: two double valves, another in-and-out pumping motion; --electricity: a wave function involving a flow of invisible sub-atomic particles; --lymph fluid: another fluid pumped by the motion of the body; pumping is always an unsteady in-and-out dichotomous process; --the Vibes: experienced by most unworlders, this physical sensation has no obvious physical source, but is actually caused by interaction of two or more differently vibrating chakras or overtones or dream bodies; --tinnitus: the inability to stop listening to the Sound Current that's always there since it creates the world, your body, and your mind. Tinnitus is possibly a habit of mind; on the other hand, if you can't keep your breathing, heartbeat, lymph pumping, and brainwave-emitting bodily centers functioning in synergetic cooperation with each other and an infinitude of other systems, such inability constitutes the death of the body. The deathless "soul," on the other hand, is just infinity. It can hardly get too involved in the ending of whatever movie it's been watching for a portion of a puny century, much less mope about it. While death is hard on those who experience the death of others, it's no big deal for the self, since there is only one of those, and infinite awareness can just play the tape over again if it was that great... with variations, even. To stop living, just stop breathing. They can claim that I'm wrong when I say that we breathe the world into existence, but they can't prove it. And while most people can't control their heart, lymph, or brain waves, almost everybody can change the way they breathe. And by so doing, change their world. I had my first classic unworlding experience around 1980 at the age of 24, during a monthlong marathon of deep, connected breathing that put me into an obviously physical version of the Vibes and kept me there. I say "obviously physical" because the particular flavors of Vibes I was experiencing were obviously caused by the way I was breathing. Not because you could see any part of me vibrating. So essentially, these Vibes were the same vibes as the Vibes vibes. You know, those Vibes. During that month of breathplay, I also had my first experience of ESP and I was in a state of bliss the whole time. I don't say that lightly. My usual jubilantly cantankerous personality more or less evaporated into a relaxed bubble and I walked around without gravity, no troubles, nothing to complain about. My whole world changed, temporarily. Walking around in a vibratory condition 24/7 is nothing to sneeze about. Not that I think you should try it. In fact I forbid you to try it. If you try this, it's your problem, not mine. Because I told you not to. So don't even read this chapter. Carlos Castaneda used to talk about something he called the lines of the world which brought the world into existence somehow. I'll tell you how. The infinite universe is awareness and

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nothing else. Since it's infinite, it can't be split into parts, because you can't draw lines on infinity or it's not infinity any more. But paradoxically, since it's infinite, it can and does include everything. All possibilities and impossibilities have equal status within infinity; they can't be told apart. This paradox is at the heart of creation. We have to impose "harmonics" or some such metaphor on infinity in order to explain the parts of the universe, how the parts interact with each other, etc. And then there's science, telling us that the universe is just a field of possibility waves, and when awareness (we) encounter these waves, our observing them turns them into facts. So facts turn out to really be choices made by consciousness from among possibilities that exist in a potential state till we manage to magically manifest them as real stuff by observing them. So Castaneda was right: we experience the world--or "feel" it, as he said--by drawing lines on the undifferentiated infinitude of awareness, separating oneness into infinite parts, which is twoness. This doesn't alter awareness one bit; the lines we draw are already contained somewhere within infinity. But by the choices we make, we experience one reality or another, whistling our happy tune within the vast fields of the mind, mistaking it all for a prison we call reality, while infinite untouched awareness just purrs away somewhere in the background as usual, unperturbed by anything. Once I dreamed that I was back at a new age resort called Campbell Hot Springs, where I had stayed on-and-off as a child in my early 20s. In this dream, I became lucid--remembered who I was--and looked around. I was lying on a cot in a room at the hot springs lodge reading a book. I looked at the cover of the book. It was decorated in livid tones of red, orange and yellow. In the world of this dream, it was a new book by Carlos Castaneda, entitled Meetings of Possible Ways. I set the book down and played with the light beams coming into my room through slatted window shades covering windows that looked out into the hallway. By opening and closing my eyes to varying degrees, I could break the light beams into brilliant, prismatic lines of every color of the rainbow with my eyelashes. I played with this effect for a while, then woke up. A few weeks or months later, I discovered that Castaneda did in fact have a new book out, and it did in fact have a cover illustration done up boldly in reds, yellows, and oranges. Be that as it may, the first time I had lived at Campbell Hot Springs, my friends and I were having a great time, cooking vegetarian food, making cookies out of leftovers, and getting by somehow without any money, when the owner of the resort moved out of his house in San Francisco and moved to the resort to personally supervise our spiritual development. This fella was deeply interested in selling his breathing method and related philosophy to rich new agers, and he called his technique "Rebirthing" since he claimed you would relive your own birth and release the associated birth trauma if you kept breathing long enough. This in turn

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would save you from your own psychological demons. Well, I had once been told that rebirthing was the cure for Primal Therapy, not an extension of it, so when the owner informed the manager of the hot springs that anyone who wasn't getting Rebirthed once a day would have to leave the hot springs, word of this new policy trickled down to me and I was beset with anxiety. I had a hard time with rebirthing, because every time I lay down to breathe, I would get hypoglycemic and start demanding pizza. But faced with the specter of possibly being evicted from this beautiful and righteously funky high mountain resort in the middle of a gorgeous summer and surrounded by people I really liked for a change, I did what any reasonable person would do: I panicked. Which to me, in those days, meant that I got angry and it was someone else's fault and I was going to find a clever way to lash out, without getting beaten up or arrested. Some means of lashing out which would make me look smarter than the morons who were torturing me. With adrenalin pump in hand, I marched up to the manager or my friend or whoever I told, and informed them that, due to the new policy, I was going to start doing the connected breath of rebirthing 24 hours a day. I was advised that I might be overreacting, but to me at this time in my life there was no such thing as overreacting, and perhaps underneath it all I was maybe a little bit bored or something. Always an intensity freak, no doubt about that. I was still informally evicted from the hot springs sleeping quarters since I had no way to pay rent, but I was allowed to live rent free at the Globe Hotel in town, less than two miles away, a national historical landmark since it was so old. I was the only tenant other than the young Swedish woman who had been put in charge of the building. She was spending all her time writing a romance novel, but she wouldn't allow me to edit it for her, so when I wasn't working for my daily grub in the hot springs kitchen or digging ditches or whatever needed to be done, I was walking to town, walking to the hot springs, walking in the mountains, or lying on my bed in the hotel with no chance that anyone was gonna come knocking at my door. And I was breathing. Within minutes of beginning my new life as a 24/7 connected breather-and possibly assisted by the aforementioned adrenalin pump--I was addicted to air. I had never felt so good, not since I was a small child with no worries. And with parents like mine, that was pretty small. But suddenly I lost interest in my hoarded primal scabs and stopped caring about all my stupid habits. I don't know if it was because the breathing supplanted my normal state of mind and I slipped into a samadhi state of no thought, or what. There's no sense trying to figure out what happened, since it was 36 years ago and I can't even remember exactly what kind of breathing I was doing. When I started breathing hard, non-stop, I quickly breathed through the harmless "creeping crud" or tetany-like symptoms where your fingers and toes and mouth curl up and get semiparalyzed. But the vibrations never went away. I just lived with them. Happily. They felt fantastic. I had never felt so alive, except maybe in those flying dreams I used to have as a

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child. One day I was at loose ends at the resort, and being temporarily not a worrier anymore, I just started walking to town for no reason. I was really flying, I mean I was high on air, buzzing to beat the band. The two-mile long, straight, flat dirt road that I walked between town and resort has become for me the symbol of the Endless Path. The featurelessness of the road matched the emptiness of my ecstatic mind. Let me emphasize that during this period I was not struggling to breathe a certain way; I was doing it. I think that's where the adrenalin pump came in, as well as the abundance of free time I had on my hands. I have not been able to really reproduce this state since, except sporadically. Smoking cigarettes till I was about 47 might have had something to do with it. When I got to town, that hot summer afternoon, I went upstairs to my little wooden room and flopped down on my creaky old bed with not a thought in my head except, "What if I'm just doing this to get high?" Another part of me quickly responded, "So be it!" and I closed my eyes, knowing I would be gone in seconds. One of the benefits of my new condition was that I could just lie down and close my eyes, any time of the day or night, and be gone is less than five seconds. And those vibrations, they were just so warm and wonderful, I can't describe how happy and excited I was to be alive, feeling that way, day after day after day. Next thing you know, I was crouching down on the floor going through my little backpack, which I had leaned up against my bed before lying down. I found a twenty dollar bill and thought, How nice, I didn't know I had any money... Now wait a minute! I don't have any money! What's going on here??? I looked up reflexively, and there, a few inches from my nose, was my sleeping body, lying in the bed. Though I was not normally a very good gymnast, I leapt back into that thing and sat up in a heartbeat. I picked up the breath again, and congratulated myself on somehow accidentally achieving my first conscious "out-of-body experience" after wishing and hoping for such a thing for ten years but not having a clue how to induce it. Actually, I recall feeling somewhat underwhelmed. I couldn't believe how normal it had felt. No bells and whistles, no angels singing on high, just me doing stuff without the benefit of my usual body, and being totally aware of it. Not long after that I had to get on with my life, look for a job in the city, etc. I went back to my cigarettes and my mental and emotional hangups, nothing was changed except I vowed that someday I would make my life all about learning and teaching what I now call unworlding. I am now one year into that "someday". I can't remember the exact style of breathing I was using, whether I was breathing fast or slow,

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belly or chest, etc., but it would have been relatively deep breathing no doubt, and definitely there was no holding the breath at any time. That's called "connected breathing" because you never stop. Being determined to never stop breathing even for a second, my mind quickly emptied and stayed that way, for the most part, for the whole month that I was doing the connected breathing. In the past year of this practice, I've tried, and temporarily sworn by, a number of different breathing styles, and what I've finally decided is that you have to keep changing how you breathe if you want to stay in the buzzy state. That's where awareness and waking-upness comes into it: breath + awareness = lifelikeness. Another way to put it is, if you only had one breath to breathe, how would you breathe it? But this information is not for you. Not you. You are forbidden to try this. Absolutely forbidden. But if you were to disobey me by any chance, I think you would find yourself dipping into little lapses on your breathing couch and having many little awakenings every day. I think you would ask yourself, "What just happened?" and you would be shocked to recall having just come face to face with one of your own dream bodies, and that "body" had been obviously trying to get your attention; to make you lucid. To wake you up.

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UNWORLDING...the art form formerly known as "out-of-body-experience," "astral travel," "lucid dreaming," "phasing," "the quick switch," etc.

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