Altered States of Consciousness

For people with a rational and scientific turn mind mystical experiences are association with metaphysics, transcendental experiences and the belief that people in a mystical state are in touch with ultimate realities and are entering into a greater union with God. This means they place the concept of mystical experiences in their mental drawer reserved for superstition and irrational beliefs. By adopting this response they are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We need to separate the metaphysical explanations from the mystical experience itself, which is a real phenomenon that when experienced can considerably enhance and enrich our lives.

Anybody who has studied altered states of consciousness knows we need to look no further than our unconscious mind to locate the source of this experience. Like other altered states of consciousness the mystical experience is very difficult to convey in words to someone who has not experienced it. Think how difficult it is to explain falling in love to someone who’s never been in love or the beauty of a rose to someone who has been blind from birth.

Peak Experiences

The American psychologist Abram Maslow introduced the concept of peak experiences in his 1964 book “Religions, Values and Peak Experiences”, to give us a term we could use instead of mystical experience, so we could study the state of mind independently of its association with religious beliefs. Peak experiences are described by Maslow as especially joyous and exciting moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, wonder and awe, and possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity or knowledge of higher truth.

The Properties of a Peak Experience

A peak experiences has the following characteristics

• It is uplifting and ego transcending.
• It affirms your sense that your life has value and meaning.
• It leaves you feeling that your life has a sense of purpose.
• It opens up a sense of new realities and ways of viewing the world.
• It is often accompanied by feelings of ecstasy, wonder and awe.
• In extreme cases it is like the classical mystical experience where you feel the world and you have merged into one entity.
• In most cases the life of the person who has a peak experience is changed forever.

The more you trust and learn to work with your unconscious mind the more you will open yourself up to receiving peak experiences.

Technorati Tags: Altered States of Consciousness, Subconscious mind, Unconscious mind

Tags: Altered States of Consciousness, Subconscious mind, Unconscious mind

This technique takes some learning but once mastered it is the most effective way of entering lucid dreams. With the wake initiated lucid dreaming technique you begin in a waking state and create conditions that allow you to transition through a hypnagogic state into a lucid dream. I like to practice wake initiated lucid dream in the natural dip in alertness that takes place after launch. But the traditional way to practice this technique, is to wake yourself up after five hours of sleep and follow the procedures outlined below.

Preparation

If you are practising wake initiated lucid dreaming after a rousing yourself from sleep then the only preparation required to set the alarm clock. If you are practising during the day, you need to find a quiet room that you can make reasonably dark and where you are not likely to be disturbed. It is best to wear earplugs to keep out the daytime noises, they also have the added benefit of emphasising the sound of your heart beat and your breathing, this aids the transition into an altered state of consciousness. You will need either to lie down on a couch or bed or in a recliner chair that offers you complete support so you can completely relax. Your clothing should be loose and the room needs to be at a comfortable heat.

The Process

You begin by closing your eyes and setting an intention. The intention can be a general one like “I’m going to enter a lucid dream and let myself experience whatever arises”, OR you can set a specific intention like “I am now going to allow myself to enter into a lucid dream where I will meet Napoleon”. It is best to begin by setting general intentions until you have mastered the art of lucid dreaming.

Now with your eyes closed at yourself become more and more relaxed and become aware of the images float into your mind. As you relax you will begin to experience hypnagogic imagery this starts to occur when your mind is on the boarder between being awake and asleep. Do not try and influence the images just observe them and let them go wherever they want to go. They will probably start off as random patterns that are constantly moving and changing.

It is important that you remain an observer, keeping your mind still and trying to avoid any word based thoughts. As you go deeper  the patterns will begin to be replaced by random images, that constantly shift and change. Now let yourself be sucked into the images, at this point the images will most probably like short film clips that keep shifting and changing around.

As you continue to observe the images they will slowly become more and more real and eventually become three dimensional. When this happens it’s time to step into the scene and begin the process of lucid dreaming.

You Need to Keep Practicing

This technique requires practice in order to perfect it. It is very unlikely that you will achieve full lucid dreaming at your first few attempts. Even without achieving a lucid dream this process still delivers some fascinating experiences. The secret is to keep practising,  good luck.

Technorati Tags: Altered States of Consciousness, Conscious Dreaming, Lucid Dreaming

Tags: Altered States of Consciousness, Conscious Dreaming, Lucid Dreaming

Most of us are aware when we enter into an altered state of consciousness, but we find it very difficult to describe what an altered states is and how to go about creating one. In order to explain what altered states are, I first need to introduce a model of the human mind. I must impress upon you that this is a model and like all models is a simplification of reality. It is like a map of the town it cannot include the richness and complexity of the ever-changing reality but it nonetheless fulfils its function and allows you to navigate your way around the real town. This map consists of three main functional areas:

·                     The rational conscious mind

·                     The sensory conscious mind.

·                     The unconscious/subconscious mind

The Rational Conscious Mind

This is the part of your mind that is self-aware and you identify as being you. It is characterised by the following attributes.

·                     It sets goals and makes plans, it spends most of its time reviewing experiences from the past and taking the lessons learned to try and anticipate the future. It can be responsible for creating a lot of unnecessary stress by replaying traumas from the past and creating imagined future dangers.

·                     The rational conscious mind thinks abstractly and logically, using language to create labels and concepts in order to understand the world around it.

·                     It as access to short-term working memory that lasts around 20 seconds. We’ll see this limitation in action when we try to remember an unfamiliar telephone number for long enough to dial numbers.

·                     It has a limited processing capacity that can only handle between five and nine ideas simultaneously. This is why we employ chunking like breaking down one long telephone number into chunks of three or four digits.

·                     This element of your mind almost certainly resides within your brain and is mainly focused in the pre-frontal lobe, a very new part of the brain in evolutionary terms, that is  located just behind your forehead.

·                     The rational conscious mind is responsible for generating the constant chatter of self talk within our heads.

Most of us in the Western world are guilty spending too much of our waking lives locked into rational conscious mind mode and cutting ourselves off from the creative power that reside in our subconscious. This results in us thinking the same or similar thoughts every day resulting in our life becomes dull and bland. It is this lack of novelty and new experiences that leads to the perception of years passing faster as we get older.

The Sensory Conscious Mind

This is part of our mind that existed before the rational mind evolved. This part of the mind evolved along with mammals and it’s the form of consciousness that our pet cats and dogs used to go about their everyday lives. It does not understand abstract words its processing takes place on the sensory level of sight, sound, smell, and feeling. We engage this part of our minds when we paint, sing, play a sport, make love and navigate our way around our world. The sensory conscious mind is more closely connected to our subconscious than the rational conscious mind.

Unconscious/Subconscious Mind

This part of your mind systems does the bulk of your mental processing. It is a multi-processor system in which it is possible to identify hundreds of subsystems but for the purposes of this model we can think of it as one system with the following properties:

·                     It regulates many of our bodies operations like our heart rate, respiration, blood sugar levels, stress reactions and digestion.

·                     It is unable to think in terms of negatives so it is important when you are setting intentions that you say what you do want and not what you don’t want.

·                     If only knows the present moment and cannot deal with abstract concepts like the past and the future.

·                     Your unconscious mind is responsible for storing and retrieving your long-term memory it records all your past experiences and encodes your attitudes, values and beliefs.

·                     It takes control of our learned habits like riding a bicycle, driving a car, and actions like raising a glass to your mouth.

·                     It processors many billion bits of information every second.

·                     Many of its processes take place within the central nervous system and a growing body of research is showing that elements of the subconscious mind is distributed throughout the body right down to a  cellular level. It has even been suggested that the subconscious mind draws information from energy fields surrounding the body and can interact with the energy fields of the planet.

·                     The subconscious mind is the wellspring of our creativity.

What are Altered States of Consciousness

Altered states of consciousness arise when the dominating influence of our rational conscious mind is reduced allowing us to become more aware of the information we are receiving from our sensory conscious mind. Because the sensory conscious mind processes its information based on the same sensory circuits that the subconscious mind utilises it is able to access the storehouse of the subconscious mind a lot more easily than our everyday conscious mind this gives it access to a wider range of more vivid experiences. If you set an intention of an insight you would like to receive before you start an altered state of awareness session you will frequently find flashes of inspiration will unfold during the session.

You will also find if you practice entering altered states of consciousness on a regular basis,  your everyday consciousness will start to include more elements that were generated by your sensory conscious mind making the world seem more alive with richer with deeper experiences.

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Tags: Altered States of Consciousness, mind, subconscious, unconscious

Technorati Tags: Altered States of Consciousness, brain entrainment, consciousness brain, consciousness levels, consciousness science, Quantum Consciousness

Tags: Altered States of Consciousness, brain entrainment, consciousness brain, consciousness levels, consciousness science, Quantum Consciousness

Lucid dreams are dreams in which you become aware of the fact that you are dreaming. During a lucid dream you can actively participate in the dream and may be able to manipulate what happens.

In the early 1970’s Daniel Oldis of the University of South Dakota carried of a series of studies to see if it was possible to influence dream content and evoke lucidity. He experimented with three methods.

   Planting suggestions into the subconscious using tapes played before and during sleep.

   Associative signaling using a muffled bell alarm timed to go off during REM sleep.

   Classic conditioning using a REM detection circuit and a bright eye-light.

The results showed that lucid dreaming can be triggered using external cues and psychological methods.

Dream Journal

The first step towards lucid dreaming is to improve your ability to recall normal dreams. This will increase your awareness of dreams making it easier to trigger lucid dreaming. It will also make it more likely that you remember any lucid dreams that occur spontaneously. To improve your recall you need to recall your dreams as soon as you awake. You can do this by having a notepad and pen next to the bed. I personally find the best method is to have a voice recorder handy and record the dream in the following way:

   Keep your eyes closed and live the dream in your imagination.

   Describe the experience in the present as if you are going through it.

   Keep as still as you can after waking. Firing your motor neurons interferes with dream recall.

Triggering Lucid Dreams Using the Dream Sign Method

There are many techniques designed to trigger lucid dreams and I will be covering many of them in a future post. The problem with most of these techniques is they interfere with your sleep patterns.  It is best to begin your experiments with lucid dreaming using the Dream Sign method because it does not involve playing around with your sleep cycle.

Before you fall asleep you ask your subconscious mind to look out for dream signs in your dreams (See Reality Tests below). It helps to think about any dream signs that have triggered lucid dreaming in the past. If you want to further improve the success of this technique carry out some of the reality tests during the day. This will reinforce your intention and make it more likely you will perform the tests in your dreams.

Reality Tests

When you are recording your dreams be on the lookout for events that occur in your dreams that do not happen in the real world. The two things I use most to convince ne I am dreaming is an ability to fly and being able to move objects with my mind. I sometimes wonder what it would do for my sense of reality if I developed these powers in real life. I will be looking at more reality tests in a future blog.

Have great dreams

David

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We open our eyes in the morning and switch on our conscious mind; it continues to run unless interrupted by drugs, until you go to sleep at night. Then every 90 – 120 minutes while we sleep a different from of consciousness arises in the form of dreams.

The quality of our states of consciousness determines whether we have a good or a bad day, though to whether we have a successful and happy life. Yet most of us never give our states of consciousness a first let alone a second thought. The mission of this blog is to change all that and help you to understand your states of consciousness and give you techniques to guide you into empowering states. With altered states of consciousness you can embark on a magical transformational journey that will uncover hidden potential within you.

The beginning of the 21^st century is witnessing a growing understanding of age old techniques like meditation and how it transforms our brains. There are also more technological approaches like brain wave entrainment that deliver the benefits of mediation faster and with less effort. We will be exploring many ways to alter your states of consciousness each week. I will be showing you ways to guide yourself into altered states of your choosing.

I hope to help you find new altered states of consciousness to experience. I will also be reminding you that there is no default state of consciousness and that every day you journey in and out of numerous states. Some may be dramatic changes like when you make love or loose yourself in a dance or experience rage, others will be gentler like becoming absorbed in a good book, the rapport you feel with a close friend, the thrill of seeing someone you look. I mention here only a few of the hundreds of states you move in and out of each day. This means you have a rich treasure chest of states already available and all you need is some guidance on how to elicit these states when and where you want them.

By following these tips you will enhance your experiences:

   Be adventures.

   Respect your rhythm’s, don’t push let the experience flow naturally.

   If nothing happens move on and tyre again another time.

   Come out of a experience gradually and take time to reflect on what as happened.

Have a great day

David

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