RE: My Experience With Sleep Paralysis
It's interesting that you said the experience was wild, as I agree but in a different meaning of the word. The process of "Astral Projection" is a variation of the wake induced lucid dreaming technique (WILD). The light and the noise were hypnagogic hallucinations. Hypnagogia/the hypnagogic state is a transitonal state between wakefulness and sleep and is experienced every night, but you usually aren't conscious for it. There is a similar state between slrep and wakefulness called the hypnapompic state. The alcohol may have helped if taken at the right time. It acts as a REM suppressant, but its effects quickly wear off (if taken in small amounts) which ends up causing REM rebound (more/longer dream time) and thus more successful lucid dreaming real estate, as it were. It sounds like you're making progress, but if I may give some advice; drop all the astral projection, light body, karma, chakra nonsense. All this dogma colors your experience through that particularly spiritual lens, which keeps you from experiencing the full joy and wonder of lucid dreaming and consciousness exploration in general.
Hey thanks for reading! If you didn't check already (or if you're interested) I have 2 other posts on lucid dreaming so I am actually familiar with the WILD technique. But in what sense do you mean to drop the astral projection/chakras and stuff? I'm a really gifted dreamer so I don't necessarily use them to "help" me with dreaming if that's what you mean.
Cool, I'll check them out. You mentioned you were into astral projection in the post, so I just meant that since they're the same thing, why not just practice lucid dreaming without the presuppositions that a lot of the astral beliefs require. I feel it kind of detracts from the gravity of the state. Just my opinion, though.
No yeah I totally get it. You leave your body every night. Lucid dreaming is just being conscious in your subconscious. When I refer to "astral travel" I just mean being conscious in the astral world and not just in your own subconscious mind.
I feel the other way around. Basically there's no real reason to believe in leaving the body as you can easily, empirically disprove it yourself. In my view, if they follow the same process and one doesn't hold more possibilities than the other, they're most likely an experience in the mind alone. Certain drugs can induce the feeling of leaving the body, which I think points to it being psychological/neurochemical in nature.
But would you agree that whether it be the "astral" or your "mind" that they both equally stem from the same energy and God-consciousness?
I mean, I think they are the same, but that they both are just consciousness interacting with itself in the closed system inside your skull. In my view, and I think there's good evidence to believe this, the brain is a meat computer and not connected to some sort of ether, energy, or god.