Descriptions:
Video Description
“”Most people think of dreams as blurry and half-forgotten, but this lesson opens a door onto something far more vivid. In the first part of a three-part series, Lyam Christopher asks a deep question: what if the dream world and the waking world are not really two separate places? Astral projection, for him, is the larger idea, and lucid dreaming is one way of stepping into it. The goal is not escape but clarity, a chance to see the sleeping state with the same curiosity that a scientist brings to a strange new country.”
“He offers a simple modern image for Plato’s ancient cave: the movie theater. Most lives are spent watching the drama on the screen, flinching at the explosions and forgetting that a projector is behind the whole show. Waking up means noticing the screen itself, and maybe standing up to touch it. The Golden Dawn called this the sphere of sensation, the living projector of the imagination. At night, a private film begins to play inside that same sphere, showing the karma and old memories that shape you. Lucid dreaming lets you stop running from the monster and begin to understand the film.”
“The wonder grows when he describes the astral body itself. Like the Taoist figure Peng Yi, it may glide on the wind, leave no shadow, and cast no reflection, much like the vampires of old legend. In this state, colors can look clearer than anything seen with physical eyes, and even old childhood memories can return in perfect detail. Yet nothing holds still, because everything in this world is always changing. The close is both strange and comforting: what you truly are is not the character on the screen at all, but the steady, silent light behind it.”
Full Video Transcript
Alright, this will be the first video, I think, in probably a three-part series on astral projection.
This is part one, and we will discuss the astral world, or the astral plane.
This place that you supposedly go when you’re out of body, or the place where you go when you dream at night, supposedly.
Let’s start with this way cool quote from Ava Wong.
she has done research into daoism and she presents a lot of daoist concepts um in her various books
uh this is this is from her book called being daoist pengi was one of the forces of nature
he could walk on the snow and leave no footprints even the sun could cast no shadow by him moving
like a spiral on a ram’s horn he rose with the wind and floated over grasslands lakes and mountains
when he descended to the ground the earth embraced him and when he ascended to the sky
the stars received him now she presents this as though peng yi is able to do this in the physical
world if you have experience with astral projection or lucid dreaming you quickly recognize that this
is a description of the projection of the astral body or an exploration of the astral world via
the dream body and one of the side effects of doing the magical work or a rigorous discipline
of meditation is that you can eventually become lucid in your dreams what does that mean becoming
lucid in your dreams means that you wake up while you’re dreaming at night and you wake up in the
midst of the dream so that you can do what you want to some degree okay some dreams are more
lucid than others okay as you might know those of you who practice meditation meditation is largely
about maintaining awareness ultimately it’s about not being hypnotized or just lulled into a trance
by your physical environment in your experiences and of course the more you meditate or the more
you do magical work, the more you begin to notice how most of the human race is essentially asleep
or essentially in a state of hypnosis or trance, lulled into a sort of suggestive state by the
physical senses, by their biology, and by their evolutionary trauma, all the stuff they inherit
when they become incarnate and one of the ways to deal with that is astral projection
notice i didn’t say one of the ways to escape that one of the ways to deal with that one of the most
important thing about astral projection is that it can become a type of dream yoga so you’re not
really escaping from the supposed physical world but you are using astral projection to confront
something very important about the physical world which we’ll I’m going to
talk about that in this video I think let’s see if that happens make no
mistake I practice lucid dreaming or astral projection because I love flying
that’s there’s no other reason really about there are other reasons to do it
so is there a difference between astral projection and lucid dreaming some of
you’ve been contacting me insisting that there’s a difference okay there is a difference okay but
i i tend to relegate lucid dreaming to a type of astral projection okay and so astral projection
for me is the larger category and then within astral projection we have um lucid dreaming and
then we have other types of projection maybe some of you define it differently uh it’s to me it’s
important not to dismiss lucid dreaming as not astral projection uh because apparently when you
view things remotely in the physical world um that is it that is accomplished by first stepping
into the dream world and then then beyond that stepping into um the space beyond your
individual psyche i’m starting to get into things that i’m not that experienced with so i
that i can’t really talk about with a lot of um authority uh most of my ability to talk about this
is in regard to lucid dreaming so essentially the first stage of astral projection when it comes to
things like remote viewing i have very limited experience with that all right um this is kind
of funny now because uh this is this this is an illustration of plato’s allegory of the cave and
if any of you have been in a philosophy class you are well aware of plato’s allegory of the cave
it’s so complicated okay but he basically comes up with this schema of um most of humanity is
like those little guys over there on the left they are chained to a rack and they’re being forced
to watch image shadows that are being projected onto a wall and that’s all they can really see
are those shadows okay uh and behind them we’ve got these figures going back and forth
creating those shadows with a light source okay and behind that we have something called the real
world okay so um you might crop this up to plato’s genius because he came up with uh an analogy
that was really difficult to come up with at the time and the analogy that works much better for
us now in the modern world is the theater all right the theater is a much easier analogy for
us to wrap our heads around um so the condition of the average psyche is somebody who’s sitting
in the theater completely captivated by what’s happening on the movie screen okay what does this
have to do with astral projection we’re about to get to that okay so um and you might be watching
a movie and you’re totally captivated by the action that’s happening on the screen as though
it is all real the uh you’re really worried about whether the hero is going to win his next battle
okay and you actually flinch when stuff happens on the screen like a massive explosion and things
like that right and so it’s all really happening but then something might come over you you might
as you flinch from an explosion on the screen your chair squeaks and suddenly you become aware that
you’re in a theater and then you can look to the left and to the right and you can see other people
around you they haven’t noticed that you have noticed them they are still captivated by the
drama that’s happening on the screen but you have suddenly noticed the theater and it’s quite
startling too because then you begin to notice that oh all that stuff that was so captivating
on the screen, that’s a projection. It’s not even necessarily real. It’s real as a phantom sort of
drama, but this world around me, the theater around me is actually much more real than what
I see on the screen in front of me. And you might actually get up from your chair, go to the front
of the auditorium and touch the screen. You’ll touch the movie screen and you’ll be like, oh my
god it’s this is this is reality you’re touching the the white the silver screen you know and you
see the image is still playing across it but then you begin to notice that the actual reality is the
theater all around you and the movie screen and the projector and all these people mesmerized by
the drama sitting in their chair riveted to their seats and you might go sit down in your chair
again and you’re watching the drama on the screen but now something’s different you cannot unsee
that screen anymore you keep seeing what’s happening it’s like everybody else is captivated
by the drama but you now you see the drama but you see the movie screen and now you’re aware of it
and the awareness of that movie screen is not going to go away anymore you cannot unsee it anymore
this is sort of an initiation experience okay obviously this is analogous to a much deeper
experience that I’m referring to so when you look at the world you begin to be not aware of the
drama that’s happening in the world or the stuff that’s going back and forth and explosions that
are happening and dramatic scenarios you begin to notice that there’s a backdrop or there’s some
kind of a projection screen. Okay, and now this projection screen that you notice is the
imagination. The only real foundation of reality is the mind or the imagination. Okay, and now we’re
going to start talking about this projection screen or the imagination or the mind. Now you
might want to imagine that when you’re in the movie theater. Well, let’s talk about the movie
theater for a second you could get up leave your chair and walk in the opposite direction and exit
the movie theater and then walk out into the parking lot and be blinded by how bright the sun
is out there and you’re like whoa there’s a whole world out here that’s much more real than the one
that i thought i was living in okay this can be somewhat disturbing okay because then you begin
to realize that the physical world that people live in is not as real as the larger world of
the imagination which is much bigger than that silver screen in the auditorium behind you all
right so the imagination is much bigger than the drama that’s happening on that little screen okay
the the world of the movie screen the auditorium the projector the lobby outside and outside the
lobby the vast world full of the heavens and the sun and moon and stars this is much bigger than
what you thought it was so let’s go back into the auditorium you go back into the auditorium and now
we what you should do is you should imagine that that silver screen where everything’s being
projected that it now curves and wraps around you and envelops you in a sphere so that the images
being projected upon that movie screen are now in a sphere all around you okay and this is what the
golden dawn referred to as the sphere of sensation so all of the drama of your supposedly physical
life is being projected on this sphere of sensation the reality of your consciousness
is the sphere of sensation not the drama that’s being projected on the screen all right so
Now, what happens with dreaming at night is that there’s a sort of secondary movie going on.
It is a projection that is free of the supposed physical world.
So when you dream at night, you enter your own private projection screen.
When you are supposedly awake during the day, you’re still inside that sphere of sensation.
but you can also see the this larger world all around sort of even as you project all kinds of
things on top of it okay so when you’re awake supposedly awake in your daytime world when
you’re running around paying your bills uh going to work feeding the pets um you can see the larger
world larger universe okay and then and even as you’re superimposing the sort of dream world on
top of it so you’re still inside your sphere of sensation when you go to sleep at night then you
enter you’re still inside your sphere of sensation but then the images projected upon it are
liberated from that larger world from that physical world and they start playing out
these various dramas that are really more part of your personal karma um yeah the karma that
you have basically inherited uh is now being projected all around you okay now that universal
karma that’s being projected on the screen while you’re dreaming at night it’s not just yours it’s
inherited from the entire human race and all of the life forms on the planet okay we i’ve talked
about this before where does that where does all that comma come from well it comes from evolutionary
trauma and so yeah the golden dawn acknowledged that we sort of live inside this sphere of
sensation okay and now the images projected in that sphere are not necessarily projected on a
sphere that’s just an analogy okay they are projected in three-dimensional space so you
might want to you might want to imagine that the sphere is filled with air and the images are
actually projected on the very air inside that sphere so no matter where you go it looks like
you’re going somewhere all right but in on some higher reality you aren’t going anywhere nothing’s
moving okay this is why if you look at the chariot card in the tarot this is why that that card is so
weird like the guy who’s in the chariot is somehow stuck inside a block of stone and some of the
versions of that chariot say it doesn’t actually move doesn’t actually go anywhere it’s absolutely
still it’s the world all around it that moves all around it okay so when you think you’re going
somewhere in your chariot it’s you’re not going anywhere it’s the world all around you that’s
moving oh okay very strange i know very strange um but on some level of reality you aren’t moving
at all okay it’s kind of like when you’re sitting in that theater and it looks like uh you’re
traveling along with the main characters as they ride in their car because the landscape is moving
all around going past it looks like you’re going past right but no you’re you’re just sitting in
the chair in the theater okay and you just for for a while you’ve been beguiled into believing
that you are moving through space when in fact excuse me on a deeper level of reality you are
not you’re absolutely still does this mean that you you are the only being in the universe like
all the people that you see around you are just figments of your imagination well uh if you are
a psychopath and you’re trapped inside your head you don’t have any heart consciousness let’s say
um it might seem that way and then everybody around you simply becomes you know a figment
of your imagination that you can manipulate without respecting who they are or any deep
reality that’s behind them or anything like that okay so um uh various philosophies come to the
rescue when it comes to solipsism um so you’re not the only being in the universe necessarily
there’s a loaded concept um uh in the east they have this idea of indra’s net
where the universe is like a giant net of jewels and each jewel reflects all of the others all
around it within it okay so uh and it reflects the whole universe within it this is the idea of
the macrocosm and the microcosm okay so you could see that we are all sort of uh each of us is like
a jewel or a philosopher’s stone uh and reflected within our sphere of sensation is the entire
universe okay and so we are uh and the interesting thing is that a lot of the projections in our own
little jewel world um in this net are projections of our own karma they’re not real okay except as
karma okay so karma has quite it’s quite real as karma but of course it’s a projected illusion
all right uh and so all the others the people that you see around you there’s a reality to them
even even though you are projecting your own version of them on top of them and this is why
you know when people get married they torment each other because the other person’s not living up to
their projected image of them okay so yeah the more you are caught up in your own karma your
own dream world the more difficult it is for you to experience relaxation happiness freedom because
you’re constantly being driven by the projections inside your sphere of sensation and eventually
what can happen is that you’re you become so purified and so awake that you’re barely
projecting any of your personal karma at all and you can really see clearly around you and at that
point um that your jewel that’s immersed or this little dew drop that surrounded you as you’re
immersed in indra’s net um you can venture outside of it go beyond that okay so when we lucid dream
at night we’re pretty much inside our own sphere of sensation it’s still a lot of fun okay um and
uh but still you’re you’re largely playing with your own projections your own karma your own
trauma is surfacing before your eyes okay the nice thing is um when you achieve lucid dreaming
you can pretty much take control and not be compelled to run away from the monster or
uh if you have the the dream that you’re falling uh you can suddenly stop falling maybe um sometimes
you can’t control you know like um there’s strange currents and things going on you can’t control
where you’re going but then you can stop the experience and you you can wake up if you want to
or you can stop falling and say hey i can fly no need to go through this falling nightmare anymore
okay one of the interesting things about uh doing the magical work or doing any kind of mystical
discipline is that over time you experience less fewer and fewer nightmares that’s because the
karma is being worked out kind of dissolving okay are you ever going to be completely free of them
no there’s just too much going on in the human race too much conditioning going on um uh but
the nice thing is you become so aware during their dreams that you cannot be besieged by
nightmares or taken over by them. I’m at a point where if something starts to get unpleasant in a
dream, I can wake up in the midst of the dream or I can simply wake up or I can stop it from
happening. I had a dream that I was in a car garage and there was a car up on a lift and I
was walking underneath it but then the car sort of started falling down on top of me like sinking
down on top of me and i was like oh no no no and i just held it up with a couple of fingers and
this is not going to happen right now so i didn’t have to wake up in the dream i was like and it was
actually a trigger for me to wake up and become lucid in the dream and simply get out from under
the car and then go exploring and usually i start flying right away um if it’s possible you know
sometimes it’s not easy to fly. So what is physicality? Okay. So it seems to be that there
is a larger mind or a larger imagination than our own. Okay. Uh, and this larger imagination
sort of has us stuck in this supposedly physical world. Um, so, um, but the physical world is also
a dream world. And as we are immersed in that physical reality, we are still inside our sphere
of sensation and we are compelled to project our karma upon that physical reality. It’s a very
interesting situation to be in because the physical world then triggers us in various ways
to wake up from our conditioning, from our karma. I’m not sure why we’re in this physical world.
it doesn’t quite make sense to me because in the dream world uh you can also do that you can
process karma but i guess i don’t know we need some kind of drama conditioned into us so that
we can then um experience we can experience what it’s like to lose our identity and get lost and
then to find it again it’s like the whole universe is sort of a big game of hide and seek so um it’s
almost like the divine explodes and turns into a bunch of sparks those sparks pretty much spread
out forming indra’s net okay and then we all get stuck in that indra’s net the spider web right
and in the process of all that then the divine can see itself and apprehend itself but through
all these different jewels everywhere okay and you are one of those jewels a philosopher’s stone
okay you can also see it like like you are a bubble let’s return to that like you are a bubble
on the surface of an ocean okay so uh that bubble is made of ocean water okay so it might seem
limited because bubbles are limited but the ocean is made of water and the bubble is made of water
so ultimately you are unlimited all right let’s see if i can go back yeah let’s talk about this
The interesting thing is that for most of us, dreams at night are sort of vague, blurry, not much detailed, hard to remember.
If you begin to experience astral projection beyond your sphere of sensation, apparently you enter a dream world that can be extremely detailed.
More detailed even than the physical world around you.
and there are colors that you can experience in this astral plane
that you have never experienced in the physical world,
that’s impossible to experience in the physical world.
There are sensations that you can experience there
that you cannot experience in the physical world.
So the clearer your consciousness gets,
the more likely you are able to step outside of your sphere of sensation.
and then you might even be able to do remote remote viewing okay i thought i was able to do
that i think i’ve achieved it a couple of times but usually i get lost and i’m back in my own
karmic dream world again i go back into some memory which is very vivid sometimes um it’s
amazing how much um how clear your memories are and some other part of i don’t know the universe
maybe you go back into that memory and some somehow it’s crystal clear like there’s not a
detail that’s been left out. And if you try to remember things that happened to you, like in
your childhood, it’s kind of blurry, vague, unclear, but it’s possible to go back to those
memories on the astral plane and they are absolutely clear. And you can basically see
all kinds of detail. Is the detail reliable? Can be, but it tends to get, it tends to,
it can be very clear, but it can morph and change shape. If you’re looking, if you’re in a dream
world and you look at your watch if you’re wearing a watch um in your dream uh look at the time you
might see a time and then you look up and then you look back again and then you’ll see something
else not even time anymore maybe you’ll see a little digital display of some kind of message
or something like that um nothing holds still nothing is very reliable in the dream world
like that and your astral body is very interesting in the dream world too um just like that taoist
character um it tends not to cast a shadow it’s kind of like a vampire uh it tends not to have
reflections in mirrors it’s able to fly sort of like some vampires right so um yeah we wonder
where the legends of vampires comes from and it’s rumored that you know people uh can survive after
death and sort of prey upon the living but they’re in the dream world they’re not physical vampires
with corpse-like bodies they’re they’re astral vampires and uh very interesting because um
vampires don’t cast reflections in mirrors they don’t have shadows um things like that some of
them can fly they can change shape which you can also do in your astral body of course so very
interesting um how your astral body is very much like a creature from a horror movie so uh dreams
are not inherently vague or blurry. They can become startlingly clear and even clearer than
your physical senses will allow for. There apparently are senses that exist beyond the
physical world. And if you get clear enough, you can visit other worlds, other levels of the astral
plane where there are different kinds of beings. There are worlds in the astral plane that have
virtually no suffering at all and the question is what is the physical world here where we are
is this some kind of a prison kind of it’s kind of a place where we’re being like the people in
Plato’s cave they were being they were chained to the rack and they were being forced to watch
the images that appear on the wall or in the modern example you’re basically in the theater
and you’re riveted to your seat completely mesmerized by the drama in front of you
that’s the nature of the prison but of course in the theater analogy you can easily notice what’s
going on on either side of you you can get up and then explore the the real world or another level
of reality so is this physical world sort of prison no but it certainly feels that way because
if you are completely captivated by the drama that’s happening on the screen then you’re then
you’re stuck you got the blinders on you can’t see anything else you’re trapped inside that drama
so then yeah it’s like you’re in a nightmare and you can’t wake up sort of thing okay uh so what
is the world like for somebody who’s really awake and or like an adept let’s say of the golden dawn
they they are no longer compelled to project this sort of karmic drama all over everything
that’s happening they see the same world you do but unfortunately you know you if you’re not an
adept you tend to see all kinds of things projected on top of that larger dream world
that physical world around you okay whereas adept doesn’t have to do that they can turn it off
and they can just see the world as it is do they still have karma to process of course
yeah there’s never you can’t be in a physical form you will never be free of karma it’s always
going to be happening in fact without karma your physical form would not exist okay physical form
remember is not really physical it’s a projection okay but it’s a projection within the larger mind
of the universe all right so if with the example of the bubble so if you were just a bubble on the
surface of a infinite ocean uh when you’re doing the uh magical work what is happening maybe
possibly is that you’re expanding that bubble or you’re stretching that bubble you are playing
around with the projections in it to explore the confines of that bubble and apparently eventually
if you become clear enough you can venture outside of it or beyond it okay but this whole notion of
outside and beyond this bubble that’s um not really accurate it’s not really possible to
describe what that means because inside and outside that’s a dualistic concept okay um but
it can seem as though yes you can escape that bubble and then explore other worlds you can
possibly do remote viewing and like, you know, um, float through the wall and see what’s happening
in your neighbor’s apartment or something like that. Uh, these things are apparently possible.
Um, I have tried to do that. I think I’ve achieved it a couple of times, not with a neighbor, but,
uh, remote viewing. Um, but I usually fall into some kind of karmic memory or dream world or
something like that. So it doesn’t seem reliable. It seems like eventually I could get clear enough
and awake enough so that I could explore the physical world in terms of remote viewing
or go to other worlds where there are other beings who exist. There might even be sort of
hell realms and hungry ghost realms and god realms where there’s heavenly realms where
there’s almost virtually no suffering at all and other realms where there’s a lot of suffering
going on uh none of these worlds are permanent um as far as i can tell nothing that is manifest
will be manifest that way forever so the whole idea of hell existing the way it does in christianity
like eternal torture uh eternal is not in the picture if anything about the astral world is
clear uh is that things keep changing um and even in this version of the astral world which is the
physical world if you look really look nothing stays the same everything’s constantly changing
okay so the physical world is not a good um it’s not a good model for stability so the standard
notion the standard notion of sanity that people have in the modern world um tends to regard um
The physical world as the platform on which we’re standing, and so a stable mind is supposedly one that is realistic or physical oriented, okay?
The physical world is not a good model for the absolute stability, okay?
Absolute stability is the view screen of the mind, okay?
So when you get up from your seat in the theater and you walk up to that silver screen at the
front of the auditorium and touch it, that is the absolute stability, not the drama happening
on the screen, okay?
So if you look around the room right now, all the things you see moving around, all
the things you see presenting themselves, these are merely projections and they appear
on that absolutely still, absolutely stable, absolutely sturdy view screen of the imagination
or the universal mind that is the absolute solidity the indestructible nature of reality
that’s all around you the philosopher’s stone okay and the images that appear in there are
mere projections and that includes everything in the physical world as well all of that is merely
projections okay and you in your physical body aspect are also one of those projections okay so
and the question will then of course arise well if you are not really the projection
what are you okay so yeah the things that you identify with your physical body well that’s
merely a character that’s being projected on the screen of consciousness as well so if that’s not
you who are you where are you okay so um and this is what we discover you know through the work
is it easy to say what that thing is what you really are no of course not
the language itself will end up defeating us as we do that all right this is a part one in
the astral projection series okay there are probably going to be two more videos and the
next video we will talk about reification and and de-reification practices the things that you can
do to see through your karmic projections so that you can become clearer and clearer and then
experience these amazing lucid dream states and maybe even astral projection beyond that point
where you can do remote viewing and things like that okay yeah the third video is probably going
to be the how-to this is how to do it okay but that’s easy to learn you can just google that
and you can come up with all kinds of cool ways of inducing lucid dreams but the third video in
third video I will give the various techniques for inducing lucid dreams. I might even talk about how
to achieve astral projection while in the waking state without having to go to sleep at night.
We’ll see. All right, until next time.
Source: Lyam Christopher