Descriptions:
Video Description
“”The secret to traveling in dreams, this lesson says, is practiced in broad daylight. In part two of the series, Lyam Christopher explains why most people cannot wake up inside a dream: they have been hypnotized into believing every boundary and every fear is perfectly real. The remedy is something he calls de-reification, a gentle learning to see the invisible boxes we draw around love and hate, self and world, near and far. These lines are useful, but they are not solid, and seeing through them is the beginning of waking up.”
“He grounds the idea in a lovely image. When you lie beneath the stars, they can sometimes feel not millions of miles away, but right up against you. That is because experience always happens here and now, inside your sphere of sensation. The story of vast distance is conventional reality; the immediate, unbroken feel of things is primordial reality. An enlightened person, he suggests, holds both at once, playing along with the story of separateness without ever being trapped by it. That is exactly the skill astral projection asks of us.”
“Then the practice becomes beautifully practical. Daily banishing urges old complexes to rise up and be seen, and writing in a magical diary helps them dissolve under attention. Reality checks throughout the day, like asking whether you cast a shadow or whether a watched clock stays steady, build the habit of wondering whether you dream. He shares the pore-breathing meditation, imagining the body breathing through every pore so the false wall between inside and outside softens. The whole path points toward one liberating truth: free from every label, you may eventually fly wherever your attention leads.”
Full Video Transcript
Here we are and I’ve got my rosemary tea. This week’s video is the second part in a series on astral projection.
And this time around we are talking about the de-reification practices.
There are daytime practices that you can do that eventually get you ready to experience the astral plane.
they are we’ll have to get into the mechanics of it but essentially um we have trouble waking up
in the midst of our dreams when we’re sleeping at night we have trouble waking up because
uh we have been hypnotized into believing that everything happening is real and then so we get
duped into playing along that’s kind of what hypnosis is okay now that kind of hypnosis goes
on all the time, okay? And as we talked about in the last video, every level of reality that you
find yourself on is part of some larger dream, okay? And so if you learn to de-hypnotize yourself
so that you can wake up in the midst of your dreams at night, you can also de-hypnotize
yourself so that you achieve wakefulness while you’re awake, if that makes any sense. But it is
something called lucid waking. We have to remember that the Buddha was supposedly enlightened,
completely enlightened, and he referred to himself as awake. So we’re going to talk a little bit
about what it means to be asleep, even in the midst of your daytime world of supposed wakefulness.
Okay, and then how to wake up from that all around, like permanently in all levels of your reality,
you will wake up from the dream no matter whether you’re asleep or whether you’re awake okay i’m
torturing the language here and talking about waking up while you’re asleep does that make any
sense oh let’s let’s start with a quote this comes from one of my favorite spiritual texts from
kashmir shivism always present to the reality that he perceives as the play of his own nature
the tantric adept is liberated at the very heart of life okay this is what i’ve just been talking
about um if you are truly present in the here and now you can then recognize everything that’s
happening as a sort of divine play as a production a drama that is playing itself out okay um this is
not to say that suffering that people go through is serious it’s quite serious but on on a deeper
level on a primordial level uh it’s not really what it seems to be okay and in some sense it’s
actually an enjoyable part of the drama of existence okay uh if that’s difficult to withstand
then uh you’re probably being triggered by that in other words if you think that if you think that
somebody enlightened is going to be laughing at you while you’re suffering um you know they might
actually do that but it doesn’t mean they don’t feel you know a compassion for you and can
empathize with what you’re going to through especially since they have may have very well
gone through that um themselves okay uh so they know what it’s like to be suffering but at the
same time they also know what it’s like to be free of that suffering and maybe we can talk about what
it really means to be free because if you take being free from suffering literally you’re going
to get it all wrong okay mainly because you need to practice dereification practices we’ll get to
that all right so if you lie on your back at night and look up at the stars uh if you look long
enough you might eventually develop the impression that they’re not really all that far away like
they’re right up against you okay so everything that you experience is right here right now
right up against you. And the experience of the vast distances and that experience of your
incredible smallness and insignificance in the face of it all is actually a fiction drilled into
you by your physical conditioning, by what people tell you, by what you’ve been taught, and by
You know, all of the evolutionary trauma that we have been through in previous generations,
you know, a million or so years of trauma have conditioned into us that we are these
physical entities that can be kicked around and that we’re really quite small and the
universe is really big, okay?
That narrative is not necessarily true, okay?
I know that sounds insane.
We’ll talk about that in a bit.
what this means is that if you’re lying on your back looking up at the sky you might get the
impression maybe that everything’s right up against you so like in other words your sleeping
bag is just all of the stars that surround you okay this is your sphere of sensation so anything
that you’re experiencing right now is in your immediate sphere of sensation that’s the golden
dawn concept of the sphere of sensation we talked about that in the last video okay uh so the let’s
say those stars are not necessarily you know millions of light years out in that direction
or that direction they are experienced just as they are being experienced right here right now
right up against you okay try to accept that okay and this idea that the universe is really large
and that these distances are really vast that’s actually a fiction of the mind okay now
is it really a great distance up into the sky of course it is but we have to think about that in
terms of our conventional reality okay because there’s conventional reality and then there’s
absolute reality okay conventional reality is the way things appear to us okay and even to to a
large extent the way they behave in regard to what appears to be us okay so there’s a relative truth
that we talk about all the time, because that is the relativity of me as a physical object
in relation to other physical objects all around me, okay, and you in regard to the physical
objects all around you. That kind of reality is what we call relative reality or conventional
reality. And then the absolute reality is something quite different from that. And this is something
that the adept sort of experiences and flashes of illumination and that’s it’s something that
someone completely enlightened like a buddha would experience almost all the time they would see
the absolute reality and the relative reality at the same time okay so that that sensation of the
stars being right up against you instead of way out there they would experience that almost all
the time okay but they would also understand why you’re saying that they’re so far away because
they understand that too they understand that um the illusion of it or that particular narrative
okay i prefer to call these things conventional reality and primordial reality so conventional
reality is the way that reality has been conditioned into us and that’s the stories
that we tell about reality around us and then there is a the primordial reality the way it
actually occurs for us immediately absolutely it’s like a lightning bolt right now there’s
instantaneously now there’s no delay there are no distances everything is up close and personal
there are no true spaces there are no true boundaries between things okay all of these
this stuff about distances and separation and boundaries is a fiction of the mind
and now this happens to us uh it’s probably the biggest fallacy in the entire universe at least
at least as far as humans are concerned you know with our type of nervous system uh the biggest
fallacy in the universe is the fallacy of reification where we are able to in our minds
create boundaries between things and around things okay and then we take those boundaries to be real
okay so you know if i have two concepts like love and hate and i put them in two little bubbles
one next to the other and then i call them opposites okay so i’ve now separated them with
these sort of artificial boundaries okay but that’s very useful to do that i’ve now created
a relative reality of love and hate are they truly separate no in absolute reality they are not
And in many cases, the irony of loving somebody and hating them at the same time becomes quite interesting.
Okay, so these boundaries that we perceive around us aren’t really there, not in absolute reality.
They might as well be there in relative reality. That’s fine.
Okay, we can make up the narrative of separation and then play along with it.
Okay, this is what an enlightened being does.
they’ll say, oh, yes, we will pretend that this is what is happening. That’s fine.
Yeah, reification is actually a logical fallacy that you’ll find in, you know, some advanced
textbooks on critical thinking. Pretty interesting. What they don’t seem to realize, though, is that
reification is a fallacy that runs very deep. Okay, you might think of it like the universe exists
on a concrete level and an abstract level. And those two planes of existence, the concrete and
abstract uh in our minds have gotten tangled up in all over each other we mix them all together
okay and we’ll i’ll give you an illustration of this shortly okay what happens is the higher
world of abstraction and the lower world of concreteness have become um enmeshed and
confused with each other a sort of massa confusa as the latin-speaking alchemists would refer to it
uh a massive confusion and in alchemy and in light and in enlightenment practices of all kinds
our task is to separate the abstract from the concrete or like the alchemists would say our
job is to separate the subtle from the gross okay this does not mean to separate the vapor
from the liquid or anything like that i’m sorry um the ultimate uh psychological alchemy of that
is to separate the um the abstract uh configurations from your apparent physical reality
from the concrete reality okay because the your imposition of all these abstract boxes and labels
and bubbles and things on top of everything uh is what’s ruining your experience of reality in most
cases causes suffering okay for example if you look at the united states from orbit you will not
see any boundaries between states okay you will see some rivers that go between what we call
various states but if you look closely at those rivers there’s no line anywhere there really
it’s a really cool song out there a river is a river not a line it’s uh robert plant and
some other artist trying to remember which all right uh just as um i have not been really
literally cut in half right now by this visual aid okay um this line these lines on the road
you look closely at them there are no lines anywhere there and yet we might be driving and
we take them to be literally real constraining us keeping us in line keeping us going straight
forward keeping us from swerving off the road or or you know keeping us from swerving into the
oncoming lane because on some level we are reifying them we are taking them to be true
and there really aren’t any lines there at all there are no barriers anywhere in the physical
world there never have been there never will be okay does this mean i can walk through walls
well remember that remember that the physical body uh is going to obey physical laws okay
What we’re really getting at is freedom from those boundaries.
Okay, what does it mean then to obtain freedom from all these mental boxes, mental barriers, mental boundaries, mental territories, mental lines that we draw in the sand?
To be free of these things is to not be constrained by them mentally or emotionally.
so if somebody draws a box around you and labels that box as evil or queer or messy or stupid
it’s like wow i don’t even have to accept that because you see that’s just a construct it’s an
abstract concept construct that’s being superimposed upon you and it’s really really nice to be
completely free of those constructs okay it doesn’t mean you can walk through walls but remember
though a wall itself is not what it appears to be okay and on a higher level of reality
yes you can walk through the wall this is a video about astral projection is it not
all right so in this video we’re not talking about the actual practice of astral projection
yet sorry uh what we’re talking about are the practices that you do to make it possible for you
to be an astral projector okay the interesting thing about the word astral projection is it’s
already a misnomer because if we take it literally or if we if we reify it we think we’re projecting
out of our body okay there’s actually something much more interesting happening than that okay
if if i’m lying on my back outside looking up at the stars and i experience those stars as being
right up against me this is a different type of reality we’re dealing with now okay so astral
projection could be seen as not really going very far at all but basically shifting into a different
wavelength oh gosh i was going to say layer of reality even the idea of way of even these ideas
of wavelengths and layers those are figurative constructs and we should not take them literally
we shouldn’t reify them okay they’re just useful for us to to talk about changes of perception
changes of our real state of reality you could say um a change of frequency okay but then of course
don’t take that literally either okay all right so what we what the task before us so that astral
projection becomes easier and easier is to be able to not take any boundaries literally okay
to and one of the one of the ways we do that is through banishing and i’ve already said that the
lesser banishing ritual the pentagram it’s not what it seems to be okay it takes all of the
it takes all of your reified beliefs and scenarios all of your complexes and it begins to push them
out into some kind of imaginal periphery okay so it’s going to intensify the boundary around
yourself it’s like a protection right it’s a protection protection ritual right so it makes
the shell around you it intensifies that sense of space around you and then causes the various
complexes or the various things that appear to be real to start to you know materialize outside
that magic circle and take on various forms okay um and so things begin to bother you more
from your daily lives what’s happening is that those things that you believe are real are now
arising out beyond the your imaginary periphery so that you can now notice them you can notice
your mind giving shape to them okay this is why we keep a magical journal like we we do the lesser
banishing ritual the pentagram every day and that’s going to have this effect upon the psyche
where these complexes that these things that we believe to be real like um oh like the scenario
of falling from a great height and being pulverized on the ground that’s something we believe to be
real right it isn’t okay does it mean i can fly in the physical world no it does not okay
being free of that means not being intimidated by it anymore as though it’s what’s actually
happening right so various fearful scenarios or various needy scenarios get pushed out into the
periphery okay and then that relationship that you supposedly have between you and it
is now being examined and it can as under observation it poofs away it dissipates okay
so this is yeah ultimately the banishing is getting rid of evil okay but it has to run its
course so it’s going to make things usually worse before they get better okay this is why like i’ve
said before this is why people who do the banishing rituals on a daily basis daily basis they tend to
be they it tends to make them into kind of like assholes because they get triggered more easily
by various things that are now triggering their complexes to arise and they’re going to more
easily project some kind of horrible category on top of you if you resemble it so that they can
now deal with this category that they believe is real and eventually that category will poof away
and then they can see oh it’s just you i thought you were some kind of horrible selfish monster
or something like that but i guess no now i’m really looking at you and this idea i had of you
was being pushed out there superimposed on top of you now i had to process it i had to basically
look at this thing that i was projecting upon you and it under observation and under scrutiny
as i write about it in my journal it it dissolves it poofs away hopefully never to return but many
of these things do reconstitute all right uh you’ll notice then the the second thing here evoking
okay when you do the banishing daily it sort of prods things pushes them out on the periphery
periphery so that they’ll take on some kind of form and appear okay just like i’ve described
that is evocation evocation means to conjure a spirit to visual appearance okay now evocation
though is a way of deliberately going after a particular complex that you’ve been having a lot
of very very evasive you know it’s been eluding your perception so you can deliberately label
some kind of psychological complex okay and then give it a form and a name so that you can visualize
it outside your magic circle okay now this thing um you give it a form not so much um it’ll also
take on a form you kind of allow it to take on its own form okay and you participate in the
creation of that form okay this is why evocation is really something that is more relegated for
somebody who’s an adept who’s still going after a lot of these more elusive complexes and they
have developed the ability to allow that complex to take on its own form in front of them rather
than you know imposing some kind of ugly form on top of it um that’s just going to you know
chase it away okay uh but but remember the banishing rituals every day are they basically
are provoking evocation to happen already and when you get really good at this stuff then you
can deliberately evoke something specific that you need to deal with okay now does this mean
that the very spirits that you conjure are only in your head now the the kind of spirits and demons
and things you have to deal with um these are shared by all of humanity not only all of humanity
but every creature in the biosphere perhaps beyond okay uh karma runs very deep okay so these various
spirits that afflict you like a fear of heights fear of drowning these are shared by almost
everybody okay some people have them really bad some people have them only a little bit
some people don’t have them at all there apparently are people walking amongst us
you might be one of them who who who have no fear of heights whatsoever and you can see you can
watch their you their youtube videos as they jump from ledge to ledge on a skyscraper and you
yourself are freaking out because you can feel that fear moving through you because you have this
sort of um spirit that is like flaring to life this horrible scenario is now intimidating you
okay and um anyway let’s go on to uh invocation to invoke something supposedly is to bring it
into yourself to evoke something is to conjure it outside your magic circle to invoke something is
to bring it into your magic circle okay you have to remember that the things that you conjure
outside your magic circle they are demons of the collective unconscious let’s say um but there’s
another demon that’s much more insidious than any of the demons you can conjure out there okay
and that is the demon of the ego which is inside your magic circle all right uh in i think in
european spirituality um the demons that you would conjure outside your magic circle
would be called imps and an imp is an old agricultural word word for a plant that
reproduces by a runner okay so in other words um like a strawberry plant mostly reproduces not
through the seed but through this little runner that pops out and makes another plant and then
then runners go out from that and make two more plants okay um and so this is how the demons tend
to arise is that the they tend to arise from a central ego and then they erupt outside your
magic circle here i am it’s like oh make peace with me and now i’m going to dissolve and disappear
ah but of course the primary demon is still inside the magic circle if that momentarily
terrifies you good because that can be that demon of ego can be quite shocking and frightening to
deal with okay um not because you are so evil for having an ego but because to dissolve that demon
means to basically die to have a death experience while you’re still alive okay so the practice of
evocation is a matter of is mainly a practice for dissolving the demon inside the magic circle that
is your ego the reason that works is because you if you invoke something you take on a personality
and the main task of that is there are two things to learn in in vocation you can pick up the virtue
of some kind of powerful aspect of deity of god let’s say uh you can invoke like a um an archangel
or something like that and then basically the virtue of that archangel will now sort of rub
off on you and it will leave its mark on your character okay um but there’s another thing to
learn and that is to let go of that persona once it has sort of filled you up okay the number one
thing to learn from invocation is not the pulling it into your body but the letting go of that
entity of dissipating it okay and this basically that’s a rehearsal for releasing attachment it’s
a rehearsal for the ultimate dissolution of the biggest demon in the room and that is the ego
okay so the ability to take on a persona and have it fill you up become it identify with it
is not nearly as important as the ability to let it go because ultimately that’s what you’re going
have to do in these enlightenment practices okay there really isn’t any other worthwhile reason
for doing magic other than seeking enlightenment like this okay but as we will explore in future
videos uh there are many benefits that do resemble um magic the way people think it is like you get
what you want sort of thing. Right. Uh, uh, so there’s a great deal of, um, joy in doing these
practices that’s possible mainly from the freedom that results. Okay. So the complete, the freedom
that results from all categories of existence. Okay. So all categories that can be imposed upon
you do not have any hold upon you. Okay. That might not sound like a big deal, but it’s everything.
okay to be free of all categories of existence okay if you truly are free of all categories
of existence you are then free to create categories of existence at will without taking
them very seriously but you can do it very well and what this means for one thing is the ability
to project astrally at will okay i can’t do that um but but i can see already that’s eventually
what’s where we’re headed okay so you can kind of travel the various planes of existence
at will okay i say travel there’s really no distances to traverse okay once i can see through
the concept of separation and distances i can then create scenarios of separation and distance
at will and then pretend to travel over those distances and i can do that very clearly very
convincingly and very powerfully okay eventually that’s that’s the ability
that we are developing here all right reality checks this is something that
anybody who has pursued astral projection probably knows about these
are very simple reality checks are things that you conduct throughout your
day one way to do reality checks is to set your to have a digital watch and set
up an hourly chime and have every time the chime goes off you ask yourself am I
dreaming or you look for dream signs it’s like when you check to see whether you’re dreaming
okay uh do i have a shadow do i cast reflection in a mirror you look at your watch and look at
it again if it says the same thing you’re probably not dreaming okay at least not the kind of dreaming
that you do at night okay um another way to do reality checks is to uh look have a certain trigger
that triggers a reality check. I particularly like this one. Every time you walk through a door
or every time you walk around a corner, they’re both kind of the same thing. Every time you walk
through a door or every time you walk around a corner, you do a reality check. You look for a
dream sign. You check to see whether you’re dreaming. One of the easiest ways to check
for to see whether you’re dreaming for me is to try try to levitate try to fly or even hop up into
the air uh and um sometimes it’s not that easy to fly because who knows why um but you you might be
able to jump like you know 20 feet up in the air and then come back down again or i’m sure you guys
have experienced this at least in non-lucid dreams sometimes uh that’s one way to do it okay but you
can do more subtle there are more subtle ways of checking on reality like do i cast a shadow do i
have a reflection look at your watch okay i’ll look at the clock on the wall look away and then
look back is at the same time okay because in a dream world if you look back at a digital display
or something like that it won’t be the same thing twice usually meditation all right so meditation
is a way of many people think they know what meditation is okay but if you are basically
hypnotized into believing that there are boundaries and barriers and territories all around you you
are you’ve been hypnotized into believing that these things are real that means you’ve been
hypnotized into reifying them because they’re basically just abstractions that you’re now
superimposing upon physical world okay um if you’ve been hypnotized into that meditation
what it really is is direct directly confronting your mind’s ability to do that so you might be
focusing on something in the external environment but no you’re not really focusing on that thing
you’re actually focusing on your mind and its ability to separate that thing from you so you’re
actually evaluating whether it’s really a separate object okay and this can be very it’s gonna be
kind of fun actually because you’re really probing to see where is the boundary between me and it
okay or how is it separate from the ecosystem all around it is it really separate from that like
where where is the line that i am imposing between it and its environment okay or between it and
myself where is that division and as you as you keep looking for that you won’t find it okay um
That being said, that’s a little difficult to wrap your head around, okay?
But there are various techniques you can use.
Probably the best way to try to dissolve these imaginary barriers that we have around ourselves and around objects
is to do something called the poor breathing exercise, okay?
Not P-O-O-R, but P-O-R-E, poor breathing exercise, okay?
And that is where you…
So for your meditation, let’s say you meditate every day, okay?
So you’re going to sit on the cushion and then you basically imagine that your body is like covered by pores because, well, it is, right?
And then as you breathe in, those pores open up and suck air in everywhere.
It’s like your whole body is a sponge, okay?
And that air waves deep inside your body, okay, into some kind of deep underworld or who knows what’s all beyond your physical boundaries, right?
And then on the out-breath, then that air blows out through all those holes.
And this just tends to de-reify that sort of boundary between yourself and your environment.
It will also tend to de-reify all the boundaries that you create around everything.
Remember, those boundaries do not literally exist.
to what’s actually there what’s actually there is much more interesting than the simplified version
of maps and territories that you are superimposing upon everything okay and of course when you do the
pore breathing exercise you could also see everything around you as breathing in through
pores and then somehow somehow that air goes into some deeper level of reality that’s just beyond
beyond everything right and then of course on the exhale everything comes back out through those
pours into the world again okay that’s a very powerful um type of meditation um don’t take it
literally don’t reify it okay it’s just a a method and eventually you’ll you’ll go beyond it and
you’ll do other things and your meditation practice might become purer and purer or you’ll switch to
other things and ultimately what you what you learn is not to take any of these practices literally
that you just use them okay um and then you know eventually as when you become an adept you can
use them to achieve various effects in your life okay you can sort of tweak the manifestation
process that’s happening around you okay can you have whatever you whatever you want yes and no
okay but we’re going to get to that in a later video as far as what’s the difference between
the personal will and your true will. Okay, that should be an interesting video.
All right, and the dream sign diary. And of course, yeah, this is one of the most effective
ways that many people have achieved lucid dreaming. Upon waking, they immediately write
down their dreams, okay? And I call it the dream sign diary because you don’t have to write out
the full narrative of your dream. You can simply go through the dream, recall as much as you can,
and look for all the dream signs okay in other words what are the things that were happening
during the dream that should have clued you into the fact that you were dreaming okay somebody was
levitating around the room oh okay um or somebody you were talking to became somebody else and it
seemed like perfectly normal for them to just become a new a different character like and that’s
fine that’s you should have noticed that that should have been a dream sign okay uh what the
reason that’s really useful is because eventually um you will begin to uh notice those happening
while you’re dreaming it’s like oh somebody just changed into somebody else i’ve already noted that
as a dream sign haven’t i i must be dreaming and then suddenly you can go exploring in the astral
world okay so all the you know these dream sign diaries these reality checks these are all
basically conditioning you so that you can check to see whether you’re dreaming even while you’re
asleep and then eventually once you realize you’re dreaming then you can to some extent take control
go flying go exploring okay and in the next video we’ll talk about how to do that there are some
nighttime induction techniques and also how to maintain a lucid dream once you’re in it because
there is a strong tendency once you begin to once you wake up in the midst of the dream that you
might actually wake up completely and you’re in your physical body again right so to speak okay
so there’s a way to actually maintain a lucid dream for quite a long time you can you can
possibly dream even have maintained a lucid dream for a couple of hours okay all right um so i’m
hoping this was of use next week we will talk about how to actually induce lucid dreams you
can already tell that the bulk of the work is the deorification practices because the main thing is
that you start to recognize um the dreamlike nature of everything around you in other words
you begin to recognize that these boundaries and boxes and categories are not real wake up okay
And once you de-reify those boundaries and boxes and territories,
then it frees you up to go exploring amidst those supposed boundaries and boxes
and create whatever boundaries and boxes you want to.
That’s, yeah, all part of the waking up process.
All right.
Well, until next time.
Source: Lyam Christopher