Back to Basics - Guidance for Beginners

In the first episode of the second season of the Astral Dimensions Podcast, 24-year veteran out-of-body explorer Vincent Field offers valuable advice and direction for new or aspiring astral projectors. By following this plan of action during the early stages of your astral projection practice, you will build the foundational skills required to springboard your experiences into higher dimensions that may be unimaginable to the novice explorer. Along the way you'll hear Vince's own personal experiences in his early days of projecting which serve to illustrate the concepts taught.

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Transcript

Back to the Basics – Guidance for beginners

Hey everyone. I’m your host, Vince, and you’re listening to the astral dimensions podcast. I’d like to welcome everyone to the second season of the show, and I’d also like to thank all of my listeners for the support! Both my book and my podcast have more than exceeded my expectations and it’s just so incredible to see how much the community of spiritual seekers and explorers has grown since I first started my own AP journey 24 years ago.  So in my previous episodes I’ve gone into detail about a lot of pretty extraordinary out of body experiences involving nonhuman entities, the afterlife, the higher self, and a whole bunch of other topics that I’ve explored during my project ions. 

But a lot of these experiences were the result of years of practice and development, and I realize that a large portion of my audience are beginners. Maybe some of you have just discovered the concept of astral projection and are curious about it. Maybe some of you really want to experience it and have tried to achieve it, but haven’t managed to have that first projection yet. Maybe some of you have only had a couple of OBEs but want to improve your abilities and consistency. And I know a bunch of my listeners are seasoned projectors who are like me and just like to hear about other people’s experiences to compare notes and maybe get some new ideas for things to explore during your own projections. 

And I know it’s incredible to hear first-hand experiences revealing the potential of this practice, and it’s so awesome and fasicinating and inspiring to hear the accounts of explorers who are pushing the boundaries of what is possible and delving into uncharted territories. But the truth is that a lot of out of body experiences aren’t all that noteworthy, especially in the beginning. But it’s still important to hear these accounts of more ordinary projections, especially for beginners, because just like everything else, you gotta take things one step at a time. You’re not gonna start out projecting into higher dimensions and communicating with divine beings and disovering deep and profound truths about the nature of the self and reality. You’re probably gonna go through the same process as just about everyone else. 

And it typically starts out with projecting to nonphysical dimensions just beyond the physical dimension, and from there you need to learn how to navigate and essentially how to function in nonphysical reality before you’re able to progress into higher dimensions, because it’s quite different from how we operate in the physical world, and it takes a bit of getting used to and figuring out the mechanics of the physics that governs nonphysical reality. But I guess the term “physics” isn’t the right word.. it’s more like, “nonphysics.” In other words, I’m talking about the laws that govern nonphysical reality, and the forces that determine the behavior of the contents of these higher dimensions. 

So for the average person, you’re going to leave your body and be in a dimension that looks pretty similar to the physical world, so it’ll probably appear like you’re still in your room. There may be some small differences, or there could even be some major changes depending on what dimension you find yourself in and how strong your lucidity is. Maybe some furniture is rearranged, or missing, or there are some posters on your wall that aren’t there in the physical world. In more extreme cases, you may find yourself in a totally different room or location. For me, in the beginning, I’d usually project into a nonphysical version of my own bedroom, and things would appear more or less the same as in physical reality. However, there were times that I would project directly into an astral version of my room at my grandparent’s house rather than my own parent’s house where I was physically located at the time. 

So that’s typically the first thing to keep an eye on. Where are you when you project? What does the environment look like? And even more importantly, how strong and clear are your sense perceptions, and how free is your movement? Is everything blurry? Do you feel slow and sluggish, or like some invisible force is pulling you back into your body? If this is the case, you’re gonna need to perform some lucidity boosting techniques that I explain in my book and in some previous podcast episodes and youtube videos. 

The “clarity now” technique is always a good one to start out with. This is when you place a strong intention for your perceptions and lucidity to increase and scream out this intention with a vocalized phrase representing the intention. The exact wording isn’t so important, so you could scream out “Lucidity now!” or anything else that signifies your intention. But there are a bunch of different ways to achieve heightened awareness, so it’s good to experiment and try them all out to see which technique or which combination of techniques work for you in that particular moment and in general. Other effective techniques involve staring at your hands, meticulously touching an object, or quickly spinning around in place, among others, always while holding the intention of boosting your lucidity. You might find that a certain technique has a consistently stronger effect than the others, and yet once in a while it may not work so well and you’ll have to pull out some of the other tools in your toolbelt. 

But Your first goal should be to heighten your level of consciousness as much as possible. Otherwise you’re wasting a great opportunity to have a truly meaningful experience. And of course, just achieving the out of body state in and of itself is tremendously meaningful. But there’s so much more potential behind these experiences than just flying around your astral house or neighborhood. So first and foremost, heighten that lucidity. Even if it seems like your senses are already sharp and your movement is unimpeded, still try to boost your lucidity immediately upon projecting. You never know just how far you can go. 

Now, I always recommend having a goal for your OBEs, so you always wanna set an intention to achieve something before the projection. However.. in the beginning of your practice, your options are usually a bit more limited due a lack of experience and development, and the overall goal is more about achieving the out of body state to begin with. I mean, you can plan your astral journeys ahead of time, but if you’re not actually able to leave your body and consciously enter the astral dimension, then what’s even the point? So again, we take things one step at a time. Focus on learning to consistently project from the body first and foremost, and then start to get comfortable in that state, because like I said, it’s different from our usual mode of operation in the physical world. So if you’re still struggling to achieve an OBE, then instead of planning what you’re going to do once you’re out of body, instead plan your projection attempt itself. Visualize what you’re going to do to get out of body, step by step.. have a concrete plan, stick to it, and be confident that you’re going to succeed. In fact, have an attitude like you’ve already succeeded. 

There are many factors that play a role in projecting from the body, such as the particular technique you use, the time of day you make your attempt, your state of body and mind during the attempt, your belief system and the attitude you bring to the attempt, just to name a few. so if one particular method isn’t working after many attempts, decide what could be one of the hindering elements of your approach. It might not always be the technique itself. You may be making your attempts at a less – than – ideal time of day or in an inadequate state of body or mind, or maybe you have some hindering beliefs or fears that are holding you back. It’s up to you to analyze all of these elements and through trial and error, make the appropriate changes.

So anyway, back to what we’re going to do once we’re out of body. We need to strengthen our awareness, and that means practice maintaining a solid state of lucidity. You need to get comfortable moving around in the out of body state. In nonphysical reality, movement is controlled by your mind and intention rather than physical muscles. You need to get comfortable floating and flying rather than walking and running, you need to get used to moving through walls and closed doors and windows, since we can pass through all of that in the out of body state, and you need to get used to communicating with others, since there’s no need for speech, and communication is more of a mental or telepathic exchange of thoughts and concepts. So its essentially going to be a totally new experience in every aspect, and its something that typically takes practice to get the hang of. 

So, what do you do once you’re out of body and have a strong level of lucidity and awareness? What should you do? Well, I’ll tell you what I did in the beginning. I flew right out my window. And it was a closed window. I flew out into the night sky. I gazed at the stars with a feeling of pure joy and freedom and excitement and awe and wonder. I flew above the rooftops all around my city. And that was pretty much it. I mean, in the early days, I didn’t have the notion of what was actually possible to experience, so I just did what seemed like a cool thing to do. I Just wandered around the dimension and aimlessly explored. And that’s not necessarily the wrong approach. It’s like learning to skateboard. And I like this analogy because I’ve been skateboarding my whole life. First you need to learn how to just stand up on the board and cruise without falling. Once you get comfortable on the board, you can then start to learn some basic tricks, and as you master those you then progress to more advanced tricks. So at first, we’re just cruising. Get comfortable moving around and flying and interacting with the environment, experiment with different levels of awareness and note the effects of a strong level of lucidity vs a weak one, observe the nature of your astral body, and just be joyful of the freedom that’s experienced in that state.

But how exactly can you do any of that? Let’s start with movement. How do you actually go from place to place while out of body? Well, you simply think it. Say you project from your body and you’re hovering over your bed. You wanna go outside and fly up into outer space. All it takes is placing that intention and in a sense, commanding the action with your mind. Consider moving in the physical world. You have the intention of going from point a to point b. You set the intention and you move your limbs to walk towards your destination, and you do it with purpose. As you walk, you’re thinking about arriving at point b, perhaps not even at the forefront of the mind, but somewhere in there that intention is present and driving your actions. Well, it’s essentially the same, except the part where you have to physically move your limbs. It’s actually quite effortless so long as you don’t overthink it and possibly create some kind of mental block which can impede your movement. 

I’ve actually experienced mental blocks quite a few times when attempting to fly through walls or ceilings. Usually the intention alone is enough to propel you through a seemingly solid object while out of body. I’ve flown through entire planets with relative ease. However, every now and then I’d find myself being pushed away from a wall or ceiling when attempting to pass through it, almost like how two magnets of the same charge repel each other. And every time this happened, I noticed a little nagging voice in the back of my head casting doubt over my ability to pass through. It was like I knew I could do it, but I also knew that if any doubt entered my mind, it would hold me back, and so once in a while that doubt would surface up… it was almost like reverse psychology… like if someone tells you not to think of a pink elephant, it’s extremely hard not to think of a pink elephant. 

So I learned a technique to overcome this issue. I would approach the wall or ceiling at a relatively fast speed with the intention of flying through it, and when I was about a few feet away, I would shut off my visual senses – basically akin to closing your nonphysical eyes – which is simply done through intention and bringing your consciousness within yourself to a certain extent – something which is a little more challenging to explain but you’re essentially pulling your focus from your external surroundings into your own self. But you only wanna do this to the extent that you can no longer see but are still immersed in your current nonphysical environment, because if you take this all the way, you’ll completely phase out of that dimension and enter the void – more on that later – and so I would cut off my visual senses right before passing through the object with a strong intention of passing through it and with an attitude of confidence, as if I’d already passed through it and was already on the other side. And this would do the trick. And if you noticed, this is the same approach that you should take when actually attempting to leave your body. You should have the confidence that it’s happening and there’s nothing that can stop it, and the mindset that you’ve actually already succeeded. Feel what it’s like to have achieved it, even if you haven’t yet, just imagine what it would be like and just let it happen. 

So how about experimenting with different levels of lucidity. How can we go about doing that? Well, first you need to be aware of the characteristics of the spectrum of awareness. On the lower end, talking about a weak state of consciousness, your vision will usually be a bit blurry and unfocused, unclear, or even absent, so you may have no visual perceptions at all in the most extreme case. You may just be on the borderline of lucidity and unconsciousness. It can be very difficult to move, your astral body may feel extremely heavy, and you may have a sensation that youre being pulled back into your body. Your astral body may even appear disfigured. I remember on occasions I’d be in a very low state of awareness and I’d look at my astral hands and my fingers would be all deformed and contorted. 

There are several ways to approach the issue of raising your level of consciousness and lucidity. You can address it then and there, performing one or more of the techniques I mentioned earlier. Or something I’ve done many times with a good degree of success is allowed my self to reenter my body, almost always finding myself back in the mind awake/ body asleep state, and then perform a quick and intense energy work session to raise the energetic state of my astral body, and then project again. I’d almost always find myself out of body with a much higher level of consciousness.

Now on the higher end of the spectrum, when you’re experiencing a high state of awareness, your vision is sharp and crystal clear. There may even be a slight glowing radiance that emanates from everything in the environment, as if everything is sparkling with energy. Your movements are fast and easy, you feel completely weightless and untethered to anything whatsoever. Your intentions manifest with ease, so simply stating an intention leads to the fulfillment of that particular experience. 

So in the beginning of your practice, it’s good to experiment with these different states of lucidity. See what it’s like to operate in various degrees of lucidity and learn how to shift between them. But not only that - push the boundaries and try to enter higher and higher states. Even if you think you’re lucidity is as high as it can get, trust me – it can always get higher. You’ll eventually begin to phase into higher level dimensions simply though the expansion of your consciousness. 

So talking about things we can do in the early stages of our astral projection practice – another interesting experience is interacting with people. I remember floating out of my body one afternoon and flying into the living room. My mom was on the couch watching tv and I began talking to her. After the experience I asked her if anything unusual had happened while I was – quote unquote – taking a nap – and she said no. So at first I began to doubt my experience. Was it just a dream? Why didn’t she remember the interaction? 

Well, with time and many more experiences of this nature, I discovered what was happening. And this is where a bit of dimensional theory comes in handy. Because our consciousness is multidimensional in nature. It isn’t just inhabiting the physical body, solely occupied with the physical dimension. There are higher levels of our own consciousness which are engaged in nonphysical reality simultaneously to our physical activities. So when you’re out of body, you can actually communicate with a higher aspect of a person’s consciousness even when they’re fully awake in the physical world, but they won’t have any knowledge of the interaction from their base level conscious awareness. But these interactions can be a great way of gaining information and accessing deeper truths about the self and reality, it’s almost like you can use the person as a channel to tap into higher level knowledge. So this is another great practice for new and even seasoned projectors. Communicate with everyone you encounter, try to gain valuable information, ask important questions, and scrutinize the responses. There’s a lot more to say about this, so it might be a good idea to dedicate an entire episode to this phenomenon and some of the more interesting things that I’ve experienced doing this.

Now the point of this episode was to bring things down a notch and come a bit closer to the reality that many aspiring astral projectors are currently at. There’s no need to rush things. The best approach is to take it one step at a time. Work on getting out of body with a decent consistency. When you’re fully projected, focus on getting a good feel for the experience. Don’t try to run before you can walk, and don’t try to walk before you can crawl. Getting to far ahead of yourself will just hold you back. Even the most basic of basic OBEs is super exciting, so don’t feel like you need to be immediately doing advanced stuff out there. I personally went through a lot of trial and error before I was able to figure things out and start to progress to higher levels. We didn’t have all the resources back then that are available now, so I definitely consider you guys lucky. 

So that’s gonna be a wrap for the first episode of our second season of the Astral Dimensions Podcast. Again, I really appreciate the support and I’m so glad that so many people are finding this helpful and inspiring. If anyone has any requests for topics for future podcast episodes, feel free to contact me – my links are in the description. I’ll talk to you next time.