Recursive by Nature

I run three times a week, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I lift weights in my garage gym. On average, I log around 25 to 30 miles a week with this schedule. Every other Friday is an off day for me, which means I get a three-day weekend at least twice a month. On those specific Friday mornings I engage in a “mission run.” All that means is I have more time to stretch my mileage and/or increase intensity. Yesterday was “Mission 15,” a 15-mile run at my best long-distance pace (9 minutes per mile). Usually, a long run does wonders for the weekend’s extended meditation sessions, but if I push it a little too far, I end up recovering the entire weekend.

Today I woke up and my body basically said, “we gonna nap bro,” and, well… I’ve been dealing with focus and attention deficit because of that. Just something I have to keep in mind, because if I don’t push myself physically, I suffer emotionally. That spirals into greater issues with my state of mind and in general throws me off, so I end up suffering mentally a whole lot more. I need physical discipline or I turn into a soft and weak complainer. This is how my physical state needs to be maintained to perform consciousness exploration. Not everyone is like this, and that’s fine.

Dick Sutphen – Astral Projection, Second Session

As I lay there and go through my prep, followed by self-hypnosis to enter F10 and then F12, I still surprise myself with how this works without any audio tech. I’m amazed by it, only a little though. This human “central receiver” is a pretty neat instrument.

I was a bit tired and had a somewhat difficult time keeping my focus. At times I’d slip in and out of visions. Some of the “hallucinations” were purely spontaneous, while others definitely materialized from wandering thoughts. One spontaneous image was Ralph Wiggum sitting on a red bus seat, feet dangling in the air, and saying the iconic line: “(chuckles) I’m in danger.” I have no idea what that was about, but it did appear when I was deep into working on astral projecting. I know there’s no real danger out there, so that’s not it. The more I ponder that scene, the more I can’t help but wonder if it’s just my subconscious sounding the alarm that we’re about to do something I’m never normally conscious for, on purpose.

Unlike my previous sessions, but a lot like AP sessions I’ve read about from other sources, this time when I would get right in the zone and positioned at the edge of moving into a conscious OBE, my body would twitch and knock me out of the ideal state. Left leg, right leg, left foot, right elbow, etc. Usually it’s the feet or legs. These aren’t new to me, but they are new in the context of what I’m trying to do. Or maybe I’m just more aware of when they happen now. These are called “body checks,” where your physical body checks in to make sure you’re asleep. I’d like to turn this feature off.

With every attempt while in the ideal state, I felt completely different from any other time I’ve done these sessions. I had completely lost the sense of my physical body. Most of the time I can get close, but not this deep. My internal orientation, if there is such a thing, was also off. It makes sense. I’m conscious, yet unaware of my physical body. Disorientation is totally normal and expected. Every time I lost the ideal state, I would snap back to my physical body. It feels like a quick suction motion. I can feel myself rising away from my body, or being right over it, or in a couple of instances, not being anywhere near it. And every time I was sucked back in, I would wonder what’s going on with my vision. It’s either blurry, blurry and grayscale, or just black. I’ve tried “clarity now!” and other such commands to no avail.

So here I am, popping in and out of the astral with my eyes closed like a doofus.

An Epiphany on Mechanics of Consciousness

I’ve done a few of Dick Sutphen’s sessions by now, and as mentioned before, the states achieved with pure hypnosis are the same as the focus levels you reach with binaural beats. In the former, you use words, repetition, and concepts (imagery) to achieve a trance state. In the latter, you use audio technology along with those same words and imagery to reach the same states. The difference between the methods is obvious, but the one thing they both share and which requires zero technology is the intriguing part: words, concepts, imagery.

That’s all that’s really needed to activate human trance, or focus 10 or 12, or whatever other labels exist for the same exact darn thing. Language.

I’ve been practicing with the Gateway Tapes for a long time and have always found tremendous value in the “recharge/release” track for modifying problematic behaviors. First it’s surface-level fears. Then the real work starts on the insidious ones that come from deep within. As far as hypnosis goes, you’ve seen or heard of commercials for those “Stop Smoking Today!” seminars and the like. Having gone through the “vanilla” hypnosis process several times, I can confidently tell you that the process to quit bad habits using hypnosis is the exact same process you follow in Gateway Tapes. The only difference is the absence of binaural beats, but it all works the same.

In both practices, your goal is to shut down and “put to sleep” the analytical mind. It’s the one that stops you from jumping off a roof because it might be fun, or from grabbing a hissing snake. It serves an important role in keeping us alive and performing complex tasks, but when it comes to modifying behavior, it acts like a firewall that won’t let any meaningful change pass through easily. Both practices work by inducing deep relaxation, putting the physical body to sleep while keeping the conscious mind awake. The part that remains conscious and interactive is the intuitive side — the subconscious. That’s the part of you that’s game for anything and everything you suggest. Naturally, you can see why this kind of work requires caution and care.

An aside: Yes, this kind of technique has absolutely been used for not-so-nice results such as manipulation, false memories, and more. In fact, there’s plenty of older research into ways, including technological ones, to reach the subconscious and modify it while the subject is fully conscious and lucid, without placing them in a full trance. More on that another time.

Both methods of hypnosis and binaural beats with hypnosis interact with the subconscious to rewrite a bad script, which influences the ego, which influences the world it interacts in, which mirrors back on itself to the ego. Ergo, our existence is (say it with me folks): a recursive loop.

Closing Thoughts

I’ve come to realize that this recursive loop concept has been presenting itself to me from different perspectives for quite a while now. At this point, I have enough content to begin seriously writing a paper on it. I am not the first to draw these conclusions, and I won’t be the last, but what I offer is perhaps a different way of interacting with the idea, and illustrations on what it is. I hope that these thought experiments and future essays are of at least modest value to even a single person. Any help my words provide is as good as payment, because when one person improves their state of consciousness, we all rise.