It took me over 10 years to make any real progress towards my goal of experiencing astral projection. I was thinking about this last night and I felt it might be helpful for others to know the points during those 10 years that I feel were the prime motivators for my unsuccessful attempts.
I feel that the #1 reason for my unsuccessful attempts over such a long period of time was due to the term that Robert Monroe coined: “Mind Awake / Body Asleep“. The problem with it, and a concept that I couldn’t grasp at the time was that the “Body Asleep” part is completely WRONG. Unless your goal is to actually fall asleep, go into a dream and become conscious within that dream (this is called a lucid awareness experience), then there is actually no point where you ever need your body to be put “asleep”.
Your body isn’t put to sleep as much as you make it so that the input you’re receiving from your five physical senses is greatly reduced. This begins the process for you to disassociate from this physical reality. While that’s happening focus your attention ‘within’, which is away from this physical reality.
The second biggest problem I’ve encountered is that when I was younger, I was quite impatient. I’d read through a book that had a dozen great exercises in it and then I’d go to bed and TRY THEM ALL!! *facepalms* Yeah, don’t ever do that… it’ll cause more frustration than anything. Pick a single exercise and try it out for at least a solid week.
Another issue was that I didn’t make the connection between Conscious Exits and Meditation. If you want to learn to Astral Project at any time during the day from a completely conscious state of awareness (this is called doing a Conscious Exit), then it’s just about a mandatory requirement that you learn to meditate. This was something I didn’t understand back then. The state that you should learn to get into is called the Point of Consciousness (PoC) state. It’s from there you can do most of the classic OBE techniques from. I remember one whereby you were instructed to create your own astral body using your thought power… but it never really indicated what “state of mind” you initially needed to be in to do it. I haven’t gone back to that technique, but the PoC state would be perfect for that.
So yeah, hopefully reading these will help you to move forward in the future… I’ll try to add some more of my missteps as I think of them. 🙂