Ha ha 

That Swami was one smart dude!

I'm not kidding you Bruce, I was literally thinking about this exact topic about perception on my drive home from work this afternoon.

Pretty cool.

Hi Bruce! 

It was in response to things I’ve been thinking about and trying to sort out for a while lately. 

Lately I haven’t been feeling as connected and influential in the events of my own life as I used to.  I’ve been feeling lost and unempowered, almost as if I’ve handed over the controls to someone else.  I've been believing that I don't have what it takes to get it back.  And I’ve been trying to get out of that funky belief!   I've been wanting to feel that I have communication with my higher self working for me again. 

Well, on my drive home today as soon as I turned the corner off work’s property this suddenly popped into my head, “How you perceive things and how you feel is controlled by what you believe.  If you alter those beliefs it will change how you feel and change how things appear, and that will affect your experience and the decisions you make.”  When I realized that all this was going through my head I knew this was how I could get the controls back.

I was really surprised at how that idea just popped into my head so suddenly like that.  I took it as a sign that this was the answer to all my wanting of help.  So I decided to take this advice. 

On the drive home I started evaluating my beliefs about certain things/causes/results in my life lately and how they made me feel, and how it affected my decisions and actions, and what I’ve been experiencing, and I gave those beliefs a 180!  I basically threw them out the door so I could stop feeling stuck in the thought of those beliefs and not knowing what else to do to get around them!  And I was especially tired of waiting for things to change so that I could feel different.

I'm not sure how I did it, but I guess just the thought of deciding to stop giving attention to beliefs that hurt me is what did the trick.  It took a ton of pressure off my mood and state of being tonight.  I felt lighter and freer tonight.  My thinking was clearer and smoother.  It resulted in me being in a great mood, which impacted some choices I made tonight, which in turn resulted in some serendipitous and synchronous events.  That of course put me in an even better mood! 

On just this small scale I was able to see the cycle of my perception, experience, and belief and how they are all tied together. 

So when I read your statement, "One's ability to perceive exists within the limiting boundaries of one's beliefs" it really reinforced what I was going through tonight.  Seeing your statement just 2 hours after I was thinking the same concept and applying it to my life, to me, was a form of verification that it's true and it's something I can do!

Hi Seagull,

Yes, it is certainly hard to will yourself to change.  I've actually been working on some specific things for a long time and recently it just all culminated.  Basically I'm fed up with myself for perpetuating worries and negative beliefs about things that I wish would change but I don't feel I can change them.  But it feels good to sometimes put all the worry aside and just let myself feel free from it.  It really does make life look different. 

Recently there were a lot of layoffs at work, and of course the rest of us worry we'll be next in a couple years.  My field is medical transcription and it's becoming obsolete.  I don't have any other training or experience!  In talking with my supervisor her advice was, "Well, you might just have to reinvent yourself." 

And so this has been a huge weight on me lately, hogging my thoughts and attention while I've been trying to figure out what I should do to prepare, trying to decide if I should go back to school and get a degree, but in what?  I'm 46!  It's not exactly practical to be starting from square one at my age.  There are worries like, who would hire someone in their 50s, fresh out of college with no previous experience?  Surely there will be competition with others who do have experience.  And I need to make at least the money I'm making now.  I can't take a huge pay cut!

So there are a lot of beliefs wrapped up on all that.  A big one being that I'm too old to really reinvent myself.  I don't have the ambition of a 20-something-year-old.  I don't even know what I'd really like to do or what I'm really capable of doing.  All the jobs that I think I'd love don't really pay that great. 

So beliefs that like, and the hidden beliefs that are buried that I don't even know about...they are hard to change.  I will probably just have to make a decision, stick with it, and see what happens.  That might be the only way to change those beliefs.  It's pretty scary for me.   

But when I talk to everyone about it, I hear that there are so many people my age and older in college, getting their degrees.  So I will try my best to try to change these beliefs, stop doing the negative worry-filled self talk, and maybe it will open up choices and pathways I haven't thought of yet.  Maybe if I keep asking everyone, I'll hear something that will give me an ah-ha moment.  I'm just hoping for the best because I feel so clueless right now.

So, that's been one big area of my life I need to get unstuck from belief-wise.  There are others too.  Like relationships.  I really do believe I'm meant to be single the rest of my life.  It's because I just don't see or feel it's in the cards for me.  Maybe because I've been single for so long.  I'm literally trying to change those beliefs but it's hard to do.  It's hard to tell yourself something that you don't actual feel, and then try to actually believe it.  But I know it works. 

Tonight with a group of friends we were all talking about OBEs.  Someone asked me advice on how they can learn to have an OBE.  I suggested re-writing their beliefs about OBEs, mainly to stop believing that it's hard to do and that you don't know how to to it.  I told them that everyone has OBEs every night, they just don't remember them. 

My advice was to stop programming yourself with the intention to try to have an OBE because there is an inherent belief in that that says you haven't had one and you don't know how.  Instead, tell yourself, "If it's true that I'm already having them but I just don't remember them, then I want to start remembering them."  If you give yourself that suggestion, the underlying belief is that you already know how to have OBEs, that "doing it" isn't the problem.  So you can throw those beliefs out the window.  It really will free up your perception because it opens your mind to a lot of possibilities that you weren't accepting before. 

So see, I know this stuff.  But I still need to work on putting it into action in all the areas of myself that I need to work on. 

Quote:


Aw thanks for cheering me on, I need it 

Soulmael wrote on Jan 13^th, 2017 at 11:43am:


Hi Soulmael,

I see this is your first post.  Welcome to the Conversation Board!

Are you also using the CDs or the MP3s that go along with Bruce's Guidebook?  If not I highly recommend that you use these.  It's also a good idea to re-do any section until you feel you're ready to move on to the next. 

You said:  "And I had no way to check if the pretended retrieval was real or not." 

I remember when I was stuck where you are, so let me see if I can help get you moving.  First, I suggest you start a new thread on the Retrieval Forum (or wherever appropriate to do so) sharing your experience if you have one to share.  That way we can all take a look.  There are a lot of people here who can give advice and helpful comments.

But in general my advice is that even though the whole exercise is in fact built on pretending and using your imagination, that doesn't mean everything you experience is pretend, as in "not real".  This is a very tricky area that will take some experience to get better at...deciphering what's real amidst the pretending. 

Pretending/imagining/daydreaming is all just a way of engaging your attention in an area of consciousness that opens the door to means of perception that we normally have blocked.  At the same time it also closes our attention to our physical senses and things in our surrounding that are a distraction.  So, you can see how there will be a sort of "overlap" where you are not sure if you're still making something up or if something real has begun to happen.  It happens to everyone, even those with lots of experience.

Another good bit of advice is when you really ask yourself, "Did I make that up?"  Because if you did not consciously decide and make something up but instead just experienced it, that's a sure sign that you didn't make it up.  One of my most incredible early explorations started off with me obviously pretending and I knew that I was, which was fine with me.  I was trying to get into the right mode, just playing along in my imagination.  But then suddenly things started happening and it was like I was watching a movie!  I was so shocked because I was not controlling any of this! 

Sometimes we do only get bits and pieces of awareness during our experiences, but Bruce has taught me to look at the sequence of events and see if I can fill in the gaps.  Ask myself, well what could have happened between the gaps to move the experience from "here to here".  It's just like when you're watching a movie but having someone distracting you for a few minutes here and there.  You end up missing parts of the story, right?  You can probably piece the whole story together by making logical assumptions and have the whole story still make sense.  It's just a way of helping you keep moving until you gain more and more experience.  It is all progress toward greatly opening your perception to a greater degree.

Even though I don't know what your retrieval experience was, let's assume it WAS real.  If it was real, the worst thing you can do is to believe that it wasn't.  That's going to keep you blocked.  If you stop judging yourself and just allow yourself to believe it was real, you're taking more steps toward progressing to greater experiences.  Think of it like practicing a musical instrument.  I recently started teaching myself guitar.  It takes so much practice and repetition and messing up over and over and over because it's impossible to just start playing perfectly!  But instead of telling myself it's not real, that all I'm doing is making mistakes and noise, I just keep practicing.  One day something just clicked and I was playing smoothly without even thinking about it!  So when it comes to your retrieval exercises, just keep believing that you're moving toward better and better skills.

What I've also learned about the retrieval exercises is that as a student you're looking at the end goal and along the way you're frustrated that you're not getting what you expect.  But I want you to remember that in the mean time you're actually building and strengthening skills, tools, and abilities that are the foundation of those goals you want to reach.  It's like "wax on, wax off".  Have you seen The Karate Kid movie?   

And, only you can unblock your perception.  I am very experienced but even I have to work hard at it.  And if I stop practicing for a while and get distracted by other things in life, when I come back to this kind of stuff I have to get reacquainted with it all over again.  It doesn't ever really go away, but even for the most skilled it does take practice, patience, and persistence. 

Vicky

Guides! Can't live with them, can't live without them -- I sometimes think. Eventually I found that they can communicate to a level/aspect of consciousness that doesn't fit the main layers I learned in school. A slight buzz indicated something was going on and I'd better respectfully accept it quietly.
It was making some adjustment in me that I couldn't define at the moment but that became clearer later.  I pulled away as did Soulmael many times, then felt the "aaargh' of the guide's frustration/disgust before realizing that doing so interrupted an important communication.   

Soulmael wrote on Jan 14^th, 2017 at 2:14pm:


I love all your questions.  They are fantastic because I can tell exactly where you are in your level of experience and progress.  And please feel some relief when I tell you that you are just steps away from getting what you want and gliding through the exercises with success.   

Sleep is not necessary.  I'd like you to try the Guidebook exercises while staying awake and sitting in a chair and expecting only the same kind of "seeing perception" that you would expect from closing your eyes and daydreaming.  Do you ever fantasize about something?  Or even just think and remember with your eyes closed?

A perfect example for what I mean is:  Can you close your eyes and think about your dog?  Or remember your best friend?  Or something else you love?  All it takes is to remember the thought, feeling, and idea of something and it's there in your mind's eye even if you can't actually "see" anything.  I'm sure you'll feel and remember more information than you'll actually see.  It's a "seeing as knowing" kind of feeling.  That kind of "vision", "perception", and "seeing" in the imagination is all you need.  Even if you think you are terrible at seeing in your mind's eye, even if you're not able to "see" memories, that's ok.  Most people are capable of closing their eyes and "seeing" by knowing what they are thinking about.

In Bruce's exercises when he asks you if it's a man or woman, or large or small...it's not necessary to know the right answer.  The point is for you to go with whatever feeling comes to mind.  If you feel nothing coming to mind, then choose.  Just decide it's a man, he's tall, he's wearing glasses, etc.  What happens is, when you force your imagination to pretend, and you just go along with this process effortlessly, it creates a framework in your imagination in which you are focusing your nonphysical perception.  And that's the whole key to the exercises.

Now you can see why it's not necessary to be in a sleep state.  It's true, you may naturally reach the hypnagogic state but even if you don't it's ok.  I would say that yes, eventually the images and the "seeing" will happen on its own.  But I bet you'll be very surprised when you find out that seeing something isn't what you will get most excited about.  What you'll get most excited about and convinced by is when you start feeling as if you're receiving information just by the feeling of it.  It's "seeing as knowing" and I think it's one of the most important aspects of the skill-building process because it's something that you will inherently trust without question.  Know what I mean?  If you're hung-up on wishing to see, wishing to have visions and pictures, then you might miss the most fundamental and most valuable tool about developing your nonphysical senses, and that's trusting what you feel. 

You're welcome 

The weird tiredness you describe in the OBE state sounds like what I'm familiar with.  I think all it has to do with is the level of consciousness during these types of OBEs.  I get those usually in the early morning when I think I'm waking up but still actually sleeping.