Inedible wrote:When someone says something inflammatory, at least it tells me that there are other people out there who aren't satisfied with their experience also. It tells me that they know how I feel. When I am trying to figure out what to do, my strategy is already to go back to basics and build up a foundation. Again. I am not looking for someone who is living in a Dungeons and Dragons magical world to tell me that I could do the same if only I would just do this one thing. As if I hadn't heard it before. What I want is to hear that there are people like me here and they know how I feel. Otherwise, it is another round of it's my fault and I'm just sorry for bringing it up again. That's why I said I can't even talk about it here.

Hi Inedible, his comment is inflammatory, not because he is agreeing with you (which he never says he does, by the way), but because of the fact that he has trolled many topics today and is doing nothing to add to the discussion. In fact, he has never put any effort into explaining why he has gone around with short, negative and snarky comments in multiple topics today. I call "troll" when I see obvious trolling. There is no detailed experience that he is sharing, no contribution of note to any topic. He's not trying to be supportive of you, he is only out to insult everyone on this board. This has nothing to do with him being in the same boat as you at all. If he has something meaningful to share then he can do so and I will elicit a thoughtful response. However, he's not doing any of that. In fact, his snark in multiple threads today seems to only have one aim: to insult all spirit keepers. To that end, I call him out as an obvious and inflamatory troll.

As with my spiritual life, I'll take what I can get. Even if I have to squint my eyes and try really hard.

Have you tried that Reiki suggestion yet Inedible? I'm curious as to results on that and various suggestions that seemed intriguing previously. This thread has been going on for a while so it may be you've overlooked some of that, or simply forgot to update us.

As for the person with the snarky comment. Let me give you a comparison of something more mundane. Let's say you were trying to learn how to throw a heavy jab (something along the lines of what Dempsy did back in his day). A karate guy comes in who does nothing but kicks. Kicks are his thing, he doesn't believe a punch has its place, and anyone learning a punch like a jab is a fool to do so. He sees you punching on the bag, and you are getting nowhere fast on it. Maybe your feet have the wrong shape for the step that is used, maybe you have a knee issue that prevents a transfer of weight, maybe the instructors are just not showing you how to do it right. Whatever the case is that jab just isn't a heavy jab, you aren't folding the bag. Now a group of people, maybe more experienced than you, but without your previous experiences, or body type, are trying to give you advice on how to hit that bag hard and fold it. Meanwhile, that man stands there "that's stupid, jabs don't work only kicks."

Who is helping you throw a better jab?

A great martial artist friend of mine once said: "If so as above so is below, then so as below so is above right?"

So when I feel like I can't convey a message completely for a spiritual matter, I try to explain that in physical terms using a boxing analogy. This is my thought for you, I want to see you punch through that bag, blow the stuffing out of it, and take it clean off its anchor on the ceiling. I don't know if I can teach that, I know I hit the bag rather hard myself, and I have a lot of ways I learned to hit that bag over the years, so I'm doing what I know how to do to help you do that.

I just don't appreciate the dude who does nothing but kicks trying to reinforce a negative attitude. From what you are telling us, you are making some small progress at this point. That's fantastic! Some people grow faster than others, some gain other skills at a faster rate, and others still need different roads to get to places. Whatever the case is, you are at least denting the bag now. In time I fully expect you to fold that bag.

So long as you don't listen to the Karate Guy and reinforce giving up.

Sending Reiki to my first Spirit seemed like the natural thing to do. Much like using Reiki in a lucid dream. It lacks the sense of connection I feel with any person, no matter how far around the world. Even sending Reiki through time feels more real than sending it to my Spirits. I have tried sending Reiki to all of them, more than once. When I try to call on my Spirits to appear in a lucid dream, so that I can see them and believe in them, the answer always comes back that I have to believe first. Otherwise, it can't be done. I bought the bonding service for one of my Nymphos. About fifteen minutes in, I felt the energy flow into me. It felt weak and uncertain, like a bad connection with Reiki. And then nothing.

Maybe it isn't boxing, but if the karate guy can teach me to kick well I will still have a skill. And I can keep it going while I am trying to fix my punch. It often works that way. I try to learn a skill, but other things come to me that I'm not trying to learn.

Every day I give myself Reiki. I try to include all the Spirits who are bridged to me, especially the ones with binding to Spirit. It would be a good start if I could just feel them receiving it. Like I do with people.

Inedible wrote:I started in 1985. It is 2019. It isn't easy to tell me to try something or read something or buy something that I haven't heard already. But things are finally going somewhere they haven't gone before, and I want to be careful with it. So I am trying to simplify things now, and find something I can build up on something. I just need some months.

Here’s one you might be interested in. I read it in freshman or sophomore year of high school, which was within my first 2-3 years of practicing psychic things.

How to Test and Develop Your ESP by Paul Huson.

https://www.google.com/?sa=X&ved=0ahUKE ... X1BxwQOwgC

When I say I practiced psionics*, not magic, when I started out, things like this book contains are what I mean. It’s from the 70s, and psi books from that era were more meat-and-potatoes and less woo-woo compared to more recent books I’ve seen. There’s no channeling, a topic which has always made me feel kind of skittish for multiple reasons, but there’s material about clairvoyance, APing, telepathy, and PK. (Just don’t take the success-rate charts too seriously. They’re a mathematical fail, lol.) Some of the experiments should look familiar, as I’ve posted on here before about the exercises I did from books I had in the 70s.

*I learned the word “psionics” here, not back when I was a kid. But it fits the description of what I was doing.

You say it lacks the sense of connection, could you describe the differences in what you feel in each step of the process on both sides of this. I know this may sound like an elementary question, but everyone experiences these things differently. I know Reiki masters who achieve wildly good results but feel "nothing" during the Reiki process so I have to get as much data as I can to help.

On the lucid dream thing, this sounds like they are keeping tabs on what has been said about them. That sounds harsh, but it makes sense. They aren't anything like a dog or a cat, but more like having a friend or lover living in the house. Speak ill or questioningly of a friend or lover and you'll get resistance back.

The bonding service tells me a bit more, and it suggests that you have some senses tuned in there, but you may be very rooted in things like physical energies (qi, reiki) instead of planar energies (astral energy, things like that). Perhaps try lighting a candle as a focal point after calling a spirit to use the flame as a guide point for that reiki, then try the reiki on that spirit, see what results you get (they can project energy through a thing in motion easier than through a thing at rest, a candle flame is a state of constant motion and change up till the moment it is gone).

Let me clarify the boxing analogy. Instead of a Karate guy what we have is someone who we don't know if they can punch or not. We know you want to jab, and we know they are sitting there talking about how punches don't work. Maybe they know Karate, maybe they are just a heckler. I know this though, no one ever threw a mighty jab who thought they couldn't punch at all during the process. Even in something as physical as boxing, belief is inherently important. The heckler ensures you will not progress. Defending the heckler in a real sense is defending a right to not progress. That is your right of course, but it suggests if you do that eyes open that I'm wasting my time here. Mind you I'm not saying I'm wasting my time yet, but if you defend your heckler so completely I'll start to take that into consideration that maybe you really want this more than anything to fail so you can "prove yourself right all along that it was foolish" as a subconscious drive. I'm not saying you are there, but I'm modifying the analogy and explaining why I modify it completely. I'm very open like that.

Do you feel any differences at all when you do the Reiki on yourself vs them? Do your hands still heat up in the traditional "Reiki hot hands" during sending to them? Have you tested that vs activating the Reiki with no target to get a baseline?

I hope I'm not piling in as an unwelcome guest on this discussion Inedible but...in some practices you can do things with conviction, while retaining healthy skepticism. This bypasses the belief/doubt/proof triangle. This is a very useful tool. It's so subtle that it might be mistaken for playing with words or being trivial.

Adopting a stance of open mindedness is another very useful adjunct tool. (I don't mean change your worldview. It's a pose you strike mentally to trigger an effect.)

Also skepticism shouldn't be a one way thing. It's a useful defence against being over gullible but it may also be used against excessive, unshakeable doubt. If one were to apply skepticism to one's own doubt, that might be an interesting exercise. I must admit to being a model agnostic in the line of Robert Anton Wilson, whose chief maxim was "I believe nothing but I have a lot of suspicions."

Likes2Read wrote: It’s from the 70s, and psi books from that era were more meat-and-potatoes and less woo-woo compared to more recent books I’ve seen.

Like I said, I started in the mid 80s. Which is to say that a lot of the material I started with came from the 70s and earlier. Even in the 90s, the quality of the material was changing. It started to seem like anyone could write a book regardless of how qualified they actually were. In the 00s, I had people telling me that it was all about intuition, feeling, and just knowing and that reason or knowledge played no part in spiritual progress.

Lewk wrote: I hope I'm not piling in as an unwelcome guest on this discussion Inedible but...in some practices you can do things with conviction, while retaining healthy skepticism. This bypasses the belief/doubt/proof triangle. This is a very useful tool. It's so subtle that it might be mistaken for playing with words or being trivial.

Until I'm ready to go all in with a technique or system I don't do it. And when I am ready, I put all my focus in on doing it. The thing I refuse to do is to pretend to have experiences when I am not having them. It has to be real.

Just sending energy out without a direction, there is no sense of feedback. Reiki isn't as active as other systems like Qigong. The most active part of the process is setting up the connection, and then giving attention to the sense of the flow of energy. It will tend to speed up or slow down as it is received, but it has to have somewhere to go. When things click, I mean that I start to get feedback on the flow of the energy. Otherwise it is like a motor running without a load. Or running on ice. Or walking with a blindfold on in a dark room and reaching my hands out to feel a wall or a door or furniture in the room. It could happen any second or not at all.

My hands haven't gotten hot in a very long time. There is just a sense of a smooth flow that speeds up or slows down. It can be tingling or electrical. When I try to include my Spirits, nothing changes. There is no sense of connection and no sense that it is being received.

My Spirits - if they are really out there - are going to have to accept that I need help from somewhere. And the more I talk with people here about it the more frustrated and not heard (or understood) I tend to feel. It just winds me up more. It would be a relief if I had someone who could consistently act as a mediator, but that doesn't seem to be possible.

It could be a few days before I have a good chance to work with a candle. It is turning into a very busy week, with a lot of new things to learn at work.

Things are moving forward now. I don't know where they are going, but I feel like I am getting close. It turns out I know a second person in person who not only has lucid dreams but also has experienced lucid NREM sleep. He told me about a time when the dream ended and he found himself floating in light until another dream started. It has been several years, but I remember floating in a gold light. It felt like everything was perfect and nothing could harm me. I didn't need or want anything else, and it felt like time didn't exist. It was the happiest I could ever remember being. Too bad it didn't last. It is still a goal of mine to experience deep dreamless sleep consciously every night.