This exercise involves selecting a house or apartment that you live in or have lived in. The main criteria is that you must feel very psychologically comfortable about the resi
dence and you know the interior intimately.
It would be all right to select a place where you had lived as a child, provided it was associated with mostly happy memories. The technique may be done lying in bed at night; however there is a risk of losing concentration and falling asleep.
1. Imagine yourself outside the house, or flat, and approach the front door. Look at the door noting details; what type of lock is on the door? What color is it? What type of knob or handle opens the door? Is the door paneled? What color is the door and frame? The door has glass, is it frosted, stained, or clear? Look down at your feet. What sort of path
way are you standing on? Is there a doormat? Look
at either side of the door and observe what is pre
sent for windows for example
2. Float through the door into the hallway, entrance, or room that the door opens into. Is it carpeted or wood, perhaps tiles, under your feet? Pick up as many details as you can.
3. Project yourself into the lounge or living room and begin a wall-by-wall inspection. Note furniture, wall hangings, lights, coffee tables, magazines, electronic appliances, absence or presence of floor covering, any unusual fixtures on the ceiling. When you come to windows look out and review the scene.
4. Extend yourself into the kitchen. Start at one wall and begin to examine every appliance and cooking aid in the kitchen. Open the refrigerator door, not
ing its color, and inspect its contents. Open any cupboard doors or drawers and see what is inside.
Look at the stove closely. How many hotplates or burners? Color? Exhaust fan? Oven door? Is there a kitchen table? Is there a tablecloth on the table, and if so what color, design is it? Go over and imag
ine yourself turning on the faucets on the sink. Feel cold water on the back of one hand. Turn on the hot water tap and see if you can get steam rising?
S. Levitate yourself through the house to the entrance of the main bathroom. Go inside and inspect. Go to every faucet in the bathroom and turn it on, and then off. Is there a bathtub or a shower recess, or both? If there is a medicine cabinet, open it and see what is inside. Can you count the toothbrushes on the rack and note their colors? Walk out of the house the way you came in and return to your actual physical location.
Practice Suggestion
You might use a tape recorder and audio tape to make a guided imagery meditation.
Start at the front door and use my suggestions, plus your own, to list "loci" along the way and cues about what to examine in each area you project to.
Example: "Kitchen; refrigerator; color; open fridge door:
examine contents;" and so on. Allow about thirty seconds between each item.
When you are ready to do the exercise, relax (sitting or lying down), turn the tape on, and project yourself through the house, following your own instructions.
Graduation Pointers
The two preceding exercises should be practiced over a fortnight, allotting a week to the Favorite Room Tour and the second week devoted to Projection of Consciousness Through A House. When dealing with the occult "haste makes waste!"
Ophiel (See The Art and Practice of Astral Projection, Weis
er, 1969), probably America's pioneer "How to" occultist had a very clever trick to encourage you to get out of your body and into another location with your consciousness.
He recommended placing a favorite scent bottle in the area to which you want to travel. You smell the scent bot
tle before going to bed, and when in bed imagine yourself back where the perfume is, smelling it.
I suggest you may wish to experiment with an essential oil and I would particularly advise patchouli, sandalwood or rose as the best triggers. These odors, as indeed all odors, come under the realm of Earth (Prithivi) and therefore Muladhara chakra-the pelvic floor psychic center.
Patchouli and Sandalwood arouse some very primitive layers of the brain, and an activated nervous system makes it easier to extend consciousness.
Auxiliary Olfaction Exercise
I first did this when I was seventeen, and the experience really shook me up. The object is to create an olfactory hal
lucination. You may recall that a hallucination is a sensory experience in the absence of a sensory stimulus.
You concentrate on the odor (rose or patchouli are both very good for this), smelling gently until olfactory fatigue sets in; Le. you can no longer detect the odor.
Once olfactory fatigue is established, put the perfume bottle, flower, or whatever the source of the odor is, away and go to another room.
Close your eyes and vividly recreate the bottle or flower visually, even feel yourself holding it, and actually start sniffing physically.
It may take a number of sessions, but eventually you will actually smell the odor. The first time this happens you are much more likely to get a shock than from any visual hallucination.
Open-Eyed Versus Closed-Eyed Pradtice
Before you go any further I want you to spend a few days repeating the "Room" and "House" exercises with your eyes open. This flexibility is very important and it is only in the beginning that I ask students to close their eyes. It is a sim
ple focus of attention to learn to do these exercises with the eyes open, and indeed even walking down a street. This does involve a shift of attention, and as a result the exteri
or world will dim a little, as you brighten up the interior world. It is a knack and not too difficult at that.
You may find it interesting to know that the Ashram of I l ll' Saraswati Order (Bihar state, India) teaches a very com
plete system of Kriya Yoga for arousal of Kundalini. The lharacteristic of the system is that nearly all the methods
Me done with the eyes open-and very quickly the uncon
scious is provoked to emerge and dominate any external sensory distractions. I do not write a book about this, as unfortunately, not everything can be learned from a book;
10 learn the system you would have to go and live in one of I he Ashrams.
In 1978 I taught a week-long session of Kriya Yoga under the auspices of Llewellyn, in the United States. This was a live-in situation, and we had people from all over America attend.