Hi,
No, what I call intermediate state is absolutely not a warm and pleasant state. It is FEAR. Or at least, very unpleasant. It is what astralists call “low astral”.
I will copy here a part of an email I sent to Dreambob :
Right from the beginning, my idea was doing meditation in dreams. I had 2 kinds of LDs :
- DILDs
- WILDs, which other people would call OBEs. For all my WILDs, I go out of my body, so they all begin in a half intermediate state (dark image of my room, and sometimes nothing).
To simplify, let’s say there are 2 different states : dream / pitch black
Experimenting the 2 of them, I tried meditation in the 2. And I immediately noticed that there was good results in pitch black and no results in dreams.
What I call result, is “flowing energy” or “vibrations” (the same as OBE or sleep paralysis vibrations). So I spent more and more time not only meditating, but explorating the intermediate state (you can believe there is nothing to explore in a pitch black ? Wrong !)
There, I had many problems, because intermediate state is not as safe as dream (many people call it “low astral”). The energy of dream imagery being “free”, all your fears become immediatly true. In fact, fear seemed to be the main characteristic of this state (another reason of the inability of LDers to stay in it. Maybe they don’t feel always fear, but anyhow, they don’t feel very good !).
Well, after years of problems, I found a way to clean it from its bad contents, and then I could stay calm in it, observing how dreams appear. Because they appear, in front of you, or all around you, and take you. And then my problem was “How to avoid being taken by dreams”. I wanted to stay calmly meditating, but there was always something falling upon me, trees, books, demons… anything. And impossible to ignore them, because of the pain. A dog biting you in a dream can be very painful. Or it could be demons putting their fingers in my eyes. As if the dream wanted me to consider it.
After some other years, I found a way to fly through entire dreams (moutains, houses, trees, oceans, trains, anything) without being touched. In fact, I didn’t fly through them. Dreams were flying through me, but they were no more solid.
Question of Dreambob : It happens to me occasionally, and normally I simply wait for the next dream to begin. Sometimes, I have wondered if this is the state, called “dreamless sleep” – do you think it is??
Answer : This is not it.
Now, after several other years, I have the whole theory.
At the source of all, there is clarity/emptiness (non dual). With ignorance, it is transformed in duality. The solid objects (matter) are the materialization of clarity, and the void is the materialization of emptiness.
So, objects and void are equal in this regard.
When you look around you, you see objects. When you close your eyes, you see nothing. But this nothing is not emptiness, it is something : it is void. It may seem strange, but the void is an object. A black objet, but an object.
So, pitch black is an object. It comes from the grasping of the absence of dream. This is the materialization of the absence of dream. In a word : a mental construction. Like dreams.
There is more free energy in pitch black because it takes less energy to create it, than to create a dream. And on the basis of this energy, one can begin a work (that’s how meditation works).
So, you understand that clarity/emptiness can only come from the reunification of dream/void.
What is called dreamless state in tibetan buddhism is clarity/emptiness.
Never mind… (mind you emptiness is not God and the latter isn’t a mental construction - far from it! but let’s not get into that…)
