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HOW I CLIMB THE BEANSTALK

The kick-start, so to speak, that I recommend people to use is the Noticing exercise. This is designed to get people through the initial reluctance they tend to have. Perhaps the biggest initial obstacle is being presented with just a wall of blackness upon closing their eyes. So the Noticing exercise is designed to get people over that hurdle...

Once a person becomes comfortable with the action of looking within, they will naturally want to start looking at something in particular else they'll either get bored, or fall asleep. So next I recommend the creation of some kind of mental rundown in your imagination. Doing this has the effect of capturing a person's focus of attention. Once their attention has been captured, they make the switch from 3rd person to 1st person view and find themselves (normally) within Focus 2 of consciousness. Reason why it's normally F2 is because this area is where your imagination is, which is the faculty that a person uses to create their mental rundown.

When I talk about engaging the senses, I mean engage them in the imaginary rundown. Doing this makes the whole scenario appear more 'real' and helps capture a person's focus more easily so they can make the switch. As I say, 'the switch' is the change in area of consciousness from Focus 1 to Focus 2, in terms of the Phasing Model that is...

...Focus 2 of consciousness is the region that mystics typically call the 'astral'...

      --Frank Kepple, Astral Pulse Forum, April 16, 2005

What Frank Kepple and Robert Monroe called 'the rundown,' I call 'Climbing the Beanstalk' or just 'the Beanpole'. It's not an unworlding technique so much as it's a dry run. Skill sharpening for unworlding. It's also a mental rundown and distraction that you use to keep yourself alert so you don't go to sleep too fast. During the rundown, if I'm relaxed in body and mind and fairly comfortable, I'll normally have several lapses into first person perspective. I might be on either side of the borderline of sleep when these occur. These can vary in lucidity. It's all a part of the Daytime Practice. Skill in hovering near the borderline of sleep, learned well because you are relatively alert, translates effortlessly to spontaneous unworlding experiences during sleep. For Frank's rundown, which he based on Track 2 of TMI's Wave I Gateway  CD series, see FranksPosts.pdf. In this chapter I'll describe the Beanpole/rundown I've been using for my own purposes. When I first started using my Beanpole, I'd do a Noticing session first and not start up the beanstalk till I'd gotten into the Spontaneous Noticing range. I haven't been using the Beanpole or Noticing sessions as much in recent months, mainly because I'm focused on finishing this book instead of doing my practice. When I run out of rough drafts that are worth polishing up to put online, I expect my practice to get a lot more productive than it has been recently.

So I'm lying down with my eyes closed, usually with a dark mask over my eyes, and usually I can hear quite a bit of noise from all over the house and the neighborhood. My thoughts can be a lot more distracting than the noise so I have already turned the racemind down, including the cumbersome, petty, and infinitely annoying thought that other people's noise should be any of my concern; I no longer Notice it as I have firmly decided it is not a problem. If it's bedtime I usually fail to retain consciousness past this point, so let's say it's sometime during the day or in the early morning after plenty of sleep, and let's say I'm not sleepy and I even find it hard to believe that I could go to sleep right now. But the secret, unspoken goal is to experience tiny lapses in and out of conscious awareness, to experience Awakenings after each one, and to ask myself What Just Happened each time I wake up from a Little Sleep. In order to do this the easy way, I must not approach sleep directly; that would just scare sleep away. I have to sneak up on it, and often I will be asleep, in my first tiny lapse of sleep, in less than five minutes.

I'm a beginner at this, and I don't practice it nearly enough. But I know better than to try to go to sleep when I'm not sleepy. That would normally keep me awake. So I feed enthusiasm instead of thinking by putting all my Attention into what I'm doing.

Once I've re-established to my skeptical conscious mind, through Noticing, the non-obvious fact that the darkness behind my eyelids is definitely not solid black, empty, or irrelevant, it's time to Climb the Beanstalk. Referring to the illustration at the bottom of this page, I start here. No need to try hard to visualize a room, a pole, the colored balls or anything else, I just put my foot on the lowest ball and climb the pole. A bare minimum of visualization is required; I don't want to get uptight about doing this some certain way. When I lapse into first person perspective, details will form all by themselves, possibly having nothing to do with the Beanpole. There are 5+ senses and I want to divide my energy among all 5+ of them. I might run through the activities of my Beanpole at different speeds or intensities depending on what I feel like doing.

My basic playground toy here is a metal pole with big, strong, colored balls attached to it which I will use as steps to climb up the pole into the room above through a trap door in the ceiling. The balls are in the order of the colors of the rainbow and represent the Seven (dream bodies or chakras). To make it more interesting, the balls are magic balls of solid light, spinning at an incredible speed, but as soon as I put my foot on one, it skids to an instantaneous halt, then as soon as I lift my foot, it's instantly back up to speed. I can hear the balls spinning. The spinning sounds like the Inner Sound Current, a high-pitched electrical sizzling sound. When they skid to a stop on the sole of my bare foot, I can hear and feel that.

And up the pole I go, not too fast and not too slow. I see or sense each color separately, but it doesn't matter how well, as I don't want to get bogged down in try-hard visualization. I can feel the cold metal pole as I clench it and pull myself up. I can feel my big, strong muscles rippling like Superman or Tarzan...

Just wanted to see if you were paying attention.

Don't go to sleep on me now.

At the top of the pole, I grab the hole in the ceiling where the pole goes through and pull myself up. This doesn't have to be technically accurate. As a child I--the guy that the class nerds used to pick on--was so good at pull-ups and climbing ropes compared to the jocks who were always kicking sand in my face that it would leave them speechless with their mouths hanging open. For this reason, pull-ups have become a symbol of "I-know-I-can" in my dreams. So I have incorporated this magic moment from my childhood into my Beanpole routine. As Frank Kepple suggests, keep your Beanpole interesting enough to engage your Attention but not interesting enough to keep you from being distracted in a lapse into first person perspective. So it should be personalized and meaningful without being all-absorbing.

The first time I tried my Beanpole I ran into my wife's aunt and niece most of the way up the pole and they encouraged me to keep going. This was a Noticing, not a lapse into sleep. See why we practice Noticing before Climbing the Beanstalk?

Upstairs, I am now in the Library. This is a special place in the Unworld that contains knowledge of everything that ever will be, ever has been, and ever could be, all in musty old leather tomes that smell awesome. If you like old books, you know what I'm talking about. I never fail to search for this smell, as soon as I get there.

The books are arranged in short rows, only about twenty feet long, or I'd go to sleep before I got to the end of one. I head between two rows of books, letting my hands run lightly along the spines of the books on either side of me. I know intimately the sound made by running my finger over the stiffened spine of an old book. I can hear this sound anytime I want. At the end of the row I take a left and walk a short way down the corridor, letting my hands smack into shelving unit poles on either side of me, hearing my hands thumping the old oak poles. Not to get too bogged down on one thing, I then take a left and head back down another row of books. This time I grab a book off the shelf, a different shelf than I chose last time I Climbed the Beanstalk. I flip the book open, feel the pages, smell the book, run my fingers along the smooth, sharp edge of the pages.

The first time I tried my Beanpole, I had a surprise switch to true first person perspective of the Unworld at this moment. When I grabbed a book off the shelf, it turned into a tiny house in my hands. My Soul Retinue was there dressed up as more of my wife's relatives, smiling and encouraging me. I thought, that's odd, where the heck am I, and had an Awakening, thrilled at the results. This had been a complete switch to the Unworld, with a switch back upon the onset of Official Lucidity, as so often happens in dreams.

I often go to sleep accidentally at this point so I've been trying to not look at the book too long, but sometimes if I remember to, I'll visualize a spiral on one page, and if I can see it well, I move it over to the facing page. The spiral is another personal symbol. I became able to see a tight, well-defined spiral at the end of a vision quest I undertook once in my past as a young explorer seeking missing parts of me in the mountains of California. Once when I Climbed the Beanstalk upon waking up from a dream, I was able to see this spiral in such astounding detail that I got out of bed to write it down, and as I walked to my desk there were bright orange and yellow streamers coming off of me as I walked.

After trying to see spirals, I put the book back on the shelf and hurry to the end of the aisle before I lose consciousness. I'll often fall asleep in this aisle. If not, I find a tiny table with a little platter on it with a cube of tasty cheese speared on a toothpick. I chew the cheese up slowly, savoring the tangy flavor. Then I wash the taste out of my mouth with a little dry red wine. I guzzle the wine a little too fast so I don't go to sleep. Then I lean over a water fountain and drink plenty of clear, cold water to wash all the flavors out of my mouth and freshen up after the mini-feast. The purpose of all this eating and drinking is to engage more senses. It's with the senses that we construct worlds, and the Beanpole draws our senses one-by-one out of the 2-3-4 World into the Unworld, sometimes fleetingly and sometimes with intersting results.

The next phase of my Beanpole is more physical and improvisational, as it will be easier to accidentally fall asleep by this time. There is a long railing that circumnavigates a huge round open area in the Library floor. Each floor of the Library is a donut-shaped terrace or large balcony. The hole in the middle is the Nowhere. If I lean over the railing and look up or down, there are identical railings as far as the eye can see. The vertical tunnel running up and down the central portion of the Library is the Nowhere. If I was in the right state of mind, I could jump off the railing and be transported anywhere I wanted to go, inside the Library or out. But there's also an elevator with buttons labeled by floor or by subject area, so I'll go to the right floor when I get in and push a button. So far I just use this to go back downstairs for another climb up the Beanpole, or I might bypass the elevator and climb a second Beanpole, but here I often accidentally go to sleep.

On my way to the elevator, I perambulate the railing with my left hand or a drumstick thumping the railing rhythmically to make a ringing sound. Or I might walk on top of the railing like a tightrope or hang out over the void by my knees. It doesn't have to be something I'd do in the physical. It doesn't even have to be possible. Most importantly, I keep moving. Instead of strolling along sleepily with the railing on my left, I might run, leap, hop, skip, jump, leapfrog, roll, waddle, or spin to get from here to there. When I get tired of these antics, I go down the elevator or up another Beanpole, and start the whole routine over.

Ideally, I will experience several Awakenings in an hour or two. Unlike practitioners who try to lie perfectly still at all times, I like to get up and record each Awakening immediately. This builds confidence in the ability to return to any desired state instantly. And the act of writing them down raises their significance in the minds of my dream bodies, causing them to pay more Attention, like I am. Woe to he who thinks these Little Dream snippets are just random noise or neural discharge, whatever that is. I have common encounters with my dream bodies when I make sure to experience a lot of Awakenings. I might try to write in my dream journal with my dream finger, for example. Or my dream body might hide my dream journal from me and make me look for it until I achieve Official Lucidity and wake up. Or he might kick me or point at me to wake me up with a Jerk. If the little dream is an aurage instead of an image, anything can be turned into abstract word pictures. Sometimes it's both image and aurage, with feelages thrown in for fun. Rarely are the aurages or "hypnagogic phrases" completely meaningless, and often they are meaningful in a multi-layered way that I can appreciate without having to understand. But the main idea is to appreciate all unworlding experiences, especially the short ones, as they are the easiest to experience, and the quickest way to build confidence, yet the easiest to forget.

A few nights ago I went to bed in an enthusiastic mindset and energetically Climbed the Beanstalk and cavorted around in the Library more than I ever had before. Even so, I only got up two or three levels from where I'd started before I fell asleep. That night I dreamed I was ecstatically walking from Used Bookstore to Used Bookstore with my Soul Retinue posing as my family. I was discouraged because I wanted to explore thoroughly and I assumed--since I thought they were my birth family--that they wanted to keep moving, looking only at sidewalk displays. Turns out my "brother," who I'd assumed would be eager to get a move on, made a liar of my paranoid 2-3-4 Mind and showed me a book like the one I was interested in, with big gold letters on the cover.

This transported me inside the bookstore standing near a brightly lit picture window/the Nowhere, where I continued looking at the book until I found a fascinating illustration of a flying gizmo invention which came to life right on the page. I became Officially Lucid and quickly woke up in the Dayly Dreame, thinking I was in my bed with my eyes closed. Fortunately I was able to keep my eyes closed and Chain back in, where I quickly became Officially Lucid again.

The above description will help you create a personalized Beanpole of your own. Most unworlding techniques are nothing more than imagination-harnessing devices to hold your Attention on something that will engage your 5+ senses including the sense of motion, which is most important since motion attracts the Dream Usher. Remember the purpose of this exercise is not to put you to sleep, but to get you accustomed to Awakening in the Unworld. It really has nothing to do with sleep.

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