With Don Lee Daniels

(Swami Jñānānanda Saraswatī)

Exploring Astral Projection (OBEs), Advanced Meditation grounded in the tradition of Nondual Shaiva Tantra, and Kuṇḍalinī/Śakti — the underlying force that mystics of all traditions have always known.

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The yogic tradition has a precise name for this vibratory pulse. Spanda.

I want to tell you what it actually feels like — not the doctrine, but the direct experience.

I’m sitting in meditation just before dawn. The world is half-formed at that hour. The air has a quality to it — soft, unfinished, as if creation hasn’t quite decided to show up yet. I begin with the breath. Cool air arriving. Warm air leaving. The familiar rise and fall.

But as you rest your attention on the inhalation, really rest it there, without agenda, something shifts. The breath stops feeling like one continuous stream. It arrives in subtle increments. A shimmering. As if each micro-moment of the inhale is being switched on from some deeper source. There’s a faint thrill at the beginning of each one — like the first ripple spreading across a still pond when a single drop falls.

You begin to sense that this is not your breath moving. Consciousness is choosing, again and again, to appear as breath.

Then attention moves toward the place where the breath dissolves — the dvādaśānta, the threshold point where inhalation fades into something utterly still. And you discover that the dvādaśānta is not merely a location around the body. It is a threshold in awareness itself. As the breath approaches that point, it feels as though the inhalation is being gathered into an invisible center — a luminous nowhere that is somehow also everywhere.

And then: the pause at the top of the inhale.

Time loosens its grip. Your name, your history, the sense of being located inside a particular body — all of it suspends. The universe has leaned all the way into being and is now perfectly poised.

That is spanda at its crest. The primordial vibration at the exact moment before it turns.

In that infinitesimal gap, you are not moving toward consciousness. You are consciousness. The one who observes and the thing being observed collapse into each other. The entire movement of breath — expansion, contraction, the play of appearing and dissolving — reveals itself as a single self-luminous pulse. Spanda recognizing itself. Coming to rest in its own source.

There is a merging so complete that there is no one left to report it. Only a wake of silent joy as the moment passes.

But here is what I want you to understand — and this is the teaching that changes everything.

That threshold is not a one-way door.

You are a free being. Consciousness itself is free — the Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam opens with exactly this declaration:

Citiḥ svatantrā viśvasiddhi-hetuḥ.

“Awareness, free and independent, is the cause of the accomplishment of everything.”

Not partially free. Not conditionally free. Absolutely free. This is the nature of consciousness itself — and it is your nature. At the crest of the spanda pulse, at the dvādaśānta, where the ordinary contracted self has suspended and pure awareness stands momentarily unobstructed — that freedom becomes directly available. Not as a concept. As a lived reality.

You have a genuine choice at that junction point. Three of them, in fact.

The first: surrender completely. Simply dissolve. Let the wave return to the ocean without a trace. Release every thread of individual identity and merge fully into the source. That is samādhi — nothing held back, the absolute stillness of consciousness resting in itself. The peace that the mystics of every tradition have pointed toward and struggled to describe.

The second: with saṅkalpa — with a formed intention — you can choose how that released awareness expresses itself. You might set the intention simply to recognize yourself as pure consciousness, surrendering not into formless dissolution but into the living recognition: I am pure consciousness. Or you might set the intention to move beyond the body altogether, into a body of light, free to explore multidimensional realms with no fixed destination in mind. Either way, the subtle state is far more responsive to intentional direction than the physical state ever is. This is not effort. It is the natural movement of free consciousness choosing its next expression. This is the out-of-body experience at its deepest level, or the direct recognition of what you already are — not an anomaly, not an accident, but a free being exercising its freedom.

The third: arrive at that same threshold, but this time with a specific saṅkalpa already formed — and understand what that saṅkalpa actually is. It is not simply a request sent outward, hoping for an answer to arrive. You are the creator of your entire reality, and your saṅkalpa does not just find what you seek. It manifests it. A specific person you wish to encounter. A question that needs answering. A place, a dimension, an experience you intend to explore. Set the intention clearly, and the experience itself arises to meet it — not because something out there grants it to you, but because you are the one generating it. The NST tradition is explicit: consciousness in the subtle state is extraordinarily responsive to intentional direction, and that responsiveness sharpens the more precisely the intention is formed. What requires enormous effort from the contracted self becomes effortless at this threshold, because you are no longer operating from limitation. You are operating from the source itself — and the source creates what it turns its attention toward.

Practitioners have known for a thousand years that a saṅkalpa sharpens when it is carried by a mantra or an affirmation — a specific phrase, repeated, that focuses the mind's intention the way a laser focuses light. An ordinary light bulb scatters its light in every direction at once — diffuse, weak, doing very little work. A laser takes that same light and concentrates it into a single, coherent beam, capable of cutting through steel. A mantra or an affirmation does the same thing to attention. It takes a mind that's scattered in a hundred directions and concentrates it into one focused beam, capable of real work. The modern pioneers of out-of-body exploration discovered the same thing independently, often in their own language, with their own words. Some phrases, used by enough practitioners over enough centuries, become Chaitanya — alive with energy in their own right. Others work simply because they are yours, spoken in your own language, shaped to focus your own mind. We will go deep into specific mantras and affirmations in a future issue. They are powerful tools in their own right, and they deserve their own full treatment.

This is the absolute play of consciousness — not a metaphor, but the living reality of what awareness does when it knows itself as free. Every experience, every dimension, every state of being is available to it. The entire universe arises within it and returns to it. And at the crest of that spanda pulse, in that infinitesimal gap between one breath and the next, you touch the same freedom.

The Śiva Sūtras name the one who has fully recognized this:

Siddhaḥ svatantrabhāvaḥ.

“An enlightened being lives in absolute freedom.”

This is the destination toward which every practice in this tradition points. Not as a distant ideal. As the recognition of what you already are. The Siddha does not acquire freedom. The Siddha recognizes that freedom was never absent. At the dvādaśānta, in that suspended moment at the crest of the primordial vibration, you are touching that recognition directly. The threshold is a glimpse of what full pratyabhijñā — full self-recognition — would make continuous.

This is what Mark Dyczkowski spent a lifetime illuminating. Not spanda as philosophy, but as the living pulse of a consciousness that is inherently, irreducibly free. His two-volume scholarly treatment, The Doctrine of Vibration and The Stanzas on Vibration, both SUNY Press, remains the definitive academic study of this teaching in English. Dyczkowski, who passed away in February 2025 after decades of preserving these texts, gave the Western world the scholarly architecture to understand what the practitioners had always known directly.

The Spanda Kārikās, the Stanzas on Vibration, one of the foundational texts of Nondual Śiva Tantra, teach that the entire universe arises from a single primordial vibration. Not as metaphor. As direct description of what is actually occurring. Consciousness moves. Reality appears. Consciousness stills. Reality dissolves. The cycle is continuous — happening right now, at every level of existence simultaneously, from the quantum field to the stars to the breath moving in and out of your body.

Spanda is that movement. It is not something consciousness produces. It is what consciousness does when it knows itself.

The Blue Pearl, which we explored in the last two issues, lives at this same threshold, consciousness at rest before the primordial vibration moves. The moment spanda pulses, the Blue Pearl becomes the universe. And the vibratory state you feel at the OBE threshold, in deep meditation, when the Kundalinī stirs at the base of the spine — that is spanda becoming perceptible. You are not having an unusual experience. You are feeling the universe arise. And at the crest of that arising, you are free to choose what comes next.

And the Blue Pearl itself is not merely a point of light that appears in meditation. It is the vibratory field of consciousness — Sat-Chit-Ānanda, pure existence, pure consciousness, pure bliss — permeating everything that exists. It is not somewhere else. It is the substance of reality, expressing itself as light when awareness is sufficiently still to perceive it.

The seventeenth-century Maharashtra saint Tukaram Mahārāj described it this way:

“My eyes have been bathed with the lotion of the blue light, and I have been granted divine vision.”

Tukaram was not speaking metaphorically. He was reporting what he saw. The same blue light that Robert Peterson encountered as a blazing ring of fire on his very first night — before he had any framework, any tradition, any preparation whatsoever. Two men. Centuries apart. No shared language, no shared culture, no shared practice. The same blue light.

Different rivers. The same ocean.

In English, we write it as OM. But the fuller rendering — the one that carries the actual teaching inside the word itself — is AUM.

Three letters. Three states of consciousness. A complete map of reality hidden inside a single sound.

The A — pronounced “ah” — is the waking state. The world you see when your eyes are open. Everything your senses can touch. The most outward expression of consciousness.

The U, pronounced “oo,” is the dream state. The interior world. The realm of subtle experience that lives between full waking and deep sleep. This is the territory of the tandra state — the threshold where the Astral Monk does much of his work.

The M — the hum that closes the sound — is deep sleep. Dissolution. All content falling away into undifferentiated stillness. Form returning to the formless.

And then — the silence after the M fades.

That silence is the fourth. Turīya. The witnessing awareness that was present through all three states and is present still. Not a sound. Not a state you enter. The ground that all three states arise from and dissolve back into.

AUM is not a religious chant. It is a complete description of what you are — moving from full expression through the dream threshold into dissolution and finally into the silence that is your actual nature.

That silence is spanda at rest. The Blue Pearl before it pulses.

When you intone AUM, you are not performing a ritual. You are tracing the complete arc of your own consciousness — from the outermost expression of the waking world all the way back to the source. Every time. In a single breath.

There are specific techniques — some of which we will explore in future issues and in the course — for using the AUM sound to initiate vibrations in the upper regions of the forehead and at the Sahasrāra, the crown chakra. With practice, these techniques open higher levels of consciousness with increasing ease and naturalness.

But even at the very beginning, simply chanting AUM sets vibrations moving through the entire body. Channels open. Something responds. You don’t need to understand the mechanics for it to work. Consciousness recognizes its own sound.

The ancient practitioners who discovered the power of AUM didn’t have scientific instruments to measure what was happening. They didn’t need them. They had something more direct — their own nervous systems, refined through years of practice into extraordinarily sensitive instruments.

What modern technology has done is find a way to help the unpracticed nervous system arrive at similar states more easily. Binaural beats work like this: you put on headphones, and each ear hears a slightly different tone. Your brain, trying to reconcile the two, naturally begins to pulse at the difference between them. Aim that difference at the right frequency — the slow, deep brain wave pattern associated with deep meditation and the threshold of sleep — and something remarkable happens. The nervous system begins to relax into the tandra state on its own. The same doorway the ancient yogis entered through decades of practice becomes more accessible.

Virtual reality works on a different but related principle. When you put on a VR headset and step into a fully immersive environment, your brain begins to treat that environment as real. Not metaphorically real. Neurologically real. The same circuits fire. The same responses activate. Why? Because consciousness doesn’t fundamentally distinguish between a vivid inner experience and an outer one. Both arise from the same source. The yogic tradition knew this thousands of years ago — it is the heart of the bhāvanā teaching, the understanding that consciousness brings into being what it fully inhabits. VR is simply the technological confirmation of what the meditators already knew.

And this is only the beginning. Neurofeedback systems, immersive environments designed for meditation, AI-assisted tools that learn your individual nervous system’s patterns — the technology emerging right now is moving in one direction: toward giving more people easier access to states that have always been available.

But I want to be clear about something, because I have always been consistent about this: technology can enhance human consciousness. This is pillar 3 in my teachings. It does not replace practice, and it is never the whole answer. Think of it like a flute or a guitar — the instrument creates an environment, a resonance, conditions that can take you higher. But the music comes from you. The awareness that enters those states is yours. The Śakti that moves is yours.

The tool points toward the door. You still have to walk through it.

So what do you actually do when the vibrations begin?

First: recognize what is happening. This is not something going wrong. This is not a medical event. This is not your imagination. This is spanda — the primordial pulse of consciousness, the living vibration underlying all of existence — becoming perceptible to you directly. That recognition alone changes everything. The moment you know what it is, fear has nothing to grip.

Second — don’t chase it. The moment you reach for the vibration, try to control it, try to direct it — it fades. The ego cannot drive this force. It can only be carried by it.

What works is this: place your attention on the vibration wherever it appears. Base of the spine. The forehead. The crown. Wherever you first feel it. Rest your awareness there gently — not grasping, not pushing. Just present.

Where you focus your attention, energy flows.

The vibration will respond. It will begin to spread, to intensify, to move through you on its own intelligence. Your only job is to stay present and allow. Surrender to the Śakti. Let your own highest nature do what it knows how to do.

Over time, with consistent practice, what once felt extraordinary becomes familiar. What once required effort begins to arrive on its own. The threshold lowers. The vibrations become more accessible, more welcoming.

That is the promise of this practice. Not occasional peak experiences. A permanent expansion of what you recognize as home.

What I’ve shared here is the beginning — the recognition of spanda, the surrender to it, the understanding of what it actually is. But there is much more to explore.

There are specific techniques — ancient and modern, drawn from the Vijñāna Bhairava Tantra, from the NST tradition, and from decades of my own direct practice — for working consciously with this energy. For moving it. For opening the channels through which it flows. For accelerating the awakening of the Kundalinī Śakti as it begins to stir within you.

We will go deep into those techniques together — in future issues, and in far greater practical detail in the Into the Light course, where you will have the opportunity to work with them directly, night by night, in your own practice.

For now, the most important thing is this: the energy is real. It is already within you. It has always been within you. And the moment you stop arguing with that fact — the moment you simply allow it — it begins to move.

Spanda is not something you will one day achieve. It is the living pulse of consciousness itself — the primordial vibration underlying all of existence, including you. It was moving before this universe began. It is moving now, in this moment, as you read these words.

And it announces itself differently to everyone.

The blue light of consciousness, the same light Tukaram Mahārāj saw as divine vision, the same light that meditators in every tradition have encountered at the threshold of the infinite, does not arrive in a single form. It moves through the filter of the mind that receives it. A practitioner steeped in the yogic tradition may first encounter it as a soft pulsing point of blue light behind the forehead. A Christian mystic may see it as the divine fire described by the Desert Fathers. A Tibetan practitioner encounters it as the thig le — the luminous drop at the heart of awareness. A Sufi may experience it as the light of the Divine Presence descending into the heart.

You already know what this looked like for Robert Peterson — the blazing ring of blue fire on his first night, with no framework to receive it.

What he didn’t have a name for, I can give you one for: a systematic path of consciousness expansion. Not a single peak experience to chase. Not an accident of sleep. A real discipline, built from the same three core areas that ground everything I teach. Astral projection and conscious out-of-body experience. Advanced meditation. Kundalinī/Śakti awakening. Three modes of the same deepening, each one capable of carrying you further into what you actually are.

As practitioners deepen, as the nervous system becomes more refined, the channels more open, the capacity to receive greater, the light begins to reveal itself more fully for what it is. The fire settles into a blazing orb of pulsating light. Not a small thing. The infinite potential of the universe itself, shining through — so vast and so bright that it must temper its own radiance simply to be seen at all. As you grow closer to it, as your capacity to receive it expands, it grows brighter still. There is no edge to it. No boundary where the light stops. Only more light, the closer you come. It is called the Blue Pearl because, at its smallest, most contained appearance, that is what it resembles. What it actually is has no size at all.

And this is exactly why the name matters — why I have always loved it.

The infinite light of the universe, blazing forth in its full nature, is almost impossible for the mind to grasp. But an orb of light, shaped like a pearl — that, the mind can hold. That is something to look toward, to focus on, to enter. This is bhāvanā: the contemplation that brings its own object into being. And here is the part most people never grasp — the mind does not distinguish between a genuine bhāvanā manifestation and what we call ordinary reality, because at the level of pure consciousness, they are not different things. What the mind can conceive and hold steady becomes real.

So when you see the Blue Pearl, even as a small point of light, even at its most contained, that seeing sets something in motion. A chain of increasingly powerful manifestations of light, each one expanding what came before. Surrender to it, and it keeps expanding. Further than you expect. Further than feels possible. Until there is no longer a pearl, and no longer a you watching it — only the recognition that you are nothing but that light.

And that light, in my experience, is blue. Whether it appears as a single point no larger than a dot, a glowing pearl, a blazing ring of electric blue fire — the way Robert Peterson saw it on a night he had no framework for — or a shimmering radiance with no edge, stretching to the boundaries of the universe itself, it is the same light, met at different distances.

This is the whole movement of the practice: changing your perception of yourself from a limited human being into a being of light. And when you finally accept it — when you recognize, not as a concept but as a direct experience, that you have no boundaries, no human form, no form at all, only light — your mind gets absolutely blown away. I can tell you that from direct experience.

And what rises in its place is joy. Not borrowed joy. Not the idea of joy. The joy of what you actually are, finally permitted to show itself.

Then you return. The body calls you back, the way it always does, and you shrink back into human form while still here on earth.

But something doesn’t fully leave.

The residual effect of that light continues. This is how you begin to see light everywhere — even, it seems, through your physical eyes. What is actually happening is that you are looking through the ajñā, the third eye, even while your attention rests on the physical world in front of you. The seeing changes. This has happened to me. It continues to happen.

There’s a saying — its true origin disputed, but I’ve always found it true — that a mind once truly stretched by a new idea never returns to its original dimensions. I would take that further. When the mind explodes into light, there is no going back to seeing, feeling, and functioning as the limited human being you once were. That door does not close again.

It takes real doing to integrate back into the body after an experience like this. This is exactly why I hold Pillar II — the psychological grounding work — as essential, not optional. Without it, the mind has nowhere to land.

Because here is what actually happens. The mind begins to perceive itself as light, as energy. The pulsations of thought, emotion, every idea that moves through you — none of it registers any longer as a small, local, personal experience. You recognize that the universe itself is expressing through you. Not only light. Everything. And the mind keeps expanding, with no edge to stop it.

I remember this happening to me directly. After my own kundalinī explosion at nineteen, I returned to the University of Florida on fire to find a teacher. Not long after I finally did, I took sannyāsa, the formal vows of monastic renunciation, receiving my first initiation into that life. My mind felt scrambled, almost discombobulated, in its wake. I remember asking myself, over and over: Who am I? Who am I? And when the answer finally arrived, it wasn’t a thought. I was light. I was love. I was pure consciousness — Sat-Chit-Ānanda.

And yet I could still live. Still laugh. Still function in the world — just not in the way I had before.

I remember what those days actually felt like. I could close my eyes at night, feel energy flowing through me, and simply lift off — into multidimensional worlds, flight after flight through realms I had no language for. And then I would come back. Wake up in the ashram, in this same body, now with a shaved head and ochre robes, answering to a name I had not been born with: Swami Jñānānanda Sarasvatī.

And I would think: I am just a being of light, hanging out in this human body. I am pure consciousness.

Everything was funny. Everything was happy. I could embrace the whole of life without needing it to be any different than what it already was. It was an extraordinary time — and I still wonder, sometimes, what the people around me made of this strange, impossibly happy young man.

But I still had to function in this world. So I had to find my way back — deliberately, with effort — to a place where I could live as a human being on this planet again. There are some funny stories from that period, and some strange ones, from the stretches when I seemed to have no mind at all. I wasn’t thinking. I wasn’t worrying. I was simply full of joy, full of happiness, with nothing left to be concerned about. I was in bliss.

And yet, as I grew older, I had to learn to pull myself back — to find a way to hold both worlds at once. That is the actual teaching here. Not how to escape into the light and stay there. How to live, fully human, fully grounded, while never forgetting what you actually are.

When the vibrations begin — and they do not arrive the same way for everyone — something extraordinary becomes possible. You find yourself outside the physical body. Below you, your sleeping form lies still and quiet. You are above it, or beside it, in a body of light. Fully conscious. Fully aware. Seeing in ways the physical eyes never could.

In that moment, you will know what it is. Not because you read it here. Because you will recognize it. Something in you already knows this. It has been with you longer than this body has.

That recognition is what this entire project exists to give you.

Direct experience reshapes your reality.

And you can learn how to access these states of consciousness deliberately — and at will.

There is a question I have left unanswered in this issue — one I think you are already beginning to feel forming at the edges of your awareness.

If spanda is the pulse underlying everything — if AUM is its primordial vibration — what happens when you consciously align your breath, your voice, and your awareness with that pulse continuously? Not just in meditation. All day. Every breath. What happens when the practice never stops? What happens when the prayer prays itself?

That is where we are going next.

See you there.

 Direct experience reshapes your reality.

And you can learn how to access these states of consciousness deliberately — and at will.

Dive inward, fly free.

Don Lee Daniels

Swami Jñānānanda Saraswatī

The Astral Monk