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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In over forty years of practice, I have felt this energy arrive in every conceivable way.

Sometimes it roars — a torrent of Śakti that sweeps through the body with such force and intelligence and love that you have no choice but to surrender completely. Sometimes it moves the body itself. The spine lifts. The arms rise into precise positions. The body flows into āsana that no teacher ever showed me — because the teacher is the Śakti itself, moving through the body with perfect intelligence. In my tradition, these spontaneous movements have a name: kriyā, sometimes called spontaneous yoga. They are not random. They are the Kuṇḍalinī energy moving through the chakras and the subtle body with deliberate purpose — clearing, opening, purifying — driving consciousness upward through successive levels of experience toward dimensions that have no adequate name in ordinary language. The energy will teach you yoga, even if you don’t know it.

I will be teaching much more about kriyā as we go deeper into this work. The movement of Kuṇḍalinī through the body, through the subtle layers of being, and ultimately into the astral and higher bodies — this is a vast and extraordinary territory. It is also, in my direct experience, one of the most accelerated pathways into conscious out-of-body experience that I know. The energy does not stop when you leave the body. It continues. And what becomes available on the other side — the states, the sights, the recognitions — is beyond anything the ordinary mind can anticipate from where it now stands.

Sometimes it shoots upward through the crown and catapults awareness into dimensions of light and consciousness that have no adequate name in any language I know.

And sometimes — especially in the threshold space between waking and sleep, or at the deepest point of meditation — it begins as something almost imperceptibly subtle. A trickle of energy. A faint warmth at the base of the spine. A gentle hum that, the moment you place your attention on it, begins to grow.

That trickle is what I want to talk about today.

Because for most practitioners, that is where it begins. Not with a roar. Not with an explosion of light. With something quiet enough that it’s easy to miss — easy to dismiss as imagination, as tiredness, as nothing worth paying attention to.

It is not nothing. It is everything.

And here is what the tradition knows — and what forty years of practice has confirmed for me beyond any doubt: where you place your focus, the energy grows. Where attention goes, power flows. Not because you are generating something from outside yourself. Because the energy is you. It is your own consciousness, your own awareness, your own deepest nature — and the moment you turn toward it, it turns toward you. It was always already there. Your attention is simply the invitation.

The moment you place your attention on that subtle current, something shifts. It begins to warm, to spread, to deepen. What started as a faint signal becomes a living presence moving through you with what I can only describe as intelligence — because it is intelligent. It is your own highest nature, beginning to make itself known.

Over time, with practice, that recognition deepens. The subtle trickle becomes familiar. You learn to welcome it rather than ignore it. You learn to surrender to it rather than control it. The limitations and blockages begin to fade. Until eventually the energy becomes a daily occurrence — sometimes a gentle current, sometimes a torrent that verges on ecstasy, always moving through you with such love that you cannot help but be carried along.

And when you begin to realize that this energy is ultimately your own — that you are being transformed from within, remembering who you actually are — something begins to shift.

Not urgency. Something quieter and more profound. A gradual reorientation. The smaller self — the habitual, contracted version of who you thought you were — begins to feel less solid, less real. More diaphanous. And what remains, what grows more vivid and more present, is the larger Self. Pure consciousness. Pure intelligence. Pure love.

This is not a force that overwhelms you. It is you. It moves at your pace, always. You can lean into it and feel it intensify, or you can simply rest in its presence. It is perfectly intelligent because it is your own highest nature expressing itself. There is nothing to fear in merging with what you most deeply are.

To me, that merging — into light, into love, into the living pulse of awareness itself — is the most exciting thing a human being can do.

Not everyone’s first encounter with this force arrives gently.

Robert Peterson was eighteen years old, a college freshman, when his father handed him Robert Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body. He was skeptical, scientific-minded, not given to mystical thinking. He tried Monroe’s technique once, out of curiosity, on a single night.

What arrived was not a trickle.

In his own words: “A kind of electrical ‘vibration’ violently swept into my body, filling my body with an electric-like shock and a terrible roaring noise.” He panicked. He fought it. The vibrations smoothed and faded. He walked to the kitchen, got a glass of water, and spent the rest of the night shaking his arms and legs to reassure himself he was fully back inside his body.

But here is what matters most about Peterson’s story — and why I’m telling it.

From behind his closed eyelids, he saw a ring of blazing blue electrical fire, moving directly toward him. Bright blue. Sparking. He had never heard of the Blue Pearl. He had never encountered the ancient yogic literature describing the blue light of consciousness. He had no framework whatsoever for what he was seeing.

He saw it anyway.

That blue ring was not a hallucination. It was not a product of fear. It was Śakti — the living intelligence of consciousness — announcing itself at the threshold between the contracted self and the infinite. The same phenomenon that practitioners in the NST tradition have mapped for over a thousand years. The same blue light. The same doorway.

But he went back. And then back again. And what began as terror became the greatest adventure of his life. Over four decades of practice, Robert Peterson has logged hundreds of verified out-of-body experiences — conscious, deliberate departures from the physical body into multidimensional states of awareness that he documents with the precision of the software engineer he is. Every attempt, every failure, every threshold sensation, every full OBE recorded with the same methodical care a scientist brings to a research journal. That documentation became three books: Out of Body Experiences: How to Have Them and What to Expect (Hampton Roads, 1997), Lessons Out of the Body (Hampton Roads, 2001), and Hacking the Out-of-Body Experience (Hampton Roads, 2023). His work is available at robertpeterson.org.

I have read every one of them. I look forward to meeting him one day.

Like me, Robert Peterson now marvels at the reality of what we are — beings of consciousness capable of moving freely beyond the limitations of the physical body. Like me, he would tell you that what waits on the other side of that initial fear is more extraordinary than anything you can imagine from inside it.

The difference between his first night and everything that followed was simply this: he got a map. He learned what the vibrations were. And once he knew, fear had nothing left to stand on.

That is exactly what the Astral Monk Project exists to give you — before you arrive at the threshold.

The Name the Masters Gave It

Modern physics agrees with what the masters of Nondual Śaiva Tantra discovered through direct experience: everything vibrates. Every atom in your body is in constant motion. The chair you sit on, the air you breathe, the thoughts moving through your mind — all of it is vibration at different frequencies, different densities, different rates of oscillation. When something stops vibrating, it ceases to exist in any form we can perceive. Existence itself is movement.

The masters of Nondual Śaiva Tantra arrived at this same recognition not through instruments or equations but through the direct investigation of consciousness itself. They turned attention inward with the same rigor that scientists turn instruments outward — and they found the same thing. At the foundation of everything: vibration. Pulse. Movement arising from stillness and returning to it.

They gave that pulse a name.

And they were not alone. Mystics and contemplatives across many traditions — Tibetan Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, Sufism, the Jewish mystics of the Kabbalistic tradition, the Hesychast fathers of the Christian East — each arrived independently at the same discovery and named it in their own language. The underlying reality they were pointing to was identical. But it is in the tradition of Nondual Śaiva Tantra — my lineage — that this vibratory pulse received its most precise philosophical mapping, its most rigorous technical treatment, and its most direct transmission from teacher to student across an unbroken line of over a thousand years.

That name is spanda.

The Spanda Kārikās — the Stanzas on Vibration, composed in the ninth century CE and among the foundational texts of Nondual Śaiva Tantra — open with a declaration that has never been surpassed for precision or power:

Yasyon meṣanimeṣābhyāṃ jagataḥ pralayodayau.

By whose opening and closing of the eyes, the universe dissolves and arises.

The scholar Mark Dyczkowski, whose two landmark works on the Spanda school — The Doctrine of Vibration (SUNY, 1987) and The Stanzas on Vibration (SUNY, 1992) — remain the definitive academic treatment of this teaching in English, describes spanda this way: “Divine Consciousness is not simply cold, inert intellection. It is rather spanda — active, dynamic, throbbing with life, creative pulsation.”

That is not philosophy. That is a description of lived experience — the same experience that Robert Peterson stumbled into on a single night, that I have lived for over forty years, that you may already be touching at the edges of your own awareness without yet having a name for it.

Spanda. From the Sanskrit root meaning to throb, to quiver, to move with life. The Nondual Śaiva Tantra tradition identified spanda as the fundamental vibratory activity of consciousness itself. Not a vibration that happens inside consciousness, the way a thought arises and passes. Spanda is the pulse by which consciousness creates, sustains, and dissolves all of experience. It is the living heartbeat of reality.

This is not a metaphor. It is a precise technical description — arrived at through thousands of hours of direct contemplative investigation by practitioners who mapped these states with the same care that physicists map subatomic particles. What Robert Peterson felt sweeping into his body on that first night — that electrical roaring, that overwhelming surge of energy — was spanda. Raw. Unfiltered. Without any framework to receive it.

What I have felt moving through me in meditation for over forty years — the warm current, the Śakti, the living intelligence of awareness recognizing itself — is spanda. The same pulse. A different relationship to it.

The vibrational state that so many OBE practitioners encounter at the threshold of leaving the body — that humming, buzzing, electric aliveness that often precedes the separation — is spanda at the boundary between dimensions of experience. Not everyone feels it. There are many doorways into the multidimensional, and the body’s vibrational signature is only one of them. But for those who do encounter it, the tradition knew exactly what it was. They built an entire science around working with it deliberately.

What keeps most people from recognizing this in their own experience is not lack of evidence. It is the accumulation of beliefs that harden into concepts, and concepts that quietly install a false orientation — one so pervasive we rarely think to question it. That orientation says: I am a small human being, navigating a large and mostly indifferent universe, occasionally reaching for something spiritual.

This is completely backwards.

You are not a human being trying to have a spiritual experience. You are pure consciousness — infinite, luminous, and free — currently experiencing itself as a human being. That is not poetry. That is the most precise description of your actual situation available in any language.

Just that understanding — received not as a concept but as a living recognition — begins to open doors within you that you never knew existed. The vibrational field that the masters mapped, that modern physics circles around from the outside, that Robert Peterson stumbled into on a single night without any preparation — it becomes accessible. Not because you acquired a new technique. Because you stopped blocking what was always already moving through you.

And when you stop blocking it, the inner Śakti — the intelligence that is your own deepest nature — moves to meet you. Things begin to accelerate. New dimensions of experience open. The idea of moving beyond the physical body stops being a fantasy and becomes what it actually is: a natural expression of what you most fundamentally are.

That is where we leave it for now.

But I want to tell you what’s coming — because it changes the practice completely.

The yogic tradition identified a precise point in the breath cycle where the ordinary contracted self suspends. Where time loosens. Where pure awareness stands momentarily unobstructed — and something extraordinary becomes possible.

Not as a peak experience you might stumble into. As a threshold you can learn to work with deliberately.

In the next issue, I’m going to take you there. We will go inside that threshold — feel what it actually is, understand what’s available at the crest of that pulse — and I will give you the three choices that the tradition says a free being can make from that position.

This is where spanda stops being a teaching and becomes a tool.

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