With Don Lee Daniels

(Swami Jnanananda Saraswati)

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

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I want to tell you about something that happened to me in meditation. Not once. Many times. But the first time changed everything.

I was sitting. Body quiet, breath slow, mind beginning to still. Eyes closed, gaze turned inward toward the space behind my forehead — the ājñā chakra, the third eye. This is not a metaphor. It is a doorway to the higher levels of consciousness, the place where you begin to see not just with the eyes but from something far more expansive — a seeing that eventually becomes all-seeing, the 360-degree awareness I will describe in a moment. And then I saw it.

A tiny blue speck of light. Brilliant. Impossibly small. Absolutely alive.

My mind locked onto it. I could not look away. I was mesmerized, captivated — held by something that felt more real than anything I had ever seen with open eyes. My meditation deepened, and I knew in that moment that whatever happened was perfect. I surrendered completely.

The light grew brighter. It began to pulsate and shimmer. And then the love arrived. Not emotional love. Not romantic love. A love so vast and so complete that it erased the word. Peace flooded in behind it. And then a sound — a vibrational frequency that permeated my entire being. The closest word is Om — or more precisely, AUM, where each syllable carries a different dimension of creation, condensing finally into the vibration at the crown of the head. But even that does not capture it. This was not a sound I was hearing. This was a sound I was becoming. And I knew — with absolute certainty — that this frequency was the cause of everything. The entire manifest universe existed because of this vibration. The Gospel of John says it plainly: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Word is the vibration. There is no separation. The mystics of every tradition have known this. We will go much deeper into this in a future issue.

The light grew stronger. I entered it.

I looked at my hands. They were turning blue. I looked at my arms. They were dissolving. Not frightening. Not strange. Just true. The body was becoming light.

And then the body was gone.

I was not a person. I was not a man sitting in a meditation hall. I was awareness itself — pure, complete, unbounded, radiating in every direction simultaneously. There was no center and no edge. Everything streamed from this point — not from me as an individual, but from a source that could only be described as 360 degrees of creation. I was the point of all manifestation. Blue light was everywhere. I was the light.

I was so complete. So full of love. So full of knowing that everything — everything — was complete in itself. There is nothing in ordinary life that compares to this.

Then the blue light began to lessen.

I knew I was returning. But even as consciousness started to contract, the blue light was still everywhere — shimmering, scintillating, sparkling through every particle of my being. My body was shimmering with it. Memories began to seep in — quietly at first, then more insistently. I felt myself adopting those memories as my identity. More and more, the person reassembled. I condensed back into the one I now call Don Lee Daniels, Swami Jñānānanda Saraswatī. The character I am playing on this planet, at this time.

But here is what changed everything: I did not feel sad.

Because I knew — I knew with the certainty of direct experience — that this blue light exists within me in its totality. Right now. Always. It is not something I have to reach for. It is not far away. It is not reserved for monks or mystics or saints. It is a breath away. A thought away. And it exists within you, too — within every person walking this earth — in its full, undiminished power and majesty.

Most people have no idea. No clue. Not even a suspicion of the enormity of what lives inside them.

This is the Kingdom of Heaven. Not a place you go after death. Not a reward for good behavior. A living reality, pulsing inside you right now, waiting to be recognized.

And this is only one experience on a vast spectrum.

There are many levels of light. Many levels of multidimensional consciousness. Worlds you can visit, explore, and return from — worlds as real as the room you are sitting in right now. Some resemble Earth. Some are shimmering landscapes of light that defy anything the human mind can construct or imagine. And along the way, you meet beings — beings of pure light, some more complete than others, some so luminous and so far beyond ordinary description that language simply stops.

This is why I teach astral projection and conscious out-of-body experience (OBE). These are not parlor tricks. They are doorways into a multidimensional reality that has always been here — and with training, anyone can learn to walk through them.

But eventually, even these worlds dissolve into light. Every realm, every dimension, every landscape of consciousness leads deeper. And at the deepest point — at the very source — is the Blue Pearl.

And as you go deeper in meditation, the Blue Pearl intensifies. What begins as a tiny pinpoint of blue light grows brighter, becoming an actual orb of scintillating blue light — brilliant but cool at the same time, radiating with love. As you approach it — or it approaches you — you enter it. And in that entering, you realize that you are that light. Everything you see within it is part of a vast ocean of consciousness, and all of it is scintillating with that same blue radiance.

And then something remarkable happens when you return to the body, to the earth plane. You begin to see the blue light everywhere. In people. In trees. In animals. Even in the air you breathe. The blue light is everywhere, at all times. We are simply not aware of it. This is the color of Shakti — the living power of consciousness itself, shimmering through all of creation.

My experiences with the Blue Pearl and the blue light are the most momentous of my life. Not because they are the most dramatic. Because they are the closest I have come to what I can only call the face of God. Or simply, from the ancient texts — Shiva. Sat-Cit-Ānanda. Pure existence. Pure consciousness. Pure bliss.

And I can show you the map.

Around the same time as my first encounters with the Blue Pearl and the scintillating blue light, I made a discovery that excited me to the depths of my heart.

I was studying an ancient text from Nondual Shaiva Tantra called the Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam. Let me break that word down for you, because the name itself is the teaching. Pratyabhijñā means recognition. Hṛdayam means heart. This is the Heart of Recognition. It is the condensed essence of a much larger body of scripture — an entire philosophical system distilled into twenty sūtras. Twenty short verses that contain the whole of Nondual Shaiva Tantra’s understanding of consciousness, creation, and liberation. And what is being recognized? That you are pure consciousness. That is the whole path. Not acquiring something new. Not becoming something you are not. Simply recognizing what you have always been. It is that simple. And it is that deep.

Written over a thousand years ago. Twenty concise sūtras that contain the entire philosophy of Nondual Shaiva Tantra. That is all.

The word sūtra may be unfamiliar, but you already know it in another form. It is the origin of the English word suture — to stitch, to string together. A sūtra is a thread. And like beads strung on a single thread, each sūtra holds a concentrated truth that connects to all the others.

When I was a monk, I carried a mala (actually I still do) — a strand of prayer beads. As I walked or practiced breathing techniques, I would move one bead at a time through my fingers, repeating a mantra with each one. Each bead a complete practice. Each bead connected to the next. A sūtra works the same way — each one a single, concentrated teaching that you can hold, turn over, and enter more deeply every time you return to it. If you have ever seen a Christian rosary, you already understand the principle. Same practice. Different tradition.

Twenty beads. One thread. The entire round trip of consciousness — from source to manifestation and back again — mapped in a single text you can hold in one hand.

And as I read them, I realized the sages had described exactly what I had experienced.

The translations that follow are drawn primarily from Jaideva Singh's Pratyabhijñāhṛdayam: The Secret of Self-Recognition and Christopher Wallis's The Recognition Sutras, adapted here for clarity.

Listen to this.

That is the Blue Pearl before it explodes into light. That is the singularity — the dimensionless point from which everything streams. Consciousness projects the entire universe on the screen of its own awareness. Not onto something else. Onto itself.

Then the text traces the descent. Over the next ten sūtras, consciousness differentiates. It contracts. It becomes mind, then energy, then matter. It forgets its own nature. It adopts limitation as identity. It becomes a person — with memories, preferences, a name, a body, a story.

I read those sūtras and thought: I watched this happen. I watched consciousness contract back into Don Lee Daniels. I watched memories seep in and become my identity. I watched the infinite become local.

The sages were not theorizing. They were reporting.

And then comes the return journey — Sūtras 16 through 20. This is the part that took my breath away.

Not escape. Not death. Not leaving the world behind. Freedom while you are still here.

There is a verse in the Shiva Sūtras that says it perfectly: Even during the three states of consciousness — waking, dreaming, and deep sleep — the rapturous experience of the fourth state, turīya, abides.

Read that again. It does not say turīya replaces the other states. It abides, it flows, through them. You wake up, drink your coffee, drive to work, fall asleep at night — and the fourth state, that deep ground of pure awareness, never leaves. It is running underneath everything like an underground river.

The great sage Abhinavagupta described what this actually feels like from the inside:

It is Shiva himself, of unimpeded will and transparent consciousness, who is ever sparkling in my heart. It is his highest Shakti herself who is ever playing at the edges of my senses. The entire world glows as one with the bliss of my consciousness. Indeed, I know not what the word samsara refers to.

That is not philosophy. That is a man reporting what it is like to live in a state of continuous recognition. The world does not disappear. It glows.

And I can tell you from my own experience — that is exactly what happens. When you come out of samādhi, when you come out of this state and open your eyes, your mind does not rejoin the world like a metal trap snapping shut. You linger at the edge of that awareness. My teacher used to admonish students who would jump up the moment meditation ended. He would say: sit still. Integrate what you have just experienced. Do not lose it. He understood that the afterglow is not the end of the practice — it is where the real work happens.

The same is true when you return from an out-of-body experience. Sit still. Remember. Ponder what you have just experienced. Let it solidify in your subconscious. Because the remembrance of these experiences — whether from deep meditation or a conscious OBE — is what begins to change you at the deepest level. It changes your neural pathways. It changes your point of reference. And over time, your default nature begins to shift toward that of pure consciousness itself. The seeing of the Blue Pearl, the light of divinity shimmering in everything around you — it stops being something you reach for. It begins to happen quite naturally, on its own.

And when you linger there, you begin to see that this world is bathed in that same glow — the scintillating blue light, shimmering in everything. You see it in the trees. In the air. In the faces of strangers. Your heart swells with love, and you cannot help it, because you are seeing them in that light. You know they may not see it in themselves. But you can see it. That light is part of you. It is your light, manifesting in other forms.

Now — what is the Center? This is where the teaching becomes very specific and very practical.

The Center is not a metaphor. At the most tangible level, it is the central channel of the subtle body — the brahma nāḍī, the innermost pathway of the spine. On either side of it run the iḍā and piṅgalā nāḍīs, the two currents of energy that govern ordinary awareness. When the Kuṇḍalinī awakens — when Shakti begins to rise — She enters the central channel and begins to expand upward through each energy center, each chakra. At each level, consciousness expands. Perception changes. The boundaries of ordinary identity begin to dissolve.

When Shakti reaches the sahasrāra — the crown — that is full expansion. That is the merging back into pure consciousness. That is the return to the Blue Pearl, the singularity, the source.

But the Center goes deeper than the subtle body. The Center — madhya — is ultimately the core of your own being. It is the silent, ever-present awareness that exists as the foundation of every experience you have ever had. It is there between your thoughts. It is there in the gap between your breaths. It is there in the pause between one sensory perception and the next. You have been passing through the Center your entire life without recognizing it.

The expansion that this sūtra describes is not about forcing something open. It is about bringing sustained, quiet attention to what is already there — that silent core — and allowing it to reveal itself. When you rest in it, something extraordinary happens. The boundaries between you and the world begin to dissolve. Not because you are losing yourself, but because you are finding what was always underneath the boundaries.

When I experience the expansion of the Center, it is sometimes like entering a tunnel of light. A shimmering tunnel of golden, silver, and bluish light — traveling upward, expanding, opening. And as you travel deeper into it, something extraordinary begins to happen. You realize the Center is not a center at all. It is not a location. It is not a point on a map of the body.

It is an expansion of consciousness into other levels of seeing. A multidimensional consciousness expansion. And what you come to understand — not with the mind but with an awareness that is beyond the mind entirely — is that this Center is the core of the universe itself. Everything emanates from it. You see this. You feel this. You know this on a level so deep that words stop working.

And it is absolutely still. The most immense experience of your life — and it is utterly, perfectly still. You watch with amazement.

Then, as you return into body awareness, the mind begins to wrap itself around what just occurred.

Sūtra 18 describes the methods — and they are exactly what I teach. Dissolving mental constructs. Working with the expansion and contraction of Shakti. Breath practices. Focusing on the point where awareness originates. These are not abstract ideas. These are techniques. This is a technology of consciousness that is over a thousand years old.

Sūtra 19 describes what happens when you keep practicing: you emerge from deep meditation still saturated with its effects, and by repeatedly recognizing your unity with pure awareness, you attain a state of permanently established samādhi — awareness that never leaves, even in the middle of ordinary life.

And Sūtra 20 — the final sūtra — declares the destination: full immersion in the perfect I-consciousness, which is the essence of light and bliss. Sovereignty over the entire field of your own awareness. And it ends with two words that say everything:

Iti Śivam

All is Shiva. All is consciousness. The journey is complete.

Twenty sūtras. The entire round trip. From the Blue Pearl — the singularity of the quantum physicists, the dimensionless point where everything explodes into our condensed reality — all the way down to your morning coffee. And then back again to pure consciousness. That is the spiritual journey we are all on. And it is something every one of us can experience.

And the Blue Pearl itself is one of the most extraordinary focusing tools available to a practitioner. When it appears, you do not have to force anything. Your mind locks onto it — captivated, mesmerized, utterly still. The thought waves quiet on their own. You are drawn into it like a moth to a flame, like iron to a magnet. The Blue Pearl does the work. All you have to do is show up and be willing to enter.

I will tell you something that surprised me. In my earlier days, when I had these experiences and came back into the body, the body felt cold. Dull. Inert. After the boundlessness of pure consciousness, this physical form felt heavy and confining. There were moments when I was not sure I wanted to be back.

A word of caution here. For some people, when these experiences beyond the body begin to open up, there can be a tendency to deny the body, deny the world, and deny the very real challenges of being human. In psychology, we call this spiritual bypassing — using transcendent experience as an escape from life rather than as a deepening of it. I have seen it. I have felt the pull of it myself. And it is a detour, not a destination. We will explore this more fully in a future issue, because it matters. But for now, know this: the goal is not to leave the world behind. The goal is to see the world as it truly is — and live in it fully.

But that is a transition phase. And it passes.

The more I traveled that round trip between the source and the body, the more something began to shift. I began to see that even this physical form is nothing but light. The body is not an obstacle. It is a temple — the temple of the Kingdom of God. And when you begin to honor it as that, something remarkable happens. It begins to work better. Your health improves. Your energy changes. Your relationship with being alive in a body transforms entirely.

Sometimes I would look down at my own hands, even in ordinary waking awareness, and my ājñā chakra would open — and I would see my arms and hands as consisting of blue sparkling light. Not in meditation. Not in an OBE. Right here, in this body, in this room.

Sometimes I see the people around me turning blue. In a grocery store. Just standing there in the checkout line, and the blue light begins to shimmer through them. And I laugh. My heart is so happy. Of course, they have no idea they are turning blue. But it makes me laugh — because I can see what they cannot yet see in themselves.

And I knew. I knew that even this body is made of pure consciousness. The mystics have always said this. And quantum physicists are saying the same thing now from a completely different direction — that everything, at its most fundamental level, is energy. There is no solid matter anywhere. It is all vibrating energy, all the way down.

When you know this — not as a theory but as a direct experience — you understand that you are not your body. You are the energy flowing through it. And rather than diminishing the experience of being human, that understanding makes it extraordinary. You become more comfortable in your body. More at ease in the world. You honor this life because you know what it actually is.

And you know for certain that there is so much more beyond.

I have spent over forty years exploring that “more.” And what I have discovered — through direct experience, through the ancient texts of Nondual Shaiva Tantra, and through the work of modern scientists and consciousness researchers — is that the Blue Pearl is not simply a mystical vision. It is a doorway. A doorway into the source of everything. And the map for traveling through that doorway has existed for over a thousand years.

In the next issue, I am going to share specific practices from the ancient texts that can begin opening this doorway for you. I will also share something remarkable — that modern science and the pioneers of out-of-body experience are confirming what the mystics knew a thousand years ago, arriving at the same conclusions from completely different directions. The convergence is extraordinary. And it has everything to do with you.

Because the Blue Pearl is not my experience alone. It is the nature of consciousness to expand. And consciousness is what you are.

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