With Don Lee Daniels

(Swami Jnanananda Saraswati)

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

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What you may not know is this: every time you breathe in and out, there are openings in consciousness — at the very top of the breath, and at the bottom of the breath. The yogis and the mystics have always known this.

This world is not quite what it appears to be. It is as real as any other world in the vast multidimensional universe we actually inhabit — and if that sentence just stopped you, there is an entire issue of this newsletter devoted to exactly that. You'll want to find it.

But right now — your breath. It moves in and out of your body approximately 21,600 times today. At the crown of each inhale. At the floor of each exhale. A gap. A threshold. A moment where the veil between ordinary consciousness and something vast, something luminous, something beyond description, becomes paper thin.

You have passed through that doorway 21,600 times today.

And you probably didn't notice once.

That's not a criticism. That's why I'm here.

I have spent forty years exploring the terrain of consciousness through three doorways that the world's greatest mystics have always known — and that modern science is only beginning to catch up to.

The first: astral projection and conscious out-of-body experience (OBE) — the direct, verifiable discovery that you are not your body. That awareness can operate beyond it, travel beyond it, know beyond it.

The second: advanced meditation — the deep states of consciousness the tradition calls tandra, turiya, and samadhi — where the ordinary mind grows quiet enough to reveal what was always behind it.

The third: the awakening of Kundalini Shakti — the underlying force the mystics of every tradition have always known. Called the Holy Spirit in Christianity. Chi in Taoism. Rigpa in Tibetan Buddhism. Prana in the Vedic tradition. It is the single living current that moves through every genuine spiritual experience — including the breath.

The breath is not separate from any of this. That gap at the top of the inhale, that stillness at the bottom of the exhale — that is Kundalini territory. That is the tandra threshold. That is the launching pad for conscious out-of-body experience. It is all the same current. Accessed through different doors.

Whether you are reading these words, watching them on video, or hearing them on the podcast — welcome. You have found your way here through one of those doors already. The teaching is the same across every platform. The transmission is the same. What matters is that you are here.

And the single best way to stay here — to receive every new teaching, every exploration, every practice — is to subscribe to this free weekly newsletter at theastralmonk.com. Everything begins there. The videos, the podcast episodes, the courses, and books to come — they all flow from this page, this practice, this conversation between us.

Now. Let's go deeper.

As we get older, time speeds up.

You've felt it. The years compress. Decades pass like seasons. But time is not the illusion I want to talk about.

Here is the deeper truth: this world — everything you see, touch, hear, and believe to be solid and permanent — is consciousness condensed into form. The chair you're sitting in. The screen you're reading. Your own hand. At the subatomic level, it is all vibrating energy. Vibrating atoms. Mostly empty space, pulsing with intelligence. The mystics knew this thousands of years before quantum physics confirmed it.

This world is no more inherently solid than a dream. It is a dream that we have collectively agreed upon — agreed is real, agreed is solid, agreed is all there is. And when you have been inside that agreement long enough, you forget it is an agreement. You forget there was ever anything else.

Einstein captured it with characteristic wit: "Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one."

Persistent. Yes. But still an illusion.

And here is the question that The Astral Monk Project exists to answer: are you going to wake up inside it — before it's over?

Because waking up is not like stepping out of a movie. You don't leave. You don't escape. You stay fully in the world — but you see it with completely different eyes. Eyes that recognize what it actually is. And once you see it that way — truly see it, from direct experience, not as a philosophy — you cannot go back to sleep. It's too exciting. Too astonishing. Too beautiful.

The Shiva Sutras say it in four words: Vismayo yogabhūmikāḥ.

The stages of enlightenment, of awakening, are astonishing.

They are right.

I have great compassion for where most of us begin.

We have been trained — from childhood, through every institution, every cultural message — to believe we are small. Separate. Limited. To look outside ourselves for answers. To distrust the very experiences that were pointing us home. That training runs deep. I understand that. I lived inside it too, before something cracked it open.

But here is the truth I want to give you today — not as philosophy, not as religion, but as forty years of direct lived experience:

You are not small. You are the infinite expressing itself through a human body. You are pure consciousness — choosing, for a time, to express as this particular human being, in this particular life, at this particular moment in history.

And the doorways back to that recognition are everywhere. They are in every breath. They are in the liminal threshold before sleep — what the ancient tradition of Nondual Shaiva Tantra calls the tandra state. They are in that ordinary moment of awe — the sudden stillness in the grocery store, the sunset that stopped your thoughts, the piece of music that made you forget you had a name.

You are already standing at the doorway. You pass through it constantly. You just don't know yet what you're looking at.

I do this not only because it brings me great joy — but because once you know you can fly, it becomes almost impossible not to show others that their wings work too.

Everything I do — every practice I teach, every word in this newsletter, every video on this channel — rests on one declaration:

Direct experience reshapes your reality.

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

Not belief. Not philosophy. Not someone else's testimony — however beautiful, however ancient, however authoritative. Your own direct, firsthand encounter with consciousness beyond the body. Beyond the mind. Beyond the boundaries of what you thought you were.

One genuine experience changes the trajectory. But we don't stop there. We go back. Again and again. Through advanced meditation. Through conscious out-of-body experience and astral projection. Through the awakening of the force that every genuine mystical tradition in human history has recognized — called Kundalini in my tradition. The Holy Spirit in Christianity. Chi in Taoism. Rigpa in Tibetan Buddhism. Shakti in the Vedic tradition.

Different names. One reality.

We go back until the recognition becomes stable. Until you no longer need a peak experience to know who you are. Until the awareness that you are pure consciousness — here, now, in the middle of ordinary life — becomes the ground you stand on rather than the exception you occasionally touch.

It is your natural state. The nature of consciousness is to expand. You are not striving toward something foreign — you remember who you have always been.

The veil is not thick. It is one breath away.

I want to speak to the full spectrum of people this project is for. Not neat categories — a living spectrum. If you find yourself anywhere along this continuum, this is for you.

The tradition I was formally initiated into in 1980 — Nondual Shaiva Tantra, in the lineage of Bhagawan Nityānanda — honors every one of these experiences as valid, real, and pointing toward the same source. I have spent forty years learning how to navigate this terrain. And I will teach it that way.

If you are a serious practitioner or meditator — someone who has sat for years, perhaps decades, who has tasted something real and wants to go deeper — this is for you. And if you practice in a tradition that has included Kundalini awakening, whether expected or spontaneous — and you are still looking for someone who truly understands what you experienced — you have found that here.

If you have had spontaneous out-of-body experiences (OBEs) or lucid dreams — waking up outside your body, moving through walls, finding yourself somewhere else entirely — and didn't know what to do with it. Perhaps you were taught to disregard it. Perhaps your tradition dismissed it. Perhaps you simply had no framework for what happened.

It was real. It was not imagination. There is an entire body of knowledge — both ancient and modern — that explains exactly what you experienced and how to return there deliberately. The great mystics and yogis of the Nondual Shaiva Tantra tradition mapped this terrain thousands of years ago. And in our own time, modern pioneers — Robert Monroe, William Buhlman, and researchers at institutions such as the Monroe Institute — have explored the same territory through rigorous scientific investigation, yielding verified, repeatable results.

The ancient maps and modern research point to the same thing. You are not alone in what you experienced. And there is a direct path back — not by accident, not by waiting — but by practice.

If you have had a peak experience that arrived without warning — standing at a sunset, listening to music, at the birth of a child, or in a love so overwhelming you couldn't contain it — and in that moment felt something vast pointing back to the source of everything. And you didn't know what to do with it. And you couldn't find your way back.

This is exactly about that. That experience was real. It was pointing at something. And there is a direct path back, and I’ll say it again — not by accident, not by waiting — but by practice.

If you have had a near-death experience (NDE) — if you crossed a threshold you didn't choose and came back with something you cannot explain and cannot forget — hear this clearly. What you experienced was real. The light was real. The love was real. The beings who greeted you were real. The music — and if you have heard that music, you know there are no words — was real.

It doesn't end where you left it. It only expands. Every level: more love, more joy, more beauty. There is no ceiling. There is no punishment waiting. There is only light. And you do not have to wait until you die to go back.

And if you are brand new to all of this — someone who has felt, perhaps their whole life, that the frameworks you were given have never been able to touch what you most deeply sense is true — you deserve the real teaching, not a softened version of it.

There is always hope. There is always love. There is always joy within.

Not as a future promise. As the deepest nature of what you already are — right now — waiting to be recognized.

Every single experience on this spectrum — the OBE, the NDE, the Kundalini awakening, the peak moment of grace, the deep meditation that dissolved the boundaries of self — every one of them is pointing at the same truth. You are not a human being occasionally touching something spiritual. You are pure consciousness expressing itself through a human form. And the moment that understanding moves from concept to direct experience — it changes everything. Permanently.

I want to tell you something about this morning.

Sleep, dreams, and meditation are beginning to merge. It's quite exciting and quite beautiful. The energy flows through me like water.

After forty years of practice, this is what it looks like. Not heroic effort. Not straining toward something distant. The Shiva Sutras speak of a state called turiya — the fourth state — that begins to pour itself like oil into waking, into dreaming, into deep sleep. Your entire world starts becoming what I can only describe as the play of consciousness itself.

Dancing with the energy of life. Moving through life like a river flowing to the ocean.

There is a witness that begins to become stronger. You perceive yourself behind all the images — behind the thoughts, behind the sensations, behind the entire moving screen of experience. You are simply watching. With great joy. With great love.

And in that witnessing — in that stillness — you begin to perceive the Divinity shining through your own eyes, through your own heart, through your own mind. And then something even more astonishing happens. You begin to see it in everyone else, too. Whether they see it or not.

This is what the tradition has always pointed toward: Seeing Divinity, pure consciousness, in each other.

When that recognition becomes stable — when you walk through ordinary life and see the same light shining through every face you encounter — you are no longer the same person. You cannot be.

The 18th-century Bengali mystic Ramprasad Sen sang of exactly this:

"Gaze intently into the blazing heart of joy / and you will perceive my blissful Mother, / matrix of all phenomena — / burning down conventional barriers, / pervading minds and worlds with light / where lovers merge with Mother Reality, / experiencing the single taste of nonduality."

— Ramprasad Sen (18th century, Bengal)

He called it the Mother. The Shiva Sutras call it Shakti. The Christians call it the Holy Spirit. The Taoists call it the Tao. Different rivers. The same ocean.

What joy. What bliss. That is the taste of our real nature.

And it fills you with such joy that you cannot remain the same.

Everyone has this ability. Every single person reading these words right now.

The tandra state — that luminous threshold right at the edge of sleep — is available to you tonight. The space between breaths is available to you right now. The moment of stillness in the middle of your ordinary day is available to you in an hour. These are not extraordinary experiences reserved for monks and mystics. These are the natural architecture of human consciousness — doorways built into the very structure of your awareness, waiting to be recognized.

There is a sutra in the Shiva Sutras that I have returned to again and again across forty years:

Siddha Svatantrabhavaha.

A Siddha — an awakened being — lives in a state of absolute freedom.

But I want to tell you what that freedom actually means. Because it is not what most people imagine.

That freedom is not living constantly in some kind of higher level of consciousness, drifting through life. That freedom is the ability and the knowledge to know that you can access these higher levels of consciousness at will. By doing so — and by knowing that — you have the absolute freedom to recognize, laugh, and forgive yourself when you fail. Or when your mind doesn't operate on the highest levels, you know that it's just a temporary state of consciousness. You can shift. You can return. You can always return. That is where freedom lies. And the more you do it, the more freedom there is.

Think of a bird sitting on a swaying branch in the wind. It is completely unafraid. Not because the branch is stable — the branch is moving constantly. But because the bird trusts its wings. It knows at every moment it can fly.

That is what this practice builds. Not a permanent elevation above ordinary life. Not escape from the human condition. The unshakeable knowledge — born of direct experience — that you can take flight at will. That the higher states are always available. That you can always return.

And the more you practice, the more consistently you return — something begins to shift at a fundamental level. The glimpses become longer. The recognition becomes more stable. The awareness that you are pure consciousness expressing itself through a human form stops being an occasional peak experience and begins becoming your default perceptual view.

This is what direct experience reshapes. Not just your beliefs. Not just your philosophy. Your reality itself. Until the extraordinary becomes ordinary. Until you walk through the world the way the bird sits on the branch — completely at ease, completely unafraid, knowing at every moment that you can fly.

And once you know that — truly know it, in your bones, from lived experience — you are free. In this body. In this life. Right now.

Siddha Svatantrabhavaha.

An enlightened being lives in absolute freedom.

This is the goal of The Astral Monk Project.

The Astral Monk Project exists to give you that freedom. Through three practices that have been known and transmitted for over a thousand years — astral projection and conscious out-of-body experience (OBE), advanced meditation and deep states of consciousness, and the awakening of Kundalini Shakti, the underlying force the mystics have always known.

The full teaching unfolds across four pillars:

Pillar I: Direct Experience of Higher States of Consciousness and Multidimensional Realms

Pillar II: The Psychology of Self-Realization

Pillar III: Technology for Human Consciousness Evolution

Pillar IV: The Astral Monk Journey

What is coming — the courses, the books, the guided practices — goes even deeper than what you've read here today. This is the beginning. The door is wide open.

Shakespeare wrote: "All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."

But what Shakespeare may not have understood is that we are also the stage. And the stage is made of light, too.

And here is what forty years of practice has shown me about that light: at its deepest level, it is not neutral. It is not cold. It is not indifferent.

It is Love.

Not a love for someone or something. Not a feeling that comes and goes. But the very nature of consciousness itself — the ground of everything — is love. When you begin to experience that directly, everyone you see and everything you do becomes an expression of it. Not because you are trying. Because you can’t help it.

That is where Siddha Svatantrabhavaha ultimately leads. Not just freedom. Freedom that is made of love.

That is what The Astral Monk Project is pointing toward.

Subscribe to this free weekly newsletter at theastralmonk.com — and join me on the other side of everything you think you are.

Dive inward, fly free.

Don

The Astral Monk