Ant’harratu taught me a very interesting spiritual practice recently.
Before doing this practice it is best to go to sleep doing E. A. Koetting’s exercise of absorbing darkness into oneself. That basically involves closing your eyes in a dark room, and then visualizing the darkness around you, and then absorbing it into yourself.
This involves allowing yourself to remain lucid during sleep paralysis, and then allowing the terror of whatever beings are present to completely saturate your awareness. You don’t try to chase the sleep paralysis entities away, and you don’t welcome them. Instead, you open the aperture of your awareness in an open ended and nonjudgmental way.
The next step is to witness what are called “the three characteristics” of the terror. This is an idea from Buddhism that all sensations have three properties in common. It is true whether the sensation in question is mental, emotional, physical, or energetic. All sensations are (1) impermanent, meaning that they arise and pass; they are also (2) insufficient, in as much as no finite sensation will ever permanently satisfy; and lastly they are (3) selfless, meaning that anything you can witness is not you, every thought and intention that you have arises out of formlessness all on its own before disappearing utterly.
Every night I have been lying in a state of sleep paralysis witnessing the three characteristics of the terror. I try to abide in that state for as long as I can before the lucidity of the state is interrupted. Then I have been taking it one step further by absorbing the darkness from around me, as in Koetting’s exercise, but in this case while still in a state of sleep paralysis. This involves taking the darkness from the sleep paralysis entities and then integrating it into my own body of darkness.
This has been teaching me something really profound about the nature of spiritual darkness that is hard to put into words. If anybody else feels like trying it out I’d love to hear about your experiences.