Somewhere Beautiful.
Field Notes from 20261101
It was Sunday, and I decided to follow my newly found freedom of the mind to just float on binaural beats for a while. So, I put on Tom Campbell’s 32-64-128 track. After the session, I decided 32 is too low a carrier for me. 64 is okay, but I’m noticing something: over the years my preference has drifted from super deep and low toward higher. I’ll have to experiment with higher carrier frequencies again.
The session was just that, prep and all, then some box breathing to drop the heart rate fast, and I was finally floating on the waves. I kept going in and out of hypnagogic imagery, not really doing much, and it was exactly what I needed.
After about 40 minutes, I turned over and went for immersive altered states, same as usual. I start with the intent “now I’m out of my physical body,” work it down to “now I’m out of body,” and let it go imaginal by engaging whatever hypnagogic imagery there is. Begin verbal, end imaginal.
I had a couple of projections into Locale 1, the layer closest to the physical (“built” one to one), but the last one went further.
The first was the basic kind. I was in the office doing something and noticed that my phone wasn’t working when someone called. A friend of mine was calling, and I sensed that she was crying. When I went to answer, the screen went black and wouldn’t activate. It was pretty obvious what was going on, so I let myself fall backwards in the middle of the office floor. Next was the familiar short trip through a twisty portal, then the click back into physical presence. Liminals, the small figures of light that show up at the edges of this work (in liminal/subtle spaces), were present but vague.
I turned over once more, automatically dropped into trance, and waited for a similar scene to spin up. I can’t recall the exact details; it was mundane in the same way. Once the projection began to break down, I felt that I was probably low on juice, so I closed my eyes in Locale 1 and let the portal start its work again.
As I began to travel, I made a spontaneous intention, “Take me somewhere beautiful, peaceful, take me somewhere nice, beautiful, peaceful.” I kept repeating it, and then suddenly I felt the portal shift into a new direction and speed up. Once it slowed down, my usual void view of it all started to catch glimpses of light fracturing in here and there.
Eventually it felt like I had stopped, or was on a slow approach. I got a little annoyed and started to twist and turn in place. It was difficult. I felt resistance and pulling; a mechanical whine rang in my ears every time I applied strong will and force. That’s new to me, though it was probably always there. At any rate, a group of lights began to approach, slowly at first. I reached out to it and felt the same resistance, same mechanical, electrical noise, grasping at it as if to say, “Yes, right here, I want to go here.”
As the scene came closer, the lights began to resemble structures. Long, thin, thick, blocky, carved, organic structures of neon: purple, yellow, red, green, blue, magenta, violet, white. They didn’t really overlap. Each was its own structure, or unit, grouped with the rest in a circular form with the void all surrounding the sight.
I had a brief thought: What if this is a lure? Neon lights surrounded by the void, you can see how that could spark the suspicion. After the event, I concluded that this was not true. I believe I was being cautious of something new, new in this existence at least, and the struggle on the approach fed the question. Humans do not like being restrained, and restraint is what it felt like, though the restraint is likely just the function of portal/tunnel travel.
At this point, it was best to end the experience, and that wasn’t easy either. Instinctively, as if I was still in my physical body, I began to twist and turn again, but nothing was happening. I closed my eyes and made a strong intent to return. That’s when I began to speed away from what I was approaching.
After a brief travel, I thought I had clicked back into the physical body, but the moment I went to remove my face mask, my hand went right through it. Once again, I was grasping at something that wasn’t really there but was partially blocking my sight. Annoyed, I did my best to sit up; it was difficult, just like Friday and like all of this session. Aha! I was still in Locale 1, or back in it rather. Where had I gone before returning here? Deeper, somewhere in the astral, Locale 2.
Tired of struggling, I let myself fall back down on the daybed, still no click into the physical. I vigorously shook my head and felt myself click back in. The physical body was in the same position as when I left it, very relaxed and calm, the opposite of what I had just been through, and the mask came off easily this time.
It felt like an hour had passed; the clock read fifteen minutes instead.
This tracks with what I know of Locale 2, and with experiences I had as a child. It doesn’t end on force. No matter how frightened I was back then, fear alone would not end it; my calm intent and will to end it would. You can be scared or spooked and react with power to get out, but if the intent isn’t there, because it has changed to breaking free rather than ending, then the experience simply continues. The separation is in the intent. Once I decided to end, and I was calm about it, that’s when the mechanism to bring me back kicked in.
The intent, and where the portal shifted to, is what I always need to trust. I hammer on trusting myself, but this time I had a last-second doubt. It came from the restraint, and the restraint was the ride. Looks like I have some shadow work to do.
One more note, because it comes with every one of these portal progressions, any and all of them. I feel a tightness in the groin, right where the physical body keeps its most obvious equipment. I’ve wondered about it before but never written it down.
Here are my findings on this special feeling. The physical body sits at the edge of REM when this work runs, and REM gives a male body an erection whether or not anyone is dreaming about anything. That part is physiology. Last Friday, the eye mask on my physical face rendered into Locale 1 as crooked, so a sensation at the groin rendering into the portal is the same mechanism.
The tightness sits at the base, where the tradition I take my origin-words from puts mūlādhāra, and that tradition has a name for a contraction there: mūla bandha, the root lock, engaged on purpose to drive energy up the axis and known to fire on its own once kundalini is active. Mine is active; the beam of July 2025 settled that. Bentov’s physio-kundalini work holds that the physiology and the energy event are one occurrence read from two sides, which is where I land.
It also fits with something else I’ve never mentioned. When I start my own visualization to get a session going, it’s often sexual. My needs are met, so what’s in the imagery is charge, with nothing lacking behind it. The image-engine reaches for the strongest reference it has, and that one addresses the lower centers directly. The body renders what’s addressed.
I’ve read plenty about sexual energy and how important it is to magick. My thoughts on that have always been simple: with nothing missing, that visualization starts the engine, from root up. Monroe gave the subject a chapter of its own and called the drive a factor most vital to the Second State, one that has to be brought under command before anything else can be.
Looks like I’ve been hitting something important on intuition alone.