One idea I came across early on when researching spiritual practices is that mindfulness, lucid dreaming, astral projection, and even meditation are all the same thing. That didn't make sense until I began fleshing out a model for these abilities.

Let us first focus on mindfulness, lucid dreaming and astral projection.

• Mindfulness can be defined as being aware of your awareness in the moment (i.e. being conscious).
• Lucid dreaming is being aware you are dreaming in the moment (i.e. being conscious).
• And astral projection is about being aware (or conscious) as your astral body detaches from your physical body when your physical body falls asleep, then maintaining awareness throughout your entire experience in the astral realms.

What's different between the three

The key difference between mindfulness and both astral projection and lucid dreaming is mindfulness is a practice you do while your astral body is in your physical body (i.e. awake during the day), while the other two are practices are what you do when your astral body is detached from your physical body (i.e. when you sleep).

The difference between astral projection and lucid dreaming is the location of your astral body. Because regardless if you're astral projecting or lucid dreaming, in both scenarios your astral body is detached from your physical body. Astral projection typically refers to exploring the astral dimension and lucid dreaming refers to exploring your mental dimension.

What's the same about the three

All three disciplines requires a person to be consciously aware of what they are doing. In other words, they have to be mindful.

Mindfulness, obviously, is about being mindful during the day.

We can say that lucid dreaming is the night-time version of mindfulness.

Astral projection is the transition time when your astral body either detaches or reattaches to your physical body. And the key objective for successful astral projection is to remain conscious or mindful during the transition process. So we can say astral projection is about being mindful of the transition of your astral body leaving or returning to your physical body

Therefore, there are three key times or phases these practices attend to: hours when we are "awake", hours when we are "asleep" or OBE, and the transition moments going to and from awake and sleep.

The three core phases of being

We can summarize the core phases we go through on a daily and nightly bases as the following:

• ABA (astral body attached): Astral body attached to the physical body (what we commonly refer to as being awake)
• Transition: The process of the astral body detaching from or reattaching to the physical body (what we call projecting, astral projecting, or falling asleep and waking up)
• ABD (astral body detached) Astral body detached from the physical body (what we refer to as sleeping, astral projection or lucid dreaming)

One way we can categorize these three disciplines is they each predominantly refer to one of the three phases of being.

• Mindfulness for ABA
• Astral Projection for Transition
• Lucid dreaming and astral projection for ABD

And at the center of all three of these disciplines is mindfulness. Which is why it's important to have a clear definition of what mindfulness is so we can know when we have it and when we don't.

What is mindfulness, really?

One limitation I noticed in modern mindfulness teachings is the lack a clear, measurable definition for the state of mindfulness. The test is basically "are you aware or not" and have a list of things you can be aware of (sights, sounds, thoughts, feelings, etc). However, that's a very subjective definition for this very important state. And without an objective way of measuring and testing the quality of the state of mindfulness, practitioners of mindfulness run the risk of doing mindful practices less optimally (or mindlessly) and not even know it.

In my research and through personal experience I found 2 things which are objective measurements for the state of mindfulness. And these two things harmonize with ancient esoteric and religious teachings (which are the earliest systems of psychology and personal development in my view). these 2 things are sensory-memory and the level of lucidity in your dream.

It is said that your dream state is a direct reflection of your 'waking state' during the day. I believe you can find many ancient texts saying the same thing as well as modern day experts in lucid dreaming. I found this to be true through my own personal experiments. I noticed when I expand my spatial awareness (different from sensory awareness) outside to reach as far as I can reach (which you can say I am in a mindful state), that same night I become lucid (conscious) in my dreams.

One technique for inducing lucid dreaming is doing reality-checks. You do this by stopping and become mindful of what you're doing, question if you're dreaming or not, then test to see if you're in the astral dimension or in the physical dimension. This is basically another mindfulness technique. When this technique is repeated enough times during the day over a period of days, the person will start to do those same 'reality-checks' while dreaming and become lucid (awake, mindful) in his/her dreams.

I heard an esoteric teacher once say "if you awaken (become truly mindful) in your dreams, then you awaken (become truly mindful) during the day."

Memory = Mindfulness

Another thing I discovered by accident when playing around with expanded spatial awareness is the improved quality of my memory of that moment. I can remember in vivid detail the moments I expanded my spatial awareness and then lucid dream that same night, and it happened at least 2 years ago. And the expanded spatial awareness for enhance memory is something I learned from the YouTuber Ryan Cropper in his astral projection course.

If you think about it logically, it makes sense that the more mindful a person is in the moment, the better their memory of that moment should me. Or the better you can recall/remember a moment, then the more aware (and mindful) you were at that moment.

For this reason, I believe memory is a more concrete and measurable objective for mindfulness practitioners to focus on. And I believe memory is actually the hidden outcome in all mindfulness practices. And dream lucidity is the only true objective test for the individual to know the quality of his/her mindfulness practices during the day.

Summary

There are three core phases we experience on a daily and nightly bases:

• ABA (astral body attached): Astral body attached to the physical body (what we commonly refer to as being awake)
• Transition: The process of the astral body detaching from or reattaching to the physical body (what we call projecting, astral projecting, or falling asleep and waking up)
• ABD (astral body detached) Astral body detached from the physical body (what we refer to as sleeping, astral projection or lucid dreaming)

All three practices (mindfulness, lucid dreaming, astral projection) aim for having conscious awareness during all three phases.

Reliable evidence procedure for knowing if one is "consciously aware" or mindful are:

• conscious awareness during ABD (i.e. lucid dreaming or astral projection)
• sensory-memory quality

Sensory-Memory = Mindfulness

And sensory-memory is the hidden outcome for all mindfulness practices (in my opinion).

What is meditation?

Meditation is about tapping into your subconscious mind to access the information located inside it. (side-note: what we label as conscious and subconscious is relative to whether we are ABA or ABD)

With meditation, your astral body still remains attached to your physical body, while at the same time your mind "thinks" from the subconscious point of view. Evidence for being in a meditative state is when you're laying down with your eyes closed and you have an idea that pops into your head and it just makes sense. Then when you open your eyes and ground your awareness in the external environment, then you either forget that idea or you remember the idea and it makes no sense.

Lucid dreaming and astral projection are more pure versions of meditation, because you are experiencing your subconscious with all five sensory modalities in a 3D environment.