I was sucked into a kind of deathly vortex which seemed to be a state of paralysis between waking and sleep — Janus

I would get that too. I eventually learned that if you focus on breathing you can get back out of it.

I also spent 18 years participating in Gurdjieff groups and practiced meditation every day. — Janus

An aside - Did you ever get anywhere with, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson? I kicked around with people in Melbourne who were into Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. I spent a lot of time trying to follow the works. Got nowhere. Can't remember a thing 45 years later... Talk of degrees of reality. I got the feeling I needed more knowledge of the Greeks to fully appreciate Tertium Organum.

Thank you for your accounts of personal experiences. I will comment on each over the next day or so.

You are the closest to my mystical adventures. After reading the Art of D, which was brought to my attention by a young fellow rock climber who enjoyed a drug or two, I made the attempt to see my hands, as you did, but instantly I was shifted to an alternate reality - or so it seemed. Stunned, I lay there for a minute or so then got out of bed and walked across the bedroom floor to a closed door, feeling the carpet under my feet and stroking a chest of drawers on the way. I had heard of people walking through closed doors so I gave it a try and it was like going through a thin layer of fog. On the other side a stairwell led down to the living room, and as I started down I was pulled back to normal reality. Later I learned that moving down in that state can result in losing it.

Other adventures followed, and in each I was fully conscious but enabled to violate the laws of physics. How would I describe it in a few words? I was pure will.

That's interesting. I never found my hands again. Although I have to admit that I didn't apply myself to the preliminaries with any consistency, and I soon forgot about the whole enterprise. Perhaps I should try again. The idea certainly intrigues me. Did you have any success entering lucid dreaming states?

I also never got very far with Bellzebub's Tales to this Grandson. Gurdjieff's other books were more comprehensible to me, and Ouspensky's were that much clearer again. As I understood it the idea was that higher states of consciousness/ being consisted in higher or "finer" 'vibrations' of energy. As I remember it, according to Ouspensky (explicating Gurdjieff of course) everything has a material reality, even God and the human soul with the difference between "brute' matter and higher states consisting in fineness of vibration, like the gradation of musical tones. Man is in the natural state, asleep, a reactive machine.

The beginning of the path on the "fourth Way" was the establishing of a 'magnetic centre'. I stayed a fair time with the school and this was largely due to the fact that I had married one of the women who was pretty much totally committed. We were not only married but together ran a successful garden design and landscaping business.

I had been struggling with my skepticism for years (the organization seemed to be becoming progressively more cult-like and I was only interested in finding ways to alter my consciousness without continuing to resort to psychotropics) and when I finally could continue no longer my wife could not accept that I was going to leave and our marriage fell apart.

What you recount here is fascinating to me and makes me wish I had tried harder with or been more naturally talented in lucid dreaming. As I said I have always had very strange dreams, but I have never experienced exercising my will in dreaming. I did experiment with writing whatever i could remember of my dreams on waking, and I found the more I practiced this the more I could remember.

I always wondered though whether I was recording genuine memories of all the details (which became very elaborate) of these dreams or whether a good part what I wrote was not fabricated after the fact. The thought occurred to me that In way it doesn't matter because in either case I would be mining the unconscious.

Did you have any success entering lucid dreaming states? — Janus

I woke up in a dream once, but I changed something that went against the integrity of the dream reality and I immediately woke up. That never happened again.

When I got sucked into the limbo state was when I was doing that meditation where you ask "Who am I"? I never did that again, but sometimes I could feel the limbo coming. I discovered that if you focus on breathing, it goes away.