

The Escapist's Guide to Out-Of-Body Experiences

Rose Christo
Foreword

There are two camps about what out-of-body experiences really are. The scientific camp describes them as an overflow of electrical activity in the brain. Open any neurological dictionary and you'll find OBEs--or "autoscopy"--defined concisely: "A vivid hallucination in the brain's parietal-temporal-occipital junction."

And then there is the spiritual camp--the New Age camp, if you will. On that side of the fence, they call OBEs astral projection and profess that these experiences truly entail leaving one's body. This is the camp that enjoys throwing about terms like "silver cord," "astral plane," and "chakras." None of these terms have ever been particularly useful to me. In fact, I find concentrating on them obstructive in the practical application of this phenomenon. In any case, if you're looking for a book about guardian angels, succubi, or anthropomorphic fox spirits, this is not the book for you.

Nor will this book attempt to choose between the two very vocal camps. As a matter of personal opinion, I find necessary insights in both points of view. As far as science and spirituality go, I don't consider myself educated enough in either field to make an authoritative statement about what's going on here. You can be your own judge.

The Escapist's Guide is a manual: nothing more, and nothing less. What you do with it is up to you, and the conclusions you draw at the end of it are uniquely your own. As a disclaimer, I can assure you that this practice is perfectly safe. None of the stories you may have heard about getting stuck outside your body, lost in another realm, or attacked by hostile entities are remotely true. On the other hand, the first several times you achieve this technique successfully will be frightening, much in the same way that any foreign experience is frightening. To this I can only say: Bear with it. If you can keep your fear from clouding your mind, you'll very quickly come to realize there's nothing to be afraid of.

In the end I can only make you one real guarantee, but that is, I think, the guarantee you came here for: By the end of this book, you will know how to induce your own out-of-body experiences. This is a technique that even a child can master. And as a matter of fact...

1

Why Children Are Masters of OBEs

I was a child when I first began having out-of-body experiences. I didn't know what I was doing, or even that I was doing anything unusual. It came to me as naturally as sleeping, or talking--or not talking, as it were.

I stopped talking when I was five or six years old. I came from a remarkably abusive home. My memories of summer vacation were of wearing sweatshirts so my friends' parents--the normal parents--didn't see the bruises on my arms. There was one constant in my life: I wanted to escape it.

It's my belief, then, that I started having out-of-body experiences for the same reason I stopped talking to people: as a coping mechanism. These were full-blown, vivid experiences that occurred in the thick of the abuse, and often, late at night. The first time it happened, I was floating above my home. I remember looking down at the top of the apartment building and seeing the water stains on the concrete roof, and the black fence out front, and the decrepit tree where I'd dug for ants and rocks a season earlier. Slowly, gently, I drifted down to the sidewalk. I walked to 86th Street. I walked to Blockbuster and looked through the glowing storefront window. At the end of the trip, I walked home and stood next to my body, and watched the bruise blooming on my cheek, my chest rising and falling with sleep.

The same experience happened the next night, and the next; and even the next. Every night before I went to bed, I started leaving the window open in my bedroom, thinking, perhaps, that it would facilitate easier escapes. I don't remember ever using it, though. The most extraordinary part of these experiences was that when I encountered other people during them, I could feel their feelings--their thoughts, in essence--just as easily as if they had been articulated to me. One night, for example, I made my way to the subway station outside McDonald's and sat down on the grated steps. A woman walked past me in a thick scarf, her stride fast and her eyes down. A powerful wave of anguish swept over me. She hadn't said a word, but I knew, without being told, what the problem was. Her grandfather had passed away, and with him, the only family she had left in this city.

I can't describe the manner through which I knew what I knew. When you learn to induce your own out-of-body experiences, you'll see what I'm talking about. People's feelings come to you not as a voice, or as an image, but as innate knowledge. We all know, for example, how to breathe. It's knowledge we had since before we could think. Nobody needed to teach us.

This analogy is crucial for another reason. Because just as naturally as breathing comes to us, so too, do out-of-body experiences. I can't cite statistics, not being a mathematician, but it is my profound belief that children are born equipped with the instructions necessary to induce these experiences. How else could I, as a child, have induced them with no effort? Over time, unfortunately, we stop being children. Things that excited us when we were five or six seem trivial at twenty-five or twenty-six. The world we live in coldly and systematically strips the magic from us. But that does not mean the magic is lost forever.

* * * * *

I lost my ability to induce OBEs when I was twelve. This was the same time that Children's Social Services finally caught wind of the abuse in my household and separated me from my mother. In separating me from my mother, they separated me from my little brother, too. I didn't know where he was, or whether he was safe. The resulting depression was so overpowering, I disconnected from the world around me. I became as numb as a slab of ice.

Therapy helped, but only for a little while. I became more withdrawn than ever, losing even the most basic ability to socialize with children my age. Worse still, I convinced myself that my vivid OBEs had been mere dreams.

It wasn't until my late teens that I discovered something game-changing and came back to OBEs of my own volition. I'll tell you what that was later.

To return to the topic at hand: Depression is perhaps the biggest obstacle in trying to achieve an out-of-body experience. It is the reason, I believe, that we lose the innate ability as adults. That does not mean that if you are depressed, you can't successfully induce an out-of-body experience. Quite the contrary.

2

Why You Should Be Having OBEs

It's one matter to assert that anyone can have an out-of-body experience (and they can). The question remains: Why should you?

Just as depression may be an obstacle, albeit not an insurmountable one, depression is also a good motivator. Leaving your body behind for a few hours every day means leaving the problems that come with it: work, stress, relatives, money. For those few hours, your problems don't exist. It is the equivalent of taking a break from your life and catching some much needed fresh air.

What's more is that stepping back from the everyday chaos allows you a glimpse at the bigger picture. It's easy to find our problems overwhelming when we're in the thick of them. Here's an analogy I find useful: Imagine you have just stepped into a common hedge maze. Your first thought: Where's the exit? If you're anything like most people, it will take you a good deal of walking before you find it. You'll run into dead ends and false leads along the way. But if you were to see the maze from above, the path to the exit would immediately become apparent. OBEs are just like that.

Perhaps the most compelling reason you should be having OBEs is also the simplest one: Because they're fun. There's nothing remotely comparable to the feeling of total freedom. Once you're outside the physical restrictions of your body, you can go virtually anywhere, and see virtually anything: Your imagination's the limit. We live in a society that shames us for having fun. If we were having more of it, we would all be healthier individuals.

Over the years, acquaintances have come to me with very personal and intimate reasons for wishing to induce an out-of-body experience. The most common reason by far was that they wanted to meet with a deceased loved one. This assumes, of course, that whatever is happening during an out-of-body experience is a spiritual phenomenon, that a person's spirit does not degrade with his or her body, and that spirits are real to begin with. I try not to make such assumptions, especially ones that ask me to choose between science and spirituality. But if you're wondering whether you can meet with deceased people during out-of-body experiences, my succinct answer would have to be: Yes. You can meet with deceased animals, too.

Even among those who believe that humans possess immortal souls, it's often a controversial statement to suggest that animals possess them, too. "Soul" is a strong word for me, and not one I care to commit to, but if you're going to use it, why should it be applicable only to humans? Humans are but one of 8.7 million species roaming the Earth, to say nothing of millions more that have already left the planet. As humans, we succumb to the pitfall of believing we're better than other animals simply because of our intelligence. But human beings do not have a monopoly on intelligence. The orca whale possesses a paralimbic region more elaborate than our own. It's this region of the brain that plays a key role in critical thinking, problem solving, and processing emotions. The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness found in 2012 that all animals' brains produce subcortical neural networks identical to humans'. Even plants have exhibited intelligence comparable to our own. The Mimosa pudica plant, a fern that collapses its leaves when threatened, is capable not only of learning the difference between harmful and harmless stimuli, but of passing the information on to its genetic offspring.

Why is this important? Because meeting with a deceased pet is actually a terrific way of testing your newfound OBE skills. When I rediscovered my ability to leave my body, one of the very first people I met with wasn't a person at all, but my dog, who had died five months back. I put my arms around her and buried my face against her white fur. I felt her, not just physically, but emotionally. It would be easy to argue that my mind had devised the scenario. But as I'll explain later, I have good reason to believe this isn't the case.

Another good reason for inducing OBEs is to tap into the ultimate truth of reality--whatever that may be. Everybody thinks he has the answer for what our universe is and why we're in it. Why listen to a self-described authority when you can look for the answer on your own? While I may be loath to prescribe a label to whatever's really going on during OBEs, one thing is clear to me: Your body is superfluous during it. And if your body is superfluous during what are arguably the most lucid moments of your life, one wonders whether your body isn't illusive altogether.

It's natural, perhaps, to want to use out-of-body experiences for personal gains. Maybe you assume you'll take a walk to the bank and learn the combination on the vault lock. Maybe you want to spy on your husband when he's out of town on business. I won't say that it's impossible to use OBEs for these purposes; but in my experience, every time I've left my body, personal and material gain never even occurred to me. The sheer novelty of experiencing the universe without a filter is so fulfilling on its own, you tend to forget you're human. You don't care about the number in your bank account or your in-laws coming to visit the following day. Perhaps you'll find differently once you induce your own OBEs. That's up to you to decide.

In determining whether OBEs are for you, take into consideration this: OBEs are not a new phenomenon. OBEs have been documented in the scientific and religious spheres since time immemorial. In fact, many famous figures throughout history were willing practitioners, some of whom may surprise you.

3

The History of OBEs

Not many people know the name Rudolf Steiner. Those who do tend to be occultists and New Age enthusiasts. While their interest is certainly warranted, to ignore Steiner's scientific accomplishments is to ignore half his legacy. It was Steiner who created the agricultural system that most of the world, including the United States, uses to this very day. And it was Steiner who brought out-of-body experiences to the forefront of the modern scientific and spiritual communities.

Dr. Rudolf Steiner was born on February 27th, 1861 in Austria-Hungary, or what is today Croatia. The son of a gamekeeper and a housemaid, Steiner's earliest childhood days were unremarkable. But at the age of nine, Steiner experienced something that changed his life and much of the world as we know it. Miles away, in the town of Kraljevic, Steiner's aunt committed suicide.

Steiner had never met the woman. His parents were so poor, travel was unthinkable, and his mother, the woman's sister, was estranged from most of her family. The reason this woman's death changed Steiner's life was that he experienced it. At the exact time of her suicide, Steiner had an out-of-body experience that took him to remote Kraljevic. Not only did he see the woman, he heard her speak, calling out for help. Later, when he recounted the experience to his mother, she was shocked to hear him describe her sister in accurate physical detail. Official news of her sister's death did not arrive by mail for another week.

Steiner grew up to be very interested in spirituality, but what set him apart from other philosophers at the time was that Steiner believed science could be used to explain spiritual phenomena, and vice-versa. Indeed, when Steiner attempted to recreate the conditions of his out-of-body experience, it was science he turned to. In studying his OBE from an empirical viewpoint, Steiner concluded that it was the result of a disrupted brain equilibrium--the lower processes speeding up and the upper processes slowing down. And if there was a practical, applicable explanation for this phenomenon, there was no reason the phenomenon could not be repeated whenever the user desired.

That OBEs could be explained scientifically, Steiner went on, did not preclude their spiritual validity. Was it not possible, Steiner proposed, that the brain, the body, and the science around them were merely the ways in which the spirit made itself manifest in our world?

Steiner's recreation of out-of-body experiences was predicated on regimenting one's mental senses, thereby divorcing them from the physical senses. To accomplish this, he invoked a number of breathing and memory exercises. One of his favorite breathing exercises entailed taking a long, deep breath, then exhaling for twice as long, then holding his breath. After earning his doctorate in epistemology, Steiner joined a society called Theosophy, dedicated to finding the commonality between all walks of life. Steiner went on to teach his breathing exercises to his fellow Theosophists. Whether his contemporaries were successful at inducing OBEs is up for debate, but Steiner himself certainly had many more during his lifetime. During one OBE, he claimed to glimpse the sum of all universal knowledge, human or otherwise, though he could not comprehend it in its entirety. He dubbed this compendium the Akashic Records, a term that persists even today.

An industrious man, Dr. Steiner eventually founded a philosophy he called Geisteswissenschaft, or Spiritual Science. Today, the philosophy is more commonly called Anthroposophy. Steiner was one of the first thinkers of his era to recognize that all human races belonged to a single human race, the distinctions between them arbitrary. No doubt this realization was aided by his persistent OBEs, in which race, age, sex, and lifestyle play no part. Unfortunately, Dr. Steiner published this insight at the same time that Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Germany. Hitler declared Steiner an enemy of the Nazi Party and publicly attacked him during a lecture in Munich in 1922. Steiner never quite recovered from the attack. Increasingly frail, he escaped to Switzerland before passing away in 1925.

* * * * *

Rudolf Steiner may very well be the reason that out-of-body experiences today have so much attention. But Steiner was hardly the first to induce them of his own accord. During the same year that Steiner had his first OBE, another man thousands of miles away was already inducing them at will. His name was Crazy Horse.

A Native American from the Lakota tribe, Crazy Horse is best remembered today as the man who killed Custer, and the first man to militarily defeat the United States. Many American history books conveniently overlook the fact that Crazy Horse won his war, never mind that he fought it in the first place to protect his people's land, which the Lakota tribe inhabits to this very day. While Crazy Horse is remembered for his military exploits, his spiritual and mystical endeavors were far more prolific.

As a young boy, Crazy Horse was called Jiji, or Light Hair. Of curiosity, he was born with a head of curly blond hair, which so confused settlers from Fort Laramie that they regularly asked his parents--both of whom were indigenous--whether he was a foundling. Later historians have postulated that his hair might have come from a recessive gene generations back--the odd non-Native fur trapper or two who intermarried with some of his ancestors. Young Light Hair did not come by the name Crazy Horse until he was an adolescent, when his kinsmen discovered that he was a highly skilled trainer of horses. In fact, the name Crazy Horse is a misnomer. In his native Lakota, he was actually called Thasunke Witko\--His Horses Are Spirited.

Like Steiner, Crazy Horse's first OBE occurred when he was a very young boy. On August 19th, 1854, in an event today remembered as the Grattan Massacre, thirty-one US troopers entered Lakota territory on a misunderstanding and killed two Lakota men they believed had stolen a cow. The Lakota warriors fought back, killing the troopers but sparing the civilian interpreter. The violence was so traumatic to Crazy Horse that, within a moment, he felt himself leaving his body. He watched from above as then-leader of the Lakota, Conquering Bear, passed away. From then on, Crazy Horse claimed to be able to leave his body at will. Later, Crazy Horse told his cousin Black Elk: "...[I] dreamed and went into the world where there is nothing but the spirits of all things. That is the real world that is behind this one, and everything we see here is something like a shadow from that world."

Before rising to prominence as a warrior, Crazy Horse first gained a reputation among his people as a mystic. Shy, quiet, and reclusive, Crazy Horse confined himself to his tipi for hours at a time, whereupon he did nothing except pray. During winters when food was scarce, Crazy Horse was said to be capable of commanding buffalo directly to camp. A generous man, Crazy Horse unerringly gave his own yield away to the elderly and the tribal councillors. He became so celebrated that it was only natural his tribe elected him as leader during wartime.

And during war, Crazy Horse had one special talent nobody else could claim: He was incapable of being wounded. It is a matter of documented history that Crazy Horse never sustained even a minor injury in battle. Crazy Horse attributed his unprecedented success to his out-of-body experiences. He claimed he had only to think of the spirit world to visit it again, and while he was in it, he could not be hurt.

Unfortunately for Crazy Horse, his OBEs were both a blessing and a curse. During one of his regular trips outside his body, Crazy Horse saw another Lakota warrior from a distance, his face hard to discern. Crazy Horse had the strong, unshakeable feeling that this man, and not any white man, would be the one to take Crazy Horse's life. For a time, Crazy Horse became paranoid of his own people. In a confrontation with his lieutenant, Little Big Man, Crazy Horse took two knives out from under his blanket and brandished them. A scuffle ensued. When Little Big Man attempted to grab Crazy Horse's elbows, Crazy Horse accidentally stabbed himself in the lower back. He was dead by midnight.

* * * * *

With more than two billion practitioners, Islam is one of the largest and fastest growing religions today. Its founder was a soft-spoken, illiterate, epileptic man who, after his seizures, recited unusually poetic verses on cosmology, embryology, and women's marital rights. And according to written contemporary accounts, it was not uncommon for him to have out-of-body experiences.

Muhammad ibn Abdullah was born in AD 570, in what is today Saudi Arabia. Orphaned by the age of six, he spent his teens as a trade merchant in Syria. It was there that he met a Gnostic Christian monk who endowed him with a deep interest in spirituality. One night, when he was sleeping in the Great Mosque of Mecca, he suddenly woke in what he claimed to be a "state between sleep and wakefulness." He felt that his body had been split open, and from a golden tray, wisdom poured into his heart; whereupon he ascended to Heaven and met and spoke with the prophets before him, one by one. This event is commemorated by his followers as the Night Journey.

The Night Journey, and other mystical aspects of Islam, inspired a sect of Muslims called Sufis, who regularly engage in out-of-body experiences for the purpose of enlightenment. Sufis believe that when one has an out-of-body experience, one's mind has traveled to Barzakh, a non-physical realm surrounding the physical one. Barzakh is not just the non-physical realm, but the place where dreams and thoughts, especially meditative ones, go. It's interesting to note that dreams and OBEs are considered one and the same in this ideology.

Muhammad continued to have OBEs throughout his religious tenure, though most of them do not seem to have been voluntary. It's been said that he would even enter this state at the dinner table, leaving off in the middle of a conversation only to resume it hours later. Modern researchers have theorized that this trance-like state owes its nature to Muhammad's epilepsy, a condition in which abnormally high electrical activity disrupts the neurons in the brain. As Dr. Steiner would have pointed out, a medical explanation for the phenomenon does not make the phenomenon any less valid.

* * * * *

Many people would be surprised to learn that Jesus appears in the Talmud, one of the sacred texts of Judaism, a full century before the first canonical book in the New Testament. However, the Jesus the Talmud describes is very unlike the Jesus most Christians know.

In the Talmud, Jesus is Yeshu ben Stada, the illegitimate son of Miriam (or Mary), a hairdresser, and Pandera, a Roman soldier. Yeshu is further identified by the epithet ha-Notzri, or The Nazarene. Angered by his wife's affair, Miriam's husband cast Miriam and Yeshu away from his home. Because he was poor, a young Yeshu went to Egypt to find work. It was there, the Talmud says, that Yeshu picked up several Ancient Egyptian magical secrets, which he brought back to Palestine with him.

According to the pagan philosopher Celsus, Yeshu was said to be capable of blowing away disease with a single breath. Celsus further describes Yeshu as telekinetic, or having the ability to move objects with his mind. Celsus goes on to say that Yeshu could "invoke the souls of heroes" by leaving his body behind to communicate with them in the afterlife. Among these heroes were Samson and King Solomon.

It's unsurprising that Yeshu learned to induce OBEs while in Egypt. In Ancient Egyptian tradition, a human being had not one soul, but five. One of these souls was called the Ka, or the Vital Spark, which distinguished the living from the dead. In Egyptian lore, it was said that learned devotees could detach their Ka from the rest of their souls and use it to travel to Aaru, the hereafter. The Egyptians even had a deity to attribute this practice to. Her name was Sopdet, and she was the personification of the star today known as Sirius. Sopdet was said to be the Ka of the more commonly known goddess, Isis. It was through Sopdet that astral travel was made possible for human beings.

Yeshu's OBEs were said to have angered the Sanhedrin the most. For forty days, a herald traveled Jerusalem, decrying Yeshu for his sorcery and accusing him of having brought corruption to Israel. Yeshu and his disciples--five, instead of the Bible's twelve--were hanged on Passover Eve. But the mystical sect that had taught him about astral travel persisted, and maybe even persists today.

* * * * *

Honoré de Balzac was a famous French novelist and playwright who wrote frequently about the end of Napoleon Bonaparte's regime. He is credited today as the founder of the European Realism movement and the inventor of the antihero, to whom such popular characters as Batman and Wolverine owe their existence. Very few famous writers didn't take a page out of Balzac's book. Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, even Karl Marx listed him as an influence or an inspiration. And with his unprecedented attention to detail, it's not hard to see why.

Born in 1799, Balzac was raised in a cold, impersonal home, not by either of his parents--his father more than thirty years older than his mother--but by an unusually cruel governess named Caroline. Caroline disliked Balzac from an early age. The young governess took delight in ignoring the boy's needs and concocting unlikely stories about him to tell to his parents. One time, Balzac was sitting in a fig tree, admiring the stars. Since Caroline knew his parents couldn't see him in the tree, she told them he had run away, merely so they would beat him when he finally returned to the house.

Possibly Balzac suffered from a learning disability. When his parents sent him to boarding school in Vendôme, he was unable to adapt to the rote memory teaching technique the school employed. Rather than tutor him, his teachers punished him by sending him to a literal dungeon. The room was small and poorly insulated. Consequently, Balzac frequently fell ill, at one point even succumbing to a coma.

Unfortunately, Balzac never recovered from his time spent ill. Although his parents removed him from the abusive school, his depression worsened, until finally, he attempted suicide over the Loire River. He recovered from the attempt and went on to pen many novels, plays, and short stories. But it's today believed that his suicide attempt was the first time Balzac had an out-of-body experience. Balzac wrote about his out-of-body experiences in his semiautobiographical novel, Louis Lambert. In the novel, the eponymous Louis--himself a stand-in for Balzac--frequently induces OBEs to travel to Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. He witnesses such historical events as the Battle of Austerlitz, describing them in vivid detail.

Balzac believed in an independent "inward self" and "outward self." In Balzac's ideology, it was the inward self that performed all the out-of-body traveling, not unlike the common theory of an astral body. Importantly, Balzac characterized his outward self as the sickly Balzac, his inward, healthy self as his true self. It is seen, therefore, that just like Crazy Horse, Balzac's OBEs were a particular form of coping mechanism. Perhaps it can be said that OBEs come to those who need them. Certainly, if anyone needed them, it was Balzac. He died at fifty-one, his lifelong sickness finally catching up with him. He had been married to the love of his life, Ewelina Hańska, for a mere five months.

* * * * *

If shamans, mystics, novelists, and neuroscientists aren't enough to quench your thirst, how about US presidents?

General George Brinton McClellan is infamous as the Civil War's slowest, most ineffective soldier, and the thorn in Abraham Lincoln's side. Historians like to forget, however, that McClellan's careful precision won him the Battle of Antietam. If it hadn't, the Confederacy would surely have overcome the Union.

McClellan was the son of Dr. George McClellan, the physician who founded Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. Raised in an aristocratic, devoutly Christian family, the young McClellan certainly wasn't encouraged to embrace the occult. It was September 17th, 1862 when the general fell asleep at his desk. While asleep, he became detached from his body and saw his office filled with an inexplicable light. From the light emerged the figure of George Washington, who warned McClellan that the Confederates were on their way to take the Capitol. A map of Lee's troops appeared before McClellan's eyes. When he awoke, he drew the map from memory, roused his troops, and intercepted Robert E. Lee at Antietam Creek. More than twenty thousand soldiers died that day, the single bloodiest battle in the history of the United States. But the victory was McClellan's; Lee was unable to claim Maryland for the Confederacy. Lee was forced to retreat to Virginia, where, in 1865, he eventually surrendered.

Washington's warning was not the extent of McClellan's out-of-body experience. Washington informed McClellan that within another century, all the world's powers would seem to turn against America. If America made it out of that conflict safely, the Republic's influence would spread across the planet. Today it is believed that Washington was referring to World War II.

After the Civil War, McClellan moved to New York and worked as an engineer. He relayed his entire out-of-body experience to The Evening Courier in an 1862 edition. By and large, the public chose not to believe him, deriding him as delusional.

* * * * *

Few historical figures are as shrouded in mystery as the Count of St. Germain. In fact, to this day, no one knows his name, his date of birth, or his country of origin. What little we can glean of this 18th century Count is that he was educated in Italy and possibly raised in Transylvania. It remains contested whether he was even a legitimate count.

The Count of St. Germain was an unparalleled scholar. Whether the subject was poetry, math, chemistry, history, music, or philosophy, the Count was the resident expert. Guests at dinner parties used to try to come up with new subjects to stump him, never to any avail. According to eyewitness accounts, he never ate at these parties, but talked and entertained from start to finish. He boasted, with complete sincerity, that he was over three hundred years old, that he knew the secrets of the Universal Medicine, and that he had taken on many identities in centuries past, several of whom were famous. Among the identities he claimed for his own were Plato, Hesiod, St. Joseph, Merlin, Christopher Columbus, and the high priest of Atlantis.

The Count professed knowledge of many cultures' magical secrets. He was particularly fond of telling his contemporaries about his out-of-body experiences. Once, he wrote: "For quite a long time I rolled through space. I saw globes revolve around me and earths gravitate at my feet." This recount would perhaps be unremarkable if not for the fact that it was recounted at a time when the Catholic Church was actively suppressing such scientific discoveries, especially those pertaining to heliocentricity, which was seen as violating Holy Writ. It is unlikely that the Count learned of such cosmological innovations during his schooling, even if he was an extremely learned gentleman, fluent in German, English, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and French.

Writes the Landgraf von Hessen-Phillips-Barchfield of the Count: "...the fact is that the Count is acquainted with details about which only contemporaries of that period could give us information." The Count of St. Germain is on record describing both the First Council at Nicaea and Nero's burning of Rome. While it's possible his stories were made up, what's certain is that he enjoyed an unusual longevity. Madam de Gergy met him in 1710 at Venice and described him as being forty or fifty years of age. Casanova is on record as dining with him in Paris more than sixty years later. Historians are at a loss to explain his impressive lifespan, especially during a time when such lifespans were unheard of. His peers at King Louis XV's court claimed he was capable of bilocation; he could visit two or more places at once. Both the Count's bilocation and his longevity could certainly be attributed to his OBEs. Who's to say, after all, that the Count Madam de Gergy met in Venice was the Count in his physical body?

Just as there is no record of the Count of St. Germain's birth, there exists no record of the Count's death. Despite having been so celebrated in the French court, and indeed, throughout Europe, historians are unable to locate his tombstone. It's tempting to suggest that perhaps the Count simply hasn't died yet, but has gone on accruing more famous identities for himself. Perhaps he'll dabble in country music this time.

* * * * *

Rudolf Steiner was far from the only scientist to have out-of-body experiences throughout his lifetime. The other scientist we're going to talk about was a contemporary of Steiner's and his fellow countryman. He was born a mere five years prior to Steiner, but outlived him by nearly twenty. His genius was responsible for most of the technological conveniences we now take for granted, including rotating magnetic fields, the radio, and Alternating Current energy, without which you wouldn't have your air conditioner, your microwave, or your car. His name was Nikola Tesla.

Nikola Tesla was born to Serbian parents in a village today known as Gospic, Croatia. Like Steiner, Tesla was extremely poor. In fact, throughout his entire life, he never owned his own house, living in hotels as an adult. As a child, he and his family lived out of the back of a church. It was his mother, Đuka Tesla, who was the scientist of the family. She built her own machines and memorized long Serbian epics, which she recited to her children as bedtime stories. Đuka's eyes were an unusual light gray. Alone among his siblings, Tesla inherited them. As Tesla grew older, his eyes became lighter still, much to the amazement of his classmates, and later, fellow scientists. Tesla believed that the color was directly correlated with his intelligence. The more he used his mental faculties, he claimed, the lighter his eyes became.

Tesla had three sisters and one older brother, the latter of whom died in a horseback riding incident when Tesla was five. As a small child, Tesla was able to tabulate integral calculus in his head. As an adolescent, Tesla contracted cholera and nearly died. His father, beside himself with fear, vowed to the young Tesla that if he recovered, he could attend any university of his choice. Tesla recovered and chose to attend an engineering school. Before his recovery, though, Tesla underwent the first of his out-of-body experiences, which he would later recount in rich detail in his autobiography. Words seemed to sprout from nothing before his eyes before assuming physical, concrete shape, the imprints burning on the backs of his eyelids.

From his recovery onward, Tesla underwent involuntary OBEs on a daily basis. Sometimes, the OBEs interfered with his ability to perform chores and schoolwork. Strong flashes of light would fill his eyes, whisking his mind from his body, after which he would see people and objects so vivid, he lost the ability to differentiate between the visions and physical reality. Though detrimental at first, Tesla later understood that his OBEs were a gift. He learned to harness them accordingly. The schematics for his AC motor, for example, came to him when he was a teenager, enjoying a sunny day in the park with his friends. While reciting Goethe's Faust by heart, a skill, no doubt, inherited from his mother, he was inspired to induce an OBE. After leaving his body, he witnessed his future self inventing the motor. Immediately after the OBE, Tesla dropped to his knees and drew the diagram in the dirt, creating for himself something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. From then on, Tesla induced OBEs not just for insight, but for leisure. According to his autobiography, he used these OBEs to travel to remote countries and to meet and make friends with people who possessed the same talent. He did this frequently until he turned seventeen, when his studies took precedence over his travels.

But the OBEs didn't stop for Tesla when he grew up. Indeed, Tesla continued to experience them on an involuntary basis. He gained an unusual sensitivity to lightning, becoming especially susceptible to OBEs whenever a storm struck. His sensitivity persisted outside of the storms to such a degree that he could detect and predict electrical activity miles away. Tesla believed that electricity was the bridge between the physical world and whatever lay beyond. Perhaps his spiritual interest in electricity was what inspired him to invent the Tesla Coil. Although mostly known today for its application in parlor tricks, the Tesla Coil is the only known device capable of generating "free energy" by increasing the voltage and frequency of any given unit of electricity. Of course, at the time, Tesla did not call his invention the Tesla Coil. He called it "A Means For Furthering Peace."

Nikola Tesla is not as celebrated today as he ought to be. In fact, if Tesla is remembered for anything, it's not for his inventions, but for his inventions having been stolen from him. It was Tesla who invented the radio wave that powers our radios, cell phones, and computers. Guglielmo Marconi stole his patent. As a young immigrant living in New York, Tesla worked for a time under Thomas Edison, who promised to pay him $50,000 if he could create a Direct Current generator. Tesla designed and built the device. Edison never paid him, but went on to claim the design for his own. Distraught, Tesla moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and designed and powered the city's famous streetcars. At least in this instance, he was able to retain the credit for his ingenuity. It was dangerous work, however. While working on a transformer coil, Tesla was struck by a whopping three million volts of electromagnetic charge. This was when Tesla had the second of his near-death experiences, during which he claimed to witness the past, the present, and the future all at once. The sensory overload, not to mention the nerve damage, put Tesla out of commission for some months. Perhaps there's some truth to Tesla's insight that electricity is the bridge between this world and the next.

Increasingly clairvoyant, it was Tesla who foresaw the splitting of the atom, and the eventual construction of the atomic bomb. Tesla was so distraught by this vision, he took to petitioning the US government, begging them to halt research. Instead of ignoring him, the US government saw Tesla as a threat. In 1943, the FBI stormed Tesla's hotel room and seized all of his documents and intellectual property. The Office of Alien Property holds the rights to these secret documents today. Nobody knows for sure what the documents entail. Perhaps they are about his OBEs; or perhaps they describe a phenomenon even more tremendous and as yet unavailable to mankind.

Tesla lived a fascinating, but deeply tragic life. The many thefts against him stripped him of his ability to trust people. He never married and isolated himself from human contact. Out of loneliness, he took to raising pigeons. He died alone of a coronary thrombosis at the age of eighty-six. His body wasn't discovered for two whole days.

* * * * *

So far we have examined out-of-body experiences from the viewpoints of those who have lived through them. But what does the modern scientific community have to say about OBEs? And is the science irreconcilable with the recounts of Crazy Horse, Muhammad, and others?

Like Dr. Steiner, modern neuroscientists agree that out-of-body experiences, as a phenomenon, begin in the brain. Unlike Dr. Steiner, most neuroscientists argue that the scientific explanation for OBEs precludes them from having any spiritual or supernatural context. Many of these scientists are in disagreement about which parts of the brain trigger OBEs, though most will concede that OBEs are processed in the parietal-temporal-occipital junction, or the PTO.

The PTO is a unique portion of the brain. As you might have guessed from its name, it's the crossroads in the brain where the parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes intersect. The parietal lobe is responsible for most facets of sensory perception, such as the sense of touch. The temporal lobe is a bit trickier, but plays a part in processing memory, language, and auditory input. Finally, the occipital lobe is the brain's grand vision center. Everything we see in day to day life, we see through the occipital lobe.

In a Swedish medical study, participants were asked to lie inside an MRI machine while wearing a head-mounted camera. Rather than recording their surroundings, however, the camera actually showed these participants the insides of other patients' MRI machines. The researchers used different stimuli to engage the remote patients: for example, poking them. In nearly all instances, the volunteers who were not being stimulated believed that they were and thus reacted as though they were. Their brains' parietal and premotor cortices instantly lit up. The research suggests that what we think is happening to our bodies is more influential than what is actually happening to our bodies. This finding may be crucial to uncovering what's really going on during OBEs.

The scientific community is at a loss, however, to explain one persistent curiosity: Blind people have OBEs, too. One such person was Helen Keller.

Later an author, activist, and teacher, Helen Keller was a healthy infant in 1880. Within nineteen months, however, Keller had lost her sight and her hearing, possibly due to meningitis. Keller grew up without any auditory or visual memories. Much has been written about her special relationship with Anne Sullivan, the teacher who restored her ability to communicate with the outside world. Less has been written about Keller's extrasensory experiences prior to and after meeting Ms. Sullivan. During one of these experiences, Keller was sitting in the library, waiting for her teacher to arrive, when she felt herself leaving her body. All of a sudden, Keller reported, she found herself floating over Athens, Greece. Sullivan was certainly at a loss for explanation later on when Keller described such ruins as the Parthenon in perfect visual detail, especially because Sullivan had yet to cover Ancient Greece in the young Keller's studies. Keller went on to say: "I perceived the realness of my soul and its sheer independence of all conditions of place and body. ... Space was nothing to spirit!"

Keller was neither the first nor last blind person to experience sight during an out-of-body experience. Bradley Burroughs and Vicki Umipeg, both born blind, underwent near-death experiences and were able to see during their duration. The ancient Asclepeion at Epidaurus, a Greek healing temple well preserved to this day, details a number of patients' out-of-body experiences on its wall murals. Some of those patients were born without sight or hearing. Many scientists will be the first to admit that science has a long way to go. Among the questions science cannot yet answer are: "Why is ice slippery?" and "How can bicycles stay upright when in motion?" No doubt, it will be a long time before science can explain the complicated and historical mystery behind out-of-body experiences.

4

How to Induce OBEs

Now that you have been persuaded of the historical validity behind OBEs, it's time to produce some of your own. The process is simple and safe; anyone can do it. The only obstacle you may face is your initial discomfort. Once you overcome that discomfort, leaving your body is as easy as closing your eyes.

If this is your first time inducing an out-of-body experience, you'll want to do it at night, or at least when you don't have anywhere to be for several hours. The reason I suggest nighttime is because out-of-body experiences are extremely physically draining; they will interrupt your sleep schedule. Ideally, if you have a day off from work and other engagements, you should plan to induce your OBE the night before.

Step 1: Lie down in a place where nothing will interrupt you.

When I say no interruptions, I mean no interruptions. Make sure your friends and your family won't come calling for a quick chat. It's a good idea to turn the ringer off on your phone and make sure you can't hear any street sounds outside your window. If you can't filter out the street sounds, that's okay. Such sounds are not particularly disruptive; it's just that you may find it easier to concentrate without them.

For an out-of-body experience, you'll want to be lying on your back. Your arms should be straight at your sides. Your legs should be straight, too. Make sure there is no strain on your neck or head. If you're lying in a bed--and most people are--you may find it easier to go without a pillow.

Step 2: Don't move.

I can't stress this enough. If you move even so much as an inch, you'll have to start the process all over again. Do not move your eyes. Do not move your tongue. Do not cough. Do not swallow. Keeping as still as possible is crucial in kickstarting the out-of-body experience--although I can't say why. Maybe your energies need time to settle down in one place. Or maybe it's a physical aid in the concentration process. Don't twitch your fingers. Don't flex your toes. Whatever you do, do not scratch that itch that's prickling your left arm.

Once you're confident that you can keep your body still and straight, you're ready for the next step.

Step 3: Imagine that you are moving.

Start with the bottom of your body and work your way up to the top. Think about what it feels like to curl your toes--but don't actually curl them. Imagine the feeling of rotating your ankles. Pretend you're kicking your shins and bending your knees. Imagine the way your hips move when you walk.

Do the same with your hands. Imagine each finger moving independently, starting with your outside fingers and ending with the fingers closest to your body. Feel your wrists, elbows, and shoulders rolling in their sockets. Think about your head turning on your neck, your eyes rolling in your head. At this point, you should be imagining that your whole body is in motion, even though it isn't. Don't worry if you feel a little silly.

When your body notices the discrepancy between your mental, moving self and your physical, immobile self, a disconnect begins to grow between your mental and physical faculties. It should start as a tingling sensation on the very surface of your skin. As the tingling spreads, it becomes an icy, uncomfortable numbness. Ignore it. It will be very tempting at this point to get your body moving again, just to shake off the steel sensation weighing down on you. Do that, and it'll be even harder for you to begin the process from the beginning.

Once your whole body has gone numb, it will begin to seem as if you're sinking into your mattress. You're so heavy at this point, you may worry that you'll fall right through the foundation of your house. Don't worry. This is a sign that you're doing things correctly.

Step 4: Concentrate on the colors behind your eyes.

Probably everybody has noticed at some point that when we close our eyes, colors persist on the backs of our eyelids. These colors, called phosphenes, are present even when all light sources are removed from the vicinity, so no one can say for sure where they really came from. As a young girl, I was told that the lights inside our eyes are the lights of the cosmos. It's a charming idea, but beyond me to examine.

Of the myriad of shapes and colors behind your eyes, pick one and concentrate on it. That light will serve as your guide when it's time for you to leave your body--but it's not time just yet. Follow the light as it dances around behind your eyelids. Don't force it to take on a specific shape. If it wants to move left, let it move left. If it doesn't move at all, that's okay, too.

After a while, imagine that you are falling into the light. Think about what it feels like when your body pitches forward. Allow the color to swallow you up until it has become the entirety of your vision, spreading tangibly to your temples.

I have to stop for a moment to address something you may be wondering just now. How are blind people supposed to complete this step? But that's the fascinating thing about phosphenes: Even blind people see them. Remember, it's very often the case that blind people can still perceive light to some degree. I'll admit that out of all the people I've counseled through OBEs, only two of them have been blind. My selection pool isn't exactly vast. Both of them were able to have OBEs in spite of their different abilities. If it happens to be the case that you are blind, and you cannot see any lights behind your eyes, ignore this step. It is a helpful step in divorcing your mind from your body, but you can still leave your body without it. Just expect the process to take longer.

Step 5: Clear your mind of all extraneous thoughts.

Those of us with very busy lifestyles will find this the hardest step in the OBE process. Often, thoughts leak into your mind without your say. Once you've fished them out, new ones take their place. Before you know it, you're obsessing about your car payment or your daughter's ballet recital.

Clearing the thoughts from your mind is easier than it sounds. Whenever you become aware of your mind wandering, focus on something else instead. Ideally, you should be focusing on the light you chose to follow behind your eyes. If you can't do that, focus on your breathing. Catalogue the rising and falling of your chest, the taste of the air in your throat, the soft sound your breath makes when it passes through your nose. In time, the worrisome thoughts will have evaporated.

If this technique doesn't work for you, or if you have reason to believe it won't, I suggest getting into the routine of meditating before you attempt to have an OBE. Meditating is terrific practice for OBEs, not least of all because it divorces the mind from the body in a manner very similar to the way that OBEs do. You should start your meditation routine at least five days prior to your first OBE attempt. If you don't know how to meditate, or if your regular meditation routine just isn't working for you, skip ahead to Chapter Six, where you'll find detailed instructions.

At this point in the out-of-body process, your body might be paralyzed. Don't try to move to find out, because if it isn't, and you move, you'll have to start the process from the beginning. If you do try to move, and you find yourself paralyzed, don't panic. This is a perfectly natural sensation called sleep paralysis. During sleep paralysis, it's not uncommon to hallucinate such visions as an intruder in your bedroom. It's my anecdotal opinion that these hallucinations are where the idea of "harmful astral entities" comes from. I can personally assure you that there is nobody in the room with you and that the immobility will wear off on its own. The easiest way to end sleep paralysis is--you guessed it--to fall asleep. This is another reason why I suggest attempting your first OBE at night.

Paralysis aside, a number of unusual sensations will start to occur in rapid succession. This is the point during an OBE when your hearing shuts off. Even if your room is quiet, the loss is unmistakable. It presents as a clicking sound in your ears, followed by the overwhelming urge to swallow. (Don't!) In addition, you'll realize you no longer can hear yourself breathing. You may not have been particularly aware of your breathing before, but you'll definitely be aware of it now.

Once your hearing is gone, your sight quickly follows. Note that sometimes the sight goes before the hearing. That's okay; there's no strict order for these two steps in the process. When your vision shuts off, you'll feel your eyes involuntarily rolling back in your head. This is one of the scariest parts of the OBE; some people even describe it as feeling like they have died. You haven't, of course. But you're almost done. In seconds, you'll be outside of your body. Here's what you should expect to happen next.

5

What to Expect During an OBE

Don't be surprised if the first thing that happens once you've completed the previous steps is that you fall asleep. Your body is in a very relaxed state right now; falling asleep is natural. Nor does falling asleep mean that you will be unable to complete your out-of-body experience. It does mean, however, that the experience may be delayed an hour or two.

To speak from personal experience, normally my OBEs begin when I am in the middle of a deep sleep. A dream I'm having will abruptly end, and I'll find myself in the middle of a real world location. This location is as random as you can possibly imagine. One time it was my local Walmart, which I'd only visited once before. Another time, it was my community swimming pool, which I'd never visited at all. I believe that most people's OBEs, at least their early ones, will take place in a location either very familiar or nominally familiar to them. It is almost always the case that the first time you leave your body, you manifest in a location considerably close to your body's resting place. You may even manifest in the same room.

When you first have your OBE, it may be difficult to determine whether you are, in fact, outside of your body, or whether you are simply having a very vivid dream. Here are some tips for telling the difference.

Tip #1: Find a clock.

Even a stopped clock tells the correct time two times a day. If you wake up in a location without a clock, get to one as soon as possible. You shouldn't have problems getting to one. During an OBE, moving from place to place is as easy as thinking about the place you'd like to wind up. If your experience is really a dream, the time on the clock you find will read nonsense--13:22, for example. In a legitimate OBE, the time will consist of valid numerical values.

Don't think you can preempt this fact checker by wearing a watch when you go to sleep. There's no concrete rule that says you're going to wear the same clothes during your OBE that you were wearing when you lay down. In fact, you may not wear any clothes at all. You may not even have a semblance of a body! If you do manifest with a wristwatch, keep in mind that it is not a physical wristwatch, but an extension of your mental faculties, and therefore isn't required to function according to logic. I used to wear wristwatches during my own OBEs until they began behaving erratically, during one instance sprouting daisies. Since then, I've done without.

If you find a clock in your OBE, and the clock gives you a valid time reading, the reading may be at odds with the time you think it's supposed to be. For example, suppose you lay down at ten o'clock at night, but the clock says it's two in the morning. Remember, first and foremost, that even if it feels as if your OBE began instantly, it probably took a few hours longer than you think, regardless of whether you remember falling asleep. Another possibility is that the time on the clock reads earlier than the time you went to bed. This has personally never happened to me, but if it happens to you, I wouldn't regard it as the nail in the coffin. During an OBE, you aren't a physical being. Physical laws, as we'll later demonstrate, don't apply to you. It's highly possible that you have manifested at an earlier point in time. Time itself, according to Einstein, is merely another dimension of space. Recall, too, that Balzac and St. Germain used to use their OBEs for something effectively akin to time travel.

If you can't find a clock, of course, there are other ways to determine whether you're actually having an OBE.

Tip #2: Find other people.

The way other people react to you, or don't react to you, is a huge indicator of what's going on during the out-of-body experience. If you find a person to talk with, and they verbally respond to you, most likely you are dreaming. In a real out-of-body experience, the people you meet with will not be aware of your presence, let alone capable of interacting with you. There are, of course, exceptions, which we will cover later.

If you can find a person to interact with, and you still aren't sure whether you're dreaming, or actually outside your body, quiet your mind and pay close attention to the person in front of you. During an out-of-body experience, you will find yourself, in a word, telepathic. You will feel other people's feelings easily and tremendously. I won't say that you can hear their voices in your head, but the emotions are so clear and concrete, you may as well. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about when you experience it. It's as if you are feeling the other person's emotions for them. If you can't feel other people's emotions during an out-of-body experience, you're not having an out-of-body experience. Wait until you wake up and try again the next night. Just because you didn't get it right the first time doesn't mean you won't the second. I have never met somebody who is altogether incapable of having an out-of-body experience, even if it takes a few nights of practice to get it right. We already hold the instructions locked deep inside ourselves.

If you're having problems locating both a clock and another person, here's one final tip that will decide whether you are sleeping or whether you are outside your body.

Tip #3: Look for a shadow.

Dreams are not intelligent experiences. Logic does not exist within their dominion. A clock that reads 13:22 is but one example of the sort of nonsense that makes perfect sense in a dream, but outside of a Dali painting, wouldn't hold true in the real world. Another example is the way light and shadows interact with each other.

If you're worried, during your OBE, that you are actually dreaming, look for an object that casts a shadow. It can be anything from a sand dune to a telephone pole, depending on your location. Does the object have a shadow? If it doesn't, of course, you are dreaming. If it does, check the position of the shadow in conjunction with the position of the light source. If the light source is behind the object, is the shadow in front of the object? It should be. If it isn't, you're dreaming. In addition, if the shadow's shape does not match the object's shape, you're definitely dreaming. But if you examine the shadow and find it behaving in line with real-world physics, you can be sure that you are having an actual out-of-body experience. In a dream, it doesn't occur to your subconscious mind to fill in the small details. In fact, in a dream, it's usually the case that objects don't cast shadows at all.

At this point, you're probably wondering whether you yourself will cast a shadow during your out-of-body experience. I can only answer this question from the standpoint of my own out-of-body experiences. Not once during an OBE have I cast a shadow. I don't think it likely that you will, either. Shadows are the result of a physical object obstructing a light source. During an OBE, there's nothing physical about you. If you find yourself casting a shadow during an OBE, but all the other shadows you've encountered behaved in line with established physics, I wouldn't worry about it too much. Recall that you don't necessarily show up during an OBE in the same clothes you wore to bed. This is because you can manifest pretty much any way you'd like to or expect to, consciously or subconsciously, which we'll cover in depth in Chapter Seven. There's no reason to believe this manifestation doesn't include shadows.

Now that we have determined that you are having an out-of-body experience: Congratulations! Take a moment to feel proud of yourself. You've done something most people said you couldn't do. Let's talk about some of the general things you will experience during your OBE. We'll get into the specifics behind what you can do with your OBE in Chapter Seven.

I mentioned earlier that moving during an OBE is as easy as thinking about moving. I don't mean that you have to spend time visualizing the steps you want to take or the place you want to wind up. This is not a process that requires even the slightest amount of concentration. The moment you've finished thinking, "I'd like to take a look at that tree," you are already standing in front of the tree, examining the smooth wood of its trunk and its lovely, scented branches. This part of the OBE is so effortless, it feels like swimming for the first time, or flying. It's such a joyful, freeing sensation, you may find that during your first OBE, you do little else besides practice moving around. Have fun with it! But if you're worried you'll think the wrong thoughts, and consequently wind up in the wrong place, there's literally no risk of that. During an OBE, you are raw, unfiltered consciousness, unfettered by the world around you, especially by negative thoughts. Everything about your very being is deliberate and assured. It's impossible, during an OBE, to do something you don't want to do. I'd go so far as to say that OBEs are the only time in your life where you're in complete control of your circumstances.

People are often surprised when I tell them that they can feel physical sensations during their OBEs. Let's go back to the tree example. If you find yourself standing in front of a weeping willow tree, and imagine yourself touching its swinging boughs, not only will you touch the boughs, you'll feel the pliable branches slipping between your fingers. I honestly can't say why this is. I discovered it by accident in my teenage years, when one of my OBEs brought me to a small-town cafe. I remember touching the foggy glass window and jolting with surprise when the condensation beaded under my fingertips. I remember the fresh scents of newly baked bread, warm butter, and bitter coffee. You can smell scents during your OBEs, too. I don't know whether you can taste food. I've never tried that. If you can taste food, I doubt you can eat it, since you don't have a stomach or a mouth. In a similar vein, while you can feel objects, you can't pick them up. It's annoying, but understandable: You don't have a body to pick them up with.

With this information, you might be worrying that it's possible to get hurt during your OBEs. The short answer is: Absolutely not. For one thing, with exception, no one can see you, so no one's going to want to hurt you. In addition, because your movements are so deliberate and controlled, accidents just don't happen. If that tree you're examining suddenly starts tipping over, getting out from underneath it is as easy as thinking, "I'm out of here!" And to be perfectly honest, such a thing has never come close to happening to me during my OBEs.

If you're still worried you can get hurt during your OBE, all you have to do is consciously decide to shut off your ability to perceive physical pain. Being in control of your experience isn't just limited to the things you see and the places you go, but includes sensory input and stimuli. If you feel something you don't like during your OBE, simply think, "I don't want that," and the sensation will disappear, rather as if it wasn't there in the first place. But it's likely you won't need to remember that instruction. It's likely that it will occur to you intuitively. Much about having out-of-body experiences is intuitive.

In Chapter Four, we talked about how physically draining OBEs can be once you've returned to your body proper. The fact bears repeating: If you plan an OBE for the nighttime, expect to be exhausted the entire following day. It's possible that your body is reacting to the disrupted brain equilibrium that Dr. Steiner taught us about in Chapter Three. On any given night that you induce an OBE, you can expect to average about four or five hours of sleep. If this is the norm for you, that's fine. If it's not, prepare for the inevitable grogginess when you wake up. You may think that you'll counteract the grogginess by catching a quick nap the following day. Unfortunately, this is not really feasible. By some cruel trick of nature, the very same force that's exhausting you physically is keeping you alert mentally. You may even be hyper alert, noticing details about your life that you wouldn't ordinarily. One day, after I had an OBE, I spent an entire morning counting the lines in the bricks on my fireplace. (Seventy-two.) Such alertness is one of the more annoying eccentricities that come along with OBEs.

If you're thinking you'll straighten out your sleep schedule by having your OBE in the daytime and sleeping regularly at night: Let me know how that works out for you. It has yet to work for me, or for any of the associates I've counseled through their own OBEs. While you may be tired enough at night to drop straight to sleep, your mind, unfortunately, is still very much awake. This physical-mental discrepancy means that, if anything, you're more likely to simply transition into a second, involuntary OBE. And if you're not in the mood for another OBE, that can be pretty annoying.

OBEs become second nature once you've been inducing them for a long while. What generally happens is that you reach a state where you can slip into OBEs automatically, just by desiring to. This is not unlike Crazy Horse's declaration that he could enter the "spirit world" merely by thinking about it. If you do not eventually reach the state where OBEs become second nature, don't worry about it. Every person is different. Some of my associates were able to induce OBEs on the first night. Others required three or four days of practice. Some reached that "second nature" state fairly quickly, only to lose the familiarity within a week or two and have to start over at Step 1. The instructions are concrete; they will always work. If you ever need to revisit them, do so at your own comfort and leisure.

Perhaps the most common question I'm asked by people new to OBEs is: "How will I return to my body when I'm done?" Like many other aspects of your OBE, this aspect is an intuitive one. Often what will happen is that you will automatically find your way back to your body after four or five hours. You may not even remember making your way back. The time period can feel shorter or longer, depending on what you've been doing during your OBE. If you don't automatically return to your body, then tell yourself that you would like to. If your OBE is frightening you, try this mantra: "This is a dream. I'm waking up now." It doesn't matter that you know you aren't dreaming. The mantra works anyway. Such is the wonderful power of persuasion.

If you're ready to read about specific things you can do with your OBE, including places you can go and people you can visit, skip ahead to Chapter Seven. If you're having problems actually inducing the OBE, or if Step 5 in the induction process is forcing you to a standstill, move on to Chapter Six for some helpful meditation techniques. Once more, I promise that you will get the hang of this process if you haven't already. I have counseled upward of a hundred people through their OBEs, and every last one of them made the transition satisfactorily, with only a few adjustments necessary in a handful of cases. There does not exist a single human being for whom OBEs are impossible.

6

Meditation Techniques

Meditation is one of the world's oldest spiritual practices, probably older even than prayer. Funny enough, nobody can actually agree about what meditation is. Merriam-Webster defines meditation as "continued or extended thought; reflection; contemplation." It differentiates between regular meditation and transcendental meditation by helpfully reminding us that transcendental meditation, whatever that may be, comes from Hinduism. Encyclopedia Britannica says that to meditate is "to engage in mental exercise (as concentration on one's breathing or repetition of a mantra) for the purpose of reaching a heightened level of spiritual awareness." The Free Dictionary says that to meditate is to "train, calm, or empty the mind." Even Wikipedia, the internet's largest and most thorough encyclopedia, answers the question with a waffling shrug.

For the purpose of this exercise, we're going to go with The Free Dictionary's definition of meditation. It's the closest I can reconcile with the meditative techniques taught to me by my elders.

As background: My father's family comes from the Cree Nation, one of the largest indigenous tribes in North America. Our line is descended from the patrilineal Sipi Wi Iniwak, the River People of Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, and Alberta. Without going too much into personal detail, meditation is very much a continued practice for the people back home. It's practically a birthright. I'm going to teach it to you the way it was taught to me.

My Great Uncle Sam once told me that meditation isn't the absence of our thoughts, but the pause between one thought and the next. As Uncle Sam explained it, we are our observations. We are consciousness itself. To completely rid your mind of thought is not possible, at least not for an extended period of time. If you get rid of yourself, what part of you remains?

The pause between our thoughts, Uncle Sam went on, is where we glimpse the Source from which we derive. The universe's greatest deception, he told me, was that we saw ourselves as separate from the Source. "A flower is more than just its pretty petals," he told me one day. "A flower is its stem and its leaves. A flower is the roots from which it sprouted. How can a flower live without its roots? Cut off the roots and the flower will die."

It's important, then, that we keep in communion with the Source. Perhaps the death Uncle Sam warned about wasn't a literal one, but a spiritual one.

It's okay if you don't like the word "spiritual." I'm not entirely comfortable with it myself. All I can say with certainty is that meditation really does work, as you've undoubtedly discovered if you already have a routine. But what is it that meditation is supposed to do?

#1: Help you relax.

Meditation is probably the most potent sedative you'll ever find. The best thing about it? It's free. I often wonder how much money today's society would save if they meditated instead of medicated. This is not to diminish the effectiveness of prescription drugs, nor the amount of people they have helped. If you do have a prescription, perhaps you should consider supplementing it with a daily meditation.

It's hard to say why meditation is so relaxing. Certainly taking a break from your worries is a part of it; but during meditation, it's as if your worries don't even exist. This is not unlike an out-of-body experience itself, although meditation has a much shorter duration than an OBE.

I'm quick to tell people that if meditating is stressing you out, or if you have to concentrate to do it, you're not doing it right. It's fine, though; many people meditate incorrectly on their first try. We no longer live in a society that prioritizes meditation as a routine. Consequently, we have to struggle to learn something that should be as commonplace to us as writing, or even breathing. It's unusual, to say the least, that we have had this most inherent of abilities indoctrinated right out of us.

If you've had difficulty meditating in the past, that doesn't mean you'll never get the hang of it. All it means is that you were taught the wrong technique.

#2: Help you focus.

Meditation doesn't just still the mind, it recalls the subconscious into the conscious. After the meditation, you'll find it much easier to think clearly, unimpeded by outside circumstances. Throughout day to day life, our thoughts are generally influenced by people and events beyond our control. A rude customer can ruin our entire day. Meditation puts up a sound barrier between those people and events and you. Nothing can touch you while you're inside the barrier, and when you take the barrier down, you'll find that your annoyances have given up and gone home, so to speak. Meditation, to put it shortly, is a blissful solitude in which, ironically, you are anything but alone.

Focus and attention problems plague our society at an unprecedented rate. 11% of children between the ages of 4 and 17 are said to suffer from ADHD. Who knows how many of those children carry their ailment with them as they grow up? One in every twenty people is said to have suffered a nervous or mental breakdown at some point in his or her life. The statistics are staggering, and worrisome. My uncle would have attributed these statistics to the "noise," as he called it, of everyday life, the unnecessary chaos we subject ourselves to as supposedly intelligent creatures. There is much to learn from wakoomakun, our animal relatives, who engage in competition only when their survival absolutely depends on it.

If you've ever had problems focusing on a work project, tackling a family grievance, sorting out finances, or even figuring out which direction you want your life to take, meditation supplies you with the tools necessary to cut the clutter from your life and excise the heart of the issue. Meditation is rather like sitting down and talking with your problems one-on-one. It's often the case that a solution that was eluding you earlier will occur to you immediately after your meditation is over. If not, that's what OBEs are for, and meditation will certainly help you achieve them.

#3: Attune you with nature.

If you're anything like me, you love this planet we're living on. In this universe estimated to be fourteen billion years old, fourteen billion parsecs in size, Earth is the only planet we know of that fosters life. Whether you look at it from a spiritual standpoint, or a scientific one, abiogenesis is an undeniable miracle, the spontaneous blossoming of organic matter from a lifeless, inorganic soup. Scientists now calculate that the likelihood of life having formed on Earth is 50,000,000,000,000,000,000 (fifty quintillion) to 1. That's not even .0000000001%. That's not even half of that number!

Those of us who cherish this planet, and the many gifts it has given us, want nothing more than to live in synchronicity with it. If that's you, then you owe it to yourself to learn how to meditate. It's hard to describe the exact feeling you get after you've meditated. The world around you seems somehow transformed. If you meditate in the comfort of your home, go outside when you're done. Look at the leaves on the trees, the shapes of the clouds in the sky. Not only are they more beautiful than before, they are, inexplicably, a part of you. You feel as if you're looking at yourself in the sky. You can practically feel the water in the leaves trickling through your veins, the sun warming the frozen rain in your chest.

You never appreciate the rarity of your life quite so much as you do when you appreciate the forces that conspired to create it. Meditation puts you in contact with those forces directly.

#4: Attune you with reality.

Reality is not just confined to planet Earth. If Earth is the architect who built us, reality is the handwritten blueprint she used to do it. The schematics existed long before her. We don't know how they got there. But through meditating, we put ourselves in a position to find out. Meditating teaches us the language the blueprints were written in. Once we're fluent in that language, we can read the blueprints for ourselves.

In the pause between our thoughts, there is a stillness that fills us with a primordial sense of understanding. During that stillness, there are no such things as questions. It feels, in that moment, as if you already know the answers to any questions you could possibly ask. It's a tenuous feeling that slips away once the meditation is over. But the feeling comes back every time you meditate. Each time it returns, it lasts a little longer. Perhaps it's not a stretch to say that eventually, the feeling will remain for good.

During one meditation, I had the feeling that I was soaring above the clouds. I felt as though I carried everyone I'd ever loved in my arms. I could understand that every moment of turbulence I'd ever experienced was a facade. At this very moment, I have no way of explaining where that feeling came from. I don't even remember fully what it felt like. It was a kind of precocial knowledge, something you could no more deny than the color of the sky, or the shape of your hands. To deny it would have been absurd.

Over the years, it's come as no surprise to me that the people with the most love in their hearts have generally been the people who meditate the most. Just as meditation brings you closer to the fabric of reality, it brings you closer to your fellow man. Perhaps to understand reality and to understand mankind are one and the same.

Now that we've defined what meditation is, we'll look at some of the techniques you can use to perform it. We'll cover beginners' and intermediate techniques.

* * * * *

In this section, we'll focus on ways you can meditate if you're brand new to the experience, or if you've only rarely meditated in the past. If you're more familiar with meditation, or are looking for a more intensive technique, which may help to lengthen the time you spend outside of your body, skip ahead to the next section.

Step 1: Find a quiet place to meditate.

While it's technically not impossible to meditate if you're surrounded by sound, it's important to make a distinction between the types of sounds you're subjected to. Running water, chirping birds, or anything rhythmic, natural, or repetitive is unlikely to disrupt you, especially if the sound is a soft one. Some types of music, such as the Native American heartbeat drum, can also be conducive to a good meditative experience. Music that's loud or makes use of a lot of instruments will more than likely distract you. The key here is whether or not you're going to find yourself paying more attention to the sounds than what it is that you're supposed to be doing. Blasting your favorite Shakira album won't help anyone. It'll only make you want to dance.

The place you choose for your meditation should be a place where no one is likely to walk in on you. Turn off the ringer on your phone, too. Nothing cuts a good meditation short as easily as a ringing phone. This is not to say that you can't meditate with a partner if you want to. You can. But that partner should be completely understanding that meditation isn't play time. Once you've begun to meditate, there should be very little conversation between the two of you, if any at all.

Step 2: Correct your posture.

While it's possible to meditate in any position, I find that the experience runs more smoothly if you're sitting up straight, legs folded ankle to knee. If you're worried about straining your back, you can sit against a wall, or the headboard of your bed.

Unlike OBEs, it's okay if you move around during your meditation. But you shouldn't move too much--like the aforementioned sounds, it's possible it'll distract you. Therefore, it's dire that you find the position that you're most comfortable in, even if that's a different position from the one listed above. But the position won't serve you any if you aren't 100% alert during it. If you find yourself dozing off, you're doing it wrong. Try again.

While this part is optional, I find it easier to meditate when I'm wearing loose, comfortable clothing. If you've just come from a party, and you're wearing stockings and heels, you might want to take those off. You can lose the necktie, too. Uncomfortable, restrictive clothing is actually quite likely to make you overcorrect your posture--which means you'll get distracted--which means you'll have to start the process all over again.

Step 3: Close your eyes.

I've yet to encounter anyone who can meditate successfully with his or her eyes open. Keep 'em closed! If your eyes are open, you'll wind up looking at your surroundings. The only place you should be looking is inside yourself. Unless you happen to own a room that's completely bare of all color and furnishings, take my word on this one.

Step 4: Breathe deeply.

Start with a series of slow, deep breaths to get yourself into the meditative rhythm. Think of this as a warmup. You don't have to time your breaths, but I find that it works best if you breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth.

If your breathing becomes ragged, or your chest feels tight, stop and start again. Some people are so unaccustomed to deep breaths that once they finally take one, their bodies aren't sure what to make of it. These are generally the people who fill their lives with more chaos than is strictly necessary. They literally forget to breathe.

Interestingly, the Latin word for "I breathe," spiro, is the root word of the English word "inspiration." To breathe, therefore, is literally to imbibe creativity. Spiro is the root word of another word we use today--"spirit." According to the ancients, each of our breaths is filled with spirit--whatever spirit may be. It's no wonder that breath control is such an involved aspect of meditating.

Step 5: Push your breath through your belly.

As you inhale and exhale, follow the path your breath takes through your stomach. Focus all your thoughts on your stomach's rising and falling. If your thoughts start to wander, gently return them to your breathing exercises. Do this as many times as is necessary until the focus becomes effortless.

Once you can be sure that your thoughts won't wander, breathe slowly, deeply through your stomach for anywhere from one minute to five. You don't need to keep your eyes on a clock; when your mind starts to get tired of this routine, it will let you know. Exact numbers aren't important.

When you feel as if you've been doing this long enough...

Step 6: Hold your breath.

If you've been following the technique correctly, all your thoughts are centered around your breathing right now. The moment you hold your breath, your thoughts should halt, too. Lengthen that pause for as long as you can. It's okay if your thoughts eventually come back to you. Nobody can exist in a state of mindlessness for long. To be conscious is to be conscious of something, as 19th century philosopher Edmund Husserl once eloquently pointed out.

Once you find yourself involuntarily thinking again, go back to Step 5. Repeat it. And that's it. The rest of your meditation should be a continual back-and-forth between Steps 5 and 6.

You can meditate for as long or as short as you'd like to. There's no concrete guideline. The only reason this is important is that establishing a meditation routine prior to attempting an OBE can help the OBE go off without a hitch. If you're going to establish such a routine, I recommend starting it five to seven days before your planned OBE attempt. If you're worried that the routine will interfere with your work or school schedule, put those worries aside. Even if you've meditated a mere fifteen minutes a day, the results will be unmistakable.

The above meditation technique is the only one you need if you're having trouble inducing OBEs. An optional, more intensive technique is listed in the next section. The more intensive technique may help you to lengthen the time of your OBEs. Read on if your OBEs haven't been lasting as long as you would like.

* * * * *

The following meditation technique is what I call an "intermediate" meditation technique. As stated above, it's handy if you're looking to lengthen the amount of time you spend outside of your body. However, it's a decidedly more complicated technique and not, on the whole, necessary for your experience. Skip ahead to Chapter Seven if you'd prefer to read about specific experiences you can have during your OBE, including places you can visit, people you can meet with, and tips for making the OBE more enjoyable.

To begin this technique, start out the way you would with the basic meditation technique. Find a quiet, peaceful place, free of distractions, and make sure you're comfortable. Sit up straight with your eyes closed. Close your mind from outside events. You can even begin with the basic technique outright and use it as a transition to the more complicated steps.

If you think you're ready--your posture's on point, your kids won't come barging in for a snack--then let's move on to Step 1.

Step 1: Roll your head slowly forward.

Keep your chin pointed toward your chest. If your throat bunches up or starts to feel tight, you've rolled your head too far. The key here is, as always, comfort.

Step 2: Simultaneously, breathe in through your nose.

I've separated this section into two different steps to render it easier to understand, but Steps 1 and 2 should be achieved at the same time. Many of the steps from here on out are going to be separated accordingly.

Breathe in through your nose while you roll your head forward. The inhalation should be somewhere between a regular breath and a deep breath. Don't worry if you don't understand what I'm talking about. Odds are that it will come naturally. If it doesn't, the best guideline you can use is whether or not you feel comfortable. The only way you can mess this up is if you feel uncomfortable or if you find yourself overthinking the process.

Step 3: Pause for three seconds.

Unlike the beginner's technique, you don't need to worry if you find yourself unable to clear your thoughts during the pause. That's not the intent of this step. The reason the pause is necessary is that you are allowing your body time to acclimate to the regimen. Additionally, it's not necessary to hold your breath during the pause.

Step 4: Roll your head backward until it's straight on your shoulders.

Again, don't overcorrect. If your throat is exposed, you've gone too far. During this part of the process, it should feel as if your head is floating effortlessly. If your neck aches at all, stop and start again.

Step 5: Simultaneously, breathe out through your nose.

Step 6: Roll your head backward until your forehead's facing the ceiling (or sky).

If you perform this part slowly, it shouldn't feel uncomfortable, even though your throat's exposed. If you have the urge to swallow, you can.

Step 7: Simultaneously, breathe in through your nose.

The rest of the steps are going to be very straightforward and formulaic. You can interpose pauses as necessary between the steps. They should be about three seconds every time.

Step 8: Straighten your head on your shoulders.

Step 9: Simultaneously, breathe out through your nose.

Step 10: Pause. Breathe in again.

Step 11: Roll your head forward, then backward, then forward on your shoulders, ending with your head straight again.

Pretend that you're working the stiffness out of your neck, if that helps you feel less funny. This should be one continuous, fluid motion, without any pauses. In fact, the movement should feel intuitive.

Step 12: Simultaneously, breathe out through your lips.

When you exhale, it should be audible, a soft hiss that passes between your teeth. Let the sound fill your ears. Hold it there and concentrate. Think about the way your breath feels as it rolls through your chest. Imagine that a part of you, or the whole of you, leaves your body along with your breath. This is true, in a way. Without breath, we have no life.

A relevant tangent you may find curious: Oxygen is technically a toxin. When it comes into contact with cells, it can corrode them in a process called oxidation, similar to what you see when rust forms on a piece of metal. Oxygen's toxicity is the reason that antioxidants are so popular on the market these days. The vast majority of organisms, especially single-celled organisms, will die when they come into contact with oxygen. We and our animal brethren are unique because we've evolved not only to withstand oxygen, but to incorporate it into our existence as a vital tool. There's nothing quite so indicative of our resilience as the ingenuity behind every breath we take.

Step 13: Pause. If possible, don't think.

If you can't suspend your thoughts, don't worry, but odds are, you will be able to. This meditation is such an involved, precise experience that, in the way of irony, you aren't thinking much else to begin with.

Step 14: Repeat the above thirteen steps, but moving your head side-to-side instead of front-to-back.

All that should change for this portion of the meditation is the direction your head is rotating in. Everything else remains the same, including the order and pattern of the breaths. By the time you are finished with your meditation, your neck should feel nice and loose.

You may be wondering why the intermediate meditation has so much focus on the head while the basic meditation focuses on the belly instead. I can't really say why this is. I could hazard a guess, but it would only be a guess. What I can guarantee is that (a) it works, and (b) the intermediate meditation is a far more cerebral experience than the simple meditation.

In fact, this meditative practice is so cerebral that when you're finished with it, you might feel dizzy. Immediately after this meditation, I often find that my surroundings are endowed with a clarity so sharp as to look surreal. Reality feels fake. At the same time, I can see myself in every object surrounding me. I am the chair I am sitting on, the ceiling above my head. I am the clothes on my skin, the walls of my house, and the raw material that made them. I've spoken with many, many people who have followed the same meditation regimen, and their findings are more or less the same as mine. Something special happens during this technique that redefines your very senses. If you think that's going to scare you, then don't try this technique. If you're determined to try it anyway, ease yourself into it. Talk yourself through the steps before you actually attempt them, especially because there are so many steps you need to remember. No matter how scary it feels, you are never, in any point, in actual danger. Meditation is probably one of the safer ways you can unwind at the end of a day.

There are likely a thousand different ways you can meditate, but that's not the scope of this book. The two techniques we've demonstrated are all you need to know for an enjoyable OBE. As previously stated, you might not even need meditation to induce your OBE. Most of the associates I've counseled through the process have not, in fact, required meditative help. But if you've been struggling thus far, meditation should clear up whatever difficulty you've had. Out-of-body experiences are not, in principle, a difficult thing to accomplish. The only difficulty you're likely to encounter is self-made.

7

What You Can Do During an OBE

You've finally done it: You're outside your body. Not even the sky is the limit right now. So you're probably wondering: What is? What can you and can't you do during an OBE?

In response to what you can't do, the answer is: not much. Limitations are something you experience as a physical being navigating a physical world. Right now, you aren't physical, and arguably, neither is the world around you. The OBE limitations I can think of are so few that I'm not even going to list them here. I'll discuss them later as exceptions to things you can do. Even then, many of these exceptions can be overcome with a little bit of old-fashioned mental elbow grease.

With that out of the way, let's start by examining your environment during your OBE. We'll take a look at the places you can go during your OBE, as well as the places you might wind up in inadvertently.

* * * * *

When you first "wake up" during an out-of-body experience, odds are you're going to wind up in a recognizable Earthly location, as we've discussed previously. I can count on one hand the number of people whose first experiences took them immediately outside the geosphere. It's rare, so for the sake of this discourse, we'll assume it won't be happening to you. We'll discuss using your OBE to visit places outside of Earth in a later section.

If you've paid attention to the language I'm using, you've probably already realized that you do not, in fact, have any control over the place where you initially manifest. Once you've been inducing OBEs for a considerable length of time, it becomes easier to decide where you're going to manifest at the onset. Even then, there will be occasions when you'll wake up on a road through some lonely desert and wonder, "Now where the heck am I?" In any case, beginners should expect to manifest in a location outside of their choosing. Once you've manifested, of course, you can change that location to your preferred parameters.

Beginners should stick to visiting Earthly locations until they're comfortable in their ability to navigate their surroundings. Remember that moving during an OBE is as easy as thinking that you would like to move, or thinking about the place where you would like to wind up. There's no effort about it. When you move from one place to another, it happens very fast. Depending on the person, the landscape can blur around you, or it can melt away instantaneously. Each person is different. And if you're wondering what real-world locations you can visit during an OBE, the answer is: literally all of them.

If there's one thing that's surprised me over the years, it's how many people want to use their OBEs to visit Area 51, convinced that the facility hides proof of extraterrestrial lifeforms. Are we as a people that desperate for confirmation of life outside our planet? Assuming such organisms exist, I'm sure they're just like you and me, give or take a few tentacles and blobs. If you, too, are looking to meet few friendly aliens, look elsewhere. You can visit Area 51; but it's incredibly boring. Expect to find armories, airplanes, and tanks. As best as I can tell, it's just a weapons testing site. The nearby Extraterrestrial Highway, which has become something of a tourist attraction, is much more fun. In the tiny town of Rachel, you can find novelty flying saucers, alien-themed restaurants, and more. You might have noticed that I'm speaking from experience. We'll blame my teenage self for that indiscretion.

I bring up Area 51 because many people are convinced they'll use their OBEs to uncover government secrets and conspiracies. Maybe you will; I don't know you, so I can't say. Still, I tend to find that just like material gain, setting out to "prove" something doesn't really occur to you during an OBE. OBEs are some of the most joyful, most incredible moments you'll ever have the pleasure of participating in. They are fulfilling in their own right.

If you've just induced your first OBE, and you're not sure where to go, here are a few suggestions you might find useful.

The Statue of Liberty

I grew up in New York City. The locale is very near and dear to me. There's something to be said about the view from the Statue of Liberty at night. New York City is dense, but vast. To see it from the air, you wouldn't believe how small it looks. The city lights sparkle on the dark water. This is a view you won't see except during an OBE; the Statue of Liberty typically only operates between eight AM and four PM. Maybe New York doesn't hold the same sentimental value for you as it does for me. But the location isn't what's breathtaking; the height is. To be so high up during your very first OBE is to feel invincible. It's an excellent way to kickstart your journey. More importantly, if you've been doubting your abilities up until this point, you won't doubt them anymore. Of course, if you're afraid of heights, or if you're not confident you'll be able to get back down, you should probably skip out on the Statue of Liberty entirely. There are plenty of places closer to Earth that are just as exciting.

Times Square

So I'm biased in favor of my city. Regardless, consider the statistics. On any given day, three hundred thousand people traverse the streets of Times Square. As previously mentioned, during an OBE, you can feel other people's feelings with little or no effort. It's genuinely a rush. Imagine feeling hundreds of thousands of feelings all at the same time. Sounds impossible, doesn't it? It's not. On the opposite side of the same token, feeling so many emotions at once can serve as a sensory overload, especially if you're not prepared for it. Maybe you're the kind of person who enjoys sensory overload; or maybe you aren't. In any case, you can always put up a partial mental blockade and turn off the feelings you don't want to feel. Once again, how you go about doing this will occur to you instinctively.

The Grand Canyon

The Grand Canyon isn't just a popular tourist attraction, it's a place of history and rich spirituality. For thousands of years, many Native American tribes lived here, including the Anasazi, the Hopi, the Navajo, and other Pueblo peoples. Many of these cultures were and are deeply spiritual. For them, OBEs are not merely a matter of communion with their gods, but an integral way of life. It's true that a good number of these cultures practice out-of-body experiences as regularly as other cultures practice prayer, or celebrate birthdays. The Grand Canyon retains certain signatures of these OBEs, past and present. To visit the Grand Canyon during an OBE is to interact with the energy of the thousands who have done the same centuries before you. It's often the case that these energies manifest in human form. The people you'll meet at the Grand Canyon are fascinating and profound. Many of them are willing to sit and talk to you, and they're more than happy to answer questions, not just about themselves, but about your OBE. In fact, if you're only going to visit one place during your first OBE, I recommend the Grand Canyon for this reason alone. If you do visit the Grand Canyon, it's quite likely that you'll make a new friend here. We'll talk more about meeting people during OBEs in a later section of this chapter.

Now that we've discussed Earthly locations you can visit during your first OBE, let's talk about places you might wind up inadvertently.

The White Room

Countless OBE practitioners, myself included, have wound up in this room by accident. In fact, if you've read other accounts about NDEs and OBEs, you might have heard of it already. It presents as a very tall, vaulted white room with iridescent crystalline structures at the front. You may find seats here, or you may not. You may also find that you're not alone. The other figures in the room--if there are any when you visit--will more than likely appear as indistinct, vaguely humanoid, but cloudy. In my experience, they don't interact with you. Just by looking at them, though, a sense of peace overcomes you.

I'm going to be honest: I have no idea what this place is. I don't know if it's a real location or some shared, subconscious hallucination that people who have OBEs are particularly prone to. I don't think it would be prudent for me even to conjecture. This location is harmless, though, and if you want to leave, all you have to do is think about leaving. There's not much to look at besides the crystals, so you probably will.

Your Childhood Home

Assuming you don't still live here, and assuming it hasn't been demolished, this is a very common place for OBE practitioners to wind up by accident. The reason is obvious: It holds a lot of emotional weight for you, whether it be positive or negative. In fact, there's so much emotional attachment at this location that you may find it prevents you from proceeding with the rest of your OBE. I'll give an example. When I returned to OBEs in my teenage years, I found that I kept waking up in the apartment of my childhood, where the aforementioned abuse had taken place. I was so swept up in memories, I couldn't escape them. I couldn't bring myself to leave the bedroom where I used to sleep, even though it was now a nursery, and home to a sweet if colicky baby boy. The only way I could escape the bedroom was to end the OBE prematurely. This can happen to you if you're holding onto emotional hangups with regards to your past. The best way to work past your emotional hangups is to accept them for what they are. Don't try this during the OBE. Address your childhood when you're awake. Tell yourself: "This happened to me. I can't change it, but it's over now. It's not happening anymore. I am more than my experiences. I am just getting started."

Having addressed your past, if you continue to manifest in your childhood home when you induce OBEs, there are still a few tools you can utilize to escape it. For example: Concentrate on the objects in your home that are no longer the same as they were when you were young. Is the wallpaper a different color? Are the ceiling lights a different fixture? This should jolt you into realizing you're not locked inside a memory. As the memory releases you, you'll automatically leave the house and manifest elsewhere. If you manifest in your childhood home again during your next OBE, don't worry about it. Just repeat the aforementioned exercise. Do this enough times, and you'll eventually stop manifesting there altogether.

If the problem persists even after applying the steps I've described, there's a reason for it. It's beyond my scope to determine what that reason is. I don't think you'd be remiss to seek counseling in this situation. Although a psychiatrist might be unwilling to listen to your interest in OBEs, he or she is certainly more qualified to diagnose you than I am.

Zzyzx Road

Remember that road-through-the-lonely-desert we discussed? This is it. Curtis Howe Springer named this road in 1944 because he wanted it to be listed last in the alphabetical register of America's national highways. Springer went on to construct an illegal health spa on the site. The Bureau of Land Management ejected him, but kindly retained his well-thought name. So it wasn't a total loss.

Early on in this book I mentioned I had an experience that convinced me that OBEs were real. To be technical, I had two such experiences. This was the first of them. When I was a child, a series of involuntary OBEs repeatedly brought me to Zzyzx Road. The name on the highway sign was so ridiculous, I thought for sure that I had unknowingly made it up. It wasn't until years later, when I was a teenager, that I discovered the album Zzyzx by Zeromancer (now my favorite band) and learned that Zzyzx Road was a real location. The discovery floored me, and convinced me to resume my OBEs.

I don't know why I kept winding up on Zzyzx Road as a child. Maybe I was meant to, so that as an adult, I would have some form of proof about my OBEs' validity. To suggest such a thing would be to suggest a sense of predestination. I won't do that to you, because I feel that's presumptuous. However, I don't think I'm the only person to wind up on Zzyzx Road by accident. A few of the individuals I've counseled through OBEs have also mentioned waking up on this desert road. They didn't mention seeing a highway sign, but some of the markers they described were unmistakable. The sagebrush bushes growing in the gritty sand. The crusty salt beds, caked with mud. The pale mountain backdrop and the dusty sky. If you visit Zzyzx Road during sunset, by the way, it's eerily gorgeous. The mountains look like icebergs.

There's not much to see on Zzyzx Road. It's host to a university field station that studies unusual desert fauna, like pupfish, which somehow made a home out of the inhospitable hot springs. There are a few Native American communities not too far away--the San Manuel Reservation comes to mind--but that's about it.

So why is it that people keep winding up on Zzyzx Road? Well, like the White Room, I can't say for sure. Unlike the White Room, though, I have some ideas. To begin with, Zzyzx Road is located in the Mojave Desert, which is just as steeped in history and legend as the Grand Canyon, if not more. One of the local tribes, the Paiute, tells a story about a race of winged people called Hav-Musuv, who came to the desert millennia ago in rowing ships. According to the Paiute, whose name literally means "Water People," the desert was an ocean before the Hav-Musuv showed up, whereupon the waters instantly dried. The Hav-Musuv presently live underneath the desert in secrecy. As with most parables, the Hav-Musuv are probably a metaphor for something. It's beyond me to say what that is. Another local legend about Zzyzx Road comes from the Cahuilla tribe. The Cahuilla say that the area around Zzyzx is inhabited by a spirit named Taqwish, who once struck the desert in the form of a meteor. Taqwish, according to legend, was the first medicine man, although to this day he uses his prowess for mischief, not altruism. What's more, Taqwish is especially interested in capturing wayward, wandering souls. Sound familiar? It goes without saying that these stories should be taken with a grain of salt. What's clear, however, is that Zzyzx Road has been a site of supernatural belief since before it was even called Zzyzx Road. Belief is a very powerful thing. A Princeton study found that in the moments after 9/11, as people came together to pray, random number generators placed strategically around the world spiked dramatically in their readings, suddenly syncing up with each other. And I'm sure you've already heard of the Placebo Effect, the famous study where patients receiving no drug protocol recovered from their illnesses simply because they believed they had been administered the cure. Who's to say that Zzyzx Road hasn't absorbed the beliefs of the people who came before us? Maybe Zzyzx Road is merely acting on those beliefs. Maybe Zzyzx Road has developed something of its own mind.

Tangentially, Zzyzx Road was the topic of a 2006 thriller film starring Katherine Heigl. Misspelled as Zyzzyx Road, the movie was the lowest grossing movie in film history, earning a mere $30 USD. And if you're wondering how to pronounce Zzyzx, it rhymes with Isaacs.

* * * * *

Let's backtrack for a moment to talk about the people you might meet during an OBE. Critically, let's differentiate between the people you can interact with and the people you can't.

Suppose your OBE takes you to a crowded city street. We can even use Times Square again as an example. The average person you meet in such a setting is not, in fact, having an OBE. Likely, he or she is very much corporeal, and simply rushing home or to work. This person won't be able to see you or hear you. You can try to get his or her attention, but it won't work. (The same is true of animals, to get that out of the way; contrary to popular belief, they are no more clairvoyant than humans are.) While you can feel a corporeal person's emotions during your OBE, I have no reason to believe that he or she can feel yours, at least not by default. Emotions aren't the end of it, of course; as we discussed previously, you can "hear" other people's thoughts. I don't mean that you're a mindreader, or a psychic. You can't probe another person's brain for long buried memories. Rather, whatever the other person is thinking about at the moment you encounter them, you will inevitably wind up thinking about, too. In that moment, it's almost as if the two of you share a mind.

But is there a way to make corporeal people aware of your presence during an OBE? The Count of St. Germain and his bilocation abilities certainly suggest so. Recall that Madam de Gergy not only saw him, but talked with him during what we now believe was an OBE backwards through time. Other famous figures who have used OBEs for bilocation, like St. Padre Pio, were also encountered by corporeal people during their experiences. These men were not dabblers in their field. Rather, they had been having their OBEs for a very, very long time; they knew all the tricks of the trade. So I don't want you to think that you can talk to corporeal people during your OBEs at the onset. Instead, I'll give you some tools you can use to achieve this once you've been having OBEs for a considerable length of time.

Let's pretend you've been having regular OBEs for about ten years now. (Yes, ten years--there's really no getting around this.) Let's also pretend you're in a long-distance relationship with someone who lives in Venice. You'd like to be able to see your sweetheart face-to-face, but Skype just isn't cutting it. So one night, you induce an OBE and send yourself all the way to Italy. Supposing you live on the East Coast of the United States, keep in mind that Italy's six hours ahead of you. In any case, you successfully make it to your significant other's bedroom. He or she is dead asleep. You reach down to shake your sweetheart's shoulder. Will they feel it? Will they wake up?

I mention that your lover is asleep because whether or not a corporeal person can perceive you is often predicated on their state of wakefulness. If the other person is sleeping, or has just woken up, it's much easier for them to perceive you, but keep in mind that they may not remember it later in the day. On the other hand, if they're already awake, there are certain techniques you can employ to make them aware of you. Remember that you are borderline telepathic during an OBE. You can feel other people's emotions so clearly, you can generally tell what it is they're thinking about that's causing those emotions. The trick here is to make them feel your emotions, too. So how is this achieved?

Start by filtering out the other person's emotions. If you need help with this, you can imagine a net that captures all of the other person's thoughts before they reach you. Subsequently, you can reach into the net and toss those thoughts aside, just like a fisherman throwing trout back into a pond. With that taken care of, heighten the intensity of your own emotions. Channel all your concentration into what you're feeling or what you're thinking about. It can be anything you like. You can think about the weather if you want to. You can think about times tables.

Once your emotions are heightened, just start talking. Depending on your level of skill, the person you're in contact with should become slowly aware of you to some degree. This awareness establishes a link between the two of you that will allow you to communicate. All you have to do at this point is remember to stop filtering the other party's thoughts. This step is dire, because during an OBE, communication happens mentally. You are not really speaking out loud. And even if the other party speaks out loud, you need to be focused on their mind if you want to hear them clearly.

Despite describing this technique to you, I actually don't recommend trying to communicate with corporeal people during OBEs. The reason for this is that some people become very distressed, at least on a subconscious level, when they realize they're talking to a person who's not really there. I have only tried once to talk to someone corporeal during an OBE, and I've regretted it ever since. If you're going to try talking to someone you know, you should come to an agreement with that person beforehand. It'll save you the guilt of having psychologically hurt them by accident.

I want to stop for a moment to note that some people have told me they were able to communicate with corporeal people during their first, second, or third OBE. It happens only rarely, but if you talk to someone during an OBE who shouldn't be aware of you, and they appear to talk back, you're probably only communicating with their subconscious mind. They will have no recollection of the event afterward, even if you question them.

You may be wondering if you and a friend who also practices OBEs can mutually meet up on the non-physical plane. Of course you can! This will take some trial and error, since there's no guarantee you'll both enter your OBE state at the exact same time. Remember that for some people, entering an OBE is instantaneous, while others first sleep for a couple of hours. What you and your friend should do is agree on a location and a time before you make this attempt. For example: "Let's meet at the train station at sunrise." This is a much more practical method than trying to meet up immediately after manifesting. But if this doesn't work out right away, don't worry about it. You're a beginner, after all. Practice makes perfect.

As you might have guessed, the easiest people to have conversations with during OBEs are other people who are having OBEs. This isn't just limited to people from the present, but as with the Grand Canyon, people from the past and future. Communicating with other people having OBEs is as easy as passing thoughts back and forth. If you find that you're a poor conversationalist in the physical world, I'm happy to report that the same probably isn't true once you're outside of your body. Thoughts, after all, are impulses, or instincts. They require no internal structuring.

When you meet another person having an OBE, it's possible they won't look precisely the way they do in physical reality. Naturally, the converse is also true; it's possible they won't see you the way they would if they were meeting you corporeally. There are three factors that determine your visual appearance during an OBE. The first is the way you subconsciously think of yourself. If you secretly think you're a very beautiful person, odds are that during your OBEs, you will appear as your idealized image of beauty. The opposite is true if you are unhappy with yourself as a person. Luckily, your subconscious presentation isn't set in stone. Once you've manifested inside your OBE, changing your appearance is as easy as envisioning yourself the way you would prefer to appear. Want a second pair of arms, just for kicks? Go ahead and grow them. Channel your inner Spider-Man while you're at it. The way you want to appear is the second factor in deciding how other OBE practitioners will see you. But the third factor is something you have no control over, and has more to do with how the other party views people in general. Here's a helpful analogy: Colorblind people can't see certain colors. In rare instances, they can't see any colors. If you dye your hair bright blue, someone who's colorblind is still going to think it's gray. If you're running around during an OBE with six arms and four legs, and you meet with someone else who's having an OBE, but they're so logic-oriented that they can't even imagine a person having that many limbs, it's more than likely they're not going to see your extra appendages. The key word here is "imagine." As we've discussed, your imagination is your only limit during your OBE. Those of us who are imaginative by nature will enjoy more exciting OBEs, while those of us very grounded in reality will understandably have a more subdued experience.

If you're having OBEs to meet other people having OBEs, you might be disappointed at first: Unless you know what you're doing, you can go for months without running into another practitioner. Luckily, you do know what you're doing, because I'm here to teach you. There are specific places that people who have OBEs will go to in order to meet up with each other. If you've read my earlier suggestions, you might try the Grand Canyon or Zzyzx Road. The former will yield more success. Another very popular site to meet other OBE practitioners is the Pyramids of Giza. I suppose the mystical history behind the place makes it as alluring as any. I live on the East Coast, and I induce my OBEs at night, so the first time I went to Giza, it was very early in the morning: that hazy blue hour just before the sun rises. I can't tell you how many people I met that morning. There must have been upward of forty people hanging around the Great Pyramid alone. As I later found out, this was intentional, at least for some of them, who travel to the Pyramids on a daily basis to meet with OBE newcomers. By the way, don't think that your timezone limits the demographic of the people you'll meet with. As mentioned, it's very easy to travel forward or backward in time during an OBE. (We'll cover that a little later.) Similarly, since communication during OBEs is entirely nonverbal, you don't have to worry about the language barrier getting in the way of the friends you make.

On the other hand, you might be worried about people hearing thoughts of yours that you don't want them to hear. It's a perfectly understandable fear, and you're entitled to your privacy. Although I prefer to keep my thoughts open to others as a gesture of good will, no one is going to begrudge you if you choose to retain some of yours. To seal away certain thoughts of yours, all you have to do is stop thinking them. During an OBE, this is much, much easier to do than it sounds. Remember that in the warmup exercise, as well as your meditation, if you chose to pursue one, you already practiced a little with suspending your thoughts. This is the part of the OBE where your practice pays off. The effort has already been applied, so you don't have to apply any more. Thinking during OBEs is a voluntary action, just as much as walking would be in physical reality. Nobody had to teach you how to stop walking. You'll find that the same is true of the thoughts you think.

"But wait," you say. "I want to think my thoughts and still keep them private!" That's a little trickier. I didn't say it's impossible, though. What you have to do is think two simultaneous thoughts and choose one to serve as the "surface" thought. This, too, is easier than it sounds, at least when you're outside of your body. During an OBE, the thoughts you feel have a quasi-physical quality about them. You'll understand what I mean when you're in the thick of one. It's no difficult matter to differentiate between your thoughts and catch them before they escape you. Layering one over the other is about as easy as crossing your fingers, or folding your hands.

Considering all this, a common concern I hear from OBE newcomers is that they're afraid they'll meet someone during their OBEs who tries to mislead them, either by masking their true thoughts or by presenting thoughts they falsified. I won't say this is impossible, but in the many, many years that I've been leaving my body, I've never encountered anyone who misled me in any regard, especially not with malicious intent. I genuinely believe that dishonesty does not occur to you during an OBE. And why should it? Think about it; what do you really have to lie about? Your age? Your race? Why would you want to, since during OBEs, you don't have either? This is part of the reason why I laugh when I hear people talk about "harmful astral entities." They just don't exist. There are no demons or "lower vibrational" creatures lurking in the shadows to suck the lifeblood out of you. People who insist that there are are only telling you so because they want to dissuade you from having your own OBEs. Why that is, I can't say. If everybody knew how easy it was to induce OBEs, wouldn't everybody be doing it? These, in my opinion, are the only people trying to deceive you. Don't let them.

Regardless, if you're still worried about being deceived or otherwise abused during an OBE, there are definitely some techniques you can employ to make sure it doesn't happen. The easiest technique, by far, would be to imagine yourself carrying a shield during your OBE. It doesn't matter what the shield looks like. It doesn't even have to be particularly big. Once you imagine it, the shield will take form. Naturally, it's not a physical shield, so you shouldn't be expecting it to behave as one. However, just knowing that it's there will lend you the subconscious belief that you are protected from harm. As mentioned when we discussed Zzyzx Road, belief is a very powerful thing. But if the shield isn't enough, there's any number of additional techniques you can employ. For instance, you might focus on your positive emotions, then say to yourself: "I will only encounter people whose intentions align with mine." Once you've done this, your OBE will selectively filter out people whose company you might find undesirable.

There's something else I have to mention about meeting people during OBEs. That is: You may or may not find that they have an aura, or an envelope of colored light surrounding their body. To elaborate, during my childhood OBEs, everyone I encountered had an aura. Now that I'm an adult, they do not. I don't really know why this is, unless it's something that I've lost inside myself. Some adults I've instructed through OBEs have been able to see auras during them. Others, still, have not. I do think that everybody has an aura, but I don't necessarily know what they are. In 1939, engineer Semyon Kirlian and his wife, Valentina, created a technology now called Kirlian photography that proved the human body is surrounded by an unidentified energy field. It was Einstein who declared that everything in existence is made of energy when he devised the now-famous Mass-Energy Equivalence, or E = MC2. Probably auras are just another aspect of that equation. In any case, they're definitely nothing to worry about.

You may be the sort of person who doesn't want to meet other people during your OBEs. Maybe the reason you're pursuing OBEs is so you can finally get some alone time. That's okay, too. If you travel to a place like Giza, and you don't want other people bothering you, most of them, in my experience, will leave you alone. Only twice have I encountered people who just didn't seem to get the memo. If you encounter such a person, you can block all contact with them just by imagining a wall between the two of you. It's also quite possible simply to filter other people out of your experience altogether. All you need to think is, "I don't want to see anybody right now," and you won't.

* * * * *

There's one other sort of person you can meet during your OBEs, but we haven't discussed them yet. If someone you love has passed away, you've no doubt already thought about getting to speak with them again. I'm very happy to tell you how simple it is to meet with deceased persons during OBEs. Encountering them is no different from encountering living persons, except that when you communicate with them, they communicate back. Perhaps it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that people who are deceased are merely having one long, continual out-of-body experience.

I don't want to tell you what to believe in, but for the purpose of OBEs, don't think of the afterlife as a location. Think of it merely as a state of being. With that in mind, there are two ways to talk to a deceased person during an OBE. Either you can call them down to your state of being, or you can elevate yourself to theirs. Bear in mind that the latter is a much more complicated thing to achieve. In any case, we'll examine the techniques you'll need to accomplish both.

To call a deceased person down to your level, first start off by thinking about your memories of that person. Focus on happy memories if you want a positive experience. Remember the deceased person's face, the sound of their voice, what it feels like to hug them. It helps to pick a single memory of that person and play it out from start to finish, to the best of your recollection. These instructions assume that the deceased person you would like to meet with is someone you knew personally. If you intend to meet with a deceased person you never knew--maybe you'd like a chat with Krishnamurti--obviously you don't have any memories of that person to use as your guideline. That's okay. Focus on the details you do know about that person. We know, for example, that Krishnamurti was from India.

It's very rarely the case that someone you've decided to meet with elects not to meet with you. I don't believe this ever happens with a loved one. Assuming that the person you've contacted agrees to meet with you, two things happen in quick succession. The first: Your surroundings change. You might not recognize your new environment. If you do, it's almost always a place that has emotional value for you and the person you're meeting with. The second: The person you're trying to talk with appears to you slowly. He or she may be blurry at first, an outline that gradually fills itself in. If you didn't know the person very well or at all when they were alive, it's sometimes the case that the outline never fills out completely.

After this initial manifestation, you and your conversation partner can talk to your hearts' content. The described method is the easier mode of talking with the deceased. Now we'll take a look at the other method, or how to ascend your consciousness to the same state of being as those who have passed away. It goes without saying that this is not a technique you should be attempting during your very first OBE.

First what you need to do is take a good look at your surroundings. Where are you right now? Let's suppose, for ease of explanation, that you're inside a museum. Look at the exhibits, the lights on the ceiling, the windows. Understand that they are physical objects, and you are not physical at present. Focus, for a while, on that discrepancy. Now think of the physical objects around you as a sort of three-dimensional veil. The more you think about these objects in such a way, the more you will see the actual veil billowing. Those formerly three-dimensional objects become two-dimensional. They are no more than the pattern embroidered onto the surface of the veil.

Reach out and grab the veil. It might feel heavy to you when you do. Use both hands to pull against it. Pull as hard as you must before it inevitably tears away. What happens next should feel like a powerful surge of foreign emotions--emotions you've never experienced before, and indeed, have no name for. Don't be scared. If you do get scared, and you want to end the experience, just say: "Wake up." Though you aren't really sleeping, the command will kick in, jolting you back to your body and your bedroom.

Assuming you choose to stick with the exercise, colors may fill your vision. As with the emotions, they will be colors you've never seen on the visible spectrum. Alternatively, they can appear as a pure white. Gradually, the colors seep together as one and envelop you in your entirety. You might say that you, yourself, become the color. It's a sensation I can't really describe with words. A stillness arrests you. In that moment, motion, as a concept, does not exist.

Then, with a clear, calm ringing, you become everything.

You are everything. You're every person, good or bad, who was ever born, every star that died to make the heavy elements of the cosmos. You are the Higgs Boson, the subatomic particle from which all other particles emerged. You are The Mind of Wigner's Friend, yourself being observed by others, others being observed by yourself. You are the past, present, and future. You are the places where you spent your summer vacations. You are the night sky that sang with crickets and the snow that fell on so silent a street, you could hear the individual flakes settling on the ground.

Somewhere in the midst of that Everything is the person you would like to speak with. You don't even need to concentrate on finding them. By proxy, they are already with you. It's not inaccurate to say that in this moment, you are that person. You don't need to ask them any questions. You already know the answers.

Ascending yourself to your deceased loved one's state of being is one of the more exhausting practices you can undertake in an OBE. Don't be surprised if, when you return to your body, you're even more tired than an OBE would usually leave you. Returning to your body, by the way, is automatic after this exercise, and requires no deliberation. After all, you are already everywhere. All you have to do is realize it.

I'll end this section by mentioning that sometimes, you don't have to go looking for deceased persons; they come looking for you. There are times when the person you want to speak with recognizes your desire before you do and visits you of his or her own accord. This is certainly never an unwelcome phenomenon. Other times, a deceased person you had not intended to contact will initiate contact with you for one reason or another. Maybe they just feel like chatting. Don't be surprised at the unusual variety of people who might initiate contact with you. One individual I counseled through OBEs told me that during his fourth night out of his body, he was visited by Marie Curie.

* * * * *

We've already discussed the places on Earth that you can visit during your OBE. Now let's discuss the places you can visit off of it.

Many people of varying levels of repute have written about what they call an "astral plane." I mentioned early on in this book that I'm not fond of such terms. To begin with, let's look at the origins of the term "astral plane." As is often the case when a people doesn't have access to higher forms of science, the classics were not very clear about what was going on up in the sky. Plato posited that the heavens were held together by an element called "ether," which similarly comprised the human psyche. Plato could not otherwise reconcile what it was that kept the stars from falling to earth. Today we know that stars don't fall because space is a vacuum, and stars are gas. It's not a question of what's keeping the stars in the sky, it's a question of what's keeping us from floating the way that stars do. The answer, of course, is gravity.

As best as we can tell, it was Plato, or one of his contemporaries, who coined the term "astral plane." When Plato used the phrase "astral plane," he was talking about the place where the stars reside. In other words, he was referring to the cosmos. Whether or not Plato coined the phrase is ultimately immaterial; by the 14th century, the concept was so pervasive, it had made its way into such works as Dante's Inferno and the writings of Ibn Sina, the Persian polymath who, among other things, invented the refrigerator. The astral plane, then, is not a new concept. But it's a concept that should be obsolete. We know now that the space above our planet is not a separate realm constituting unknown forms of matter. It is an extension of the very universe we live in; and the matter in space is the same as the matter on Earth. With the right technology, space is just as traversible as the surface of our planet. In fact, NASA is presently working on torpor technology that will enable astronauts to make the long trip to Mars and beyond. It's likely that we'll see human colonies outside of Earth within the next two centuries.

Today, New Agers who use the phrase "astral plane" or "astral realm" are not ordinarily referring to outer space. Instead they are referring to what they believe is an extrasensory dimension outside the four ordinary dimensions that make up spacetime. If you're taking up OBEs in the hopes of finding such a place, I don't really know what to tell you, except that I sincerely doubt it exists. Maybe you'll find otherwise. I don't pretend to know everything about everything, and nothing would make me happier than for someone I've counseled through OBEs to become more masterful at them than I am. But the closest I've come to encountering such a place is the state of being we talked about in the section on meeting with deceased persons. Recall that I cautioned against referring to such a state of being as a location.

There's good news, though: If it's outer space you're interested in, you can definitely go there! I happen to be one of those people who love outer space so much that I rarely bother visiting Earthly locations anymore during my OBEs. Once you've gotten a taste of outer space, you may feel the same. And why shouldn't you? Space is the progenitor from which everything and everyone derives, the spark of ingenuity before the beginning of time itself. But as I've said before, you shouldn't be attempting extraplanetary travels during your very first OBE. You should wait until you're more confident in your OBE abilities before you decide to leave Earth. If you're at such a place in your OBEs, then read on.

All throughout this book, we've talked about how easy it is to travel from place to place in an OBE: Just think about a location and you're there. It ought to be just as easy when it comes to leaving the geosphere, but in my experience, it is not. It's possible that you'll find differently; after all, no two experiences are alike. I could spend a minor eternity theorizing on why I think space travel is harder than Earthly travel. At its core, I believe space travel is more difficult because it asks us to project our minds to a place where very few minds have ever been. It was the famed psychiatrist Carl Jung who postulated that all minds share a subconscious, the Collective Unconscious, a well of data to which all human minds uniformly contribute their contents and from which all human minds, in turn, derive. If we subscribe to this idea, for a moment, it's easy to think of OBEs as our digging through the well of data to look at a place somebody else has been. If few people have been in space, there's less data for us to look at. Granted, the data is still there; but it's going to require a little creativity to pull it to the forefront of our minds.

Happily, once that creativity has been utilized, there's no difficulty to speak of. So I'll teach you the technique I use for leaving the geosphere during my OBEs. If you uncover a different technique during your own OBEs, feel free to use it. There is never a right or a wrong way to have an out-of-body experience.

Assuming you're already in the middle of an OBE, get yourself to an outdoor location. If you're outdoors, and it's nighttime, you're already halfway done with this step. Tilt your head back and look up at the sky. Observe the stars in their luminescence and beauty. If it isn't nighttime, that's okay. Imagine that it is. It helps if you can call to mind a real constellation. The Orion constellation is one of the easier ones to recognize, so I often counsel new practitioners to stick with it. The Great Rift, the dark dust cloud that cuts through the night sky during summer, will also suffice. Whichever image you've chosen, lock it in your mind and hold it there.

In physics, there exists a property called escape velocity, which determines how fast an object has to be moving if it wants to leave the atmosphere of the celestial body it's orbiting. On Earth, the escape velocity for any given object is 11.2 kilometers a second, which equates to roughly ten miles a second. Imagine yourself moving at such a speed. I don't expect you to be able to calculate the exact speed; just picture yourself moving as fast as you can conceive. You shouldn't be moving forward, but up. Picture yourself rising through each layer of the Earth's atmosphere. The troposphere, where airplanes fly. The stratosphere, where hot air balloons might drift. The mesosphere, a place of meteoric activity. The hot thermosphere, where radio waves go, and the Northern Lights crack back and forth like colored ribbons. Finally, rise up through the exosphere, where satellites orbit, and the stars reach for the planet's embrace. See yourself emerging through the Karman Line, the invisible boundary that separates Earth from outer space. Feel it as it pushes against you, and you successfully break through. Now slow your body down to a gentle drift. You've done it. You're in space. Take a deep breath--or don't. There's no air out here, but it's not like you really need to breathe.

I don't think most people understand just how big space is. Sometimes you'll hear people say that it goes on infinitely, but that's not actually the case. What's true is that it expands infinitely, and continues to expand to this day. In fact, instead of slowing down, the expansion is speeding up. It was Edwin Hubble who discovered this in 1924 by watching Cepheid stars through his telescope. In that regard, you could say that space goes on forever; but as of this moment, it definitely has a finite diameter. Today, scientists believe that the universe is fourteen billion parsecs in size. Understand that a single parsec is twenty trillion miles long. The universe is finite, but unbounded, which means that if you could somehow travel all of it in its entirety, you would eventually wind up back where you started your journey. And with out-of-body experiences, unfettered by space and time, you can theoretically travel all of it in its entirety. I don't recommend that, though. For one, it's a decent way to get lost.

I visit space every opportunity that I get, so I feel confident in my ability to describe it to you and to provide you with some easy locations you can visit if you're visiting for the first time. As you grow more confident in your own OBE abilities, you can skip the guidelines and explore the cosmos at your own leisure and pace. For now, it's best to have a safety net.

If you're brand new to space travel, confining yourself to the immediate solar system is a good idea. It's close to home, and odds are, you won't get lost traversing it. (Remember, as always, if you do get lost during an OBE, just say to yourself, "I'm waking up now.") What's more, the solar system is only a couple of light years long. In OBE time, this means that exploring it in its entirety is as fast as taking a walk around your neighborhood back home. You might take longer exploring, if you're like me, because the beauty of our solar system is truly that awe-inspiring. In any case, as you leave Earth for the first time, here's something that's going to surprise you: Space is not cold the way it's been described for centuries. Space is warm. Deliciously, comfortably, indescribably warm. It feels like a familiar, long-forgotten embrace. If we look at this from a scientific viewpoint, it makes sense. "Cold" is the sensation we get when heat leaves our body and escapes to another object. Since space is a vacuum, there aren't any objects out there to take our heat away. Therefore, the heat stays inside us.

Having just left Earth, the closest celestial body to you will be the moon. This is as good a place as any to start your exploration. Moving through space, I've found, is best facilitated by swimming; so swim to the moon if you'd like and look around. The moon has no atmosphere, meaning that landing on it will be a very simple matter. Presumably, you'll have landed on the moon's near side, or the face we constantly see from Earth. That's because the moon is tidally locked. In other words, it takes just as long to spin on its axis as it does to spin around us. It's mere circumstance that we never get to see the far side of the moon.

Thanks to OBEs, you can see the far side of the moon. It is not nearly as dark as fiction makes it out to be. In fact, there's not much to see there besides giant impact craters. Be careful if you decide to climb down into these. They're steep, and many of them are hundreds of miles wide. I'm not saying you can't get back out again, but it will be a huge pain. Do you know why the moon has all these craters? It's because the Earth used to have two moons, not one. Those craters are the spot where the moon crashed into its twin many millennia ago and absorbed it. Want to see the remnants of its sister moon? Look around you at the silvery mountains. There she is.

The near side of the moon is much smoother and easier to travel. Walking its terrain, you'll notice plains of what look like frozen silver underfoot, darker than the rest of the moon's chalky consistency. These plains were oceans once upon a time--not of water, but of lava. They're beautiful, and they glimmer faintly, like stars. Speaking of stars, you won't see any when you're standing on the moon. The only reason stars seem to sparkle from Earth is because of our atmosphere's refraction.

What else is there to see on the moon? Junk, and lots of it. Not merely content with destroying our own planet, astronauts felt the need to litter on the moon, too. Besides the broken rockets and satellites, you'll find upward of a hundred bags of human waste, dozens of pairs of rubber boots, cameras, golf balls, and a toy astronaut (I'm not kidding). There's a plaque from Richard Nixon, along with a memorial to fallen astronauts, a faded family portrait one astronaut must have left behind, and two golf balls. The American flag from the Apollo 11 landing is still on the moon, but it doesn't stand upright; somehow, at some point, it was knocked over. It lies flat on the moon's surface, a trampled afterthought. (It's also extremely faded with time, the stripes a bleached white.)

Fortunately, the rest of the solar system's satellites and planets are devoid of such thoughtless junk. It won't be that way for long, so let's enjoy it while we can. Mercury is a good place to visit next. Because of its short, speedy, orbit, it will probably appear closer to you than Venus is, even though that's not really the case. Like the moon, Mercury appears silver, and it has no atmosphere. Unlike the moon, its surface has far fewer craters. If you visit the side of Mercury that's facing the sun, expect to be scorched by extreme heat. If you were inside your body, you'd be dead by now. The heat shouldn't hurt you--at least, it's never hurt me--but if you're worried about it, simply tell yourself you won't be experiencing any temperatures for this part of your journey. For some reason, parts of Mercury have gravity while other parts don't. You might find yourself standing on your own two feet one moment, but floating the next. It's harmless, but an interesting anomaly nonetheless.

There are planets in the solar system that you can circle around, but you can't stand on. Jupiter's one of them. Jupiter is what scientists call a gas giant, meaning that it's not solid the way Earth is, but gaseous like a star. Unlike stars, though, Jupiter could one day become solid. Likely that's not going to happen for a while. Far more interesting to me are Jupiter's moons, especially Europa. The whole moon is covered in smooth white oceans. At present, the oceans are frozen, so expect to see a lot of ice and snow. Interrupting the oceans are deep brown sulfur cracks that you can stand on. These are the more hospitable parts of the moon. Travel long enough along the cracks and you'll find water geysers erupting at a regular rate. The water escapes these geysers in a fine, breathy mist. Water is one of the most important conditions necessary for life to form. I'm not definitively saying there's life on Europa. But it's definitely something to consider.

The view from Europa is exquisite. Like our moon, Europa is tidally locked, so the same side of Europa is constantly facing Jupiter. And Jupiter is a beautiful planet to behold, glowing and bright with hazy orange energy. Days are longer on Europa than they are on Earth--about eighty-five to ninety hours long, by my estimate--so it might be a while before Europa swings in sight of Jupiter's other moons. Though Jupiter has sixty-three moons, you're really only going to see Ganymede and Io. Ganymede is a ghostly silvery-white. Io is white-gold, a gentle dawn. If you're going to visit outer space during your OBEs, Europa is definitely one site you don't want to miss.

My favorite places to visit in the cosmos aren't planets at all, but nebulae. Nebulae are unparalleled in their splendor, bright and colorful, simultaneously radiant and soft, cloaked in the serene, dark oceans of void space. I definitely recommend you visit some, not just because they are achingly beautiful, but because nebulae are actually the building blocks of the entire universe.

A nebula is a colorful cloud of hot cosmic dust, about 97% hydrogen and 3% helium. Over a period of time, a nebula condenses in on itself to become a star. (Interestingly, nebulae are hotter than stars, or so I find.) As stars burn, they produce heavy elements through a process called nuclear fusion. These elements are the materials that bind together to become planets, asteroids, and entire galaxies. These elements are inside the water, blood, and bones in our body. Our physiological makeup, then, is identical to that of the rest of the universe.

Once the star dies, though, something interesting happens. The dust it leaves behind becomes a nebula again. Slowly, expertly, the life cycle begins anew. Nebulae, then, are the phoenixes of reality, constantly reborn from their own ashes. They have no beginning and no end. Since their lifeblood presently flows through us, I sometimes wonder whether we are no different.

There are countless nebulae in the Milky Way, and no doubt beyond. Unless you've been space traveling for a very long time, I recommend sticking to the Milky Way when you look for them. Once more, this is for your own safety and ease of mind. First we'll talk about the seven types of nebulae so you'll be able to differentiate between them when you uncover one. After that, I'll provide you with a list of nebulae you might like to visit, as well as their general coordinates so you can get there without hassle. Once you're in space, you can get to the nebulae just by thinking about them, if you know enough about them, but the coordinates will at least prevent you from feeling as though you're lost. Note that the coordinates assume you are looking for the nebulae immediately after you have left the Earth's atmosphere. Bear in mind that visiting nebulae is the closest to the "astral plane" you're going to get, at least in my humble opinion. Sometimes, when I hear people describe the celestial heavenliness of the "astral plane," especially its supposed "seven layers," I can't help but think that they're describing nebulae, and they don't even know it.

#1: Supernova Remnants

This is the brightest and youngest type of nebula. They tend to be the largest as well. These nebulae are the ones that form immediately after a star goes supernova. The Crab Nebula is one such nebula, an aquatic lagoon of bright blues, blue-greens, and crisp, extraordinary golds. Supernova Remnants are so bright, so powerful, looking at one takes you to the very edge of sensory overload without pushing you beyond the boundary. The first time I saw one, I wanted to cry.

You'll recognize a Supernova Remnant when you see it. It's still so bright, you can practically see the reflection of the star it's left behind. Supernova Remnants have erratic boundaries as well. They are, by far, the most multicolored of nebulae, sometimes comprising three or even four colors on polar opposite sides of the visible spectrum. In a word, they are exquisite.

#2: Bipolar Nebulae

In astronomy, you'll sometimes see Bipolar Nebulae called "Planetary Nebulae." Bipolar Nebulae got this name because many of them are shaped like planets. Not all of them are, however, so "Planetary Nebulae" is a bit of a misnomer. In any case, if you're looking at a nebula that's spherical, it's definitely a Bipolar Nebula. Nebulae shaped like hourglasses or butterflies are also Bipolar. The main thing to look for in these nebulae is symmetry. If you drew a line down the nebulae's center, could you cut it in half and walk away with two perfectly even halves? If the answer is yes, then you've found a Bipolar Nebula.

Bipolar Nebulae often consist of two colors. They differ from other nebulae in that they can cast off their outer shells and produce new, separate nebulae from their own bodies. An example of a Bipolar Nebula is the Egg Nebula, twin stars that fused together over time. Shaped rather like a moth, the Egg Nebula is cloudy and white with an iridescent aura.

#3: Emission Nebulae

An Emission Nebula can be red, blue, green, or yellow, but it tends to be the one solid color without any variance. Like Supernova Remnants, Emission Nebulae have irregular, jagged boundaries. They are the only kind of nebula that slowly grows over time.

An example of an Emission Nebula is the famous Orion Nebula, a red-violet cloud that, at least in my opinion, resembles a Regency era ballroom gown. Interestingly, many Native American tribes, especially the Maya of Central America, weave a rich mythos around the Orion Nebula. To the Maya, Orion is one of the hearthstones of creation, and the doorway to the hereafter.

#4: Reflection Nebulae

Reflection Nebulae are usually thinner than other kinds of nebulae. The critical aspect of Reflection Nebulae is that they do not produce their own light. Rather, they have to borrow their light from nearby stars. If you uncover a nebula that's surrounded by stars, odds are that it's a Reflection Nebula. These odds increase if the nebula appears to be blue or blue-white in color.

An example of a Reflection Nebula is the Witch Head Nebula, whose outline looks like the profile of an old hag--gaunt eyes, hooked nose, laughing, toothy mouth. Even the cosmos likes to celebrate Halloween.

#5: Dark Nebulae

These nebulae are nowhere near as foreboding as their name suggests. It's just that they're so thick, they block all light from passing through them, and indeed, produce very little light of their own. The Great Rift, which we discussed earlier, is one such nebula. The Great Rift is the most visible of all nebulae, too. It's often the case that you can see it from Earth with the naked eye, especially if it's summertime, and the stars in the sky are very multitudinous. Look to the east.

Dark Nebulae usually form when the dust molecules from many dead stars clump together. They appear black, purple, or gray in color.

#6: Hybrid Nebulae

This type of nebula is extremely uncommon, so if you encounter one, consider yourself lucky. Like its name suggests, a Hybrid Nebula is a nebula that does not fit neatly into a single of the previously mentioned categories. It may express characteristics of two or more types of nebulae. If, for example, a nebula is symmetrical, like a Bipolar Nebula, but purple and blocking light, like a Dark Nebula, you've officially found yourself a Hybrid.

Herbig-Haro Objects may be considered Hybrid Nebulae. They display characteristics of Emission Nebulae, slowly growing over time, but like Reflection Nebulae, they do not produce their own light, instead borrowing it from stars.

#7: Stellar Nurseries

I'm a little reluctant to consider these a separate type of nebulae, because at their core, they're really just Emission Nebulae. However, what separates Stellar Nurseries from regular Emission Nebulae is that Stellar Nurseries contain a massive amount of newborn stars inside their bodies. As uncommon as the Hybrid Nebula is, the Stellar Nursery is even rarer, accounting for less than 1% of all nebulae. Stellar Nurseries are considerably large, but they're usually smaller than Supernova Remnants. The Orion Nebula and the Eagle Nebula can be considered Stellar Nurseries.

The most famous of Stellar Nurseries is probably the one from which our planet and our sun emerged. Long extinct, we have no name for it, though when astronomers talk about the "Stellar Nursery" in the singular sense, they're often referring to this one. If you're out in space, and you think you've found a Stellar Nursery, ask whether the nebula exhibits characteristics of an Emission Nebula. If it does, and it contains within its boundary a vast amount of stars, then you're probably right on the money.

Now that you can differentiate between nebulae, I'll provide you with an easy list of nebulae you might enjoy visiting during your OBE. These are the nebulae I tend to visit the most myself, so who knows: We may run into each other on our travels.

Flame Nebula

The Flame Nebula is one of my personal favorites to visit. A hazy, buttery gold, shaped like a hearth fire, the Flame Nebula fans gently underneath the Alnitak star in Orion's Belt. It is an Emission Nebula, and about ten light years in size.

The Flame Nebula has a nice little history associated with it. Specifically, the ancient name for Orion's Belt is "The Three Wisemen," and the Flame Nebula was believed to be their caravan. If you've read the Biblical story of the three Wisemen who visit the baby Jesus in his manger, it's possible that that story takes its inspiration from the stars. Perhaps the story should be read as an extended allegory.

The Flame Nebula is about 900 light years from Earth. To get there, look for Orion's Belt in the sky, three closely clustered stars aligned in ascending order. Orion is the most recognizable constellation in the sky, but if you can't find it, use the celestial equator as your frame of reference. The celestial equator is an invisible marker that extends into space from Earth's equator at nighttime. During OBEs, the equator is visible as a faint silver line. The more you concentrate on it, the more visible it becomes. Once you've found Alnitak, the lowest star in Orion's Belt, the Flame Nebula will be both below it and behind it.

Minkowski's Butterfly

Minkowski's Butterfly is one of the more famous Bipolar Nebulae today. It looks exactly like its name implies--a dainty, elegant butterfly in varying shades of blue and green. About 2,100 light years from Earth, it's located in the Ophiuchus constellation. Ophiuchus aligns almost perfectly with the celestial equator, so getting there is as easy as following the equator into space without stopping.

Minkowski's Butterfly is twenty light years long. At its center is a small White Dwarf star. The nebula is surrounded by a series of gentle stellar winds. Don't be surprised when you feel them coasting across your face. You can go inside the nebula, if you like. It won't hurt you. The sights inside a nebula are some of the most beautiful in the universe, an incomparable ocean, the very soul of spacetime itself.

Rosette Nebula

This nebula, like the Flame Nebula, is another Emission Nebula. In fact, it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that Emission Nebulae are the most common in the galaxy. The Rosette Nebula, as its name implies, resembles a beautiful, blooming rose at the end of the Monoceros constellation. It is sixty-five light years long. To get there, start by traveling to Orion's Belt as before. After that, continue east without pause.

Although the Rosette Nebula is 5,000 light years from Earth, don't let this dissuade you. Remember what I said about time being another dimension of space, very flexible, almost nonexistent when you're having an OBE. There are other, smaller nebulae in the Monoceros constellation, so in any case, it's a nice place to explore if you're testing the depths of your comfort zone.

On a side note, the Rosette Nebula happens to be my namesake. It's for this reason that I keep an extension of myself at the Rosette Nebula whenever I induce an OBE. Come say hi if you like. I don't bite. When we discuss bilocation later, I'll teach you how to choose a signature landmark of your own.

Calabash Nebula

At a mere 1.4 light years in diameter, Calabash is the tiniest nebula I've ever seen--though keep in mind that even the smallest of nebulae is unquantifiably large compared to our planet. Still, because you have no body right now, you might say that you're pretty large yourself. You can be small, if you prefer that, but I find that the bigger you are, the easier it is to explore nebulae. You have to be big, or else it will take hours.

The Calabash Nebula is a Bipolar Nebula, located 5,000 light years away from Earth in the Puppis constellation. A relatively large constellation resembling the stern of a ship, the Puppis constellation is best seen from Earth's southern hemisphere. It's not that far from Monoceros, so if you want, you can travel here immediately after you've visited the Flame Nebula. The Calabash Nebula appears as a very bright yellow, not because of any nuclear activity, but because it's very rich in sulfur. Expect to smell rotten eggs if you visit it. The Calabash Nebula is surrounded by an indistinct blue aura. When you travel inside of said aura, you might feel vibrations ripple across your skin. They won't hurt you, but I don't know what they are, unless they're a kind of sound wave. The old adage that there's no sound in space is only partially true. There is sound, and plenty of it, except that space is a vacuum, so we can't hear it.

Manatee Nebula

The Manatee Nebula is a Supernova Remnant, and an enormous one. Clocking in at an impressive seven hundred light years long, the Manatee Nebula sits in the heart of the Aquila constellation, which you can find by looking north of the celestial equator. The Manatee Nebula is more than 18,000 light years away from Earth, making it one of the more distant nebulae you're going to visit. It resembles a teal green fish, or a very fat mermaid.

Manatee is very beautiful, but it's also tremendously hot. Although I don't believe this will bother you, since you don't exactly have nociceptors, you might want to prepare yourself if you intend to explore the nebula. There's a micro-quasar in its center, or a very small bundle of radio waves. Take a listen and hear what they have to say. We'll talk more about the sounds of outer space in a moment.

Running Chicken Nebula

I'll admit, the first time I went looking for this nebula, it was only because the name sounded so ridiculous, I couldn't help my curiosity. Unfortunately, it doesn't look very much like a chicken, or any other type of bird, for that matter. Its stellar light is a bright red, but the color's so vivid, I can't think of anything on Earth to compare it to. It's an Emission Nebula, but it's close to an Open Cluster. So expect to see a lot of unassociated stars.

The Running Chicken is located in the Centaurus constellation. From Earth, Centaurus can be found by looking south of the celestial equator. It resembles, of course, a centaur with a bow drawn. It's one of the closer constellations to Earth--only about 500 light years away. As for the Running Chicken, expect it to be about seventy-five light years long.

Jewel Box Nebula

Of all the nebulae we've discussed thus far, the Jewel Box, more properly NGC 3603, is the most distant from Earth. It lies about 20,000 light years away, in the Carina constellation, one of the official "arms" of the Milky Way. (By "arms," we are referring to the Milky Way's distinctive spirals.) This nebula is at the very edge of our galaxy, so visit it only if you're extremely comfortable in your ability to traverse space. From Earth, it's very close to the Puppis constellation and resembles the keel of a ship.

If you do visit the Jewel Box, you won't regret it by a long shot. It's one of those rare Stellar Nurseries we talked about, a place where new stars are constantly being born. To watch the quivering lights blooming from nothingness is humbling. I'd go so far as to call it breathtaking if you actually had breath right now. Those stars are the eponymous "jewels" in the Jewel Box's name. A glittering, deep gold, they dot the nebula's milky blue horizon like scattered coins. The blue of this horizon is so rich, it melts imperceptibly into the vacuum's black welkin. Some of the stars here are what scientists call Wolf-Rayet stars, meaning they're among the brightest and the most explosive you'll ever find.

By examining the Jewel Box Nebula, we can learn a good deal about formative properties, especially organic ones. Take a trip to the nebula and see if you can't find iron and even oxygen among the elements. Maybe you'll find the beginnings of a planet. I haven't yet; but then there are many things you'll be able to do that I've never done before.

We've talked a little about visiting planets, and I'm sure you're expecting the topic of alien life to pop up at any moment now. I'll cut straight to the chase: I've never encountered extraterrestrial lifeforms while visiting space. To be more specific, I've never encountered intelligent lifeforms, such as those that might be comparable to humans, or even orca whales. Remember that the odds of life having formed on Earth were fifty quintillion to one. There's a good reason for this. We live in what physicists call a Fine-Tuned Universe. What this means is that life within our universe can occur if and only if a very narrow set of conditions is first met. Supposing any of these parameters were even slightly different from the necessary conditions, life would snuff out in the blink of an eye. If, for example, the nuclear force of the universe were 2% stronger than it is right now, hydrogen would turn into diprotons instead of helium, stars would never be born, and the elements that made up Earth would never have come into being. The odds of your having even been born are far fewer than the odds of you winning the lottery, or spontaneously growing wings. You can look at this in one of two ways: Either the odds of finding life outside of Earth are very narrow, or the odds of finding life outside of Earth are ridiculously good.

I've never found intelligent life elsewhere in the Milky Way. Your findings might be different. I'd be ecstatic if they were. Bear in mind that the Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter. I've definitely never seen it in its entirety, and I doubt that anyone else has, either. Supposing there's no life elsewhere in the Milky Way, there's a galaxy next door to ours that might have better odds. It's called Andromeda, and it's two and a half million light years away.

Andromeda is a good candidate for extraterrestrial life because it's a spiral galaxy. As astrophysics tells us, a galaxy must be spiral-shaped if it's going to support life. This rules out the vast majority of galaxies in our universe. But if you're planning an impromptu trip to Andromeda, there are a few things I need to warn you about. Make sure you're sitting down for this. We're going to chew on some more science terms.

As stated, Andromeda is two and a half million light years away. As physical beings, we would never be able to make the journey; we'd die before we finished even a fraction of the route. All accepted doctrines of physics presently state that it's impossible to travel faster than light. Wormholes, hypothetical tunnels through space, could theoretically destroy that rule. But in order to be constructed, wormholes would require an exotic form of matter that doesn't technically exist. Yikes.

What this means is that, assuming there are lifeforms in Andromeda, and assuming they look at the Milky Way through a high-powered telescope, they're not even going to see us. Why? Because two and a half million years ago, humans didn't exist! Humans are only 200,000 years old. If there are any Andromedans looking at Earth right now, all they see are dinosaurs. To Andromedans, we haven't been born yet. The same is true in the converse.

You've probably already realized where I'm going with this. To get to Andromeda would require a form of time travel. Out-of-body experiences provide us with a form of time travel. Then why am I cautioning you against visiting?

To begin with, to travel forward in time is much more difficult than to travel backward in time. We're going to discuss why in the very next section. But to present you with another reason: There's no human data on Andromeda right now. If Carl Jung's treatise of the Collective Unconscious holds any truth, our minds can only ever derive contents about subjects to which other human minds have contributed. And maybe that sounds hokey. After all, there has to be a first, so why not you? Maybe I sound like a coward. So I'm going to turn to physics once more to expound on my reservations.

In physics and cosmology, there exists a treatise called the Anthropic Principle. The Anthropic Principle tells us that observations of the universe must be compatible with the sapient life performing the observations. This treatise is the foundation behind the Fine-Tuned Universe model. And this treatise provides us with astronomical implications. Literally, these scientists are telling us that the universe only ever provides us with information because we are looking for it. Literally everything the universe has ever done, it has done because we were watching it. If we weren't watching it, maybe it wouldn't do anything at all.

Do you see what I'm getting at? I don't know that you're going to find anything in Andromeda because I don't know that anything in Andromeda exists yet. If we have not yet made observations about Andromeda, how can it? And how can we have made observations about Andromeda when, from our point of view, whatever could possibly be out there won't be out there for another two million years?

Maybe you're braver than I, and you'll use your OBEs to visit Andromeda anyway. I can't stop you, but I ask you to exercise caution, and diligence, and to be safe. To get to Andromeda, you'll have to leave the Milky Way first. That's probably not a difficult thing to do. We live in a part of the Milky Way called the Orion Spur. It's a starry arm that, toward the center of the galaxy, joins together with another arm called Sagittarius. Follow Sagittarius to the very outside of the spiral, and the arm will come to an abrupt stop. What you do next is up to you. We'll discuss time travel in the next section, so you might want to wait until you've read up on that before you make your next move.

If you're looking for people to talk to in space, you don't have to leave our galaxy to do it. At least eighteen astronauts have died in space. Their signatures, so to speak, as with the Navajo in the Grand Canyon, are still out there. I don't think you'll find them very difficult to pick up on.

To close this section, we'll discuss something far more pleasant: sounds in space. I mentioned earlier that space is abundant with sound, but because of its vacuum consistency, we can't typically hear it. To be more specific, space is filled with radio waves, which only become sound when they are converted to audio waves. In normal circumstances, this would be achieved with something we call a VLF receiver, or a Very Low Frequency receiver. The most common form of a VLF receiver you're ever going to come across is an antenna. This is the principle that allows you to listen to the radio in your car. (Thank you, Nikola Tesla.)

During an OBE, you don't have ears, so you don't need to worry about converting radio waves to audio. To hear radio waves, all you really need to do is quiet your mind and focus lightly on the vibrations brushing up against you. There are countless vibrations in space. In fact, each celestial object produces its own set of radio waves. Even the Earth has such a set. Each planet, asteroid, star, moon, and galaxy can be said to be singing.

To listen to these songs is one of the most calming experiences you can enjoy during an OBE. They are a form of music older than life itself. And they are the most beautiful songs you'll ever hear. You don't know what music is until you have heard them.

* * * * *

As we've seen with the Count of St. Germain and Honoré de Balzac, it's possible to use your OBEs to travel back and time and witness historical people and events. As with regular OBEs, you shouldn't expect corporeal people to be aware of your presence, or for your presence to make any difference one way or another as to the flow of history. In short, no, you can't travel back in time and kill Hitler. To understand why, we need to consult another scientist--a physicist named Igor Novikov.

Born in the Soviet Union, Igor Novikov is an astrophysicist and cosmologist who presently teaches at the University of Copenhagen. By far, his greatest contributions to the scientific sphere have been his insights into the fabric of spacetime. In the 1980s, Novikov formulated what we today call Novikov's Self-Consistency Principle. The Principle can be summarized thus: If you could travel back in time, and if you could perform an action that had the ability to change the past, the probability of that action reaching fruition would be zero. But why?

It all relates to something called the Grandfather Paradox. You might have heard of it before. Let's suppose a man travels back in time with the intent to kill his grandfather. Let's suppose that he succeeds. If the man kills his grandfather, then the man's father will never be born. If the man's father is never born, then the man himself is never born, either. Because the man is never born, he never travels back in time to kill his grandfather. Because his grandfather is never killed, the man's father and the man are both born after all. Because the man is born, he travels back in time to kill his grandfather...

You see the problem? The Grandfather Paradox describes a situation so absurd that it could never possibly happen. This is the reason why it's impossible to change past events if you travel back in time. You can try--and I commend you if you do--but something will always get in your way to stop you.

With that out of the way, I'll give you some quick tools you can use to travel backward in time, if that's the kind of thing you're interested in. As always, this exercise assumes you're already in the middle of an OBE.

The first thing you'll want to do is get yourself to the location where you expect the time travel to occur. If, for example, you'd like to visit Ancient Rome, project yourself to modern-day Rome. It'll help if you visit an aspect of the city with high historic relevance--the Forum, for example, where the ruins of ancient government buildings still stand.

Still your mind. Open yourself to the energies around you. Probably you don't feel them at first, but that's okay. If you suspend your thoughts for a while, they'll occur to you naturally. Some of these energies are undoubtedly more recent; but many of them were left behind by long-departed persons. To differentiate between the two, focus on the energies that seem to have a stronger presence. I find that the older an energy is, the more of a signature it has.

Align yourself with these energies. Open yourself to them in earnest and humility. Hide nothing from them. Slowly, they will respond to you. Start thinking about the time period you would like to visit, in as much detail as you know how. Don't worry if you can't provide much detail at all. If you want, you can ask the energies to assist you. More than likely, they will be accommodating.

The scenery around you will begin to change. Assuming you're in the Roman Forum, the ruins will be replaced with their more perfect selves. Shop windows will fill with light. Men in togas and women in stolas will take to the streets. Like I said, they probably won't see you. You won't be able to interact with them. But you can now explore the ancient Forum until your curiosity is sated.

The past is much easier to visit than the future is. It's true that time is just another dimension of space; but we need to examine the aspects of that dimension to understand what's really going on here. The past is something that's definitively happened. There are records of it, written or otherwise. The future is something that, from our point of view, has not happened yet. Of course, the future will happen; because it must. But just as the present is predicated on the past, the future is predicated on the present. What we do today has the power to shape tomorrow. If a gunman opens fire on a crowded bus today, tomorrow we're going to have mourning families. If that same gunman instead decides to seek psychiatric help, tomorrow, nobody will mourn.

The future, unlike the past, is not set in stone. Just as the universe is still expanding, so is the dimension of time. So even if you use your OBEs to visit the future--and you can, actually; I don't want you to think that you can't--there's no guarantee that the future you visit is the future that will eventually come about.

With that out of the way, visiting the future is accomplished surprisingly similar to the way that visiting the past is. You're still going to seek out energies to focus on. This may seem counterintuitive to you, but the Law of Conservation of Energy is quite clear that all the energy that will ever exist in the universe already exists, and has existed since the dawn of time. Energy cannot be created. Energy cannot be destroyed. Instead, it is recycled endlessly from one system to the next.

Rather than seeking out strong energies, look for the weak ones. Understand that they are weak. Offer to lend them energy of your own. Having accomplished that, ask them to open themselves to you. Explain to them that you would like to see where they come from. Make sure you hold no specific image in your mind. Your surroundings will change accordingly.

You can use this technique to see your own future, too--but like I said, the future is forever subject to change. Ironically, only you have the ability to determine what it's going to look like. However, this isn't the time or place to discuss that.

* * * * *

I promised earlier that I would teach you how to bilocate; that is, using your out-of-body experience to be in two places at once. In theory, it's not impossible even to be in three or more places at once, but I have a hunch that stretching your mind that thin will prove taxing on you in the long run. You can experiment with it later at your own leisure. We'll stick to two locations for now.

To bilocate, project yourself to the first of the locations you want to visit. For me, that's usually the Rosette Nebula. If you'd like to set up a "signature landmark" for your OBEs--a place where other practitioners can always find you--now's the time to do it. Have you picked your signature landmark? Good. Once you're there, get settled and comfortable. There are a couple of methods you can use to bilocate. We'll examine them one at a time.

The first of the methods will have you experiencing both locations at the same time. This is something of a sensory overload, or rather close to one, so if you think that's going to bother you, don't attempt it. What you do is this: While you're at your primary location, start thinking about your secondary location. Ordinarily, this would whisk you right out of your primary location, and indeed, you might feel yourself slipping away. If you can catch that sensation, give yourself a quick command: "Stop." You will halt instantly. If you look in front of you and behind you, you'll find that you're sandwiched between the two locations. Congratulations. You've managed to confuse your OBE.

What I want you to do next is reach one hand in front of you, and one hand behind you. (I don't care if you've decided to go Spider-Man for your journey--you only need two right now.) Quickly think of your locations as if they are sheets of paper. Close your hands around them, and hold on tight. A tightness will spread down your center before spreading out to your extremities. It may feel as if you're being pulled in two directions. Don't be alarmed by this. If it does frighten you, and you don't like it, turn your back on one of the locations and run directly into the other. The bilocation attempt will immediately end.

Assuming you're sticking with the bilocation attempt, your mind, for lack of a prettier term, will tear in two. Or maybe it doesn't, really; but it certainly seems that way. What happens next is something I can't cohesively describe, although I'll try to the best of my ability. You simply experience both locations at the same time. It doesn't confuse you, although it may dizzy you. In fact, at that moment, it makes sense that you're in two places at once. Navigating them is as easy as using your thoughts to rotate them around you. I'm sorry if this description isn't adequate. But like many aspects of an out-of-body experience, you need to attempt it yourself before you'll understand.

The easier method of bilocation is a bit of a cheat: It requires you to use time travel. For this method, do not start off in your landmark location. Instead, first visit the other location you had in mind. Let's say it's the gas station down the block from your house. Do whatever it is you wanted to do here. Check to see whether gas prices have gone up overnight. Buy a bag of potato chips. (I'm just kidding. You can't really buy a bag of potato chips.) When you're done, send yourself to your signature location--but with the understanding that you would like to have been there all along. You might say: "I'm going to the church, five hours ago." And it's as easy as that. Of course, you can use the more extensive technique we listed earlier for time travel. But that's not really necessary. You're not traveling to a completely different time period. Odds are, whether you know it or not, you're already five hours or more into your OBE. So all you're really doing right now is going back to the beginning.

* * * * *

We're almost done with this chapter. In closing, we'll quickly run through some other fun practices you can enjoy during OBEs.

Flying

Everybody wants to fly! I cannot number the amount of people who, prior to inducing their first OBEs, asked me first about flying. I wish I could say why flight is such a common desire among mankind. Maybe it represents our subconscious seeking freedom. Maybe it just looks like fun. Who knows? Flying is fun--there's no denying that.

Flying during an OBE is not as intuitive as you might think. On the flipside, it's not difficult, either. For as far as I can remember, I've always accomplished it the same way. First I raise my arms to about waist height. Immediately after, I rock my weight from the balls of my feet to the tips of my toes. I lean into the air, especially if the wind is blowing in one direction or another. Just like that, I am carried into the sky.

Don't flap your arms around when you're flying. It may look cool, but it's not necessary. Keep them straight, and lean in the direction you want to go. Keep your legs straight behind you. Once you're in the air, flying is about as intuitive as walking. It feels like you've been doing it most of your life. Simultaneously, flying is such a joyous sensation that each time you accomplish it feels like the first time. I know people who have out-of-body experiences just so they can fly around like a bird. Whatever makes you happy, right?

If you're flying on Earth--which you should be, because you can't fly in space--always consider your altitude. There are parts of Earth's atmosphere that are downright unpleasant to fly in. The tropopause isn't only freezing, it's incredibly dry. Unless you're willing to experiment with which parts of the atmosphere don't bother you, I'd recommend just staying below the clouds. If you can brave the temperatures, though, flying in the stratosphere can be exceptionally beautiful, all the clouds on Earth below you unfolding in a thick blanket. It's not difficult to see why this image forms the common representation of "Heaven" in most religions.

Building Your Own Adventure

Okay, so this is a little childish. There's nothing wrong with having a child's heart, though. Remember what I said in the very beginning of the book? If all of us were having more fun, we'd collectively be healthier individuals.

Find some like-minded practitioners to accomplish this with. If you're a loner, that's fine, too. Create a story that you'd like to play out. Build a spaceship. Decide who's the captain and who's the quartermaster. You can create whole planets for your crew to explore, provided that you don't mind superimposing your imagination over real world locations. Come up with some fun scenarios to get yourselves out of. Is the first mate planning a mutiny? Have you picked up a refugee from an alien colony? A lot of people get exasperated with me when I liken their profound experiences to a game of make believe. So what? Make believe can be pretty profound, too. If it wasn't, we wouldn't have novels.

When I told you your imagination was the limit, I really meant it. You can play out entire novels and movies from start to finish. You can devise a movie of your own. It's even better in 3D.

Healing

Earlier, I cautioned you against trying to communicate with corporeal beings while you're incorporeal. I'm not going back on my suggestion. But there are still things you can do on a smaller scale to make somebody else's day a little brighter.

Go to a place that's filled with people. Think about the things you love, or the things that make you proud, or your favorite memories. Think about your favorite ice cream flavor. Think about your very first pet. Allow yourself to feel your emotions as strongly as you can; and then walk away. Leave your emotions behind you. Don't direct them to a specific person. You're not trying to make them aware of you. They don't have to be aware of you. Haven't you ever gone into a building, or a friend's house, and instantly picked up on the energy present? When I was a young girl, I attended a high school with an unusually oppressive atmosphere. Just walking through the doors sapped the strength from your body and made you feel as if you'd never be happy again. It was horrible, and eventually, I wound up transferring. Later, I learned that a student had committed suicide there twenty years prior.

Lending your happiness to others doesn't just make them happy; it makes them well. Our feelings make up such an important part of our minds' constitution. If you're feeling good, good things will come to you. Someone who's feeling good is more likely to lead a healthier life with a greater longevity. A study in the UK found that people who reported living generally happy lives wound up living 35% longer than the national average. Maybe it's the same scientific principle as the Placebo Effect. Have you heard of Bhutan, widely considered to be the happiest country on Earth? Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, traveled there to film a documentary. While he was there, he noted that his tremors stopped.

You might have noticed that if it's possible to affect someone positively during your OBE, it's possible to affect them negatively as well. To reiterate what I've said a few times before, malice never occurs to me when I'm having an OBE. If it occurs to you, I ask you not to act on it. If there's somebody who hurt you, and you've decided you're going to hurt them back, it's not worth it. I'm so sorry that you've been hurt; but trust me, it's just not worth it.

Searching for Truth

Now we're getting philosophical again. What the heck is the "truth," anyway? It was Jiddu Krishnamurti who famously said that truth and reality are not one and the same. It was Dr. Rudolf Steiner, Krishnamurti's fellow Theosophist, who said that truth is an invention of man, and that it would never have existed had we not given it form.

It doesn't matter what those men said. It doesn't matter what you think right now. When you're having an OBE, certain things occur to you by instinct. This is the precocial knowledge we talked about when we were discussing meditation techniques. These occurrences feel like remembering something you've long forgotten. Frankly, to recall them so suddenly will strike you as a relief.

If you believe in God, or if you don't believe in God, but you want to look for such a deity, do it. This is your chance. Grab a friend, if you want to, and have them accompany you. Visit Vatican City. Visit Mecca. Look within yourself and ask yourself what you feel. You don't have to travel to religious sites if you don't want to. Watch the sunrise. Count the stars. (At night, almost three thousand stars are visible from the northern hemisphere alone.) Travel to the stars. Listen to their individual songs. What do you feel? What do you think? Where are your instincts telling you to go? In the stillness between your uncertain thoughts, what is it that you see?

You should never--not ever--let an authority figure tell you what the truth is and what it isn't. Don't be content with what you've been fed your entire life. You have an inquisitive mind. The fact that you're reading this book is proof of that. I'm not even asking you to believe what I've told you thus far. I certainly haven't lied to you; but why should you take my word for everything I've described when you can see it for yourself?

And who knows? Maybe, in the end, your truth will be different from mine. Maybe there's not a single truth, but many, one for each pair of eyes on Earth. I'd be happy if that were the case. Human beings are so very different from one another. Just because you're you, you're incredibly unique. Nobody else is ever going to have your exact combination of specific traits and experiences. Cherish that. Honor that. Take it with you wherever you go. That combination of traits and experiences is the only teacher you should be listening to.

It's served you pretty well thus far.

8

But Is It Real?

Okay. At this point in the book, you know how to induce your own OBEs. I've told you about my experiences on Zzyzx Road and how astonished I was to learn it was a real location. But that's not good enough. You still have doubts about whether whatever's happening right now is an actual out-of-body experience. And that's a good thing. A compliant mind seldom ever learns anything for itself.

I'm going to relate to you another personal anecdote. This was the second of my experiences that convinced me, once and for all, that out-of-body experiences are a legitimate phenomenon.

When I was a teenager, an old man started visiting me during my OBEs. He was the sort of man you might meet on any given day at Rocky Boy's Reservation, which is where a part of my tribe lives, and where I lived for a time in my adolescence. Loath to adapt to the times, the old man wore a ceremonial Cree ribbon shirt with a fringed tobacco pouch on his hip. His right hip seemed to give him trouble; despite being extracorporeal, he walked with a cane and leaned heavily against it. Long, thin gray hair framed his face in cloudy wisps. It was a face full of personality, with a rather big, hawklike nose, leathery wrinkles so pronounced I was tempted to fold them back to see what he looked like underneath them.

Sometimes it's the case that people are lonely, even during out-of-body experiences. The fact that this man kept seeking me out for conversation seemed to suggest that he was lonely, too. I didn't mind keeping him company. During one of our conversations, we walked together around the Bear Paw Mountains, cloaked in the moon and serenaded by coyotes. Despite the man's cane, he kept up with me at an even, leisurely pace. I answered all his questions as he asked them.

"Is your name Rose?" the old man asked.

"Yes, it is," I said. Some information can flow freely between minds during OBEs. This didn't surprise me all that much.

"How old are you, Rose?" the old man asked.

"I'm eighteen," I said.

"Are you from Rocky Boy?"

"No, but my father is. I grew up in New York."

"Ah! Still, you came back here."

"I wanted to meet the rest of my family. I didn't grow up knowing them. I guess a part of me's always missed them."

"Who is your family?" the old man asked. This is actually a very common greeting in Indian Country. Two parties will exchange clan information--in their Native language, if they know it--because they might turn out to be related.

After telling the old man who my relatives were, we climbed Baldy Butte together, where the air can get pretty thin. I wasn't worried about the old man's health. We weren't physical, for one. At this point, I wasn't sure whether I was speaking with a living man's subconscious, a living OBE practitioner, or someone who had passed away. A few days later, I eventually learned that the old man had been a young boy during World War II. He told me about growing a victory garden with his family to feed the soldiers overseas. They planted tomatoes, peas, and beets.

"I could show it to you," the old man suggested.

I expected that he would take me back in time, so to speak. Deceased persons will sometimes do that during an OBE, especially as a means of showing you their memories. It makes for an interesting experience, although it can be annoying when they spring it on you without warning. Instead, the old man surprised me by telling me to look in my uncle's attic for a shoebox wrapped in rubber bands.

I didn't look for the shoebox right away. I'm ashamed to admit I forgot about it for many weeks. The old man continued to visit me sporadically, but somehow, it never occurred to me to ask his name. Then one day, toward the end of spring, I went upstairs to my uncle's attic to do some cleaning. He had decided to get rid of a few old boxes full of powwow regalia he and his children no longer wore. While I was stacking up Uncle Sam's boxes, I saw a shoebox sitting against the back wall, rubber bands wrapped around the lid. I swear I thought my heart stopped. Abandoning my work, I bent down and opened the box to look inside.

It was full of old photos. All of them were black and white or sepia. A few had been folded so many times, they were flimsy when I leafed through them. One photo stopped me in my tracks. It was a photo of my Uncle Sam when he was a boy. He was sitting behind a small victory garden full of beets. Next to him was the old man I had seen during my OBEs. He was much younger, of course; about thirteen. He still wore the tobacco pouch on his hip. He was my biological grandfather on my father's side. He had passed away before I'd gotten to meet him.

You don't have to believe me if you don't want to. I know there are people who probably won't. If you're one of those people: Induce your own OBEs. I gave you the steps in Chapter Four. If you follow them exactly as I've outlined them, there's no way you can fail to have an out-of-body experience. It works without exception. Maybe you'll meet your own deceased relative. Maybe you'll find some other piece of evidence that convinces you of OBEs' validity. If it's evidence you want, you could always track down the 1862 edition of The Evening Courier that contains General McClellan's interview about his OBE, most especially his insights about World War II. I'm sure it's floating around the internet somewhere. Most things are these days.

* * * * *

But still, what if out-of-body experiences are dreams? Despite how realistic out-of-body experiences are, despite the vivid amount of detail at your disposal, including information that shouldn't be accessible to you, how do you know that you aren't just dreaming very convincingly?

Or maybe we should be asking a different question altogether: What does it matter if you are?

Don't throw the book at the wall just yet. Let me explain to you why it wouldn't really matter whether you were dreaming. When I'm done explaining, I think, if anything, you'll walk away more convinced than ever about the validity behind out-of-body experiences. I can only hope that's the case.

There exists a fascinating branch of physics called Hamiltonian mechanics, which directly influenced the derivation of the much more famous quantum physics. We're not going to talk about quantum physics. We're just going to focus on Hamiltonian mechanics for now. Hamiltonian mechanics is an interesting science, because it's concerned almost solely with the nature of information. Specifically, it applies a mathematical value to units of information, and uses those mathematical values to determine how the information can or will behave. One such mathematical value is something called a wavefunction. It's kind of like a unique, invisible barcode that every object in existence has. If you examine an object's wavefunction with the right kind of tools, such as quantum confinement and quantum dots, you can predict all the possible behaviors that the object might demonstrate in the future.

Within Hamiltonian mechanics, we have two very compelling physical laws. The first of these is Liouville's Theorem. Derived by French mathematician Joseph Liouville, Liouville's Theorem states that information, much like energy, cannot be destroyed. If we apply a little common sense, we can immediately see that this is true. If a city burns down in a terrible fire, it doesn't suddenly become true that the city never existed. People were there to observe it. Letters, postcards, and books describe it. Even if you were to burn every document about the city, even if all its inhabitants died along with the fire, even if a million years passed and nobody remembered the city's name anymore, the city existed once. You can't invalidate the experiences of the people who lived there. Liouville's Theorem is satisfied by an equation that reads as follows: Δ0=(∂2)/(∂x2)+(∂2)/(∂y2)=4(∂/∂z)(∂/∂z)

The second of these laws isn't technically a law, but a theory. Specifically, it's called Information Theory. However, it's a "theory" much in the same way that the Big Bang is a theory; all the evidence we have supports that it's true, but we're missing a few details necessary to rule out any external factors.

Information Theory states that everything you interact with in the world around you is actually information. The bed you sleep on? Just data. So is the food you eat. You can never interact with an object itself; you can only ever interface with the information that describes it. This is not unlike Electron Repulsion, a property in chemistry that tells us you can never really touch an object, because your electrons and the object's electrons repel each other. The sensation of touch isn't what it feels like to touch an object, but what it feels like to be repelled by it. The distance between your finger and the object is so minute that you can't see it with the naked eye. All your life, you've been deceived.

How can Information Theory be true, though? That is, how can it be possible that we only ever interact with information, and not real people or objects?

To understand this premise, let's consult one of the OBE practitioners we talked about in Chapter Three. Let's see what Dr. Rudolf Steiner has to say about the subject.

In his book Die Philosophie der Freiheit, Rudolf Steiner writes: "...The images of the earthly forms only come about in geometry and whatever else we form in the way of thoughts of our earthly surroundings... A table wants to make your brain itself into a table inside your head. You don't allow this to happen. Thus arises within you the picture of the table." Modern neuroscience supports these ideas. All of reality happens inside your head. You only taste food, for example, because the parietal lobe in your brain tells you that you do. If the parietal lobe didn't light up while you were eating, you wouldn't taste anything at all. The sounds you hear aren't in your ears. They're information processed by your temporal lobe. The sights you see aren't in your eyes. If you stand and regard a lovely Renaissance painting, you aren't actually looking at the painting itself. You are looking at the image of the painting your occipital lobe has provided you with. You have no method of proving that the image truly matches the one on the canvas.

Is this starting to sound familiar? Do you remember when we talked about the parietal-temporal-occipital junction, and the role it plays in allowing us to have out-of-body experiences?

If everything we interact with is only information, how do we know that anything other than information even exists?

We don't. In fact, physicists are accepting this at an unprecedented rate. At a conference in Stockholm, Stephen Hawking found that an object that falls into a black hole doesn't really disappear because the information about the object doesn't disappear. The information, then, is more important than the object itself. The information is the object. Quantum physicists who are trying to build a teleportation device are looking at ways not to teleport objects, but to teleport quantum information, or all the possible information belonging to a single object. (Quantum information, by the way, is inconceivably huge.) And in 1993, physicists Gerard 't Hooft and Leonard Susskind found that all the information about our three-dimensional universe would still be intact even if the universe were two-dimensional. With the numbers they crunched, they unequivocally decided that the universe around us must be a simulation of some kind. A projection, in other words, of information.

If the entire universe is a projection, this raises the question of what, exactly, is doing the projecting. This is a question you might use your OBEs to try to answer. I can provide you with the answer I've uncovered. But I can't guarantee that the answer you find will be the same.

You've probably heard of the great physicist Erwin Schrodinger, who famously created the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment. In Schrodinger's Cat, a hypothetical cat is locked inside a hypothetical room. A tiny amount of radioactive substance is locked in the room with the cat. The atom is so small that it might decay over time; or it might not. If it decays, the cat will die. We don't know what the outcome is until we open the door to the room to check on the cat's status. Therefore, according to Schrodinger, until the door is open, the outcome doesn't even exist.

Schrodinger didn't just devise Schrodinger's Cat. A lesser known derivation of his is called the Arithmetical Paradox. In the Arithmetical Paradox, Schrodinger sets out to define just what the mind really is. From the onset, Schrodinger already has a few ideas. Your mind, Schrodinger posits, is the totality of its observations. It's impossible to separate your observations from your mind. You cannot simply extract them from you. Where would you put them, for starters? They're as much a part of you as the nose on your face. Similarly, if we had nothing to observe, it couldn't be said that we had minds at all. For how would we ever know whether we did?

But, Schrodinger points out, a problem arises from this definition. Because if your mind is equivalent to your observations, what happens when you observe other people? What happens when you observe other objects? Quantitatively, they must be a part of your mind, too. Since those same people are observing you, you must be a part of theirs. There is no separation, then, but only the illusion of separation. Schrodinger goes on: "The reason why our sentient, percipient and thinking ego is met nowhere within our scientific world picture can easily be indicated in seven worlds: because it is itself that world picture."

Picture, if you will, that before there was anything, there was a singular consciousness. But to be conscious is to be conscious of something. We mentioned this in Chapter Six when we talked about Edmund Husserl. Think about it. When a man wakes up from a coma, how does his doctor determine he's really conscious? By checking to see whether he has any awareness of the objects and circumstances around him. That singular consciousness, then, needed something to be conscious of, in order to sustain and support its own existence. So everything you see around you was added for that purpose. Your family and your friends. Your hometown, favorite color, and favorite hobby. The grandiose galaxy that birthed your planet. The mysterious unknown that unravels beyond it. They are your observations. They are you. You came first. You are all there really is.

So I ask you: Even if your out-of-body experiences are nothing more than dreams, does it actually matter? Reality takes place inside of your head to begin with. Your favorite songs only exist in your temporal lobe. So, too, does the scent of a cake baking on your birthday, or the salty ocean lapping against a smooth beach. Maybe we should be thinking of reality as a dream we just haven't learned to control yet.

I'm not necessarily saying that out-of-body experiences are dreams. I'm not saying they aren't, either. Certainly I'm not educated enough to pass judgment in either direction. Many people more educated than me have already spoken on the topic. You can listen to them. Or you can listen to nobody. Listen to yourself. Start having out-of-body experiences at your own convenience. Navigate them with your instincts, instigate your own investigations, come up with your own conclusions, and tell me what you think. You know where to find me. I'm always happy for a chat.

