Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience
Page 1
Photo by Triin Tõniste
About the Author
Graham Nicholls (London, England) has had hundreds of out-of-body experiences and is a world-recognized expert on the subject. An experienced speaker on many areas of spirituality, art, and psychical research, he has presented his ideas at prestigious institutions such as The Science Museum of London, The London College of Spirituality, and Cambridge University. He has also been featured on the BBC and in The Times, The Independent, and the Telegraph, as well as in many magazines and websites.
Llewellyn Publications
Woodbury, Minnesota
Copyright Information
Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience: Radical New Techniques © 2012 by Graham Nicholls.
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Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
1 Celestial Horizons: The Art of Leaving the Body
2 Science and the Out-of-Body ExperiencE
3 Skeptics and the Out-of-Body Experience
4 Your personal profile: Which Approach is Best for You?
5 Transforming Beliefs
6 Immersive Approaches to Having an Out-of-Body Experience
7 The Physical Body
8 The Extended Mind
9 Leaving the Body: What Can You Expect?
10 ANOTHER REALITY: Multi-Dimensional Visualisations
11 Healing and the Out-of-Body Experience
12 Cerulean Dawn: PerceIVING Across Time
13 The Next Level: Life After Death
Epilogue
Appendix Techniques and Approaches
Glossary
Endnotes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
* * *
I would especially like to thank my mother and father for their unending support, as well as the rest of my family and the friends who inspired and supported me during the writing process, including: Merlyn Roberts, Eucalyptus Thompson, Cecil McGrane, Matthew Dennis, Lawrence Brightman, Kadri Allikmäe, and Triin Tõniste.
I would also like to say a special thank you to Herbie Brennan for his very kind foreword to this book, and Philip Paul, Tom Campbell, Dr. Peter Fenwick, and Dr. Jeffery Long for their interviews, comments, and endorsements. I would also like to acknowledge the Society for Psychical Research, the Monroe Institute, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and the International Association for Near Death Studies for resources and research that have helped greatly with the writing of this book. Thanks also to Alex Tsakiris for his important work moving the proponent/skeptic debate forward through the Skeptiko podcast and the Open Source Science project. I would also like to acknowledge Rupert Sheldrake, Brian Josephson, and Dean Radin, whose work has influenced many of the ideas that I have drawn upon.
Finally, I would like to thank Susan Mears, my agent for this book, who suggested putting the proposal forward and helped make this book a reality; Carrie Obry for championing this book at Llewellyn; Adam Schaab for taking over as editor and seeing it through to publication; and Lee Lewis, for her excellent copyediting.
[contents]
Foreword
* * *
Some research polls suggest that as many as one person in every four can expect to find themselves outside their physical body and wandering the world like a ghost at some point in their life … without the inconvenience of dying in order to do so. The experience is sometimes thrilling, sometimes frightening, frequently fascinating, and almost always unexpected. For the vast majority, it is also unrepeatable.
And therein lies a major problem with what might be considered a potentially important phenomenon. Scientific investigators dislike unrepeatable evidence, which, by definition, does not lend itself to careful examination or laboratory experiment. As a result, the evidence itself is often ignored or dismissed as anecdotal. In the process, something of huge value may well be lost.
Enter Graham Nicholls. When Graham first discovered the out-of-body experience (OOBE or OBE) as a boy, he was not content to treat it as a bolt from the blue, likely never to be repeated in his lifetime. Instead, he studied, observed, and practiced until he could leave his body at will. This gave him, over the course of literally hundreds of OBEs, an opportunity to examine the phenomenon at depths unavailable to those who experience it only once, spontaneously.
In the process, he discovered there was more to the experience than met the eye. While, for many, an OBE involves no more than stepping out of the body and traveling the world in ghostly form, an OBE can also open doorways onto what appear to be different levels of reality, some of which are seemingly equivalent to the astral planes of esoteric tradition. It can also lead to changes in perception that produce a new and different understanding of the universe and can even generate the realization of unity reported by mystics down the ages. Interestingly, several of Graham’s experiences were confirmed by the results of my own (unpublished) experiments in this area.
Graham’s work eventually led to his first book, Avenues of the Human Spirit, which describes some of his experiences and presents his philosophical speculations about them. His current book goes further and in an even more exciting direction, for in it, he describes the techniques that can potentially enable you to take control of your own OBEs and, with diligent practice, develop the ability to leave your body at will.
There are a great many other books on OBEs and astral projection. (As you will soon learn, the two are not exactly the same.) A trawl of the Internet will quickly deliver scores of techniques that promise to place these fascinating experiences in your own hands. None of them—and I reluctantly place my own work in this category—can hold a candle to the book you have in your hands now. For here you have the fruits of vast personal experience, combining with pene
trating intelligence, diligent observation, and a surprisingly skeptical scientific approach, to produce a work of immense value to both the psychical investigator and esoteric practitioner alike.
The key to this work lies in the final section, which describes, clearly and concisely, a multitude of methods you can use to generate an OBE. Some involve simple visualisations, like the great majority of other books on the subject, but Graham Nicholls was not content to stop there. His approaches can just as easily involve breath work, sonics, yoga, energy manipulation, even sensory deprivation techniques like Ganzfeld and the so-called “witch’s cradle.” His three-dimensional elaboration of the Hindu tattvas is one of the most interesting developments in the use of astral doorways since the days of the original Golden Dawn.
You may, if you wish, read the present book as no more than a fascinating account of one man’s unusual adventures, but you will gain much more from it if you are prepared to embark on some adventures of your own. I urge you to experiment with Nicholls’ methods for yourself, searching out those that work best for you.
Your results may well be both life-changing and, much more importantly, life-enhancing.
—J. H. (Herbie) Brennan
County Carlow, Ireland, March 2011
[contents]
1
* * *
celestial horizons:
the art of leaving the body
I have watched the sun’s rays breaking through the Earth’s upper atmosphere while contemplating the swirl of oceans around the continents of the world beneath me. I have drifted through the silent vastness of space surrounded by endless stars and gaseous clouds of awe-inspiring beauty. I have seen the magnificence of the universe reflected in the structure of flowers, leaves, and stems as I looked deep into their being with my nonphysical eyes. I have experienced the profound nature of life, the interconnectedness of all that is around us. I have seen the wonders of physical and nonphysical perception. I have stood at the threshold of life and death and explored the hinterlands of consciousness. And through all of these life-changing moments, I have been aware that anyone open enough to the possibility can have similar experiences for themselves.
If we take a moment to think about it, what greater faculty could we desire than the ability to liberate ourselves from physical limitations and begin the journey of self-discovery? The out-of-body experience, or OBE as it is generally known, allows us to explore for ourselves the reality of life after physical death and perception through time, and can even afford us the freedom to travel to any place in the known universe and beyond in an instant. What’s more, the OBE also begins the process of individual healing and transformation; it allows us to come into contact with our spiritual nature and find harmony and peace on a multitude of levels.
When I began my journeys beyond the body, I was a very different person. I grew up in the inner city surrounded by many social problems and few possibilities. My life was heading in a destructive direction and there seemed little possibility of anything changing. Yet, despite this environment, I had experienced some strange perceptions during my childhood and this led me to buy a book entitled Out-of-Body Experiences: A Handbook by Janet Lee Mitchell. I practiced every night until I experienced my first induced OBE six months later.
The result was a total change in direction in my life. I began to read about topics such as parapsychology, religion, magic, and philosophy. Soon my worldview was totally changed and, as I explored the out-of-body state, I came into contact more and more with energies and ecstatic experiences that slowly dissolved the pains of my past. Now, as I write this more than twenty years later, I still see great beauty and many possibilities awaiting me and those who would learn the art of leaving the body.
This book represents the coming together of what I have learnt over that time. This book does not require belief in supernatural powers or religious or esoteric frameworks; it makes no assumptions about the nature of the out-of-body state. It draws from all areas that I have found to be effective approaches to leaving the body, both from the last hundred and thirty years of parapsychology and my own direct experience and work with others. The result, I believe, is the most scientific approach yet in print.
My aim for this book is simple: to teach you the skills and knowledge necessary to have out-of-body experiences for yourself. Over the last twenty years, I have found that a personalized approach is the most effective way to teach someone to leave his or her body. We are all different in subtle ways: each with our own fears, needs, and emotional make-up. This book will show that with a better understanding of these needs and emotions, you will have a far greater chance of success and often in a shorter amount of time.
This tailored approach requires a process of self-enquiry that will be beneficial in all areas of your life. The first step in this process is to consider your motivations for learning to project your consciousness to another place or time. Is it simply to explore? For spiritual development? To gain greater understanding of the nature of the world around you? Or maybe to connect with someone who has passed on? Whether it is clearly one of these or a combination of factors, by understanding a little of what draws you to this exciting field, you can unravel what will motivate you most effectively toward success. The next step in the process is to understand what kind of person you are: are you emotional or analytical, an introvert or extrovert? What are the specific aspects of your identity that make you who you are, and how will they affect your goal of learning about out-of-body experiences?
Chapter 4 is an in-depth guide designed specifically to help you answer these questions and explore who you really are. Once you understand these key areas of your identity, you can go directly to the techniques in the appendix, if you like, and begin trying them out as you read through the rest of the book to deepen your understanding. These techniques have been developed and categorised so that you can select the best possible combination of options I have developed. You will have some of the most effective approaches available to help you leave your body.
These techniques are different from anything you will find in other books for several reasons, the most important of which is that they draw upon every aspect of your make-up as a person: your fears, your strengths, and also all of the sensory awareness that you use in your everyday life. This approach is designed to create a total experience, taking you more effectively into the OBE state. It is not simply a series of visualisations, as is the case with many other techniques; it is designed to use all the senses.
The design for my techniques is drawn from the science of parapsychology as well as my own research and experimentation. Parapsychology holds many clues to our psychical make-up, clues that can be put to practical use when learning to have an OBE. The history of parapsychology can be traced back to 1882 in London with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research. This enigmatic institution is still in existence to this day and has produced many excellent publications and researchers since the 1880s. Today we have far better evidence for psychic ability, or psi functioning as it is known within scientific circles. Even many skeptics admit that by the standards of any other area of science, the evidence for psi is well established. However, many remain skeptical as they claim that more research is needed. Unfortunately, those willing to ignore the nay-sayers and explore these areas are very few, as the negative impact on a scientist’s career can be severe.
Yet despite the taboo against psi, there are individuals who continue to offer amazing insights into the nature of consciousness and the universe, such as consciousness researcher Michael Persinger, near-death researcher Pim Van Lommel, and “extended mind” researchers Dean Radin and Rupert Sheldrake. We will return to the findings of these individuals later, but what their work represents is a convergence of evidence in support of nonphysical perception and consciousness. I draw on their research when offering ways to enhance your out-of-body experiences.
Par
apsychology suggests that consciousness is “nonlocal”—in other words, that the mind may be much more like a receiver, or may exist both inside and outside of the physical brain, and so can be tuned to perceive at a distance, be that in space or time. I believe that the OBE is the most powerful way to experience and explore the outer boundaries of perception and awareness. There is no other experience open to us in which our whole sense of self is liberated from the everyday to explore, learn, and grow in such an awe-inspiring way.
What Is the OBE?
To begin, please note that I use the term out-of-body experience in this book to refer to a set of phenomena that appears to involve the spirit or subtle body leaving the physical body. I do not necessarily believe this is the case; terms like leaving and exiting the body are used for ease of explanation, but are not to be taken as literal facts or representative of my beliefs. As you will see, there are many exciting possibilities that could potentially explain what is taking place in an OBE, but as yet there is no clear answer to these fascinating questions.
So if I don’t claim that a spirit is leaving the body during an OBE, what is an out-of-body experience? This is an extremely complex question, but it seems clear that if reality is less objective and more of a potentiality, as quantum physics seems to suggest, then the notion of bodies and even separation becomes too limited an understanding. The sensations and impressions we have during an OBE may suggest separation, but maybe it is simply a state of pure consciousness, in which we experience reality more directly. We will explore this idea more later. Others may have different opinions on this interpretation, but for the purpose of learning to have an out-of-body experience, I will define it in a more pragmatic way here:
An out-of-body experience (OBE) involves coherent feelings, impressions, and sensory awareness of total separation from your physical body in the form of an independent consciousness, whilst usually still being able to see and reason. The experience often involves perceiving the body from above, travel over distances, and sometimes interaction with others. The OBE can also lead to what appear to be other levels of reality. The OBE is generally described as “being as real as everyday reality.”