Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience

by Graham Nicholls

  Many of us will have experienced something similar to this during a lucid or flying dream. However, based on my research and experiences, I would say they are very distinct states. I break it down like this:

  What are the key features of a dream?

  They occur during sleep.

  We often experience rapid eye movement (REM) sleep during dreaming.

  There are no consistent defining features, such as, “All dreams begin with...”

  Dreams generally do not feel as real as waking reality.

  What are the key features of an OBE?

  They can occur during many different states (sleep, waking, during trauma).

  Some research shows that people having OBEs are not experiencing REM sleep.

  There are many consistent features to an OBE, such as leaving the body, the silver cord, and the vibrational state.

  OBEs feel as real as waking reality.

  By breaking down the key features in this way, we can see there are clear differences between OBEs and dreams. The idea that OBEs are simply a form of dream is, in my view, a misconception and one that can be unhelpful when dealing with experiences in the everyday world. When we begin to learn about other levels or planes of reality, the definitions become more subjective, but the breakdown above still serves to highlight the distinctions.

  So what are the most common forms of out-of-body experience, and what is it like to have one? The most common form of OBE is the spontaneous experience. As you are reading this book, you may well be one of the 10 to 25 percent of people who have had a spontaneous out-of-body experience. They can happen in a whole range of ways, including during sleep or an illness, and sometimes even in extreme situations, such as a serious injury or cardiac arrest. However, most experiences of this type happen on what appears to be a totally average day; after you lie down to sleep, you find yourself unexpectedly floating up near the ceiling of your bedroom or in another place entirely. Some people I have spoken to over the years have had experiences of being in more than one place at the same time, and some have had OBEs induced by drugs such as ketamine or DMT. However, most of these drug-induced experiences also contain other factors on top of the generally reported out-of-body phenomena, so I tend to see them as an altered state of consciousness rather than a pure out-of-body state. During these drug experiences, consciousness may be operating in a more expansive way, but is also mixed with the everyday stuff of the mind. Of course, there are exceptions to this when dealing with mind-altering drugs, but on the whole they come into a different category.

  My first encounter with being beyond my body was a spontaneous OBE. I was ten or twelve years old, and remember that on one seemingly ordinary day, I opened my eyes to find myself floating vertically around half a meter above the ground. It was very tangible; I vividly recall the grainy concrete of the playground of my childhood school. Even the cracked white paint comes to mind when I think about it, and the strange sensation of being in a familiar place yet in such an unusual way. I remember having several of these early experiences. Although it is hard to be sure whether they are true out-of-body experiences in the way I define them in this book, they did open up my interest in a way that led to me learning to induce the full out-of-body state.

  It seems that most people have experiences that fall into this category at first; it is as if only part of our awareness has shifted to another vantage point, so we still retain some aspects of our sensory perception. If the spontaneous experience is the result of a more extreme situation, the exteriorisation seems to be more complete. A more complete spontaneous separation can also take place, although more rarely, when you are already asleep and wake suddenly, and attempt to get up, only to find that you are nonphysical. This can be frightening as you try to grasp what is happening, but usually does not last more than a few seconds to a few minutes.

  Although these spontaneous experiences are usually brief and may only happen once or twice in a lifetime, they do still serve to inspire many of us to seek out a deeper understanding of what is going on. We may question our sanity, as researcher Robert A. Monroe did, or try to dismiss what happened as an unusual hallucination. This can seem like a reasonable thing to do, and indeed I have little doubt that some occurrences do fall within this category. But is the belief that out-of-body experiences are always simply hallucinations really a useful explanation?

  If we start with the word hallucination, we see that it implies that what we are perceiving is false or untrue. According to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, “Hallucinations involve sensing things that aren’t there while a person is awake and conscious.”1 Thus the key issue becomes: are the things that are perceived in an out-of-body experience real or illusory? This is one of the most fundamental questions related to these experiences. If what we see in an OBE is real, then the universe is even more amazing than mainstream or popular science has so far imagined. There is a divide among scientists and also among the public over this issue, so I will share some of what I have concluded on the subject.

  Like all psychic abilities, OBEs are dependent upon the understanding, awareness, and state of mind of the person experiencing them. As the name implies, psychic abilities are connected to our mental faculties and therefore subject to all of our psychological strengths and limitations. This, I believe, is the clue to understanding the objective and subjective aspects of OBEs.

  I have had many out-of-body experiences that could be verified afterward by physically visiting the location I had been to in the OBE or researching details from the experience. This kind of evidence is extremely important as we explore and learn more about the out-of-body state, but personal anecdotal evidence can only be part of the story, since human beings are prone to mistakes and biases.

  Similarly, in research into near-death experiences (NDEs), there have been many instances of people giving details that they could not have learnt via normal means while having no heart rate or observable brain function. You may be familiar with descriptions of people who have experienced a near-fatal accident and have left their bodies and drifted into a tunnel of light, or watched the process of their resuscitation, usually from above. While not everyone experiences an OBE during an NDE, research in this field strongly suggests that OBEs are not based just upon the brain and are not simply hallucinations. There are many theories designed to explain away these life-changing events, but no one has yet offered one that explains the full complexity and detail that is communicated by those who have them.

  One study, by NDE researcher Dr. Penny Sartori, looks at whether people can guess what happened to them while unconscious as effectively as those who had NDEs and observed their resuscitation whilst out of the body. The results were hugely in favour of the near-death experiencers. While those guessing either had no idea or based their opinions on television or movie reconstructions, the near-death experiencers, on the other hand, were able to give accurate details of what happened to them.2

  Another area of scientific research that supports the reality of out-of-body perception is remote viewing (RV), which is a form of psychic intelligence-gathering developed by the U.S. military during the Cold War period. In the very first book I read on OBEs, Out-of-Body Experiences: A Handbook, which I mentioned earlier, I learnt about work undertaken by Janet Lee Mitchell to explore evidence for perception beyond the body. She worked closely with Ingo Swann, an artist and a specialist in remote viewing. Like many of the military remote viewers, Swann was able to offer evidence to support the idea that consciousness can travel to another location and bring back factual information from that remote location. The RV program lasted for more than twenty years in the United States and has continued in other forms and in other countries. When the program ended, the research was evaluated by a statistician, Jessica Utts, and a skeptic, Ray Hyman. Even Hyman’s skeptical position, in the face of the evidence in favour of remote viewing, was close
to supporting the existence of psychic abilities. For example, he wrote in his report:

  “The case for psychic functioning seems better than it ever has been. The contemporary findings along with the output of the SRI/SAIC program do seem to indicate that something beyond odd statistical hiccups is taking place. I also have to admit that I do not have a ready explanation for these observed effects.”3

  Despite what a small group of skeptical individuals are saying, the evidence for abilities such as remote viewing and out-of-body experiences becomes stronger with each new study. When scientists are fearless and look into these little-known areas of human experience, we edge closer to an understanding of an area of life that has fascinated and inspired human beings since the earliest cultures. The scientific method offers a way of looking at the world as it really is, but we must not allow this vision of truth to be limited or hijacked by those who would tell us which avenues of inquiry are valid and which are not.

  Brian Josephson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, has spent much of the later part of his career exploring psychic abilities and has written a theoretical model of how they might work. He has connected perception at a distance and other psi abilities with the nonlocal nature of quantum physics, especially the concept of entanglement, which states that two particles remain connected in some mysterious way despite being separated by vast distances. This contradicts much of what we once believed about the universe.

  Overall, within the world of parapsychology there are various theories of how psychic abilities could work, and there is a wealth of evidence that suggests these experiences are real and objective.

  When dealing with topics like the out-of-body experience, we hear many differing views on what is taking place and how it is possible. It can become very confusing to those new to the field to understand the different worldviews that writers draw upon. That is why I focus on what science is revealing. We also hear different terms when we are learning about leaving the body; this can also confuse our understanding. The most widely used of these terms include astral projection, etheric projection, and out-of-body experience. These terms are often used interchangeably, but what do they actually mean?

  I’ll start with probably the oldest and most widely known among these: astral projection. Astral comes from the Greek word ástron, or star, so roughly translated it means “like a star.” The modern use of the term can be mainly traced to Theosophy, a worldview that seeks to blend Eastern and Western spiritual philosophies. The most notable among the Theosophist writers on the subject was A. E. Powell, who wrote books such as The Astral Body and Other Astral Phenomena and The Development of Astral Powers. Most of the books on astral projection draw upon his concepts in some form or another. He described many invisible bodies in his work, not just the astral, which he saw as being emotional in nature. The other nonphysical body he described that is important to our discussion is the etheric double, generally the body through which he believed experiences in everyday physical reality take place. He believed that the astral body, on the other hand, generally travels to the mysterious world of the astral planes.

  The etheric double has its roots in a belief in the aether, dating back to the ancient Greeks. It was believed to be a kind of mystical fifth element after earth, air, fire, and water. It was sometimes seen as binding all other elements together. It is easy to see that, if there were some kind of spirit element in the universe, early writers on astral projection would suppose that this would be the substance the double was made of. The aether was also associated with air; it can be translated from the Greek to mean “pure air.” As the Theosophists also drew on Eastern ideas, they soon connected the aether with prana, the yogic life force connected to sunlight and breathing. In fact, some even use the term pranic body instead of etheric body.

  The astral and etheric bodies are the two that the vast majority of literature on astral projection focuses on, yet I have seen many invisible bodies described. Some claim this is not a literal belief in several separate and distinct bodies, but more of an understanding of different states of awareness. This way of viewing the concept seems more in tune with our modern minds, as more scientifically minded researchers recognize that there are different states or levels to the experience.

  Robert A. Monroe, though not a scientist, did approach the subject in a fairly scientific way. He described what he called locales, which again refer essentially to different states or levels of consciousness. Locale I, for example, would relate to the etheric level, as this locale relates to experiences on the physical reality level, while Locale II would refer roughly to astral plane experiences.

  It was also Monroe who popularised the term out-of-body experience in his 1971 book Journeys Out of the Body. The importance of this term lies in the fact that it does not assume the existence of a soul, spirit, etheric, or astral body. It simply notes that we experience a sense of leaving or being beyond the usual limitations of our physical body. I prefer this term over astral projection and other terms for this reason; I want to explore the experience with an enquiring mind, without a predetermined idea of what I will find or experience. When dealing with such important yet complex experiences, we owe it to future generations as well as our own integrity not to limit our worldview.

  This openness when learning to have OBEs creates much more exciting possibilities. Far from setting off along a well-worn path, you will be exploring the territory of nonphysical reality for yourself. At first I drew heavily upon esoteric knowledge when I explored the out-of-body state, yet as time went by I increasingly found that my experiences did not match the worldview I had been learning about. This may have just been my experience, but the power of the exploratory approach is that you will learn for yourself and maybe even discover a level that has never been described before.

  New Approaches to Having an OBE

  In 1998, I began work on a series of projects that used the power of hypnosis, guided meditation, and new scientific understandings about consciousness to create special environments and structures designed to help people enter into the kind of trance states needed to have an OBE. The first of these was called an Epicene and consisted of a large, bedlike platform suspended in space by a steel frame. Once volunteers got onto the platform, they instantly experienced a feeling of floating, which many found relaxing. Once they were ready, a guided meditation began that would gently take them into a trance state. Depending on the person, some would go deeper and others would simply report a light euphoric state. Those who that went deeper sometimes reported strong emotional experiences.

  At this time, I also experimented with neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), which is a form of psychological performance enhancement. I made video recordings of many people under hypnosis as I regressed them to specific points in their lives to identify their fears and limitations. This research now forms part of my OBE system, as I found that many people have a range of fears connected to what they perceive as losing control or the unknown. These fears can be transformed by understanding that we almost always remain in control in an OBE, and also that there is nothing fearful or negative about the experience. In fact, after several hundred OBEs, I have found nothing but healing and transformation within my own experiences.

  A few years after my hypnosis experiments, I began researching virtual reality and was lucky enough to get the opportunity to create another large-scale immersive environment at London’s Science Museum in 2004. I was using the most advanced virtual reality technology available at the time and also exploring ways that the public could interact with this technology in a way that would feel comfortable to them. I learnt a lot and developed simple forms of the technology that could be used at home.

  I will explain how to make a simple immersive environment later in this book. I will also explore how churches and temples throughout history have created a form of immersion without complex technology using images, scents, and sound. This is the basis of r
itual practices across the world and provides another way to induce an altered state for those who dislike the use of technology. There is even the retreat approach—going on a journey away from people and other influences for the purpose of developing your OBE skills. The key factor is immersing yourself fully in the process, whatever method you decide to use.

  It was actually my total engagement with the process of learning to leave my body that led to my first induced out-of-body experience. I wasn’t successful until I’d already been practising every night for six months. I have written about it in my book Avenues of the Human Spirit, but I will briefly recap the experience here. I had almost given up on inducing an OBE after such a long time, since I’d had little success beyond experiencing feelings of flowing energy and sometimes a sense of floating. Like most people, I would sometimes drift off into sleep or lie there for what seemed like hours in a kind of sleepy trance state. Yet somehow all of this had been building steadily over the months of practice; I was beginning to understand my own psychological landscape in ways I didn’t even realise at the time.

  On the night I finally succeeded, I remember lying there when a jolt of energy shot through my body, something akin to a large electrical shock. It wasn’t painful, but it was very close to that level of intensity. As I regained awareness of my surroundings, I realised I was hovering or floating around a meter above my physical body, fixed in a horizontal position while unable to move forward and backward or up and down. I could only rotate as if a pole extended the length of my body. I remember looking at the window and, as I did, I was aware of vibrant energy pulsing and flowing all around. This energy seemed to colour my bedroom with a blue, hazy light.