Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience

by Graham Nicholls

  Managing Your Time

  We all have a limited amount of flexible time in our day-to-day lives. Many of us are almost overloaded with obligations. What does this mean to our spiritual well-being and growth? We cannot expect to find fulfillment if we spend many hours a day involved in stressful or tiring work and then spend only a few minutes to an hour or so exploring our spiritual nature. The sheer weight of outside influences is against us. To succeed in having on OBE, we must take time to focus on our spiritual and psychical development away from the stresses of work and family obligations. An extended workshop, a period of meditation, or a retreat are all helpful ways to balance the weight of our commitments. Spending time focused on ourselves and our goals in this kind of nurturing environment is an excellent way not only to rebalance ourselves, but to reconsider our life choices. Much like a positive change of diet or stopping smoking, a change in the way we utilise our time can improve our emotional and physical well-being.

  If you feel that you need to address this time issue to allow more time for this program, start by allocating just fifteen minutes a day to your practice. (Anyone can squeeze fifteen minutes out of his or her day!) Another tactic is identifying a negative or limiting element in your life and either ending it or reducing it down to a manageable level. Common time-was-ters that take up more time than actually benefits you include surfing the Internet aimlessly, watching television, reading articles that offer nothing, or wasting time, money, and energy shopping. Whatever your sources of mindless distraction, become aware of the amount of time spent and seek to reclaim some of that time for something nurturing and life-changing, like a spiritual practice.

  When I teach, I often find that people underestimate the amount of time they really have available. They feel overwhelmed, and just thinking about making changes brings up anxiety. It is important not to allow this attitude to limit you, or to become the reason that you don’t see this program through. If you have a computer, smartphone, or diary, set a reminder each day to take time to work on yourself. Just fifteen minutes a day can change your life. As was mentioned earlier, working with a partner can also help to motivate and engage you. In short, it is important to find time within the structure of your particular job and commitments that lets you reclaim something for yourself.

  Exercise: Identifying your distractions

  Distractions are a part of our daily life, and becoming aware of them is the first step toward overcoming them.

  Step 1: Write down a list of topics that you thought about or discussed with friends or family today.

  Step 2: Next to them, list where the ideas came from: what led you to be thinking about that topic? Start with the morning and the first person you met: what did you talk about? What led to the conversation? Did you think more about that topic, or explore it further, later on?

  Let’s use my day as an example. I woke up and soon thereafter my partner started talking about the death penalty. This topic arose because she was reading a book as part of a course of study on ethics. So the source for this conversation was education—information from an academic source. The next person I spoke to was a friend who spoke about a documentary on mediumship he had watched the night before. So the second source of information was television.

  Step 3: Become aware of how sources outside of yourself impact your thoughts and your time.

  When I do this exercise, it is amazing how often the trail leads back to visual media such as television. The workplace and education of some form are also common. Very little is from self-initiated sources for most people. This is what I advise you to change. Look at the influences in your life and reduce passive sources where the choice of what you learn or think about is not your own. Reduce exposure to topics that you have not drawn to yourself, and increase exposure to topics that you wish to learn about. Consider skills you’d like to learn and pursue them. Engage with spiritual writers who inspire and motivate you, and explore the fields that will lead to a greater understanding of your psychical faculties. This is key when wanting to gain the most in your learning about OBEs and the nonphysical levels. You cannot develop advanced abilities and understanding in a vacuum or with no positive or nurturing influences. You also cannot make progress without the simple investment of your time.

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  6

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  immersive approaches to having an out-of-body experience

  With this chapter, we will begin to explore the specifics of having an out-of-body experience. First we will look at the impact of the environment—specifically, the effect of special types of environment designed to fully immerse yourself in the experience. These “immersive approaches” are highly effective ways of inducing an OBE through the use of several or all of the senses, rather than just one, as is common in many approaches.

  The term immersion , in the context that I use it here, is mainly drawn from the world of virtual reality (VR), which is an attempt to create a believable experience of a computer-generated, artificial world through the use of headsets, three-dimensional (3D) glasses, and other technology designed to trick the brain into believing that what it sees is real. There are two common forms of VR immersion. The first utilises a head-mounted display that plays a slightly different version of the virtual world into each eye, with the resulting illusion of a three-dimensional space. The second form does not use a head-mounted display; instead it creates the illusion using a “cave,” which is a small white room onto which images are projected. When the cave is viewed through simple 3D glasses, the effect is that you seem to be physically within whatever environment is being projected.

  While VR technology has mass appeal when applied to entertainment, it also has constructive applications, such as its use to help people with phobias. Within the safety of the artificial world, a person suffering from, say, fear of spiders can gradually desensitize himself or herself and release his or her fear response when confronted with a real spider.

  Like VR technology, the field of sensory or perceptual deprivation also uses the idea of immersion. In the 1960s and earlier, several laboratories were studying the effects of various forms of sensory deprivation to determine what psychological impact it might have. Immersion was used in a literal sense: participants were submerged into tanks of water, usually in total darkness, to see what would happen once the senses were in effect switched off. This resulted in a whole array of hallucinatory experiences. It was also around this time that scientists studying psi abilities such as telepathy began to experiment with mild sensory deprivation to help people get successful results in psychic trials. This is where immersion really becomes applicable to our aims. Immersion has two powerful factors: first, it can impact the part of the brain that helps us understand the world around us in a way that can help us grow or overcome fears. Second, it can help us to get deeper into our unconscious awareness, which can aid psychic development.

  Robert A. Monroe was the first person to explore a mild form of immersion using a system of sound frequencies he named Hemi-Sync®, based upon the binaural beat concept first put forward in 1839 by Heinrich Wilhelm Dove. The idea, in simple terms, was to use sound to alter the brain state of the person listening to the frequencies. Monroe discovered the concept while exploring the possibility of using similar technology to enhance learning. Instead, he had his first out-of-body experience.

  While Monroe’s system was ground-breaking, it was limited to sound alone. In 1998, I began work on my own immersive system designed to help induce an altered state. But unlike Monroe’s, mine would involve all the senses to create a complete sensory experience, thus greatly increasing the impact on the participant and the chance of having an OBE. I have continued to develop and refine my approaches, and in 2004, working with a designer/curator and an artist, I built an immersive environment at London’s Science Museum that used sound, 3D film, and VR technology to take the idea of immersion to the next
level. Next, I will introduce the ideas behind these cutting-edge developments and explain how the reader can create a simple immersive system at home.

  My Experiments with Immersive Environments

  My first project exploring immersion as a way of accessing the out-of-body state was called Epicene. It not only allowed me to get solid feedback from participants on what worked and what didn’t, but also allowed me to help people experience totally new states of awareness in a very safe and effective way.

  The idea for the piece had been with me for a long time, and I sketched out many ideas before finally creating the plans for the project. My early versions were more like hammocks, after I had experimented with an ancient approach called the “witch’s cradle,” which is basically just being suspended from a tree in a sack. I had read about it in some of the literature on astral projection, and found that the intensity of the experience did lend itself to inducing OBEs, but obviously its discomfort meant it would not be for everyone. I wanted to find a way of inducing a similar psychological impact without making people feel uncomfortable.

  I began to think about floating. How could I make someone feel as if he or she was weightless? It occurred to me that if I could build a structure that would respond to the slightest movement, as well as visually seem to be floating, maybe people could experience a sense of weightlessness. I soon began to formulate how the structure could be built, and luckily at the time I had access to a workshop where I could actually build it.

  Physically, the piece consisted of a large metal frame, cube-like, with a white, bed-like platform suspended within by steel wire (the kind used in theatres to suspend actors above the stage). A participant would lie on the platform, which gave a feeling of floating. As he or she relaxed, a recording would begin playing, much like a guided meditation. First it would guide them into a highly relaxed state, then it would begin to take them into a light, positive trance state. As they became more deeply involved in the experience, they would be guided through a series of scenarios that would introduce possibilities, such as leaving the body, on a fully conscious as well as a subconscious level.

  The results were often deeply emotional and people would find that they had accessed a part of themselves that they were almost totally unaware of. There was a sense that the experience could potentially open people up in a similar way as going through months of practicing visualisation techniques.

  Almost as soon as I had a good level of feedback from people about their experiences, I began work on my second project. This time, I wanted there to be more than the hypnotic induction; I wanted to use light as well. I had been thinking a lot about the possibilities of virtual reality. At the time, I didn’t have access to the level of technology needed to make a fully immersive VR system, but I did have a good enough understanding of technology to set up something similar.

  The result was a project I named LAM. It consisted of a computer that ran a lighting and sound system, as well as video projectors showing footage designed to suggest that consciousness is fluid and not limited in the ways we often assume. I did this by showing more generally understood concepts, such as the “self” watching the world from inside one’s head in a visual form, and then showing the senses disappearing or being reduced and posing the questions, “What is left? Where is the ‘I’ located?” This is actually a very hard question to answer and it poses the further question, “Is consciousness an illusion?” This does not mean that consciousness does not exist, but rather that it may not be what we believe it to be, or it may not work in the way we think. This can be very liberating, as it opens us to explore the nature of our consciousness. It suggests to those who may never have considered it that we may be more than our senses, or maybe that “I,” wherever it is located, could be capable of much more than we ever considered.

  To truly open up to the possibilities of consciousness, we first must relinquish our preconceptions and limited worldviews and be open to new possibilities. Using the benefits that technology can offer is one way we can experience new ways to reach other levels of consciousness.

  The Ganzfeld Approach

  The Ganzfeld Approach is a form of mild sensory deprivation that was introduced into psychology in the 1930s. It was later taken up as a tool by parapsychologists studying telepathy. The real effectiveness of this approach is that it gives us a relatively easy way of taking our attention away from our external senses and encouraging a connection to our unconscious mind so that psi perceptions can come to the fore.

  The process begins by taking two halves of a Ping-Pong ball and placing them over each eye to shut out all visual input (thus creating a “total field,” the meaning of the word Ganzfeld). The brain is then encouraged to become active by the use of a red light, dimly visible through the ball halves. This causes the pupils to dilate and the brain to look for incoming information from our physical senses. When nothing comes in, the brain begins to fill in the void and we start to hallucinate. This effect is enhanced by the use of pink noise, which is essentially the random static that you hear if you tune a radio to the frequencies between stations. After a time in this state, psi impressions can come to the fore in a far more reliable way than if you were simply closing your eyes.

  In psi research, a person in another room, called the sender, will try to project or transmit images to the person in the Ganzfeld state. The sender is usually looking at a series of images that have been randomly selected. These are usually images of major landmarks or other easily recognisable subject matter. When the experiment is over, the person who was in the Ganzfeld state (the receiver) will be asked to look at the random images and also to listen to a recording of the session. He or she will be asked to choose the image that they feel the sender was trying to telepathically transmit.

  The Ganzfeld Approach has produced some of the most powerful demonstrations of telepathy under controlled circumstances.1 It has been replicated in many laboratories worldwide in accordance with scientific protocols. The results are especially compelling in the auto-Ganzfeld variant, which uses a computer to control all elements of the experiment, thus greatly reducing any chance that the receiver could gain knowledge of the target image in any physical way.

  The Ganzfeld process is extremely useful to our goal of inducing OBEs because it helps to bring about a trance and takes you to a deeper level of inner focus. It is also useful to those who are uncomfortable or unfamiliar with being in a trance state; you will be able to take your first steps with the help of a tested system that is also pleasant to experience. I have found that this system, when combined with the vibrational state and other techniques, enhances your chances of having an out-of-body experience. Furthermore, it requires only a set of headphones, a Ping-Pong ball, cotton wool, tape, and a red light (the kind used in photography darkrooms is ideal).

  When working with any form of sensory deprivation, the experience is best kept fairly short, especially at first. This is because extended periods in sensory deprivation have been shown to cause anxiety and stress. Although this is highly unlikely with a mild approach like Ganzfeld, which commonly results in a sense of peace and expanded awareness, for general well-being I recommend a period of no longer than thirty-five minutes to start. It usually takes around fifteen minutes for people to reach a trance state in which visual impressions form; these experiences then generally last for around twenty minutes on average, for a total of thirty-five minutes, which is the ideal period.

  How to make your own Ganzfeld system

  What you’ll need:

  A Ping-Pong ball

  Fine sandpaper or a nail file

  Cotton wool

  Tape (medical tape is good)

  A sharp knife, such as a scalpel or craft knife

  Headphones and something to play pink noise (see my website at www.grahamnicholls.com for a 35 minute pink noise track)

  A red light

/>   A comfortable seat or recliner

  With the knife, carefully cut the Ping-Pong ball into two halves. Gently place them over your eyes, taking care not to cut yourself with the edges, to get a sense of where you might need to shape the sides to better fit your face. Once you are happy with the fit and you can see virtually no light, take the file or sandpaper and smooth the edges off.

  Next, switch on the red light and sit or lie down. Experiment with your position until you find the best distance that results in a uniform reddish glow coming through the Ping-Pong ball halves. When you’re ready to start, place some cotton wool under the edges of the ball halves to make them more comfortable and improve the fit. Then apply some tape to hold them firmly in place. The tape can also block any areas where light is getting in.