Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience

by Graham Nicholls

  Of course, modern scientifically based medicine should never be denied or overlooked. The forms of healing I’m exploring are complementary to modern medicine, not a replacement for it. This is a really important point, since many people fear the actions of science when it comes to medicine. The best thing you can do to allay these fears is to become familiar with the research being done.

  All of these things seem to point toward reality, energy, and consciousness being linked in some complex way, so that psychological changes can lead to a change in the way we experience the world.

  Practical Vibrational State Healing

  The best approach you can use related to alternative healing methods is to try some exercises for yourself and see what results you get. Generally, there is good evidence that if you believe in what you are doing, you will get some positive results. This particularly applies to experimenting with the out-of-body state.

  There are two concepts to be aware of in using the out-of-body state for healing. The first is to understand that the condition or illness that you are working with is just one potential state of being. Those potentials, it appears, can be changed or shifted; thus no outcome is set in stone. The second factor concerns the experiential aspect of the out-of-body state. The state is like an energy field that contains a kind of blueprint, which you might call your second body, subtle body, or extended consciousness. But what is important is that this sense of yourself beyond the body does not contain the limitations, acquired fears and beliefs, or learnt behaviors that you have developed during your lifetime.

  When you bear these two factors in mind, you realise that within the OBE, the healing process is related to directly experiencing this more genuine aspect of ourselves. Like the mindfulness experienced during meditation, being in the out-of-body state connects us to our unfettered self, which in turn promotes well-being and healing.

  Exercise: Sharing energy with a partner

  Step 1: In the first part of this exercise, you will need to develop the vibrational state, or at least a level of awareness closely related to the early stages of an OBE (since, as discussed, not everyone experiences the full vibrational state). The goal here is not to fully leave body awareness, but to increase your sensation of subtle shifts and flows in consciousness as much as possible. You will find the Three-Dimensional Doorway Technique (see page 187) helpful with this, as well as the Bellows Breath Technique (see page 202).

  Step 2: I suggest sitting in a simple crossed-legged posture with your partner lying flat in front of you. Instruct your partner to focus on your breathing to start with, and any sense of the flow of your energy he or she might become aware of. Your partner should continue to focus on your energy throughout the exercise.

  Step 3: Once you feel the level of energy in your body at its height—especially if you feel a wavelike sensation or vibrations—start to expand the motion of the waves or vibrations outward. Concentrate on the boundary or edge of the sensations and push outward a little—not too far, just enough to begin to push the energy out toward your partner.

  Step 4: Once the energy is radiating outwardly, toward your partner, extend your arms out, palms down, and start to concentrate the sense of energy within and around your hands. Sense the flow of the vibrational state all around your body and out over the body of your partner.

  Step 5: Now start to shift your awareness to the position of your partner, as if you are starting to have an OBE. Let your awareness move around his or her body seeking places where the energy feels blocked in some form. This may feel like a resistance, or like tangled fibers. Sense what part of the body the blockage is in and begin to concentrate your awareness there, bringing the vibrations over this part of the body. You might also want to move your hands to this area of your partner’s body.

  Step 6: Place your awareness as fully as you can into the vibrational field and sense the blockage beginning to match the heightened frequency of your vibrational state. Continue until the blockage is no longer apparent.

  Step 7: At this point, try to activate the vibrational state in your partner. He or she should still be focused on your energy as instructed in step 1. Start to picture in your mind the conscious awareness of your partner and try to infuse that image with the vibrational energy all around you. Try to draw your partner into sync with you.

  Step 8: Hold this mutual state for as long as feels comfortable. When you’re ready to finish, place your hands on the ground and let the vibrational energy subside naturally. It may help to imagine the energy flowing into the ground as a way of returning yourself to normal everyday consciousness.

  After completing this exercise, you may want to discuss it and get feedback from your partner about what he or she experienced. I advise writing this down in your journal, and seeing whether or not your perceptions were correct. As with any methodology, it may take some practice to get a good sense of what is happening with your own energy, and how it interacts with the energy of the other person.

  The out-of-body experience can have a powerful impact on the personal well-being of the individual. It can lead to a total change in values, and even lifestyle. As our awareness of both the out-of-body state and our inner ability to heal and maintain optimum health continues to grow, I expect the OBE to become a more widely accepted aspect of the spectrum of complementary methods for living a more spiritual, harmonious, and holistic life. I sincerely hope that there will be more scientific research into this important field.

  All areas of psychic and spiritual understanding hold fascinating possibilities and clues to our innermost nature. They challenge us and open our perceptions to ways of looking at the world we hadn’t imagined before. In the next chapter, we will explore one of the most challenging psychic abilities I have personally encountered—the ability to perceive forward or backward through time.

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  cerulean dawn: perceiving

  across time

  The out-of-body experience holds the potential for us to move our awareness to any point in the universe, but it can also allow us to travel beyond the limits of time—a possibility that has both challenged and fascinated me since my first experiences. Many explorers of consciousness have found that time and space seem fluid, malleable, or even totally illusory. For example, Joseph McMoneagle, the famous remote viewer who developed his skills as part of the U.S. military’s secret Stargate program, found that time was no more of an obstacle than any other. In fact, many in the world of parapsychology, as well as some physicists, now believe that the future can influence the past. This notion is called reverse causality or retrocausality and, if true, could change the way in which we understand everything.

  Precognition in Action

  Dean Radin at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California has demonstrated an unconscious awareness of the future in volunteers. These presentiment experiments show that shortly before an emotional image is shown to an individual, they will react on an unconscious level as if they have already seen the image.1 The response is generally measured by monitoring electrical activity in the skin of the volunteers, much like the process used for biofeedback devices. Again, the implications are huge; it implies that we may have an innate awareness, although largely unconscious, of events before they happen. Some have suggested that this represents an ancient survival mechanism, which would give us a subtle early warning when danger is near. Psychic abilities in this sense would offer an evolutionary advantage in hostile predatory environments such as the Earth of the past.

  My experiences with precognition: The Soho bombing

  This idea of an early warning fits in well with common descriptions of premonitions and/or a sense of foreboding shortly before a major disaster, and is something I have experienced in my own life. My understanding of how time and space work was challenged for the first time when I found myself beyond my bo
dy, standing on the corner of Moor Street and Old Compton Street in central London. The scene was powerful and vivid, despite the fact that my vision was infused with a grayish-blue or cerulean light that seemed to have a unique energetic quality. (I had only ever experienced this cerulean-blue vision once before, and that had been one of the most objectively verifiable of all my out-of-body experiences.)

  I felt fixed to the spot, not in the sense of not being able to move—I feel I could have if I had tried—but rather that I knew instinctively that staying where I was was the right thing to do. As I stood there motionless, an explosion burst out of a building in the distance, on the right of the main road. Almost immediately, a man ran past me, heading for the site of the explosion. I watched as the scene changed from calm everyday life in Soho to anguish and disbelief. I felt a wave of emotion and sensed that this was not an accident; it was an extremely important event that had yet to take place.

  Five days later, a bombing took place, just as I had seen in my OBE. This was obviously very hard to fully grasp; had I actually seen a future event, or was this simply a coincidence? At first I didn’t know what to believe. I always maintain a level of healthy skepticism when faced with such experiences, but I couldn’t ignore the high level of accuracy.

  My experiences with precognition: The 7/7 attacks

  A few years later, my sense of what was possible was challenged again. This time I found myself floating above Moorgate Underground Station in the city of London, my vision again tinted with cerulean blue. Within moments I was following a train as it clashed and rattled along the line into Liverpool Street Station, one stop down the line. I remember pausing at the back of the train as it pulled away from Liverpool Street and headed for Aldgate East. Then came a wave of emotion and anguish that seemed to be rolled into the shockwave of an explosion up ahead. Again, it was obvious that I was witnessing a terrorist attack, and again I believed it would take place at some point in the future.

  Since I was more aware than I had been during my experience with the Soho attack, I decided to try and gain some sense of when this latest event might take place. Unfortunately I could only pick up glimpses of the numerals 5 or 05. This experience took place some time in April 2004, so I took this to mean May, the following month, or 2005, the following year. This was far from the precision I had hoped for, but this level of detail is simply the way that the information comes through. Gaining details from these experiences is something like walking through a room once and then trying to describe all the details some time after.

  Moments later, I was back in the apartment I was living in at the time. This experience impacted my life for the next year, until the event did take place as I’d seen it, on July 7, 2005. I avoided the underground stations in that part of London, and I had a general feeling of compassion towards all those who would become involved.

  Experiments with Time

  It was clear that I could not simply dismiss these experiences as coincidence. I began researching precognition as well as talking to people such as Dean Radin about their views. I also read anything I could find that gave some scientific context to the experience. One such book was J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time, in which he explains that precognition is common, especially in dream states. He outlines a system for observing your dreams and comparing them to events in waking reality. The result, he claims, is that many dreams appear to be precognitive in nature. Rupert Sheldrake, the British scientist whose work I discussed earlier, states in his book The Sense of Being Stared At that he was able to experience similar precognitive perceptions by recording his dreams in the way that Dunne suggests.

  Sheldrake also believes that consciousness operates through a form of causation from the future to the past. This involves the concept that consciousness is operating on the level of potentialities, also discussed earlier. Physical reality meets with this level of consciousness in the present. He believes that, on a quantum level, this would be referred to as the collapse of the wave function, which means a single possibility becomes an actual occurrence after the involvement of an observer. I was actually able to use this understanding to get the highest score ever in a single trial on a computer-controlled, random precognition test designed by Sheldrake; whether this is repeatable to any degree remains to be seen. While a single trial in any area is not conclusive, it does at least suggest that the future influencing the past may have some truth to it. This is also another example of how an awareness of current scientific theories may help us optimise our psychic functioning.

  As research in these areas becomes more computer-controlled and more people gain access to psi testing via the Internet, the evidence will become the best it can be; human error will be almost removed from the argument, as will claims of cheating. The only downside that may arise with scientific trials of telepathy, precognition, and remote viewing going online is an overly casual attitude toward the tests. In some online trials, there is already a tendency for some participants to abandon the test before they have completed it, which then stands as a negative trial and brings down the average results. Two possible solutions would be to include an incentive to finish the trial, or to make the process of joining a test harder, so that only those with a genuine wish to take part will take the time to complete the process.

  If we do continue to find evidence for precognition in a scientific way, we will be entering a fascinating period in history when consciousness really does become the ultimate unexplored territory. You have probably heard the dictum that we know more about the vastness of space than we do about the oceans of our world. Maybe, with the help of radical scientists willing to explore and question, we will turn our attention even closer to home and explore the true nature of the mind and human consciousness.

  An Historical Approach to Precognition

  The idea that human beings can perceive events before they occur is a very old and persistent one. Names such as Nostradamus have entered the popular imagination and new prophets and prophecies arise in every generation. I remember as a small boy visiting the home of Mother Shipton, a seer who is thought to have predicted the Great Fire of London in 1666. The magic of the cave and the well inspired my imagination, and I still own the small booklet of her predictions that my parents bought me during that visit. To my mother and father, the tales of figures like Shipton were and are simply a bit of fun; as for me, I wondered if there might be a clue in some part of her writings as to the nature of my own unusual experiences.

  Going even further back into history, we have the stories of the Oracle at Delphi, a woman believed to be in communication with Apollo, the Sun God. Interestingly, there seems to be some crossover between the methods of these ancient prophets and figures like Nostradamus. In Delphi, the Oracle was said to sit on top of a tripod and gaze into the surface of water. Nostradamus also used a tripod and a form of reaching into trance to see the future called scrying. This is the same process used with a crystal ball, or the surface of water, or a mirror for the purpose of having visions of the future or to gain information, not dissimilar to the modern process of remote viewing. Even John Dee, an English mathematician and advisor to Queen Elizabeth I, used scrying with the help of a seer by the name of Edward Kelley, although Dee and Kelley did not generally focus on seeing the future. Scrying continues to be used by psychics and spiritual seekers today.

  After learning about scrying, I tried using a range of materials to see if I could uncover any benefits to this approach. I tried using water, crystal, ink, and even smoke as a medium through which to perceive psychically. But it turned out that a black mirror, somewhat like the one that is now on display in the British Museum once belonging to Dee, was most effective in my experience.

  To begin, I would sit in a comfortable position in front of a round sheet of glass that I had spray-painted on the reverse to give an even black surface. I would usually do this in candlelight and sometimes with incense. After a time o
f staring at the surface, my mind would seem to drift into the blackness, like looking into a starless sky. I would find that images would arise, forms and shapes followed by identifiable scenes and people. However, I only ever experienced a few things that could be categorised as precognitive, for example, seeing someone in the mirror I had not seen for some time, only to bump into that person a few hours later. In other words, little mundane glimpses of what may or may not have been future events. Overall, scrying is an excellent way to train your perceptions, so for that alone it is worthwhile, and, depending on the person, may also help to open precognitive awareness for those interested in explore this area further.

  Seeing into the Past

  While the future has always fascinated us, there is also a long tradition of belief in seeing the past. The akashic records, seen as a kind of store or library of the entire knowledge and experience of the world (and maybe of all worlds), feature highly in many writers’ descriptions of the astral planes, and are believed by some to provide a way to access the past.

  While I don’t take on the esoteric beliefs surrounding ideas like the akashic records, I find that my own experiences seeing past events through the OBE do resemble in many ways a recording. I remember one occurrence when I floated out of the apartment I was living in at the time to find myself not in the modern-day street outside but instead in what appeared to be a Victorian version of it. I drifted across the large London road that would usually be full of cars and buses, passing by horses, black carriages with a brownish dirty appearance, and carts roughly cobbled together from wood and coated with thick, colourful paint. Yet apart from the buildings that lined the immediate road around me and what looked like a small church, the scene was bare, with the area from which I had just come looking green and open, far from how this part of London looks in the modern day. I remember watching grand-looking gentlemen dressed in top hats and groomed to a degree that seemed unusual to my eyes. Flowing through the streets around them, operating on a totally different tempo, were men and women of a different class. They seemed to have an urgency about them, as if they needed to be somewhere and if they weren’t, there would be extreme consequences. The whole scene felt like two worlds (actually two social classes) operating without awareness of each other.