As I moved farther along the street, I began to notice a familiar building or turn in the road. The houses, though far from the twenty-floor apartment blocks that now stand in the area, did seem somehow like a place I had been before, in my own time. Their gray and brownish stone facades seemed to connect me back to the time from which I had come. It was all the more intriguing to follow this route toward the center of the city, as I had done so many times before, both physically and in OBEs. In fact, moving along this road had become a routine way of getting to other parts of the city when I was out of my body, so much so that I was familiar with many small details along the route. Yet now only a vague impression of what might one day become the everyday was present.
As I began to feel more comfortable and the experience seemed at its peak, I felt the familiar sense that I was being drawn back to normal consciousness, back to my body. I tried to push in the opposite direction, to hold on a little longer so I could retain a little more of what I was seeing, but it was impossible. I was already reaching my body and my awareness was shifting back to the familiar details of my bedroom.
While this experience had many of the elements I would normally expect when out of the body, somehow it was very different. I wonder whether it was some kind of past-life memory or energetic memory recorded in the very stone of this place, or if it was actually a journey to the akashic records. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem like an experience with a living consciousness. Although I cannot physically interact with people I might encounter in an OBE, there is usually a sense that they might potentially become aware of me and that the events are taking place at the same moment the people are in. In other words, they are in the same time awareness as I am. In this particular experience, I did not get the sense that the people I saw were present in the same time awareness as me, or even that they were aware on another level. I believe that the people, horses, objects, and events were not in that moment but were more like recordings or even ripples through time.
Developing Perception through Time
It seems that precognition often arises during peak moments—situations when our psychic senses become heightened due to some form of danger or a huge emotional outpouring. These abilities can and do change our lives, and not always in the obvious ways. For me, seeing and experiencing the uture has been an extremely rare occurrence and thus more powerful because of it. I have also only rarely tried to draw upon or use this ability and that too has been a positive choice for me. However, you may consider it worthwhile to develop your precognition, perhaps even to the point where you are able to prove, at least to yourself, that time and space are not as they seem. Therefore I’m going to look at some ways of developing the ability.
I have discussed the main ways that precognition generally arises, such as through dreams, remote viewing, scrying, and out-of-body experiences. All of these methods can be developed and, in fact, each can benefit the other. I believe that remote viewing and scrying are really flip sides of the same coin; they are both methods used to enhance our visual psi abilities. It seems, from history and personal experience, that scrying helps in the forming of visions, while remote viewing uses a structured format that helps gain more accurate and workable results. Combining them might involve staring into a reflective surface while going through a checklist of elements about a given target, which may be a specific future event or the general unfolding of world events in a particular locale. I advise working with a partner if you want to explore this kind of perception; that way, there will be a clearer sense that you have connected with the correct target. There are many different remote-viewing protocols, but most have a very basic structure. You may also find the simple protocol from Chapter 2 useful.
Once you have achieved some degree of success with the out-of-body state, you may wish to explore traveling to past and even future events in a more tangible way. Start with simple, specific targets like a social event or something related to your day-to-day life. Experiencing precognition through an OBE is a different process from working with remote viewing, since the nature of the OBE opens up other possibilities, such as coming across unexpected people, places, and events that can distract you. It also seems to me that, because the out-of-body experience is so much more intense, in the sense that you feel totally separate from your normal understanding of the world, it requires a greater amount of energy and focus to control it. Nearly every time I have experienced something precognitive in nature, I have realised it during the experience, which I believe is due to the energy involved and, in my case, the cerulean-blue cast of my vision.
One of the key factors when wanting to access information outside of linear time is to break down your belief in how time operates. If you find yourself out of the body and you start to think about time in the same way you think about space, you will find that your consciousness reacts and new abilities begin to open up. It is as if you are rewiring your understanding and, by doing so, you open the door to new experiences. It took me a long time to begin to see the idea of perception across time as being possible. It still remains a complex and mysterious area to me, but one that is all the more exciting because of it.
It seems likely that as we learn more about the nature of time, space, and consciousness, the greater the potential becomes that we will be able to use this knowledge for a greater benefit to humanity. Maybe there will be ways to heighten the nature of our precognitive sense to such a degree that we would become aware when we are in mortal danger, or if a major event such as a natural disaster is about to take place. There are already many reports of people having this kind of awareness, yet at present we don’t have enough of an understanding of the nature of precognition to really utilise it.
Within the world of fiction, there are many references to seeing the future and the possible impact on our world. “The Minority Report,” by Philip K. Dick, treats the idea of precognition in the setting of a future society where murder has been eradicated through the abilities of three “precogs” or precognitive people. Yet the story also raises questions about a society that attempts to create a utopia while controlling its citizens, as well as the issue of free will, which is a key area when we imply that there could be such an ability as precognition. Most of us like to believe that we have choice and that our lives are not simply running along a set track. Leaving aside the psychological question of whether or not there is such a thing as free will, the way I approach this is to look at these future perceptions as potential futures. We could even view the precognition as an effect caused by the course of events and the choices we make. If we look at it this way, precognition actually becomes a kind of interaction with your own life. In fact, some remote viewers and scientists believe that precognitive perception may be something like a memory from the future, almost as if your future self is sending the information back to your past self.
Obviously many of these ideas are very hard to fully apprehend, but they offer different ways of looking at precognition that don’t negate the notion of free will. They also don’t contradict what we know about physics. Of course, those who see time and space as being meaningless on the other planes of reality may have no issue with these concepts. I often hear the idea that in the “spirit world,” there is no past, present, or future. Maybe these other levels, if they exist in a literal way, are in fact the ground plan of this reality. Maybe quantum physics will uncover a way that consciousness and reality are part of the same process and dependent in some sense upon each other.
All of these ideas take us to the next level, an area outside of objective scientific understanding. Yet it is in these areas of the subjective that science and new ideas are propelled forward.
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the next level:
life after death
The greatest implication of the out-of-body experience is its suggestion that consciousness is not dependent upon the brain and the
refore can continue after physical death. This means that the OBE can directly address the oldest and most fundamental questions of human existence, the very essence of spiritual philosophies across the world: Do we have a soul? What lies beyond death? Using the processes in this book, you can attempt your own exploration of the nature of the afterlife, or possibly even connect with loved ones who have passed on, should you wish to.
The out-of-body experience offers us a way to experience a deeper spiritual reality in our lives now, a vision of unconditional love and freedom beyond this world. This level of reality is available not only to those who have stood at the brink of death in the near-death experience, but also to those who have the courage and determination to lift up their consciousness beyond the limitations of their everyday lives and open their eyes to the wonders that lie beyond the body.
Evidence for an Afterlife
The “afterlife” is in many ways an unfortunate term, since it implies that the other levels of reality only exist at the next stage of transformation, after physical death, yet I have seen within my own experiences that this is not the case. In some of my most profound OBEs, I have glimpsed levels of reality populated by beings who I believe may once have lived among us, yet now live on in a state of renewed, pure consciousness.
There is a term often used by scientists, “the convergence of evidence,” which basically means multiple kinds of proof, coming from many different angles and disciplines, that all point to the same conclusion. When this convergence exists, it becomes increasingly likely that the idea being looked at is true. It seems to me that what we are dealing with when it comes to the issue of life after physical death is a convergence of evidence. With work in the fields of parapsychology, quantum physics, and near-death research coming to many of the same conclusions, it seems harder and harder to dismiss the possibility that there is some form of continuation of individual consciousness after death.
The near-death experience
Near-death experiences (NDEs), which I have touched upon earlier in this book, offer evidence in a scientific sense as well as a personal sense that there is a deeply spiritual nature to the universe—not a religious nature or even a moral one, but simply a sense that at our core we are all connected via a vast network of consciousness that seems to exist or interpenetrating this reality. This boundless awareness, experienced by millions as pure white light or unconditional love, has been called God, the source of everything. Whatever we believe it to be, it’s clear that many people experience something life-changing and healing in these moments at the edge of death. In virtually any NDE description, we find a deeply held conviction that we are more than our physical bodies and that death is no more than a transition from one state of being to another.
Ghosts and spirits
Parapsychology offers key evidence of life after physical death through research into ghosts and hauntings. In their most basic form, ghosts or apparitions are figures, forms, or images that someone sees, for which there is no physical explanation. However, this in itself proves little. What is needed in these cases is some verifiable evidence.
For example, in the building in which I spent most of my youth, a mother and daughter moved in shortly after the death of an elderly lady. They had no initial awareness of who had lived in their apartment before them, yet almost as soon as they arrived, they began to see an old lady walking through their rooms. She did not pay any attention to the new residents and would simply appear, walk through the kitchen, and vanish. This happened so frequently that the daughter became very frightened. In an effort to find out the history of the apartment, the girl’s mother approached my mother, who had known the previous resident. My mother was amazed to hear an accurate description of the old woman, down to fine details of her clothing.
This story is just the experience of a few people in my local community, and can be largely dismissed in the context of science since there is no tangible proof, but stories like this one do offer a starting point for deeper and more scientifically controlled exploration.
When it comes to ghosts and spirits, it’s commonly believed that some are conscious or self-aware in some way, and able to interact with observers under the right conditions, while others are not. The latter, often called “residual” hauntings, are more like recordings left by high levels of emotion or by a deceased person’s connection to a particular site. The old woman from my childhood apartment block seems to fit well with the idea of an unconscious (residual) recording. She never reacted to those around her or gave any impression that she knew what she was doing.
In my own life, I have seen two apparitions fully visible with my physical eyes—the first when I was very young and the second at sixteen with a close friend. Both took place in the same apartment building mentioned above. In both my experiences, the apparition seemed very aware of its surroundings and seemed to be trying on some level to communicate. I wasn’t able to really understand their message, but these experiences did suggest to me that there may be a continuation of consciousness beyond the physical.The first experience took place when I was very young, maybe five or seven years old. I saw a tall humanoid figure standing in the doorway to the flat in which I lived. It remained motionless, yet seemed to convey a sense of something profound simply through its presence. I remember the feeling of terror that this apparition evoked in my young mind—not because it was actually threatening in any way, more that it was such a shock to my sense of reality. The second of these experiences involved an orblike form around the size of a basketball, glowing green. I was with my best friend at the time, yet we weren’t fearful; we simply accepted it and felt generally very positive about the experience. It is very hard to describe how we got the impression it was trying to communicate, but in the feelings and impressions that arose, we got a sense our thoughts were being guided. It seemed like a telepathic link rather than anything verbal.
Many people believe that orbs—the blurry circular marks or balls of light—which appear on many digital photographs are in fact spirits. I remain unconvinced by this, since I have enough experience with photography to understand that particles of dust or water can easily make these kinds of impressions. However, my own out-of-body perceptions and the experiences mentioned above leave me wondering if the true nature of spirits might actually be something not dissimilar to the orb concept—in other words, floating spheres of some kind of energy or awareness. Many writers and psychics over the years have also claimed that the true nature of spirits is something akin to an orb. In many of my own OBEs, I have also taken an orblike form, which felt very much like a natural state, more natural even than the humanoid form that is also common in my experiences.
Whether or not you believe that ghosts exist, there is strong evidence generally accepted by both skeptics and proponents that there is a relationship between ghost sightings and electromagnetic fields (EMFs). Skeptics claim that these fields may stimulate the temporal lobes of the brain, resulting in hallucinations. Proponents either claim that strong EMFs are often found in the presence of ghostly activity, or alternately that the field does stimulate the brain but this actually aids in the process of perceiving the spirit. Again, it seems to come down to whether or not what people see can be shown to have some objective basis in fact. Some cases support this, while others don’t. However, the quality of an individual case is of more importance than the fact that some aspects can be put down to weaknesses in human perception. If the majority of the evidence put forward is factual and difficult to obtain, this still remains hugely supportive of the argument that there is something objective taking place.
In some cases, trained observers claim to have witnessed tangible physical phenomena, such as objects moving and energies and forms moving around in front of multiple witnesses. All of these different factors lend some credibility to the idea that spirits exist, but more research is needed, in a controlled and genuinely scientific way, if we are to gain soli
d evidence that would convince a skeptic.
Past-life memories
The theory of reincarnation also suggests that a continuation of consciousness may take place. Descriptions of past lives, especially those that arise from young children, provide intriguing clues. In many of these cases, the child has been able to accurately describe large amounts of detail from the previous life, including the circumstances of their death.
One recent example is Cameron Macauley, a boy from Glasgow, Scotland. Beginning at about the age of two, he claimed that he had lived before, on the remote island of Barra in the Outer Hebrides off the northwest coast of Scotland. He described a white house where he lived with his mother, father, brothers, and sisters. This house had a view of the beach where the plane from the mainland would land. He also described the surrounding area, such as rock pools and a gate to the beach. He was able to give the name “Robertson” as the surname of his father, although he may have been inaccurate about the first name. The case is a strong one, since the boy is quite young, but describes living in a remote place that it is highly unlikely he would have any conscious knowledge of. He is also able to offer details of his life on the island that are very difficult to explain.
In adults, too, there are those who have been able to give the details of a previous life. Cameron is far from unique in his perceptions. In fact, I don’t include this case as an exceptional example, but more of an everyday one. It illustrates how “normal” people with no paranormal interest or background are confronted with situations that make it hard to reject the notion of consciousness surviving death. Similar cases exist worldwide, and are especially common when the person from the previous life is thought to have died violently or accidentally.
Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience Page 16
