by Hans Holzer
“He brought the young man out and introduced him to us. It was the young man that I had seen in the village! I asked him if he had really arrived Monday morning and he later proved beyond all doubt that he had not been in Turbo on Sunday afternoon when I saw him. He was dressed in the same clothes on Monday as those that I had seen him wearing on Sunday in my vision.
“I do not know why I saw him when he wasn’t there. Later he asked me to marry him, but I did not.
“When I and my companions went to Cartagena later on we checked and again confirmed the facts—he was miles away when I had seen him!”
* * *
I am indebted to Herbert Schaefer of Savannah, Georgia, for the account of a case of bilocation that occurred some time ago to two elderly friends of his.
Carl Pfau was awakened one night by the feeling that he was not alone. Turning over in bed, he saw his good friend Morton Deutsch standing by his bedside. “How did you get in here?” he asked, since the door had been securely locked. Deutsch made no reply but merely smiled, then, turning, walked to the door, where he disappeared. On checking the matter, it was discovered that Mr. Deutsch had been sitting in a large comfortable chair at the time of his appearance at this friend’s bedside and had just wondered how his friend Carl was doing. Suddenly he had felt himself lifted from the chair and to Carl’s bedside. There was a distance of about two miles between their houses.
* * *
Bilocation cannot be artificially induced the way astral projection can, but if you are bent on being seen in two places at once, you may encourage the condition through certain steps. For one thing, being in a relaxed and comfortable position in a quiet place, whether indoors or outdoors, and allowing your thoughts to drift might induce the condition. The more you concentrate, the less likely it is to happen. It is very difficult to produce that certain state of dissociation that is conducive to bilocation experiences. The only thing I can suggest is that such a condition may occur if you set up the favorable conditions often enough. It should be remembered that the majority of bilocation incidents is not known to the projected individual until after it has occurred and been confirmed on the other end.
ASTRAL PROJECTIONS OR OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES
One of the terms frequently met with in the discussions of paranormal phenomena is the word “astral.” Although vaguely reminiscent of stars and celestial conditions, it actually means the same as etheric, at least to me it does. By astral or etheric dimension, I mean that world outside the physical world which contains all spiritual phenomena and ESP manifestations. This dimension is made up of very fine particles and is certainly not intangible. The inner body, which in my opinion represents the true personality in humans, is made up of the same type of substance; consequently, it is able to exist freely in the astral or etheric dimension upon dissolution of the physical body at physical death. According to theosophy and, to a lesser degree, the ancient Egyptian religion, a human being has five bodies of which the astral body is but one, the astral world being the second lowest of seven worlds, characterized by emotions, desires, and passions. This, of course, is a philosophical concept. It is as valid or invalid as one chooses it to be. By relating to the astral world as merely the “other side of life,” I may be simplifying things and perhaps run counter to certain philosophical assumptions, but it appears to me that to prove one nonphysical sphere is enough at this stage of the game in parapsychology. If there be other, finer layers—and I do not doubt in the least that there are—let that be the task at a time when the existence of the nonphysical world is no longer being doubted by the majority of scientists.
* * *
In speaking of “astral projection,” we are in fact speaking of projection into the astral world; what is projected seems to be the inner layer of the body, referred to as the astral or etheric body. By projecting it outward into the world outside the physical body, it is capable of a degree of freedom that it does not enjoy while encased in the physical body. As long as the person is alive in the physical world, however, the astral body remains attached to the physical counterpart by a thin connecting link called the “silver cord.” If the cord is severed, death results. At the time of physical death, the cord is indeed severed and the astral body freely floats upward into the next dimension. Nowadays we tend to call such projections “out-of-body experiences.” Robert Monroe, a communications engineer by profession and a medium by accident, has written a knowledgeable book about his own experiences with out-of-body sensations, and a few years before him, Dr. Hereward Carrington, together with Sylvan Muldoon, authored a book, considered a classic nowadays, on the subject of astral projection. The reason that out-of-body experience is a more accurate term to describe the phenomena is to be found in the fact that projection, that is to say a willful outward movement out of the physical body, is rarely the method by which the phenomena occur. Rather it is a sensation of dissociation between physical and etheric body, a floating sensation during which the inner self seems to be leaving its physical counterpart and traveling away from it. The movement toward the outside is by no means rapid or projectionlike; it is a slow gradual disengagement most of the time and with most witnesses. Occasionally there are dramatic instances where astral projection occurs spontaneously and rather suddenly. But in such cases some form of shock or artificial trauma is usually present such as during surgery and the use of an anesthetizing agent or in cases of sudden grief, sudden joy, or states of great fatigue.
Out-of-the-body experiences can be classified roughly into two main categories: the spontaneous cases, where it occurs without being induced in any way and is usually as a surprise, and experimental cases, where the state of dissociation is deliberately induced by various means. In the latter category certain controlled experiments are of course possible, and I will go into this toward the end of this chapter.
* * *
The crux of all astral projection, whether involuntary or voluntary, is the question whether the traveler makes an impact on the other end of the line, so to speak. If the travel is observed, preferably in some detail, by the recipient of the projection, and if that information is obtained after the event itself, it constitutes a valuable piece of evidence for the reality of this particular ESP phenomenon.
There is the case of a Japanese-American lady, Mrs. Y., who lived in New York and had a sister in California. One day she found herself projected through space from her New York home to her sister’s place on the West Coast. She had not been there for many years and had no idea what it looked like inasmuch as her sister had informed her that considerable alterations had taken place about the house. As she swooped down onto her sister’s home, Mrs. Y. noticed the changes in the house and saw her sister, wearing a green dress, standing on the front lawn. She tried to attract her sister’s attention but was unable to do so. Worried about her unusual state of being, that is, floating above the ground and seemingly being unable to be observed, Mrs. Y. became anxious. That moment she found herself yanked back to her New York home and bed. As she returned to her own body, she experienced a sensation of falling from great heights. This sensation accompanies most, if not all, incidents of astral travel. The feeling of spinning down from great heights is, however, a reverse reaction to the slowing down in speed of the etheric body as it reaches the physical body and prepares to return into it. Many people complain of dreams in which they fall from great heights only to awaken to a sensation of a dizzying fall and resulting anxiety. The majority of such experiences are due to astral travel, with most of it not remembered. In the case of Mrs. Y., however, all of it was remembered. The following day she wrote her sister a letter, setting down what she had seen and asking her to confirm or deny the details on the house and of herself. To Mrs. Y.’s surprise, a letter arrived from her sister a few days later confirming everything she had seen during her astral flight.
* * *
Ruth E. Knuths, a former schoolteacher who currently works as a legal secretary in California, has had many ESP ex
periences, and like many others, she filed a report in conformity with a suggestion made by me in an earlier book concerning any ESP experiences people wished to register with me.
In the spring of 1941 when I lived in San Diego, where I had moved from Del Rio, Texas, I was riding to work on a streetcar. I had nothing on my mind in particular; I was not thinking of my friends in Texas and the time was 8 A.M. Suddenly I found myself standing on the front porch of Jo Comstock’s house in Del Rio. Jo and I have been friends for many years. The same dusty green mesquite and cat claw covered the vacant lot across the road, which we called Caliche Flat. People were driving up and parking their cars at the edge of the unfenced yard. They were coming to express sympathy to Jo because of the death of her mother. Jo was inside the house. I knew this although I did not see her. I was greeting the friends for her. The funeral was to be that afternoon. Then as suddenly as I had gone to Del Rio, I was back in the streetcar, still two or three blocks away from my stop.
Two weeks later Joe wrote, telling me that on a certain date, which was the same date I had this vision on, her mother had been found by neighbors unconscious from a stroke, which they estimated had occurred about 10 o’clock in the morning. Jo was notified at 10:30. She said that she badly wished me to be there with her. Allowing for the difference in time, two hours, I had had this experience at the time of the stroke, but the vision itself was projected ahead of that two days, to the day of the funeral.
On May 28, 1955, she had another experience of astral projection, which she was able to note in detail and report to me:
My husband and I had dinner with Velva and Jess McDougle and I had seen Jess one time downtown, afterward, and we spoke and passed. I had not seen Velva. Then on June 11, a Saturday, I was cleaning house, monotonously pushing the vacuum sweeper brush under the dresser in the bedroom, when suddenly I was standing at the door of a hospital room, looking in. To the left, white curtains blew gently from a breeze coming from a window. The room was bright with sunlight; directly opposite the door and in front of me was a bed with a man propped up on pillows; on the left side of the bed stood Velva. The man was Jess. No word was spoken, but I knew that Jess was dead, although as I saw him he was alive though ill. I “came back” and was still cleaning under the dresser. I didn’t contact Velva, nor did I hear from her. However, about a week later my sister, Mary Hatfield, told me that she was shocked to hear of Mr. McDougle’s death. That was the first confirmation I had. I immediately went to see Velva, and she told me that he had suffered a heart attack on Thursday before the Saturday of my vision, and had died the following Sunday, the day after the vision occurred.
* * *
Richard Smith is a self-employed landscape service contractor, in his thirties, married and living in Georgia. He has had many ESP experiences involving both living people and the dead. Sometimes he is not sure whether he has visions of events at a distance or is actually traveling to them. In his report to me he states:
On one very unusual occasion, just before sleep came, I found myself floating through the air across the country to my wife’s parents’ home in Michigan where I moved about the house. I saw Karen’s father as he read the newspaper, his movements through the rooms, and drinking a cup of coffee. I could not find her mother in the house. She was apparently working at the hospital. I was floating at a point near the ceiling and looking down. Mr. Voelker, her father, happened to look up from his coffee and seemed to be frightened. He looked all around the room in a state of great uneasiness as if he could sense me in the room. He would look up toward me but his eyes would pass by as though I were invisible. I left him, as I did not wish to frighten him by my presence.
This latter experience I seem almost able to do at will when the conditions are right, and travel anywheres. Sometimes, involuntarily, I find myself looking upon a scene that is taking place miles away and of which I have no personal knowledge. These experiences have taken place since my childhood, although I have kept them to myself with the exception of my wife.
* * *
From a scientific control point of view, astral projection is mainly a subjective experience and only the large volume of parallel testimony can give clues to its operational setup. However, there are a number of verified cases on record where the astral traveler was actually seen, heard, or felt by those at the other end of the trip, thus corroborating a subjective experience by objective observation.
That time is truly a convention and not an independent dimension at all can be seen from the fact that differences in regional observation times in such cases are always adjusted to coincide with the proper local time: if an astrally projected person is seen in his etheric or non-physical state at 3 P.M. in Los Angeles, and the traveler himself recalls his experience in New York to have taken place at exactly 6 P.M., we know that the time differential between California and the Eastern Seaboard is three hours and thus practically no measurable time seems to have elapsed between the commencement and the completion of the astral trip.
That a tiny amount of what we call time does elapse I am sure, for the speed of astral travel cannot be greater than the speed of thought, the ultimate according to Einstein (and not the speed of light, as formerly thought). Even thought takes time to travel, although it can cover huge distances in fractions of a second. But thought—and astral projection—are electric impulses and cannot travel entirely without some loss of the time element, no matter how tiny this loss is. Some day, when we have built apparatus to measure these occurrences, it will no doubt be found that a tiny delay factor does exist between the two ends of the astral road.
The duration of astral flight varies according to the relaxed state of the projected person. A very nervous, fearful individual need only panic and desire to be in his own bed—and pronto, he is pulled back, nay, snapped back, into his body with rubber-band-like impact and some subsequent unpleasantness.
The sensation, according to many who have experienced this, is like falling from great heights or spinning down in a mad spiral and waking up suddenly in one’s bed as if from a bad dream, which in a way it is.
I am convinced that the falling sensation is not due to any actual physical fall at all, but merely represents the sudden deceleration of the vibratory speed of the person. Astral travel, like all psychic life, is at a much higher rate of speed than is physical life. Thus when the personality is suddenly yanked off the road, so to speak, and forcibly slowed down very quickly, a shock-like condition results. The denser atmosphere in which our physical bodies move requires a slower rate of pulsation. Normally, in astral projection, the person returns gradually to his body and the process is orderly and gradual, so no ill effects result. But when the return is too sudden there is no time for this, and the screaching coming to a stop of the bodily vehicle is the result.
Psychiatrists have tried to explain the very common sensation of falling from great heights in one’s dream as an expression of fear. The trouble with this explanation is that the experience is so common that it could not possibly cover all the people who have had it; many of them do not have unexpressed fears or fear complexes. Also, some astral travelers have had this while partially or fully awake.
I think it is a purely mechanical symptom in which the etheric body is forced to snap back into the physical body at too fast a rate of speed. No permanent injury results, to be sure. The moments of confusion that follow are no worse than the mental fogginess that one often feels on awaking after a vivid dream, without astral projection involved. However, many travelers find themselves strangely tired, as if physical energies had been used up, which indeed they have!
One such person, perhaps a typical case, is Dorothy W., who is a young grandmother in her fifties. She is a mentally and physically alert and well-adjusted person who works as an executive secretary for a large community center. Dorothy has had many psychic experiences involving premonitions of impending death, and has been visited by the shades of the departed on several occasions. She takes these things in h
er stride and is neither alarmed nor unduly concerned over them.
Frequently she finds that her dream-state is a very tiring one. She visits places known and unknown, and meets people she knows and others she does not know. Those that she recognizes she knows are dead in the conventional sense. She cannot prevent these nocturnal excursions and she has learned to live with them. What is annoying to her, however, is that on awakening she finds her feet physically tired, as if she had been walking for miles and miles!
A typical case where corroboration is available from the other end of the trip is in the files of the American Society for Psychic Research, which made it available to True magazine for a report on ESP published two years ago. The case involves a young lady whom the Society calls Betsy, who traveled astrally to her mother’s house over a thousand miles away. In what the report described as a kind of vivid dream state, Betsy saw herself projected to her mother’s house.
After I entered, I leaned against the dish cupboard with folded arms, a post I often assume. I looked at my mother, who was bending over something white and doing something with her hands. She did not appear to see me at first, but she finally looked up. I had a sort of pleased feeling, and then after standing a second more, I turned and walked about four steps.
At this point, Betsy awoke. The clock of her bedside showed the time as 2:10 A.M. The impression that she had actually just seen (and been seen by) her mother a thousand miles away was so overwhelming that the next morning Betsy wrote her parent asking whether she had experienced anything unusual that night.
The mother’s reply in part follows: “Why don’t you stay home and not go gallivanting so far from home when you sleep? Did you know you were here for a few seconds?” The mother said it was 1:10 A.M. on the night in question. Her letter continued: “It would have been 10 after 2 your time. I was pressing a blouse here in the kitchen—I couldn’t sleep either. I looked up and there you were by the cupboard, just standing smiling at me. I started to speak and saw you were gone.” The woman, according to the mother (who saw her only from the waist up), wore the light blouse of her dream.
