OBE Quest

by Brian Mercer

 

After reading hundreds of accounts of people having out-of-body experiences, it became clear to me that some people have a natural ability to induce them.  Unfortunately, I was not one of those people.

As a boy I was fascinated by accounts of near-death experiences and stories of people who were visited by relatives who had recently died.  I was also intrigued with the phenomenon of out-of-body experiences (OBEs), where people appeared to experience consciousness independent of their physical body for short periods of time.

The first book I read on OBE was Beyond The Body, by Dr. Susan Blackmore. This was the first time I’d heard of someone deliberately trying to induce the state.  That was when I began my personal quest to have an out-of-body experience (sometimes referred to as “astral projection”).

My first instruction manual on OBE was a book called Llewellyn’s Practical Guide to Astral Projection.  The book’s central OBE preparation technique consisted of mentally “running energy” through one’s major chakras.  Once this technique was mastered over a period of weeks, one could then attempt projecting out of body. 

The prescribed projection method involved imagining a projectable double floating overhead.  Once this felt concrete, one was to mentally transfer one’s consciousness to the double using an imaginary silver cord that connected the double to one’s physical body.

From the very beginning I had trouble practicing the techniques. The instructions called for practicing the chakra energizing exercise in a standing position with eyes closed.  Shortly after beginning the technique, I would find it difficult to maintain balance.  When I tried the exercise while leaning against a wall, I found that my lower legs itched incessantly.

Discouraged, unable at the time to see how energizing my chakras related to getting out of body, I eventually gave up.  My initial attempts had failed before I’d even made any serious attempts at projecting.

About a year later I was studying in the school library when a friend passed me a magazine article about out-of-body experiences.  The piece featured The Monroe Institute, an organization dedicated to conducting seminars about exploring human consciousness.  The Institute’s foremost workshop was called the Gateway Voyage, a week-long residential program where one learned to have an out-of-body experience.  Participants spent much of their time in what amounted to a sensory deprivation room where they listened to a special sound program calculated to synchronize the two hemispheres of the brain, thus making projection out of body possible. 

After reading the article, I imagined the Gateway Voyage to be the panacea that would fuel an out-of-body experience.  One could take the workshop and before long be flitting around invisibly, flying, visiting distant places.  If only I could experience the Gateway Voyage for myself.

But it was 1985 and I was only in high school.  I didn’t even have a job.  The likelihood of being able to afford a trip across the country to the Monroe Institute seemed pretty unlikely.

About a year later I was browsing in a local music store when I came across a display of self-hypnosis cassette tapes.  One of the tapes was labeled “Astral Projection”.  The tape used a verbal induction method to bring about an out-of-body experience.  It wasn’t Monroe’s special sound program, but it seemed promising.

The tape talked the listener through a relaxation technique, followed by healing imagery, and finally an exercise where one visualized lifting out of body using all one’s will to float up and off the bed.  The idea was that your spirit would rise off the bed while your body remained behind.

The instructions that came along with the tape also required that one write positive affirmations thirty times a day to program one’s subconscious that astral projection was possible.

For weeks I wrote affirmations until my hand cramped.  Every afternoon when time permitted, I listened to the tape and practiced the techniques.  But after two months I was still no closer to getting detectable results. 

The hypnosis tape instructions never emphasized how important relaxation was to having an out-of-body experience.  Every time I was willing myself to lift off the bed, I was also tensing my muscles.  As long as I did that I’d never succeed.  But, of course, I didn’t know that at the time.

I few months later I invested in a cassette tape album from Master of Life catalogue that contained four tapes for learning how to have an out-of-body experience.  These tapes also used self-hypnosis, but the visualization techniques were more advanced and didn’t tempt me to tense my muscles.  I had some great mental projections using these tapes and was able to visualize distant places and accurately describe what was taking place there.  Still, I never had anything like an OBE.

A year or two later I tried using a video tape from the same company to create an out-of-body experience.  Like the cassette tapes, the video used a self-hypnosis technique, but this one required the subject to watch a video screen that simulated a flight through space.  The video never brought about a projection, either.  Of course, I didn’t know at the time that in order to have an OBE one needed to have one’s eyes closed.

I was discouraged but undaunted.  Occasionally, I’d run across people who would tell me of their own out-of-body experiences and this kept my interest in learning OBE high. 

There was the woman who described her experiences as a child, waking up in the middle of the night in the out-of-body state.  She would find herself in the darkness of her front yard, hovering just above the lawn.  The feel of the dewy grass on her back would wake her up. 

Then there was the friend of my parents who related his experience in a college dorm room, reading a book on Buddhism and shortly thereafter finding himself looking down on his physical body.

And then there had been the old man who lived next door to my nonno and nonna.  He related stories of being held captive in a prisoner of war camp during World War II with Cochise’s great grandson.  At nighttime the great grandson would help him get out of body and together they would go exploring beyond the confines of camp.

I myself still retained childhood memories, as many people do, of falling dreams that took place just after dropping off to sleep, dreams that were purportedly memories of childhood projections.  I knew it was possible to have an out-of-body experience, yet the question remained: How to provoke it consciously?

Then in the summer of 1987, about a week after school let out for the summer, I had a powerful, life-changing dream; a dream that I would later recognize to be an out-of-body experience.  I had read about dream-induced OBEs before, and after this experience I focused on this method as a means to project.  If all OBEs could be as profound as the one I had that morning, I had to experience it again.

Several months later, I awoke in the middle of the night in a paralyzed state.  My mind had become conscious while my body remained asleep, hence the inability to move.  Somewhere above me, as if coming from just beyond my bedroom ceiling, I could hear voices.  There was a woman’s voice and others.  Later I wouldn’t remember what they said, only that they were talking about me.  Within seconds, I felt myself rising up and out of my body, even as I tried to stop it.   Unfortunately, I have no memory of what happened after I separated from my physical body.

And so I began practicing an OBE dream-induction technique.  This method called for becoming lucid in a dream and converting the dream into an out-of-body experience.  Yet, every time I found myself lucid dreaming, I would will myself back to the locale of my 1987 OBE, which took place in my parents’ neighborhood.  I had dozens of lucid dreams there, but very rarely did anything profound happen.  Certainly, nothing matching the intensity of that original experience in 1987.

In my senior year of college I was dozing on the couch one Saturday night while reading Dreams and the Projection of Consciousness by Jane Roberts.  Shortly after falling asleep, I found myself flying in front of the house.  Intent on having an OBE, I willed myself up into the sky and shortly thereafter found myself rocketing through space.

Without warning, six stars appeared in front of me, forming a hexagon.  Flying through the six stars, I saw another circle of stars, then another.  I was flying through a tunnel of stars to some unknown destination.

Eager to take control of the experience, I demanded, Show me my soulmate!  An instant later something resembling pea soup splattered and ran down my field of vision.  A moment later I found myself hovering in a bedroom looking down on a young woman.  I examined the furniture in the room and how it was organized, hoping to remember it later.  Shortly thereafter, I returned to my body.  It was the closest thing to date that I could call a consciously provoked OBE.

I was still in college when I started attending meditation classes at the Berkeley Psychic Institute of Sacramento.  The Institute’s meditation techniques focused on working with personal energy, essentially letting go of energy that was not one’s own, while calling back one’s energy from all the places where one left it.  This process was thought to promote healing. 

I had some amazing experiences using the techniques I learned at the Institute.  It was a primer for  using New Energy Ways and developing the 90-day OBE program years later.

Shortly after getting married and moving to Seattle, I learned that the Monroe Institute was now offering their Gateway Voyage program in audio cassette form.  At last, having a consciously directed out-of-body experience seemed within easy reach.

I still remember the anticipation of ordering those tapes and the waiting time before they arrived.  I made a long list of all the things I wanted to do once I learned OBE.  I had questions and I hoped to soon find answers.

The Monroe cassette tape program was called the Gateway Experience.  There were six albums in all, each called a “Wave” (e.g., Wave I, Wave II, etc.); each Wave album included six tapes*.  

My first session took place one hot summer night.  As I listened to the first tape and the sound used to synchronize the hemispheres of my brain, something did begin to happen.  I felt tremendous pressure in the muscles of my arms and legs, as if I had worked them really hard and now was very sore. 

This happened the first few sessions and a couple of times it was so uncomfortable that I had to end practice prematurely.  I would later learn the pressure I was feeling was a result of energy blockages.  The Gateway Experience was somehow stimulating my energy body into activity.

Again, I had some interesting experiences, but not an OBE.  With a little research, I learned that the goal of the Gateway Experience was to explore one’s inner consciousness.  A noble, worthy and valuable goal in itself, but I still yearned to experience a consciously directed out-of-body experience.

It was with knowledge of the technology behind the sounds program in the Gateway Experience that I stumbled upon the BrainWave Generator, a PC program that does essentially the same thing programmatically using a computer and stereo headphones.  My early experiences with the BrainWave Generator can be found here, in the article Learning Astral Projection with the BrainWave Generator.

Every few years thereafter I would make another “run” at the Gateway Experience tapes.  I was preparing to do just that in the spring of 2000 and was browsing in a nearby bookstore’s New Age section, looking for a book about the Monroe Institute. 

I spotted Astral Dynamics by Robert Bruce on one of the shelves, noted it, and went on looking for the book I had come there to buy.  Yet, while my legs kept walking, my arm reached out and grabbed Astral Dynamics.  I paged through it, bought it on a whim, and for the next week and a half it consumed my every spare moment.

I was only halfway through the book when I read one of the more advanced OBE exit techniques.   As soon as I returned home, I lay down and tried the Rope Technique without even relaxing properly.  I immediately felt my body turn to liquid as huge waves of my energy ran up and down from my head to my feet and past the borders of my physical body. 

I suddenly found myself instinctively holding on, trying with all my power not to project.  For the first time after all these years I had just casually been playing around and had nearly projected.  If this is what can happen casually, just think what could happen if I made a serious effort at it?

A week later I was making the first of what would be many revisions to my 90-day OBE program.  I emailed it to Robert Bruce, author of Astral Dynamics, and the end result is Mastering Astral Projection: 90-day Guide to Out-of-body Experience, a book Robert and I collaborated on from cover to cover.

Using myself as guinea pig, me—a person with no apparent natural talent for OBE, I worked and reworked a practical system for implementing the techniques in Astral Dynamics.  I also integrated other techniques in the program that I’d found helpful, as well as methods I used for overcoming fears and personal roadblocks.  The results of many of my successes are documented in Mastering Astral Projection.

I worked hard on the chapter material associated with the 90-day program.  I wanted to be very explicit, spelling out the basics so that others wouldn’t make the early mistakes I had made.  It was also gratifying to be able to offer a special version of the BrainWave Generator program with the book, so that one didn’t have to spend a fortune to get the benefit of this very powerful technology.

OBE is not the end-all, be-all for spiritual development.  It is merely one path to something greater.  There are others.  But I think that it is an important one and feel extremely fortunate to be able to help make OBE reachable for others who possess the inner drive to explore.
 

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*The Gateway Experience now is available on CD-ROM and includes seven albums or “Waves”.