Review: Astral Projection as a Bridge to the Spiriual World

Review:

Astral Projection as a Bridge to the Spiritual World

by Luiz Roberto Mattos

Today I'm reviewing the book Astral Projection as a Bridge to the Spiritual World by Luiz Roberto Mattos.

I received a copy of this book from a Facebook friend who thought I might like it. I'm going to be honest with you: I was disappointed. With a title like that, it had so much potential, but unfortunately, it didn't live up to it.

The premise is good: the author uses astral projection to visit the spirit world where there are unlimited opportunities to learn. On the back cover it says "This book is an autobiography..." so I expected some good OBE narratives.

It tells the story of how the author, Luis Roberto Mattos (nickname Beto) grew up in South America. He was influenced by the Spiritist religion (as in Allan Kardec), and studied metaphysics, yogic meditation, Rosicrucianism, and many spiritual traditions. Then he became interested in astral projection. He gave up eating meat, opting for very light evening meals. He gave up all his bad habits, alcohol, etc., and took up a spiritual life. Then he quit school to pursue his spiritual adventures full-time.

He meets a spiritual master named Sana Khan on the astral plane, who begins to teach him spiritual lessons. Unfortunately, the book quickly devolves into only that: the teachings of Sana Khan. Sana Khan teaches Beto lots of lessons about birth, life, sex, death, the afterlife, reincarnation, and how spirits interfere and influence the living. In a way it reminded me a lot of the movie Astral City, but from the perspective of someone who is still in-the-body.


For the most part, it's all pretty standard New Age teachings. Well, except for one or two things that contradict modern science. For example:

"There are four hundred million stars in the Milky Way, master," I said with some astonishment, demonstrating my awe at the immensity of our structure." (pg. 156)

According to google, there are 250 Billion stars (with a B) in the Milky Way Galaxy, give or take 150 billion. That's 940 times more. But who's counting?

Here are some other things I disagreed with: Mattos talks about how spirits need to be shrunk down in size in order to fit into the tiny human egg at the time of conception:

"And the Spirit will bind to the egg immediately after sperm penetration." (pg. 270)

I tend to favor what Jane Roberts / "Seth" says about the topic: That spirits heading toward birth only visit the womb from time to time. Mattos says the spirits are also affected with amnesia, and he talks about how abortion is a serious spiritual "outrage" (his word) like you're robbing a spirit of its incarnation and denying it an opportunity for spiritual growth. I prefer Seth's suggestion that all these things are carefully planned out in advance, including births, deaths, the lessons, and yes, even the abortions, at a "Higher Self" or "Oversoul" level.

The thing is: I didn't want New Age teachings. I already know all that stuff. I wanted to know about the author's astral projections: how he learned it, the techniques he used, the discoveries he made, what weird quirky things he encountered "over there." But the whole book was almost exclusively just discourse: Sana Khan took me to this place. He said this. He said that. The dialogue was flat; the author breaks up the dialogue by saying things like, "This is interesting, master."

It wasn't just that. It also lacked a feeling of authenticity. If you've had OBEs, you know what it's like. You can tell when someone is describing a real OBE: the strange otherworldly atmosphere, the foreign 360-degree eyesight, the strangeness of how gravity doesn't affect you, the fog floating around; all that "delicious eeriness" Michael Ross talks about. This book lacked all that. The author's OBEs all sounded too..."physical." Sure, he acknowledges the dialogues were telepathic instead of talking, but the dialog was too Earthly. The OBEs were too three-dimensional.

Maybe I'm being too critical. Maybe Mattos was just targeting an Earthly audience. Or maybe because he's from South America, it was just cultural differences (I thought the movie "Astral City" was too physical too, for example). Whatever it was, it didn't work for me.

Another problem is that the dialog was too long and detailed to have taken place in genuine OBEs. There's simply no way anyone (short of eidetic memory) would be able to remember and quote word for word what someone said in an entire half-hour lecture. Not even in real life, let alone from an OBE. I'm lucky if I remember just a few sentences.

Here's another tip-off: the author's story takes place over the course of several weeks, but night after night, without fail, he just effortlessly pops right out of his body to have his nightly lesson with Sana Khan. Anyone who's studied OBEs knows it's just not that easy; not even for the most proficient OBE experts: not William Buhlman, not Robert Bruce, not Akhena, not anyone. It was just too effortless. If Mattos wrote about struggling to achieve the proper focus, or occasionally losing focus during the process of separation, or getting sucked back into his body prematurely and having to leave it again, or having a cat jump on his body while he was out, it would be more believable.


There's enough content; just not enough OBE-related content. The book is 325 pages, each of which is a decent size. The font is somewhat big, so it's an average-sized book.

Except for the preface (not by the author) the writing was pretty good, but it needed weeks of serious editing and proof-reading. The book was obviously scanned in from an older printed manuscript. It's obvious because there were lots of mistakes that would be caught by any human proof-reader, but not by a computer spellchecker. For example, instead of the pronoun "I" the text had, in many places, the number "1." Or "he" instead of "The". Another example: anytime the original text had "rn" it was converted to an "m". So the word "modern" was printed as "modem" (like the old computer modulator-demodulator device). These are the hallmarks of OCR (optical character recognition) from a scanner to a document that was never proof-read. There were glaring mistakes on almost every page.

I'm sorry, but I can only give this book 2 stars out of 5. Most of the New Age teachings aren't bad, but this isn't an OBE book as much as it is New Age 101. There are no OBE tips, techniques, or pointers, except for eating light vegetarian meals.

If it was titled "The Lessons of Master Sana Khan" it would live up to its title. But really, it has almost nothing to do with astral projection.

Bob Peterson
27 March 2018

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Using OBE to Contact Dead Loved Ones

Using OBE to Contact Dead Loved Ones

by Bob Peterson

Sooner or later we all experience the death of a loved one. Often, people desperately search for ways to contact the dearly departed, and that's what leads them to discover OBEs. So a lot of people ask me, "Can I use an OBE to talk to my dead husband/wife/child, or other dead loved one?"

The answer is yes, but it's not easy.

Surprisingly, encounters with the dead are rare in OBE literature. In his book Vistas of Infinity, author Jurgen Ziewe talks about meetings with the dead, including his own deceased mother. The meetings are somewhat matter-of-fact and unemotional, at least compared to Ziewe's other OBEs.

Another encounter is described in the book, Astral Projections, by Michael Ross  who used OBEs to contact his dead son, Murray, who had committed suicide. This was a much more emotional encounter than Ziewe's.

Rodrigo Montenegro's book The Out-of-Body Experience: An Experiential Anthology also has an encounter with the dead. Also, Preston Dennett's book Out-of-Body Exploring has an OBE in which he meets his dead mother. The late French OBE expert, Akhena, also described encounters with dead people she knew, in her book Out of Body Experiences.

I've had my own encounters too. In chapter 19 ("The Mind During OBEs") of my first book, I wrote about an OBE from 1982 in which I saw and spoke to my dead father. I wasn't trying; it just kind of happened spontaneously. Like Ziewe, the encounter was meaningful, but a bit unemotional.

In the year 2000, my wife Kathy's best friend, Pam, died under some really strange circumstances that I described in an article on my website called The Spirit Carries On. Her death was particularly tragic because she was still in her 30s and had two young kids. After her death, I decided to use my OBEs to try to contact Pam and see if she wanted me to convey any messages to Kathy or her devastated husband, Al.

In my first book, I described how I had trouble traveling to specific locations, but thankfully, I had long since learned the trick and knew how to travel pretty well. It's not easy to describe in Earthly terms, but basically you "feel" for the distant location or person, then mentally "pull yourself there" along that connection. So finding Pam should be easy, I told myself, right? Wrong.

For a full year, I spent every OBE trying to find Pam. Despite that, I just couldn't seem to contact her. It felt like there was nothing to grasp on the other end. It was like I was being blocked by some unseen force. Eventually, I gave up and decided Pam just wasn't ready to talk.

So when people ask me if they can use OBEs to contact a dead loved one, I tell them yes, but the dead person needs to be receptive to it and cooperate. It has to be a mutual decision between you and the dead person.

By far the biggest problem with contacting a dead loved one is that the goal tends to kill your focus. To induce an OBE, you need to be very focused and single-minded. If you're distracted by thoughts of your dead loved one, it will probably distract you enough to keep you from inducing the OBE state. You need to learn to set aside your goal and focus only on achieving the OBE itself. Once you're safely in the out-of-body state, then focus on your goal.

So now you may be wondering: Have I had any other encounters with the dead since I wrote my OBE books? The answer is yes. I've seen my mother on more than one occasion after she died. It was a long and very emotionally charged series of events that shook me to the core. It's hard for me to talk about it and I've only shared it with my wife, my sister and her husband. Someday I may write a book about it, but that's all I want to say about it now.

Let's just say that contact with the dead is not an easy road. You've got to have a lot of patience with yourself, and with your dead loved one.

Bob Peterson
13 March 2018