My Five Unconventional Meditations

My Five Unconventional Meditations

by Bob Peterson

In my never-ending pursuit of out-of-body experiences, I've tried a lot of types of meditation. But you know I'm an unconventional guy: I'm not one to follow the rules and do the stereotypical Transcendental Meditation (TM) or Kriya yoga. I'd rather try new things, explore and reinvent.

Inducing an OBE is a special kind of meditation itself, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about "support meditation," in other words, meditation to make OBEs more likely and your OBE attempts more fruitful.

I basically do five types of meditation. They are:

1. Silent meditation
2. Binaural beat meditation
3. Musical meditation
4. Left-right meditation, and
5. Vibration raising meditation

On most days, I meditate twice every day: Once in the morning and once in the evening. Every morning, I meditate for about twenty minutes, and I always do a silent meditation. In silent meditation, no music is playing. I just sit in complete silence and try to quiesce or "turn off" my mind completely. What often happens is that as soon as my mind is completely shut off, I start seeing things, literally, in my mind's eye.

In the late evening I meditate again. Depending on my mood, I pick one of the other four types at random. I always, without exception, listen to binaural beats or music under good quality over-the-ear noise canceling headphones. A couple years ago I broke down and invested in a pair of Bose QuietComfort 35 Bluetooth headphones. They were expensive, but I have no regrets.

Binaural beat meditation

I listen to a lot of binaural beat meditations. I've got a collection of them on my phone. I always wear my headphones. My current favorites are:

1. "Winds Over the World" by Richard Roberts (not to be mistaken for the idiotic Christian evangelist with the same name). You can buy this from the Monroe Institute at this link: https://www.monroeinstitute.org/node/1085. The track is 30 minutes long, but you can hear a two-minute sample here: https://www.monroeinstitute.org/sites/default/files/Winds%20over%20the%20World%20Sample.mp3?uuid=5cb2172ae1eeb
2. "The Far Countries: Multidimensional Man" by Jurgen Ziewe. You can listen to this track here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVshec6YL_Y
3. "Maha Mrityeonjaya Mantra" by Hein Braat. You can listen to that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmsPdQlEy2c
4. You can also find a variety of binaural beat meditations on youtube. Jason Bannister has created several nice ones.

Music meditation

When I don't feel like listening to binaural beats, I sometimes listen to "ordinary" music that makes me feel "spacey," "entranced," or "otherworldly." I'm not talking about "trance music" as most people like to think about it (I've never cared much for that). I've got a large collection of songs for this. Some of my favorites are:

1. "Awaken," "Ritual" or "Close to the Edge" by Yes.
2. "State of Independence" or "The Mayflower" by Jon and Vangelis.
3. "One of These Days" followed by "Echoes" by Pink Floyd
4. "Kashmir" by Led Zeppelin.
5. "Rajah Khan" by Renaissance.
6. "Little Neutrino" by Klaatu.
7. "Cygnus X-1" by Rush.
8. "One of These Days" followed immediately by "Echoes" by Pink Floyd.

Left-Right music meditation

Out-of-body mogul Robert Monroe developed his "Hemi-sync" technology when he discovered that binaural beats synchronized the two hemispheres of the brain. The brain tries to synchronize what it hears in the left ear with the right ear.

I've always thought he didn't take the technology far enough: While Hemi-sync has a long list of benefits, I believe it doesn't go far enough to aid in inducing OBEs. In my experience, it's more effective to jar your brain's sense of location by deliberately feeding it false auditory information, and hopefully in such a way that confuses it.  If you scramble that so it doesn't make sense, you can kick it out of its normal patterns. What I mean is to close your eyes and:

• Feed different-but-similar music into each of your ears. This is similar to Hemi-sync, but for example, play the same song with two different instruments, and pipe the two separately into each ear.
• Listen to music that unpredictably "bounces" the music from one ear to the other.
• Visualize the music as best you can.
• Imagine energy or "chi" moving through your body and around your body in harmony with the music.

This is probably my favorite type of evening meditation, and I've amassed a large collection of songs that do this, and I'm always looking for more. I listen to them a lot, and I love them. Here a just a few of my favorites, in no particular order:

1. "Merlin the Magician" by Rick Wakeman.
2. "I Robot" by Alan Parsons Project.
3. "Magnum Opus" by Kansas.
4. "Nucleus" by Alan Parsons Project.
5. "Yours is No Disgrace," "Long Distance Runaround," "Face To Face," "Astral Traveller," "Arriving UFO," or "The Ancient: Giants Under the Sun" by Yes.
6. "How it Hits You" by Jon Anderson.
7. "Toward the Within" or "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove" by Dead Can Dance.
8. "Too Much Time On My Hands" or "Lights" by Styx.
9. "Autobahn" by Kraftwerk. 

Vibration raising music meditation

I'm not talking about "The Vibrations" associated with OBEs. I'm just talking about music to change my mood to be more positive, optimistic, and uplifting. A lot of OBE experts say that having a bad, sour, or negative mood lowers your vibrations and makes it impossible to induce OBEs. So this is one way I try to improve my own attitude and lift my spirits.

1. "Are You The One," "Key to the Universe," or "Silence of the Night" by Timo Tolkki.
2. "In Perfect Harmony" by Within Temptation
3. "Street Spirit" by Stream of Passion (Yes, I know it's a remake)
4. "I'm Okay," "Sing for the Day," or the entire album "The Grand Illusion" by Styx.
5. "Holy Light" by Stratovarius.
6. "Bound for Infinity" by Renaissance.
7. "I'll Sing You Home" by Timo Tolkki.
8. "The Answer Lies Within" by Dream Theater.
9. "And You And I" by Yes. I love to visualize my vibrations getting higher and higher, then kundalini energy shooting from my base chakra out through my crown chakra while this plays.

Don't try to do anything else. Just close your eyes, listen to the music and let it do its magic. Whenever possible, try to visualize the music dancing in front of you.

After doing this for years, I still think the most effective of these for me is the "Left-Right" music. For me, it seems more effective than listening to binaural beats. I listened to a few of these last night creating this blog article and had an OBE this morning. Enough said.

Bob Peterson
11 June 2019