Lessons from the Chess Board

 

by Bob Peterson

One of my earliest life-lessons was when I learned to play chess when I was in elementary (primary) school. My older brother, Joe, taught me how to play, and he coached me and gave advice. I was hooked and couldn't get enough. Every day after school, we played game after game, as much as he would tolerate.

In spite of all his help, Joe had no mercy. He ruthlessly defeated me, beating me game after game after game. He kicked my ass bloody. But he also explained what I had done wrong. I'm not sure what he got out of it, but I know what it did for me: it made me a better chess player. My focus and determination grew and my chess skills slowly improved. After what seemed like years, I matched Joe's skills and won about half the time.

One day after school, at a friend's request, I visited a chess club that was holding a tournament for middle-school ("junior high") players. I played a few games of chess against their best players and I won every game. These kids were years older than me, and I went home undefeated, with a super-inflated ego. One of them said, "Next year, when you graduate to middle-school, you should join our chess club."

In middle-school I soon learned that if you only play against the same player, you may learn to defeat him/her very well, but you still may be no match for other players with different strategies.

Years later, when I got to high school, my interests changed from chess to computers. I started visiting the University of Minnesota for free "continuing education" computer classes. That's when I heard about an upcoming chess tournament at the University. A little scared and anxious, I scraped together the money and entered the tournament. 

On the day of the chess tournament I was very nervous, but defeated my first two opponents in close victories. My third opponent kicked my ass. He just took me apart, handed my ass to me, and I went home defeated, with a broken and defeated ego. It's a good thing I was good at computers!

Nowadays I play chess on my phone, and my phone usually kicks my ass. It's still fun.

What does all this have to do with astral projection or out-of-body experiences? It's all in the lessons.

My lessons from the chess board were:

• You can't get better at chess or anything in life by playing weaker opponents.
• You learn best by playing superior opponents and overcoming obstacles.
• It's good to broaden your skills by playing different players, not just the same opponent over and over.
  
• You only "lose" if you give up and stop working toward your goals.
• Don't take defeats to heart: see them as lessons, or baby steps, and move on.
• Don't take victories to heart either: there's always someone better than you.
• If you hitch your value/worth to your ego, you will always be let down.
• Never get discouraged: There is always time for another try.
• We are never done learning. There's always something else to learn.
  

As it is with chess, so it is with astral projection, except you're only playing against yourself. Astral projection is a skill, much like any sport.

• Don't be afraid of obstacles. Face them and overcome them.
• Never stop practicing and never stop improving your skills.
• You've only failed if you've given up, so never give up.
• Learn from multiple people who have experiences, not people with book-knowledge, and not just one person.
• Most importantly, try different strategies: many may fail but some of them might lead to success.
• Don't judge yourself by your success or failure. Just work toward your goals.
• The amount of effort you put into it will determine how much you get out of it.
  

And as it is with astral projection, so it is with life, too. Every one of the bullets above apply equally to anything in life.

It's all a journey and a game. We all learn and we all teach. We're just walking each other home.

Bob Peterson,
20 June 2023

Review: Astral Projection by Marius K. Green

Astral Projection

by Marius K. Green

Today I'm reviewing the book Astral Projection (Extended Edition) by Marius K. Green. The subtitle is: The Supreme Guide to Travel in Unknown Worlds and Contact Your Missing Loved Ones. That's a mouthful!

It's been a long time since I read an astral projection book and did a book review. Sorry! I guess I've had other priorities in life. Part of the problem is that the book was tedious--hard, even painful--to read, at least at first.

In fact, if you had asked me to rate this book while I was reading the first half of the book, I would have said that this is the worst astral projection book I have ever read. But then it got better. The second half is better than the first.

As usual, I'll start out with the negative and list the problems so I can end on a good note.

Some of the bad points:

• The pages have no page numbers, so I can't even tell you where to find quotes! The best I can do is tell you what chapter it's in. Unprofessional. Did I mention that this is "The Extended Edition" which means nobody caught the omission on the earlier edition?
  
• There are incomplete sentences that just end unexpectedly.
• He makes some dubious claims like "the astral body can be released and set off on a long journey, moving at the speed that is less than only the speed of light waves". (chapter 2)
• He uses strange and unfamiliar terms compared to other books in the literature. For example, he refers to the astral body as "the ghost." He refers to sleep paralysis as "astral catalepsy" like some of the very oldest books on the subject.
  
• He doesn't reference any contemporary books on the subject. He only quotes very old sources like Hereward Carrington, Oliver Lodge, Charles Lancelin, Sylvan Muldoon, and such.
• His sources are not listed in any detail, so the reader is left wondering if he/she should take the author's word for it, try to find the actual reference, or just write it off. And I'm not a man who takes authors at their word.
  
• He talks about two astral projections he had a very looooong time ago. One, he says, took place in the "summer of 1924". That's 99 years ago! His photo in the back of the book is in color and makes him look about 30 years old. The other took place "in the summer of 1916" which is 107 years ago! So something definitely doesn't add up. Maybe he was quoting from one of those old books, but didn't say so? Or did I miss-read it?
  

A big part of the problem was just the author's wording. I felt like I was reading a computer-generated translation from a book that was originally written in French. Why French? Well, the author's name is Marius and as an ignorant American, the only other time I've encountered that name was from Les Miserables (Have a listen to "A Heart Full of Love"), a play about the French Revolution. Plus he references the French author Charles Lancelin. Maybe I'm jumping to conclusions.

At least in the beginning the book uses all kinds of weird phrases, even wrong words. For example:

"That what you met, following the laws of art that will be stated, may not coincide in some respects with what I tell, and about which art is acquired by practice." (Chapter 2)

Huh? Here's another example:

"This is always the way that the ghost moves when exteriorization occurs, and the body is in a horizontal position. The whole process could happen stray or slow." (Chapter 4)

Another example:

"When this happens, the physical body always experiences a concussion, sometimes accompanied by pain, or as I called it, "splitting in two." This is also called "bestowal" (repercussion.)" (Chapter 4)

I don't think he really meant concussion (head injury); he meant repercussion. In the heading that precedes this, he refers to it as "Rapercursion" which is just...bad.

Another example:

"Whenever I saw a dream, I was attracted by some terrible ghostly object, similar to the Buddha." (Chapter 5)

I can't even imagine a sentence in which "Buddha" can be described as both terrible and ghostly.

In chapter 6 he even describes sleep paralysis (a normal function of the sleeping physical body) as "epilepsy" (an electrical storm inside the brain). Yikes!

He calls flying dreams "flying sleep." He calls falling dreams "dreams of the fall." and his pronouns are often mixed up, sometimes using "it" to refer to a person, or "he" or "she" to refer to a thing. (This trait is common to European languages.)

Green says a few things that differ from my personal experience. For example, he writes:

"In the dreams of the fall [falling dreams], we always wake up before we reach the earth." (Chapter five).

I hate to break it to you, but that's not true at all. I've had dreams in which I not only hit the Earth, but was violently smashed several feet into the ground, and died from the fall! And the current book I'm reading [to be named later] contains another fine example dream.

Green references the work of a few other authors, but he doesn't cite references, so I have no idea how to do further research, and he often misspells the authors' names. For example, several times he references the work of:

• Dr. Lindler regarding the composition of the astral body.
  
• Hereward Carrington, but he calls him "X. Carrington."
• He references experiments done by "Dr. Van Letem" but cites no references, so how can I give it any weight?
• He references "Dr. Van Idey" and "Dr. Van Eden" but maybe he meant Dr. Frederik van Eeden? Possibly the same person as the previous bullet?
  
• He references the famous spirit medium Eusapia Paladino as "Evzapia Paladino."
• He references "Mr. Gurney," as one of the authors of "Ghosts of the Living." Um. That's "Phantasms of the Living" by Gurney, Myers and Podmore.
  

He also uses very dubious "pseudo-science." For example:

"Radiated in this way, their strength can be measured by means of specially designed instruments - a biometer, tonometer, and so on. Some devices of this kind were invented by French experimenters. These devices show that repulsive force is emitted from one side of the body, and gravity from the other." (Chapter 7)

He also talks about "ether" as being a fundamental particle of science, which is like 100-year-old pseudo-science. He also talks about the "weight of the soul," which, as far as I know, was debunked fifty or more years ago.

He also makes very dubious medical claims. For example:

"The body has four large nerve, or psychic centers--four brains, as they are sometimes called (brain, cerebellum, medulla oblongata and solar plexus.)" (Chapter 8)

This is not science; this is nonsense. Even if you give him the benefit of the doubt and suppose he's talking about chakras, it still contradicts conventional thinking.

Now for some of the good points:

The book is based on the author's personal experience, which many authors cannot claim. In fact, he says "...the author is well acquainted with this phenomenon, having made hundreds of projections of a period of 12 years..." (chapter 1).

To back that up, he has several OBE narratives, and they sound pretty convincing to me. You know how much I love OBE narratives.

Green has some interesting points about astral projection. For example, bucking conventional wisdom, he says:

"So, if you think that for astral projection, it is necessary that the mind remains calm, then you are mistaken." (Chapter 10)

(I, for one, do need to remain calm). And yet later he stresses the need for complete "passivity"--Something which I've insisted on since my very first book.

"Everything that stimulates you - alcohol, drugs, or food, is negative factor because it prevents the achievement of a passive state." (Chapter 10)

Calm and passive is what works for me. But, to get nit-picky, alcohol is a depressant, not a stimulant.

Interestingly Green also recommends using as light blanket as possible, stating that "excessive weight on the body creates a special physiological effect." Although I remember another author insisted just the opposite, citing that heavy blankets are preferred because they make you slightly uncomfortable and hot. I've always preferred sleeping atop the blankets if I can.

Green insists that his astral projections correlate to a slow heart rate. In fact, he recommends trying to slow down your heart rate to induce OBEs. He said he has a naturally slow heart rate, so slow that his doctors put him on a medicine that increased his heart rate, and his out-of-body experiences completely went away for weeks. As soon as he stopped taking the medicine, he started having OBEs again. (Chapter 10). He estimates his ideal heart rate is 42 beats per minute.

He also ties many of his astral projections to fear: he had more OBEs when he was afraid of them, and as he became more comfortable, they slowed down. He was able to overcome that factor by using extreme desire, which brought them back. (Chapter 11).

He discusses some of his experiments. For example, several times he tried Sylvan Muldoon's "Thirst" technique and was successful. He's the only author I know of, besides Muldoon himself, to have actually used it successfully, and several times.

In another series of experiments, he projected several miles away to his girlfriend's bedroom to try to make his presence known to her. He got there several times, but she never saw him. Then, when he stopped trying, he dreamed that he visited her, and this time she actually saw his ghostly form. I had to laugh because this exactly mirrors some of my own experiments!

Green tried several times to affect the physical world, like trying to knock things off a shelf, but he was never successful. He became extremely frustrated by this fact, maybe even a little sorrowful, and described how joyful it was to rejoin his physical body and regain its ability to affect physical things.

There aren't really any astral projection techniques in the book, but there are hints. He talks about how he had the most astral projections when he slept for 6 hours, stayed awake for 15 minutes, then went back to bed, setting a strong intention. This is, of course, the now famous "WBTB" (Wake Back To Bed) technique, but he seems to have stumbled on it by accident. He made no references to WBTB.

He also talks a lot about developing "passive will" and influencing the "crypto-conscious mind" which apparently is halfway between the conscious and subconscious mind. It's an interesting discussion, and he spends some time on it. In fact, he states:

"I say without hesitation that the role of the passive will in the projection of the astral body is one of the great secrets. You can call it the method of simple imagination, but this is not entirely accurate. Rather, it is imagination plus a will, fulfilling the desires of the imagination. In this case, the passive will can never be used by force because it will turn into an active will. You just have to have a strong desire to project." (Chapter 11)

Yes, I agree with that.

Oh, and he makes a clear distinction between lucid dreams and astral projection.

So what are we to make of this book? There's definitely a cultural gap here, with Green talking about drinking water from a stream and visiting "nearby villages," but he also writes about power lines. There's a time gap, with references to experiences that happened a hundred years ago, and books from a hundred years ago, with absolutely no modern references. It made me wonder: Was most of the material written by his grandfather? His descriptions of the non-physical sure seemed genuine enough. He even honestly admits he never went to "higher planes" and was always stuck in the "lower astral" or the echo of the physical world. 

I didn't count the number of pages, but I'm guessing about 120, with decent (but slightly large) font and margins, so you're not cheated on the amount of content.

In my opinion, there's nothing "supreme" about this book, nor does the author explain how to contact dead loved ones, as advertised in the book's title. One thing's for sure: Things don't quite add up. And because of that, I'll only give the book 2 stars out of 5. I've read worse books, but you can find better.

Bob Peterson
06 June 2023

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