Answers Within: Contacting Your Inner Voice

Answers Within: Contacting Your Inner Voice

by Robert Peterson

“The answer lies within.” We hear it from the loftiest spiritual teachers to heavy metal bands like Dream Theater, but how do you do it? Often shrouded in mystery, it's had many names: clairaudience, second sight, and intuition. In its stronger forms: talking to angels, spirit guides, or your inner voice. Whatever you call it, it's a skill you can learn, and its roots lie in the subconscious.

But only crazy people talk to themselves, right? Wrong. Psychologists have known about the unconscious mind since Friedrich Schelling coined the phrase in the 1800s. Whether we like it or not, it always influences us. Many think the subconscious is a dark, murky place; the cesspool of our minds, but experience shows it's a direct connection to what New Age people call the Higher Self, which has a world of psychic information, guidance, and spirituality.

The biggest obstacle to inner voice communication is conditioning: we're taught from day one to focus on our five senses, and that everything else (what's inside) is unimportant or untrustworthy. So the first step is to undo all that negative programming.

The next step is to learn to turn your attention inward, and maintain that link throughout the day. The trouble is, we're usually given vague (or worse, incorrect) instructions. It's often described as one-way communication steeped in mysticism or religion: perform a ceremony, cast a spell, recite a prayer and hope for the best. But the communication flows both ways; we just don't realize it because our brains have complex noise filters to keep “what's not important” from bubbling to the surface. It's like hearing a whisper in a rock concert; the signal is too weak to hear over the noise.

Meditation is only part of the equation. It helps dismiss some of the musicians, guitars and screaming audience from our inner auditorium of everyday life, but we still have to listen for the whisper.

In chapter 10 of my first book, Out of Body Experiences: How to have them and what to expect, I described my inner voice and how I talk to it. I've received almost as many emails about that as my OBEs. I've been reluctant to comment because I was afraid treating the subject too lightly would do more harm than good; messing with people's minds is not to be undertaken lightly. Instead, I spent years working on a new book, Answers Within: How to Use Your Inner Voice for Wisdom, Spirituality and Psychic Awareness, that I published in 2012. Here are some tips and techniques from the book:

• Play “the wisdom game.” Make time to ask yourself philosophical or religious questions and pretend you're the guru. Pause your inner dialog to get stray thoughts; take the first ideas that pop into your mind and morph them into “wise” answers.
• Choose a “protocol question” you can ask yourself to get into the right frame of mind. Pick a question that will make you dig deep inside for the answer. Mine is “What is love?”
• Take walks and try to see everything around you as a spiritual metaphor, and tell yourself its deeper meaning.
• Expand the game: Instead of philosophical questions, ask yourself to just “Say something wise” and make up answers.
• Each morning, give yourself a spiritual lesson for the day. Just make something up. Make every day a spiritual learning experience.
• Throughout the day, ask yourself to comment on what's happening; check it against the lesson you gave yourself.
• Increase psychic sensitivity by being love-based and non-judgmental.
• Ask about other people's lessons. Learn from what other people are going through, but don't mistake their lessons for yours.
• Don't doubt yourself. Gain confidence through verification.
• Recognize the voice of fear. Pay attention to impressions accompanied by a detached feeling of peace and calm. Discard impressions accompanied by fear, negativity or strong emotions.
• Use music and books to increase inner voice vocabulary.
• Keep a “running question mark” in your mind. Try to remain open to messages from your inner voice throughout the day and in every situation.
• Keep playing and eventually you'll start getting “answers” without questions.

Learning to talk to your inner voice is an invaluable tool for spirituality and psychic development. Making it fun and being persistent are key.

15 January 2013

Affirmations and OBEs

by Bob Peterson

A lot of people talk about affirmations and their importance to out-of-body experiences, but how important are they? In my opinion, very important. I'm not alone. In his groundbreaking book The Projection of the Astral Body, OBE pioneer Sylvan Muldoon, wrote:

"Recall the fundamental law of astral projection: when the subconscious will becomes possessed of the idea to move the body (coinciding bodies) and the physical body is incapacitated, the subconscious will moves the astral body out of the physical."

In other words, if your body is under sleep paralysis, and your subconscious wants to move, your astral body will move away from the physical.

What I've found is that I can consciously try to induce an OBE for hours and get nowhere unless I'm in the right state of mind. But my subconscious can take me out-of-body easily, quickly and efficiently whenever it's motivated to do so. So one important tool for inducing OBE is motivating the subconscious.

It is very easy is it for your subconscious to pull you away from your body, because it's done it your whole life: it pulls you out of your body every night during sleep. Typically, you just hover above the body, watching the illusion of your dream hallucination, and you're completely unaware of the OBE because you're unconscious.

It pulls you out-of-body as soon as you fall asleep. In fact, your subconscious waits passively until it believes your awareness is completely extinguished, then it pulls you out. If you keep your conscious mind completely, totally, utterly blank (quiesced), your subconscious can be fooled into thinking that you're unconscious. Your mind has to be quiet and inactive enough that your subconscious can't tell that you're still aware. Once it pulls you out of your body, you can wrestle conscious control away from it, and voila: you're out of the body.

How do I know this? I've seen it firsthand. I've done it successfully. I've also tried to wrestle control from it too early, with interesting results. My subconscious (which I become very aware of) acts very surprised by this rude intrusion into its normal dealings, as if to say "WTF? How did he manage to slip through?" Then I get forcefully slammed back into my body: wham! Apparently it doesn't like me interfering with its nightly falling asleep routine!

Despite experiences like this, your subconscious can be trained, and it can help you with your OBEs. Not during the falling-asleep process, but during your "normal" OBE practice sessions.

So how do you program your subconscious to give you conscious OBEs? The same way you program your subconscious for anything:

• Use hypnosis
• Change your inner dialogue
• Use Affirmations

I've mostly been resistant to hypnosis my whole life, so it doesn't work for me. Consequently, the OBE hypnosis tapes and CDs don't work on me.

Changing your inner dialogue is a complex subject, and this article's already getting too long, so I'm not going to cover it here.

That leaves affirmations. Affirmations are similar to your inner dialogue. You silently say them to yourself. And while doing it may seem silly, your subconscious hears those inner thoughts and reacts accordingly. So here are some tips on affirmations:

Make affirmations simple

Your subconscious communicates in many ways, but it's not designed for language interpretation or complex linguistic analysis. So a long sentence will just confuse it. Long sentences will just be ignored and do you no good. Imagination and visualizations are better.

Make affirmations positive

Your subconscious is very literal. It will interpret negative sentences negatively. For example, if you affirm "OBEs aren't difficult" your subconscious might only notice two words: "OBEs" and "difficult", and you've just made your job harder. On the other hand, if you affirm it in the positive, your subconscious will interpret it the way you want: "OBEs are easy."

Less is more

Don't try to give yourself too many affirmations at once. One per day (or maybe two) is all it takes. If you start rambling to yourself in a long discourse, your subconscious is going to get confused. Don't say to yourself, "OBEs are easy. I have them all the time. It comes naturally. I want to have OBEs. I slip easily out of my body. I become conscious while I'm asleep..." because it's too much information for your subconscious to handle. Just pick one simple sentence per day. You can use a different affirmation each day.

Do affirmations when you first wake up

When you first wake up, your subconscious and conscious are more closely in communication than at other times of the day. In fact, the groggier you are, the better. Use that to your advantage.

Do affirmations several times throughout the day

Your subconscious is programmed by repetition. Each time you repeat the affirmation to yourself, the more it becomes ingrained. But do NOT just repeat an affirmation twenty times, then let it go for the rest of your day. You have to repeat, but at different times. It's better to affirm once or twice, then do something else and repeat it again later.

For example: When you first wake up in the morning, before you sit up in bed, affirm "I leave my body". Then sit up in bed and say it again to yourself. Then visit the bathroom. When you're finished, affirm it again. Then, go get that first cup of coffee, and while you sip, affirm it again. Affirm it at every meal. Every bathroom break. You get the idea: make it a habit throughout the day. In a way, you're changing your beliefs about yourself.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Your subconscious is much more comfortable with pictures than words. It's much better to do your affirmation as a visual image than a bunch of words. So when you affirm "I leave my body" it's more effective to visualize yourself leaving your body. The idea of leaving your body is much more potent than the words. The words pale by comparison.

Your subconscious is literal, so be careful

When I started using affirmations, I didn't know what I was doing, so I made mistakes. For example, I once used an affirmation like "I can easily slip away from my body." That affirmation seems innocent enough, but I had a core belief that interfered. I had read somewhere that OBEs can happen easier when you are sick: when your body is weak, it has less hold on you, and your subconscious is more apt to pull your astral body out in order to recharge. So my subconscious interpreted this simple affirmation as "I want to get sick, so slipping out-of-body will be easier" and the net result is: I got sick. And this happened multiple times until I figured out what was going on.

The bottom line is: be careful how you formulate your affirmations and make them positive, associating them with healthy, normal behavior.

The Self-Questioning Trick

The self-questioning trick is something I developed for remembering my dreams, but I soon discovered it works for any affirmation. I wrote about this in my latest book, Answers Within. Basically you do this: (1) Affirm what you want, (2) Visualize yourself happily attaining your goal. (3) Ask yourself, "Is that what I really want?" (4) Tell yourself, "Yes, that's what I want." Then repeat these steps at least three more times.

So in the beginning, I learned to remember my dreams by doing this: (1) I'd say to myself, "When I wake up, I'll remember my dreams." (2) I'd imagine waking up and happily recalling my dreams. (3) I'd ask myself, "Is that what I want?", (4) I'd tell myself, "Yes, that's what I want." And I'd do this four or more times.

When I adapted it to OBEs that became, (1) "I have OBEs." (2) Imagine myself leaving my body, (3) "Is that what I want?", (4) "Yes, that's what I want."

Doing versus Wanting

A lot of spiritual teachers warn against stating wants. One theory is this: If you affirm "I want to have OBEs" your subconscious will act on the primary verb in the sentence: You will "want" more effectively. You won't have any OBEs, but you sure will "want" them better.

But if you affirm "I do OBEs" your subconscious will act on the verb "do" and actually help you do the OBEs, not just wanting them.

Avoid the "Wish Trap"

This is similar to the issue of "wanting" above. You should avoid affirm term "I wish" because that is loaded with connotations that your subconscious will interpret literally. If you affirm "I wish I had OBEs" you are implying to your subconscious that you do not currently have them. Even if it's true, don't do it. Your subconscious can interpret this as "OBEs are lacking in my life: I don't have any OBEs" which is the opposite of what you want. So always affirm their presence, not their absence.

Conclusions

OBE affirmations program your subconscious, and that, in turn, makes them more frequent in your life. You probably won't see immediate results. In fact, it may be weeks or months before you make any progress, so be patient and keep your subconscious motivated.

09 January 2013

Explorations In Consciousness

Explorations In Consciousness:

A New Approach to Out-of-Body Experiences, by Frederick Aardema

Review by Bob Peterson

I just read the book Explorations In Consciousness by Frederick Aardema. To be honest, I enjoyed this book more than many I've read in recent years. It was thoroughly enjoyable. One of the reasons I liked it so much is just because of the author's approach. It really makes you think. Hard.

You can tell from his writing that he's been out "far". I dare say "farther" than most OBE authors. The author's experiences not only take you to the far reaches of the OBE, it also paints a fairly accurate picture of how things work "out there".

The author spends a fair amount of time talking about experiments he did trying to gain veridical evidence that the experience is "objective" and not merely a subjective experience. Like my own experiences, his level of success was far from ideal, but that ends up being a springboard for far-reaching theories of perception and why these types of experiments often fail.

He talks about the "personal field" where perceptions are entirely subjective, and "collective fields" where perceptions are objective: the idea of concensus realities that may be shared between people (whether alive or dead). In a previous blog article I wrote, I talked about the difference between Lucid Dreaming and OBE being primarily whether the subject is hallucinating (personal field) or not (collective field). But really, that's a matter of perception.

That leads us to question how perception works in the physical world. When you think about it, what is "real"? It REALLY messes with your mind. After all, all you have to base your opinions about "reality" are sense perceptions from your physical body, right? These sense perceptions are just electrical impulses fed from your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and touch receptors. The electrical impulses are then interpreted by your mind into a cohesive whole. That whole is your "world" and it's entirely created inside your mind.

For example, you may see a lamp sitting on a table, but really "lamp" and "table" are just convenient categories inside your mind based on senses that can easily be fooled or tricked.

The senses are not all that accurate either. It's "survival knowledge". You perceive pleasure and pain, hot and cold, threats and non-threats. Your mind categorizes them all neatly into convenient boxes: a lamp goes into the "light fixture" box, and thus obtain certain attributes (helpful, not a threat, often yields light, etc.) But in fact, the perceived object is just a collection of atoms, and atoms are just energy balls: huge amounts of empty space. There are very miniscule protons and neutrons orbited by electrons, but it's mostly just space. That "space" information isn't important to your survival in the physical world, so it's completely ignored, overlooked.

So while you're awake, your mind interprets data coming in from your physical body's senses to create an impression--a summary within your mind--of what you call "the real world". In an out-of-body experience, you take away those physical senses, and your mind is forced to create another cohesive whole, a framework for your existence. Since the data coming in is not physical, the framework sometimes doesn't make sense.

Now consider this: In reality, there is no astral body, but only a body-image created by your own mind, and it's there because you're so used to that type of physical framework. Your mind creates it out of force of habit.

Since there's no "real" astral body, there are no astral eyes or astral photon receptors. In other words, you're not really "seeing" but your mind interprets your experience that way out of habit. Your mind creates your astral world--merely an interpretation of your mind--as much as it creates your physical world.

That leads to a discussion of "the contextual nature of perception". If your world is literally created by your mind's interpretation of all this sense data (whether from physical senses or non-physical senses), then the act of  directing your attention--changing your focus--literally changes your world.

Now add this to the mix: I think it was parapsychologist Susan Blackmore who made the famous observation "Who said you're in the body anyway?"  You're not really in the body at all. It's just that the focus of your attention is primarily on your body's senses.

In reality, your conscious awareness extends far beyond the body. Famous studies in remote viewing (e.g. Joe McMoneagle, Russell Targ, etc.) have shown that if you direct the focus of your attention "enough" away from your physical body to a remote location, you can gather data from those remote locations. And it's all done while "in" the body. It's just a matter of how much you can learn to redirect your attention and train your mind to interpret the nonphysical data.

Toward the end of the book, Aardema also gives a step-by-step breakdown of how to induce an OBE. I didn't find it that much different from how I induce my own OBEs; it's just that he goes into meticulous detail of what happens (and what needs to happen) at each step. This approach can be very helpful to someone with an analytical mind like me. Some, however, may not find it very practical because it reads more like a text book. It's like an instruction manual for putting together a piece of furniture: way down into the nuts and bolts, which is great for some, but it definitely might lose some people. It may very well go over a lot of people's heads. Still, this level of detail is great and shows the depth and quality of the author's experiences, and how much time he's spent analyzing what's really going on.

This is one of the best OBE books I've read in many years and I highly recommend it.

04 January 2013

OBE and Time Travel

by Bob Peterson

In the Questions and Answers section of my second book, Lessons Out of the Body, I wrote that I had never had a time-travel OBE. In the same year the book was published, 2001, that changed. Sigh.

The truth is, I never believed in time travel. It seems like a bogus concept; too far afield, even for me. My skepticism was off the charts. Then it happened to me. Too many times I've heard myself say: I'd never believe it if it hadn't happened to me, and I'd never expect anyone else to believe it either way.

It was Saturday, 21 Apr 2001. I put the dogs outside early, then climbed back into bed to make an OBE attempt. I found the properly state of mind pretty easily and slipped out. I floated out of the bedroom and did some minor casual gliding just to experience weightlessness. I affirmed how real the experience felt; my consciousness was very clear.

I didn’t have any particular goals in mind. As I assumed a standing position, a kind of door formed in front of me. It wasn’t like a physical door, but I perceived it to be some kind of portal or tube. A very subtle thought was sent to me: “Let’s go.” As I stepped toward the door I asked, “Where am I going?” As I passed through the door, a disembodied voice replied, “To the year 2049.”

As I felt myself whooshed away, I thought, Yeah, right. I was even pretty skeptical about time travel but I try not to judge my experiences until I'm back in the body.

I found myself in a big city. There was no helper in sight. Whoever or whatever had brought me here was now gone. I assumed I was in Minneapolis, but I didn’t recognize anything, so there was no hope for finding any kind of validation. I decided I should go to a place I might recognize.

I willed myself to the area where I grew up and found myself on the corner of Lowry Avenue and Polk street in Minneapolis. The neighborhood was recognizable, but things had changed. I decided I wasn’t going to trust that I had traveled in time, so I decided to find proof. I wanted to find a calendar or some kind of computer screen that would have the date on it. With that thought in mind, I started walking east on Lowry toward Central avenue. I walked into a few businesses and tried to look at their computer screens. The computers looked old, like the basic design hadn’t changed much in 48 years. I wondered if maybe they were using these really old computers for some strange reason. It struck me as odd; didn't the technology advance? Or were these people using old computers because that was their only option?

Was there a manufacturing problem or hardship that had forced everyone to use antiques for their computing power?

I couldn’t find any calendars or dates anywhere for a long time and when I did, the numbers seemed fuzzy. I was either having a hard time perceiving them or my consciousness was not as clear as I'd like it. I found one reference to 1994 and another to 1996. Very strange indeed, since this was 2001. I didn't trust my perceptions, and went back outside to find better validation.

I continued to walk toward the intersection of Lowry and Central Avenue. When I got there, a found a huge concrete walkway had been erected over the road. The road--what is today Central Avenue--looked like some kind of mini-freeway. It had concrete walls to keep pedestrians out, but it was too small to be a freeway by today's standards. It looked like some kind of strange single-lane mini-freeway. I wondered if it was for bicycles or motorcycles, or some kind of miniature mass-transit. Or perhaps it was some kind of automated transportation system for small people-sized vehicles.

That should be easy to tell, I thought, if there were any vehicles. I looked around and didn’t see any vehicles anywhere. No cars or motorcycles parked anywhere. Very strange.

I continued to explore. There were people milling about the area, and they looked normal in every respect, but there were very few of them. That struck me as odd too. I expected the year 2049 to be crowded with lots of people, but instead, the place looked almost abandoned, with only a few people out walking. I wondered, “What happened to all the people?” I had been reading Bruce Moen’s third book, Voyages Into the Afterlife and he had predicted that some great disaster will cause the majority of people on Earth to die. I really didn’t buy into what Bruce was saying, but now I wondered if I was seeing proof. Or was it a manifestation of subconscious fears generated by the book? Hard to say without any validation. If I could only find proof of what year it was...

I wandered into what appeared to be a drug store so I could see what calendars they were selling, but my consciousness started to deteriorate. I was losing lucidity and tried to make myself more alert.

I couldn’t find any calendars in the front of the store, so I wandered to the back. In a back room, I passed by two women sitting at a small table, one blonde and one brunette. As I walked by, the blond’s head turned slightly toward me. Now that was odd. I stopped and turned to look at her, and she seemed to be looking directly at me. That was odd; I’m usually invisible to physical people during my OBEs.

Looking around, it appeared that she was apparently giving some kind of psychic reading to the other woman. She had Tarot cards spread out on the table. I walked back to her and bent down close to her face. I asked, “Can you see me?” She slowly nodded yes, as if afraid to speak and appear, from her client's point of view, to be talking to thin-air. I asked, “Are you psychic or something?” This time she spoke: “Yes.”

Then my consciousness disappeared altogether and I woke up in bed.

I didn't know what to make of this experience, and I'm still just as baffled by it today. I've never believed in time travel, and there are very few credible reports in the OBE literature. It's definitely an area worth exploring, but unfortunately, I've never had another OBE quite like it.

2012 December 19

The Four Out-of-Body States

by Bob Peterson

You are an out-of-body traveler. We all are. I agree with the majority of OBE authors that we pop out of our bodies every night during sleep. Of course, most of the time we're not aware of it because we're unconscious.

As a matter of fact, based on personal experience, I believe there are four distinct states in which our identity is separated from our body. It depends on whether or not we're conscious and whether or not we're hallucinating.

The four states are as follows:

1. Ordinary dream = unconscious + hallucinating

During ordinary dreams, we are outside our bodies, but as I said, we're not conscious, so we're not aware of what's happening. We also are hallucinating, which means we're watching and experiencing the fantasy dream-world that plays in front of us, which is a construct of our own mind. According to Sylvan Muldoon and others, while we're dreaming, we're usually floating a couple inches above our physical body, watching the dream hallucination play out. I've personally watched the entire creation of a dream from start to finish, so I've seen this first-hand. With dreams, the illusion takes on a life of its own and the dream progresses and tells a story within your mind, whether you want it to or not.

2. Shared dream = unconscious + not hallucinating

Some authors, most notably Robert Moss, have written about shared dream experiences. In these experiences, two or more people can, for example, meet in a well-known location, see the same things, do the same things. Later, when they're awake, they can describe the dream to one another, and verify what actually took place in the dream. It's as if they are sharing the same experience, in some objective non-physical reality, but they're unconscious. When they wake, they clearly remember the experience as a dream.

3. Lucid dream = conscious + hallucinating

Many people think OBEs are the same as lucid dreams, and I acknowledge that unless you've done them both and seen the qualitative difference yourself, it's hard to tell. In a lucid dream, you're completely conscious and you know you're dreaming. However, since you're hallucinating, your environment is an artificial construct of your own mind. Since it's a complex fantasy created by your own mind, you have complete control. You can make a dancing purple elephant appear if you want, and do so as a conscious act. You are God of that dream-world. Some people use it to enact elaborate sexual fantasies or deep mystical experiences, but still, you know it's not real, both during the experience and when you wake up.

4. Out-of-body experience = conscious + not hallucinating

OBEs, on the other hand, are also conscious experiences, but you're not hallucinating. Like waking reality, you know you're not dreaming. You can even transition from am lucid dream into an OBE by "waking up" from the lucid dream, or dissolving the dream hallucination. It can be tricky to do without waking up your body in the process. When you do, you can watch the illusion of the dream hallucination dissolve, and often find yourself floating comfortably above your physical body. I'm not saying that you see the physical world; I'm only saying that what you see is not a dream hallucination. Unlike a lucid dream, you can't easily manipulate the objects in front of you. In fact, except for traveling somewhere, things that happen are often unexpected and out of your control. If you want, you can sit there bored and nothing would happen; in other words, there isn't a story that keeps unfolding in front of you like there is in a dream.

Understanding the four out-of-body states is an important step in learning to control your consciousness and induce the various states.

11 December 2012

Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience by Graham Nicholls

By Bob Peterson

As I pointed out in my Sylvan Muldoon blog entry, one important key to having OBEs is convincing the subconscious mind to do it. For that reason, I've amassed a collection of more than 150 OBE books (OBE-only books, not including books on related subjects like NDEs). I like to re-read these books occasionally to keep both my conscious and subconscious motivated. Recently, I decided I should start writing about these books and what I got from them. That way, years from now, I can revisit the books and what I thought of them quickly, plus I can share my opinions on them with the world.

I recently finished reading Navigating the Out-of-Body experience: Radical New Techniques by Graham Nicholls. It's a very good book. Here's my report.

What I liked most about this book is the author's holistic approach to the subject. It's not a step-by-step "Here's what you've got to do" method to achieving an end. Rather, it views the human being as a system, and it talks about different factors that influence the system: diet, sleeping habits, meditation, subconscious programming, transforming beliefs, breath work, etc. The reader is urged to determine which personal profile best describes them, then they are given several techniques to mix and match, based on that profile.

Another good thing about the book is that the author takes a healthy and informed middle-ground between old-school (occult traditions) and new-school (pseudo-scientific). I've read way too many OBE books that peddle occult practices with "matter of fact" assumptions, most of which I dismiss as superstition. As in religion, it's hard to discern the grains of truth buried beneath the dogma. On the other hand, most other OBE books completely ignore the occult traditions, even though they may give us valuable history and insights.

At several points throughout the book, I found myself surprised that I had been doing many of the things Nicholls recommends for years, some of which I did with no regard to an OBE connection. A non-OBE related example is a "push hands" technique he gives, which I used to do when I practised Tai Chi Chuan years ago. Regarding OBEs, he extensively talks about manipulating visualized geometric shapes. He suggests moving visualized triangles, pyramids and spheres. In my first book, Out of Body Experiences, in chapter 24 "How to have an OBE" I recommend using a cube, which I sway back and forth toward you and away from you. In Lessons Out of the Body, I refined that a bit and suggested keeping the cube spinning to solidify the image. Often times I use an octahedron (which can be thought of as two pyramids glued top to bottom, similar to the 8-sided die used in role-playing games) in my visualizations.

I made another interesting observation. On page 186, Nicholls gives his "Introductory Vibrational State Technique" in which you imagine floating a beach ball in front of you, glowing with light and energy. Although he didn't say it, I immediately thought of repeatedly bouncing the ball up into the air. At some point you move it directly above your head. What strikes me about this technique is its similarity to Robert Monroe's technique, from Journeys Out of the Body, of visualizing two lines of force that are pushed outward, then pivoted to the point of being on top your head. In my technique, I use the cube or octahedron in a similar way, but I push it out and back rather than up in the air.

I thought the similarities between Monroe's technique, my technique and Nicholls' technique was pretty interesting. Really, these visualizations are all just ways to accomplish several things at the same time:

1. Focusing your mind inward.
2. Achieving a state of heightened focus.
3. Focusing psychic energy at the crown chakra.
4. Creating momentum to carry your awareness away from your body.
5. Creating a kind of pivot point, a fulcrum against which you can pry your awareness away from the body.
6. Calling the vibrations.

Nicholls also writes about time travel within OBEs, a subject that not many books have breached. In Lessons Out of the Body I mentioned that I had never had a time-travel OBE. That changed in 2001. But that's another story for another day.

The only thing negative I have to say about the book is the fact that I found the subtitle, "Radical New Techniques" a bit misleading. I found nothing radical in the techniques. As for "new" there are some good ideas. Some of these, such as audio-visual subconscious programming, ganzfeld, etc., are not new to parapsychology, but are a new approach to OBE. He suggests using immersion in the form of sensory deprivation, and while that's a great idea not covered in other books, my brother Joe was doing that in the 1980s with his own home-made float tank, so it wasn't new to me. Using physical exercise to shapen the mind while tiring the body is something I suggested in exercise 19 of my first book, but Nicholls carries it a bit further. He also talks about massage and partner exercises, which is a different approach. His 3D Tattva approach is very cool.

His approach was fresh and insightful. All in all, a very good book.

2012 December 5

The New Introduction, Blanke, Persinger and Skeptics

by Bob Peterson

I got a call from my publisher a week ago. They're gearing up for the second edition of my first book, Out of Body Experiences: How to Have Them and What to Expect and they wanted me to write a new introduction. I was given two restrictions: First, I was only given one week to write it, and second, it needed to be around 500 words (but if need be, as many as 1000).

I didn't realize it would be so difficult. Where should I begin, I wondered? There's so much I wanted to say, and so few words. Should I make it (a) an introduction to the new edition and what's new in my life? (b) a description of what is new in the field of OBEs in general? Or (c) an introduction to OBEs and the book itself?

The subject of OBEs is so vast and there was so much I wanted to add to that book that I could write a whole second book on the subject. Wait, I already did that. It was called "Lessons Out of the Body." So how do I begin to narrow down my focus to 500 words? I certainly couldn't rehash that.

So I took a step back from the situation and asked myself, "What do people want to know? What's the first thing people ask me?" The answer was simple. It's been fifteen years since the book was first published and people always ask me what I've been up to lately. What new, exciting things have I learned in my OBEs? Where has it taken me?

So I set about writing my introduction and what I've been doing since the book was first published. Then I thought to myself: No, I can't do that. The book has a chronological order. To talk about the latest fifteen years first is just wrong. Plus, it's not supposed to be about me, it's supposed to be about OBEs. So I scraped that version and went back to the drawing board.

I decided I should write about what's happened in the field of OBEs in the past fifteen years. And what's happened? Well, for one thing, researchers Olaf Blanke and Michael Persinger conducted experiments where they electronically stimulated an area of the brain called the right temporal-parietal junction. They found they could artificially cause hallucinations, disorientation, floating sensations and affect a subject's perception of their body position. Parapsychologist and OBE author Susan Blackmore tried Persinger's "God Helmet" and came away convinced OBEs are all in the mind. Pretty soon the mass media was pointing to this research as clear proof that OBEs are merely hallucinations. But as Graham Nicholls aptly points out in his book Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience: they are “...relying upon the logical fallacy that producing a hallucination or illusion disproves something about the object of the hallucination or illusion.” You can't prove, for example, that UFOs are fake no matter how many faked Photoshop images you produce of them.

But I couldn't bring up the subject of skeptics discounting the OBE without talking about some of the other parapsychology work that's been done lately. Skeptics came out with an argument that nothing needs to ever leave the body to explain OBEs: it could be a combination of (1) completely turning off the normal senses, (2) having complete absorption in extraordinarily vivid visual, tactile and auditory hallucinations, (3) a phenomenal combination of psi talents. Two things struck me when I read that paper: First, it admits that psi is a fact (which seems at odds with the very principles of this kind of skepticism). Second, it ignores Occam's razor, a principle that states that among competing hypotheses, the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be favored. Seeing is believing, folks.

Likewise, I couldn't talk about these two forms of skepticism without addressing the most common argument: that OBEs are just lucid dreams. So I added something about that too. Then I hacked it back to 700 words.

I proudly gave a copy of the rewrite to Kathy to critique. She said that it was too negative. She was right; it was. It was too focused on the detractors and why I think they're wrong. An introduction should draw the reader in, talk about the positive, and where OBEs can take us. This is not about the skeptics and naysayers. This is about OBEs and what to expect. And so I scraped that version too.

So last night I finished my third complete rewrite of the introduction, and this one is much better than any of its predecessors. I shipped it off to my publisher this morning before work. It's a good thing I have Kathy to give me perspective! Like Deep Purple's "Woman from Tokyo" she makes me see.

2012 November 28