Religious OBE Experiments

 by Bob Peterson

 

Many of my readers may wonder: Why don't I share more of my OBEs in my blog? There are several reasons:

• Many of my OBEs are just plain uninteresting. The OBE literature is chock full of authors with much more interesting experiences than mine. A book like Jurgen Ziewe's Multidimensional Man is enough to make me think my OBEs are mostly rubbish.
  
• I shared several of my more interesting OBEs in my first two books.
• I'm saving up my more recent the OBE narratives for another book, which is still a long time away.
  
• Many of my OBEs, especially more recent ones, are deeply personal and I'm not sure I'm ready to share them.
• Even now after 40 years I still feel like some of my experiences make me sound a bit loony.
  

Still, I feel like I should start sharing more of them.

 

I believe that most (or all) of mankind's religious beliefs are the result of someone's personal experience of the divine, and out-of-body experiences offer an ideal way to conduct religious experiments.

 

Over the years I've done several "religious experiments" from the out-of-body state. In December, 2015, I detailed one of those experiments in a blog article titled "Meeting Jesus Christ Face To Face." It was largely excerpted from my second book, Lessons Out of the Body, which is out of print and hard to find.

Here, then, is another religious experiment I did back in 1997, most of which appears in the same chapter in Lessons, titled "Chasing God"):

Kathy and I were at her parents' cabin with some friends. In the mid-afternoon, I lay down to attempt an OBE. I induced the trance, but couldn't sit up, even though I was separate from my body. I struggled a while, then came back.

I decided to try again, so without moving my body, I immediately tried to induce an OBE again. My consciousness was pretty clear. I used a relatively new method that involved intensely imagining that my body was swaying back and forth, swiveling my hips, as if I were standing up and shifting my weight from foot to foot repeatedly. The method worked, and within minutes, I was free from my body again. I made a mental note that I should use this in the future as a method of teaching OBEs.

As soon as I got out, I said, “Yes!” and thought about what I wanted to do. Once again, I tried to sit up and was unable to do so. I struggled a while, then came out of it again.

I induced the OBE state again, reached my arms out in front of me and opened my eyes. I couldn't see my arms, so I knew I was out-of-body for sure. This time I decided to try to contact God.

I stood up, this time successfully. I looked up to the heavens and prayed. I said something like, “God, Almighty, Creator of all things, I reach out for you.” As I said that, I reached up toward the sky with my mind. My soul became charged with energy, and I felt my aura expand in rings of energy out from my astral body.

My energy rose, and reached up to the sky higher and higher. Almost at once, a single bolt of energy came shooting down from above and hit me. The force of the energy bolt was so powerful that it knocked my astral body to the ground. It was just raw power; there was no feeling behind it. I lay there stunned for a second, wondering why I didn't encounter something more religious or loving or holy. Then I came back to my body again. I didn’t feel I was being punished at all; it was more like I had touched an energy force too powerful for me to handle.

I had expected to experience "Transcendence," see "The Light," or maybe some other kind of intense religious experience, but all I got on that particular occasion was raw power, as my astral body lay crumpled on the ground. But it was not my last experiment, and it's not the only one I'll share.

One way to tell the difference between an OBE and a lucid dream is that your expectations are often met in a lucid dream but OBEs usually defy your expectations. Religious OBEs especially seem to defy my expectations every time.

 

By the way: My physical body was not affected by the experience.

Bob Peterson
21 September 2021

If you have ideas for blog articles related to astral projection and out-of-body experiences, send me an email: bob@robertpeterson.org.

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