Sneaking Past the Gatekeeper

Sneaking Past the Gatekeeper

by Bob Peterson

Many times as people fall asleep, something goes wrong and they are startled awake. As they start exploring the edges of consciousness, they learn to pay more attention to the process of falling asleep and it happens more often. Then they wonder, "Is this related to out-of-body experiences? And if so, can I use it to achieve OBEs?" The answer to both questions is yes, but it's hard to explain.

To explain what's happening, you must first have a basic understanding of what happens when you fall asleep. Almost all OBE authors agree that we leave our bodies every night, but we are almost always unconscious and completely unaware of what's happening. As you gain skill in out-of-body exploration, you learn to retain consciousness for longer and longer periods of time, and thus, you learn to witness the process of falling asleep. So this is not conjecture; this is all based on my firsthand observations.

First, you sink into a more relaxed state of mind, and your mind begins to wander. For most people, your consciousness slips away pretty quickly and that's the end of the information. If you retain consciousness beyond that, you start to see hypnagogic images: random images pop into your mind. For example, you might see a river, then a toaster. The hypnagogic hallucinations are not just visual: You will often hear random voices saying random things; not coherent sentences, but bits and pieces. For example, you might hear a man's voice say "...was at the corner when I saw for the first time..." and that's it. Then you might hear a woman's voice say "...was twelve years old when Missy first walked to the..." and so forth. Just random sentence fragments, along with random visual images. This is called the hypnagogic state of sleep.

Normally, as you drift into unconsciousness, your "subconscious" (for lack of better words) assumes more and more control. This is the "Gatekeeper" I'm talking about. Perhaps it's more correct to call it your "Higher Self", but I tend to think of my Higher Self as something that extends well beyond the subconscious. I call it the Gatekeeper because your subconscious is responsible for taking you out-of-body every night during sleep, and it has several defense mechanisms to prevent your consciousness from spilling over. One of its primary responsibilities is to make sure none of your conscious awareness gets through to "the other side." I'm not talking about a subtle, mindless robotic self as most people like to think about the subconscious. In my experience, this other self is highly intelligent, highly aware and highly complex. It is another part of you, but it has its own goals, motivations and will.

As you approach the hypnagogic state, you have three choices to induce an out-of-body experience (1) Hold onto a visualization while drifting down into the hypnagogic state, (2) Allow yourself to drift down into sleep naturally, then control and manipulate a naturally occurring hypnagogic image. (3) Sneak past the gatekeeper. The three methods range in level of difficulty and they all have their advantages and disadvantages. The advantage of #1 is that it's easier to retain awareness and not succumb to sleep, but the disadvantage is that it's hard to visualize with enough detail. The advantage of #2 is that it's easy: you don't have to do any complex visualization. It takes advantage of your own natural hypnagogic images, but the disadvantage is that it takes discipline to remain alert all the way down to the hypnagogic state. The advantage of #3 is that it doesn't involve any kind of complex manipulation of images like #1 and #2, but the disadvantage is that it's more difficult than the other two.

Here are more details:

Choice 1: The object here is to never give your subconscious the chance to take control. Before you're in the hypnagogic state, you visualize a small object. The example I gave in my first book is to visualize a cube, but it can be any small object. Then you can start spinning the object to stabilize it (a visualization tends to disappear unless you keep it moving). Next, start swinging the object back and forth, and imagine a kind of gravity between you and the object. Finally, you mentally grab onto the object and let the momentum of its swinging motion pull you out of body. You do all this as you inch ever closer to sleep, while at the same time, you narrow your consciousness down into a tiny pinpoint of awareness.

This method is medium difficulty for several reasons. First, because some people aren't good at visualization. Second, it's difficult to actively use your imagination this way while remaining passive. Third, your visualization may directly compete with your own natural hypnagogic images. The details of this method are in chapter 24 of my first book, Out of Body Experiences: How to have them and what to expect, so it's beyond the scope of this article. (No, I'm not trying to sell you a book: it's available for free on my website, http://www.robertpeterson.org). This method works best for people who can't seem to go deep enough to actually see hypnagogic images.

Choice 2: you can wait for a suitable hypnagogic image to appear, then take take control of it. This is easier than choice 1, but you must have patience. It's difficult to take control of some images: a landscape, a mountain, a face, or even a train, for example. But it's easy to take control of an ordinary object like a bicycle, a coffee cup or a pencil. Like choice 1 above, once a suitable object appears in front of you, focus on it and start making it spin. Then start swinging it back and forth. Same thing as before. The difference here is that you're letting your subconscious have a bit more control during the process, but you have to train yourself to remain alert.

Choice 3: This is where things get interesting. This is what I call "sneaking past the gatekeeper" and it's not easy at all. Basically what you do is simply keep your mind completely still. Just watch what happens. Make your awareness so quiet and so small that it seems almost nonexistent. You can watch the hypnagogic images, but don't get wrapped up in them. If you do, you'll be pulled unconscious and start dreaming.

In a normal night, what happens next is this that your subconscious (Higher Self, Gatekeeper) waits patiently for you to lose all conscious awareness. Within a few (five?) seconds of losing consciousness, it propels you out of your body. Many times, this feels as if the floor dropped out from under you, and you feel like you're falling as much as six feet (two meters) down. Despite the sensation of falling, you're really being pushed upward out of your body. Then your subconscious starts "recharging" your energy while you float quietly above your body, unconscious.


(As a side note: People with little energy usually float above their body and recharge for long periods of time. People with a lot of energy don't need to recharge as much; their subconscious often takes them far away from their physical body and they do astral work, like healing or spirit rescues, all while the person is unconscious and unaware.)

So the trick to this OBE method is to make your awareness so tiny and insignificant that you fool your subconscious into thinking you are "out cold". When your subconscious detects no activity from your conscious mind, it does its normal routine: it pulls you out-of-body. Once that process is complete, you can literally wrestle conscious control away from it and voila: you're having an out-of-body experience. You return your consciousness back to its normal condition, and go about having a fully conscious OBE.

But beware: If you try to wrestle control too soon, your subconscious will abort the OBE. Bewildered, it will think, "WTF? How did he (your conscious awareness) get through?" and WHAM! you get slammed back in your body.

The trick is to not get drawn into the fantasy of the hypnagogic images that appear, and to keep your conscious mind so quiet that it fools your subconscious into thinking you're unaware.

What happens if you wait too long before wrestling control? You can consciously watch the creation of a dream. I've personally watched this happen, so again, I'm speaking from experience. As you watch, you can see the background being created, the characters being placed into the scene. Then they're made three-dimensional, given artificial personalities, and everything. Then your own body-image enters the dream-hallucination, which then seems to come to life. And voila: You're dreaming.

Now, this whole falling-asleep process can "go wrong" at several stages, and with different results. People often get slammed back into their bodies during the falling sensation, and that's all they remember.

Sometimes, you'll see an ugly or startling face appear and scare the hell out of you, and again, you'll get slammed back into your body. I've never been able to figure out if these are mischievous "spirits" or just an artifact of my own subconscious, but they're scary nonetheless. Don't let this discourage you. Regardless, your subconscious aborts the OBE and brings you back to full consciousness with no harm done.

If you have trouble visualizing, you may want to try this method. As in all OBE practice, you must have a lot of patience. It took me a very long time to be able to extend my conscious awareness that far into the dream cycle. Just try to go a little farther each night until you get the knack of it.


2013 Mar 03

Mirth

Mirth

 by Robert Peterson

Last night Kathy and I went to the Phoenix Exploration of Consciousness meetup.com group for the third time. This is a great group of people. For the first hour, they just eat and socialize. After that, they do a group meditation, and often it's with binaural beat technology, typically the Monroe Institute's hemi-sync technology. The goal is to induce Monroe's "focus level" experiences.

I've never had much luck with the hemi-sync courses, and I've never taken a class at the Monroe Institute. It's probably because focus level experiences have never been my primary goal in meditation, which has always been out-of-body experiences. Typically, the instructor or guide's voice does more to interrupt my journey than to guide me there. Nonetheless, I've been using the meetup as a chance to do some meditation and connect with friends.

The group meets at 7:00pm, socializes and snacks for about an hour, then everybody plugs their headphones into splitters and FM receivers, and goes through the hemi-sync meditation.

Last night I did not have an OBE, but I did get some interesting results. I was meditating, eyes closed, staring into the blackness in front of me. I was trying my best to ignore the voice on the recording, and do my own thing. I had visualized a vertical slit in the fabric of the blackness. It was kind of like a one-dimensional doorway, and I was trying to narrow my consciousness to the point where I could fit through that narrow slit-doorway.

Unexpectedly, the doorway started to bend so that it was no longer a straight line. It bent into a semicircle. I wasn't consciously manipulating it, so it surprised me. Then the slit, now a semicircle, formed the outside profile of an eyeball. Slowly, my visualization panned back and I could see more of the eye. At the same time, it rotated so it was looking right at me. Somehow, it seemed alive.

They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. As I looked at the eye, it seemed without gender; like a young child's eye. I saw so many things in that one eye: innocence, joy, laughter, boundless energy, playfulness, unconditional love. The best word I could come up with was: mirth. In this child's eye I saw unbridled bubbly mirth. But who was the owner? What child was this, and why was I seeing it now during my meditation?

To answer those questions, I wanted to see more of the child's face. I wanted to pan out to see more. As I backed up, I started to see a mischievous smile. Then I had an intuitive understanding: I was not seeing a child. I was seeing God! Or maybe a representation of God.

The realization hit me: I could never see all of God from this human form because God encompasses all of creation. I could only see as much as God cared to reveal to me.

Then I also realized: God has all this unconditional love, all this boundless energy, all this mirth. We all exist in the eye of God, and God has nothing but love for us. There is no angry, vengeful, judging Old Man with a long white beard. The seriousness and heaviness is all in the eyes of mankind. It's all child's play.

21 Feb 2013

Spiritual But Not Religious 

by Robert Peterson

Okay, I know this blog article may offend some people, especially religious people. If you're defensive about your religion, stop reading right now. 

On Monday, a facebook friend posted a photo of an iceberg. Above the surface, the iceberg showed one word: love. Below the surface were many words with negative connotations: Hate, greed, bigotry, misogyny, submission, homophobia, anachronism, indoctrination, child abuse, repression, genocide, slavery, murder, racism, fear, and lies. 

The photo didn't bother me. I interpret it this way: Many of the "religious right" purport to love everyone on the surface, but beneath the surface they harbour many of those negative traits. Jesus taught us to love. In fact, love is integral to the only two commandments he gave us: (1) love God with all your heart, all your soul and all your mind, and (2) love your neighbour as yourself (Matthew 22:37). Yet many so-called Christians are more focused on discriminating against gay people or other groups than they are focused on God. But that's not what this article is about.

The facebook friend I mentioned obviously interpreted the photo differently because what he posted with the photo was:

Why there's a growing population of "spiritual but not religious" group.

And that really bothered me.

If I understand him correctly, he's saying that the group "spiritual but not religious" is growing because they have love on the surface but all these negative things on the inside? Boy, did he ever get it wrong.

Fighting the urge to speak my mind, and trying my hardest not to start a religious name-calling fistfight, I posted a simple reply to his statement:

No, it's because people are starting to see the truth and the truth doesn't fit the old religious paradigms.

Today, people in general are more scientific. As much as they are mostly still in the dark regarding religious topics, they at least have a better understanding of basic science, physics and anatomy. Science had trained them to look at things analytically, and some are starting to look at their religion with the same critical eye. And what they're seeing often doesn't jibe with what religious authorities are teaching. As much as they're told to "have faith", many don't accept religious stories blindly anymore. Nowadays you question when your thirteen-year-old daughter turns up pregnant and claims she wasn't having sex. You're skeptical when she gives you some wild story about an angel named Gabriel who allegedly said she's been selected by God to give birth to a special boy whose name means God Is With Us. You question that "miracle" a little bit more than you did two thousand years ago and wonder if it's covering up a deeper truth.

When the scientific method is applied to religion, you start to see through the misinformation. You can either ignore the evidence and desperately cling to the belief that people were better observers two thousands of years ago, or take a closer look. When you find a discrepancy, your choices are to lose faith, white-wash the data to fit your beliefs (as so many scientists today do), or to do your own homework. Sadly, out of laziness, most people take the first option, leaving us with a Godless society. But the evidence of God, the afterlife and a spiritual realm are abundant if you look for them.

It's only in the last 300 years or so that people have been free to share their own theories and observations, whether spiritual or scientific. Before that, you'd typically be excommunicated, condemned as a heretic, burned as a witch or otherwise tortured and executed (unless everything you said about your experiences perfectly matched the religious dogma of the dominant religion, in which case they made you a saint).

Case in point, Giodano Bruno, who was burned at the stake for insisting on something we now know is scientific fact: that the Earth travels around the sun. Better known Galileo Galilei said the same thing, and was also condemned as a heretic, forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Organized religion has done more to quash scientific discovery than any other force on the planet, but tragically, it's done even more to quash religious discovery. It's systematically destroyed anyone who dares to share what they've learned through their own personal experiences and communion with God.

Isn't it ironic, then, that all the world's great religions were born from the religious observations--based on personal experiences--of people who contradicted their culture's prevalent religion? Great religious leaders like Jesus Christ, Moses, Mohammad, Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, Zoroaster, Patanjali and the like, all followed the same pattern. They all meditated. They all communed with God. They all had religious experiences. They all went through the door and saw the other side. They all fought the religious paradigms of their culture and were brave enough to tell people what they saw. Some, like Jesus Christ, got killed for it.

After their deaths, their disciples took over. Full of good intentions, they spread the word. Not the original, but a twisted version of their master's words, morphed into self-serving political organizations. Without going through the door themselves, they tried to interpret the light coming through the keyhole, and make definitive statements about what is on the other side. Without that direct communion with God, they were lost trying to put physical interpretations on nonphysical events. And in most cases, they failed miserably. So they focused on herding their sheep rather than on God.

We all know why organized religions suppress the religious experiences of their followers: because at the core, they're political organizations. Maintaining power, control and self-preservation are more important to them than "the truth." But you know what? The truth has a way of getting out, despite their best efforts to hide it or keep it for themselves.

As technology advances, religious experiences are becoming more commonplace. Modern medicine has saved thousands from the brink of death, and these survivors have incredible stories to tell about what they saw in their Near-Death Experiences. And their observations don't fit the old religious paradigms.

At the same time, more people today are meditating, going within, becoming self-aware, learning to induce out-of-body and other mystical experiences. They're learning new techniques and sharing what they find. More importantly: they're developing their own personal relationship with God.

What they're finding is that their relationship with God and Spirit have very little to do with the religious organizations: the churches, synagogues, mosques and temples, and the people who control them. I believe God is within everyone's grasp and you don't need organized religions to show you the way. The information is out there. Maybe too much, in fact. Information--both good and bad--is available at our fingertips on our cell phones, tablets and computers through the Internet.

A hundred years ago, you never questioned your doctor. Today it's absolutely essential. People need to take personal responsibility for their health and question everything, not because health care is getting worse, but because the information--and misinformation--is getting out of control. 

It's the same way with priests, rabbis, imams and gurus: people must take personal responsibility for their spirituality, their religion and their relationship with God. They need to start questioning time-honoured religious traditions. If for no other reason, because knowledge trumps faith.

To aid them on their journey, the technology is also improving. Now, ordinary people--not just the religious fanatics--are employing Ganzfeld setups, mind machines, flotation tanks, infra-liminal technology, biofeedback, neurofeedback, and hemi-sync to explore the outer reaches of the mind. And what they're finding isn't much like what you find in the pages of the Bible, Talmud, Koran, Avesta or Bhagavad Gita.

That is why more people are becoming "spiritual but not religious."

There's nothing "supernatural" in this life. Nothing is defying the laws of physics. Any theories about reality must make room for everything we experience, both religious and scientific. A science that denies religious observations is just as absurd as a religion that denies the observations of science. Experience is experience and truth is truth.

I like to think that eventually, science and spirituality will meet in the middle. I hope that through direct observations like out-of-body experiences, they will both arrive at a unified view of reality that includes God and spirit as well as physics and biology.

I like to think that one day, we can all directly experience God and see things as Jesus and the others did. And I look forward to that day.

08 Feb 2013

 

What's In A Name?

What's In A Name?

By Robert Peterson

Does having the name Robert increase your ability to have out-of-body experiences? For some reason, many of the people associated with out-of-body experiences have the name Robert. Some have speculated (in jest) that it's because "Robert" actually contains the letters OBE: R-OBE-rt.

Robert Monroe is probably the most famous OBE expert of the 20th century. He founded the Monroe Institute and wrote three books on the subject: Journeys Out of the Body, Far Journeys and Ultimate Journey.

Robert Crookall studied OBEs for many years and wrote many books on the subject, including The Study and Practice of Astral Projection and Out of Body Experiences: A Fourth Analysis.

Let's not forget our favorite Aussie, Robert Bruce, who wrote Astral Dynamics and Mastering Astral Projection.

Robert ("Bob") Moser wrote a book called Mental and Astral Projection.

Robert Cornelius has an OBE book Astral Projection: Break Free in 16 Different Ways.

Then there are my (Robert Peterson's) books, Out of Body Experiences: How to have them and what to expect and Lessons Out of the Body.

Robert Bushman compiled a comprehensive OBE bibliography at http://obebibliography.info/

And let's not forget Robert Moss, author of books on lucid dreaming and shared dreaming like Dreamgates and Conscious Dreaming.


Okay, there are lots of OBE books out there. I own more than 150, and that's just books on out-of-body experiences. It doesn't include the many books I own on peripheral topics like Near-Death Experiences (NDEs), Lucid Dreaming. That's just OBEs. So yes, there are plenty of famous OBE authors who aren't named Robert: William Buhlman, Fred Aardema, Albert Taylor, Graham Nichols, Sylvan Muldoon, Oliver Fox (Hugh Calloway), Ophiel (Marcel L Forhan), Joe Slate and many many more.

I suspect it's all just a coincidence. But then again, many of us believe there are no such thing as coincidences.

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