Out of body experiences are often romaticised in New Age literature. Yet the truth is that there are numerous kinds of OBEs, and some of them are more harmful than good. In today’s post I recount a few of my own OBE’s including a rather interesting experience where I was pulled out of my body and operated on by a team of “psychic surgeons”.
As I reported in my book Sage of Synchronicity, when I first began to get into meditation and explore other ways of knowing in the 1990s, I began to have a lot of out-of-body experiences. It seemed that every time I went sleep, or had an afternoon nap, I would go flying off. For me, the OBEs began with a whooshing type sound, and I would feel my energy moving out of my body in fast and furious fashion. These were primarily kinesthetic experiences, characterised by the physical sensation of movement. I didn’t see myself floating above my body, as in some near-death experiences.
There were often visual aspects to my OBEs, though. Since the physical eyes are not used during these times, the mind will often construct an image of what is “seen”. I eventually realised that I could not take what I “saw” during OBEs on face value.
Often there was no visual component at all, just the sense of flying through blackness. I suspect that my consciousness had dislocated from the body, and was moving through a “nearby” astral plane.
There were times, though, when I saw quite clearly where I was, though it was not always somewhere I recognised. One time I left my body and found myself flying over power lines above a road, dipping up and down with the rise and fall of the lines. It was like riding a roller coaster ride. Later I read Robert Monroe’s Journeys out of the Body, and noted that during his self-directed OBEs he was sometimes attracted to electricity. I’m not quite sure why this is, but I do know that electrical fields greatly affect consciousness fields., and often not in a positive ways (hint, never sit a laptop computer on your lap – one of the worst things you can do to your energy field). More about that in later post.
Another time, when I was having a drama (read “conflict”) with a friend of mine, I found myself flying out of my body, and descending into his bedroom, where I grabbed him by the neck, and started strangling him.
