Not A Blog™

[This turned out to run a lot longer than I expected. I thought I could sum it up in a few hundred words. I should know better. At the risk of frustrating everyone over the cliff-hangers involved, I’m splitting this into a few posts. It looks like it’ll run for the entirety of this week: two posts describing background and the event itself, and a third on the bigger picture and my personal thoughts behind it all.]

Today’s entry could be considered something of an antithesis to Faitheist. It is another side to that subject—a side which I’ve mentioned here before, but never gave time. It may seem like something that directly contradicts what I wrote before. Ultimately, I think it comes down to whether you believe that it’s an actual happening, or if it’s just all in your head. Naturally I’m talking about out of body experiences.

A quick disclaimer for the very rational minded and skeptical among us (myself included): I would like to clarify that these experiences actually happened to me. Because I am so rational minded is part of the reason why I endeavored to undertake the experiment in the first place. However, whether OBEs are real or all a fancy virtual-reality in the brain is not something I’m discussing in this particular post. To the best of my recollection, this is how I perceived things, but for simplicity of discussion, I’m telling it as if it had real existence. Saying “I felt as if I were out of my body and I perceived that I did this other stuff” gets cumbersome, so I say I was out of my body, although this my not technically be correct. Additionally, I’m not going to ask anyone to approach this with an “open mind” or other such justification in the face of unusual circumstances. I don’t care whether or not you believe me.

There are varying opinions about discussing these sorts of things. Many spiritual gurus and the like will insist that the experience not be discussed, lest the act of attempting to verbalize the episode tarnish its memory. On the other hand, I think there’s a bit too much mystical double-talk and not enough straightforward, open discussion on the topic. Then again—at the risk of immediately sounding like one of these mystical double-talkers—it is extremely difficult to put some of these things into words. Regardless, I’ve been asked numerous times to elaborate on my own personal experiences, and I do feel this is important for some reason I’m not entirely clear on. So in addition to my philosophical examination of what this should mean for me, I’ll tell the story of my first OBE in as clear a manner as I’m able.

Not only is the OBE itself unusual, but the story starts kind of weird, too. (It’s less strange to me now, for reasons I won’t elaborate on at the moment, but it’s still unusual.) On the morning of Wednesday, December 13, 2000, I woke up from my typically dreamless sleep. (Side note: I dream very infrequently. Or more correctly, I remember my dreams very infrequently. At the time of this OBE, I hadn’t dreamt for about eight years.) Immediately—before even getting out of bed—I had an almost uncontrollable desire to learn everything I possibly could about OBE’s right then. I couldn’t think about anything else all day at school, and I kept scouring my memory for any stray bit of information I may have picked up on the subject, which wasn’t much.

After I got home, I spent the next few hours on the internet reading everything I could about the phenomena. There were a lot of different techniques suggested to do things like “increase etheric energy flow” and “open chakras”, but the main idea seemed to be: meditate as deep and often as you can. Simple enough.

Fortuitously for this experiment, Christmas break was right around the corner, lasting for about two weeks, until January 2. I threw myself into the routine, spending a great deal of free time in meditation. I disregarded a lot of the advice, including all the people who said to never meditate while laying on your back. Being in a busy, crowded house, the only place of solitude I really had was my room (which I still shared with my brother at the time, so it wasn’t even that solitary), so I meditated exclusively laying on my back, on my bed. Since then I’ve discovered that I have a very hard time meditating in any other position. Yes, I have a tendency to fall asleep when I’m tired, but I’m better able to concentrate. Go with what works, I guess.

I tried a few of the suggested “raise your energy” techniques, but I’m not sure they were really necessary. Mostly it’s a matter of being quiet and getting a grip on your mind—which in my case is harder than it sounds. I’m always going off to think about random subjects like whether or not it makes sense to use cows as currency when a given population is not a stable number.

Well, Christmas vacation came and went and no OBE. Of course at this point I only had two weeks in, so while I wasn’t really expecting any results in this time frame, I was a little disappointed. I mean, how cool would that be if it were real? It would be like the closest thing I can think of to a real-life superpower! But, no. School started again, at which point I found that I had zero time to meditate because by the time I got home at the end of the day, I was utterly exhausted, and usually crashed, doing nothing that required a concentrated mental effort, least of all meditation.

I was trying to figure out how to work an ongoing meditation plan back into my absurdly hectic high-school schedule, without which I figured I’d never be successful. I never quite got around to meditating again in the next few days, which may very well have been what I needed. It’s that famous cliche about giving up before finding success, but in this case, that’s actually what happened. On Friday, January 5, 2001 at 7:29AM I had my first out of body experience.

As I mentioned, my brother and I shared our room. We slept in a bunk bed, with me on the bottom since I’m deathly afraid of heights and was absolutely convinced that if I were on top, I would roll out of the bed somehow, guardrails not withstanding. I was supposed to get up at 7:30, but being a senior, I drove myself to school, meaning I could fudge the morning time schedule a bit. I was woken up by my brother getting ready. I searched out the clock on the bookshelf: 7:29. I closed my eyes again and feigned sleep, and heard my brother leave the room.

But then a curious thing happened. Rather than laying around, irritable that I was awake and unable to fall back asleep, my body slumped into an ultra-relaxed state. It’s not something I’ve ever felt other than just prior to an OBE. (Although I’ve felt it before failed OBEs. It’s an indicator that I’m close, anyway.) Imagine being as relaxed as you can possibly be, all muscles loose and so comfortable that you don’t even want to bother trying to move them. It’s about ten times more relaxed than that.

At this point, I’m feeling perfectly relaxed, except for my heart, which is racing and pounding blood through my ears. This was exactly what a lot of folks had said would happen—and it’s also where most people screw up, evidently. It’s easy to get fixated on your excitement-fueled heart beating it’s way to a new world record, whereupon you disturb the precious ultra-relaxation state and find yourself just laying on your bed like a schmuck. So I’m laying there, mentally chanting, don’t lose it don’t lose it don’t lose it don’t lose it… and completely failing at managing to control my heart at all.

I decided that if I can’t get my excitement under control, I’ll at least ignore it and move on to the next step. Having gotten to the point of ultra-relaxation, I remembered clearly what the next step was. It was simple: leave your body.

The problem with most OBE instructions is that you can’t actually tell anyone how to do this. You can give people all sorts of metaphors and mental tricks and crutches, but when you get right down to it, eventually just you have to figure this part out yourself. All the instructions have a line in there somewhere which is nothing more than “and then you leave your body!” And this helps no one. It’s like trying to explain how to eat. You take the food, and bite a chunk off with your teeth, and then you mash it around for a while, using all your other teeth—and make sure to keep your tongue out of the way—and then you swallow. Oh, but how do you swallow? Well, I don’t know. You just do.

How do you leave your body? I couldn’t tell you. You just do it. It comes down to the wire and you have to take that metaphorical step, and then you do it.

The first time I tried it, I screwed it up. There is one thing that’s a little disorienting. And here is where we get into the mystical double-talk that I wanted to avoid, but I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible. When you do this, there’s not any particular distinction between thought and doing. In the real world, you can sit there and think about moving your hand, but it doesn’t actually move until you move it, which is a rather different process. Well, when you’re out of body, you have to be careful not to imagine something wacky, because either it’ll happen, or there’ll be some other unintended consequence to the thought-action, and that’s just really inconvenient and annoying. In all seriousness, it requires a huge mental effort to stay on task, because there’s no brain-body barrier preventing you from doing something stupid. (So it’s probably good you have to do all that meditation to get there in the first place, come to think about it.)

Anyway, I imagined myself laying the opposite direction on the bed, at which point I found my head at my feet, and vice versa. This brought me right to the edge of losing everything, because when you’re out of alignment like that, it’s, well—it’s weird. My mental center of activity was right below the bottoms of my feet, even though I was hearing people downstairs through my ears, which were still at the other end of the bed.

Remembering that thought equals action, I imagined myself head-side-right and immediately popped back to how I had been before. Amazingly, I was still in the ultra-relaxed state, and ready to try again. I think I was very lucky that I got a second shot. My mind had already been completely blown by laying backwards in my body, so at least I was prepared for further mind-blowing, and I was less nervous the second time around. This time I imagined myself sitting up and getting out of bed.

The actual moment of leaving one’s body has been described in many different ways. For me, it felt like pulling up through a giant wad of rubbery, stretchy substance, which snapped and popped as I got further away. I think this rubbery-ness is pretty common, from what I’ve read. It was accompanied by a few electric pops, like Van de Graff generators discharging. I “sat” up in a sort of board-like position, that is: I remained in the position I was laying as I pivoted up. It’s not really a movement you can do in real life. Then I realized I was half-free, and bent at the waist and made a non-euclidian twist (seriously—I don’t know how else to describe it) around the bunk bed in some sort of a parody of how I normally get out of bed without bumping my head, and then I was up and beside the bed.

The first thought I had outside my body was, Holy shit! It worked!

[Continued on Wednesday]