My OBE Quest – Page 3

I was still in college when I started attending meditation classes at the Berkeley Psychic Institute of Sacramento. The Institute’s meditation techniques focused on working with personal energy, essentially letting go of energy that was not your own, while calling back your energy from all the places where you left it. This process was thought to promote healing.

I had some amazing experiences using the techniques I learned at the Institute. It was a primer for using New Energy Ways and developing the 90-day OBE program years later.

After getting married and moving to Seattle, I learned that the Monroe Institute was now offering their Gateway Voyage program in audio cassette form. At last, having a consciously directed out-of-body experience seemed within easy reach.

I still remember the anticipation of ordering those tapes and the waiting time before they arrived. I made a long list of all the things I wanted to do once I learned OBE. I had questions and I wanted answers.

The Monroe cassette tape program was called the Gateway Experience. There were six albums in all, each called a “Wave” (e.g., Wave I, Wave II, etc.); each “Wave” included six tapes.

My first session took place one hot summer night. As I listened to the first tape and the sound used to synchronize the hemispheres of my brain, something did begin to happen. I felt tremendous pressure in the muscles of my arms and legs, as if I had worked them really hard and was now very sore.

This happened the first few sessions and a couple of times it was so uncomfortable that I had to end practice prematurely. I would later learn the pressure I was feeling was a result of energy blockages. The Gateway Experience was somehow stimulating my energy body into activity.

Again, I had some interesting experiences, but not an OBE. With a little research, I learned that the goal of the Gateway Experience was to explore your inner consciousness. A noble, worthy, and valuable goal in itself, but I still yearned to have a consciously directed out-of-body experience.

With knowledge of the technology behind the Gateway Experience, I stumbled upon the BrainWave Generator a few years later, a Windows program that does essentially the same thing as the Gateway Experience. I had some amazing adventures using the BrainWave Generator, but nothing precisely like those accounts I’d read of OBEs.

Every few years thereafter I would make another “run” at the Gateway Experience tapes. I was preparing to do just that in the spring of 2000. Browsing in a nearby bookstore for a book about the Monroe Institute, I spotted Astral Dynamics by Robert Bruce. I hefted the heavy volume, mentally put it on my list of books to buy, and went about browsing.

I found the book I wanted and was on my way to pay for it when my hand shot out, as if it had a will of its own, and grabbed Astral Dynamics off the shelf. Apparently, I was supposed to read that book.

In the days that followed Astral Dynamics was my constant companion. I poured over it every chance I got. I was only halfway through when I read about one of Robert’s advanced OBE exit techniques. Excited to give it a go, I lay down and tried the Rope Technique without even relaxing or clearing my mind.

My body instantly seemed to turn to liquid. Waves of energy bounced up and down, from my head to my feet and past the borders of my physical body. The core of my being buzzed and hummed and vibrated. My head felt three sizes too big.

After all those years of trying to project, I suddenly found myself instinctively holding on, using all my will to make it stop. I was completely unprepared for it. Okay, I’ll say it. It scared the crap out of me. After all those countless hours of practicing OBE, how could I be going out of body within seconds of casually playing with one of Robert Bruce’s techniques? If this is what could happen when I was just playing around, just think what could happen if I made a serious effort?

A week later I was making the first of what would be many revisions to my 90-day OBE program. I emailed it to Robert Bruce, author of Astral Dynamics, and the end result is Mastering Astral Projection: 90-day Guide to Out-of-body Experience, a book Robert and I collaborated on from cover to cover.

Using myself as guinea pig, me–a person with no apparent natural talent for OBE–I worked and reworked a practical system for implementing the techniques in Astral Dynamics. I also integrated other techniques in the program that I’d found helpful, as well as methods I used for overcoming fears and personal roadblocks. The results of many of my successes are documented in Mastering Astral Projection.

I worked hard on the chapter material associated with the 90-day program. I wanted to be very explicit, spelling out the basics so that others wouldn’t make the early mistakes I had made. It was also gratifying to offer a special version of the BrainWave Generator with the book, the sound files of which are downloadable for free on this website, so that one didn’t have to spend a fortune to get the benefit of this very powerful technology.

OBE is not the end-all, be-all for spiritual development. It is merely one path to something greater. There are others. But I think that it is an important one and feel extremely fortunate to be able to help make OBE reachable for others who possess the inner drive to explore.

Page 1, 2, 3