The great thing about out of body experiences is that ANYONE can learn and see it with their own eyes. Let’s start at ground zero:

What is an Out of Body Experience?

An out of body experience (OBE) is when you perceive your consciousness outside of your body. The basic outline is that you lay down, meditate or trance out, and at some point you start to float outside your body. Sometimes this feels so real that you’re not even sure if you’ve left your body. There have been times when I’ve fallen out of my body, and thought I actually fell out of my bed physically! Only to “wake up” back in my bed, slightly confused :-).

It’s hard to wrap our minds around what an OBE actually is. If you read about OBEs, then you might draw the simple idea that it’s like being a ghost, floating around going through things. This idea could be true to some extent, but you’ll be very disappointed if you think you can just get up and do whatever you want once you leave your body. Once you leave your body, motion, sight, logic, memory, and other basic functions need to be re-learned. I’ve been having OBEs for 8 years and I still can’t move around freely every time.

Other people might argue that OBEs are a form of hallucination or dream. After all - a lot of OBE techniques focus on going to sleep and messing around with altered states of consciousness. It seems like a logical explanation on the surface. However, just like the ghost explanation, it’s an oversimplification. It’s true that during an OBE you will probably experience hallucinations of some sort… there have been OBEs where I perceived my environment completely wrong. Garages in the wrong location, outdoor decks that don’t exist, paint cans that don’t exist, etc. But there are also experiences where I’ve perceived things accurately that I couldn’t have known otherwise - in my favorite experience, I saw a black plastic washer on the ground. Upon waking up, I realized it was really a black guitar pick that I had dropped.

Another piece of evidence that OBEs are real to some extent is that during my 8 years, I’ve always experienced the OBE in the same location as my physical body (except maybe once). You can’t say that about dreams. Nearly all dreams are in foreign locations, like schools, malls, fields, etc.

My point is that OBEs are weird :-). I hate when people try to simplify it without having personal experience or doing any research. It’s like being a ghost, but it’s not that simple. Some parts seem like hallucinations, but it’s not that simple. So whatever your opinion is, please be aware that this is not an easy thing to explain, and if you find yourself simplifying it in your mind, the most likely reason for that is that you haven’t researched it enough, and/or you’ve never had one.

Strong Desire Method

There are an unlimited number of techniques to achieve an OBE. There isn’t one set way to do it. Here is one method that I’ve had success with:

Have a burning desire and unhealthy obsession with wanting to leave your body. Want it more than you’ve ever wanted anything else in the world. If you can achieve that level of emotion, then you’ll have one.

Now why does this work? Perhaps you want it so much that you brainwash yourself into having one?! That’s not good! Well, relax for a second :-). I’ll explain why this works, and then maybe you can understand the sort of “desire” I’m talking about. I’m not talking about the “self-delusion desire”. I’m talking about the “every level of being desire”.

The reason this method works is because the gateway to an OBE is in an altered state of consciousness. When you’re in an altered state of consciousness, you think differently. You make different decisions. Logic functions differently. Memory functions differently. Emotion is different.

Everyone has experienced this. Has your alarm clock ever woken you up? You hit the snooze, laying in bed. The night before you decided to wake up at 6am to go for an early run, but now that you’re in your comfy warm bed, that logic simply doesn’t make any sense. Who cares about exercising? Screw that. More sleep.

When you were awake and alert the night before, you made a simple decision: get up early and exercise. Makes sense to me. But when you were in a groggy state of mind, a different part of yourself made the decision to stay in bed. If you think back to the exact moment you made your groggy decision, you can see how your mind functioned very differently.

The burning desire is necessary to overcome this. If every fiber of your being wants to have an OBE, then when you get into an altered state of consciousness, that altered decision making process will still want an OBE. This is extremely important. There are states of mind where it’s almost a completely subconscious decision. If you really want to have an OBE that’s great. But if your subconscious fears or desires are screaming “No way!”, then when you hit that altered state of consciousness, you will resist having an OBE.

To understand this method, simply understand that when you’re in an altered state of consciousness, you make different decisions. It’s that simple. As another example… have you ever had a weird dream? Of course! One of my dreams today consisted of me making sure no one contaminated the ingredients to a juice maker. Some guy was being a jerk and messing around with the equipment, and it was my job to get him out of there, so the juice would be free from contamination. Now that I’m awake, I see how silly the entire situation is. But at the time, I was in an altered state of consciousness, and my decision making process was completely different. My memory was different. My emotion was different.

Had I had a burning desire to leave my body, then even the part of myself that felt it was necessary to guard a juice maker would have wanted to leave.

In Conclusion…

OBEs are weird. We might be tempted to explain them using simple ideas, but we should remind ourselves that reality isn’t as simple as our beliefs would like reality to be. Research and personal experience can keep us rooted in reality.

One method to leave our body is to have a strong desire on every level of our being. The reason this works is because we need to make the decision to leave our body while in an altered state of consciousness. We’ve already seen in our past experiences how an altered state of consciousness usually makes strange decisions. Having a burning desire to leave our body will ensure that even our altered decision making will point us in the correct direction.

Thanks for reading!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 1:24 pm and is filed under How-To, Dream Phenomenon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.