Everyone knows I love a good story, and apocalypse is one of the best.

It seems a preacher is touring around, claiming he is one of the two prophets talked about in Book of Revelation.

For those that don’t know, the Book of Revelation is a Christian prophecy about how the world is going to end. It is extremely hard to read, because it’s very vague and riddled with metaphors. One thing the Book of Revelation does say is that there will be two prophets who do amazing things and spread the word about how awesome God is before Jesus comes back to Earth.

And apparently one of the prophets runs the website, http://the-end.com/.

If you enjoy religious prophecy talking about how awesome God is, and how much humans are going to get bitch-slapped by him, then check out the site.  And to tell you the truth, the author sounds like he actually knows what he’s talking about!

Recently I got into an argument about whether out of body experiences were real or not.  Whenever I get into such an argument, I always force myself to be as scientific and logical as possible.  This usually pisses skeptics off, because they are used to being the scientific guy, and the other person being the religious nut job.

I insisted that scientific evidence - if studied without bias - actually supports the theory that OBEs are real.  The skeptic was quick to jump on that claim.  He stated that OBEs (and their close cousin, near death experiences) were nothing more than a brain going crazy from the chemistry.  He presented me with recent scientific studies and articles as proof:

1. Scientists Induce OBEs in the Lab - A scientist used virtual reality goggles to trick the brain into thinking it was out of body.

2. Extreme Gravity Triggers OBEs/NDEs - A report stating that extreme G-Forces will induce an OBE because of the lack of blood flowing to the brain.

3. People have NDEs While Brain Dead

Seems a little daunting at first - I mean, how could I call myself a scientific guy, when there is scientific evidence that OBEs/NDEs aren’t real?

It turns out it was pretty easy:

1. Did the scientists really induce an OBE? No. The virtual reality goggles gave a creepy illusion of being out of body, but the OBE state of mind wasn’t actually induced. It’s an optical illusion. Just because you can fake it, doesn’t mean that the original isn’t real. I can create a fake video of me walking - that doesn’t mean I can’t walk.

2. All the report states is that lack of blood flowing to the brain can induce a near death experience. Well, that doesn’t really say either way whether the experience is real or not. It just says that when you do things that might kill you, you might have a near death experience. Which is actually pretty obvious :-P. I can induce a gun shot wound by shooting someone in the leg. Does that mean gun shot wounds aren’t real? Of course not.

3. The third piece of evidence was the best. How many of you read the page? Probably not that many. It turns out that article is in favor of NDEs being real. The person I was arguing against only read the title. I read the article.

I want to point out two things: 1. I am right about the evidence supporting OBEs being real.  I may make a separate post with a list of evidence in the future.  But more importantly, 2. skeptics are full of shit.

Skeptics hide behind citing work, and long articles, and scientific studies - but they can only get away with it because it’s very rare for them to actually be challenged.  It’s a game of intimidation - not one of pursuing truth.  The strategy is simple: argue the skeptical position, and when someone challenges you, just google the topic and paste a bunch of links to scientific documents.  No real effort required, and you look smart in the process, and feel good about bitch slapping some “moron”.

And for the most part, science has figured a lot of stuff out, so this strategy actually works really well.  For example, if you were to get in an argument about evolution vs. creationism, you could just google it, and find enough links on the internet that supports evolution, and throw them in the religious guys face.  You win.

But the reality of the situation is that science hasn’t figured everything out.  And when it comes to the subject of parapsychology, they are light years behind.

The down side to this is that you have to know your stuff if you want to challenge a skeptic.  The skeptic won’t put in the effort, so if you want to sound credible, you have to put in the effort for both of you.  It is an uphill battle, and I’ve yet to see a skeptic change their mind, but it’s an important battle because it teaches us that science is far from perfect, and suffers from the same fundamentalism as any other system of beliefs.

Alrighty!

I’ve updated the look of ALW, along with adding some forums!

The look badly needed an upgrade.  The old layout was made as a temporary placeholder, and was a little bland.  The new is similar, except it looks more bad ass, and has bigger buttons.

I decided to add the forums for two reasons.

1. Some people were using the Video Board as a forum, and just posted multiple replies to get their message across.  I figured that would happen, and didn’t attempt to prevent it, because communication is good :-P.

2. Forums create a wonderful community feeling, which I don’t think was really captured with the Video Board.  I had hoped people would post videos of themselves, but I learned just as everyone else did - it takes a lot of effort to make even a simple video.  And a lot of people really don’t want to broadcast themselves over the internet for everyone to see.  Fair enough :-).

I scripted the new forums from scratch, because I didn’t feel like hacking around bloated forum packages found online (compare my script, 1,100 lines of code, to SimpleMachines, with 59,000 lines of code).  I’ll be adding more features over time, and if you have any suggestions, just let me know.

Other than that, I hope everyone enjoys the updates!

Sorry for the lack of posts - a lot of my time spent recently has been on the stock market, and on watching politics.  I’m continuing to train in OBEs and play the lottery, but I haven’t had noteworthy results (a few small OBEs, but no video).

Either way, the other day I was reading Mad Hatter’s blog, Dreaming to Infinity.  In it, he talked about a cool sounding shared dreaming project being set up call the Green Room, by DreamPort.  The basic idea is to get some people next week, and try to meet up in a shared lucid dream.  I thought the idea was cool, so I signed up for it.  I’ve attempted shared dreaming in the past, but never had any luck.  Perhaps this time we can get some cool results :-).

If you want to join the project, be sure to check out DreamPort, and see the registration thread here.  The deadline is this Friday, February 8th - so hurry!

Other than that, nothing too crazy going on in my world at the moment.  I’ll be sure to continue to document my progress in my blog.  Maybe I can think of some more cool things to put online, like a psychic game or something.  Have fun!

My previous post was made just a few hours ago, so please don’t forget to read that if you missed it.

Cutting to the chase: I got a video of myself having an out of body experience, but it doesn’t look like anything amazing is going on from the video :-P. I suppose I should be bummed out or something, but honestly I just feel really excited! I can’t believe I was able to catch the experience on tape - even though there isn’t anything amazing in the video itself.

I’ve uploaded the uneventful video to YouTube, for those that really want to watch it. The second half is a zoomed-in high-contrast version.

(Note that in my excitement, I accidentally typed the timestamp of 3:55am, when it was actually 3:38am - I must have been thinking of my previous night’s OBE when finalizing the video).

I had been trying to get an OBE on video for about a week, and had just recently perfected my technique. Last night I had an OBE, but it turned out my camera ran out of tape mere minutes before the OBE actually happened. This night, I tried again. I found another setting that extended my tape length from 92 to 94 minutes (by changing the sound from 16-bit, to 12-bit). I pushed the record button, and jumped in bed ASAP - in order not to lose any time on the tape.

I tranced out from 2:05 to about 2:45, listening to music. I shut the music off, then did some more meditation for another 30 minutes. Then I rolled over to my side in order to get more comfortable, and attempt an OBE.

I fell asleep and started dreaming. I was dreaming I was laying in one of my old beds, trying to trance out :-). My mother came into the room and laid next to me. She started talking to me about my sister, and I was getting annoyed, because I was really focusing on trancing out, and wanted to get the OBE on video. My desire to OBE was so strong that even my dream-self kept the mission alive :-).

Eventually I told my mom about my frustration, and she didn’t say anything - just gave me this really strong bear hug. It was really painful, because it wasn’t a nice hug or anything. She grabbed me and started squeezing the breathe out of me. This snapped me out of the dream state, and propelled me into having an OBE. I “woke up” out of body, but laying inside my body.

My right arm was free to move. I checked the clock (while out), and it was 3:38am. I did some quick math and realized I only had a minute or two left on the tape! I started to frantically wave my right arm, and tried to escape my body, but I was mostly stuck (probably because I was trying so hard :-P). All I could do was wave my right arm. So I just kept doing that. After about a minute of that, I jumped back into my body, and wiggled around to wake myself up. I got up, waved at the camera (with my left arm, instead of my right), in order to show the camera where I had just been waving.

I got over and looked at the camera - Tape End! Oh no!, I thought :-). I was about to flip out, thinking I had just missed my OBE for a second night in a row. When I checked the tape, I saw that the tape actually ended right after I had woken up and waved at the camera. I literally had about a 10 second buffer :-). The end of the video on YouTube is the exact end of the tape itself (I just trimmed off the first 92 minutes of trancing out).

It’s 5:40am now, and I really need to get ready for work. I just played the tape again, and it’s getting corrupted for some reason. There are large green bands across the video. Luckily I was able to extract and watch the end before the data corruption took place. I’ll have to mess around with it to see if the tape is really corrupt or not. At least I have the digital data :-).

I had another out of body experience (OBE) last night.  Three in a week!  This one was induced voluntarily.  I’ve mastered the technique :-).

A good portion of the questions that people ask me are concerning OBEs.  The question might be, “I can trance out, but then nothing happens!”, or “How do you know when it’s time to actually leave?”, or “I had a weird experience… do you think it was an OBE?”  These are all great questions!   Unfortunately, my honest response to each one is: “I don’t know” :-P.

Maybe I can be more helpful than that though…

The hard part about learning how to have an out of body experience is that it is so dependent on feel, that it’s very hard to teach.  There is a certain feel that goes along with the build up to having an OBE.  Whether that “feel” is a brainwave frequency, or chemical imbalance, or some other weird thing in the brain - I don’t know.  What I do know is that I can usually predict within the first 5 minutes of a trance whether I’ll be able to navigate to the correct feel required for an OBE.  Not intuition, not talking with my subconscious… it is a feeling in my mind.

Having an OBE is just one of many outcomes of trancing out.  In order to have an OBE, you must navigate your trance towards the OBE-feel. So, if you’ve never had an OBE, how can you figure out where to navigate your trances towards?  Basically, brute force.  You trance out, try new things, mess around, and just hope for the best.  Yes it sucks, but I can’t think of any better way (maybe hemi-sync if you want to cheat :-P).

Once you have your first OBE, then you have a basic idea of where the OBE-feel is.  But it takes practice to really pin-point it down, and possibly years to get there willfully.  I don’t know why it’s this hard, but it is what it is.

I can have an OBE using a lot of different techniques because I know where the OBE-feel is located, and I can use the techniques to help control my mind to get there.  If you don’t know your destination, you can have all the control in the world, but it won’t really help you :-P.  Only until you start to lock on to the OBE-feel can you start having them consistently and willfully.

My OBE last night was induced via a Wake-Back-To-Bed method (those in the Lucid Dreaming circles will know the basic idea).  What I did was fall asleep at 8:00pm.  I told myself to wake up at 2:00am, but my body must have hit the snooze on my internal alarm clock, because I woke up at 3:00am.  I got up, walked around, surfed the net, thought about my future OBE, etc.

At around 3:15am, I felt awake enough to have confidence that I wouldn’t just zonk out once my head hit the pillow.  I set up my camera, with hopes of recording my OBE.  I found some new settings on it, which allows for (crappy) night-vision, and changed the settings from SP to LP - which basically meant I could record for 92 minutes (instead of 64 minutes).  I put it on record, then laid down.

I listened to some Daft Punk music - specifically, their live album.  My alarm was set for 6:00am, which is the time I get up to go to work.  I got a decent trance going for about 30 minutes, and then decided that the music was distracting more than it was helping, so I shut it off and went solo.

I fluttered in and out of consciousness for quite a while.  I kept trancing, and nearly fell into a dream state, but managed to keep myself from falling asleep.  Between black-outs, I noticed I was in the right state of mind to have an OBE.  I left for a short while and had a lot of trouble with my vision.  I didn’t remain passive, like I had been on my previous OBEs last week.  I was really disorientated, and having a hard time in general.

I floated over to my door, then back to my bed, and then it dawned on me: I’m filming this!  So I quickly floated towards my camera.  I couldn’t see anything, but I knew I was where it was pointing, and I tried to do crazy stuff with the intention of being caught on film.  I went back to my body, woke up, and checked the clock - 4:55am.  I made a mental note to myself that my OBE was probably around 2-3 minutes long, and made sure I wouldn’t forget the time frame.  I needed to remember exactly when my OBE occurred so I could check the tape when I woke up for that exact moment.

Well, for those of you doing the math, I’ll cut to the chase.  My tape ran out at 4:47am.  My OBE started at around 4:52am.  Noooooo :-).

I checked the tape, and I didn’t see anything noteworthy.  I’ll check again, just to make sure I didn’t miss anything.  The good news is that I have locked on to the OBE-feel, and I am confident I can OBE at will.  This should make future experiments much easier, and tonight I may even catch myself on camera :-).

I’ve been training in OBEs lately, and I think I just had an OBE last night.

The technique I used was to sleep for 3 hours (around 5:30pm to 8:30pm), wake up, and then go back to sleep around 1:00am. I’ve done this the past couple nights. Upon going to sleep the second time, I will listen to music in order to trance out. After trancing out for a good 30-40 minutes, I’ll remove my headphones, and go to sleep.

If I had an OBE, and it wasn’t just a dream, then this marks a significant milestone - I haven’t had an OBE during the night time in what feels like years. Almost all of my OBEs occur during the transition from sleeping -> wake. It takes a lot of training for me to accomplish an OBE from the wake -> sleep transition.

I’m learning to better control them, and make them longer. I’ve finally figured out the key to a long and clear OBE: remaining passive! HA! I always thought that I was passive, but I’ve realized that in the past, I was never passive enough. In the past, when I had an OBE, I would try to be passive, but also have strong motivation to explore and take advantage of the OBE. Now, I have removed these underlying motives, and have a true passive feel - I don’t care if the OBE lasts a minute, or 30 minutes, and I don’t try to force myself to experience anything. If my OBE consists of floating immediately outside of my body for a few seconds, then so be it.

The downside to having an OBE on the wake -> sleep transition is that I had a couple hours worth of dreams after it. So my memory of the OBE is extremely foggy. I remember leaving, remaining passive, floating around in my apartment, and looking at my hands. I remember playing with my breathing, and being confused whether my breathing pattern was actually being used by my body - or if it was just inside my head. I had lost my connection to my body, so I was unsure if what I was doing was affecting my body at all, or if I was just floating around, pretending to breathe. I’ll have to attempt to remember more.

Fun fun!

EDIT: I wanted to add a few more comments, just for the sake of having it documented. After thinking and remembering the experience, I am now positive that it was an OBE and not a dream. Specifically, I remember trancing out, and “swinging” my awareness around in circles, around my body. I also was playing with shifting my awareness to the left, which made me feel like my lungs where breathing to my far right (instead of below me). I remembering thinking at the time, “Oh cool, I’m probably going to have an OBE, because usually when I can get my awareness to fudge around like this, it means that I’m close.” I may post more on this technique in a future entry…

EDIT II: Another one! Two nights in a row :-). My technique was nearly the same - sleep early for a long time, wake up for a few hours, and then go back to bed. This time around, I didn’t listen to trance music as I fell asleep the second time. I just went to bed, and tossed for an hour or two restlessly.

The OBE consisted of falling through the floor at rapid speed, after which I said, “That was cool, let’s do it again!”. After that, I stumbled around without vision for a few minutes, feeling my way around my room. I returned to my body, and had a creepy feeling that there was another “presence” in the room with me (though it could have easily been my mind playing tricks on me). I played around for a few minutes longer, then fell asleep for good.

W commented, asking if I got a video of my first OBE. This made me think about how to video tape my second one. I didn’t attempt to video tape my second one for two reasons: 1. my room is dark. It’s night time, and it’s pitch black. 2. my OBEs take a long time to prepare for - I was tossing and turning for about an hour and a half before I began to trance slightly, and then it probably took another half hour to trance. My video camera can only record for an hour, maximum. I will have to see if I can think of some solutions to these two problems.

Alright, time to cast your precognitive vote.

Use precognition, or just follow your gut, and predict who will win the Democratic and Republican nominations, who the nominations will choose as their Vice President, and who will win the White House.

As an example, I will give my prediction.  I believe Obama will get the Democratic nomination.  I believe he will choose Edwards as his Vice President.  I believe Romney will get the Republican nomination.  I don’t know who Romney will choose for his Vice President.  And in November, I believe Obama/Edwards will win the Presidency.

Remember - this is not what you want to happen - this is what you predict will happen.  Optionally, describe the process you used to get these predictions.  For me, I used a combination of my knowledge of the races, and my general “feel” for what’s going to happen.  Post your results in the comments.  The people who get it right will have bragging rights for four years, until the next bid for the White House :-P.

Not a whole lot going on right now… But I do manage to keep myself busy. My current projects are as follows:

1. Win MegaMillions. The jackpot is below $45 million, so I’m not playing right now. My current strategy is to just pick numbers off the top of my head, with no overall understanding or strategy. This is based on the idea that I’ll never fully know how it works, but I just have to trust that it will work. I’m also working on my lottery machine, but since it’s construction won’t help my current strategy, it’s not a priority.

2. Video tape myself having an out of body experience. I’ve started getting into the habit of training myself to OBE again. I’ve noticed that my OBEs have dropped in frequency over the past months, and that bothers me. So I’m resuming my training, and also video tape myself at the same time, with the idea that if I have an OBE during a training session, it will be on camera.

3. I’m reading the book, Science and the Akashic Field, by Ervin Laszlo. It’s interesting, but it really hasn’t captured my interest completely yet. Perhaps in the later chapters it will do so.

4. Unrelated to the paranormal, I’ve been working a lot on another site of mine, codetank.com. It’s purpose is to teach programming, and provide a nice and fun environment to learn programming in. I have a few games online, and it’s slowly growing. Fun :-).

Nothing terribly exciting this moment, but maybe I’ll start seeing results with the lottery or start having some OBEs again. I’m beginning to have consistent lucid dreams (I’ve had an LD every night for the past three or four days now), which is usually a sign that my training is having an effect.

I’ve noticed that there seems to be a large population of people who have attempted to learn and acquire psychic abilities, but have only achieved limited results. Maybe the results were a little cool, but overall, it wasn’t impressive or notable.

The question comes down to: what is the difference between someone with substantial achievements in their psychic pursuits, and another who simply has mediocre results?

Before I attempt to answer this question, let me make one thing clear: I don’t know the answer :-). I do not know how psychic abilities work, nor do I know the formula for success. What I can offer is my perspective and experiences. I believe I’m one of the many who has had notable results, and I think I might be able to help those that think they’re stuck at a mediocre level.

A Solid Base

First, let’s do some house cleaning. Priorities and overall goals are a large factor here.

You will probably be stuck at mediocre results if:

1. You want to develop psychic abilities because you’re bored, and it sounds cool. (Because you will only put in enough effort to cure your boredom).

2. You don’t actually practice, but you just like hanging out with weird folks online. (Because achieving results usually takes some effort, like learning any other skill).

3. You want to beat up someone at school with your awesome mind-control skillz. (Because your maturity will grow faster than your abilities… I hope).

4. You want to do something you saw in the movies. (Because movies are fictional, and at best are exaggerations of reality).

5. You want immediate results. (Because learning a new skill takes time, no matter what that skill is).

Those are pretty obvious, and I hope that if you’re reading this, you don’t seriously fall into one of the categories above. If you do, then that’s no big deal - but don’t get bummed out when you don’t have the results you were expecting. Becoming proficient in psychic abilities is just like any other skill, like playing the piano, or learning to speak a new language. It takes effort. The more effort you put in, the better results you’ll get (in general).

What are some good goals to have? Well, I learn and practice my psychic abilities because I am fascinated by reality and truth. I love doing things that others think is impossible, especially if at one time I thought it was impossible myself. It’s about outgrowing an old mindset, and stepping into a bigger world. This goal has allowed me to stay focused and motivated for a long time. I didn’t choose or design this goal consciously - it’s something that I feel inside of me that keeps me going automatically. If you ask some other people who have developed their psychic abilities quite a bit, you’ll likely find they have much more deeper goals than just doing something cool. Don’t get me wrong - psychic abilities are totally cool! But that’s not the prime motivating facility.

Don’t Listen to Anyone

No one knows how psychic abilities function. NO ONE. Including myself. So don’t listen to us. If someone starts preaching some “truth” to you, don’t treat it as gospel. My ego is flattered when people follow my instructions religiously, but ultimately - it’s not healthy. And it will lead to failure. If you are a follower, then you will probably be stuck at mediocre results. You will only consume whatever small successes the leaders have achieved. If you want to step it up, then you need to lead yourself.

There are phases that one should go through. Usually, when you first learn about psychic abilities, it’s a whole new world of ideas. At this stage, it’s highly encourage to read and take in a lot of ideas, information, and techniques. The reason for this is so that you won’t ask annoyingly broad questions, like “how do I do telepathy?” or “any tips for psychokinesis?” These questions make me irate :-).

After you have a solid foundation of ideas, and have practiced with the standard techniques for a little bit, you need to go into a new phase. You need to switch modes from learning what others have done, to creating your own path.

If you want more results, you need to take personal responsibility for your results. You need to be self-reliant, and do what makes sense to YOU. Stop asking for help. Stop looking for someone else to tell you what to do. Think for yourself, come up with a plan, and do it! Yes, sometimes you will fail. That’s the price you have to pay for meaningful results. You can either be stuck at mediocre, waiting around for everyone else to tell you what to do, or you can take charge and evolve your own understanding.

Practice Correctly

When you are just starting out, your practice routine should be exactly what the standard techniques tell you to do. If step one says meditate - then meditate. If step two says visualize - then visualize.

Once you finish with that phase and decide to start leading yourself, then you need to modify your practice. Don’t do what the standard techniques tell you. Modify the techniques, insert new steps, try entirely new approaches, experiment with different belief structures, skip steps, mix techniques, etc. This is now the correct way to practice.

When starting out, the correct way to practice is very procedural, and step by step. This will get you the mediocre results, which serve as a great start. But when it’s time to move on, then you need to start using your creative mind, and try new things without asking for permission.

Be Open Minded

Lastly, you absolutely must be open minded. This does not mean gullible. Being open minded simply means that when someone comes to you with a new idea, then take it in and digest it. Have respect for the person who is presenting this idea to you - clearly they must believe in it to some degree, so even if it sounds insane from your perspective, it is very real from their perspective.

The reason this is important is because of the axiom of this article: no one knows how psychic abilities function. Never treat anything as gospel, and never outright dismiss someone else’s perspective. There is a happy middle-ground, where ideas are treated as ideas, nothing more, nothing less. Truth can be evasive, so you must always stay alert.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there is a certain mindset that a lot of successful psychics have. Meaningful goals, independent thought, and open mindedness has shown itself to be stronger than any individual technique. Why do you think experienced psychics argue over techniques? Because we usually create them ourselves, over a long time of trial and error, and feel a strong sense of pride and ownership for them :-). If you are stuck at mediocre, then stop walking behind us, and start walking beside us.