Researching Peak and Mystical States of Consciousness have been a deep interest of mine for many years…
In the year 2000 I went to a training program at The Monroe Institute in Virginia (U.S.A) , after I heard a friend of mine explain that using their techniques helped you experience how ‘you are more than your physical body’.
So, I went off to a six-day retreat. The Monroe Institute has a patented sound technology called Hemi-Sync® that enhances awareness and consciousness.
Each participant goes into a private sound-proofed booth called a CHEC unit (which stands for Controlled Holistic Environment Chamber) for between four and six hours a day and uses the Hemi-Sync technology which sends different frequencies into each ear, frequencies that are masked by either pleasant music or a guided meditative journey.
The two different sounds alter your brain waves and thus your state of consciousness. For each session, you have a theme and set an intention, such as to retrieve early memories, heal a past wound, access heightened creativity and more wild stuff…
My experiences were dramatic. I felt my sense of self expand and my consciousness enlarge and shift, such that I had access to information and thoughts—which would just pop spontaneously into my mind—that I had never had before and never imagined having.
In a few sessions I felt I healed some emotional childhood wounds, accessed buried childhood memories, and generally came to realisations and understandings of my current unresourceful behavioural patterns.
In other sessions I experienced a huge magnification of ‘self’, feeling a huge expansion in which I was connected to everyone in my life in a new and deeper way, and to everything in nature and in the cosmos. The boundaries of myself evaporated, and I experienced a profound unity consciousness.
After a few days of undertaking these sessions, I was feeling extremely relaxed and calm. I felt an exquisite sense of inner peace and happiness. I felt I had touched my true nature and essence. After about fifteen sessions, I was flying! This sense of unboundedness felt nothing like a caffeine or adrenalin high—I simply felt filled with light and freedom.
In one of my last sessions, I felt myself going very deep within, losing all sense of my physical boundaries. I’m not sure how much time passed, but suddenly I realised that I was above my body looking down on it! I was observing myself reclining on the bed in the CHEC unit, yet my consciousness was freed from my body.
This felt nothing like a dream or my imagination. The consciousness of ‘the me’ that was looking down was far more real than ‘the me’ on the bed. I know this sounds bizarre and possibly very hard to believe, yet there I was, out of my body and still fully conscious and aware, seeing my physical body in all its details. Everything felt natural and in order. Nothing felt strange.
Yet, after a while, I seemed to ‘wake up’ to what was happening, and I felt a surge of shock and fear. As soon as I did, I shot back into my physical body with a jolt. It felt like I had been dropped as a dead weight from a two-foot height. I cannot tell you in words what the next moments were like as I tried to piece together what had just happened…
It was very clear that it was not a dream, a hallucination, a memory or a fantasy.
I knew that in some way I was more than just a physical body and had just experienced being what I am in my essence—an unbounded spirit. That realization really shook me up, and the entire experience changed my view of reality. Talk about a change of belief!
Renowned consciousness researcher and psychologist Professor Charles Tart explains, thousands, if not millions, of people alive today have had the experience of existing outside the space of their physical bodies for a brief period and experiencing this separate state as real, not as a dream or imaginary experience.
Tart’s research reveals that the experience is similar no matter what your background or belief system. A typical sequence of an out-of-body experience starts with the sudden feeling of being free from your physical body and is almost immediately followed by amazement.
For many people, the amazement is quickly displaced by fear, and they tend to pop back into their body as a consequence. So, practice is required to acquaint yourself with the unique feelings and perceptions, and to allow yourself some time to get used to the feelings and to learn to control your movements while out of the body.
Tart reported on a woman who claimed she regularly had out-of-body experiences while sleeping and dreaming, and during this time out of her body she was able to gain useful information. To test her claim, Tart wrote a five-digit number on a piece of paper and placed it a ledge high on a wall, near the ceiling, where the only way to read the number would be from above it.
After a few nights the woman reported that she had left her body and floated to the ceiling and read the number: 38957. She was correct !
Tart’s colleague, psychologist Professor Stanley Krippner, decided to repeat this experiment, only using a picture instead of a number. Using extremely tight scientific controls to prevent any kind of deception, his research team selected a number of famous art illustrations, and one was chosen at random in a way that prevented anyone from knowing which one was the ‘target’ picture.
The image was put into an envelope and placed on a ledge near the ceiling in the lab. A medical student who claimed he had out-of-body experiences while he slept was tasked to try to open the envelope and view the picture during one of his out-of-body flights. The student’s brain waves were measured over a period of nights as he slept.
On the fourth night, his brain showed an odd, slow brain-wave signature. When the student awakened, he reported having been out of his body. He said,
‘I have just gone out of my body and seen the picture. It is a sunset’.
When the researchers retrieved the envelope and opened it, the picture they pulled out was titled ‘Memory of a Perfect Sunset’.
The researchers worked out that the chances of dreaming of a sunset are approximately one in fifty thousand, so they were open to at least considering that the student had indeed left his body and viewed the picture or else had somehow paranormally acquired the information telepathically in a dream.
Professor Krippner concluded,
‘Here we have two experiments that indicate that even though mind and body are one, sometimes the mind takes a little vacation from the body, just like the body takes a little vacation from the mind and sometimes this does happen during dreams’.
We have so much potential when we update our mind and what we believe about who we are and what we can do. We really are deeply integrated to an infinite field of intelligence, where all the answers we need are available to us…
