The Importance of a Meditative Attitude in the Out-of-Body State

Normally, I meditate every morning for 30-60 minutes, and then in the middle of the night every other day or so. But this past week, I had the flu and so I found it hard to meditate for several days. Not that I didn't try, but my physical condition kept interrupting my progress.

Finally, I felt good enough to get up at 4:00 and meditate for 30 minutes after taking galantamine. I hoped that I could resume my regular out of body adventures, which have often involved apparent journeys to other star systems. To make sure my excursions are not interrupted, I go down the hall to one of our spare bedrooms for the remainder of the night.

I have been able to have a lucid dream/OOBE just about every time if I do everything right--at least 30 minutes of meditation, a sufficiently positive state of mind, and 8 mg of galantamine taken about an hour before my first dream upon returning to bed. On many occasions, I experience a WILD--that is, a "wake-induced lucid dream" without a break in consciousness from waking to dream.

Sure enough I find myself with another man, and I point out to him that we are in a dream. He resists the idea at first, then realizes it is true. I take him by the arm and lift him off the ground to show him that we can fly, and proceed to explore the domain with him. After a while, I decide to leave him and set a course for the stars, which usually means dropping my arms to my side, and orienting myself to a certain part of the eastern sky.

But as I begin to fly upward, it becomes clear that I am losing buoyancy, and I become unable to fly or pass through barriers. Everything is becoming increasingly dense, and I am becoming heavy. The harder I try to counteract the effects of gravity, the heavier I become and the more trapped in form I feel. Suddenly, I know that I need to meditate. So I close my eyes and meditate. Immediately, a brightness fills my closed eyes, and I feel myself floating upward weightlessly. I open my eyes, and find myself with several people, including a woman whom I recognize from somewhere and from whom I feel a timeless, deep love. We continue to visit for a good while in a state of heightened awareness and luminous surroundings.

Meditation is like putting money in a bank. If your account is full, then your experience in the OOBE state will be luminous, refined, subtle and full of love and connection. But if you have been unable to keep your account "full" due to distractions or illness, then you'd be better off not leaving your body, because none of the ineffable properties available to you will manifest in your phenomenal experience. At least that's my experience.

I have heard many people talk about their own lucid dreams and OOBEs, and I've come away thinking that each of us encounters what we have built in our lives. A person who does not meditate will report rather pedestrian OOBEs that mirror the waking state with fair precision. Speaking of the after-death state, Edgar Cayce captured the self-fulfilling, self-mirroring nature of nonphysical reality by once saying, "A dead Presbyterian is a dead Presbyterian." He was saying, I believe, that death alone does not confer any particular release from what we believe, and have built in our lives. In my experience, neither does lucidity/OOBE awareness. I wrote back in the 70s that the so-called OOBE  simply mirrors the observer's own beliefs and paradigm about the world. If one tends to be a "realist," measuring life in empirical terms, then the OOBE state accommodates this believe system by mirroring the physical world, and is often identical (with some variations) to one's waking reality. Does that make the OOBE "true?" Not at all. It's just a mirror of one's paradigm, confirming it in most ways, but often revealing along the edges of the experience a reality that is far greater, and much less ego-centered. It takes meditation, or an attitude of surrender to take us beyond our own reflection in the mirror.