Graham Nicholls - Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience: Radical New Techniques

Cover art Spiros Horemis/Dover Publications Cover design by Ellen Lawson Editing by Lee Lewis

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Contents

Science and the Out-of-Body ExperiencE

Your personal profile: Which Approach is Best for You?

Leaving the Body: What Can You Expect?

Acknowledgments

I would especially like to thank my mother and father for their unending support, as well as the rest of my family and the friends who inspired and supported me during the writing process, including: Merlyn Roberts, Eucalyptus Thompson, Cecil McGrane, Matthew Dennis, Lawrence Brightman, Kadri Allikme, and Triin Tniste.

I would also like to say a special thank you to Herbie Brennan for his very kind foreword to this book, and Philip Paul, Tom Campbell, Dr. Peter Fenwick, and Dr. Jeffery Long for their interviews, comments, and endorsements. I would also like to acknowledge the Society for Psychical Research, the Monroe Institute, the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and the International Association for Near Death Studies for resources and research that have helped greatly with the writing of this book. Thanks also to Alex Tsakiris for his important work moving the proponent/skeptic debate forward through the Skeptiko podcast and the Open Source Science project. I would also like to acknowledge Rupert Sheldrake, Brian Josephson, and Dean Radin, whose work has influenced many of the ideas that I have drawn upon.

Finally, I would like to thank Susan Mears, my agent for this book, who suggested putting the proposal forward and helped make this book a reality; Carrie Obry for championing this book at Llewellyn; Adam Schaab for taking over as editor and seeing it through to publication; and Lee Lewis, for her excellent copyediting.

Foreword

S ome research polls suggest that as many as one person in every four can expect to find themselves outside their physical body and wandering the world like a ghost at some point in their life without the inconvenience of dying in order to do so. The experience is sometimes thrilling, sometimes frightening, frequently fascinating, and almost always unexpected. For the vast majority, it is also unrepeatable.

And therein lies a major problem with what might be considered a potentially important phenomenon. Scientific investigators dislike unrepeatable evidence, which, by definition, does not lend itself to careful examination or laboratory experiment. As a result, the evidence itself is often ignored or dismissed as anecdotal. In the process, something of huge value may well be lost.

Enter Graham Nicholls. When Graham first discovered the out-of-body experience (OOBE or OBE) as a boy, he was not content to treat it as a bolt from the blue, likely never to be repeated in his lifetime. Instead, he studied, observed, and practiced until he could leave his body at will. This gave him, over the course of literally hundreds of OBEs, an opportunity to examine the phenomenon at depths unavailable to those who experience it only once, spontaneously.

In the process, he discovered there was more to the experience than met the eye. While, for many, an OBE involves no more than stepping out of the body and traveling the world in ghostly form, an OBE can also open doorways onto what appear to be different levels of reality, some of which are seemingly equivalent to the astral planes of esoteric tradition. It can also lead to changes in perception that produce a new and different understanding of the universe and can even generate the realization of unity reported by mystics down the ages. Interestingly, several of Grahams experiences were confirmed by the results of my own (unpublished) experiments in this area.

Grahams work eventually led to his first book, Avenues of the Human Spirit , which describes some of his experiences and presents his philosophical speculations about them. His current book goes further and in an even more exciting direction, for in it, he describes the techniques that can potentially enable you to take control of your own OBEs and, with diligent practice, develop the ability to leave your body at will.

There are a great many other books on OBEs and astral projection. (As you will soon learn, the two are not exactly the same.) A trawl of the Internet will quickly deliver scores of techniques that promise to place these fascinating experiences in your own hands. None of themand I reluctantly place my own work in this categorycan hold a candle to the book you have in your hands now. For here you have the fruits of vast personal experience, combining with penetrating intelligence, diligent observation, and a surprisingly skeptical scientific approach, to produce a work of immense value to both the psychical investigator and esoteric practitioner alike.

The key to this work lies in the final section, which describes, clearly and concisely, a multitude of methods you can use to generate an OBE. Some involve simple visualisations, like the great majority of other books on the subject, but Graham Nicholls was not content to stop there. His approaches can just as easily involve breath work, sonics, yoga, energy manipulation, even sensory deprivation techniques like Ganzfeld and the so-called witchs cradle. His three-dimensional elaboration of the Hindu tattvas is one of the most interesting developments in the use of astral doorways since the days of the original Golden Dawn.