OBE — Peterson

Here is a book that just didn’t gel for me.

Out of Body Experiences: How to Have Them and What to Expect

Mr. Peterson’s intentions are good and he writes well enough. The problem, for me, is that it’s mostly disjointed experiences from his journal. Fear seems to be a big piece of his experience. When you finally get to the techniques, there isn’t much there. There are interesting elements here but the book just isn’t useful for me. Unlike the Bruce and Buhlman books, it just didn’t move me forward or provide a path to results.

Beer — Roxy Rolles

This will be brief. I can’t describe the color of this one because I drained it from the bottle.

I haven’t been a huge fan of Magic Hat beers. They are good but they haven’t wowed me. Tonight, I found this beer at a local grocery store. It is described as a hoppy amber. I like amber. I really like hoppy. Seemed like a natural fit so I had to buy a six pack.

It has a very nice hop aroma. It’s a forward scent but it isn’t overpowering.  The beer is medium bodied (to me) and you definitely get that smooth taste of an amber. The malty sweetness is very subdued. Then the hops hits. The hops is pronounced but not overly bitter. It also isn’t overwhelmingly citrus, like many of the west coast beers. Very tasty. Very nice. Very much worth trying.

OBE — Bruce Moen

One of the things I find fascinating about OBE books is how different they can be. In some respects, this makes perfect sense, since the area into which you “project” seems to be highly responsive to thought. If this is the case, it seems reasonable to expect that different people will have different experiences.

What I find even more fascinating is how the books in a series seem to change as they progress. If you’ve read the Robert Monroe books, you know that they get more and more odd as the books go along. This has always troubled me a bit. Do they get more and more strange because the person writing them is continuing to increase their level of vibration and progressing “higher” (or, perhaps, continuing to loosen this reality’s hold on them), or is it all the sign of a person going deeper into madness?

There is another series that seems to progress in a similar fashion. It is the afterlife series by Bruce Moen:

Voyages Into the Unknown (Exploring the Afterlife Series, Vol. 1)

Voyage Beyond Doubt (Exploring the Afterlife Series , Vol 2)

Voyages Into the Afterlife: Charting Unknown Territory (Exploring the Afterlife Series, Vol. 3)

The first book was compelling reading. You won’t get OBE technique in this series but reading about Moen’s early OBE experiences and his work with Robert Monroe was very interesting. It gives insight into Monroe and his institute and it wet my appetite for the Gateway CD’s. Plus, you get to follow Moen as he learns to project and moves from passive projector to active soul retriever. Watching his exploits as he learns to effectively gather people who are trapped in death is truly a unique read. His descriptions of the world beyond is quite consistent with some of Monroe’s descriptions, which shouldn’t be surprising if he’s a protege of Mr. Monroe. It’s hard to completely discount such a wild, yet coherent and congruent tale.

The problem, for me, is that the other two books get progressively stranger. The soul saving drops off as Moen begins to encounter “alien” beings. The encounters get more and more odd and the explanations for things also begin to veer more and more toward the bizarre. By the end of the third book, I was beginning to wonder if what I had read in the first book was just the beginnings of psychosis. To be fair, I don’t believe that’s the case (Moen seems a very sincere–and mostly sane–guy) but it certainly doesn’t seem out of the question.

Moen does provide techniques for finding and assisting the dead. Since Moen insists the techniques do not require you to leave your body at all, they are surprisingly simple. After several attempts, I had two interesting experiences. Were they “real?” I have no idea. They seemed real, but without the amazing clarity of an OBE. They were much more of a mental experience but it was a mental experience that I felt was too fluid and unexpected to be under my own control. I have no way of knowing if I was just following the NLP maxim of “fake it until you make it” or if I really experienced what I think I did.

In any case, they are interesting reading, particularly the first book. Still curious to me is how the books are congruent with the writings of Monroe but very different from the writings of Bruce or Buhlman. It leads me to believe that if we each wrote a book about our experiences, they would all be much more unique than the typical travel books that one can find related to travel on earth. Does this mean we are all having different hallucinations or is there really something to all this?

Having had a number of OBE’s, I certainly have an opinion  on this. How about you?

OBE — Astral Dynamics

My first successes with OBE’s began after reading “Astral Dynamics” by Robert Bruce.

Astral Dynamics: A New Approach to Out-of-Body Experiences

Mr. Bruce has taken great care to write a book that is logical and usable. It’s a large book but is filled to the brim with useful information. It provides this information in a very straight forward way, without going too deeply off any new age tangents.

A focus of the book is ‘raising energy.” Mr. Bruce maintains that you can improve your success by drawing energy into your body. This energy, as it builds up in your astral body, helps to raise the energy level of that body, helping it to separate from the physical body. The exercises are relaxing and, when done on a daily basis, the results are impressive.

The book is also a tour book of the astral planes. He describes many different experiences at many different energy levels and helps you to prepare for the experience.

If I have a complaint about the book, it’s in the discussion of negative entities. It’s clear why he has done it, since it is something you might encounter. However, I believe that you can create what you expect while traversing the planes and that by describing possibilities in detail, the chances are increased that you will experience just such an event. For my part, I have opted out of reading the negative entities topic on his forum because I would prefer not to begin creating possibilities for myself.

An extremely worthy read by a true pioneer.

ConceptDraw Office — Some Negatives

I’ve already gone on record as really liking ConceptOffice (especially the combination of Project and MindMap). However, there are a few annoying shortcomings:

- On a Windows PC, it can be a resource hog. My laptop will occasionally crawl to a near stop. This may be due to the fact that my main file has 12 projects and a master project that combines them all (of course, on the Mac, this is not an issue at all).

- On a Mac, you cannot export to Excel or Numbers.

- Although you can combine multiple projects, shared resources are treated as separate instances. I have found no way to summarize resource usage across the multiple projects without pulling a report into Excel and doing a lot of manipulating.

- There aren’t enough fields available on the resource sheet and I haven’t been able to find a way to add them. It would be nice to be able to classify tasks and then summarize or cost by task type. It would also be nice to have fields for resource cost AND resource billing rate so that margins can be calculated.

OBE – My Next OBE

The follow-up to my first OBE was this one. It’s interesting to me because I had sensations/sounds that are “typical” for an OBE. It may be a false belief and there could certainly be physiological factors that lead up to a totally internal experience. However, based on the nature of the experience, the vividness of the experience, the sense of total control, and the fact that I had all my waking memories, I now believe these were OBEs.

OK, this morning I think I projected again. I woke up and decided to try it. Started using the rope method and as I pulled up, the vibrations increased. Finally, I slid out. At first my vision was obscured, like looking through gauze. I willed my vision to improve and saw my comforter as I was leaving. Exited the house and it felt really wild to go through the wall. The texture of the wall was very different.

Thought I would check out my neighborhood but, of course, I found myself in a neighborhood I didn’t recognize. I saw movement in this house and decided to go in. There was a woman wrapped in a white shawl (including her head). As I entered the house, she came toward me. The shawl dropped away and she (it) had this undersized deformed head with wispy hair and very big eyes. “She” had 3 teeth on the top and 3 on the bottom but they were long and curved, like the teeth on a warthog. Her eyes lit up, she smiled, and she grabbed me, wrapping her arms and legs around me. I couldn’t get away, so I willed myself back into my body.

When I got back into my body (if that’s what really happened), there was kind of a thump and I “woke” up. What really seemed to happen, though, is that I joined a dream already in progress. After a few minutes of that dream, I truly woke up.

After this experience, nothing happened again until this morning. Perhaps it was because I was so freaked out by that experience. Not even a hint.

Last night, I woke up around 3:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. I was doing all kinds of relaxation stuff and probably did fall back asleep. Around 5:30, I realized that my body was totally relaxed and nearly paralyzed, so I decided to try to astral project. For some reason, I decided to try to “shift” my non-physical body. I shifted a little to the left, shifted a little to the right and BANG!, the vibration started.

This time, instead of the loud mechanical sound, I heard the wind. The vibration was much less violent than the previous experiences. Instead of moving out sideways, I dropped out of my body backwards, almost like a scuba diver dropping backward out of a boat. Then, I was falling for a while. Several times, I almost brought myself out of it and had to push back into the vibration. Also, while I was falling, I had no vision (I had forgotten about fact that sometimes you have to “will” your vision and thought maybe I had failed to project). Next thing I know, I’m in a very nice neighborhood that I don’t recognize. I decided I wanted to fly. Up into the air I flew. It was about the right level of darkness for 5:30 in the morning but there were a lot of white birds flying about. For a few moments, I flew above the birds. As I swooped up and down, I could almost feel my gut drop (that elevator feeling).

Then, I swooped down past a lady walking on the street and over to a person and two girls walking into a house. I followed them into the house (flew right through the door). They walked into a pantry area that was kind of tight. I followed them into the pantry, then turned around and headed out again. The “mom” had been by the door when I entered. I touched her as I left and she looked right at me and smiled at me.

Then I was back in my body and I couldn’t do it again. It was very wild and the most “realistic” experience so far. This really seemed like the real world.

Beer

Disclaimer: I am not a beer expert. I have not been trained in the mysterious ways of beer judging. Anything said here should be considered the ramblings of a madman.

Quite some time ago (probably around 12-13 years ago), there was a brew pub in Lawton, MI called Duster’s. The story of that brew pub is tenuous in my brain, so my history may be more mythical than reality. As I recall, it was started by a man who was a crop duster. There was a crop dusting motif within the pub that gave it a true pub atmosphere. They really didn’t have much in the way of food at the time and the staff were downright surly. More than once, I had an argument with the waiter over what they charged me.

The lack of food didn’t matter. The pissy attitudes of the waitstaff didn’t matter. They had a good red (I think) and this remarkable IPA. To be fair, they may be one and the same beer, I can’t remember. Whatever their attitudes, they knew how to make beer. This was back when micro-breweries were just beginning to form (at least in Michigan). It was an exciting time for anyone who despised Budweiser.

This beer that we liked was the most aggressively hopped beer we had ever tasted. We were convinced that it would take the paint off your car and straighten pubic hair (sorry…). My drinking buddy has a bit of a reaction to hops. When he had this Duster’s beer, he would begin to sneeze uncontrollably. After a few minutes, he would get himself under control and happily finish off his beer. It was that good. Note: there is now a beer that may be close in hop aggressiveness. It is Huma-Lupa-Licious, by Short’s Brewing in Bellaire, MI. It’s another mega-hopped beer that you will hate if you don’t love hops. Short’s is another brewery worth visiting but that is outside the scope of this posting.

Duster’s was then purchased by Larry Bell (of Bell’s Beer fame). Our favorite beer disappeared and we stopped heading out to Lawton. Arcadia, Bell’s and Kraftbrau were closer and there were just no compelling beers to be found there anymore. It appears that The Old Hat has since been purchased by the brewmaster that Larry had put in charge of the brewery. They now serve food (good bar food) and sometimes have live music.

Tonight there was a bluesy band. They were good. The food was good. The beer…interesting. The Old Hat seems to trend toward maltier beers, which I like, but which aren’t my favorites. I got a sampler of all their beers and wrote quick notes about each. If you know how to evaluate beer, you won’t like my descriptions. My ignorance knows no bounds. The beers were all tasted in small sampling glasses, so it was harder for me to get the scent. Having said that…

Station 1300 — This is their “light” beer. I’m not fond of light beers but I enjoyed this one. It has a light body and a good color. There is a nice hint of hops that gives it character but it isn’t a hoppy beer; you get the sense of hops but not the bitterness. This would be a good quaffing beer. 4.5 out of 5.

Pumpkin Ale — One of my rules is, keep fruit out of my beer. I’m sure there are good examples of beer with fruit in them, but aside from the Belgian ales, I’ve not found them. This beer has the spices associated with pumpkin pie. To be honest, it was better than I expected. It wouldn’t be my favorite and would have to be saved for special occasions, but it was drinkable. It has a light body and the nutmeg/cinnamon taste is prominent. 3 out of 5.

Hefe Weizen — It definitely has the unfiltered look you expect from a hefe weizen. It also has a light body. There is a pronounced banana taste to it. There is a hint of the yeast flavor that I associate with the wheat beers I’ve had in Germany but that taste yields to the banana. My drinking buddy for the evening loves wheat beers. He liked this but felt it was stronger in taste than either Oberon or Whitsun (he preferred Whitsun but liked them all). To me, it was pleasant; another quaffing beer. 3.5 out of 5.

Red Lager — This was light red in color and bitter. It is bitter but not hoppy. It seemed like a more carbonated, lighter IPA. The malt keeps the bitterness from being overwhelming. It isn’t sweet like some of the other reds I’ve had (but they were probably ales). 3.5 out of 5.

Pale Ale — This beer is copper colored. It has a more balanced hop/bitterness that makes it fairly smooth. 3 out of 5.

Cherry Baby — (cherry weizen ale). This beer is more coppery colored and is clearly unfiltered. You get your nose near this one and it screams cherry. The cherry overpowers in the scent and in the taste. It was like drinking bitter maraschino cherry juice. I’m sure there is an audience for it but I hated this one. The overpowering cherry essence probably hit me the way my favorite hoppy beers hit others. 1 out of 5.

Lug Nut Brown Ale — This is a dark beer. Possibly Porter dark. It is light-bodied, smooth and malty. If I had to describe it, I would call it a Porter Light. It’s a good beer but not one I would drink often. 3.5 out of 5.

Billy Bock — This was also coppery colored and appeared unfiltered. It is light bodied with a hint of fruit. It is not sweet or as full-bodied as other bock’s I’ve had. In fact, it’s not very sweet at all, which is good. To me, it just didn’t have a lot of taste or character. 2.5 out of 5.

Scotch Ale — This is reddish in color and medium bodied. It has a definite bitterness to it. Again, it is not as sweet as I would expect but it is more bitter than I would expect. There is a definite hint of the roasted malt to it. It doesn’t have that strong sense of alcohol that may Scotch Ales seem to have. Without that and the sweetness, it’s a more refreshing version of a Scotch Ale. 4 out of 5.

Coffee Porter — This has a good, dark color. It is fairly light-bodied with a medium roasted malt taste. The hint of coffee plays well with the malt and keeps it pretty smooth. 4 out of 5.

Stubbin Stout — This has the expected color. It is smooth. It has less body than the Porter and a smoother roasted malt taste. Another easy drinking beer. It isn’t Guinness but I don’t think it’s trying to be. 4 out of 5.

All in all, I enjoyed the beers. The maltiness without a pronounced sweetness was refreshing for me. It made the beers more drinkable. The waitstaff is now MUCH more pleasant also…

OBE – A Warning

There is a site on the web that promotes instant astral projection via their special mp3 file. You also get two smaller mp3 files and a “secret astral projection” pdf booklet. To me, the mp3 files was crap, pure and simple. It appears that someone put something together using bwgen and has been hawking it as an advanced method for achieving astral projection. Don’t believe it. It isn’t even terribly useful as a means of relaxing.

Here is the website:

http://www.astral-projections.com

Read the descriptions. It’s quite likely that you’ll come away thinking, nothing could be that good. Why would anyone be stupid enough to buy it in the first place? Excellent question. What got me was the

NO RISK 100% Money-Back Guarantee!

I can honestly say that I had not been ripped off on the web before. I have always found that people who guarantee their products stand by that guarantee. It seemed to me, based on my long experience of buying things on the web, that I had nothing to lose. So what if it didn’t work? I’d get my money back and will have only wasted time in the trying.

After quite some time and effort using the product, I was convinced that it was useless for me. Without any concern, I e-mailed them, explained that the product did not meet my expectations, and requested my money back. No response. This went on for weeks, with me sending many e-mails to request that they honor their guarantee. No response. I then went to PayPal, only to find out that this site has structured the length of their guarantee so it falls outside the time limit within which PayPal protects you. Very nice… Finally, I contacted the Better Business Bureau, supplying all the supporting information. After 6 months, they sent me a nice letter letting me know that, despite numerous attempts on their part, they were unable to get any satisfaction either.

So, learn from my costly experience. Avoid this site and any of the other sites related to it. They have an inadequate product and they will not honor their guarantee. There are many good books/products out there. Don’t fatten the wallets of these dishonorable people.

First OBE

As a curiosity, I thought I would post the log of my first OBE. This is a lead-in to discussions of books and other tools. It’s brief but it was an amazing experience. What I found interesting is that the sensations I experienced are very common OBE sensations. What I keep asking myself is this: If this is just a dream or it is just some sort of internal mental trip, why do people have such similar experiences? Why the vibrations and the rushing/mechanical sounds? Anyway, here is the first experience. Some discussions will follow soon, particularly a warning against a site/product that is a rip-off.

I recently purchased Astral Dynamics and for 4-5 nights have been practicing the techniques with very little success. This morning, I awoke before 4:00 and was wide awake. Seemed like I might as well try again.

I did the deep relaxation exercise, did the trance exercise with the elevator, did several iterations of the body energy circuit, then did several of the exit techniques. Wasn’t really getting anywhere.

Next thing I know, I’m feeling this vibration that begins in the crown of my head and then flows rapidly down through my body. There is also this weird vibrating/whirring sound in my ears (not a wind sound). I feel myself begin to spin horizontally out of my body, with the top of my head being the pivot point. Realizing what was going on, I got excited and pivoted back. After telling myself to relax and calm down, the vibration and the weird sound began again. This time, I “pushed” and I pivoted out the same way, but much faster. Once my head was freed, I decided I had to do something, so I began flying about the room and doing flips in the air. I remember thinking, “Man, I have to tell my friend about this. This is cool!” I also remember thinking, “OK, Robert Bruce said to keep it short” so I flew around the room a few more times, then flew back to my bed (never looking at myself). When I lay down, it felt like there was someone under me and these two arms flailed out, almost like they were trying to hit me. I then “awoke” with a slight headache centered in the “pivot point” and with this weird settling sensation that included a cold vibration throughout my body (this went on for several minutes).

Here’s why I figure it was a lucid dream: When I was exiting, I did not get the chest rush or anything like that. The room I projected into was not my hotel room. It looked like a hotel room but was definitely not the one I am in. There were shelves on the wall and two chairs in the room (my room has one chair). On each chair there was a creepy little clown doll (don’t have any of those…). When I realized that I needed to keep it short, I decided to fly into the room next to me, just to see what was in that room. Each time I tried, it was if something was holding me back.

I will publish further experiences later. To my disappointment, I don’t have much of anything to report lately…

OBE

In the ongoing search to find effective and consistent means for achieving OBE, I spent time reading posts in the William Buhlman group on Yahoo!. This is where I learned about the Yuschak book and it is where I learned about a “physical” approach to OBE.

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/OBE_Newsletter/

They physical approach extends Robert Monroe’s “Body Asleep/Mind Awake” a bit further (or perhaps it just provides a more effective means of achieving the state than does Monroe’s Gateway series).

At http://www.saltcube.com you will find an inexpensive DVD that discusses the physical approach. Techniques are provided to help you more effectively reach a state of body asleep/mind awake. It is an interesting experience to lay there, your body feeling heavy and numb, and listening to yourself snore. The unique bit of information in this series, at least for me, is the concept that your mind and your body are less “connected” than we think. As your body is going to sleep, it doesn’t know if your mind is asleep. The only way it can tell is to send test signals to see how you respond. These signals might include a very strong urge to roll over or a powerful need to itch your face. If you successfully ignore the urges for a minute or two, your body decides that the mind is also asleep. If you give in, the body resets its sleep timer and waits another X minutes before checking your status again.

So, the recommendation is to ignore these impulses so that your body decides that your mind is asleep and it can begin “shutting down” for the night. Once your body has shut down, creating a feeling like you are paralyzed or like your body is covered by several layers of heavy blankets, you are ready to begin your efforts to separate from your body. The DVD also provides techniques for promoting your exit.

I have had success using this method but, like any of the methods I’ve tried, the success is spotty. This is more likely an issue with me than it is the techniques. The nice thing about this approach is that is does not require visualization to the extent that many of the other techniques do.

If you’re still looking for your way out, I recommend giving this DVD a try. Some of the techniques are unique, the information is clearly provided, and the production values on the DVD itself are quite good.