Astral projection, also known as OBE (out of body experience), even with our current understanding on the human mind is a mystery. The explanation for this phenomena has been debated for centuries. What is your belief on the causes and effects of AP?

Dreaming. Lucid dreaming. Halucinations. Imagination.

From my two days here I have learnt that AP is an out of body experience of the mind when you are lucid dreaming in your sleep. However, from the other topics they say your conscience can leave the physical dimension and enter the astral dimension, which is why your body can feel sensations and jolts, as if your spirit is trying to leave the body.

Hi, Samo.

You personally are aware that you are dreaming when you have your OBE's. So that's an OBE during lucid dreaming.

Others report their OBE's differently, namely, they feel especially confident that they are wide awake during their OBE.

If those people are dreaming, then it might involve another dream phenomenon known as false awkening - so-called because many reported instances of it occur just before true awakening. Whatever the name, it is simply dreaming that you are wide awake.

Alternatively, you can dream while really awake, too.

However, recent lab experiments, discussed elsewhere here at UM, published in Science show that the OBE sensation can be felt by subjects who are fully awake.

Since dreams while awake are rare and quirky, while the lab results are reliably "on demand," there is no scientific reason to associate the OBE sensation necessarily with dreaming.

Of course, for you, that's how OBE's happen. but in general, whatever else might be said about the experience, it appears to available apart from dreaming, too.

once i was wacthing tv and i closed my eyes, and instanly felt a jolt upwards and left like i left my body. when i opened my eyes i would look down at my surroundings and than quickly go back into my body. this happened twice and then never gain, kind of wish it did though so i could figure what i was experiencing....any suggestions? lol

Hi, sincerely yours. Welcome.

Everything we see is computed by the elaborate visual processing facilities in the central nervous system. What your eyes furnish your brain is the information needed to compute what the world ought to look like if viewed from a given perspective.

In deciding what that perspective should be (that is, when computing where your head is, in what direction you are looking, etc.), the brain will take into account information from other sensory modalities, especially proprioception and the vestibular system (particularly that beautifully sculpted organ in each of your ears which detects your head's orientation and its acceleration).

The vestibular system, however, is easily misled. You might sometime use an ear syringe to squirt some slighty warm or slightly cool water into your ear. Please take precautions against falling down if you do that, and being close to the toilet may also be wise.

You will likely experience dizziness, and maybe false accelerations ( "instanly felt a jolt upwards").

What you can do deliberately with a bit of water can happen spontaneously. If it does happen when your eyes are closed, then when you open them, you are going to see what your brain computes the scene looks like from the perspective it computes as the origin of its information. That is what you always "see," your brain's best estimate of how light reached the eyes.

The false impression will persist until the brain receives better information about the eyes' actual situation.

There is no such thing as direct, unmediated visual perception. You are not the passive observer of some biological video feed, and cannot be surprised when your experience reveals to you how much we all "paint" our visual surround from moment to moment.

Eight bits, that is so interesting that I think I may have to try this out. It really does sound like some drug though...

This gave me a thought about teleportation...(please read on)

Can you trick your mind in thinking that you have just teleported? Maybe a technique similar to this can make you unconscious for a second, in which you are thinking about a position your body is at just a few inches away, and when you have stopped thinking about it you turn up conscious at that position.

Hey there eight bits ,

i popped in to tell you how much i admire your way of explaning very abstract concepts .. i feel smart after i read your posts . thanks !
sama

Hey there ,

Having experienced OBE a couple of times , my deep belief is , that one can actually provoke them.. requiring lucidity , off course . My target was actually ambigious , i needed to extract myself from my "hull" and go back to my previous one .. "regressive " .. and it worked !
Our mind's potentials are so deeply embedded , that we need to dig .. and i mean dig ..
One may also try basic auto hypnosis before starting .. by basic i mean the simple 5 questions ( related to sensory perception) .. .. taking a comfortable postion in quite room , visualizing 5 memories of last night .. what did i see last before i closed my eyes ( before TOTAL shtdown ) , what did i hear before shutdown , what did i smell ...etc .. these thoughts activate your memory ...then reset your senses and start evacuating .It all sounds easy like that , but believe me , it needs a lot of training ..
My ultimate experience was seeing ( and talking) to myself when i was 8 .. !

Interesting replies. What I have so far concluded is that AP is like a lucid dream but goes a little bit beyond. I am a firm believer in telepathy, I believe that during astral projection we are traveling through the minds of others and ourself. How a group's mind collectively and individually perceives reality is what you are experiencing.

I think that you have a good insight on this. As I see it we are all a part of the astral plane at all times. In our sleep it is easier to tap into this and most of us AP in dreams. To get good at it when we are awake, we need to develope visualization skills. The intuitive and imagination need to work beside the logical mind or that mind will distract you. So it is best to work with logical thought constructs for visualizations to keep that left brain involved in the process.

Telepathy itself is a connection to energies. A telepathic conversation with another is an exchange of your energetic experience with them. Kind of like a shared experience.

As I see it the astral plane is a collective energy pool we are all a part of. Our thoughts are energy and thay can be focused best through improvement in our visualization skills.

John

Hi, Sama.

Thank you for your kind words!

Your own experiences are interesting, too. Do you have a goal in meeting and talking with yourself as you once were? It sounds fascinating, almost like a spiritual exercise.

Coincidentally, today I walked around the neighborhood I lived in when I was a child. I hadn't walked there in many years. I was surprised not only how many memories resurfaced, but how vivid and fresh they were.

I wouldn't mind talking to the boy who lived there. I should try what you wrote.

And Samo. Your quasi-teleportation idea is interesting, too.

I don't know how you would deliberately induce it, but I have had what I think is a similar experience spontaneously. It did not involve unconsciousness, but rather memory-failure (not forgetting something, but rather probably never remembering it in the first place).

It happened a few years ago when I was driving. I pulled up to a stop light, and realized that I had no recollection of anything since the previous stop light on this road - 25 km. back.

Of course, there was no sensation of 'teleportation.' I obviously drove the 25 km. Also obviously, I hadn't been unconscious, or I couldn't have driven that far (in fact, it is a notoriously dangerous stretch of rural highway; I must have been paying close attention all the way).

Nevertheless, I had no memory of anything that had happened on the drive between the stop lights. I did not even have the sense that any time had passed (just the knowledge that 30 minutes or so must have elapsed).

I think this happened because the contents of my short-term memory were simply never recorded in my intermediate nor in my long-term memory. You can drive flawlessly so long as you can remember the past few seconds.

Anyway, the sensation was very strange. I know that there are people who have memory disorders like this as a chronic problem.

There may be drugs that can induce it; I don't know. I am just as happy, though, that this only happened to me that one time .

Hey there eight bits ,

I did have a goal .. needed to talk to myself - back then when i was a child - because of something i had with "stairs "!!!

I have been haunted by falling off the stairs for years .. afraid of going on boats because of those ladders .. hated airports where they make you climb stairs down or up to the plane .. no way i can walk down without thinking i'll break my neck... a real obsession.. so i decided to go back there and see for myself .
I did find out why .

We( our family) used to visit my grandparents on weekends and take a train back home . The train station had these very tall stairs and little flyover to cross to other platform.. those stairs were quite large and had big openings between the steps .. i could see the rails and lights between my feet . My dad would be carrying my baby brother and my mom took my little sister by her hand .
I had to climb those scary "stairs with holes" on my own !

I talked to myself .. understood why i am so scared of stairs ..

Now i am doing better ... well .. only if the stairs have no"holes" !!

At least i know !

Hey, Sama.

That is one very practical use of these out-of-the-ordinary aspects of experience. Well done!

I have an old friend who acquired a fear of some animals when she was a child. She doesn't know why. It has really limited her life, since she likes other animals so much. I am going to pass along what you've said here to her. Thanks.

Interesting Sama. I've noticed that my dog along with some other dogs I know won't go down stairs with holes. They are fine going up and down stairs you can't see through, but if you can see through them they are deathly afraid. lol

I too believe you can induce AP, I have found a number of triggers. Coincidentally most of the triggers are the same triggers that cause sleep paralysis for me.

I agree John. I've found out that since I've been practicing writing with my left hand (I am right handed) my thought patterns have changed making visualization (among other things lol) easier.

8 bits, sounds like a lacking of the miracle of mindfulness lol. I have a bad habit of losing my grounding and going on autopilot a lot. Especially with things that I've mastered a ritual for, like driving. When it gets bad is when I am autopilot doing something and on top of that autopilot thinking of thinking of thinking of thinking, etc.

I've always thought that Astral Projection was just in your mind. Lucid Dreaming. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be able to do stuff some people claim to do. For example; Meeting someone while the both of you were doing AP. I find that to be silly because AP is just in your own mind. Sure, you can meet for example.. George Bush during AP, but it wouldn't really be him, just a representation that you mind has created. So it's not like if you can go to your friend and honestly say, "Man, it was fun astral projecting with you!". It just wouldn't be physically impossible because there is no other realm or plane as to which you two would meet. My opinion.

Hi, 2x3x4xquin (your username exceeds my level of incompetence as a typist )

I ought to have added in my reply to Sama that the searchable term for reluctance to walk on see-through supports is visual cliff.

Sama had an unusual instance of this nearly universal concern because as a child some well-meaning adult may have insisted that she must use those stairs, or maybe she herself realized that she needed to use those stairs there and then, despite her "unfounded" fears.

But her fear was altogether well-founded. Everybody - adults, your dog, children - anybody with eyes and a brain - is going to hesitate to walk on what appears to be inadequate support.

And by the way, Sama, it may be that your correction of your disabling fear of stairs has been completely successful. Your remaining reluctance about "stairs with holes" may not be something left over from childhood, but rather something you share with thinking people everywhere.

As to the driving, sure, I drive on "auto pilot." But usually, if you asked me questions about my last 30 minutes of driving, I could answer them (how was traffic? did you pass any other cars? was the convenience store open? what were you thinking about? etc.). Not so that time.

I did not even sense that there was a gap; I just knew intellectually that there ought to be something where instead there was nothing. Nasty.

And Ghost, AP does happen in dreams. Everything that can happen at all, and more besides, happens in dreams.

When it is a dream, then in order to realize that, it helps to be aware that you are dreaming. A dream in which you are aware you are dreaming is a lucid dream.

One of the immediate pay-offs of those Science experiments is to estabish that the OBE sensation also occurs outside of dreams. This directly corroborates many OBE'ers insistence that they are wide awake when they "travel."

Of course, that doesn't mean you can chat up George Bush whenever you feel like it . It does mean, however, that there is something to study besides yet another dream motif. And when you look at something seriously, you never know what you might find out.

You are most welcome ! And please keep me posted about your friend ..