From New Dawn 205 (Jul-Aug 2024)
This article arises from the shamanic-styled presentations of Carlos Castaneda, an anthropologist who delivered several best-selling books about his apprenticeship to don Juan Matus. As I have previously written, I also apprenticed to don Juan and have examined this path for several decades, writing about it as Kenneth Smith and Ken Eagle Feather. Out-of-body experience (OBE) is actively cultivated by this lineage of shamans and is one element of dreaming, an in-house term with technical connotations distinguishing it from ordinary dreams.
In this view, dreaming – including OBE – results from the natural capacities of the human energy body, an arrangement of energy that surrounds and permeates the physical body. As energies cohere (come together) within the energy body, they produce perception and meaning. Change the coherence or cohesion of energy and you change perception. By consciously entering dreaming, you have changed your cohesion by altering the phase or ordering of energy within the energy body.
For example, the ordinary experience of daily life represents one phase of cohesion, one coherence of vibrations. OBE reflects a change of phase, a shift in the pattern of energy within the energy body resulting in different perceptions. Throughout the day, we all have minor changes in phase, such as going from home to work. Your home and work environments each have distinct cohesions based on all the elements and conditions that went into forming those environments, and you’ve learned to transition from one to the other – a remarkable feat. A significant shift of cohesional phase results in entirely new events such as OBE, also a remarkable accomplishment.
To intentionally cultivate OBE, it is helpful to know that it is not only possible but natural. In one study, researchers found that 95 per cent of cultures worldwide report OBEs, with an incidence ranging from 10 per cent of the population to virtually all, depending on the educational conditioning or values of the population. Eighty-nine per cent of those interviewed wanted another OBE, while 78 per cent found lasting benefit. Another indication of the normalcy of OBE, pervasive relaxation was the single, most prevalent element associated with having an OBE.1
OBE is often discounted by scientists as illusory, with these scientists relating them to temporal-lobe seizures or otherwise abnormal neural (brain) activity. For instance, neuroimaging studies have shown the irregular recognition of body location during OBE to be associated with the temporal and parietal cortex.2 Among their functions, these areas of the brain process information into meaning and sense of spatial location. Based on current knowledge, this anomaly of “irregular recognition” may easily be interpreted as the OBE being a somehow false experience. Yet, wouldn’t one expect different neural patterns resulting from an out-of-the-ordinary experience? Because the focus of attention is outside the physical body, wouldn’t this different localisation of awareness produce different neural readings pertaining to body location? Moreover, since there is specific brain activity that occurs by the ordinary act of walking down a street, by the same rules, shouldn’t this common behaviour be considered illusory?
Similar dynamics occur with research of near-death-experience (NDE), an event that may include OBE. For example, NDE is often discounted by relating it to temporal lobe abnormalities, including seizures, yet there is little correlation of temporal lobe seizures with NDE accounts. NDEs are also debunked by relating them to the effects of a dying brain. However, NDEs do not necessarily occur near death. As a result, proponents of transphysical phenomena such as OBE and NDE regard these criticisms as forcing data to comply with existing models of perception.3
If we examine numerous personal accounts the world over of OBE as well as pictures of reality developed by mystics, we open the doors to acknowledging other behaviours outside of ordinary life. Shamans, for instance, typically develop OBE, or at least some type of specialised dreaming, as part of their practices. From this, we can recognise that OBE not only occurs spontaneously but can also be the result of deliberate skill involving the focus and shift of attention. This, in turn, brings about a firm conviction that there is another side to life, that there is another dimension to humans that we can step into and use in practical ways, just as we do in daily life. All things considered, OBE is a natural capacity of human perception. It is just not yet accepted as part of our current reality.
Stages of developing OBE include entering dreaming where you experience a blackness that is at once heavy and dense, yet peaceful and relaxing. This is akin to meditation. The next step is entering your dreams – lucid dreaming, as it is often called, where you can control the dream. From here, you cultivate OBE where you have additional abilities.4
OBE is frequently attributed to a flight of imagination, an intense dream, or lucid dreaming. However, a classic OBE carries a set of five characteristics: exteriorisation, form, locomotion, emotions, and environment. Exteriorisation is the projection of awareness where a dreaming body is distant from the physical body and views events from that location. This has been termed astral projection, while these days is more commonly referred to as OBE.
There is usually a sense of having form of some kind during OBE. Due to conditioned habits, this often resembles the person’s human form. For others, such as those with a shamanic bent and having a power animal, the form might be an animal. It seems the longer the duration of an OBE, or the more frequently a person has OBEs, the form spontaneously becomes a sphere. At more advanced stages, the form becomes a concentrated point of awareness.
No matter the form, the requirements of the physical and dreaming bodies are different. They have different cohesions, different specifications, if you will. For instance, the physical body needs air, the dreaming body doesn’t. As a result, the dreaming body can travel to deep space or underwater without concern.
This leads to the next element defining OBE. The dreaming body has the ability of locomotion, of being able to move and change location. This might be within a room, to distant geographic locations, or even to other planets or dimensions. During an OBE I had many years ago, I visited Mars. Travelling from Earth to Mars took only an instant. The journey was a sudden shift in awareness rather than a sense of movement through time and space. Mars was reddish and rocky, just like NASA photos. Hovering about the landscape, I noticed geometric figures of different shapes. Through a telepathic-like process, I was able to briefly communicate with them. The gist of this is that they were lifeforms but foreign to human thinking. The geometric patterns represented energetic configurations of their non-corporeal awareness.
During other OBEs, I travelled to a world Castaneda describes as being inhabited by inorganic life. Here, I experienced a pitch-black dimension that felt extremely dense and heavy yet unlike the darkness of the initial stages of dreaming. It was as though gravity was significantly greater than on Earth. I was surrounded by pencil-shaped entities filled with soft light of different colours having very low radiation. The nature of time was quite different. It seemed that hours had passed while I was in that region, but when I awoke my clock indicated that just a few minutes had gone by. Castaneda more fully addresses this throughout The Art of Dreaming, where don Juan discusses several aspects related to this dense world.5
The visits to Mars and another dimension can be chalked up as resulting from an overactive imagination, trauma, or whatever. However, if we take a hard look at these as being only a minimal reference to many, many other reports worldwide, perhaps we can better redefine what it means to be human.
Next on the list, the dreaming body has emotions. It is not a dry experience such as found with remote viewing or other psychic functions. A form combined with emotions offers a useful reference to daily life. As a result, there is a correlation of learning that bridges the daily and dream worlds that can significantly accelerate our understanding of consciousness.
A key difference between dreams and OBE is that during an OBE the environment is stable. During a dream, including a lucid dream, the environment may spontaneously shift. Even in a lucid dream, where control of the dreamscape is more evident, the environment might change, or the person dreaming can intentionally change the environment. During an OBE, the environment remains constant. It is stable. If a person desires a new environment, the dreaming body goes to that location rather than changing the panorama on the spot. This further connects processes of consciousness in daily and dream lives. As a result, dreaming gains the same practical utility of learning and application as found while awake.
During OBE, you can begin stabilising the experience by relating it to daily life. At first, for instance, you learn control by focusing on a known place, somewhere you’re familiar with, so you have the feel of it to guide your out-of-body travels. It also helps to know your place in your daily world by knowing what kind of life you want to build. Stability in your daily world feeds steadiness in dreaming. Something peaceful and strong balances emotions which carry over into dreaming. Amid this orientation to OBE, know why you want OBE in the first place. Cultivate a strong, balanced focus toward that goal.
In addition, meditation promotes dreaming as do exercises like disrupting routines, where you interrupt your daily habits. Both loosen cohesion to help you change phase. Your focus of energy creates a new cohesion. You then integrate dreaming and OBE into your daily life and vice versa to develop your sense of reality and expand consciousness in general.
Overall, OBE accelerates learning by offering new experiences, environments, and perspectives to draw you out of a slumber. You eventually gain a sense of flow, of directed movement of energy toward a goal. This is not unlike that of an athlete hitting the zone for optimal performance. It comes from finding a relaxed, centred, purposeful pace in daily life. You may even find yourself going through an ordinary day as though it were a dream, a minor shift in phase that delivers powerful results because you’ve altered your relation to your world.
Dreaming, including OBE, is “simply” a way to become aware of more human capacities and acknowledge there’s more to life. But don’t constrict your newfound awareness to OBE. Dreaming helps awaken other perceptions such as seeing a luminous world of energy in which the energy body is part. And while OBE often requires an unyielding effort to initially produce, you also need to ease up and enjoy life to gracefully allow changes in phase that yield new experiences and enhance your life.
Kenneth Smith’s book, Power Up Your Energy Body: Out-of-Body Experience & Expanding Consciousness, is available from online bookstores.
Footnotes
1. Gabbard, Glenn O and Twemlow, Stuart. With the Eyes of the Mind: An Empirical Analysis of Out-of-Body States. New York: Praeger, 1984, 27-39.
2. Blanke O, et al. “Out of body experience and autoscopy of neurological origin.” Brain, 127, 2004, 243-258.
3. Kelly, Edward F and Kelly, Emily Williams. Irreducible Mind: Toward a Psychology for the 21st Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007, 531-535.
4. Smith, Kenneth. Power Up Your Energy Body: Out-of-Body Experience & Developing Consciousness. Wilmington, NC: EB Dynamics, LLC, 2024, 127-131.
5. Castaneda, Carlos. The Art of Dreaming. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.
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