From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 17 No 3 (June 2023)
Former radio executive and pioneer of out-of-body-travel Robert Monroe (1915–1995) had his first OBE (out-of-body-experience) in 1958 at the age of forty-three, discovering he had a natural talent for dissociating his mind from his physical body.
By 1984 and many “astral journeys” later, Monroe and his team at The Monroe Institute had reached a mix of premises and conclusions regarding out-of-body-experiences and sleep that were highly consonant with occult doctrines, including:
All humans move out of phase with physical matter reality and into the out-of-body state during sleep.
During deep or “delta” sleep, consciousness is completely detached from physical reality.
Some form of energy enters the body prior to birth and leaves at death, taking its experiences and learnings with it.
Human and other forms of consciousness are inherently non-physical. At death (or OB), people naturally move into an ambiance and environment that resonates with the vibrational matrix of their being.
No belief system, illusion, action or thought during life in the physical can alter this basic process.
Like it or not, we will survive the death of the physical body.1
Occultists had long realised that when someone enters sleep, “his higher principles in their astral vehicle withdraw from the physical body,” leaving the dense body and the etheric body remaining on the bed, with the astral body floating in the air above them. “In sleep, then, a man is simply using his astral body instead of his physical,” continues A.E. Powell in his 1927 book The Astral Body.2
Interestingly, the idea is expressed in ancient Mesopotamian literature, that the soul, or some part of it, moves from the body of the sleeping person and actually visits the places and persons the dreamer sees in his sleep.3
The Poso Alfures of Celebes (in Indonesia) believe in three souls: the vital principle (inosa); intellectual (angga), and divine element (tananoa) – the latter of which leaves the body during sleep and wanders in dreams.4 There are variations on this trinary theme among other cultures as well. The point is the shared concept of some intelligent principle that separates from the physical aspect during sleep.
Manly P. Hall writes in The Secret Teachings of The Ages of the likelihood that the Eleusinian initiates of ancient Greece (c. 1600 BCE–392 CE) “realised that the soul left the body during sleep, or at least was made capable of leaving by the special training which undoubtedly they were in a position to give.”5
The American esotericist Sylvan Muldoon wrote in the 1920s that the astral body moves slightly out of sync with the physical body each night, allowing it to absorb the “cosmic force” or prana. The farther away the astral moved, the more easily it could obtain or “condense” (implode) the ambient energy. The distance between the astral and the physical determined the depth of sleep and amount of recuperation achieved. (“Man does not live by bread alone.”) The more tired you are, the farther the astral moves away from the physical to obtain energy, hence the notion that fasting or being physically ill or weakened can assist astral projection.6
As sleep deepens, the sleeping astral double moves higher and higher until, perhaps, it moves away to roam the astral, acting out dream scenarios until cycling back into the physical before awakening. Muldoon also pointed out that conscious projection prevents the re-energising process – unconscious projection is needed for proper recovery in sleep. At this point in time, it is a basic need for most people in order to function healthily.
OB traveller and author Preston Dennett explains that while dreaming and hovering outside our bodies, we basically live our stream-of-consciousness fantasies. Theosophical occultism in the early 1900s held that people operate at night in the astral body, but as soon as it is mastered, work in the ‘mental body’ begins. When the mental body too becomes completely organised, “it is a far more flexible vehicle than the astral body” and can do much that the astral cannot.7
From this perspective, the realisation of our astral wanderings takes on a humbling new form. Spiritually, we are but at the larval stage of development, for the most part.
Dennett (like any serious astral traveller) affirms Monroe’s conclusion that we all go out of phase with physical space-time each night to have OBEs. The event that initially confirmed this for him was waking one night to find himself out of bed, standing there inexplicably in the dark. Amusingly (though probably less so for him at the time), it dawned that he was out of his body. In a wave of terror, fearing he had died, the panic-stricken Dennett dove immediately back into his body.8
Theosophist Charles W. Leadbeater wrote of the nightly astral jaunt in 1915:
“There are many among us who are able to perform (and do perform every day of their lives) this elementary act of magic in full consciousness – who pass from one plane to the other at will; and if that is clearly realised, it will become apparent how grotesquely absurd to them must appear the ordinary unreasoning assertion that such a thing is utterly impossible. It is like telling a man that it is impossible for him to fall asleep, and that if he thinks he has ever done so he is under a hallucination.”9
In the obscurely named Breakthrough to Creativity (1967), Shafica Karagulla documents an extensive range of psi phenomena, including a number of mainstream medical practitioners who were also:
“…sensitives who attend classes when they are asleep at night. These are not usual dream experiences… None of the irrelevancies appear which are commonly associated with dreams. The lectures are as precise and clear as those given in a college classroom. The individual in question receives instruction and information which is accurate and often useful to him in his work.”
More poignantly, friends and/or acquaintances were also showing up in the same classes “who remember the same lectures on the same subjects…”10 (Emphasis added)
Shared experiences are strong evidence in favour of reality (and consciousness) being nonlocal and holographic.
One mainstream “medical sensitive” mentioned by Karagulla was a Dr Philip, who was beloved by his patients and frequently consulted by the Mayo Clinic for his remarkable insight. He had kept secret that it was “higher sense perception” which allowed him to function so effectively as a doctor. He could see inside his patients’ bodies, observe the organs and immediately detect pathology without external assistance. Within a few minutes, he could see the complete health condition of a patient just by looking at them and, additionally, pre-cognitively see the course the condition would take. He hid these abilities and told Karagulla to share the information only after he had died.
During his nocturnal outings, Dr Philip found himself in a medical college where lucid and logical lectures were given; in the morning he could remember everything that had been said in detail. In these classes, he was trained to see into the body to discern its condition and functioning. The ability translated perfectly into his day-to-day medical operations and guided his diagnostic and treatment procedures.11
Karagulla’s friend Vicki was another of these nocturnal students who had spent her whole life visiting the same buildings/learning centres in her sleep. The architecture was simple but unlike anything she had seen in the physical. In the classes, the teacher/lecturer would manifest three-dimensional thought-form models as learning aids, which they could rotate and alter at will.
Vicki remembered every word of the lectures and transcribed some for posterity at Karagulla’s urging. Lectures on the neutron in the iron atom contained compelling esoteric information, which, in fact, dovetails with that in Chapter 6 of The Grand Illusion [by Brendan Murphy], where the true nature of atomic and subatomic matter and its structure is discussed.
The class was shown “a schematic model of a neutron in an atom of iron. He represented it as a spiral of a certain number of turns with the two ends of the spiral forming a central line within the coil perpendicular to the plane of the turns of the spiral.”12
Vicki was also able to verify the “astral” presence of a friend at one night class via confirmation over the phone. He remembered the class too, though his recall of the information was lesser.13
By 1985 the Monroe Institute team had tested the Hemi-Sync process with over 3,000 subjects in the previous ten years. With a minimum of twenty individual tests/exercises per subject participant, that comes out to 60,000-plus trials/tests.14 That is a lot of testing and verification of the occult tenets – and those were the numbers from over 30 years ago. As Monroe said, through this process, people come to know – not believe – they survive physical death, regardless of what they do (or don’t do) in life. For Monroe, survival was not a belief system but merely a natural fact of life.
In summary, Monroe described “the after-death state, the nature and inhabitants of the nonphysical planes, the use of common siddhis and other phenomena of an occult nature.” Monroe uses different terminology to describe it all.
“Thus, the occultist’s ‘planes’ become ‘rings’, a ‘spirit’ becomes a ‘curl’, a ‘thought-form’ becomes a ‘rote-ball’, ‘telepathy’ becomes ‘rote transfer’, and so on…” according to Donald DeGracia in Beyond The Physical: A Synthesis of Science and Occultism.15
The “rings,” DeGracia (a biochemist and OBE traveller himself) observes, “correspond closely to the septenary arrangement of planes described by occultists and yet, from Monroe’s perspective… are the ‘backwoods’ of an even vaster interdimensional civilisation.”16
A perusal of the internet quickly reveals that the OBE is global, extremely common, and 99.9% of the time, encountered by well-adjusted, intelligent people. I know of many such people who have had OBEs and other related phenomena (such as sleep paralysis post-OBE).17
If we are essentially astrally projecting each night as we sleep, then something amusing emerges from all of this: in a sense, we all “die” every night when we go to sleep, only to awaken in the morning and resume our fearful delusions about the “horrors” of death!
The difference between clinical death and sleep is that the body and etheric vehicle in sleep remain living and functional so that we can make re-entry from the astral back into “physical matter reality.”
Death, then, is simply a permanent exit from the physical-etheric tuning system after the physical body has become non-functional.
The above is excerpted with permission from Brendan Murphy’s forthcoming release of The Grand Illusion – Book 2. Keep informed on its release by visiting brendandmurphy.com/signup.
Footnotes
1. Monroe, Far Journeys, 63-4.
2. Powell, The Astral Body, chapter .9
3. See Mishlove, The Roots of Consciousness.
4. Christie-Murray, Reincarnation, 23. See also: theodora.com/encyclopedia/l2/lycanthropy.html
5. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages.
6. Muldoon and Carrington, 148-9.
7. See A. Powell, The Mental Body, chapter 18.
8. Dennett, Out-of-Body Exploring, 9.
9. Leadbeater, Invisible Helpers, Ch. 5.
10. Karagulla, Breakthrough to Creativity, 246.
11. Ibid., 72-73.
12. Ibid., 111-112.
13. Ibid., 113.
14. Monroe, Far Journeys, 31.
15. DeGracia, Beyond the Physical, 104.
16. Ibid., 103.
17. Sylvan Muldoon actually referred to sleep paralysis as astral catalepsy. He asserted that sleep paralysis indicated the astral double was also cataleptic at that time. (Muldoon and Carrington.)
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