OOBE: Did It Ever Happen To You?

It was probably like 4 a.m. You could hear a pin drop in our dark bedroom.

Those were the years when I used to meditate a lot, including early morning meditations at 3 a.m. in our living room.

After half an hour of repeating my mantra in the dark while sitting in a half-lotus position, my legs would start to go numb and hurt a little. When the pain started to get real bad, I would get up and return to bed.

I would lie down. After a minute or so, just before I drifted back to sleep…

It would start…

VIBRATIONS… a strong tremor that would start at my feet and the tip of my hands and wiggle its way up my limbs.

It scared me the first time it happened but I got used to it over time, until that early morning.

That night it again started with vibrations following a 3 a.m. meditation session.

Then SUDDENLY, without any prior warning, I found “myself” at the footer of our bed.

First I was thinking “wow, I’m at the foot of our bed”…

I very clearly remember even today the weaving of the fibers that made up our blanket.

I was that close to it, looking at it perhaps from an inch away, and marveling at the muted colors of the fibers and their intricate weaving pattern.

Then I realized “I” was actually still sleeping in bed, next to my wife!

That’s when I PANICKED because I realized that the conscious ME that was examining the blanket up close and the other “me” still sleeping in bed next to my wife were different…

I’d be damned if I weren’t having an OOBE – Out Of Body experience!

With that startling realization I literally SNAPPED back to my body with a jolt and woke up sitting straight.

My heart was in my mouth. I was scared and confused but the night was as quiet and untroubled as before. And my wife was sleeping right next to me, God bless her, unaware of anything that was going on.

I carried that unique experience with me for years, even after I quit meditating regularly.

It all came back to me the other day when I stumbled upon this volume in my local public library: The Journey of Robert Monroe: From Out-of-body Explorer to Consciousness Pioneer, by Ronald Russell.

This is not the first book to read about OOBE; it should be Robert Monroe’s classic Journeys Out of the Body. If you haven’t read it yet, trust me, it’s nothing like you’ve read before. It’s a true mind bender, especially coming from as worldly a character as Monroe was at the time he had his own first OOBE.

Russell does an excellent job in giving us the full context of Monroe’s work and the detailed story of the ups and downs of the The Monroe Institute which still operates today in Faber, Virginia.

I’m wondering if any Culture Feast readers have had any similar experiences themselves?

And if so, whether such an experience has caused any changes in their religious and philosophical views on life?

Because as skeptical as I am towards my own experience, two things are certain:

1) I KNOW it was NOT a dream. Nor was it a hallucination or an illusion. (Disclosure: I never did any drugs in my life.) I knew and still am certain today that it was a genuine sensory experience, as real as my fingers typing out these words on the keyboard right now.

2) It did help me “understand” in a non-verbal and visceral way the “probable reality” lying behind postulates such as “we are more than our bodies,” or “we are spirits inhabiting material bodies,” etc.

I sometimes think a personal OOBE is the true missing link between our worldly-sensory model of reality and what most religions and spiritual disciplines are talking about.

Pick up Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body from your local library today and see what you think.