Out of Body Experiences:

What are we able to learn when we are floating around Out of Body?

It should be noted that Out of Body Experiences can occur within the earthly realm, but also, while still incarnate, in the spirit realm. Robert Monroe, a sound engineer and radio producer in New York City over a half-century ago, one day discovered himself up at his bedroom ceiling looking down at his wife, Nancy, in bed with a man. It turned out that the man he saw was himself. After considerable research with a little help from the medical establishment, including psychiatrists, Monroe concluded he was not insane and was not suffering a serious delusion, but was simply having what he termed an out of body experience, hence the acronym OBE. Monroe spent the rest of his life searching the earthly and heavenly realms while out of body, and he created an Institute in his own name located near Charlottesville, Virginia at which dozens of attendees over the course of a year attend week long sessions to learn how to take OBEs to earthly and otherworldly realms of consciousness. (See his Journeys Out Of The Body, Broadway Books, New York, 1971/1977). Shamans for millennia have doing the same thing as Professor  Roger Walsh M.D. points out in his book, The World of Shamanism, Llewellyn Publications, Woodbury, Minn.,2007.

One of those realms Monroe was quite curious about was where one goes when one dies. Because he was trained as an engineer and thought in non-poetic frames of reference he was inclined to name each identifiable realm of otherworldly consciousness as a “Focus.” As his wife Nancy lay in bed dying of cancer, Monroe became increasingly concerned about where she would go when she died. His description of that place he called simply “Focus 27.” To discover more about what he learned as he accompanied his dying wife to the other side see his Ultimate Journey, Doubleday, New York, 1994. In that book he describes traveling into otherworldly realms while accompanying Nancy’s disincarnate spirit. When he reached a certain point he was told by a spirit being that he could travel no further without cutting his silver cord, the other end of which was attached to the Earth. Monroe was informed that if he traveled further, his silver cord would break and he could not return to Earth to rejoin his physical body that was located there. So at that point he said goodbye to his wife and returned to his physical body.

In his The Modern Book of the Dead Ptolemy Tompkins reports that “The silver cord shows up in many early near-death narratives, where it tends to act as the spiritual equivalent of the umbilical cord. Once it is broken, power to the body ceases instantly – as when an electrical cord is yanked from a wall. Deprived of the trans-physical energies that it needed in order to maintain its organic coherence, the physical body begins the process of disintegration. At the same time, the spiritual body, free now of the need to keep the physical body energized and coherent, undergoes an immediate increase in power and intensity of consciousness…” Tompkins continues, “Once thoroughly free of the physical body and having only our astral and spiritual bodies, we live in a world that we create, in large part, with our own imagination, but that nonetheless overlaps the worlds created by others.”

During Robert Monroe’s out of body travels he learned that once the transition from life to afterlife is made only the heavily addicted remain closely attached to the physical life on Earth they had just departed. Otherwise they move into what Dr. Michael Newton describes their Life Between Lives phase of existence. Monroe also was informed by a spirit being that in that afterlife realm “there is no joy, there is no sadness, there is only love.”