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Science doesn't have the antagonistic relationship towards OBE's that you are imagining. Of course some scientists will dismiss it right away, but you don't have to be a scientist to do that, most people on the street will do the same thing.

They're not being closed-minded: there is a difference between saying something is false and saying there's not enough evidence to believe that it's true. Just like you don't have any reason to believe that Zeus, the thunder god, is watching you from a mountain in the sky, they don't have any reason to believe that you can send your spirit or whatever out of your body.

They can't believe in something based on insufficient evidence because they have to follow the scientific method. If they didn't follow the scientific method we'd still be in the dark-ages regarding medicine, physics, computer science, pretty much all the advances you take for granted. Don't mock them for being scientists, how they think is defined by what they do. You don't work in a scientific field, therefore you can be more "open minded" about this stuff and still do your job.

[based on quantum physics--then there should be a way to completely shift our focus into another dimension]

I can relate to what you're saying.  If our bodies are indeed the product of the mind, as some would suggest, based on quantum physics--then there should be a way to completely shift our focus into another dimension completely without having to come back to this physical dimension.

If our bodies are indeed the product of the mind, as some would suggest, based on quantum physics--then there should be a way to completely shift our focus into another dimension

based on quantum physics

I can't even describe how depressing it is when people do this to quantum theory. Please read a book, written by a scientist who actually knows what quantum theory is. Stephen Hawking's "The Grand Design" is very short and written for the layman, a great explanation.

Try doing some full body exercises before lying down. I had this same problem and found that doing 3-4 yoga sun salutations stopped it, they stretch you out without getting your blood pumping like crazy, so when you lie down your muscles aren't primed for spasms anymore.

If you don't know any yoga just giving your arms and legs a good stretch (a few minutes) will have the same effect.

Interesting, I never focus on my breathing: it seems to become very shallow and slow on its own, until I can no longer sense that I'm breathing at all, at which point I'm in Focus 10.

I'll try doing slow deep breaths on purpose today and report my results.

I've noticed that different visualizations of the brain do different things:

-If I visualize parts of my brain relaxing I lose sensation of various parts of my body.
-If I visualize moving my focal point of awareness into parts of my brain those parts start to tense up and absorb my attention, as if my awareness is being focused into a single point.
-If I imagine my brain extending into infinite darkness above my head I can slowly move into it and it feels like I am leaving my body.

The last exercise creates all kinds of funky exit sensations and makes me too excited to sustain for more than 5 minutes at a time. So far

I loved this movie.

It's even better the second time you watch it, because [spoiler]you notice how everyone behaves towards DeCaprio's character and it makes perfect sense[/spoiler]. It's like watching it a second time!

Since I discovered this it's become my favorite way to listen to music. You need to be as comfortable as possible, though, because you will lose sensation of your body and fall over or slump badly and end up with a stiff neck.


Frank Kepple often talked about changing your focal point of awareness. Usually this point is in your eyes, when you're looking at the world. When I meditate on my breath I move this focal point of awareness to my nose.

Recently I found out that if you're listening to music you can move your focal point of awareness to the music. I do not mean to your ears, but to the actual music being interpreted by your brain once it travels to your auditory cortex. At first it took me about 30-40 minutes to reach this state, but since I've been practicing (this is extremely fun to do!) I can get there in about 15 minutes now. It's AWESOME, here's how to do it:

1) Get in a relaxed position. Sitting down with neck support is fine, lying down is even better.
2) Close your eyes and listen to music through headphones.
3) Relax your face and eyes as much as possible. The eyes will be the hardest thing to relax completely, so don't spend more than a few minutes on this as it will happen by itself in the following steps.
4) Calmly focus on all the instruments and voices you hear in the music. At first it seems like you're just hearing sounds in your ears, but after a while you may notice that the sounds are actually taking shape in your consciousness, somewhere inside your head. For me it feels like they are at a point near the back of my head, where men get bald spots.
5) Focus on the music in this location and try to perceive it with your mind instead of with your ears or eyes. Yes, you are actually using your eyes to listen to music: if you pay attention you will notice this subtle action.
6) Eventually everything falls away except the music. You perceive pure music, and you hear all the sounds, instruments, subtle touches you never noticed, all at once. Your body disappears completely, like you're in sleep paralysis (but of course you can move if you want). This stage is EXTREMELY obvious, you will know you're there right away. You will probably lose it after a few seconds, but be patient and it will come back.

What I'm describing is basically mindfulness meditation, where the focus of mindfulness is the music. This is great if you have good-quality headphones, since you end up hearing every little detail in the music. It's like being on stage with the musicians. Some types of music work better than others: for example, music with a high degree of stereo separation is harder than music where the instruments are more spatially centered (narrower sound stage).

Anyway, it's entertaining and I predict success for anyone with any meditation experience, and would love to hear about the experiences of others who try it! It's a great way to practice moving your focal point of awareness away from your eyes, as well, which was my original intent. It just turns out it's a great way to listen to music.

Maybe this is the 3D blackness stage? Have you reached that stage before?

I tried to do it and all I got was neck strain.  I  know I'm not supposed to 'really' clench anything, but my neck muscles are too ready to clench anyway.

You might be doing it too soon. You have to be pretty relaxed already.

An "immaterial mind" is not a good explanation for the free will question. Try explaining the concept of an immaterial mind to someone who's suffered a stroke and now has a completely different personality because of physical changes to their brain.

I guess it depends on what spiritual beliefs you subscribe to. If you're dead set on believing in a conscious soul that is somehow thinking thoughts separately from your physical mind, you're forced to believe in free will. There's no way to prove or disprove this theory so it's somewhat of a show-stopper if you're trying to have a discussion.

If you're more of a scientific materialist, there's room for an interesting discussion. One place where the rubber meets the road is criminals: if we are really matter reacting to stimuli, no matter how complicated those stimuli/reactions are, then those criminals were destined to commit their crimes at their moment of conception. Should they go free because they didn't choose to be born criminals? Absolutely not. Personally I think we can accept that free will is an illusion but still behave as if it exists.

There's some wiggle room if you think about quantum physics. I hate to bring up a topic I know so little about, but if there is true randomness at the atomic level then there's are possibly true undetermined outcomes in your brain matter, and thus your decision-making process. Whether this rolling of the dice equates to free will is another question altogether.

I found the technique here: http://aing.ru/files/sobt.zip

It's a free e-book by Michael Raduga. I stumbled upon this guy by accident because he is Russian and most of his material is either untranslated or unknown outside of the Russian-speaking world, but he's the Russian Frank Kepple. No nonsense, strictly technique, none of that spiritual energy-raising mumb-jumbo that confuses most people.

He says that there is no one technique that works for everybody, so instead he provides a list of about a dozen for people to try. You try one for just a few minutes, and if you don't feel immediate results you switch to another until something starts working. The "brain strain" has a relatively high success rate for his students (he says about 35%, compared to 15-20 for other techniques).


Some of them are along the same lines, which can be described as "phantom movement." For example you imagine you're moving your hand for a while, without actually using any of your muscles, and eventually the imaginary sensation becomes indistinguishable from the real thing. At this point you are moving your "astral hand" rather than your physical one.

The brain strain is a little more abstract: you're pretending to clench your brain, similar to your arm when you're making a muscle like Popeye. Obviously there are no muscles to contract, you can't really do ANYTHING physically to your brain, but the effort and focus it takes to imagine this moves your attention away from your physical body.

Haven't been able to phase with this technique. The "startling" part is how rapidly it makes you feel exit symptoms. As soon as you stop concentrating, though, your attention necessarily snaps back to your physical body, so it takes some practice to sustain the focus.

I read about this technique recently and tried it out: the results were pretty startling. The effect is so intense that I have trouble staying physically relaxed, so some practice is needed to get to the point where you're "bored" with it and can just go with the flow. Anyway, the technique:

1) Get into a relaxed state. The more relaxed, the better. I did this after getting about 70% of the way to Focus 10.
2) Try to clench your brain, as if it were a muscle, and then relax it.

This moves your focal point of awareness to your head immediately, with some weird effects. Personally I feel a burst of vibrations, like I'm dipping into sleep paralysis for just a second or two. If you're not feeling anything, play around with straining different areas of your brain until you figure it out.

Important: It's easy to accidentally tense up your face, neck, or shoulders, instead of your imaginary brain. Avoid this.

Sorry if I sound militant. I've actually chilled out a lot since watching Inception, that movie has a very good understanding of subjective reality and what it means to an individual.

Because that's all I've got.  We can explain the astral in many ways, but IMO it's better to look at a model that most resembles what we think we know about reality.  If there is a correlation, then why not use it instead of inventing other possible scenarios? Not in waking reality while using our five senses- but if we consider the possibility that an astral projection is a projection of consciousness into or in synch with quantum speed or scales, it can be explained that way.  You don't have to buy it, but it is simply drawing from what we think we know about the physical.

I think you are trying to match facts to suit a theory, instead of the other way around. Starting from the assumption that the astral is at some level an objective reality is to throw the whole concept of a hypothesis out the window. David Warner's up to a similar thing in his "validation" journal, trying to prove his astral experiences are real instead of trying to find out whether they are or not.

Habit of perception.  But ask any quantum physicist and (s)he'll tell you it is not uniform and unchanging, it just seems that way.
Provided the account is indeed of an objective nonphysical reality, the answer would be "Because of the uncertainty principle".  In solid reality, the uncertainty principle is very small, due to the slow frequency of what we see.  As frequencies become higher, the uncertainty principle gets bigger, until, if things get fast and/or small enough, the uncertainty principle makes it impossible to know everything about an object's location, and this, according to Schrodinger's theory, is virtually the same thing as saying that it may or may not exist as what we believe we know about it.
If you apply this reasoning to the astral, you will see, that if you go with the perception that the astral is a state of high/frequency or what has been called 'quantum scale', then it would seem that the astral behaves exactly the same as matter would, given known physical laws.  Or hypotheses, anyway.

There's a lot of handwaving there. You're conflating a property of subatomic particles with our perception of the world. We don't perceive things at quantum speeds or scales, so drawing a line between the uncertainty principle and the transiency of the astral is a non-sequitur. You might as well question what happens to gravity or the strong nuclear force in the astral.

[know very well]

I discovered this by accident one day while listening to an album of music. First a bit of background:

If you're familiar with Winamp, it's music software that contains a very nice visualizer called Milkdrop. Itunes has something similar. Anyway, I used milkdrop for this because it uses "presets," which are individual visualizations. As you play music, milkdrop loads a preset randomly, plays it for around 30 seconds, and then loads another random preset and blends the two together. You can switch to the next preset by hitting H on your keyboard and you can lock the current preset so it doesn't change by hitting "scroll lock" button on your keyboard.

The exercise:

1)Play an album you know very well and enjoy, preferably high-fidelity and with vocals, and turn on the milkdrop visualiser so it is in Full-Screen mode. I used headphones, but speakers will do if you don't have any.
2)Hit H until you hit a visualization that is fairly uniform but still colorful and pretty. When you find one you like hit Scroll Lock to prevent it from changing over time. Avoid presets that have individual elements moving around the screen as they will make this exercise too difficult.
3) Sit in front of your monitor so the visualization is taking up most of your visual field. Relax your eyes so they naturally fall on a point in the center of the monitor.
4) Now, keeping your eyes open, imagine the band, on stage, playing the music you are hearing. See the instruments, the singers, try to get a stable image going.


You will find your attention is constantly being pulled back to the monitor. You will be able to see the band playing in your mind's eye for just a split second at a time before your attention is torn away by the pretty visuals in front of you. As you practice you will be able to hold the image of the band for long and longer. If you can do it for 3 seconds you are extremely advanced and I recommend you stop immediately and go phasing.

The point of this exercise is to develop the skill of being able to switch your attention from your physical eyes to your mental ones. After a while you should become familiar with the action of switching your attention: it will feel like flexing a muscle you use all the time. I guarantee you will feel some weird sensations after a while, but don't expect to phase, and don't do this for more than half an hour as your eyes will dry out from not blinking.


If anyone decides to try this please let me know about any sensations, successes, or failures you experience.

Perhaps it's more helpful to tackle this question at a point where the rubber meets the road.

If everything is subjective, made of thoughts and perceptions, and there is no true objective reality, why is there only one of the multiple "realities" subject to immutable laws? Why are all astral experiences characterized by shifting time, space, inconstant memories, random inconsistencies...and why is what we call the physical world sturdy, unchanging, absolutely uniform to everyone who lives in it?

Why can we all look at an orange in the physical and agree it is an orange, but in the Astral some may think it's a banana or a postcard?

I love Indian's descriptions of mindfulness.

You can break mindfulness meditation into two components: the goal and the skill needed to attain that goal.

The GOAL is to observe something purely, without applying any of the concepts, labels, thoughts, or feelings you've built up over your years of experience. One key aspect of this "pure witnessing" is the smooth and uninterrupted focus you employ to achieve pure experience. Attaining this focus is the SKILL you need.

If you practice breath awareness long enough you may start to notice that when you are focusing on your breathing, you're actually only doing it for milliseconds at a time.

You will perceive the sensation of breath from the nerves in your nose, and then immediately this information will be analyzed by your mind and you are instantly no longer using those nerves--instead you are experiencing the thought of those sensations; the concept of feeling your breath. It is very difficult to make this distinction, but it's there. In addition to this there are a bunch of other things clamoring minutely for your attention: every time your eyes make a micromovement it registers in your mind and tears your attention away for a tiny fraction of a moment. Other sounds, sights, sensations are always pulling your attention away, so fast you don't even notice it. In this way your attention is similar to the images in a film reel: they flicker by so fast it appears to be a smooth motion on the screen, when in reality they are separate unconnected images going by too fast to perceive.


When your attention is totally focused there is no room for thoughts to impinge on your consciousness. A stray thought trying to get in would be like trying to dart your fingers in and out through a whirling fan. This level of focus is the skill you are trying to develop with mindfulness meditation, and this skill has the great side effect of making it easier to phase.

I start phasing practice with mindfulness meditation in order to still my thoughts and focus my mind. To get a strong unbreakable focus would take more than an hour, but I can focus my mind sufficiently after about 15-20 minutes so that falling asleep or losing concentration becomes impossible. It becomes VERY EASY to practice phasing in this state of mind, since there are no distractions. You can go to the edge of sleep and still be fully in control.

I think this is what you were asking about? The relationship between meditation and phasing?

But whener I am focused, and I start feeling some paralysis in my hands and then rest of the body, the tension in my face appears and ruins everything.

When you lose sensation of your body the last thing to go is usually your head, specifically the eye and forehead region. With so little sensory input that area tends to draw your attention and becomes very sensitive. Instead of thinking it as tension that appears and ruins everything, think of it as a sign that you are getting close to totally losing sensation of your body. This tension is always there, you are just becoming aware of it as you make progress.

When I feel this tension it's usually after I've been lying still a while and relaxing, and when it appears it means I'm at the next "stage." It's impossible to do the hands and "brain relaxation" trick until I get to this stage, it's very distinct and doesn't work unless you're suitably relaxed, physically and mentally.

Yes the past few times I've attempted I've had weird random Body itches, and also some muscle twitching. And sometimes i feel like my eyes are flattering, why?

When I get very close my eyelids sometimes start to flutter. I'm not sure why this happens yet, need more research. My working theory is that they capture your attention and create a feedback loop: you sense your eyelids, they twitch involuntarily, you feel the twitch and become even more aware of your eyes, they twitch even more, etc... I managed to pass through this roadblock today by staying very calm and not getting discouraged. I relaxed my mind first, and then calmly followed suit by relaxing my eyes. In a minute or two they settled down and I could move on.

I think this requires some considerable practice, and I can't be sure yet if the eye-fluttering is a necessary stage you must pass through or if it represents nothing more than an unfortunate hiccup you sometimes encounter during a practice session.

One thing that definitely seems to be working is to relax my mind first and foremost, before attempting to deal with any tricky twitches or tension. If you're bending your will towards achieving something it becomes impossible, but if you mentally shrug and try to capture that care-free mental state as you are falling asleep at the end of a long day, you can relax right out of these problems very easily.

Saw this topic and wanted to post that I had this same problem and had my own solution for it:

When I'm practicing I usually get the sensation of very focused tension or tingling near my nose or forehead, kind of like when you've been frowning and wrinkling your brow for too long and the muscles get sore or pulled.

If I was patient this sensation would sometimes randomly dissipate, and it would be like someone flicked a switch and the tension melted away like magic. This is a very distinct sensation, nothing subtle about it. Even if you're not aware of this tension when it disappears you notice it by its sudden absence. It would only happen sometimes, though, and randomly.

Then I found that I could relax parts of my brain, the parts right beneath the tension, and it created the same result. I would also almost immediately start to feel sleep paralysis symptoms. It seems removing this tension acts as a trigger for exit symptoms. Obviously I'm not releasing physical tension in my brain, since there are no muscles in the brain, but the mental effort and imagery are a good proxy for what you're actually doing.


The way I relaxed the tense parts was to imagine a pair of small hands massaging that part of my brain. At the same time I would imagine the section relaxing, and I would simultaneously let go of the tension. This last part is very difficult to describe, it's something you have to lie down for a couple of sessions and experiment with until you figure out what it feels like. You could compare to a wrestling move (stay with me here): if you're trying to pull someone towards you and they're resisting, if you suddenly switch direction and push them away they generally go flying. That's kind of what this feels like, you're releasing the tension and almost pushing it away.

Hope this helps someone...

I do the exact same mindfulness meditation before trying AP. I find it the sensation of breath in my nostrils usually goes through some stages:

1) At first it's very easy to perceive the breath around the nostrils
2) As you get relaxed and your breathing becomes shallower and slower, it gets difficult to hold onto the sensation, especially the exhale.
3) As you continue to focus you lose awareness of your entire body, except for your nostrils. The breath now becomes very clear and easy to experience: it's a cool sensation passing across your nose.

Maybe you haven't reached stage 3 yet? There are more stages beyond that one but I haven't reached them yet myself.