Messages

Catmeow,

I think God gives us enough clues, a taste of the after-life through trauma, trials, loves, loses, through light and darkness. Still we are trying to find out 'ourselves' if this exists or not. Listening to the NDE cases, patients who are dying can give a better and vivid validation than what science can conjure up by placing electrodes in someones head.

It kinda of reminds me of the movie "Raiders of the lost ark" where towards the end everyone was destroyed by looking at this energy and for the power of greed. When the two who didn't were not destroyed because of their intent for good. There are just some things that are sacred that God won't let us trespass with evil intent. Imagine if everyone could project, manipulate matter, control the world, change time,space, and future. This world is mangled today with pain, suffering, war, economy, governments trying to over throw each other.. add this to the mix - that would definitely be the end of days.

Tvos

Tvos, these are good points.  (This is a great thread!!!   )  Sometimes when I just look around and reflect, like when I'm out in the wilderness hiking or something like that, I can't help but think that this world is a strange thing because it's explainable in many ways, and something that might be made by a traditional God would not and could not be explained in any way shape or form and to any degree, it would just exist as a pure thing.  For example, a human being wouldn't have a brain and organs, we would just be this blob of jello that just "is" with no constituent parts to make us work.  The fact that there is a brain, an imperfect one at that, and organs and man made objects everywhere we look indicate that there is a definite purpose.  There are struggles going on everywhere because of the imperfection of this reality and it is our destiny to deal with those imperfections for whatever reason.  If we knew it all, there would not be an imperfect world, only a very pure perfect one which would almost have to lack any features at all, just pure empty space and a pure empty consciousness to reside in this pure empty space.  No flowers, no music, nothing.  It's the imperfection that makes this reality and our familiar form of consciousness possible, and I might add, might also explain why the astral is so imperfect as well.

If it is non-physical phenomena, how can the physical have knowledge of it (ie if the physical couldn;t have knowledge of the astral, then this forum wouldn't be here).

I think for the most part, and IMHO, in the scientific community physical is anything that can be detected by instruments or through other "physical" experiments.  This would include ordinary matter, all forms of energy(light, heat, etc.), and the 4 known forces (electromagnetic force, strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, and gravity).  Even though consciousness exists, it's impossible to explain because it doesn't fall under any of these categories.  In the future we will probably discover more things that are physical, such as additional forces, or unusual matter which will then give us the ability to turn consciousness into an equation and create computers that are truly conscious, but until then, consciousness is considered "non-physical".  Or maybe like Tvos says, it might be forever in the realm of the unknown for some mysterious reason.

Even if scientists discover a fool-proof way of producing OBE's by stimulating a certain part of the brain, and let's hope they do, this wouldn't mean that OBE's are hallucinations.  It could just as easily mean that scientists discovered a good way of ejecting people from their bodies!

Hey CM, Well put!!!!!!!!

Well, I believe the physical is tied into the non-physical.  Actually, this is true according to physics.  E=mc^2 literally means that energy is accelerated matter.  

I too believe that in some unknown way the physical is tied into the non-physical.  I wanted to clarify something however.  E=mc^2 actually does not imply that energy is accelerated matter.  This is a popular misconception brought about probably because the speed of light (C) is included in the formula.  What this formula actually states is that if you have a certain quantity of matter and multiply it by 3*10^9, the result is the amount of energy that you will get out of this matter.  You don't have to do anything to the matter, just simply convert it to get this energy.  Converting it is the tricky part of course.  The purest way is to allow equal quantities of matter and antimatter to touch each other.  This reaction will cause 100% of the matter to be converted into energy.  The second more popular way is through nuclear fission or fusion which involves the nucleus of atoms to be broken apart by other nuclear particles (neutrons) or be combined into larger nuclei by combining neutrons also by bombardment.  This actually is only moderately efficient however.  A typical nuclear reaction such as from a bomb only converts about 10% of the nuclear matter into energy, the rest is just waste matter.  The least efficient way of converting matter into energy is by ordinary burning which is hugely inefficient.  I don't know the exact number but it's like .001 % or something ridiculously low like that.  For example when you burn a 1 gram piece of paper, you get some energy and about .999999 gram of ash.  

I hope you don't mind that I picked on this, but I think it's important to clear up misconceptions cause they can spread like wildfire. :redface:  

So, energy is matter.  
-Z

Yep!

It's what everyone says here, the beginning of the vibrational state.  The sound is very very loud when you hear it for the first time, but after several OBEs the sound will not be so noticeable.  It's probably just as loud, but just doesn't sound as loud after awhile.  Some folks stop hearing it all together and some don't hear it at all ever.

In any case, don't be afraid of it and in fact you should just pay attention to it and try and "weave" it into being as loud as you can get it.  You will then suddenly either find yourself just floating up or floating sideways and out, or rolling out, or you might need to just give yourself a gentle "nudge" to roll out to get things started, then they will happen on their own after that.  Don't push too hard.

Congrats for getting this far, you are very very close.

Here's one that I grabbed out of my journal folder at random.  I love going back and reading these things.
________________

September 21, 1998

Between 6:20 and 7:40 this morning I had a series of 3 OBE's.  

I was lying in bed at 6:20 and thinking that I could probably have an OBE if I let my mind drift a little and sure enough I began to get the familiar rush noise in my ear indicative of the onset of the OBE state.  I remember I had to coax it a little bit as I wasn't sure if it would really "catch" or not.  I also remember that I was very much awake and rather surprised that I got the rush while I was still so awake after looking at the clock just a few moments earlier.  The imagery was beginning to increase and I also remember being able to see through my closed eyes while the initial rushing was starting to happen.  But what I saw was not my bedroom.  I'm not sure what it was.

The separation process began and I rolled out to my right, ( I was on my back).  At that moment I remembered how recently a lot of my separations have been immediately caught by the magnetic wind and I never had a chance to explore the bedroom anymore since I would leave so quickly.  So this time I made a conscientious effort to look at my body in bed just as soon as I could turn myself around to see.  There I was under the blankets.  I tried to pull the blankets off so I could see myself, but my stubborn body was holding dearly onto them and wouldn't cooperate.  I yanked hard and accidentally pulled my body right off the bed onto the floor.  I gasped and said "oops" as I wasn't sure if I had done any damage or not.  It was a pretty loud thump when I hit the floor.  I tried to pull the blankets off while I was still on the floor and to my surprise the body was gone.  It was just an empty pile of blankets.  Then suddenly, just like in those ghost cartoons the blankets took shape and stood up, hopped up on the bed and started jumping up and down.
I made one last effort to pull the blankets off and uncovered a small boy, about 4 years old in blue and white pajamas laughing and jumping up and down.  I picked him up and looked him in the eyes and he said to me "I want to go OBE too!".  I laughed and told him he couldn't because he was just a body without a soul since I was his soul and I was already out.  He didn't really accept that explanation and grumbled, but then made his way out the door  and evidently found something to entertain himself with.

I looked around the room and noticed that quite a bit of the bedroom was different, the bed was oriented the wrong way.  The door swung in to the left instead of to the right.  I opened the half open door the rest of the way and found myself in a big big living room, that was not at all like my living room.  There was lots of furniture and lots of lamps and so on.

It's unclear what happened from here but I remember I spend a lot of time examining things in the room and kept swinging from lots of clarity to more minimal clarity.  I was experimenting with looking at different things because it seemed some things cause my sight to improve and others did not.  I remember that I wasn't feeling rushed and had lots of time to explore objects in the room.  I did return to my body after about 10 or 15 minutes of this.  I did not travel to my body but instead just lost lucidity and began to feel myself back in my body in bed.  I was still ripe for another separation and did so again without hesitation or problems.

This time when I separated I noticed that the door to the bedroom was shut.  I don't remember shutting it, and it surprised me.  I opened it and walked into the same big living room again, but this time some of the floor lamps that I saw earlier had their lamps facing in new directions, as if someone had adjusted them.  There were some other things that were different in the room as well and all of this surprised me since I had just been in this room moments earlier.  I spent a lot of time looking at things again, but then moved outdoors and noticed that the sky was light blue with high clouds scattered across it.  This color made me more lucid and I was really able to enjoy the view of looking up.  I started to think that perhaps it was colors that changed lucidity.  Perhaps blues helped and white did not.  I felt like traveling and called out for some assistance from the Magnetic Wind to take me for a ride since I wanted to explore and meet up with some people if I could.  To my surprise a rope with a loop handle appeared in front of me and stretched down a long stream bed far in front of me.  I grabbed the rope and said "OK let's go".  But nothing happened.  I coaxed the rope to pull me and it did a little bit but then stopped.  Then the rope vanished and reappeared stretching directly up into the sky instead.  There was no end to it.  I grabbed it again and tried to coax it to pull me, but again, nothing.  I realized this was not going to work as I had hoped and let the rope go and instead just hopped in the air and flew around on a breeze.  That's when I noticed there was a stronger breeze starting to stir and it made my flight a little shaky.  I kept getting blown one way but was trying to go the other.  I returned to my body the same way as before, just by losing lucidity, but was still able to go out again.

The third time out I once again walked out the bedroom door and into the living room and things were a little different again.  I thought how I must be going into just slightly different levels each time I separated again, that the process of going into the body and leaving resets everything and we randomly end up in a new universe each time.

The third time out I managed to fly to some place where there were some people and managed to see an old roommate.  I visited with her for awhile (actually we got kind of intimate but I'll leave those detail out) then I found myself back in my body.  That was it for the morning.  I looked at my clock right away and it said 7:40.  I had been out for 1 hour and 20 minutes.  It seemed like a half hour, but it was much longer.

That's an interesting question and I cannot recall ever swearing on the astral.  How bizarre!!!!  I'm constantly tossing out explicatives under my breath in waking life, usually in response to doing stupid things like stubbing my toe or having too much work to do or whatever but never once on the astral.

Well, now I have a goal for my next trip out.  Swear on the Astral!!!!

If I were to guess why this is I would say that most of the time I swear just to let off steam when frustrated or if I'm overworked and exhausted.  Neither of these emotions seem to apply on the astral so I guess there's never been a reason to use them.  Don't swear much in anger, don't get angry much.

Yes and here is the thing about collective consciousness:  Let's say there are a thousand of us that remember a past life of being Robin Hood.  There isn't a contradiction here.  There was one Robin Hood, but his mind is the mind of a thousand people of today as his consciousness simply was split up into the minds of the thousand people that remember being him.  This is just an example as I think really it has to be expanded to be all inclusive.  I think in each and every one of us is the mind of every mind that ever existed or will ever exist so we have the potential to have past live regressions of anyone we fancy.  

I do like the idea that the collective consciousness is above "time" and it's a very good working theory too.  It just occurred to me that time has to be considered something that flows only relative to something else.  If all time moved the same then there would be no relative motion and time could just as well be considered to not move at all.  It would have to be taken in the same context as moving bodies.  A ship in space moves only relative to the stars.  If there were no stars, there would be no way of knowing if the ship was moving or not.  Adding the Theory of Special Relativity to the equation and we can now say that one persons time moves relative to another persons time if the two persons in question are moving relative to each other, but that still does not say how fast time moves relative to anything outside of this simple subset.  Does time move at the speed of light?  Does time move backward?  It doesn't make sense to say how fast time is moving, so it makes just as much sense to say time doesn't move at all or that there is no such thing as time.

I guess the only reason time exists is because the concept of now exists, like the line between the moon shadow and light.  If we had no awareness of the concept of now, then there would be no concept of time.

Time I think is how we see things when we are not able to see the bigger picture.  A good example of this is portrayed in the story "flatland".  Before I tell the story, what if I asked the question: Is there any relationship between a dot that appears in the middle of space, grows into a foot long line, then shrinks again into a dot and disappears, and a ball?  The answer lies in Flatland.  Flatland is a place that has only 2 dimensions, like a piece of paper and is inhabited by little 2 dimensional creatures that have no depth.  They can't see above or below the sheet of paper only along its length and width.  They move around each other by crawling over their heads or under their feet.  One day a creature on Flatland declared "I just say a dot appear in space that grew into a line then shrunk again into a dot and disappeared" Everyone laughed and said that no such thing could happen.  But it did happen and the explanation was simple enough to us creatures living in a 3 dimensional world.  A ball was flying through the air and passed through the sheet of paper.  When the ball first touched the paper a person in Flatland saw it as a dot in space.  As the ball passed through the paper the dot grew into a line, then as the ball exited the other side of the paper the line shrunk into a dot again and finally disappeared altogether.

I think time is like that.  It is something that appears to be dynamic when really it might just be the intersection of physical reality and conscious mind.

One of my favorite discoveries of all time was Einsteins Theory of Special Relativity because it was one of the most fantastic slaps in the face for us pompous human beings ever.  (For those of you that don't know, Einsteins Theory of Special Relativity was the theory that showed that time does not move the same for everyone, but instead moves at different rates depending on relative speeds.  The faster you go the more time slows down for you, including the rate at which you age and so on.  The rate of time change increases rapidly the closer you get to the speed of light and in fact if you get infinitesimally close to the speed of light, time will slow down for you so much that the entire universe will age billions and billions of years in the time it takes for your heart to beat just once.)

The reason I love the theory so much is because it is the perfect example of how you can be 100 percent sure of something and be completely wrong.  Until Einstein proved otherwise, everyone "knew" that time was unchanging and so all kinds of things were derived from this "fact" including the wrong theory that there was an "ether" pervading the universe and so on.  It is a beautiful reminder that we must keep an open mind about everything.

The other reason I love the theory so much is because it also demonstrates beautifully that "when all possibilities have been exhausted, whatever remains must be the truth" (or however that saying goes).  OBEs and other metaphysical phenomenon (including our own self awareness which is quite metaphysical) are clues.  And I understand completely the frustration of not knowing what to think anymore because there are just so many clues and many times they seem to contradict each other.  A good example of this is the RTZ or that area in an OBE where you are in your bedroom and surrounded by familiar objects.  If this is the bedroom then why is there a candle on the dresser (There isn't a candle on the dresser).  Is this or is this not my bedroom?  This type of contradiction can make a person go nuts trying to figure out whats going on.  But here's the thing:  The bedroom looks like this in the RTZ because that's exactly how it looks if all the rules (that we don't know about) are being followed.  In other words, there is no contradiction, we just haven't yet figured out the rules.  So instead of being frustrated I like to just try and fit the pieces together as best I can and try and adjust my beliefs slowly and decisively as more information comes in.

As far as different religions, yea, really, what to believe!  Is there life after death?  Well if your asking me I say yes, but that's a big qualified yes because it's not quite that simple.  I'm at a point where I accept certain contradictions that will resolve themselves in due time.  One of these is that I believe in a single consciousness, but yet there are obviously individuals each with a supposed "soul" or consciousness and so bingo, contradiction!    This will have to resolve itself and eventually will.  What I'm doing in the meantime is trying to imagine if there is only one consciousness and individuality is just an illusion (which I really believe it is) then this is a clue as to what happens after death.  (drum roll)   What I think is that it is impossible for me to not exist after death or everything would cease to exist including you.  If the tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?  What if a tree falls in the forest and there are people there to hear it but I'm not there to hear it, then does it make a sound?  I say it doesn't! This almost sounds like solipsism (the belief that I'm the only real soul and everyone else is just a good android), but it's not.  It' just taking what I consider a fact (singular consciousness) and applying it to everyday existence.  Somehow, someway, one consciousness is (seemingly) being split up into many individuals, but if one consciousness expires, and there is only one consciousness then obviously everything and everybody expires as well all at the same time.  So as far as I'm concerned I will always exist and I have always existed and I may not remember how things were for me a million years ago or remember today a million years from now, (which is probably a good thing) but to think that this very small moment in time was the only time available to me just doesn't make sense.  

Think of it another way.  If time is infinite, that is to say if there was never a beginning to time and there will never be an end to time, and if the universe were created by an immortal consciousness with no beginning and no end, then the span of my life is an infinitely small slice of time compared to the length of time of eternity.  Now an amount of time that is infinitely small cannot exist which means that unless my consciousness is immortal in both directions of time, I could never exist at all.

Mark one benefit of OBE is that a clear head and healthy body make for better (clearer, longer) OBEs and this can be an incentive for you to keep on the path your are going.  Your prior drug use won't have a significant impact on your ability to have OBEs, but having a clear head will.

I'll sometimes I'll have very long dry spells, maybe 6 months without a single OBE.  It's terribly frustrating.  Actually I just had a recent dry spell which lasted way too long and one of the reasons I post on this forum is because I know that discussing and thinking about OBEs on a regular basis are one of the best ways to break a dry spell and it seems to be working.  I had an OBE a week ago, short but satisfying.  When I'm not in a dry spell I can have 3-5 good OBEs a month which is very nice.  Also the more I project the longer they are so it really helps to try and keep up the frequency.

Yes indeed!  There are others as well, such as a door being on the wrong wall in your bedroom during an OBE or a building outside your bedroom window that is not there in real life.  Why is it that we can get almost all the details of a bedroom correct and yet have something like a door on the wrong wall.  I know where my doors are!!!  Yet this is a very common experience during OBE for everyone.  Another is the magnetic wind.  It's the same for everyone.  If I even mention that phrase anyone with any OB experience will know immediately what I'm talking about and yet there is no equivalent in the real world.

I tend not to separate OBE experiences and hypnogogic hallucinations into "valuable" and "not so valuable" or real and not-real categories as I find it very difficult to decide what is inside my head and what is external.  Mostly because I think this is a very grey area anyway.  I guess I start from the premise that self awareness (consciousness) has no real connection with the physical brain.  I was reading a book recently edited by Ken Wilber called "Quantum Questions" which is a bunch of essays by the worlds greatest physicists on the questions of consciousness and it seems to be the general consensus that physics will never be able to find a physical model to connect the conscious mind to the physical mind.  This is very important to me because even something like a common dream has to be given great importance in light of this.  Even though one cannot deny that the physical activity of the brain and certain thoughts or hallucinations are related, I tend to think that thought comes first and brain activity reflects that rather than the other way around.  If thought itself is external than voices, whether they come from hypnogogia or during the vibrational state can also always be considered to be external.

Don't know if that helps much.

Congratulations Mark on your first experience.  I hope you have many more to follow.  The community of Astral travelers is growing!

It's interesting that you chose to try and move through the floor as opposed to something like a wall, but not surprising.  Sometimes what seems a little "weird' in waking reality seems perfectly normal during an OBE.

I look forward to hearing about your next trip out.

Funny, my profession is engineering, I study physics as a hobby and I own a copy of "the holographic universe".  Hmmmm.....

meow, I agree that physics and philosophy have truly become integrated.  This is good and bad.  I would have liked to have been Newton where my discoveries were solid, irrefutable, logical, and definitely provable, but I don't think physics will ever be like that again.  The Pandora's box has been opened and all realistic physicists realize that today's working theory is good only for today.  Tomorrow brings another different but equally valid theory.  Honestly, no one knows whats going on anymore.  The good side of this is that we are at an age where we recognize that things are just not as they seem and that is the reason for all the confusion.  Eventually the confusion will subside and a logical framework will appear and then the real truth of reality will appear.  

Until then I think it would be good to continue to take data from astral travels and to try and compare notes the best we can.  For example, I was just reading a post where someone mentioned passing through a brick wall and seeing all the tiny grains of the cement while she was passing through.  I had a very similar experience where I passed through a sheet rock wall and I could also see the spider like web of plaster and air gaps.  This is more than a coincidence.  This is also more than imagination.  There is no way I would pay attention to such a thing as the details of the inside of a wall if I were just flitting around in a dream.  This was a very real and noticeable observation while it was happening and the fact that someone else also observed the same thing is definitely noteworthy.   Clues like these will eventually tell us more about the astral realm and the OBE experience in general and I for one am paying attention! :peace:

Hi catmeow.  Are you a physicist by trade?  I study physics as a hobby so I'm familiar with everything you are saying.  The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and so on.  

With all of this in mind what is your take on the difference between waking reality and the astral plane?  It seems that in waking reality statistics, which as you said rule the events that occur on an everyday basis seem to form a stable bell curve the same for everyone.  In other words, the chances that the moon will be where we expect it to be is statistically high, not just for me, but for everyone around me who is also in this waking reality and these statistics remain unchanging.  This however may not be the case on the astral realm.  It might be, as is the case when 2 astral travelers are just chatting and are experiencing the same situation like a carnival or something, but even so a single individual astral traveler, like myself,  could be in one environment one moment (statistically high event) and in the next moment it all disappears and becomes something else, meaning the probability suddenly dropped from very very high (existing) to very very low (not existing).  Waking reality does not suffer from this.  Why?

Perhaps it's an idea you invite some others here of that time you still know. We can always use experienced projectors on these boards to help many others striving for similar experiences, including charming sceptics like Janice.

Looking forward to reading your posts.

I'll drop Janice a note and she can do the invitations if she wants as I can't seem to directly access the newsgroup anymore since I changed servers.  Yes, Janice is charming isn't she  

Do you ever feel you are up against a time limit with the vibes? When I didn't know what the vibes were I'd just project. Over time I became familiar with the pattern, that rising in intensity out of nowhere then falling away again, and I think that has made me kind of anxious of getting it right before they fade away again, of their being a ticking clock, window of opportunity, call it what you will. I don't think that helps me. Rolling my eyes up into my head helps, but isn't successful in itself. I feel I have been going backwards in my projection abilities for a long time.

I do believe you have just identified the cause of your problem!    There is no real time limit per se.  The ebb and flow of the vibrations is the tool you need to be successful at this.  What you need to do as I mentioned earlier is to wrap yourself up in the sound and the feel of the vibrations and use the changes in the vibrations (the ebb and flow) as feedback to guide you toward ever increasing vibrations.  Don't fear that they will disappear (or they will), just listen to them and guide your mind so that the vibes "waver" toward a greater and greater level.  The wavering is like a drunk driver trying to stay on the road, but keep the focus, be calm and "accepting" at all times and let the vibrations guide you and you will be fine.  There is no need to push (and you shouldn't) because once the vibrations swell enough, you will just release and float out or roll out with absolutely no effort on your part.  Sometimes I will gently nudge myself (very gently) to roll out as I get excited to get a move on, and I'll do this if I'm lingering in the vibe state a little too long, but if you do nudge yourself it really has to be subtle or you will break out of the vibrations.

Later at night I had my OB and remember going through a concrete wall (impressive to a little kid) feeling the texture of the wall, how it looked on the inside seeing the little rocks it was made of, this kind of thing,

One of the coolest things about OBE is the similarity in peoples descriptions of the experience, most notably the "vibes", but also in things like this.  I remember one time I was traveling through a wall and I had the very same experience.  I could clearly see the microscopic material that the wall was made of as I passed though it right down to the fiber and air gaps.  It was really amazing!

I was working a night shift (when I was around 21) when one of the guys I worked with turned me onto astral travel and it intrigued me so he loaned me a book on the subject, "the handbook of astral projection" or something like that and I took it home after work (morning) and immediately read the first few chapters.  I was really tired, so I hit the sack and BAM   I had my first (short) astral projection right then and there!  That was just mind bending and I was never the same.  I studied up on it and practiced it night and day, sometimes with success but often without.  

Then one time (I think it was just a year or so after my first projection) I had a bad experience and I had to fight to get back to my body.  It scared me so much that I all but vowed to give it up for good.  So I gave it up for about 3-5 years, but the vibrations were very strong and I eventually had to give in to them as they were exhausting me.  I'm glad I did as I never had another bad experience and it was simply meant to be.

I think the most important thing I learned from all this is that there is more then meets the eye and things are not what they seem.  Consciousness is hugely magical and hugely vast and reality is one state of consciousness, but it is one side of a many sided coin.  More importantly it has allowed me to (IMHO) really understand so much about the nature of "God" and my relationship to the universal creative force and fellow human beings and animals and plants.  A lot of questions that I could not answer before I seem to have answers to (at least to my satisfaction) and I feel prepared for anything that may come (or so I think   )

Hi Ken,

Good to see you out here. Don't you remember you, but I never was highly active there.

Do remember Janice, and yes, Gunner too I think, if he was the one who died in a glacier.

Hope to hear more from you, and your experiences.

Post a couple of good OBE stories in the experiences section.

Yes, Gunnar was the one that died in a glacier.  It was a little over 4 years ago and I was thinking it might be nice to have a celebration of friends for the 5 year anniversary.  It just broke my heart to pieces when he died.  I considered him a really close friend even though I never met him in person.  He was a very experienced astral traveler and I learned a lot from him.  

I still keep in touch with Janice every now and then.  You can buy her book on conscious dreaming on Amazon BTW.

I'll definitely pull out some of my old adventures and post them.

I get the same feeling about these voices in that they seem to be talking but without any regard for the fact that I'm there listening.  I also have a hard time understanding what is being said.

It always interests me the way the vibrational 'push' causes a change in the intensity of vibration. If this is common to all of us who have the odd vibe or two, I wonder if it signifies something detectable to neurological instruments? To me vibration is like lining up all the wheels on a combination lock, even if you have all the numbers but one you can't open it no matter how hard you push. When you get it right you can sail out without effort. I cannot get out at all now, the last number eludes me.

You might be doing something differently than you used to but don't realize you changed your technique. What I do to get out at this moment in time is to focus completely on the vibrations and in particular, the noise and just try to "wrap it around me" as much as possible, just really get into the feeling at the exclusion of everything else.  I also mentally encourage myself to move forward and to feel everything that is going on.  This is a very reliable method for me.  If you get a chance to try this I would be interested in hearing if you have any success with it.

I like to use looking at the back of my hand not only to clarify my vision but it's also a great way to stay out longer.  The process of focusing on the details of the hand, like the veins and the texture of the skin really helps to keep the trip going strong.  Inducing OBE from hypnogogia can be really cool.  It's different, but worth doing.  I've only done this a few times and it feel more like remote viewing to me, but definitely a fantastic visual experience and I would like to experience it again sometime.

I wish I could help more with the negative feeling you have upon exiting, but maybe when you realize that you don't always have the option of doing this, you might think of it as a more precious moment that you shouldn't squander if you know what I mean.  Also remember there are folks that would give anything to have a crack at a good vibrational experience.    

I have never had to deal with stuck parts... oh wait, once I did.  My head was stuck and the only way I could get out was to actually do a back flip over my head.  It seemed funny in retrospect, but it worked!  Pulled me right apart.  

Yea the wind is one of my favorite things.  I've had guides as well, and sometimes the two seem almost the same as if the wind is just a guide in disguise.  It always takes me somewhere of value so there is obviously an intelligence involved.  It never just picks me up and dumps me in the middle of a desert somewhere. :yikes2:

Thanks Jeff,  I hope you get over your fear of the vibrational state, but I understand it.  It can be pretty scary.  I don't know how long you've been trying to get past this but if it's any help, try and think of it as a car full of your friends pulling up along side your house on a quiet night and blaring the horn real loud.  At first you'll be startled, but very quickly you realize the horn and "party" are synonymous and when you hear the horn you think party.  So it is when I get into the vibrational state, I can't wait to get out.  When I hear the whistle in my ear, it's like the train ride to adventure land for me and nothing is going to stop me and nothing excites me more and I really think this type of attitude is necessary to have a nice clean exit and an easy time moving about.