This column from 1999 popped up on the home page today.
In the twenty years since, the air force has been doing studies on how g-loc is associated with out of body experiences (OBE’s) and near death experiences (NDE’s)
How the U.S. Air Force Induced Out-Of-Body Experiences | Big Think - YouTube
https://www.near-death.com/experiences/triggers/extreme-gravity.htmlOh, I forgot to add my own experience with OBE
When I was in Jr High (about 13yo) we discovered how to make ourselves pass out. I believe this little tidbit of info was passed onto us by someone’s older sibling - you know, how most childhood info is passed on. the way to do it was to take several deep breaths and while holding the last breath squeeze your body down into a tight ball; effectively freezing you blood stream in place. eventually the blood in your brain would be depleted of oxygen and you would pass out. Now I don’t know if this is the actual mechanism that causes the blackout but that’s what we told ourselves. I tried it a couple of times without luck, on the third go still no luck and I got up and finished the day of school and then walked home. As I reached for my front door, it started to disappear and I could hear my friends laughing and asking if I was alright. . . apparently the third time I tried I was successful in passing out and in the 10 - 15 seconds I was out I lived the 3 or so hours in my mind. The dream state I was in was very real and the time passage also seemed very real. Needless to say, I was a little freaked out and was hesitant to do it again. . .but eventually I did, cause everyone was. . .I was able to pass out again but I never did have another out of body experience. . .until college, but those are stories for another day!
mc
I have had sleep paralysis on several occasions. It seems out of body like. I cannot move my body and I am aware of not breathing. And all of a sudden I am floating near the ceiling, looking down on my body. I can see my self struggling to breathe. It seems like hours and I try to get out of the room. When I wake up in bed again it is not more than a few seconds later. I assume no longer than the time I can hold my breath.
There is no doubt in my mind that there is way more to reality than what we can perceive on this plane of existence. Even on this plane of existence alone, all you have to do is study Quantum Theory in depth to see the “impossible” routinely confirmed in laboratory experiment after laboratory experiment.
How does this tie into astral projection, other than the fact that both are mysterious to those who take a cursory look at them?
And yet, when you study in depth any “way more to reality” other than QT, you routinely confirm they are rooted in humans deluding themselves.
Quantum Physics is science that has had nothing but smashing success in laboratory experiments for over a hundred years. Many of its principles are counterintuitive and impossible when measured by what we sense in our macroscopic world. It is proof that, even when we’re certain that something is absolutely impossible, we can be dead wrong.
That is why I mentioned it, to give context to why I keep an open mind and to show why I am hesitant to dismiss anything out of hand. If our five senses and how we mentally perceive reality were sufficient, then Euclidean Geometry would be the final solution. As we all know, it is not because space is curved, and what we are dead certain is a “straight line” isn’t truly straight.
It “ties in” because it was my way of telling the OP that, in my opinion, his experiences are worthy of serious consideration. I hope that is sufficient for you because you come across to me as rigid and contentious, and I really have no further interest in responding to you.
Astral projection has been looked into heavily, and there is still no solid evidence that it is at best anything but hallucinatory in nature, and at worst a deliberate fraud. There has been no “dismissing out of hand” when it comes to this subject.
If “Amazing Thing A” is possible it does not mean that “Amazing Thing B” is also possible if there is no connection between the two
Jasmine I dont think anyone doubts that there is way more to this universe than we currently understand. And as we unlock those mysteries it will seem magical and other worldly to us. There may even be aspects of this universe that we are incapable of understanding. And maybe you meant nothing more than this. But when people throw out phrases like “planes of existence” it automatically triggers some peoples woo alarms.
The more we find out about how the brain works the more unlikely it becomes that there are other planes of existence. For centuries (longer?) people have used that fact that near death experiences and out of body experiences are ubiquitous and that these experiences feel absolutely real to those who experience them as proof that there is someplace else we go after we leave here. Well, now we find that we can artificially induce NDE’s without dying. and we can artificially induce astral projection and test to see that the “soul” (or whatever) does not actually leave the body because it cannot perceive the flag put on top of a cabinet that it would surely be able to see if it had truly left the body. These experiences, as far as we can tell, exist soley within the brain.
I included my own example as another data point that it all happened in my brain. Some forty years later, I still have a vivid recollection of those “3 hours” I spent outside of my body. Everything was as real as anything else in my life. I “actually” attended the rest of my classes, felt the desks, heard the teachers, made my way home by “really” walking and saw all the sights on the way. 3 “real” hours passed in my recollection. All of this happened in 10-15 seconds of time “in this plane.” Obviously it didn’t really happen here, and if I did project into another plane of existence, why did the time frames not line up? Why did I enter the other plane at the exact moment I left this one, only to spend 3 hrs in that one and only 15 secs in this one? why were the two planes linked in time until I got there? Clearly, to me anyway, it all happened inside my own brain.
Now, the fact that NDE’s and OBe’s can be shown to occur entirely within the brain, does not disprove that there are other planes such as heaven or whatever you believe. It just makes them less likely. We can no longer use these experiences as some sort of quasi proof of their existence. If there are other planes of existence (and I am skeptical), with every new thing we learn about this existence, it becomes more and more clear that there is no connection between there and here that we can perceive while we exist here.
mc
Quantum field theory follows strict mathematical laws, and has been tested literally to a precision of over ten digits, and the tests have agreed with the theoretical predictions perfectly. In other words, we understand quantum field theory really, really well. It would, in fact, be reasonable to say that we understand it far better than we do anything else in all of science. And in none of that extensive understanding is there any hint of anything resembling astral projection. You would be much better off to point out that a rock falls when you drop it, and use that as evidence suggestive of the possibility of astral projection, because that’s something that we really don’t understand very well at all, and what we do understand can support some concepts which do vaguely resemble some concepts which come up in woo talk.
The mind is an amazing and wonderful thing, which we don’t understand at all. As soon as you talk about something that happens to “mind” you have left the realm of science and are happily wandering through the land of “We Don’t Know What We’re Talking About.” No wonder so many people can say so much stuff that has the same heft and resonance as unicorn droppings.
The Magic 8 Ball never fails to fill me with aww.
You find them cute? 
Awe?
In Magick, the saying is that “It’s all in your mind, but your mind is a lot bigger than you thought”. In studying it, I found that it is 99% psychological. Even ‘correspondences’, symbols and tools are all about your mind and how you perceive and use them, not in what they really are. There are no ‘magic crystals’, but if you cast a spell using them and a bunch of other tools, the psychological work is happening in your head.
Oh, and the saying that 90% of anything is crap definitely applies to magick. In fact, I’d say that about 98% of it is crap, and the other 2% is completely missed by most people who are trying to do D&D magic instead of working on themselves.
The modern idea of “astral projection” can be traced back to the 19th century, and the development of Occultism out of Spiritualism.
Roughly speaking, the Spiritualists believed themselves able to get in touch with the spirits of the dead, which in turn were capable of a great many wondrous feats - including travelling freely all across the Earth, going through walls and into hidden chambers etc., or for that matter up, up and away, far into the ethereal realm, there to commune with angels and higher intelligences etc.
The Occultists, however, believed that we, the living, were already capable of all these things.
A key figure in this was Madame Blavatsky, who believed that the key to all of this lay in the separation of one’s “astral body” from one’s physical body - or, as her buddy Colonel Olcott put it, the ability of the would-be magicians to “extricate their spiritual bodies from their encasement of flesh, and go in them wheresoever they like.” Emma Hardinge Britten described this as “the complete liberation of the soul from the chains of materialism,” where…
The aforementioned Olcott, an American, spoke of this burgeoning “science” in rather egalitarian and democratic terms:
The question, of course, was how to actually do it.
Some - including Olcott himself - stressed moral development first and foremost, whereas others, of perhaps a more impatient bent, began to experiment, in an alphabet soup of wee little magical orders and circles on both sides of the Atlantic, with everything from fasting to dancing to scrying to meditating to intoxication by opium or henbane or mescaline.
Their results varied - some came away disappointed, others horrified, others quite content.
The idea has spread from there, and remains, I believe, quite common among New Age types.
I can heartily recommend John P. Deveney’s Astral Projection Or Liberation of the Double and the Work of the Early Theosophical Society, a very fine read on the concept’s modern beginnings.