When I pulled out of my body, there was a dark hooded figure standing there, looking at me.

I had been trying to have an Out of Body Experience for several years. It was one of the few things I could think of that would count as evidence of the spiritual. I had long since left behind Religion, yet I still suspected there was something more to reality than material objects and struggles for power.

The Techniques

There are all kinds of guides all over the internet that will teach you all kind of techniques to have an out of body experience. They all boil down to this:

Learn to meditate, and then focus all of your attention on some interior object.

It is not really all that hard to do. It's not really something you do at all. It's all the doing that gets in the way. What makes it hard is that people are trying to do too much.

What you are trying to do without trying is not to do.

Meditation is an important part because unless you are able to meditate, you have no control of your mind. It jumps all over place and you can't focus. Sit in silence and watch your mind for a while if you think it's easy. Just sit quietly and see how long you can go without thinking a thought. See how long you can go without your mind trying to do.

People use tools to help. You can focus on your breathing, that keeps you from thinking a bunch of random thoughts. You can repeat a mantra or sound in your mind, that also keeps you from thinking a bunch of random thoughts. Eventually you'll start thinking random thoughts anyway, but when you catch yourself doing it, you just return to the mantra. If you are a visual thinker, imagine a spinning object in front of you and focus on that, like a soccer ball, that will also serve to keep the random thoughts from popping in.

Once you've got a pretty steady state of meditation going you just need to gently start to intend to have an Out of Body Experience by focusing all of your attention onto something not coming from your senses. The mantra sounds and the floating objects will give you a head start.

One Day, For Me, The Techniques Worked

I'm not going to sugar coat it. This took weeks and months. I did the techniques every night before bed, if I woke up in the middle of the night I did them again, if I took a nap during the day I did them again.

Here is, I think, the key to my success: I asked for help.

I think this, because it didn't happen of my own effort, per se. I'm not sure the techniques are even what did it. Instead of me doing it, it was more like it happened to me. I'll explain, but first let me tell you about each of the "almost successful" attempts that preceded the one that worked.

The First Time It Almost Worked, I Stopped It From Working, Because I Didn't Want It To Work

I remember one night I decided to switch it up a bit, and used the word, "Krishna" as my mantra. I just chanted the word over and over in my mind as usual, but then I started really getting into it. I started focusing on the sound. A deep, low, guttural voice like a chanting buddha stretching out the word for several seconds, vibrating in my ear...

KRIIISSHHNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaa.... KRIIISSHHNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaa....

Soon my whole body started vibrating. Like a tingling electricity pulsing all throughout. The closest I can come to describe it is the feeling you get if you sleep on your arm and it goes numb and tingly, but your whole body, and much more intense. I expected this, everybody knows the vibrations are a stage right before you have an Out of Body Experience. I tried to remain calm, and just kept chanting my mantra in my head, focusing on the sound.

KRIIISSHHNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaa.... KRIIISSHHNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaa....

Then, while peering into the black void in front me, a hazy white wisp of something appeared far in the distance. I watched it as I kept my mantra going and tried to ignore the intensity of the vibrations. It grew larger and larger until I realized it was a spiral of white wispy fog, spiraling in front of me and growing larger and larger.

Soon it was right in front of me and I could see it was a tunnel, and I was about to go through it, and the vibrations were getting almost unbearably intense.

I freaked.

I was suddenly overcome with fear, I stopped the chanting, I forced my self out of the trance, I stood up in my bed, panting, and whispered to myself, "I'm not ready yet. I'm not ready yet." And just went to sleep.

The Second Time It Almost Worked, I Didn't Realize I Had The Opportunity

The second time I was taking a nap on my couch in the living room, but doing all the techniques trying to have one. I fell asleep while doing the techniques, which was a usual occurrence by then, but I was awakened by the sound of a tv playing loud static from another room in the house.

I opened my eyes, and tried to get up, but I couldn't. My body wasn't responding. I was paralyzed. I could only move my eyes.

This is called sleep paralysis, and it happens a lot when people are trying to have an Out of Body Experience. In fact, it is perhaps the easiest way to have one. If you are ever in sleep paralysis, close your eyes, relax, and focus on drifting up and out of your body, and you will.

I didn't know this at the time, so I freaked out. I started trying with all my might to move an arm, a finger, my head, anything! I thrashed and struggled, strained with all my will power to break the spell, and the more intense I tried, the louder the hissing tv static sound got from the other room.

When finally I was able to break out of it and sit up, I noticed the room was perfectly silent. There was no static sound. I got up and checked all of the rooms, nothing. No tvs, no stereos, just me and the silence.

Third Times A Charm

The time it worked for real, I was laying down on my back, doing the techniques, and once I was in a good meditation state, I shouted out (mentally) into the black void, "Okay. I'm ready. If you're out there and you can hear me. I'm ready to do this. Help me out."

I ended up falling asleep while doing the techniques, and I slipped into a very strange dream. I remember it played out in front of me like a movie. I was watching Homer Simpson run around in a brown robe in a vast open landscape, flanked by towering mountains.

He was running away from some sort of T-Rex dinosaur, and right before he got eaten a much larger dinosaur that looked like a carnivorous Brontosaurus came and attacked and ate the T-Rex. Then Homer had to run from the huge Brontosaurus and just before it ate him a helicopter like thing came and shot it.

I remember being jolted awake by the terrifying thought, "They need our blood! They are harvesting us for our blood!" And then I was laying awake on my back again, back in my room.

My eyes were open, but I couldn't move. I was paralyzed again. But this time, I remembered. Instead of panicking and trying to break free of the paralysis, I closed my eyes, relaxed, and tried to gently roll out of my body.

It Worked

I rolled right out, and sat up on my bed. There was a very distinct and pleasant feeling about it. It was like I could breath for the first time in my life. The air and the atmosphere was so light and cool. I looked around and my room was just as I remembered it, but there, at the food of my bed, was standing a dark figure.

I had read several things about Out of Body Experiences, and I knew that being afraid was never a good thing, so I decided, instead of being afraid of it, to embrace it.

I moved towards the figure, and gave it a hug.

It was not very tall, a small guy, like a teenager. When I looked at him, I noticed he was wearing a robe with the hood over his head, and he shimmered like a staticky black and white television program, like he was a shabby hologram.

When I looked at his face in the robe, it was a black and white and gray face, shimmering like a staticky tv program also, and his features were that of a hispanic boy, or perhaps a young American Indian boy.

His mouth started moving, as if he were talking to me, but I could hear no words. It was total silence. I motioned to my ears to signal to him that I couldn't hear what he was saying, and he just shrugged his shoulders.

The most interesting thing about this entity to me was that it felt like nothing at all. I would expect to feel some emotion, feel some warmth, feel love or anger or something radiating off of an entity like that, but there was nothing. Like he was hollow, like he wasn't really there. When I hugged him, it was like hugging a cold blanket, only it wasn't even cold, it was just nothing.

Then I noticed that I had an erection for someone reason and became very embarrassed. I sat down on my bed, next to my body to hide it, but I think he noticed anyway. I felt like a kid that had spilt milk on the floor.

Then I heard a noise from outside my bedroom window that startled me. I quickly turned and looked in that direction, and began to feel fear creeping up inside of me, and the hooded entity placed his hand on my shoulder, as if to calm me, and then I woke up.

I jumped out of bed and ran immediately to my journal and started jotting it all down as fast as I could. Nothing even remotely close had ever happened to me before.

I was, after that experience, convinced of the reality of such things, and, I am sad to say, I have never had another Out of Body Experience since.

• KG

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash