kaos

Out-of-body experience
Joel—You stress that astral travel and out-of-body experience (oobe) are very different.
Care to expand? I thought they were the same.
TANSY
Difference between oobe and astral travel is that with astral travel you don’t get the
frizzling crackling hissing popping electrical static horribly serious ripped from body
sound that seems to accompany sleep paralysis one awakens too early from, because
astral travel is imagination from within the body (not to say you can’t “see” real things)
and a dream state but oobe is more like a crash-entry to the bardo plane.
For years I came across no mention of this very distinctive and truly appalling sound
in reports, then I met a person who described exactly what I had heard and it was at
that time that I distinguished in my own mind the difference between oobe and astral
travel. Since then I have come across a few other people who have heard this sound,
such that I now regard it as the mark of the true oobe. I tend to think if you haven’t
heard this sound but think you have had an oobe you are more likely to be talking
about lucid astral travel but were not actually outside of the body, although I wouldn’t
want to be dogmatic over that point. I regard oobe of this character as a dangerous area
to experiment with and feel they are best left for those spontaneous occasions when
they may occur, which is not a pleasant experience, even speaking as one who has gone
out of his way to experience unusual states, this I class as an area I want nothing to do
with. The term oobe I classify as describing a “bad” body exit, almost as if one has torn
some delicate dimensional membrane that should not be torn.
So I tend to think anyone who talks of oobe lightly is simply confusing it with astral
travel, genuine oobe is a traumatic experience, like finding yourself wounded on a
dimensional plane beyond all human help, you cannot call for help to human society,
they cannot hear you. It is utterly horrifying, with that terrible sound to keep you
company, your body paralysed and you unable to animate it in any sense, you may as
well be dead you cannot wake yourself from this by will alone. That is the reality of
oobe. Astral travel, by contrast, is on a par with dreaming.
That said, in my experience you can get into an oobe reality from dream/sleep paralysis
without going through the horrible pinging crackling popping sound. Something I
noticed is that what appears to be a normal if extremely lucid dream can appear to
collapse bringing a far greater reality, the walls of the “dream” feel just like … you know
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