Journeys Out of the Body (Paperback)

The definitive work on the extraordinary phenomenon of out-of-body experiences, by the founder of the internationally known Monroe Institute.

Robert Monroe, a Virginia businessman, began to have experiences that drastically altered his life. Unpredictably, and without his willing it, Monroe found himself leaving his physical body to travel via a "second body" to locales far removed from the physical and spiritual realities of his life. He was inhabiting a place unbound by time or death. 

Praise for Journeys Out of the Body

"Monroe's account of his travels, Journeys Out of the Body, jam-packed with parasitic goblins and dead humans, astral sex, scary trips into mind-boggling other dimensions, and practical tips on how to get out of your body, all told with wry humor, quickly became a cult sensation with its publication in 1971, and has been through many printings. Whatever their 'real' explanation, Monroe's trips made for splendid reading." —Michael Hutchinson, author of Megabrain

"Robert Monroe's experiences are probably the most intriguing of any person's of our time, with the possible exception of Carlos Castaneda's." —Joseph Chilton Pierce, author of Magical Child

"This book is by a person who's clearly a sensible man and who's trying to tell it like it is. No ego trips. Just a solid citizen who's been 'out' a thousand times now and wants to pass his experiences to others." —The Last Whole Earth Catalog

Introduction

In our action-oriented society, when a man lies down to sleep, he is effectively out of the picture. He will lie still for six to eight hours, so he is not “behaving,” “thinking productively,” or doing anything “significant.” We all know that people dream, but we raise our children to regard dreams and other experiences occurring during sleep as unimportant, as not real in the way that the events of the day are. Thus most people are in the habit of forgetting their dreams, and, on the occasions when they do remember them, they usually regard them as mere oddities.

It is true that psychologists and psychiatrists regard the dreams of patients as useful clues to the malfunctioning of their personalities; but even in this application dreams and other nocturnal experiences are generally not treated as real in any sense, but only as some sort of internal data processing of the human computer.

There are some important exceptions to this general put-down of dreams, but for the vast majority of people in our society today, dreams are not things that serious people concern themselves with.What are we to make of a person who takes exception to this general belief, who claims to have had experiences during sleep or other forms of unconsciousness that were not only impressive to him, but which he feels were real?

Suppose this person claims that on the previous night he had an experience of flying through the air over a large city which he soon recognized as New York. Further, he tells us that not only was this “dream” “intensely vivid, but that he knew at the time that it was not a dream, that he was really in the air over New York City. And this conviction that he was really there sticks with him for the rest of his life, despite our reminding him that a sleeping man couldn’t really be flying by himself in the air over New York City.

Probably we will ignore a person who makes such a report, or we will politely (or not so politely) inform him that he is becoming a little weak in the head or crazy, and suggest that he see a psychotherapist. If he is insistent about the reality of his experience, especially if he has other strange experiences too, we may with the best of intentions see about committing him to a mental hospital.

Our “traveler,” on the other hand, if he is smart, will quickly learn not to talk about his experiences. The only problem with that, as I have found from talking to many such people, is that he may worry about whether he’s going crazy.

For the sake of argument, let’s make our “traveler” even more troubling. Suppose in his account he goes on to say that after flying over New York City for a while he flew down to your apartment. There he saw you and two other people, unknown to him, conversing. He describes the two people in detail, and mentions a few things about the topic of conversation occurring in the minute or so he was there.

Let’s suppose he is correct. At the time he had his experience, you were holding a conversation on the topic he mentions with two people who fit our “traveler’s” descriptions. What do we make of things now?

The usual reaction to a hypothetical situation of this type is that it is all very interesting, but as we know that it couldn’t possibly happen, we needn’t seriously think about what it might mean. Or we might comfort ourselves by invoking the word “coincidence.” A marvelous word, “coincidence,” for relieving mental upsets.

Unfortunately for our peace of mind, there are thousands of instances, reported by normal people, of exactly this sort of occurrence. We are not dealing with a purely hypothetical situation.

Such events have been termed traveling clairvoyance, astral projection, or, a more scientific term, out-of-the-body experiences (OOBEs). We can formally define an OOBE as an event in which the experiencer (1) seems to perceive some portion of some environment which could not possibly be perceived from where his physical body is known to be at the time; and (2) knows at the time that he is not dreaming or fantasizing. The experiencer seems to possess his normal consciousness at the time, and even though he may reason that this cannot be happening, he will feel all his normal critical faculties to be present, and so knows he is not dreaming. Further, he will not decide after awakening that this was a dream. How, then, do we understand this strange phenomenon?

If we look to scientific sources for information about OOBEs we shall find practically none at all. Scientists have, by and large, simply not paid any attention to these phenomena. The situation is rather similar to that of the scientific literature on extrasensory perception (ESP). Phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition, and psycho-kinesis are “impossible” in terms of the current physical world view. Since they can’t happen, most scientists do not bother to read the evidence indicating that they do happen; hence, not having read the evidence, their belief in the impossibility of such phenomena is reinforced. This kind of circular reasoning in support of one’s comfortable belief system is not unique to scientists by any means, but it has resulted in very little scientific research on ESP or OOBEs.

In spite of the lack of “hard” scientific data, there are still a number of definite conclusions one can make from reading what material there is.

First, OOBEs are a universal human experience, not in the sense that they happen to large numbers of people, but in that they have happened all through recorded history, and there are marked similarities in the experience among people who are otherwise extremely different in terms of cultural background. One can find reports of OOBEs by housewives in Kansas which closely resemble accounts of OOBEs from ancient Egyptian or oriental sources.

Second, the OOBE is generally a once-in-a-lifetime experience, seemingly experienced by “accident.” Illnesses sometimes bring it about, especially illnesses which are almost fatal. Great emotional stress sometimes brings it about. In many cases, it simply happens during sleep without our having any idea of what might have caused it. In very rare instances it seems to have been brought about by a deliberate attempt.

Third, the experience of an OOBE is usually one of the most profound experiences of a person’s life, and radically alters his beliefs. This is usually expressed as, “I no longer believe in survival of death or an immortal soul, I know that I will survive death.” The person feels that he has directly experienced being alive and conscious without his physical body, and therefore knows that he possesses some kind of soul that will survive bodily death. This does not logically follow, for even if the OOBE is more than just an interesting dream or hallucination, it was still occurring while the physical body was alive and functioning and therefore may depend on the physical body. This argument, however, makes no impression on those who have actually had an OOBE. Thus regardless of what position one wants to take on the “reality” of the OOBE, it is clearly an experience deserving considerable psychological study. I am certain that our ideas concerning the existence of souls have resulted from early experiences of people having OOBEs. Considering the importance of the idea of the soul to most of our religions, and the importance of religion in people’s lives, it seems incredible that science could have swept this problem under the rug so easily.

Fourth, the OOBE is generally extremely joyful to those who have it. I would make a rough estimate that between 90 and 95 per cent of the people who have this experience are very glad it occurred and find it joyful, while 5 per cent are very frightened by it, for the only way they can interpret it, while it is happening, is that they are dying. Later reactions of the person as he attempts to interpret his OOBE can be rather negative, however. Almost every time I give a speech on this subject, someone comes up to me afterward and thanks me for talking about it. They had had the experience some time before, but had no way of explaining it, and worried that they were going “crazy.”

Fifth, in some instances of OOBEs the description of what was happening at a distant place is correct and more accurate than we would expect by coincidence. Not the majority, by any means, but some. To explain these we must postulate either that the “hallucinatory” experience of the OOBE was combined with the operation of ESP, or that in some sense the person really was “there.” The OOBE then becomes very real indeed.

The fact that most of our knowledge about OOBEs comes from reports of once-in-a-lifetime experiences puts us at two serious disadvantages. The first of these is that most people cannot produce an OOBE at will, so this precludes the possibility of studying them under precise laboratory conditions. The second disadvantage is that when a person is suddenly thrust for a brief period of time into a very novel environment he may not be a very good observer. He is too excited and too busy trying to cope with the strangeness of it. Thus our reports from the once-in-a-lifetime people are very rough. It would be of great advantage in studying OOBEs to have trained “travelers” available who could produce the experience at will and who generally had the characteristics of a good reporter.

The book you are about to read is very rare. It is a firsthand account of hundreds of OOBEs by a person who is, I believe, a good reporter.