CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210026-4

Approved For Release 2003/09/10 : CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210026-4
The Out-of-Body Trip:
What a Way to Go!
By Joan Kron
" ... Parapsychologists are interested in out-of-body experience
because it has implications for survival after death ... "
On this past Halloween morning-
after a dark and stormy night-I saw
the past, present, and future at the
Waynesboro-Afton Holiday Inn, near
Charlottesville, Virginia.
A cow had somehow strayed onto U.S. His M-5000 training program is a pain-
Highway 250 and was trotting along,
unnerving motorists; in the inn's park-
ing lot, a flotilla of Corvettes was lined
up for a convention of Corvette own-
ers; and in three adjoining rooms on
the upper level, thirteen men and worn-
en, including me, were lying in bed
wearing earphones, trying to achieve an
out-of-body experience-a phenomenon
' in which one feels one's consciousness
is located outside the physical body.
Out-of-body experience (OBE) could
be the next body-control fad, a rival
for fasting, yoga, TM, biofeedback,
etc. But instead of being a means to
control the body, OBE lets you escape
the body. It's supposed to be a pleasant
trip. And if you're looking for a mean-
ingful experience, it couldn't be more
so, for it poses questions about exis-
tence and nonexistence.
Parapsychologists are interested in
the OBE for two reasons, says Univer-
sity of California parapsychologist John
Palmer: One, because "the OBE might
.
be a state particularly conducive to ESP
[extrasensory perception]" and two, be-
cause "it would have implications
of survival after death, [since) what caleasen
function outside the body before death
might be able to function [outside] the
body after death."
No wonder people are beating a path to
Robert Monroe's door in Afton, Virginia.
less, nontraumatic course in OBE using
recorded speech and sound effects-
and it's almost ready to go national.
Some 600 pioneers have already tried
it, and Monroe has a branch pro-
gram in San Francisco. When I ar-
ranged to join one of the weekend ses-
sions, insiders warned me I'd be spend-
ing a lot of time in bed. And Monroe
warned me I couldn't expect to have an
OBE on the first weekend. But I had
high hopes for instant success. After
all, I am an American.
The $175 weekend (plus meals and
motel room) did not attract the us-
ual parapsychology crowd, although
there were some in the group who
knew their way around a séance table.
There were three college students from
Buffalo, a chiropractor from South Da-
kota, a woman who had founded the
Louisiana Society for Psychical Re-
search, another who had recently lost
her husband (and whose daughter is
writing a book on ESP in dogs), an ac-
countant whose hobby is religion and
philosophy and who believes he's been
reincarnated.
woman from the Na-
works for Monroe, and an ordained
minister. In addition, there were two
young men-a hematologist from Wash-
ington, D.C., and a professor of psy-
chological counseling-who were re-
ferred by Illinois psychiatrist Elisabeth
Kübler-Ross, the cult figure of the
death-and-dying movement and a Mon-
roe booster.
"Elisabeth Kübler-Ross got out [of
her body] both times she took the pro-
gram," said one of the Monroe trainers.
We were not so lucky. In the course
of the three-day program no one claimed
to have achieved liftoff. We had lain
on our adjoining beds through three
45-minute tapes on Friday evening,
nine 45-minute tapes on Saturday, and
had about six to go on Sunday-and
still nothing.
The tapes evolved over a ten-year
period. In 1973 Monroe took them-
by invitation-to the Esalen Institute
in Carmel for a tryout. In the M-5000
training-program jargon the tapes play
combinations of sounds (using a pat-
ented sleep-inducing method) with
delta-theta pulsing, plus a binaural beat
to help the left and right brain hemi-
spheres get in sync. The voice-over in-
struction-some barely audible-is a
step-by-step buildup with each tape
guiding you · from relaxation to visual-
ization exercises to deeper relaxation to
NEW YORK/YEAR-END ISSUE
Illustrated by Miton Gleser

Approved For Release 2003/09/10 : CIA-RDP96-00788R001700210026-4
" ... Un one 'astral flight,' claims Monroe, he visited the home of
a skeptical woman friend and gave her an astral pinch ... "
ing and controlling nonphysical energy
and refocusing consciousness away from
physical reality. But to me it sounded
. like ocean waves with a mesmerizing
voice telling me, "Now you will conduct
· guide you. . . . You will know you have
feel an intensive vibration and hear a
roaring or hissing sound in your head
or experience patterns of light. .
Whether it's the best way for you to
your exercise in resonant breathing as I have one or not, it guarantees quick
attention from doctors of varying spe-
reached the resonant point when you cialties who will want to debrief you
for their forthcoming books.
And so it goes, hypnotically and some-
what pretentiously, from C-One (your
conscious physical waking state), to Fo-
cus Ten (body asleep, mind awake), to
Focus Twelve (state of expanded non-
physical awareness), to exercises in re-
mote viewing of a six-digit number (no
one guessed it right), to psychokinesis
(trying to make a cotton ball rise-it
didn't), to your energy bar tool (sort of
a mental chinning bar), to Focus Fifteen
(the state where time does not exist or
is unimportant) , to, it is hoped, the dis-
crete out-of-body state.
The woman from Louisiana kept
falling asleep and someone else found
himself swallowing a lot. "They were
resisting," we were told. Some people
in other sessions dropped out because
"they might not be able to take the
assault on their value structure." I had
a brief moment when I felt I was flying
over New York, but maybe that was
what scientists call the "halo" effect-
trying to please the teacher-except I
didn't tell my teacher.
"Why do I pursue this?" asked the
physician from Washington, rhetorical-
ly, in one of our walks around the deck . that they can travel and/or project their
between tapes. "Because I trust Kübler-
Ross," he answered himself. "She says
it happens, so I believe it happens."
I know it happens. I have had many
OBE's myself, years ago in the dentist's
chair when nitrous oxide (laughing gas)
was commonly used for anesthesia, On
those occasions, I relished the sensa-
tion of floating out of my body up to
the ceiling, looking down on myself. It
wasn't like dreaming, because I felt
· fully aware, present. I could even talk
to my doctor. There was a dizzy Fan-
tasia-like delirium about it that made
me feel omnipotent. The only thing I
disliked about those levitations was
the smell of the gas.
"But the best way to have an OBE,"
says University of California psychol-
ogy professor Dr. Charles Tart, "is to
almost die."
the OBE state's neurophysiology? Sci-
entists are fairly sure about what it's
'not. It's not a dream state; it's not a
sleep state. The only consistent finding
emerging from studies, says John Palm-
er, "is a reduction of eye-movement
activity during OBE's."
Gifted OBEers are almost as rare as
certifiable ghosts-the most notorious
ones around are New York artist Ingo
Swann, Maine psychic Alex Tanous,
parapsychologist Stuart "Blue" Harary,
who works at Brooklyn's Maimonides
Medical Center, and M-5000 entre-
preneur Robert Monroe. They all claim
consciousnesses, or "doubles," as they're
called, to other locales. One of the
aims of Monroe's program is to turn
up gifted OBEers for his eight-per-
son "explorer group." "We're really
paying Monroe to be his guinea pigs,
aren't we?" said the Louisiana woman
in a flash of enlightenment.
.
Monroe is the author of Journeys Out
of the Body, which chronicles his experi-
ments with inhaling glue fumes, fol-
lowed soon after by his first spontaneous
OBE at age 43, and since then his con-
tinuously recurring OBE's. On one
"astral flight," Monroe claims. he visited
the home of a skeptical woman friend
and gave her an astral pinch. The result-
ing black-and-blue mark is proof, say be-
lievers, of his dual existence in the
OBE state. Monroe claims he can now
with a wink, "I don't think they're put-
ting everything that happens in it."
The 61-year-old Monroe seems to
need to legitimize his OBE's to prove
that they're more than hallucinations
or altered states of consciousness, so
he's building an institute to go with
them, complete with a "respectable"
board of advisers (Kübler-Ross is one),
sci-fi jargon, and a hypothesis that ESP
and OBE's are related to some kind of
more intelligent life on other planets.
His explanation reads like a B-movie
script. And it's expectable from a man
who scripted a few episodes of The
Shadow when he was a New York
writer, producer, and programmer in
radio's early days. Today Monroe sells
the out-of-body trip the way Don Wil-
son sold Jell-O. "The main thing is
how do you feel about the Ten state?
Can you feel the difference be-
And if you have OBE's often enough
or can achieve them at will, you may.
be invited to Stanford Research Insti-
tute in California, the Psychical Re-
search Institute in Durham, North Car-
olina, the American Society for Psychi-
cal Research in New York City, or the
Clarke Institute in Toronto, Canada-
where you will be hooked up to brain-
wave machines and tested on all sorts
of neurological equipment to help sci-
ence fathom the enigma of the OBE.
The big question is, when it's not
caused by body-chemistry alteration, tween the Ten state and the Twelve
fever, or trauma to the brain, what is state? You'll get to the 'I know' sys-
tem-'I know I am something, other
than physical matter.' That's the begin-
ning stage. You don't need proof for
that. . . . You must overcome the bar-
rier of nonknowing. . . . You can't .
crash-program out of your body. .
You must log a number of exercises.
Our failure rate is zero [if you prac-
tice]. Ten is simplistic. Twelve is the
gateway. I won't begin to tell you the
things you can do with it."
Monroe's brochure claims his courses
are good for almost anything: Heal-
ing. Re-energizing yourself. Pain reduc-
tion.Dehabituation from smoking, drugs,
and overeating; concentration and
decision-making techniques; accelerated
data-learning; exploration and contact
with other energy systems. "So have a
good time, folks, up there in Twelve,"
says Monroe. "When you get into
Twelve, you're on the fringe of space
time." And "Thank you," joked our
leader, Nancy, his stepdaughter, "for
flying Monroe-via."
Though "flying" out of the body may
be an intriguing diversion in itself, a
prime concern of the OBE buffs is its .
relevance to life after death.
Life-after-death
(also
called sur-
vival) research isn't new. It started in
the nineteenth century and got a tre-
mendous boost in the late 1940s when
For years, I felt unique for having
had those experiences. But now I've
learned that untold thousands of ordi-
nary Americans have had OBE's. They
can be triggered by therapeutic drugs,
prospector James Kidd bequeathed
nearly $300,000 to anyone who could
prove that the soul survives death. In
"fly" in tandem with his wife and that ' 1972, after the "Great Soul Trial,"
two of his "explorers," a husband and Kidd's money was finally divided be-
marijuana, LSD, anesthesia, hypnosis, wife who live miles apart, visit each tween the American Society for Psychi-
meditation, sensory Apoptoated,ForreRelease 2008109/6 @ryCh4gIRDP 96:00788PRORds20.021QA8BRA and the Psy-
treme stress.
keeping a diary, but,", says Monroe chical Research Foundation (PRF) in
-2
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What would you call a schizophrenic little
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You name it, you win it, we said, and
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The personal portable
with the dual personality
Both organizations used the money to
test the separate existence of the OBE-
er's "double." It was hard to prove.
Meanwhile, ASPR research director
Dr. Karlis Osis, with some extra sup-
port from Xerox inventor Chester Carl-
son, also did a cross-cultural survey of
deathbed visions as reported by doc-
tors and nurses.
According to Osis, many dying pa-
tients insist they have glimpses of post-
mortem existence, persons long dead,
scenes of otherworldly beauty. Espe-
cially common were apparitions of
the patients' deceased mothers, spouses,
and offspring, whom Osis calls "take-
away figures," whose role was to take
the dying patients to the other side.
"The data," says Osis, "are more con-
sistent with life after death than with
death as total destruction, But it's not
proven."
Where the parapsychologist won't
rush to conclusions, psychiatrist Elis-
abeth Kubler-Ross doesn't fear to
tread. "I'm convinced beyond a shadow
of a doubt that there is life after
. death." she said in a recent newspaper
interview. Her encounter with the ma-
terialized persona of one of her de-
ceased patients seems to be one of her
proofs. Her other "proofs" of life after
death are the out-of-body experiences
of dying patients.
God knows I'd like to believe in life
after death. Like most survivors, I
have yearned to be, even dreamed of
being, united with my dead daughter.
Sometimes when I put the key in the
lock of my apartment door, I feel she
is hovering over me in the hall. After
she died, it was comforting to imagine
her being taken care of by all those
who had predeceased her-my grand-
father, my father, my friend's son.
The theory of evolution . notwith-
standing, belief in "the other side" is
almost a reflex action. Miracles are
programmed into us from the begin-
ning-through our religions, our my-
thology, and our fairy tales. "If you be-
lieve in fairies," says Peter Pan, "Tin-
ker Bell will live." And if you don't be-
lieve in fairies, Tinker Bell will die.
Following that line of reasoning, if you
believe in life after death, you will find
it-and if you don't, you won't. So we
skeptics hunger for proof.
It's no surprise, then, that Dr. Ray-
mond Moody's book, Life After Life,
embellished with a foreword by Kübler-
Ross, is a best-seller. There was a
favorable reaction from all religious
denominations, and sales of the book
went out of sight.
Members of the thanatology commu-
nity (who study death), however, had
fits. After working for years to con-
death and dying was a worthy sub-
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... Just because she heard them say she was dead doesn't mean
she was dead. Maybe it was a lousy diagnosis,' said Blacher ... "
ject for scientific study, one of their as dying. Flying to San Francisco is not
own members, Kübler-Ross (who was
already getting flak from her colleagues
for her stages-of-dying theory), was
now steering thanatology into spiritual-
ist waters. "I admire Elisabeth tremen-
Even Moody admits, "I certainly
.don't think that a logical conclusion
can be drawn that these are life-after-
death experiences," thereby contradict-
ing his own book title and book jacket.
dously," said one colleague, "but I
don't believe in mixing one's religious
beliefs with science." "I have left in-
structions," said another, "not to let
that woman within a mile of my death-
So why did Moody, a man the Ban-
bed."
But most of the critical blasts are
aimed at the 32-year-old Moody, a psy-
chiatry resident, now on leave from the
University of Virginia to write a se-
quel to his best-seller. "As anecdotes,
I'd give the book B-minus," says Uni-
versity of California professor of
thanatology and suicide expert Dr. . death"?
Edwin Shneidman, "and as research,
I'd give it D-minus."
Life After Life is based on interviews
with 50 people who came close to death
through accident, illness, or injury-as
well as some who were judged or pro-'
nounced clinically dead and were resus-
citated. Nowhere in the book, however,
does Moody state exactly how many of
his subjects were pronounced dead, or
how many had a spiritualist orientation.
Moody says merely that he himself has
never been interested in spiritualism
and that many of his subjects were doc-
tors and nurses, from which, presuma-
bly, we are to infer that they are totally
objective about their experiences.
In a recent lecture at Columbia-
Presbyterian Medical Center, Moody
said that fifteen elements crop up again
and again in the experiences of his sub-
jects: "There was an alarming audi-
tory sensation, like a swarm of bees-
this is referred to as the moment of
death. Many people said they heard
the doctor pronounce them dead. Then
there was a feeling of being drawn
down a tunnel, valley, or sewer, then
the sensation of looking at their body
from outside of it, of floating on the
ceiling. They feel they can't get through
to their doctors and nurses. They often
feel someone who has died before
them is there to meet them. They have
flashes of their life or a panoramic re-
view of it-in 3-D, all at once, not se-
quentially. And they see a being of
light, a loving, warm, accepting being
that most of them called 'he' or Christ
or the Supreme Being or the angel."
the same as San Francisco. Just because
the patient heard the doctor say she
was dead doesn't mean she was dead.
. . . Maybe it was a lousy diagnosis."
"It's hard to trust the copy on the
covers of books," says Moody. Then he
adds, "Just as it's impossible to infer
there is survival after bodily death,
there is no way to assume that there is
not."
The "clinical death" cases in his
book refer to people whose heartbeat
and respiration had stopped, who had
no blood pressure, and whom the phy-
sician had considered dead. "Cardiac or
even respiratory standstill does not,
however, automatically mean the onset
of clinical death," it says in the 1976
Encyclopaedia Britannica section on
death authored by Elisabeth Kübler-
Ross. "The pronouncement of death is
much more problematical and contro-
versial than most people realize," says
medical ethicist Dr. Robert Veatch.
"When a person says, 'I died for
three minutes and had this experi-
ence,' this person was not dead. He
or she transiently ceased respiration
and heartbeat but not all brain func-
tion. Key brain function had to be
there or the person couldn't come
back." Even Moody concedes the "re-
turn" to life of these people was "no
physiological miracle . . . something
was going on in those bodies in order
for them to be resuscitated." But what
accounts for the out-of-body visions of
these near-death experiences? As Moody
admits in Life After Life, they might
be attributed to drugs, isolation, or
, cerebral anoxia. When oxygen levels
are tampered with, you can get all
sorts of subjective visions and dissoci-
ative effects like OBE's.
cination or a religious experience. We
need to reassure patients they are not
[crazy]."
But apparently no one ever needs
to reassure them again about dying.
· "People who have survived this expe-
rience are no longer afraid to die," says
Moody.
Must you almost die to conquer your
fear of dying?
According to parapsychologist John
tam P.R. person says has "this integrity . Palmer (in a paper entitled "Conscious-
thing," call his book Life After Life?
"I didn't pick the title," Moody told
me. "But . . . I especially like it be-
cause it doesn't say life after death."
ness Localized in Space Outside the
Body," published in Osteopathic Physi-
cian, April, 1974), "Many persons who
· have had striking OBE's report that the
And why does his Bantam paper-
back bear the subhead "Actual case
histories that reveal there is life after
experience convinced them of survival
after death and eliminated their fear
of death. Whether or not this con-
clusion is objectively valid, it does
suggest therapeutic possibilities for the
OBE. ... [It] may help persons engaged
in high-risk occupations ... where fear ...
may adversely affect . . . performance.
[It] might also provide comfort to pa-
tients in certain stages of terminal
illness."
Kübler-Ross, who once said she "ex-
pected to die fighting and not accept-
ing," is now an adviser to Robert Mon-
roe on his Star System program-an
OBE course for the terminally ill that
has certain similarities to earlier stud-
ies using LSD for the terminally ill.
"It's a program to help the dying get
a foothold on the other side," says Mon-
roe. "If there is a great beyond, there's
a place for out-of-body. Given three
months, we can easily train a person
to achieve out-of-body experience and
change his concept of death and estab-
lish a beachhead where he's going."
Encouraging the dying to believe in
an afterlife isn't new. "I don't dis-
courage a belief in life after death,"
says Philadelphia hematologist Dr. J.
Lawrence Naiman, who works with leu-
kemic children. "It's a strong element
providing comfort in dying children
and their families." The Monroe pro-
gram doesn't discourage it either.
During the M-5000 weekend, the lead-
er casually mentioned that "one woman
took the course to try to reach her son
who had died." My pulse quickened.
(I have never tried to communicate with
my daughter. I do have a friend who
prearranged all sorts of signals with her
husband when he was dying, but after
his death she never received a message
or sign.) The next day I asked non-
chalantly if that woman had. ever
reached her dead son, A lot of people
"It's fascinating as near-death experi-
But please don't call it hallucination,
as if comparing these patients to psy-
ence," said Boston psychiatrist Richard
Blacher. "The trouble lies in the subtle chotics. Many of these people, says
extrapolation that these experiences Opel@feed/2008/09/0 1A:RDP96:00788R001700210026-Aieved that some-
curred after dying. Death is not the same cians that their experience was a hallu; one had asked. "Not during the train-

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". . . 'Our own death is unimaginable,' says
Dr. Noyes, 'so we become observers'.
"
ing-program weekend," we were told.
"She reached him after months of prac-
tice at home."
-
The search for reunion with the lost
love object, as C. Murray Parkes points
out in his book Bereavement, is biolog-
ical-an animal instinct. Similarly, the
griever is drawn to reunion like the
moth to the flame. Many suicides are
reunion-bound. So I felt ambivalent
about this possibility-attracted and at
the same time guilty for not wanting to
leave life yet. Still, I was curious to
talk to that woman. As it turned out,
she had never actually "been able to
contact" her son. However, since she
had taken the Monroe course she had
had a dream in which her son told her
not to. worry about him-he was not
alone.
Whether or not OBE can help sur-
vivors, do we need an OBE rehearsal
for dying? A paper by University of
Iowa psychiatrist Russell Noyes Jr. and
clinical psychologist Roy Kletti entitled
"Depersonalization in the Face of Life-
Threatening Danger: A Description"
and a subsequent interpretive paper
could save you hours of practice with
earphones. Noyes and Kletti interviewed
104 people who had had near-death
experiences.
"The accounts revealed the almost in-
stantaneous development of depersonal-
ization"-a cluster of reactions includ-
ing altered perception of time, lack of
emotion, feeling of unreality, altered at-
tention, sense of detachment, loss of
control, panoramic memory, and the in-
ability to describe it-"followed . .. by
a separation of the observing from the
participating self [OBE]. . . . Deper-
sonalization," write Noyes and Kletti,
". . . appears to be an almost universal
reaction to life-threatening danger. As . minent] death, one might find within
such it may be « basic adaptive pattern
of the nervous system. . . . "
"It's an emergency mechanism,"
Noyes told me, "a reflex action, if you
like," which, as his article explains,
"has been viewed psychologically as a
defense against anxiety. Freud felt we
tend to eliminate death from our lives
by becoming . .. detached observers.
Our own death is indeed unimaginable,
so we perceive that we really survive
But don't let me ground you. The
nonchemical out-of-body trip may just
class ticket to relaxation, self-actualiza-
tion, and enlightenment.
as spectators. Thus, in the face of mortal
danger, we find individuals becoming · possibly be-like meditation-a first-
observers . . . effectively removing them-
selves from danger."
Noyes reports that 49 percent of the
people he interviewed experienced de-
tachment from body. A sense of harmony
cal extension of this experience oc-
curred almost exclusively in persons in
whom some alteration of cerebral func-
tioning might be presumed to have oc-
curred-for example, cases of drown-
ing, where, it's implied, there might
have been a lowered level of oxygen
to the brain. And 47 percent of those
who believed death imminent had pan-
oramic memories. Although much the
same symptoms are found in deperson-
alization brought on by marijuana in-
toxication, says Noyes, the revival-of-
memories component appears to be
more closely associated with life-threat-
ening circumstances, and bears a strik-
ing resemblance to a typical grief
reaction, where memories of deceased
persons, resembling. lifelike presences,
are reported during the acute stages and
represent a bereaved person's clinging
to and at the same time severing ties
with the lost loved one. It could also
explain Osis's "take-away figure."
What about the tunnel Moody's people
see? "I've heard of experiences like
that but not very many," says Noyes.
While there's no question that peo-
ple are concerned about the hereafter,
studies show that people don't fear
death nearly as much as they fear
dying. Will I be in pain, disfigured,
abandoned? These are the universal
fears. "What does it feel like to die?"
is a question that's common to patients
who know they are dying.
Noyes's work, contrary to Moody's,
addresses these fears by explaining the
out-of-body experience and the accom-
· panying phenomena as an automatic
component of dying rather than a pre-
sumption of being dead. "One may
take comfort," says Noyes, "from the
fact that if suddenly confronted by [im-
oneself the resources for coping with
that frightful prospect. In such an ur-
gent moment, the strength may be
found to effect a rescue, but failing
that, to face life's end with serenity-
even acceptance."
Yes, I find that a tremendous com-
fort. And it makes me suspect that it's
no more necessary to rehearse for dying
than it is to learn to breathe.
It may also be the quintessential vi-
carious experience for our plastic sur-
gery-prone, de-aging, death-denying
For Release"2003/09/90°rte: AYRbiss for880017002which people have every
subjects, and the authors say the mysti-
intention of living forever.
NEW YORK/YEAR-END ISSUE
YORK