Tami Simon: Welcome, William, to “Insights at the Edge.”
William Buhlman: It’s a pleasure to be here.
TS: Most of the time, I’m trying to get in my body, meaning I feel a little ungrounded. I want to make sure, when I’m driving, I don’t want to get in a car accident, so I’m doing things like breathing into my hands and feet and just trying to get grounded as a person, because I can get kind of dreamy. And yet here I am, I’m talking to you about out-of-body experiences!
Let’s just start right at the beginning. In spiritual life, we’re trying to get in our body? Out of our body? How do you see this?
WB: I see this as, the primary goal is to experience our spiritual essence, and whatever path we take to do that is valid for us.
TS: OK. And so, the “spiritual essence,” tell me what you mean by that.
WB: What many people perceive as a higher self, a non-form-based consciousness that exists beyond all elements of three-dimensional form. In other words, our state that exists in its natural state, beyond all three-dimensional realities.
TS: So what’s the relationship between this spiritual essence—to use your language—and the physical form, the physical body?
WB: I perceive the physical body as a vehicle of consciousness that we use to learn and grow and explore the physical world, because all of us are explorers, because this isn’t our natural habitat! We’re only here for a temporary period of time, so each of us is essentially, when we enter a body, we have become explorers, entering this dense body. I perceive the entire physical world to be the epidermis layer of the universe. I know from my own out-of-body experiences (or OBEs) that there’s countless realities, subtle realities that exist inwardly, and that as we have an out-of-body experience, we’re actually moving inward into the universe, and we’re experiencing these other realities that exist.
TS: OK, now you’re saying this word “epidermis.” That means the skin?
WB: Yes. The physical world is like the skin of an apple, because when you leave your body or have an out-of-body experience, you’re actually moving inward into the universe, into a finer vibratory level of reality, and you’re experiencing your finer vibratory energy body.
TS: OK, so here you are, you’re one of the world’s leading experts on out-of-body experiences. Did you spontaneously have an out-of-body experience at a young age? Is that how you became interested in this? Did you just decide, “This is my field of inquiry: how to leave the body and travel the inner dimensions of the universe”?
WB: Well, no, not exactly. A friend of mine in college, John, had a spontaneous out-of-body experience, and he came to me and shared his experience, and he got me excited about it. I was not a believer in the topic at all—never heard of it! I decided, well, if he could have this experience that so altered him, so changed him, I wanted to see myself if it was real.
I found that there were books available on the topic, and I began to do one of the techniques that I found, which I now call the Target Technique, where I essentially just focused my attention on three objects that were in my mother’s home as I fell asleep every night. And into the third week of doing this, I awoke in my small dorm room, I was laying on my side, and when I reached out my hand, my hand actually entered the wall. That’s when it hit me, that “Oh my God! I’ve done it!” because I had to prove this for myself. At that moment, I thought about standing. I’m standing by the foot of the bed, looking down at this lump that was my body, and it was a shocking revelation! It changed my entire paradigm! I was fully aware, fully awake; it wasn’t a dream, and I was existing, consciously, beyond my body.
I also realized quite quickly that there was someone else that I could see, a nonphysical person that was observing me. To be quite honest, it scared me. The next thing I knew was, bang! I was back in my body.
That first experience changed everything for me. It opened up a whole new realm.
TS: OK, so let’s try to break it down a little bit. So first of all, the Target Technique: you’re imagining three physical objects in the home of your childhood. I get that. How did that lead to the experience of you being outside of your body, such that you felt your “hand” through a wall?
WB: OK. The whole idea of many out-of-body exploration techniques is to maintain your focus away from your body—
TS: OK.
WB: —as you allow your body to just drift off. The primary premise is, of course, that we go where our thoughts direct us, just as we do in the physical world, but in this case, you’re focusing 100 percent of your attention away from your body. This initiates the out-of-body experience for many people, and it’s been proven to work for thousands and thousands of people.
TS: So I’m taking all of my attention, and I’m putting it in the swimming pool where I grew up, or a painting in the living room that I used to like to look at when I was a kid. I’m fully outside of my physical form. I’m in imagination, right?
WB: Well, you’re focusing your awareness to a specific physical location. This technique is designed only for a physical reality location, not an imaginary place. It does not work if you’re imagining something. The targets must be actual physical reality targets for this technique to work.
TS: OK, but I mean I’m imagining a picture. What if this picture was taken down by my mom, and I didn’t even know it, but—
WB: You would still be focusing your attention away from your body. The act of doing that is what helps to initiate the entire separation process of out-of-body experiences.
TS: OK. So now you said your hand was through the wall. Not your physical hand, right?
WB: My energy body hand, of course.
TS: Your energy body hand was through the wall?
WB: Yes. And of course, before that, I felt a high vibratory feeling throughout my body that was totally, at that point, alien to me. I had never had an experience like that, but as I reached out my hand, my hand and arm actually entered the wall, and I could feel the energy of it. That’s when it hit me, because this is such a radical thing for many of us. It’s unusual for many people to experience this. It certainly was for me.
For me, it was important to prove it to myself, because I would have never believed it if somebody had walked up to me and told me, “Oh, Bill, you can leave your body!” There’s no way I would have accepted that as a reality! The beauty of out-of-body exploration is that we do have this capability of verifying our own expectations of what this is. I think that’s very powerful.
TS: Yes, that if I’ve learned these techniques, then I can do it and I can have my own experience, and then we can talk about it. OK, but we’re going to keep going with your experience for a moment here. So in this initial experience you had in college, then you said there was a being there that you felt a little afraid of. Who or what might this being have been?
WB: Well, the being at the time, I feel now that this was a guide. At the time, I didn’t know that; that’s why it scared me, because this was my first experience. Now I know for a fact that this was one of my guides, and he was just observing. Generally, guides will stay out of your line of sight, but in this case, I did perceive him.
TS: OK. Now here we are, we’re sitting here, we’re having this conversation in the Sounds True studio here in Boulder, Colorado. You’ve been with us here at Sounds True for the last few days, recording this audio series called How to Have an Out-of-Body Experience. You’ve been teaching people. Right now, as we’re sitting here, in the midst of this conversation, could you initiate an out-of-body experience?
WB: No, I could not. I’d have to be in an altered state of consciousness, a very deep, altered state. That’s why I use all kinds of techniques in my workshops, like hypnosis. I’m a certified hypnotherapist. When people come to a workshop of mine, they have three hours of conditioning in deep hypnosis before we even do a technique.
TS: OK.
WB: And then I have them going really down, deeply down, into a completely relaxed state, and then we begin to really do out-of-body exploration techniques. Very few people can actually initiate and experience from an awakened state.
TS: There has to be some kind of transitional—
WB: Yes, because you’re transferring a large part of your consciousness to a different energy body, and for most people that requires the physical body to be completely relaxed and to be able to let go.
TS: So this energy body—so I’m taking the energy out of my physical body, and you said “transferring” it to the energy body?
WB: Well, that’s a good question. We are multidimensional beings. We are a microcosm of the universe, and we already have multiple energy bodies. The concept of body-mind-spirit is actually a very simplistic view of the universe. I have found, from 40 years of my own experience, that we are already on every level of the universe. We already exist there in these multiple energy bodies. What we are actually doing is transferring a portion of our consciousness from our (let’s just say) physical body, to our (let’s call it) subtle energy body, and we have this ability to do this and control it.
Think about it: if we are (let’s just say) soul or consciousness, we are already projecting our consciousness, right now, into the physical body. We are actually existing on multiple energy dimensions of the universe. All of us are. It doesn’t matter what labels we give it, but let’s just call it “soul.” If you exist as a soul, whatever your reference point is for that, then you already are there, right now. We are already existing on soul level; we are already existing on the mental level or dimension; we are already existing on the emotional level. All of these are energy bodies that are within us already, and the power of out-of-body exploration is that ability to begin to shift our awareness from one energy body to another energy body, and to be able to use it effectively.
TS: OK, I think I’m with you. This is exciting. So normally, a lot of my awareness is in my physical body.
WB: Yes.
TS: And what you’re saying is that, through techniques and practice, a large portion of my energy could be in this subtle body?
WB: Yes, exactly!
TS: What would be the benefits of me experiencing more time in the subtle body?
WB: Answers to the questions of life. As we move inward, one of the powerful things I’ve found is that we have the power to obtain the answers to the big questions, the answers to the really important ones, like “What are we?” “Where did we come from?” “Where are we going?” “What is our purpose?” These questions are available. As you move inward, you begin to connect with the more expansive part of ourselves, and this is where the answers are found, because this is where we truly reside as pure consciousness. This is where we’re far more expansive than in the physical body.
It’s almost like a vast dimension of consciousness has been focused, for each of us, into a tiny vehicle we call our physical body, and as we leave our physical bodies and begin to explore, we’re exploring ourselves! We are actually exploring the higher dimensional realities within ourselves, and we’re in touch with this higher portion of ourselves, so we can obtain answers that way.
Also, one of the great benefits is your fear of death, of course, disappears. In all the people that I’ve ever met that have had out-of-body experiences, there’s no fear of death.
TS: So you have no fear of death?
WB: No, because I know it’s a facade. I know I don’t die. I know for a fact, because I’ve been out of my body thousands of times. I know this is just a vehicle of consciousness. I also know I’m not a humanoid form, that as I hold my awareness beyond my body, my energy body will lose its physical attributes, and I’ll become almost like a globe of consciousness, with 360-degree awareness. That’s a more natural state. The physical body is actually a very alien state of consciousness, a very alien vehicle that we’re only here exploring for a very short period of time.
So I look at the world in kind of the reverse of how many people do. This is the exploration, in the body, because this is not our home. No matter what you believe or don’t believe, we’re all on this inward journey beyond our bodies. It doesn’t matter what belief system you adopt. We’re all leaving our bodies. We’re all going to step beyond this facade, so wouldn’t it make sense for all of us to know what this process is, since this is the journey, the universal journey of all of us?
TS: So what’s it like for you when you’re fully disconnected from the physical body, and you’re in the energy body? What is that experience like?
WB: Freedom. Unbelievable freedom. There’s no limitations. That’s what’s so wonderful about it: You no longer have any form-based limitations, unless you so believe you do. So you could fly, you could walk through walls, you could stand in the corner and just raise your vibration rate and explore anywhere you wish to go.
As a matter of fact, this is what I teach in my workshops. Having an out-of-body experience is just the first little step. The big exploration is in how to use this knowledge, how to take this experience and turn it into something unbelievably powerful for yourself, how you become an explorer of consciousness. You become an explorer of all of the inner aspects of yourself. You can demand to experience your spiritual essence—or your soul, or whatever term you wish to use—during an out-of-body experience. You can actually contact and communicate with a dead loved one. I’ve done this on several occasions, and I have an entire chapter in one of my books about this.
TS: OK, well, let’s talk about that for a moment. So you’re in the energy body, and you’re connecting with a deceased loved one. What are you connecting with?
WB: You’re connecting with them as they perceive themselves after death. What I’ve found interesting—I’ve met my uncle and my mother, and what I’ve found especially interesting was the fact that every time I’ve met somebody who has died, they’re always in the prime of life. My uncle, for instance, when he died, he was very overweight. When I met him during an out-of-body experience, he felt 22, 23 years old. The same applies to my mother. I’ve found, during my explorations and during my survey of over 16,000 people (I’ve received a lot of feedback from others) that this is universal. People will experience loved ones who have died as being in the prime of their life, living in this other energy dimension in a consensus reality that they’ve adapted to.
This is because the afterlife is essentially a series of consensus realities created by the thoughts of the group consciousness. Like attracts like. For instance, right-wing Christians would be in a collective of their own making, where Buddhists might be in another collective of their making, because they resonate by thought. Everything is by thought. Creation is by thought. The afterlife, as we know it, is created by the thoughts of the inhabitants, and there’s millions and millions of these realities. Each one is created by the group consciousness, but all of these are available for us to explore on our own, face-to-face, in full consciousness.
We have the ability to verify this information, and that’s what makes it so exciting. There’s no belief system attached to out-of-body exploration. There’s no philosophies. There’s no rules. It’s just: do it! Have the experience, and then you determine your own personal viewpoint of what you experience.
TS: OK, so I think I lost you a little bit when we were talking about meeting deceased loved ones, and I asked, “Who are they? What is that energy that you’re meeting?” And you said it’s their view, the thought they have about themselves.
WB: Oh, it’s their identity, of course. They have assumed the self-identity that they— For instance, one of the things I’ve found is that, during the transition we call death, people will assume the self-identity that they have of themselves. In other words, before an incarnation, my mother will still continue to be Laura, my mother. She’ll just be a younger version of that. After that incarnation, when she decides to make her next incarnation, she will take the form of a new personality. It could be a new sex, could be a new culture. It doesn’t matter. Then she’ll adapt to that, and she’ll conform to that. Her energy body will mold, actually, to that new personality. Of course, my view of her would change, but for now, when I met my mother, she was still in that mode of her last (let’s just say) experience in matter.
TS: OK, so each one of us can have out-of-body experiences and see what we see, discover what we see, know for ourselves. What is it that gives you confidence that the experiences you’ve had are giving you answers that are “correct” about the world? I mean, you said, “I can do these things and I get answers.” I believe you get answers, but how do we know that these answers have any kind of validity beyond your subjective experience?
WB: Excellent question! Because I have the absolute ability to repeat the question over and over again, and actually confirm it for myself; because I have the ability to be there in full consciousness; and because I have the ability to make conscious decisions. An out-of-body experience is not like a flighty little experience where you’re floating around the ceiling. You’re like you are right now, except you’re vibrating at a finer rate. I want to make that clear. Many times, your awareness, which is actually your thought processes, is much more enhanced, because you’re no longer using the biological hard drive. Everything is actually, in many ways, clearer and more concise, but the power of this is that I can confirm it. If I have a doubt, I can confront it.
For instance, if somebody was to come to me and say that they are so-and-so, I can confront them. I can actually say, “What do you represent?” I can demand, I can be demanding of any energy form that comes close to me, to verify whether that form is an actual reality and not a thought form, for instance, or just a figment of my own creation. We have the ability to actually reconfirm our own experiences.
Again, this is one of the things I teach in my workshops. In other words, I don’t trust the outer form of anything that I encounter, because everything is created by thought. We have to be very discerning about all the information we receive, and there’s various techniques that we can use to absolutely know that we are getting the correct information and not some facade.
TS: OK, so as you’re talking, I’m thinking of things like lucid dreaming, remote viewing, shamanic journeys. These are all different techniques that various Sounds True authors have taught. What’s the relationship between the way you teach out-of-body experiences, and the techniques of lucid dreaming, remote viewing, shamanic journeying, just to name three techniques that I think are relatively well known?
WB: Well, number one, lucid dreaming is— I don’t perceive out-of-body experiences to be anything like a lucid dream. I feel strongly that all spiritual traditions, including shamanism— The core element of shamanism involves this transition of consciousness into the various worlds, whether it be the lower realm, the middle, the upper, but it’s all about the shift of consciousness. There is a relationship to shamanism, especially, in out-of-body experiences. I had the opportunity to train for many weeks with a shaman in Peru, and he told me that his core ability was to actually leave his physical body, because that’s where the best healing was achieved. That’s where he was interacting one-on-one with his client. That was a powerful part of shamanism. The core element, I feel, of all spiritual traditions revolves around this transition, or let’s just say expansion of awareness beyond the body. A classic example is Islam, now that we’re bringing in different paths.
TS: Sure.
WB: What is the night journey of Mohammed but an out-of-body experience? When you strip away the semantics, he specifically writes about this journey through seven dimensions, and entering each dimension there is a different vibration rate, different color, and he’s moving through this, and he’s encountering angels. Of course he’s interpreting his out-of-body experience based on his cultural background, and this has been done for centuries.
The same applies to the Bible. In Revelation, it says, “I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day.” It begins with this! Then it says, “And then I heard behind me a great voice.” What does “I was in the spirit on the Lord’s day” mean? If he lived today, could it not mean, “I was out of my body”?
Every spiritual tradition has, in a sense, created their own vocabulary that has limited, in many ways, our understanding of what that core experience was. I feel strongly that the core element of all spiritual paths involves this transcending of consciousness beyond our physical limits. It doesn’t matter what the path is. Even nirvana: What is the Buddhist nirvana? If you look at the core element, they’re all moving beyond this 3-D, dense world. How they get there, the practices they use, may be different, but they’re all moving inward within themselves in the higher vibratory worlds, and they’re experiencing these profound experiences beyond their physical bodies, whether it be Buddha, or Krishna, or Mohammed, or Saint Paul in Corinthians I, where he talks about “whether in the body or out of the body.” All of these people were having, I feel, out-of-body experiences, but they were interpreting them along their own cultural guidelines.
TS: OK. And just to sew up a little bit the question that I asked you: You said that shamanic journeying is quite similar in some ways, in terms of this shift in consciousness that takes place in the journey when you’re traveling outside your body, but you said that lucid dreaming is not like what you’re teaching?
WB: Well, I made a separation of lucid dreaming because I feel lucid dreaming is, in many ways, a low-powered experience. Based on my 40 years of experience, I have found that there’s a continuum of consciousness that flows inward and outward in the universe, and I write about this extensively. In other words, we’re travelers moving our consciousness inward into the universe at death, during near-death, during OBEs, and during deep meditation. We’re moving inward then. Outward is, of course, when we’re born.
Lucid dreaming is, in a sense, a low-powered OBE in one aspect. It’s a portion. We’re starting to become more aware of our dream body—which, by the way, is a form of an energy body—but I don’t want this connection to be made in such a way that people perceive it as, “Oh well, all OBEs are lucid dreams.” In a way, there’s a deep connection, because during an out-of-body experience, it’s a real reality going on. Your I-ness, your entire presence, is there. You are as there as we are here. Reality doesn’t just change in shape at a whim. At the beginning, you are often in a room just like this, with all the three-dimensional trappings. You’re just observing it from a different angle. It’s radically different from a lucid dream.
But what I’ve found interesting, now that you bring up dreams, is that based on out-of-body experiences and a lot of research, everybody leaves their body when they fall asleep. I’ve observed this, and many others have. When people fall asleep, they’re actually beginning to separate from their body, their denser energy body—or what many people call the astral body. (I don’t generally use that term.) They’re actually beginning to separate; they’re actually moving out of sync with their physical body during sleep, and you can observe this during an out-of-body experience. I’ve done this; it almost looks like a double image. I’m not saying that they float up to the ceiling, but they’re floating out of sync with their bodies. All six and a half billion of us are doing this every night; we’re floating about three inches or so out of sync. So in a sense, all of us are having an out-of-body experience every night. It’s just not fully understood yet.
TS: OK, and you’re saying that the dream body is an aspect of the energy body, but in your view it isn’t as free, isn’t as unlimited, as the energy body that you’re describing?
WB: Because there’s a lack of conscious awareness present in it. It’s all about the percentage of conscious awareness in the energy body that makes it an effective tool for exploration, just like the physical world.
TS: OK.
WB: We have to maintain a certain percentage of our consciousness in this body, or we are not effective. The same applies when you’re out of body. Each energy body that we use must have a certain degree of consciousness. No one knows what that percentage is, but it has to be enough for you to be able to absolutely use that energy body with the same minimal freedom that you would experience in the physical world.
TS: OK, and just to complete this. It doesn’t need to be a long answer, but this idea of remote viewing, that you leave your body and that you can go look at some place in another country or whatever. It seems like that would be a form of an out-of-body experience.
WB: Yes, yes it is, for many people. There’s a fine line. I’ve met many of the remote viewers; I do workshops at the Monroe Institute, so I’m familiar with Skip Atwater and the whole crew. There is a difference. Remote viewers, if you talk to one and ask them the same question, they will delineate the two; they will tell you. Many of them have the ability to have out-of-body experiences, and they also have the ability to remote view in the strictest of senses, where they are using psychic vision.
I’m from the old school. In the ’70s, we called remote viewing “psychic vision.” Today, in my conversation with remote viewers, they will tell you whether they’re out of body, because it’s a more visceral experience. They’ll be crawling on the ground, observing something, and they’ll feel themselves in an energy body during an OBE. During a (let’s just say) remote-viewing experiment, it’s strictly psychic impressions coming in, and it’s a whole different kind of experience. But many of the remote viewers do have OBEs. I know this for a fact from talking to them.
TS: Being in the energy body, it sounds like there’s a lot of different possible aspects, emphases, things that can happen, and you teach a lot of different techniques—
WB: Yes.
TS: —for both being in the energy body, and then what kinds of adventures the person goes on, correct?
WB: Right.
TS: What I’m curious about is, I would imagine there are dimensions beyond the energy body, as well.
WB: Yes, there are. That’s what makes this so fascinating and exciting! Each of us possesses multiple energy bodies. I use the term “energy body,” actually, as a description for all of our various energy bodies. During an out-of-body experience, you can move from your physical body to—let’s just call it your “first energy body,” or what people perceive as astral. What’s fascinating is, with a little training and focus, you can actually exit the astral body very much like you would the physical, and shift your awareness into your finer vibratory body. Many labels have been put on this, but let’s just call it a much finer energy body that’s much more of thoughts, and it’s much more free. It’s a finer body with more freedom. This shift can occur within ourselves. Out-of-body explorers who use control have the ability to travel inward within themselves through the various energy bodies.
Like I said earlier, we’re much more complex than body, mind, and spirit. We possess multiple energy bodies, and eventually, as we move inward, we experience what people perceive as their spiritual self, as their spiritual essence. You can continue to travel within yourself. I call it the direct path to spiritual liberation, where you’re moving within yourself through all of your various energy bodies. The purpose of meditation and yoga is to liberate yourself from all energy bodies, essentially, and go to your highest aspect, but often in meditation, people will still experience these energy bodies. What I have tried to do is make it clearer, more concise, and to actually explore each dimension as we go through them, so people will understand just how magnificent we all truly are.
TS: Now William, you may find this a strange question, but see if you can hang in with me for this. It’s a little personal, too. The kind of meditation that I’ve been doing is one that’s very physically based, very embodied, really working with the feeling of the body, and then exploring it in more and more subtle ways. Here’s the question: I’ve noticed sometimes when people discount their physical body, that they’re discounting certain shadow or hidden aspects of themselves, meaning they’re very comfortable out in the energy world, but then they come back and have trouble maybe with their relationships, maybe with issues around power or morality, or other kinds of things that are really on this physical plane. They’re fabulous out in space, but they’re not that great actually dealing with the physical world, like ethics, things like that. That’s always bothered me, and I’m curious what you have to say about that. Do you believe that our travels in the outer dimensions change how we act in the physical world?
WB: Yes, I do. I think it has to change it, because we’re gaining more knowledge about what we are. And as we grow in our knowledge, I think we grow in our ethics, we grow in our understanding, we grow in our empathy, because we understand how tough this evolutionary process is, because we’re actually seeing it from the inside. We’re seeing a broader spectrum of what each of us must travel through to (let’s just say) evolve on our path.
Now, getting back to your point on the physical body. I don’t discount the importance of the physical body; I like to make that very clear. We have incarnated here because we have work to do. There is no doubt that this is a training ground of consciousness, and that there’s valid, important work that must be done here that cannot be in any way sidestepped. The importance of out-of-body experience is just to enhance that.
I am very active in the physical world. I have a family, I have a business, I have a lot of things going on. It doesn’t detract; it adds, because it gives me a broader perspective of what’s truly important. I feel that as you obtain more knowledge about yourself, then your priorities are changing. Then you truly see what’s important, and you’re not so caught up in the minutiae of the physical world, or “all the illusions,” as the Buddhists would say. You see the illusions for what they are, so you become more expansive, and you become, I think, actually more effective.
Now everyone is different, but I like to emphasize that I do feel strongly—and I teach this in my workshops, in every workshop—that the physical world cannot be in any way thought of as a secondary adventure. This is still our prime event. When we entered the physical world, we were brave explorers, and this is our prime learning ground. All the other learning grounds are just in addition to it. I think that’s the focus that I think.
TS: Mm-hmm. Now, you mentioned that through out-of-body adventures, it’s possible to get answers. I’m curious what are some of the big questions you’ve asked in your own explorations, and what answers you’ve received.
WB: I’ve demanded to experience my spiritual essence, which was a remarkable experience. I’ve done this many times, and in fact I have a technique that I teach called Higher Self Now, where during an out-of-body experience, away from your body about ten feet, you use a technique I call Awareness Now in order to center yourself, and then you demand to experience your higher self or your spiritual essence, or whatever phrase means that to you.
The result is amazing! If you’re open to it, what you’ll experience—or at least what I’ve experienced—is that you end up shooting through layers of color and light and energy, and you feel like you’re being stretched across the universe. The end result is that you’re floating in this immense sea of pure white light and love. You can’t put words on this, but you’re beyond all form. In a sense, you’ve done what they talk about in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which is called “going into the clear light of the void.” I feel this is the clear light of the void. There’s no form. It’s pure conscious awareness, and you’re there; you’re conscious. You’re absorbing everything that’s there: all answers, all questions, everything is present.
Again, you can’t put words to this, but I wanted to give you a feel for this. This is what’s possible during an out-of-body experience. It gives you an opportunity to have a profound spiritual experience without going into a cave for 30 years, without slogging through all of these what I consider to be very difficult techniques that are sometimes available in the physical world. We have the unique ability to have our own spiritual experience, and by the very act of leaving your body, you’ve already transcended one of these layers, so you’re closer to the source. In a sense, your body is a launch pad for whatever you want to make of it, because you are that much closer to the source of everything, and from there, you decide how you’re going to use it.
TS: You know you refer to some arduous techniques that some people are using, whether those are meditation techniques or other paths that do seem, I think, quite difficult for people. Learning how to have an out-of-body experience, is that not that hard? Can anybody do it?
WB: Good point. Out-of-body experience does take dedication. It takes daily practice. There are no shortcuts. I’m not saying it’s easy; I never have said it was easy. But I know it’s very direct and powerful; I know it works for me and works for tens of thousands of other people. But it’s not for everyone, and I’ll be the first to share that. It takes a certain person to, let’s just say, to be free enough or courageous enough to be able to explore beyond their physical limits. Again, it’s not a point of being easy. It’s a point of it’s available and it will be—some people it will resonate with, because it’s active.
I’ll give you an example. In my workshops, I often get about 75 percent men—which is unusual in workshops. They’re generally 75 to 80 percent women! Guys always talk to me about this. I say, “Why are you here?” I ask them. And they say, “Because this is exciting! This is active! I feel like I’m taking control of my own destiny, and not waiting for something to happen.”
I think that sums it up. A lot of people like out-of-body exploration as a path because it’s an active process, and there’s a lot of excitement around it with the vibrational state (which we really haven’t talked about at all) and all of the prelude to an out-of-body experience.
TS: Well, let’s not skip over the exciting vibrational state!
WB: OK! The vibrational state is essentially the prelude to an OBE that 80 percent of people experience, according to my research. It is powerful; it’s abrupt. It’s shocking for people. Suddenly you’re paralyzed; you feel paralyzed, and there’s energy flows going through you. There’s this electrical buzzing noise moving through you, or you’re being touched, or you feel like somebody’s trying to pull your legs, or you just feel a presence in the room or your name being called. There’s over 50 different elements that make up the vibrational state. Essentially, anything strange that happens out of the norm during what we perceive as sleep is the vibrational state. It’s the prelude that indicates that the transfer of consciousness is beginning, and for many people, it gets to be quite exciting. You have to be prepared for it. You have to remain calm. You have to surrender.
For instance: paralysis. I enjoy that temporary state of paralysis, because I know that’s a launch pad for OBEs. I surrender completely to it, and that’s what works. You surrender, because you’re transferring your awareness. You have to let go of the physical. The paralysis state that many people are so afraid of is actually a very natural state of consciousness. Same thing for the vibrations, and all this is part of the vibrational state.
Many people—as a matter of fact, most people—will experience all these elements at some time in their lives, but they don’t know what they are! They don’t know how they connect to the experience of out-of-body exploration, so they just linger in the state and become fearful, especially of paralysis. There’s even terms for it now; it’s almost a medical condition. But it’s a natural state of consciousness that occurs when we’re transferring our awareness from our dense body to a higher vibratory energy body. For a lot of people, this is almost like an early warning system. It’s like, “Yes! Here it goes. Here we go!” You just relax into it. Almost every one of my out-of-body experiences involved a vibrational state.
TS: So the courage that you referred to earlier is being able to let go through that vibrational state, to go with it?
WB: Yes. You have to surrender and let go. You have to surrender to the now, as many people are talking about today, but it’s very true in this work. You must surrender, because your analytical mind, if it kicks in, it will block the experience every time. You have to let go of all analytical thought. That’s part of the training in this process. You’re letting go of your connection to all analytical thought, and you’re letting this higher portion of yourself take over. It’s very exciting work!
TS: William, just a couple final questions. We’re sitting here together, and I wrote down a quote from a presentation that you gave to the Sounds True staff, introducing them to out-of-body experiences. You said, “We are not human beings. We are consciousness in a human container.” And as we’re sitting here together, we could experience ourselves as two human beings, sitting here together on these brown chairs in a studio, the microphone set up, but I’m curious: How do you experience us sitting here?
WB: [Laughs] To the best of my ability, I perceive us both as just consciousness having a communication, and that these vehicles are just a part of the process. That’s how I view it. The physical vehicle is such a temporary little facade that we use. It’s silly to get too attached to it.
That’s one of the practices I teach, by the way. I do a four-day workshop with the Monroe Institute, and in that workshop, I teach people to disassociate their entire feelings with this flesh body. When they examine other people, we actually do techniques where you begin to perceive everyone— I’ll put people in pairs and have them just begin to look at each other as nonphysical beings, in other words begin to disassociate from this self-identity of just this container. This really helps to allow us to go beyond the limits of this, because most people are so identified with this three-dimensional form, they actually believe they’re this little flesh bag! They think, “This is what I am!” And imagine how limiting it is; once you have accepted that as part of your beingness, you’ve trapped yourself in that body.
The work is in conditioning ourselves to move beyond it, just like the Buddhists do. That’s why a Buddhist monk is selected when they’re very, very young; it’s so they can begin to condition them that they are not just this flesh body; they’re so much more than this. That’s the same thing that I do in my workshops.
TS: OK. And just finally, William, our program is called “Insights at the Edge,” and I’m always curious if people are aware of or working with a certain edge in their own being, meaning something that they are questioning, something that they can imagine moving beyond, something that’s up for them at this moment. I’m curious if you have any response to that, the edge for William right now.
WB: For me, the edge would definitely be to reexperience myself beyond form as often as possible. During OBEs, I don’t focus on the physical-like world. I did that for 10 years. To the best of my ability, I try to move beyond all worlds of form, all realities of form, and to the best of my ability, I try to reconnect with that higher aspect of myself. For me, that’s always a challenge, because we always have to deal with our own blocks. For me, that is the edge; that’s where I’m always working toward.
TS: Wonderful! I’ve been speaking with William Buhlman. He’s the author of a new Sounds True learning series called How to Have an Out-of-Body Experience, a program that is filled with lots of techniques, practices, and different portals and entryways into the OBE world. William, thank you for being with us!
WB: Oh, thank you! It was a pleasure.
TS: SoundsTrue.com. Many voices, one journey.
