Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48965 in Books
• Published on: 1997-05
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 278 pages

Amazon.com
Out of Body Experiences could be summed up in Robert Peterson's own words: it's "what the books didn't tell me." Many people have tried to have out of body experiences (OBEs) and are discouraged when things don't go exactly as the books suggest they should. Peterson assures readers that anyone can have an OBE, and relates the difficulties and discoveries in his personal quest for them. His anecdotal, reassuring approach makes the whole experience seem much more accessible than do other books on the subject, which tend to read like textbooks. Peterson also addresses odd and potentially startling aspects of the OBE that the more technical books neglect to mention. Out of Body Experiences is a casual, friendly approach to astral travel that should be the first book anyone attempting an OBE reads, and should be high on the reading list of anyone who has tried unsuccessfully to leave his body.

Customer Reviews

Be warned......again.
Hello, this is basically the same review I wrote for "Adventures Beyond The Body. It's basically the same book just written by two different people. This book will also help you to acheive an OBE. This book is also an excellent read, but obviously this authors OBE experiences are different from the other author.
This is where I am with the OBE issue....

I figured I'd weigh in on this book.
In other reviews I had stated I was raised Catholic but had more or less given up on Christianity and other religions as a source of knowledge about the next world.
I decided to go looking for myself. Being a big fan of the movie Flatliners, I was wondering if this OBE thing could be accomplished with out actually stopping your heart.
A little internet research led me to this book and one other which I will also review.
The book really is an amazing read.
He gives great tips on how to accomplish the experience and what to expect.
Like other reviewers I found myself lucid dreaming and being able to sway and partially get in and out of my body within a few weeks. But it literally took me over a year to overcome the fear factor and actually leave my body.
I titled my review, "Be Warned".
Why?
Because the author was right, one you force the experience you can't stop it.
I would say in the last ten years I have had hundreds if not more OBE's.
I went looking for answers, I didn't find any.
OBE's are NOT NDE's (Near Death Experiences)
There is no white tunnel waiting for you to enter.
There is no garden of tranquility waiting for you.
Nor were there any flames or demons.
What did I see?
It's difficult to put into words exactly..........
The author claims to have experienced some very incredible things, and who am I to say he's lying.
Everyone I've told has told me, you were asleep or imagining it.
There really isn't anything I could do to convince them otherwise, I was as awake during the actual experience as I am during my real waking state.
What did I see?
LOL, my bedroom and the downstairs of my house. I tried an experiment by moving a lamp while out of body.
As soon as I reentered, I saw the lamp had NOT been moved.
This leads me to believe when you are out of body; you are seeing the spiritual side of the real world, a mirror image if you will.
I haven't had any contact with any otherworldly beings, positive or negative. Whatever celestial secrets are out there, the angels and demons are keeping their celestial mouths shut.
Like I said, I started this looking for answers and found none. The experience itself is VERY difficult to control. You vision is either clear as can be or extremely distorted and unfocused. I don't remember if it's the author of this book who says to "demand clear vision" while out of body and it will happen. I tried that, DIDN'T WORK!!!!.
I did look down at my arm while out of body and what I saw was beautiful. It was like an outline of an arm with millions of little blue lights inside of it. I also have looked at my bed on numerous occasions and the only thing I have ever seen was a blank bed with the indentations of a body laying on it.
I've never had any scary encounters but my experiences are really never that long, if you so much as think of your body, ZAP your right back in it. I've never been in any kind of fear of possession, I've seen the "silver cord" that is mentioned in the book and it's very real. Nothing can take your body without your permission I don't care what the fundamentalist's say. Your soul has a claim on your body, period.
I've never had an experience that has lasted long enough for me to actually venture out of the house so I can't comment further on that.
I guess I can't wait for some comments from people. Have any of your experiences been the same as mine?
I started doing this looking for answers, religion and the occult gave me none.
OBE's gave me none.
If you're bound and determined to do this, then it's at your own risk.
Like I said, once you force the experience, you CANNOT stop it from happening again.
It doesn't seem to happen at night when I go to sleep, but if I lay down to take a nap in the afternoon forget it.
I'm in and out constantly. There is however a school of thought that says a part of us leaves every time we go to sleep. I'm inclined to believe that, maybe I'm just not recalling the experiences during my nighttime slumber.
Again folks, be careful, if you aren't mentally ready for this then don't do it.
If you're bound and determined to do it, then it's at your own risk.
Whether or not you find any answers to your questions will depend on.............don't ask me, it seems the universe is content to withhold any otherworldly information from me, oh well.
Take care.
B

excellent
this book is well written and puts alot of fears to rest. i find that your expectations highly affect what you experience and this book keeps you in a good frame of mind. this was the first book to get my friend "OUT" and she cherishes this book. i have a special attachment to another book because it was the first to get me "out", even though this robert peterson book is a better, more well rounded book. i highly reccommend this book, actually i just let a few people borrow it, they love it.

This Got Me Out There
I've owned this book for several years now, and the time has come to review it. This is a seriously important subject matter to me. I made the decision not to review books about Astral Projection until enough time had passed for me understand quite well what I was writing about. Over the past years I've had some OBE experience and now I'm confident that I'm giving a valid perspective in this review.

Prior to reading this book I had read only Robert Bruce, and he of course is very very good. But I found his book ("Astral Dynamics") too procedural somehow, too technical, and definitely too focussed on energy work, skipping too much of the simpler and less flashy pure meditation. When I picked up this book it was a breath of fresh air. It is very simply written and it has a real multitude of techniques. And after I read it I had the impression which I had not got from reading Bruce, that I really had begun to have an intuitive feel for what OBE was about. This proved to be correct as my experiences afterwards showed me.

There are many small things that made this book helpful for me. Peterson began OBE as a complete klutz and he has no problem admitting it - he is constantly getting stuck in his body, his initial control isn't good, and a couple of times he describes truly ludicrous situations such as getting back *in* his body the wrong way round! The fact is this humanized the book alot. I could relate to the subject matter much more easily after reading his little difficulties with it, it made things so much more realistic somehow.

Then there are the very numerous techniques scattered throughout the book. I never permanently adopted any of them as written, but because there were *so* many of them, and because I read them quite a few times, I suddenly started to see (or maybe feel) an underlying common denominator to all of them. In other words I saw the state of mind they were aiming at - that's the important thing in projection as it turns out, not any particular technique. The methods Peterson describes are incredibly various and this is why that realization happened for me. I was trying to work out what all these different-seeming ideas could have in common.

I could name many other little things I like about this book - the fact that he includes so many interesting small-scale observations about OBEs, his notes on having to rethink his religion, his investigations of OBE mythologies (some of which he is very happy to explode), his methodical recording methods, the very good little description he gives of what happens for him in meditation (which dovetails so well with another excellent OBE book, Draja Mickaharic's 'Magic Simplified'), the way he includes so many psychic observations too, the moments of genuine humour ("ident inspect..." ^_^)... all this is great.

But what made this book for me in the end were just a few pages - specifically, pages 226-9. They are the absolute best description of how to prepare to have an OBE that I have EVER read. To project there is a certain state of mind you have to get into, I have always called it 'divine neutrality'. Peterson calls it 'passivity', and unlike me, he is able to give a description of it. As soon as I read that description, I suddenly felt I'd got it. I was shortly afterwards able to have an OBE. Since then I have honed and honed my technique but this really excellent description is what gave me the insight to come up with a way to do it.

When I re-read these pages today I could see that I still am following *exactly* what he wrote here. The fact is that what he says just dovetails perfectly with the way things work for me. He speaks so simply about how to become neutral, how to have the limbs 'disappear' and so on, things that I naturally had been doing but wasn't sure were right - when he mentioned it in a way that made perfect sense, it gave me confidence, and from that confidence came success.

Some have said the book is a little simple, and perhaps in a certain way it is, but if you actually want to project the levels of simplicity or complexity are irrelevant. Really try all the techniques given, or think about them and work on it a little as I did, and I genuinely believe you will succeed - that's after some years of road-testing remember.

Certainly you should take into account the negative reviews on this page as well as the positive, because different people resonate with different methods and descriptions. Trying to learn something from a book you are relying on that 'click' to happen because you don't get feedback as you would from a teacher. I also certainly believe in investigating deeply and in reading everything you can lay your hands on; I've deepened my experience with more reading, Buhlman and Mickaharic being particularly helpful. But I have to give credit where it is due, this is the book that got me out of my body. And whenever I couldn't quite get the knack in the early days, I just reread bits of this book and it all came clear again. I have a connection with the way it is written, and it seems I'm not alone.

I recommend you read a little of this book on the Amazon reader, and if it feels good to you, get it. It worked for me, so I recommend it 100%.

[PS I should also mention the book's very extensive bibliography which will give you many further avenues to explore. It includes many older volumes that you can still get, but which not too many will know about. I wish more people would write bibliographies the way the late great Glenn Morris used to, with descriptions of the books rather than just their names, but this is still yet another excellent feature of Peterson's book that has served me well.]