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Going Home – Colm Keane

Brendan from County Kerry

I started trying it about ten years ago. I tried it first out of curiosity. I read about it because, at the time, I was very much into looking for knowledge or truth. I found a great book called The Projection Of The Astral Body, which was by Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington. It was a hard-cover book and it came out I suppose 80 years ago. They researched it well. All the techniques were there. That's how it started.

The key thing is relaxation and to let your muscles go limp. You have to be totally relaxed, which is very hard to do. You also have to be totally focused and concentrate on going out.  Breathing has a lot to do with it too. You have to breathe in a certain fashion - slow and deep. I would call it the 'breath of relaxation.' But the most important factor is to believe that you are going to do it. That's a very hard thing. You have to more or less hypnotise yourself into believing that it's possible and that you will succeed.

I did it about five or six times. The first experience was very strange. I did it lying down in bed. I kept trying and the next thing I felt was that I was shrinking. I felt my feet were moving up towards my head. My other body was contracting into a sort of a point. I had a strange feeling in my body. I could hear a sound like a jet engine, like a 'fluffing' sound in my ears. It got louder and louder. I felt as if I was ballooning, as if there was an expansion within my body, as if something was going out of me.

All of a sudden I found myself in a different place. I found myself inside a house, looking out of a window. I don't know where it was, somewhere in the countryside. I could see tiles on the floor and the greenery outside and the trees. The colour was spectacular. The colours that we see every day are dead by comparison. I was conscious of myself being out of my body although I wasn't conscious of the body I left behind.

The second time, I found myself standing under a huge wall. It was an eight-foot or ten-foot high wall. I don't know where it was. I don't know why I was there. All of a sudden there were pebbles on top of this wall. They dropped down to the ground. The strange thing about it was that the sound they made when they hopped off the ground was a kind of a hollow, melodic sound. It was an artificial sound, very pure, like a hollow echo.  That time I found it hard to get back to my physical body.   My whole body was paralysed. I couldn't move a muscle. I had no power over it at all. That scared me. The only way I could get out of it was to rock my head from side to side and keep rocking it. That way I was able to get the muscles going again. They call it a cataleptic trance. But it didn't feel like a trance, which I always thought was a hazy stupor. This was real.

I tried it another time during the day. This time I left my body and found myself trying to switch on the light. It was a bit darkish, in the early evening. My finger kept slipping off the switch. I don't know whether my finger was slipping off it or going through it. I just couldn't put on the light.  Then, for some strange reason, I knew that my wife was lighting the fire below in the sitting-room. I confirmed afterwards that she was.

That time I had a problem getting back into my body. I didn't get in right. The two bodies got entangled. I could feel the elbow of my physical body up against the chin of let's call it my psychic body. My arm got wrapped around my psychic body. I was in a real quandary and couldn't disentangle myself. I just relaxed and somehow shifted myself around a bit. I was grand after that.

It can happen that people worry they won't find their body again. I was always scared that I mightn't be able to come back and I might be buried alive or something. I  worried that I might be caught outside and they might think my physical body was dead. No one would realise that I was actually somewhere else. That was a big fear with me.

I gave it up because I had a bad experience. One night I was in this pitch-black place, a space of blackness. All of a sudden these demonic heads came rushing at me. I became afraid. Another reason I gave it up was because my alternative body became too loose for my physical body. Sometimes I felt myself going off without wanting to.  That frightened me.  I worried especially when I was driving a car.  I thought I would be dangerous to both myself and the public. I wondered what would happen if I left myself - who would be driving the car? That really scared me when I was driving along the road because I thought I might lose control of the car.

I believe anybody can do it. If I can do it, anybody can do it. It's a bit like riding a bicycle. When you first ride a bicycle, you can't imagine how you are going to do it.  You wonder, 'How am I going to balance on two wheels?' You find it difficult at first but once you get the knack of it, it's easy. And the experience is very real. 

I think there's another side to us all that lurks beneath the surface. I really think there is a  'spirit' side. I don't like using that word but it's probably the best way of describing it. I think we evolved from some source way back before we were physical. It might have been some sort of vibration. I think we have many layers. The outer layer is the physical one but there's an inner one as well. There might be an even purer one within that again, with its own reality. All the old sages, long ago, said that everything has seven layers, seven bodies if you like. I kind of believe that.