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Tony Iommi – Iron Man

I always wondered about what happens when you die, when you're beyond this world, and tried to find information about that in books.

While living at the big house, I read a lot of books by Lobsang Rampa. He was a writer who claimed to have been a Tibetan monk before spending his later years in the body of an Englishman, or so he wrote. I started getting into all this leaving the body stuff astral travelling. I really believed in it and that made me want to do it.

I planned it and thought about it and I tried it a few times, but nothing happened.

When I finally managed to do it for the first time, I came out of my body and, with a jolt, suddenly jumped back in. You feel it pulling you back as your astral is leaving your body; you feel this pull up your spine. I must have got frightened and I came straight back in.

Once I had done that I was determined to make it work properly. I kept practising. You've got to be by yourself in a room and you have to really, really relax, but not to the point of falling asleep, because you have to stay conscious.

And then you will yourself to leave.

At first it’s funny, because you feel like you’re falling. Most people have had that feeling when in bed. You go, oohh: you experience a jolt. That’s when your astral comes back in your body when you dream. You're asleep and you’re just about to leave your body, and if you move, whoof,, it comes straight back in and you get that jolt.

After a while it worked. I came out my body.

It was weird. I floated around the room and looked down on myself from the ceiling. And I could leave the room, go through walls and go off to the roof. It sounds mad, but once I even went along the beach.

You come back. You’re attached by a silver cord that pulls you back. If that’s ever severed, you don’t, so it can be risky. When you dream and your astral leaves your body, and an entity is in the lower-class astral, and it pulls on your silver cord and annoys you, you get these horrible dreams. It could be caused by drugs or drink, just anything. I know it sounds odd, but I have experienced all that and it opened another world to me.

I don’t know why I don’t do it any more. I didn’t follow it through. I have actually tried it a couple of times and: nothing.

I can't leave my body any more.

But in those days I could do it quite easily. I got to a point where I could do it without falling asleep.

I still believe you can go to a non-physical plane of existence.

'When you die you can go there, and you can look back on your life in a thing called the akashic records. I really think that’s what happens: you can go and see whether you've achieved what you wanted to achieve, and if not you can be born into another body and try again….