Observations placeholder
The OBE Case histories of Dr Sandor Brent - 03 Scott experiments with his own group
Identifier
023173
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
David Scott Rogo - Leaving the Body: A Complete Guide to Astral Projection
During the summer of 1981, I decided to experiment with a guided imagery procedure partly adapted from Brent’s, when a private parapsychology group invited me to lead a discussion on the OBE and then organise some sort of informal experiental exercise. The use of a guided imagery procedure was a natural choice.
When I met with the group a week later in a private home in Los Angeles, I found that they ranged in age from the early twenties to the late forties. All reported previous psychic experiences and had a strong interest in developing their abilities further. This made them a perfect group for my purposes, since they were very open and excited about the prospect of undergoing an OBE. Two participants reported previous spontaneous OBEs, while one woman had undergone a particularly dramatic near-death OBE as a result of a severe accidental electrical shock.
The fact that only three out of the 18 members had undergone previous OBEs indicated to me that the group was fairly typical in their collective "OBE talent threshold," since this percentage (16) is roughly equivalent to the portion of the general population reporting OBEs.
While talking with the participants, however, it became clear that few of them had made any particular study of the OBE. Most had experimented with "altered states of consciousness" of one sort or another, such as hypnosis or meditation, but they were generally naive about out-of-body travel.