THE ASTRAL EXPRESS
The time meditation opened a
wormhole in my living room
The last thing I expected when I started meditating was that I would be shot out the top of my head like a cannon and into another world—but that's exactly what happened.
THE PREAMBLE
Part of me expected meditation to do nothing. How the act of sitting still could cause anything except a relaxed state of mind, I couldn't understand. And for the first 50 days, nothing unusual happened.
During that time I experienced only the "usual" effects: A dramatic increase in energy level, a major reduction in stress, a spontaneous, stoned-like euphoria, and a razor-sharp clarify of thought were all regular features of my sits.
Then things took a turn for the weird.
TERRA INCOGNITA
It began with the sensation of air blowing against my forehead. Suddenly, a tactile, flame-like substance leapt out, flickering and bobbing like a candle. It grew larger, eventually branching into other areas of my body.
"Those are your chakras, you dummy!" I can hear some of you saying, and that's great—I just didn't believe in those kinds of things.
Like Dr. Strange, I'd seen them in airport gift shops and the windows of psychics, but never emerging from my own skin, pulsing and flickering like liquid flames, 24 hours a day.
When I began to feel a telltale pressure at the base of my spine, it was almost comforting—at least it was a landmark I recognized. It pushed upward like a thermometer, sit after sit, reacting directly to my breathing, flaring up like a hot coal after every exhalation.
Fig.1 - A Tibetan Buddhist mural from the 16th century shows a meditator travelling to another world via explosion from the top of his head.
"I'd dismissed the "chakras" as completely made-up."
Weeks later, my entire body began to vibrate as though I'd stuck my finger into an electrical socket. It came in waves and was so intense that it would often wake me up at night. It all seemed to be building up to something, but I didn't know what.
THE ASTRAL EXPRESS
The morning of October 11th I awoke to the usual vibrations, but this time they ramped up so quickly that I could only hold on for dear life as a spinning sensation gripped me, and with explosive force, I felt my awareness shoot violently out of the top of my head.
When I came to, I was fully lucid in a cloudy, nondescript space. A circular, brightly-colored object appeared in front of me, opening radially. It was garishly hued and lined with symbols I didn't recognize. It seemed to be awaiting my input, but I hesitated, worried that if I hit the wrong button I might wind up in an ethereal paper shredder.
"This is not a very high yogic plane."
Amidst all this, it occurred to me that I didn't feel terribly enlightened. As if in response, a voice said:
"This is not a very high yogic plane."
This dry remark made me laugh, which caused me to involuntarily snap back into my body where I opened my eyes and found myself laying on the couch.
"What was this experience? And how could meditation
have caused it?"
If it all seems too absurd to be real, imagine how I feel. I'd like to explain it away as some kind of DMT flood, but that's like saying to an astronaut who's just been to the moon that their experience in outer space was a hallucination brought on by rocket engines. Was I really somewhere else? How could I be sure I wasn't?
FROM EXPERIENCE TO EXPERIMENT
The logical next step was to design an experiment to see if the physical world could be interacted with from the astral. Doing so would allow us to determine whether or not the two are connected. If they are, it would imply that the "astral" is not simply a dream-like hallucination. So that's what I did.
In Contact, Dr. Arroway is ridiculed for having an unexplainable experience.
If consciousness is separate from the brain, it implies that there must be an interface between the two, and based on what we know about the brain, it's possible that interface is electrical.
Thus the experiment is simple: Can a person in the "astral" / OBE state wiggle some electrons in a physical sensor, and pass a simple message in morse code?
This experiment is ongoing.
