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When I was thirteen years old I belonged to an evening class or club, it was a photography club but held along with other evening classes in a nearby school, nearby to where I lived at the time. There was a time when four or five of us were standing in a group, as a circle, facing inwards toward each other, probably jointly attending to a film developing cannister, when I found myself becoming aware that I was up high above myself looking down on the group and wondering who I was, where I was, when I was and as I did this and took in this new and startling perspective I gradually lowered back down into my own body again.
Most people who relate a personal OBE will have a far more interesting one to tell about than mine. That was it, short and unremarkable. Well, unremarkable except for the simple fact that such a thing is not supposed to be possible.
So as I regained my normal position, in my body, I didn't say anything to anyone about it and on the way home I thought that it would not be a good idea to speak about it to anyone. I suspected that I might be sent to see a psychiatrist and pronounced mentally ill so silence was the better option. Next thing was that I forgot all about it.
In the years after I think I only ever discussed that subject on one occasion and with one person, a friend of my own age and he related a story his aunt had told him about a patient in a dentist's chair, the aunt I think was that patient, who suddenly found herself at the ceiling in the corner of the room. That would have been around a year after my own experience but I don't think I had remembered it to be able to discuss it, I am not sure.
Regardless of whether I did mention it or not I certainly haven't since. And, in fact, I had forgotten, completely, all about it.
Then, some seven years later, I read "You Forever" by Dr Tuesday Lobsang Rampa and the memory of it, that brief OBE, came back to me, back to my conscious awareness, suddenly!
Never before in all my conversations with people or listening to the radio or watching television had anyone explained anything close to like it. And now here I suddenly had proof of what I was reading - my very own long forgotten OBE experience!
I believe that is always how it is. We push a personal experience out of our own conscious awareness when it doesn't fit in with our idea of reality. We think that we would welcome with open arms any experience that brings us some great realization, but the opposite is what happens despite how much talking we do to the contrary. If it doesn't fit and it's a bit unnerving, then we will reject it and forget it, we will repress it and it will be concealed, often for life, from our conscious awareness. It could even be the top item in our stated priorties, to discover the truth about it but conscious stated intention is nothing compared to unconscious driven concealment. It is what we do. It's a fear thing. We think we are brave and want to really know about such things but that is very rarely the case and each of us, when it comes down to it, will do the very same thing as I did when I was thirteen, simply push it to the back burner and then surrepticiously give it an extra little shove so that it disappears forever behind the stove along with all the other best forgotten and never seen again grime, dead insects and the like that accrue in such normally unseen hideaway places right under our noses.
If Lobsang Rampa's books had only ever made me recall that experience and make me think about what it really means then that would have been better than a treasure chest full of priceless jewels.
Perhaps you think that is an exaggeration but think about it. I know beyond all shadow of doubt that not only can we leave our bodies and still exist but that is exactly how it is for each of us. That is our nature, our reality, each of us is a spirit that happens, at the moment (albeit that moment might last for maybe 100 years), to inhabit a body, and the body is much more of a secondary issue once you grasp this extremely simple idea and you grasp it just like I did when you have the experience and you have some wonderful person like Lobsang Rampa who explains it and explains it without having to join some special club, gang or religion or pay into some devious fund, or pay homage to some dubious leader.
But TLR went beyond explaining that one amazing fact of life and explained much more too.
The problem is not that he didn't provide a treasure chest of priceless jewels, he did, but that people generally do not know how to value information so they feed into a system that attracts a kind of predatory feeding whereby pseudo spiritual people lay claim to being experts but for the most part they are simply providing fodder for that feed-need and have particular skills in people and mind manipulation and that's about the sum total of it, so when a truly great person tells us important things in a simple and down to earth way, what do we all do, more or less, well we reject them, that's what. That is the problem really, not that he was the fraudster that he has been accused of being but that he delivered priceless information that we, in the West, are more or less oblivious to knowing about, in an unpretentious way.
We, in the West, like sham and pretence, we don't say so and we don't admit it but we encourage it and we readily fall prey to it so in the end we lose all sense of how to evaluate information and instead of looking at it objectively and thoughtfully we do two very stupid things. The first is we go into pack mode. What does the pack say about this? And adopt that. Nice and sheep like. The second is that we say if it's strange then it's probably not true. To cap that second one in a very british way, my familiar cultural background, we add a nauseous "Truth is stranger than fiction" to our set of cliches to make it seem as if we are wise. It is actually rare for anyone to pay attention, openly or with friends, to strange information in more than a dismissive way.
This is why or partly whyTLR had a hard time despite him providing us with astonishing information. He did it without the kind of western flourish that lawyers, doctors and other assorted professionals do. It's a great shame that such rare people don't get treated better, that someone in our society doesn't detect them and raise their societal status, not so they are worshipped like Jesus but so that they can take a proper place in a modern society. That is one thing a modern society should be capable of: being ever ready to elevate a person's status in that society when our leaders and others in positions of responsibility get to hear about them.
TLR could have been a public figure if we had such a society. But that kind of society doen't yet exist. Moreover, the people still want to robot-like follow and pay respect to poisonous systems within their own society, christianity being the worst one but there are others too all fighting for our attention, allegiance, loyalty, respect and money.
Getting back to the personal and leaving the nature of the whole wide world or at least the UK part of it and I guess the other western parts of it too, for me TLR was an eye opener. I make these comments and observations now nearly forty years after first reading "You Forever".
If you want to gain an understanding of life and what it is really all about then I recommend that you read some of TLR's books. Not in one rapid flourish. They need time to be absorbed. You could read one a week easily and that would be the stupidest thing you could do. Take a lot of time. Pause a lot. Treat each part as true at least while you are reading it - later if it is too much, fine, reject it. But don't bother to read any of it if you are already closed to what he is saying because that way you will gain nothing, probably.
An OBE reveals that we are not bodies, as we are falsely led to believe even by the best of religious ideas, that may or may not have a spirit, whichever you prefer, but that we are spirits. Each of us is a spirit that happens to possess a body for the time-being. Some say that all spirits are equal and in some respects I'm sure that's true, but in other respects you have wise spirits, generous, really spiritual spirits and then you have the religious kind and other closed, narrow, mean spirited spirits, especially the religious, especially the christian kind, the mentally and emotionally selfish, the spiritually ignorant and pig-headed, that just want to take over the whole world and dominate everyone's private thoughts and feelings but without the honesty sufficient to make it clear so we can all put a stop to them finally. These then are much less spiritually evolved and are spiritually retarded to a degree of self induced spiritual blindness that I prefer to call them the R. souls.
You too can have your own OBE just like I did and instead of relegating it to the back of your mind you can hold on to it and these days I think you could even discuss it, not with any kind of religious person though, that would be foolish and bring you nothing but grief so don't make that mistake. And reading, say, "You Forever" can trigger that memory if you, like me, simply need to recall a hidden memory. And if that happens to you like it did to me then you too won't need any convincing that OBEs are real and then you can grasp that, joking aside, we really are spirits and we temporarily inhabit a body. This realization saves you reading mountains of useless and confusing books and saves you becoming addicted to some pretend religion or other. In fact and you can quote me on this because I think it may just be original to me: "When spiritual awareness is present then theology becomes redundant" and theology includes religion for the vast bulk of it. When you become aware that you are not just a spirit, a somewhat later realization, then you begin to grasp what it means to be responsible in spiritual terms. These are the most wonderful things that anyone can ever realize because it is both liberating and revelatory as well as making it clearer what our purpose in life is and what our responsibility is. If I could pass on to you some real treasure that is what it would be, that knowledge. TLR can bring you that just as he brought it to me. I only knew him from his books but that is more than enough which means that you too can get to know a lot of very important things about life that apply to each one of us by reading his books too.
A final point I'd like to make to you is that I fully believe that had I not read any of Lobsang Rampa's books then I would more than likely, now, more than 45 years since that brief OBE, be still in the dark about the reality both of OBEs and the Greater Meaning that they convey.
By Paul E. Coughlin
SaneThinking.com
24th April 2007
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