Seeing Myself by Susan Blackmore

Author:Susan Blackmore [Blackmore, Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472137388
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2017-07-06T04:00:00+00:00

Relax, concentrate, imagine

Almost every method begins by combining physical relaxation with mental alertness and producing a state similar to hovering between waking and sleeping. This encourages vivid imagery and reduces signals from the body, confusing the vestibular system and allowing the body schema to drift. Muldoon & Carrington (1929) advocates lying down but the danger then is that it’s so easy to fall asleep. At the other extreme, however, being uncomfortable interferes with concentration and brings your attention back to the body, which is what you are trying to avoid. This is why an alert but comfortable posture is best. You are then ready to relax, concentrate and imagine.

If you find it hard to relax, recordings with a soothing voice will guide you step by step, but you can easily do this on your own using progressive muscular relaxation. The idea is to go slowly around the body, alternately tensing and relaxing the muscles: tensing brings your attention to that part of the body; relaxing lets it go. You may find tension in muscles you didn’t even know you had. There is no right way to do this but you might begin at the feet, tense and relax each toe, flex and relax each toe, tense and relax the whole foot, flex and twist the foot and let go. Then carry this on to the ankles, calves, knees, thighs and so on, slowly tensing and relaxing every muscle you can find. Thinking about the whole process as you go along should keep you alert while your muscles relax.

When Palmer tried to test for ESP, he used a similar method, along with disorienting sounds and images, to induce OBEs in the lab. Placing target pictures in another room, he asked regular OBErs to travel there and report what they saw (Palmer & Vassar, 1974). Twenty-one (42%) of them achieved an OBE but their ESP scores were below the chance guessing level. A second experiment gave more promising results but they could not be repeated (Palmer & Lieberman, 1975, 1976) and similar disappointments followed when other researchers looked for ESP during OBEs (Alvarado, 1982, Osis, 1975, Rogo, 1978).

Concentration and imagery skills are also important and both can be improved with practice. Meditation entails both. Indeed learning to meditate is all about training attention (Austin, 2006) so this provides an ideal foundation. My own meditation practice has been mostly in Chan, the Chinese forerunner of Zen, in which the main method is the stark practice of ‘just sitting’, but I’ve also trained in Tibetan techniques which involve conjuring up the most wonderfully complex and colourful images of deities with multiple arms and elaborate surroundings. Many occult traditions use special imagery techniques too. These may be designed for performing magical operations, reading Tarot cards or developing clairvoyance, as well as for astral projection. Back in the 1970s, when I took classes in Wiccan magic, I learned to cast spells and joined a coven. We studied Conway’s Occult Primer (1974) and Brennan’s Astral Doorways (1971),

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