Episode 20 - Navigating the out-of-body experience with Graham Nicholls

You can listen to this episode using the file below, or find it online at iTunes, Spotify or by following this link. https://anchor.fm/kim-mccaul/episodes/Episode-20---Navigating-the-out-of-body-experience-with-Graham-Nicholls-ecoj2t

My guest today is Graham Nicholls, who spoke with me from London, where he was under lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic like so many of us around the world at this time. This situation - of being cooped up at home - in some ways provides a great incentive to pursue out of body travel and the freedoms of experience that offers. And Graham is a perfect source of guidance for this experience. He is the Director of the Out of Body and Near Death Experience Society (UK), as well as a lecturer and advisory board member for The Rhine Research Center (US). He is a leading practitioner and researcher into out-of-body experiences.

He is also an installation artist exploring psychology and consciousness through specially designed technological environments. His installations have led to immersive technology designed to induce OBEs, and later his Infra-liminal sound recordings, which help bring about the vibrational state (a key stage of the OBE) in the majority of those who use them. You can purchase downloads of those recordings on his website.

Graham is the author of Avenues of the Human Spirit and Navigating the Out of Body Experience, which is the book we discuss today. One of the things I really appreciate about Graham’s approach is that it is very scientific in the true sense of the word. He seems confined neither by long-standing esoteric teachings nor by materialist science, but approaches the phenomenon of the OBE or astral projection with the mind of a true explorer - collecting data and looking for those aspects that can be replicated and find support in multiple sources across time. Graham also emphasises the importance of veridical OBEs. These are experiences where the experiences involves obtaining data that one could not realistically have obtained without being out of the body and he provides a number of compelling examples.
Among other things we discuss healthy and unhealthy skepticism, the kinds of fears that can stop us from consciously leaving our body, the benefits of doing so and how to go about generating the experiences. 
If you’ve been following this podcast you will know that we keep coming back to out-of-body experiences simply because they have been an important part of the spiritual experience of many of my guests as well as myself. They are, after all, the key experience that can give us deep inner certainty of our life beyond the physical and empower us to follow our spiritual growth free from dogmas or cultural restrictions. Graham really embodies this form of spirituality and offers a lot of insight into this crucial experience. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Find out more about Graham's work on his website
​www.grahamnicholls.com

H​ere is a link to the article about the differences between dreams and OBEs mentioned in the podcast
www.grahamnicholls.com/blog/17-reasons-lucid-dreams-and-obes-are-different