RISING POWER

I’ve never taken a big interest in the paranormal.  Yes, there are people who claim to have seen ghosts or UFOs or experienced any number of odd things.  Perhaps it can be explained, perhaps not, but no one can say what it’s supposed to mean to me.  I still take this view, even after having my own paranormal experience. 

In the first days of my year at the University of Warwick in England, I went to sleep one night in my glorified broom closet of a room.  Only I didn’t fall asleep.  Lying there with my eyes closed but completely awake I went into a odd state of consciousness.  I felt myself rising out of my body.  I floated above myself and looked down on my motionless body lying in bed in the dark.  I decided to see if I could leave my room and take a look around.  I floated out into the hall outside my room and looked down it in the light.  It was then that the thought occurred to me that I might not be able to get back into my body.  In a panic, I rushed back into my room and into myself, and then opened my eyes with a start.  It was immediately apparent that I had just had an out of body experience – something that I had heard of but always considered a delusion. 

The year before I had a few friends that would amuse themselves by going around to psychic fairs and attempting to debunk the various tarot card readers, irridologists, palm readers and other types who peadled their abilities at these events and who they considered quacks.  I was generally in agreement with them that the various forms of psychic phenomenon were a joke, but then I never took it all as seriously as they did and figured that people should be allowed to have their fun.  I don’t think any of us even attempted to discredit out of body experiences because they were so easy to dismiss as fantasies.  Who could even attempt to prove they’re real, and how?   

But this had been no fantasy.  I knew what I had experienced and it wasn’t something that I had tried to make happen and it wasn’t a dream.  It had been a very real experience. 

The next day I wondered if it might happen again.  I decided that if it did I could take a look around and have fun snooping on everyone in secret. 

That night I felt myself rising out of my body.  But looking down at myself from above the fear that I wouldn’t be able to get back into my body came on faster and even stronger than before.  I almost immediately scurried back into myself.  I decided that I simply didn’t have the stomach to continue experimenting with this strange phenomenon, and that would be the end of that.  It would remain a good story to tell and nothing more.  It was not for me to determine if my experience was any kind of proof of the existence of a soul or to address any other questions that may have been raised.  Who knows what it had meant.   

Then, a couple of years later, after I had started working, I saw an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal about out of body experiences.  There was a company that trained people in how to have these experiences for the purpose of increasing one’s self control and ability to concentrate.  It was a self-improvement sort of thing, and some respectable large corporations were sending their top  people there for the training.  The fear of not being able to regain entry into one’s own body was described as the most common barrier to the experience.  One statement in particular piqued my interest.  Someone claimed that once you developed the ability you could use it for your own purposes and, among other things, even acquire the ability to travel through time.  The fact that this article was located in the famed middle column, reserved for semi-serious or outright humorous material, made no difference to me.

I knew what I had experienced, and I knew that it had been real and not a joke.  It was then that the implications of what I had seen became clear.  I was being prepared for a career in the stock market, in which the ability to anticipate the future is a highly prized asset.  Of course I was being taught that since no one really has this ability we must apply tried and true principles of investing such as diversification and management of risk and not fall into the trap of trying to guess the direction of the market.  But what if I could divine the future?  All the problems I was facing would be solved in a single stroke.  The problem wouldn’t be how to attract clients but would become how to conceal my stock picking ability and prevent anyone from finding out how I did it and considering me a lunatic.  Hell, I wouldn’t even need a career because if I could travel only one day into the future, look at a newspaper for a minute and then go back to today I could buy options on tomorrow’s biggest movers and become a millionaire in a matter of a couple of weeks.

Of course the very thought was laughably absurd, and I knew it.  Still I couldn’t get it out of my head.  Refusing to throw the paper away I finally went down to the library and looked up the address of the company that offered the training (this was before the Internet) and sent them the money for their audio tape course. 

Feeling slightly ridiculous, I began listening to the tapes at night, as soon as I came home from work.  It was a long course.  The first few tapes were an extensive introduction outlining how to approach things, what could be expected, and explaining what was called “hemisync”.  This is a hypnotic kind of state of mind in which one becomes very open to suggestion.  The tapes contained a sound that was supposed to put you into hemisync and was one reason why it was important not to listen to the tapes while driving. 

After many nights of listening, I finally got to the part where I was to rise out of my body.  The tapes put me into the same state of mind that I had had those nights in England.  The course was designed to gradually teach you how to control the experience and overcome the fear.  Accordingly the first time was meant to be very limited.  But I had the experience again. 

It was actually working, and this created a dilemma.  I could go on and find out if this extremely far-fetched plan of mine could somehow be carried out.  This would take a significant amount of time, as I was still near the beginning of the course.  I decided that I was too busy to pursue such foolishness, and that perhaps in the future when I had more time on my hands I would come back to it.  But I also began to worry about what might happen if it turned out that I was somehow able to pull off this scheme.  Wouldn’t I be violating the natural order of things for my own benefit?  Wouldn’t there be some sort of punishment or at least consequence in store for doing this?  Some sort of nemesis to reward my hubris that would hurt or even destroy me? 

The tapes have sat in my closet and collected dust ever since then. 

This is a story that I was reluctant to tell for years.  Even now there are very few who I’ve told.  I’m not sure if it makes me sound like an idiot for actually pursuing such a scheme or if I come across as a coward for dropping it once it began to look like there might be a chance of it succeeding.  In either case, the experience didn’t make me into any sort of believer in psychic phenomena as a whole.  There are things that we don’t understand, but I can’t quite draw any exact conclusions about them.  But I suppose if I found a way to read tomorrow’s newspaper today it would make me believe in something.  Perhaps one day a lust for money will bring me to try it again.  How insane is this?