Inside Out: Exploring The Out of Body Experience

A conversation with spiritual explorer William Buhlman

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William Buhlman is a man on a mission.

“I had this wild belief back in the ‘90s that if everybody could have an out-of-body experience, the whole planet would change,” he says by phone from Faber, Virginia, where he has just completed a workshop on intensive out-of-body experience. “It would shift the consciousness of the planet, the ‘hundredth monkey’ thing.”

But as he taught and wrote about the phenomenon of out-of-body experiences, or OBEs, he met with resistance. “Then I realized that’s not going to happen. People are too entrenched in their beliefs. So you do what you can do. Get the information out and try to make it understandable, because some of this information is so beyond people that you have to spoon-feed it. I can’t walk up to people and say, ‘You’re not human. You’re a multidimensional being.’ They think you’re a nut job.”

When William Buhlman was a sophomore at the University of Maryland, a childhood buddy told him about having a spontaneous out-of-body experience, during which he woke from sleep and suddenly found himself floating above his bed, looking down at his dormant body below.

Excited by his friend’s account, Buhlman decided that if his friend could do it, he could do it.

It was the early 1970s and there were few books on the subject. However, he did find one book that suggested using ‘targets’ onto which to direct your attention as a way of urging the mind to separate from your physical body. The book also suggested that you had to try this for at least 30 days to have any chance of actually separating your consciousness — what some might call the mind, but as distinct from the brain — from the physical body.

“I chose some things I had made for my mother — a metal ashtray, a wooden doorstop, a watercolor of the ocean — really silly stuff, child art,” Buhlman says now. “I was dedicated, doing this every night, and as you do it you get better at visualizing. I would imagine myself walking around my mother’s home touching these objects. In retrospect, this is important because you end up focusing your consciousness away from your body just as your body