Friend, if you are only interested in practical experience, then you may confidently skip this section of the book. In it, I would like to briefly touch upon how all of this started with me.

First of all, I would like state that had any of this not happened to me, I would never have believed people who say that they fly out of their bodies. Knowing this about myself makes me very understanding of those who are skeptical about this topic.

I’d be hard pressed to say that I was especially interested in magic or mysticism as a child, but UFOs and extra-sensory perception had always been one of my favorite topics. All of this would have been banal had everything not cardinally changed on one autumn night. I was 15 years old. I simply went to bed and woke up in the middle of the night, but those were to be the last moments of life as I had known it thus far. Everything changed from those seconds on, and something came into my life that was to become the rudder of my entire future existence.

I didn’t immediately notice the strangeness of the situation. It seemed like a normal awakening, though I felt unusually alert for such a late hour and such an abrupt rousing. I first tried to turn over here, and then scratch myself there, but to no effect. I was unable to move a muscle, and lay as motionlessly as a rock or a log. The realization that I was in a state of paralysis evoked a wave of physically palpable terror, enveloping and devouring all of my being, thought, and desire.

I subsequently learned that this phenomenon is not all that uncommon and that it is referred by terms like sleep paralysis, stupor, and sleep catalepsy. According to statistical studies that I have performed, one person in about three or four has encountered this state at least once in their lifetime. Conduct a survey among your friends on this topic and you’ll easily confirm this fact. Perhaps you’ve experienced sleep paralysis yourself. This phenomenon is relatively well studied by science and is nothing out of the ordinary, though you wouldn’t say so when experiencing it. What happens is that during REM sleep, when we have dreams, the brain blocks signals going to the physical body. Otherwise, we might go into convulsions or throw punches in bed when dreaming that we are fighting off vicious dogs. But it sometimes happens that the conscious awareness wakes up before this mechanism is turned off – and then anything can happen to the poor slumberer.

But let’s return now to that night and my personal experience. Scared to death, I at first started to try to toss and turn anyway, but soon realized that I had no chance of getting my body to move. I couldn’t even move my litter finger. Only my eyes opened and closed. Fear caused by the strange experience only mounted, and then I finally put two and two together and thought that I had figured out what was happening. As funny as it seems now, I came to the conclusion that I was going to be abducted by aliens. What else was I to think, as I believed in UFOs, daydreamed about alien abduction all of the time, and read about it voraciously. And that’s nearly always how it starts.

As soon as I thought about being abducted by aliens, my suspicions were immediately confirmed – my body started to lift gently into the air above the bed. The fear was indescribable. I telepathically asked the invisible creatures to postpone my abduction, and they let me back down. I didn’t have a chance to catch a breath before an unknown force lifted me back up into the air while still in that paralyzed state. This time, the movement was far steadier and taking me somewhere. I at first found myself in the center of my room, and then was thrown towards the window. To my amazement, I didn’t break the glass, but went right through it. This was a complete surprise, as I had been sure that I was actually physically levitating. Pay close attention to that fact, my friend, to help you realize how realistic these experiences are.

Having flown outside my window, and seeing the brilliant stars in the sky, I had already come to terms with the inevitable, and thus decided to try to calm down. However, everything ended right there at that very moment – and I abruptly found myself once again in my own bed. You’ll soon learn the correlation between how relaxed you are to the length of your stay in the astral plane.

After telling people my story, many told me that it had all merely been a dream. As if I hadn’t had dreams before. I had never had any such dream before or since. I could call what happened a dream just as well as you could lie awake on your bed and then proclaim that you had until then been dreaming that you were lying in bed. This was reality.

That was the beginning. Of course, I remained convinced over the next two years that I had been abducted by a UFO, and that extraterrestrials had simply erased my memory of what had happened after I flew out the window. I wouldn’t have been lying if I said that. At first glance, that’s just how it was, if I was to believe my eyes. After all, we believe our eyes more than anything else, don’t we friend?

If you fall into the astral plane state spontaneously and are unable to control it, then whatever you subconsciously expect more than anything else, or are afraid of most of all, will happen to you. That’s why, when a person hasn’t notice that he’s fallen into the astral plane, most of the time he will simply wander about his home, going through his daily routine. This is because he thinks that he has simply woken up for the day. However, it’s a far different affair when he immediately understands that something strange is going on with him.

Let’s consider what would happen with a person who has often read that UFOs abduct people at night in similar situations, and constantly daydreamed about the phenomenon. This process would then start to occur as realistically in sensory terms as if it were actually happening, and at times even more realistically than it would in reality itself. And that’s how my UFO hobby played such a strange trick on me, one that changed my entire life. And what would have happened if I had thought that I was dying? And if I were devoutly religious?

There probably would have been a light at the end of a tunnel, or the Creator would have appeared to me. This often happens to people. How they then interpret the experience is another issue… A person who had this happen once, and who believed his own eyes would be hard-pressed to deny that everything occurred exactly as he remembered it. Unfortunately, the astral plane is not the place to approach occurrences in such a way, no matter how realistic they may seem.

Friend, I have more good news for you: if you’ve read all of the preceding pages, and now close this book and never open it again, there’s still about a 30% chance that you will nevertheless have an out-of-body experience over the course of the next month, or at maximum two months… It is not mandatory to complete the homework doled out in these types of books. They program you for such experiences just by reading them.

Dear friend, you may be somewhat surprised to see "In Closing" here instead of "Introduction". This is no misprint. The lines of this book will close out the life you have led thus far. You have in front of you a gap-closing, cutting-edge and conscious-awareness raising technology that will allow you to complete your transformation into the new era. Its modernized, secular approach to these ancient technologies brings conscious awareness outside of the physical world within everyone’s reach.

The difficultly of the task ahead consists of nothing more than performing specific actions that will show you the existence of another world, one more lucid and realistic than the one you experience while in your physical body. This task is made difficult by the fact that many would never have come to believe in this phenomenon, one that turns upside down our understanding of conscious awareness and our plane of existence, had they not first experienced it for themselves.

Thanks to the development of simple technical instruments, the practice of freeing one’s conscious awareness from the body opens up the widest-possible horizons and is the most promising personal development technology in existence. I say this for the simple reason there is nothing more useful and provocative out there. This is the long-awaited next step in human evolutionary development. The explosive propagation of this practice will also be the trigger for the 2012 transformation.

Experiencing this phenomenon can be compared only with being born into another body, into another life. And that’s exactly how it is. So if this world has dealt you a life situation beyond your control, you can be born again there and live only through willful acts and the power of your conscious awareness.

After just one visit there in the new world, you’ll understand how gray your former life was, how pale were its hues, and meager its possibilities. And you’ll feel how that low, invisible glass-ceiling you’ve been living under all your life disappears, that one you’ve always prayed didn’t exist and tried to wish away. But now it will truly be broken and you’ll feel an incredible lightness of being from knowing that your world has become thousands of times richer and wider, and that you’ve left the confines of that little cubbyhole that you used to call existence. It’s quite possible that you’ll be one of the first in your circle of friends to have made this transformation into the new era. However, the world will gradually catch up with you, and life will become far easier and more interesting for all.

Friend, I have good news for you: abstractions of the above kind will make no further appearance in this book. I’ll be giving you just a bit of introductory background information, and then nothing but specific techniques that you can take action with. It only remains for you to perform them several times in order to once and for all break the chains of that slave-like perception of the world – a captivity you are in but can’t recognize as such, as you have nothing to compare it to. Who has never tasted sweet, knows not what is bitter. Just give it several tries, and your conscious awareness will obtain true sensory experience in a world that is new and has been thus far concealed from you. And that’s just the beginning. Let’s get to it.

Michael Raduga

Founder of the School of Out-of-Body Travel

March 16, 2010

Not only are the older terms saddled with stereotypes in the public imagination, but one and the same older term can be understood by different people to mean different things. For example, if we are speaking about a phenomenon where you experience hyper-realistic sensations when traveling through an incredibly vivid world, then the term "astral projection" does not nearly always convey what we mean! In most cases, "astral projection" means simply an imagined journey made while in a relaxed state, something like visualization or mental imagery. How is just this one term to cover two things that don’t even begin to converge? One needs to studied hard and learnt how to be done. As for simple visualization or guided imagery, one just need lie down and take off…

This refers to when the subject behaves adequately in terms of communication and interaction, but nevertheless shows no sign that he ever knew the practitioner. Meanwhile, this person may be exactly the same as the practitioner is used to seeing him, with the same character traits and physique. He may know his name, but everything else, especially the life history he describes, may not have anything to do with reality.

It is safe to assume that this lack of a true-to-life memory in a deceased person will present no obstacle to communication for some practitioners. Lack of true-to-life recall in a deceased subject is truly not all that important when compared to the joy of finally seeing a loved one again. A practitioner reunited with a loved one would hardly think that their encounter were unsuccessful if the deceased acted like a stranger, and would hardly see it necessary to take corrective action, as this type of communication allows the practitioner to once again see those same eyes, hear that same voice, and so on.

Perhaps those encountered do not need to remember what happened to them or know where they are? Maybe it’s best to let them live in their reverie, seeing the whole situation in a completely different light? Does one really need to go through all of the ordeals that may arise after they realize their situation? That’s why, before implementing measures to achieve more true-to-life contact, one ought think long and hard about the wisdom of doing so.

One should interact as naturally as possible with a person lacking memory of the past, as this is just what the situation calls for. It should be kept in mind that brining up what happened in the past might evoke negative reactions in the subject, which is why sometimes it makes sense to introduce oneself to him and talk to him as if for the first time.

If you have already encountered the out-of-body phenomenon (the astral plane) in your life, then you already know how great it is and you hardly need any more motivation than the desire to do it again. But if you do not have any experience, then you, my friend, must first either try to understand the incredible essence of the phenomenon, or read in detail about its practical side.

The fact is that if you are going to do this just because it’s something new to try and then see what happens, it’s possible that you won’t get any results. You have to really want it. When this desire inside you becomes deep and intense, your results will be much, much better. Moreover, it will often happen spontaneously without any intention on your part – that’s how strong the power of desire and intention is!