I am often asked the same question over and over again: seeing as the astral plane world is so wonderful and offers such fantastic possibilities, does the desire ever occur to remain there, or just neglect real life? I always answer in the same way: your practice itself will not be so wonderful if there are problems in your life – each of these two worlds enriches the other; when things are going well both here and there, the effect is increased many times over. And that’s truly the case. Whether you like it or not, you will still have to deal with real life. You spend a large part of your life there; it’s not worth messing up.

Few people know that such words are not mere philosophizing. They’re experience speaking. Indeed, at one time, while still a youth who had just encountered the phenomenon of the astral plane for the first time, I got carried away. My day-to-day life fell apart in a real way, in every possible aspect. And the more it fell apart, the less I wanted to return there. Compounding problems unbalanced my life and this had a strong effect on my general well-being. At one critical moment not even the astral plane could redeem me, and so I transformed my life. I began to pay attention to the physical world, and to my welfare in it, by applying the power of the astral plane itself to that end… Gradually, I became successful, both here and there. And these two worlds genuinely started to enrich each other, making me doubly – no, thrice happier.

Having gone on and lived through all this myself, I would now first of all entreat you, my friend, to approach this phenomenon in the same way. Do so and happiness is yours. You must be a master at out-of-body, you must be beautiful, you must be healthy and agile in your physical body, you must be successful in your own endeavors. Happiness is in your hands. And it is multifaceted. There is no sense in polishing only one facet of this diamond. And do not forget that the astral plane can help you in all of this. Take a brief look at the practical side of the phenomenon and you’ll understand this immediately.

Case Studies

August 2008

I woke up at about 8:00 am and took a cold shower, but was still unable to get into work mode. I decided to go back to sleep. Given that this would be a good time make attempts to enter the astral plane, I decided to try make a go of it. However, I wasn’t in the mood to try anything but phantom wiggling. Not really expecting anything to come of it, I half-heartedly and monotonously tried to "rock the boat" with one hand. That hand, in turn, quickly yielded and started moving, though initially with little amplitude. Already having practically fallen asleep, I noticed that the amplitude had increased dramatically and my hand began to literally slip out of my body. I decided to monitor the situation more closely, and was able to move my forearm further and further to each side. At some point, I was able to trace a full circle with it. It then occurred to me that there had been a marked change in my sense of bodily perception. Something clearly started to occur. I tried to roll out. That did not work, but vibrations arose upon attempting it. This served as a signal to try more actively to roll out. I tried again – and it worked. Granted, there was some difficulty and sluggishness involved, but it worked.

I rolled out off the bed, but the state was unstable: there were no distinct sensations, and I was drawn back into my body. I began erratically palpating everything. The pull on my body gradually disappeared, and after 5 to 10 seconds my sight started to return. I used it to deepen by peering. That proved to be the decisive factor. the astral plane became hyper-real.

I remembered right then and there what needed to be tried in this astral travel, and I began from the most important item – experimenting with translocation. I had wanted to check once again how difficult it was to translocate in space using the door technique. First, I closed the door. I focused my attention on there being an auditorium behind it in which I was to give a lecture. I opened the door, walked into the auditorium, and closed the door once again behind me. I then focused my attention on the other side of the door being the weight-room of the gym that I go to. I opened the door, and looked in to the weight-room. Then, I shut the door and opened it again – the weight-room was still there. I went into it and closed the door behind me. I then focused on deep outer-space being behind the door. I opened the door, which led into the hallway that would have been there if I were really in the weight-room. I closed the door and concentrated even harder on outer-space being behind it. I started to open the door, but something seemed to be holding it back from the other side. I had to use force to get the door to budge. After that, it opened all the way easily. At that point, I noticed that the astral plane space began to blur. However, I managed to concentrate and restore its realism by straining the brain. Behind the door was deep outer-space.

I stood at the entrance to the weight room, and literally a step in front of me was endless expanse without beginning or end. I could breathe freely. An icy draft came in through the door. Experiments have shown that unless one is simply going from one room into another, translocating using doors is one of the more difficult methods. Such difficulty is probably only due to the internal psychological blocks that people have. While standing and analyzing what was happening, I was sucked into a stencil. The only thing that I could do at that very moment was grab at the door handle, which I did almost automatically.

I then felt myself lying in my body. However, my hand was clearly still grasping the door handle. I began moving the phantom hand on every plane, and soon felt that I would be able to separate. I easily rolled out and found myself in my room.

I quickly brought the state to a level of hyperrealism through peering interspersed with palpation. Realizing that I had already achieved my primary objectives, I gave in to a desire to meet with a girl whom I had not seen for a while, but still had feelings for. I went to the bathroom door, and opened it without a shred of doubt that she would be on the other side. And that’s just how it happened. I opened the door and saw behind her the interior of my old apartment where she used to visit me. I had of course hoped to have seen her naked in the bathtub, but this scenario was not bad at all.

She was sitting on the couch and looking out the window. I felt that she understood that I was close-by. I went up and sat down on the floor next to her. I cuddled up to and started being affectionate with her. Thanks to the hyper-realism of the experience, the sensations were incredibly intense and amazing. Simply stroking her skirt and jacket was a stunning experience, as it once was in reality. It was extremely pleasant to feel her soft and warm body under her clothes, pantyhose, and knee-high stockings.

Once I brought my hand to her head and began taking her hair away from her face, she turned toward me and smiled. After seeing the gaze of those same very eyes and that same smile, there was nothing I could do in response but smile. I continued to move my hands over her face, head, and body in order to maintain the astral plane. Her eyes were sad, her smile seemed to be amid tears. But all the while, her expression was more open and sincere than it had ever been in reality.

She also started to smooth my face and hands. She then came to ask me how I was doing and what I had been up to. Understanding that such communication was only a formality of secondary importance in the astral plane, I answered only in monosyllables, all the while enjoying the fact that I was next to her, could feel her touch, see her eyes, and hear her painfully familiar voice. Surprisingly, I was not overwhelmed by the unbridled sexual instincts that usually arise when contacting the opposite sex in astral travel.

After spending some more time with her, I decided that it was time to bring the meeting to a close, as I could see her another time. Before me still remained the task of entering and exiting my body multiple times. Practicing that skill had been a part of my preliminary plan of action.

I intentionally returned to my body and immediately began trying to exit it. I was easily able to roll out. I returned back to my body, and then rolled out of it again. However, my connection to reality greatly increased after that last return, and it took a fair amount of effort to literally fly out of my body. I would also have to employ the technique of forced falling asleep.

Having found myself floating once again in the center of the room, I clearly understood that there was no point in returning back again to the body. Without even bothering to strengthen the astral plane through deepening, I nevertheless intentionally rushed back to my body in order to discover the limit of my own capabilities, and further refine my skill at exiting the body. Caught in a stencil, I was at first barely able to move, but then I was seized by a wave of awakening. I switched to forced falling asleep, and then on to observing images when forced sleep did not work. No images appeared. I again began to try to divide, but then arose the feeling of having fully awakened.

I started trying to move my hands down along my body and back. Phantom movement arose after several seconds, and my consciousness immediately submerged deeply, sinking away from the outside world. I focused even more on movement, and it occurred even further. I started to try to get up. I was able to, but very sluggishly. My body seemed to be several times heavier than it really was. Any relaxation on my part immediately nailed me back to the stencil. At some point I managed to completely separate, and found myself next to the bed. I tried chaotically to use all available deepening techniques, but nothing helped, and I was returned to my body. I was done for that session.

Technically speaking, besides fear, there are no hard-to-surmount obstacles to meeting with the deceased in the astral plane. Meanwhile, they exhibit several basic types of behavior, each of which will be treated separately. Whatever theory on the nature of the astral plane is closest to you, whatever the true qualities of the astral plane, there are nonetheless several characteristic types of behavior exhibited by deceased subjects in the astral plane.

All strangeness of behavior and character in persons encountered nearly almost always occurs within the first few seconds of communicating with them, although not rare are situations where abrupt changes begin to occur only after some time.

These changes take place in the psychology of the subject, and in the nature of communication with him. Such breakdowns most often occur in cases when one is still unable to control the astral plane well, and still commits a variety of errors. Once one has solid practical experience under one’s belt, and has acquired the ability to confidently use the techniques for controlling the astral plane, such situations become the exception rather than the rule.

Thus, the possible types of behavior to be encountered are:

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…