Aim

Students learn how to analyze their unsuccessful attempts to enter out-of-body experience and search for the mistakes they made during those attempts so that they can develop in their practices without constantly consulting their instructor or the instructions they were given.

Key Concepts

Mandatory: When to perform analyses, the analysis procedure, joint analysis, keeping a journal, false reports, typical mistakes, typical mistakes with the indirect method, and tallying results.

Non-Mandatory: Typical mistakes with the direct method, typical mistakes when practicing becoming conscious while dreaming, typical mistakes with non-autonomous methods, typical mistakes during deepening, typical mistakes with maintaining, typical mistakes with primary skills, typical mistakes with translocation and finding objects, and typical mistakes when using practical applications.

Many instructors experience stage fright when speaking before an audience. This is especially true when they are first starting out. Few are able to make it through their first lesson without stammering, trembling, sweating profusely, breathing heavily, or forgetting material. However, there are simple tricks to alleviate such tension. The easiest way is to go up to people some time before the start of the lesson and answer the students’ questions or ask your own (e.g. "Who has already had an experience? Ma’am, have you ever had an out-of-body experience or lucid dream?"). What’s interesting is that if you are the first person in the room, the members of the audience who trickle in after you will be more nervous than you are.

Other tricks are purely psychological. For example, it helps to decrease the importance of the event. Stage fright is basically due to focusing on the importance of the event and importance of being up to it. Acknowledge your fears and calmly carry on. Also simply be aware that stage fright is a temporary phenomenon. It will only be with you for the first few minutes, and then you will become so engaged in the process that you won’t notice anything else around you. Simply being aware that stage fright works in this way will substantially reduce it. You take it as a given and bravely march on to meet it.

Your "body language" can even come to the rescue. Many masters of the art of rhetoric recommend assuming as open a pose as possible, as this creates a feedback loop that puts you in a more receptive state-of-mind.

Find enjoyment in working with people. They came to see you. They paid money for the opportunity. They want to spend their free time with you. Who’s in charge here? Who’s got control of the situation in his hands? All of the good cards start out in your hand – don’t squander them. Go into the room with that in mind, and mold your protégés into real practitioners, all the while handling the event like you would a car on the road.

Out-of-body travel is possibly the most unusual and interesting practice there is in and of itself. Yet no matter how perfectly-honed the techniques are, people will still perform them reluctantly and without concentrating. It’s a problem of engaging those proverbial instincts. Supposedly people know that this is what they need. Supposedly they realize that it’s beneficial and interesting. But you still need to engage deeper human drives to get someone to strive with all his being to perform the techniques no matter what. Although this of course doesn’t apply to all students, it does for most of them.

That’s why every training session should start with discussing how people will be able to put to use what they are going to learn. You don’t have to go into detail straight away. You need to give them at least some approximate benchmarks. Meanwhile, there’s no point in turning your nose up at more primitive things. Mentioning the possibility of finding out how to make a million dollars does not brighten people’s faces as much as hinting at how genuine sexual experiences are in out-of-body experience. The ability to meet any celebrity in out-of-body experience will never take the place of the ability to see deceased relatives there.

Budding practitioners should be clear on why they are going into out-of-body experience. Moreover, they should have a clear idea of what they will do as soon as they get there. If it happens to be something interesting, your instructions will be adhered to much more closely. This is why they need to have a plan of action before you teach them the easiest phase entrance method.

Considering the time required to get together a group and the difficulties typically encountered in finding a suitable conference room on short notice, you should start looking for a place 3 to 4 weeks before the start of your event and reserve it.

For the simplest and most effective format – the three-day seminar on out-of-body travel – you’ll need to reserve a place for 7pm to 10pm on Friday and 2pm to 6pm the following Saturday and Sunday. The room for the first seminar should seat from 15 to 20 people. Ideally, the place should come with a flip-chart or whiteboard and be quiet. The closer the venue is to the city center, the higher the seminar turnout will be and the easier it will be for people to get there.

When looking for such a place you should pay special attention to ads for conference rooms, training-session rooms, and auditoriums. Such offers are easy to find online and in the classified section of newspapers. It’s worth paying attention to various personal development centers (e.g. yoga, bioenergetics, motivational speaking, or self-actualization, etc.), which will have not only premises with the right atmosphere, but also the right kind of audience. Once you are in touch with the real-estate agent or landlord, you’ll want to find out the price of the venue, the dates it is available, how many people it will fit, and the exact location, as well as agree upon a time to see the place yourself. If you’re satisfied that the place is suitable after having seen it, then you’ll need to reserve it by prepaying in part or in full, or making arrangements to pay after the event is over.

Due to the breadth and multifacetedness of the topic, quite a number of issues may arise in regards to practical applications of out-of-body experience. Even when given the opportunity to travel wherever they want, practitioners will be stubbornly unable to fully comprehend or act on this freedom. Their minds will still be filled with numerous blocks and hang-ups. It’s as if they are afraid to believe that they will indeed be able to appear wherever they want, even if only in terms of what their senses perceive. This ability to go anywhere applies not only to places in the real world, but also to those of any other world, including even those of fairy tales and Hollywood films. The role of the instructor consists in eliminating all the blocks and hang-ups that keep his students from launching into a universe of incredible opportunity and adventure.

On that note, there may arise the problem of a practitioner encountering his deceased friends and family in the way that he would least like to see them. To avoid this, you should explain that the practitioner should focus on the best years of his loved ones’ lives when employing object-finding techniques to see them. So as not to subconsciously program your students, it’s best to leave out the fact that it’s possible to see a decomposing body.

When obtaining information, there may arise the hard-to-overcome problem of the inner disposition of people who want to find out that things are a certain way, are afraid to find out something, or are simply incredulous. All of these internal conflicts will find reflection in the quality of the information obtained. The instructor’s task here is to explain that such matters are to be taken up in as detached a way as possible, as if the results didn’t matter.

When trying to influence their physiologies, students often forget that it doesn’t really make any sense to merely pop pills in out-of-body experience. What’s extremely important here is to reproduce the sensations that the pill is to induce. Inducing sensations and symptoms is another way of influencing the physiology in out-of-body experience. Once students realize this, many will independently come to the conclusion that any “treatment” performed in out-of-body experience is nothing more than a ritual that helps one to have greater faith in one’s own personal powers. When all is said and done, you can forgo these rituals and directly act upon the required processes in the body.

Of course, differing views on the true nature of the practical applications of the phenomenon will be at the root of any heated discussions or issues that arise. At times it can be quite difficult for the instructor to convey what the practice of out-of-body experience really is to students who already have their own firm beliefs regarding the phenomenon, beliefs which are often at odds with those of the instructor. For example, when such a person is told that it is possible to experience stepping foot on Mars with all five of his senses, what he will hear is that it’s possible to visit Mars using some “etheric” or “astral” body via out-of-body experience. The same applies to meeting people, obtaining information, and similar issues. However, the task here is not to change a person’s philosophical beliefs or somehow influence them. The instructor is tasked with having all kinds of discussions regarding the nature of the phenomenon. This is no easy job considering the constant questions and follow-up queries of all sorts that will come from students with the most diverse points of view. As soon as the instructor officially espouses one viewpoint or another, he will immediately lose face among the ranks of people with opposite views, and they may be in the majority. This will eventually affect the quality of instruction and the overall mood of the group.