My journey began the day I was born, however, let’s fast forward to a time more relevant to the subject matter – July 2012… After 5 years of the same routine, I felt numb, I felt like I didn’t know who I truly was. I longed to find a deeper meaning in life than my circumstances had shown me. In the back of my mind, I knew that life is an adventure – I yearned to venture into the unknown, to explore, to dream and discover my life’s purpose. I had a high paying corporate job as an IT Manager for an International organisation in the heart of London. However, being part of the 9-5 rat race began to make me feel empty and robotic. I would rush to work each morning to complete tasks that had no true value, then rushing home to eat soulless meals and before the last morsel had left my tongue stomach bound – it was already time for bed. The highlight of my week was Saturday when I would spend a few short hours with my daughter.
I began to dread going into the office, despite the fact that my daily tasks required little more than 5% effort on my part on a normal day and 10% effort during busier periods. My girlfriend at the time thought I was insane when I told her I was planning to hand my notice in exchange for inconsistent freelancing.
On the last day of my employment; my colleagues who had become my friends threw me a leaving party, it was Friday evening so we went to a nearby cocktail bar to dance and drink the night away. Little did I realise that my destiny was going to start unfolding from there on…
I got friendly with the DJ as I kept pestering her to play all my favourite songs and she was kind enough to oblige me. During the course of the night she asked me if I was on Facebook with the premise that she would invite me to her next gig. Months later I received an invitation to an event via Facebook by someone called Caz… “Ahhh!” I remembered; it was the DJ from the cocktail bar! She must be DJing at an event I thought.
The event had nothing to do with DJing or cocktail bars – it was an event held by the International Association of Consciousness (IAC) and it was about out of body experiences! I was thoroughly intrigued. Anything supernatural or out of the ordinary always fascinated me, although I had never known where to go to find accurate information on these topics, not to mention I had been a victim of my own desires in the past and always got distracted by normal everyday life.
I sent the details to my girlfriend at the time, asking if she wanted to go along with me. I had always been a bit too open minded and I knew I would likely believe anything they told me. Whereas she was a far less trusting, and I felt it would be a good idea to have a more discerning perspective at hand.
We went to the IAC offices in London on the day of the event. It was held in a small room that barely contained 15 chairs. We immediately went to sit at the back of the room. We seemed to be in a room full of much older hippies (with the exception of Caz and the host). The gentleman who was hosting the event began talking about the energy body, chakras and a bunch of other similar topics which I had only ever heard about in cartoons. He and the other attendees were so serious about the topics that my girlfriend and I shared a few giggles through the long one-sided discussion.
The host got everyone in the room to do a series of exercises that involved visualising energy moving up and down our bodies, then into our third eye and looping this energy back into the crown chakra. We did these exercises in 3 phases;
The first was to make the energy move from feet to head – gradually increasing the speed of it. It was relaxing at slower speeds and made my body tingle all over as I increased the speed of the vibration.
The second was to visualise the energy moving up to our third eye, coming out of our third eye and going up and into the crown chakra, then back out through the third eye – creating a loop as we breathed gently. This exercise felt very relaxing and not much else at the time.
The third phase of the exercise was for us to shoot energy out of our third eye and into the third eye of the host for several minutes, then he did the same to us. I felt a pulsing sensation at my brow and became pleasantly light headed.
We did these energy exercises for roughly an hour, at which point he explained in his South American accent “All your third eyes should be moderately active and the energy of the room has built up into a good concentration. For this next phase I want you guys to sit relaxed and just focus your attention to the top of my forehead; keeping your eyes open just enough to see what’s going on. You may also pay attention to your peripheral vision.”
The host who had a receding hairline then sat before us and closed his eyes, and he appeared to be concentrating fiercely. I felt very relaxed; after a few minutes a subtle purple haze encompassed my vision, and the host appeared to have an angelic golden glow radiating around his body. Suddenly from the corner of my left eye, I saw a tall hooded figure clothed in black and standing over an elderly lady who was sitting in the front row. This figure was as tall as the ceiling – which was an impressive 8-9 feet in height and I instinctively knew it was a spirit. Startled by the sudden appearance I turned my head to try and see it clearly, the tall dark figure and the purple haze immediately vanished. Everything had gone back to normal. I realised that being startled had taken me out of the relaxed zone I was in. So, I calmed myself and resumed the exercise; after a few moments the purple haze returned and so did the tall cloaked figure. This time I remained calm and turned my head to look at it slowly – again it vanished. I could only see it from the corner of my eyes, so i decided to ignore it and fix my gaze upon our balding host.
Without warning, the most unbelievable thing happened right before my eyes… the face of the host began to slowly morph and take on the appearance of different people! As I watched and tried to remain calm – the host had taken on the face of a woman with long flowing hair. He then morphed into an old man with grey hair, a young boy and even a black man with a high top (the host is Caucasian). It was only his head that changed, and the changes were subtle. The rest of his body and clothes remained the same throughout. I noticed that whenever I would get over excited or if I looked closely – the magic would instantly vanish. I would only be able to perceive it whilst completely relaxed.
Finally, towards the end, the host lost his head… that is to say – his head completely vanished and I could clearly see the wall behind his heat. I was stunned beyond belief; I had never experienced anything like this in my life! The fire inside of me erupted with curiosity, I had to discover the truth behind what I had seen. I hungered to discover the how, and more importantly – what else is possible! All my former limiting beliefs around the nature of reality began to melt away during that fateful evening.
Everyone in the room had the opportunity to share what they had experienced. Many of them had seen far more than I had; they had seen the spirits who they described in details that matched the faces I had seen the host morph into. Others described seeing spirits enter the room and surround the host and one by one these spirits took turns getting into and out of his body. My girlfriend had also seen his face change slightly and his head vanish. I could tell that she was shaken up by the experience, where I was more excited. The other people attending the event were barely phased by what had happened; as if this was an everyday thing for them.
The host explained that by raising the vibration and energy of the room it encouraged nearby disembodied spirits to come see what was going on. He said he had created a barrier only allowing friendly good-natured spirits to enter the space. He then telepathically communicated with them and invited each of them to inhabit his head space one at a time – he explained it was like possession except that they had no power over him, it just made it easier to communicate with them on an emotional level while they were guests in his head space. He explained that it is impossible to be totally possessed by a spirt as is often depicted in the movies – “your soul is a unique key that fits perfectly into your body”. He went on to say that we were able to see these spirits to a greater degree due to the energy exercises we had done prior. We were not seeing them with our physical eyes, rather with the third eye. He said the first exercise could be used for a variety of things such as balancing the chakras, cleansing the aura, psychic chord cutting and out of body travel which he dubbed projection.
In the excitement of what I had experienced, I didn’t notice the host hadn’t told us how to go out of body, until I had left the event. I spoke to a few trusted friends about what I had experienced and they all surmised that the host must have used mass hypnosis or some other technological trick to fool us. However, my instincts which had never failed me said otherwise. I began reading up online about various out of body and astral projection experiences people had posted in various forums – information which at that time was far and few between. I started spending all day and all-night researching, and trying out various guided meditations designed for astral projection. Having quit my day job was a blessing to my new found obsession.
In just a few weeks I had gotten to the point where I was meditating twice a day; 2 hours in the evening just before bed and 2 hours first thing in the morning after waking up. I was desperate to experience astral projection for myself, this seemed the most straight forward and magical way to find out if there really was more to this life than I had been lead to believe. Meditation wasn’t my only avenue of exploration – I started attempting to activate my chakras using crystals, I began experimenting with Prana – attempting to sense and touch the energy that surrounds all matter.
My girlfriend at the time accused me of being obsessed (I was) as I began paying more attention to my meditations than our relationship. After 2 months of this daily/nightly meditation I still hadn’t managed to astral project. Instead, I ended up in an unusual state of mind; my mind would stay completely awake while my body would be fast asleep – I would be completely unable to move it. I was completely aware throughout the entire night, I wouldn’t dream, just lay in wait for morning to come, while thinking about various things related to astral projection. Despite this unusual disposition – I would wake up feeling refreshed every morning as if I had a full restful sleep. After this going on for two weeks, I was getting fed up of being in what I felt was trapped in body. I decided to stop all meditation in order to return back to normal sleeping conditions, and eventually consulted Caz (the DJ) who I discovered had been a long-time astral projector and lucid dreamer amongst other phenomenal things.
Caz gave me a new method that didn’t involve hours of meditation. The method was called “Wake Back To Bed” (WBTB). As the name implies, you go to bed and sleep as normal, wake up during the night and go back to bed with hopes of encouraging sleep paralysis, which is the catalyst of most planned out of body experiences. I cover this and two variations of this method in detail in my article How do I Astral Project.
I decided I would try this for a week, if it didn’t work, I would give up on all this stuff and focus back on the real world. Caz also invited me to her group The Conscious Explorers which had just over a hundred members at the time (now over 3,000) many of whom had experience of astral projection amongst other things. This way I could speak directly to real people, and gain deeper insights into my own practise.
From the first moment I tried this technique, I would immediately reach the sleep paralysis state (dubbed SP), but would get too excited and end up moving my physical body rather than projecting. After three days of persistent trying – I decided to customise the WBTB method and combine it with Binaural audio beats. I used the binaurals immediately after waking up and at the point of ‘going back to bed’. Finally, after 6 months of trying every single day – it happened! I was out of body!
I recall the feeling of standing up and out of my body for the first time – the vividness and reality was such that I almost believed that it was my physical body that had stood up. The feeling was beyond anything I could imagine! I was expecting it to feel rather dream-like and foggy, but it felt like I had been sleeping my entire life and for the first time I had truly woken up to face the world. It felt more real than waking life, at was as if waking life had been the dream and the Andre in my projected state was the real source of my being.
At that time, largely due to ignorance and lack of information – I mistakenly believed that I had achieved astral projection. But it was beyond that. What happened next was even more surprising… please continue to read my journey in chapter 2 which you can find here – My Spiritual Awakening Chapter 2.
Stay positive, stay healthy, live with passion and compassion.
Thank you so much for reading.
Your brother,
Andre Zen
This article was first published: on the 12th December 2015 on the Sifume website (which is no more).
