— My life of strange and enlightening experiences over six decades
I’ve known many people over the course of my life, but none seem to have had the number of strange experiences that I’ve had, beginning when I was a very young child. It started with out of body experiences, and over the years I have had between 1000 and 2000 of such occurrences, according to my rough calculations. When I was in my 30s I read that with practice I could have these experiences on purpose, so I began to practice every night. I read all that I could on out of body travel, including Robert Monroe’s seminal book, Journeys Out of the Body. This focus resulted in my having one nearly every night for several years on end. And about the same time I practiced lucid dreaming after having read university researcher Stephen LaBerg’s book on the subject. I also quickly learned to be lucid in my dreams.
But my forays with out of body experiences were just the tip of the iceberg. I have also run into various sort of otherworldly entities, including what is commonly called dark force entities bent on causing harm. I first encountered one of these in my son’s bedroom when he was still a baby and while I was traveling through the apartment out of my body. The next thing I knew I was engaged in a fight to the death. Obviously I won the battle, but I came away with a strange new power of sorts — the ability to increase my own size and strength in another reality. This would come in handy in future encounters with these same dark force beings. I discussed my encounters with dark entities with psychotherapist and folklorist Jo Hickey-Hall on her fascinating podcast called The Modern Fairy Sightings Podcast.
Although my life had been full of otherworldly visits with otherworldly beings since age five or six, when I was in my late 50s I began to investigate who I was beyond the superficial sense of self. I realized that there was more to this “other me” than just flitting around out of my body, psychic explorations, and philosophy. I grew an intense need to know myself in the tradition of the great saints of India, Sufism, Taoism, Buddhism, and so on. I had no interest in religion, just the most important part, which was an awakening to my own true nature.
My wonderful wife and I began reading and listening to enlightened gurus from India — Krishnamurti, Nisargadatta, Ramana, and a couple of others — so that we could discover for ourselves what they had discovered for themselves. The results were enlightening and I covered some of what I experienced in this book, Observations of a Reluctant Mystic: a journey into awakening.
I had never considered myself to be a mystic, but just a regular person who has strange, unusual, and revealing experiences in a place that I call non-physical in structure. My hope is that this book can guide readers back to their own essence if this is what they desire to do. For others it may serve as entertaining or a revelation of the possibilities and realities beyond the world of our physical senses, materialist science, and even the broad category of spirituality.
