Hi all! Hope everyone is well and I have brought a New Years gift - the interview with Graham Nicholls!
I think it's a fascinating interview and I'm sure everyone will want to thank Graham for giving us his time.
1. First question – can you tell us briefly about yourself, when you started to have OBE’s, how they affected you, how having them affected you, and just an outline of what you’ve been doing from when you started having them until today?
My first OBEs occurred spontaneously in 1987 when I was 12 years old. My memory is now quite vague about the conditions from which the experience arose, but I believe the experiences began from a relaxed waking state. If I am correct that I was in a relaxed waking state, this would be consistent with the 78% figure found by G. O. Gabbard and S. W. Twemlow in their study of OBEs in the general population during the same period.
Sometime in 1990 I first heard or read the term ‘Out-of-Body Experience’ and realised that was what had happened to me. I remember walking to James Street, near Oxford Street in central London hoping to find a book on the topic in one of the large bookshops. As it happened they did have a book called ‘Out-of-Body Experiences - A Handbook by Janet Lee Mitchell’, which basically set everything in motion for me. The book was mainly scientific in outlook, but did describe a basic technique. I decided to commit to a year of practice to achieve controlled OBEs.
After several months of OBE practice I initiated my first intentional OBE. From that point on the experiences came much easier and I explore all the esoteric and parapsychological information on the subject I could find. I also started working for Dr. Douglas Baker who was teaching astral projection in London at the time.
In the late 90s I started exploring areas like sensory deprivation, hypnosis, virtual reality and other technologies to help others have OBEs. This led to major exhibitions of my work in galleries around the world including my first solo show in Soho, New York City in 1999 and in 2004 a major virtual reality project at London’s Science Museum.
In 2008 I met Rupert Sheldrake and worked with him organising some experiments, as well as taking part in them. After that I continued my practice and began working on my first book that appeared in 2011 and my second in 2012. More recently my focus has been on working with The Rhine Research Center (US) as an educator, advisor and research subject. I have also been working on a study with Patrizio Tressoldi and generally continuing my support of a scientific approach to understanding the OBE that does not exclude the veridical elements.
2. Can you tell us about some of your more striking or stand out OBE’s?
Well the ones that have stood out the most for me have been the ones that have challenged my understandings about the world or contained something veridical. So my shared death experience or my Soho precognitive OBE in 1999, or more recently my OBE to the arctic ocean. All of these experiences left a lasting impression on me and I feel are quite striking examples.
3. What similarities/differences do your experiences have with those of other OBErs of who you are aware? What do you make of any inconsistencies/dissimilarities?
This is an interesting and important question, as I feel it highlights some of the work that still needs to be done on OBEs. We need to understand the qualities that make up different types of OBE. I tend to refer to veridically consistent OBEs, like my own, as Independent Consciousness Experiences (ICE), as this is a more accurate description of my experiences and those of others I have studied. I generally find my experiences are more consistent with those of NDE accounts, than with many of the other popular authors or accounts that I might come across. My thinking on this is that there are different forms of OBEs and those arising from dreams (which are popular currently) seem to be more subjective. I feel this is either because something of the dream state is still apparent once the OBE component begins, or that these experiences are not in-fact OBEs at all, but rather a form of dream (by which I mean they are fully internally generated). I do have a theory that OBEs could be the result of a combination of mental model and external data (much like our usual experience is), but I feel that the external or extrasensory foundation is what distinguishes an ICE.
4. Have you ever experienced, during an "OBE" or some other visionary state, the experience of becoming infinite (or at least numerous) souls or beings, individually and in their "totality" (ie. knowing all their "history", connections, relationships etc, despite their being "fictional" interior characters, ostensibly at least). Have you experienced any other unusual "OBEs" or visionary experiences that are in some way "unusual", and do not fit the linear, singular person perspective of "out-of-body" perceptions?
Yes, my experience of what the artist Alex Grey calls The Universal Mind Lattice. I will quote from my first book Avenues of the Human Spirit:
"I opened my eyes to a gleaming expanse of colour and light. The most beautiful imagery revealed itself in geometric streams of light and pattern, a sunset overflowing with rich turquoise and edged by delicate pink transformed into dancing rays like the charged particles of the northern lights. In every direction a new vision of natural beauty arose. As I looked deeper into the expanse I became aware that these colours and mists of energy were the result of consciousness all around me, like I was floating in a collective mind. In each moment I became more aware of exquisite points of light mixed within waves of colour and space. I felt that I could reach out and connect with anyone, anywhere. From the centre of the expanse rose a vast concentration of light; it was the source of all that was flowing around and it seemed to be drawing me closer to it. I felt like I was surrendering to the desire to connect with this endless sea of thought. As I touched the column of energy I rose up in a spiral of consciousness like I could think with a million minds at once. As if I was present in places all across the globe, all the emotions that characterise humanity phased in before dissolving away again. In that single moment I was consumed by the sense of endless interconnected minds. I saw the intricate lives of people across vast distances; I felt in the most tangible way the common humanity between people. No self, no separation, no now and no tomorrow. That was how I felt; accepted and totally free."
Since, that time I have had more such experiences of Monism or wholeness. I have had realisations through these perceptions that suggest many of the ways I used to divide life or ideas are simply illusory structures. The Aghori Sadhus of India would be a good example of this idea of trying to look beyond such illusions of division. This was most apparent in my life during what became a retreat in Sardinia in 2002. I spent 10 days in Zen meditation, before experiencing a shift that was without drama, but was as profound as it was simple.
5. Do you differentiate, and in what practical ways, between different varieties of "OBE", such as "etheric projection", OBE, astral projection, lucid dreams, remote viewing etc? If so - what is the practical differences between these experiences in relation to our ontological being or state of consciousness? Is it just the CONTENT of the experience which defines what label we ascribe to them, or what method or practice we use, or something more fundamentally "differential"? Further, is there some sort of objective or invariant structural hierarchy to these states of experience, in your opinion, and how do you personally frame that conceptually?
This is a huge question and I’m not sure I can fully address it here, but I will try to tease apart some of the most important elements. Firstly, yes, I certainly do differentiate between different expressions of consciousness and psi. Some of these terms are simply outdated in my view, like astral projection and etheric projection. They are based upon assumptions that an astral or etheric body exists, I don’t feel that we can realistically claim that. I say that based upon both the evidence addressing what people actually experience in an OBE and what we observe in veridical accounts.
So if we start from the experiential we find that far fewer experience a secondary body of any form than is generally claimed in the esoteric and new age literature. For example, in recent research by Carlos Alvarado and Nancy Zingrone only 30% reported experiencing any kind of secondary body. If we then look at research such as that conducted by Karlis Osis with Alex Tanous, we find that his out-of-body perceptions in the laboratory were most accurate or veridical when he did not experience a secondary body, suggestive that the more objective form of experience is the form without a secondary body. This would also be consistent with my own findings from my own experiences and work with my students over the last more than 20 years. It is my hypothesis that the secondary body, when experienced, is a kind of model of the self, or a construct. This construct seems, in most cases, to diminish or disappear completely once the practitioner becomes more comfortable in the out-of-body state.
Lucid dreams in my opinion are a totally different experience to an OBE, their only relationship is they are both states of consciousness. I have written an article highlighting 17 reasons I believe this is the case. I think the popularity of the link between the two is again a symptom of new age unscientific approaches to OBEs and people repeating uninformed opinions across the internet.
Remote viewing is a structured protocol for applying psi abilities. If we put the protocol aspect aside then I feel that psi abilities and especially clairvoyance are a form of non-local perception and are on a continuum with OBEs. I feel non-local perceptions arise in remote viewing while the primary senses are still fully active, while an OBE or ICE are fully immersive experiences. Essentially, the senses and bodily awareness are shut down, and a complex multisensory experience comes to the fore. Is this within the body and receiving the information from the external world, or is this a totally separate experience, or some combination of the two is hard to say. I tend to lean towards it is a combination of the two at this point in my understanding.
In terms of what differentiates the different types of experience, I base this on an evaluation of both the internal experience as best we can know it, and the external characteristics we can identify from laboratory research and case studies. At this point there are large gaps in our understanding of the phenomenology of OBEs, so this is my focus currently. I am drawing data together to build an understanding of what people actually experience and then from that look at different kinds of OBE, ICE, and non-local consciousness. From there I hope to build a more consistent model of what we know and what OBEs might be in various contexts. I have just completed work on a paper with Patrizio Tressoldi, that is being peer reviewed and should be published soon, looking at the phenomenology of OBEs in both induced and spontaneous OBEs.
6. What are your thoughts about specific "objectively-existing" "Locales" that OBErs can visit? Is it all only subjective mind-creating/exploring or is there truth to that?
I think based upon the limited information we have available now we can’t say with much confidence. But from my own experience and reviewing the data at this point I would say it is a mixture. There certainly seems to be consistencies, like in my own shared death experience (SDE) linked above. But there are also culturally based inconsistencies, so we are left with no clear line. So the logical conclusion would be that these ‘areas’ contain both objective and subjective elements. Whether or not that means they are ‘places’ in our usual understanding of the word, I don’t think we can say. They could also be some form of telepathic link or other psi connection.
And then can we expect those Locales to be "places" consciousness continues to visit in the "afterlife"?
Well as I said we don’t have enough to go on to make leaps like that, and I am very careful to not go the usual road in this area of 1 + 1 = 11. I want to look as objectively as possible at what we know and draw from that. So I would say that experiences like my SDE certainly suggest both an afterlife and a consistent environment, but there are also experiences that that don’t.
7. If out-of-body experiences really involve what they appear to do - perception from a viewpoint outside the body - and if they can be induced, why can't that be proved by straightforward experiment? If they don't involve that, in what sense can they be considered objective?
This is quite a common and important question, so I will explore this with some depth. Veridical or objective evidence for out-of-body experiences (OBEs) within a controlled context is subject to much the same limitations and strengths as in other areas of psi research or science in general. However, the small amount of research we have is supportive of objective perception during OBEs. So by usual scientific standards OBEs can be demonstrated by simple experiment.
![[Image: EnjyNI3vDIogYS-9JTXRbteQ4pB-edOsrNhauuLF...LO3JnE66ED]](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/EnjyNI3vDIogYS-9JTXRbteQ4pB-edOsrNhauuLFzHoxl9kdLuVyQy7uI5THE0cH0YZziqs0yZNYi5cC2BQaHBpB9wWqpxC3XOqgCQEupEosXgLx0yVlKPwrk91vxcLO3JnE66ED)
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