How Does CRV Relate to
Out of Body Experiences?
ANSWER:
No. I attended the Monroe Institute Gateway course the summer before I first started learning CRV. I had an OOBE there, and can tell you from experience that they are totally different. There is a phenomenon which occurs for very advanced CRVers called "Perfect Site Integration" (PSI)*. You are working on your session, writing down your perceptions, and you look up from the table to find yourself actually at the site. You can see, hear, smell, taste, etc. just as though you were actually there. It is absolutely amazing. Even that, though, is not the same as an OOBE. In an OOBE, your mind separates from your body and actually goes to the site. The problem is that in OOBE, there is a lot of misinterpretation of what's there, simply for one reason: your mind is there, but your brain is back at home. (OOBEs and ghosts are indicators that there actually is a mind/brain dichotomy.)
Remember that CRV is simply a process whereby you are able to bring impressions from your subconscious mind to the conscious. In CRV, your conscious mind stays in the body (with brain intact), and you begin a structured process whereby the brain begins to accept the perceptions which the subconscious is picking up from the site as input from its normal senses, thereby allowing you to become aware of them. Hence, you sit in the CRV room and perceive smells, colors, etc., as though they were in some way real. However, throughout the CRV process, you normally maintain the awareness that they are only "virtually real". When the phenomenon of Perfect Site Integration happens, your BRAIN has come to the point where it is so accepting of those perceptions that it forgets about the real input from your normal senses. It buys into the alternate reality and begins to perceive it as the only reality. As a result, both the mind and the brain perceive the site. The clarity is phenomenal.
The first time this happened to me was during a practice session - and I was totally unprepared for it to happen. The monitor asked me something, and I looked up at him. Suddenly, the monitor, the room around me, the table where I was sitting, and everything I knew to be my surroundings were gone, and I found myself standing in a very cold, uninhabited place with a sharp bite to the thin air. I looked out and saw an expanse of rocky sand with the sun low to the horizon and the sky much darker than it should have been. There was something large behind me - a stone structure of some kind that I could see out of the corner of my eye. I was just turning to see what it was when the realization struck me that this was crazy. I wasn't supposed to be here. The shock of the realization snapped me out of it, and I turned my head back forward to see the monitor (who had seen this sort of thing before) chuckling at me from across the table. Although I hadn't known it at the time, the target site was the pyramids on Mars. To this day, every time I see a picture of the Martian landscape, I get the feeling, "Been there - done it."