UNWORLDING... the art form formerly known as 'out of body experience,' 'astral travel,' 'lucid dreaming,' 'phasing,' 'the quick switch,' etc.

Since I'm known online as someone who always has a ready and long-winded opinion about unworlding, while also claiming to be a beginner since 1970, there may be some who want just the facts about where my practice stands right now and what stands behind it. Just the facts!  Well that's tough. 'Cuz along with the facts you get the frosting.

I was born on the first anniversary of Albert Einstein's death and the 50th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake in the same town as the Sikh singer who wrote my favorite song, "Ek Ong Kaar."

I did not speak in school till the second grade because I didn't think people had anything interesting to say. My two older sisters found me embarrassing so they told everybody I was shy, but I was actually just bored with the typical preoccupations of the human race and felt certain that I'd been born on the wrong planet. Or else just landed there somehow, maybe while I wasn't paying Attention; I didn't remember being born at all. I've never been accused of having social ability, but I've been accused of nearly everything else.

When I was 14 I first heard about astral projection and that was going to be my life, but my dad thought I was using relaxation as a crutch so I studied reincarnation and hypnosis instead. By the time I was 18 my parents had informed me that I was a budding drug addict, although I'd never touched the stuff, nor did I want to, but since they insisted, I spent the next several years exploring the compulsive use of LSD, marijuana, and other mind-altering substances, and consequently I retired at the age of 19 to pursue the life my parents had chosen for me. They had sent me away to technical school to study a hobby I'd already lost interest in--piano repair--instead of sending me to college as they'd always promised.

At this writing I can honestly say that my focus has long switched from drug-induced ecstasy to the real thing. I have no more interest in LSD or marijuana, etc. because I've had enough real unworlding experiences to say that they are certainly a thousand times more fulfilling than any chemically induced state of consciousness for the simple reason that they are acquired due to my own efforts. Even trying to use dream aids such as mugwort/muggons and supplements led to a long dry spell in my case. After showing some initially promising results, the dream aids seemed to turn off my inner drive to induce these states by developing skills.

I'll be 62 years old in 2018. I find this impossible to take in. I can think of a million inconceivable notions more believable than this.

Since I moved to the Philippines, I've written some interesting non-fiction books based on researching topics with which I lack practical experience and fluency including Compressed Air Power Secrets, You Already Know Calculus, and Advanced Bisaya for Beginners. As fiction goes, I wrote three fantasy novels, which no longer exist as far as I know, by the age of 21. I'm trying to rewrite my life as a comedy/melodrama. The first in this trilogy--Maxwell Zdaemon Gets a Job--appeared about 15-20 years ago. All 585 pages were summarily rejected by my family, but I plan to put it online once everyone in my family has finished achieving senility. I guess it wasn't good enough for them that I changed our names; they want me to change the facts too. I've also written a good screenplay called Airman: A Rural Legend. I'd have to say that air is my life. Please no wisecracks about 'hot air'.

I've always wished to have astral projections and lucid dreams, only changing this terminology to unworlding a year or so ago after having some fairly consistent success with it. But I'm a natural skeptic who wants to believe in the paranormal and has shown absolutely no talent for it. I shouldn't say 'absolutely'. Before I started my unworlding practice two years ago, I had logged one out-of-body experience, I'd seen one aura, I'd seen one UFO, I'd experienced the Vibrations one time, I'd experienced hypnotic amnesia once... like that. I also had a few dozen lucid dreams in the early 1980s when I was focusing hard on the topic, doing some concentration practices invented by myself, and others gleaned from Carlos Castaneda's books, and doing a lot of connected breathing which I learned from the inventor of 'rebirthing,' a triple Scorpio named Leonard Orr who claims that he's recently cured himself of senility. Having once attempted to be his personal secretary, I am not going to ask him for the details. He probably wouldn't remember me anyway.

I've read more books and articles about Milton Erickson M.D., the founder of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, than anyone else I know, but my lack of social interest makes me inherently a non-hypnotist, although I can make tapes. Remember tapes? I think they're called sound files now.

In the 1990s I tripped and fell into a 'shamanic self-soul-retrieval' period in which my power animal Tiger--who is still my power animal--attempted to show me parts of myself which I had lost and which needed to be retrieved, supposedly. Unfortunately I turned this into psychology since my dad had been an amateur psychologist as a hobby, with me as his only subject. I can't say he knew what he was doing, although I guess he succeeded in making me wary of psychologists, which is a pretty good start. Not wary enough, though. I didn't know what to do with shamanism without a shaman in the house, and pretty soon it turned into psychobabble so I gave it up. Like religion--which I tried at age 16--'soul healing' made me miserable: just imagine a future me that's better than the real me, then add heat and stir... never mind! Some of the people I was corresponding with during my self-soul-retrieval periods don't speak to me any more. The moral of the story is, if your passion in life is to 'find the off-switch to your whinebox,' do yourself a favor and don't tell anyone.

During my current practice I briefly tried dipping into self-soul-retrieval again. The seductive voice of Yer-Not-Good-Enough is... very seductive. Once again I've sworn off psychology in all its insidious disguises. It's been many long months since that unfortunate episode and I don't necessarily regret it as such, but I've tried to delete most references to it from my dream journal. During the period when I was doing self-soul-retrieval my practice consisted of what I call 'visioneering' instead of unworlding, which refers to a practice of moving through self-guided imagery and calling it a 'shamanic journey,' none of which can be trusted. Not that I believe everything you see in a real unworlding is divinely inspired either, but there's something to be said for truly losing contact with the meat body before you start having experiences that you intend to classify as revelations. Keeping a diary of the thoughts and experiences of the conscious mind in this life... is kinda icky...

Before I fell into this brief practice of what I call 'oopy-goopy,' I had a handful of relatively long unworldings which I was very impressed with. Along came oopy-goopy and a 4-1/2-month-long dry spell. Since I got back on track, my experiences have come plodding along at the rate of one or two per month, with the exception of a rare streak in which I got Officially Lucid, but briefly, several times in one month.

Early on in this two-year-old practice I was assaulted twice by a brother-in-law who is a next-door neighbor. This resulted in a lot of work to do in the realm of getting thoughts and emotions under control so the practice could proceed. I highly recommend not going the 'petty tyrant' route of being forced to get your thoughts and emotions under control. Better do it voluntarily.

I've made slow-but-steady progress as far as realizing the intentions set for things I want to achieve in the Unworld, such as looking at my hands, looking in a mirror, not flying every time, etc. Currently I'm working on remembering to 'walk to the library, find the Bob Neal section, and interview him about his invention' (see my other website). I don't put much stock in the Unworld as a source of physical information and it may be that my natural skepticism is slowing me down. But I did manage to stop wasting all my time flying around screaming in ecstasy... now I have to remember to stop crawling and walk. I'm already carrying out this Intent Agenda in dreams which are less than Officially Lucid, so it's just a matter of time before I start having more detailed, longer, more volitional and lucid experiences.

For a long time my focus was on experiencing conscious sleep paralysis, and now that I no longer think about wanting to do this all the time, it is happening due to a normal progression of skills. I'm gradually learning to stay awake closer and closer to the borderline of sleep, or to lapse into sleep briefly and wake myself up. My long-coveted first experiences of conscious sleep paralysis were like my first few orgasms in a way: 'I'll believe this is possible when it actually happens to me.' Yup. It's possible.

Much of my website is occupied by my philosophical beliefs including 'Synfonemia' which is my Theory of Everything. I began this course of thinking decades ago when I used to check out books from the library on Taoism and Buddhism and quantum physics and holographic universes and ESP and reincarnation and hypnosis because I couldn't afford weed, and found that reading pop philosophy regarding the nature of reality was enough to get me kinda high for the most part. Like when I used to sit in church as a child, bored out of my mind, trying to figure out what infinity is, while the pastor droned on about God knows what. For many years I've known what the first four harmonics of awareness are because of all the reading I've done, and suspected correctly that Change is the fiveness. I surmised that there are elements of reality since everyone in the Nature of Reality business has different terminology for the same few concepts. After I re-started my practice two years ago and extricated myself from that brief fling with being obsessed with seeking peak experience--which is obsession with 6ness--I came to understand what 6ness, 7ness, 8ness and 9ness are. Synfonemia was first inspired by a study of numerology. Discovery of the more recent elements of my philosophy was inspired by hearing people speak of chakras, the third eye, guides, higher selves, kundalini rising, etc.

As a small child and until I was 16 I had little time to sleep because I was trying to learn how to go to sleep and didn't know how. Since I was going to sleep so slowly every night, I was probably having awesome unworlding experiences all the time and just forgetting about it by morning. I remember the Itchies clearly and I recall hearing a sort of pseudo-auditory storm building at a certain point which I could turn into the loud babble of an anonymous crowd. At this point I was a millimeter from sleep. Whatever experience I gained at that time is finally starting to come back to me. Just last night I had another clear episode of hearing the pseudo-auditory storm, which sounds just like an energy of organized thought without words or meanings. It's a self-organizing sort of rhythm in the fog that awareness becomes when you relax your mind to just the right stage where things happily stop making sense. It's what happens when the Inner Sound Current is allowed to stop making the same world it made yesterday and start making the Unworld instead.

The first conscious unworlding experience that I actually remember came about accidentally in 1980 due to a month-long practice of connected breathing which put me into a non-stop state of bliss during that period of time. Ever since then I've been trying to get back to that state and it's been way harder than I thought it would be. It seemed easy the first time because Leonard Orr had threatened to evict me if I didn't breathe two hours a day, so in a burst of adrenalin I'd vowed to show him up by breathing continuously 24 hours a day. At the time I didn't realize how easy I was making it look and when I left the breathing commune in the High Sierra Mountains of Northern California, I didn't realize what I was getting myself into. The real world has not been an easy place to remember to breathe.

Not being one to answer personal questions without giving the questioner more than he asked for, I hope I've provided some information that is useful. Everything on this site that is not a direct experience is just my opinion, but I do not choose to uglify my writing by presenting it in an apologetic light. I prefer to think that anybody who's survived a life like mine and lived to tell about it must have learned something along the way.

--W. H. Early