i was going through my 'The Dictionary of the Esoteric' by Nevill Drury (gosh he goes on about the Golden Dawn in this dictionary, anyhow ..) and i came across the entry for Robert Monroe and would like to share it here if no-one has seen it;
Monroe, Robert A. (1915 - 1995)
American businessman who in 1958, began having out-of-the-body experiences. One afternoon, while resting on the couch in his living room, Monroe felt a 'warm light' upon his body and began to 'vibrate' involuntarily. Over the next few months Monroe noticed that he could move his fingertips when the vibrations began, and 'feel' things normally beyond his reach. Later he discovered that he could project his total consciousness outside his physical body, although his first experience of such dissolution was accompanied by a feeling of panic and the thought that perhaps he had died. Monroe later began to systemically explore the new faculty he had discovered, and subsequently identified three 'locales' that could be 'visited' in the dissociated state.
In Locale One, according to Monroe, time seemed to cease, and past and future co-existed with the feeling of 'now'. In Locale Two, one's will and visual abilities seemed to be able to create thought-forms, which then became experientially real. In Monroe's terms, 'to think something is to make it happen ..'. Locale Three, meanwhile, had a time-warp dimension, which provided imagery inconsistent with modern science.
An account of Monroe's experiences, Journeys Out of the Body, was published with a foreword by the leading parapsychologist Charles Tart. It remains one of the classic contemporary accounts of astral projection.
See also Fox, Oliver; Muldoon, Sylvan.
it was a pleasant surprise to read this.