One can separate brain and mind by consciously leaving the body. It has to be fully conscious, not dream like, not just observed and recollected like a dream of leaving the body.

And it has to have physical life associations/connections.

One has to get well disengaged so that the body is clearly seen to be different to oneself. Also going in and out so that the sensations of extracting from and immersing into the body are experienced/known.

When the brain is reasonably healthy the mind and consciousness can go in and out and carry with it all memories of experiences either way. When brain is damaged or unhealthy it may not be able to receive/download information coming in with the immersing consciousness/mind.

Not all the consciousness is in the brain anyway, and when we go out via the crown centre we reunite with more of the consciousness that is upside of it. If brain is damaged, even less consciousness is in it, until when it is so damaged it has no consciousness in it. Only going out through crown unites the upper and lower consciousness. Going out through head/front is much the same as normal wakefulness; going out through solar plexus has awareness and memory at best, but no self initiative.

There are many books on it. Read and practice.

Also, what is not in the books:

Practice honesty, seeing things as they are. Pure awareness and observation and conscious control of self at all times. This clears the mind, makes it transparent, and intensifies the awareness. You must comprehend truth and value truth above all other values and this will enable you to see honestly as things are, otherwise your trying will be in vain because you preferences will cloud the mind and overlay all you see. When mind is clear and honest and consciousness is heightened and always present and in control, then when you lie down to go to sleep the heightened trained consciousness has more ability to go in and out of body - by head and solar plexus, and maybe crown.

If it goes by solar plexus it cannot control or exercise the intellect while outside, only observe and recall at best.

If by head it direct and control similarly to when in body.

When out via crown it has further abilities.

As well as conscious awareness, also practice responsibility and most importantly accountability for yourself. These heighten consciousness. Don't get obsessed by rights and opportunities and shun accountability like so many certain people do because this attitude will close off your exits and prevent going out of body. Desire accountability.   

Exercise heart, like love, forgiveness, thankfulness; and conscience; and live, speak, act, do according to own highest best standard by others. Dont just keep it up there and not do it - live it out. This downflow of energy from own inner upper best standard to normal living makes a pathway from crown to the place from where normal daily consciousness sits and operates, so now it can have a pathway to go upward and out via crown and to come back in again without a break in consciousness.         

Live this way and in time you will have the proof and the answers to the questions you seek. Until then you can only summise and guess.

But life will get better anyway and you may realise other priorities than wasting time with astral travel. Dont neglect physical life duties, right attitudes, and attending to surrounding human relationships, be up with these things in your life, or leaving the body wont happen, except by unhealthy means and unpleasant results. Know your motive - it must benefit more than just yourself, or it wont happen, except by eventual trouble to you. Also if you want to be proficient avoid mind altering drugs and alcohol. Get up to no mischief for the comeback is more severe than it is for earth bound mischief.

Bruce Moen wrote on Jan 25^th, 2012 at 4:15pm:

Exactly!  The physical body is sustained by one's nonphysical counterpart ("spirit", "soul", "Mind"), not the other way around.  The physical body dies when the Mind disconnects. 

You are not a physical body.  It would be more accurate to say that you are a fragment of consciousness or point of light.  You have chosen, for any number of reasons, to engage in the human experience for the purpose of learning and increasing the quality of your consciousness.  It is also likely that you have engaged in other physical experiences such as animals and alternate universes.

Focus27 wrote on Dec 20^th, 2011 at 11:53pm:

Here's something to think about.  It seems that you are taking your physical experience and using it as a sort of yardstick to decide what is "real" and what is "not real."  Your, eh, "hallucinations" are just as real as the world around you; they are simply located in another area of consciousness.

Bruce's fifth book is a guidebook for contacting deceased persons and gathering verifiable information from them.  It never ceases to amaze me that many skeptics cannot take a fraction of the effort they use to criticize the afterlife and explore for themselves.  Experience for yourself, know for yourself.

Focus27,

If you research Karl Lashley, you will find he was a neuroscientist who tried to localize where memories are stored in the brain.  To do this, he would teach a rat how do run a maze and give it food as a reward.  Then, in a horrible manner, he would take a hot probe and fry a different part of the rat's brain, and then let the rat run the maze again.  He reasoned that in this way, he would find the location of the "memory" of the maze.

To his surprise, no matter where he burned the brain, once the maze was learned, he could not reliably remove the memory from the rat by burning any one spot.  Some rats had more than half their brains cauterized, yet still showed memory of learning the maze.

His conclusion was that memory was not stored or generated in one location in the rat (and by extension, in people).  He reasoned that the memories were stored across the cortex.  However let's look at this from a different angle.

Bruce mentioned a radio; this is an analogy I have put forth and am fond of. Imagine bringing back a man from the past, say 2000 to 3000 years ago, and put him in front of a TV or radio.  He would assume that there were tiny people inside.  That the radio was doing the thinking and talking.  By the same reasoning we can say - what if consciousness exists in a mental plane and connects to the physical world through our brain and body.  The brain is the "radio" receiving the signal of consciousness. 

But, you may say, what about people who have brain damage?  Doesn't that prove that consciousness arises from the brain.  Not at all.  Imagine a radio or TV.  Damage it in different ways; what happens.  One may hear static, or in the case of a TV, see blurred or unusual images.  In the same way, if a stroke damages our brains, the "receiver" of consciousness may then be damaged so that we see abnormalities in the physical world. 

It is a shame that in western society, we want to use the scientific method so that we deny our basic nature; that of thought and intent manifest through love.  We worship the body and the physical world, and assume that is the only thing which is real.  This is, in some ways laughable, for as Bruce noted, science recognizes that even controlled experiments are always affected by the observer in some way.  And we only believe that the physical (the results of sensory input to our eyes, ears, touch, etc.) is a true reality because we ignore our true perceptual essence which is pure perceptive consciousness.


Matthew