Expert: Laurie McLauglin - 3/20/2009

Question
I am a meditation instructor from the Christian contemplative tradition.  I have a student who is having many out of body experiences.  There is not a lot of info on this subject in my tradition.  I am wondering how budhism views this phenomena?  Is it Considered normative on the path to enlightenment? Is it considered a distraction? Is it an advanced practice?  thank you for you time.

Answer
Hello and thank you for letting me answer your question.

You pose a very interesting question.  You have an advantage over me in that you are a meditation instructor and therefore might know more about meditation techniques than I do. I have taught basic meditation classes. The folks that I have taught, my fellow practitioners and teachers have reported to me very few cases of out of body astral travel; though it does happen. However, this may be because in our tradition, it is not proper for ones with higher meditative attainments to share their experiences with those on the lower levels.  

Things like psychic experiences, out of body experiences and astral travel, as I understand it, are part of our mind’s natural qualities, though most of us do not encounter them until we improve our meditative abilities and comes closer to the ability to have complete single pointed concentration.  These phenomena are natural and will be attained by our minds and experienced by us the better we get at meditation and the more and more we begin to see reality as it truly is.

However, from my understanding of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition thus far, these kinds of occurrences are not to be sought after and especially early on are more of a distraction as they can take us away from our main focus which is simply training the mind to be able to focus without distraction for as long as we choose on a single object. However, since these occurrences are part of who we are naturally, some folks might experience them.

The potential problem is that because these experiences are so cool and different in and of themselves, they can be very distracting and lead us away from the main focus of training our minds.  And instead, we may veer off and explore these phenomena and forget all about training our minds to become better and happier persons. So, from what I have learned thus far, if we do experience these kinds of things in our meditation practice, we are to acknowledge them but just put them aside and return the work at hand; training our minds.

So, if something like that happens to us, as far as I understand it at this point, it should be something to be let go and put aside as we teach our mind to work on holding an object of meditation.  At first we simply concentrate on holding the sensation of breathing, for example, as our object then we move to holding emotions such as patience, kindness, compassion as our object, then we begin to use that strong ability to concentrate to begin to come to terms with and understand higher concepts, such as that of emptiness; whereby we learn that the world is not the way it appears to our minds. Realizing this helps us to be able to let go of negative concepts and incorrect views that bind us to this world of suffering.

Especially for the Mahayana tradition, we train our minds this way so that once we attain such realizations and find the peace and freedom in seeing the world as it truly is, we can help others who are searching for the same things.

Therefore, something like astral travel or out of body experiences are of little use to a Buddhist practitioner of meditation until they have reached such a level that they can realize how to benefit other sentient beings by using these gifts. Until then they are just a distraction.

I hope that this answer helps a bit.  Don’t hesitate to ask if you have any further questions.