OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCES
Of course, if man is a not a body but a spiritual being, it follows that he could experience things independent of his body. And, starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the first references to what eventually became known as “out-of-body experiences” began to appear in the para-psychological community. Titles such as “Near Death Experience” reported case studies of men and women, having died on operating tables or in car accidents, only to return with complete memory and perceptions of a brief existence completely separate from mortal flesh.
It was not long after that a then nascent New Age movement grabbed the concept, and promptly pushed it into the mainstream. By the beginning of the 1990s, public interest in out-of-body experiences was strong enough to boost books on the subject to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Yet in all the New Age discussions of out-of-body experiences, one important fact has been routinely overlooked. A decade before those first instances of out-of-body experiences were reported by the popular authorities of the day, L. Ron Hubbard had already succeeded in getting individuals to exteriorize from their bodies using procedures he described in The Creation of Human Ability. And as Scientologists across the world utilized his same techniques – with the accomplishment of identical results – exteriorization, like past lives, became a broadly accepted consensus which gradually permeated the rest of society.
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