Q. How does CRV relate to the Out of Body Experience?

Question:

"I've had OOBEs and I've wondered if it is the same thing as CRV? There are a lot of people on the internet chat groups who act like they know, and some say the two are the same, some say they aren't. Are they the same?"

A. No. I attended the Monroe Institute Gateway course the summer before I first started learning CRV. I had an OOBE there, and can tell you from experience that they are totally different. There is a phenomenon which occurs for very advanced CRVers called "Perfect Site Integration" (PSI)*. You are working on your session, writing down your perceptions, and you look up from the table to find yourself actually at the site. You can see, hear, smell, taste, etc. just as though you were actually there. It is absolutely amazing. Even that, though, is not the same as an OOBE. In an OOBE, your mind separates from your body and actually goes to the site. The problem is that in OOBE, there is a lot of misinterpretation of what's there, simply for one reason: your mind is there, but your brain is back at home.

Remember that CRV is simply a process whereby you are able to get impressions from your subconscious mind, become consciously aware of them and then write them down. In CRV, your conscious mind stays in the body (with brain intact), and you begin a structured process whereby the brain begins to accept the perceptions which the subconscious is picking up from the site as input from its normal senses, thereby allowing you to become aware of them. Hence, you sit in the CRV room and perceive smells, colors, etc., as though they were in some way real. However, throughout the CRV process, you normally maintain the awareness that they are only "virtually real". When the phenomenon of Perfect Site Integration happens, your brain has has simply become so accepting of those perceptions that it stops paying attention to the real input from your normal senses. It buys into the virtual reality and begins to perceive it as the only reality. Sort of like tuning out all the background noise in a cafe so you can have a conversation with a single person there. As a result, you start to perceive the site as though it were the only input to your senses. The clarity is phenomenal.

The first time this happened to me was during a practice session - and I was totally unprepared for it to happen. The monitor asked me something, and I looked up at him. Suddenly, the monitor, the room around me, the table where I was sitting, and everything I knew to be my surroundings were gone, and I found myself standing in a very cold, uninhabited place with a sharp bite to the thin air. I looked out and saw an expanse of rocky sand with the sun low to the horizon and the sky much darker than it should have been. There was something large behind me - a stone structure of some kind that I could see out of the corner of my eye. I was just turning to see what it was when the realization struck me that this was crazy. I wasn't supposed to be here. The shock of the realization snapped me out of it, and I turned my head back forward to see the monitor (who had seen this sort of thing before) chuckling at me from across the table. Although I hadn't known it at the time, the target site was the pyramids on Mars. To this day, every time I see a picture of the Martian landscape, I get the feeling, "Been there - done it."
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* Ingo Swann calls this "bi-location", but that term has since been denegrated by others to mean nothing more than the process of perceiving a site separate from your own location. You will hear others speak of "bi-location" as the method by which CRV works. While it does give a name to the process, it still doesn't explain how it works. It does, however, indicate to me that they may have never had the experience of TOTAL "bi-location", which is what I have started calling "Perfect Site Integration" - where you become perfectly attuned to the site. Once you've had that experience, you realize that anything less is just sitting at a table perceiving things.

Lyn Buchanan