After my foray into out of body experiences with Robert Monroe, I was pretty freaked out. So I went back to an author that I felt comfortable with. I read Eben Alexander’s two books The Map of Heaven and Living in a Mindful Universe. Honestly, I do not remember much from these books at all. However, I know that in these books Eben Alexander draws on the research he did after having his Near Death Experience. In his books, he introduced me to other titles of books/ authors that I wrote down to read about later.
This book also seemed to start this repetition that many of the times that people were married and underwent a crazy experience (NDE or OBE), they often got divorced. Since I was at the time engaged to my wife, I remember being concerned that my new spiritual awakening would lead me on a different path than what I was currently on. However, one of the biggest reasons I am certain I am on the right path and that things happen for a reason is because of Caitlyn. Our journeys really intertwined so perfectly together. I’ll likely have a separate post on that next.
Eben’s books also taught me that we all have psychic senses and that we are all able to use it as well. There was an exercise that we did which absolutely blew my mind. He said that this technique was used by intelligence agencies back during the Cold War to try to use psychic attacks to obtain information. Can you believe that such a thing actually existed? Anyway, he did an exercise where all he gave me was a number to focus on. That number was linked to a photograph. That photograph could be absolutely anything, but he told me to focus on the number and take note of what I saw. I remember seeing green all around with a brown structure in the middle and a little bit of red overtop of the brown. I instantly thought, well that was pointless. It means absolutely nothing. I then looked at the picture and my jaw dropped. The picture was a wooden gazebo in the center of a nice lawn of grass. Hanging in front of the this gazebo were some trees with red flowers blooming.
This book really started to expand my mind on skepticism. I knew that my skepticism was healthy, but having a neurosurgeon talk to me about psychics senses seemed to introduce me to topics that I initially did not believe in. At this point I was more willing to listen to them and experiment with the possibilities.
EDIT: May 22, 2020 – I realized now that this part about the psychic senses did not come from Eben Alexander’s books. Unfortunately, it has been a long time since I read these books and I merged together some different sources. The book I was thinking about was You are Psychic (seems obvious). However, Eben Alexander DID connect me to meditative practices involving Sacred Acoustics. His company that has engineered sounds that can put us in certain hypnotic states. I recommend these for anyone that are looking for deep meditations! They are very good.
