This study attempts to contribute to our understanding of the Out-of-Body-Experience (OBE) by exploring the lived experience of one advanced meditation practitioner with over 25 years experience of consciously inducing hundreds of meditative OBEs. Two face-to-face, semi-structured interviews along with one previously published article of the participant's life story were analyzed according the principles of Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. Three themes emerged including:
The OBE as mystical experience and initiation, (2) astral body as immortal soul, and (3) astral body as vehicle of consciousness. The findings reveal the OBE to be a spiritually transformative experience resulting in a fundamental shift in the research participant's world-view and belief governing personal immortality. The research also highlights the role of meditation as a development process, which may inform how we conduct OBE studies based on the projection-model in the future.
