Alternate Perceptions Magazine, August 2021
“I have to step into a big ball of light….molten gold in color” claimed astral traveler
by: Brent Raynes
In You Live After Death published back in 1949 there are described quite a number of extraordinary psychic experiences. Written by Harold Sherman, a noted author who wrote many books on psychic phenomena and the higher powers of the human mind, he presented in this book the account shared by one David Williams of Altoona, Pennsylvania who claimed that since he was a young man he had been able to project himself into higher states of being. He added that it had seemed so natural to him that for quite sometime he had thought that everybody had this ability to some degree or another.
His account reminds me of so many other testimonies over the years shared by so many other people, whether they were out-of-body experiencers, near-death experiencers, UFO contactees, shamans, etc.
Williams explained: “My celestial experiences are fabulous in sights, colors, sounds, and sensations. The expanses are breathtaking and the colors are very intense and alive with feeling. I call it ‘optic colors.’ The stellar constellations are incredibly vivid, with a constant swirling state of activity. I have been drawn irresistibly to a certain group of stars, in the company of a guide, and taken to them at a tremendous rate of speed. But before I can travel, I have to step into a big ball of light, or fire, or whatever – molten gold in color.”
“I have been to vast cities with very unusual looking buildings, impossible to describe. The colors are always much more intense than on earth. Sometimes I seem to be engaged as student, usually I just seem to be visiting.”
“I have tested myself while in my astral body. A few months ago, I went straight through a glass window with both the window and me remaining intact. I went out through my bedroom window. It was peculiar to stand there, out of my physical body, and look up at the sky.”
I’m reminded from this account of UFO contactees and abductees who describe being taken into and transported in apparent craft, in this case a “ball of light,” plus claims of being escorted by beings out through windows or walls. “It doesn’t matter how many times they’ve taken me through the walls or the windows, my mindset is that, ‘Oh, I’m going to hit this wall with the top of my head and it’s gonna hurt, but then the next thing I know I’m actually going through the wall,” one “alien abductee” shared with me a few years ago. “It’s really weird because all of a sudden I see the outside and I can move my eyes and I see part of my body still in the wall or the window, but my head, and say shoulders, are already outside.”
California ufologist Ann Druffel told me once how she suspected that indeed some UFO contact experiencers are unknowingly in an out-of-body state. She recalled a hypnosis session with a woman abductee where this became evident. “We were discussing what was happening to her and she said, ‘I’m going now through the window with these entities. They are taking me through the window, and I looked back on my bed and there’s my body lying there,’ and she said, ‘I’m not in my body. I am in an astral state.’ If she hadn’t looked back she probably would have perceived it as a physically real experience.”
Meanwhile, Williams added: “I have heard transcendent music numerous times. One of the richest was an enormous choir of soldiers. You both hear and feel the music; it is a very living experience. Two times, I’ve heard a fantastic calliope.”
Sherman went on to explain how such extraordinary accounts as described by Mr. Williams are quite numerous, can no longer be so easily brushed aside as mere imagination and hallucination, adding how they’re reported often and independently, “possessing a significant similarity.”
“I, too, have heard exquisite music, sung by vast choirs or groups of singers,” Sherman admitted, himself someone who had been no stranger to psychic phenomena over his lifetime, and had also experienced out-of-body states. He became the founder and director of ESP Research Associates out of Little Rock, Arkansas.
