Lehal Library

The vibrations came and went six more times before I got up the courage to try to repeat the experience. When I did, it was an anticlimax. With the vibrations in full force, I thought of floating upward—and I did. I smoothly floated up over the bed, and when I willed myself to stop, I did, floating in mid-air. It was not a bad feeling at all, but I was nervous about falling suddenly. After a few seconds I thought myself downward, and a moment later I felt myself in bed again with all normal physical senses fully operating. There had been no discontinuity in consciousness from the moment I lay down in bed until I got up after the vibrations faded. If it wasn't real—just a hallucination or dream—I was in trouble. I could not tell where wake-fulness stopped and dreaming began. There are thousands of people in mental institutions who have just that problem. The second time I attempted to disassociate deliberately, I was successful. Again I went up to ceiling height. However, this time I experienced an overwhelmingly strong sexual drive and could think of nothing else. Embarrassed and irritated at myself because of my inability to control this tide of emotion, I returned back into my physical body. It wasn't until some five episodes later that I discovered the secret of such control. The evident importance of sexuality in the whole subject is so great that it is covered in detail later. At the time, it was an exasperating mental block which held me within the confines of the room where my physical body lay. With no other applicable terminology, I began to call the condition the Second State, and the other, non-physical body we seem to possess the Second Body. So far this terminology fits as well as anything else. It wasn't until the first evidential experience which could be checked that I seriously considered these to be anything but daydreams, hallucinations, a neurotic aberration, the beginnings of schizophrenia, fantasies caused by self-hypnosis, or worse. That first evidential experience was indeed a sledgehammer blow. If I accepted the data as fact, it struck hard at nearly all of my life experience to that date, my training, my concepts, and my sense of values. Most of all, it shattered my faith in the totality and certainty of our culture's scientific knowledge. I was sure our scientists had all the answers. Or most of them. Conversely, if I rejected what was evident to me, if to no one else, then I would also be rejecting what I respected so greatly: that mankind's