GRAHAM NICHOLLS: Graham Nicholls believes that everyone has the potential to have an out of body experience (OBE). In fact, he offers private sessions to help people make that happen. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience (and hundreds of personal OBEs), Graham shares with us what it’s like to leave our bodies by extending our consciousness. Graham had his first OBE at the age of 12 (unintentionally), and then learned how to induce intentional OBEs about a year later. In this video conversation, Graham Nicholls describes what it’s like to leave our bodies, how we can diminish our fear around OBEs, what it’s like to interconnect with plants and animals, and why OBEs are significant in our investigation into the afterlife.
Graham Nicholls is an English author, artist and expert on out of body experiences (OBEs). His exploration of these areas began when he was a twelve-year-old boy after having a series of fleeting experiences of floating a few feet above the ground. Around a year later he heard the term ‘out of body experience’ for the first time, and this led him to buy a scientific book on the subject. Graham committed to practicing the basic steps outlined in that book for inducing an OBE. And after six months of daily practice, Graham intentionally left his body for the first time.
Shortly after, as a part of his growing interest in spirituality, he became vegetarian, having already committed himself to abstain from tobacco, alcohol and recreational drugs at the age of just ten years old. A few years later he traveled to India for the first time and explored the practice of yoga and came into contact with Jainism, which with its focus on non-violence left a lasting impression on him.
Due to his growing awareness of science and technology, Graham also began working with areas that examine psychical experience in an objective and rational way. This led him to become a member of the Society for Psychical Research and to correspond with Dean Radin, Tom Campbell, Dr. Peter Fenwick, Dr. Jeffery Long and others. He has also organized and conducted a series of telepathy experiments with author and biologist Rupert Sheldrake.
In 2010 Graham Nicholls completed work on his first book, Avenues of the Human Spirit, a compelling true account of his hundreds of out of body experiences and the spiritual insights they’ve revealed. Within a month of signing a publishing deal on that first book, he was commissioned by Llewellyn to write his second book, Navigating the Out of Body Experience: Radical New Techniques, which was published in April 2012.
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Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
Check out Bob Olson’s other sites: BestPsychicDirectory.com (a directory of hundreds of psychics & mediums by location with reviews & Instant Readings) & BestPsychicMediums.com (his personal recommended list of tested psychics and mediums) or visit Bob’s Facebook Page. Bob also has a popular workshop for psychics and mediums at PsychicMediumWorkshop.com.
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Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Hi everybody, Bob Olson here with Afterlife TV. This is where we search for evidence of life after death and ask the meaningful questions around that subject. Welcome back to Season Two. This is our first episode of Season Two. I’m really excited about it. I hope you are as well.
I wanted this session to be just really special. I wanted it to be really special, and so it’s really hard. Who do you choose as a guest on your first episode into the new season? Well, I think we’ve got a really special one here. His name is Graham Nicholls, and he has written a book called Navigating the Out of Body Experience. I have it here. I’ll show it to you a couple times as we do this. There it is there, great book.
Graham sent this to me, and I didn’t know what to expect. I got into it, just couldn’t stop. It’s one of those page turners. You don’t want to put it down. I really loved it. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. We’re going to talk about out of body experiences. There are a lot of people who have near-death experiences who have left their body. We haven’t talked with anybody who has just been an expert on this subject of out of body experiences, so here we are.
Welcome, Graham Nicholls. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Graham Nicholls: You’re welcome. It’s really good to talk to you.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Now, I’ve watched a few interviews with you on your website, grahamnicholls.com. There are two L’s on the end of Nicholls. The one thing that I have noticed and other people have suggested as well is that you’re just very calm and relaxed and grounding, and you make me feel really calm and relaxed and grounding.
We’ll let the audience know my internet was down. All morning my internet was down. I called Graham to let him know. I called him on my cell phone, and he laughed. He was like, that happens, yeah; easygoing, relaxed guy, and made me calm about it. Then sure enough, a few minutes after we hung up the internet pops back up. So here we are doing the interview.
I think this is something that a lot of people are aware of, out of body experiences. Few people have ever really thought about it in terms of the way that you teach it, which is, one, it’s a spiritual experience. Two, it’s an experience that teaches us so much about life and death, which we’re going to get to in a moment, and the oneness of everything.
For those people who really don’t fully understand what it is, maybe you could give us a definition of what an out of body experience is.
Graham Nicholls: Okay. Well, an out of body experience, I suppose the clearest definition I can give is it’s a complete multisensory experience of feeling yourself outside of the body at usually another location. Often the classic experience will be coming out of your body and looking down at yourself from above, almost like a spirit or a ghost form, something like that. It’s very much like what you hear in near-death experience accounts, but it happens when you’re completely healthy and everything is normal in your life. But just it’s some unusual occurrence that you’ll have this experience of being out of the body.
Often they happen spontaneously, but many people develop their skills to do it as well. So there are lots of different variations in how the experience can happen, but usually they’re the common ones, being out of the body looking at yourself, maybe moving around a familiar environment, things like that. Sometimes to a very far off location as well, but they’re rarer in the early stages of the experience. But as people get more comfortable with having out of body experiences, then sometimes they try to go out further, even out of the planet and to other levels.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: A lot of people often might call it astral projection. Is there a difference between astral projection and out of body experience? If not, why do you obviously prefer the out of body experience phrase?
Graham Nicholls: I think the difference really is the astral projection term generally refers to more the esoteric traditions and the historical approaches to out of body experiences going back to theosophy and the occult traditions and different areas like that. I think with my approach I really wanted to bring as much of the science into what I was doing as I could and really try to strip away the belief systems and see what the underlying essence of the experience was, try to get to the truth essentially of what might really be going on.
In the early days when I was learning about the experience, I did often look into esoteric writings, and there are some really interesting and useful insights in those traditions. But at the same time, they can also give you ideas that maybe aren’t so helpful, and they can be limiting ideas. So I wanted to try and find what might be the real essence, the true stuff, as opposed to the stuff that maybe is more just another belief system, like there are so many out there.
So I think that’s why I lean towards out of body experience because it’s just descriptive of what it’s like, what happens, rather than suggesting something else. Astral projection suggests astral, meaning like a star, and projection, that was actually not a good thing as well when I was learning because this idea of projection gave me this sense that it was all about focusing and forcing it to happen almost. You had to project this thing out, when in a way I think it’s almost the opposite. It’s almost like letting go to the experience. So yeah, in a way I felt the term wasn’t so helpful, so I went more for OBE.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You did mention you have a foundation in the scientific as well. I mean you have a fascination with it obviously, and you cover a lot of that in your book. You cover a lot of the questions that people have about science and even skepticism, all that stuff. You cover a lot of that information, first of all, in the book, in other interviews that you’ve done, so I’m not going to get into it too much.
I think as much as our audience loves the scientific as well, there’s some things like what is this experience like; what does it feel like; what does it look like and smell like or whatever, that I didn’t see in some of the other interviews. So I want to go in that direction.
But the other two terms that maybe people get confused with a little bit are near-death experiences and remote viewing. Two very different things, but could you sort of tell us how the out of body experience is related to near-death experiences and remote viewing?
Graham Nicholls: Okay. Well, I think remote viewing is more of an out of body perception, maybe is another way of putting it, where instead of the full experience of being separate to the body it’s just the perceptual part of the experience. So you might have sensory awareness, you might have visuals, you might even have other senses, but you’re always aware of the body at the same time. So it’s kind of more of an information coming in. It’s more of a receiving rather than an experience of going out or being externalized in some way. So I think that’s how I would describe the difference.
But I think with all these things they go along a line in a way. The remote viewing is one level, and I think even within the out of body experience are different levels and different degrees to which the experience can be fully multi-sensory. Sometimes it can be a mixture of impressions.
For example, you might have very strong visual impressions but not much of the other senses, or sometimes you might just hear and not really have much in the way of visuals. So it can be different in the degree to how you encounter the journey that you go on in any particular experience.
I think with near-death experiences in a way it’s the top of that spectrum of experiences that we’re aware of. It’s where all of those sensory components, as far as what I’ve seen from what I’ve read, I’ve never had a near-death experience, but from what I’ve read and people I’ve talked to it’s more of this all-encompassing experience where because the body is disconnected essentially or non-active to some degree, then it allows for the full externalization of consciousness or spirit or whatever it is that is undergoing that experience.
So I think that would really be the difference. I think it’s a matter of degree really. They’re along a spectrum, a line of different levels.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: How similar would you say the out of body experience is to the near-death experience, or what are the differences?
Graham Nicholls: I think they can be extremely similar. I think often what people describe in a near-death experience sounds exactly like things that I’ve experienced. For example, coming out of the body seeing myself and then moving off towards a light which feels like boundless compassion, love energy in a sense. It’s very hard to put it into words, but I’ve experienced something very similar to the accounts that I’ve heard like that; also, this idea of interconnection in that experience, this sense of minds all being connected in one.
So I think that’s all very similar, and also the way of looking down at yourself and seeing the whole scene often accurately to how it is in the real world. So I think in a way a near-death experience is activated through the body trauma, if you like. But an out of body experience is essentially the same experience but just not initiated through that kind of trauma. It’s something that in a way it’s often best initiated through a highly healthy situation.
So it’s almost like they’re two ends of the spectrum in terms of your physicality. So one happens when you’re almost at the brink of death, and the other happens almost when you’re in a heightened highly energized state.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s what really excited me about this whole idea. I’ve talked with a lot of different people. I’ve interviewed a bunch of people who have had near-death experiences. A lot of people I know are like, that would be really cool except for the near-death part. To have that experience seems very life changing. I always thought, yeah, but the cost is not worth the risk or the risk is not worth the cost. I don’t know.
But obviously that’s not even something you can plan for, you can’t create, you can’t induce on your own and know that you’re going to live. So all of a sudden your book comes and I start doing some research on you. I’m like, well, this is it. This is what people want. This is the near-death experience without the death part. How fascinating it really is, and we’re going to learn more as we go along. I’m so excited about this, as you may be able to tell.
Let me just start off with we have just under 30,000 Facebook fans, and we’ve got a lot of Twitter fans. I’ve asked people if they’ve had out of body experiences and that sort of thing, and a lot of them have. It seems as though the majority only seem to have one in their lifetime or maybe one or two. That might be about it. Is that common? Is that sort of what happens is people who have had them, it sort of just happens very accidentally and it’s very brief? What’s your research on that?
Graham Nicholls: Yeah, often people will just have the one spontaneously. If those people then pursue the area and try to learn more about it and try to induce them, they’ve probably got a higher chance than the average person of having more experiences. But most people just don’t go down that avenue. But yeah, the average is to have one, maybe two or three experiences maximum, in a spontaneous way.
But then there are the people who research the area and start to have them in a more consistent way. But I think often that requires a certain degree of changing your life to some level in order to facilitate that in order to create the circumstances for that to happen consistently.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Right, exactly, and obviously something you’ve done yourself and started at a very young age, which we’ll get to in a bit. So I was talking to a friend recently, two friends, and they both had a very brief experience. They were both very similar.
So what happened was, just as you’ve described in the book, it was not in the sleeping state. It was more in the very relaxed, maybe starting to fall asleep state that all of the sudden this one girl starts feeling that she was leaving her body. She felt as though she was starting to go above her body. Then fear immediately brought her self back, boom. That was it. That was her experience, very brief, but she gets a sense of what that’s like, interested. Is fear usually the thing that brings people back, that stops people from having a longer experience?
Graham Nicholls: Oh sure, yeah. Unfortunately, it’s a real thing that has to be overcome, I think, to really move forward with the experiences. It was definitely something that was hard for me just as much as the people I work with. It’s very common as a problem. It’s kind of natural in a way though, so it’s very hard to completely get rid of that initially.
The only way you can overcome fears is really to just become more comfortable with the idea, to become more experienced with being in that kind of state or at least imagining being in that state, almost like when people describe doing something that they find frightening, like public speaking or something like that. If they rehearse it in their mind, often that can just help to make them more comfortable with the idea.
I think OBEs can be similar if you start to be comfortable with it by imagining going through the process, reading other people’s accounts, and just getting to know the experiences are generally very positive and not fearful in any way. I haven’t really come across anyone who’s had a negative out of body experience. I mean maybe the interpretation if they felt scared because they thought they were dying or something like that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: That’s right. In so many spiritual experiences it’s our interpretation of it that often will make it a scary thing, where someone else could have the exact same experience and because of their beliefs might be a little bit different. They tend to just not be scared by it. They see it with a different paradigm.
It’s interesting that you brought up the public speaking thing because I was thinking in one way people hearing your story and listening to you, it will help them overcome their fears. I’m sure it will. But is it really more just doing it that really helps people overcome it? Is that really kind of what is necessary?
Graham Nicholls: Yeah, I think you can definitely diminish the fears by different techniques like visualization and whatever, but I think, yeah, ultimately getting comfortable with the different states that you’ll come into. Like the vibrational state, for example, some people find it frightening at first. Some people find it exciting. It can be very different interpretations to it.
But that’s often the first sign that people will undergo that gives them this sense that, oh, there’s an out of body experience coming, or it might be about to happen. Often that’s when they become like, oh my God, this is actually going to happen.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, yeah.
Graham Nicholls: It’s at that point in a way that they need to be most relaxed and go with the process as much as possible and not be focusing on the physical body as well, even though all this activity is happening around their body. So it’s a bit of a trick to try and be aware of something else while your body is surrounded by energy and vibrations.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. Just so other people know, without having you tell the story I’m going to give a little away, because you’ve talked about it in other interviews. Like you said, you’ve had your own fears, and some of that meant once you were less fearful about leaving your body, you didn’t want to leave your bedroom. Then once you got beyond that you went into your home, but I’m sure there was a certain fear about leaving the home, right? So there are just these different stages that even you went through before you were ready to really take some long journeys. Is that correct? Did I paraphrase that correctly?
Graham Nicholls: Yeah, totally. It was a long process really. I mean although I had some spontaneous experiences when I was young, I wasn’t really a natural in a sense. It took a lot of work and effort for me to learn to do it in a consistent way. I think the thing when I couldn’t really go out of my bedroom or out of my home initially, I didn’t associate it at the time with fear. In a way I just accepted that maybe that was the limits of the experience at the time. But now looking back, I would generally say, yes, I think that was a fear-related response.
I much more now see these experiences as they are colored by the consciousness that we’re operating through and the fears, the beliefs, all of those things. If we think about it in terms of it is a consciousness extended beyond the body, then really all of those things that are within our consciousness, within our minds, would become a part of the framework of how we experience things. That seems to make total sense to me, and that seems backed up by what happened when I had these experiences earlier on.
Also, now they’re much more I just kind of phase in and out. I don’t even really have very much the sense of leaving the body. It’s more I go into this almost blackout phase. Then I’ll find myself at another location. It’s interesting. More and more of my students, I’m finding, are having a similar experience where they’ll go into this blackout phase and then they’ll find themselves at another location. They’re not even having this sense of exiting the body so much. That happens with some people but not others.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: So that’s more of a beginner’s kind of experience where you feel yourself leave the body and see your body and that sort of thing? Is that more of an early stage OBE?
Graham Nicholls: I’m not sure I’d say that because sometimes I do still experience the body and I do experience the exiting. I think it’s more that it’s maybe the level or the frequency that you’re operating on. That can happen at any stage in your development but probably does happen more in the early stages because we identify more with our bodies early on, I think.
As we develop we have that sense of self or identity located in the body less and less as we go through the process of connecting with those high levels or those spiritual levels. It seems less us in a way. We don’t think, oh, I am my body, anymore. We think of ourselves as more than that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It’s interesting. I mean so much of the things that you’re talking about just remind me it’s sort of a metaphor for life. It just seems like metaphors for life, like even the idea of I didn’t leave my room because I just never really thought about it and that idea.
I remember one time I was stuck on a roof. I was working up on a roof, and my ladder fell down. I stayed up on that roof for hours, and there was a ladder on the back that some other guy had left on the back. I didn’t even look because it didn’t even cross my mind that there might be a ladder somewhere else on the roof. So I waited for hours for someone to come home to rescue me. Just that idea that so much of life is like that, we don’t move beyond our limits because we don’t think to.
Graham Nicholls: We make huge assumptions about how the world actually operates and works. Once we start to let go of those, suddenly all these new avenues, doors, open up to us. So yeah, I think it is a great metaphor for life.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It really is. That’s why this work that you’re doing is so important because you’re teaching people what is possible with the out of body experience. I mean really, I know there have been others, but even the books that you were reading early on when you were 12 years old, I mean they were really limited. They were really basic, vague kind of things.
You have described it in such a way that people can really understand the out of body experience, and then they can work with you to help understand it as well. I think it’s just a new frontier. You’re allowing people to do something that like we didn’t even really realize we could do before. So I really like that about the work that you’re doing.
I would love for you to share some of your experiences. So along this line, maybe you could give us a sense, what is this like? So I have some things that I know that you’ve talked about or written about in the past where you have left your body and experienced these different things. I heard you talk about as you’re sort of out of your body traveling through town or whatever, traveling across the lands, you recognized that buildings had frequencies. Tell us a little bit about that. I think that’s fascinating.
Graham Nicholls: I think it is one of the most fascinating things actually because I think it gives an extra insight into how our reality works in a way. But yeah, sometimes when I have an out of body experience things won’t look exactly like they do in physical reality. It’s almost like I’m seeing them in terms of their auras or some kind of energy frequency.
The most common seems to be associated with the age and the accumulated emotional energy at that particular location. So very old buildings especially will have a very strong energy signature that it’s almost like they’re glowing with some kind of emotional information. It’s almost like you can get a sense of what the nature of that building might be. I mean this might be along the lines of when psychics go into a building and they pick up particular information about a location and who might’ve lived there, something happened there, that kind of thing.
It’s almost like seeing this in a very visual sense when you’re in the out of body experience. So a tree, for example, will have a very particular kind of energy about it, in my experience more crystalline, more yellowish-white, more like a high frequency like it’s alive essentially; whereas I can think of one example, it was an old hospital that was very near to where I grew up. I think it was Victorian. I remember in one experience I moved over that old hospital, and the whole building seemed to have these much more earthy colors, sort of reds.
It seemed much more that there was a mixture of things there like suffering but also this sense of health and wellbeing and giving as well. So that was a very interesting building because of that, because it, I suppose like any hospital, has this combination of birth, death, all these different factors that the people experience within the walls of that kind of place.
You might not necessarily think of that on a day to day level, but when you’re in this altered state of the out of body experience and you go near to something like that you suddenly realize, of course, that makes total sense that a building, if these levels exist, then they would give off this information or these patterns to us.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Did you ever go over a jail or a prison in contrast, we’ll say, to the hospital or a church or something? When I heard that, I was thinking of all the different types of buildings that you might go over. Again, prisons, some of them are very old, same thing, so you’d have the age there but obviously a completely different energy, right?
Graham Nicholls: I’ve experienced a similar energy with a prison but not in the out of body state. I once visited a very old Victorian prison in London where I grew up. There I had very interesting contrasting energies, just like I felt myself; it’s a very instinctual thing the way I experienced that.
But I have experienced churches in the out of body state and other temples, not just Christian churches but also in India as well, places like that. They have, again, this more crystalline energy, more yellowish-white, I would say, more along the lines with nature somehow, which is interesting as well. I wouldn’t necessarily associate the two in my mind, but in the out of body experiences they often have that kind of feeling about them but maybe more expansive. It’s quite hard to describe really.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Sure. I think it’s an interesting thing for people to think about and recognize this idea that everything’s giving off some form of energy. We understand the life forms, plants and animals and people, but even buildings and stuff like that also have their own energy frequency to them. You talked about a tree, and I know you talked about it in your books and with other people. Tell us about this interconnecting with a tree. What is that like?
So let me get an understanding of what this is first. You leave your body. You’re this extended consciousness of yourself, right? You come across a tree. I know you use the word interconnect, so are you going inside the tree or are you just somehow merging energies with the tree? If so, what does that feel like? I know you’re very visual, so I’ll try to get you to get beyond. I like the visual, but what does it feel like? Is there a smell? Is there a taste? What else is there that we can get from that tree? Tell me about that.
Graham Nicholls: Well, if I give an example, I can’t remember exactly experiencing it so much with a tree, but there’s a very powerful experience I had with a flower, a small plant. How it felt was initially I was over the treetops, and that was just very much like in terms of feeling I had this sense of moving through the air. I had this sense of looking down over the trees. It was a sense of sunlight. It was a very vivid, intense sunlight, and a sense of warmth on my body to some degree. So I did have this sense almost like I was a body at that point in time.
Then I went down through the treetops and there was all this energy, which seemed to be blended with the daylight. I couldn’t really 100 percent tell you whether it was sunlight and energy or whether it was just how I experienced sunlight in that state. But it felt much more expansive and much more energetic than if I physically walked out into the sunlight. So I went down and I was in amongst all the trees. Then I saw this flower, but then it was like somehow my consciousness singled out this flower.
Then it was like I zoomed in on it essentially. So it’s like my whole being became completely focused on the details so that that was very much a visual thing initially. But then as I looked at the details, this is very common in remote viewing and out of body experiences actually, but when you look at something often you might zoom right into it. It’s almost like in a physical sense you just look, and unless you physically move nothing will happen. But when you’re operating in this state where it’s almost like pure consciousness, you just can go right into the essence of something.
So looking at that particular flower, then I started to see the detail in a much more vivid way than I could physically. Then it was like my being was being drawn into it. It was like not so much maybe I was interconnected with it, but more like I was experiencing what it would be to be that plant, so feeling the nutrients. I remember this sense of feeling more vital and more alive because the nutrients and the fluids were coming up through the stem, which was like my body in this experience.
Then this awareness of being rooted to the soil as well and this network of roots underneath and just this multicellular awareness. I think a lot of the experience both with plants, both on sort of other levels, multidimensional levels or whatever they are, and also with animals and other forms of mammalian life, I’ve had this sense that they don’t just operate as a singular individual; even I don’t see humans like that anymore.
Within these kinds of experiences it’s almost like it’s the lattice of connections, nodes, points of information, and when you connect to one it’s almost like you’re connecting to all those other ones. That’s very much how the experience with the flower was, but then all of these other kinds of experiences you get this breaking down of the I, the individual, this more expansiveness, which I think is what religions and near-death experiences and people across the world are describing in lots of different types of experience.
But I think the out of body experience is an amazing way of connecting with that because it’s the most direct way in a way of moving away from body awareness into that larger consciousness.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Incredible. Yes, I totally agree. People who have had near-death experiences, like I said, the same thing, usually it was they were focusing in on people. But like Anita Moorjani, who I talked with, she focused on her brother. It was sort of the same thing. As soon as she like zoomed in on her brother it was just like she knew exactly everything that he was feeling, what he was doing, just zoomed in on him in a similar way that you did with the flower. I mean what a wonderful benefit to the out of body experience to be able to do that.
What you described about that flower, I can’t imagine anybody listening that isn’t fascinated. It’s mind-blowing, and then it’s like, oh, I want to have that experience. I want to have that experience. Now, I don’t imagine you can have an experience like that and then it changes your relationships with flowers, I would guess. I mean can you go and cut a flower now? I mean I don’t know.
Graham Nicholls: It makes you a lot more aware of our role in nature for sure, and experiences like that did lead me to go vegan and to try to live in a more nonviolent way where I show compassion and connection with all of the life around me and cause as little harm as possible, I suppose. Yeah, it’s very hard to not see those things as a part of the whole process of how you live your life after an experience like that.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: You know, the time flies by so fast. So you also describe a similar thing with the mouse. Maybe a little more briefly you can just tell us about sort of doing the same thing with a—was it a mouse or a mole?
Graham Nicholls: A rodent of some description. I don’t know exactly what it was, but yeah, that was almost a recording of its entire life or experiencing its entire life. I started off I was just meditating in the woods. I was looking out. It was dark at the time, and I was looking out into the darkness. I started to pick up little points of light. Then I started to realize that those points of light within the undergrowth of the forest were actually consciousness. They were points of consciousness, small, small creatures within the undergrowth.
Then I started to feel that I was one of them and I was connected with them. Then I felt this sense of pure instinct. It wasn’t like I was thinking with the same kind of consciousness anymore. It was like I was now experiencing the world around me—it’s so hard to describe. It’s almost like autopilot but with some sense of all of the other creatures as well. It was like I had telepathy and I knew where they were. So it was like we were working as a group, as a unit.
Then I went through this whole process of experiencing its life and going into its burrow under the ground and all of the different elements that made up its instinct for survival and its awareness of its environment around. Its awareness of smell was very acute. Its awareness of fear of daylight, essentially because it was vulnerable in daylight, that was very, very strong in the experience. Then ultimately its death when it was killed by an eagle or a bird of prey of some description. So it was the whole life cycle essentially.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Now, that’s interesting because I was actually a little confused by that before. So was this a live animal though that you were sort of focusing in on at that time? How would you experience the death? Was it a former death, or was it not a live animal and it was an energy of one? Maybe you know, maybe you don’t know. I don’t know.
Graham Nicholls: It’s very hard to say. All I can do is describe how I felt. I suppose it would have to be some kind of previous experience, but then that opens up all these questions and ideas in terms of does information about our lives continue on that can be transformed into a reincarnation or into the afterlife. So I see it as a creature maybe that had already lived, but I was somehow connecting with the essence of that life. But it’s very hard to know completely.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Definitely. There was a lot more I wanted to ask you. You’ve traveled to other planets as well, right? I imagine that would take a long time to describe. It just must be an amazing experience to be able to do that.
Graham Nicholls: Well, yeah, I mean I think the most moving ones have probably been being in the upper atmosphere of the earth and being near to the earth and just looking down on the place that you originated and seeing the continents and the seas and the oceans, just getting this sense of all the life and that you’re down there somewhere and that there’s all these millions of other lives. It’s very humbling, I suppose, seeing something like that.
In terms of further space, I haven’t encountered anything like aliens or anything like that. I’m sorry to disappoint.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Some of the people out there, yeah.
Graham Nicholls: But I have nevertheless been completely awestruck by just how huge the universe appears to be when I’ve explored and gone on these experiences, on these journeys. But usually it’s been a rare occurrence that I’ve been able to go to that kind of level and shown that far.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. People talk about being connected to your body by a silver cord or something. Is that sort of the idea?
Graham Nicholls: I haven’t encountered the silver cord. I know some people do experience that. I’m not sure what my view on that is, but it might just be, as we were talking about earlier, this projection that we identify with our body much more strongly in the early stages. Maybe that connection, that identification that we have, is shown through a silver cord or something like that. But I think often people won’t experience the silver cord, and I haven’t experienced it.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: At any time if you wanted to go back to your body, you can do that?
Graham Nicholls: Yeah, sure. I mean the difficult part is usually trying to stay away for longer, with the average experience being about 20 minutes, I’d say. Most people are trying to keep away from their body because they want to do more. They want to see more. They want to go further.
But I think in a way your default awareness is in your body, so it’s harder to keep away from the body. In the same sense as leaving the body requires learning a process, I think also staying away from the body for an extended period of time needs a bit of practice.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Is there an awareness of time when you’re there, or does 20 minutes feel like three hours?
Graham Nicholls: It can do, yeah, very much so. Twenty minutes rarely feels like 20 minutes because I suppose you’re very excited and exhilarated. Things that can seem very mundane in physical reality can be completely fascinating when you’re in the out of body experience.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. So with the little time we have left, let’s talk about how this relates to the afterlife. Let me ask you this. Well, let me just ask you a very general question. What do out of body experiences teach us about the afterlife? You can go any direction you want with that.
Graham Nicholls: Okay. I think they give us the opportunity to explore that level directly really. That’s what I would say. I think that not commonly but often within my experiences I will reach areas that seem to be what we would describe as the afterlife. For example, the Summerlands are often described in different traditions, this place that seems earthlike but is also saturated with sunlight and nature and natural type environment and populated by people who seem to have passed on.
That would probably be the one that is often experienced in other people’s descriptions and also in my own. So that would be one key level. I think when going to that sort of level again it can reconfirm that there is more to our consciousness than just the end when we physically die.
I think some of my experiences as well have given me some confirmation that these levels that I’ve reached are also objective to some degree. Like one that happened with a plane crash where I saw a large group of people who seemed confused as if they’d just died, and they were all in a large group. They were all at a distance, and there was this very acute sense of confusion and not knowing what had happened to them, what was going on.
Then when the experience ended and I returned to my body, not long afterwards I heard there had been this large plane crash and that a large group of people had died in this plane crash. Although I can’t confirm it 100 percent, it did seem very likely that what I’d seen was related, was the people who died in the plane crash.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Could you tell if they were aware of each other?
Graham Nicholls: They did seem to be aware of each other. They didn’t seem to be aware of me, or maybe I was just too at a distance. It’s hard to say, but I didn’t notice them being aware of me. But they seemed to be aware of each other.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: What did they look like to you?
Graham Nicholls: Because I was at a distance, I couldn’t see very much detail, but they looked like figures. I’d have to check my diary to be totally sure of all the details, but I think they didn’t have any injuries. I didn’t notice anything that would maybe give away that they’d just been in an accident or anything like that.
Emotionally they were giving off this confusion. They just seemed like normal people, like a group of mixed, normal people, but a very large group to all be in the same kind of emotional state and to all be in that one location. It felt very much like the first level, if you like. It felt like the point of which you would get to right after having gone through death experience.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah. Again, a lot of near-death experience people have talked about that, that first whoa, where am I? That’s often when they see their body and go, oh. Can you do this by intention? So for instance, you talked about the Summerlands. Some people might call it the afterlife or the spirit world or a level of that. Other people have written about the Summerlands, as you talk about, as you mentioned.
Let’s just say obviously not at my level, but at your level where you are able to go in and out of the out of body experience, could you set the intention to go to the Summerlands and actually have that experience, you think?
Graham Nicholls: For me personally, I’ve found it quite difficult to get to those kinds of levels. I think probably people like mediums or people who are more working with that kind of level on a day to day level, I think probably they might find it easier to get to that level, or maybe we’re just dealing with something because it is really intended for people who have disconnected completely from the physical level, because it maybe requires that, maybe it is just more difficult to reach in that way.
When I have attempted to get to that kind of level, it’s required almost like a purification of myself, so some degree of fasting or really focusing on what I’m trying to do. Then I’ve been able to reach back to that other level to some degree, but it’s had mixed success in my experience. But I don’t know of many people who’ve really experimented and tried to do that, so it’s another area that I want to explore more and to see if it is possible to reach that level in this way. So these are all exciting areas really that are still there to be explored.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: They really are. It excites me as well. You talk a little bit about how people could use the OBE as a way to communicate with deceased loved ones. You even give five steps or something, some instruction as to how that might help them do that, accomplish that.
Graham Nicholls: That’s the purification process I was talking about.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Okay, which is so interesting because years ago when I first started researching this field I ran into a woman who was a medium. She was a riot. She was funny. But she seemed to believe that by eating bacon it helped her to have the out of body experience. So I always wondered about that. Then you’re talking about purification. I’m not sure how bacon fits into that.
But anyways, what kind of success have you seen with maybe even students of yours, clients, who have wanted to communicate or meet with—this isn’t just communicate, right? This is really meet with deceased loved ones.
Graham Nicholls: Potentially meet them, yeah. I think what tends to happen from people I’ve worked with is they describe almost like a symbolic connection. It’s almost like the loved one sends them a message in some way that can be in terms of where they go within the out of body experience. So it’s almost like they’ll be drawn to a location that maybe they’ve never actually been to, but it might relate to something very important in the life of the loved one. Then the next day they might not necessarily connect things, but then they’ll suddenly have this moment where they’ll realize.
For example, even in my own experience my mother’s closest friend was a woman who was born in Cuba. She was of Jamaican descent but born in Cuba. I knew her all my life. She looked after me as a child, and I was very sad when she died. I noted it down in my spiritual diary on the day that she died and wrote a bit about her. Then I didn’t have any out of body experiences for maybe a couple of weeks.
Then I had this out of body experience where I found myself moving over Cuba and Jamaica. It was a very beautiful experience, very vivid. I had the sense of the oceans, the feeling of the sun, the feeling of moving over the different areas, and the small fisheries and all the different people along the coast.
Then when I returned to my body I didn’t actually think at the time that this had anything to do with her. I didn’t make the connection in my head. But then when I opened my diary I saw that the last thing I’d written in my diary was that she died. Then suddenly I realized that this was directly related in some way. It was like I’d gone to her birthplace essentially, or she’d drawn me there. Suddenly I felt this intense presence or feeling of her as a result of that.
So that’s similar to the kinds of things people describe and also sometimes visitations as well. They’ll see a figure. They’ll see their loved one as a figure close by. So it’s almost like they’ll visit them. So that can be quite common. But by going through that process of focusing on their loved one and being engaged with them, it’s almost like they’re sending that request out. Sometimes it will happen in a symbolic way or going out of body, and sometimes it will happen where that loved one will actually visit them in some way.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: New frontiers, no question about it. New things that I’m sure you’re going to be looking into. I can’t wait to hear. In a year I can’t wait to hear how things have changed for you and what you’ve learned. As a final message, I know this is really hard for anybody to do, but what have you learned or gained spiritually, the big message, from doing this work that you’ve done that maybe we can inspire others to do it too.
Graham Nicholls: I think the big message for me has just been maybe to let go of my assumptions and let go of my preoccupations with the way I am, let go of my focus on myself in a way and just explore and see what’s out there and find that sense of interconnection and that wider consciousness. I think we have so much potential in terms of our consciousness still to tap, and I think the out of body experience for me has been a completely amazing, transformative way of reaching that and just learning, seeing every day as a learning process really.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: How often do you have an out of body experience?
Graham Nicholls: I tend to have maybe two a month at the moment.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Wow, that’s a lot. You’ve had a lot. I mean just so the audience knows, it’ll be in the paragraph underneath this video, but you’ve been doing this for 25 years, right?
Graham Nicholls: Yeah, since the first ones when I was 12.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: What are you, 36, 37, now?
Graham Nicholls: Yeah.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Yeah, phew, that’s a long time. Fascinating story, obviously. I tried to cover some different stuff that people wouldn’t hear in some of the other interviews, things that excited me that I wanted to ask you. Boy, I just wish I had a whole weekend I could just fire questions off at you and hear about your experiences.
This is a great book for people to read and learn about these experiences, but not just read and learn about them, learn how they can have these experiences themselves. There’s a whole section. It’s like a third of the book that you give different ideas of how people can induce out of body experiences for themselves, which is whoa.
Graham Nicholls: Well, that’s what I want them to do. I want people to really be able to do this for themselves and to try and explore their lives, I suppose, in the same way it’s been for me.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: It’s so cool. You also have another book, Navigating the Out of Body Experience. There’s more about your story, just more of a storyline with some conclusions at the end, that I kept hearing about.
Graham Nicholls: Avenues of the Human Spirit.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: Avenues of the Human Spirit. Oh, I just read this title. That’s good. I’m glad I wrote that title down. But yeah, Avenues of the Human Spirit, I’ve heard a lot of great things about that book as well but completely different, more about your story so that people can understand, oh man, if this guy can do it, I can do it.
You just come from very ordinary beginnings. You struggled. You had a lot of struggles in your life. It’s not like any of this has come easy, but it’s just fascinating that a 12-year-old would have an experience and then want to repeat that experience and then spend 25 or more years just having it over and over and over again. Great story, I recommend it to everybody.
The links are down below, grahamnicholls.com. Nicholls has two L’s at the end. They can just click on that and go to your website, other interviews there. They can just learn more about you. I can’t thank you enough. What a great way to start off Season 2. I’m excited. I hope we can have you back because I do feel like we could have you back once a month and we wouldn’t cover all this stuff. Anyways, thank you, Graham, so much. I appreciate it.
Graham Nicholls: Thank you.
Bob Olson, Afterlife TV: All right, bye.
Graham Nicholls: Bye.
Afterlife TV is presented by Afterlife Investigator & Psychic Medium Researcher Bob Olson, who is the author of Answers about the Afterlife: A Private Investigator’s 15-Year Research Unlocks the Mysteries of Life after Death.
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