EXTRAPHYSICAL LUCIDITY

IN SEARCH OF THE TIME LOST DURING SLEEP

The phenomenon of the Out-of-Body Experience (OBE) or the projection of the consciousness outside the human body (popularly known as astral travel) is a natural occurrence that human beings have experienced since ancient times and is currently being researched. Brazil is in the forefront of this work owing to the efforts of the International Institute of Projectiology (IIP), an independent, private, non-profit institution of research and education founded and headed by Waldo Vieira, M.D., the progenitor of the sciences of Conscientiology and Projectiology. This article will explore some of the basic concepts of the new sciences of Conscientiology and Projectiology, and will introduce the work of the IIP.

Conscientiology and Projectiology:

Two sciences that study the consciousness

Recently proposed in Brazil, Conscientiology and Projectiology have been gaining ground internationally as leading-edge non-conventional sciences which are re-establishing the study of consciousness within the context of science. Science discarded the concept of the consciousness approximately 300 years ago, when it embraced the materialist-reductionist-newtonian-cartesian-physicalist paradigm - now recognized by many as out-dated. Conscientiology and Projectiology offer the consciential paradigm as the inevitable contemporary successor.

Conscientiology, as the word indicates, studies the consciousness and all of its attributes and manifestations, and analyzes it in the most systematic way possible. Conscientiology offers a more comprehensive approach than Psychology, for example, as it extends its investigations beyond the boundaries of physical manifestation, addressing such areas as the classification of evolutive levels, consciential types, the cosmoethic (the extraphysical ethic) and strategies for the attainment of consciential maturity and serenity.

While the approach of Conscientiology is a broad one, Projectiology focuses on the practical application of interdimensional phenomena. The overlying objective of Projectiology is the study of the consciousness in its various degrees of discoincidence (discoincidence being the condition of the partial or full projection of the consciousness from the human body in one or more of its vehicles).

Projectiology defends the hypothesis of the objective body which holds that conscious projection (CP) is a manifestation of the consciousness outside of the physical body achieved through the utilization of a subtle, but real, body (the psychosoma, or astral body), and is not a mere oniric (dream) activity related to dreams and hallucinations, as is argued by many researchers who are not conscious projectors. Projectiology studies the constitution and mechanisms of the holosoma (the four vehicles of the consciousness - the soma or human body, the holochakra or etheric double, the psychosoma or astral body and the mentalsoma or mental body - when considered as a whole).

Projectiology considers conscious projection to be a natural phenomenon. Accounts of this experience have been recorded by persons from all walks of life for thousands of years. What the new methods and techniques of Projectiology seek to do is to put the phenomenon under the voluntary control of the experiencer, thus developing the ability of the individual projector to remain lucid during the experience (extraphysical lucidity), to reach various chosen extraphysical objectives, and to remember the experience afterwards (physical recall). The mastering of one's projectability allows the individual to utilize, over many physical (intraphysical) lives, that one-third of his or her life which is, from a consciential point of view, wasted during sleep.