A Teacher
William Buhlman
Out-of-body exploration
The transmission
William Buhlman (b. c. 1949) is an American author and a senior instructor at The Monroe Institute, where he has taught out-of-body experience (OBE) workshops for decades.
Building directly on Robert Monroe’s legacy, he became one of the most systematic and practical teachers of deliberate OBE induction for a general audience.
His book Adventures Beyond the Body offers a step-by-step program for inducing out-of-body states, and he conducted a large international survey of OBE experiences documented in The Secret of the Soul.
Buhlman frames OBE not merely as a curiosity but as direct experiential evidence that consciousness can operate independently of the physical body, with profound implications for the question of survival after death.
What they gave
Practical OBE induction: Provided clear, replicable techniques for leaving the body at will.
- Affirmation-based method: Popularized specific verbal intentions (e.g., “Now I am out of body”) as induction tools, linking OBE to affirmation practice.
- Consciousness independent of body: Advances OBE as experiential ground for the claim that awareness is not brain-bound.
- Experiential ancestor of shifting: His detached, navigable non-physical states prefigure reality-shifting and “the void” imagery.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Robert Monroe and The Monroe Institute; the astral-projection tradition.
- Influenced: modern OBE practitioners; consciousness-survival explorers; reality-shifting culture.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Their Practices 1
Essential Works
- Adventures Beyond the Body1996
- The Secret of the Soul2001