Roberta Grimes

Out of Body

Posted by Roberta Grimes • September 19, 2026 • 14 Comments
Afterlife Research, Book News, Death, Understanding Reality

Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
We could float among the stars together, you and I
For we can fly (we can fly)

Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon!

The world’s a nicer place in my beautiful balloon
It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon
We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky
For we can fly (we can fly)

Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon!

Suspended under a twilight canopy
We’ll search the clouds for a star to guide us
If by some chance you find yourself loving me
We’ll find a cloud to hide us
We’ll keep the moon beside us
– Jimmy Webb, from “Up, Up and Away” (1967)

There have been so many interesting side-adventures inherent in my purely wonderful, nearly lifelong, and entirely love-based journey of researching death, the afterlife, and the greater reality, one of which side-adventures has been the whole fascinating concept that is out-of-body traveling. Oh my goodness! I discovered that astonishing field many years ago, when I initially read the first book of three by the great astral traveler, Bob Monroe, entitled Journeys Out of the Body, which was first published in 1971. If you have never read Bob Monroe’s trilogy, then you really must do that now! He will open your mind and help you understand so much more about what actually is going on. Bob Monroe and The Monroe Institute have inspired and trained a generation of out-of-body travelers who soon followed him, out of their material bodies and into the great and endless astral wilds. Some of them soon began to do the indispensable task of spirit-rescue work; and one of these, Bruce Moen, led me to do my own bit of spirit-rescuing, before he himself soon after transitioned. I will recount for you here below that amazing little adventure that we shared. 

Mainstream scientists have never been allowed to study anything so  wonderful and enlightening as out-of-body travel, since of course any non-material adventures would violate the sacred dogma of atheistic materialism that was imposed upon traditional science soon after the turn of the twentieth century. Ever since then, and therefore for the past hundred and twenty years or so, no scientist who hopes to have his work recognized, and therefore ever published in any peer-reviewed scientific journal; taught in any university scientific department; or eligible for any scientific prize, especially including a Nobel Prize, may study any phenomenon that is not related to matter. I know what you’re thinking. That’s ridiculous, right? They might as well have said that all scientific investigations have to be related to water, or to the color blue. Why impose such an arbitrary limit beforehand on what had been, not long before, just the simple and open-minded study of everything?

Well, you know why they did it. Max Planck and his fellow quantum physicists had begun their work soon before that time, and Dr. Planck and some of the others working in the quantum field had discovered something amazing. Dr. Planck said it best. In 1931 he said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Albert Einstein, too, as much as he came to resent quantum physics overall, eventually said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” Even Nikola Tesla, a renowned genius and polymath of about their same era, said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” But science was simply not prepared to go there. The risk of possibly discovering something that might pass for the Christian God, and crossing that not-crossable line between science and religion, was simply too great. So, more than a century ago, mainstream science turned itself into the religion of atheism and imposed materialism upon scientists, as a necessary dogma. And there these matters have stood, ever since.

But finally, of late, mainstream scientists have begun to test a few very old non-material ideas and concepts. Since consciousness is so much energy-based, it is not surprising that dry and disbelieving scientists have not achieved much in the way of encouraging results whenever they have attempted to study any aspect of consciousness. This has been consistently true as well of scientists’ efforts to study out-of-body travel under their dry and disbelieving laboratory conditions. But, you know, there the news is not all bad. A couple of things did happen when they tested OBEs that the experimenting scientists flat-out could not explain.

Bruce Moen was an out-of-body explorer and author who attended as a speaker a decade ago one of the afterlife conferences that Craig Hogan and I put on in Scottsdale, Arizona. I had enjoyed reading some of Bruce Moen’s books, and I found Bruce himself to be a dear and fascinating man. By then, I was curious about the whole process of doing spirit-rescue work, so he volunteered to guide me through actually rescuing someone who had gone off-track at death. He insisted to me that this was all perfectly safe, and he told me that the need is desperate! So, okay. I agreed to try it. I went with him to his room in the hotel, and at his invitation, I lay down on the bed. He explained that a spirit Being would be doing the actual rescuing, but the person we were rescuing was unable to see the spirit until I pointed her out; the stuck person could, however, easily see me, a material Being. So, my whole job in this was to get the stuck person’s attention, and to make the introduction. Then Bruce put me into a light trance.

At once, I was whisking rapidly along a narrow, paved road with low stone walls on either side, in what felt like New England. There was a very advanced Being with me, to my right; I could sense its presence, and it seemed to be female, but when I glance that way, I couldn’t see anything. Soon we arrived at a wooden gate in a tall hedge, which opened; I think that happened at the spirit’s touch. And there was a very odd scene! A woman in an apron, plain long-sleeved day-dress, and mob-cap of long ago was sitting at a spinning wheel in a 1700s courtyard, very busy at her work. I could see, though, that the whole scene was vague, and beneath it was a modern grassy back yard, a modern patio with lawn chairs and a grill. That gray-haired woman had died in what I thought must have been the 1700s, and now at last it was her time to go home. I could just barely see the higher-level Being next to me now, beautiful in her shimmering long dress.She was looking only at that long-dead woman, and her lovely face was soft with concern.

I approached that woman sitting at her spinning wheel, rapidly working her spindle, and I murmured, “Hello”. I wasn’t walking; I just moved by thought, and the Being was moving close beside me. That old, long-dead lady looked up, startled. She could see me at once. She said in a small voice, but sharply, “Can’t ye see I be workin’?” While her spindle kept spinning. And had she kept at this nonsense work for as much as the past three hundred years? The advanced Being beside me whispered close to my ear, “Introduce me as ‘Starlight’. Tell her I will take her to her children.” So, I did that, very gently.

The woman sitting at the spinning wheel then noticed the beautiful Being beside me, but only after I had introduced her. Starlight said to her in that soft and gentle voice that there were four grown children waiting for her now, very nearby. We mustn’t keep them waiting any longer! The old woman said something like, “Well then”, but I didn’t quite catch it. The Being helped her to her feet, and took her hand, and then they were whisking to a nearby village street, with me following close behind them. As I was beginning to awaken from my trance in that hotel room, I glimpsed four young adults, two men and two women in antique dress, standing on an ancient street corner, and very excited to see and embrace that old woman, who was just arriving. From the way they were dressed, I was guessing that we were maybe in the 1820s. But now I was waking up, and back again in that hotel room, in the twenty-first century.

Wow! I was amazed and thrilled by that single spirit-rescue experience, and indeed I still am, to this day. Bruce Moen was amused by my excitement, and he and I talked for a long time about it that day. He agreed with me that it was indeed awful that some people stayed earthbound for such a long time; even though they were outside of time, so it likely hadn’t seemed to her to have been as long as it had seemed to have been to us. When I asked him how many more people needed rescuing, and even so very long after their deaths? He said, “Thousands. I wish you would do this work every day, if you could find the time.” Bruce Moen himself died later that same year, at the age of 69, after what his obituary said had been a long illness. And no, I never have done any further rescue work. As my life has progressed, I have been led in a different direction.  

But, as my subsequent afterlife research has continued, I have come to understand that just about all of us venture out of our bodies very often; and for many of us, it happens nearly every night, while our material bodies sleep. We generally have no memory of these nocturnal jaunts out of our bodies, which is why I think the whole thing is so strange. Why would we go off gallivanting across the cosmos, perhaps risking damage to the silver cord that must keep us connected to our material bodies in order to maintain our earthly lives, if we are not going to remember even the first thing about those nightly experiences? But, so it is.

My own most wonderful astral travels happened in the spring and summer of 2022, and with my Thomas right there with me. Jesus was then talking me through the website that He wanted me to do for Him, and we plan now for it to go live sometime next year. My beloved Thomas is very close to Jesus, and he is primarily responsible for helping Jesus to maintain the “fully Man” aspect of His “Fully God and Fully Man” character. To do this – and I have seen it happen – my Thomas is called upon on occasion to – how do I say this delicately? – to chase down a Being who is God incarnate, and to, you know, actually beat Him up. What they do is just boys-will-be-boys rowdy play, and Jesus badly needs it from someone, but nobody else would even dream of treating Jesus that way! So, sometimes Jesus will just sidle up to Thomas, whisper something insulting in his ear – I think He calls him a “bloody general” in their old, dead language – and then Jesus runs. Thomas takes off after Him, catches Him, throws Him to the ground, and, well, kind of beats Him up. Jesus often laughs in the process, especially if He thinks He has managed to make my Thomas genuinely angry.

Oh, my very dear one, if we didn’t know now the greatest truth of all, what a terrifying place this greater reality and our whole existence would be, and how pointless and hopeless our every next breath would feel, even as we are taking it! What would be the point? But no, my darling, quite the opposite is the shining truth at the core of our existence. Oh no, my heart, for you know now with absolute certainty that you are eternal. You know that the only power that exists is love beyond our ability to comprehend it. And, best of all, you know that you, in particular, are dearly beloved, forever safe, and cherished in the arms of a benevolent and all-powerful Creator God.  

Love is waiting there in my beautiful balloon
Way up in the air in my beautiful balloon
If you’ll hold my hand, we’ll chase your dream across the sky
For we can fly (we can fly)

Up, up and away
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon!
Balloon…

Up, up, and away
Up, up, and away
Up, up, and away…
– Jimmy Webb, from “Up, Up and Away” (1967)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)