Short Stuff: Death from Astral Projection

UM the New Age movement. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna put it like that because I think that's pretty accurate. Really, that's right. We're talking about a man named Robert and toast Chick. And this is a gentleman who uh it was in his late twenties in the mid seventies. He lived in an arbor, Michigan. He was, by all accounts, a good dude. He was pretty chill. He teached yoga, teached he taught yoga and why w c A, he's a vegetarian. He uh was a practicer of kata, te

former marine. Just seemed like an all around good dude. Very much into esoteric yoga, which is to say, a large focus on the mind and spirit. And one of these people that really got into like, Hey, I'm really going to start studying with yogis and I'm gonna travel to India and I'm going to take up fasting and meditation and give up a lot of my material possessions.

Like went all in on this. Yeah, and he didn't just show up in India, you know, eat some like paneer plock paneer, hang out for a few days and then come home, like he actually went and studied under the yoga master angar Um. So like he really really was into yoga in the seventies. Like this was not the nineties or the two thousands. This is the seventies when it was like, you know, not the most usual thing you would find somebody who had traveled to India

to study yoga. Still, so, um, he came back from that, from what I can tell, a fairly changed person. And like you said, he was really interested in esoteric yoga and in particular astro projection. And I found a contemporaneous article which I just used on purpose, um from the Detroit Free Press in and they called astro projection, astro projection all one word, and they yeah, they said, it's kind of like the Jetson's version of it. But then they they used it more than once, so apparently they

thought that's actually what it was called. Um. But with astro projection or astro projection, I guess, um, if you if you take it on face value, UM, it's kind of easy to explain. And that is that when you meditate in a certain way, one technique is to focus on the line between um sleep and wakefulness, and like really focus on that and try to actually stay in that space. Um, you will your spirit, your soul will

leave your body. And in that state, your conscious mind is conscious taking in all of this information and all of these sights and sounds and and things. But you can go anywhere, not just in the world, not just in the universe, Chuck, but in different dimensions and planes of existence entirely, all while your soul is still connected

to your body. Right. Yeah, And that's that's the key that waking consciousness, because it's not like you come back and say, boy, I really I think my soul left my body, but I have no memory of anything, Like it's floating around metaphorically speaking, and uh, taking all this in and bringing it home with you. Uh, they have

like in this delusive dreaming because there are some similarities there. Um, but the the whole key here and I kind of joked about it earlier, that we're all attached and tethered by our silver cord. That's what it's called. That's sort of like an umbiblical chord. When you're astral projecting, that keeps you, uh tethered like an astronaut to a spaceship, so you just don't get stuck out in the astral plane somewhere. Yeah. Um, it is possible for your silver

cord to sever apparently. Uh. One tradition is that when you die, like when you're born or when you're conceived ice I should say, you're you're the fetus. You as a fetus is connected to your spirit through your silver silver cord, and then as you grow in age and everything, you stay connected. And then finally when you die, the that silver cord is is separated, so your soul is separated from your body. Um. But it's possible too for

your silver cord to become accidentally or inadvertently separated. And that is not something that you want to happen, because in this plane of existence, that means that your body is dead, your spirit is never coming back. It's permanently untethered, which means it's permanently and forever lost in the astral plane, in the spirit world, and it will never be able

to find its way back. And there's a lot of people who believe in this stuff, who believe that that's exactly what happened to Robert Antosh Chick, and they actually make a pretty good case if you really dive into it. And I say, we take a break and then dive into it, chunk, let's do it all right, it's Robert and so's chick. That's hard to say. It's hard to spell as well. It is whenever you have s c I'm sorry s z c z y k. I'm not seeing any any vowels in there, so that makes it tough. No,

but we got the ant to park down path. Yeah, that's easy. So. Uh So Bobby A was living in a house. He had a couple of roommates and it's June of seventy five, it's a Sunday, and he says, hey, listen, I'm gonna go and uh meditate and try an astral project in here. So you know what that means, roommy's I'm tying the the Forever scrunchy on the outside of my I'm hanging it on my door knob, and that means do not come in at all, do not disturb me. Please, please, please.

So the roommates were like, whatever, man. And several days go by, and it becomes Tuesday, and one of the roommates finally says, it's been a few days. He has not come out of his room. Maybe we should go in there, open the door, and there he is dead on his back, but still in a meditative pose. Yeah, he's got his thumbs still between his fingers, I think

his index and middle finger. UM. And the medical examiner who showed up shortly after UM said that he had a serene expression on his face, but he was in fact dead and if you examine the body, which they did, they were like, I don't see any reason he died. Once they can conducted in autopsy, things got even weirder because the medical examiner said there was no evidence, no trace of anything that might have killed them, no injury, no disease, UM, and there was such a dearth of clues,

he said, normally. In the Detroit Free Press, the medical examiner said, normally there's something that provides some clue. Even if it does, it's not like directly pointing at the mechanism of death. There's something there that I can at least make a guess. He said, there's nothing here, and I have no idea. I can't even make a guess at why this guy died. It's a total mystery. He was the picture of health. They even brought in Quincy,

and Quincy, and Quincy had no idea. And if you don't know who Quincy has just asked your great great grandparents. That's not nice. Uh. His stomach had food in it that was undigested, which would seem to indicate that he died not too long after the meditation on Sunday, except food would have been moved through if he had waited till Tuesday to die after like a three day sash. And so they said, well did this guy die for meditation? Um,

The medical examiner said, well, that's an interesting idea. Let me look into that. UM. Not so much interested in astral projection, because I'm not sure I believe in that stuff. Because I'm a medical examiner, but there have been reports of yogi's all over planet Earth that try to um regulate and change their heartbeat, like usually slow it down. I seem to remember they were like like, on, that's

incredible and stuff. In the eighties there were yogis who did tricks where they said they could like slow their heartbeat. Here's the thing, there's never been like super verified accounts that this is possible to do like with great success and regularity. I think they there was a yogi once who did slow his heartbeat for a few seconds. Um, we're not saying it's not possible, but they just haven't

studied it and proven that a human is capable of that. Yeah, and I have actually seen a couple of studies that do suggest it as possible. But yes, the the it's not really it's not definitely been disproven. But it also there's not a whole bunch of support for it necessarily amongst scientific study, right, But it was enough that it was enough of at least a rumor or an idea that that was a line of thinking that the meta

Colo examiner followed and he posited that it's possible. Robert in this this meditative state where he was trying to ast really project, which, by the way, is considered a really dangerous um type of meditation among yogi's in the East. Like, this is not something that you do lightly um And having trained and studied in India, Robert probably would have been a better candidate to do this than the average person.

But it was still dangerous. And so the medical examiner positive that perhaps he had slowed his heart beat down so slowly that it just stopped beating to zero. Yeah, and after a very short while. You would die if your heart stopped beating. But also you could say, you could make a case that this would leave no traces of itself because the heart would stop beating under death under any other circumstance too, So if the heart stopping beating was the cause of death, you would never have

any idea. Yeah, like it wasn't you could tell if someone had a cardiac arrest or something. It's it's not that it's just slowing down and then the and stops. So this was a theory, uh that went away because the official cause of death ended up being and I'm not laughing, but it was a bit of a It was a bit of surprise at the end of this material that you sent me when it said he died from a cocaine overdose, because it's I did not see that coming, uh, and his family didn't see that coming.

As friends, his mom all said, there's no way like Robert was like the opposite of that. He was a clean liver and he was he shunned stuff like this and was really into detoxifying his body, not putting cocaine into it. Um. The only thing I'll say about that is like, you never know, like Prince Prince died of of overdose and he supposedly, you know, was devout religious individual who shunned medication and then you know, dies of

a what was it? Fitting all? I guess overdose? I think yea or else it was from oxy I don't know, Yeah, something like that. But anyway, all that to say like something could have happened. It was the mid seventies. I did see in the material you sent that it might have been hard to get cocaine and ann arbor and seventy five. I think that's highly disputable. Well, that's cocaine in a college town. Seventy five was hard to come by, Okay,

But let me defend that because that's actually me editorializing. Right, So cocaine became really popular and it reached like its first peak of popularity in the late seventies, say like seventies seventy nine, right, this is v in Michigan, um. And during that first bout of popularity where cocaine became a thing in America, it was associated with like wealth and glamour, not like ascetic living in yoga and vegetarianism.

So I just put it out there because I think it actually supports the idea that he might note have done it and that it was just kind of a cursory. We have no idea, We're just going to say this. The point is is there's no explanation, Like coverage of this just drops off. After that that ruling came out the official cause of death was a cocaine overdose. So I can't find and apparently no one can find any explanation why they said that and how it was backed

up and how they came to that conclusion. Yeah, I'm with you. I mean, I would think if you died from a cocaine overdose, there would be some sort of trace that a medical examiner would find, right, sure, and I think a lot of people say, well, I guess the medical examiner found cocaine in the system and determined it was enough to kill him. Either way, it's very weird. Again, it's a one a d that doesn't really jibe with any other part of this story. And that doesn't mean

that it's not true. Like you said, you never can tell. It's entirely possible. And if you use atoms razor, that's what happened, right. But if you don't use atoms razor, and you if you're if you believe in astro projection, you probably aren't a big fan of Vocam's razor anyway.

But if you, if you believe in astro projection, then what happened to Robert and toast Check is one of the most hellish things that can ever happen to a human being, which is his spirit got separated from his body, his silver cord was severed, and his body is dead here in this plane, but out there in the astro plane, his conscious mind is forever trapped to be lost in wander forever, never to be able to come back. That

is scary stuff. And also maybe still out there on the plane, though maybe he is a very happy individual and some other dimension, let's hope. So, because there's a lot of astro projectors who come back and um, I'll talk about very scary places out there where souls eat other souls and it's very violent and chaotic. It's not all like happy hippie stuff. Yeah. So I want to shout out an article on medium from Nick Repasitrony called

The Hades Environment definitely worth reading. It's about the weird history of astral projection. Yeah. I don't know if maybe we should do a full app on that one day. Okay, maybe we will. But in the meantime, hopefully everybody enjoyed the short stuff. Neither way, it doesn't matter now because short Stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.