Sylvan Muldoon (February 18, 1903October 15, 1969) was an American esotericist who promoted the concept of astral projection. According to Muldoon, astral projection is an

out-of-body experience An out-of-body experience (OBE or sometimes OOBE) is a phenomenon in which a person perceives the world from a location outside their physical body. An OBE is a form of autoscopy (literally "seeing self"), although this term is more commonly us ...

(OBE) that assumes the existence of an astral body separate from the physical body and is capable of travelling outside it. A 2012

Princeton University Press Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financia ...

publication by

Hugh Urban Hugh Bayard Urban is a professor of religious studies at Ohio State Universities Department of Comparative Studies and author of eight books and several academic articles, including a history of the Church of Scientology, published by Princeton ...

asserted that one of Muldoon's most popular books formed the basis for theories of the Church of Scientology founder

L. Ron Hubbard Lafayette Ronald Hubbard (March 13, 1911 – January 24, 1986) was an American author, primarily of science fiction and fantasy stories, who is best known for having founded the Church of Scientology. In 1950, Hubbard authored '' Dianeti ...

which he claimed were his own.

Early life and experiences

Muldoon was born in

Darlington, Wisconsin Darlington is a city in and the county seat of Lafayette County in the U.S. state of Wisconsin. The population was 2,462 at the 2020 census. The city is surrounded by the Town of Darlington. History The first residence within the city limits of ...

, and was the second child of his parents Henry F. Muldoon and Mattie Muldoon (née Harvey) whose siblings were Harry Harvey Muldoon, Frank Lyman Muldoon and Lynn Muldoon. In 1915, when he was 12 years old, Muldoon was said to have experienced his first OBE while at a Spiritualist camp in Clinton, Iowa with his mother that made him believe he had died. By 1927, Muldoon, as an earlier pioneer in the OBE field, was collaborating with the well-known British-born American investigator of

psychic phenomena A psychic is a person who claims to use extrasensory perception (ESP) to identify information hidden from the normal senses, particularly involving telepathy or clairvoyance, or who performs acts that are apparently inexplicable by natural laws ...

and author

Hereward Carrington Hereward Carrington (17 October 1880 – 26 December 1958) was a well-known British-born American investigator of psychic phenomena and author. His subjects included several of the most high-profile cases of apparent psychic ability of his times, ...

writing three books on OBE's, the most popular being their 1951 collaboration ''The Phenomena of Astral Projection''. Dream researcher Jayne Gackenbach and psychophysiologist

Stephen LaBerge Stephen LaBerge (born 1947) is an American psychophysiologist specializing in the scientific study of lucid dreaming. In 1967 he received his bachelor's degree in mathematics. He began researching lucid dreaming for his Ph.D. in psychophysiol ...

have compared Muldoon's OBE experiences to

lucid dreaming A lucid dream is a type of dream in which the dreamer becomes aware that they are dreaming while dreaming. During a lucid dream, the dreamer may gain some amount of control over the dream characters, narrative, or environment; however, this is n ...

Theories used by L. Ron Hubbard

In 2012,

named

Ohio State University The Ohio State University, commonly called Ohio State or OSU, is a public land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio. A member of the University System of Ohio, it has been ranked by major institutional rankings among the best publ ...

professor

's book on the Church of Scientology as one of their most outstanding academic titles for the year, and wherein Urban asserted that

had adopted many of Muldoon's theories as his own and stated that Hubbard's description of exteriorizing the body thetan is extremely similar if not identical to the descriptions of astral projection in occult literature popularized by Muldoon's widely read ''Phenomena of Astral Projection'' (1951) and Muldoon's description of the astral body as being connected to the physical body by a long thin, elastic cord that is virtually identical to the one described in Hubbard's "Excalibur" vision.

Death

Muldoon died in 1969 and was buried in Union Grove Cemetery, Darlington, Wisconsin.

Bibliography

*''The Projection of the Astral Body'' (1929) co-written with

*''The Case for Astral Projection: Hallucination or Reality!'' (1936) *''The Phenomena of Astral Projection'' (1951) co-written with

*''Sensational Psychical Experiences'' (1941) *''Famous Psychic Stories'' (1942)

References

External links

Sylvan Muldoon
– Article by

Susan Blackmore Susan Jane Blackmore (born 29 July 1951) is a British writer, lecturer, sceptic, broadcaster, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Plymouth. Her fields of research include memetics, parapsychology, consciousness, and she is best known ...

{{DEFAULTSORT:Muldoon, Sylvan 1903 births 1969 deaths 20th-century American non-fiction writers American occult writers Astral projection L. Ron Hubbard New Age writers Parapsychologists American male non-fiction writers 20th-century American male writers