Sylvan Muldoon (February 18, 1903October 15, 1969) was an American esotericist who promoted the concept of

astral projection In Western esotericism, esotericism, astral projection (also known as astral travel, soul journey, soul wandering, spiritual journey, spiritual travel) is an intentional out-of-body experience (OBE) in which a subtle body, known as the astra ...

. 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 as if from a location outside their physical body. An OBE is a form of autoscopy (literally "seeing self"), although this term is more common ...

(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 financial ...

publication by

Hugh Urban Hugh Bayard Urban is a professor of religious studies at Ohio State University's 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 The Church of Scientology is a group of interconnected corporate entities and other organizations devoted to the practice, administration and dissemination of Scientology, which is variously defined as a cult, a business, or a new religiou ...

founder L. Ron Hubbard 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, Wisconsin, United States. 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 Dar ...

, 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 and author Hereward Carrington 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 have compared Muldoon's OBE experiences to lucid dreaming.

Theories used by L. Ron Hubbard

In 2012,

named

Ohio State University The Ohio State University (Ohio State or OSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Columbus, Ohio, United States. A member of the University System of Ohio, it was founded in 1870. It is one ...

professor

's book on the

as one of their most outstanding academic titles for the year, and wherein Urban asserted that L. Ron Hubbard 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 Hereward Carrington *''The Case for Astral Projection: Hallucination or Reality!'' (1936) *''Sensational Psychical Experiences'' (1941) *''Famous Psychic Stories'' (1942) *''Psychic Experiences of Famous People'' (1947) *''The Phenomena of Astral Projection'' (1951) co-written with Hereward Carrington

References

External links

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