Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Death from Astral Projection

Episode Date: July 20, 2022

In 1975, yoga enthusiast Robert Antoszczyk retired to his room in a group house in Ann Arbor, MI to try a meditation technique that would allow him to astrally project his spirit. He died, never coming out of his meditative state. What happened?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck. Jerry's here too. Dave's here in spirit. It's short stuff. But we're all in the same astral plane, man. We're all here in spirit.

That's right. We're tethered by the silver cord. But otherwise, we're just floating around checking things out. Sure. Sure. The reason Chuck's talking like that, everybody, is because we're going to investigate one of the weirdest occurrences in the annals of both traditional yoga and the New Age movement.

Okay. I'm going to put it like that because I think that's pretty accurate, really. That's right. We're talking about a man named Robert Antoschik. And this is a gentleman who was in his late 20s in the mid-70s. He lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was, by all accounts, a good dude. He was pretty chill.

He taught yoga. Teach. Teach? He taught yoga. The way he's teaching you English. And YWCA. He's a vegetarian. He was a practice of karate, a 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 going to 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, eat some like paneer, palak paneer, hang out for a few

days and then come home. Like he actually went and studied under the yoga master, Iyengar. So like he really, really was into yoga in the 70s. Like this was not the 90s or the 2000s. This was the 70s 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 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 astral

projection. And I found a contemporaneous article, which I just used on purpose from the Detroit Free Press in 1975. And they called astral projection, astro projection, all one word. And they did astro. Right. Yeah. They said it's kind of like the Jetsons version of it.

Yeah. And they used it more than once. So apparently they thought that's actually what it was called. But with astral projection or astro projection, I guess, if you take it on face value, 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 sleep and wakefulness and like really focus on that and try to actually stay in that space, your spirit, your soul will leave your body.

And in that state, your conscious mind is conscious, ticking in all of this information and all of these sights and sounds 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? And 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.

Right. Like it's floating around metaphorically speaking and taking all this in and bringing it home with you. They have like in this delusive dreaming because there are some similarities there. But 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. It's sort of like an umbilical cord when you're astral projecting that keeps you tethered,

like an astronaut to a spaceship, so you just don't get stuck out in the astral plane somewhere. Yeah. It is possible for your silver cord to sever. Apparently one tradition is that when you die, like when you're born, or when you're conceived, I should say, you as a fetus is connected to your spirit through your silver cord. And then as you grow in age and everything, you stay connected.

And then finally, when you die, that silver cord is separated. So your soul is separated from your body. But it's possible 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 and Toshchik. And they actually make a pretty good case if you really dive into it. Can I say we take a break and then dive into it, Chuck? Let's do it. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

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It's 1975, Robert and Sozchik. That's hard to say. I apologize. It's hard to spell as well. It is. Whenever you have S-Z-Y-K, I'm not seeing any vowels in there. So that makes it tough. No.

We got the Anto part down pat. Yeah. That's easy. So Bobby A. was living in a house. He had a couple of roommates and it's June of 75. It's a Sunday and he says, hey, listen, I'm going to go and meditate and try an astral project in here. So you know what that means, roomies?

I'm tying the forever scrunchie on the outside of my, I'm hanging it on my doorknob. 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, hmm, 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 thumb still between his fingers. I think it's index and middle finger. And the medical examiner who showed up shortly after 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, hmm, I don't see any reason

he died. Since they can conduct it 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. 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 had no idea. No. And if you don't know who Quincy is, just ask your great, great grandparents, everybody.

That's not nice. 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, because that food would have been moved through if he had waited until Tuesday to die after a three-day sesh. And so they said, well, did this guy die from meditation? The medical examiner said, well, that's an interesting idea. Let me look into that. 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 yogis all over planet earth that try to regulate and change their heartbeat, like usually slow it down. I seem to remember there were like, like on that's incredible and stuff in the 80s, there were yogis who did tricks where they said they could slow their heartbeat. Here's the thing. There's never been super verified accounts that this is possible to do with great success and regularity. I think there was a yogi once who did slow his heartbeat for a few seconds.

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 is possible. But yes, 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? Right. But it was enough of at least a rumor or an idea that that was a line of thinking that

the medical examiner followed. And he posited that it's possible, Robert, in this meditative state where he was trying to astraly project, which by the way is considered a really dangerous type of meditation among yogis in the East. Like this is not something that you do lightly. 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 posited that perhaps he had slowed his heartbeat down so slowly

that it just stopped beating. Yeah. 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 and 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 not that. It's just slowing down and then the engine stops. Exactly. So this was a theory that went away because the official cause of death ended up being, and I'm not laughing, but it was a bit of a surprise, it was a bit of a surprise at the end of this material that you sent me when it said, he died from a cocaine overdose.

Because I did not see that coming and his family didn't see that coming. His friends, his mom all said, there's no way. Like Robert was like the opposite of that. He was a clean liver and he shunned stuff like this and was really into detoxifying his body, not putting cocaine into it. The only thing I'll say about that is like, you never know, like Prince died of an overdose and he supposedly was a devout religious individual who shunned medication and then dies of a, was it fentanyl, I guess, overdose?

I think, yes, or else it was from oxy, I don't know. Yeah, something like that. But anyway, all that to say, something could have happened. It was the mid-70s. I did see in the material you sent that it might have been hard to get cocaine and Ann Arbor in 75. I think that's highly disputable that cocaine in a college town in 75 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 70s, say like 77, 78, 79, right? This is 1975 in Michigan and during that first bout of popularity where cocaine became a thing in America, it was associated with wealth and glamour, not like aesthetic living in yoga and vegetarianism. So I just put it out there because I think it actually supports the idea that he might not 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 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 180 that doesn't really jib with any other part of the story. And that doesn't mean that it's not true. Like you said, you never can tell, it's entirely possible. I mean, if you use Occam's razor, that's what happened, right?

Yeah. But if you don't use Occam's razor and if you believe in astral projection, you probably aren't a big fan of Occam's razor anyway. That's a good point. But if you believe in astral projection, then what happened to Robert Antoszczyk 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's dead here in this plane.

But out there in the astral plane, his conscious mind is forever trapped to be lost and wander forever, never to be able to come back. That is scary stuff. And also, maybe he's still out there on the plane though. Maybe he is a very happy individual in some other dimension. Let's hope so because there is a lot of astral projectors who come back and all 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 Rapazotrone 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 lap on that one day. Okay. Maybe we will.

But in the meantime, hopefully everybody enjoyed the short stuff. And either way, it doesn't matter now because short stuff is out. What you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. All podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.