July 20, 2022 • 15 mins
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?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Jerry's here to Dave's here in spirit. It's short stuff.
But we're all on the same astral plane. Man, we're
all here in spirit. That's right. We're tethered by the
silver cord mhm. But otherwise we're just floating around checking
things out. Sure, um, Sure. The reason Chuck's talking like that,
(00:28):
everybody's because we're going to investigate one of the weirdest
occurrences in the annals of UM, both traditional yoga and
UM the New Age movement. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna
put it like that because I think that's pretty accurate. Really,
(00:48):
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,
(01:08):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:52):
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
(02:13):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:57):
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
(03:17):
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
(03:38):
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,
(04:02):
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
(04:23):
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,
(04:43):
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
(05:04):
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
(05:25):
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
(06:00):
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
(06:24):
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
(06:44):
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
(07:06):
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,
(07:26):
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,
(07:46):
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
(08:07):
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
(08:28):
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
(08:51):
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
(09:11):
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,
(09:33):
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
(09:54):
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,
(10:15):
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
(10:36):
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
(10:57):
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
(11:19):
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
(11:43):
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
(12:05):
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,
(12:27):
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
(12:49):
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
(13:11):
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
(13:33):
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,
(13:56):
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
(14:20):
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
(14:42):
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
(15:05):
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.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck.
Jerry's here to Dave's here in spirit. It's short stuff.
But we're all on the same astral plane. Man, we're
all here in spirit. That's right. We're tethered by the
silver cord mhm. But otherwise we're just floating around checking
things out. Sure, um, Sure. The reason Chuck's talking like that,
(00:28):
everybody's because we're going to investigate one of the weirdest
occurrences in the annals of UM, both traditional yoga and
UM the New Age movement. Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna
put it like that because I think that's pretty accurate. Really,
(00:48):
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,
(01:08):
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
(01:30):
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
(01:52):
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
(02:13):
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
(02:36):
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
(02:57):
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
(03:17):
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
(03:38):
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,
(04:02):
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
(04:23):
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,
(04:43):
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
(05:04):
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
(05:25):
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
(06:00):
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
(06:24):
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
(06:44):
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
(07:06):
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,
(07:26):
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,
(07:46):
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
(08:07):
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
(08:28):
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
(08:51):
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
(09:11):
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,
(09:33):
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
(09:54):
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,
(10:15):
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
(10:36):
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
(10:57):
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
(11:19):
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
(11:43):
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
(12:05):
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,
(12:27):
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
(12:49):
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
(13:11):
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
(13:33):
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,
(13:56):
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
(14:20):
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
(14:42):
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
(15:05):
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.
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Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
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40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.