"Out-of-body" experiences

[sergeyvladimirovich]

...so what do you make of these?

[sergeyvladimirovich]

As a matter of fact, I haven't included one more option:

Our current understanding of the world is too poor to give a definite answer

This actually is my belief regarding this.

I voted for "hallucinations" because when there is no evidence available (at least not to me), it's safest to be sceptical. I am, however, not as arrogant as to claim that modern science understands everything. Didn't the Church make a similar mistake during Gallileo and Bruno?

[Demosthenes]

My take is that it's a powerful hallucination involving a disassociation from your body which feels like as if you've actually left your body. Basically you're never really looking at the real world at all. The information you get come in through your senses which are reconstructed by your brain to form a sensory environment which you perceive youself to be immersed in. In reality, it's more like a virtual reality environment synchronized to the information coming in through your senses. You find yourself centered in that world via your propriception sense and other bodily senses. So if those senses were to be scrambled through mediation, drugs, altered states of conciousness... perhaps you would find yourself drifting around that virtual world within your own head. I could see the unconciousness being used to fill in details and reconstruct the rest of the world outside the reach of your senses. Think of it as a very vivid type of lucid dreaming.

It could explain many of the fantastic worlds reported by people doing the so called astral projection. I for one won't mind doing astral projection to explore my own mind. I used to be able to do lucid dreamings but now it doesn't happen to me anymore. :(

[sergeyvladimirovich]

Originally posted by Demosthenes
My take is that it's a powerful hallucination involving a disassociation from your body which feels like as if you've actually left your body. Basically you're never really looking at the real world at all. The information you get come in through your senses which are reconstructed by your brain to form a sensory environment which you perceive youself to be immersed in. In reality, it's more like a virtual reality environment synchronized to the information coming in through your senses. You find yourself centered in that world via your propriception sense and other bodily senses. So if those senses were to be scrambled through mediation, drugs, altered states of conciousness... perhaps you would find yourself drifting around that virtual world within your own head. I could see the unconciousness being used to fill in details and reconstruct the rest of the world outside the reach of your senses. Think of it as a very vivid type of lucid dreaming.

It could explain many of the fantastic worlds reported by people doing the so called astral projection. I for one won't mind doing astral projection to explore my own mind. I used to be able to do lucid dreamings but now it doesn't happen to me anymore. :(

This makes sense. Maybe there's really nothing else to it.

In the end, the only way to prove that OBEs are real is to use the only criterion of reality available to us: the physical reality. Case in point-- remote viewing. If researchers could get OBEers to report on things that are not observable from their physical bodies (such as a number written on a piece of paper laying on a table in a neighbouring house), that would prove once and for all that consciousness is not spatially confined to the body.

To my knowledge, such an obvious experiment hasn't been conducted successfully up to this point. All the literature on OBE/Astral Projection that I'm familiar with, is silent about whether people who have these experiences can correctly observe the details of the physical places they supposedly visit. The usual trick is to say that OBEs take place on "another plane" but since the existence of that "another plane" so far can't be confirmed, we have to say that the only evidence is subjective, that is to say, not evidence at all.

The ultimate question that we are dealing here with, however, is the nature of reality. What is our basis for saying that spiders observed by someone on an acid trip are less real than the spiders observed by a sober person on a trip to a zoo? According to the modern worldview the answer is this: the latter can be independently and reliably confirmed by other observers while the former cannnot. The modern thinking defines as real only that, which is objective or can be independently observed by a number of observers.

Is this the only right way to approach reality? It's certainly a practical way, as it is objectevism that underlied the emergence of science with all its achievements. To me, though, this division between the objective and subjective (with the subsequent writing off the subjective to the realm of illusion) seems only that-- a practical division. Carl Jung, for instance, stressed in his works that the division between the objective and subjective is artificial-- there is no one good reason to claim that one is more or less real than the other...

[Tufted]

I have had OBEs. I have sensed the floating out of my body. I have floated through rooms and passed through doors. They are indeed, to me, very vivid lucid dreams. In fact, in my last one I actually was lucid enough to perform an experiment. I travelled to the kitchen and observed a clock (My eyes came with me?). I remembered the time and went back to my body and woke myself up. I then checked the actual time - not even close. I knew then , as I had certainly expected, that I was not really out of my body.

I crave lucid dreams. Knowing that you are dreaming allows some very immoral sexual behavior. There are no consequences, nobody gets hurt. I sometimes fly around in these dreams too, but it is a different sensation than an OBE.

[Marduk]

I voted ‘other’, they are most likely hallucinations but there is always the possibility they might be something more, though I don’t know what or how one would be able to determine which ‘other’ they would be; afterlife, another realm of existence/perception dimension time universe, whatever, who knows?

[sergeyvladimirovich]

Originally posted by Tufted
In fact, in my last one I actually was lucid enough to perform an experiment. I travelled to the kitchen and observed a clock (My eyes came with me?). I remembered the time and went back to my body and woke myself up. I then checked the actual time - not even close. I knew then , as I had certainly expected, that I was not really out of my body.


Well, the New Age people, I imagine, will tell to you that you visited not the physical but the "subtle physical" (terms may differ) plane of consciousness. Therefore, the clock was showing the correct time-- only not the time of the physical plane.

As wacky as this sounds, there's just no way to prove them wrong. Anybody familiar with logic knows how hard it is to prove that something doesn't exist. And these subjective altered states of mind apparently feel so real that it's hard for those who experience them to treat them as illusions.

A while ago, I read the classics of OBE-- Robert Monroe's "Journeys out of the body". There he gives a detailed account of his adventures in the state of OBE, as well as recommendations which I tried. To tell the truth, I did get to the point of "separation" of "soul" with the body-- several times I felt that I was floating up, disconnected from my physical body. Every time I got scared shitless and with an effort "returned" to my body. Damn, that feeling of floating out ouf the body was so physiologically real, that I just couldn't help thinking that I was actually going somewhere else....At any rate, I have no reason to believe that Monroe was lying in any part of his description of "that" world and his exploits there-- up to the point of separation I felt exactly what he said I would feel.

Monroe, however, maintained that the reality observed by an OBEer isn't in any way less real than the physical reality. He also believed that he visited deceased people and was convinced about the existence of afterlife. Objectively, these claims cannot be verified. But then again, who said that the rules of objectivity as set by moden scientific thinking, really define existence? This is why when I think of issues like OBEs I just prefer to say "I don't know".

[Random]

I have a friend who claims to be able to induce OBEs with meditation and visualisation techniques. He thinks he's genuinely astrally projecting, I think he's having a rather interesting lucid dream kind of experience. I'm thinking I might try looking into inducing lucid dreaming and possibly even OBEs myself, starting off by asking him how he does it - it sounds pretty interesting.

[Philosoft]

It seems to me that OBEs entail more than just a non-physical component to consciousness. If my "spirit" (for lack of a better term) can "see" things that ordinarily require both reflection and absorption of specific photonic wavelengths, there must be some underlying non-physical component of physical things. I'm not sure how troubling or surprising this is, but it makes me question the need for physical existence in the first place if it's just a fallible counterpart to non-physical existence.