- Joined
- Mar 22, 2009
- Messages
- 51
While I am aware that there is another thread of similar topic, I would prefer this thread to go deeper into the issues of the problems and evasions of these experiences, to try to unpack what they really are.
Do out of body experiences really exist?
The answer seems obvious.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in years of looking into the subject (including years of trying to induce these in myself) it's that what appears obvious is not.
Of course in one sense they are real. People have the experience of leaving their bodies. But what I mean is, do they really leave their bodies? Or, more precisely, do they really see things which they could not have seen or known from their vantage or condition.
Now we all know the stories, but the problem is this. One has to rely on story in order to support the idea that this really happens. Unfortunately, it has been tried, a number of times to move from story or anecdote or self report to an investigation of whether this is actually possible, and (with pretty much one exception, itself something of an anomaly) it is consistently found that nothing clairvoyant is seen.
I personally believe that there may be something to it, but notice the terms I am forced to: “I personally believe”. If this were simply a matter of watching a scene unfold from a hidden vantage, then any of the world’s (self-reporting) OOBE adepts should be able to deliver within, say, a week (or at most two). The market is not thin with self-reported books by such “adepts” claiming all sorts of extraordinary perceptions and mega-clairvoyant happenings, all of which vanish without trace when we try to do a simple experiment, such as identify an object sitting on a mantle.
It can seem very tempting to say “we just haven’t got lucky yet”, but given that this problem is endemic across all things “paranormal”, I don’t feel this gets to the bottom of it.
What is undoubtedly the case, whatever else may or may not be true, is that many people are making up these stories. Since Medieval mystics and beyond, consciously or unconsciously, claiming unusual powers has always been a way to bask in a sense of “specialness”. I can’t imagine that any discerning person who has ever read a fair number of these stories, or who has ever spent time on any internet forum where such things tend to be discussed, can have failed to notice this Walter Mitty element. My point though, is that this element is not marginal. Rather, it seems to be an integral part of whatever this is. The conscious or unconscious trend to fabulate and blather seems to be an irreducible part of these phenomena and their story-vehicles.
In many ways, these experiences can be seen as social texts that bargain for a kind of attention, specialness, and self-worth on the part of their originators. That is to say, they serve an identifiable psychological function. Not in every case, or at least not seemingly so.
Does this describe the whole situation? Probably not, but then again it is such a neglected and IMPORTANT dimension of the whole situation, that to discuss “out of body experiences” without discussing it, is in effect not to discuss them at all.
Are there cases where innocents have really seen things that they couldn’t have seen? Well, this is the $64 question. If the psyche itself has a tricksterish determination in hatching these stories from the unconscious, are any of us really “innocents”? What I mean by this, is that outside of a carefully constrained experimental context, it is impossible to reconstruct the information flow in any given anecdote with certainty, whether of OOBE or NDE variety. Add to this the fact that there are various levels of arousal which the digital impression of conscious or unconscious, as if it were a light switch, fails to capture.
However, even if we DO assume that there are innocents who perceive things clearly from out of body, there is the further problem of what it is they perceive. One NDEr, for example, was breathtakingly certain that she was out of body, floating near the ceiling, watching the doctors work on her body. There’s just one problem: the surgical team was divided down the middle, as was the operating table, into personnel dressed in green on one side, who represented “life” and others dressed in white on the opposite side, who represented "death". Another person looked down on the battlefield where a mine exploded very near their position, saw his body beneath him on the sand….but failed to see his buddy who in reality was blown to bits by the mine and the parts strewn across his back.
So whatever is going on here it is not a matter of simple perception, but of elaborated imagination. The scene seems to be built from a faculty of imaginal construction, based around memories and guesswork, sometimes wrong. I do not mean to imply that clairvoyant vision (i.e imaginal construction which happens to report real data) is impossible in this context, only that if it is there, there is a larger question to deal with before we are even likely to answer that, which is why does this phenomenon embed themselves in inaccessible story and ambiguous fable like a flea in dog fur?
Do out of body experiences really exist?
The answer seems obvious.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in years of looking into the subject (including years of trying to induce these in myself) it's that what appears obvious is not.
Of course in one sense they are real. People have the experience of leaving their bodies. But what I mean is, do they really leave their bodies? Or, more precisely, do they really see things which they could not have seen or known from their vantage or condition.
Now we all know the stories, but the problem is this. One has to rely on story in order to support the idea that this really happens. Unfortunately, it has been tried, a number of times to move from story or anecdote or self report to an investigation of whether this is actually possible, and (with pretty much one exception, itself something of an anomaly) it is consistently found that nothing clairvoyant is seen.
I personally believe that there may be something to it, but notice the terms I am forced to: “I personally believe”. If this were simply a matter of watching a scene unfold from a hidden vantage, then any of the world’s (self-reporting) OOBE adepts should be able to deliver within, say, a week (or at most two). The market is not thin with self-reported books by such “adepts” claiming all sorts of extraordinary perceptions and mega-clairvoyant happenings, all of which vanish without trace when we try to do a simple experiment, such as identify an object sitting on a mantle.
It can seem very tempting to say “we just haven’t got lucky yet”, but given that this problem is endemic across all things “paranormal”, I don’t feel this gets to the bottom of it.
What is undoubtedly the case, whatever else may or may not be true, is that many people are making up these stories. Since Medieval mystics and beyond, consciously or unconsciously, claiming unusual powers has always been a way to bask in a sense of “specialness”. I can’t imagine that any discerning person who has ever read a fair number of these stories, or who has ever spent time on any internet forum where such things tend to be discussed, can have failed to notice this Walter Mitty element. My point though, is that this element is not marginal. Rather, it seems to be an integral part of whatever this is. The conscious or unconscious trend to fabulate and blather seems to be an irreducible part of these phenomena and their story-vehicles.
In many ways, these experiences can be seen as social texts that bargain for a kind of attention, specialness, and self-worth on the part of their originators. That is to say, they serve an identifiable psychological function. Not in every case, or at least not seemingly so.
Does this describe the whole situation? Probably not, but then again it is such a neglected and IMPORTANT dimension of the whole situation, that to discuss “out of body experiences” without discussing it, is in effect not to discuss them at all.
Are there cases where innocents have really seen things that they couldn’t have seen? Well, this is the $64 question. If the psyche itself has a tricksterish determination in hatching these stories from the unconscious, are any of us really “innocents”? What I mean by this, is that outside of a carefully constrained experimental context, it is impossible to reconstruct the information flow in any given anecdote with certainty, whether of OOBE or NDE variety. Add to this the fact that there are various levels of arousal which the digital impression of conscious or unconscious, as if it were a light switch, fails to capture.
However, even if we DO assume that there are innocents who perceive things clearly from out of body, there is the further problem of what it is they perceive. One NDEr, for example, was breathtakingly certain that she was out of body, floating near the ceiling, watching the doctors work on her body. There’s just one problem: the surgical team was divided down the middle, as was the operating table, into personnel dressed in green on one side, who represented “life” and others dressed in white on the opposite side, who represented "death". Another person looked down on the battlefield where a mine exploded very near their position, saw his body beneath him on the sand….but failed to see his buddy who in reality was blown to bits by the mine and the parts strewn across his back.
So whatever is going on here it is not a matter of simple perception, but of elaborated imagination. The scene seems to be built from a faculty of imaginal construction, based around memories and guesswork, sometimes wrong. I do not mean to imply that clairvoyant vision (i.e imaginal construction which happens to report real data) is impossible in this context, only that if it is there, there is a larger question to deal with before we are even likely to answer that, which is why does this phenomenon embed themselves in inaccessible story and ambiguous fable like a flea in dog fur?