ABOUT OUT OF BODY EXPERIENCES

Out Of Body Experiences

An out-of-body experience (or OBE, or OOBE) is characterized by subjective perception from a vantage point outside of one¹s physical body. It is sometimes associated with near-death experiences, hypnopompic or hypnagogic dreams, mystical trances or occult phenomena and psychoactive drugs.

An OBE may be contrasted with astral projection, which does not require the perception of one's own body from the outside. Astral projection does not typically posit that one's consciousness or soul is actually traveling through our day-to-day physical reality. An OBE may also be contrasted with dreaming, lucid or otherwise, by the intense perception of being awake and aware of the reality of the experience.

Not every OBE has exactly the same aspects, and it may be that there are several different types of OBE that have different causes and meanings. Some observations can be made based on collections of firsthand accounts of "spontaneous" OBEs - those that were not part of a planned program to induce the experience.

In the great majority of cases, the subject reported being asleep, on the verge of sleep, or having been asleep shortly before. A fairly large percentage of these cases refer to situations where this sleep is not particularly deep (due to illness, noises in other rooms, emotional stress, exhaustion from overworking, frequent re-awakening, etc.).

In some cases, the feeling of being outside the body is something that is suddenly realized after the fact; they see their bodies almost by accident. In other cases, they either will themselves out of their bodies or find themselves being pulled from their bodies (these are usually preceded by the feeling of paralysis).

The OBE is not generally long; on the order of a minute or so. Those who experience OBE may note that the subjective experience is much longer than the objective time passing.

The OBE may or may not be followed by other experiences which are self-reported as being "as real" as the OBE feeling; alternatively, they may fade out into a state self-reported as dreaming, or they may wake completely.

The OBE is sometimes ended by a fearful feeling of getting "too far away" from the body.

Many of these OBEs end with a feeling of suddenly "popping" or "snapping" back into their bodies.

Some people experience spiritual epiphanies; others experience a general feeling of peacefulness and love; still others experience fearfulness and anxiety. Finally, some experience only the OBE itself, with no direct spiritual experience.

A majority describe the end of the experience as "then I woke up". Thuup

Comparing the experience to that of lucid dreaming, it feels more real.

Opinions regarding the objective reality of OBEs are mixed. An appreciable number of people believe the phenomenon is exactly what it feels like, and that the soul is leaving the body and exploring. Many OBE accounts are positive that the usual explanation, that the experience was a dream, is insufficient; and often cite the experience as having a spiritual effect.

Despite claims of some "projectors" who aver that they can initiate the experience at will, there is to date no reliable evidence that any imagery or information acquired during the experience could not have come from normal sources.

While the subjective experience may be very compelling, most skeptics discount the idea that the phenomenon is somehow linked to an actual physical relocation of consciousness. They note that, in the absence of the typical conviction that the experience is real, these experiences would simply be considered dreams; and that lacking hard evidence to the contrary, the simplest explanation would be that the experiencer's sense of heightened reality, however powerful, is a subjective one.

In support of this idea, some neurologists point to experiments in the context of treatment of epilepsy involving electrical stimulus of a particular part of the brain, the right angular gyrus located in the parietal lobe, which produce subjective experiences having all of the hallmarks of an OBE, including the sense of enhanced reality and extreme disembodiment. This evidence, as well as similar results involving use of the drug ketamine, support the hypothesis that at least some OBEs are caused by an unusual but natural brain state in which one's body perception and sense of reality are altered.

Skeptics also point to the increasing body of evidence which ties mental functions such as perception and memory to exclusively physical processes which occur in the brain; and note that no known mechanism would account for how these processes could occur at a distance (the mind-body problem). However in some instances, such as patients during surgery, people describe out of body experiences in which they see something they could not possibly have seen while under anesthesia (for instance, one woman accurately described a surgical instrument she had not seen previously, as well as conversation that occurred while she was clinically dead).

OBE's cannot be disproved, but there is no solid evidence that anyone has actually left their body. Many experiencers have made detailed observations they reportedly could not have made by any other means, but these have not yet been studied to the satisfaction of the scientific community.

Messages received from out of body experiences generally are in the form of symbols or archetypes that you may or may not recognize at first.

Voluntary OBE's take time and practice. Remember that we are all having multidimensional experiences and that there is no linear time - therefore your consciousness can travel anywhere in he grids that form our reality matrixes.

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