Not A Blog™

[This is the final part to my out-of-body experience series. See also, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.]

Over the next few months, I spent a great deal of time reading about out of body experiences from both a spiritual and a scientific point of view. Many people may not be aware of this, but the amount of empirical study on OBEs back in 2001 was not very much. There was a lot of anecdotal evidence, and a few studies here and there, but nothing comprehensive. At the time, I got the impression that most serious scientists thought the intentional, concentrated effort of projecting oneself out of the body was an over-hyped load of crap.

Certainly reading back over my own posts, I can understand how that would happen. Is it really like that? I think the default assumption from most people is that the effects are exaggerated at least a little bit—so I’d like to once again reiterate that I have described the events as straightforwardly as possible with no hyperbole. It does indeed feel as real as anything. I shall resist the temptation to say that it feels more real than reality, although others have stated this to be so.

It has only been in the last five years or so that OBE’s have been studied with an eye towards underlying brain process and methods of inducement. Without going into a lot of technical detail, it seems that an OBE arises from either a conflict in sensory input or a deprivation of sensory input while remaining conscious. The theory is that the brain then constructs its own reality to compensate, which is perceived as being perfectly real—or even “more” real, perhaps because it’s localized and the neural signals are stronger.

One neat study was performed in August 2007, where participants were given a virtual reality helmet that was hooked to a camera some fifteen feet behind them. Their only visual input was of themselves, fifteen feet in front of themselves. After a few moments, spontaneous OBEs would occur.

I have a particular interest in electric or sensory-alteration induction of OBEs because I’d really like to see how they compare with the others I’ve had. (I have no interest in chemical or drug-induced OBEs, though. Mostly because drugs are illegal, but also because I’m not all that keen on taking medications of any sort. However, if a psychotropic drug like LSD were to become legal, I’d probably try it at least once.) I think it would be valuable to make a comparison between the various types of OBEs by induction method; I’m not sure anyone has ever done a study on this.

The seemingly obvious way to test the “realness” of OBEs would be to induce them and have the subject attempt to visit the next room over and describe an arrangement of objects or the shape of a sculpture or something. Again, to my knowledge, no one has done this. However, as OBE inducement becomes easier, someone is going to have to set this up.

My own personal attempt at this (with the star patterns) has an interesting conclusion. As you’ll recall, I memorized a pattern of what I assumed were stars, but when I checked the spot the next morning, there was a hill there. Clearly my mind was filling in detail. Well, of course I was distraught at that, but I didn’t just leave it. That night I checked again before going to bed. This time, quite unexpectedly, I saw the same pattern of three lights as I had seen during the OBE. It was the light from three windows from a building off in the distance.

This still raises questions, namely: why should I see the glow of windows (which are not inherently transparent as I mentioned) during an OBE, even if the lights were on? A more likely, skeptical explanation was that I had seen the lights before during some previous night, and my mind, recalling this, simply placed them there when I went “looking” in that direction.

I never satisfactorily repeated this experiment—but not for a lack of trying. There is one more incident I’d like to mention, which happened to me during my second OBE. At this time in my life, I had an early morning paper route, which provided a convenient time to try and project since I had to wake up at like 4:30 in the morning anyway. (It actually didn’t help that much because I fell asleep much too easily.) I had woke up to the now-expected paralysis of ultra-relaxation, and with some trepidation, got out of my body again.

This time I was not going to mess around with the horizon. I was going to see me some stars. I went over and moved myself through the window. I had a room on the second floor, so I was sort of hanging half way out the wall, about twelve feet over the yard. The lights on the hill were gone (makes sense, anyway), so I turned up attention straight upwards with the intention of looking at constellations. It didn’t quite go that way.

Again, recall that I mentioned OBE-o-vision has something of a range-finder ability. You can “feel” how far away things are. I had never considered what exactly this might mean for stargazing until I tried to do it. As soon as I looked up—

Holy fucking shit, space is huge!

Please excuse my swearing, but do realize that this does not remotely convey what I actually felt. I believe the saying goes “the bottom fell out of my world.” I tried to look at the stars up there, and suddenly felt myself mentally reaching across like 9 billion light years of mostly empty space to a few stars (which are immensely gigantic, by the way). Even worse—something else I hadn’t considered—the stars you can see aren’t remotely next to each other. I immediately became aware that this one star and this other star “next” to it are nowhere near each other, and it’s actually silly to think about it that way unless you’re standing on this one very precise spot on Earth. Otherwise, they don’t relate in the slightest.

This may all seem like overstating the obvious, especially if I have any readers with an interest in astronomy, but it is quite literally stuff that I never thought about before. Oh sure, I knew stars are billions of light years away; everyone knows that. But it’s really fundamentally different when you feel it. That could be all in the brain, too, but damn. Space is really massive. (You may think it’s a long way down the road to the Chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.) And it blew my mind.

I panicked, anyway, and I did that other thing everyone tells you not to do: don’t try to force moving your body while you’re out of your body. Don’t get me wrong, being sucked out into the universe is great fun if you’re expecting it, but I was scrambling to think my way back into my body without success. I couldn’t tear my attention away from the all encompassing bigness over my house, but I tried to force myself to move anyway. I managed to do it.

Which was worse! Because now I was staring at my wall, faintly illuminated by the orange glow from the dial of my electric blanket controller AND simultaneously having my consciousness being pulled like taffy across interstellar distances. Disorienting as all get out, but frightening because I couldn’t seem to turn off looking through the universe. Fortunately it was only another second of this before I felt the familiar sucking back to my body, except that I was disoriented enough that I didn’t quite align properly, and I found myself staring at the back of my own head. I couldn’t move, now—just open my eyes—so I started blinking furiously while mentally thrashing about in an attempt to end the damn thing. Suddenly I popped back in my body with a bang—followed immediately by another bang as my entire body spasmed and I accidentally flung my left arm into the wall as hard as I could. [5]

In addition to making my hand hurt like hell, and probably waking up everyone in the house (I never did ask my brother if I woke him up), the experience left me trying to curl up in as tiny a ball as possible just to make the bigness go away. I was in a cold sweat and hyperventilating, and trying to just be very small—and yet I still felt wide awake because I had just projected, which was one good thing because I had to get up to do papers in half an hour anyway. If nothing else, it was very interesting.

Needless to say, I was much more careful around the sky from then on, but I never did try to memorize patterns of stars again, and I never did perform a nice reality-check on my OBEs.

The point being, OBEs should be very easy to verify the validity of, and I expect this will happen within the next five years. I also, unfortunately, do not expect they will correspond with reality. In other words, I think we’ll find that it’s all in your head.

Let the truth be known: I’m very split about this. I slightly lean towards “it’s a psychosomatic process”, but the event is incredibly real. It’s like if someone gave you an apple and let you feel it and smell it and even taste it, but then said, “actually, it’s not real.” Maybe not. We certainly are aware of mental disorders leading to hallucinations while awake, so it’s really not that much of a stretch to see this with OBEs. But I can’t dismiss it outright without further info. It doesn’t seem likely that anyone actually leaves their body, but when you do it, it does really seem like you leave your body.

Basically, it comes down to this. I’d love for it to be real. I’d really like that. To be sure, it would be one of the most important discoveries ever. And I think an enormous number of people would be thrilled to find out a super-natural world exists. (Not to mention, a vast majority of the people would say “We told you so”, which I think would be very condescending and uncalled for.) Everyone wants it to be true.

But that doesn’t make it true. I can’t personally dismiss it, and as a culture, I think it’ll be even harder to let go. But also, I don’t think we’ll find supporting (much less convincing) evidence.

So I’m an atheist in that I don’t believe in a big god. Or gods. Only once (during the astral projection) did I even see another entity. But I’m agnostic in that I don’t know one way or the other.

I’ve had six OBEs altogether. They eventually tapered off in the Spring of 2001 after I didn’t make time keep up the mediation routine. This was not an oversight on my part. I intentionally let the experiences wane for a few reasons. The biggest reason was because, for all intents at purposes, I was an agnostic by this time. I wouldn’t have called myself an atheist (Richard Dawkins would have), but I really had no use for the supernatural. And yet I had these OBEs which now didn’t “fit” anywhere. I was building a nice, tidy, naturalistic world view and the OBE was something I couldn’t explain away. So I buried it.

In light of the more recent studies, it looks more and more likely that it’s tied into the brain. This is a fine explanation, but I remain split on the issue, and I still have a difficult time integrating the idea of “out of body experience” with my world view. It’s a big unknown. However, I expect that as the hard data comes in, it will demystify the experience somewhat.

My goal for the future is to begin projecting again, but today work is much like school, time-wise; I really have no free time to dedicate to meditation. I’ve started again, but I know from before how much I need to do, and I don’t see myself hitting that. What I’ve never done is long-term consistency in mediation, so I remain optimistic that this will be helpful. Regardless of what happens in the future, the past OBEs remain precious, vivid memories, and I like to think that recounting the experience here may help us get to the bottom of a few things.

-Ted

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5. Reading back over this part again, I was laughing a little bit. I’ll admit: it does seem kind of funny when you’re just reading my description. (And I’m not exactly going out of my way to be completely serious.) So you can laugh. However, in all seriousness, it very much did freak me out at the time. [Back]