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DarkElf said:
It happened to me once in a deep meditation.

I sat on my bedroom floor, maybe for 2 hours? It was just getting dark when I started, and when I came back it was completely pitch black.

It didn't last long (The OBE - The meditation was the 2 hour part)
I remember getting up (Felt very real) I walked around the room, and paced for a few seconds, and then started going towards my bedroom door, I looked back and their I was, sitting on the floor. I had a panic attack, and was back in my body.

I was so disappointed. I kept trying again after that, but when my body hits that awkward state of sleep/awake... I start to panic again.

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Moonshoe said:
So seeing as so many of us have had OBEs, do you think OBEs are proof that some kind of spiritual world exists, or that human consciousness can leave the body, and therefore is or could be some kind of life after death?

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Moonshoe said:
By the way the only reason they stopped using ketamine as a human anesthetic was because it caused so many people to have out of body experiences.

Ketamine basically proved the existence of the soul.

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Moonshoe said:
Thanks for your replies everyone trippy stuff!

So seeing as so many of us have had OBEs, do you think OBEs are proof that some kind of spiritual world exists, or that human consciousness can leave the body, and therefore is or could be some kind of life after death?

Personally I think OBEs are proof that life after death could exist, specifically because of all the cases where people who are put under for surgery float out of their bodies and then accurately witness things they had no way of seeing like what was happening in the next room over. To me this is hard proof that the materialistic reductionistic world view is false and essentially the world is much more spiritual and mysterious than it seems.

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Moonshoe said:
Ketamine basically proved the existence of the soul.

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After extensive experience with dissociative states I did not come to a conclusion that is anywhere close to that. It is rather funny because before experimenting with these altered states I believed in a soul and all of that. Maybe I don't have a soul

I think we should at least consider it in this context. We have evolved to collect data from the world around us and process that data. In sober reality we can only see a certain part of the electromagnetic spectrum, for example. But our sensory organs, our eyes, are always physically constrained to perceiving data within that range. So taking drugs cannot make us physically see (visually) beyond our sober reality. Drugs alter the processing center, our brain. We can process information in ways that we are otherwise not capable of. This allows us to experience new perspectives which is the most beneficial part of the drug experience.

Also, I find that dissociatives and existentialist philosophy go incredibly well with eachother. Someone else should try this out. I recommend Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus (or Existentialism is a Humanism). As well as an enjoyable amount of MXE.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMDAR
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NMDA_receptor_antagonist#Mechanism_of_action

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The_Aviator said:
I used to be certain that it was evidence of some sort of extradimensional realm that we could access but after having a couple of legitimate experiments I decided it is just a mind trick. Pretty fun though and the headspace that is associated with sensory deprivation can be incredible.

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This is the conclusion I came to as well after numerous OBE and practicing astral projecting(which comes natural to me) for a while.

Its really just its own form of a lucid dream. It is fun as hell though Especially if you are one of the lucky ones who are able to do this naturally without drugs on a regular basis.

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Moonshoe said:
Apparently there are many recorded and verified occurrences of "veridical OBEs" where the accounts of the out of body experiencer about what is happening (in the next room in the hospital for example) is confirmed to be accurate despite no possibility of them knowing that.

The smoking gun, so to speak...

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The_Aviator said:
But our sensory organs, our eyes, are always physically constrained to perceiving data within that range. So taking drugs cannot make us physically see (visually) beyond our sober reality. Drugs alter the processing center, our brain. We can process information in ways that we are otherwise not capable of. This allows us to experience new perspectives which is the most beneficial part of the drug experience.

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Moonshoe said:
Apparently there are many recorded and verified occurrences of "veridical OBEs" where the accounts of the out of body experiencer about what is happening (in the next room in the hospital for example) is confirmed to be accurate despite no possibility of them knowing that.

The smoking gun, so to speak...

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KremrBigSikter said:
I don't understand how OBEs could indicate that you have actually left your body, and are floating around outside it. I'm (somewhat) open to the idea that there is more to a living creature than the sum of all its physical components, but not that it's possible to leave the physical body behind and still experience things outside of it. How can you "see" or "hear" what's on the other side of the wall without eyes or ears? Even if your incorporeal form could somehow pick up the same information as your flesh-and-blood-body, why would it arrange visible radiations as "vision" without a retina or neurons, or vibrations in air as sound? And why no 1080 degree vision? The whole idea just feels like wishful thinking of the unimaginative kind.

That being said, I find OBEs, lucid dreaming etc very interesting. Kind of like hacking your brain to reach the hidden bonus levels.

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Moonshoe said:
Have you ever had an out of body experience? How many? what was it like? Please share your out of body experience stories here. Did you induce it on purpose or did it just happen?

I have had a handful in my life, maybe between 6-12. They just happened, I did not induce them intentionally. I have tried inducing them a few times without success.

The main difference between the OBE and the lucid dream seems to be that the OBE begins in the bed, with a state of sleep paralysis an odd in-between states of consciousness threshold, at the edge of waking and sleep.

It is as though normally your body is paralyzed then you drift into a dream. But sometimes for whatever reason your body is paralyzed for sleep but instead of going to dreamland your mind stays in your body, and this odd dissasociative state, almost like ketamine perhaps. At this point one may feel hypnagogic hallucinations, hear voices, approaching footsteps, or see figures moving or sitting nearby. Often there is a great sense of fear and trepidation as though a threat is approaching.

This often distracts people from the opportunity to have an OBE. I have often freaked out when the sleep paralysis comes on , thinking people or zombies are moving in my house and I need to get up and grab my sword.

But if you relax, and don't fight it, you instead focus on floating up, out of your body. You can also sink down out of your body or roll out of your body to the side. This is the hard part.
I have often gotten this far but not been able to float out.

When I do succeed, there is a sensation of an intense vibration, like being electrocuted, and a sound like buzzing in the ears. Then I float out of my body into the top corner of my room and look down at my body in bed.

When you are close to the body there may be a kind of gravity trying to pull you back in. I had this experience an it made the room wobble back and forth like I was on a rocking boat, and I had to struggle away from my body.

In any case once out and away from the body I fly around, through the window, out to the city, over treetops, buildings, cars, people and roads below... and I just kind of fly around and look at stuff and trip out about how crazy it is.


Like I said its happened like a handful of times. The interesting thing was I had all those experiences and only later read a book about it where it said that the buzzing, the electrocution, and the gravity and rocking back and forth when you are close to your body are all typical pasts of the OBE. In other words the same characteristics happen for OBEs from person to person.

A Nasa astronaut had hundreds of OBEs  and wrote a book about it. Soul Traveler.

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