Oct

Is an out of body experience normal?

While reading an article the other day at newscientist.com titled out of your head: Leaving the body behind, I was struck by the point of view of the scientist and doctors. The article was about them documenting out of body experiences. They definitely acknowledge that OBE’s occur. They also seemed to think that it is not normal for a person to have an OBE. From their scientific perspective the OBE is a result of trauma or malfunction of a certain region of the brain called the temporoparietal junction or (TPJ) for short.

Science acknowledges OBE’s

The article was interesting in that there is a definite acknowledgement scientifically that there may be a definite separation between consciousness and the body. But it also raised a lot of questions for them like, how can a person with their eyes closed visually see when they leave the body? And how can they look back on the body, as in leaving the confines of the body?

They do acknowledge that “people without any obvious neurological disorder can have an OBE.” However, it seems that not having an “obvious” disorder leaves an implication that their may be something wrong or abnormal with an OBE.

Ofcourse there are many people that experience OBE’s as a normal state when they go to sleep. OBE’s are actually normal for everyone. Just like many people are not aware that they dream, most of us are not aware when an OBE occurs. Our soul leaves the body whenever we sleep. Do you know that a person can die if they do not get sleep? The soul has to leave the body to rejuvenate. When it stays away from the body to long we can physically feel sluggish. Ten hours of sleep is not always a healthy thing for the mind and body.

Here are some of the highlights of the article:

Insights from neurological disorders or brain surgery can only take you so far, however, not least because cases are rare. Larger-scale studies are required, and to achieve this Blanke and others have used a technique called “own-body transformation tasks” to force the brain to do things that it seemingly does during an out-of-body experience. In these experiments, subjects are shown a sequence of brief glimpses of cartoon figures wearing a glove on one hand. Some of the figures face the subject, others have their back turned (see diagram). The task is to imagine yourself in the position of the cartoon figure in order to work out which hand the glove is on. To do this, you may have to mentally rotate you own body as one image succeeds another. As volunteers performed these tasks, the researchers mapped their brain activity with an EEG and found that the TPJ was activated when the volunteers imagined themselves in a position different from their actual orientation – an out-of-body position.

Seems that when we imagine something the brain does not know the difference. the subjects imagined they were in a position other than there actual orientation. This is a major key in understanding the mobility of our consciousness. When a person does remote viewing the same mechanisms operate. I will bet that these scientist and doctors are aware of this but they can not some out and speak on what they can not scientifically document.

A puzzling question

This does not, however, explain the most striking feature of out-of-body experiences. “It’s a great puzzle why people, from their out-of-body locations, visualize not only their bodies but things around them, such as other people,” says Brugger. “Where does this information come from?”

This is a puzzle because they have not come to terms with the idea that the soul can sense and experience without the physical body. We can do this when we are conscious through what we call imagination. In actuality it is how the soul can perceive.

Science thinks the brain is the seat of consciousness

“The brain resolves sensory conflict by splitting the self from the body. The body gets left behind.”

This is an explanation of why they people feel a sense of moving or flying when sleep. The scientist believes it is the physical brain. Often times when you dream of flying you are. It is just not physical. Hard to believe? Because of the way science is defined by scientific method it does not allow for subjective experience. It order for it to be real it has to be observable and quantifiable. In other words if everyone can not see it and measure it that it is not “real.” Your consciousness can do things a go places in the universe that your body will never be able to go because it is bound by the laws of physical reality. Consciousness has no such boundaries

Science is making inroads in some areas. I always enjoy when they “discover” aspects of our being that the ancients have spoke about philosophically for ages. I can believe that these highly intelligent people have stumbled on the next step that their finding would lead them to but are unable to speak on it publicly. Or they must be in complete denial of the implications of many of the objective findings. They keep running to the edge of an ocean of consciousness. One day they will have to take the plunge.

Click here to view entire article at newscientist.com