Spirit-Quest

Scientists study 'out of body experiences'

Jessica Salter, UK News 2008

Doctors in hospitals in Britain and the US will study 1,500 heart attack patients to see if people with no heartbeat or brain activity can have "out of body" experiences.

Some people report being able to soar out of their bodies and look down on themselves and medical staff. The study at 25 UK and US hospitals will include doctors placing images on shelves that are only visible from the ceiling to test the theory.

Dr Sam Parnia, an intensive care doctor who is heading the study, said: "If you can demonstrate that consciousness continues after the brain switches off, it allows for the possibility that the consciousness is a separate entity.

"It is unlikely that we will find many cases where this happens, but we have to be open-minded. "

And if no one sees the pictures, it shows these experiences are illusions or false memories.

"This is a mystery that we can now subject to scientific study." Dr Parnia said that after a cardiac arrest, where the body is technically dead, doctors restart the heart and reverse the dying process.

Is it possible to have an 'out-of-body'experience?

Jerome Taylor, The Independant Science, 2008

Floating above one's body or travelling down a long tunnel leading to a white light has become such a clichéd description of near-death experiences that many remain deeply suspicious of them. And yet time and again people from different walks of life have described the same scenario.

Traditionally debated by theologians and philosophers, the scientific community is now taking a look in an attempt to answer one of life's most enduring questions: what happens to our consciousness when we die?

A coalition of British and US scientists has launched an experiment to study more than 1,500 heart attack patients over the next three years to see if people with no heartbeat and brain activity can have genuine "out-of-body" experiences.

Key to the experiment is an investigation into whether those who say they briefly departed their body while clinically dead "physically" left themselves behind or were simply imagining it during their resuscitation.

Body swap research shows that self is a trick of the mind

James Randerson, The Guardian, 2008

Brain scientists have succeeded in fooling people into thinking they are inside the body of another person or a plastic dummy. The out-of-body experience - which is surprisingly easy to induce - will help researchers to understand how the human brain constructs a sense of physical self.

The research may also lead to practical applications such as more intuitive remote control of robots, treatments for phantom limb pain in amputee patients and possible treatments for anorexia. The research follows a related study from the same group last year in which the scientists convinced volunteers that they were having an out-of-body experience. It was the first time it had been done in the lab and showed that the intensely spiritual experiences that patients sometimes have while on the operating table, for instance, can have a scientific explanation.

"We are interested in how normal perception works, how we recognise our own body. And we do that by studying these perceptual illusions," said Dr Henrik Ehrsson at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. "Critically it depends on the visual perspective and the so-called multisensory integration or the combination of visual signals and tactile signals."

Marine Channels NDE Into Helping Poor In Peru

FOX NEWS - Monday Aug 25, 2008
Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Todd Bowers knows the exact date and time an insurgent bullet embedded itself in his head: October 17, 2004 at 11:36 a.m. At the time, Bowers was serving in Fallujah with a U.S. Marine Corps civil affairs unit. His job was to help Iraqi residents rebuild their lives — literally and figuratively — by repairing battle-damaged homes. Then came the gunshot wound that changed his life. "It's funny. Everybody seems to think you'll have an afterlife experience, your whole life will flash before your eyes," reflected Bowers. "I initially thought my rifle had exploded because I couldn't see out of my left eye and my safety glasses had blown off and my helmet had blown off."
Aware that he no longer held onto his rifle, Staff Sgt. Bowers instead pulled out his 9mm side-arm, and crawled for cover. "When I looked into the ground, I just saw blood pouring into the dirt and realized something had gone really, really wrong," he said. "I was having difficulty seeing out of my eye and obviously losing a lot of blood." Bowers' close call with death didn't sink in at first. "It wasn't until probably about five minutes later when I was getting patched up by the Corpsman that they realized the bullet had actually struck the side of my rifle and skimmed into my left temple. The rifle took the brunt of the blast, and that's pretty much what saved my life."...

Astral vs Etheric Projection - OBEs

Many authors on the subject of Out-Of-Body Experiences, seem to incorrectly lump all OBEs into the definition of Astral Projection. This leads beginners astray, as the experiences are very unique compared to each other and deserve to be treated as such.

The description of etheric projection as a separate entity from astral projection seems to have been lost in literature and teachings somewhere around the late 1800’s to early 1900’s, and has continued until today where most authors still want to combine the two into one experience. Prior to this, etheric and astral projection were clearly explained as separate experiences.

It has been suggested that the highly influential writings of occultist Mdme Blavatsky were a major contributing factor to this merger. She combined the two principles in her written work The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888. Very few current authors make the distinction anymore. The exception to this would be the author Robert Bruce who explains OBEs taking place in the Real Time Zone (RTZ) which is for all intents and purposes, synonymous with etheric projection.....

SQ Project 1a: Emotion During OBEs

Are Out-Of-Body Experiences really taking place outside the physical realm? Neuroscientists say ' no' stating that since emotions, thoughts, and sensory input such as sight and sound are biological functions of the brain, and since they can control these things with chemicals (such as drugs), then experiences such as OBEs must be created by our minds. This is because they equate emotion, thought, and sensory input as what makes us ``us``.

We are currently looking at emotion while out-of-body. It is well known that emotions are easily controlled by chemicals, so then are emotions a purely physical function? What we are hoping to find is that if a vast majority of people who have had OBEs do not experience emotion in the same way while they are out (especially if under the influence of an emotion altering drug or chemical), then it may be an indication that OBEs are an experience outside of the physical.

How do people perceive emotion while they are having an OBE? Do they still feel the physical aspects of emotion, or are the feelings experienced as just thoughts without the physical attributes? The physical aspects of emotion we are referring to are the pit of stomach feelings with fear, the heart palpitations with utter joy, etc.

If you have experienced OBEs (or NDEs) you can participate by answering the current survey to the right...

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The Bridge Across The Great Divide...

As far as OBEs and NDEs go, the main theories are either black or white, with no in between. Either you believe that it's a spiritual event in which something leaves the body, or you believe that it's all in the mind and nothing more. There seems to be no in between... no bridge across the great divide.

You can't tell someone who has had an OBE or NDE that it was all in their mind, because they will tell you they just 'know' somehow that it was real. And you can't ever convince the skeptic who has never had the experience themsevles.

Why can't the experience have elements of both? After all, something must happen physically to initiate the OBE/NDE right? Liken this to a car... you need to open the door to get out. The physical body is just another vehicle.

Let's concentrate on the finding the door and how to open it, rather than trying to disprove or prove OBEs exist in the first place.... More

Yet Another Part Of The Brain is Implicated?

Can the neuroscientists just decide on one theory? Nope! So far they have implicated the Angular Gyrus, and more recently tried to 'prove' that OBEs are the same experience as VR! In this example... they shrug OBEs off as a dissociative phenomenon caused by the temporoparietal junction in the brain.

Linking Out-of-Body Experience and Self Processing to Mental Own-Body Imagery at the Temporoparietal Junction -
From the Journal Of Neuroscience - originally oublished in 2004
http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/25/3/550

The spatial unity of self and body is challenged by various philosophical considerations and several phenomena, perhaps most notoriously the "out-of-body experience" (OBE) during which one's visual perspective and one's self are experienced to have departed from their habitual position within one's body. Although researchers started examining isolated aspects of the self, the neurocognitive processes of OBEs have not been investigated experimentally to further our understanding of the self. With the use of evoked potential mapping, we show the selective activation of the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) at 330-400 ms after stimulus onset when healthy volunteers imagined themselves in the position and visual perspective that generally are reported by people experiencing spontaneous OBEs. Interference with the TPJ b transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) at this time impaired mental transformation of one's own body in healthy volunteers relative to TMS over a control site. No such TMS effect was observed for imagined spatial transformations of external objects, suggesting the selective implication of the TPJ in mental imagery of one's own body. Finally, in an epileptic patient with OBEs originating from the TPJ, we show partial activation of the seizure focus during mental transformations of her body and visual perspective mimicking her OBE perceptions. These results suggest that the TPJ is a crucial structure for the conscious experience of the normal self, mediating spatial unity of self and body, and also suggest that impaired processing at the TPJ may lead to pathological selves such as OBEs.

The Astral Body in the Subconscious Mind

By George A. Boyd ©2003
http://www.mudrashram.com

There are many references to an astral body or light body in esoteric literature. The astral body shimmers like countless tiny stars, hence the name astral or "starry" body. This vehicle is the first subtle covering over the attentional principle; its counterpart is found over the spirit in 10 of the 12 domains.

Meditation emphasizes experience of interior realities. So after a brief description of the astral body, we will give you a meditation exercise to guide you into exploring your own astral body. We will also discuss methods of projection of the astral body and astral sensing.

The surface of the astral body shimmers or sparkles. The actual body is opalescent and resembles the physical body in appearance. However, the astral body may resemble the form of a younger or older physical form. For example, a 60-year-old man may assume the astral form of his 35-year-old physical appearance. A mature 14-year-old young lady may appear in an astral form of someone in her early 20s.

The astral body connects to the medulla center by an umbilical cord-like structure that is referred to as the silver cord in esoteric literature. This cord is infinitely extensible, yet tethers or anchors the astral body to the body’s etheric matrix or chakra.

In its ground state, the astral body is effectively superimposed on the physical form. When the physical body’s arm moves, for example, the astral body’s arm also moves..... More