Out-of-Body Experiences

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People who report out-of-body experiences typically say they were sleeping at the time.

Out-of-Body Experiences

(dreams)

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are sensations that one is viewing the world—and especially one’s own body—from a position outside the physical body. Persons who have undergone OBEs were usually asleep or under anesthetics at the time, but OBEs can also occur under ordinary, waking circumstances. Some people claim to have experienced OBEs since adolescence or early childhood. The similarity among reports of OBEs—often widely separated by geography and even history—is sometimes proffered as proof of the reality of travel of consciousness out of the body.

OBEs manifest in a variety of forms. In the most elaborate, people sense their consciousness escaping from their body, which is then perceived as a lifeless object. Usually a mist or ball of light or ethereal body seems to surround the escaping consciousness and to be attached to it by a silvery or white cord. In his highly popular book Journeys Out of the Body, Robert Monroe gives instructions on how to produce OBEs. Monroe’s work more than any other popularized the expression “out-of-body experience,” supplanting the older term astral projection. Acceptable scientific proof of the ability of human consciousness to leave the physical body has yet to be demonstrated.

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Mohr, "Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy, and autoscopic hallucination of neurological origin: Implications for neurocognitive mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self-consciousness," Brain Research Reviews, vol.

Autoscopic Hallucination in Alcohol Dependence Syndrome: A Rare or Missed Phenomenon?

A putative implication for fronto-parietal connectivity in out-of-body experiences. Cortex, 45, 216-227.

Floating sensations prior to sleep and out-of-body experiences/ Sensaciones de flotacion antes de dormir y experiencias extracorporales/ Sensations de flotter avant le sommeil et experiences de hors corps/ Schwebegefuhle vor schlafbeginn und ausserkorperliche erfahrungen

The trend is similar throughout the rest of the book; while each chapter artfully describes a particular trait of spiritual experience, it leaves unanswered the most pressing question: what actually happens to the brain during sex, seizures, hunger, cold, near-death and out-of-body experiences, for example, and what can that tell us about the biology of spiritual experience?

Wired for God? The Biology of Spiritual Experience

"Ketamine may disrupt patterns of brain activation that coalesce to represent an integrated body and self, leading to out-of-body experiences," Girard says.

Club drug is out-of-body experience: ketamine could be used in research on sensory integration

This research was funded by the Bial Foundation, as part of the project 'The Flexibility of Body Boundaries and its Relationship to Out-of-Body Experiences' (number 124/02).

Dissociational body experiences: differences between respondents with and without prior out-of-body-experiences

He begins by describing holistic medicine from before history to the present, and describes the nature of miracles and their occurrence from creation onward, miracles in near-death and out-of-body experiences. He describes clerical and secular miracles workers such as Jesus and Cayce, miraculous healing and shamanism, incidences of miracles in science, and how to become a miracle worker.

Alternative medicine and miracles; a grand unified theory

One witness undergoes an atrocious vision and reflects, "As a result, I am much more afraid of dying." (So much for the happy notion that the chemical changes that trigger out-of-body experiences guarantee a fabulous deathbed trip.) By no means do all of the tales suggest their narrators would disagree with current scientific hypotheses about their experiences; but irrespective of their aetiological assumptions, most convey awe and astonishment at the sheer fact of the shattering psychological journey they've made.

Speaking volumes: Rachel Withers on the art of Susan Hiller

Of that 66 per cent who are Christians, at least 10 per cent must have had out-of-body experiences, some believe in past-life regression, others in channelling the dead.

People seek salvation their own way; pop theology mixes divergent ideas into a personal faith

It has a reputation as a "nightmare" drug, yet studies suggest most patients instead experience pleasant, dreamlike, out-of-body experiences while on ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic and psychedelic.

Ketamine: a therapeutic agent and an addictive party drug. (Potential For Use, Abuse)

Have you ever had one of those out-of-body experiences where you see yourself outside your own physical frame in some type of surrealistic spiritual setting watching yourself do something--significant or otherwise?

Helping those who help others. (Thinking Outside The Box)

Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind.

Ring, Kenneth & Cooper, Sharon. 1999. Mindsight: Near-Death and Out-of-Body Experiences in the Blind

She was a famous nursing theorist, whose conceptual model of nursing, which included 'energy fields', has helped launch a whole generation of students who have studied clairvoyance, precognition, Eastern mysticism, and out-of-body experiences, as well as TT.