When I think about an out-of-body experience I tend to conjure up the movie version, where somebody is on the brink of death, doctors all around, CPR and defibrillation being administered, but the person is hovering between deciding whether to live or whether to give up and all the time aspects of their life are flashing before them…
However in reality out-of-body experiences can appear on a much less dramatic level, such as when we are on the verge of sleep, either when we are entering or leaving REM sleep – the rapid eye movement part of the cycle or during lucid dream sleep. People that have such experiences tend to have very emotional responses, either finding the event deeply disturbing or incredibly moving. It may be that they actually unconsciously willed themselves from their bodies, but others describe a feeling of having been dragged by an unknown force. The simplest explanation for out-of-body experiences is that our human consciousness separates from our human body for a period of time but travels unhindered.
In many cases such as these science will try to find an answer as to why these experiences are felt, one such suggestion put forward by Lecturer and writer Susan Blackmore is that during an out-of-body episode a person loses connectivity with their sensory input. So the person is not seeing views created by sensory information, but is drawing on the brains ability to create replicas of our physical world as we understand it, just like we do in dreams. Psychologists and scientists have conducted a number of experiments to provide a normal neurological reason why an individual might experience an out-of-body event; they have tried to replicate the effects by magnetic stimulation of the brain, sensory overload, sensory deprivation, brain wave synchronisation and even hallucinogenic drugs.
Spiritual individuals tend to have a different take on things and consider the out-of-body experience to be a type of Astral Projection. In this scenario an individual has a separate spiritual body, one that is capable of travelling to non-physical realms. These realms are sometimes referred to as planes, astral, etheric or spiritual. This state was described by Native American shamans and is recorded in ancient Hindi texts, essentially the consciousness in astral projection can travel without limitation, it will not perceive physical objects only astral counterparts and beings in other dimensions.
Ref: Mind Body Spirit, Judy Hall
Tweet