One hot August afternoon in 1965, parapsychologist D. Scott Rogo, author of the 1978 book “Mind Beyond The Body” then a student, was lying on his bed to take his usual after-class nap but, for some reason he was unable to sleep. He said “I began to feel oddly chilly and started to tremble. I flipped over onto my side, realising at the same moment that my whole body was pulsating and that I was almost paralysed…. An instant later I found myself floating in the air and, in another instant I was standing at the foot of the bed staring at myself. I made an abrupt about face and tried to walk toward the door to my room, which led to a hallway. I felt as though I were gliding through jelly as I moved, and I lost balance for a moment and almost fell over. Everything was blurred by a cloudy hue that enveloped a whitish form which I perceived as my body. A moment later I found myself awakening on my bed. But I also realised that I had never been asleep.”
This experience is far from an isolated case and they are commonly referred to as “Out Of Body Experiences,” “OBEs,” “OOBEs,” “OOBs” or, more formally, as “Ecsomatic States.”
The characteristics of an OBE are that the person is aware that they have become separated from their body, sometimes by a great distance, and they can perceive their body and its surroundings from an external viewpoint. They feel alert and aware and are usually extremely observant. Some feel that they are occupying a second body, maybe a double of themselves and this may or may not be visible to an onlooker. Some feel that this second body is transparent but intact, while others feel that they are a cloud of vapour or mist, a glowing ball or even a magnetic or electrical field. The form is also said to generate its own light and many report seeing a luminous cord which connects them to their body. The form may walk, glide, float or fly and may remain around the body or even travel great distances, even sometimes through time and space. They may pass through matter such as walls and doors but are rarely able to touch and move objects.
The English novelist, William Gerhardie, had no prior knowledge of astral projection until it happened to him. He felt that he was waking from a dream and went to switch on his bedside lamp but he found himself “grasping at a void.” He came fully awake and realised that he was floating in mid-air. He was in full command of his senses and could see everything in the room, including his own body lying in bed. He tried to open the door but was unable to get a grip on the handle.
It is interesting the way that Gerhardie describes the cord which linked him to his physical body, he said that it was like “the strong broad ray of dusty light at the back of a dark cinema projecting onto the screen in front” and it seemed to illuminate his face on the pillow and seemed attached to its brow. “The sleeper was myself, not dead, but breathing peacefully, my mouth slightly open.” Gerhardie travelled about the house, making careful observations about where objects lay, which windows were open and which curtains drawn, all of which he found to be correct in the morning.
All through his experience he was aware of the cord that connected him to his body “like an umbilical cord, by means of which the body on the bed was kept breathing while its mold wandered about the flat.” At one point he became afraid that something might happen to sever the link with his body, but he wrote: “I felt it hovering over my old body on the bed, drab disappointment came back to me, ‘Not yet’ I said, and again I flew off. When I flew this swiftly, my consciousness seemed to blot out and only returned when again I walked or moved at a reasonable speed.”
While Gerhardie claimed to have “flown” around his house, 26 year old Martha Johnson experienced a long distance OBE on January 26th, 1957 where she “floated” to her mother’s house 926 miles away and in a different time zone.
When she arrived there she found herself in the kitchen and her mother was also there. Martha took a couple of steps toward her but then abruptly returned to her body and, on looking at her bedside clock, saw that it was 2:10am. She soon received a letter from her mother, who had known nothing of Martha’s OBE. In the letter she described that she had gradually become aware that Martha was standing in the kitchen, typically with her arms folded and her head slightly tilted to one side. She had started to say something to her but she had suddenly disappeared. She noted in the letter how nice Martha’s new hairstyle was and she added that it had been “ten after two, your time.”
It is almost as if the psychic reality and the mundane world were incapable of co-existing. Skeptics say that OBEs can be explained away as any one of a handful of things such as dreams, hallucinations, self-delusions, ESP, psychic episodes and of course, the old faithful, hoaxes.
In the 1970s, Dr. Dean Sheils, than an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, analysed data from some 71 non-western cultures to explore their beliefs in OBEs. He found that a belief existed in 95% of them and he also found that their respective ideas and descriptions are “strikingly similar.” Typically they say that “something” leaves the body, mostly during sleep or unconsciousness, but the experience is easily distinguishable from ordinary dreams, and is spontaneous, though some do claim to be able to project – Astral Travel – at will, but this is not specifically a trait of non-western cultures.
For example, at the turn of the 19th century, Ed Morrell was sentenced to life imprisonment in San Quentin, but in 1909 he won a pardon and was then released. He later wrote a book about his ordeal entitled “The Twenty-Fifth Man” and in it he describes the worst period of all as when he was falsely accused of hiding guns in the prison and, in order to try and make him reveal their whereabouts, the jailers placed him in the notorious “bloody straitjacket.” This was a garment that covered the whole body and was fastened so tightly that it induced a feeling of “suffocation similar to the experience of being buried alive.”
He would have water poured on him so that the jacket would shrink and become even tighter still, and he likened the experience to being “slowly squeezed to death” One of his sessions in the jacket lasted for as long as 126 hours, and Morrell recalled the stabbing pains, gradual numbness and the bodily excretions that ate into his skin like acid. He added that it made being “squeezed to death by a giant boa constrictor pale before the death terrors of the jacket.”
His first session in the jacket left him in a state of despair unlike any other but it was his next episode that was memorable for different reasons. As he lay in pain on the floor of his cell, he felt his consciousness slowly leave the body and float outside the prison walls, and he felt himself gliding “into the living, breathing outside world” and whenever he “returned” to his cell he would feel refreshed.
Morrell’s inexplicable ability to withstand his torture mystified the prison warden and so he ordered the guards to place a second jacket over the first, but still, whenever he was released, the guards would find him in relatively good spirits. It could be said that Morrell’s experiences were merely a subconscious reaction to his predicament and that he didn’t necessarily leave his body at all, but he was later able to corroborate events that he said he had witnessed on his excursions. A change of prison warden saw his release, first from five years of solitary confinement and then from prison and he never experienced an OBE again.
A similar claim was made by the British secret agent, Odette Hallowes who looked forward to her OBEs when she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo during World War 2. Whenever the pain got too much she would leave her body and watch the sadists below her do their dirty work while she remained free of any physical pain.
It appears to be a frequent claim that OBEs can be used to avoid pain and suffering but they are not always voluntary. An eminent British anatomist, Sir Auckland Geddes, became suddenly ill with gastroenteritis and, by the next morning, he was so ill that he was unable to telephone for help. He accepted the probability of death and even began to consider his final financial affairs before he felt his consciousness slip out of his body. He was then able to look down where he could see his own body lying in bed, and even everything in his house and garden. He was also able to see various sites in London and Scotland and wherever he directed his attention. He said “I was free in a time-dimension of space, wherein ‘now’ was in some way equivalent to ‘here’ in the ordinary 3 dimensional space of everyday life.”
Geddes saw his daughter come in to his bedroom, look at his body and hurry to the phone. “I saw my doctor leave his patients and come very quickly and heard him say, or saw him think, ‘He is very nearly gone.’” He saw the doctor inject his body with camphor and “was drawn back and I was intensely annoyed, because once I was back, all the clarity of vision disappeared, and I was just possessed of a glimmer of consciousness, which was suffused with pain.”
In 1965 and 1966, an experiment was carried out by Dr. Charles T. Tart to see whether or not OBEs could be instigated intentionally. Tart’s subject was a successful Virginia business man and electronics engineer, Robert Monroe, who had experienced vivid ONEs since 1958 and who claimed to be able to induce them. Monroe was placed in a makeshift laboratory bedroom where his heartbeat, eye movement and brain waves could be monitored. He was intending to leave his body and “project” himself into an adjoining control room where there was a randomly selected five digit number on a shelf above eye level.
Monroe found the monitoring equipment uncomfortable and he was unable to relax enough to be able to induce separation until the eighth and last time of trying, when he claimed to have had two separations. In the first he moved from the control room “through a darkened area” and came upon two men and a woman who were talking. He felt disoriented and couldn’t see too well so he returned to his body and tried again. On the next attempt he separated and rolled off the bed and floated to the floor, slowly went through the door into the control room but couldn’t see the lab technician at her usual place, but passed out of the room, without noticing the five digit number, into a brightly lit corridor where he could see her talking to a man he didn’t recognize.
Monroe became aware of some discomfort and returned to his body to find that he had a dry throat and a sore ear. He called to the technician to report his OBE and she confirmed that she was indeed in the corridor with a man he didn’t know, her husband. Tart could come to no solid conclusions about Monroe’s alleged OBEs but did say that his studies showed that OBEs are not “beyond the pale of scientific investigation.”
Robert Monroe went on to set up “The Monroe Institute for Applied Sciences” in Richmond, Virginia and he now also claims to have “bumped into” other astral travelers, had out of the body sex and even re-entered a corpse by mistake.
Robert Monroe doesn’t use the word “Astral” when writing about OBEs but he believes that he has visited different “planes of reality” which he calls “locales 1, 2 and 3.”
Locale 3 is a physical and material world with a civilisation based on different technologies to ours and with different customs. A lot of what Monroe claims to have seen in locale 3 stretches the imagination to the limits, such as people, roads, businesses, cities and all signs of civilisation but no sign of the use of oil, electricity or internal combustion, giving rise to the opinion that science there is less advanced than our own, but it cannot be a period of our past history because our science was never at the stage that Moroe describes in Locale 3.
It is interesting to note though, that since Monroe’s book was first published in 1971, theoretical physicists working in advanced quantum mechanics have hypothesised that there are multiple universes which are similar but can be transversed by “transition events,” of which one kind may be OBEs.
In their 1929 book “The Projection of the Astral Body” Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington describe several ways in which it is possible to induce an OBE. They all involve lying on your back with your eyes closed, and you may then imagine rotating your point of view in the imagination around a central axis so that you are looking at your feet or at the length of your body. Another way is to drift off to sleep while holding an imaginary sensation of you going up in a lift. A third way is to go to bed thirsty and while you go to sleep, imagine yourself going to the kitchen to get a drink and picture yourself at the sink.
There have been many studies into OBEs, and Celia Green of the Institute of Psychophysical research in Oxford, England published some results of her work in her 1968 book “Out-Of-The-Body Experiences.” Her study was based on a questionnaire completed by 326 people who had experienced one or more OBEs.
She found that over 60% had had only one OBE, 18% had had between 2 and 5 and 21% had had over 6. The group surveyed were made up of people of all ages and the results also showed that people had less OBEs as they got older. Those who had had more than 1 were often in childhood when they occurred, and those who had had only 1, most often had it between the ages of 15 and 35. Most of those in the study, 80%, did not have a vivid OBE but a feeling of “disembodied consciousness,” 32% under anaesthetic or after an accident, 12% during sleep, 25% under conditions of psychological stress and the rest while awake and active.
This would seem to suggest that a lot of people experience some kind of OBE but few are very lucid and easily remembered astral journeys. One such brief experience reported in the survey was that of a man who wrote “During the morning while driving fast along a road the drone of the engine and vibration seemed to leave my motorbike like a zoom lens in reverse and was hovering over a hill watching myself and my friend tearing along on the road below and I seemed to think ‘I shouldn’t be here, get back on that bike!’ and the next instant I was in the saddle again.”
Another was reported by a waitress who had just finished a 12 hour shift and had missed her bus, so she set off walking and “The next I registered was of hearing the sound of my heels very hollowly and I looked down and watched myself walk round the bend of Beaumont Street into Walton Street. I - The bit of me that counts - was up on a level with Worcester College Chapel. I saw myself very clearly – It was a summer evening and I was wearing a sleeveless Shantung dress. I remember thinking ‘So that’s how I look to other people.’”
In these two reports, and other similar ones in the survey, there is no mention of the form taken by the outer self, the link with the physical body or the feeling of great freedom. Despite this, both had a distinct notion of a second self, “the bit of me that counts,” the “disembodied consciousness.” As surveys show, most OBEs happen at times of pain or stress and there is a particular type of OBE which is referred to as an N.D.E. (Near Death Experience) and these are OBEs which occur during surgical operations, after accidents or during serious illness. A 1982 Gallup poll found that 8 million Americans have experienced an NDE. They are believed to occur when a person actually dies and their soul leaves their body on its way to wherever it goes, but if they are revived and brought back to life, their soul returns to their body and they can later recall their experience.
They have been reported with regularity since recent medical advances have meant that people can be clinically dead – with no heartbeat and no breathing – and then be brought back to life, in fact 40 minutes after the heart stops beating, electricity can still be detected within the body. One wonders what may happen if, in the future, we can revive people after they are brain dead. Where will they have been to?
In the past, NDEs have been blamed on hallucinations brought about by oxygen deprivation to the brain or by anaesthetic, but many who have NDEs are not deprived of oxygen or under anaesthetic and, conversely, many who are do not have NDEs. The term itself was brought about after the publication of Raymond Moody’s 1975 book “Life After Life.”
In April 1916 a medical officer attached to the 2nd Brigade of the Royal Flying Corps in Clairmarais, France was responding to an emergency casualty report from another airfield. He jumped aboard a plane with a pilot and they made a hurried take off, but before they had gained adequate height or speed, the pilot made a sharp turn and the plane lost its upward thrust and began to fall out of the sky. The medic remained unusually calm and found himself wondering which wing would hit the ground first and later recalled “suddenly I was looking down on my body on the ground from some 220ft vertically above it.” He had been thrown clear in the impact and was lying on his back, apparently unconscious, though he had a feeling of pleasant awareness.
Looking down from above, he could see the uninjured pilot and two senior officers run toward his body and bend over it. “My spirit, or whatever you like to call it, hovering there, was wondering why they were bothering to pay any attention to my body, and I distinctly remember wishing they would leave it alone.” He also saw the ambulance pull out of its hangar and stall; the driver get out, crank the engine and get back into his seat; the medical orderly run out of the field hut and jump in the ambulance, but he had obviously forgotten something as he ran back to get it, and the ambulance then continued on its way.” He then felt himself “and it was most definitely me, and not something else” moving away from the airfield at great speed. He had a sense of moving toward a nearby town, then far beyond it toward the open sea and, as he wondered about this, he felt “a sort of retraction” and he was hovering above his body again. He became aware that a medical orderly was pouring a stimulant down his throat and he opened his eyes and was back in his body once again.
Later, as he reflected on his trip, he thought that he may have imagined the journey out to sea, but what about the actions that he had seen near the hangars and around the crash site, actions that were later confirmed to be correct by his commanding officer who made discreet enquiries on his behalf. The medic still felt that he may be considered bizarre or unusual so he wished to remain anonymous, but he clearly wasn’t “bizarre” as he later became consultant physician to the Royal Air Force, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In 1964, David Taylor and a friend were spending the final weeks of their tour of East Africa in Tanzania. Taylor said “We had been driving through the game park and had just turned on to the main road to Moshi. It was dusk and I was sitting half asleep in the passenger seat.
I was suddenly woken by my friend who was delighted to see the first vehicle we had come across in six hours, driving down towards us. Either my friend or the other driver must have been half asleep, for within seconds the two vehicles drove smack into each other.
As the two vehicles collided, I suddenly found that I was watching the scene from several yards up in the air, as if I were suspended above the road. I saw our own Land Rover colliding with a large lorry, and I watched as I was thrown from the Land Rover. My friend then climbed out unhurt and came back to examine my body. I also saw the lorry drive off. I remember thinking that I looked a terrible mess lying there on the road and could well be dead.
The next thing I knew was coming to in Moshi hospital. I had been unconscious for two days with serious injuries. I told my friend what I had seen and he confirmed that it was indeed a lorry that had run into us and that it had driven on. I had only been saved because another car had come down the road afterwards and taken me to hospital.
The whole experience, even after all these years, has left me incompletely unafraid of death.”
This feeling of being unafraid of death must surely be experienced by those who experience the more typical NDE, that is, those which feature the “dark tunnel” and the “bright light” alleged to be a glimpse of what lies beyond, a glimpse of heaven.
Typical of such an NDE is the one that appeared in November, 1979 in a journal article that featured the experience of Mrs Iris Lemov who went into hospital for a routine operation. She recalled “I was brought back to my room after surgery and was speaking to my nurse, when a strange separated feeling between my body and my brain occurred. High above my body I floated wondering why so many doctors were round my bed.” Mrs Lemov had slipped suddenly and unexpectedly into a coma and, as she watched, her heart stopped beating, though it seemed to her only that her face had gone pale. All of a sudden, everything went dark and she was sucked into a long, black tunnel with a light at the end of it. She reported; “I felt frightened and excited as I neared the end of the tunnel, I felt peace, without pain, and free. The light at the end of the tunnel was bright but easy on my eyes.”
When Iris came out into the light she found herself in a peaceful valley which she described as “a sight to behold. There was velvety green grass and calmness. Music coming from nowhere made me feel comfortable and I began to feel as if I belonged. I saw figures of people dressed in shrouds coming toward me and they called me by name. This man with a white beard told me to go back – your family still needs you – enjoy your life. This beautiful man was my grandfather who died two years before I was born.”
This account is extremely typical of NDEs, and another is that experienced by an American airline pilot, George Jehn, who crashed his car into a bridge. He remembers the ambulance arriving and the paramedics pronouncing him dead, and then he says that everything went white and he felt himself in a tunnel, heading towards a bright light. He says that “It was beautiful. It was just a feeling of total, total love that enveloped me.” Before he reached the light, he says that he found himself standing in front of a guy. “He looked at me, I looked at him, and he was a friend of mine.” He recognised him as a friend called Tom who had died five years earlier. “Tom looked at me and said: “You’ve got to go back, George. It’s not your time yet.” And Jehn returned to the hospital to find himself on a ventilator.
It isn’t all a bed of roses though, with people going to green pastures and comforting light. One account given to Dr. Margot Grey was of a person who apparently briefly visited hell. He said “I found myself in a place surrounded by mist…. There was a big pit with vapour coming out and there were arms and hands coming out trying to grab mine…. I was terrified that these hands were going to claw hold of me and pull me into the pit.”
Another report, this time given to Dr. Raymond Moody, described the person travelling toward the light, but as they did, they passed a place where there was terrible desolation, full of “washed out” partly human forms with a crushed, hopeless demeanour who appeared to be shuffling around, not knowing where they were going, who to follow or what to look for.
Both of these kinds of hell have also been reported by other people and as Dr. Michael Rawlings put it “It may not be safe to die.” Though reports such as this do exist, they are quite rare, and in fact, far, far rarer than NDEs that talk of heaven and peace and light. One man reported “I thought I was dead, and I wasn’t sorry that I was dead, but I just couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to go.”
There is one particular example of an NDE that contains all the typical elements and it was featured twice on BBC Television. In late Autumn 1968, a young girl named Durdana who was aged 2 had an NDE. She had been ill for some time and even began to become paralysed as well as suffering from bouts of vomiting and blindness. Durdana’s father was an Army doctor posted in the foothills of the Himalayas, and he took his daughter to the military hospital some miles away for tests which proved inconclusive. It was thought that her condition may be the after effects of a viral encephalitis which had claimed the lives a dozen children in the area.
One day he received a message from an orderly that his wife had called to say that something had happened to Durdana. As she had been very ill the night before, he raced home fearing the worst, and when he got there he looked down at Durdana lying in her cot in the garden but his hasty examination found no signs of life. He said to his wife “She’s gone.”
She picked her up and carried her inside the house and one of the orderlies who had accompanied Durdana’s father home left to get some equipment in order to perform the emergency measures that were mandatory under Army regulations. Her father treated her “knowing that they were unlikely to have any effect. While doing so, I found myself repeating, half consciously, under my breath: ‘Come back my child, come back.’”
As a last resort his wife poured a few drops or Nikethamine – a heart stimulant – into her mouth but it trickled out of her mouth and down her cheek, but to their surprise Durdana opened her eyes and told them that the medicine tasted bitter. As he again examined her, her vital signs began to reappear.
A few days later, when she was somewhat recovered, Durdana was in the garden with her mother who asked her “Where did my little daughter go to the other day?” and she replied “Far, far away, to the stars.” She then asked her what she saw there and Durdana replied “Gardens.” When asked what she saw in the gardens, she said that there were apples, grapes, pomegranates and streams. One white, one brown, one blue and one green.
Her mother then asked her if she saw anyone there, and she replied “Yes, my grandfather was there and his mother and another lady who looked like you.” She was asked what they said and she replied “Grandpa said he was glad to see me, and his mother took me in her lap and kissed me.” She then said that she “heard my daddy calling me, ‘come back my child, come back’ and I told Grandpa that daddy was calling me and I must go back. He said we would have to ask God, so we went to God and Grandpa told him that I wanted to go back. ‘Do you want to go back?’ God asked me. ‘Yes’ I said, ‘I must go back. My daddy is calling me.’ ‘Alright’ said God, ‘Go’ and down, down, down I came from the stars, on to daddy’s bed.”
Her father found this interesting because Durdana had not been in his bed at the time, or any other bed. When she had regained consciousness she was in no state to realise where she was, but her mother was more interested in her meeting with God and she asked her what God was like: “Blue.” She answered. Whenever they would ask her what God looked like or for more details Durdana would always give the same answer, blue.
During her recuperation Durdana stayed in Karachi with her mother and they visited several relatives in the area. While visiting one of her uncles they were drinking tea and chatting and Durdana walked around the room and she suddenly exclaimed “Mummy, mummy! This is my grandpa’s mother. I met her in the stars. She took me in her lap and kissed me.” She was right about who was in the photograph but the lady had died long before Durdana was born, and there were only two photographs of her in existence, both of which were in the uncle’s home, to which she had never been before.
Later, the family moved to London and their story attracted the attention of the media and Durdana was featured in the BBC programme “Everyman” in 1980. Before the programme they were visited by the Producer, Angela Tilby, who noticed some paintings that Durdana had done, and she suggested that she should try to paint what she had seen “in the stars.” The BBC again featured Durdana, this time on their “Pebble Mill At One” programme and this time her paintings were also shown which sparked a new twist in the story.
The day after the programme was shown, her father received a telephone call from a lady called Mrs Goldsmith who was one of his patients – a well-read, intelligent German-Jewish woman. She said that she had seen Durdana on TV the day before and she said that she would like to see the paintings again as she had had a similar NDE to Durdana.
She said “I nearly jumped out of my chair when I saw this picture on the television” and she added, “My God, I’ve been to this place.” It turned out that she had not only been to the actual spot that Durdana had painted but she recognised everything that was in the picture and also described things that were not in it. She and Durdana sat and talked about what was round the bend in the stream and the location of other streams that Durdana had described to her mother.
Durdana felt that she was very happy while she was in the stars, and only returned out of a sense of duty as her father was calling her. She had felt a sense of freedom, as though she was everywhere at once, and could reach anywhere she wanted to. There was no apparent source of light, but everything seemed to have its own luminescence, and physical objects were ethereal images which seemed to have no substance or weight. She feels that her experience may somehow reflect her own expectations and commented that “If I had been a Martian, perhaps I would have been sent to a replica of Mars. There, perhaps God would have appeared red.”
If all this were so, how could Mrs Goldsmith have recognised the scene in Durdana’s painting? Did she actually recognise it or is it a little too convenient that she was actually one of Durdana’s father’s patients?
To help to try and define NDEs, researchers have come up with what they call the “Core Experience” and this is a standard set of events which take place when a person is briefly clinically dead, and every NDE is a variation on this core experience, featuring some, or all, of the following:
The instruction to “Go back” isn’t something you would expect to find in a response to impending death. Much more useful to us would surely be a method to help us cope with pain or bereavement, so why do we not have one of these? It has been suggested that they may be a cultural thing, for example, Japanese reports feature seeing a wide river, while in Indian NDEs the person may be told that there has been a clerical error, and that somebody else of the same name was actually supposed to die that day. The world over there are features of NDEs that will be absent from those of other religions and cultures, so they may be a facet of cultural upbringing.
Carl Sagan points out that in times of great fear or dread it is natural for the human to revert to the foetal position for protection, is the notion of the astral body also a similar proposition of a return to the womb, where we consider ourselves to be at our safest? Sagan wrote that “Every human being has already had an experience like that of travellers who return from the land of death; the sensation of flight and the emergence from darkness into light; an experience in which the heroic figure may be dimly perceived, bathed in radiance and glory. There is only one common experience that matches this description. It is called birth.”
New York psychiatrist Dr. Jan Ehrenwald wrote; “OOB experiences are expressions of man’s perennial quest for immortality; they are faltering attempts to assert the reality and autonomous existence of the soul. A deliberate challenge to the threat of extinction.” D.Scott Rogo pointed out that “Just because the OBE may be a method of defying death does not mean that it is a purely symbolic and/or hallucinatory experience. The fact that man has a psychological need to believe in an afterlife does not automatically mean that we do not survive death.
The astral body is said to exist in what is called the astral plane, which includes the everyday world and beyond, and possibly even surviving death. So, could the mind help to cope with the trauma by detaching itself, but still having a “mental awareness” similar to ESP, no longer constrained by the body, perhaps having all its power unleashed? Maybe then it could perceive and later recall the physical events occurring around the body while it is temporarily dead.
Cynics say that NDEs are a result of the drugs given to patients, a lack of oxygen to the brain and a religious upbringing, but Dr. Tony Lawrence, NDE researcher and lecturer in psychology at Coventry University, argues that drug induced hallucinations are usually random and would never be so consistent, and he adds that people from many cultures describe heading toward a bright light.
This would be a good argument against NDEs being a hallucinatory experience, but what about OBEs? Surveys have found that roughly 25% of people have had at least 1 OBE, while Dr. Charles Tart found that among marijuana smokers the figure rose to around 44%. Does the marijuana merely open up the mind so people are better able to perceive OBEs or does it actually cause them?
There is also a clinical answer put forward for NDEs, and that is the damage caused to the visual cortex. It is this cortex which sends visual signals from the eye to the brain, and at death, this system begins to break down as the neurons die and cause tiny sparks on the visual cortex. This is done in a circular pattern from the centre of the cortex, and so the brain would pick up a signal of a bright light surrounded by blackness, the light at the end of the tunnel.
This experience is far from an isolated case and they are commonly referred to as “Out Of Body Experiences,” “OBEs,” “OOBEs,” “OOBs” or, more formally, as “Ecsomatic States.”
The characteristics of an OBE are that the person is aware that they have become separated from their body, sometimes by a great distance, and they can perceive their body and its surroundings from an external viewpoint. They feel alert and aware and are usually extremely observant. Some feel that they are occupying a second body, maybe a double of themselves and this may or may not be visible to an onlooker. Some feel that this second body is transparent but intact, while others feel that they are a cloud of vapour or mist, a glowing ball or even a magnetic or electrical field. The form is also said to generate its own light and many report seeing a luminous cord which connects them to their body. The form may walk, glide, float or fly and may remain around the body or even travel great distances, even sometimes through time and space. They may pass through matter such as walls and doors but are rarely able to touch and move objects.
The English novelist, William Gerhardie, had no prior knowledge of astral projection until it happened to him. He felt that he was waking from a dream and went to switch on his bedside lamp but he found himself “grasping at a void.” He came fully awake and realised that he was floating in mid-air. He was in full command of his senses and could see everything in the room, including his own body lying in bed. He tried to open the door but was unable to get a grip on the handle.
It is interesting the way that Gerhardie describes the cord which linked him to his physical body, he said that it was like “the strong broad ray of dusty light at the back of a dark cinema projecting onto the screen in front” and it seemed to illuminate his face on the pillow and seemed attached to its brow. “The sleeper was myself, not dead, but breathing peacefully, my mouth slightly open.” Gerhardie travelled about the house, making careful observations about where objects lay, which windows were open and which curtains drawn, all of which he found to be correct in the morning.
All through his experience he was aware of the cord that connected him to his body “like an umbilical cord, by means of which the body on the bed was kept breathing while its mold wandered about the flat.” At one point he became afraid that something might happen to sever the link with his body, but he wrote: “I felt it hovering over my old body on the bed, drab disappointment came back to me, ‘Not yet’ I said, and again I flew off. When I flew this swiftly, my consciousness seemed to blot out and only returned when again I walked or moved at a reasonable speed.”
While Gerhardie claimed to have “flown” around his house, 26 year old Martha Johnson experienced a long distance OBE on January 26th, 1957 where she “floated” to her mother’s house 926 miles away and in a different time zone.
When she arrived there she found herself in the kitchen and her mother was also there. Martha took a couple of steps toward her but then abruptly returned to her body and, on looking at her bedside clock, saw that it was 2:10am. She soon received a letter from her mother, who had known nothing of Martha’s OBE. In the letter she described that she had gradually become aware that Martha was standing in the kitchen, typically with her arms folded and her head slightly tilted to one side. She had started to say something to her but she had suddenly disappeared. She noted in the letter how nice Martha’s new hairstyle was and she added that it had been “ten after two, your time.”
It is almost as if the psychic reality and the mundane world were incapable of co-existing. Skeptics say that OBEs can be explained away as any one of a handful of things such as dreams, hallucinations, self-delusions, ESP, psychic episodes and of course, the old faithful, hoaxes.
In the 1970s, Dr. Dean Sheils, than an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, analysed data from some 71 non-western cultures to explore their beliefs in OBEs. He found that a belief existed in 95% of them and he also found that their respective ideas and descriptions are “strikingly similar.” Typically they say that “something” leaves the body, mostly during sleep or unconsciousness, but the experience is easily distinguishable from ordinary dreams, and is spontaneous, though some do claim to be able to project – Astral Travel – at will, but this is not specifically a trait of non-western cultures.
For example, at the turn of the 19th century, Ed Morrell was sentenced to life imprisonment in San Quentin, but in 1909 he won a pardon and was then released. He later wrote a book about his ordeal entitled “The Twenty-Fifth Man” and in it he describes the worst period of all as when he was falsely accused of hiding guns in the prison and, in order to try and make him reveal their whereabouts, the jailers placed him in the notorious “bloody straitjacket.” This was a garment that covered the whole body and was fastened so tightly that it induced a feeling of “suffocation similar to the experience of being buried alive.”
He would have water poured on him so that the jacket would shrink and become even tighter still, and he likened the experience to being “slowly squeezed to death” One of his sessions in the jacket lasted for as long as 126 hours, and Morrell recalled the stabbing pains, gradual numbness and the bodily excretions that ate into his skin like acid. He added that it made being “squeezed to death by a giant boa constrictor pale before the death terrors of the jacket.”
His first session in the jacket left him in a state of despair unlike any other but it was his next episode that was memorable for different reasons. As he lay in pain on the floor of his cell, he felt his consciousness slowly leave the body and float outside the prison walls, and he felt himself gliding “into the living, breathing outside world” and whenever he “returned” to his cell he would feel refreshed.
Morrell’s inexplicable ability to withstand his torture mystified the prison warden and so he ordered the guards to place a second jacket over the first, but still, whenever he was released, the guards would find him in relatively good spirits. It could be said that Morrell’s experiences were merely a subconscious reaction to his predicament and that he didn’t necessarily leave his body at all, but he was later able to corroborate events that he said he had witnessed on his excursions. A change of prison warden saw his release, first from five years of solitary confinement and then from prison and he never experienced an OBE again.
A similar claim was made by the British secret agent, Odette Hallowes who looked forward to her OBEs when she was captured and tortured by the Gestapo during World War 2. Whenever the pain got too much she would leave her body and watch the sadists below her do their dirty work while she remained free of any physical pain.
It appears to be a frequent claim that OBEs can be used to avoid pain and suffering but they are not always voluntary. An eminent British anatomist, Sir Auckland Geddes, became suddenly ill with gastroenteritis and, by the next morning, he was so ill that he was unable to telephone for help. He accepted the probability of death and even began to consider his final financial affairs before he felt his consciousness slip out of his body. He was then able to look down where he could see his own body lying in bed, and even everything in his house and garden. He was also able to see various sites in London and Scotland and wherever he directed his attention. He said “I was free in a time-dimension of space, wherein ‘now’ was in some way equivalent to ‘here’ in the ordinary 3 dimensional space of everyday life.”
Geddes saw his daughter come in to his bedroom, look at his body and hurry to the phone. “I saw my doctor leave his patients and come very quickly and heard him say, or saw him think, ‘He is very nearly gone.’” He saw the doctor inject his body with camphor and “was drawn back and I was intensely annoyed, because once I was back, all the clarity of vision disappeared, and I was just possessed of a glimmer of consciousness, which was suffused with pain.”
In 1965 and 1966, an experiment was carried out by Dr. Charles T. Tart to see whether or not OBEs could be instigated intentionally. Tart’s subject was a successful Virginia business man and electronics engineer, Robert Monroe, who had experienced vivid ONEs since 1958 and who claimed to be able to induce them. Monroe was placed in a makeshift laboratory bedroom where his heartbeat, eye movement and brain waves could be monitored. He was intending to leave his body and “project” himself into an adjoining control room where there was a randomly selected five digit number on a shelf above eye level.
Monroe found the monitoring equipment uncomfortable and he was unable to relax enough to be able to induce separation until the eighth and last time of trying, when he claimed to have had two separations. In the first he moved from the control room “through a darkened area” and came upon two men and a woman who were talking. He felt disoriented and couldn’t see too well so he returned to his body and tried again. On the next attempt he separated and rolled off the bed and floated to the floor, slowly went through the door into the control room but couldn’t see the lab technician at her usual place, but passed out of the room, without noticing the five digit number, into a brightly lit corridor where he could see her talking to a man he didn’t recognize.
Monroe became aware of some discomfort and returned to his body to find that he had a dry throat and a sore ear. He called to the technician to report his OBE and she confirmed that she was indeed in the corridor with a man he didn’t know, her husband. Tart could come to no solid conclusions about Monroe’s alleged OBEs but did say that his studies showed that OBEs are not “beyond the pale of scientific investigation.”
Robert Monroe went on to set up “The Monroe Institute for Applied Sciences” in Richmond, Virginia and he now also claims to have “bumped into” other astral travelers, had out of the body sex and even re-entered a corpse by mistake.
Robert Monroe doesn’t use the word “Astral” when writing about OBEs but he believes that he has visited different “planes of reality” which he calls “locales 1, 2 and 3.”
- Locale 1 is the physical world we live in.
- Locale 2 is the “thought world” which is “the natural environment of the second body.”
- Locale 3 “Seems to interpenetrate our physical world, yet spans limitless reaches beyond comprehension.”
Locale 3 is a physical and material world with a civilisation based on different technologies to ours and with different customs. A lot of what Monroe claims to have seen in locale 3 stretches the imagination to the limits, such as people, roads, businesses, cities and all signs of civilisation but no sign of the use of oil, electricity or internal combustion, giving rise to the opinion that science there is less advanced than our own, but it cannot be a period of our past history because our science was never at the stage that Moroe describes in Locale 3.
It is interesting to note though, that since Monroe’s book was first published in 1971, theoretical physicists working in advanced quantum mechanics have hypothesised that there are multiple universes which are similar but can be transversed by “transition events,” of which one kind may be OBEs.
In their 1929 book “The Projection of the Astral Body” Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington describe several ways in which it is possible to induce an OBE. They all involve lying on your back with your eyes closed, and you may then imagine rotating your point of view in the imagination around a central axis so that you are looking at your feet or at the length of your body. Another way is to drift off to sleep while holding an imaginary sensation of you going up in a lift. A third way is to go to bed thirsty and while you go to sleep, imagine yourself going to the kitchen to get a drink and picture yourself at the sink.
There have been many studies into OBEs, and Celia Green of the Institute of Psychophysical research in Oxford, England published some results of her work in her 1968 book “Out-Of-The-Body Experiences.” Her study was based on a questionnaire completed by 326 people who had experienced one or more OBEs.
She found that over 60% had had only one OBE, 18% had had between 2 and 5 and 21% had had over 6. The group surveyed were made up of people of all ages and the results also showed that people had less OBEs as they got older. Those who had had more than 1 were often in childhood when they occurred, and those who had had only 1, most often had it between the ages of 15 and 35. Most of those in the study, 80%, did not have a vivid OBE but a feeling of “disembodied consciousness,” 32% under anaesthetic or after an accident, 12% during sleep, 25% under conditions of psychological stress and the rest while awake and active.
This would seem to suggest that a lot of people experience some kind of OBE but few are very lucid and easily remembered astral journeys. One such brief experience reported in the survey was that of a man who wrote “During the morning while driving fast along a road the drone of the engine and vibration seemed to leave my motorbike like a zoom lens in reverse and was hovering over a hill watching myself and my friend tearing along on the road below and I seemed to think ‘I shouldn’t be here, get back on that bike!’ and the next instant I was in the saddle again.”
Another was reported by a waitress who had just finished a 12 hour shift and had missed her bus, so she set off walking and “The next I registered was of hearing the sound of my heels very hollowly and I looked down and watched myself walk round the bend of Beaumont Street into Walton Street. I - The bit of me that counts - was up on a level with Worcester College Chapel. I saw myself very clearly – It was a summer evening and I was wearing a sleeveless Shantung dress. I remember thinking ‘So that’s how I look to other people.’”
In these two reports, and other similar ones in the survey, there is no mention of the form taken by the outer self, the link with the physical body or the feeling of great freedom. Despite this, both had a distinct notion of a second self, “the bit of me that counts,” the “disembodied consciousness.” As surveys show, most OBEs happen at times of pain or stress and there is a particular type of OBE which is referred to as an N.D.E. (Near Death Experience) and these are OBEs which occur during surgical operations, after accidents or during serious illness. A 1982 Gallup poll found that 8 million Americans have experienced an NDE. They are believed to occur when a person actually dies and their soul leaves their body on its way to wherever it goes, but if they are revived and brought back to life, their soul returns to their body and they can later recall their experience.
They have been reported with regularity since recent medical advances have meant that people can be clinically dead – with no heartbeat and no breathing – and then be brought back to life, in fact 40 minutes after the heart stops beating, electricity can still be detected within the body. One wonders what may happen if, in the future, we can revive people after they are brain dead. Where will they have been to?
In the past, NDEs have been blamed on hallucinations brought about by oxygen deprivation to the brain or by anaesthetic, but many who have NDEs are not deprived of oxygen or under anaesthetic and, conversely, many who are do not have NDEs. The term itself was brought about after the publication of Raymond Moody’s 1975 book “Life After Life.”
In April 1916 a medical officer attached to the 2nd Brigade of the Royal Flying Corps in Clairmarais, France was responding to an emergency casualty report from another airfield. He jumped aboard a plane with a pilot and they made a hurried take off, but before they had gained adequate height or speed, the pilot made a sharp turn and the plane lost its upward thrust and began to fall out of the sky. The medic remained unusually calm and found himself wondering which wing would hit the ground first and later recalled “suddenly I was looking down on my body on the ground from some 220ft vertically above it.” He had been thrown clear in the impact and was lying on his back, apparently unconscious, though he had a feeling of pleasant awareness.
Looking down from above, he could see the uninjured pilot and two senior officers run toward his body and bend over it. “My spirit, or whatever you like to call it, hovering there, was wondering why they were bothering to pay any attention to my body, and I distinctly remember wishing they would leave it alone.” He also saw the ambulance pull out of its hangar and stall; the driver get out, crank the engine and get back into his seat; the medical orderly run out of the field hut and jump in the ambulance, but he had obviously forgotten something as he ran back to get it, and the ambulance then continued on its way.” He then felt himself “and it was most definitely me, and not something else” moving away from the airfield at great speed. He had a sense of moving toward a nearby town, then far beyond it toward the open sea and, as he wondered about this, he felt “a sort of retraction” and he was hovering above his body again. He became aware that a medical orderly was pouring a stimulant down his throat and he opened his eyes and was back in his body once again.
Later, as he reflected on his trip, he thought that he may have imagined the journey out to sea, but what about the actions that he had seen near the hangars and around the crash site, actions that were later confirmed to be correct by his commanding officer who made discreet enquiries on his behalf. The medic still felt that he may be considered bizarre or unusual so he wished to remain anonymous, but he clearly wasn’t “bizarre” as he later became consultant physician to the Royal Air Force, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
In 1964, David Taylor and a friend were spending the final weeks of their tour of East Africa in Tanzania. Taylor said “We had been driving through the game park and had just turned on to the main road to Moshi. It was dusk and I was sitting half asleep in the passenger seat.
I was suddenly woken by my friend who was delighted to see the first vehicle we had come across in six hours, driving down towards us. Either my friend or the other driver must have been half asleep, for within seconds the two vehicles drove smack into each other.
As the two vehicles collided, I suddenly found that I was watching the scene from several yards up in the air, as if I were suspended above the road. I saw our own Land Rover colliding with a large lorry, and I watched as I was thrown from the Land Rover. My friend then climbed out unhurt and came back to examine my body. I also saw the lorry drive off. I remember thinking that I looked a terrible mess lying there on the road and could well be dead.
The next thing I knew was coming to in Moshi hospital. I had been unconscious for two days with serious injuries. I told my friend what I had seen and he confirmed that it was indeed a lorry that had run into us and that it had driven on. I had only been saved because another car had come down the road afterwards and taken me to hospital.
The whole experience, even after all these years, has left me incompletely unafraid of death.”
This feeling of being unafraid of death must surely be experienced by those who experience the more typical NDE, that is, those which feature the “dark tunnel” and the “bright light” alleged to be a glimpse of what lies beyond, a glimpse of heaven.
Typical of such an NDE is the one that appeared in November, 1979 in a journal article that featured the experience of Mrs Iris Lemov who went into hospital for a routine operation. She recalled “I was brought back to my room after surgery and was speaking to my nurse, when a strange separated feeling between my body and my brain occurred. High above my body I floated wondering why so many doctors were round my bed.” Mrs Lemov had slipped suddenly and unexpectedly into a coma and, as she watched, her heart stopped beating, though it seemed to her only that her face had gone pale. All of a sudden, everything went dark and she was sucked into a long, black tunnel with a light at the end of it. She reported; “I felt frightened and excited as I neared the end of the tunnel, I felt peace, without pain, and free. The light at the end of the tunnel was bright but easy on my eyes.”
When Iris came out into the light she found herself in a peaceful valley which she described as “a sight to behold. There was velvety green grass and calmness. Music coming from nowhere made me feel comfortable and I began to feel as if I belonged. I saw figures of people dressed in shrouds coming toward me and they called me by name. This man with a white beard told me to go back – your family still needs you – enjoy your life. This beautiful man was my grandfather who died two years before I was born.”
This account is extremely typical of NDEs, and another is that experienced by an American airline pilot, George Jehn, who crashed his car into a bridge. He remembers the ambulance arriving and the paramedics pronouncing him dead, and then he says that everything went white and he felt himself in a tunnel, heading towards a bright light. He says that “It was beautiful. It was just a feeling of total, total love that enveloped me.” Before he reached the light, he says that he found himself standing in front of a guy. “He looked at me, I looked at him, and he was a friend of mine.” He recognised him as a friend called Tom who had died five years earlier. “Tom looked at me and said: “You’ve got to go back, George. It’s not your time yet.” And Jehn returned to the hospital to find himself on a ventilator.
It isn’t all a bed of roses though, with people going to green pastures and comforting light. One account given to Dr. Margot Grey was of a person who apparently briefly visited hell. He said “I found myself in a place surrounded by mist…. There was a big pit with vapour coming out and there were arms and hands coming out trying to grab mine…. I was terrified that these hands were going to claw hold of me and pull me into the pit.”
Another report, this time given to Dr. Raymond Moody, described the person travelling toward the light, but as they did, they passed a place where there was terrible desolation, full of “washed out” partly human forms with a crushed, hopeless demeanour who appeared to be shuffling around, not knowing where they were going, who to follow or what to look for.
Both of these kinds of hell have also been reported by other people and as Dr. Michael Rawlings put it “It may not be safe to die.” Though reports such as this do exist, they are quite rare, and in fact, far, far rarer than NDEs that talk of heaven and peace and light. One man reported “I thought I was dead, and I wasn’t sorry that I was dead, but I just couldn’t figure out where I was supposed to go.”
There is one particular example of an NDE that contains all the typical elements and it was featured twice on BBC Television. In late Autumn 1968, a young girl named Durdana who was aged 2 had an NDE. She had been ill for some time and even began to become paralysed as well as suffering from bouts of vomiting and blindness. Durdana’s father was an Army doctor posted in the foothills of the Himalayas, and he took his daughter to the military hospital some miles away for tests which proved inconclusive. It was thought that her condition may be the after effects of a viral encephalitis which had claimed the lives a dozen children in the area.
One day he received a message from an orderly that his wife had called to say that something had happened to Durdana. As she had been very ill the night before, he raced home fearing the worst, and when he got there he looked down at Durdana lying in her cot in the garden but his hasty examination found no signs of life. He said to his wife “She’s gone.”
She picked her up and carried her inside the house and one of the orderlies who had accompanied Durdana’s father home left to get some equipment in order to perform the emergency measures that were mandatory under Army regulations. Her father treated her “knowing that they were unlikely to have any effect. While doing so, I found myself repeating, half consciously, under my breath: ‘Come back my child, come back.’”
As a last resort his wife poured a few drops or Nikethamine – a heart stimulant – into her mouth but it trickled out of her mouth and down her cheek, but to their surprise Durdana opened her eyes and told them that the medicine tasted bitter. As he again examined her, her vital signs began to reappear.
A few days later, when she was somewhat recovered, Durdana was in the garden with her mother who asked her “Where did my little daughter go to the other day?” and she replied “Far, far away, to the stars.” She then asked her what she saw there and Durdana replied “Gardens.” When asked what she saw in the gardens, she said that there were apples, grapes, pomegranates and streams. One white, one brown, one blue and one green.
Her mother then asked her if she saw anyone there, and she replied “Yes, my grandfather was there and his mother and another lady who looked like you.” She was asked what they said and she replied “Grandpa said he was glad to see me, and his mother took me in her lap and kissed me.” She then said that she “heard my daddy calling me, ‘come back my child, come back’ and I told Grandpa that daddy was calling me and I must go back. He said we would have to ask God, so we went to God and Grandpa told him that I wanted to go back. ‘Do you want to go back?’ God asked me. ‘Yes’ I said, ‘I must go back. My daddy is calling me.’ ‘Alright’ said God, ‘Go’ and down, down, down I came from the stars, on to daddy’s bed.”
Her father found this interesting because Durdana had not been in his bed at the time, or any other bed. When she had regained consciousness she was in no state to realise where she was, but her mother was more interested in her meeting with God and she asked her what God was like: “Blue.” She answered. Whenever they would ask her what God looked like or for more details Durdana would always give the same answer, blue.
During her recuperation Durdana stayed in Karachi with her mother and they visited several relatives in the area. While visiting one of her uncles they were drinking tea and chatting and Durdana walked around the room and she suddenly exclaimed “Mummy, mummy! This is my grandpa’s mother. I met her in the stars. She took me in her lap and kissed me.” She was right about who was in the photograph but the lady had died long before Durdana was born, and there were only two photographs of her in existence, both of which were in the uncle’s home, to which she had never been before.
Later, the family moved to London and their story attracted the attention of the media and Durdana was featured in the BBC programme “Everyman” in 1980. Before the programme they were visited by the Producer, Angela Tilby, who noticed some paintings that Durdana had done, and she suggested that she should try to paint what she had seen “in the stars.” The BBC again featured Durdana, this time on their “Pebble Mill At One” programme and this time her paintings were also shown which sparked a new twist in the story.
The day after the programme was shown, her father received a telephone call from a lady called Mrs Goldsmith who was one of his patients – a well-read, intelligent German-Jewish woman. She said that she had seen Durdana on TV the day before and she said that she would like to see the paintings again as she had had a similar NDE to Durdana.
She said “I nearly jumped out of my chair when I saw this picture on the television” and she added, “My God, I’ve been to this place.” It turned out that she had not only been to the actual spot that Durdana had painted but she recognised everything that was in the picture and also described things that were not in it. She and Durdana sat and talked about what was round the bend in the stream and the location of other streams that Durdana had described to her mother.
Durdana felt that she was very happy while she was in the stars, and only returned out of a sense of duty as her father was calling her. She had felt a sense of freedom, as though she was everywhere at once, and could reach anywhere she wanted to. There was no apparent source of light, but everything seemed to have its own luminescence, and physical objects were ethereal images which seemed to have no substance or weight. She feels that her experience may somehow reflect her own expectations and commented that “If I had been a Martian, perhaps I would have been sent to a replica of Mars. There, perhaps God would have appeared red.”
If all this were so, how could Mrs Goldsmith have recognised the scene in Durdana’s painting? Did she actually recognise it or is it a little too convenient that she was actually one of Durdana’s father’s patients?
To help to try and define NDEs, researchers have come up with what they call the “Core Experience” and this is a standard set of events which take place when a person is briefly clinically dead, and every NDE is a variation on this core experience, featuring some, or all, of the following:
- As people begin to die they feel a blissful sensation.
- As clinical death occurs, they have an OBE, floating above or around their body.
- They go into a mist or dark area, most often a tunnel with a light at the end.
- They pass with increasing speed along the tunnel.
- As they enter the light, they are greeted by a relative or religious figure such as Jesus.
- The scenery around them is often a garden or rural scene.
- Soothing music is playing, though from an invisible source.
- Their lives will flash before their eyes as if in a movie sequence.
- A relative, a figure or a voice from the light will tell them to go back.
- The return is usually instantaneous and the person feels pain, either from their injuries or from people treating them.
- They will no longer fear death, express a greater interest in spiritual things and less in material things, but conventional religions may lose their former appeal.
The instruction to “Go back” isn’t something you would expect to find in a response to impending death. Much more useful to us would surely be a method to help us cope with pain or bereavement, so why do we not have one of these? It has been suggested that they may be a cultural thing, for example, Japanese reports feature seeing a wide river, while in Indian NDEs the person may be told that there has been a clerical error, and that somebody else of the same name was actually supposed to die that day. The world over there are features of NDEs that will be absent from those of other religions and cultures, so they may be a facet of cultural upbringing.
Carl Sagan points out that in times of great fear or dread it is natural for the human to revert to the foetal position for protection, is the notion of the astral body also a similar proposition of a return to the womb, where we consider ourselves to be at our safest? Sagan wrote that “Every human being has already had an experience like that of travellers who return from the land of death; the sensation of flight and the emergence from darkness into light; an experience in which the heroic figure may be dimly perceived, bathed in radiance and glory. There is only one common experience that matches this description. It is called birth.”
New York psychiatrist Dr. Jan Ehrenwald wrote; “OOB experiences are expressions of man’s perennial quest for immortality; they are faltering attempts to assert the reality and autonomous existence of the soul. A deliberate challenge to the threat of extinction.” D.Scott Rogo pointed out that “Just because the OBE may be a method of defying death does not mean that it is a purely symbolic and/or hallucinatory experience. The fact that man has a psychological need to believe in an afterlife does not automatically mean that we do not survive death.
The astral body is said to exist in what is called the astral plane, which includes the everyday world and beyond, and possibly even surviving death. So, could the mind help to cope with the trauma by detaching itself, but still having a “mental awareness” similar to ESP, no longer constrained by the body, perhaps having all its power unleashed? Maybe then it could perceive and later recall the physical events occurring around the body while it is temporarily dead.
Cynics say that NDEs are a result of the drugs given to patients, a lack of oxygen to the brain and a religious upbringing, but Dr. Tony Lawrence, NDE researcher and lecturer in psychology at Coventry University, argues that drug induced hallucinations are usually random and would never be so consistent, and he adds that people from many cultures describe heading toward a bright light.
This would be a good argument against NDEs being a hallucinatory experience, but what about OBEs? Surveys have found that roughly 25% of people have had at least 1 OBE, while Dr. Charles Tart found that among marijuana smokers the figure rose to around 44%. Does the marijuana merely open up the mind so people are better able to perceive OBEs or does it actually cause them?
There is also a clinical answer put forward for NDEs, and that is the damage caused to the visual cortex. It is this cortex which sends visual signals from the eye to the brain, and at death, this system begins to break down as the neurons die and cause tiny sparks on the visual cortex. This is done in a circular pattern from the centre of the cortex, and so the brain would pick up a signal of a bright light surrounded by blackness, the light at the end of the tunnel.
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