CBS News explores the science behind Near Death Experiences (NDEs). Aired February 23, 2007
Science of Self is a student-run university club. The two themes are science, or the pursuit of verifiable and useful knowledge, and the self, or the individual, and self-growth.
We are a non-profit research and education organization dedicated to investigating consciousness and helping people develop their human potential to the maximum. At IAC, great emphasis is placed on the rational study and development of psychic and energetic abilities, especially the out-of-body experience (OBE), as a means of understanding the multi-dimensional fabric of our reality and learning how to live better within it.
I’m William Ember, an author and explorer of Lucid Dreaming, Out of Body Experiences and Astral Projection. My main works on how to have and enjoy these experiences to the max is the Ultimate Astral Experience Course. The ILoveLucid blog is a central hub for insights and discussion of these topics, written and managed by yours truly. Enjoy!
A faculty member at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, scientist Tate (Altered States of Consciousness, On Being Stoned) spent more than 50 years studying the paranormal. In this challenge to traditional science and spirituality, Tart employs scientific skepticism and an open mind (both essential to interpreting results "as objectively as possible") to question the seeming contradiction between "the formal, rational rules of science, which have worked so well in understanding the physical world" and "behaviors that cannot be reduced to materialistic explanations."
Get High Now is an illustrated, mind-blowing magic carpet ride of more than 175 ways to alter human perception and consciousness without drugs or alcohol. Culled from science, physiology, spiritual practices, and the audio visual arts, these 'all natural' highs playfully and safely explore the mind-body connection to entertaining and illuminating effect. Accessible and well-researched, each entry introduces concepts such as lucid dreaming, optical and auditory illusions, controlled breathing, meditation, time compression, and physical and mental exercises, explaining the ways in which they affect our minds and bodies and how to do them. Readers follow the author and his 'HighLab' testing team through mind-bending and sometimes hilarious investigations, such as how to lull the mind into hallucinatory states with audio loops; why multiple bee stings lead to euphoric states; what cheeses to eat to induce psychedelic lucid dreams; how to control your breathing to create an out-of-body experience; and many more. Including solo, tandem, and group highs, Get High Now features hundreds of ways to calm or stimulate the senses and open new windows to experiencing the world.
You’ve just found the multimedia appendage of the historic and thrilling book, Get High Now—(Just Released!)—an illustrated, mind-blowing magic carpet ride of more than 175 ways to alter human perception and consciousness (without drugs or alcohol).
A Campbell River man has received $63,000 in damages for an "out-of-body experience" in which he said he saw God after being accidentally overdosed with the painkiller Ketamine while recovering from back surgery in Vancouver General Hospital.
The study found that one in four hostages had intense hallucinations, and these were invariably people who were in life-threatening situations. Isolation, visual deprivation, physical restraint, violence and death threats also seemed to contribute to the chance of having a hallucinatory experience.
More than half of adult Americans report they have had a spiritual experience that changed their lives. Now, scientists from universities like Harvard, Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins are using new technologies to analyze the brains of people who claim they have touched the spiritual -- from Christians who speak in tongues to Buddhist monks to people who claim to have had near-death experiences.
Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates--empirically--that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.
Paranormal phenomena aren't just for Fox Mulder, Melinda Gordon, and Rod Serling. Even top academics can't resist a good ghost story. And maybe that's for the better: Brilliant ideas often seem crazy at first. Germs, quarks, black holes, and continental drift were all once considered laughable. Still, impeccably credentialed scientists persist, as Lewis Carroll's White Queen says, in trying to believe a few impossible things before breakfast—or after they've received tenure.
I recently read in Life magazine about people who have had near-death experiences. These people report walking toward a being of light, feeling totally loved, etc. Do near-death experiences prove there is some type of existence after death?
After Hinds' fight in Las Vegas, he spent three days in a coma. "I was totally astral-traveling. I had the most enlightening, loving feeling. I specifically remember being in outer space, looking down on planets and stuff." His journey was eventually interrupted by a sharp pain in the groin — he was somewhere near Saturn, he estimates, when a nurse began to change his catheter.
I think it can, although the research is in an early stage. A stunning new description of how the human body and brain communicate to produce emotional states -- including our feelings, cravings, and moods -- has all the elements needed to explain how the human brain might give rise to spiritual experiences, without the necessary involvement of a supernatural presence, according to Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California in San Diego who is also a Zen practitioner.
This popular synthesis of a technical field in neuroscience explores how the brain constructs its models of the body. Entangled with the perception of self, these maps are multitudinous and dynamic, as experimenters have discovered. The Blakeslees ground the idea of mental maps in the work of Wilder Penfield, a 1940s researcher whose probes on the brains of living people localized which areas of the brain represent which parts of the body. Subsequently, scientists have refined the concept of body maps, a history that binds the Blakeslees' informative explanations of specific maps, case studies, and psychic disorders. Expressed in an amiable, we're-all-in-this-together manner, their tour describes one's personal space and its extension to one's clothes, tools, instruments, and sports gear. The body in motion generates its own set of changing mental maps, distinguishing the graceful from the clumsy. Maps are plastic, report the Blakeslees, yet they also have permanence: successful dieters may still feel overweight, and amputees retain a map of the missing limb. Varied and revealing, this will intrigue readers interested in the clinical perspective on self-perception
A collection of videos from the Monroe Institute.
This week's ABC Radio National's All in the Mind discusses what happens in the brain during out of body experiences, and why actions can be accurate even when our perceptions are not.
This week, the scientific effort to simulate out-of-body experiences to probe the limits of the self. And, remarkable stories of vision gone heywire—what they reveal about our 'seeing brain'. Two scientists join Natasha Mitchell with extraordinary insights into how your brain creates your mind...
In The Scalpel and The Soul, acclaimed Neurosurgeon Allan Hamilton shares his considerable knowledge and experience while baring his heart, soul and passion for his profession and for pursuing those unique patient occurrences that defy scientific explanation with our current knowledge of traditional western medicine. His observations and insights push the limits of current scientific knowledge as he attempts to bring some rational thought to the unexplainable. This book is thought provoking and will equally inspire the average citizen as much as it does our fellow physicians and scientists.
When people ask me, "Do you really believe the mind can leave the body?" I have never come up with a satisfactory answer. I have difficulty explaining it to someone that believes the physical is the center of existence. The answer is "no," but upon hearing that, people generally assume I am saying astral projection is some sort of hallucination. What I intend is rather that there is no body. I think that we are in a simulator or matrix within which the physical, along with the body, is projected into existence. So how can you leave a body that does not exist outside a simulator? Astral projection instead appears to be a way to temporarily shut off at least some part of the simulator.
As several letter-writers have pointed out, Wilbur confuses feelings of transcendence that can arise from meditation/religious experiences, as well as from mind-altering substances, with primary evidence for some sort of reality. Such experiences ARE evidence for something -- the way in which the brain reacts to certain types of stimuli/contexts -- and more critically, the kinds of subjective experiences that result. As such, the study of trans-rational states of consciousness can be extremely useful in understanding brain function and the neural bases of consciousness.
If I’m lucky, sometime in the next four days I’ll have an out-of-body experience. It will happen as part of a training program called Gateway Voyage at the Monroe Institute outside of Charlottesville, Virginia. The trip there takes me into the deep green foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains and, as the country road unwinds in front of me, images of Institute Founder Bob Monroe, who died in 1995, flood my mind. I have not been back here in 23 years.
As a shamanic practitioner, through monotonous drumming or rattling, I enter a type of trance, the “shamanic state of consciousness,” in order to access what has been termed “non-ordinary reality.” In that altered state, which can range from light to deep, a trained shamanic practitioner engages in the central practice of shamanism, the out-of-body experience. In the journey experience, I can interact directly with benevolent spiritual beings to diagnose, heal, and seek advice on behalf of others. For experienced shamanic practitioners, shamanism is not a matter of faith. You no more believe that there are spirits than you believe that the sun rises in the east. You know there are spirits because you see, talk, and interact with them, both in journeys and in your daily life – and because they help you to help others.
Recently there has been a notable increase in the number of research articles relating to the study of out-of-body experiences (OBEs) that have been published in the mainstream literature. Most of these articles have focused on the search for the areas of the brain that may be associated with one common feature of the OBE – seeing one’s own body from a distance.
A collection of books on Astral Project from Lulu.com
Karinthy’s book is, to my mind, a masterpiece. We are inundated now with medical memoirs, both biographical and autobiographical–the entire genre has exploded in the last twenty years. Yet even though the technology may have changed, the human experience has not, and Journey Around My Skull, the first autobiographical description of a journey inside the brain, remains one of the very best.
The experiments, described last August in studies by H. Henri Ehrsson and Olaf Blanke and colleagues in Science, demonstrate that out-of-body experiences, previously confined to the realms of psychiatry, fiction and the occult, occur when the normal processing of sensory information is disrupted. This research provides an important tool to understand how the feeling of self is generated by the brain. Sherlock would approve.
WikiMindMap is an interesting tool to help organize Wikipedia information into visual hierarchies (in this case: astral projection).
Astral projection (or astral travel) is a paranormal interpretation of an out-of-body experience achieved either awake or via lucid dreaming or deep meditation. The concept of astral projection assumes the existence of another body, separate from the physical body and capable of traveling to non-physical planes of existence.
Robert Bruce is an internationally respected mystic, author and speaker from the land down under (Australia). For over 30 years he has actively explored metaphysical, paranormal and spiritual phenomena, making some groundbreaking discoveries. Robert is the author of the best-selling books: Astral Dynamics, Practical Psychic Self-Defense, Energy Work, and coauthor of the Mastering Astral Projection workbook and audio book with Brian Mercer.
Astral: Out of Body Experiences aims to share information from my personal interest in the non-physical. In a way it's my story, definitely my path, and whilst others are welcome to tread the same path as myself, ultimately you must find your own. The information presented here represents my belief system and worldview, and my truth; this may not be yours.
Another large list of resources for lucid dreaming and out of body experiences.
Linga is the Sanskrit term in the Samkhya system for the characteristic "mark" of the individual reincarnating entity. The Linga Sarīra is the subtle body or vehicle of consciousness in later Samkhya, Vedanta, and Yoga.
The greatest illusion is that man has limitations.
Both experiments appeared to show that a sense of one's self depends on cooperation between the senses and that experimentation can radically disrupt this linkage.
Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces. But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that she was hanging from the ceiling, looking down at her body.
The Kentucky researchers believe that NDEs are actually REM intrusions triggered in the brain by traumatic events like cardiac arrest. If this is true, then this means the experiences of some people following near-death are confusion from suddenly and unexpectedly entering a dream-like state.
Leave it to Google to create the most comprehensive list of books on a particular subject. Here is the Astral Projection list.
Autoscopy is defined as an experience in which a person while believing to be awake sees her/his body and the world from a location outside her/his physical body. A better word to use then 'astral projection'. A short entry, not a lot there.
A promising looking paper on inducing OBE through electrical stimulation.
Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — - in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.
A modest list of free papers concerning the OBE from a medical perspective.
An earlier article discussing the 'disassociation' patients have during various medical procedures.
Science has just published two short papers where researchers induced a touch sensation that that seemed to be felt in a 'fake' body that appeared to be several metres in front - similar to an 'out-of-body-experience'.
This is the original Robert Monroe book. Worth reading but his perceptions definitely changed as he wrote more books.
Monroe's second book, I need to go back and review my notes on this one.
Monroe's final book and the one that really had a deep effect on me.
Her research in hospital units and in the literature reveals that more than 70% of the individuals who regain consciousness remember events during their unconscious period.
The companion web site to the Advanced Lucid Dreaming web site.
An article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker about people who have had near death experiences and found new inspiration in experiences.
Gnosticweb teaches online courses in astral projection and dreaming.
Out-of-body experiences? Near-death experiences? Researchers are beginning to understand what's really going on. By Steven Kotler, author of West of Jesus.
Feelings of oneness with other people, nature, and the universe. Encounters with extraterrestrials, deities, and demons. Out-of-body experiences and past-life memories. Science casts a skeptical eye. But Dr. Stanislav Grof—the psychiatric researcher who co-founded transpersonal psychology—believes otherwise. When the Impossible Happens presents Dr. Grof ’s mesmerizing firsthand account of over 50 years of inquiry into waters uncharted by classical psychology, one that will leave readers questioning the very fabric of our existence.
Author Talbot writes that ". . . there is evidence to suggest that our world and everything in it. . . are also only ghostly images, projections from a level of reality so beyond our own it is literally beyond both space and time." Hence, the title of his book. Beginning with the work of physicist David Bohm and neurophysiologist Karl Pribram, both of whom independently arrived at holographic theories or models of the universe, Talbot explains in clear terms the theory and physics of holography and its application, both in science and in explanation of the paranormal and psychic. His theory of reality accommodates this latest thinking in physics as well as many unresolved mind-body questions. This well-written and fascinating study is recommended for science collections.
From the review: Dreamgates offers insights from cultures with strong dreaming traditions, insights which profoundly challenge the ruling paradigms of a culture that confuses the real with the physical
Next to LeBarge's work, Godwin's book on lucid dreaming is the best resource I have found on the subject yet. Thoroughly researched with excellent insight and great design.
A limited and not very informative entry on Bruce Moen.
Very limited entry on Monroe.
Sloppy entry on binaural beat technology.
Comprehensive list of books about Astral Projection.
Another long list of books about Astral Projection.
A collection of chapters and lectures which provides a complete program of study and practice related to the awakening of the consciousness in the Internal Worlds. Every sincere person who practices the techniques included in this book can experience directly for themselves the realities beyond the physical world. Includes, for the first time in English, a complete reference to dream symbols and their meanings as explained by Samael Aun Weor.
Dr. Carrington, one of the world's foremost psychic researchers, brings his vast knowledge of scientific investigation to bear in editing the remarkable account of Sylvan Muldoon's out of body experiences. Muldoon gives not only a vivid account of his own astral projections, but instructions to the student in the technique of projecting the astral body.
WHEN the members of the Society for Psychical Research set to work to collect evidences in connection with what they termed supernormal phenomena, the first thing that impressed them was the frequency of records of the apparent action of the human consciousness at a distance from the place where the physical form was at the time being located.
A short but very informative article about Astral Projection including a history of testing people who are OBE.
Dr. Susan Blackmore is the leading academic authority on the out-of-body experience or OBE, she has had OBEs herself and has seriously studied the phenomenon for many years.
Part phenomenology, part introduction and part instruction manual, this book attempts to explain the nature of astral projection and urge readers to give it a try. Magnus, entrepreneur by day, certified Reiki master by night, confesses early on that after becoming interested in astral projection via the Internet and many initial attempts to move beyond the realm of the physical, it was sleep that opened the door to his first experience of getting "sucked into another dimension of existence." Magnus provides readers with exercises galore, personal journal entries of astral experiences and a serious dose of encouragement to join him in discovering new realms.
A lengthy and informative entry with a lot of links at the end.
A professional psychic and seasoned out-of-body traveler, Leland is an otherworld tour guide extraordinaire. Illustrating his travelogue with examples from his own adventures, he escorts readers to various points of interest in Otherwhere. These include designated realms where you can explore alternate realities--play out the results of different 'what ifs' in your current life, paths you never took, but might have. Another memorable stop on Leland's tour is the living archives, a depository of vanished cultures, abandoned religions, and outmoded myths. With Leland's thoroughly engaging guidebook in hand, travelling to Otherwhere will be an adventure you are sure to enjoy.
Albert Taylor gives us his honest and very personal account of how he escaped his nightly fears of sleep paralysis to soar consciously through the astral plane. Some call this astral travel, or an out-of-body experience, but Taylor calls it "soul travel." His term eloquently embodies his philosophy that we are actually powerful, spiritual beings in the midst of a human experience, rather than human beings having minor spiritual experiences. Despite Taylor's background as a NASA engineer, Soul Traveler is far from a technical manual. Reading it is like having an engaging conversation about astral travel with a friend. Along with some simple advice for inducing and controlling our own out-of-body experiences, Taylor shares the encouraging insights about the spiritual nature of human beings that he has gleaned from a remarkable experience he once viewed as an affliction.
Celia Green talks about her books and the relationship between OBEs and Lucid Dreams
Letters and thoughts about OBEs
Home page of the Monroe Institute