So I read this in the book, “Third, if the world of dreaming can take on any external form with any properties, then how does one differentiate real exit of the soul from the body into the physical world - or a parallel astral one - from a simulated dreamscape? Many can offer theoretical explanations, but not one that can be applied or proven in practice.”
Excerpt From: Raduga, Michael. “School of Out-of-Body Travel.” Lulu, 2011-12-10. iBooks.
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Just wondering has anyone done the simple experiment where you have something like a card from a deck of regular playing cards, you flip one over without looking, then go to sleep to enter the phase. If you have a successful out of body experience and you look at the card, say a jack of diamonds, then enter your body and write it down by your bed. Then go over and look at the card to see if it is the same? I would think this would verify a real experience in the physical from an obe state. it seems like the book skirts around this issue from the quote above saying nobody can really do this.
In some of the stories from others in the book it seems like people try this but don't put the effort in, rather they get caught up in doing other things.
I am trying this but can't even get out I will keep trying but I would love to hear if anyone knows anything about this kind of experiment.
Robert Monroe tried to do all those experiments. I didn't manage to finish all of his books but I do not think it is proven. At least, Raduga says that there are no documented proves. I personally haven't tried it.
I've done tests with cards, and continue to do so, and so far cards in the the phase have not matched the cards in the real world. Also, when I first started practising with the phase state, I visited a number of people. What I found is that I tended to have more "hits" with astral projection believers than those who were sceptical and were of the opinion that astral projection experiences are just "wake-initiated lucid dreams". It seems to me that confirmation bias played a big role in those individuals who favoured esoteric views as they often seemed to interpret my experiences better than myself. The hard-nosed sceptics took no nonsense and did not attempt to fish for possible associations.
I think what is going on here is that people who believe in real OOBEs and astral projection are suffering from a delusion similar to that of young children who mistakenly believe that their dreams have an objective reality until they learn otherwise. In a way, the lucid dreamer (person who knows the experience is just a dream while it is occurring) is at a more advanced stage of cognition and practice than the "real" OOBEr (who believes he has really exited the physical body into the real world). A lucid dreamer (or someone who understands the subjective nature of the phase state) will be able to deepen the state, see with more clarity, and have a better degree of control. So when people say that "real OOBEs" are superior to lucid dreams, it is actually the other way around. The astral projection interpretation is also limiting because a phase practitioner who adheres to it is automatically limiting the scope of what they can do in the phase by believing that they enter an objective plane of existence dwelt by things that are completely beyond their control. This reminds me of the fact that when I first started I was often chased by demonic figures. But eventually, me and my inquisitive mind decided to explore the possibility that my phase pursuers were created by my unconscious mind. One day I decided to face one of them and was able to transmute it into something pleasant. That's when the penny dropped.
Michael Raduga is not the only one to adopt a healthy pragmatic and logical view on the the nature of the phase world. This is from the Lucidity Institute website:
"Are there any scientific data that might allow us to arrive at a verdict on the claim that OBE vision is valid? There is in fact a good deal of relevant evidence available and there have been a number of studies of OBE vision that meet the standards of rigorous control required by exact science.
There are two ways of broadly viewing the results of these studies. First of all, we have the summary of Karlis Osis, Director of Research at the American Society for Psychical Research (A.S.P.R.). This society, in an effort to produce evidence for survival of death, undertook an extensive investigation of OBE perception. [13] In the course of this study, approximately 100 subjects, all of whom believed they were proficient in inducing OBEs and possessed paranormal perceptual abilities during these OBEs, were tested under controlled conditions. While confined to one room at the A.S.P.R., the subjects induced OBEs and "visited" a distant target room, attempting afterwards to describe in detail what they had "seen" while there. A comparison of their reports with the actual contents of the target room revealed, in all but a few cases, absolutely no indication of any correspondence whatsoever. In other words, in the great majority of these cases, there was no evidence supporting accurate OBE perception, nor for the validity of the subjects' convictions that they had actually left their bodies. Moreover, these subjects were described by Osis as being "the creme of the claimants" of OBE. I believe the results of this study strongly supports the "OBE as misinterpreted lucid dream" interpretation offered above.
As for OBE vision, in the words of Dr. Osis, "the bulk of the cases seem to be a mirage." At best, OBE vision seems a highly variable and unreliable mode of perception "ranging from fairly good (i.e., clearly distinguishing some objects) to complete failure (i.e., producing very foggy or totally incorrect images)." Moreover, Osis added, "of those individuals in our studies who have shown some signs of OOB perceptual power, we did not find a single one who could see things clearly every time he felt he was out of body."
Thanks sooo much for the lengthy reply and to the other reply everyone. You wouldn't believe how hard it was for me to find out if there was any good tests for physical verification done or not. I also appreciate you testing it out yourself and sharing your results.
I was getting the feeling that many people were just not interested in this question but it was burning a hole in my head! I feel pretty convinced that it seems like it is all just in our minds, but I have a few doubts yet about the stories where people report knowing information while near death and coming back and telling about it. I have to research more on this, but I have a feeling that the stories may be fudged enough to sound real. Gosh I don't know. Thanks again!!
It is in our minds but it doesn't take away from the fact that phase state practice can still be exciting and used in a variety of ways. Your intuition in the last paragraph is right and there is nothing wrong with scepticism. There is no doubt that NDEs are real experiences, but many people unjustly interpret them without carefully looking at the facts.
I also happen to have have a near-death experience once from drug intoxication years ago. at the time, I was young and naive and the experience absolutely convinced me that I had died and come back to tell the tale of being in a peaceful state and then floating over people's heads. But we must not forget that "near-death" is not "death". It is still an account by the living and our brains, regardless of what is spread out there in those sensationalist stories, is still very much active.
Many hospitals don't have the right equipment to probe deeply into the dying brain or the near-dead brain, hence why doctors will say that there was no measurable brain activity. In the lab, where neuroscientists are better equipped, it is a different story. There are deep reverberations in the brain which are enough to produce experience. This fact is conveniently edited out by sensationalist media corporations who focus mainly on the verbal account of the biased experiencer.
The NDE is a traumatically induced phase experience where the brains natural psychedelics kick in and consciousness is thrust into a dream world - despite the anecdotal evidence you might have heard regarding verification. Furthermore, consider one of the common features of NDEs: the nearly dying seem to regularly encounter their loved ones who have gone before them into the next world.
We know, however, that recognising a person's face requires an intact fusiform cortex, primarily in the right hemisphere. Damage to this area of the brain definitely robs the mind of its powers of facial recognition (among other things). People with this sort of damage have what its called prosopagnosia, and, although they can see perfectly well and are able to recognise objects, colours, and shapes...they fail at faces even if they belong to close family and friends! The living can experience other types of agnosia, too!
In fact, every mental faculty is vulnerable and liable to expunction via brain damage or malfunction (and a number of funny, hallucinatory effects can arise too). Also, the living can experience varying degrees of consciousness as well as unconsciousness. What makes us think that a dead person will have any conscious experience at all? With the scientific evidence at hand I can only infer that, either there is no afterlife, or, there is one where we possess all the brain deficits in a realm shared by equally impaired deceased individuals. Which on makes more sense to you?
Many people find this fact hard to accept: mental experience - be it in waking, dream, or phase states - is a thing of the living. Dead means dead. When we pass we become, to put it sarcastically, as conscious as we were prior to our birth. We will lose everything including our sense of self. It is possible, however, that we may have a pre-death experience which is like that of the NDE, in which case we'd temporarily perceive a pseudo-afterlife before being naturally ushered out into permanent unconsciousness as the brain gives out.
Sorry can't agree with at this point in time Summer. I don't believe there is death at all.
How to you know" dead means dead"? Yes one probably does lose all sense of self. Doesn't mean permanent unconsciousness, necessarily. Beside there are plenty of beings already walking around in permanent unconsciousness, right before our eyes. How do you explain that? Plenty of brain deficiency there.
I am not being facetious either.
I just don't think it is that black and white Summer.
Still, I enjoy reading your posts.
I never propose black and white views. In fact, the perplexing picture that science paints about consciousness is far from it. But the grey areas that are evident have to do with a realm of illusions conveyed in a monist universe. Let me get straight to the point...
Just because there are unconscious things that move does not mean that they are not living and that can be easily explained by an organism (biological clockwork) that is simple enough to react to environmental stimulus and survive for a long time without requiring (in fact, not being able to) think or be self-aware. I can also tell you that our minds are mostly unconscious and get us to unconsciously act in various ways. The ability for a living organism to also be unconscious does not take away from the notion that death means permanent unconsciousness. I'd also like to point out that, just because some non-human organisms of a simpler nature are not conscious, does not mean that they are brain deficient, it just means that their experience (or non-experience) is the extent of their mental power according to their biological structure and make.
The evidence from neuroscience speaks for itself. The fact that we can be rendered unconscious even in our living condition (and brain activity can reflect that) speaks volumes about a dead or utterly destroyed brain. How can we expect, then, the dead to be conscious? This is why I cannot acquiesce to your reasoning or preference. Another reason is evolution. The fact that consciousness evolved from unconsciousness. The fact that evidence suggests we are more with it and more aware than, say, our Australopithecus ancestors ever were. Also, the fact that an adult human being is more conscious than a little baby. Or the fact that I've got no memories of ever existing prior to my birth. Present manifestation is the product of evolution, a long process of gradual change by natural selection (emphasis on "natural" so that "selection" is not seen as a misnomer or implying the intelligent design debacle).
Secondly, in nature, when things die, they cease to function permanently. We are not talking about the caterpillar becoming an insect here because that deals more with transformation than death, more about progression than termination. There is evidence of continuation in the cycle of an insect's life - from egg, to larva, to being an adult creature (just as a human goes from infancy, to adolescence, to adulthood), but, insofar as regeneration and replacement of cells go, there is no real death of the organism until what we can scientifically ascertain to be final.
When a butterfly dies, nothing comes after that. Same as a human. There is nothing to be seen functioning and certainly nothing to evolve or change in any way. Apart from the emotional significance that the dead can play on our minds, they become, in reality, obsolete and thus naturally insignificant. You couldn't possibly be anyone who existed centuries ago any more than you could be a member of your family, a friend, or even a stranger. More over, humans will eventually evolve beyond recognition (beyond what we recognise as Homo Sapiens today) and along with physical appearance, so will consciousness change. Your consciousness today is not compatible with the consciousness of "tomorrow". Darwinian selection has no natural cause in evolutionary progress to bring your awareness back as it exists today - just like the Neanderthal mind is not revived in our era. Evolution is not retrograde. Things refine themselves.
The evidence strongly opposes the dualism that you subscribe to. Consciousness is a byproduct of complex arrangements of matter. It does indeed exist but it exists as an illusion (meaning it is not what it seems or what you believe it to be). If you have any reason to believe that it is not so, fire away. I'm here for you...
All the things you are saying about NDE and OBE being in the mind tends to be true to me. I have personally had obe and nde experiences without being near death. So for me I have a hard time believing in anything after death. The only hope I have of knowing if there could be anything after death is to prove the card experiment for myself. Ug, Can't seem to do it and it seems like it may not ever happen.
So my question to you is how do you deal with permanent death? Maybe it isn't hard for you. For me it is extremely disturbing and has taken some time to come to terms with it as a truth. I want to exist forever! I don't care if "I" don't exist, I could float around as a planet, or a plant, whatever (even if I don't remember). I just need to exist. I mean, why do I exist now?
The only thing that brings some comfort is that I understand the idea of Oneness and non-duality. This means somehow, in whatever form I am apart of everything around me even if I am not conscious of it.
To me, the reason for our existence is more a question of "how" rather than "why". We are here because the cosmological constant of our universe permitted the emergence of galaxies and their evolution led to our creation. If the energy of this cosmological constant was any higher or lower, we would not exist. It isn't hard to conceive the existence of other universes, but, not all of them have necessarily stumbled upon life.
Our place in the Milky Way happens to be an ideal breeding ground for abundant life - at least the Goldilocks zone that the Earth happens to be in. Our planet's tilt is also favourable for our life to endure and evolve for a long time. It is like a warm dirty surface where bacteria thrive the most. There is probably intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, but you can bet that Earth is like a needle in a haystack. The life we may find elsewhere may be mostly bacteria, then a percentage will succeed in evolving animal-like or plant-like life before natural annihilation, and, an even smaller portion will have evolved intelligent life like our own or even more advanced.
We must also remember that the life of each human individual here on Earth is microscopically short compared to how old the universe is and how much it will extend ahead. So my philosophy is to make the most of it and learn as much as you can about this wonderful reality while you still can. If there is an emotional gap to be filled deep within me, it is not with the falsehoods of religion or superstition, but rather, science. Even if you are not much for scientific detail or have no interest in becoming versed in scientific knowledge, I bet that you will love keeping up with recent discoveries and breakthroughs.
Rather than believing in something that has never been proved and seems less likely the more we learn about the nature of things, why not take heed of what has been established already and wonder about the things that have not been solved yet? I'd rather listen to logic, reason without jumping to conclusions, and think freely for myself without being told what to believe if you catch my drift. The only life I am sure of is this one so I'm not going to ignore it or think less of it as I await in the promise of another hypothetical one born from wish-wash.
Death is coming whether we like it or not. The way I deal with it is by realising that I was 'dead' in the times of Aristotle, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Kurt Godel and wasn't bothered by it one bit. And, whilst considering myself lucky to live in this amazingly technological age of science, one day I will go back to that non-existent state. The only thing I fear is a slow and painful process of dying. If I'm lucky, the process will be short. But death itself should not worry us because, after all, we won't know that we are dead. There will be no self to know. I often think of the following quotes among other witty ones:
"Life is hard. Then you die. Then they throw dirt in your face. Then the worms eat you. Be grateful it happens in that order."
- David Gerrold
"The fear of death is the most unjustified of all fears, for there's no risk of accident for someone who is dead."
- Albert Einstein
And finally, ask yourself if you would really like to live forever. Imagine an eternity where you can do everything you can possibly think of an infinite number of times. You would get bored shitless to the point of losing your mind. Imagine even thinking the same thoughts and feeling like there is no escape from the madness, as you realise that your eternity gradually kills the new and exciting. You would beg for a release... a release from the pain of being conscious for such a long time.
Now imagine that when you die, everything ceases and you are free from all experience... even your self. Remember those times when you sleep like a log. Well, to be dead is to be beyond that. And the amazing thing is that, while you are alive in deep meditation, you can experience a still-mind, free of concepts, and the realisation of one being intrinsically empty can be achieved. In meditation I realised that the less thoughts I had, the more blissful it got.
The Buddha came to a profound realisation in his meditative practice. He found that he could be anything in his mind, but, most profoundly, he realised that those concepts came from the intrinsic nothing inherent in all of us. The self, he found, is a strong illusion.
The Buddha was an agnostic, and rightly so for his time. He may have stumbled upon the still mind and explored altered states of consciousness during his meditation practice, but he was not impervious to fallacies or drawing the wrong conclusions. He was just a man who was curious about the nature of things and that led him to observe reality closely.
He might have been insightful about matters of the mind and the nature of self, but he could still be biased by fantasy and incorrect philosophical thinking. When he said, "The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground," he was spot on there! But, if historically it is true that he came up with the karmic concept, he was not thinking outside the box.
I tend to think that the whole rebirth didn't come from the Buddha anyway. I think overtime Buddhism was sprinkled with the mysticism and biased by false promises of an afterlife by other religions. The original Buddha just seemed too logical an individual to take assumptions as truisms. Either that or he ended up being swayed by his dreams of other realms and took them literally like today's New Age mystic who thinks the phase world exists objectively as an astral plane. If the Buddha ended up making the same mistake he is excused. After all, there was no neuroscientism at the time.
On children, I happen to have three. My eldest is nine and I still have to alert him to the occasional dog poo on the pavement on the way to school. In what way are children more conscious than adults? More conscious than unconscious adults, yes, but, in terms of awareness, knowledge, wisdom, certainty, and confidence, they are far behind. If you tell a cognitive scientist that children are more conscious than adults he will laugh at you.
Understanding the world as you evolve biologically is one thing, being brainwashed by world-views is another.
You know what Summer you are adept in your writings.
At this apparent point in time, I am on information overload.
I just know what I know (I think I know) I just like to put things out there and if anyone can figure out what I am saying, good.
We are all buddhas. I wasn't actually revering him.
Science definately has it's place and makes wonderful discoveries
There is more than science that underpins us. (maybe)
Yes children are more conscious, let them laugh. Do you mean unaware? That is probably a more appropriate word.
From where I view, I could consider you are being brainwashed by science.
Maybe they (scientists) could look a little further than a synapsis or a neuron.
I know they have looked further You and I know they have discovered, there is something like 97% empty space, NOTHING, in other words. Just empty space. Mmmm... I wonder what the 3% is?
Anyway I love the phase if I could only get more of it.
Nova, I am not a big fan of science either but there have been so many theories about who we are and why we are here that I stick to the rationality and expirentiality for the time being. Once I experience smth outside of the box, I will let you know I am just sick of thousands of theories and everyone claims his theory is the One. We have the tools MR gave us and all we can do is go and experience for ourselves. If the influence on the real world is possible, MR's thousands of experiments would have proven it.
And that is the whole point, Kate. This type of verification remains as hypothetical as Santa delivering presents because the evidence heavily weighs in favour of subjective experience happening completely in the brain.
NOVA, there is no such thing as being brainwashed by science because science is not a belief. Science follows evidence. It may not have all the answers but it's the one method of precise reasoning we have with which we can fairly study the nature of reality. Like I said before, the nothing that most people think about is not the nothingness of the vacuum in physics. It is not what lies between two objects that are stuck together...
In quantum mechanics, if there is nothing, there is always something. A measure of space-time represented by a vacuum contains virtual particles popping in and out of existence. It's a kind of natural fermentation, which, admittedly, isn't fully understood, but we can observe its effects and make predictions. At the heart of it lies an explanation that will one day be deemed logical as we advance our understanding. The very process of an energised vacuum gave rise to and sustains baryonic matter (me, you, the planets, the stars).
But dark matter and dark energy exist and are out there as agents too and we can see how they effect the universe. The visible universe is just 'weak pollution' compared to the forces that make up most of the universe. Anyway, none of this backs up the notion of a real OOBE or consciousness somehow exiting the physical body.
Science is a meta paradigm based on what our senses can detect, rather than 'rational unobservables' (which it is starting to get into with dark energy, the maths is there, its effect can be detected, but not the 'substance' itself).
Don't get me wrong, science is wonderful and has brought us some amazing advances in our understanding of the universe, but it needs to move forward and realise it is just a subset of ontological mathematics.
I know Summerlander may not have any interest, but to the newbies I would recommend the God Series of books by Mike Hockney (starting with 'The God Factory).
I really don't know about all this. Raguda's theory is very reasonable, but there are numbers of cases that present situations that a simulation could not construct, for example, a girl was in coma, she out of body and floated to the hall, she saw her parents talking, I don't remember exactly what was, but she heard something considerable importante and that she didn't previously knew. When she came back from coma, she told her parents about what she saw and heard in the hall and they confirmed. A simulation of the mind can't do this, it does not have the information, unless, the phase is linked to a collective unconscious.
There is also hundreds of testimony where people have been to places they had never been, contradicting Raguda's theory that one canot go to a street they never visited because one does not have information to simulate the scenery.
What if the fase is actually more then just a simulation, maybe it create (not simulate) the enviroment based on the person's believes, but then anything could be possible, and one's reality is not the same as others reality, in this case, Raguda's subconcious created a reality that is as close as possible to embrace his ceticism and pragmatism and since he is a mentor of a number of people, almost all this people could have been seriously induced to have this view of the phase as the most probable one and the consequence is that everybody under Raguda's orientation will experience a phase that is very similar to Raguda's own phase experiences. The same happens with other people that are under influence of other cultures and believe systems, for example, an indian could have a phase based on the hinduism and Indian culture. The point is that none is more real or truthfull then the other.
I am not saying that my theory is the best of all, or have the pretence that my theory is the truth. However I think this is a very new world for all of us, we are like babies, it is too early to define anything, we must be very carefull, specially because the nature of the phase is reactive to what we think of it.
My proposal theory is more a perspective of investigation then anything else.
I will keep trying but I would love to hear if anyone knows anything about this kind of experiment.
