Newsgroups: alt.out-of-body
Subject: Re: OOBE or just vivid imagination
From: gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo)
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1992 05:56:29 GMT

OK.  Now I think we're getting somewhere.  I really want to thank Robert
McGrath for his thoughtful response to my recent article.  I hope our
exchanges don't become so analytical as to be uninteresting for others.
I would invite others to join in.  But I think there's still lots of
room for accounts of personal experience which are unaccompanied by any-
thing in the way of analysis.  In fact, I think these kinds of articles
are very important, and I always read them with great interest.

I'd like to start this posting by saying a few words about my own moti-
vation, so that it's clear that if I ever appear to be on one side or
the other of some dispute, everyone will realize that most of whatever
positions I may take are taken for the sake of learning, rather than due
to my having some belief or other.

My primary reason for being interested in out-of-body experiences is that
I am personally dissatisfied with the kind of life that most people seem
to lead in which there is not much in the way of critical thinking about
alternatives.  Most people seem to take things pretty much "at face value"
when it comes to thinking about their own natures.  We become socialized
into prefering certain activities as a source of pleasure or gratification
of some sort, and "sickness, old age, and death" and all the other dis-
apointments that creep up on us pretty much take us by surprise - and seem
like real distractions from just living our lives, rather than as an im-
portant part of its fabric.  We come to construct certain beliefs about
ourselves and our potentials and our likes and dislikes, and arrive at self-
definitions about our makeup that are derived from experience and from what
we learn from others and from social institutions, unless we are of such a
nature (wherever it comes from) as to question these things.

Well, it's in my nature to question.  It has always seemed to me that there
must be more to life.  Religion, which a lot of people use to deal with
these kinds of questions, isn't really satisfactory - at least not the kind
that's institutionalized, since it seems seldom based on real personal ex-
perience - at least in the West.  Eastern traditions seem to be more exper-
ientially based, but they also seem prone to ritual which has lost much of
its meaning and to blind faith and obedience to teachers and spiritual guides.
The mystical traditions, however, are fascinating to me, and I would like to
explore them more thoroughly.  (But let me point out at the outset that in
my thinking about out-of-body experiences, I would really prefer to avoid
any language that immediately imposes a mystical interpretation upon that
experience, since it seems unwarranted, and it has the potential of dis-
torting what we can learn from thinking about it - which is not to say that
thought and analysis is the only or the most productive avenue for coming
to terms with the OBE phenomenon.)

As a teenager, I read a variety of books on a variety of subjects pertaining
to these matters, including all kinds of "supernatural" phenomena, as well
as traditional Christian theology, since I had been raised in that tradition
and was hoping to reconcile the two.  One of the most fascinating books I
came across in this quest was a book in the reference room at the Oakland
(California) public library.  I think it was called simply _The Book of
Miracles_, though I could be wrong about the title.  It was about the Kanuha
people of Hawaii (no, it wasn't anything by Max Freedom Long, who, by com-
parison with the style of this book, seems positively sloppy and uninter-
esting).  There was a model of the human presented which involved the ex-
istence of several bodies (I think it was four) which overlap and inter-
penetrate one another.  The Kanuhas are the shamans among the indigenous
Hawaiians.  They can heal, and they can cause illness and bad fortune,
according to what the book said (but I believe it is considered a misuse
of the shamanic power to do the latter, except, perhaps, under very special
circumstances).

Well, in the interest of not making this preface too long, I'll just say
for now that my pursuit has continued, and I've continued to read and to
try to learn about various models of human being and consciousness, and
I'd like to reconcile, as far as might be possible, the discoveries made
by people in various cultures at various times throughout recorded human
history.  My real motivation is to personally understand who and what I
am, and to try to live a full life, once I know what it means to be alive,
and what my potentials really are.  I'd like to know how I'm related to
the rest of the physical world, and to other inhabitants in that world,
and what are the important choices available to me in this life and what
information and experience I might be able to acquire so as to make those
choices as well as possible, relative to whatever I can learn about the
previous question (i.e., understanding how I relate to the world might
well extend my notions about benefit, so I might decide working for my
own personal benefit might not be as meaningful and worthwhile as working
for the well-being of the planet as a whole).

This, then, is my abbreviated preface to my response to Robert's recent
article.  I hope that it will help to establish a bit of context, which
readers might want to keep in mind as they read what follows:

In <1992Nov5.202057.6210@m.cs.uiuc.edu> mcgrath@cs.uiuc.edu
	(Robert McGrath) writes:

> In article <1992Nov5.052722.13683@gnosys.svle.ma.us>,
	gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us (Gary S. Trujillo) writes:

>> ...
>> There are certain assumptions made in drawing a implicit distinctions
>> between "mental events" and some alternative like "a literal leaving of
>> the body" (whatever such a thing might mean).

> I prefer the question, "Does anything leave the body during an OBE?"

What I was attempting to say in my previous article is that we may not be
able to ever get any reliable evidence concerning this subject, since we
are by default using a three-dimensional materialistic model of the phy-
sical world.  We may have no detection equipment appropriate for the task.
If a person experiences him or herself in an external form, we should not
necessarily expect that there is any way of an outside observer perceiving
some event which correlates with such an experience.  In such a case, I
would feel comfortable in saying that the experience is a "mental event"
in the sense in which Robert later defines his term *and* there is the
possibility of perceiving the ordinary material world from a perspective
which could ordinarily only be had by inhabiting a material body and using
the ordinary senses - which extends the sense of the term "mental" consid-
erably relative to the meaning we ordinarily give the term.

In fact, the passage Bishop quoted in a recent article seems to bear on
this subject.  He writes:

| From: acs.ucalgary.ca!bishop (Lionel Richard Clark)
| Subject: Silver cord
| Message-ID: <9211050556.AA60126@acs1.acs.ucalgary.ca>
| Date: Thu, 5 Nov 1992 05:56:10 GMT
|
| Quoting from _Beyond_The_Body_, Susan J Blackmore (pg 3!)
|
|         "Again, as I formulated answers, the muth below spoke.  It
| seemed quite capable of saying what I wanted said, and I soon let it
| be and concentrated on the experience.  From the ceiling I could
| apparently see the room quite clearly.  I saw the desk, chairs,
| window, my friends, and myself all from above.  Then I saw a string
| or cord, silvery, faintly glowing and moving gently, running between
| the neck of my body below and the navel, or therebouts, of a
| duplicate body above.  I thought it would be fun to try to move it.
| I reached out my hand and immediately learned my first lesson.  I
| needed no hand to move the cord, thinking it moved was sufficient.
| Also I could have two hands, any number of hands, or no hands at all,
| as I chose.  And so I learned a little of how to act in this
| thought-responsive world.  Much later I learned that I needed neither
| cord nor duplicate body, and when I realized this they evaporated."

Perhaps the "body" that one who is having an OBE perceives is just the
way the consciousness has of helping to orient the perceptions, since
we don't usually have any experience of the world except from our own
body-based perspective.  Therefore, looking for something leaving the
body which correlates with the subjective experience might be bound to
be fruitless.  So perhaps the experience is entirely "mental" in the
sense that there is no physical or material "thing" that leaves the
body - except the perception (whatever that phrase might mean).  At
this point it should be clear that what might be most lacking is any
experience that could give a possible basis for understanding this
most elusive phenomenon.  It might be like trying to understand plane-
tary motion using a pre-Copernican model of the earth being in the
center of things - or trying to fathom physical properties of bodies
like gravity when we only have a set of observations about the
mechanics of the phenomenon, but no real model which relates that
phenomenon to other phenomena for which we do have seemingly adequate
models.

I'd like to throw in one more item here - primarily because it might
be useful to come back to in future discussions.  I can't properly
develop it here or demonstrate its relevance to the present discussion.
I'm speaking now of the assumption that most of us have that the brain
is really the seat of consciousness and memory.  There's no disputing
that the brain is centrally involved in mental activity, but we really
have no way of establishing its precise role, given the present state
of the art of analysing brain function.  We are only at the point of
being able to correlate certain electrical activity in given areas of
the brain with observable phenomena, such as perception and certain
kinds of mental processing, and we know we can trigger memories by
stimulating certain areas of the brain (I believe Wilder Penfield, M.D.
the Canadian physician and author did some work in this area and wrote
about it in fairly accessible works).  We do *not* know, however, that
the brain is where memories are stored, or where consciousness resides,
though it may be convenient to assume so (the principle of "Occam's
Razor" would recommend that we do so, but it does not eliminate the
possibility that the brain is only one component of a much more complex
process).  I am thinking in particular of some talks given by Rupert
Sheldrake, Ph.D., author of _A New Science of Life_.  Dr. Sheldrake
offers the possibility (supported by some experiments he has conducted,
and some based on work with rats reported in the medical literature)
that the brain may be a transmitting/receiving device, and that much of
what we perceive to be fundamental to consciousness, including memory,
is actually stored external to the physical being of any life form.

Yes, I know, these hypotheses sound fantastic, but I find Dr. Sheldrake's
gedanken experiment which demonstrates the fallacy in our conventional
assumptions to be a particularly fascinating one...  He observes that it
would be difficult to convince a person who has never seen a television
set that the pictures on the face of the tube and the sounds coming from
the speaker are in fact generated by a transmitter located some distance
from the receiving set.  It is far more convenient to assume that what-
ever is happening is actually taking place within the circuitry "inside
the box."  Again, we use the principle of Occam's Razor, and get what we
all know to be an incorrect result.  The state of brain science is simply
not sufficiently advanced to demonstrate that what we observe about our
own mental functioning all takes place "inside the box."  Therefore, I
would submit that to say that out-of-body experiences are "simply mental
events" doesn't really tell us very much about their nature, and doesn't
really help to distinguish them from some other kind of events with which
we would like to contrast them, as was seemingly attempted in Robert's
earlier article.

> ...I have dreams and can simply imagine things that are VERY accurate.

Indeed you can.  But if you can report events that you have no means of
knowing in an ordinary way (through visual or auditory impressions, or
as a result of having read or been told something), whether you do so as
a result of a dream or some "paranormal" event (relative to a certain
conventional sense of what "normal" means), I think we would have to say
that we have something worth investigating, and that we probably need a
very different model of human being and functioning to adequately explain
it and other phenomena which are not explicable using our usual models.

I have not demonstrated, and probably *cannot* demonstrate, though, that
an OBE differs in some important way from the kinds of events studied
by parapsychology.  I don't really seek to do so anyway - I would just
like to get or generate some map of the territory if such a thing is
possible.

Well, I think perhaps I've written enough for one article.  I'll try to
come back and deal with the rest of what Robert has written when I get a
chance.  My overall sense, though, is that we're both struggling together
to understand what's going on here - not that we're taking the most mean-
ingful or productive approach, since it's based on analysis and a fairly
conventional logic.  Personally, I'd like to have one of these experiences,
and I may make some attempts, unless I become convinced there is some danger
or some other good reason not to.  I realize that having an experience may
not bring one any closer to understanding it, but I think it would provide
an even stronger motivation to do so, than merely wanting to investigate a
series of intriguing accounts of other people.

Gary
--
    Gary S. Trujillo                            gst@gnosys.svle.ma.us
Somerville, Massachusetts              {wjh12,bu.edu,spdcc,ima,cdp}!gnosys!gst
Newsgroups: alt.out-of-body