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What Out-of-Body Experiences Taught Me About Reality
Vic Shayne author
13 Pillars of Enlightenment: How to realize your true nature and end suffering
I may be opening myself up to ridicule, argument, and derision for writing this article, but if this subject is not for you then you can just stop reading and move on. The purpose of this article is not to prove the reality of out-of-body experiences or to promote their practice, but rather to discuss what they have implied for me on my personal search for the essence of what I am….
What it is not and what it is…
While it has become popular to say, “I had an out-of-body (OBE) experience” to describe feelings of dissociation linked to trauma, confusion, great excitement, cognitive dysfunction, temporary insanity or confusion, or even surreal situations that befuddle the mind, such experiences have led to a misuse of the term. An out-of-body experience is not a feeling or a malaise, it is an immersive occurrence that is undeniably real to the experiencer.
And off I went…
My first out-of-body experiences began around age six, more than sixty years ago. Having had at least a thousand or more OBEs, it is my own observation that they take place when the attention becomes placed external to — away from — the physical body. When this attention is strong enough, the in-body (in the physical body) experience/awareness becomes nonexistent or negligible in favor of another form of existence, just as it does in a dream, loss of consciousness, coma, or deep sleep.
With the OBE, there is a vivid awareness of activity, thought, interaction, and/or movement that does not involve the physical body.
By the time I was in my early 30s I at last realized that there was something of value beyond the excitement, amazement, or wonder of the experience itself that led in some way to knowing what I am beyond the self. But this realization took many years and experiences before coming to fruition.
A faulty scientific explanation
Although a number of scientists have tried to explain away OBEs by attributing them to a function of the angular gyrus of the brain, this hardly jives with what’s really going on or makes sense in all…
