Hi LittleToe,
:: "Out of body" experiences are nothing more than unusually intense dreams, or dreamlike states of mind.
: Interesting statement, Alan. You seem quite categoric.
With things like this, I’m extremely skeptical. The brain is extremely powerful on its own, in terms of influencing the body and creating internal “experiences”, and I don’t think we need to look beyond it to explain all sorts of strange subjective phenomena. Keep in mind that our experience of “reality” is just the brain’s interpretation of all of its sensory inputs. When the senses get screwed up, or the interpretive mechanism goes awry, the person “experiences” all sorts of weird things – but these have nothing to do with objective reality -- meaning reality outside the messed up brain -- reality that other people with normal brains could also experience.
: I believe that there is far more, outside the miniscule capsule of synapses that we call our minds, than we dare believe.
I assume you mean things like we have an immortal soul or something like that. Well, I have yet to see an iota of evidence for any such things.
In some cultures, such as those originating in parts of Africa where “spirits”, good and bad, are believe to influence everyday affairs via blessings, curses, witchcraft and so forth, everyone claims to experience all sorts of magical, miraculous things. For lack of a better term I’ll class such beliefs as voodoo. But someone from outside the culture can live in it and not experience anything like what the cultural natives claim to, no matter how hard they try to observe those things, as long as they remain skeptical. It’s the same thing in the culture of some American religions I’m familiar with. “The Lord did this for me today” and “The Lord told me thus and so” are common claims, which have no objective reality whatsoever. People from these cultures believe in these things for no better reason than that they were trained to.
I think that things like “out of body experiences”, “demon attacks”, “alien abductions” and especially the notion of an “immortal soul” have much in common with these culturally induced beliefs. No one has ever demonstrated their objective reality.
: Of course, my statement need not necessarily be any more correct than yours.
True, but I have some pretty solid evidence to back up my statements. The proverbial situation applies: Suppose you tell me that you have a powerful, invisible pink unicorn hovering over your head, helping you out in every situation. Need I demonstrate that your claim is false? Not at all. It would be you making the extraordinary claim, and as we all should know, extraordinary claims ought to require extraordinary evidence for intelligent people to believe them.
Hi Heaven,
:
Sometimes people only believe what is physical, or solid.
For very good reason. Things that are not physical and solid cannot be demonstrated. Like the invisible pink unicorn over LittleToe’s head.
: You just cant deny that there have been many people with similar experiences.
More precisely, I can’t deny that many people claim to have had such experiences. For example, a JW I used to know claimed that when he was “coming into the Truth”, he experienced demon attacks. He claimed that a “succubus” would get in bed with him in the middle of the night and try to rape him. He was absolutely convinced that this was objective reality. I asked him if he was doing drugs at the time. He claimed he wasn’t. The better part of a year later I asked him again about his drug experiences. Turns out he had been doing LSD a lot until he got into his JW bible study a couple of months. Now, we all know that many people who do LSD can have strong hallucinations months after they quit. Combine that with the usual nonsense JWs teach about “demon attacks” and the very real warning they give that a person beginning to study with them will soon experience opposition from every quarter, including from Satan himself, and you have a deadly combination.
It’s the same thing with UFO’s and such. A particular story gets a lot of publicity, and then some people start “experiencing” the same kind of thing. History is full of such fads.
And remember that just because a person claims to have had a real experience, this does not mean that he did. Towards the end of his life my dad began experiencing hallucinations due to congenital brain damage. He told me that he often couldn’t distinguish between hallucination and reality, except that the hallucinations eventually gave themselves away, sometimes by suddenly ending. He actually “saw” imaginary people sitting in the room with him and could carry on conversations with them.
: How can so many people dream the same thing, or know things that they otherwise wouldnt have, while they are unconscious, or flatlined?
People’s brains have similar wiring. Similar situations produce similar reactions. Some scientists have done objective testing of “out of body experiences” and found that particular combinations of stress, such as being unconscious and near death due to oxygen starvation of the brain, or whatever, induce similar reactions in people. People experience many of the same things going through life. When the brain gets stressed, people from similar cultural backgrounds experience the same type of stress reaction. I seem to recall a TV documentary several years ago that said that people from non-Western (and heavily Christian-influenced) cultures have “out of body experiences” quite different from people from Western cultures.
Hi Qwerty,
I can’t explain the blind woman’s experience. However, I suspect that if the full story were to be told, it wouldn’t be nearly as clear cut as you’ve been led to believe. I have yet to see such wild stories stand up under careful examination. How is it that my stepson sometimes has “out of body experiences” when sleeping normally? He’s convinced that they’re real, but I’m convinced that they’re just intense dreams, since I have very intense dreams sometimes.
AlanF
