in 1999, on a business trip to KC, I brought a book on OBE by a NASA scientist who claimed to have mastered them to a degree.... his accounts were facintating and he had excersizes in the book to try it...so I did... after 2 weeks I suddenly got a partial out of body experience.... I suddenly had 2 right arms and hands at the same time and could feel both of them equally even though they were about a foot apart.... but it only lasted a few seconds. It did, however, give me a MATRIX like revelation.... THIS is NOT the real world.
The only world we know is made up by our own mind, This does not mean it is not true or accurate... but it does mean it is not THE REAL WORLD and may not be accurate.
Here is how it works.... our mind invents the only world we know from a data source which if accurate is a stream of electrical pulses coming from bio-mechanical transducers which convert one form of energy into another... eyes seems to translate light into electrical pulses, ears do it for sound, skin does it for touch, temp. and pressure. etc... but all of these convert the original source into different frequencies of electricity and those frequencies are some how turned into the world we know and are some how mapped out.
A well known phenomenon called the Phantom limb effect happens because a missing limb in the "real" world has not altered the mapping of where it should be in the mind maker.... the map seems to grow less and less changeable or plastic with age... if you lose a limb early on, chances are the mindmap will be absorbed for other uses... but after a certain age the map stays intact and activations of the map are FELT in the location of where the limb should be relative to the body.... take this a step further and when you cut off the world as in sleep you get a phantom world, a dream world where activations in the map are read as real by comparison to queit sense data... now if you follow all that, the OBE is part of the continuum between a day world and dream world, closer to the day world... the map data is not as random and not as shifting and so seems just as real as the day world... what explains the feeling of being seperated from the body? while dreaming you are not feeling your sensory body at all, you are in a dream body moving freely about... but in OBE, you still are close to being awake and you still sense your body... and your dream body at the same time....two bodies.
It also made me aware of another MATRIX like fact... I have no way to tell the source of either world... THIS world seems like it is from THE REAL WORLD, but is it? could this world be from a computer pumping info into me which is not like reality at all? could this world be, as I have come to believe, a shared hallucination made stable by many minds sharing data?
Materialists assume that matter and energy generate mind...but we have only the evidence that mind generates matter and energy as symbols within it! there is really NO evidence that it works the other way around and no one has ever shown any way that matter or energy could generate consciousness. No matter how complex a computer ever gets, it will still be shoving 1s and 0s around circuits and there is no indication that doing this will ever allow any circuit to FEEL or see or hear...etc... we have computers which can descriminate between visual inputs but no indication that there is any part of them that is SEEING in order to do this. we even have what is called blind sight where part of a persons brain seems able to take visual signals and descriminate but not allow the person to consciously see what is being done...consciousness is not a requirement for a computer to operate and simulate a wide variety of things we do...but one thing that a computer lacks is a self interested caring because of being AWARE that what it does might cause it to FEEL pain or pleasure.
being out of body may infact be just as real as being in apparent body, since in BOTH cases one is NOT in his true body which may be completely other than either... I realized that reincarnation is possible because we are only symbolically interacting with each other, you never see the REAL me, only your symbol of me... and when my symbol appears dead to you, that does not mean in any way that I am dead... no more than I would be if I stopped using a game token and instead found a new one to play with.
Of course JWs have no souls and this talk to them is completely from the demonic...but they do believe in spirit beings and my belief is that we are really that, not this as we appear to each other.