Kai
New
I am not an “all my eggs in one basket” type of person, so it is a bit embarrassing to be leaning for the moment somewhat heavily on one case I have been discussing in a recent thread (the Jeff S) case. While I will continue to have these thoughts whether or not the Jeff S case existed, I do think it a kind of exemplar or “smoking gun” for something that is wrong with our whole way of looking at the out of body experience problem.
I want to develop some ideas here that would amount to the initial steps in a new, or broadly new, theory of what the “out of body experience" is. If you are interested in these thoughts, I would strongly recommend that you read first the “Berenstein Bears” thread on the “Other Stuff” subforum, and then proceed to read the “Jeff S” thread on the “Critical” subforum before coming back here. It’s just that what you read may make more sense to you if you do that. Not complete sense perhaps…just more sense ;)
However, for the purposes of this (present) post I want to highlight what I think is the problem, and how the Jeff S case poses this problem in the strongest terms. You see, it quickly becomes kind of arbitrary and ad hoc to claim that the Jeff S case does not have the qualities of an out of body experience. It in fact has almost ALL the qualities of such an experience but with an additional and very problematic "gotcha." And that aspect is that bleeding and demonstrably physical action is involved. Were it not for that one aspect, no one would bat an eyelid, who usually calls such things “out of body experiences” at calling this such an experience. The subject has an altered state of consciousness. He ventures forth from the position of his body. He turns back and sees his inert body there in experiential space. He ‘returns’ or ‘loses consciousness’ and finds himself back in his body. Again, this narrative has all the features of a typical out of body experience except for the fact that his “out of body self” left a trail of blood soiled tissues in a collectively empirical landscape. Thus we are forced to a panicked card-deck-shuffle of labels and suppose that this must have been something else…a “bilocation” or some yet more exotic possibility perhaps.
But I don’t think those labels are instructive or particularly illuminating. I think they are more in the way of placeholders for a problem. In experiential terms, an OOBE* IS a “bilocation”…your perceived body is THERE and your sense of presence is HERE. So that doesn’t really tell us anything useful. It doesn’t tell us why most ‘out of body experiences’ don’t seem to be capable of acting causally in the perceived world (which makes them at least partially distinct from dreams) and it does not tell us why a Jeff S style experience can happen, which has most of the same characteristics plus an added one. Nor do I think it stupendously useful to float additional different categories such as OOBE and "remote viewing," which appears to be yet another subvariant of a deeper and more pervasive "bilocated experience" problem.
I usually have the suspicion that when there are too many categories acting in a field of interest, this is a symptom that a range or spectrum of related phenomena are being interpreted as entirely different phenomena, where a concept of greater explanatory force might be capable of uniting these phenomena…with a price of course, that we might have to look at them a little differently.
I want to reprise quickly the concept I have floated in the two threads named above before proceeding any further. This concept is that “consciousness” is a variable in nature that has a particular nameable function. Not that I am at all saying that this function exhausts what consciousness is. Only that its nature is in part to be understood in terms of this function. And that function is to “hover over” and to “step between” different actualizable strands in what might be termed a cosmic possibility space.
It is this concept I am going to be using, moving forward, to explain why I think that our present notions of what an out of body experience is, are (broadly speaking) misconceived. Just as I said in another thread, an experience like Jeff’s in a sense becomes a lot more believable and understandable if we contemplate that it is not a “freakosaurus” event that has never happened before in the history of human action, but is simply a more dramatic or in our face version of a principle that is acting in our lives all the time.
Thus, too, I am inclined to believe that “out of body” experiences become a lot more plausible if we can understand them in terms of what “embodied experience” or as I might choose to word it “experience of a body flavor” has really been for us (and for all organic life) all along.
* I will be using the original Tart-spawned acronym "OOBE" rather than the somewhat uncouth Blackmore-ism of "OBE."
I want to develop some ideas here that would amount to the initial steps in a new, or broadly new, theory of what the “out of body experience" is. If you are interested in these thoughts, I would strongly recommend that you read first the “Berenstein Bears” thread on the “Other Stuff” subforum, and then proceed to read the “Jeff S” thread on the “Critical” subforum before coming back here. It’s just that what you read may make more sense to you if you do that. Not complete sense perhaps…just more sense ;)
However, for the purposes of this (present) post I want to highlight what I think is the problem, and how the Jeff S case poses this problem in the strongest terms. You see, it quickly becomes kind of arbitrary and ad hoc to claim that the Jeff S case does not have the qualities of an out of body experience. It in fact has almost ALL the qualities of such an experience but with an additional and very problematic "gotcha." And that aspect is that bleeding and demonstrably physical action is involved. Were it not for that one aspect, no one would bat an eyelid, who usually calls such things “out of body experiences” at calling this such an experience. The subject has an altered state of consciousness. He ventures forth from the position of his body. He turns back and sees his inert body there in experiential space. He ‘returns’ or ‘loses consciousness’ and finds himself back in his body. Again, this narrative has all the features of a typical out of body experience except for the fact that his “out of body self” left a trail of blood soiled tissues in a collectively empirical landscape. Thus we are forced to a panicked card-deck-shuffle of labels and suppose that this must have been something else…a “bilocation” or some yet more exotic possibility perhaps.
But I don’t think those labels are instructive or particularly illuminating. I think they are more in the way of placeholders for a problem. In experiential terms, an OOBE* IS a “bilocation”…your perceived body is THERE and your sense of presence is HERE. So that doesn’t really tell us anything useful. It doesn’t tell us why most ‘out of body experiences’ don’t seem to be capable of acting causally in the perceived world (which makes them at least partially distinct from dreams) and it does not tell us why a Jeff S style experience can happen, which has most of the same characteristics plus an added one. Nor do I think it stupendously useful to float additional different categories such as OOBE and "remote viewing," which appears to be yet another subvariant of a deeper and more pervasive "bilocated experience" problem.
I usually have the suspicion that when there are too many categories acting in a field of interest, this is a symptom that a range or spectrum of related phenomena are being interpreted as entirely different phenomena, where a concept of greater explanatory force might be capable of uniting these phenomena…with a price of course, that we might have to look at them a little differently.
I want to reprise quickly the concept I have floated in the two threads named above before proceeding any further. This concept is that “consciousness” is a variable in nature that has a particular nameable function. Not that I am at all saying that this function exhausts what consciousness is. Only that its nature is in part to be understood in terms of this function. And that function is to “hover over” and to “step between” different actualizable strands in what might be termed a cosmic possibility space.
It is this concept I am going to be using, moving forward, to explain why I think that our present notions of what an out of body experience is, are (broadly speaking) misconceived. Just as I said in another thread, an experience like Jeff’s in a sense becomes a lot more believable and understandable if we contemplate that it is not a “freakosaurus” event that has never happened before in the history of human action, but is simply a more dramatic or in our face version of a principle that is acting in our lives all the time.
Thus, too, I am inclined to believe that “out of body” experiences become a lot more plausible if we can understand them in terms of what “embodied experience” or as I might choose to word it “experience of a body flavor” has really been for us (and for all organic life) all along.
* I will be using the original Tart-spawned acronym "OOBE" rather than the somewhat uncouth Blackmore-ism of "OBE."
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