Astral Projection

Great Debates
181

:eek: WHAT!!

OK slowly after deep breaths.

Dreaming: a subjective experience but with a wide shared concordance and physical referents. That is, wake someone up when in REM they will report dreaming.

AP: A narrowly reported phenomenon without apparent physical referents not verified by experiment.

The comparison is quite interesting. Dreams are primarily reported as subjective experience. They may include things like dreaming someone has died or you’ve moved house but on waking it is clear the physical world is not changed by actions or experiences while dreaming. Why would you believe anyone dreams? Because it is a widely shared experience, you can do experiments which influence when, how and what people dream under well controlled conditions and you can find changes in brain activity that correlate with the dreaming state (cite: Mental activity during sleep. Fagioli I. Dipartimento di Psicologia, Universita degli Studi di Firenze, Via S. Niccolo, 93, 50125 Florence, Italy. iginofagioli@mail.unifi.it. Sleep Med Rev. 2002 Aug;6(4):307-20. Amongst many others). The basis and mechanisms of dreaming, although not completely understood, have been demonstrated to be a consequence of brain activity. You don’t get dreams without a brain. Current hypotheses are testable and are being tested.
AP on the other hand is not a widely reported experience. Any test so far conducted has not confirmed the claims of effects in the physical world whether in terms of observations, communication or changes to the physical world. There is no theoretical basis for the phenomenon that has any testable claims (and I did look at your cites).

I think your astral travellers are dreaming.

182

I gotta second this.

183

Nothing in that cite about NDEs, right? I read what was posted.

184

‘NDE’ is a label, given to what is experienced when one is in a state from where death is a high likely outcome, if undisturbed. The different components of a NDE correlate quite well with the DMT experience. The ‘NDE’ label is no more privileged in assignment to ketamine than it is to DMT, or when one is “near death”.

185

Neat hypothesis. You gonna do some research to back this one up?

186

There’s no hypothesis here, just observation.

Let me make it more clear, using formal notation…

A person goes into the ER, complications arise. Let’s represent their experience as {effect 1, effect 2, effect 3…}. They get revived. The doctor tells them: “We almost lost you there…you were very lucky…yada, yada”. So, person assigns a label of ‘NDE’ to {effect 1, effect 2, effect 3}.

A druggie gets hold of some DMT. Knowingly consumes the drug, with existing awareness of what the drug is supposed to do. The person experiences {effect 1, effect 2, effect 3}. Labels it ‘DMT trip’.

Just because they aren’t labelled the same, doesn’t make them different experiences. Compare the effects, not the labels. The label doesn’t define the effects.

The only good way to confirm whether DMT/NDE are essentially the same is for an open-minded/undecided NDE subject to consume DMT.

Anyway, one doctor/professor has done extensive legal/clinical research on DMT. I’ll disagree with his interpretation, but the research’s there.

187

What was hypothetical about anything ll Gyan ll said? Let’s examine it line by line:

This is true, is it not? NDE is a name we give to that particular expeience. Can we agree that the first sentence is not a hypothesis?

This is a statement of fact, not hypothesis. Read the research. Do you contend that the DMT experience is not similar the NDE experience? If so, what is the basis for your contention?

Nothing hypothetical about this either. What’s the difference if the experience is indused by drugs or a brush with death. It’s the same experience- a sensation of leaving the physical body. And if natural DMT gets dumped into the brain during NDEs we now have shifted the burden to those who would say that the NDE was not caused by DMT.

188

It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.

189

II Gyan II,
What do you disagree with? I thought most everything in that book was pretty sound.

190

From the book description: The Spirit Molecule makes the bold case that DMT, naturally released by the pineal gland, facilitates the soul’s movement in and out of the body

191

He means soul in a “you” sense, not a religious sense. Not in a “my soul goes to heaven” way.

192

I’m not dissing anyone’s conjecture/hypothesis/idea that DMT mediates/causes the NDE experience.

But just saying “DMT causes it” makes it sound like an accepted fact–a non-controversial thing. A skeptic should know better.

Diogenes, if you think the origin/cause of NDEs can be settled with a few lines of argument in GD with a “hey, you’re an idiot if you can’t see it’s settled” attitude, then I’ve got to come to the conclusion that you’re just joking–or totally clueless.

People come back from their NDE experience swearing that they’re “real.” I’ve said this before, but show me a cite giving a percentage of NDE experiencers who claim that what they experienced was merely a hallucination. Not only have I never seen such a statistic, I’ve only seen one ambiguous case cited–anywhere.

Do you end your DMT trip thinking what happened to you was real? Do you swear that you really met dead relatives–or some other experience in which you interact with people and claim that you really did so? NDE experiencers do.

If you think that your DMT experience was “just a trip,” then in this point it differs significantly with the NDE experience. If you claim that it was 100% real, as NDE experiencers do, then you would be backing up the NDE experiencers’ claims. (Or if you think yours was partially real, then perhaps the NDErs’ also were partially real, etc.).

A further counter is that NDErs are just clueless non-drug-users who wouldn’t know a trip from reality anyway. But among NDErs are drug users who should know the diffference. There are atheists and skeptics who have every incentive to claim that their experience was “just a dream.”

Again, I repeat: NDErs say it was real. Skeptics have a hard time explaining away this fact.

193

Just when I thought we might get over personal insults, Oh well.

Try sticking to the debate.

Love

194

We are not trying to “explain away” the fact that NDErs claim that their experience was real. We are trying, to the best of our ability, to explain to you, as simply as is humanly possible, that because they have no evidence(note that word-“evidence”. Not feelings. Not beliefs. Not religious dogma. “Evidence”. Say it again. “Evidence”. Look it up in the dictionary, and make note of the fact that none of the definitions involve the words “feeling”, “belief” or “religious dogma”) supporting their fervent wishes that they have some sort of supernatural abilities that separate them from us mere(but incredibly handsome and extremely witty, if I do say so myself) humans, and the fact(there’s that other pesky word again, so sorry) that boatloads of evidence indicate that a lack of oxygen to the brain perhaps combined with certain chemicals released by said brain can give over the effects described by NDErs without having to invoke unprovable and unnecessary supernatural elements, that we think that they are wrong.

195

Thats the definition of hallucination, something that fake but you think it is absolutly real. Hallucinations are not the same as “visuals”. And yes, to believe it was “real” is quite common of DMT trips. DMT completely overrides reality.

196

If you have done even a small amount of serious research on near death experiences you would know:

that most individuals are brain and heart dead when they take place.

some of these have been in controlled conditions like Pam Reynolds where she was dead (by medical/clinical definition) for about 2 hours.

In other controlled conditions (on monitors than have flatlined for more than a few minutes) the time “dead” varies from a few minutes to several hours. One russian was morgue dead for 3 days with the papers to prove it.

some were in the morgue or on their way to it when they came back to life.

Yes, there are those who have had near death experiences without being clinically dead. In most of these cases there was a real honest belief on the part of the individual that death was certain.

Now while these people were dead they were still alive in spirit form and could tell (after they came back) what went on while they were dead. Some can tell what happen (while dead) away from the scene of the body. Many of these accounts have been verified by the doctors and professional people present.
There is an least one scientific study and affirms this phenomenon.
In the studies these have been names veridical NDEs. A title given to them by researchers at the University of Virginia Psy. department.

The cause of NDEs is death of the body, when the spirit (you) thinks/knows/has reason to believe the body can no longer support the physical environment it leaves. You then look down on your body and from there we have a near death experience. A very real spiritual experience that every one who has it knows it’s real.

You can say drugs, or whatever cause it and I guess they technically do if they kill or come close to killing the body.

Heart attacks, car crashes, strokes, all these cause NDEs also.

What I read from the skeptics is a group of badly informed individuals trying to hang on to outdated ideas about mankind.

http://aleroy.com/wildcard

for more info and more than 200 ndes on the site. If you are going to discuss ndes learn all you can about them.

Love

197

The NDE experience itself, as far as science is concerned, consists 100% of introspective claims. You see to be taking the claims seriously enough to provide for them a chemical/physical explanation, but not seriously enough to take what the experiencers themselves say about their experiences. This approach seems to me both contradictory and arrogant.

Why not just call NDEs bullshit from the start and forget them? The reason is fairly simple: large numbers of people have these experiences and claim that they are real. I have only read one account of a person having doubts that his experience was real. Following this logic, if the whole human population had this experience (including atheists and agnostics), then the whole human population would come to believe in life after death.

Would you care to answer why atheists who have this experience also claim that it is real? The implication is that you, Czarcasm, would also claim your experience to be real if you had one. You, the ultimate skeptic, would also be “fooled.” How can this be? Is there understanding of science and reason, no preparation one can make not to be overcome by the experience and have one’s entire worldview altered?

You could at least admit that it’s an interesting quandary.

198

I can’t agree about the definition here. www.m-w.com has it as,

1 a : perception of objects with no reality usually arising from disorder of the nervous system or in response to drugs (as LSD).

The perception is enough; you don’t have to believe it. Yes, “visuals” are hallucinations. I once took a nasty-ass sleeping pill and, when I woke up, there was a lovely purple ribbon floating in the air with typed writing snaking through it upside-down and backwards. That was a hallucination even though I knew it wasn’t really there.

Look, this is splitting hairs about terminology, but there have been so many fallacious arguments in this thread and others concerning the paranormal, that I get antsy. You simply can’t explain away NDEs a la, “DMT produces hallucinations; NDEs are similar to DMT trips; NDEs are just trips, nothing more.”

I would be curious to hear more about your experiences, however. What seemed real to you, and how did you feel about it afterward?

There was a mistake in my response to Czarcasm. NDEs are not just 100% introspection; experiencers also report things they experienced unconscious that later turn out to be true and are verified by people who were there (doctors, etc.).

The argument should have run, Even if you deny the veridical accounts and consider NDEs to be 100% introspection, then if you take them seriously enough to give explanations for what they said they experienced, then you cannot simply deny another major claim of what they experience: that it was real.

199

Well, yes, it is very interesting. But it’s the exact same effect you get with a ‘deja vu’ feeling - the sensation that you have seen this before. This has a scientific reason - something like images coming from the senses accidentally getting routed through the memory areas of your brain, but I’m no expert.

I know it has a scientific reason, and I know I can’t be remembering something that hadn’t happened at the time, but I get the same spooky feeling every time. I can’t distinguish between the mental accident (images rerouted) and the actual memory.

Even the ultimate skeptic believes their dreams are real while they’re having them - you are always overcome by these experiences. It’s only after you wake up, and use some logic (It’s seven in the morning, and I’m in bed…), that you realise that the dream never actually happened.

200

With NDEs, the difference is that the skeptics continue to believe in the reality of their experience forever.