What happens when you have an experience that, well, is not supposed to happen? You are likely to confront some ironclad assumption. Can’t be! But you experienced it.
Let me share a bit of my mind-blowing experience. This experience takes me back to a university class I taught some years ago. It was philosophy, and we were discussing the mind-body problem. We can all distinguish our minds and our bodies—two very different things. The problem: how do they relate to each other?
Philosophers like to tussle over that question. During the discussion a student raised a question about the near-death experience and wanted to know if it was possible for a person to leave his body. That would be a dramatic step into the unknown. It challenges the popular assumption of many scientists who swear by reductive materialism. However, scientists and philosophers cannot explain how consciousness came into being. It’s a stubborn mystery, but a topic for another day.
Walking out of the classroom, a student I’ll call LS caught up with me and tapped me on the shoulder. “That was an interesting talk,” she said, “and there’s something I’d like to tell you, but it’s between you and me.” “I can keep a secret,” I replied, curious about what she had to say. “You never know how people will react—especially if you have something weird you want to share,” she added.
“I understand,” I said, “and weird is just an old German word that means become. Are you about to become something weird?” “Not right now,” she smiled with a faintly seductive air. “I just wanted to comment on the last question about the out-of-body experience. Is it a real experience? For sure, and I know from my own experience.” She paused and I waited for her to go on. I could see she wasn’t inclined to get into details. So, impulsively (and sardonically) I said, “Hey! Next time you find yourself out of your body, come and visit we.” LS said nothing but gave me her enigmatic smile. We exchanged a few more words and went our ways.
It must have happened no more than a week later. I had forgotten the exchange with my student. One morning I woke up, had breakfast and glanced into the living room. I was taken aback. Something was slightly off. I stepped into the living room and quickly noticed that my music stand was out of place and sitting in the middle of the room. I normally kept it flush up against the bookcase. I stood there, baffled. There was nobody in the apartment but me. I had no doubt where the stand was when I retired last night. What caused my music stand to move to the center of the living room? Frozen on the spot with wonder, at that very moment, the phone rang. I picked up, it was my student LS, and she says, “How do you like the new furniture arrangement?”
LS explained what happened the night before. Getting into bed and drifting off she found herself hovering above her bed—out of her body. She remembered my challenge about visiting me. Suddenly, she (her disembodied consciousness) found me in my kitchen, reading and writing. She tried to catch my attention but failed. It was terribly frustrating. How can she prove she came to visit me by her out-of-body express? She looked around and noticed the music stand. She approached it and managed to move it to the center of the room. There it was, right in front of me, moved by her invisible, intangible, and inaudible self. It was a shocking fact that I could not deny. My student left her body, traveled about 25 miles, entered through the walls of my house and physically rearranged a piece of my furniture. It was absolutely clear that this happened, a fact that is bound to strike most people as impossible.
I know there is a great deal of data that point to the reality of psychic phenomena. But in the end, what counts the most is personal experience. There are many compelling out-of-body (OBE) stories in the NDE literature. The literature is growing so that one could plausibly argue that to say that Mr. X died is equivalent to saying that Mr. X had a terminal OBE.
The implications of the OBE are highly suggestive. If my conscious self can leave my body, it could be a statement about the afterlife. My real self is my consciousness that leaves my body at death. Plato said that philosophy was the practice of death, of rising ecstatically out of the confines of your body into a mental universe.
There is another item from my student’s experience. Not only does she liberate herself from her body—a metaphysical blast—she moves through space in a self-directed fashion—she also can act upon the physical world, as demonstrated by LS’s movement of my music stand. This experience allows me to entertain the possible reality of invisible agents and hidden forces among us. Incorporate OBE and PK into our worldview and reality can get very interesting. My experience certainly enlarged my worldview.
If you enjoy having your mind jogged by the unexpected and the impossible, see my book: Smile of the Universe: Miracles in an Age of Disbelief. Anomalist Books, or Amazon.
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