Astral Projection - Are you for real?

[EvilDarkMagicians]

My friend keeps telling she has had astral projection. I never bought what she said. We have arguments for literally days on this subject. Is their any evidence supporting OBE's ? Is their any saying why people have these deluded hallucination?
What do you believe. Discuss.

[Alsatian Knights]

My friend keeps telling she has had astral projection. I never bought what she said. We have arguments for literally days on this subject. Is their any evidence supporting OBE's ? Is their any saying why people have these deluded hallucination?
What do you believe. Discuss.

I believe in acid drops...

[Ryadn]

Is it just me, or have a lot of the threads started today made no sense whatsoever?

Seriously, I hit my head really hard against a doorjamb yesterday, and it might have knocked loose something important in my brain.

[Alsatian Knights]

Is it just me, or have a lot of the threads started today made no sense whatsoever?

Seriously, I hit my head really hard against a doorjamb yesterday, and it might have knocked loose something important in my brain.

Balderdash, there is no scientific consensus that your brain is important.

[Rejistania]

There is no scientific proof whatsoever for OBEs.

[RightLeaningChristians]

The work of the Devil.

[Nation Tracker]

I try to keep an open mind about such things. But I think there are fewer Out of Body Experiences than Out of Mind Experiences.

[Hairless Kitten II]

My friend keeps telling she has had astral projection. I never bought what she said. We have arguments for literally days on this subject. Is their any evidence supporting OBE's ? Is their any saying why people have these deluded hallucination?
What do you believe. Discuss.

Check this link:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg1 ... iment.html

A Swiss woman who fell off her bicycle has yielded a unique insight into how auditory hallucinations are generated.

The woman suffered damage to the part of the brain where speech is generated and could speak only in short, stunted words and sentences. Five months later, when she suddenly developed epilepsy, she began "hearing" voices with the same speech impediments as herself.

This is maybe also a solution for the Lourdes Cave experience of Bernadette Soubirou.

When the ‘holy’ 'virgin' Mary appeared then she talked the local French dialect, by coincidence the only language Bernadette knew.

[Wilgrove]

I believe in Astral Projections.

[Hairless Kitten II]

I believe in Astral Projections.

I believe you. But it is not that you percept them as real that they are real.

[Sidoria]

Couldn't you test this by placing certain test objects without your friends' knowledge and asking her to identify them? In theory you're supposed to be able to project to anywhere in the physical that you've personally been before. The unfortunate part for alot of various beliefs is that "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence", so no matter how you try to convince your friend she can still choose to believe.

[Alsatian Knights]

Couldn't you test this by placing certain test objects without your friends' knowledge and asking her to identify them? In theory you're supposed to be able to project to anywhere in the physical that you've personally been before. The unfortunate part for alot of various beliefs is that "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence", so no matter how you try to convince your friend she can still choose to believe.

Yeah but OBE's usually occur once somebody has either (a)ran head first into a wall (b)dropped some acid (c)smoked a funny cigarette (d)got hit by a mac truck or (e) ran into a parked car.

[Sidoria]

The difference, as I understood it, was that 'astral projection' was a willing act whereas an 'OBE' is unintentional version of the same thing. I took the question in context of the friend having an ability to intentionally perform the act. Either way, both are supposedly experienced by the subconscious mind and thusly diffucult to remember, just as dreams are, unless you practise at it. In either case the human mind is so utterly complex that in the mind of someone who 'experienced' this type of thing it becomes utterly and unrevokably real. Convincing them of its lack of reality would be like me convincing a reader that they weren't actually reading this right now.

[House of Crap]

When I was younger I used to try to astrally project, I read a few books on it, used to meditate a lot, it was also something that a few of my friends were into cause it sort of meshed with our mind sets at the time. To define it as real or fake doesn't seem like a fair task for a few reasons. 1 maybe some people can astrally project, and other just fool themselves into thinking they can. 2 aside from consensual reality nothing else is provable, even though consensual reality is only provable up to the point that we assume others truly exist. and 3 there is always a chance that any determination that we come to is completely wrong anyways.
But as I said I used to try it and actually sometimes it did work, but its different for a lot of people I think, and I never got too far into it, the whole experience really freaked me out. There is a form of meditation where you focus on spatial awareness, and thats what I think most people experience when they "astrally project" the majority of the time, their imagination takes their memory of their surroundings and begins fabricating additions to it and makes it seem real enough to where you can imagine being anywhere really. The thoughts are real thoughts, and they are of real things, but it is likely to be considered false. But there should always be taken into account the unpredictable, because I am sure out there somewhere is someone who is truly psychic, and someone who can truly astrally project, and many other people who can do "impossible" things and maybe for them those things can be real, but for most other people I think we just imagine ourselves a world where we can do those types of things.

[Cameroi]

well if somebody watches you all night, and your body doesn't get up and physically sleep walk, and in the morning there's a note on your fridge door that wasn't there when you went to sleep, and you dreamed you got up and wrote and put it there, yah, i'd say there's a pretty good chance obe's are real.

and i HAVE read anecdotal stories to simular effect.

for that matter i a have, well litterally obe's are the same thing as dying, in the sense that the real you takes a wee bit of a vacation from your body, except the difference is the atonomic systems kept it going so you can crawl back in and put it back on.

logically this doesn't sound like a very good idea to do, just for the fun of it.
but sometimes, well it CAN have its uses.

since the soul is colorless, oderless, and not tangably detectable, all there ever really CAN be is anecdotes.

lots of things CAN be without having to be provable. and that doesn't make them evil or out to get you either.

i happen to believe in strangeness. and strangeness makes a lot of things possible.
it just doesn't make them provable.

interacting with the physical universe is what we bodies for,
if there are other ways of doing so, well there might be at that.

just be careful what you wish for or do, whether in body or out,
there doesn't have to be something for us all to be accountable to,
in order for us all to be accountable, whether there is or not,
and i do rather believe/suspect, that we are, if only, and at least, to ourselves.

[EvilDarkMagicians]

well if somebody watches you all night, and your body doesn't get up and physically sleep walk, and in the morning there's a note on your fridge door that wasn't there when you went to sleep, and you dreamed you got up and wrote and put it there, yah, i'd say there's a pretty good chance obe's are real.

and i HAVE read anecdotal stories to simular effect.

for that matter i a have, well litterally obe's are the same thing as dying, in the sense that the real you takes a wee bit of a vacation from your body, except the difference is the atonomic systems kept it going so you can crawl back in and put it back on.

logically this doesn't sound like a very good idea to do, just for the fun of it.
but sometimes, well it CAN have its uses.

since the soul is colorless, oderless, and not tangably detectable, all there ever really CAN be is anecdotes.

lots of things CAN be without having to be provable. and that doesn't make them evil or out to get you either.

i happen to believe in strangeness. and strangeness makes a lot of things possible.
it just doesn't make them provable.

interacting with the physical universe is what we bodies for,
if there are other ways of doing so, well there might be at that.

just be careful what you wish for or do, whether in body or out,
there doesn't have to be something for us all to be accountable to,
in order for us all to be accountable, whether there is or not,
and i do rather believe/suspect, that we are, if only, and at least, to ourselves.

What gives proof for having such a bold statement that OBE's are real.

[Sidebody]

Is their any saying why people have these deluded hallucination?

Autoscopic hallucinations 'are due to functional disintegration of lower-level multisensory processing and abnormal higher-level self-processing at the temporo-parietal junction' if you go with Bunning and Blanke.

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are defined as experiences in which a person seems to be awake and sees his body and the world from a location outside his physical body. More precisely, they can be defined by the presence of the following three phenomenological characteristics: (i) disembodiment (location of the self outside one's body); (ii) the impression of seeing the world from an elevated and distanced visuo-spatial perspective (extracorporeal, but egocentric visuo-spatial perspective); and (iii) the impression of seeing one's own body (autoscopy) from this perspective. OBEs have fascinated mankind from time immemorial and are abundant in folklore, mythology, and spiritual experiences of most ancient and modern societies. Here, we review some of the classical precipitating factors of OBEs such as sleep, drug abuse, and general anesthesia as well as their neurobiology and compare them with recent findings on neurological and neurocognitive mechanisms of OBEs. The reviewed data suggest that OBEs are due to functional disintegration of lower-level multisensory processing and abnormal higher-level self-processing at the temporo-parietal junction. We argue that the experimental investigation of the interactions between these multisensory and cognitive mechanisms in OBEs and related illusions in combination with neuroimaging and behavioral techniques might further our understanding of the central mechanisms of corporal awareness and self-consciousness much as previous research about the neural bases of complex body part illusions such as phantom limbs has done.