Mind, consciousness, and OBEs

Two different lines of discussion just came together for me in an interesting, albeit entirely speculative, way.

First, I got an email from a reader whose screen name is Eteponge. He discussed the fact that many out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences contain a mixture of valid and invalid perceptions. He gave the example of someone in an out-of-body experience who perceived a barbecue set in the neighbor's yard, when in fact there was no such barbecue, and the example of someone who hovered over his own body and perceived himself wearing long johns, when in fact he was not wearing them.

Second, I had a conversation with the medium Marcel Cairo, in which he said that mediumship seems to involve the spirits searching the memory banks of the medium and the sitter in order to find the nearest match for a particular idea they wish to get across. He compared it to combing through an index of images and words and experiences, in search of the closest "fit" to what the communicating entities want to express.

Okay. Now let's see if we can put these two things together and come up with some explanation for the strange mix of accurate and inaccurate perceptions in out-of-body experiences and related phenomena.

We'll begin at the beginning – with the nature of reality. Let's imagine that the reality we see around us is only a construction put together out of the raw materials of a deeper reality, much in the way that a hologram is constructed out of the information encoded in the wave-interference patterns preserved on a holographic plate. This is physicist David Bohm's theory, which he developed at length. Like any analogy it is imperfect, but it does have its interesting features.

A hologram is created when a focused beam of light passes through (or reflects off) the holographic plate. In Bohm's theory, consciousness plays the role analogous to the light beam. Consciousness decodes the encoded data and constructs a multidimensional space-time reality out of it.

One interesting thing about holographic plates is that a very large number of wave-interference patterns can be superposed on the same plate. Which pattern is decoded depends on the angle of the light beam. A shift in the light beam can construct a new image. (This theory and its implications for psi phenomena are discussed at length in Michael Talbot's The Holographic Universe.)

Now let's say that the amount of information that our consciousness decodes is normally limited by the built-in restrictions of the central nervous system. Since the central nervous system has limited capacity, and the information must be "piped through" it in order to allow us to function in the physical world, there is a sharp limit to how much we can perceive of the world around us.

But in an out-of-body experience, consciousness is set free of the body and is no longer restricted by the constraints of the nervous system. Thus, vastly more information can be decoded and passed along to the mind. (For our purposes, consciousness is what perceives, while the mind is what labels and conceptualizes.)

Not only does extracerebral perception entail much more information than consciousness normally processes, but it is possible that consciousness, liberated from the body, may roam more freely "across the dial," so to speak. Varying our analogy for a moment, body-restricted consciousness is locked in, for the most part, to a particular channel on the radio spectrum, while bodiless consciousness can pick up other frequencies.

These other frequencies correspond to the superposed wave inference patterns in the holographic plate. That is, consciousness ordinarily is directed at a specific angle that constructs a certain specific hologram. But out-of-body consciousness is free to explore other angles of view and to construct other holograms that are normally outside our range of perception.

Now, if this is anything like the true situation, then we would expect to encounter some problems in out-of-body experiences and related phenomena. During these experiences, consciousness will be decoding enormously more data than usual - data gathered not only from its regular plane of perception, but from adjacent planes, as well. Many of these new data will be unfamiliar, difficult to label and categorize. This will inevitably lead to errors as the mind struggles to integrate unfamiliar data/impressions into the overall picture.

Thus, consciousness may pick up something of a particular shape which the mind cannot identify. The mind finds the nearest match or fit for this impression, and the nearest match is a barbecue. The mind then chooses to identify the perception as a barbecue in the neighbor's yard, and to really "see it" that way, even though there is no barbecue.

Or for instance, consciousness may detect an aura around the body, but the mind, unaccustomed to seeing auras, chooses to see it as long johns covering the body.

Where consciousness detects what is familiar and expected, there is no error. Where it detects something unfamiliar and difficult to integrate, it seeks a match. This match may be wrong.

In near-death experiences people may see Jesus or Hindu deities; conceivably a dying child could see Santa Claus; in his book The Golden Ass, the Roman writer Apuleius relates the story of his entranced vision of the goddess Isis. We need not believe that consciousness is literally perceiving these things – that Santa or Isis is actually real. Consciousness is perceiving something unfamiliar, and the mind matches it to the nearest item in the mental catalog. Different people have different catalogs, different image sets to choose from. It's almost like doing a Google image search under different search parameters. The parameters you set will determine the matches you get.

For this reason, Buddhists warn us that what is perceived -- whether in ordinary life, in trance, in out-of-body experiences, in near-death experiences, or in death -- is to some extent a product of our own preconceptions. The mind matches unfamiliar data to their nearest familiar analogs from the mental memory banks.

We do this even in regular life when we encounter something "unprocessable." Someone seeing a UFO in the Middle Ages might have seen it as a floating castle or a flying dragon. Today we would probably see it as a spaceship. Something is being perceived, but if it is outside normal categories of thought and perception, we reduce it to a familiar, easily labeled idea/image. And we really do "see it" that way. We can even photograph what we see. The photograph itself is just another thing that we see and is processed by the mind in precisely the same way.

With vastly more information to process in extracerebral perception, and with access to entirely unfamiliar realms, the chance of making errors of this type is greatly increased. Note, too, that perception includes all modalities, not just sight. Our entire experience is a stream of perceptions mediated by familiar categories of thought. When bafflingly unfamiliar elements intrude into the experience, we have a tendency to reduce them to the familiar. In short, our mind makes errors because it is unable to properly integrate the new perceptions. The experiences are real, but they vary according to the interpretation of the individual mind.

Or maybe not. It's just an idea ...

Comments

[Art]

"At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. - excerpt from online essay about the holographic universe, http://www.earthportals.com/hologram.html#zine

If you write about or mention the holographic universe you might expect that I'll make a comment. In Susan Blackmore's drug induced mystical experience the roof's of the houses she percieved where different colors from the roof's of the houses she though she saw, so she wrote the whole thing off as a hallucination. In Michael Talbot's book The Holographic Universe he tells the story of two women who, while overlooking a park (I think in Paris), saw the park as it appeared 150 years ago. I have read several mystical experiences where people percieved or viewed past events. One in particular I remember was a man who walked out of his house and while staring out the front of his house viewed the scene as it was a couple of hundred years ago. Some ghosts appear to be holographic images from the past, being replayed over and over again. I think what happened to Susan Blackmore was that she either viewed the color of the roofs of the houses as the might once might have been in the past, or they might one day appear in the future. And in Etponge's story about the house with the barbecue grill, that house may have once had a barbecue grill, or it may have one it's future. Every once in a while the true nature of reality slips through and we view the Universe as it really is. Past, present, and future all existing simultaneously. The truth is that the Universe is more weird and bizarre than we could even begin to imagine. That's enough for now. I'm sure that I'll have addtional comments later.

[Art]

Here is a link to an online article about EVP being holographic imprints. Good stuff!

Here's a little taste of the article:
EVP: Holographic Imprints
From Stephen Wagner,
"What if EVP are just multidimensional recordings?
SOMETHING HAS always bothered me about electronic voice phenomena (EVP). If these are the voices of the dead, then the fate of these people is a highly disturbing one. They are still loitering about the Earth, lost. And if this sad fate is possible for those people, it’s possible for you and me as well. Personally, I don’t relish the thought of wandering around eternity, answering trite questions from legions of ghost hunters."

full article can be found @:
http://paranormal.about.com/od/ghostaudiovideo/a/aa111306.htm?nl=1

[william]

Recently I was reading a book about an English pilot who was flying a plane in the late 1930’s and flew over what he knew was an abandon airfield and noticed it had strange colored planes and even mechanics working on them. The mechanics even looked up and stared at him. He was flying low due to weather conditions. He thought this strange and when he told other pilots about this experience of course they thought he was under the influence or having hallucinations so he quickly said no more. Several years later during World War II he flew over this same airfield and it looked exactly like what he had seen years before even the planes were the same strange color as he had seen several years before. This was a very creditable pilot/person as he was head of the English air force during World War II. A student looking out the window in a classroom at the university of Nebraska looked into the past and saw what Lincoln, Nebraska looked like about 150 years ago: horse and buggy, etc. the pilot saw the future and this student saw the past. Past and future may not be as set in concrete as it appears to be.

[william]

On another note I attended a near death seminar several years ago and one lady who presented her NDE stated in her presentation that she had seen Jesus during her NDE. After her presentation I started a conversation with her and asked her what Jesus looked like. She stated that she really did not see his face but a figure with a bright light around it so she knew it was Jesus. This goes along with the idea of a memory bank filling in the unknown for us. The one thing I remember so well about her was the peace she radiated. I could see it in her eyes and somehow feel it. Cannot explain it only know what I felt. Before anyone jumps to conclusions about my projecting my beliefs on to her because she was a presenter I saw this woman before the seminar in the parking garage and had no idea she was even attending this seminar and she had such serenity on her face and when see saw me and my friend she had a smile that radiated such love and peace. With all of the research I have done on near death experiences many of these people if not most lose their fear of death and come back more loving and compassionate than before their NDE. Their NDE has a profound impact on their view of life after death. This is why I doubt that Susan Blackmore had a NDE but maybe some type of hallucination.

[Ryan]

Hi Michael and others,

Perhaps some of you may be interested to learn that Stephen Braude is highly critical of these holographic theories/speculations:

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/pdfs_pubd/braude--Holographic%20Analysis.pdf

He criticizes other theories such as Rupert Sheldrake's, along similar lines.

http://userpages.umbc.edu/~braude/pdfs_pubd/braude--Radical%20Provincialism.pdf

He seems to believe that such views are conceptually/philosophically naïve. In my view anything written by Braude is worthy of attention. Of course, his views can be controversial.

[drew hempel]

I love Michael Talbot but to really understand his work you need to read his Vampire "historical" fiction -- "The Delicate Dependency" and "The Bog" and "Night Things" are his 3 amazing fiction books. His fiction is really about the occult forces behind science -- and that's really the deeper secret of the holographic paradigm.

Magic is based on right-brain asymmetrical sine-wave resonance (the Tai Chi symbol) driven by certain body postures (the full-lotus) using harmonic oscillator resonance.

[Matthew]

I checked out Braude's analysis of Sheldrake, since I am very partial to Sheldrake's descriptions of holism via morphic field theory.

Braude has some great points. I do not think that morphic resonance is the be-all and end-all of understanding holons. However it is a great stepping-stone for die-hard materialists to begin to see a different possibility than their reductionist doctrines.

[Art]

This is why I doubt that Susan Blackmore had a NDE but maybe some type of hallucination." - william

Susan Blackmore was on drugs. She did not have a NDE. She had a drug induced hallucination. Even so, what she saw may have been "real", only not the reality we normally experience. If past, present, and future all exist simultaneously, when one's brain is freed normal time we may experience reality as it really exists, a holographic projection from someone else.

Hi Michael,
what do you think about the possibility to induce OBE in the lab in healthy person like Olaf Blanke et al. did. Do think its alls natural and just a illusion.

[Marcel Cairo]

Michael,

Thanks for the mention in this truly thought provoking essay. This is what's so great about your blog - non-scientists adding to the scientific thought on consciousness survival.

Now, I know keeping a blog can really suck up a lot of your time and turn you into a antisocial hermit, but all your readers here are more than willing to send you down that dark path if it means getting more articles like this one.

Here's a question... can this blog get official "Think Tank" status yet, or do we need to get a venture capitalist behind us? :-)

[Michael Prescott]

>what do you think about the possibility to induce OBE in the lab in healthy person like Olaf Blanke et al. did.

I think OBEs can be triggered by a wide variety of factors and circumstances, including the use of certain drugs, electrical stimulation of the brain, anesthesia, fear of imminent death (whether or not it is justified), a traumatic emotional shock, meditation, even sleep. Robert Crookall wrote two or three books on this subject, in which he compiled people's accounts of their OBEs, and he found that many different things could induce the experience. Some people seem to be more prone to OBEs than others.

I reject the idea that OBEs are "all in the mind," because in many cases OBErs (and NDErs) report information that is later verified, but which they had no normal way of knowing. Also, NDErs have these experiences when the brain is showing either no activity or minimal activity.

>can this blog get official "Think Tank" status yet

Maybe I can start my own religion and at least get a tax exemption. The First Church of Prescottarianism!

[Marcel Cairo]

You know Michael, your church idea sounds tempting, but I swore to myself a long time ago that I would never kneel at the feet of someone from New Jersey. Sorry. It's a New York thing. Go Yanks!!

[Ryan]

Matthew,

I did have mixed feelings concerning Braude's critiques. It is tempting sometimes, to think that discussions on the nature of reality are split between materialists vs non-materialists. Braude's critiques seem to be aimed more at what he considers to be bad theorizing within science.

If reductionistic-mechanistic explanations are not up to the job of explaining reality (or the data we have to work with) then this is true whether the theories are physicalistic or not.
This means we can take certain phenomena such as psi, consciousness (and maybe even souls) as primitive. We can explain them as another feature of reality and not try to look for any underlying mechanisms (physical or otherwise).

This is an oversimplification of what I take Braude to be saying but I think his arguments against holographic theories and morphic resonance do need to be studied carefully. They are not easy ideas to absorb though, and if he is correct it would mean that a lot of speculation in many areas of science such as neuroscience and parapsychology, is not really worthwhile.

[Bill Ingle]

Norman Friedman's _Bridging Science and Spirit: Common Elements in David Bohm's Physics, The Perennial Philosophy, and Seth_ may be of interest to those immersed in questions regarding consciousness and the nature of reality.

Bill Ingle
RealityTest
Magnolia, MA
USA

[drew hempel]

I was very frustrated by Susan Blackmore's work: once again Western analysis just doesn't test people who have proven results. For example how many tests of "meditators" actually involve masters of full-lotus yoga? Not many. When I say Master I mean someone who can sit in a cave without food and water for say 28 days straight. Consider Master Chunyi Lin's new radio interview in NYC:
http://www.springforestqigong.com/content/view/56/85/

[Michael Prescott]

I read Stephen Braude's essay on holography. He seems to direct much of his criticism at Pribram's holographic brain concept. My notion is that consciousness, not the brain, decodes the information. Braude also criticizes the theory for reducing everything to frequencies. My idea is that everything is reduced to frequencies and consciousness. Of course the big question remains: Frequencies of what? I wish I had an answer, but I don't - which means that my speculations don't rise to the level of a theory or even a hypothesis. They are just a suggestion intended to stimulate further thinking.

[Ryan]

Michael,

Your speculations are always stimulating. I am still in the process of studying these issues myself. I just thought Braude's work was worth a mention as these holographic ideas are often discussed or mentioned here. I have not managed to undertake a close reading of all Braude's works yet but having skimmed them it seems that there may be good reasons for doubting a lot of materialist-reductionist theories by taking a wholly different (more philosophically sound) approach to our dealings with reality.

At the end of Immortal Remains he sets the stage for introducing some kind of metaphysical framework for understanding some of these issues. I hope he offers something like this in subsequent works. And I hope you also continue with your interesting speculations.

[drew hempel]

Michael -- "frequencies" is a concept based on logarithmic tuning not shamanism! Frequency comes from the Law of Pythagoras which IS shamanism but is based on ASYMMETRIC RESONANCE. So ONE is not a number, but the Form of consciousness as the male principle and TWO is the reflection of the FORMLESS consciousness -- the eternal feminine. Science is based on trying to "contain" FORMLESS consciousness with equal-tempered tuning (i.e. frequencies) or the equipartition principle.

Quantum chaos does violate the commutative principle creating "asymmetric time reversal" but the foundation of quantum chaos is still based on equal-tempered tuning or frequency (using phonetic language).

So quantum chaos has indeed returned science to shamanism (with such concepts as "ghost resonance" and "hidden coherence") but the difference is that in quantum chaos the MACHINES are in control.

What remains unchanged in all this is the FORMLESS AWARENESS. Even Chomsky has stated recently that science may just be a "changing of the elements" (i.e. turning carbon-based left-hand directed molecules into silica-based right-hand directed molecules).

[drew hempel]

Look Michael I don't want to leave you hanging but I did a masters thesis on this stuff -- the secrets of frequency -- see the "epicenters of justice" link (2001, U of Minnesota) at http://nonduality.com/hempel.htm

Or you can just google my name, "drew hempel" and get some 650 hits.

Basically Yang is the ratio 2:3 or the interval of the Perfect 5th, from which ALL the frequencies can be created (as a nonlinear soliton). That's the Law of Pythagoras and also the secret of Taoist paranormal skill and ALSO the reason that the ancient Egyptians broke down all numbers into the ratio 2/3 plus unit fractions (for the harmonic series).

In western music this is turned into "frequency" as the "circle of fifths" but empirically that's a lie! The law of Pythagoras states that the ratio 2/3 is infinite -- not a circle but an unending spiral (you can't visualize the 4th dimension of space -- a Klein Bottle or ouroborus).

So right off there's some deep paradoxes in science about magnitude and velocity and frequency and intensity (vs. density), etc.

Read math professor Luigi Borzacchini. He had a recent article about how no one really knows "where" light comes from -- does it enter our brains or LEAVE our brains! Still a mystery. Also Borzacchini states that western science is founded on DEEP DISHARMONY precisely because of this violation of the Law of Pythagoras.

So there's a diminishing rate of return for technology.

Wow! This is great!

I could never seem to explain away a particular detail that bothered me about an OBE that I had one night during my college years. I ejected from my body and hovered above the bed but noticed that my bedroom was immaculate, when in fact (in waking reality), the floor was littered with clothes and books (hey, I was in college, what can I say). For years, this "inaccuracy" contributed to my dismissal of OBEs as merely some type of dream state, or in other words, fantasy.

This has opened my eyes to a new possibility.

Another somewhat curious detail of that experience was that I seemed to float through the ceiling into what was a particularly filthy kitchen in the apartment above me. I never knew the tenants and always wondered if it really looked that way -- scary! Perhaps it was it was actually spotless and my mind decoded a different (previous or future) layer of the hologram?

[Art]

"At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A few years ago I had a dream that one of the walls of our bedroom was empty, blank, with no furniture against it or anything. At the time we weren't planning on moving or anything, so I tried to decode the dream. Fast forward several years later we're moving to Middle TN and I look at the wall I'd seen in my dream, and I realize it looks exactly the same way I'd seen it in my dream, several years earlier. This isn't an unsual occurence for me at all. It's not unusual at all for me to dream something that I might see in my own future. For instance one time I dreamed about a bowl of black eels and then a night or two later I was watching a program about Rome on the History channel and they showed a bowl of black eels and said the emperor used to cut his enemies up and feed them to eels. One time during my afternoon nap I dreamed I was being chased by some old gay man and I was on my way up to see some pretty Asian woman. My wife came home from work that day and asked me if I wanted to see a movie that we'd bought for 88 cents from Hammer's. It was called The Ying and Yang of Dr. Go. It starred Jeff Bridges. What was so weird was there was a scene in that movie that was identical to my dream. I think I identified with the character because I looked so much like Jeff Bridges when I was young. Another time I dreamed about a giant swordfish and then two nights later I was watching A Perfect Storm on TV and they showed a picture of a giant swordfish that was exactly like the one in my dream. I think it has something to do with the emotion of the experience. The more emotional the experience the greater the chance that I might dream about it before it happens. The level of emotion seems to be the key to me having precognitive dreams. - Art