In Sheldrake’s work, however, the notion of a subtle body becomes less important, since he believes that biological fields form from activity and evolve over time. He sees the “laws” of nature as being more like habits. This has many interesting implications for the out-of-body state, since there is little doubt that the second body is very fluid and closely linked to
consciousness in a way more suggestive of a kind of field than an invisible, dark-matter body.
The search for physical evidence of a soul or spirit body existing beyond death is a long one. In 1907, Dr. Duncan MacDougall published a paper detailing a series of experiments that involved weighing a body at the time of death.2 MacDougall believed strongly that if continuation of consciousness after death took place, then it must be via a body of some form. He writes: “If the psychic functions continue to exist as a separate individuality or personality after the death of brain and body, then such personality can only exist as a space-occupying body.”3 His conviction was based on his understanding of the science of the day—that there must be a form of “gravitative matter” as the basis of the “soul substance,” as he called it—but could he prove such a notion? He set out to weigh the physical bodies of a range of subjects, shortly before death and shortly after, to see if there was any difference. If there did exist a body that included some physical mass, as he believed, he should be able to detect it, assuming its mass was not too small for ordinary measurement devices available at the time.
He describes his first subject as a man dying of tuberculosis, selected because the nature of his disease would cause little bodily movement, which would have disturbed the weighing process. His method was simple, but far from precise by the standards we expect today. MacDougall states: “The patient was under observation for three hours and forty minutes before death, lying on a bed arranged on a light framework built upon very delicately balanced platform beam scales.”4 He goes on to describe the actual moment of death: “At the end of three hours and forty minutes, he expired and, suddenly coincident with death, the beam end dropped with an audible stroke, hitting against the lower limiting bar and remaining there with no rebound. The loss was ascertained to be three-fourths of an ounce (20 grams). This loss of weight could not be due to evaporation of respiratory moisture and sweat, because that had already been determined to go on, in his case, at the rate of one-sixtieth of an ounce per minute, whereas this loss was sudden and large, three-fourths of an ounce in a few seconds.”5 MacDougall went on to weigh another six subjects at the time of death, resulting in a perceived average loss of weight of 21 grams, a figure that has now entered the popular imagination, due in part to a recent film by that name.
From a scientific perspective, MacDougall’s experiments were too loosely controlled and open to tampering, so they can’t be held up as strong evidence of a soul or spirit; even so, his results have continued to fascinate for over a hundred years. Our obsession with the notion of a soul or spirit has not diminished with time, but is the soul composed of a physical substance, as MacDougall theorized? Personally, I think it is unlikely.
What Can We Learn from Personal Experience?
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, I think it’s important that you examine without preconceptions what you personally experience. In this section, I’d like to share what I’ve experienced during my OBEs.
Most researchers agree that, if there is an actual body rather than a framework of consciousness, then it is a very malleable and fluid body able to take on an array of different forms. This suggests that consciousness is the guiding principle behind the form; in other words, our awareness defines how we experience our form. This is backed up by my own experience. Sometimes I lift out of my body to perceive my “self” as a radiant point of awareness, full of light; on other occasions, I perceive having a body, with all the normal characteristics of my physical body. It seems that when a body has some role to play in the OBE, such as standing at a location or touching another physical object, the body form or field becomes apparent.
For example, on several occasions I have made a connection to a physical object while out of my body; I have done this simply by touching it. Once, when I touched a flower, I was aware of my slightly energised hand touching the delicate surface before I felt transported into the very cells of the plant, which felt like many points of consciousness spread out like a small universe, yet also existing as one. I could feel myself present in every cell, as if each one was an individual but intimately linked to a grand network of life. Both within the plant itself and within the ecosystem of the forest around me, the delicate play of energy, water, and light seemed perfectly balanced.
In another experience, the sensation of touching a door was fascinating in a different way; I experienced the inside of the hollow wooden form. I remember the tiny splinters of chipboard inside the narrow enclosure between the two surfaces. The layers of paint were also visible, as my perception could focus closely on any element of the structure. I felt only the vaguest sense of resistance from the physical form of the door; it was as if my awareness was fully interwoven between its atoms. We can see, in both of these examples, the interplay between my awareness of a body and my experience of pure consciousness.
There are many in the scientific community who believe that the way we experience the world—our consciousness—is not simply a process of unaltered sensory information coming into our brain. Instead, they believe that much of how we actually experience consciousness is the result of the mind filling in the gaps that our senses leave. I am not just talking about minor optical illusions and the like. The idea is essentially that the old notion of a stream of consciousness is the result of the piecing together of various sensory fragments to create what appears to be a congruent whole. This implies that consciousness itself is a kind of illusion—not that it doesn’t exist, but that it is the result of many elements coming together to form something that appears to be whole and seamless.
If this is the case, it could mean that when we experience fragmentary imagery and shifting perceptual awareness in psychic and out-of-body imagery, maybe we are actually experiencing a purer unfettered consciousness, free from the interference of the brain. As mentioned earlier, psychic and OBE perception has much in common with memory; it is often emotionally driven, which means that we generally remember what was important or powerful to us. In a similar way, in psychic perception, we become nonlocally aware of that which is powerful on an emotional level.
If we break all this down, our out-of-body and psychic awareness resembles a mind without the brain creating the theatre of the mind—or the simulation, if you like—that we know as our consciousness. This is not a negative concept, since “illusory” in this sense only means that there is a deeper level to our experience of the world, and that the OBE can give us direct contact with that level.
This idea has much in common with the concept of Maya in some Eastern traditions. Maya means “illusion” and represents the notion of duality. In other words, we believe ourselves to be separate from everything when, in fact, everything is one. In this sense, there is no distinction between self and the universe as a whole. Maya represents a state of awareness that can be transformed through spiritual or psychological development.
It seems that the further we extend our consciousness through practices such as the OBE, the closer we come to the notion of consciousness as a kind of movie playing out our emotions, thoughts, and needs, dissolving into a state of oneness. We discover that consciousness is simply not what it appears to be. The more we remove our preconceptions about the nature of things, the more likely we are to break free of the illusory and embrace the real core of our awareness.
Cosmic Consciousness
The idea of cosmic consciousness, or the interconnectedness of all life, can be traced to the beginning of the last century, just a few years before Duncan MacDougall began his experiments with the weight of the
soul. This was a unique period in history when the birth of many new ideas was transforming the way we looked at the world. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was well known, but many were slow to champion natural selection as its primary process. Albert Einstein published his theory of special relativity, and within a decade Carl Jung introduced the concept of the collective unconscious. In fact, Jung’s idea of a kind of psychic store of information containing elements of our ancestral past has much in common with Richard Maurice Bucke’s writings from this same period. Bucke envisioned three stages in the evolution of consciousness: the first is the animal, or instinctual level, followed by the ordinary human, and then, finally, the cosmically or universally aware and evolved state.
It could be that cosmic consciousness is, in fact, a state of awareness in which the collective unconscious becomes accessible; the collective unconscious becomes the collective consciousness, so to speak. Whatever the case, Jung’s and Bucke’s theories were and are an attempt to look in a scientific and progressive way at the transformative psychic experiences that people have. The twenty-first-century idea of the extended mind is a refining of these concepts in a way that brings it into line with the findings of parapsychology, yet it has all of the same possibilities.
In the theory of cosmic consciousness, we find the notion of a network of thought that is ultimately aware. In a similar way to how the individual neurons in the brain are thought to lead to the complexity of our minds, each mind becomes a part of a greater whole. Quite early in my own OBEs, I experienced something very close to this interconnected mind. I had been reading about the astral planes and the idea that there is a whole array of other levels of reality that somehow coexist with the world we perceive with our everyday senses. While these other levels are invisible when we are physical, they become accessible while we are out of the body. This idea fascinated me; I wanted to know how far these levels extended, if indeed they had any limit at all.
As I closed my eyes and went through the process of becoming aware of my energy, I focused my attention far above the room in which I was lying. Within moments I felt myself lifting up; I remember the distinct sensation of moving through the ceiling of the room above and, a few moments later, the sensation as I turned to move through the wall of the building. Then, as if all the barriers had been removed, I moved straight up with a force that seemed almost out of control. Soon the familiar, winding, cobbled streets and distinct landmarks of London disappeared and were replaced by points of energy and form. It was as if I was seeing the underlying structure of things; the heavy, immovable world of physical matter was now replaced with swirling energy and vivid colour like nothing on Earth. I don’t know how I got there, but it was as if, by moving almost faster than the speed of light, everything had collapsed around me to reveal its true nature as some kind of primordial light from the source of the universe.
I was dissolving into this maelstrom of infinite possibilities, and my self, my understanding of me that had been everything to me a few moments before, seemed unimportant in this moment. For an instant it was as if I was losing control, and I paused as if I wanted to return, but a second later that last egotistical resistance disappeared and I was somehow everywhere and everything.
In a burst of true cosmic consciousness, I saw what appeared to be the birth of the universe in such unbelievable motion that it seemed to turn in on itself, like it was moving backward and forward at the same time, because time itself was not yet born. In each new moment, it was as if every aspect of my being became unified with the totality of everything. I moved faster and faster with the expanding universe until I reached the point where the whole process paused, before I too turned in on myself and seemed to become a single tiny point encompassing everything that is.
Then I felt myself reforming into some semblance of myself, like the first embryonic cell separating to eventually form a complex life, my life. Moments later, I was looking at my physical body; somehow it seemed to contain the map or route that I’d taken in that experience. It was as if I was looking at my current state of evolution that I had seen beginning just moments before. Often in my OBEs I would barely recognize my body; it would seem like seeing a stranger in the street or lying asleep, as if it wasn’t anything to do with me somehow—but tonight it was. It represented my journey and the form through which I was able to learn and grow to the point of experiencing this cosmic understanding of the universe.
That was only one of many experiences I’ve had in which I was able to glimpse the power and magnitude of the universe. Although each time I have returned to some level of normality afterward, these experiences on other levels and in a state of cosmic awareness have changed a part of me forever. I can’t say whether I was aware of this during those experiences, but now when I look back, I can see how my life went in new directions each time I experienced the real power of the OBE to expand my consciousness.
Even my awareness of this planet has increased in profound ways. I can perceive a planetary awareness or consciousness that arises from all of life and the delicate balance of the Earth. While out in nature, or experiencing an OBE in a distant location, I would often sense that there was some kind of awareness behind the beauty of the mountains, rivers, and vast planes of this world.
The Global Consciousness Project
I am far from alone in experiencing a sense of the conscious nature of the planet. But there has been little attempted in the area of science to investigate how our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs might impact the nature of awareness worldwide. The Global Consciousness Project, founded in 1998, is the first wide-ranging attempt to look at how human attention might be linked across the planet and what this might mean.
According to its website, “The Global Consciousness Project (GCP) is an international effort involving researchers from several institutions and countries, designed to explore whether the construct of interconnected consciousness can be scientifically validated through objective measurement. The project builds on excellent experiments conducted over the past thirty-five years at a number of laboratories, demonstrating that human consciousness interacts with random event generators (REGs), apparently ‘causing’ them to produce non-random patterns.”6
Like many of the ideas we explore in this book, the Global Consciousness Project has huge implications for our beliefs about the underlying nature of spirituality, as well as the importance of our thoughts and actions. This relates directly to the “law of attraction” and the exciting possibilities of quantum physics. Whether or not theories like the law of attraction are “real,” they stem from the growing understanding that consciousness appears to be linked and able to interact with matter. Even if this is only on a very subtle level, the work of organisations like the Global Consciousness Project adds another important piece in the puzzle that attempts to explain the possibility of life after physical death, the existence of telepathy, and even our ability to change the flow of our lives through our thoughts and intentions.
The way that we think, and the level of awareness that we attain, have long been thought to impact the nature of our reality. In my understanding, global consciousness—also called the extended mind—is part of the mechanism that allows for out-of-body experiences. Like an Internet of accessible awareness that stretches in every direction, it enables us to tune in to a vast resource of information, as has been used in recent years by remote viewers. The Global Consciousness Project provides yet another piece of the converging evidence that demonstrates the extended mind is a reality.
The Extended Mind and Enlightenment
Enlightenment is generally seen as a very grand term, one that is hard to define, yet what we do understand of it seems in tune with the idea of the extended mind. Enlightenment implies a state of detachment from the concerns of the ego, a state of awareness in which consciousness is fully engaged in the self. This is not the self in the sense of “selfish” wants or desires; it is the
true self that exists when the stuff of everyday life and the ego has been stripped away. In short, enlightenment is about fully realizing the nature of ourselves as we truly are, and within that is a sense that the divisions we see between ourselves and others are an illusion.
The idea of enlightenment has much in common with the extended consciousness of the out-of-body experience or any spiritually transcendent state. The OBE is not just a way of having a powerful experience; it is quite literally a step toward a deeper spiritual understanding (and maybe even the fabled enlightenment). The implication of this understanding is that the OBE will change you, if you allow it. It can bring about a greater sense of peace, compassion, and even comprehension of others, quite simply because you start to see others in the light of your own self. You stop seeing all life as separate and begin to see even the darkest and most fearful aspects of our humanity as the result of a rational cause; therefore you may find that the desire to condemn or judge others vanishes. I feel that the OBE has made me view the negative traits and actions of others as arising from a cause lying within the personal landscape of the person involved, and while I may avoid his or her negative behaviors, I do not see the person as “evil” or in need of punishment.
That which is spiritual, literally speaking, means “relating to the spirit or self,” and the spirit or self refers to the psyche or the mind. In the past, the spirit and the mind were generally seen as one. The very notion of the extended mind inevitably leads to questions about the nature of spirituality because, in many ways, the extended mind as a concept is a modern form of that age-old notion of the mind and spirit being one, or at least arising from the same source. Thus we come full circle to an understanding of spirit as an interconnected consciousness able to exist outside of space and time. So what does this mean to someone about to leave his or her body for the first time? What might you expect to find and experience, and how might it change your way of viewing life and death? In the next chapter, I will explore these questions and try to give some sense of what might unfold as you travel deeper into your own psychic landscape.
Navigating the Out-of-Body Experience Page 11
