Hello, thanks for your thoughts, here are a few more from past discussions....
To me, 'Astral Projection' and 'Out of Body Experiences' can be distinguished as follows:
Nearly all of us, consciously or unconsciously, have a mental model of how we're perceived by other people. For example, a good basketball player has a sense of how he is perceived at the moment by the other players on the court, and he hesitates and feints in relation to that. In an 'OBE', a person projects his own first person perspective to such a third person perspective, and imagines seeing himself. It is primarily a visual experience, with an audial component, because that's how other people perceive us. Although the OBE is from a first person perspective, the mental machinery, so to speak, is already there from that other kind of thinking about how one appears from a nearby perspective.
In Astral Projection, in contrast, a person stays in one's usual first person perspective, but moves or warps it so that it no longer corresponds to the actual physical location of one's body. Since one's experience of one's body has mostly to do with feeling, its a very tactile experience, in contrast to the OBE experience.
There are a lot of variations of or gradiations to both kinds of experiences, different people experience them differently, and the same person may not experience it the same way every time. The touch sensation during Astral Projection, for example, can be remarkable, it feels like every bit of you has been peeled away from your body. But its not always like that, a person can be more aware of one's sense of presence and buoyancy, for instance, and not so much about feeling in one's nerves.
Viewed strictly in terms of manipulating a mental model, there's nothing supernatural about either experience, and it is definitely a form of lucid dream if you do it while 'asleep'. Nothing about the 'mental model' understanding says that's necessarily all that's going on though. I think this is a common mistake of a scientific perspective, to be able to describe the most mechanical aspect of something, then just wave away anything subtler as if it doesn't exist. I have not personally gained any extra-sensory knowledge during astral projection or OBE. However, I believe that other people have, because I have in other kinds of dreams. I suspect that their extrasensory perception is only vaguely connected to their OBE or astral projection experience, and that the experience is mostly a way of explaining a more subtle and confusing experience to themselves. But of course I can't judge that fully.
As I see it, the idea of astral projection is a thought, consciously and subconsciously embraced by the people who have such experiences. The overwhelming majority don't recognize their experience to be an experience of a thought, they imagine it to be a direct and experience of a more fundamental reality. And those that do recognize it to be a thought don't recognize the full extent of what that implies. Available writings on astral projection are a mess of plagiarisms, confused intuitions, and outright fabrications. From what I see, the general agreement between the different descriptions has very much to do with plagiarism, either consciously or psychically, and does not say very much about what is 'true'. In some books there is a lot of talk about controlled and uncontrolled psychism. From what I see, the 'real', supernatural aspect of the experience is mostly uncontrolled for everybody, and its the more superficially imagined aspect of the experience that's controlled. So mostly it hasn't been 'proven' because it can't be reliably repeated in any substantially real way. But it also hasn't been 'proven' because not everyone can replicate a result, so there's no way a referee can defend themselves against accusations of fraud. It doesn't lend itself well to scientific validation for that reason. And of course there's no obvious way to monetize it, and all scientific research requires funding.
I think that some people are afraid to let go of the thought of astral projection, its almost as if they feel their astral experience connects to a fundamental part of themselves, and are scared to lose themselves. Or maybe they've staked their ego on their psychic abilities and are afraid to lose that. In any case, I would like to strip away some of the pretend aspect of the experience, if possible, and find a less limited and more true way of describing it.
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