Thread: Has having an obe shaped your views about the afterlife?

Hey Luffy

let me see if i got the context. well i had a few obe's so can answer some things. i prefer lucid dreaming over astral projecting when i am Lucid i have greater control.
some lucid dreams can be described as next level though. like your choices you made while lucid. will impact your hereafter. good consequence or bad. it depends.
some use lucid dreaming to prepare for it. the great beyond. i know i do that's how i roll. when i was on the astral, i was floating on my back. i couldn't feel arms or legs instead i was like a gas like substance. trying to control where i went was rather hard! i never really mastered it. i do get bit confused at times. for false awakenings seem astral like in nature at times. i have way greater control over my dreaming bodies. Etheric is likely the body experienced within lucid dreams, its possible to upgrade.
i purpose. we might even be able while lucid to make hybrid bodies. capable of doing different things probably spiritual in nature.
i dont like to be or have a gas body. my drive for ap dribbled. i became aware of lucid dreaming while studying astral projection. old school authors.
im thankful for finding lucid dreaming was a thing. which i taken to extreme levels. i still have the spontaneous projection from time to time. getting trapped in the roof is a problem i should learn to deal with it. just about all my aps were dark i could barley see in front of me. i really hope i can get used to being a gas spirit or whatever i am
i hope my afterlife has a lucid dreaming mode. look into seven bodys of man. lucid dreaming changed my views on it more then AP. I think, therefore I am
consciousness should be your proof you seek. your past lucid dream experiences? start building your map. your dream journal. a aboriginal dream character. claimed to never been flesh. answered a great question. do i come here when i die? her answer was yes you do.
i believe in the hereafter. i been super aware conscious like none before. the seeker has awakened in you luffy my friend. the answers you seek are out there. you just gotta look upon destiny's web.

So far as I believe, I've only had one OBE and it took about three seconds. It was mesmerizing however, and it certainly left me with the belief that consciousness can operate away from where it normally operates. This on its own is not enough to make me believe fully in an afterlife.

I've had many astral projections so life-like and complex that I am convinced they were not made up by my own mind - other minds had to be involved too. This, on its own, is also not enough to make me an afterlife believer.

More recently I've taken to remote viewing and thereby obtained results so wildly implausible, if the ordinarily accepted laws of physics were true, that I believe strongly that the actual laws of physics are entirely unrelated to those taught in school, and that the materialistic worldview therefore must be fundamentally incorrect.

Finally, it seems impossible to me that consciousness can be made of the same stuff as the physical universe supposedly is. The physical universe (and maybe other universes too) is what consciousness observes, and there is no way known to me whereby consciousness can be explained in terms of physical matter or energy. Consciousness has never been measured, it has only ever been experienced by consciousness itself. Therefore it seems unavoidable to me that consciousness cannot be destroyed by physical means. From this would follow that consciousness survives physical death.

All these things taken together, I am now a firm believer in life after death, but I am also confident that not everything associated with a persons mind, character and behaviour survives death. Consciousness survives, the feeling of "I" survives, but a lot of earthly baggage will not. In other words, dying will leave a person changed, but alive.

^
And of course that also calls up the possibility that after death we not only lose any sense of our own personality or individuality, but also get sort of re-absorbed into some mass consciousness, like a drop of water returning to the ocean. Wow Voldmer, that really got me thinking about consciousness. What you said - you're right. It's definitely not 'made of' anything like matter or even energy as we understand it, and calling it an 'emergent property' of brain activity really says nothing about what it is or how it functions. It's sort of like describing water by saying "well, it's wet". So far as we're aware now, it's the ultimate mystery. And whatever it is - that's what we are...

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

And of course that also calls up the possibility that after death we not only lose any sense of our own personality or individuality, but also get sort of re-absorbed into some mass consciousness, like a drop of water returning to the ocean.

I like that description a lot. I have pondered this for a very long time and I am coming around to the feeling that the human spirit/soul/consciousness exists in sort of a collective continuum that has evolved for far longer than we realize and not just here on this particular world of ours. I think we may have evolved past the corporeal and into a more spiritual form that occupies these cool bodies of ours here on this planet.

So death is just a transition. My research into dream yoga, which gave me my first real glimpse of Buddhist tenets, has led me even further down that particular path.

I have had three brief but very distinct OBEs since I began this lucid dreaming journey and the feeling I got from them fortified my theories even more.

Originally Posted by lenscaper

I think we may have evolved past the corporeal and into a more spiritual form that occupies these cool bodies of ours here on this planet.

Wow, I had never thought of it that way. But it brings up the question, do (the other) animals have the same experience? If this idea is true, or something similar to it, has it always happened this way, or is it something that started at a particular point in our evolution? Very intriguing. Of course the Buddhists say we can reincarnate as animals, so that would mean they're part of it as well. I have no thoughts on it beyond that at this point.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Of course the Buddhists say we can reincarnate as animals, so that would mean they're part of it as well.

They may well be correct....but that is not what I am feeling. I feel as though I am a small part of a very human pool of consciousness.....that drop of water that you spoke of. I think it is that consciousness...what we have come to call the soul perhaps.......that gets "recycled". What luffy28 is calling the "afterlife" may really just be the transitional period.

Try this on for size, if you will. Imagine a planet (or planets) exactly like our earth where this very same kind of human life form evolved. In the hundreds of billions of possibilities in the universe that is certainly a distinct one. But then imagine that instead of having the brief window of evolutionary time that we have had here, they had the window that, say, our dinosaurs had......millions of years of human evolution. Plenty of time to evolve past the need for these somewhat limited but very cool human bodies.

I believe that may be who we are. Don't get me started...I have other ancillary but supportive theories.

Perhaps our diligent practices of lucid dreaming and dream yoga are ways of jump starting some of the evolutionary processes that led to this collective human consciousness.

You know, you don't fit the stereotypical idea of a Landscaper at all!! Now I'm seeing you on lunch breaks meditating under the tree like Buddha before trimming it.

And I'm starting to learn more and more to take ideas from spirituality and religion metaphorically, and in fact that that's originally how many of them were intended to be taken. Possibly that's how the Buddhists mean the stuff about animals, representing just a very low level of conscious awareness. But I suspect they really do mean it literally, and I can kind of see it that way. I don't think that necessarily destroys your idea but just modifies it a bit. If a person were to reincarnate in animal form that would be a very low level of conscious awareness and in that life they wouldn't be capable of much if any growth toward enlightenment. It would be like a pause before they can get back to human lives with the potential for further growth. Or maybe some of us have things we need to learn from living as an animal? But it's all just conjecture and I don't know much about reincarnation in Buddhism. Like you I started to learn from the Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep, and then got a few more books plus did a little study online, mostly about meditation though.

A big part of what makes me think this is because meditation leads to enlightenment and the end of reincarnation, and meditation shuts down the logical conscious mind, the purely human part that came into being when we stood on our hind legs and started using the opposable thumbs to make tools etc. Meditation takes us back to a very animal level of awareness.

Though I can also see that maybe left-brain conscious awareness, or the back-and-forth between the 2, could be necessary for meditation to mean anything. Pure low-level brute awareness might not contain spirit, I really don't know. Cool to think about though.

And now it occurs to me that even in deep meditation with the left brain supposedly shut down, human consciousness does seem very different from the more purely reactive animal consciousness.

There is much about me that is definitely not stereotypical. I am quite able, however, to project a very stereotypical persona when it is situationally required.

I'm not a landscaper these days, btw. Nowadays I advise architects and developers on sound control strategies for construction. Life....like dreams....is incredibly changeable. No matter how conscious you are in either dream you can end up facing surprising changes.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

If a person were to reincarnate in animal form that would be a very low level of conscious awareness and in that life they wouldn't be capable of much if any growth toward enlightenment. It would be like a pause before they can get back to human lives with the potential for further growth. Or maybe some of us have things we need to learn from living as an animal?

This had been a great dialog! I hope you are also getting some sort of answer from all this as the OP, luffy28.

Originally Posted by lenscaper

There is much about me that is definitely not stereotypical. I am quite able, however, to project a very stereotypical persona when it is situationally required.

I'll bet that's a useful skill, and I wish I could do it better. I tend to be the square peg in the round hole. I'm glad I came back and saw your edit too, that is an interesting evolution in your life. Or should I say a 'dying and resurrection?' I'm starting to understand it means the same thing. You die as who you are so you can be reborn as who you need to be in the next phase of your life.

To veer back somewhat onto topic, I had what seemed like an OBE once. I'm not sure if it really qualifies, but I'll describe it. I found myself floating up near the ceiling over my bed and saw my body lying there sleeping, and I just knew I could fly right out through the wall if I wanted to. And I did. Just drifted right through it like a ghost, and I felt like I was a ghost, in fact I started getting a sort of wicked desire to be mischievous. Outside it was dark and 2 black dogs ran up out of the woods and were waiting for me. They were slim and had pointed ears like German Shepherds or Dobermans or something. They started running toward the neighbor's house and I followed, as if they were leading me there.

This neighbor had a long empty front yard where all the neighborhood kids use to want to play, but any time we did he'd come out and make us leave, so we didn't like him very much. I was pretty young when this happened, young enough to still feel that way, so I drifted into his house through the wall and found him sitting in a big easy chair in his living room watching TV. I circled over his head trying to figure out what to do - I didn't know if I could interact with physical reality or not.

And suddenly he looked up right at me, or very near me, with a sort of half shocked half angry expression and reached behind the chair and pulled out a shotgun that he aimed almost right at me, following as I circled. He said something like "I know you're there - I can't see you but I can sense you, Get out of here!! I'm not going to put up with this!"

That shocked me - I thought I was invisible! He started shaking a little and I could see the fear on his face, and that freaked me out. What was i doing? If I really was a ghost why would I do this? I thought better of it and flew back out and woke up I think when I was halfway home.

But I decided it must have been just a dream because when I woke up it was bright daylight outside and in the dream it had been dark night. I don't know if this is what people would consider a 'real' OBE or not, or maybe more like astral travel? It definitely had a different feel than a normal dream though, a sense that I was really outside of my body.

It didn't make me believe in an afterlife, but then I decided it must not have been real since the conditions outside didn't match the way things really were (daylight). It didn't occur to me that maybe it was somehow partially real but my mind made up some details. I didn't think like that back then.

Why does your belief in afterlife have to depend on obe's? I think most people cant come to general agreement on what a obe is. A dream? A lucid dream? Visiting another dimension? Something that only happens in crisis type situation, car crash. I mean everyone's free to believe what they want but couldn't you rely on anything else to strengthen your beliefs or even investigate other strange things, unexplained phenomena?

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

it brings up the question, do (the other) animals have the same experience? If this idea is true, or something similar to it, has it always happened this way, or is it something that started at a particular point in our evolution? Very intriguing. Of course the Buddhists say we can reincarnate as animals, so that would mean they're part of it as well. I have no thoughts on it beyond that at this point.

Quoting myself from a little ways up. (And I got a notification, which confused me for a second lol!)

I just read somewhere that Jung said in order to reach Individuation (aka Spiritual Awakening, Mystical Union, etc - the goal of all transformative esoteric religious/spiritual traditions), it requires that we become consciously aware of our unconscious elements to a large degree. So that would mean the animals have half of the equation, the half we seem to struggle with now, but they lack the conscious part.

OBEs haven't really changed my views about the afterlife, but my beliefs about the an afterlife are just about impossible to put accurately into words, because my myriad experiences in various altered states of consciousness have ultimately led me to experience things that involve concepts whose fundamental nature exceeds human comprehension. I'd have to say my psychedelic and dissociative hallucinogenic experiences have greater influence on my beliefs about an afterlife than OBEs.

To begin with, OBEs are, in my opinion, just another altered state of consciousness and I don't necessarily believe that that actually entails my consciousness being unbound to the physical location of my body. I believe this for a lot of reasons really. Fundamentally it boils down to philosophical and definitional issues.

To begin with, what's it actually mean for the consciousness to be constrained to a given physical location or orientation? Sure, we naturally view our consciousness as being stuck within our bodies, but why? Is there really a "where" at all when it comes to our consciousness? Our sensory perceptions are tied to our sensory organs, yes, but consciousness itself lacks any meaningful discernibility when it comes to spatial location. It seems to me that the only meaningful factor that can be assigned to our consciousness is temporal, the "when". Yet, by that same token, it's only just a bit more meaningful, because when it comes right down to it, our spatial and temporal "coordinates" only acquire meaning when considered in relation to their surrounding coordinates. What is "now"? Now is not just then, and it is not yet what is to come. What is "here"? It is not "there", "there", or "there".

Then when it comes to the term afterlife, let's assume, for example, that you're 100% factually correct, DarkMatters. If we return to some larger "collective" consciousness and lose all the earthly baggage that makes up our identities and personalities, is it actually accurate or correct to refer to it as an afterlife? The word afterlife means that there is life after this life we have now, but if we lose all individuality, can we be considered living? Life is a concept that is intrinsically tied to our human nature, which means fundamental to the concept of it is that we possess some form of individuality and identity. There is a "self" that we are aware of. Now, just to be clear, not remembering our conscious experience, like happens when sleeping but not dreaming, isn't quite the same as outright lacking a self to remember in the first place. So, why should we refer to such a phenomenon like you described in your post as being an "afterlife"?

Now, most critical of all, let's consider something here. Our lives and conscious experiences are part of a greater existence whose factual nature remains a truth regardless of and separate from our conscious experiences of it. Our conscious lives are secondary to our existence. Ultimately, what we experience, what we call living, everything we have ever known or ever will know, think, do, say, feel, etc., are all only meaningful within the context of our human experience and so our perceptions of reality are fundamentally flawed. When, in our travels, we come upon the temporal coordinates marking the end of our conscious experience and we "die", nothing about the greater unified existence at large changes whatsoever. Life and death don't actually really mean anything. Just like existence itself, they simply are. We simply are. Things can appear to be something, but what they appear to be by definition cannot be what or how they actually are, otherwise they wouldn't simply "appear" to be that way. An image (symbolic representation) is not the thing it represents. Consciousness is just a collection of symbols, signifying something greater beyond what they are capable of representing.

I know none of what I said really gives us any kind of answers here about anything, but I have to wonder if that isn't almost the point, kind of. There are no true answers in life, only questions. Some questions give us a glimpse at something... a hint to the overall transcendent truth we're all struggling to uncover, and that provides us with some insight, but never anything real or concrete. I think to wonder if there is an afterlife, in a way, is to miss the point. The life we believe we live has never actually been real/true when compared to the essential truth of existence, as it transcends experience. It is beyond comprehension. What is comprehensible is just a bunch of half truths whose state as absolute falsehoods is suspended only depending on the context in which they are considered in and when. "Life" only exists as a truth within ourselves. If we expire, never to perceive again (at least as ourselves, not being reborn as something or somebody else), then that truth of life expires with us, and "life" is no more. Not just our life, all life.

I think that having OBEs and Astral Projection experiences (I distinguish the two) have contributed to my sense that there's more to life than what I understand. I consider my experience of being in my body in a particular location to be an accurate hallucination. The fact that I can hallucinate something else instead doesn't tell me very much about what's real, beyond highlighting the role that imagination plays in my mental simulation of myself in my environment.

Some premonitions I've had seem to demonstrate that I'm something 'more' than my body and brain caught in a particular moment in time. I don't know what that implies about an afterlife though.

From these experiences I don't think that its reasonable to conclude that consciousness is grounded in some other 'stuff' besides 'physical' stuff. What is "physical"? We have a thought, with a lot of assumptions, about what matter is and what its properties are. All the detail about electrons, protons, etc. is a mathematical model that very successfully describes some important properties of matter, but not all properties, and not necessarily all important properties. If our thought about what the physical world is doesn't completely capture our more 'spiritual' experiences, I think that says more about the limitations of our assumptions and definitions than it does about nature.

I'm not suggesting that there is no grounds for believing in other, scientifically unknown kinds of matter-like essences that are involved with supernatural experiences. I'm just saying that it doesn't follow automatically from the fact that our thoughts about matter are incomplete.

A characteristic that life has is that its not possible to concretely know or specify it, not even in a particular detail. In our physics models, which are limited but work impressively well as far as they go, atoms don't have precisely defined positions or energies or times when they are involved in interactions. Such quantities can be made more precise, but never completely so, and without some degree of ambiguity there would not even be chemistry. I think other questions about reality and identity are somehow like this also. It is as if what is real exists in a sea of what is unreal, and it needs what is unreal to support it. If we could somehow entirely know what is real and what isn't, that would destroy everything. Likewise with questions about who we are. I'm not justifying pretending or lying, or saying there is no place for questions about such things. But I think there's a fallacy in the way we commonly ask these questions, and the fallacy has destructive effects. Prophecy is also like this.

A riddle I haven't solved is how to be as fully alive as I need to be, with the awareness and empathy that involves, without being destructively tormented by the brutality and tragedy in our experience. Everyone deals with the problem by ignoring or denying something. If I can understand a better way of approaching this, for myself, and if I can share or preserve some of that understanding so that not everything I've gone through and worked for is wasted, then beyond that I don't care so much about what happens to me when I die.

Hi,
Thanks for all the replies. I don't believe in the afterlife but I also think it there could be a possibility for it. It's my opinion that astral projection and lucid dreaming are the same things. In my opinion, astral projection is a product of the brain. It's like a video game emulator. There's a guy named Victor Zammit I'll list his site below. He claims that no one can outprove him when it comes to the afterlife. He's offering a million dollars to anyone that can outprove him. Once I understand science / math at the college level I'm going to try to outprove him.

AFTERLIFE: A LAWYER PRESENTS THE SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE FOR THE AFTERLIFE | WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU DIE

Thanks.

I dont think with me personally (my rare obe experiences were probably just dreams) however people have reported strange (paranormal related) dreams for thousands of years. Can i prove anything? I doubt it would be easy but if someone wants to explore possibility of afterlife (dabble in evp, automatic writing, ect) thats there business. If they're very persistent about going down that rabbit hole, i believe anything could happen (just my personal opinion). Anyway, everyone's different, i suppose it depends on your beliefs.

I agree that astral projection and out of body dream experiences are lucid dreams. But that doesn't mean that there isn't something else 'real' going on that's inspiring the dream. What I'm calling OBE is basically just a lucid dream set in my bedroom where I've projected my first person visual perspective to some third person vantagepoint. The astral projection is more tactile, as if my whole network of nerves are being physically separated from my body. I found it to be disturbing, and a bit scary. The tactile experience was accompanied by what seemed like being able to see and hear things that I can't usually see and hear, ghost-like presences that I would normally feel but not sense any other way.

In my second 'astral projection'-like experience, I didn't separate from my body, but my mental spatial map inverted, so that outside seemed like inside and vice versa. The far distance was a point inside my head. This reversal happened independently for the two hemispheres of my head, so that sometimes one side was flipped around, and sometimes both. I associate this with the 'astral projection' experience because it had a similar kind of electric feeling, even though the transformation was geometrically different.

I wrote a paper on obe's in college. (i really dont know much about subject) My professor gave a b grade (i was happy) said because he didnt have slightest idea what i was talking about or specifically what experience is. Anyway just wanted to add my perception growing up was there's always a silver cord attached to you. If you dont see that cord..all bets are off!

I strongly suspect that the silver cord thing is utter BS. Blavatsky made it up, or more likely plagiarized it from somewhere else, then other people keep repeating it since then.

I believe that if people are in a dream, believing they are "out of body", then they may see a silver chord, because they expect there to be one. That could confound the issue.