Originally Posted by
Peregrinus
Actually, it's both at the same time. That's one of those things that's kind of hard to get your mind around, but it is literally both at the same time. This aspect of quantum mechanics is called "wave particle duality". You're right about conservation of massenergy (yeah, that's the scientific name for it-- creative, huh?). The amount of massenergy in the universe is fixed, and cannot be created or destroyed, only transformed. However, to say that brainwaves are matter is a a stretch. Photons are actually massless particles as far as we've been able to tell, so if you want to talk about the electromagnetic energy created by the brain in terms of particles, they don't have mass. Einstein's famous E=mc^2 formula is usually somewhat misunderstood. The purest example of the conversion between mass and energy that I can think of is the creation and destruction of particle/anti-particle pairs. When matter and anti-matter come into contact, it basically goes *poof* and is transformed into radiation energy equal to the sum of the masses of the particles times the speed of light in a vacuum squared.
I know very little about astral projection or OBE (which seem like the same thing from what I’ve read on the forums) and am quite skeptical of the idea anyway, but do know a bit about science, so I'm going to leave it at that. Hopefully that little explanation made sense. If not, let me know.