Out of Body Experiences

[Lorizael]

So here's something I don't think I've ever talked about on Apolyton. In 2003, when I had my revelations and decided to pursue this whole all-consuming telepathic techno-blob thing, it began with an out of body experience. I had gone into isolation for 5 weeks in order to, uh, find enlightenment, which involved a lot of meditation, essay-writing, and taking long walks in which I pretended different parts of my personality had different voices and then made them talk to each other.

During one walk (no Gollum/Smeagol this time), I was playing with the idea that I didn't really exist, and then... well then I was looking down at the top of my head as I walked through my neighborhood. For a few moments, I was a brief mote in the universe observing a hairless ape loping along. I didn't feel like I had any control over my body, that I was simply following along behind it because it piqued my curiosity. I also seemed to have no personality of my own; I was just a clump of awareness interwoven with the rest of the universe, connected to everything but not remarkable, because everything was connected.

And then I was back in my body, filled with joy and comprehension. The meaning I took from that experience formed the foundation for everything else.

But I did not really have an out of body experience. As far as I'm concerned, I managed to trick my brain into a weird state of mind that let me think things I wouldn't normally be able to think. My soul did not detach from my corporeal shell and go roam the universe or anything like that. I've never believed the experience was in any way supernatural or mystical, just a trip I managed to have without drugs.

Anyway, has anyone else ever had any kind of out of body or numinous experience? If so, what did it mean for you? Where do you think it came from? And what do you think it was?

[Ming]

I took a parapsychology class way back in college. One day, our druggie instructor told us about his out of the body experience, and then prepared all 50 of us in the lecture hall for ours.
He dimmed the lights, burnt some incense and turned on a tape recorder. The crashing of waves echoed throughout the room, and then in the distance, a single note tone... waves, tone, waves, tone... and then a voice telling us that the tone was our beacon, and that when we next heard it we were to return to our bodies... waves crashing, more waves, more waves...
And then about 20 minutes later, the tone again. Most of the class woke up from a deep sleep. Nobody reported an out of the body experience

[ZEE]

If I evar had an out of body experience I would be very pissed if I had to come back.

[The Mad Monk]

I'll have what he's having.

[Aeson]

Once in shock I had an out of body experience, it was on a scout fishing trip and one of the other scouts had cast badly and I felt something whip across my face, then I was looking down on me, standing in the middle of a ring of scouts who were all looking at me weirdly, the one who hooked me was wailing.

My dad was the scoutmaster and he said I was strangely calm through it all, even as he used the razor from the snakebite kit to cut the barb of the hook out of my nose. I'm not sure when the out of body part finished.

Ive had the calm feeling several times, but that was the only change in perspective.

Our sight is all interpretations of inputs, there is no "real" sight. It's possible to visualize yourself from a third party perspective ... probably out of body is this happening while your logic routines that would normally say "this isn't the right perspective, I'm just imagining it" is overwhelmed with other stimuli.

[Aeson]

I can at will (without drugs) see out of body experiences, flying over terrain is the most common, occasionally greater than actual vision (like concurrent 360 view of objects and more detail than I can see unassisted) for moments. But never without the understanding that it isn't real.

[The Mad Monk]

I'll have what he's having.

[Lorizael]

I'll have what he's having.

That'd be a helping of incoherent misanthropy, chunks of deep frustration and hopelessness, and a thick glaze of unrequited love and interpersonal conflict. (I have no idea how to cook.)

[Bereta_Eder]

Learn to cook, half of that will be gone

[Bereta_Eder]

I'm actually now going back with a mission.

You can't achieve the level of heat required to deep fry squid (calamari) at home with home devices.

Can't be done.


But I found a way around it (it doesn't entail tochlights, massive fires, cerosene, anti-matter etc)


You need to heat the oil very very much.
Take flour and put it in a bag. Put the calamari in. shake it shake it

Then, when the oil has heated so much, the maximum possible, so much you could probably stop a castle invasion with it, place the calamri, one next to the other. ONE LAYER. Not more so as not to cool down the oil.


remove repeat as many times as there is calamari


serve with frech fries

I'll try it

[Lorizael]

Learn to cook, half of that will be gone

Well that was me at 17. Now it's mostly just self-loathing and loneliness. I've grown!

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Learn to cook anyway. It's a basic skill that 100% of everyone should have.

[Lorizael]

Hey, I don't want every thread to be about me. My current forum-cluttering, ****ty, look-at-me thread is here. This one is about out of body or otherwise mystical experiences.

[Elok]

Had two of what I would characterize as "religious experiences," the first when I was maybe sixteen and the second when I was living in Peru back in '11. Rather different experiences, oddly enough; the first was an overwhelming sensation of divine presence, the second a feeling of utter internal silence and clarity. I don't mean the latter in a hippy-dippy "inner peace and oneness with the universe" sort of way. Rather it was as though an annoying, discordant song had been playing in my head my whole life, and I'd been trying semi-successfully to ignore it so I could think, and all of a sudden God turned off the stupid radio. Hadn't even known the song was playing until it was gone, I'd been trying so hard to shut it out. And it came back later. No doubt it's playing now, and I still don't notice, because I'm used to background noise. But I was grateful for the silence while it lasted.

[Lorizael]

Do you have any sense of what prompted those experiences?