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astral projection

The separation of a person's consciousness from his or her body, allowing the person to travel short or vast distances without taking the body along. The separated consciousness can perceive physical reality. Two common types of the out-of-body experience (OBE) are the near-death and the space travel experiences. In the former, a person who is unconscious hovers above his or her own body and perceives what is going on during an operation or while rescue workers try to save the person's life. In the latter, a person visits Jupiter or other galaxies.

Two scientists who have popularized this modern variant of metaphysical dualism are Elizabeth Kübler-Ross and Raymond Moody. The former is well-known for her work on death and dying. The latter is a psychiatrist with a Ph.D. in philosophy whose favorite title seems to be `parapsychologist'. He has written at least four books on the subject. They are based mostly on liberal interpretations of testimonials and anecdotes from doctors, nurses and patients. Characteristic of Moody's work is the glaring omission of cases that don't fit his hypothesis. He has even written a book about Elvis. Kübler-Ross claims it is possible to have sex with the spirits of the dead. Other popular investigators of out-of-body experiences are Drs. Puthoff and Targ of the Stanford Research Institute (not affiliated with Stanford University) and Dr. Charles Tart, a psychologist who retired from the University of California at Davis and is now on the staff at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. The latter trio also do research on esp.

Astral projection requires us to believe that (a) consciousness is a separate entity from the body and can exist without the body, at least for short periods of time, and (b) that the disembodied consciousness can `see', `hear' and `feel', and, I suppose, smell as well.1 The belief that the mind and body are separate entities and can exist apart is the basis for the traditional Western view of the immortality of the soul. On the traditional view, you must die before your soul can travel, and even then your destinations are pretty limited: heaven or hell and you don't get to take your pick! The New Age view lets you take your pick of anywhere you want to go and you don't have to die to do it. What a deal!

However, imagine what would happen if thousands of souls took off on astral voyages and came back to the wrong bodies. You'd think that there'd be a mix-up occasionally. One would expect some minds to get lost and never find their way back to their bodies. There should be at least a few mindless bodies wandering or laying around, abandoned by their souls as unnecessary baggage. There should also be a few confused souls who don't know who they are because they're in the wrong bodies. If dualism were true, one would expect that there would be minds out of their bodies everywhere!

It seems obvious to me that when I perceive anything it is because I have bodily senses (sight, hearing, etc.) which are stimulated by physical phenomena (electromagnetic radiation, vibrating air, etc.). According to the dualists, however, it is my mind that is really doing the perceiving. My body is superfluous. Descartes, often called the Father of Modern Philosophy, thought he had proved this point in his Metaphysical Meditations. There he asks the reader to follow him while he does a thought experiment. Imagine a piece of fresh beeswax, he writes. Consider its odor, its texture, its size and shape. Tap it and listen to the dull sound it emits; taste the sweet honey still embedded. Now imagine that the wax is burned. It now looks, smells, feels, sounds and tastes different. In other words, every piece of perceptual data tells you that this is a different object. Yet, you know that it is not a different object; it is the same object with a completely different appearance. You know that the essence of the wax remains through the transformation of its properties. How do you know this? Not through your bodily senses, since they tell you this is not the same wax. You know it through your mind. Thus, your knowledge of material substances does not come through your bodily senses, but through your immaterial mind.

The main difficulty with Descartes' argument centers on the ideas of essence and substance. They are superfluous concepts. Everything can be explained just as well without assuming that behind every perception of a physical object there is a substance called mind and a substance called body. Is Descartes' wax the same wax after it is burned? Is an egg the same egg after it is boiled? Is a dollar the same dollar after it is cut into four parts? Just because something is equal to something else does not mean it is identical to it. It may be the same wax in the same way that the boiled egg is the same egg. It is not the same wax in the same way that the mutilated dollar is not the same as the pristine one. What is gained by assuming that there is an egg- essence that stays the same through boiling? How does this egg- essence differ from the physical properties of the egg? Why assume that the real egg is a substance grasped only by the mind?

Likewise, why assume that besides seeing a red ball, hearing a thumping noise, feeling the wind on your face, smelling the cabbage cooking, etc. there is a non-material substance, the mind, which is really doing the hearing, feeling, smelling, etc. and the body, including the brain, is just a vehicle somehow pumping data to this mind? One troublesome aspect of dualism involves trying to explain how it is possible for a spatial entity to interact with a non-spatial one. How does mind connect with body if they are different substances? How can the physical cause effects in the nonphysical and vice-versa? [Descartes could not explain how the interaction of mind and body is possible, but he did claim to know where it occurs: in the pineal gland.]

One might wonder, if the dualists are right, why consciousness requires the assistance of sensory organs under ordinary circumstances. The body becomes a superfluous entity on this theory. If it were possible to separate a soul from its body why would the soul ever come back? If it can do just fine without this material prison (as Plato called the body), then why doesn't it venture out on its own and stay there?

Now, there is nothing mystical or mysterious about experiencing travel while the body stays put. Most people on the planet do this every night when they go to sleep and dream. Many of us daydream about foreign and exotic places. Some people do this when they take certain kinds of drugs. Some people do this when they have a brain disorder.2


James Randi cites the case of two scientists at the Stanford Research Institute, Dr. Russell Targ and Dr. Harold Puthoff, who favorably compared the findings of Mariner 10 and Pioneer 10 (research spacecrafts) with the `findings' of Ingo Swann and Harold Sherman who claimed to have visited Mercury and Jupiter on `astral trips' before the research vessels had been launched.3 These scientists said they found exciting similarities between what Swann and Sherman reported and what the spacecraft reported. They called for more studies, using the astral travelers as guides to outer space exploration. Isaac Asimov took a list of the claims the astral observers made and compared them to what was known based on the spacecraft research. Asimov concluded that 46% of the claims of the astral travelers were false. He classified only one out of 65 claims as a fact that either was not obvious or not obtainable from reference books. The scientists were not even put off by the fact that Swann claimed he saw a 30,000 ft. mountain range on Jupiter on his astral voyage when there is no such thing. It is hard to imagine why anyone would have faith in such claims. If I told you that I had been to your hometown and has seen the 30,000 ft. high mountain there and you knew there was no such mountain, would you think I had really visited your town even if I correctly pointed out that there is a river nearby and it sometimes floods? Swann, by the way, now claims that astral travel is so fast that he probably wasn't seeing Jupiter but another planet in another solar system! So, there really is a big mountain out there somewhere!

Despite the claims of parapsychologists such as Moody, Tart, Targ and Puthoff, there is not one piece of physical evidence to support the claim that anyone can project their mind or soul or psyche or spirit or whatever to somewhere else on this or any other planet. All we have is testimony. How could it be otherwise? The real question for psychology is why is it that when confronted with the same evidence, two equally intelligent and knowledgeable groups of people, each with their armies of Ph.D.s, M.D.s and Nobel Prize winners, the skeptics and the believers, respond so differently. The skeptics scoff at the claims of the witnesses to the paranormal and consider the believers to be naive, gullible and foolish, directed more by wishful thinking and self-deception than critical thinking. The believers think the skeptics are close-minded "professional detractors" (J.B. Rhine's characterization of Martin Gardner) directed more by stubbornness and preconceived notions than by critical thinking.

In concluding, we should note that purists make a distinction between astral projection and OBE. The former is a teaching of Madam Blavatsky and involves belief in different bodies, one of which is the astral body. The astral body perceives other astral bodies rather than their physical bodies. So, strictly speaking it is not the soul or consciousness which takes off during astral projection, but a kind of body. This body, by the way, is the one which has an aura. It is also the seat of consciousness and is generally described as being connected to the physical body during projection by an infinitely elastic and very fine silver cord, a kind of cosmic umbilical cord or Ariadne's thread.

See related entries on mind, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences and soul.


further reading

reader comments

Blackmore, Susan J., Beyond the Body: an Investigation of Out-of-Body Experiences (London: Heinemann, 1982).

Blackmore, Susan. Dying to Live: Near-Death Experiences (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1993). $18.17

Grof Stanislav. Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research (New York: Viking Press, 1975)

Ryle, Gilbert. The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Sacks, Oliver W. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Harper Perennial Library, 1990).

Sagan, Carl. Broca's Brain (New York: Random House, 1979), pp. 47-48.

Siegel, Ronald K. Fire in the Brain : Clinical Tales of Hallucination (New York: Dutton, 1992).


notes

1. Either that or it requires an even more farfetched belief, namely, that the brain and senses can operate over vast distances and perceive through objects by some mysterious physiological power not yet discovered. Thus, it is actually the physical body which perceives, say Mars, on an astral voyage: vision somehow miraculously extended to millions of miles without losing the sharpness of sight usually associated with seeing objects at close range; hearing somehow capable of picking up vibrations thousands of miles away; etc. If you're interested in taking this belief seriously see Jane Duran, "Philosophical Difficulties with Paranormal Claims," in Philosophy of Science and the Occult, edited by Patrick Grim. 2nd ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 196-206.

2. See, for example, Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious : Observations from LSD Research (New York: Viking Press, 1975); Ronald K. Siegel, Fire in the Brain : Clinical Tales of Hallucination (New York: Dutton, 1992).

3. James Randi, Flim-Flam! (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books,1982), pp. 68-69.


The Skeptic's Dictionary
by
Robert Todd Carroll