Sunday, October 14, 2001		Article

Out of body experiences
Suneet Kaur

IT was June 12, 1977, a middle- aged lady was going towards the temple when she had a sudden nervous breakdown and was immediately shifted to the hospital, but the doctors declared her "brought dead". After a few minutes, she opened her eyes. The doctors were amazed. What she narrated was startling; "I don’t know what happened to me. I fell down, but soon I found myself above somewhere in a different universe where there was grass everywhere. There was calm and peace. For a second, I felt I was relieved of all the pain and suffering and suddenly I returned into my body. First I thought it was just an illusion, then I heard similar incidents from other persons too. They too had vivid pictures of coming out of their physical body’’.

Even 40-year-old Angela had faced a similar situation. After a very major operation, she felt that she was up in the room and her physical body was being treated by the doctors. Then, suddenly she found herself back in the body. Both the ladies say that they have been sent back to the earth by that eternal being because their time had not arrived as yet. Both these incidents appear to be very strange and place several questions before us?

In this age of scientific advancement people do not take these incidents for granted. We treat ourselves as just the body and what we feel, realise and think comes from deep inside us, which is not the work of a physical body but a force that makes us do this. This force is the soul in which all religions have faith.

Ms Verma too recalled having such an experience. She was not ill, but was in a stage of meditation when she saw a light in front of her eyes and felt that she is somewhere near God. There were scores of other people, all dead, standing in a row for their judgement. After a few minutes, she opened her eyes and was back on earth. This experience changed her life completely and she became a spiritual person.

These startling events take us back to that age when our rishimunis used to travel in the mountains and jungles and sit for meditation for a long time at a stretch and even for months and years just for the glimpse of God. This happens to them by their inner urge which gives them the power to realise themselves and God. This inner urge is a soul which wants to attach itself to the Almighty. In our daily life too, we always worry about our looks and appearances and what we have inside our body. We say we have arms and legs and five sensory organs with the help of which we feel and see and we have a heart, a brain, blood and various organs about which we are worried but it is the soul about which we do not know. That remains a mystery. The main reason is that the soul does not have any direct or indirect effect on our body and life, but it does affect our non-material being.

We pray for the peace of the departed souls but we do not pray for ourselves, that is for our soul. That’s why these near-death experiences are still shrouded in mystery. Psychologists have something different to say J.N. Jerath, head of the Psychology Department, Panjab University says, "These instances are near dream-like situations. Dreams are a fact and all human beings see dreams every day. They come out of the bodily frame work and find themselves anywhere in the universe. There is some spot deep inside the brain where this realisation takes place. "If dreams are true then these experiences are also true, he further adds.

Some psychiatrists even treat these experiences as an internal data processing unit of the human computer. Dreams are not something which people think about seriously. Most people are in the habit of forgetting dreams, but on occasions when they remember those dreams, they regard them as mere oddities. Even in this state, there are some people who consider themselves fortunate enough to experience the realisation of flying in the air over some very far-off place and recognise their friends walking on the road, while their body is far away at home. Later on they find that what they saw was all correct.

Such events in psychology are termed as travelling clairvoyance, astral projection, or, OOBE (Out of the Body Experience). This is a state in which a person is not sleeping and seems to perceive some portion of the environment which could not possibly be perceived from where his physical body is at present. He even knows that he is not dreaming or fantasising. Such experiences happen with people over after the world. This OOBE just occurs once in a lifetime, sometimes illness, sometimes by emotional stress, sometimes after a long sleep and sometimes and in a very rare instances by deliberate attempt which only spiritual persons can do.

There are two kinds of people — who believe in these realisations. One kind are those about whom I have mentioned above, just ordinary people like you and me. Others are those who meditate and realise that they are near God. They have a special sensitivity and for them it is a spiritually-elevating experience. They believe it is a narrow kind of consciousness in which the body is a prison and they have escaped from the bodily cage and begin to fly to that external being.

When people have this OOBE, there is a brain-wave pattern which occurs during the dream-like sleep. In addition, there also occur eye movements which occur during the sleep and seem to be scanning the dream imagery i.e. the eyes continue to scan a picture which exists only in the brain, i.e. in dreams.

V.S. Ramachandran, one of the leading brain surgeons, in his book Phantom in the brain explains that there are some temporal lobes (these are some sort of circuitry) in our brain which are somehow involved in religious experience and these become hyperactive in epileptics. Mostly, the patients who have epileptic seizures enjoy the unique privilege of gazing directly into the God’s eyes every time they have the seizures and these seizures permanently alter the patients mental life. They also often produce interesting and highly selective distortions of the patients’ personality. The doctor further adds that in epileptics there are certain permanent changes in temporal lobe circuitry caused by selective enhancement of some connections and effacement of others-leading to new peaks and valleys in the patients’ emotional landscape.