"Let's Get Small"...: On The Possible Physics of Out-Of-Body Experiences and Near-Death Experiences

I've borrowed the beginning of the title from one of Steve Martin's comedy sketches; it's just what the doctor ordered if you'll "excuuuuuuse me". My writing style is getting so formal and dry here out of the necessity to save disk space, I'm even having to assure myself I'm not quite as lifeless as I sound!

There continues to be an ever-increasing amount that is learned about the out-of-body experience (OBE), and yet it still continues to present us with challenging riddles. One of the greatest challenges it may present is the riddle of how to take a moderate approach, when caught between the need to look at the anatomy of the experience rather than mindlessly adore it, and the need to dissect the experience down to its components without losing our sense of respect, reverence, purpose, and other attractive qualities that the experience has long held for mankind.

Still, the line-up of riddles is formidable. It's become the would-be test of authenticity of out-of-body experiences whether or not someone can bear witness to the nature of an object hidden in a room that the person who may have such an experience could "not otherwise" see, and unfortunately, this test of physic phenomena has no other controls that even recognize, let alone rule out, other sorts of psychic phenomena. If anything, it shows a bit of the desperation to try to answer, even haphazardly, the burning question of whether someone is really out of body or whether they "just think they are".

The possibility that consciousness could be subject to such a convincing illusion as the realistic dream of being above one's body and aware is perhaps further added to acknowledgments of other possibilities; while it's long been reported as part of the authenticity of the closely related near-death experience that individuals seem to encounter departed loved ones who welcome them to the "other side", it's also not uncommon to dream of the recently departed, and yet it hardly seems anyone has the willingness to insist that such dreams, regardless of the similarity, are anywhere near as "real". The mind can synthesize experiences.

Besides that I would like to ask the reader consider whether our sense of reality and meaning in out of body or near-death experiences shouldn't come most, not from their apparent content, but that they seem to have archetypal contents, that is, they are superficially much like shamanic visions. In other words, these experiences should get our attention, they should strike us as profound, but in spite of our knowledge of the physical anatomy of these experiences, we should give even more thought to the possible messages they contain. Those who are familiar with shamanic events in the more fundamental frameworks such as dream analysis, and those who are familiar with the aspects of the way that the brain handles information, need only to integrate several possibilities as to sources of knowledge, to be eligible to grasp the content of these archetypes.

To give you an example of where my awareness that the shamanic experience can occur as an involuntary process begins, there is considerable detail given in this site's Tarot pages of the content of a near-death vision happening to a man who mistakenly interpreted his experience though the biased lens of Christian salvation rather than the practical lens of shamanic medical interpretation, oblivious to the fact that the higher mind of man has use of symbols and knowledge that the conscious mind may refuse.

While no one is to say whether his choice of interpretation and appropriate response is right or wrong, he has forsaken a keen insight into the nature of the disease that nearly took his life, its mechanics, and powerful direct routes of remedy to this disease which, in practical terms, might have saved far more lives than the souls he may merely believe he is saving. What is more, the particular interpretation which I apply to his vision, seems to have solid roots in the history of the Christian church. They are, however, indicative of a church and a ministry that is far different that what has become of it.

The reason that this is important is not only because it could very well prove typical for any elements of any near-death experience, but many elements of out of body experience and visions in general. The same interpretive techniques applied to the visions of the great mystics of the Theosophists suggest they could only experience things only figuratively at times because not even they possessed the interpretive tools to do more. Another reason it may prove important is that these experiences tend in established examples, to pertain to the ailment at hand. Some of the more consistent occurrences of archetypal elements may pertain to the very nature of death itself in a powerfully remedial way, if we are capable of decoding them.

In the case of these experiences, while there is a powerful amount of neurological and neurochemical research for example, and while the applied science of Michael Persinger constitutes powerful understanding of how these phenomena work, and even how to predictably induce them deliberately, their actual anatomy seems to have been barely explored by modern man.

In attempting to equate these events and effects with known or given elements of physics, we might encounter such notions as a literal interpretation of Einstein's "gespenster" particle, or ghost particle, something without a quantum presence which is still recognizable. One association that is extremely tempting to make in the mysterious course of trying to explain the encounter with a "clear white light", almost as if someone had somehow become small enough to see the inside of their own pineal gland, as is the field of human consciousness were actually undergoing a holographic reduction is size, is the collapse of the wave function. Even the theoretical means of its induction may match probable factors at work in the collapse of human consciousness.

Such a collapse is also reminiscent of the collapse of stars, accompanied by a nova, an outward expansion, while at the same time, there is an inward expansion of matter creating a smaller and far denser core.

While it may be "technically" precarious to refer to the collapse of a star as a collapse of its wave function, it's no more precarious to refer to human conciousness this way, and in fact, we may have been advised that this is a perfectly appropriate criteria by the content of Aleister Crowley's often highly scientific symbolism in his Thoth tarot.

Still, there isn't as much there that speaks of this "human supernova", and this model is not only extremely enticing to account for the spectrum of experiences in this context, but it may also serve to explain how and why, as our deeper feelings often seem to suggest, that a person may be out of body, and even looking at themselves, and yet not truly out of body at all. Its also very closely associable with the traditional models of consciousness that have been passed down to us by the incredibly insightful ancients down the centuries. Even this incredible shrinking and expanding of the sphere of human consciousness has for thousands of years been expressed in Hindu traditions as a "siddhi", a mystical power, of literally being able to physically make one's self larger or smaller.

Were a Thesophist to have approached Einstien's Law of the Conservation of Energy and Matter, or his pupil David Bohm's "form-conserving" holographic physics, would they thereby advise us that all people possess these occult powers, and like matter and energy, they cannot be destroyed? They may merely change form, or even more likely, lie dormant in an implicate state, where they await to awaken at some time of extreme events? How many times might there be a delay of only seconds in such a principle that could have saved a life, appearing after the apparent demise of that person?

Nor is such a premise without other precedents. We encounter also the change in scale of objects, fields, matter or energy in Kowsky and Frost's experiments, which yielded an increase in volume of a crystal simultaneous with its levitation. It is an issue also in transmutations of elements which do not experience proportionate changes in volume, a principle which may eventually re-write many examples of "apparent" transmutation of elements as accumulation and exchange of elements. One of Tom Bearden's most striking works refers to "customized quanta". Our most astonishing alchemical feats, palingenics and the homunculus alike, are preserved in anecdotes that are repeatedly saturated with the most striking of details, that both processes involve, perhaps invariably, a stage in which a fully matured form of a being appears in a size small enough to fit inside of laboratory glassware. We encounter the diversity of scale in observing the phenomena of growth, of man or mineral, and we encounter it in the phenomena of holography, and in fractals, where forms are made of the same forms at smaller scales, which are in turn made of the same forms at even smaller scales, and so on. Variation in scale may be inevitably part of whatever brand of relativity theory is in question as well; so, too, has "inflation theory" been a popular part of the physics of roughly the last decade or so. No doubt it is also to be encountered elsewhere.

Such a list may not be an abstract collection of similars; already, the problem of alchemic transmutation vs. alchemic accumulation contains principles which are very satisfying to related feats of materialization, and in turn to materialization in the context of spiritualism and mediumship, such as the generation of ectoplasm or the re-solidification of the forms of the departed. Such a list may give us further tools to comprehend the matter more deeply; as I have suggested elsewhere on these pages in as brief a manner as possible (the EVP page), it is sometimes astounding that spirits who possess the power of telekinesis so as to cause various miraculous events, do not seem to be able to manipulate matter so as to re-clothe their field of consciouness with the matter of a new physical body and rejoin the living as they often seem to desire doing.

I have suggested a "tuning problem" in this regard, for it seems often in materialization strategies for any type of object, that an energetic blueprint of some type is first established, and then matter is impelled into such a "matrix". The most straightforward way, perhaps, to achieve such an effect is to use the analyzing energy that samples the atomic structure of an object to be duplicated, to subsequently acquire and shape the replica. Often, it seems as if the proper means of targeting the appropriate atom to match the original is by means of their natural resonant frequency. Such a frequency matching, a resonance, however, may require some feature of the energetic blueprint to have the same physical scale as the correspondent atom.

Any changes in scale, therefore, that can compromise the resonant frequencies of the atomic data or representations of atoms in an energetic blueprint, such as the field of consciouness may obviously be, may therefore be capable of impeding any property whereby, inherently, a being may have the latent power to immediately re-clothe themselves with the new matter of a new body or miraculously repair their old body by modified materialization, and immediately rejoin their loved ones. Without carefully examining the possibility and the possible factors which may have gone wrong, we cannot at all rule out such a thing as a normal and automatic human birthright, to be able to automatically recorporeorate at will!

In fact, in some cases, perhaps this is the final light we need shed on some certain "Earth mysteries"...

Certain episodes of Star Trek have already, before millions and millions of veiwers, have already walked up and knocked on the door of this type of premise. In "The Next Generation" Series, in the episode, "The Next Phase", two crewmembers of the Enterprise are induced into a state indistinguishable from ghosts (in fact, they nearly believe they have perished) by means of a "Romulan Cloaking Device" with the incorporation of a "Molecular Phase Inverter", whereby they are made both invisible and intangible. (These too are both traditional siddhis, mystic powers of the holy men, and one of them is demonstrated amongst the miracles of Christ read verbatim). The technical consultants offer the solution that by means of a powerful "anyon beam" (fractional quantum particles), they are restored.

Not all of these premises may be identical, and one may have to juggle a bit- in fact, the difficulty may simply be that what we are talking about has never in modern times been well-defined- however, one possible way of interpreting such a notion may be that the energetic blueprint of beings in such a state has had its very quanta individual collapse, and the influx of fractional quantum particles allows accumulation of quanta by fractions, to allow by perhaps the same principle of Beaden's customized quanta, the restoration of normal quanta. Such collapse, again, may be an unwanted custom quantum effect, whereby the loss of scale in field components results in the loss of the ability to connect to matter.

Another interpretation that may be closer to the exact details of the show's premise may be even more astounding, and this relates to the possibility that a being's energetic blueprint, their field of consciousness, still contains actual matter which has become intangible!

In fact, in some cases, perhaps this is the final light we need shed on some certain "Earth mysteries"... but it is clear that this seems to be one of the last great mysteries that we need to conquer, whether the form of the disincarnate being is a holographic body, or one made of intangible matter, or even, as is conceivably possible, both. While the latter of the two, a body of intangible matter, may be harder to comprehend, it has parallels in some modern concepts of physics systems, the modernistic natural philosophy of Lucretius and his "idols", transmitted visual images of objects that in his view are not different than the objects themselves, and perhaps other related arenas, such as we begin to discuss the inevitable higher-dimensional possibilities of the workings of our sun, not the "fusion reactor" we have been told we enjoy, and how they recall how the ancient philosophers so clearly tried to communicate that such an object, as are all objects, mere "shadows" of things in higher realms.

In the event that both of these are the fact, we may be seeing where intangible matter prevents regeneration by some means, such as persistantly preventing the fractal blueprint from reaching a scale necessary to achieve the tuned acquistion of matching atoms, by perhaps the Pauli principle. In such a case, the "fractional quantum particles" that "Star Trek" prescribes may still be an appropriate answer.

We have probably, in fact, in the sciences, never bothered to ask such a question about "molecular phase inversion", even though we know it for example in the purely physical as the determinance of the chirality in molecules of chlorates by the direction in which a solution is stirred, as whether it is a means by which "ancestoral spirits" cause food offered them to be stale or lacking taste, which amongst modern Mesoamerican mystics, for example, is said to be a sign that they have accepted and made use of it. By incorporating the theories which associate the chirality of living molecules with that of certain particles, such as neutrinos, we may find remarkable things.

We may find eventual help as well in the way in which the ancient seeress, Hildegarde of Bingen, may have detailed for us a holographic process in which the identity of a given atom is holographically labeled as part of a certain object, one which may account for many time-reversible or reversable theromodynamic phenomena which Bohm's famous "Ink Drop Experiment" so dramatically represents, and one which could prove a viable alternative to the questioned and sometimes cumbersome application of phase-entanglement as a possible working principle in these instances. What we may be seeing there may be microscopic views of gravitational holography, since physics is relatively adamant that any object possesses its own gravitational field. The fact that a center of gravity is internalized eventually prove to translate that in Bohm's terminology, it is an expression of implicate order.

We may not be certain yet whether such inner fractality is a consequence of gravitational field, any more than we may be certain we are successful in distinguishing gravity from magnetism; at the appropriate frequencies, most or all elements will demonstrate strong attraction for their own kind, a fact that is already utilized in metals separation technology in the form of the "master magnet". The fact that the latter in its prototype form utilizes induced electrical charge may simply mean that the application of a carrier force happens to be in that case of the explicate order. One assumes that in a Unified Field Theory, these two forces must eventually have some degree of synonymy.

One other thing that is intriguing about the previously-mentioned "Star Trek" plot is that models of fractional quantum particles that science has given us thus far begin with two-dimensional electrons; any of the classic photographs of spirits such as those by Shrenck-Notzing clearly appear to be basically two-dimensional. Dimensionality may be again a whole other way in which to approach such a problem if no other way proves adequate.

Such a premise as a field of consciousness which collapses even while it expands is also seems capable of satisfying certain classical physics, such as Einstein's law of conservation of energy and matter, even though we are applying it to consciousness or to fields associated with consciousness. Nothing is lost, or gained in such a model; the total is merely redistributed, and this, in turn may satisfy the criteria of the physics of David Bohm, of the implicate and explicate order. This physics, in fact, is one of the most powerful and convenient for explaining such re-distributions, and there may already be hard physical evidence in the holographic qualities of the electronographic (electrographic, or "Kirlian") images of imaging specialist Ioan Dumitrescu.

Were a Thesophist to have approached Einstien's Law of the Conservation of Energy and Matter, or his pupil David Bohm's "form-conserving" holographic physics, would they thereby advise us that all people possess these occult powers, and like matter and energy, they cannot be destroyed? They may merely change form, or even more likely, lie dormant in an implicate state, where they await to awaken at some time of extreme events? How many times might there be a delay of only seconds in such a principle that could have saved a life, appearing after the apparent demise of that person?

To extend Dumitrescu's observation that creating a smaller living hologram of a leaf is as simple as cutting a round hole in the middle of it to human beings isn't that far a leap.

To have one's consciousness re-distributed and localized in a sphere around one's body, and to be able to look at one's own body, while sounding outrageous, is merely another expression of the ability of consciousness to allow one part of a whole to perceive another part. In other words, it's about as "far out" as touching your foot or looking at your hand. Any degree to which it sounds alien at first mention no doubt lies largely in a total lack of experience with the concept, although in fact, similar suggestions have been made by a number of modern mystical scientists. Christopher Hill's model of "360 degree awareness" is even more extreme that this model of a spherical field of consciousness for which we are only proposing linear perception, even though in turn what Hill's describes is already very much reminiscent of our own sense of hearing, and it, too, already is giving strong indications when carefully examined of being holographic in nature.

Both Michael Talbot's "Holographic Universe" and Ralph's "Exploring the Fourth Dimension" refer to the possibility of the astral body, the possible vehicle of out of body experience, being a "holographic projection". I cannot myself rule out other possibilities still, such as physic ones, wherein the mind in a certain situation can act like a magick mirror or time camera, and bring in enough data, without actually traveling anywhere, to create a convincing illusion for the observer of having gone somewhere, even with every detail exactly as life.

Often, however, a wide number of experiences do contain telltale idiosyncrasies that may help to identify them as fabrications. They may be labels that the mind uses to distinguish what is almost real from what is absolutely real.

While there may be fundamental difference between this theory put forward by Talbot and Ralphs, and the theory put forward here, there are still probably components of a common view of reality. The difference between a projection of consciousness and a projection that extends consciousness, or a consciousness that can sense exterior forces as ours demonstrably can, might be an extremely arbitrary one if the "nova" model of human consciousness does not become a valuable tool for a view of human workings that leads to deliberate mastery of the phenomena in question.

This model may help us to correctly define demise, if we have not done so already, and we may not have. We seem to be barely beginning to come to terms with the concept. News reports of resuscitation of legally dead persons happening another twenty-four minutes after the "six minute limit" stand to challenge our definition of death, our ways of recognizing it, and even confront us with the horror that we may have pronounced as dead, countless individuals which were not beyond the grasp of resuscitative efforts. The stakes, in fact, quite possibly couldn't be higher.

Such experiments in rethinking our present understandings may also help shed light on those who in the past may have been, even mercilessly, labeled as misguided or ignorant. While I have devoted several length pages of this site to exploring what the reality behind the alleged accounts of ritual Aztec human sacrifice may be, and more of this site to presenting glimpses of the true standards of civilization and technical prowess they may have enjoyed, in all honesty, I have not deeply scratched the surface of possible rationale for the most profound of reasons that they reportedly did what is alleged.

That a man's spirit might go to promote the longevity of a stellar body is suspiciously close to what I have suggested about human consciousness in the form of the "nova" model, although a great deal could easily be lost in translation with such a concept. The Aztec may never have believed they could accomplish such a task in such a way, and they may never have felt the need to, and therefore never have done such a thing. That much is easy enough to support, as this sites pages on the subject have tried to do. But the whole very notion may have come about because they were trying to consider and commemorate the very same model, or a similar one, that I have proposed here.

One possible difference of course between the "death" of a star and the "death" of a human being is that there seems to be a markedly fixed limit to the outward expansion of a field. This is not an anomaly, but it certainly deserves careful consideration. The products of such consideration may yield perhaps the most important clues and insights of all. Another possible difference appears to be something we already know very well, that the reversal of the situation is often quite readily accomplished even with present applications of technology. Another difference may be that the collapse of a star involves the compression of matter, whereas the collapse of the field of consciousness may not involve compression of matter but only field data, a collapse, perhaps, of information.

These changes in scale may also correspond to many other classical elements of spiritual traditions- the size of the human aura, or to the elements that parapsychologists and "ghost busters" routinely encounter. One tends to wonder at times in cases of hauntings if rather than attach to the matter of a new corporeal form, disincarnate spirits have attached to the matter of a place or object, partly though their "expression of emotional energy", or through the power of acquisitive consciousness.

We have parallels to this size-changing field of conciousness in many places- in magnetic bubble technology, in ball lightning, in custom quanta, in fractals, in weird glowing balls of light which Tom Bearden associates with the scalar interferometric potentials of faults and crevices in the ground acting as Prigogyne resonators. While the glowing "fairy lites" that seem to enjoy frequenting ancient sites may or may not be spherical fields of sentient conciouness that have accumulated plasma charges from miscellaneous sources, they may be an essentially similar phenomena, and the theories of Michael Persinger of archetypal phenomena induced by naturally occuring electromagnetic field effects in association with them may manage to be wedged into the mix harmoniously here. After all, as Bearden asserts, the brain itself may be a kind of scalar interferometric device.

Most of all, such a model may conform very closely to what we have been long told by Theosophists and other mystics; the Theosophical seers were known to see the aura or its closely kindred energies in the form of an egg-shaped oval, and the visions of Hildegarde of Bingen show us what we might not only find at the atom level to account for the integrity of atoms in a body, but what we might also find by the same token one level of scale higher in the macrocosm, the same sort of fields, counterparts of the orbital shells of electrons (as may be the similar large spherical energetic phenomena) surrounding the whole being. (We have also long been told the same by the Egyptain concept of spherical fields of human conciousness, stylized as the "ba").

Such fields may yet prove gravitational in nature, just as the observations of Kirlian photography may yet bear this out if perhaps they are scrutinized for their conformation to Einstein's efforts at a unified field theory.

(Depending on the absolute accuracy of this rendition, we may be seeing an atom whose normal particle residents inside the nucleus have re-configured themselves in some way, perhaps by means of a wave-particle transition.)

Likewise, the Theosophists indeed have maintained that the smallest possible division of a conscious being would reduce down to a single, or central, atom of consciousness. One of Annie Besant's books bears the very title, "The Consciousness of the Atom".

Still, the process of identifying these effects on a smaller scale are challenging; while the single atom with a holographic copy of the whole to define an object is elegant, the way in which all of these smaller replicas connect to any correspondent whole is confusing enough to suggest the role of higher dimensions. While this may prove encouraging to certain theories of shapeshifting or transmographication, it still gives one pause for thought.

Nonetheless, it is very striking how elegantly also that certain explanatory models of quantum computers fit this pattern. The mind may be a quantum computer, as well as the body, and these doubles may act as a concerted whole by this means. This model may also explain a great deal of questions about certain things that the body "seems to know".

The fact that this might be a quantum computing system of a gravitational type might also ultimately help explain the means in which the field of human consciousness may collapse as has been suggested here, as well as certain means of attempting to affect or reverse the process.

We are certainly so close to having all of the necessary parts of understanding all of this that the failure of those entrusted with the responsibilities of this science are nearly negligent that such ways of understanding have not been put forward to humanity far more vocally. In spite of our "Enlightened Age" we seem as if to suffer a time when even the faintest speculations of this sort are seemingly frightening to men of standard science.

Perhaps there will come a day when merely exorcising or dispatching lingering disincarnate beings rather than recorporeating them, will be thought of as coldly and callously "sweeping them under the rug" as we might at present consider it when someone we love has been prematurely pronounced dead and nearly buried alive by a methodically impatient practitioner who is "roboticized" to believe they only have six minutes to devote to the pursuit of the restoration of that individual's vital signs. Perhaps some day to fail or refuse to contemplating assisting the departed in the restoration of their physical existence will be found by many to be as they perhaps find distasteful as physician-assisted suicide in the present.

There is of course much more to be said on these subjects, but for now, let us consider this a start. I will, when I am able, return to include on this page whatever possible further assistance I might offer.

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