The “Out of Body Experience“, or OBE, is one of the most mind boggling research questions. Awarded filmmaker Veysi Yildirim starts a crowdfunding action (27.000 euros needed) to make a science and empirically based documentary about this phenomenon.

(Image in blogtitle: www.in5d.com)

Over 30 stories were collected on video of people that experienced or witnessed such inexplicable events. For science these experiences need to fulfill a series of criteria in order to be understood.

• Verifiable. In case of the experiences lived by people it is of course difficult to verify their stories. They experience a physical death situation for a certain period of time. Often this time is enough to declare them diseased by doctors. To everyone´s surprise the corpse comes back to live without any residues of this death experience. The person tells then a story of leaving the physical body and being able to observe and remember the environment, including the conversations and presence of people, even in adjacent rooms. People can even travel through these walls. Verification comes from the incredible testimonials of people in those stories that have been observed, listened to, smelled, etc. They are often flabbergasted about the testimonial. And these people are often highly educated people such as the medical staff present.
  • Scientifically it does not seem possible to observe and memorize events without the presence of a living body that carries the sensoring properties, the neurotransmitters and brains for the interpretation and memorization of that what has been observed. How is this possible without the presence of a body?
• Reproducible. Some people are known to have the ability to do the OBE voluntarily. Other people do it with the help of substances. So to some extend it is reproducible and this is necessary to be able to study the phenomenon and maybe come to an understanding of it.
• Explicable. And here comes the issue. We cannot explain it. There is enough proof about its existence and even part of its working. But we cannot explain it. In our current understanding of our sensory capabilities we need a physical living basis, a body, equipped with the right sensory facilities in order to be able to hear, see, smell, observe consciously, interpret and memorize our observations. The body may be there, but it is at a distance and without the functional signs of being alive. Maybe it is, in a dormant (dream), hallucinatory or unknown state, but this does not explain its capacity to observe at a distance even across rooms.

In addition, people who experience such happening tend to come back to “normal” life with their conscience altered. They look at reality in a different way, with a deeper trust in life, no fear for death, and relieved of their sense of materialism. So, even if we manage to clarify scientifically the mechanics of OBE, this change of awareness and conscience is much more difficult to explain. It seems that we need to accept that there is an energetic life form or experience connected to our physical body, a spirit, that has it own energetic resonance. A resonance that has to do with the way we sense and interpret reality and that this sensing can be altered. Many people experience such sudden altering of their conscience in their lives due to intense experiences but without OBE. But this was never associated to the idea of a spirit as an integrated entity into one’s existence.

So proof and understanding of such spirit has major implications on the way we understand life as whole. It would open up a totally new field of research around the relationship between such spirit and the physical body, the properties of such spirit in time and space, its impact on our behavior, etc.

So far the element of the existence of a spirit has been confined to the world of religious and paranormal beliefs. Bringing it into our scientific reality would have also implications on the way we look at the complexity of life in general and of us as self conscious human beings specifically. Questions arise if such spiritual dimensions are generalized for all living beings, subject to evolution or that it has its own rules? Also interesting is the development of our understanding how this dimension works if it exists without the support of physical bodies. Or does it make use of a broader spectrum of the physical living reality? If so, what would be the relationship, how is it orchestrated as a bigger possible entity to which we are all related?

All this right now is speculation, open questions without concrete answers. The multidimensional options of life have found little scientific support despite some curious riddles that hardly find answers through the physical interpretation of life alone. As STIR (Transformation, Indexation and Research foundation of what the human being really is and how to organize ourselves for our sustainable evolution) this is very relevant and we like to keep an open mind. Especially the change of conscience of people, both within their normal lifetimes through specific (painful) events, through OBE or NDE (Near Death Experience), is relevant for achieving a next phase for humankind in our evolution, away from our (self)destructive presence in our current times.

This may also help people with suicidal thoughts or with difficulties to deal with old traumas that may be helped with the peaceful mind-shift related to OBE and related research.