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This is a very unpopular idea, but I'll say it anyway because it's relevant: With a modest amount of meditation practice you can cause your awareness to exit y
by duncancarroll 8y ago
This is a very unpopular idea, but I'll say it anyway because it's relevant: With a modest amount of meditation practice you can cause your awareness to exit your body. I say this from personal experience but it's also in the yoga texts.
Typically you come back, but if not, it's called yogic suicide. That's why a lot of monks are burned "alive" in a meditative posture--they're not actually in there being roasted, they hit the eject button.
It's a much nicer way to go out than many alternatives, and once it becomes more common knowledge I'm sure we'll see much more of it.
Sadly even the idea tends to make people angry, esp. if they have invested in a worldview where the brain is the sole originator of consciousness, death is the end, etc, even though all they have to do is try it for themselves, though for some reason most don't. Just don't tell me it's a hallucination until you've done it successfully yourself. I'll say I was certainly surprised. It is like sticking your finger into an electrical socket and then being shot out of a cannon out the top of your head into another world.
If you're interested look it up, it's not nearly as hard to do as people make it out to be, though I still can't do it exactly on command, I am getting better at it with practice. I don't claim to know everything about it, but the world you enter has some strange properties and its not as simple as
just waltzing around as a disembodied spirit with x-ray vision or something. There's some overlap of the objective world and this other world which is not as rigidly objective as this one. Future researchers will figure it out I'm sure. It's a fascinating frontier of human knowledge, and I will say as far as hacks go, hacking your consciousness is a pretty good one.
<Holds up flame shield>
- 908087 8y agoHow long should one charge their energy crystals for before attempting this?
- bellerose 8y ago> Just don't tell me it's a hallucination until you've done it successfully yourself. I cannot resist, I've done meditation with never performing the out of body experience and I've read about it in great detail. I would still think the possibility of it all being a hallucination and even if performed with thinking it was definitely real. Hallucinations can be so real that they're impossible to disprove. Consciousness might not even be real in the sense that most people think about it as because reality tends to be deterministic with the impossibility to prove otherwise.
- duncancarroll 8y agoThat's partly why I suggested people try it for themselves, because while I agree my personal subjective experience doesn't qualify as evidence one way or another for it being real / not real, it's much harder to dismiss once you've had it happen. FWIW, this wasn't actually my goal when I started meditating, it just happened after some months of regular meditation, and I had to piece together what it was from limited information. As you can see from the number of downvotes, there's still a strong prejudice against even the suggestion that these are valid experiences with potential utility. So it goes!
- bellerose 8y agoI don't doubt your experience or even the countless others who have had it happen and shared online. I just find it possible to be a trigger-able hallucination. Similar to what is possible with drugs. It's impossible to ever know if an out of body experience is real or a hallucination. I do find it interesting though. I think meditation is a healthy process to keep in one's arsenal of activities.
- duncancarroll 8y agoI appreciate your open-mindedness. The only point I would make in reply is that is is possible to know if it's real or a hallucination, it just hasn't been thoroughly tested. It is possible to design an experiment to test the extent to which our normal world and this seemingly other space might intersect. It would also be possible, though ethically controversial, to test whether or not a person in an OBE state could reliably alternate between being pronounced dead, and then resuscitated. It would be a substantial finding to learn that someone could will themselves to both "die" and also to be revived. What is certain is that as meditation becomes more popular these experiences will become more common and no longer ridiculed. We will then learn more by virtue of level-headed people sharing information about them. Who knows what we'll find?
- WaltPurvis 8y agoI don't understand why this comment is being downvoted. I found it quite interesting and it is at least as substantive and relevant as a dozen-plus other, non-downvoted comments on this post.
- duncancarroll 8y agoThanks. It's just a sticky subject matter, intellectually, so people feel better dismissing all of it. "Men show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they think laughable." -Goethe The irony for me is that I too used to think it was all nonsense, until I started doing the meditation. It's much harder to dismiss when you start to experience a litany of things you can't explain.