In his autobiography Rabbi Lionel Blue talked of his own “out of body experience”: he experienced rising out of his own body and coming to rest under the ceiling where he looked down upon the other people present in the room. If I remember correctly he described feeling compassion for these people.
This is a very common experience and, I believe, an increasingly common one. It is a sort of hallucination or dream and is easily interpretable: Lionel Blue is a man of the intellect. That is, he does not use his senses to gain an understanding of the world. Rather he uses reason and logic and reads widely and analyses all he reads and experiences. Leaving the body in the dream is showing him abandoning his senses in favour of pure intellect. Rising to the ceiling is, as it were, what people do who take to the intellect: they think the intellect is superior and raises them above those who do not use the intellect exclusively in this way. (Men e.g. have traditionally patronised women who, unlike themselves, use intuition and their senses and can appear quite irrational at times. This irrationality is seen as weak-minded and is tolerated with condescending amusement.) Further, having gained this supposed superiority of the intellect, he looks down, as the experience shows, on those beings who remain in their bodies and feels compassion for them. This compassion, in other words, is a product of his feelings of superiority.
The dream does not comment on the rightness or otherwise of this behaviour directly but further interpretation makes the situation clear: Lionel Blue is troubled throughout his life about human nature, about the existence or otherwise of God — in total he is troubled by his own inability to grasp reality. (In fact, although admittedly his homosexuality was a contributing factor, his anxieties about the world and how it worked reached such a pitch that he had a nervous breakdown whose effects lasted decades.) It is quite clear that this free-floating spirit, detached from the body CANNOT grasp reality. You need to be IN your body, FULLY in touch with your senses, to achieve this.
Lionel Blue’s problem which caused the out of body experience is, as I said, an increasingly common one. In our day and age the intellect, reason and logic, become ever more elevated. Even many women are now abandoning their larger mind in favour of mere intellect. The results for such people are likely to be anxiety and mental health problems of all kinds.
Interesting.
I don’t see compassion in that way, pity, yes, but not compassion. In compassion, you would recognize your self in the other person without the feeling of superiority, with a sense of respect for their state. It’s a selfless appreciation for the integrity of the state of being - as is.
In pity, you’d also emphasize, but at the same time, distinguish yourself apart in being grateful that you are NOT that person, or are not in that state. In compassion, there is merging of two selves (or one self disappearing); in pity, there is an identification that is followed by distinction (as is also with envy), in other words, it is an act of comparison, (or an act of judgment against or in contrast to some thing).
Your particular definition of comapssion is irrelevant here. I was talking about Lionel Blue and used the word in accordance with his usage in his book.
It’s all very well making intellectual definitions of words, but that can really get in the way of mutual understanding. One is really better to try and understand the meaning of a word IN CONTEXT, i.e. as it is being used “at the moment”, by whoever you are trying to come to a mutual understanding with or trying to communicate with. This, of course, is far more difficult and requires a great deal more of various abilities, but the rewards in terms of understanding other people are very high. Further, there are often subtleties in the meanings of words as used by people which are indefinable.
You’ve just displayed the problem with people who commonly live “out of their bodies”: I could think up a few dozen other equally probable, equally possible, reasons for “out of body experiences” (OOBEs). However, the difference between you and me is that because you are “out of your body” you have no way of distinguishing one from another, of telling which one is correct, while I live IN my body and therefore CAN tell which one is correct.
I agree with this distinction. I Think there has been a strong trend away from the body, and the monotheisms have passed this on to modern reasonists. Suddenly the various possibilities become as real as what is. And various explanations can be true, since the context is less relevent to the transcendent mind.
It’s good you put it in quotes, here, since one need not ever have a formal OOB experience to be disconnected from one’s body.
And you were able to discern this by reading two of my posts?
Yes, evidently you live in so darkly and deeply in your head, you think it’s unnecessary to define your jargon so that lesser minds, like myself, or any minds for that matter, may comprehend you. What exactly do you mean by - live in/out of your body? Do you mean something like introvert/extrovert, or rational/intuitive?
Don’t declare, demonstrate, why is your theory more plausible than mine?
From my experience and research, perception doesn’t respond to our philosophical persuasions, rather, it responds to neurology. Lionel was probably having an anxiety attack, a nervous breakdown, his brain short circuited, producing the hallucination. These things usually have neurological causes, rather than psychological ones.
If you’re reading about other peoples experiences, then you’re employing indirect empiricism, if you’re analyzing your own experiences, then you’re employing direct empiricism. It seems “Lionel Blue” is a man of the senses.
Really not the case at all. And even scientists who Think that it is merely a hallucination do not attribute all or even most OOBs to a lack of oxygen in the brain. What you have said here Irrelius is actually a delusion on your part. You read this somewhere or Heard it and because for you it with physicalism, it became the way you dismiss the phenomenon, but it has Little scientific grounding, including the ‘motivation’ you attribute.
Speaking of dismissal when he first interviewed doctors they denied the phenomenon. Note: not a specific interpretation of it, but that nearly no one and none of their patients had these experiences. It turns out they were really significantly incorrect on this very basic fact.
OOBs can be triggered by all sorts of phenomena, including ones that increase oxygen to the brain and have nothing to do with near Death experiences.
I only wanted to emphasize that the soup of consciousness contains the physical ingredient as well as the mental/environmental. The desire for supernatural explanations for natural experiences is overwhelming and, probably, natural.
Once again, let me clarify my error. I stated that OBEs are a matter of lack of oxygen to the brain when I meant NDEs in general. I realize that OBEs can occur in states of mind other than near death. That the NDEs may be caused by lack of oxygen to the brain does not mean they can’t be portals to spiritual experiences. Psysicality is not adverse to spirituality except in Cartesian dualism.
These issues cannot undestood properly somewhere from the middle. One has to go through the complete ontology.
In a nutshell, this is the incresing order of the concentration-
Normal mental state - dreams - lucid dreams - hallucination/visions - OBE - Tunnel experience - NDE - Death.
These are not rare phenomena as each and every person goes through this upto the end at the time of death. But, in general, we can experience only upto lucid dreams from this chain.
But, sometimes, and for different and extraordinary reasons, some of us may experience beyond that, may come back to normal state and remember that too.
Different people may explain these phenomena differently, but these things use to happen.
Having said that, i am 100% certain of the fact that if anybody claims that he can teach you OBE, as there are many on the net claming so, he is nothing but a con, because there is altogether different way to engage in these things.
Right now, Schumacher is almost there, somewhere between NDE and death. And, being there for that much time, odds are in the favour that he may have the remembrance of something that kind, if he would ever come to senses.
Mr Blue is suffering from an unexamined, and false assumption that “HE” is not constituted by his body, but think that he has an immortal soul which is separable.
In the event of a dream state he immediately allies his assumption to re-inforce his personal prejudice, and interprets his experience as a OIBE.
But this assumption is so ridiculous as to be risible.
The notion that you can think, feel, and maintain aspects of personality without the brain is ludicrous, as it is the idea of the immortal soul that suggests the experience to him.
“Out of Body Experience” is simply a contradiction in terms. Experience is what the body does, without it there is nobody to experience anything.
All the evidence point to the fact that the maintenance of the personality is the entire responsibility of the brain and associated nervous tissues. Damage to the brain via injury, surgery, drugs and illness, range the person in increasingly predictable ways, as neuroscience breaks new ground in it’s understanding of cerebral function.
This is a book written on the subject by a Dutch Cardiologist who did extensive surverys in many countries, coupled with interviews - and then also bringing in the work of other researchers. It is a fairly common experience, though I cannot remember the percentages of people who have them. amazon.com/Consciousness-Bey … 741&sr=1-1
