Monroe Institute Research Files: Out-of-Body Experience

den fall of systolic blood pressure lasting seven seconds, this being roughly equivalent to Monroe's estimated length of his OBE. There was REM activity of an ambiguous nature during this period. The second OBE was reported after a period of EEG shifting between stage 1 and stage 2 sleep. This second OBE's exact duration is un known, but appears to have been accompanied by a similar stage 1 pattern, and only two instances of isolated REM activity near the end. No clear-cut cardiac changes were seen on the plethysmographic recording. Monroe reported having used a different technique for pro ducing the OBE this second time. In general, then, Monroe's OBEs seem to occur in conjunction with a prolonged, deliberately produced hypnagogic state (stage 1 EEG). Such prolonged states are not normally seen in the laboratory. The preponderance of theta rhythms and the occasional slowed alpha show an intriguing parallel with EEG states reported for advanced Zen masters during meditation (Kasamatsu, 1966). Modern EEG feedback techniques have shown that subjects can learn to produce increased alpha rhythm, and to slow the frequency of their alpha CHARLES T. TART 91 rhythm. If I were still actively researching this area, I would try training people to produce theta and slowed alpha rhythms, control led drowsiness, as it were, and see if this helped them have OBEs. This is the sort of thing that Monroe worked on developing with his HemiSync procedures at the Monroe Institute, which Monroe often conceptualized as putting the body to sleep while keeping the mind awake. While I have been very intrigued and impressed with some of these results, I have not followed them closely enough to give a professional analysis of them, though reports have been circulated privately (F. H. Atwater and J. Owens, personal communication, 1995). Out-of-Body Experiences: Sixth Study The final OBE study I carried out in 1970 was like the first one in 1957, an attempt to use hypnosis to produce OBEs, but on a much more sophisticated level. I had done hypnosis research for more than a decade by this time, especially investigating the use of posthypnotic suggestion to influence the content and process of nocturnal, stage 1-REM dreaming. I had a small group of highly selected and trained participants at the University of California at Davis (Tart and Dick, 1970), all in the upper 10% of hypnotic susceptibility. Besides being adept at having their nocturnal dreams influenced posthypnotically, they had explored deep hypnotic states and were quite comfortable in the laboratory. About seven of the participants had individual hypnotic sessions where they reached very deep hypnotic states, confirmed by their self-reports of hypnotic depth (Tart, 1970, 1972a, 1979). They then received a suggestion that, while the hypnotist remained quiet for 10 minutes so as to not disturb them or keep them connected to his or her body, their consciousness would leave their physical body and cross the hall into a second, locked laboratory room where some spe cial target materials were on a table. They were to observe these materials carefully; then they could wander about out of body at will for a while, then return and report on their OBE to the experimenter, one of my graduate student assistants. All the participants reported vivid OBEs that seemed like real ex periences to them. They included journeys to places they knew, like downtown Davis, that were vividly experienced, as well as vivid ex periences of journeying to the target room. None of their reports of 92 JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES what they saw on the target table bore any clear resemblance to the targets. A formal analysis was not worth the trouble. Conclusion So what is an OBE? Does the mind or soul really leave the body and go somewhere else, "out," or is the OBE just a special altered state of consciousness that is basically hallucinatory in nature? That is, is the feeling and conviction that you are elsewhere than your physical body's location an illusion? After decades of reflection on the results of my own and others' research (Alvarado, 1982a, 1982b, 1984, 1986, 1989; Blackmore, 1984, 1994; Gabbard and Twemlow, 1984; Gackenbach, 1991; Green, 1968; Grosso, 1976; Irwin, 1985, 1988; Krippner, 1994; McCreery and Claridge, 1995; Morris, 1974; Osis and McCormick, 1980; Osis and Mitchell, 1977; Palmer, 1994; Palmer and Vassar, 1974; Rogo, 1978; Stanford, 1987; Walsh, 1989), particularly in the light of my studies on the nature of consciousness and altered states, I have a more complex view of OBEs that includes both of these possibilities at different times and more. I believe that in some OBEs, the mind may, at least partially, really be located elsewhere than the physical body; this may have been the case with Miss Z. At the opposite extreme, as with my virtuoso hyp notic subjects whose experience was vivid and perfectly real to them but whose perception of the target room was only illusory, I believe an OBE can be a simulation of being out of the body, with the mind as much "in" the physical body as it ever is. In between these two extremes, I believe we can have OBEs that are basically a simulation of being out, but which are informed by information gathered by ESP such that the simulation of the OBE location is accurate and veridi cal. This is a messy situation in some ways, especially because all three of these types of OBEs may seem experientially identical to the person having them, at least at rough levels of description. While I would prefer reality to fall into simple, clear cut categories, I have learned in life that reality is often complex. Simulation of Reality We all have a model, a theory, about the nature of consciousness and of the world, although it is usually implicit, so that we do not CHARLES T. TART 93 consciously know we hold a theory. The theory is that space and time are real and pretty much what they seem to be and that things have a definite location in time and space; that consciousness is "in" the head, and that from that spatial position we directly perceive the outside world through our physical senses. As a working model, this theory works quite well most of the time: if someone throws a rock toward you, for example, an automated part of this model that has been called the ecological self (Neisser, 1988) instantly calculates the trajectory of the rock, compares it to where you are, and makes you duck if the trajectory intersects your position. In terms of biological survival, it is usually quite useful to identify psychologically with this ecological self and give very high priority to protecting your physical body. Indeed, it is very difficult not to identify automatically with this ecological self process. Looking at this in more detail, we now know, through decades of psychological and neurophysiological research, that this naive view of perception-that consciousness just perceives the external world in a straightforward way-is quite inadequate. Almost all perception is really a kind of rapid, implicit, and automated thinking, a set of judgments and analyses about what is happening and its relevance to you. When something moves in the periphery of your visual field, for example, you will generally actually see a threatening person ducking behind a tree, rather than experience an ambiguous move ment in the unfocused part of your visual field, leading to a thought of "What might it be?," leading to searches of memory for possible candidates that show some fit to the ambiguous perceptual data available, leading to a conclusion that a threatening person ducking behind a tree has a 45 percent chance of fitting the perceptual data while, for example, a branch blowing in the wind has only a 30 per cent chance of fitting, and so on, so that it would probably be best to get ready for action. If it really was a threatening figure, the per son who sees it that way instantly has a better chance of survival by reacting faster than the one who goes through a long sequential analysis process. It is as if there is a distinct evolutionary advantage for the organism that has instant readiness to fight or flee even at the price of some false alarms, compared to the organism that takes too long to get ready to flee or fight. It is useful, therefore, to see our ordinary consciousness as a proc ess that creates an ongoing, dynamic simulation of reality, a world model, an inner theater of the mind, a biopsychological virtual reality (Tart, 1991, 1993), "in" which consciousness dwells. The most obvious 94 JOURNAL OF NEAR-DEATH STUDIES example of this process is the nocturnal dream. There we live in a complete world, set in dimensions of space and time, with actors, plots, and an environment. Indeed, most of the brain mechanisms that construct the dream world are probably by and large the same mechanisms that construct our waking world with the very important difference that in the waking state this world simulation process must constantly deal with sensory input in a way that protects us and furthers our ends. Thus I have defined the reality we ordinarily live in as consensus reality (Tart, 1973), to remind us that, even though we implicitly think we perceive reality as it is, it is actually a complex construction, strongly determined by the social consensus of our particular society about what is important and our own psy chodynamics and conditioning. Applying this perspective to the study of OBEs and NDEs, we should first realize that the ordinary feeling that we are "in" our bodies (usually our heads), is a construction, a world simulation, that happens to be the optimal way to ensure survival most of the time, but that it is not necessarily true in any ultimate sense. It is helpful to remember that, just as a person using a high quality computer generated virtual reality simulator forgets where his or her physical body actually is, and becomes experientially located "in" the com puter-generated world, it might be that our "souls" are actually lo cated on some other planet, but we are so immersed in the biopsychological virtual reality our brains generate, and to which we are telepathically and psychokinetically connected (Tart, 1993), that we think we are here in our bodies. This far-fetched analogy helps to remind us that the experience of where we are is not a simple matter of just perceiving reality as it is. A Scientific Model of Mind That Opens to Noetic Knowledge Those who have had OBEs and NDEs know, on some very deep level, that mind or soul is something more than your physical body. The automatic psychological identification of who you are with the physical body, with the simulation constructed by the ecological self, is a very useful working tool, but not the final answer. As I noted at the beginning of this paper, integrating this experiential know ledge with your everyday self in the everyday world is not always easy, especially when the dominant climate of scientism constantly CHARLES T. TART 95 tells you that your deeper knowledge is wrong and that you are crazy to take it seriously. My small contribution toward integration is the message that, us ing the best of scientific method rather than scientism, looking fac tually at all the data rather than just what fits into a philosophy of physicalism, the facts of reality require a model or theory of who we are and what reality is that takes OBEs and NDEs and noetic knowl edge seriously. You are not deluded or crazy to try to integrate your NDE knowledge with the rest of your life. You are engaged in a real and important process!