by Lyall Watson
One of the most accomplished subjects in this area is a Virginia businessman named Robert Monroe who, in 1958, began to have spontaneous out-of-body experiences. During the next years he succeeded in establishing some sort of control and has now written a fascinating account of his techniques and of his terror and confusion in taking the first deliberate steps into what he believes to be an astral plane. [186] Monroe recommends starting by relaxing and then grasping mentally with one hand for an object you know to be beyond your physical reach. "When you reach out in this fashion and feel nothing, push your hand a little farther. Keep pushing gently, as if stretching your arm, until your hand encounters some material object . . . When it does, examine with your sense of touch the physical details of the object. Feel for any cracks, grooves, or unusual details which you will later be able to identify."
Orientation techniques of this kind have a great deal in common with those used to achieve the state of transcendental meditation. Images of climbing a ladder, going up in steam, being sucked down by a whirlpool, passing through an hourglass, or turning inside out are all used to achieve dissociation. Many projectors speak of a "passive will," which sounds much like the "relaxed attention" of meditators. We know that the state of meditation involves an increase in both regularity and amplitude of the alpha rhythm in brain waves. [288] I suspect that the same will be found to be true of all those trying to project themselves.
Charles Tart of the University of California has recently completed a pilot physiological study on Robert Monroe while he claimed to be out-of-body. Electroencephalographic records show that Monroe was not dreaming, nor properly awake, but producing slow alpha wave activity while his body was in a state of semiparalysis. Reading this report, I am reminded of the fact that Russian research indictates that a synchronized production of alpha in both parties is a necessary precondition for telepathic contact between two people. [210] Projection would certainly provide an explanation for many of the observed phenomena of telepathy, but telepathy cannot be involved in the same way as an explanation for the information acquired while apparently out-of-the-body. In another of Tart's experiments, a young woman was able to read and report a five-digit random number on display in an adjoining room which was locked and uninhabited throughout the duration of her test. [264]
The instructions for projecting are so explicit that it is impossible not to put them to the test. I have tried for some time to follow all the suggestions outlined above and succeeded in achieving some very pleasant and deeply relaxed states of contemplation, but have failed so far to experience any kind of real separation. This means nothing. I am quite prepared to concede that I lack the necessary skill and patience. Next time I try it might well work. I hope so, because there is something very appealing about the doctrine of astral projection; not just the notion of free and unrestricted travel, but the scientific satisfaction inherent in finding a key that could open so many as yet ill-defined psychic doors. If telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and hauntings can all be accounted for by an explanation that is based on just one assumption, then this must commend itself to any scientist. A belief in out-of-the-body experience involves only one article of faith -- namely, that there are two of us in each of us, a somatic system and another one; and that the second system is usually attached to the body, but can leave under certain circumstances so that we may sometimes veritably be in two places at one and the same time. An acceptance of this assumption makes it possible to find logical explanations for a wide range of other physical phenomena. Practiced projectors claim that the reality of the body they call astral has been proved and that anyone can demonstrate it for himself. My one spontaneous experience with it predisposes me to believe that this is true, but I have not (and I cannot find evidence that anyone else has either) been able to demonstrate the reality of the second system under controlled conditions and beyond all reasonable doubt. The most we can say at this time is that there is nothing in biology to suggest that an alternative to the body does not exist. In fact, there is much in natural science that very strongly supports the hypothesis. The life field does not fulfill all the requirements of the traditional astral body, because it ends with absolute death, whereas astral bodies by definition are believed to be totally independent of the somatic system. But the one thing the life field does is to provide a tangible introduction to this difficult and insubstantial area.
The most tenuous aspect of the astral body doctrine is the belief implicit in it that this second system continues to exist after the death, and even after the disintegration, of the body. The only empirical evidence so far available comes from a series of tests done years ago in England and in Holland by three completely independent medical men. Dr. R. A. Watters tried to photograph the emerging astral bodies of mice, chickens, and frogs at the moment of death. [42] He built special vacuum chambers, and ones filled with water vapor and oil, and succeeded in getting pictures of cloudlike masses hovering over the animal's body; but all these forms could equally easily have been produced by normal physical means. In The Hague, Dr. Zaalberg VanZelst weighed dying patients and claimed that there was a sudden loss of weight of exactly 69.5 grams at the moment of clinical death. [193] Similar tests in England by Dr. Duncan McDougall came up with the precise Imperial equivalent of 2 3/7 ounces. The correspondence between the findings is remarkable, but knowing what differences of opinion exist about the identification of the precise moment of clinical death, it is difficult to take these experiments at face value. They have not been repeated in recent years, but they should be. A correlation between a definite weight loss and some clearly recognizable event such as the cessation of brain waves would be fascinating.
Many anecdotal observations have been made at deathbeds, and it will surprise nobody to learn that these refer to ghostly clouds and shapes hovering near the deceased, but there is a surprising uniformity of detail in many accounts. The mist is always said to leave the body at the head end, very often in a spiral flow, and then to form into a definite and recognizable body shape that lies horizontally about two feet above the physical body before dissipating. [53] Professional clairvoyants also tell of "spirals of energy" leaving the bodies of the recently dead. One report tells of observing these spirals as long as three days after clinical death. [89] At a military laboratory for physiological research in Leningrad, an instrument similar to those in use for detecting magnetic fields in space has been adapted for detecting Burr's life fields. [240] It can do this successfully at a distance of four meters from the living body and continues to register emission from a clinically dead human body whose brain waves and heartbeat have ceased. In one case, the emission after clinical death was greater than that observed in any normal living body, except for one that at the time was engaged in a demonstration of psychokinesis. [210]
In the biological sense, a clinically dead body is still very much alive. If this were not so, it would not decay. The body continues to metabolize and to emit heat, so there is no reason why it should not continue to sustain a measurable field for as long as any biochemical activity at all takes place, though the chances are that this field will change its character. Is there any possibility that a cohesive field could be sustained after the collection of matter that produced it has been disbanded? There may be.
Burr concluded that his field both determines and is determined by the organism with which it is involved. This reciprocal action fits well with the new quantum mechanics. When it was known only that action in matter produced waves and formed a field, it was impossible to conceive of a wave pattern that could continue to exist for long after the matter that produced it had disappeared. Now that we know that matter itself can be wavelike, the problem no longer exists. My understanding of the theory of matter is rudimentary, but at least it seems clear that the physicists have no theoretical objection to the existence of matter waves in free space. We have absolutely no evidence to suggest that this is how an energy body or a personality survives in the absence of its physical cou
nterpart, but it is important to note that it could do so.
The intangible second system has a biological parallel in the "queen substance" of the honeybee. When this circulates in a hive, the complex community goes about its collective business, but within minutes of its disappearance, the integrated organism loses its direction and becomes a disorganized gibbering idiot. It cases to exist as an organism, but the substance that provided that unity can be carried away in a bottle and kept intact. Eventually it, too, will fall apart, just as I believe that the energy body decays in time. This is pure conjecture on my part, but it seems to make biological sense to assume that the second system's time is as limited as the first. It remains with the somatic system for a while after both clinical and absolute death, but eventually leaves, and when it does, the matter loses life and becomes goth. It is possible that the second system continues to survive, relatively intact for a while into goth, but I suspect that it, too, slowly attenuates and eventually loses its unique pattern. Physically, and biologically I can see no reason why, and no way how, the alternative system can survive indefinitely. I am not using this as an argument against immortality, there may be yet other systems that continue to survive as vehicles for the spirit long after the two I have been considering have decayed. But I think that the second system or etheric substance or astral body or energy double or fluidic counterpart, or whatever you care to call it, must eventually go the way of all flesh.
It seems that despite the fact that the personality is based on and largely determined by biological processes, it does have a certain independence. This is manifest mainly in dreams, which apparently function as a channel for the organization of memories in an area that has yet to be precisely located, but could be apart from the body.
The nature of transcendental experience and the success of practices such as acupuncture support the mystical tradition of dualism in the body. There is no irrefutable scientific evidence for an alternative system to the familiar somatic one, but the discovery of life fields suggests that we have by no means explored all the possibilities.
The prevalence and consistency of out-of-body experiences suggest that separation in space may well be possible. There is nothing in biology that denies this possibility, and much that could be simply and logically explained by the existence of a relatively independent second system.
We know that dissociation within the body and brain is of common occurrence, and it seems that there is no valid reason for setting spatial or temporal limits to the process. The techniques for producing detachment by conscious control create conditions that are very similar to those that occur spontaneously in anesthesia, accidental unconsciousness, and dying. If separation can take place in a living organism, and there is much to suggest that it does, we cannot deny that it could also take place in one that is in the ambivalent state that follows clinical death.
So it is biologically possible for an individual, in some form and at least for a short while, to survive death.
PART THREE
SOUL
In the second volume of his autobiography, Arthur Koestler tells of his imprisonment under sentence of death by Franco's troops in Spain. [151] While in solitary confinement, he had a visionary experience iii which he came to feel that "the 'I' had ceased to exist." He goes on to say that it "is extremely embarrassing to write down a phrase like that when one has read The Meaning of Meaning and nibbled at logical positivism and aims at verbal precision and dislikes nebulous gushings." Like all others who have had experiences of this kind, he finds it impossible to express what has happened in words without debasing it. Rosalind Heywood suggests that all attempts to "communicate the incommunicable" are doomed to failure because our normal senses cannot cope with totally new kinds of information. [116] When Darwin's Beagle appeared in their island channels, the Tierra del Fuegans did not even notice it because their imaginations could not encompass so vast a ship.
The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter believes that we live in a sensory environment totally different from that of preliterate man, simply because we have learned to read. [41] He says that in "shifting from speech to writing, man gave up an ear for an eye, and transferred his interest from spiritual to spatial, from reverential to referential." All inner states are now described as outer perceptions. We say "thereafter" instead of using the logical thenafter ; we use "always" (meaning all ways) when what we really mean is all times ; and we refer to something being "before" (which is in front of) when we mean earlier than .
Our panoply of senses have become subordinated by one of them, by sight. Today it alone is trusted and all truth is expected to conform to observed experience. "I'm from Missouri," said Harry Truman, "show me." We say that "seeing is believing" and that "I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it," but it seems to have escaped our notice that this emphasis on one kind of sensory experience could also mean that "I wouldn't have seen it if I hadn't believed it."
The eye is an extraordinary organ. It isolates particular things and extracts them from a total situation. We discover depth and perspective by touch and experience -- and then marry these sensations to sight. Things are programmed into our mental computers so that they make sense to us in the future, purely on the basis of our experience with these things in the past. A pygmy from the dense forests of the Ituri, where it is never possible to see very far, is astonished by the tiny antelope he sees in the distance when taken out onto the plain for the first time. In the perpetual gloom of the forest floor, sound is more important than sight, and the pygmy's experience is arranged by a different kind of sense life. His is a separate reality. Sight has a natural bias toward detachment and pinpoint location. We visual creatures even hear with our eyes -- we listen to music, while the multi-sensory pygmy merges with it. The ear accepts information from all directions simultaneously, so better listeners than we can wrap themselves in their environment more easily.
Simply because we read a lot, which means employing only one sense -- and that one in a highly restricted way -- we have destroyed the harmonic orchestration of our senses. We have programmed ourselves in a way that might make it totally impossible for us to respond to anything that wasn't built on the same bias. An astronaut confronted with a totally new life form, something really odd, might not be able to experience it at all. We solve all our perceptual problems in a mental computer programmed both by evolutionary conditioning and by our own personal experience of the world. This old program could well be inappropriate and prove to be inadequate when it came to solving a new problem posed by a completely different kind of sensory experience.
Under the dictatorship of the eye, all information is translated into a visual code. Inner experiences are expected to conform to outer perceptions. If they fail to correspond, we dismiss them as hallucination. Anything that cannot be clearly seen has not been sensed; it is nonsense. Science insists on seeing how things work, it demands "observations" -- visual experiences encoded in verbal reports. But what can we do with sensations that avoid easy visual description, that evade verbal classification?
Imagine a child who rises at dawn and goes out to track rabbits through the dew; smells the damp of fresh patches of bone-white mushrooms; tastes the bloom on grapes picked cool and straight from the vine; meets two of his best friends and runs shouting down the hill to swim in a river still milky with melted snow from the mountains; lies drying in the sun on the rough bark of an old tree trunk and listens to the sound of a distant bell. He comes home and Mother wants to know where he has been. "Out." And what has he been doing? "Nothing." When forced to give some adequate reply, he might say swimming, but this answer is acceptable only to the parent. The child knows how inadequate words are for describing any total sensory experience.
In our attempts to come to terms with unusual experiences, we run into the same kind of difficulty. We describe them as visionary, putting the emphasis back on the eyes, when sight may have had nothing whatsoever to do with the experience. We need a new approach, new attit
udes, and an entirely new vocabulary, but we have none of these things.
This distresses me. I have worked long enough within the scientific discipline to know its limitations, but I still believe that there is value in its method. I think that there are meaningful answers to be found in totally nonscientific approaches to problems like these of life and death, but I believe that any workable solution that is going to mean something to large numbers of people in our society will have to be more or less firmly based on established scientific tradition. The hard science of physics has broken through the barrier of weights and measures into the magic world of black holes and antimatter. I believe that biology is headed in the same direction.