I was just reminded of GM Glaskins book "Windows of the Mind".  Glaskin developed a technique which he called the "Christos Experience".

It involved assisted projection.  The subject would lay down and get comfortable and relaxed.  Assistants would then massage his head and feet.  A guide would give suggestions of expanding and shrinking, of rocking and floating, and then expanding into a big balloon and floating over the house.  In most cases the subject experienced a highly vivid waking dream.  He was isntructed to float up high into the sky and then back down to earth.  At this point he usually described what was assumed to be a vivid past-life experience.

"Windows of the Mind" is quite hard to get hold of now, but second-hand copies can still be found:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Mind-Experience-G-M-Glaskin/dp/0907061818
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Door-Eternity-Proving-Christos-Experience/dp/0704530023

This guy seems to have corroborated Glaskins work:

http://www.alastairmcintosh.com/articles/1979_psychoenergetic.htm

Thought some members might be interested in giving it a try...!   

Thanks, excellent job Don!

In general I quite like scientists and their discoveries, but it really pisses me off when they lose their objectivity and start stating that they have proven this or disproven that, when they haven't even skimmed the surface.

Colourful language but bang on the money.  In fact good post.

At worst Blanke is barking up the wrong tree.  At best he has discovered a way of ejecting people out of their bodies.  In either case there is absolutely nothing in his results to suggest "it's is all in the mind".

Actually Blanke has done a number of studies regarding OBEs, but it's a shame his mindset seems to be to debunk rather than to enlighten.

That's how it seems, I could be wrong of course.... 

if obe is in the brain then the physical world is in your brain also

Wel conventional quantum mechanics teaches us that nothing exists until it is observed.  So without some type of consciousness, the universe does not exist.  Well that's what science teaches us.....  Strange these scientists eh?

Thanks Tvos, codolences on your loss, but I know you passionately view it as a passing not an ending.  I look forward to reading your publication.  Please let us know on this board when it is ready.

Also I do agree with you that scientists have it a bit wrong.  The cold light of reason becomes the warm glow of experience, when we actually witness a validation which defies all science and all scientists.

Yes lily moonsong, you are absolutely correct.

The practice of reducing brain activity to absolute zero (zero EEG and zero blood supply) for several minutes whilst surgery is performed is a normal medical procedure.  It is done routinely for certain brain surgeries. There are numereous cases of people undergoing this procedure and then accurately reporting what took place whilst their EEG was flat.  Clearly this is impossible to explain using the conventional assumption that the "mind" is generated by neural activity in the brain.  In fact the only real conclusion to be drawn is that the mind can operate independently of the brain.  It's also pretty difficult to explain what sensory apparatus was used to "see" and "hear" during these experiences.

There are many such examples, and I still haven't heard a credible conventional explanation.  Usually, critics claim that the patient "heard" something whilst he was coming out of anaesthesia and somehow his mind translated what he heard into the experience of having an OBE.  But this doesn't add up.  Patients report incidents, conversations, tools used, the appearance of people in the room and adjoining corridors and so on.  These things happened whilst they were flatlined NOT whilst they were coming out of anaesthesia.  There is no way they could know this information, using conventional explanations.

Alternatively of course, critics claim that these experiences didn't happen the way they were described.  They must have been exaggerated or inaccurately reported.  Pathetic.  It goes without saying that the same criticism is not levelled against Blanke.

Check out these links

http://www.near-death.com/
http://www.nderf.org/

The article is very flawed.

Olaf Blanke's work with one or two epileptic subjects, whilst interesting, is of no more scientific value than you or me describing our own out of body experiences. It was performed on a neurologically abnormal patient, without any experimental protocol (making it anecdotal), has not been peer-reviewed, has not been replicated by others, and we only have his word that it actually happened....

Hey look if they are going to play the "honesty" card against people who describe real out of body experiences, they should expect the "honesty" card to be played back in return!

To complicate matters further, other scientists have reported inducing OBE like sensations by stimulating different parts of the brain (eg the sylvian fissure - Penfield), again this work has not been replicated.  Hence scientifically, their work is interesting, but not definitive.

Do a search on Blanke on this board, and/or read my critique:

http://www.astralpulse.com/forums/welcome_to_obe_discussions/outofbody_experience_clues_may_hide_in_mind-t22481.0.html;msg191577#msg191577

Or read the critiques of others:

http://www.neuralgourmet.com/2007/03/06/near_death_experience_reaction

I'm not disrespecting scientific work.  It's a good thing, but we have to make correct judgements on what the research actually means.  Generally, it does not mean that "it's all in the head".  Unfortunately that is the way it is usually represented, or mis-represented to be more precise.  Don't take my word for it, read Dr Pim Van Lommel's rebuttal of Michael Shermer mis-representation of his scientific findings:

http://www.nderf.org/vonlommel_skeptic_response.htm

It's a common idea in "occultism", that astral thought forms can be constructed, energised, and instructed to perform tasks.  I seem to remember authors like J. H. Brennan and Ophiel talking about this sort of thing, also the old theosophists such as C W Leadbeater used to talk about this too.  You'll have to make up your own mind whether this is true or not, and whether you believe these thought forms can interact with the physical plane.  But the idea is well known. 

It is folk lore (perhaps apocryphal) that Charles Dickens used to be occasionally (mildly) annoyed by thought forms of characters from his own books, which took on a kind of life of their own and used to wander around his house.  As the theory goes, thought is form, so a very imaginative author who can clearly visualise the characters in his stories, actually creates "real" entities in the astral which others can "see" if they have the necessary sensitivity.  As I say, you need to make your own mind up about this, but it's a well known idea.  Just like our own "Astral Pulse island" is a creation of the members on this board.

What matters is how clearly you imagine the scene you project into.  By imagining it, you create the environment, so it doesn't matter if it's a picture hanging there or an image projected on the wall.  However, if it's a picture which has been hanging there for some time, then probably it is already strongly imprinted in the astral because you see it every day, so it already has a real existence. If it's a new image, then it won't be so strongly imprinted and so a little harder to project into.... (imo).

Hmmm

Yes interception, I agree with most of what you said, these machines would need an evolutionary mechanism, which means something similar to DNA, a mutation mechanism, which changes this artificial DNA, a life death cycle, with "superior" mutations more inclined to life than death etc etc.  In short something very similar to what humans (and all physical life forms) have. 

But this whole mechanism would have to be engineered by humans, for it to be called "AI", rather than just "I".  And even then the distinction is blurred.  So yes all of this is possible.  But this has not been done as yet, and although we have computer programs which can play chess, and appear "intelligent" this is not "intelligence"; it's simply a machine navigating a fixed algorithm, which a human invented and programmed.  There is no artificial intelligence here, beyond that which was used by the human creator, no matter how sophisticated the algorithm acts or behaves.

So yes I agree totally that we would need something like artificial DNA to create "AI".  But just how do you slip self-awareness (a soul?) into this mechanism?  How does that get in there?!!!!

Yeh we can make a carbon nanotube which is extremely thin, strong and light. They're even talking about making super-strong hair-width cables out of nanotubes and lowering these from a geo-stationary satellite down to the earth to form a "ladder" between earth and space.  The carbon filament will be strong enough to lift an elevator all the way up into space.  fantastic idea and quite realistic.

But there's a huge world of difference between a hollow carbon filament and a nano-bot.  The nano-bot needs to have an engine to propel it and it needs to have a computer program built into it, to guide it.  It also needs to have a delivery mechanism for delivering it's payload.  They are making rudimentary progress with propulsion mechanisms and no progress on the built-in program.  A simple nano filament does not have any of these.  It's just a strand, like a strand of hair.  We are still a long way off with  nano-bots I'm afraid....

All of this stuff, carbon nanotubes, nanobots and the like were discussed in a recent excellent BBC television documentary called "Visions of the Future":

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/visions-future.shtml

You can buy the series on DVD.  It was excellent and I'd recommend it.  They are just repeating the series on BBC4; the 3rd part is airing on Friday morning this week at 1:10am UK time.  Worth watching if you can.

But we are stil a long long way from creating working nono-bots....

Consciousness is something that exists in all things in varying levels. It has/does and always will be present in a computer

I assume this is opinion, rather than scientific fact?  There is no evidence to back this up.  I personally also suspect that consciousness possibly exists in everything in some form or other, even in stones and pebbles.  But then if computers have "consciousness" it's at the same level as a stone or pebble, and has nothing to do with how artfully it is designed or how cleverly it's program is written.  Consciousness is not created by logic circuitry.  But that's just my opinion.  I suspect that the only thing that actually truly exists in fact IS "consciousness" and the "real world" is created by consciousness, rather than the other way round, ie I don't think that consciousness is generated by the activities of neurons firing in the brain.  Rather it's the other way round.  But I have absolutely no proof of this...  That's why I'm very skeptical about us ever creating AI.

btw, nanotechnology is still just a pipe dream.  They are still working on the very simple propulsion engines required to push these things around our blood stream.  There is absolutely no progress to date on constructing a functioning nano-bot.  None whatsoever, but it's an idea which has captured the imagination.  It doesn't exist as yet.  I'm not saying it won't exist, but we're still a long way off...

Hey Jeni, nice validations.  I hope things turned up for you since those days in 2005...!

hi imp

My gut instinct is to agree with every word you said. (Good post).  But my scientific mind can not dismiss the possibility that sadly, we are just machines.

Who says we have to have a soul?  What you are saying is that you believe consciousness (or intelligence) is a spiritual thing and therefore it will never be created by scientific means, ever.  This is just your "belief" (in a soul). Others will not share this belief in a soul and therefore will not agree with your conclusions.

We can not dismiss the possibility that we may in fact just be machines, created by an evolutionary mechanism that has played out over the past 4 billion years, evolving us into entities that "feel" and are "self-aware".  It's quite possible that we are nothing more than just genes, proteins and nerve impulses. 

It boils down to whether you think consciousness is a physical or spiritual thing.

However what i would say with certainty is that in the event that we are just machines, we are about as close to creating truly self-aware AI as an insect is to understanding the theory of relativity.  That's because i would compare our understanding of consciousness to an insect's understanding of the theory of relativity.   This is what most people don't realise.  There is too much Terminator and Start Trek hype around, fooling people into false hope about AI and raising expectations about a million times higher than they should be.

We are just no where near...... no where......

Agreed.  The only herbs which might induce AP are actually life-threating (poisonous) which is why they might conceivably work.  Not recommended:

http://www.llewellynencyclopedia.com/article/1941