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Or another theory could be NDE's during traumas and mind split OBE's during physical activities do not involve any type of sleep or sleep paralysis. Maybe if a person could form the ability to induce an OBE while the physical body remained awake, then there would be excellent clarity with no reality fluctuations.

Well I have a pet theory, that the physical body has its own consciousness (which dies with the physical body) and the astral body has its own separate consciousness (which continues after physical death).  In the mind split or spontaneous type OBE, the physical consciousness is fully occupied with the task of looking after the waking physical body. But when the physical body is asleep, perhaps part of the physical consciousness mingles with astral consciousness and kind of dilutes it, reducing its clarity. Just a thought.

Nice find Kirkland.  I have heard some very arrogant assertions from neurologists about the nature of consciousness, but the truth is, nobody has the faintest idea how self consciousness arises. It's called the "hard problem of consciousness" and not a single person in over a century of consciousness research has any real knowledge about this problem. Opinion and conjecture, yes, but actual knowledge, no.

This is generally true except in the mind-split cases where someone has an OBE while they are walking or doing some activity. They have the expanded awareness, and they still have a physical body to go back to.

Yes, it's true. Also in these mind-split cases, observations of the physical environment tend to be accurate and fantasy free too. I think I prefer to call mind-split type OBEs "spontaneous OBEs", as opposed to "induced OBEs".  Since by definition, NDEs are spontaneous, I suggest that it is the spontaneous nature of OBEs and NDEs which has something to do with their clarity and veracity. Perhaps there is something about the act of "forcing" an OBE which reduces its clarity?

NDE's have more awareness than your common OBE's because at the time the person doesn't have a physical focus to go back to. So the NPR becomes their entire focus! 

I agree with this. By and large, NDErs are much more likely to experience expanded consciousness than OBErs. They are also much more likely to have cosmic awareness (knowledge of all things) and also their observations of the physical world tend to be accurate and undistorted. Much more so than with OBEs.

Like Lionheart, I assume that this is due to the absence of a living physical body, which tends to cloud the experience in some way (which I don't understand).

Regarding DMT there is some debate as to whether the pineal gland is able to release DMT in sufficient quantities at death, to actually be the cause of NDEs. Actually, the idea that the pineal gland releases DMT in this way at death is conjecture anyway.

The answer to most or all of those questions is "yes" but unfortunately it is never as simple as a plain "yes". The astral experience is not like the physical experience, where we are bound very rigidly by laws of physics, space and time. So if you travel in the astral say, to visit a friend in the physical, the first problem is control. Actually having sufficient control to get over to your friend's house is very difficult. Let's say you make it over to his/her house. There is no guarantee that you will still be in "present time". You may be visiting them in the future or the past. Let's say you visit them in the present and communicate with them. Now there is no guarantee which "consciousness" you are communicating with, physical astral or higher. If you communicate with your friend's astral or higher consciousness, they probably will have no physical memory/awareness of the communication. Get the idea? It really isn't that simple.

Lottery numbers? I have done this, but there is a twist. I AP'd and asked to see the lottery numbers. So as soon as I got these, I woke myself up and wrote them down. On the Friday I bought a lottery ticket. Now when the lottery was drawn, there were two problems. Although I got all six numbers, firstly, three of them were reversed, ie 24 instead of 42. and secondly, I got the numbers for the Euro Lottery, not the National Lottery! This is how the astral works. I thought of repeating the trick, and hedging my bets, by buying a load of tickets, and trying to cover various permutations of reversed numbers, but that actually gets quite expensive, and there's no guarantee I will get the correct lottery, or even the correct lottery date. Never the less, I have had some good validations, but I hope you get the idea.

You are so lucky LightBeam! Strangely, it has never occurred to me to ask to see God. Now I think I will give it a go. It is interesting that you had spherical vision, I always think of this as the hallmark of a deep AP experience. Spherical vision means forward, backward, left, right, up down all at the same time. I find it hard to explain spherical vision type experiences as subjective, hallucinatory experiences, since there is no parallel in the physical world, nowhere to get the suggestion from. Yet spherical vision is not that uncommon in AP. Thanks for sharing.

Hello Sammy and welcome! Enjoy your stay!

Hello and welcome to the Pulse. Ophiel? Yup I read his book years ago and thought it was interesting. You will find that there are newer techniques these days, which he didn't know about.

Catmeow, you can see all that at this site here too http://www.planetxresearch.org/planet-x-research#!__tsrsolar. They also have links there to every other site that studies the Sun's actions.

Lionheart, I can't get that link to work???

This is the link I was thinking of:

http://stereo-ssc.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/images

This guy explains how to use it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmNsVvgsG-U

EDIT: Lionheart, I got your link to work. It wouldn't come up in my tablet, but I switched to my desktop PC and I can see the site now. Looks like an interesting site....

Well, as I understand it, China has little to gain by waging war against the USA. The Chinese and US economies are intimately tied together, China being a mass net exporter to the USA. China doesn't actually need to go to war with the USA, it can be done economically. All China needs to do is stop exporting to the USA, that would bring America to its knees. But it would also harm the Chinese economy, so they wouldn't do it. Interesting blog though. Scary.

Truly stunning images. NASA has a website where they publish all of the images taken of the sun by their space telescopes. You can dial in the date, time and telescope id, and it comes back with a set of images taken at that time. The images are amazing. I might try to dig out the details.

Actually I think that's called an opinion.  LoL  

But I like his thinking!

EDIT: oohhhhh, it is a fact. Read your sig Xanth!!!

god doesn't exist in any traditional sense.

god is simply the infinite knowledge of self.

any religious god is bunk and you'd be deluded to believe in such a thing. 

Trying to offend 70% of the world's population??!!! But probably true.

Here is another list of things transhumanists want to do.

"Transhumanists support the emergence and convergence of technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science (NBIC), and hypothetical future technologies such as simulated reality, artificial intelligence, superintelligence, mind uploading, chemical brain preservation, and cryonics. They believe that humans can and should use these technologies to become more than human.[70] They therefore support the recognition and/or protection of cognitive liberty, morphological freedom, and procreative liberty as civil liberties, so as to guarantee individuals the choice of using human enhancement technologies on themselves and their children.[71] Some speculate that human enhancement techniques and other emerging technologies may facilitate more radical human enhancement no later than the midpoint of the 21st century.[41"

Sorry to rain on the parade, but some of us think that these technologies will never exist, or at the very least, are way way beyond our current scientific understanding of the nature of the mind.

The field of AI emerged, maybe 60 or 70 years ago as a direct result of the invention of the computer. I think Alan Turing is the father of all this AI nonsense, when he invented the Turing Machine and proposed the Turing Test. Turing likened the human mind to a computer. And once he sewed the seeds, the idea took off. People (mainly science fiction authors) then started to propose that the human mind is a bio computer.  i.e. the brain is a piece of hardware, and somewhere mixed in there, is a computer program, running on the brain hardware... and bam! the mind appears!

Well, there is absolutely no evidence to support this notion, other than the observation that computers can be made to respond a bit like humans do. But otherwise absolutely NO EVIDENCE that the human mind is the result of brain software running on brain hardware. The idea is pure speculation. It has gained widespread acceptance. Why? Mainly because of science fiction writers, such as Isaac Azimov and "I Robot". But NOT because of any scientific research. It is ALL just pure speculation.

Computers are not self aware, they do not have subjective experiences, they do not have emotions, they do not experience qualia like we do. these are all part of the "hard problem of consciousness". We must solve the hard problem before we can create any sort of technology which can interact with a human brain, let alone replace part of it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

We are no closer to solving the hard problem than we were 70 years ago when the field of AI was invented. And there is no evidence that this situation is is changing.

Why do we think that we will have this technology by 2050? Because Ray Kurzweil says so? Do you realise that back in 1960 they were predicting we would have this technology by 1990?  It never appeared. It doesn't matter how fast our technology is expanding. If we start with zero knowledge about the "hard problem" it doesn't matter how quickly we expand that knowledge. It is still zero knowledge.

Hi Ihavewings. Unfortunately, what you're trying to do, ie to will yourself to another location, is really difficult. You have to have a strong emotional connection with that other place, to get there. You also have to really believe that it is going to work. The slightest doubt will block you. If it's a place you have been to before, then it is much easier. But a new unknown location, is hard.

An indirect method which I use is to float vertically upwards until the scenery below is tiny. Then hold in your mind the place you want to go to, and float back down. The new location should then come into view.

Hi gregus01 and welcome to the forums.  Best time to practise is after about 6 hours' sleep. There are various versions of the technique, some involve getting out of bed for half an hour or so, going back to bed and snoozing for a while. When you wake up again you should find yourself in just about the correct mental/physical state to project. But there are many variations on this technique called "wake back to bed". Personally I skip the getting out of bed part. But there are many variations. Have fun!

Hi spirited away and welcome to the Pulse. You're a natural! The voices and moaning you heard during the vibrations are completely normal. You are likely to hear all sorts of sounds at this stage, and these sounds seem to be designed to distract you or discourage you from projecting. I tend to hear my bedside radio, even though it is off, or else I hear the sounds of an "intruder" moving around the house. You should just ignore these sounds, they stop as soon as you successfully exit. But anyway, welcome and enjoy the forums!

I just see normally, but then I've never "tried" to see all round. But it is fascinating that some people see 360 degs automatically.

Last time I looked I saw a younger version of me ie me in my prime.  Probably we see what we want to see.

Where did god come from then?

Yeah, I know. In NDE accounts, there is a tendency to refer to God, or the Light as the "Source". I kind of like this. I have no firm beliefs on this matter, but if I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that consciousness is the basic building block of the universe, and that God, or the Source is the universal consciousness. We are all little drops of consciousness. taken from the Source. Perhaps the Source has always existed, and all of physical creation is just a creation of our collective consciousness.

Yup that was my point either way something had to exist (I'm agnostic so I'm personally not sure if their is a god or not). Our reality either way wouldn't be an accident because even with the idea that the universe has always been there it was bound to happen. If the universe has always been infinite then every possibility will happen at some stage. Put it this way if you threw a dice of say 1 zillion numbers on it every number will come up at least once if you throw the dice infinitely.

Well, if there was a creation event, then there would be nothing not even space-time, prior to the creation event, so the idea of having an infinite amount of time in which a creation event could happen is not correct, I think? There would have been no space-time "before" creation. Nothing, not even a vacuum, no space, no time, nothing. So there would not have been an infinite "time" for a spontaneous creation event to randomly happen. So how did it happen?

Alternatively, if the universe in some form has always existed, then that's a bit of a difficult concept too.

It gets more complicated, because the theory of "inflation" allows for universes to spontaneously inflate out of regions in a present universe, spawning new universes with their own laws of physics. These can give rise to other universes in a similar fashion.

So we can have (1) an everlasting universe, spawning new universes, presumably an infinite number. We can also have (2) a non-everlasting universe spawning new universes, but in this case, the whole shooting match started at some discrete moment, which marked the beginning of time.

Some people speculate that there is no difference between (1) and (2) arguing that (2) has been going on for ever, meaning that we could never trace all the way back to the original creation event. "It's turtles all the way down" is the expression that comes to mind.

(Some woman at a lecture piped up her idea that the planet earth was a turtle standing on the back of another turtle. When asked what the other turtle was standing on, she said "it's turtles all the way down").

Personally I find it all a bit mind blowing. And unbelievable. Yet it is true.

Edit: More on turtles.....!!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

Thanks Ange 

I think I believe in God, but probably not the Devil (the fact that one exists doesn't mean the other must exist too). In NDE cases, a deity (God or the Light or the Source) is very commonly reported.  Curiously, whilst hellish NDEs are common in youtube, very very rarely, do people report meeting the Devil. Much more commonly they meet evil entities, or evil people, but not "the Devil".

Where did the universe (multiverse) come from? Why is it here? Looking at Creation, it's difficult (for me) to think it's just some sort of massive accident. Maybe it is,  but it seems too incredible to think it is just here, because of some sort of spontaneous creation event. Science certainly hasn't solved the mystery of Creation, there are many different theories, including half a dozen which postulate a universe which has no beginning and no end ie it has always been here. Hmmm. Big bang type theories generally require a singularity to exist, before the big bang. Where did this come from?

It's a mystery. To me the idea of a universe without a God or a Source, is meaningless, and logically just reduces (cancels itself) down to a non-existence, a nothingness. Without a Source, the universe would feel non-existent, and basically unreal.

I agree ange (is it ok to call you ange?), I have a very close friend who I consider a soul mate. I have known her for 17 years and once I said to her "if there is such a thing as reincarnation then I'm sure we knew each other in a previous life" and she agreed completely. I feel as if I have known her for thousands of years.

Hi ange.connell, I have heard it said, by a number of sources, that we each belong to a "soul group", ie a group of souls to which we are connected. Our soul group would be family, husbands, wives, parents, children, close friends, and so on. Someone who is a mother in one incarnation, may be a wife in another. Your close friends may be family in another incarnation. We never lose contact with our soul group. Well at least this is the theory, I don't know if it is true, but it feels true to me at least!