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Pleased to hear you live in a single story house! Good luck with your astral travels!

Hi Curious1,

I enjoyed the article you linked, and the author's reasonable skepticism.  By saying that sleep walking is the opposite of AP, all that the author meant was that in the former, your body is awake whilst your mind is asleep, while in the latter, your body is asleep while your mind is awake. I don't think that sleep walking is any barrier to AP, per se, although it may be harder to achieve. This is simply because many of the techniques involve lulling your physical body to sleep, and then rolling out of bed, leaving your physical body paralysed in bed whilst your astral self rolls onto the floor. You might end up in the curious state where you are active astrally, and your physical body mimics your astral.

So the one word of serious caution I would point out, and with your history may be likely, is that your physical body might act out whatever it is that you are getting up to in your astral adventure. This means that if you launch yourself out of your first storey bedroom window, for a nice little bit of flying around, as I like to do, there is the distinct possibility that you might actually do this physically, and end up badly hurt, physically.

What I would do in your case is never launch myself out of an upstairs window, but always go downstairs and launch from ground level.

Just saying!

Apparently in all those years of schooling he never learned you can't prove a negative.

First class.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/04/consciousness-after-death/all/

Interesting interview given by Sam Parnia with Wired Mag, 24 April 2013.

Sam Parnia has been discussed hear before .  I thought for his study he should put a Barbie, g.i. Joe doll , or gumby , in a box on a high shelf in the operating room , instead of a card . Its not some thing normaly in an operating room , and easy to remember .

You're quite correct, the chances of someone floating above his body noticing something as ordinary as a card, during such an extraordinary experience, is slim.

This article actually was  published in 2001. However, the Aware study, which I thought it referred to, is due to report this month. When I first found the article it seemed to have a recent date on it but I managed to research the article and get it's real date. We have been waiting years for the Aware study results. Hope they report soon.

It's actually a large multi centre study and will be reporting in much greater detail I would hope quite soon. They placed cards on a shelf above the patients, the cards being visible only if the patient was floating near the ceiling. Parnia was hoping to have at least a few positive card IDs, but I don't think they had any positive IDs. This isn't too surprising with the small numbers involved (4 NDEs), but is disappointing.

Never the less, I believe all the patients were monitored so it could be established that brain "death" was present. Patients were interviewed, and their narratives compared with what actually happened in the theatre (I believe) . A prime objective, with the monitoring and the interviews is to establish whether the patient was conscious and lucid at the time of brain death. The Mail's article implies that this might have been established. We have to wait for the full report (and the book!).

I spotted this:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-24509/Near-death-patients-afterlife.html

The Comment
"The Astral Plane, Astral Travel/Projection, OBE, 5th Dimension etc. is actually what is called Cloning Centers. When someone projects or travels, their consciousness is transferred into a clone (most likely a REM-driven Mark 2 clone) at a Cloning Center (in the 3rd Dimension) while experiencing MK Ultra visual and audio effects. Also, your clone may be pre-drugged to make it feel like a dream. These Cloning Centers are above and below ground (in DUMBs).
Look up: Donald Marshall, Cloning & Vril"

BS meter overload. This is just drivel. The author clearly has no experience or knowledge of AP whatsoever, or is a 6 year old. Don't feel bad Sam, btw, this is not directed at you, you are 100% correct with the observation "doesn't add up".

No I feel like visual tests like captchas are still pretty effective; only very sophisiticated algorthms can read them; if they weren't effective at getting at least most of the spammers, then they wouldn't be in such popular use.

I'm guessing in the spam community there is now software around with OCR capabilities to defeat some captchas?

Most of them automate the process and get through security like that rather easily.

So I assume they do some sort of image processing/recognition to get a best guess for the characters in the captcha image and try to register. If they fail, they just try again with a new captcha?

Although CAPTCHAs were originally designed to defeat standard OCR software designed for document scanning, a number of research projects have proven that it is possible to defeat many CAPTCHAs with programs that are specifically tuned for a particular type of CAPTCHA. For CAPTCHAs with distorted letters, the approach typically consists of the following steps:

Removal of background clutter, for example with color filters and detection of thin lines.
Segmentation, i.e. splitting the image into segments containing a single letter.
Identifying the letter for each segment.

Do these bots actually get past the visual verification part of the registration process? How? Brute force?

Thanks Xanth

I've noticed recently that the website is intermittently unresponsive, ie it works fine for a while then I try to refresh a page and it hangs for a long time. Later on it is working OK.

Has anybody else noticed this? Or is it just me?

Anything to do with the alleged DOS attacks?

Well I think this might be just normal attention seeking by your cat. My cat as she grew old, started howling for attention. I'm sure this was related to her developing deafness. My brother has a cat going through the howling attention seeking thing. How old is your cat?

LightBeam, I like your thinking. But anyway, to answer the OP's question, yes I do most firmly believe this is possible. See the Validation Thread:

http://www.astralpulse.com/forums/welcome_to_permanent_astral_topics/validation_thread-t25607.0.html

where I describe an experience of this kind. I believe there are a few more shared dreams in the thread. It is definitely possible.

Going AP can be indistinguishable from the physical. My one and probably only fear is that I will jump out of a window to go flying, only to find out I'm actually awake for real and plummeting to a very solid unforgiving landing.

For this reason, and I have practised it religiously for many years, whenever I go NP and before I do anything dangerous like jumping through a solid glass 2nd floor window, I ALWAYS do a reality check. The simplest and most reliable is simply to jump off the ground and hover in the air. If I am NP, then I will ALWAYS hover momentarily and float gently back down. This is a pretty conclusive and reliable check. Then I launch myself recklessly out of the window!

But never without the reality check. Call me paranoid!

OK so I bought Sam Parnia's book "The Lazarus Effect" but haven't had time to read it yet. I can say that Sam Parnia knows his stuff. The book has a bibliography at the back, of suggested reading, and this lists about 500 titles and publications, concerned with cardiac arrest, brain death, consciousness, soul and NDE. The book looks interesting, and towards the end, there is a chapter on the AWARE study.

Skimming through this, there aren't many results given, the AWARE study results are now due in September/October 2013!   However, there are anecdotes from medical professionals which are clearly puzzling.

This link

http://www.horizonresearch.org/main_page.php?cat_id=279

explains that the AWARE study is ongoing and will be expanded in the future, rather than shut down, in order to get more results.

What do I make of this?  Firstly Sam Parnia is clearly a believer and a man on a mission. I'm guessing he had some interesting results from the AWARE study, but not sufficient for general release at the moment. He keeps pushing the end date back, in order to get more (or perhaps any) conclusive positive results. If Sam were a committed skeptic, he would have shut down the study years ago and announced failure. But he isn't doing that.

He is going to get the proof he believes in, even if it takes another decade. There are many doctors, who like Sam, have seen things they can't explain in cardiac arrest patients...

Hi desert-rat

OK, so I found the case you mentioned, in H F Prevost Battersby's "Man Outside Himself" P13. Incredibly you can read the relevant parts of the book here, with Mark Macdonnell's name highlighted:

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=HnR4fAhGJ3gC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=dr+mark+macdonnell+mp&source=bl&ots=oIucT09yz0&sig=Jq0OAiofjEzR4N9yS80bfWE7cU4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=4aU9Ub_NHIOv7AaJq4CIAQ&ved=0CCgQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=dr%20mark%20macdonnell%20mp&f=false

He says:

"Dr. Mark Macdonnell was another who, while ill in bed, appeared in the House, was seen by fellow members on two consecutive days, actually entered the Division Lobby and recorded his vote. ... The case of Dr Macdonnell did, indeed, come in for a certain amount of comment in the Press, but seems not even to have been a nine days' wonder."

Dr Mark Macdonnell was a British MP for the constituency of Queen's County Leix between 1892 and 1906:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queen's_County_Leix_(UK_Parliament_constituency)
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/mark_macdonnell/queen's_county_leix

That's what a quick Google search returned. He was a real MP and his doppelganger appearance was reported in the press at that time. He apparently recorded his vote whilst ill in bed. So either an impersonater who looked like him did it, it was a real AP, or else it is just some kind of folklore.

Personally I am amazed that you can read the book on line.

Actually the name Mark MacDonnell doesn't sound correct to me, the politician I had in mind was someone fairly famous. It will meaning pouring over my old AP books to try to find the name. But I will have a quick look to see if can find it!

desert-rat, I would be interested if you could find any more info on that MP. The case is well known in AP folklore, but it would be good to see if it holds up to scrutiny!

Well I think Volgerle has it exactly right. Sam Parnia is basically one of the "good guys". But he has to maintain his reputation as a credible scientist, and after all he actually is a credible scientist. So he is involved in uncontroversial medical research, which maintains his reputation. This allows him to speak on the mind/brain issue, suggest mind can exist independent of brain, and still be taken seriously.

hello. Sorry I just have a hard time believing that.

Really? First time I've ever been called a liar. But makes no difference to me. It happened. I was disappointed that three numbers were reversed. The Euro lottery has seven numbers not six, so I only got 6 of them. I didn't even think it was a big deal because mathematically it isn't that unlikely, to get a few hits and a few reversed numbers. I expected to be criticised for that, rather than accused of lying. That's what you really should have critiqued.

He is just using the "I come to bury Ceasar not to praise him" technique. Camouflaging his intent by making uncontroversial scientific noises, whilst occasionally slipping in occasional "distinct possibility that mind can survive brain death" noises.

Well I quite like the timeline argument against winning the lottery given by Bedeekin. Ie Winning the lottery would have to be part of our future timeline, to make it possible for us to create that very timeline.  But I don't think it holds water. There would only be a problem if seeing the lottery numbers resulted in a paradox. But there is no paradox. If we don't act on the information, there is no paradox. If we do act on the information, and win, we simply create a future which is entirely consistent with correctly seeing and predicting the lottery results. Hence no paradox here either. So I think Bedeekin's logic is wrong, but nevertheless highly enjoyable.

I did once request and see the future lottery numbers in a LD. All six numbers came up. three exactly as seen, and the other three reversed, ie 42 instead of 24. The only problem was that these six numbers came up in the Euro Lottery, and I bet on the UK Lottery! So make sure you specify exactly which lottery you mean, when you ask for the numbers!