Greetings, all!
This is my first post, although I have lurked off-and-on throughout the past couple of years. I've recently found myself in a bit of a quandary; warning, this is not a short post:
I finally got around to joining lucidipedia.com (http://lucidipedia.com) after procrastinating for time. I already had some experiences with lucid dreaming, so I thought of it as a good stepping stone into the realm of OBE and phasing (along with being interesting on its own), which I had read about on a number of different forums, but never fully accomplished. The gentleman who runs lucidipedia, Tim Post, stated in his introductory pages that he will make frequent references to research by the Lucidity Institute, which I see has been mentioned a few times on the Astral Pulse forums. I visited the website, and under the section "LUCID DREAMING LITERATURE," the 9th chapter from the institute's book, entitled "Dreaming, Illusion, and Reality" caught my eye (that being the title of the -chapter-, btw, not the book). The selection contained some rather unsettling conclusions about the nature of OBE that I had already held to. Here's the link, for those of you willing to read the whole thing: http://www.lucidity.com/LD9DIR.html (http://www.lucidity.com/LD9DIR.html)
Obviously, that's a lot to read, so for those looking for the gist of it, I'll try summarizing the main points. Essentially, the claim is that lucid dreaming is actually a "higher" state than having an out-of-body experience, because those people are so convinced that they are not merely dreaming, when their experiences contain elements commonly found in regular dreams. Two of the main examples given are that of a man whom, after going OBE in his bedroom and observing his "physical" surroundings, looks back to his bed and sees the body of his mother, who had died many years before, rather than his own, as is common. Another was of a different man who blew out a candle in his room during his OBE state, only to wake up the next morning to see that the candle was burned down to the stump, suggesting that his astral manipulations did not affect his physical surroundings, supposedly "proving" that the OBE state is little more than your average dream, and that OBE-ers are rather deluded in their thinking.
Given the many OBE experiences held by the members of this forum, I was hoping somewhat could offer up any insight regarding this. I had very high hopes for my future OBE experiences, and this apparent "debunking" is rather disturbing.
It is a very long read ha. It seems to follow the basic argument of so many others trying to "prove" the Spirit world (Astral world) does not exist. Somehow I get a bit irritated at the arrogance of folks like that. Ha No use. In any case the entire thing seem to be a pseudo logical argument. It is based on the notion that the "laws" of nature in the Astral are similar to the ones in this dimension. It seems to be a bit of a frustrated attempt to convince people who have OBEs that they really don't. We who have them on a regular basis are undaunted. Its like trying to convince someone from Europe that Europe does only exist in their mind. I have had similar conversations with many Buddhists and Hindus actually.
Regards Mustardseed
Thank you for your response, MustardSeed. By "similar conversations," do you mean you've discussed OBEs with Hindus and Buddhists, or tried to convince such people that they were not really Hindu/Buddhist? :wink: