What are we to make of Graham's extraordinary out of body experiences? How can we really analyze his experiences? How we can compare it with other experiences? What are we to make of the variety of extraordinary paranormal experiences and what methodology can we use tease apart what is most real?
You can measure the frequency of veridical information produced by the experience and compare it to the frequency of inaccurate information produced by the experience.
Do you think that these out of body experiences might be happening in a non spiritual way? Might they be something akin to a natural phenomenon? and who would we know something like that?
Graham wants to redefine "natural" so I will just say that I don't believe that ESP can be produced by the brain (not even through quantum entanglement).
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2014/04/near-death-experiences-and-afterlife.html#facts_esp
Veridical OBEs are not a natural phenomenon, but non-veridical OBEs could be a natural phenomenon if they are just dreams and if dreams are produced by the brain (see below).
There are many different types of experiences that get called OBE's. Different people have different types of experiences. If you are going to discuss OBE's you have to consider the specific experiencer and what type of experience they have, and if they induced the experience, how they induced it.
You can't generalize about OBE's you have to be specific about the experiencer, the experience, and the cause of the OBE.
One of the studies on OBE's used hypnosis. The subjects said they had real experiences but they didn't just fail to produce veridical information, they produced grossly inacurate information.
http://ncu9nc.blogspot.com/2012/10/out-of-body-experiences-real-and-fake.html
Six Studies of Out-of-Body Experiences by Charles T. Tart, Ph.D. (
PDF HTML)
All the participants reported vivid OBEs that seemed like real experiences to them. They included journeys to places they knew, like downtown Davis, that were vividly experienced, as well as vivid experiences of journeying to the target room. None of their reports of what they saw on the target table bore any clear resemblance to the targets. A formal analysis was not worth the trouble.
So you really have to consider what produced the experience. Techniques that mimic hypnotic induction, or self-hypnosis, if they don't produce a high frequency of veridical information, cannot be relied upon to tell us anything about any level of reality except maybe something about hypnosis and the power of suggestion.
. When you read astral projection literature the silver cord is constantly mentioned throughout the literature for going right back probably to Muldoon and Carrington’s famous book in the 1930s or whatever.
Muldoon induced OBE's by slowing his heart rate to the point where he became incapacitated.
THE PROJECTION OF THE ASTRAL BODY
SYLVAN J. MULDOON
HEREWARD CARRINGTON
...
One cannot say definitely how slowly the heart should beat in order to induce a fair degree of physical ‘incapacity’. You will recall that my heart-beat, when experiencing projections regularly, was forty-two pulsations per minute. This speed could never be considered dangerously slow, and yet it brought about passivity of the physical to an unusual degree.
This might produce an entirely different phenomenon (more NDE-like) than the OBEs induced by hypnotic induction-like techniques.
My personal view is that spontaneous OBE are much more likely to be genuine experiences of the spirit leaving the body than induced experiences. Induced experiences are more likely to be dreams or lucid dreams. Since we don't know what a dream is, that is not to say they are not spiritual experiences in some sense, but the inability to produce veridical information routinely is strongly suggestive that they are more like dreams than objective perceptions.
However I will say that just because you are dreaming doesn't mean you are not out of the body - there are supposedly astral realms where thoughts produce reality - some people believe ordinary dreams occur in this realm too.
Sometimes
dreams have veridical content. Until we understand what dreams are, the rare occurrences of veridical induced OBE's will remain unexplained.
You can also break the problem down into parts: Is it a spiritual experience? Is it a real experience? It could be spiritual but still not be "real" - but what does "real" mean in a realm where thoughts create reality?