Thread: OBE Skeptics.

I've been reading little posts here and there from people who are skeptical to the idea that OBEs are possible. That's fine, I've said it before and I'll say it again, that I have no problem with non-believers. I have a problem with assholes.

Why are so many people so goddamn hard pressed to prove OBEs don't exist? What is it to you? If you don't believe they exist, good for you..but what do you care if other people do?

By the way, explain validations? If OBEs aren't real, explain validations. I know people who can, and I have projected in a room with something written on paper, read it, and remembered it when I woke up to see that I was correct, and verified by another party. I'm not too great at RTZ/Etheric OBEs but there are many people who are.

If you can explain to me how that's possible without it being an OBE, I'm very open minded to ideas, unlike most of you skeptics who refuse to even CONSIDER anything but fellow skeptics' opinions. Just because something can't be proven..YET..doesn't mean it is automatically fake. And science isn't god. All knowledge is based on previous knowledge, and all previous knowledge is based on further previous knowledge. Everything...EVERYTHING is RELATIVE, and therefore NO aspect of science can be proven as CERTAIN.

Now before some idiot flames me because of not reading what i said CAREFULLY, I said no aspect of science can be PROVEN as certain. I didn't say nothing is certain. Just that no scientific law/theory/whatever can be proven as certain. All scientific "knowledge" is based on other previous "knowledge", and all scientific "knowledge" is based on the fact that there have not yet been any counter examples, and until there is a counter example, we assume that it is true how it stands. Hahaha. That's a great method. And this is the science-system everyone warships like it's a fucking god. It's not written in stone. It's only "certain" until a counter example comes along, and one often does.

Insulting others' intelligence because of "lack of scientific evidence" is hilariously hypocritical. What is scientific evidence? Scientific evidence is just a couple of words that are supposed to make us feel like we know something. Knowledge is only valid in the context of pre-established knowledge, and that is an inarguable fact. So you're gonna need to chill with the belittling us people who believe in OBEs, it's getting pretty fucking annoying. I don't care if you don't believe it. That's your choice, but is it necessary to be such a goddamn asshole? No. It's not.

There was a time when everyone thought lucid dreams were bullshit too. The idea of the internet? Bullshit. Flying machines? Bullshit. A vehicle that can move faster than sound? Bullshit. But everyone believed it as soon as there was a counter example. The first plane. That rocket car thing. Stephen Laberge came along and proved that lucid dreams actually happen.

Who are you to look down your nose at people who believe in OBEs? If you don't believe it, I really can't blame you, and more power to ya. But you cannot prove that they DON'T exist. So hating on members and even passively suggesting that they are not intelligent or inferior because they believe something that you do not, that you cannot even disprove is completely absurd. Some of you should seriously grow up.


</rant>.

Let skeptics argue that OBE dose not exist, they say we can't prove it. There is absolutely no proof lucid dreams exist!!! I will say it again! No PROOF lucid dreams exist!!! They do and so do OBE but who needs to prove it, let them limit their own experiance, you know what you experiance.

That's a long post.
I didn't read it.
Would it suffice to say that I don't have an opinion about OBE's one way or another?

Lucid dream is just a name we gave controlling your dreams, just like space, universe, earth, etc.


I hate when people say so and so is impossible so much! just because they/we cannot understand it right now. Obviously the world is really flat because it's impossible to think eitherwise or whatever lame thing people wanna make up because they can't get past their own problem of thinking and when people have no sense of wonder, or are complatly 1 sided it's unreal.

I dunno about OBE's...i mean there are cases where people float to other places in the world and see/hear things
. I read a story where someone was out of their body and went down the hall in the hospital he was in and saw his sister crying..he came back to his body later and she said she was crying at the place he saw her at...i mean explain that! maybe psychic ability, or OBE...who knows. Or hell read this...


http://www.near-death.com/experiences/evidence01.html

Explain how she knew how the b-1 bone saw blade looked like while being brain dead, with all blood drained from her head? not to mention everything was fine n all the electronics keeping an eye on her while she was dead. Dont care about the rest because that's probably just neurons and the retinas.

Sigh...

I don't know if this is "proof", but please for the love of anything that matters to you, read LaBerge's book before you so passionately say you can't prove lucid dreams, okay? He did experiments in his lab to try to prove these things, otherwise his whole PhD work would not have been taken seriously.

If you don't like people going on and on about OBEs not existing, don't read the threads. Just go on with your life believing whatever you want to.. why do you care. :p

Hey you again. Well I do not care. Read that other thread we were on. I am just being a loud mouth saying nothing is enough proof for someone to say it is totaly proven. I am a science geek, it is something from imperical science. Only a few LAWS of nature exists, as in indisputable. Everything else is just commonly believed to be true. But I did post a serious question for you on the other thread.

Originally Posted by sivason

Hey you again. Well I do not care. Read that other thread we were on. I am just being a loud mouth saying nothing is enough proof for someone to say it is totaly proven. I am a science geek, it is something from imperical science. Only a few LAWS of nature exists, as in indisputable. Everything else is just commonly believed to be true. But I did post a serious question for you on the other thread.

Ah sorry, so many of these

Originally Posted by sivason

Let skeptics argue that OBE dose not exist, they say we can't prove it. There is absolutely no proof lucid dreams exist!!! I will say it again! No PROOF lucid dreams exist!!! They do and so do OBE but who needs to prove it, let them limit their own experiance, you know what you experiance.

Proof of Lucid Dreaming:
http://www.lucidity.com/SleepAndCognition.html

To argue otherwise is to argue the certainty of anything in life. If this is the case, then we can never know that we know nothing. Advocating this, what practical means do you propose to live your life by? If you do not believe in anything or the possibility of knowing anything, then you ought to have a suggested means of living, deciding ethical matters, and taking responsibility for your social life.
~

I wasn't meaning to you O'nus, i was just talking out loud. I'm alittle skeptical, and believe. I used to be a believer untill i came here to DV and learned what the brain can do. Though some things i will still believe no matter what but i'd take the skeptisism because i'm not all knowing. I didn't mean you think you know everything, i ment people in general who learn some new trick and think they know it all if you know what i mean.

Originally Posted by LucidFlanders

I wasn't meaning to you O'nus, i was just talking out loud. I'm alittle skeptical, and believe. I used to be a believer untill i came here to DV and learned what the brain can do. Though some things i will still believe no matter what but i'd take the skeptisism because i'm not all knowing. I didn't mean you think you know everything, i ment people in general who learn some new trick and think they know it all if you know what i mean.

Oh I see what you mean.

Though, your comments are subject to contradiction:
"Though some things i will still believe no matter what"
+
"i ment people in general who learn some new trick and think they know it all"

Does this mean that you will believe in something even if there is empirical, logical, and reasonable evidence against claim X? (I am not sure what you are referring to)
~

No, i'll half believe it.

Originally Posted by Rainman

I know people who can, and I have projected in a room with something written on paper, read it, and remembered it when I woke up to see that I was correct, and verified by another party.

What are you waiting for to apply for the million dollar challenge ? I'm serious here. If you, or your friends, or someone in this thread, can do the validation "at home", go and prove it once and for all in a lab to advance the debate. If so many people can do this, why nobody ever succeeded in a controlled, repeatable experiment ?

Hahaha. That's a great method. And this is the science-system everyone warships like it's a fucking god.

Yeah, I wonder how this stupid method gave us 95% of all the science and technology that runs the world today.

OK, less sarcasm now. You're right about the method; nothing can be proven. We can only say that past observations fit in a theory, and that the theory accuratly predicts future observations. When this breaks, the theory must be replaced by a better one.
Relativity and Quantum theory where "bullshit" too. But with the time, opposing scientists had to see the evidence: they were more accurate with observations than the previous theories, and so became accepted.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", so in the current scientific context, OBEs need a strict protocol of experimentation, with numerous cases to be better than "statistical coincidence".
Science cannot "prove" that "OBEs do not exist"; it just says (or should say) that "OBEs do not fit at all in the current theory, and are very improbable". However, you can prove that they exist by providing a counter-example.
Scientists are quite conservative, true. It's human nature, reinforced by the scientific method. You may think it's frustrating (I did), but look at it this way: it's not to prevent progress, but to prevent regression. Science is currently successful, and was built by patient refinement of theories. We can't break everything at the first anomaly; it needs big problems to make big changes (Quantum theory was such a case).

Should we accept OBEs "as is", and take them as a postulate to build theories above ? No, because "out of body experience" is one theory to explain some subjective facts (or objective ones, when you compare what you "read" with the real paper).
Other theories could exist, which could be outside of orthodox science too, and be believed by people. In this case, who is right, you, or them ? If you don't believe them, who is the skeptic ? You need the scientific method to tell.
- One theory: You never went "outside of your body"; but you did, unconsciously, communicate by telepathy with the one who wrote on the paper. Your subconcious then created an hallucination with it.
- A variation: There is no astral plane, but there is a collective consciousness linking every brains by radiowaves emitted by neurons, letting you visit places far away as long as someone else has been there too.
- Another one, more "orthodox": No telepathy, but a very powerfull subconcious able to use the smallest hints from your real senses to reconstruct the world. For example, by just subliminally hearing the sound in the other room, it could reconstruct what was written just by the "scritch scratch" of the pen on the paper.
(there was a case of a "savant horse" able to do mathematical operations given verbally. Turns out, it couldn't answer if no human present actually knew the answer. It is very possible that it just was very sensitive to the "expectations" of people and computed this way instead of being mathematically intelligent or psychic. Which is still impressive.)

I don't say that OBEs are "absolutely impossible", just very improbable. By being skeptical, I think human knowledge will progress more on the long term (even if each transition is frustrating) because we can't jump to conclusions "just because we feel it". Each of my alternative theories is as acceptable as the OBE theory, but leads to very different directions about the nature of consciousness or physiology.
Only strict experiment protocol will tell. And waiting for old scientists in charge of research to die, to be replaced by people with different preconceptions, of course.

I appreciate everyone's reply. Thank you, Mind, you raise a good point. I have thought about the quite likely possibility that an OBE is simply a lucid dream with a sort of telepathic connection. At the moment it would be kind of hard to prove that OBEs exist solely with validations because it's pretty hard to do them consitantly. RTZ and Etheric projections are difficult. The concept that there are other dimensional planes of space and time makes sense to me.

The only aspect of OBE I can prove right now is etheric energy. Etheric energy can, and probably has been measured by infrared/thermal cameras. The movement of etheric energy can be controlled by the conscious mind. Many people know etheric energy by another name like Chi flow or something, but they are all the same thing. Etheric energy. During a projection, much of this etheric energy is focused around eight points of the body most people call chakras. This can be measured as well. As for the OBE itsself I'm not sure yet.

They are quite different from a lucid dream. Who knows, maybe it really is just a lucid dream. It seems like that'd be impossible though. Unless we're all potentially telepathic

Anyway, again, no problem with skepticsm, just people who can't have an intelligent argument for their position, and feels the need to just be insulting and rude instead of speaking like a mature adult. And there are a lot of those on DV sadly. I'm glad I've recently had soem people raise some good arguments from a nonpersonal point of view. Thanks everyone.

And by the way, Mas_Tarrant..

If you don't like people going on and on about OBEs not existing, don't read the threads. Just go on with your life believing whatever you want to.. why do you care.

This is the beyond dreaming forum. In big bold letters on the caption to this board it says "Note that this board is only for people who believe in the mentioned topics". Why should I stop reading threads about people with OBE questions, IN the Beyond Dreaming forum, which is not here so that skeptics can argue?

I don't think you fully got me. I don't care if people don't believe what I believe. If I did, that would make me a big jackass. No, I just have a problem with members that come into this board in particular, but others as well and feel the need to insult members such as myself who believe in OBEs.

What do you believe in Tarrant? If I insulted you/your intelligence, repeatedly simply because you believe in [x], in a place where you and other people met to discuss it, are you telling me you wouldn't be offended? If that's the case, you're a really peaceful person, and that's really admirable, but you can't blame me for getting pissed off about it

Edit* Sivason, there is completely conclusive evidence that lucid dreams exist. Read Dr. Stephen Laberge's book, "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming". It's got an entire chapter about it.

Originally Posted by Rainman

I've been reading little posts here and there from people who are skeptical to the idea that OBEs are possible. That's fine, I've said it before and I'll say it again, that I have no problem with non-believers. I have a problem with assholes.</rant>.

Skepticism is to be expected when discussing topics of this nature. Everyone has a right to express his/her opinions and relate experiences (or lack thereof).

I'm on the fence about what causes OBE-like experiences because I haven't had any and haven't studied the subject in depth. But, I don't doubt that people who claim OBEs experience something. I only know one person who claims to have experienced repeated OBEs, my favorite aunt.

MindDaguerreotype's 3 possible hypotheses are case in point why skepticism exists. I'm sure there are other explanations that have been proffered for the phenomenon.

My opinion is that science is a tool and one of the better ones that human beings have. But, sometimes you need more than one tool to get a job done, and not all tools fit all jobs. We also have our reason and analytical abilities, intuition, and understanding of psychology to help us learn more about what's going on. Perhaps the cause of OBE-like events can be explored by science effectively, perhaps not. Until then, personal experience, reason, and open-minded exploration should have a role in forming your opinions.

You can't expect thinking people to believe something as subjective as OBE without them applying their reason, analysis, intuition, and personal experience, too. Some folks are even going to ask for scientific proof for the subject and seemingly unprovable - G*d, afterlife, the soul, etc. Let folks ask if they need to. It's up to them to find proof or confirm lack of proof as they see fit. You base your beliefs on your reason, integrity and experience, and they on theirs. No one is a hypocrite, no one is a convert.

You're right about the attitude thing. I've seen multiple instances on this board (and others) where opinions are expressed in a derogatory, immature, and insulting manner. It becomes more about precious little egos and 'winning' arguments than the subject being discussed. It's detrimental to learning, exchanging info/ideas, and building our community of lucid dreamers. Disagreement can be done respectfully and in a way that clarifies issues instead of clouding them with bad feelings and resentment.

It's good to see someone acknowledge all of those things. You are absolutely right and I would never try to take away validity from skeptic opinions. Skepticism is a natural part of any argument of this nature as you said, and I've got no problem with that. Skeptics have every reason to be skeptical if they are from a scientific background. My only issue is with those people who make the argument about personal competition.

And even when there is no debate happening, I have seen members just straigt out insult other members for mentioning something about OBEs. I am bothered only by that, not by their ideas. Your outlook on science is very interesting and you have a good point.

I have a deep respect for science, and I probably didn't make that very clear. My thing is simply that science cannot explain everything. Scientific laws are based only on the fact that there has been no counter example to date, thus science is always changing. Nowadays, we are becoming smarter and are able to predict more and more if there is even a scientific liklihood of a counter example happening. But it is still true that nothing can be proven certain.

I today have been trying to find out if there have been any scientific trials on persons who claim to be able to project at any time and be able to do RTZ validations in a controlled environment.

I'll let you all know if I find anything Thanks for your responses.

Seriously im starting to laugh at this thread, How come noone sees that we cannot proof something that does not vibrate on our frequency?
Does that mean radio is bullshit? and all the invisible waves around us are BS?
Bunch of scientist who waste their lifes on declining that oobe's and other paranormal experiences are fake?

Its a no, A force beyond scientist is controlling them. If we uncover our true potential. Than there will be no limits to our conscious.
Science in past declined anti gravity existance, and today look! they prooved that anti gravity can be accomplished! LOL Good morning!

Science and all that crap is based on theories. The Biggest scientist named "Einstein" said :
Imagination is more than knowledge! LOL and why did he say that?
Where are the Scientist? why the heck do you try to decline spiritual experiences? ofcourse paychecks must come from someone !

So here we go, a force that controls the world needs to keep its peeps in place, including me LOL
Who gives a f*ck? you shall experience it once you die.
Try to damn enjoy ur life, and not ruin others life's. Scientist are mortals so stop counting them as Gods. They are normal human beings who make profit on everything they can make $$ from.
Look how much $$ was spend on global warming. Wheres the F*cking proof that its real? its been 50 years.

People need to open their eyes, im starting to think that monkeys are even smarter than some of us.
Look around your self, what do you think is real? and why the f*ck are you in this world?

oh well, i really dont care what people will reply on my post. I dont give a F*ck. Death will teach you soon enough what reality is.

I agree that we don't really know anything about reality, and if we do learn, it'll be after we die. But I wouldn't go as far as to actually bash science. As Mind pointed out, science is the reason we have so much useful technology. I agree with you that relying on science as a determiner of a reality is absurd, but science has done many good things for us if you think about it.

Science was brought with a good purpose, and human beings turned it into a weapon by creating weapons, atomic bombs and tons of other war sh!t.

Imagine if we explore other dimensions,psychic abilities or see trough other frequency's what disaster would it bring?
Even though we have this technology,a price has to be payed, Which is our damn life. Was that the purpose of science? wheres piece?freedom?and where the heck is reality?

We face this world in a terrible way. Our consequences of daily use of chemicals kills us in time.

Our brain is the Ultimate weapon, and people with power know that. Thats why we live in a world where materialism takes place.

"I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject. Any man who does not accept the existence of discarnate spirits and the proof of it is either ignorant or a moral coward. I give him short shrift, and do not propose any longer to argue with him on the supposition that he knows anything about the subject." Prof. James Hyslop in Life After Death (1918).

Alright, just claiming there is proof is different from showing the proof. Show proof, and you'll make skeptics believe it. If they don't believe it, either the proof is false or they are not skeptics, but disbelievers.


But if your proof is a story of how you saw a shadow cross your way when you were eleven, don't even mind posting it.

Originally Posted by Kromoh

But if your proof is a story of how you saw a shadow cross your way when you were eleven, don't even mind posting it.

i didnt just see a shadow...i took a picture of it!!!!

do you request any more proof?

lol providing it was not on a digital camera and your machine was working nicely... then we can discuss it

You're not the first one to come up with such "proof" you know.

But you must still agree it is possible to take a random picture, open your brand new Photoshop CS3, make a silly shadow on it, and print it on photo paper, right? Not that I discredit you, but it would never serve as scientifical proof.

Mind posting it?

I have a picture of my now dead dog that has a face on the forehead. Obviously it was from the camera but i found it weird....i zoom in and i see several more.

http://img265.imageshack.us/my.php?i...1051121oz0.jpg

Check between the eyes. You wont know it's there untill you see it, then when you see it you never miss it.

Make of it as you will, but it's probably just the camera....i doubt "spirits" can be seen on cameras.

TELL ME THAT DOESN'T LOOK LIKE A FACE TO YOU!

I beleive in OBEs since I've had them... but I beleive them just to be really weird dreams and not spiritual at all. Would you class me as a skeptic?

I humbly request proof. Something that has followed the rigor of the scientific method, using controls.