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consciousness as a “qualitative alteration in overall pattern of mental functioning, such that the experiencer feels his consciousness is radically different from the way it functions ordinarily,”12 an adequate definition of OBE might include the following points: an altered state of consciousness in which the subject feels that his mind or self-awareness is separated from his physical body and this self-awareness has a vivid and real sense about it, quite different from a dream. To flesh out this rather abstract definition, a letter was selected from one of approximately 700 describing such experiences received by one of the authors (SWT). This report is an example without many of the dramatic trappings of those reported in the parapsychological and theosophical literature and is given by a 52year-old retired government employee living in Puerto Rico. He says, “When I was approximately ten years old I was living together with my older brother at my uncle’s house, a major in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. One day I was reclined on my bed quite awake and was looking at the ceiling beams of the old Spanish building where the living quarters were located. I was saying to myself many questions such as what was I doing there and who was I. All of a sudden I get up from the bed and start walking toward the next room. At that moment I felt a strange sensation in me; it was a sensation of weightlessness and a strange mix of a sense of a feeling of joy. I turned back in my steps in order to go back to bed when to my big surprise I saw myself reclined on the bed. This surprising experience at that very small age gave me the kind of a jerk which, so to say, shook me back to my body.” This example, particularly well exemplifies the ordinary, even mundane, content of the experience, its vivid emotional impact, the sense of a complete functioning self located outside the brain and the considerable surprise when the physical body is seen, and the way this anxiety triggers the delicate balance of the alteration of consciousness causing a restitution of the normal cognitive set of “in-body state.”
Taxonomy of OBEs
As might be expected, all possible classification approaches have been applied to such experiences and each generally begs the question because there is no agreement as to what constitutes the OBE. Four possible approaches suggest themselves: 1. A classification by natural clustering of phenomena, that is, subjective