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out of the body.18 In fact, a shaman cannot be anointed as such unless he has that capacity. According to Eliade, such flights express “intelligent understanding of secret things, metaphysical truths, symbolic meaning, transcendence, and freedom.” A South African study,19 analyzing 122 accounts in response to a press request, found that the OBE occurred often while the subject was asleep, relaxed, or dozing, and that over 50% of the subjects claimed to have been in a normal mental state when the phenomenon occurred. Anecdotal accounts exist from people already convinced of the veracity and validity of such experiences.5,20–24 All contain vivid and exciting descriptions based on the assumption that an objective separation and independent existence of mind from body is possible. Many of the reports are interested in what other dimensions of reality can be explored under these conditions. Eastman13 reported the first summary of conditions under which OBEs occur, for example, before, during, and after sleep, during hypnotic trance (not supported subsequently in the literature), during illness, drug states, and after shock or accident. The sparse psychiatric literature11 provides elaborate frameworks to explain the experience based on, for example, psychoanalytic theories which usually emphasize defenses against the imminence of physical death and various ways to deal with infantile omnipotence. Thus OBEs are often seen as unconscious attempts to portray aspects of man’s eternal quest for immortality. Literature from philosophical and psychic sources, however, use the OBE to classify people as more or less spiritual (which usually means psychologically healthy and/or with ESP ability) based on the type and nature of their OBE.25
Method
On February 15, 1976, one of the investigators (SWT), in an interview with a national periodical (circulation 15 million on the North American continent), solicited letters from people who thought they might have had an out-of-body experience. Of about 1,500 responses, 700 subjects reported experiences in which they thought their consciousness was separated from the physical body. About one year after the interview two multiscale questionnaires (Profile of Out-of-Body Experiences, POBE, and Profile of Adaptation to Life, PAL) were sent to the individuals and 420 people returned valid questionnaires. 339 reported OBE experiences, while 81 people did not have such experiences, but expressed a strong interest in learning more about them, and for the purposes of this study