Since the dawn of the scientific and materialist era, the predominant worldview has been that the material world – 3D space and time – constitutes the base reality. The physical world is regarded as the real world, the original world, in which consciousness occasionally arises within biological bodies made of matter.
Even for many so-called spiritual individuals, this perspective has become an ingrained worldview, leading to beliefs and practices that often resemble superstition and a naive belief in magic. The viewpoint also results in a fundamentally flawed understanding of phenomena such as out-of-body experiences and astral projection.
This limited perspective posits that consciousness, or the soul, existing inside a physical body, exits that body, and then floats around like a ghost in 3D space and time, occasionally peeking into other dimensions and planes of existence, such as the astral.
Right…
The Impossibility of Nonphysical Experiences in a Materialist Framework
This idea obviously seems silly in more ways than one. The same materialist worldview confuses consciousness with the waking conceptual mind and the activity of the brain, making the entire concept seem impossible. How can electrical and chemical activity within a physical brain exist beyond that brain. If one is that mind made of activity in the brain, how can one experience things without a physical body and without physical senses?
No wonder skeptics and so-called rational materialists have a hard time accepting this sort of phenomenon. Viewed in this way, it obviously does seem nonsensical.
Additionally, we face a problem created by the sheer limits of language and the rational mind. How does one express nonphysical phenomena in concepts evolved mainly to describe and tackle material issues? How does one even begin to understand the same phenomena with a mind evolved to describe and experience physical spacetime existence?
Acknowledging the Reality of Nonphysical Experiences
Despite all of this, conscious experiences that aren't tied to the physical body, or a physical world experienced through its senses, still occur all the time. The challenge in accepting them as real is exactly what’s mentioned above: They are just as difficult to prove within the materialist worldview as they are to describe and comprehend.
Still, the answer is not to ignore the nonphysical experiences, but to finally take that radical step that the self-referential loop of the scientific method, dealing solely with matter and energy, can never prove nor accept: Namely, to boldly accept the materialist worldview as simply wrong.
Afterall, if the materialist worldview was correct, nonphysical experiences would be quite easy to prove with the scientific method. And while there are very significant data to support the idea of phenomena like telepathy, OBE, and remote viewing, the results are not conclusive to the point they would be if all that happened during such phenomena was consciousness simply leaving the physical body in order to explore the same physical world that the body inhabits.
Reconceptualizing Reality: Consciousness as the Base of Existence
A more effective way to conceptualize not only phenomena like out-of-body experiences and astral projection, but our entire reality, is as follows:
Consciousness itself – whatever that may be – serves as the base reality – an eternal and boundless nonphysical core of potential and imagination. Within this consciousness, patterns emerge that form our individual selves.
Then, within these spiraling pools of seemingly individual consciousnesses, smaller fractal patterns arise, which we eventually perceive as our individual bodies in 3D space and time. Through these bodies and their physical senses, we experience a small bandwidth of other aspects of consciousness as the material world.
Flipping the Conventional Model of Reality Upside Down
In other words, if we turn the conventional worldview almost completely inside out, we arrive at what I consider to be a much truer understanding of how reality functions. However, we are still inevitably limited by language and our mind's rudimentary ways of understanding and expressing reality. Remember, language and the conceptual mind can never fully grasp reality as it truly is.
Nevertheless, this perspective offers significantly greater explanatory power for many spiritual phenomena, with out-of-body experiences being one example.
By viewing pure consciousness as the base reality, and our physical experiences as projections within it, out-of-body experiences and astral projections become as natural as our experiences in the physical world and our dreams at night.
They are also just as common, taking place all the time beyond the borders of our bodily senses and our mind’s obsession with thought. The key difference is that these experiences are less frequently recalled by our conscious, waking mind, which exists almost exclusively within physical 3D space (senses) and time (mind).
Do you allow yourself to remember?
If you really think about it, the consciousness-first model reflects how we have always experienced the world, albeit overshadowed by later materialist programming and indoctrination. This was the way you first experienced coming into the womb as a child, gradually shifting your point of focused consciousness into a mind inside a brain, which in turn exists inside a body.
It is still how you experience the world every single morning, as you recreate your body and the entire physical world upon waking up, though later programming of this mind has convinced you that all except sensory input and thought is somehow an irrelevant illusion. This programming may run so deep you have forgotten and ignored how the totality of you functions all together.
When awareness shifts back into the physical we therefore tend to ignore and forget all experiences that do not fit into the world model our physical minds have adopted.
Patterns of Consciousness – A Matryoshka doll of Increasingly Subtle Forms
The common worldview that considers 3D reality to be the base reality may work well for exploring matter and physics, but it lacks any explanatory power when it comes to consciousness. Remember, consciousness is not identical to the mind created by the brain. Furthermore, this materialist perspective fails to adequately describe or validate true spiritual phenomena, which are not merely hallucinations or ideas within the mind of a material brain – although such hallucinations and false ideas do exist (the materialist paradigm being one of them).
Our bodies – the patterns in consciousness that we perceive as ourselves – are not only manifested as physical objects in the form of our material bodies. On more subtle levels, they are also manifested as mental bodies, emotional bodies, and so on. Although the materialist paradigm likes to convince us that these are nothing but byproducts of brain activity, the opposite is true: The physical body is a more “dense” manifestation inside these larger patterns of consciousness.
During dreams, as an example, you move around in these bodies, independently of your physical body, which lie still and quite in bed. But this fact is not to be confused with the idea that these more ethereal bodies float around outside of your body in actual physical space, as this is an idea rooted in the false materialist worldview.
The Spectrum of Form – From Pure and Empty Consciousness to Physical Bodies
While the term "bodies" may not be entirely appropriate, since we are not dealing with material forms, it still conveys the idea. Each of these aspects of ourselves exist in their corresponding realms, experiencing phenomena according to their own nature. Engaging with an "outer world" through these bodies, we encounter everything from the above mentioned dreams, via astral projections and so-called out-of-body experiences, to states and worlds that are so extremely subtle they eventually lose themselves completely in the totality of consciousness, and are experienced as nothing but emptiness – or shunyata, as the buddhists say.
Still, all these experiences and “worlds” take place and exist in consciousness itself, the base reality.
The material world, where our physical bodies and personal minds live, is nothing but a very dense version of consciousness manifested in form. It is basically imagination frozen in space and slowly, slowly – extremely slowly – changing through time. Our physical bodies, in the same way, are just the densest version of the consciousness patterns that make up the totality of ourselves.
A Dream is Essentially an OBE
What essentially happens during an out-of-body experience is the following: Our individual consciousness shifts its focus to experiences that are not mediated by the senses of our physical bodies. Nothing more.
While it is important to make distinctions between terminology, a dream can therefore be considered an OBE, as it involves consciousness focusing on a world that sometimes has very little to do with the physical world experienced through our physical bodies. Still, each of us has experienced dreamlike states where the dream world and the "ordinary" physical world begin to merge and seem almost indistinguishable.
This is especially common in the morning, particularly when sleeping in late, when we might experience false awakenings – dreams in which we believe we are getting up from our beds and walking around our homes, with everything appearing perfectly physical and "real." However, we may then encounter something that could never be experienced through normal physical senses, such as a deceased relative standing in our living room, leading us to realize that we must still be dreaming, which often results in an immediate shift of focus and return to our beds and physical minds.
Rethinking Distinctions – The Continuum of Conscious States
I know many purists will protest and insist that “no, there is a huge difference between lucid dreaming, astral projection, and out-of-body experiences. They are three separate phenomena!” And in a way, they are correct, depending on how one uses the terms and definitions. However, the difference is more a matter of degree and point of focus rather than of kind.
Additionally, such statements are often rooted in spiritual dogma – concepts you’ve read about, learned, and adopted religiously. They are rarely based on personal experiences, as such lived experiences inevitably reveal how fleeting the distinctions between different states can be, including the physical.
Purists and dogmatists of this kind often assert that while lucid dreams may be common, actual OBEs are rare and much harder to achieve. This perspective often reflects a materialist worldview in which consciousness during an OBE must perform the impossible task of somehow exiting the physical body and floating into a world that is “outside” oneself, while a lucid dream is all in your mind and therefore, according to the materialist paradigm, inside your brain.
However, following the consciousness-first model, all one needs to do is focus one's awareness a particular way, achieving a state that is independent from the physical brain, which exists inside the totality of one’s awareness, and not the other way around.
An Narrow and Sensitive Bandwidth of Focus
While it is true that OBEs – at least what is commonly thought of as “true” OBEs – are more rare and harder to achieve than, for example, lucid dreams, this is only the case because the point of focused consciousness during such an OBE (where you experience a world almost identical to the physical world) is held at a very specific bandwidth that is very close to the ordinary point within the physical body, yet not entirely within it.
This means that the focused attention exists somewhere between the dream state and the waking state (with dreams, of course, being just as "real" as physical reality, but in their own way).
This, in turn, makes it possible to experience a “world” that is very close to actual physical reality, though still dreamlike in nature, allowing you to move freely and break physical rules. However, this very sensitive point of focus makes it difficult to achieve and maintain for any extended period.
Still, we have probably all had short OBEs during moments such as the aforementioned false awakenings.
The Complexity of Validating Out-of-Body Experiences – Dreams within Dreams
The difficulty of proving these experiences also lies in the fleeting nature of consciousness and the fact that our physical world is just one state among many others.
For example, if you want to prove that a person in an “actual” OBE state can read what’s written on a piece of paper in another room, consider this: the physical world is just a very dense dream within consciousness, among millions of other dreams. What’s to say that this person, while experiencing an out-of-body state, moves to that room and reads the paper in that exact dream to which they will return when they shift the focus of their consciousness back to their body?
The Blending of Conscious States and Experiences
In essence, what truly is happening during an out-of-body experience is not your soul flying out of your physical body like a ghost. Rather, it is the awareness that you are focusing not within your physical body, as in ordinary waking consciousness, but in and as a very sensitive and fragile space outside of it – yet still within a dream world that is almost identical to the reality experienced by the body’s physical senses.
And more importantly, it involves the miracle of your conscious, physical mind actually remembering the experience outside the realms of its own existence and world.
In the end, there are thousands of other points where your focus of awareness can be directed – points that have nothing to do with your physical body and the world experienced through its senses. Dreams are one such point, representing a step away from the ordinary physical world into realms that may heavily resemble the physical world but operate in increasingly strange ways.
Beyond this, we enter the astral planes, of which dreams can indeed be considered a part, because there is no clear border where you leave one plane and enter the next. This is actually the case between physical reality and other states, as well. Experiences of paranormal phenomena may involve such “blending” of two different states in the same conscious experience.
Conclusion
However, you may sometimes hear the claim that there is a significant distinction between dreams and astral experiences, just as there is supposedly a major difference between dreams, astral projections, and out-of-body experiences (OBEs). This perspective again reveals a materialist worldview, in which dreams are seen as mere fantasies occurring within your mind, while the latter two phenomena are thought to involve leaving your mind in space – either into the ordinary physical world or into the astral realm.
But in reality, as already stated, they are all different points of focus for your awareness, existing within the same pattern of consciousness that is you. The physical world is essentially just the densest form of the imagination of consciousness, experienced through the physical body, which, in turn, is the densest version of the consciousness patterns that make up the totality of what is essentially you.
