I open my eyes, but there's nothing there...

People sometimes talk about an out of body experience when they’ve had a serious illness or suffered an accident from which they survived unscathed. The precise definition of this is neither explained nor really analysed, but the religious among us claim that it is in this area that we would do well to look at. Not look for answers, but to understand that a direction of some sort is being offered. Whatever religious beliefs I have—and I would say that they border on logic first and mystery second—I don’t always think that we can take such a simplistic view. Neither can we really define such things in scientific terms. I believe that we have to accept that there are things we do not fully comprehend and that maybe in time we will get closer to whatever the real meaning is. And it’s not like predicting what life is like on another planet by dreaming up all those weird creatures in science fiction films. That comes from an amalgamation of what we already know, and that we simply reassemble. No, I think that it’s possibly something that we have no conception of at the moment, and we will probably be taken by complete surprise when we learn more.

Our heart essentially controls the functions of the various parts of our body. True the brain gets involved by sending signals to the different parts pointing out pain, cold, heat, etc. but these are automatic functions which we take for granted. We also take for granted the way we understand how to live in society. We know the consequences of actions in certain situations and often don’t need to plan a strategy to deal with them, it’s done almost automatically. These are really the basics, like walking or even driving when we can think about different things at the same time yet arrive at the right destination safely. Our own internal guidance system operates in the background like some computer program, and only when we meet an obstacle does our fully conscious mind awaken to the demand and take over.

Nevertheless there are times when we start to think about a particular emotion and sometimes arrive at a super-concentrated thought. In this state, the world around us becomes a series of objects as if we too were an exhibit in a museum. We become objects that we can examine, initially from within as we go through different scenarios in our mind—acting out all the possibilities that result from how we can project our current thought process onto different events. This thought process becomes stronger as we delve deeper into our mind and ultimately we have detached the abstract from the physical. We are now a thought bubble outside of our bodies and looking back at ourselves. In one sense we have disconnected the experiences of our lives from our physical body and reduced it to that of a child just starting out in life. We have become two entities, a physical and an abstract. The physical is now a vulnerable being who you could probably could knock with a feather. And certainly in this state any vexation would result in that child curling up into a ball like a hedgehog, in an attempt to defend themselves against unknown fears.

The abstract entity however, is like a body of knowledge no longer shackled to a physical prison and therefore able to arrive at many thought permutations. Like a child learning from a story in a tv programme, our thoughts are reflected back to ourselves and in this ethereal state we can derive a conduct that seems suitable—at least at this time. The danger we have at this point is of allowing our thought analysis to go even further and become too distant to re-engage with our body. Physically we are still one person, but inside our brain a kind of wall has been created that separates our ability to join thought and action together. So the automatic functions provide essential life support, but the learning process is now operating as a complete individual within a cage. We can still survive and appear to be part of the society around us, when in fact we have become too distinct personalities. One that keeps us in touch with the basics of everyday life and one that is running both in the background and the foreground, re-interpreting everything to suit our new state.