were mostly academic but also autobiographical. At some points, the
theoretical problem appeared directly and unexpectedly in my life. As a
young man, I encountered a series of disturbing experiences, of which
the following is a typical instance:
It is spring, 1977. I am nineteen years old. I am lying in bed, on
my back, going to sleep, deeply relaxed yet still alert. The door is
half open, and light seeps in. I hear my family’s voices from the
hallway and the bathroom and pop music from my sister’s bedroom.
Suddenly I feel as though my bed is sliding into a vertical
position, with the head of the bed moving toward the ceiling. I
seem to leave my physical body, rising slowly into an upright
position. I can still hear the voices, the sound of people brushing
their teeth, and the music, but my sight is somewhat
blurred. I feel a mixture of amazement and rising panic, sensations
that eventually lead to something like a faint, and I find
myself back in bed, once again locked into my physical body.
This brief episode was startling for its clarity, its crisp and lucid quality,
and the fact that from my point of view it appeared absolutely
real. Six years later, I was aware of the concept of the out-of-body experience
(OBE), and when such episodes occurred, I could control at least
parts of the experience and attempt to make some verifiable observations.
As I briefly pointed out in the Introduction, OBEs are a wellknown
class of states in which one undergoes the highly realistic illusion
of leaving one’s physical body, usually in the form of an etheric double, and moving outside of it. Most OBEs occur spontaneously, during sleep
onset or surgical operations or following severe accidents. The classic
defining characteristics include a visual representation of one’s body
from a perceptually impossible, third-person perspective (for example,
lying on the bed below) plus a second representation of one’s body, typically
hovering above.
At about the same time, in the early 1980s, I underwent an equally
disturbing experience in my intellectual life. I was writing my philosophy
dissertation at Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe University on the discussion
of the so-called mind-body problem that ensued after Gilbert
Ryle’s 1949 book, The Concept of Mind. In this period, various philosophers,
from Ullin T. Place to Jaegwon Kim, had developed nearly a
dozen major theoretical proposals to solve that age-old puzzle, and
great progress had been made. I had grown up in a more traditionally
oriented philosophy department, which was dominated by the political
philosophy of the Frankfurt School. There, almost no one seemed
aware of the enormous progress in analytical philosophy of mind. To my great surprise, I discovered that in the really convincing, substantial
work at the research frontier, materialism had long ago become the orthodoxy.
Almost no one seemed even remotely to consider the possibility
of the existence of a soul. There were very few dualists—except on
the Continent. It was sobering to realize that some forty years after the
end of World War II, with practically all of the German-Jewish intelligentsia
and other intellectuals either murdered or driven into exile,
many lines of tradition and teacher-student relationships were severed,
and German philosophy had been largely decoupled from the global
context of discussion. Most German philosophers would not read what
was being published in English. Suddenly some of the philosophical debates
I witnessed in German universities increasingly struck me as badly
informed, a bit provincial, and lacking awareness of where humankind’s
great project of constructing a comprehensive theory of mind actually
stood. I gradually became convinced, by my own reading, that indeed
there was no convincing empirical evidence of conscious experience
possibly taking place outside the brain, and that the general trend at the
frontier of the very best of philosophy of mind clearly pointed in the opposite
direction. On the other hand, I had myself repeatedly experienced
leaving my body—vividly and in a crystal-clear way. What to do?
There was only one answer: I had to turn these episodes into a controllable
and repeatable state of consciousness, and I had to settle experimentally
the issue of whether it was possible to make verifiable
observations in the out-of-body state. I read everything on OBEs I could
find, and I tried various psychological techniques to produce the phenomenon
deliberately. In a series of pitiless self-experiments, I stopped
drinking liquids at noon, stared at a glass of water by the kitchen sink
with the firm intention of returning to it in the out-of-body state, and
went to bed thirsty with half a tablespoon of salt in my cheek (you can
try this at home). In the scientific literature, I had read that OBEs were
associated with the anesthetic ketamine. So when I had to undergo minor
surgery in 1985, I talked the anesthetist into changing the medication
so that I could experience the wake-up phase of ketamine-induced
anesthesia in a medically controlled, experimental setting. (Do not try
this at home!) Both types of research projects failed, and I gave up on them many years ago. I was never able to go beyond pure first-person
phenomenology—that is, to make a single verifiable observation in the
OBE state that could even remotely count as evidence for the genuine
separability of consciousness and the brain.
In some of my recent research, I have been trying to disentangle the
various layers of the conscious self-model—of the Ego. I firmly believe
that, from a theoretical perspective, it is most important first to isolate
clearly the simplest form of self-consciousness. What is the most fundamental,
the earliest sense of selfhood? Can we subtract thinking, feeling,
and autobiographical memory and still have an Ego? Can we remain in
the Now, perhaps even without any acts of will and in the absence of any
bodily behavior, and still enjoy phenomenal selfhood? Philosophers in
the past have made the mistake of almost exclusively discussing highlevel
phenomena such as mastery of the first-person pronoun “I” or cognitively
mediated forms of intersubjectivity. I contend that we must pay
attention to the causally enabling and necessary low-level details first, to
what I call “minimal phenomenal selfhood”; we must ground the self,
and we must do it in an interdisciplinary manner. As you will see, OBEs
are a perfect entry point.
Not too long ago, OBEs were something of a taboo zone for serious
researchers, just as consciousness was in the early 1980s; both have been
considered career-limiting moves by junior researchers. But after
decades of neglect, OBEs have now become one of the hottest topics in
research on embodiment and the conscious self. Olaf Blanke, whom we
met in the Introduction, and I are studying the experience of disembodiment
in order to understand what an embodied self truly is.
From a philosophical perspective, OBEs are interesting for a number
of reasons. The phenomenology of OBEs inevitably leads to dualism and
to the idea of an invisible, weightless, but spatially extended second
body. I believe this may actually be the folk-phenomenological ancestor
of the notion of a “soul” and of the philosophical protoconcept of the
mind. The soul is the OBE-PSM. The traditional concept of an immortal
soul that exists independently of the physical body probably has a recent
neurophenomenological correlate. In its origins, the “soul” may
have been not a metaphysical notion but simply a phenomenological one: the content of the phenomenal Ego activated by the human brain
during out-of-body experiences.
In the history of ideas, contemporary philosophical and scientific debates
about the mind developed from this protoconcept—an animist,
quasi-sensory theory about what it means to have a mind. Having a mind
meant having a soul, an ethereal second body. This mythical idea of a
“subtle body” that is independent of the physical body and is the carrier
of higher mental functions, such as attention and cognition, is found in
many different cultures and at many times—for instance, in prescientific
theories about a “breath of life.” Examples are the Hebrew ruach, the
Arabic ruh, the Latin spiritus, the Greek pneuma, and the Indian prana.
The subtle body is a spatially extended entity that was said to keep the
physical body alive and leave it after death. It is also known in theosophy
and in other spiritual traditions; for instance, as “the resurrection
body” and “the glorified body” in Christianity, “the most sacred body”
and “supracelestial body” in Sufism, “the diamond body” in Taoism and
Vajrayana, “the light body” or “rainbow body” in Tibetan Buddhism.
My theory—the self-model theory of subjectivity—says that this subtle
body does indeed exist, but it is not made of “angel stuff” or “astral
matter.” It is made of pure information, flowing in the brain. Of course,
the “flow of information” is just another metaphor, but the informationprocessing
level of description is the best we have at this stage of research.
It creates empirically testable hypotheses, and it allows us to
see things we could not see before. The subtle body is the brain’s selfmodel,
and scientific research on the OBE shows this in a particularly
striking way.
First-person reports of OBEs are available in abundance, and they,
too, come from all times and many different cultures. I propose that the
functional core of this kind of conscious experience is formed by a culturally
invariant neuropsychological potential common to all human beings.
Under certain conditions, the brains of all human beings can
generate OBEs. We are now beginning to understand the properties of
the functional and representational architecture involved. Examining
the phenomenology in OBE reports will help us to understand not only
these properties as such but also their neural implementation. There may well be a spatially distributed but functionally distinct neural correlate
for the OBE state. In her work, the psychologist Susan J. Blackmore
has propounded a reductionist theory of out-of-body experiences, describing
them as models of reality created by brains that are cut off from
sensory input during stressful situations and have to fall back on internal
sources of information. She drew attention to the remarkable fact
that visual cognitive maps reconstructed from memory are most often
organized from a bird’s-eye perspective. Close your eyes and remember
the last time you were walking along the beach. Is your visual memory
one of looking out at the scene itself? Or is it of observing yourself, perhaps
from somewhere above, walking along the coastline? For most
people, the latter is the case.
When I first met Blackmore, in Tübingen in 1985, and told her about
several out-of-body experiences of my own, she kept asking me to describe,
painstakingly, how I moved during these episodes. Not until then
did I realize that when I moved around my bedroom at night in the OBE
state, it was not in a smooth, continuous path, as in real-life walking or
as one might fly in a dream. Instead, I moved in “jumps”—say, from one
window to the next. Blackmore has hypothesized that during OBEs we
move in discrete shifts, from one salient point in our cognitive map to
the next. The shifts take place in an internal model of our environment—
a coarse-grained internal simulation of landmarks in settings
with which we are familiar. Her general idea is that the OBE is a conscious
simulation of the world—spatially organized from a third-person
perspective and including a realistic representation of one’s own body—
and it is highly realistic because we do not recognize it as a simulation.Blackmore’s theory is interesting because it treats OBEs as behavioral
spaces. And why shouldn’t they be internally simulated behavioral
spaces? After all, conscious experience itself seems to be just that: an inner
representation of a space in which perceptions are meaningfully integrated
with one’s behavior. What I found most convincing about
Blackmore’s OBE model were the jumps from landmark to landmark, a
phenomenological feature I had overlooked in my own OBE episodes.
My fifth OBE was particularly memorable. It took place at about 1:00
A.M., on October 31, 1983: My vision was generally poor during OBE experiences, as would
be expected in a dark bedroom at night. When I realized I was
unable to flip the light switch in front of which I found myself
standing in my OBE state, I became extremely nervous. In order
not to ruin everything and lose a precious opportunity for experiments,
I decided to stay put until I had calmed down. Then
I attempted to walk to the open window, but instead found myself
smoothly gliding there, arriving almost instantaneously. I
carefully touched the wooden frame, running my hands over it.
Tactile sensations were clear but different—that is, the sensation
of relative warmth or cold was absent. I leaped through the window
and went upward in a spiral. A further phenomenological
feature accompanied this experience—the compulsive urge to
visualize the headline in the local newspapers: “WAS IT ATTEMPTED
SUICIDE OR AN EXTREME CASE OF SOMNAMBULISM? PHILOSOPHY
STUDENT DROPS TO HIS DEATH AFTER SLEEPWALKING OUT
THE WINDOW.” A bit later, I was lying on top of my physical body
in bed again, from which I rose in a controlled fashion, for the
second time now. I tried to fly to a friend’s house in Frankfurt,
eighty-five kilometers away, where I intended to try to make
some verifiable observations. Just by concentrating on my destination,
I was torn forward at great speed, through the wall of
my bedroom, and immediately lost consciousness. As I came to,
half-locked into my physical body, I felt my clarity decreasing
and decided to exit my body one last time.
These incidents, taken from what was a more comprehensive experience,
demonstrate a frequently overlooked characteristic of self-motion
in the OBE state—namely, that the body model does not move as the
physical body would, but that often merely thinking about a target location
gets you there on a continuous trajectory. Vestibulo-motor sensations
are strong in the OBE state (indeed, one fruitful way of looking at
OBEs is as complex vestibulo-motor hallucinations), but weight sensations
are only weakly felt, and flying seems to come naturally as the logical
means of OBE locomotion. Because most OBEs happen at night,
another implicit assumption is that you cannot see very well. That is, if you are jumping from one landmark in your mental model of reality to
the next, it is not surprising that the space between two such salient
points is experientially vague or underdetermined; at least I simply
didn’t expect to see much detail. Note that the absence of thermal sensations
and the short blackouts between different scenes are also well documented
in dream research (see chapter 5).
Here are some other first-person accounts of OBEs. This one comes
from Swiss biochemist Ernst Waelti, who conducts research at the University
of Bern’s Institute of Pathology on virosomes for drug delivery
and gene transfer:
I awoke at night—it must have been about 3 A.M.—and realized I
was unable to move. I was absolutely certain I was not dreaming,
as I was enjoying full consciousness. Filled with fear about
my current condition, I had only one goal—namely, to be able to
move my body again. I concentrated all my will power and tried
to roll over onto my side: Something rolled, but not my body—
something that was me, my whole consciousness, including all
of its sensations. I rolled onto the floor beside the bed. While
this was happening, I did not feel bodiless but as if my body
consisted of a substance constituted of a mixture of gas and liquid.
To this day, I have not forgotten the amazement that
gripped me when I felt myself falling to the floor, but the expected
hard impact never came. Had my normal body fallen like
that, my head would have collided with the edge of my bedside
table. Lying on the floor, I was seized by panic. I knew I possessed
a body, and I had only one overwhelming desire: to be
able to control it again. With a sudden jolt, I regained control of
it, without knowing how I managed to get back into it.
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