"Prima facie, it looks as though the parapsychologist is here studying a phenomenon in which a human subject, normally in some sense 'in' his body, appears in some paranormal fashion to get 'out.' There is no reason to dispute the correctness of this view at a certain level of observation. In my opinion, however, when we look more closely, we arrive at a very different picture of what is happening. At least one advantage of this revised picture is that it renders the phenomenon of OBE simpler and consequently more intelligible. The difference is this: the subject, instead of paranormally getting 'out' of the body, is already, in substance, 'out.' If so, it is not a matter of being in or out, or of two mutually exclusive and discrete states, but rather, of varying degrees of being 'out,' where at one end of the continuum we observe the dramatic phenomenon parapsychologists call the OBE; at the opposite end we observe something quite different, the subject wholly enmeshed and entangled in his bodily existence to such a degree that he experiences himself as identified with the events and vicissitudes of his bodily organism."
"...the subject always was out-of-the-body and ... the paranormal OBE represents one type of empirically dramatic and self-certifying instance of becoming fully conscious of the fact."
"The model I am proposing goes far beyond epiphenomenalism. It would be closer to hypophenomenalism. Ducasse (1961) introduced this term, though not the conception it is intended to express. 'Thus, the soul is not in the body, but the body is in, and dependent upon, the soul, which both precedes and survives it, and whose force gives form and organization to the matter of which the body is composed' (p. 81). So, instead of thinking of consciousness as in some sense located 'in' the body and sometimes managing in some paranormal fashion to get 'out,' it may be more in accord with the truth to think of the body as located 'in' the field of consciousness."
/misc | Aug 08, 2022