"Going Out of Body"

Five important soul phenomena have appeared in our Western experience in the last quarter of the 20th century: fragmentation of soul; out-of-body experiences, with or without a near-death experience (NDE); reincarnation, especially in respect to past life regression therapy; shamanic practices; and visits from beyond. A grasp of these concepts will help us to understand more about soul.

Words like "heaven" and "nirvana" that come from our spiritual traditions and experiences strongly suggest that life is far more than ashes-to-ashes, dust-to-dust existence. Indeed, it is a process that ties into the very life of the Universe. Only the incarnate soul that lives the sacred life can fully appreciate the value of the entire process; ego, living the secular, finite life, cannot.

Being eternal, soul has the power to outwait the suffering of its temporal home, the body.

Fragmenting the soul, having a piece of your soul leave home:

The soul’s fragility makes it subject to wounding. Because we are at best only faintly conscious of soul’s presence, we are hardly aware that a soul can be wounded, let alone how it would respond to the wounding. A soul can suffer a wound from any kind of trauma, even a sprained ankle, but none is more egregious than when a naked, soul-less ego — a Hitler — traumatizes and fragments another person’s soul out of a craving to restore its own lost soul.

Soul-aware societies, the world over, share an awareness of soul’s tenderness and sensitivity to trauma. The trauma causes breaks or gaps in the integrity of soul, and soul fragments, breaking off the injured piece in order for it to find safety from the trauma. Those lost parts of our soul damage the integrity of soul, and without soul integrity, we are not whole. The part that stayed was a tender part of my soul that wanted to leave its earthly home for the safety of its eternal home.

When my aunt "rescued" me from my "stupid" clam-digging adventure, the terror I felt caused a part of me to separate from the rest of me and stay under the water… where it was safe from her terrified and terrifying anger. The part that stayed was a tender part of my soul that wanted to leave its earthly home for the safety of its eternal home. I paid a tremendous price for this loss and my ego did its best to compensate for it. It wrote a set of life rules that it believed would protect me from such insults.

However, they were not adequate for all of the demands that life would impose, nor were they adequate for the pressure of my soul to recover its lost part. The soul part of my self would patiently, subtly, ingeniously and inexorably set up situations in which it hoped to be able to recover that piece and be whole—to heal. As I have already mentioned, I would suddenly find myself doing something unbelievably stupid for which I would be discovered and accused of the worst—stupidity. Eventually, my soul succeeded and I recovered the memory, and in that instant I experienced the most profound relief I could ever imagine.

Out-of-Body Experiences, when the unfragmented soul leaves home:

Out-of-body experiences take place in altered states of consciousness and when the body experiences extreme physical or emotional trauma. We all experience the former in our dreams, those rich, visual, auditory, tactile, and kinesthetic images that we all experience three or four times nightly, whether we remember them or not. We encounter meaningful legendary figures and experiences in dreams. For many indigenous cultures, dreamtime is a time for soul to wander, and they wake a person from sleep very carefully lest soul be not fully returned to the body by the time of full awakening. Dreams are soul-journeys.

An out-of-body experience in the awakened state can put a person in contact with people and situations from other times even when death has separated them. Toward the end of the last century, out-of-body experiences became the subject of many books and popular media experiences. G. Ray Moody described the experiences of many of his counseling clients who had such experiences when their lives where threatened. Each one moved through a long dark tunnel towards a point of brilliant light only to be told by a presence at or near the end of the tunnel that his or her time had not come and that he or she was to return to the body. Kenneth Ring described the experiences of people who went all the way into the light at the end of this tunnel. There they were in the presence of beings whom they could sometimes see and sometimes not. Most of them received instructions as to what they were to do with their lives.

I would like to share with you some stories that came to me directly from the person involved:

An out-of-body experience without an NDE:

A woman in her thirties had experienced two recurrences of a difficult cancer. Her doctors had told her there was still cancer in her body, and were proposing more therapies. She was attracted to a weekend retreat with a healer who worked with music. There, she found she could enter deep meditative states while listening to his music. In one of these states, she found herself out of her body, going down a long dark tunnel toward a beautiful, brilliant, yet comfortable light. She went into the light and knew she was in the presence of beings that she could not see. They spoke to her without voices, yet she understood them clearly. They gave her instructions about what she was to do with her life. Immediately, she began to follow them to the letter, and was still in good health, many years later.

Another woman with severe musculo-skeletal pain from several accidents was studying brainwave biofeedback with a therapist. She found relief in this work, and started to find herself in strange, yet pleasant and reassuring places when she attained certain levels of relaxation. One session was moving along pleasantly when she suddenly found herself out of her body, traveling down a long, dark tunnel toward a lovely, brilliant light that did not hurt her eyes. She burst out into the light and into the presence of the four adults in her family who had subjected her to a lot of physical and emotional abuse as she was growing up. They had all died years ago, and now their spirits welcomed her with peace and love that stunned her, transforming huge amounts of the anger with which she had lived most of her adult life. On returning to ordinary reality, she realized she still had the pain, but it was changed, much as her attitudes had changed. She was at much greater peace with herself and the griping edge of pain was blunted and softened.

An out-of-body experience in an NDE

A woman brought her near-death experience (NDE) to an early HOPE Group meeting of sixteen people, all of whom had cancer, but her. She only had terrible pain in her body from multiple fractures that she sustained in an automobile accident in which her husband died. The first thing she became aware of after the accident was that she was in a hospital emergency room, "floating" up beneath the ceiling with her husband and her father and mother-in-law who had been dead for ten and eight years, respectively. All four were wordlessly communicating with each other about what was going on. After a while, her husband said, "I’ve done all the work I came here to do. I’m not going back." Her response was, "Well, I’ve not done all my work, so I am going back." She wondered aloud to us why she had decided to come back because of the physical and emotional pain. Sixteen people with cancer responded by expressing their deep gratitude for her story and her presence. I have repeated this story hundreds of times to people concerned about their own death and dying. It always creates a deep thoughtful silence in them.

Reincarnation

Up until the beginning of the 17th century, reincarnation had been a part of Judaic, Christian, and Islamic belief. Also, until that time, soul, the active principle in reincarnation, was a partner with body, mind, and spirit as an essential component of human life. Though scientific reason at that time discarded soul, it seems that soul never left us. Today, for the first time in centuries, hundreds of books on soul are in publication.

Brian Weiss, MD, is a psychiatrist who met the reincarnation of soul in a remarkable encounter with a woman he calls Catherine about whom he has written a book, Many Lives, Many Masters. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988. She was suffering from eleven different phobias, each with its own panic attack. As they worked together under hypnosis, she experienced the traumatic death of each of eleven different people living in different times and places. Each experience of dying bore a relationship to one of her phobias and its associated panic attacks. In each instance, she experienced the profound peace common to all who go out of body, and both the phobia and its panic attack completely disappeared on coming out of trance.  His experience supports the shamanic  perception out that traumatic death may hold the soul in non-ordinary reality instead of releasing it to incarnate into another human still in its mother’s womb. The consequences of such soul entrapment reach out over time causing illnesses that relate to the mechanism of death. The trapped soul seeks ways to attract the attention of healers who will set it free to resume its incarnations and experiences of life.

Weiss’ experiences and those of his patient help us examine the validity of believing in the eternal nature of soul. My personal and vicarious experiences suggest to me that illnesses and dysfunctions might well be associated with wounds of the soul that go back in time even into the collective of human experience. What might it be, other than the soul that goes out of body, down a long tunnel and into a brilliant light to either return or leave? If you still question the remarkable properties of soul, read the following story told by a woman in another HOPE Group who worked as a hospice volunteer in regional nursing homes. She told us about being present to the dying of a tiny little old lady who had a wonderfully clear mind and a terribly weak heart.

One day, while she was paying a hospice visit to the old woman, the older one suddenly said, "Get in bed with me and hold me, I’m going!" No sooner had she done as asked, than the tired old heart stopped beating. The HOPE’r held her center, remaining peaceful, and suddenly she found herself walking across a prairie towards a river, carrying her little friend who, to her surprise, was alive and alert! My friend has never seen the prairie, let alone walked in it, and yet she knew exactly where she was! They were approaching a river, on the other side of which she could see a small crowd of people approaching the river.

Her tiny burden suddenly cried out, "Jennifer! Is that you?" whereupon one of the group stepped forward and called, "Yes, Gram, it’s me. How are you?" The old one replied, "I’m fine, but how are you? You died ten years ago, didn’t you?" to which the answer came, "Yes, and I’m fine. It’s wonderful to see you, Gram!" One by one, the others in the group came forward and greeted the little woman in my friend’s arms. Like Jennifer, they were all family members who had died earlier. When the two reached the river, there was no visible way across, so the little one called out, "How do we get across?" "Keep walking!" was the reply, so the turned and walked along the river while the conversations across it continued. Twice more they asked how to get across. Each time they were told to keep walking, and the second time they were told to look ahead of them—there was a bridge! The little one said, "Take me halfway across and put me down." HOPE’r did as she was asked. They said "goodbye" and the HOPE’r turned back. Immediately, the prairie disappeared and she found herself in the bed in the nursing home, holding the lifeless body of her little friend.

Shamans and Shamanism: Soul Retrievers:

Virtually every society around the world has or had soul-workers called shamans. The archeological evidence for their work goes back at least 40,000 years! They specialize in going into what Michael Harner calls "non-ordinary reality" where they speak to souls to get stories, and retrieve soul fragments that dissociated because of trauma—and we thought psychotherapy began with Freud!

Shamanic practices teach that fragmentation of the soul by physical, mental or emotional trauma causes both physical and mental illness including PTSD and the psychoses. The shaman learns to travel in "non-ordinary reality" to recover the separated fragments, and to return them to the soul of the person for whom the shaman journeys. Ordinary reality, the pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts reality in which we move as we go about our daily lives, tends to exclude experiences of the mystery that surrounds our condition. The shaman routinely visits this mysterious realm in her rituals.

A shaman performing soul retrieval travels in trance to the time and place where the lost soul fragment hides, and brings it back home to the body that it had left in fear or because it was stolen by another fragmented soul that wanted to be complete. My teacher, Sandra Ingerman, used the word essence to describe the soul… the same word several of my Buddhist acquaintances use for the soul.

I often journey without knowing anything of a person’s story … it makes for interesting surprises! Journeying one day for a man in his forties, I entered the light trance state I have come to identify with the shamanic journey, and found myself in a newborn nursery in a hospital, standing in front of an infant incubator. I saw myself opening it, lifting out its infant occupant, and saying to him, "I’m here to take you home," to which he replied, "It’s about time you came. I’m ready!" (In non-ordinary reality newborn infants can speak). I returned to the ordinary reality of my office, and as I was going through the closing part of the ritual, the man suddenly began to weep. I waited, and when he was quiet, I asked him what had come up for him. He said he did not know, but it seemed that the most profound sense of relief had come over him. He then told me that when he was born, his umbilical cord was wrapped twice around his neck, nearly strangling him. He had had to spend the first two weeks of his life in an incubator, away from his mother! He said that he had always had to work on deep, powerful feelings of abandonment. Subsequently, many harmful behaviors that had plagued him for most of his life just seemed to evaporate!

Visits from Beyond:

We can add to the above the many strange and wonderful stories of the visit of a dying person’s soul to a beloved spouse or family member that sometime take place over great distances and enrich our perceptions of the nature of soul thereby. When a soul is liberated from the body that had been its home, what are its capabilities? Could it also be that soul knows how to thin the veil between the physical world and the spiritual world? Could it also be that the discovery and experience of these remarkable spiritual phenomena will lead us to the recovery of soul of the human species?