Thanks for sharing.Outside the body definitely wasn't scary. Haven't done it for ages. The first time was a Monday morning after 3 hard drinking nights. I had to get up. I had responsibilities. I tried to force my self up out of bed. I really did. But I fell back to sleep. But there I was above body getting further away. I thought I was dead and had left my body. I set off to tell a brother 'hey look I'm dead' . Movement, everything was free and easy. A little later I returned to my body with a bit of wow about it all.
A few times I did it without leaving my body. More or less like the aneathetsic wearing off but you can't move. Not so much fun but not really a problem either. I think those sorts of expereinces, and there is more of the out of body ones, come from a car accident in, believe it or not, 1968. (Was on the way to a footy clinic. Grew up in the Wimmera which became Essendon's zone and they were putting on a clinic in a nearby town (Warracknabeal). Not sure now but I think Ken Fletcher and Geoff Pryor were to be there to name two. Being an Essendon supporter was dead keen to go. There was about 8 of us in a station wagon before seat belts. The driver was the father of a few of the passengers and he crossed a major road evidently in full football discusion and we were cleaned up. I came out and went head first into a white post. I think I was the worst of it. Another chap had broken ribs. The Essendon players sent their best wishes to the hospital when they heard about it which was good but it is a concussion that still affects me. The joke at school was I got my brains unscrambled. I sort of started getting good or better marks in maths and sciences.)
As far as your arguing goes, is there more than death and the universe? And I think you are under selling sleep. Where do you think a dream occurs? Is it on atomic matter? It is a question that good science should be addressing. I have my post atomic theory on it but it is only a theory.
Or, in terms of your last sentence, if conciousness does not depend on the body, what does it depend on? Where does consciousness come from?
Interesting stuff interests me.
I don't think I'm underselling sleep. I agree that it is of the same essence as the psychedelic realm but I think it is usually more attuned to our corporeal drama lived out day to day with the occasional psychedelic dream occurring. Dreams play out in familiar settings with irrational/surreal scenarios and often have people you are acquainted with drifting in and out.
Psychedelics send you through unfamiliar settings and can bring encounters with inter-dimensional beings. They seem to send your consciousness further into that realm.
I think consciousness is the most important area of human understanding yet to be adequately explained by science. This is why I am so strongly in favour of exploring psychedelics as I believe they are a genuine tool readily available to us to better understand consciousness. For decades now, research has been inconceivably shut down or hindered due to government ideology rather than clear scientific reasoning.
As far as where consciousness comes from...
We can only really theorise on that one.
I think, taking into account the warped sense of space and time when in a dream/psychedelic state, that consciousness falls outside of the space/time continuum. This is why science struggles with the concept. It falls inbetween events, matter, thoughts etc. It is everywhere and nowhere. It is the centre and the circumference. All things built or designed by people, all these things around us, are products of our imagination and therefore, by definition, products of a creative force. And that creative energy is the manifestation of a unified consciousness. All matter has varying degrees of consciousness. Our cells at a rudimentary level are conscious of their own immediate environment and role and are completely unconscious of the greater, encompassing unit that relies upon its function.
So, what's this post atomic theory you speaketh of?