Hee hee hee hee hee!  You are funny, Dude!

Where's the nearest wooden object I can desecrate!

I declare that I will inscribe this verse with a pocketknife somewhere where All may see True Love given voice into the wilderness!!!!!!!!!

Oh, maybe not.......maybe I'll just Sing it annoyingly All Day within earshot of Everyone I know.......  

love, blink, who believes that True Love should Never be a Secret because......welll, that's no fun for the rest of us....

Ah ye of little faith in OOBEs,

This is the same discussion that Dave and I have had before.  If you say "all crows are black" and you can find even ONE instance of a white crow, you have disproven that hypothesis.  Likewise, for those lucid dreaming specialists.  If you have only 2 or 3 episodes of documented OOBEs where a verification is present (either reading a number, seeing and relating a real time event or making contact with the deceased), then it disproves the notion that "OOBEs are not real, but merely wishful dreams."  

There is ample evidence that certain verifications have been obtained in OOBEs.  Victor Zammitt's site can support this.  However sometimes OOBEs are not verified and do seem to be waking dreams.  OK.

The "ESP" explanation still cracks me up after all these years.  Somehow, if you say that it isn't a real OOBE, but only ESP, it makes it more based in physical reality, and less of a chance that anything spiritual occurred.  Now keep in mind, science does not acknowledge anything called "the soul" or spirit, and most Western science considers the mind/ego to be an epiphenomenon that came by as a fluke of evolution.  Thus, the notion that if person A claims to go OOB, and gets a verification, it is not really true because somehow he "read the mind" of person B is laughable.  If there is consciousness/spirit, and if one person could know the thoughts of another without any direct physical communication, it would follow that there is in fact a human soul, and that we, as human beings are more than the sum of our parts.

If we are spirit/consciousness interacting in a physical plane, of what importance is it that we travel from one physical earth location to another in an astral body, as opposed to just perceiving the journey in our mind.  Remote viewing has no less of an implication for postmortem survival or the primacy of consciousness than does OOBE.  We have a mind/consciousness perceiving things in a manner impossible with knowledge gained by the input from our usual senses.  

Don recently cited evidence on my "faith of a mustard seed thread" of healing from a distance with intent of one or a group of minds on another person.  If true, there is no obvious physical connection between those praying and the person being prayed for.  One must postulate a spiritual healing, or a connection between all things (people, places and things) in order to make sense of the healings.

Are many OOBEs fanciful lucid dreams using our imagination?  Perhaps, yes.  However, if according to my thread, thought and intent creates physical and spiritual reality, then one can not dismiss all lucid dreams as mere whimsy.  Once you accept the primacy of consciousness and the interconnectedness of people with each other, and with God, you would be wrong to dismiss dreams in such a flippant manner.

Matthew

"The Sanctimonious"

Hi Jean,

Thanks.  Don recently gave me that monicker.  Kind of liked it in a tongue-in-cheek sort of way.



Best to you,


Matthew

Good one, Doc.

Love
Irene

On the one hand, some areas of New Age thought tell us that we plan our lives out prior to birth, and that the rarity of ADCs (after death communications) stems in part from the "spoiling the ending of the movie" phenomenon.  If we knew whe we incarnated that there was no risk to our choices and free will, or that we were immortal in consciousness, we might make decisions differently.  Remember Bill Murray in "Groundhog's Day," where he was stuck in the same day over and over again.  He found he could not die - even if he committed suicide he would wake up at 6 AM in the same town on the same day.  So with this knowledge, he did some pretty crazy things.  This school of thinking goes, that we are part of a divine intelligence, and that in order to fulfill our spiritual goals on earth, we need to believe physical life is real.  Thus ADCs are thought to be rare in this model so that they wouldn't spoil the unfolding of our lives.

The other school of thought is that ADCs are so rare because of the difficulty for those in spirit to "get through," and contact us.  In this vein of thought we have Bruce's "M band noise," the phenomenon of constricting our awareness of the spiritual plane to work and fit into a physical body.  This train of thought has the rarity of ADCs being attributed to the difficulty in communication itself, or more specifically the difficulty in incarnate human beings in perceiving the spiritual plane.

The first school of thought presupposes that we are empowered to make many prelife decisions and our very much part of the planning.  The second school of thought makes no such assumptions.  They are not mutually exclusive.  I wondered what most of you thought about this...


Matthew

At this point of the game it isn't necessary for me to do the verification game, but here are a few.

One time while meditating I heard a little dog barking outside. I thought he was this short nosed dog from down the street. I wondered what he was doing in front of my house. Then I saw a perfectly clear image of a long nosed dachshund barking, with more hair than dachshunds tend to have. I got up, looked outside, and I saw a dog that looked just like the dog I saw in the image.

One time I astral projected to a house. I wasn't familiar with the house, but I could tell it was accross the street from a school. I drove to where the house would be and there it was.

One time I had a problem with ants in my house. I couldn't figure out where they came from. I was meditating one day and I saw a bunch of ants crawling around within the walls of my house. I saw that they were entering my house through a hole at the back of a book case. I checked and there was a hole behind my bookcase.

One time I was laying awake in bed one morning. I experienced myself driving on the freeway on my way to work. Suddenly I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident. I could feel the motion. That morning I decided to not drive in the fast lane. While commuting to work, in the exact same area where the above occurred, an area where the traffic had come to a halt, I looked in my left mirror and saw a car coming along very fast. He didn't apply his brakes until about 15 feet before it was time for him to meet up with the car if front of him. He plowed into the car and because of a domino like effect four cars in that lane ended up getting involved with the accident.

I have had dreams that warned me about changes that were going to happen at work and the changes happened.

I have done a couple of retrievels where I could verify names by doing an internet search.

Sometimes it isn't possible to receive such information, so instead I'll receive information I have no way of verifying.

For example, one time while meditating I made contact with a friend who had passed away (I didn't plan to do so, it just happened). He showed me where he lives in the afterlife. I asked if I should contact his wife, and he didn't feel this was a good idea. Instead for verification purposes he provided me with information I knew nothing about. He told me Mount Rushmore and a name of a town other than where Mount Rushmore is located. I looked it up on the internet and it turns out a meeting was held in this other town in order to determine who should be added to Mount Rushmore.

Another such example is as follows. I doubted that my retrievel experiences were real. I asked for a verification. I was shown the cover of Robert Monroe's second book. I hadn't read it. The pages opened and I felt page 144, and saw page 145. I didn't understand why. I got the book, opened it to page 144, and saw that this is the page in which a chapter called "Rescue Mission" begins. The reason I felt 144 rather than see it, is because the first page of a chapter in Robert's second book isn't printed. The second page of a chapter does have the page number printed. In this case page 145.

One time I was given a number. I can't remember what number, something like 1653. I was also given sleeping giant. I couldn't figure out what this meant until I searched both items at the same time on yahoo. It turns out that in Virginia there is a mountain called sleeping giant and the elevation is exactly 1653. I had no way of knowing this.

When a person does retrievels it isn't always practical to ask for information.  Often the information isn't available.