Chasing Consciousness Thomas Campbell - TESTING OUT OF BODY EXPERIENCES
How can out of body experiences be explained? What theory of reality could accomodate such a phenomenon?
Today we have the extraordinary topic of the science and physics of Out of Body Experiences to get our head around! Many brain scientists have reduced this common experience to a mix of physiological and brain chemical effects, maintaining that no perceiving consciousness actually leaves the body, rather it is a form of hallucination and distortion of body schema. Not knowing when these experiences will spontaneously occur has made them hard to study in the lab.
However, certain researchers have developed a method for inducing the experience, allowing for deeper study. Following that study some new theories of reality have developed that could include such an experience and even others like Near Death Experience or NDE, and Controlled Remote Viewing which we’re evaluating in this second series.
One such scientist is our guest today physicist Dr. Tom Campbell! He’s an experimental physicist who’s worked for over 20 years developing US missile systems for the Department of Defence, specialising in developing cutting edge technology, large-system simulation, technology development and integration, and complex system vulnerability and risk analysis.
He began researching altered states of consciousness with Bob Monroe at Monroe Laboratories in the early 1970s. He helped design experiments and develop the Binaural Beats technology for creating specific altered states, and became an experienced test subject and trainer too. After many years studying consciousness, and out of body experiences he wrote the book ‘My Big TOE’, as in ‘Theory of Everything’, which describes his model of existence and reality from both the physical and metaphysical points of view.
PART 1: Testing Out of Body Experiences
00:00 Intro
06:00 Balanced left right brain thinking
09:00 Out of Body Experience is a bad term, but neutral
13:00 Consciousness is not projected from the body
21:30 Testing Bob Monroe’s OBE phenomena
32:00 The experiment that confirmed it was real
36:00 Alpha Numeric information is not the same type as image, pattern or metaphor
46:00 The weirdest stories Tom’s encountered
55:00 Non-embodied consciousnesses encounters
01:05:00 Binaural beats to aid getting out of body explained
01:20:00 Theta brainwave is the state you need to be in to explore your consciousness
PART 2: The physics of Tom’s ‘My Big T.O.E’ (Theory of Everything)
01:25:00 Consciousness evolves by lowering entropy, finding more order and structure
Full show notes at Chasingconsciousness.net
References:
‘On testing the simulation’ One of Tom's scientific papers