Uranus-Neptune and Virtual Out-of-Body Experiences

The August 24 issue of Science magazine had an article titled, “Out-of-Body Experiences Enter the Laboratory” (they require a subscription or one-time payment to read the article). The New York Times subsequently described this rather amazing development in “Studies Report Inducing Out-of-Body Experience.”

I feel this experiment is part of a larger trend involving extra-sensory advancements using technology. Recent experiments have also enabled brain waves to directly control a robot. These developments seem to be connected to the Uranus-Neptune mutual reception, which began in 2003 and will continue until 2011, as well as the 1993 Uranus-Neptune conjunction.

Neptune involves states of consciousness which overflow the boundaries of ego and everyday consciousness: meditation, drugs and alcohol, dreams, feelings of unity and oneness, Samadhi. An out-of-body experience has strong elements of Neptune—one is literally flowing out of one’s own body.

Uranus is technology, and the out-of-body experiences described in these articles are induced through technology. Here’s what the Times reports:

Using virtual-reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences — the sensation of drifting outside of one’s own body — in ordinary, healthy people, according to studies being published today in the journal Science.

When people gazed at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and were prodded in just the right way with the stick, they felt as if they had left their bodies.

The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said one expert on body and mind, Dr. Matthew M. Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University.

Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Dr. Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.

The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.

The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to otherworldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich, who, like Dr. Botvinick, had no role in the experiments. In what is popularly referred to as near-death experience, people who have been in the throes of severe and sudden injury or illness often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said and then, just as suddenly, finding themselves back inside their body.