Have you ever had a NDE (near death experience)?

[Jeebo]

8. Not a near death experience, but out-of-body experiences.

Two of them, in the 1970s. They were two of the most profound experiences I have had in my life.

One of them was a straight out-of-body experience. I had been taking lessons at the School of Metaphysics. I told them I would like to have those kinds of experiences, and they said sure, we can show you how to have them and control them. And whaddaya know, after a few months of lessons, I did have one. But when I realized what was happening, I totally freaked out at the utter weirdness of it, and snapped back into my body immediately. But for just a couple of seconds, I was out of my body -- sort of. It was more like my astral body was superimposed on my physical body, like a double-image on an old black-and-white TV. That imagery illustrates what the sensation was like, and as I said, it ended almost as soon as it began, because of my total freak-out reaction.

The other one involved an orange tabby cat I had at the time. People who live with cats know that some of those critters are really smart. You can tell. I have always lived with cats and this one was I think the smartest one I've ever lived with. He was snoozing lightly and purring beside me on my bed one morning as I was waking up, just at that never-never land of fringe consciousness when you're not exactly asleep and not exactly awake either. I was aware of the cat beside me, though, and suddenly I had the thought, I wonder what it's like to be a cat? And then suddenly, I was finding out. I think what was happening was that my astral body was momentarily touching, or perhaps subsumed within, his. My consciousness was feeling what being a cat feels like. And wow, was it weird. For me to try to describe those sensations would be like trying to describe color to somebody who's been blind from birth, but, well, there were components to that cat's consciousness that you would expect a cat to have. For example, I read somewhere once about cats that the author was claiming that even the tamest domestic house cat is "always stalking the jungle's edge" and that predatory, feral nature was definitely there. Cats have been domesticated more recently than dogs have, and it follows that they are instinctively closer to those wild beginnings.

Both of these profound experiences happened in the early spring of 1977, March or April. They both happened when I was on the periphery of wakefulness, so the obvious objection from the skeptic would be that I was imagining these experiences, or just coming out of a dream. The problem with that objection is that these experiences and the sensations I was experiencing were so completely out of the ken of normal human experience that I cannot believe they were anything other than completely real. Nobody could have possibly imagined or dreamed these sensations. I know they were exactly what they seemed to be, I know this with every fiber of my being, but they were also completely subjective experiences, so that their legitimacy is a proven fact only to the person who had the experiences, which was, of course, me.

-- Ron