People who experienced the experience of being out of the body during clinical death described the ability to move out of time, how they found themselves above their bodies after death, how they saw their new body. This, as you can see, was achieved with the help of the power of thought.
• “I was 12 years old and my brother and I decided to go swimming one afternoon. More guys came with us. Someone suggested: "Let's swim across the lake." I did this more than once, but this time for some reason I started to sink almost in the middle of the lake. I was floundering, now going down, now up, and, suddenly, I felt that I was far from my body, far from everyone, as if by myself.
Although I did not move, being at the same level all the time, I saw my body, which was three or four feet in the water, going down and up. I saw my body from the back and a little from the right side. At the same time, I felt that I still have a certain body shell, although I was outside the body. I had a feeling of lightness that I cannot describe. I felt like a double to myself."
In one of two cases, after death, people whose soul, mind, consciousness (or call it something differently) separated from the body, said that after leaving they did not feel that they had any kind of "bodily" shell …
According to one person, he had the feeling that he "was able to see everything around him, including his own body, lying on the bed and did not take up any place", as if he were a clot of consciousness. Several other people said that they simply could not remember if they had any kind of "body" after they were outside the body - to such an extent they were captured by what is happening around them.
• “On a bend, I lost control of the car and it fell off the road and flew into the air, and I remember seeing the car fall into a ditch. The moment the car left the road, I said to myself: "I had an accident." Then I lost my sense of time and sense of physical reality in relation to my body - I lost contact with my body. My soul or my "I" or my spirit, call it what you want - I felt that it seemed to go out of my body, up out of me, through my head. It didn't hurt, it just seemed to rise and be over me.
My essence felt itself as some kind of density, but still not physical density, rather it looked like some kind of wave or something similar to it. And this was not a completely physical reality, but resembled some kind of charge, if you will. But it felt like something quite real … It was small in volume and perceived as a ball with fuzzy boundaries. Perhaps this can be compared to a cloud … It almost looked as if it had a shell.
When it came out of my body, it seemed that it had two, as it were, extensions - a long one in front and a short one in the back … It felt very light, very. There was no tension in my physical body. This sensation has completely disappeared. My body had no weight … The most amazing of all the out-of-body travel I had undergone was the moment when my essence stopped above my head. It was as if she had decided whether to leave my body or return to it.
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It seemed that even then time did not move yet. At the very beginning of the car accident and after it, everything happened unusually quickly, but at the very moment of the accident, when my essence was, as it were, over my body, and the car was flying over the embankment, it seemed that all this happened for a very long time, before the car fell to the ground … All this time, I actually felt myself neither in the car, nor in an accident, nor even tied to my own body, I was only in my mind.
My essence had no physical properties, but I have to describe it in physical terms. I could describe it in many ways, in many words, but, in fact, no words fully correspond to what was happening to me then. It is very difficult, even impossible to retell.
Finally the car fell to the ground and rolled, but my only injuries were a sprained neck and a bruised foot."
• “I remember being brought to the operating room. For the next several hours, I was in critical condition. During this time, I several times found myself outside the body and returned to it. I saw my physical body directly from above. At the same time, I was, nevertheless, in a body, but not a physical one, but in another, which I, perhaps, can best describe as some kind of energy. If I tried to describe it in words, I would say that it is transparent and spiritual, as opposed to physical objects. At the same time, he definitely had separate parts."
• “After death, when my heart stopped beating … I felt like I became like an elastic ball or became like a small sphere inside the ball. I just can't find the words to describe it."
A Vietnam War veteran, during the operation, he felt how he "left" the operating room, which contained his physical body, and was back on the battlefield, where the rest of the American soldiers were collecting the dead:
• “During the operation, I remember an unexpected movement back to the battlefield where I was wounded. They cleared it there after the battle. I looked at all these people who were killed in this battle, they were put into their ponchos, and the wounded were carried out. I knew one of these people, and I remember clearly trying to stop him, I wanted to get his attention. Nothing worked for me, and suddenly, unexpectedly, I was back in the operating room … It was like how you materialize there, and the next moment you are already here. How to blink your eyes."
• “There was an unusual commotion, people were running around the ambulance. When I peered at others to understand what was happening, the object immediately approached me, just like in an optical device: and I seemed to be in this device. However, at the same time it seemed to me that a part of me, that is, what I will call my consciousness, remained in place, a few yards from my body. When I wanted to see someone at some distance from me, it seemed to me that a part of me, something like some kind of body, was attracted to what I would like to see. Then it seemed to me that it was not happening anywhere in the world, if I wanted to, I could be there."
“Hearing” inherent in the spiritual state, as can be seen, can be called only by analogy with what takes place in the material world, since most of the respondents testify that they did not actually hear a physical sound or voice. Rather, it seemed to them that they perceive the thoughts of others. One woman described it this way:
• “I saw the people around me and I understand everything they talk about. I heard them as I hear you. It was more like if I found out what they were thinking, but it was perceived only by my consciousness, and not through what they said. I already understood them literally a moment before they opened their mouths to say something."
All of the people interviewed noted that at the time of clinical death, they actually felt "separated" from their physical bodies. After the out-of-body journey, there was a "return" to the physical body, so that, as one woman put it, "to become one again." Upon "return" a person either regained consciousness in a physical body, or again found himself in an unconscious state in order to physically awaken later.
This "return" has often been described as an instantaneous event, coinciding with specific resuscitation measures observed just before the end of the experience. The electrical shock to the chest was identified as a return to the body experienced by a 62-year-old aircraft mechanic during a cardiac arrest in March 1978:
• I was above myself and looking down. They worked on me, trying to bring me back to life … I saw how they tried to bring me back with those pads (defibrillator). They put a kind of lubricant on them, rubbed them together and applied them to my body, and it jumped from it. But I didn't feel it then. They again put it to my chest and hit it again … At that time I thought about my family and everyone. It was like I went back and entered my body …
Others, after cardiac arrest, claimed that they were abruptly returned to the body by a shock (defibrillator):
• The nurse was on this side of the bed with that car. She picked up things for the shocker and put one here, and the other exactly here (shows the corresponding places on the chest), and I saw my body twitching, as if I was a doll … It seemed that I was divided, and after that, as if two troops came together with a bang. When I was up there (pointing to the ceiling), something grabbed me and my body and made me come back, shoved back.
I was somewhere above and looked down … When the doctors shocked me a second time … I went back into my body - the transition was like a snap of a finger.
The experience of travel outside the body, during a postoperative coma, not associated with cardiac arrest, apparently ended when someone entered the door of the hospital room:
• “… I kind of floated under the ceiling… and looked straight down at the bed, and saw my body. Then someone from the family opened the door and called … I immediately returned to my body."
Occasionally the “return” to the body was spontaneous, unrelated to any event. For example, a 38-year-old Florida farmer felt himself "re-entering" his body during a brief cardiac arrest in a parking lot:
I looked down at my body … Then … I returned to it. Presumably, this man's experience ended with a spontaneous resumption of his heartbeat.
A 60-year-old woman, hospitalized in January 1978, while out of her body, watched her own resuscitation, and then suddenly found herself back in her physical body. However, she could not attribute her physical "entry" to any resuscitation measures, which she was witnessing at that time.