EBTs and Out of Body Experiences: The concept of Once-returner in Robert Monroe's books

[Viveka]

Just to make this a little more balanced and rounded, and to highlight the relevance to the Buddhas teachings, I wanted to add the following.

Mind states, OBE’s etc etc are all interesting, nice, awful etc etc etc, but they don’t lead anywhere on their own, One can just keep experiencing these things ad infinitum… I know of one person who ‘astral travels’ just for amusement - it has no other impact on their life beyond this…

What is needed to properly galvanise these mental abilities is a framework, and this is what the Buddha taught. He explicitly described a pathway - the Noble 8 fold path. This goes from Delusion to Liberation > there is a definite path to follow. Without the other 7 factors, Samadhi itself goes no-where, it is just types of experience… Add the framework and all of a sudden you have a tool for liberation, of improving life for oneself and others.

This is why I find that even though one can recognise elements of experiences all over the place - they don’t actually mean much. In the worst situations individuals set up religious/belief systems that can be totally unwholesome and deluded.

As such it is imperative to seperate the experience itself, from any mental proliferations or conditioning of the experience.

While there are many who may have ‘seen’ some aspect of the processes of existence, it is only in rare cases like the Buddha, where the totality of the knowable has been seen. Ultimately it is about the process rather than the ‘things’…
eg most people’s vision is like looking at the world through a straw (seeing only a tiny fraction of the whole picture) - as opposed to the Buddha who had unimpaired vision. So even though it is interesting, and on some level reassuring that there are others in the world who have similar experiences, those ‘experiences’ are only a conditioned experience. Rather the focus or attention needs to be on the process/mechanism. The systematic dissolution of delusion, is what leads to greater clarity of vision. And this is where the Suttas are such a treasure.

This is like the difference between seeing the images in a kaleidoscope versus understanding how the kaleidoscope works…

Also those with some skill in generating specific mind states can reproduce/manufacture certain experiences, but this isn’t the same as ‘insights’, it’s really a by-product of technique. As Ajahn Brahmali suggests here

@Brahmali

What we need to be cautious with, however, is to over-determine how such insights are supposed to appear to the individual. We should focus on general principles, as the Buddha does, not on the specific contents of each moment of insight. The more specifically you describe the nature of insight, the more likely it is that an individual meditator will “manufacture” a similar experience, which is then misinterpreted as the described state. I have seen this a number of times, with people who thought or were told, based on very specific experiences, that they had reached certain stages of awakening, only to realise later on that they had reached no such thing.

Metta