Verifiable Flight

Experiencing the Next World Now
by Michael Grosso, Ph.D.

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Can the experience be verified? The scuba diver claimed to have accurately observed his wife while out of his body, and the young woman verified the dead spider on the ceiling molding. Consider a well-known case from the early days of psychical research. In 1863, after eight stormy days, a Mr. S. R. Wilmot was sailing from Liverpool on the steamer, City of Limerick, to New York City. On Tuesday, October 13, he finally fell sleep and toward morning dreamed his wife came to his stateroom in her nightdress. After hesitating at the door and looking at the other man in the room, she stood beside him, bent over, and kissed him.

The other man was William Tait, a fifty-year-old librarian from Cleveland, Ohio. In the morning, Mr. Wilmot found Mr. Tait staring quizzically at him. Mr. Tait said: "You're a pretty fellow to have a lady come and visit you in that way." Mr. Tait was a "sedate and very religious man, whose testimony on any subject could be taken unhesitatingly." Wilmot, before leaving the ship, questioned him three times about what he saw; each time Tait repeated the same description of what Wilmot had dreamed. Mr. Tait seems to have seen Mrs. Wilmot's dreambody.

Upon arrival Mrs. Wilmot said to her husband: "Did you receive a visit from me a week ago last Tuesday?" She explained that she had heard reports of storms in the Atlantic, and was too anxious to sleep that night; then, at four in the morning, it felt as if she "went out to seek" him, crossed the stormy sea, found a black steamer, and entered her husband's cabin. There she saw another man on an upper berth staring at her, which caused her to hesitate before going to her husband's berth to kiss him. Mrs. Wilmot asked: "Do they ever have state-rooms like the one I saw, where the upper berth extends further back than the under one?" Although she never physically entered the ship, she accurately described the way the berths were arranged.

So here we have an out-of-body experience in which three people are reciprocally involved. The investigator Richard Hodgson interviewed the parties, except Mr. Tait who had in the meantime died. Tait did report what he saw to Mr. Wilmot's sister who was a passenger on the boat. "He said he saw some woman, in white, who went up to my brother." Tait's oral testimony was confirmed indirectly through Wilmot's sister. Researcher Eleanor Sidgwick concluded that the story "tends to show that Mrs. Wilmot was actually there in some sense other than a purely mental one." When three people have mutually confirming experiences of the same events, it's hard to dismiss their accounts as based on mere fantasy or hallucination.

A more recent example from the files of Celia Green: "I was in hospital having had an operation for peritonitis; I developed pneumonia and was very ill. The ward was L-shaped; so that anyone in bed at one part of the ward, could not see round the corner. One morning I felt myself floating upwards, and found I was looking down on the rest of the patients. I could see myself, propped up against pillows, very white and ill. I saw the sister and nurse rush to my bed with oxygen. Then everything went blank. The next I remember was opening my eyes to see the sister bending over me.

"I told her what had happened; but at first she thought I was rambling. Then I said, 'There is a big woman sitting up in bed with her head wrapped in bandages; and she is knitting something with blue wool. She has a very red face.' This certainly shook her, as apparently the lady concerned had a mastoid operation and was just as I described." Verifiable out-of-body experiences like this one are not rare. Since this is an important step in building the argument for postmortem survival, let's also look at some experimental studies.

Experimental Studies

California psychologist Charles Tart conducted a classic experiment. A Ms. Z claimed to have out-of-body experiences twice to four times a week. She typically did this during sleep; she agreed to be tested in Tart's sleep lab. Ms. Z spent four nights in Tart's lab and was closely monitored for physiological changes. She usually found herself floating near the ceiling, wide awake and out of her body; perhaps she could do it under test conditions.

Tart had to determine if her experiences were just fantasies or contained veridical perceptions — crucial to the survival hypothesis. If her experiences proved to be nothing but fantasies, they would have no positive implications for survival. If during her out-of-body state she could identify the target correctly, that would mean she really did somehow exit her body, and would count as a step toward proving postmortem survival.

A target number was set up on a shelf five and a half feet above her head near the ceiling but not visible from where she lay in bed. Electrodes and cables attached to her body recorded brain waves and other physiological variables and prevented her from sitting up in bed more than two feet. If she at any time disconnected herself to sneak a look at the target, it would have been automatically recorded. If she left her body and saw the target number, she was to wake up and report what she saw through the intercom.

The first night was uneventful. The second night Ms. Z called out: "Write down 3:13 A.M. I don't see the number, but I just remember that." Ms. Z had floated out of her body, not high enough to read the target number, but high enough to read the clock. Next evening Ms. Z had a nightmare whose details corresponded to a murder that took place in the city. A suggestive anecdote. Third night, Ms. Z had a flying dream, in which she seemed to converse with her sister. Later, her sister reported that she dreamed of Ms. Z at the time of her flying dream. This incident resembles the reciprocal experience cited in the Wilmot story above.

On the fourth night Ms. Z floated out of her body during sleep and correctly called out the five-digit target number. "I needed to go higher because the number was faceup." Tart comments: "It should be mentioned that Ms. Z had expected me to prop the target number up against the wall on the shelf; actually, I had laid it flat on the shelf, which she correctly perceived." Could this have been a lucky guess? The chance of guessing the correct sequence of five digits is one in ten to the fifth power. So on the fourth night the evidence for a verifiable out-of-body experience was strongest.

What about brain waves and physiological variables? EEG was a mixture of Stage 1 sleep and alphoid activity, without rapid eye movements and cardiovascular and skin resistance changes — a pattern not found in the sleep literature. William Dement, an authority on sleep behavior, confirmed Tart's assessment that Ms. Z's EEG was an unknown pattern, associated neither with waking nor any sleep stages. Alphoid — lower alpha — rhythms have been linked with sensory isolation and Zen states studied in Japanese laboratories. Absence of rapid eye movements shows she wasn't dreaming but in a brain state suggesting Zenlike dissociation from external stimuli. This landmark experiment confirms the reality of verifiable out-of-body experiences.

In 1980, Karlis Osis and his assistant Donna McCormick of the American Society of Psychical Research reported a series of out-of-body experiments. They were lucky enough to find a gifted psychic willing to cooperate. Alex Tanous was a Lebanese with unusually dark and intense eyes that reminded me of photos I've seen of Rasputin. I met Tanous several times and found him a little spooky. He once held out his hands before me. "It's through these," he said, "that I feel things." As a child he experienced the death of many friends and relatives, and his specialty was sensing death. Tanous also had the rare ability to will himself out of his body. The two abilities are most likely connected.

In the Osis experiment, Tanous was to project himself to a specified target area, an enclosed space containing an optical viewing-device that displayed randomly selected visual targets. To see the targets you had to be right in front of the viewing-device. Tanous lay down in the dark in a separate, sound-reduced room, relaxing and meditating as he prepared for projection.

The aim of the experiment was not just to prove out-of-body perception but to test the hypothesis that something gets out of the body, perhaps the same something that survives bodily death. It was a test for the existence of the "subtle" body. According to Rhine, "psi," or psychic capacity, have two sides, cognitive (ESP) and kinetic (PK), "information gain and kinetic action." In short, if the mind can get out of the body, it should be able to prove it by out-of-body information gain and out-of-body kinetic action.

To test for this "body," a device called a strain-gauge sensor was installed near the target. This would detect the slightest movements or vibrations of anything physical in the vicinity — hopefully, Tanous's localized "subtle" body. To see the target in the optical device, Tanous would have to project himself to a point right in front of it. If he viewed the target correctly, the sensor should register his presence. Tanous was told nothing about the strain gauges.

In a series of 197 trials over twenty sessions, he succeeded 114 times. The extra chance factor was modest. What was important was that when Tanous correctly guessed the targets the strain gauges acted up, proving some kind of physical presence. Osis concluded that this correlation supported the hypothesis of a localized out-of-body entity, and claims to have caught Tanous's living ghost, so to speak, in a net of objective measurements.

This experiment repeats Tart's, for Tanous, like Ms. Z, correctly identified targets during his excursion. There is a detail in Tart's experiment that seems especially important. Ms. Z had to rise to a certain point near the ceiling to "see" the target number, which Tart laid flat on the shelf. It sounds like Ms. Z, in her out-of-body state, maneuvered her "subtle body" to the correct position above the shelf to observe the target. From her description, she occupied a localized "vehicle" that moved through space. In short, like the Tanous experiment, her experiment bolsters the view that something leaves the body.

I think I have said enough to give the reader a sense of the out-of-body experience. It is widespread in time and geography, a recurrent potential of human consciousness. There is reason to believe it has shaped the history of religion, especially the experience of shamanism, but also of mysticism, prophecy, and even philosophy. (Plato once said that philosophy was the practice of leaving one's body.) The experience is stunning for its mental lightness, clarity, and expansiveness, and qualifies for what Abraham Maslow called a "peak" experience. From a practical and emotional standpoint, it gives us a glimpse of what it may feel like to exist without a physical body and therefore of what it may feel like to survive death.

What are the implications of this experience for life after death? In the first place, verifiable out-of-body experiences are inconsistent with materialism, the view that persons are just material objects. If persons were just material objects, verifiable out-of-body perception should be out of court. But such perception doesn't prove survival because the person in the out-of-body state is still very much alive. However, if the consciousness of a living person can function physically at a distance from his body, it suggests to me a latent potential for survival. For if my consciousness can function outside and at a distance from my body, why not survive death without any body?

It may be objected that verified out-of-body experiences at best prove clairvoyance accompanied by the illusion of being located far from one's body. It has also been argued that the action on the strain gauges was an artifact and not evidence that Tanous got out of his body. Supposing all this were true — and I'm not willing to grant that it is — the sheer fact of clairvoyance would still be a significant step toward showing that consciousness can survive death.

Clairvoyance implies there is something about the mind of a person that can interact, mentally or physically, with things beyond the reach of the body. That is what we mean by an action or cognition being paranormal. Paranormal ability, however, by itself proves nothing about any particular person surviving death. At most, we can say it's a necessary but not a sufficient condition for survival. Now let's move on.

Copyright © 2004 by Michael Grosso

About the Author

Michael Grosso studied classics and obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from Columbia University. He has taught philosophy and the humanities at Kennedy University, City University of New York, and New Jersey City University. He is on the Board of Directors of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, and is working with the Esalen Center of Theory and Research on a consciousness research project. His previous books include The Millennium Myth and Soulmaking.