The OBE. Good Goal or Playing With Fire?

I do think there is a difference between the two--OBEs and lucid dreams. But I don't think that you can necessarily bring back verifiable information simply because you went out of the body.

Simply "getting out of the body" is a huge hurdle for 99% of people, I think. Being able to do it at will and go where one wants and bring back information--those kinds of ideas come from people who really haven't read a lot of literature on the OBE or haven't tried very hard to become a practitioner. Even the most experienced practitioners don't have complete control once they are out of the body.

(I use the phrase "getting out of the body" as a metaphor. I don't really think anything is "leaving the body" per se.)

The type of OBE I am talking about is a consciously induced OBE. You go from being conscious, most likely into a vibrational state, and then into a process where the "astral" body separates completely from the physical. This is distinctly different from lucid dreaming.

It may be the case that one can end up in the same non-physical territories in certain OBEs and lucid dreams, but the path to get there is radically different.

Snip- But I don't think that you can necessarily bring back verifiable information simply because you went out of the body.

That's true. And you need to consider the extra variable that the stuff that you see, is NOT necessarily an exact representation of the physical space in question. There are usually large reported differences that demonstrate your OBE is experienced in a similar but not identical environment. It it considered by many as an "astral version" of of reality.

So those pictures on the wall may be different. Or maybe not be there at all. And maybe there are two windows in your bedroom instead of one. Or maybe the rug is blue and not red. Or maybe your friend is washing his car and not reading a book. 

The inconvenient truth is- even if you got a clear and unambiguous look at something in the OBE, sometimes the information you bring back is a match, and other times it is not. Kinda makes absolute veridical attempts unreliable. 

Which explains one of many reasons the scientific method needs to rely on statistics and not absolute hits and misses, in many psi situations.