Review by Bob Peterson: Mindsight by Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper

Review: Mindsight by Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper

One woman named Claudia who could see as a young child, but was blind by age 5, described it this way:

"It's kind of like vision but it's not vision...It was seeing but it wasn't vision...because vision is really sharp and it wasn't like that." (pg. 98)

This really piqued my interest. I devoted an entire chapter of my first book to the subject of OBE eyesight and its different modes and peculiarities. The chapter is called "Fight for Sight." You can read the chapter by clicking on this link. What Ring and Cooper found about the blind perfectly matches what I called "Astral Mind-Sensing" in the book. It's almost like you're remotely sensing everything in the room at once in great detail. For example, you "sense" that a chair is six feet (2 meters) in front of you and "sense" every detail about it, at a distance, but it's qualitatively different from "seeing." In fact, this seems to be the normal mode of operation for my OBE eyesight, and I often have to make an effort to switch my mode of perception to "astral sight" in order to get a more visual representation of things; one that more closely matches my physical sight.

Other times, the blind do seem to be able to "see." People who have extreme visual impairment can, in an OBE, suddenly "see" everything with crystal clarity.

It often startles them to be able to suddenly see clearly...

That's interesting. A few of these cases have been discussed before, but it's good to have a more thorough and detailed look.

Incidentally, that review links directly to a chapter of a book.

It seems the full book (but not the one reviewed) is available online:

Out of Body Experiences
How to have them and what to expect
By Robert Peterson

Bob is a great guy. Love his OBE reviews, very generous with his time and resources.

You can check out his OBE book reviews here: https://obeoutlook.blogspot.com/

This sight in blind persons is very weird to address materialistically. I've seen on some skeptics forum/blog the idea that blind people can perceive light, and they sometimes descrived their "visions" during NDEs as made out of light they proposed some kind of "recreation" of objects through light. Or, such as in a case reported above, that they didn't really see but had the impression of seeing. In my opinion, although theoretically possible, in reality it sounds incredibly hard or nearly impossible. In fact, blind people whpo "saw" during NDEs described the event as totally extraordinary, something that was much more specific than a bland perception through light.

Another thing that doesn't really make me believe too much in skeptical answers is that lot of people, with well functioning sight, described their vision as made out of light. the grass, the trees, all of their sorroundings were either engulfed in light or made out of it. So, it doesn't look like that this was something happening only in blind people-