(2021-06-07, 05:24 AM)Sciborg_S_Patel Wrote: Hmm the fact other people see these NDEr "astral bodies" or whatever one wishes to call them to suggests some causal relationship between these bodies and the world.
Getting back to this question of depression, we have reason to believe psychedelics can increase one's Psi ability and induce OBEs if one has the proper shamanic training. If one believes the testimony collected by Graham Hancock these spirit bodies can even have children. Some sages/mystics have also suggested that souls are bodily gendered/sexed. So physical stuff can change the filter-transmitter, if one wants to go with that analogy, and spirit bodies seem to be "physical" on a different layer of reality.
I really think the video game analogy works well, though of course a regular game can't penetrate the inner life of the player. The physical can be thought of objects tagged in a game to behave a certain way, including pushing feelings of depression on someone (brain structure) or causing intoxication (alcohol). The subtle body is "tagged" in such a way that objects tagged as physical do not impede movement.
As such I don't think depression due to brain structure means mind=brain, but it would be interesting for sure to see if an NDEr or even OBEr felt temporarily "freed" from depression while their consciousness was traveling in a subtle body away from their physical one.
On the first part, that of other people 'seeing' astral bodies, this is the exception rather than the rule. I have no idea whether eyes and photons are involved. That's why I use the word 'see' with reservations. There are special cases for small children and those approaching their own death, who are somehow existing in two overlapping realities. I'm not excited at the prospect of debating whether these other realities may be called 'physical' so I'll let the go by.
On depression, I have a long personal history with that. Though in recent years it hasn't visited me much if at all, so it isn't a current part of my life.
It was such a complex set of interactions between many aspects of my life, including where I was living at the time and with whom, as well as other factors, which triggered the initial onset. There was also the subject matter of my thoughts which I mentioned elsewhere had included Sartre's Sisyphus which was something that had been discussed among my circle of student friends.
Once the doors had been opened, depression was here to stay, for many years. We all have our own ways of handling the world, and for better or for worse, I decided that since I had got into this thing myself, I was determined to get out again myself. Accordingly, I never for a moment considered seeking any kind of professional help.
To get to the point, I've also played a little with OBEs, again it is not a current part of my life. But one in particular, I found myself suddenly ejected from my ordinary domestic environment and located somewhere among the stars. The feeling was profound. One aspect was that my ordinary day-do-day cares fell away too. It was not an NDE-like euphoria, but the feeling of being there was somehow very different, something I can't describe in words.
More generally, there are quite a number of examples of NDEs among attempted suicide cases. I'm not in a position to give a complete or full description, I may have another look in some of the examples later.
My own experience with psychedelics was to bring about a fresh and prolonged onset of depression, it was one of the least helpful things I could have done.
I've started to theorise that depression may be a kind of possession, not by a spirit with voices or anything like that, but by some sort of force or energy. And sometimes we ourselves may be manufacturing that energy, but not always, it seems more like being inhabited by something at times.
Over the years I've gradually learned to handle it, I liken it to my gradual learning how to cook some basic food. What I do with food is very ordinary and simple, but I'm better at it than I was years ago. On the last encounter with depression, I'd been living with it for weeks, maybe months, then one day It was gone, it felt like a burden had been lifted and I was free. But a little later that day I had some stray thought, I considered some possible occurrences or eventualities and instantly I was back in a state of depression. I did a kind of double-take. What just happened? I paused and thought about it, asking what had just taken place. I'd just blundered into the darkness and I didn't know how to get out. I reasoned very simply that if a simple thought could take me into this place, then there must be another thought to take me out again. After a little while I'd done it.
But what was the method, how did I get out? A 'voice' answered me: "the doorway is always directly in front of you". So very simple. I should say, this is after decades of familiarity - just like my cooking - and it isn't something I could have done years ago, when my thoughts were likely to take me deeper in, rather than out.
On this last part, it does remind me of some NDE accounts where a person is taken on a kind of tour of different afterlife environments, and they enter a hellish and distressing area where beings are enduring unimaginable horrors, and the guide explains that the beings there are free to leave whenever they want. In the NDE case I'm thinking of there were a number of other environments, not a minimalist choice of just two, but a multiplicity of possibilities.
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