A materialist always thinks it is absurd to suggest that people can leave their bodies in the example of a NDE (Near Death Experience) or an OBE (Out of Body Experience) despite the fact that many people have experienced each. In Buddhism we come across this strange experience in the Pali Nikayas and elsewhere with the difference that it is controlled and not by the accident of near death.
"With his mind thus concentrated, purified, and bright, unblemished, free from defects, pliant, malleable, steady, and attained to imperturbability, he directs and inclines it to creating a mind-made body. From this body he creates another body, endowed with form, made of the mind, complete in all its parts, not inferior in its faculties. Just as if a man were to draw a reed from its sheath. The thought would occur to him: 'This is the sheath, this is the reed.”(Samaññaphala Sutta).
This experience, with regard to the "mind-made body," is also treated in the Lankavatara Sutra, the main discourse of proto-Zen.
One who has left their body finds it distinct from the physical body itself which is like a scabbard or the slough of a snake. The body created or fashioned is certainly nonphysical and to a certain extent immaterial like a radio signal but nevertheless who I am, personally.
The difficult part for those of us who have not had an NDE or have not sensed the immaterial, spiritual body, lies in our inability distinguish the immaterial body from the material body. We are so deeply attached and entangled with the five psychophysical constituents consisting of physical shape, feeling, perception, volitional formations and consciousness so as to be like “our soul is nailed down to the body” (I have taken this from Plato’s Phaedo 83D). For the spiritual adept, the taking out of the nails, so to speak, has to be done gradually. We have to un-crucify our soul or self from our many passions which have nailed it to the psychophysical cross and with it horrible suffering.
And just what is “passion” (which helps to explain Buddhist "thirst" or desire)? According to my Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary it is, “the state of being subjected to or acted on by what is external or foreign to one's true nature.” Thus our passion leads always to a fall in which we suffer. By passion we never fail to have an attraction or thirst for what is not ours; for what is, actually, alien to us. And according to the Buddha, the five psychophysical constituents (pañcupadánakkhandhá) are external to our self which alone is intrinsic and fundamental. What is alien to us is no-self.
It follows from this that Buddhist training has to be involved with helping us to distinguish our true self from the false or no-self, otherwise we can easily fall into nihilism as if Buddhism only teaches no-self and the acceptance of death, death being non-existence. Perhaps just as important, our passion for our psychophysical body has to be subdued. Our passion for it only brings more suffering and spiritual blindness by which we come to doubt that we have a spiritual body hidden within the body of flesh. What a surprise for an NDE experiencer to learn that they are not this dead thing lying below them. One such NDE experiencer was Carol Parrish-Harra who said:
“The human mind, once animal, received into itself the divine spark and started this ascent. It will not be wiped out. It can be pushed down, tortured, made to wait aeons of time. Humanity has glimpsed divinity. Already some have achieved it” (Kenneth Ring, Heading Toward Omega, 268).
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