An introduction to religious and spiritual experience

Out of the Body Experiences
Some people have experiences of being outside their bodies. This may 
happen in times of stress or critical illness or even near death. The writer 
of the seminal work 
On Death and Dying
, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, had an 
Out of the Body experience but had no idea of what had happened. It was 
not until later in her life that she began her research into dying patients 
and then Near Death experiences.
A few seconds later I was in a deep sleep. But instead of ‘falling’ asleep, 
I felt as if I was rising up out of my body, higher and higher, but 
without any control or fear. Once aloft, I perceived several beings take 
hold and carry me off to someplace where they fixed me up. It was like 
having several car mechanics work on me. Each had their own 
specialty – brakes, transmission and so on. In no time, they had replaced 
all the damaged parts with new ones and set me back in bed.
In the morning, after just a few hours’ sleep, I woke up feeling bliss-
fully serene. The nurse was still in the room, so I told her what had 
happened. ‘You obviously had an out-of-body experience,’ she said. 
I gave her a puzzled look. After all, I did not meditate or eat tofu. Nor 
was I a Californian. Nor did I have a guru or a Baba. My point? That 
I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about when she said 
‘out-of-body experience.’ But if they were anything like that, I was 
ready for another flight anytime.
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In a BBC Radio 4 series, 
Devout Sceptics
, Bel Mooney interviewed 
well-known people about their views on faith and doubt. Certain inter-
views were then written up in a book of the same name. Melvyn Bragg 
was interviewed and asked about a personal article he had written earlier 
in which he had admitted to having had terrifying Out of Body experi-
ences as a boy. He was then asked whether this led him to believe in the 
soul as distinct from the body. He replied:
If I was asked on pain of life and death, I would say, yes, I do. It’s an 
impossible question to answer, for obvious reasons, in that it doesn’t 
stand up to any proof you can think of, but from the experiences I had 
it is possible for some essential thing in you, the thinking . . . to be 
removed from this corporeal frame, as it’s been described, and exist 
somewhere else, in my case the corner of a room. After I’d written the 
article I got a great number of letters from people saying they had 
floated around the town where they were born, in cities, across the 
seas . . . One of the things which interests me about the description of 

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Dying and Death
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out-of-body experiences, where people have almost died and floated 
towards death and pulled back, is that they’re always the same . . . 
Early Christian writing is full of such descriptions. So in terms of evi-
dence, what does it add up to? It adds up to the possibility of continu-
ity, the notion that there may be something so distinctive and 
extraordinary, something that does exist outside what we are, what we 
seem to be. If I had strong faith I’d say it is a fact. It’s something that 
has to be grappled with, because if you’re going to believe in a pattern-
ing and creative and religious universe then you have to believe in con-
tinuity and continuousness.
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Many OBEs are the first stage of a Near Death experience.