Here’s another article summary I did for THETA, the Psychical Research Foundation’s journal. I’d forgotten about Plato.
Michael Grosso, Plato and Out-of-the-Body Experiences. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research. Vol. 69 No. 1. January 1975, 61-74.
Is there a way to practise, or rehearse, for the supreme adventure none of us can avoid taking — dying? Plato thought so — in fact he defined philosophy as the art and knowledge of dying — and modern-day parapsychology shows the way towards what Grosso calls “an experimental science of death.”
Plato saw death as a natural phase of human development — the seeming opposites of living and dying being, in fact, complementary aspects of one process. What normal sense experience reveals is not the whole of nature, but rather a shadow, or copy, of a more complete region of being. Our ignorance of this is revealed in the famous Allegory of the Cave. To the ignorant dwellers within the cave a journey to the world outside is tantamount to death. Parapsychology, in Grosso’s opinion, gives us glimpses of what lies beyond the cave of “normal” reality. Out-of-body experiences (OBE’s), especially, can be an “experimental fulcrum” for gaining access to that dimension of experience normally called death. As Karlis Osis has said, “there is a possibility that dying is an OBE characterized by a process of a very slow ‘loosening up’ and separation from the body and then — no return.”
Death, like any other experience, can be good or bad, in Plato’s view, depending on our preparation. Ignorance, compounded by a natural fear of the unknown, increases the terror of death, and paralyzes our ability to live, too. Plato held that death is less terrible for philosophers than others, and Grosso suggests that “in place of irrational fear, flight, and repression of death — and of life — philosophy and science could help to show us a path of cooperation with nature.”
Grosso discusses OBE’s, along with Plato’s call for an intellectual and moral rehearsal for death, in relation to an individual’s beliefs, habits, emotions and intellectual training.
Beliefs: Because we usually believe in the exclusive reality of the sensory world, and identify ourselves with our physical organism, we interpret its destruction as the end of our being. Like Carlos Castaneda’s teacher Don Juan, who calls for transcending our ordinary “perception” and for deliberate attempts to undo our sense of being “real,” Plato’s method is to discipline the body, not to cater to its needs. This will alter one’s beliefs, and give rise to new ways of seeing and knowing. Now, although Grosso relates that the majority of spontaneous OBE’s do not happen as a result of any special beliefs — most of them occurring involuntarily during illness, accident, sleep-like or drug-induced states — placing the phenomenon in a meaningful frame of reference may make their reoccurrence more likely, since believers in the para-normal seem to demonstrate greater para-normal ability than non-believers.
Habits: Although habits help us survive, certain types of strong physical sensations, according to Plato, result in the psyche becoming “nailed” or “riveted” to the body. Such identification with bodily experience “inhibits the free play of the higher psychic modalities,” Grosso says. “Now OBE’s, spontaneous or voluntary, do in fact, seem to involve conditions which are inimical to the force of habit.” The use of psychedelics, fasting and meditation are discussed as voluntary efforts that are causal factors in OBE’s. Psychedelics “decondition and deautomatize consciousness, thus dissolving, however briefly, habitual patterns of being in the world.” Fasting, a deliberate refusal to satisfy bodily appetite, can be seen as a rehearsal for death. Meditation, a form of discipline contrary to passive habit, is sometimes a factor in causing OBE’s, Grosso says, and goes on:
“The point is that mental or physical events or activities which disrupt the routine mind-body liaison are conditions potentially productive of the OBE. In Plato’s view, nature will eventually disrupt the routine of bodily existence; philosophy is a way of anticipating and cooperating with nature. Where life encourages an uneasy marriage of psyche and body, philosophy is a gentle saboteur, plotting for the inevitable divorce.”
Emotion: While, on the one hand, involuntary projection is sometimes precipitated by a strong emotion, such as fear or desire, voluntary effort and “cool detachment toward emotion seem to be necessary to sustain the OBE.” This is comparable to Plato’s view of the soul in Phaedrus. The soul, according to the famous myth, “rises to the Plain of Truth on the condition that the charioteer, Reason, holds firm the reigns to guide the horses of passion on the journey. Failure to maintain the correct sort of control and balance results in the downfall and embodiment of the soul.”
Intellectual training: For Plato, Grosso suggests, “sporadic and spontaneous OBE’s would barely suffice as adequate rehearsals for death. For such experiences, in themselves, provide neither knowledge nor insight into the nature of being or the path to enlightenment. The philosopher aspires to escape bondage from the body as such, and that includes the ‘astral body.’ Thus, it is knowledge of the highest Forms of being which is the proper training for death, in the sense of freedom from the limitations of the body.”
An experimental science of death would explore, then, not only the OBE state but the possibilities such a state implies.
In the Phaedo, Socrates claims something alien to the modern mentality — that only after death, when we are free of bodily influence, will we know the truth of being. This is the theory of mind perhaps best suited to “explaining” the para-normal. For Bergson, as for Plato, the brain is a filter mechanism for consciousness, and therefore restrictive. Only in death does it cease to function, thus allowing the conscious self greater, and truer, awareness. It is why, it may be remembered, Socrates takes the hemlock with such good humor. Nothing is lost. And good student that he was, there is nothing to be feared.
