In the images that popular culture has built of “the soul leaving the body,” it is always midnight: a body lying on a bed, a luminous cord stretching out from the chest, a strange journey to the seventh and eighth heavens. It is as if something utterly exceptional is supposed to happen, a supernatural event with no connection to everyday life, reserved only for those who have spent years in ascetic discipline or have accidentally come to the brink of death. But perhaps this picture, rather than revealing a reality, is more the product of our imagination about ourselves.
If we pass through this story shell, what remains underneath all of it seems to me simpler: in all these accounts, what actually moves is not the soul as a separate, detachable substance from the body, but awareness itself. The phrase “the soul leaving the body” is probably not very accurate; the experience is more like a “relocation of awareness” or a projection of awareness. The body is situated somewhere, in a room, on a chair, on a street, but the center of experience is wherever attention has gathered. Wherever awareness is concentrated, that is where the world is for us, even if our body is somewhere else.
A clear example of this can be seen in simple, everyday situations. Someone is speaking, words are coming out of their mouth, but their gaze is fixed on some distant point; then, all of a sudden, it is as if they come back to themselves and say to the person in front of them, “Sorry, my mind was somewhere else.” Their body has been in front of us the whole time, the sound has come from this very throat, but their awareness was moving back and forth in another scene: conversing with an inner image, walking in the past or the future, in a world made of meaning rather than matter. In mystical language we might feel tempted to say “their soul was somewhere else,” but if we look more closely, what has happened is simply that their awareness has detached from the physical world before them and become concentrated in another world. We usually give this gentler names: daydreaming, distraction, being lost in thought. But in terms of structure, it is not very different from the image of “the soul leaving the body.”
To understand what this relocation is, it helps to look for a moment at its opposite, the state that is usually called “being present in the moment.” In such a state, awareness stands wholly on the here and now: the contact of skin with the surface of the chair, the warmth of the air, the pressure of the feet on the ground, colors and shadows, sounds near and far, the weight of the body, the rhythm of the breath. In this state, the world is experienced through its most sensory layers, and nothing remains hidden behind this experience. Being in this state seems simple, but in practice it is difficult; continuous presence in the now creates a kind of inner tension, a wakefulness that is tiring for a mind accustomed to escape. As soon as this tension loosens a little, imagination slowly rises from the margins and opens another world alongside this one. In that very moment, awareness separates from the pure surface of the senses and settles into another scene. That is where the relocation of awareness happens.
Most of the time, we perform this movement unconsciously. We are neither fully present here, nor do we truly take up residence in the world our mind has created. We shuttle between two realms, in a grey state that is neither waking nor sleep, somewhere between presence and absence. A large part of life is spent in this middle zone, where we are neither really in contact with what is happening around us, nor faithful enough to our inner dream to be able to turn it into something alive. Such a way of living could be called sleepwalking in awareness: a kind of constant departure, but one without direction and without a center.
If we speak in the language of energy: when inner force is scattered and faint, awareness cannot become stable on any level. It stands firmly neither in the physical world nor in the world of imagination; it keeps slipping and sliding. But the more collected and condensed this energy becomes, the greater the possibility of standing and choosing. Then one can truly be present at a specific point, whether that point is this very room and this very body, or a landscape constructed in the mind, or the face of another human being toward whom attention is directed. In sleep, the body becomes, in a sense, paralyzed, and awareness is almost completely transferred to another scene; in special experiences, perhaps this same relocation happens with greater intensity and takes on forms that are later told as “astral” stories or spiritual journeys. But the root of the matter is the same: the movement of the center of attention.
We might say there is a spectrum. At one end lies ordinary daily distraction; at the other, an intense concentration in which awareness is deliberately and for a long time projected onto another person, another place, or another layer of experience. All of these are of one kind; only their intensity and clarity differ. From this angle, much of the spell of the flashy narratives about “the soul leaving the body” dissolves, and gives way to something closer and more familiar: a simple reality already at work in our lives right now, where we are, at each moment, not with the body, but with awareness.
Perhaps the real question is not “How can I get out of my body?” but rather “Where is my awareness standing right now?” If we take this question seriously, it gradually becomes clear that other worlds, before being separate layers of the cosmos, are layers of this very single experience, layers that appear and disappear with each shift of attention. In the end, the issue is not strange techniques or otherworldly adventures; the core matter is the relationship between this body, this imagination, and that invisible realm of meaning that embraces them all. Somewhere in between, there is a point from which one can see that all these movements, all this coming and going, are nothing but the dance of awareness on different surfaces.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, I recommend reading John Kreiter’s book Out of Body Experiences: Quickly and Naturally, available on Amazon.
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