And out-of-body experiences

Although some people use ketamine regularly, others may stop using it because off the K-Hole experience—that near-death/out-of-body experience that is seen with higher doses of the drug. K-Hole experiences increase in frequency with repeated use of ketamine, and these frightening bad trips may actually deter people from future ketamine use. 

Beings in the Bonnet realm sometimes have blank eye sockets. This image is also occasionally reported by people who have used the hallucinogen Special K (ketamine hydrochloride). One person e-mailed me to tell me that, while under the influence of Special K, everything was normal except that people in the room suddenly had no eye sockets, just black voids, and he saw light being sucked into the void from around the periphery of the eyeballs. Ketamine has also been associated with feelings of ego loss, out-of-body experiences, and near-death experiences. 

The nature of the effects experienced depends on many factors including dose, set and setting. Frequently people report having seen visions of people, objects, and places. With doses above 1 mg, out of body experiences are frequent. Occasionally individuals get up and move about with no apparent awareness of their movements or behavior. Some individuals speak gibberish during the most intense phase of the experience, others laugh hysterically. 

If your answer to any of these questions is yes, you already understand our natural tendency to dissociate—to be in one conscious state but to experience in it properties of another. I will show that when amplified this normal process can lead to such exceptional states as sleep walking and hypnopompic hallucinations, and that these exceptional states can become models for understanding out of body experiences, extrasensory perceptions, or alien abductions All of these exotic experiences can— and usually do—occur in the privacy and safety of our bedrooms. 

The question that I want to address is not whether or not out-of-body experiences actually occur. I have good reason to believe that they do, but I have deep doubts as to what they mean. In particular, I see them not as evidence that the mind and body are actually separable, but as evidence that the illusion of separability can be both vivid and extreme. 

But we already know that this conviction can be illusory and, indeed, that it normally is illusory when we dream. Because dreaming is an altered state of consciousness typically characterized by the illusion that we are awake and not rarely characterized by seeing the self as a third-person participant, it stands to reason that out-of-body experiences are natural, fully illusory alterations of consciousness. 

EXTENSIONS AND COMMENTARY Four quotations were chosen arbitrarily from literally hundreds that have worked their ways into the files. The vast majority are positive, ranging from the colorful to the ecstatic. But not all are. There are people who choose not to go into the corporeal but, rather, prefer the out-of-body experience. They express discomfort with 2C-B, and seem to lean more to the Ketamine form of altered state, one which dissociates body from mind. 

Variables Associated with Out-of-Body Experiences. In J. Morris, W. Roll, and R. Morris (eds.). Research in Parapsychology, 1974. Metuchen, N.J. Scarecrow Press, 1975, pp. 127-129. 

Visions of life and death, some calming, others frightening, have been reported. Religious hallucinations, out-of-body experiences, and a pronounced dissociative state that some have called another plane of consciousness are also credited to ketamine. While in what is referred to as K-land or the K-state, users claim to gain insights into their personalities, the people they know, and the workings of the universe. 

The effects of Salvia are extremely variable and depend on the dose and the environment in which the plant is consumed. Visions of people, objects, and places occur frequently. There have been reports of out-of-body experiences, loss of the sense of one s body and one s identity, being in several locations at once, becoming one with objects, and visiting places from the past. A common experience is the feeling that one has become a two-... 

As with other psychedelics, "out-of-body experiences occur in many peyote and mescaline trips. Users have often felt weightless and had a sense of "flying. More than a few have reported seeing their body become "luminescent or "transparent as they looked on from some distance away. One of Ellis subjects felt a blue flame wafting from the back of his head, then found himself becoming transparent like a Chinese lantern. 

Out-of-body experiences associated with the San Pedro cactus are discussed in Douglas Sharon s Wizard of the Four Winds—the story of Eduardo Palomino, a Peruvian sculptor, teacher, fisherman and shaman. Asked about the cactus effects, Eduardo told Sharon that first there is... 

Because ketamine is available for clinical and veterinary use, it has been studied extensively. Recreational users of ketamine report feeling both anesthetized and sedated. The most sought-after effect is the feeling of dissociation, where the user has a distorted perception of the body, environment, and time. Users refer to this sensation as an out-of-body experience. The dissociation of one s own consciousness and the near-death feeling is also referred to by the slang term K-hole. ... 

Every night for the next several weeks, and off and on ever since, I tried to duplicate that out-of- body experience. Although I have had various levels of "success" (usually very dream-like and uncoordinated), never to date have I managed to reproduce the clarity and relatively conscious control of that first amazing adventure. Over the years I have come to a rather "mystical" understanding of it. If I were able to access that kind of conscious, controlled experience at will, I very likely would do little else, and I now believe there is some wiser part of my psyche which does not want me off adventuring on the "astral plane" at the expense of my duties in the here and now. 

The key ideas here are that the shaman can alter his consciousness at will (either through innate skill or by using Psychotropic drugs) that he is a master of the out-of-body experience (that is, he can go where he wills in other dimensions of reality, and understands how to deal with the forces he meets there) and, last but not least, he serves the needs of his community. 

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