Out of Body Experience
The scientific, rational, evidentiary, and experiential proof

From earliest memory we are who we are. We will call this person we know so intimately the self-aware "I". What is the source of the "I"? Why does it fundamentally not change? Can the coming together of unintelligent matter account for it? Where does it go upon death? Let's look for the thing doing the looking and discover what we really are. It is much more than we can imagine.

Here in Michigan we are privileged to witness the encores of migrating red breasted robins. Their arrival in the spring and their beautiful songs are most welcome after we snowbirds endure an often bleak and hard winter. Having been raised here, the robin's arrival and sounds stir many warm memories for me and give the sense of home.

This spring an expectant mother robin decided to build her nest on one of our window sills. What a Herculean effort that turned out to be. She would make several trips bringing grass and twigs to the sill, then, after the rudiments of a nest were stuck together using some mud, she would wiggle and scooch around on it to try it out. Usually this resulted in the starter materials falling off. She would take a look at this, evaluate it, then off she would go for more building materials.



To make a very long story short, we have eight windows she tried. Each one was attempted several times. Over the course of many days she made hundreds of trips and dozens of failures. Her determination and failures were a pathetic thing to watch. We wondered when she would drop of exhaustion and just lay the eggs on the ground. But no, she persisted and finally succeeded. And the nest appears perfect in its functional architecture - a seemingly random mass of twigs, grass, and mud intermixed, woven, and hollowed to hold her body exactly.

She then laid three eggs and dutifully kept them covered with her warm breast. When they hatched, she remained on the nest and the father brought her food. She would then get up from the nest and place the food in the yawning mouths of her chicks.

And the nest, well, it just stayed there solid as a rock through all this commotion. Somehow she was able to secure it such that its tenacity withstood her and her mate flying to and fro from its lip, and three growing youngsters wrestling around in it.

After a time, the mother began to leave the nest to find food. The father, having done his duty, eventually disappeared. In her absence, the chicks were smart enough to hunker down and huddle quietly together.

We are still waiting and hoping that this little family survives. But what an incredible ordeal to watch from the up close and personal vantage point of an upstairs window where we could look down into the nest.

Aside from just the pure fascination of this wildlife drama, the question that looms is, why? Why did the two robins come together to mate? Why did she have to go to such lengths to build the perfect nest? Why did she put it out of reach of predators? Why give up her life to sit on it? Why did the father hang around to feed her? Why is she now doing all the work of not only feeding herself, but three new mouths as well?

I know the obvious answers have to do with survival. The evolutionist would throw in phrases like selection and survival of the fittest. But hold on. Don't all such concepts, including survival itself, assume that which needs to be proven?

If robins are a mere assemblage of atoms, where does the WILL come from to go through all these antics of breeding, obsessive nest building, caring for others and the like? Do atoms have such characteristics latent within them? No. They simply obey natural laws that make their behavior perfectly predictable. That's what chemistry is all about. Obedient atoms are what allow chemists to mix a batch of certain chemicals together to produce plastic food wrap and count on not getting Coca-Cola coming out of the extruder. Atoms do not have will, they just obey law. There can be no such law that dictates will, since will (choice) is the antithesis of obedience to law.

Life and all of its incredibly complex shenanigans such as out of body experiences are not explained with slogans like evolution, natural selection, and survival of the fittest that assume the indefensible. (And they are slogans, not imperatives like the laws in physics and chemistry.) The will to survive cannot be uttered in the same rational breath as the will to self sacrifice. But the robin in practice does both. It tries to survive - eats, sleeps, flies from the nest when we get too close - but then also sacrifices its life to create and care for other life.

The materialist is left with the dilemma of explaining how, after a certain critical mass of atoms agglomerate, that it becomes this thing we call life. What is that, and how can it be explained by chemistry and physics, the only explanatory tools evolution has at its disposal? Using them to explain will and desire in nature makes about as much sense as trying to make the details of mortar chemistry in the walls of an opera house explain the will of the musicians to be there, and their choice of music to perform.

The presence of will clearly speaks of other. Other than matter, other than natural law... and most certainly other than spontaneous generation and evolution.

It may be argued that animals don't really have will but rather are obedient to instinct, much like sodium has an 'instinct' to combine with chlorine to form salt. But there is a difference. All sodium atoms and chlorine atoms behave in a predictable way. But not all robins try to lay nests in all eight of my windows and settle in on the same spot. They also don't choose the same mates, same geographic location, same migrating flight paths, nor snatch the same worms. Although all creatures are somewhat predictable, they vary in their actions in ways that are not predictable. There is no scientific law or scientist that can use any law to predict exactly what a creature will do.

This unpredictability, particularly with regard to humans, speaks to something other than randomness and the laws that govern the physical components that constitute living organisms.

The existence of free will and initiation tell us that our world - and we - are something more/other than the matter of which we are composed. If we, our essence, are something other than matter, then we are not bound by it or the laws that govern it.

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