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

The normal approach in attempting to answer the big questions is to just philosophize and think about it. Although reason is essential, thoughts by themselves have no anchors in certainty. To explore the unknown we must begin with the known. Since we live in physical bodies in a physical world, physical reality must be in tune with the correct answers to The Big Questions.

Matter Is Space
Even before we look at out of body experiences, or even dismantle matter into nothingness by using gedankens and quantum mechanics, the basic structure of an atom is already primarily space. Picture a pile of about four tablespoons of table salt. A little over half of that pile would represent sodium and the rest would be chlorine. How many atoms of sodium would be present? About 6.02 x 1023. That's scientific notation for 602 followed by 21 zeros - 602,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's the number of atoms in 1 mole of sodium, a measurement known as Avogadro's number.

If each of the billions of people on Earth were to count the sodium atoms in this small (one mole) pile of salt at the rate of one atom every second, it would take four million years to count them all. That gives only the slightest inclination of the magnitude (‘minitude') of the dimensions in the invisibly small, the stuff of which all matter is made.

More importantly, let's consider the distances between the components within each one of these atoms. If we take one of the tiny sodium atoms out of the above pile and expand the nucleus to the size of a pea, the distance between it and the outer-most electrons encircling it would be a radius of about two football fields. Just imagine a pea on the center of the 50-yard line of a football stadium. The outer walls of the stadium and parking lot would be where the electrons are.

Here are other ways to envision the space in an atom: If a nucleus were like a speck of dust in a ray of sunlight beaming into the living room, the electrons would be out on the siding and shingles; if the nucleus were a bus at the center of our planet, the electrons would be on the Earth's surface; if the nucleus were the size of a soccer ball, the electrons would be ten miles away; if all the space within the atoms that make up your body were removed, and all the atomic parts were compressed to the density found in an atomic nucleus (200 million metric tons per cubic centimeter), you would fit on the head of a pin. Your density on that pin would be 200,000,000 metric tons per square centimeter.



The point being, atoms that comprise the physical world we perceive as solid are 999,999,999,999,999/1,000,000,000,000,000ths empty space. If the matter of our bodies is essentially all space, and if the same is true of walls, it would seem that we could walk right through them. We can't because the electrons are streaking about the nucleus at 600 miles per second. This creates an electromagnetic wall. Similarly an airplane propeller creates what appears as a solid disc at its rotating tips. The apparent solidarity of matter is an illusion created by motion and energy in space, not because there are little atomic billiard balls all packed together. Paul Valery cleverly put it, "God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through."

In The Beginning - Physicists who ponder the origin of the universe from a "Big Bang" about 15 billion years ago start with ideas like quantum gravity, repulsive gravitational fields, and vacuum fluctuations. These are not things viewed through telescopes. They are more like solutions to mathematical equations. Such esoteric math and research, as abstract and meaningless as it may seem to the average layperson, must be respected. It is what makes atomic bombs and nuclear reactors reality.

A progression of events after the Big Bang is purported to account for our universe. First there were nonphysical fields, then a quark soup of subatomic particles that in turn formed protons, neutrons, atomic nuclei, light, atoms with electrons, galaxies, and then us. Going back to the first 1/100,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1 x 1034 ) of a second, called the inflationary period , the entire universe was about the size of a small marble. From there it expanded into the countless trillions of tons of universe we see today. The distance (space) between the material in the marble at the beginning, and all the matter we see today, is almost infinite.

This again points to the fact that matter is pretty much all space, or whatever it is that fills the void between quanta (most likely interfering holographic waves and fields of some sort of energy or information). Not only is there immense space between subatomic particles, the particles themselves are not matter. The physicist James Jeans concluded: "It is probably as meaningless to discuss how much room an electron takes up as it is to discuss how much room a fear, an anxiety or an uncertainty takes up."

Our bodies and brains, being matter, are therefore not the substance we see and feel. We are essentially all space, not a dense aggregate of particles. We are, in majority, what lies between that pea nucleus on the fifty-yard line and the electrons spinning around it clear out in the stadium parking lot. In other words, nothing—at least in the materialistic nothing-something sense. Matter is, in effect, an illusion, a perception created by material brains that have the ability to make something from nothing.

Missing Matter - Only matter is believed to have mass and thus exert gravitational pull. But there is far more gravitational pull in the cosmos than there is matter to account for it. Even if all dark matter and visible matter is tallied, there is still too much gravitational pull. That would mean there is something out there nonmaterial that is not only beyond measurement, but so far even beyond imagination.

E=MC2 - Einstein's famous equation, E=MC2, says that something is nothing in the material sense. In that equation, E is energy, M is mass, or matter, and C is the velocity of light. According to my rusty algebra, you can divide both sides by C2: E/C2=MC2/C2. On the right side of the equation the C2s cancel each other out leaving E/C2=M. That means energy divided by the velocity of light squared = matter. Since both the speed of light and energy are nothing in the touchy-feely material sense, the matter they equal is nothing as well. (The explosion of nuclear bombs is a sobering example of the conversion of matter to its nonmaterial energy form.)

Although our senses tell us this is a solid world, and even scientists treat it as such, that is not what it really is. Dissolved to the most elemental level, reality appears to be nothing. But something - us and all else - cannot come from nothing. Only nothing comes from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit - Parmenides, fifth century B.C.). Unveiling what the something that is the apparent nothing behind our material reality is, and trying to solve the out of body experience, provides the key to answering the big questions. That is the exciting prospect that now lies before us.

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