Can an OBE be repeated and experimented upon?
Hare Krishna question can an OBE be repeated and as experimented upon answer the body is not the soul and the body are very strongly united together and an out of body experience is not something which is a toy for people to replicate so there are some people who claim to have that art of projecting their consciousness outside their body and seeing from out of body experiences but these are not under scientifically rigorously inspected situations so asking that an OBE be repeated upon and experimented that is like asking if Newton was going to prove that the planets move according to the law of gravitation and asking Newton to conduct experiment on the planets and to see if the increase if the increased or decreased application of force on the planets causes a variation in the motion according to his laws and only then accepting the laws of accepting the principle of law of gravitation as true so that is an impossible demand in general there are many fields in science where experimentation is not possible so in the whole field of archaeology where scientists try to find out fossils from the past or they get some remnants underground maybe and they get some artifacts from the past and now they can't do any experiment they can't get the people from the ancient civilization back here and ask them to demonstrate how did you make this particular pottery or whatever else so the scientific method does not always require experimentation for verification scientists especially there are respected sciences even among the hard sciences not the soft sciences like sociology and economics but even in hard sciences such as biology and others there are scientists who base their models not on based their theories and many theories are considered conclusive not based on experimentation but on IBE inference to best explanation that means that a particular situation is observed very carefully so for example artifact was found from the ancient times which is shaped like a pot which has some designs on it and which has a proper head on it and which has a a tap a protrusion like a tap for getting the water out then archaeologists will try to see what are the alternative explanations is there any other natural explanations by which they can say that this particular artifact could have been formed and when that artifact could not have been formed by any other alternative means then they accept that this is a artifact which must have been formed by ancient civilization ancient people at that time so this is not something which is inferred by experiment it is done by inference to best explanation so we try to get the best possible observation and then try to eliminate whichever explanations for that are not reasonable and then whatever is left that is considered the most reasonable explanation that is the respected scientific method it is called as abduction and science uses reduction, induction and abduction reduction is used in mathematics and reduction is considered the most reliable but life is not mathematical at least not all of life can be reduced to mathematics and sciences so for example biology or theory of evolution for example is not being reduced to mathematics at all so reduction is not usable in all fields then there is induction induction means there are certain number of observations and then there are certain theory made based on that and then experiments are done to further expand the range of observations and the experiments results which are consistent with theory and the theory is considered to be proven but beyond induction when no experiments are possible and there is only observation and theory then in the theoretical stage there is elimination of all possible explanations and then by abduction the best explanation is arrived at so in the case of OBEs there is no experimentation that is possible because one cannot actually predict who, which person, when will have an OBE still researchers are diligently striving for cases wherein they are more and more prepared so for example in some hospitals in especially cardiac hospitals in Europe they have been more and more equipped so that the patient surroundings and the patient's certain studies have been conducted where the patient's surroundings and the patient's bodily measures all of them are taken very accurately and if the patient reports an NDE then the circumstances can also be verified so Dr. Sam Parnia has done some research like this and it's not exactly an experiment in the technical sense but there are many many cases where there is documentation beyond doubt that the patient was unconscious at the time when the patient gives veridical memories that means patient gives report of facts and the report is accurate so there is no explanation for this because the patient is unconscious so there is no way that person could have actually observed this further those facts are so specific that they cannot have come from general knowledge or from guesswork and in some cases the patient also gives knowledge of things which are not in the room which are maybe outside the room somewhere so that is impossible for the patient to have known even if the patient is unconscious so by this way there are cases where it's beyond doubt that no other explanation will work and that's why the inference to the best explanation is the best that we can get for confirming.