KARL JASPERS FORUM

TA24 (Muller)

Commentary 39 (to C36 by vdMeijden and Kolos)

( INFORMATIONAL BODY AND EXOREAL BODY:
THE ISLE OF THE FROZEN WORDS )
by Claude Rifat
31 Jan 2001, posted 20 March 2001

<1>
[Adrian van der Meijden]

It is YOU who are "con-fused", I call it an O.O.B.E. out of deference to conventions, I do not "project" a conceivably "imagined" MIR as endo and exo, YOU do, as I have already commented on this before and I wish you would read my comments before you "comment".

[Claude Rifat]

It never occurred to me to invent such a strange concept as "out" of the "body", during my research on dreams, because I have always been aware, precisely, that I was in a dream and NOT in the exogenous reality. Different cultural circumstances led other persons to invent the concept of being "out" of our Self. But, what is the Self? An isle of frozen words (see below) ?

<2>
Every night, all human beings dream and "go" "out", in your terminology, as there is **no difference**, in this respect, between ordinary dream and conscious or lucid (both are not the same) dreams except for the intensity of recall...

Are we going to change oneiric terminology just because of intensity of recall? This would be irrational.

The terms exoreality and endoreality are conventions necessary to describe things, in linear way, to persons who have never experienced waking consciousness within the oneiric realm. As I wrote you, privately, I think that the term "exoreality" is, in fact, ultimately, also an expression of endoreality. However, this is a difficult topic to discuss within a forum where most readers probably did not ever visit endoreality consciously and, therefore, cannot adequately figure what we are discussing about.

<3>
When some ordinary persons happen to visit endoreality, by chance, such as the "near-death experiences", they often lose their sense of critical judgement and become true believers of "life" after death and other, unsubstantiated, fantasies which need to be proven in some way before being integrated as authentic knowledge.

Suffice to say that, by linear conventions, I am forced to distinguish an exoreality from an endoreality and not elaborate further. If I went beyond sequential language then I would not be understood anymore by those who are used to linear analysis and are not aware of the existence of non-linear, polymodal, analysis which is part of polythinking.

<4>
I can elaborate with those Buddhists, who trained themselves with similar techniques, because we, both, have an homologuous experience which permits us to discuss on clear terms and without falling in illusory traps or, worse, confusion. When restricting myself to communicate with fellow human beings who do not share this experience, I have to follow conventions if I want to make myself understood in a first approximation. This is the same as with, let say, mathematics: you start with 2+2 = 4 before discussing differential equations. Exo and endo are the most basic concepts of discussion, like 2 and 2, for "non-specialists".

Now coming to oneirc material. If we were really "going" "out" of our body while dreaming, then it follows that we should observe a world which is the same as the waking world.

<5>
An example : if I leave my exoreal body and find myself in my room or in a known place, then it follows that both places should be absolutely similar, in all respects, to the same places observed during waking.

The fact of observation is that it is not. Endoplaces are NOT related in a biunivocal way to their corresponding exoplaces and, worse, obey to laws which reflect a memory process or a memory-like process. Consequently, they are created "by" the CNS, this said in conventional scientific terms.

It is clear that, from a physical point of view, what we call "physical" "objects" are some forms of memories of Space, otherwise they would not exist. Similarly, informational (mental) objects are also memories of Space **but** localised within a CNS domain.

<6>
Do you remember the example, stemming from Rabelais, which I mentionned (the isle of the frozen words) privately? Let me evoke, again, this metaphor for the readers of this forum. In one of his many famous tales about Pantagruel and Gargantua, Rabelais describes a place where his heroes arrive : the isle of the frozen words.

In this isle, words are frozen and, when heated, just sprout into the air!

This metaphor helps to say that both exo and endoreality might just be different versions of the same underlying "object". Metaphorically, a brain might only be a "heater" of already existing and stored information within the very **fabric of Spacetime** itself.

<7>
It might be that what I think to be Claude and what you think to be Adrian are, merely, "heated" (activated) expressions of the "vacuum", Space, where parts of Claude and Adrian existed since innumerable ages.

In this metaphor, brains would be...."activators" of Space, experiencing bits of what was already experienced since the "beginning" of Reality and which would be, normally, kept frozen, like the frozen words of the isle of Rabelais.

This drives us to the very interesting but mind-boggling hypothesis of the late philosopher Aimé Michel who postulated the existence of a "cosmological psychical medium" which pervades the vacuum since immemorial times...

<8>
He summarised it nicely in this way: "What is, has been. What will be, was" (Ce qui est a été. Ce qui sera, fut).

Perhaps, Spacetime remembers and experiences itself through CNS?

So this is where I stand for the time being.

However, this hypothesis is too speculative, in my opinion, to be discussed in this forum and without adequate knowledge in physics, knowledge which I do not have in order to pursue this heuristic speculation.

<9>
[Adrian van der Meijden]

So I am disagreed with on the basis of a word whose operational mechanism I account for otherwise than "by convention". One can simply switch off awareness of the body, as happens in sleep, while retaining awareness awake, also done in "lucid dreaming" and while the body & senses requires a location in an AS IF MIR, the mind needs no such thing.

[Claude Rifat]

How do you explain the fact that your informational, oneiric, body can change its structure to any other body such as, for example, the "body" of a person from the opposite sex?

<10>
[Adrian van der Meijden]

So like St Paul, I don't *know* whether I am IN the body or OUT, as then there is NO body awareness too tell such a difference.

[Claude Rifat]

As far as I am concerned I know when I am in my exobody or my informational exobody because one is stable from waking to waking while the other is metastable from dreams to dreams. I also know in which reality I am from the observation of the exoreal landscape or oneiric landscape and, also, from the structure of my consciousness.

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Claude Rifat