A Key to Overcoming Our Wrong Focus on the Individual? Out-of-Body Experience as Ritualistic Practice in (Indigenous) Societies.
Joseph Macke
Art and Science Conductor, HEKA Studio
I have had two specific out-of-body experiences (OBEs) in my life so far. Both occurred during childhood, and I considered both to be near-death experiences. Even as a child, I had heard that people describe the process of dying as leaving their body. It is like taking a position behind or above one's own body, as if from a third-person perspective (Blanke et al., 2016).
My first experience was in a whirlpool on a ship. I was lying there looking up at the sky. I could no longer see the horizon, only sky. I felt the water jets evenly on my body and the swirling of the whirlpool. All I could hear was a humming sound. After the experience, I felt like I had fallen asleep, but then I wouldn't have been able to remain seated there. So something else must have happened. I had fallen into a dreamlike state, a kind of trance in which I no longer perceived my physical limitations, but was detached from them or had grown beyond them.
Perhaps that is what Rilke meant with his rings.
I live my life in growing rings
I live my life in growing rings,
which extend over things.
I may not complete the last one,
but I will try.
I circle around God, around the ancient tower,
and I circle for millennia;
and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm
or a great song.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, 1899
OBE in Societal Context
Neuroscientific research in our Western societies is finding more and more evidence that our Enlightenment-era conception of humans as the crown of creation, as (uniquely) rational individuals, needs to be relativized or even revised. It is time for such a reclassification in order to undermine the philosophies that have been able to perceive this separation of humanity into individual islands as a welcome gateway for their further division (feudalism, capitalism, etc.). We have to build bridges.
The Asian region has never been so bound by the belief in reason and has always sought the truth closer to the union between body, mind and spirit or layers of consciousness / energy. Something similar is known from indigenous cultures in South America, cf. the “skin knowledge” of the Cashinahua (Kensinger, 1995). It is not a big step from turning away from reason, or rather balancing it with other elements, to the question of what these other elements, which transcend the individual, mean. In the Asian tradition, such forces are often described as qi, a subtle energy that permeates and animates the world. European natural philosophy likewise imagined a cosmic medium (“ether”) believed to fill the universe and connect all things.
Could OBEs be a hint at this “great song” (Rilke) between us? Could these experiences be like a memory of this greater whole that we all come from and a taste of this One that we'll go back to once we understand that we're (just) a part of it? That there is no outside out there, but that it is just as much within us as it is outside us. That we are all connected through this and are all one?
The universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything that you want, you already are. - Rumi
Can such experiences provide the impetus to reflect on ourselves as a community? Not only as a human community, but specifically as an inclusion of all that exists? Could we thus acknowledge that animals are in no way inferior to us, and nature just as little? What impact could this have on our societies and our legal systems if we become (physically) aware of this? Can we establish this feeling of shared responsibility for the Terrestrial (here in the sense of Latour, 2025)?
One indication of this could be the study of societies that have integrated OBE, e.g., through rituals. This is evident in many indigenous societies, such as the Sufi dervishes, the shamans in Siberia, and the Bardo practices in Tibet. How do such societies understand the connection between people and between nature? Do they start from an anthropocentric/individualistic worldview? What values and norms follow from their understanding? Could we take a cue from this? Could it be that we have “accidentally” (the German word “verSEHENtlich” fits here so well as it incorporates already the Western focus on the sense of sight for perception) strayed or been misled in our understanding?
From Berlin Techno to Derwish Dances and other ritualized forms of OBE
As a lawyer, I am interested in the social aspects of this question. As an artist, I am interested in attempting to make these aspects tangible for people through OBE art projects. Is it possible to make people aware of the connection when they feel a sense of boundlessness?
Are we not constantly searching for forms of boundlessness in our affluent societies? In this context, I am reminded of Berlin's club culture, especially the techno scene, where people often perform almost automated, unvarying movements to monotonous music in a dance space of 0.5m x 0.5m that is virtually defined for them, in order to enter a form of trance (possibly also aided by drugs). This is a form of community building that is not openly physical, as the dancers often even keep their distance, and yet something forms between them, or they form themselves into this “between them” in the ether, the atmosphere (see on the topic of atmospheres: Böhme, 2022). Interestingly, the parallels between my whirlpool experience and the Berlin techno disciples are also those highlighted in the description of the dervish dances: Monotonous repetitions.
Spinning for minutes or hours causes intense stimulation of the sense of balance in the inner ear. The body loses its stable orientation in space. Many participants report a state in which they feel simultaneously inside and outside their bodies (Avery, 2004).
Similar phenomena can be found in numerous other traditions. In shamanic rituals in Siberia and Amazonia (e.g., Shipibo-Conibo trance rituals), the transition to other levels of consciousness is often triggered by rhythmic drumming, dancing, and monotonous movement. The shaman often describes his journey as actually leaving the body (Eliade, 1964).
Tibetan dream and bardo practices attempt to detach consciousness from the physical body during sleep or meditation. The goal is to experience the state of consciousness independently of the physical perspective (Norbu, 1992; Evans-Wentz, 1927).
In some Arctic traditions, such as those of the Inuit, ritual experts “angakkuq” report traveling great distances during trance states while their bodies remain in the ritual space. These spiritual journeys often serve the purpose of healing or communicating with non-human actors in the environment (Rasmussen, 1929; Laugrand & Oosten, 2010).
In the Amazon region, the Shipibo-Conibo also describe experiences during ayahuasca-based ritual practices in which consciousness leaves the body or moves through other spaces. These states are induced by songs (ícaros), rhythmic structure, and psychoactive plants, and are central to healing rituals and cosmological communication (Brabec de Mori, 2011; Gebhart-Sayer, 1985).
These practices vary greatly from culture to culture, but they use similar mechanisms: rhythmic movement, sensory overstimulation, or monotonous repetition.
The Neuroscience on OBE
Neuroscientific studies show that OBEs are linked to specific processes in the brain. At the center of this is a region that neuroscientists call the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ). It integrates information from various sensory systems: sense of balance, body perception, visual orientation in space. If this integration is disrupted or unusually modulated, the brain can miscalculate the position of its own body. The result is a shift in self-awareness, with the self appearing to be outside the body.
Interestingly, such experiences can be produced experimentally. In laboratory studies, researchers have succeeded in making subjects feel as if they were outside their bodies through virtual reality, visual reflections, or electrical stimulation of the TPJ (Blanke et al., 2002; Lenggenhager et al., 2007; Ehrsson, 2007).
HEKA as Conceptual Atmosphere
We, the founders of HEKA, did not seek each other out in a targeted manner, yet we did not find each other by chance. I think that we all felt our own individual experiences of connection to the unifying force and maybe this common force has connected us, who knows. Some of us have found their path through vibrations that transform into sound, others through waves that carry light.
Perhaps we don't need the ritualization and almost technoization of such experiences. Perhaps all it takes is an initial impulse to perceive one's surroundings and the world as a space of possibility, as a projection screen for a future into which I can glide dancing with the ease of a child full of imagination, without thinking and without structuring. Simply because I am and because everything around me is with me and within me.
Perhaps this enables us to gather energy, a wave that continues to travel through the ether and draws others along with its positive charge. A self-reinforcing effect of coming together in an atmosphere of hope. A dissolving of the man-made boundaries between us, a genuine social medium. I think that is the desire of our project, which is still in its infancy, yet we have already been able to invite others with our first tentative dance steps.
And every beginning has a magic that protects us and helps us to live. - Hermann Hesse, Steps, 1953
References
Avery, Kenneth S. (2004). A Psychology of Early Sufi Samāʿ: Listening and Altered States. Routledge.
Blanke, O., Ortigue, S., Landis, T., Seeck, M. (2002): Stimulating illusory own-body perceptions. The part of the brain that can induce out-of-body experiences has been located. Nature, Vol. 419
Blanke, O., Faivre, N., Dieguez, S. (2015): Leaving Body and Life Behind: Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experience. In: Steven Laureys, Olivia Gosseries, Giulio Tononi: The Neurology of Consciousness: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuropathology, 2. Auflage, Academic Press, Amsterdam 2015, ISBN 978-0-12-801175-1, S. 323–347 (englisch).
Böhme, G. (2022). Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik.
Brabec de Mori, Bernd (2011). Tracing Hallucinogens: Contributing to a Critical Ethnography of Ayahuasca Usage in the Peruvian Amazon.
Ehrsson, H Henrik (2007). The experimental induction of out-of-body experiences. Science. 2007 Aug 24;317(5841):1048. doi: 10.1126/science.1142175.
Eliade, Mircea (1964). Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy. Princeton University Press.
Evans-Wentz, W. Y. (1927). The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Gebhart-Sayer, Angelika (1985). The Geometric Designs of the Shipibo-Conibo in Ritual Context.
Kensinger, K.M. (1995). How Real People ought to live.
Latour, B. (2017). Où atterir? Comment s’orienter en politique.
Laugrand, Frédéric & Oosten, Jarich (2010). Inuit Shamanism and Christianity.
Lenggenhager, B., Tadi, T., Metzinger, T., Blanke, O. (2007): Video ergo sum: manipulating bodily self-consciousness. Science. 2007 Aug 24;317(5841):1096-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1143439.
Norbu, Namkhai (1992). Dream Yoga and the Practice of Natural Light. Snow Lion Publications.
Rasmussen, Knud (1929). Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.
Macke, "Dance - 1", 2024, digital (Link)
