Authorities Keep Gaslighting Those Having Out-of-Body Experiences

 In my July 2025 post "When Gaslighting Psychiatric Mudslinging Defames Healthy NDE and OBE Observers" (which you can read here) I documented some appalling gaslighting by authorities trying to shame, defame and pathologize healthy witnesses of the paranormal. The American Heritage Dictionary defines the word "gaslight" to mean this: "To psychologically manipulate (someone) so that they question their memories, perception, or sanity." 

Below is an infographic on gaslighting, one I modified from an output of Google Gemini:

Sociologist Paige Sweet defines gaslighting as "making someone seem or feel unstable, irrational and not credible, making them feel like what they’re seeing or experiencing isn’t real, that they’re making it up, that no one else will believe them.” The visual below shows two examples of gaslighting:

The visual below shows two other examples of gaslighting:

The latest example of gaslighting of witnesses of the paranormal is an article by neuroscientist Marina Weiler entitled " 'Am I Crazy?' Understanding Out-of-Body Feelings." Weiler attempts to reframe the well-documented fact of out-of-body experiences (a type of anomalous visual perception) as a mere "feeling." Instead of referring to out-of-body experiences, her title refers to "out-of-body feelings." Of course, there is a world of difference between an experience and a perception (on one hand), and a mere feeling (on the other hand). You may go to a reputed haunted house, and get a spooky feeling; but that counts for very little. If, on the other hand, you actually see a translucent apparition floating about, that is a perception, and it counts for very much as evidence. 

Are out-of-body experiences mere "feelings"? No, they are not. They are something much more than mere feelings: they are perceptions and observational experiences. In my post "Neuroscientists Cannot Credibly Explain Any of These 11 Features of Out-of-Body Experiences" which you can read here, I describe nine common features of out-of-body experiences, giving abundant examples of cases in which each of the features was reported. The features were these:

1. Feature #1: observing one's own body from outside it, typically from a horizontal position, at a distance of about two meters above it, or from a location near the ceiling.
2. Feature #2:  a strong feeling of euphoria or exaltation during an out-of-body experience
3. Feature #3:  an experience of being able to pass-through matter while having an out-of-body experience.
4. Feature #4:  an experience of having enhanced senses during an out-of-body experience, which may include the ability to see through walls or look inside the body as if you had x-ray eyes, or the ability to see a 360 degree view.
5. Feature #5: an experience of being connected to the body while outside of it, sometimes with there being a cord-like or elastic structure between the observer outside of the body and his own body.
6. Feature #6:  an experience of encountering one or more spiritual or non-physical entities (or deceased people) while having an out-of-body experience.
7. Feature #7:  an experience of completely leaving the location of the body, while traveling to other earthly locations or unearthly locations.
8. Feature #8:  an out-of-body experience experience that includes observations of things that should have been impossible for a person to observe, giving his physical position.
9. Feature #9:  an experience of having an exalted intellect or speeded-up mind during an out-of-body experience.

Only one of these nine features can be called a "feeling." So it is grossly misleading to be calling out-of-body experiences "feelings," and to try to reframe out-of-body experiences as "out-of-body feelings." 

Engaging in some psychiatric mudslinging, Weiler claims, "People who'd had a disembodiment feeling showed more mental health diagnoses, more treatment history, and higher dissociation and childhood trauma." This statement includes a reference to a paper of hers hidden behind a paywall. The abstract of the paper makes no such claim, and we read no numerically specific claim of such an effect in the snippets of the paper you can read here. Should we bother to pay money paying for such paper? No, much better to just assume that no strong evidence was found of any such effect, because of the failure to report numerical specifics of any such effect in the paper's abstract or snippets. Almost always when scientists get noteworthy results giving decent evidence of an effect, they mention the specifics of such results in the abstracts of their paper. 

Gaslighting is a game of "shame, blame and defame the witness." Weiler seems to play some of that game when she tries to associate  having out-of-experiences with shame. She says, "In my inbox, I regularly hear from people carrying enormous shame around disembodiment feelings like hers, afraid to tell even those closest to them." You get her drift? It sounds kind of like: "Did you have an out-of-body experience? Be ashamed. Be very ashamed!" There is actually no reason why anyone should be ashamed of having a psychic experience, and surveys show that a large fraction of the population have such experiences.  You can read about such surveys here. 

It sounds like gaslighting when Weiler states this: "The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (DSM-5) defines depersonalization/derealization disorder as persistent episodes of feeling detached from one's own body, thoughts, or surroundings—a description sitting uncomfortably close to out-of-body experiences." But typically an out-of-body experience is a one-shot affair, happening only one time in someone's life; and typically that one time is when someone had a close encounter with death such as a cardiac arrest. There is no legitimacy in Weiler's attempt to compare such once-in-a-lifetime events with " persistent episodes of feeling detached from one's own body, thoughts, or surroundings."

A site with the title of "The Brains Blog" can be found at the URL of https://philosophyofbrains.com/.  It has a byline of "Since 2005, a leading forum for work in the philosophy and science of mind." Searching for the term "out-of-body experience" using the search tool at the site, I get only one article using that term in its title. It's an article with the gaslighting title "What do out of body experiences tell us about self-consciousness; Or, Disorders of Self-Consciousness Part 5." The psychologist author makes a bad description of the conditions under which out-of-body experiences occur, failing to mention that they occur during close encounters with death such as cardiac arrest. I am left with the impression that the brain experts long writing at the Brains Blog have failed to do their homework in adequately studying this topic of out-of-body experiences so relevant to "the philosophy and science of mind."

Beware of gaslighting authorities who act like the guy below, who tries to gin up a personality defect from some one-shot observational report, while getting all confused between "something someone saw" and "something someone felt":

Postscript: I looked up some of the papers of Marina Weiler on Google Scholar. She has some papers on out-of-body experiences, which are mostly behind paywalls. Her paper "Distinguishing out-of-body experiences from lucid dreaming: a phenomenological analysis" is a paper that seems to gaslight those having out-of-body experiences, by trying to conflate out-of-body experiences with a type of vivid dreaming. Saying things like "maybe you were just dreaming" is a common type of gaslighting. The most prominent cases of out-of-body experiences occur during cardiac arrest, when the brain has shut down in a state of asystole, with brain waves appearing only as flat lines. Neither hallucinations nor dreams are possible during such a state, a fact which cripples Weiler's attempted explanations of out-of-body experiences. 

In that paper by Weiler we have this very bad misstatement: "Nonetheless, some have found that only a small percentage (4.5%) of reported OBEs occur during awake states (Green, 1968b), indicating that the majority of OBEs occur during sleep states." The reference is to the 1968 book "Out-of-the-body Experiences" by Celia Green, which you can read here. The book describes a major survey of out-of-body experiences conducted by Green, in original research.  Searching for that figure of 4.5% in the text of that book, I cannot find it. But I do find statements in that book stating the opposite. On page 85 the book states, "Of the subjects of single cases, 56.5 per cent actually claimed to have been more awake and keenly observant than usual." On page 20 the book states, "Twelve per cent of the 'single' cases studied were initiated while the subject was asleep." 

On page 61 of Green's book we read this: "Sixty-one percent of subjects report having had only one ecsomatic experience."  The book earlier defined "ecsomatic experience" as an out-of-body experience. This data is consistent with my claim earlier in this post that "typically an out-of-body experience is a one-shot affair, happening only one time in someone's life," a reality that discredits Weiler's attempt to link out-of-body experiences and types of psychiatric phenomena happening more than once in a lifetime. 

On page 42 of Green's book she states this: "Eighty-one percent of the subjects of 'single' ecsomatic [out-of-body experience] cases stated that, while they were apparently out of their bodies, they seemed to see their physical bodies from outside." So it makes no sense at all when Weiler states in her paper that "our proposed definition suggests that OBEs [out-of-body experiences] should not be defined by the subject’s ability to perceive their own body from a third-person perspective."

Weiler's paper "Neuroimaging studies of extra-sensory perception: A systematic and critical review" has the wrong title, as the studies reviewed are almost all EEG brain-wave studies that do not involve the creation of any images. But quite foolishly, some neuroscientists have started to say that EEG studies that involve no images are examples of "neuroimaging." It's just another of endless examples of defective assertions by today's neuroscientists.  

Such a paper causes me to wonder: why would someone focus on the tiny number of studies involving attempts to get neural correlates of extra-sensory perception, rather than seriously studying the vastly larger body of ESP tests that were done when a subject was not being brain-scanned and was not connected to an EEG device?  The very idea of looking for a neural correlate of extrasensory perception (ESP) makes little sense. ESP is a particularly clear example of a mental capability that cannot be explained by brain activity. That's why so many neuroscientists refuse to seriously study the 200 years of evidence for ESP and psi -- because such evidence conflicts with their "brains make minds" dogma.