Standing In Someone Else’s Shoes

By James Donahue

We recently expounded on the complex idea that if the Creator God, or soul, exists within all of us, and we have the power to mentally create a unique universe in which each of us lives, no one can fully understand how others around us perceive and understand our own world.

But now modern science is seeking to prove us wrong.

During a recent meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, a team of Swedish researchers presented a technique for tricking the brain with optical and sensory illusions so that two participants can sense the effect of trading bodies. The effect is to at least give the subjects the mental effect of being transported into the minds of each other.

The technique was presented by Dr. Henrik Ehrsson and Valeria Petkova of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

To achieve the effect, the subjects stand or sit facing one another. Both are wearing headsets, with special goggles that contain small cameras rigged so that the subjects see through the viewpoint of one another.

During the experiment, the researchers have the two subjects squeeze each other’s hand. Within seconds, they say the illusion is complete. In a series of studies they say the subjects actually have the sensation they are in the other person’s body. Even when the experimenters use mannequins and stroke both bodies’ bellies at the same time, the subjects say they not only feel they have taken on the new body, but they also unconsciously cringe when the mannequin is poked or threatened.

What is especially interesting about the study is that Ehrsson and Petkova have found that by inducing various kinds of out-of-body experiences they say the brain is easily tricked. They say this is because it has spent a lifetime in its own body and has built models of the world based upon personal experiences and using the assumption that the eyes are attached to the skull.

This is why it is almost impossible to convince people that they are not the body. The spirit that comprises our awareness of ourselves exists within the body, but it is separate from the body. We occupy the body and experience the sensation of taste, touch, hearing and pain while living there. The big mystery, of course, it what happens to us when the body no longer serves us and dies.

It is believed the spirit goes on . . . but just where does it go and what happens to it once the body is dropped? And why don’t we know how to fly in and out of these bodies during the time we live in this Third Dimensional plane?

Some people achieve this ability. It is not an easy thing to learn because of that sensation that our eyes are attached to the skull. This is also one of the reasons many people fear death. Not only does the dying experience often involve pain and suffering, but they cannot conceive of existing without the body that they have become so used to using.

While the Swedish team has succeeded in teaching us some important things about separating ourselves from the body and experiencing what it would be like to live in the body of a person of the opposite sex, someone of an extreme age difference, or understand racial differences, we do not believe the experiment has proven or disproven theories about individual universes.

They may trick the brain into seeing ourselves in another person’s shoes, but they have yet to show us the world as created and experienced by that other person.