What theories have been put forward to account for the OBE?
The notion of the human double has a long and colorful history. Plato gave us an early idea. He believed that what we see in this life is only a dim reflection of what the spirit could see if it were released from the physical. Imprisoned in a gross physical body, the spirit is restricted; separated from that body, it would be able to converse freely with the spirits of the departed, and see things more clearly. Another idea which can be traced to the Greeks is that we have second body. The spirit or some subtle body would be able to see better without its body. Aristotle taught that the spirit could leave the body and that it is capable of communicating with the spirits, while Plotinus held that all souls must be separable from their physical bodies. This ‘doctrine of the subtle body’ runs through Western tradition. Homer regarded man as a composite being comprising three distinct entities, namely the body (soma), the ‘psyche,’ and the thumos; this last term is untranslatable, but is
