He learned that between eight and fifteen per cent of the population reports having had an “O.B.E.”-perhaps during the night, or after surgery-and that, for millennia, people have seen in such experiences evidence for various mystical theories of the soul. Metzinger began reading about out-of-body experiences. Could materialism be wrong? Could consciousness exist immaterially, outside of the body? He admonished himself: “How arrogant I have been!” He was, therefore, doubly shocked by his out-of-body experience, which had seemed irrevocably real. Immersing himself in the work of the Anglophone philosophers, he’d eventually become convinced that his soul was made by his brain. In Metzinger’s department, such theories were denounced as anti-human and “proto-fascist.” Metzinger considered himself a radical-he had waist-length hair, and was proud to have been teargassed while protesting the U.S.

In Britain and America, philosophers, computer scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists were working together to reconceive the mind as a purely physical system created by the brain. During the postwar years, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer had made the university’s Institute for Social Research-the Frankfurt School-a center of neo-Marxist thought, and the campus remained a politically radical place.

Only much later did he realize that the breathing had been his.Īt the time, in the early nineteen-eighties, Metzinger was a philosophy student researching the mind-body problem at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität. He heard someone else breathing and, in a panic, looked around for an intruder. Gazing out into the room, he was both amazed and afraid. He tried to force the arm to move, and, somehow, this shifted him up and out of his body, so that he seemed to be floating above himself. He tried to scratch it, but couldn’t-his arm seemed paralyzed. Then he awoke, feeling an itch on his back. After a long day of yoga and meditation, he had a slice of cake and fell asleep. He was on a ten-week meditation retreat in the Westerwald, a mountainous area near his home, in Frankfurt. Thomas Metzinger had his first out-of-body experience when he was nineteen. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.

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