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As I was reading the article, I had a flashback to my undergraduate days. One of my many jobs was working in the biology department at school. I did essentially whatever they told me to do, but more often than not, I was making copies of the exams. For hours. The biology classes were in lecture halls with hundreds of students. If I hadn’t been an honest person, I could have made some SERIOUS money selling copies.

…

Now that I think about it, I probably wouldn’t have had to work so hard to pay for school and would have had more time to study and maybe could have amounted to something. As I type this, for the first time ever, I find myself wondering, what the hell was wrong with me? Why didn’t I sell a couple of exams? !!

Boy, have I ever made some mistakes in my life! Integrity, schmintegrity.

Oh shut up! Find someone else to be a role model.

Back to the topic. There was a T.A. (whose name eludes me) who would frequently chat with me as I stood for hours beside the mimeograph machine organizing the pages and stapling them together. I didn’t know the dude very well, but he seemed nice and didn’t strike me as being hoohoo. He would tell me in great length about his out-of-body experiences and all the spirits he would meet. In one OOB, he asked the spirits if they were dead and they all laughed at him. He was real embarassed about that. He also told me with great conviction that every flying “dream” is an out-of-body experience.

When he told me these stories, I would pepper him with questions about it, what he thought it meant, how he knew it was real, what it felt like, whatever I could think of to understand what he was telling me. After all our conversations, the only thing I knew for certain was that whether his out-of-body experiences actually happened, he believed that they did. He was a decade or so older than me and could easily have been a child of the seventies. I can’t tell you if he liked to experiment with a little LSD now and again, or if he was a completely straight and narrow, logical “normal” person. The interesting thing is that he was working on a doctorate in the sciences.

Even now, I find that as much as I prefer scientific explanations to supernatural ones, who am I to say that his experiences weren’t real? Who knows. I just hope that today whateverhisnamewas isn’t institutionalized and is a healthy functioning member of society.

Since everything eventually comes back to the Orioles for me, I’m just wondering…if you could learn how to have and control an OOB experience, who needs Opening Day tickets? Or to drive to Spring Training? Seriously, think of the possibilities and the money you could save. I have to go meditate on this one. So to speak.

While I was searching for the online version of the article on OOBEs, I also found this: another reason to go to the gym…

This extraordinarily article caught my attention too…I find it very encouraging. Maybe you’ve heard the popular theory that psychological health influences physical health? Look at this remarkable study that says that psychological attitude had no effect on the survival of cancer patients: Be As Curmudgeonly As You Want! It’s comforting to know that watching the Orioles won’t make me die. Well, maybe raise my blood pressure, but not make my cells mutate and turn on each other. We take our good news where we can get it. This study contradicts the evidence presented in Emotional Longevity that points to optimism being a determining factor in how long we live.

Maybe this all suggests that we can relax and just be human, happy, sad and in between, and not worry so much about labeling it as good or bad. Maybe it’s okay to give ourselves permission to feel the bad as well as the good, and process things in our own time and in our own way, without guilting ourselves for not being happy 24/7 on top of it. It all just “is,” and is part of the human experience. (For once, I’m not referring to the Orioles here–I mean real life kind of stuff. Even I admit, sometimes there are bigger things than baseball. Relish it, it won’t happen often.)

Science continues to evolve.

Or does it?

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