Why do people have out-of-body experiences? (Mar. '02)
A good treatment of “out of body experiences” is offered in the book The Soul, The Body and Death by Archbishop Lazar Puhalo. In short, he writes “out of body experiences are never real. They are either demonic hallucinations, phantasies or delusions, medical hallucinations or manifestations of mental illness.” The reasoning for this is that the soul cannot exist outside the body. They are inseparable until God chooses to receive the soul at the time of one’s death. To believe that God would remove a soul from the body and then place it back would suggest that God was in error and decided to somehow set things right. We know God to be perfect and free from error. He does not change His mind, like an indecisive human being. St. Gregory Palamas said, “To cause the mind (nous or soul) to abide outside the body itself, so as there to chance upon noetic spectacles, is the root and source of the very worst of pagan errors and of all heresies, an invention of demons, an instruction engendering folly and an offspring of senselessness.”
As for those near-death experiences and the bright light phenomena, there are medical explanations that shed light (no pun intended) on these events. They are a bit lengthy to explain here, but Archbishop Puhalo deals with them in his book. If we look at the scriptural examples of those raised from the dead (Lazarus and Dorcas), notice they never speak about what they experienced. Those things are beyond our comprehension. Suffice it to say God had other reasons for raising them from the dead.