Research Program / Claims / trance-state-9

In certain deep trances, consciousness may be swept away, leaving the individual unable to critically analyze their own state, and such trances may be accompanied by a certain type of out-of-body projection.

在某些深度恍惚中，意识可能被席卷而去，个体无法批判性分析自身状态，此类恍惚可能伴随某种类型的出体投射。

Concept trance state · Domain Extended Perception and Consciousness Transduction · mechanism · interface 3/3 · testability 3/3 · status contested · ★ fundable

This program treats the Seth Material as a source of hypotheses, not as doctrine to be validated. Lead dossiers are AI-compiled from the corpus with a book-and-session citation after every statement; literature reviews are AI web-search summaries whose references were all DOI-verified against Crossref; the agenda draft is an AI synthesis. None of it is Seth's original text, and none of it represents scientific consensus. English fields are machine-translated; the Chinese text is authoritative.

Seth sources (book §session)
Adjudicating experiment
Approximately 120 participants, stratified by susceptibility, cross-over receive neutral hypnosis, suggestions for deep trance and reduced sense of agency, waking imagery, and virtual reality body illusions; 4–6 visits, total period 12 months. Visual discrimination and confidence ratings are used to estimate metacognitive efficiency, along with source monitoring, self-location, and EEG arousal indices, avoiding treating “feeling deeper” as the depth mechanism itself; if out-of-body experiences are reported, a separate pre-registered, double-blind hidden-target task is then executed, with an additional 12 months for independent replication.
Suggested paper title
Metacognitive Monitoring and Bodily Self-Location During Hypnotic Suggestion
What it would overturn
Only reliable extracorporeal target information acquisition would challenge the sufficiency of the explanation that out-of-body experiences can be accounted for by changes in the brain's body self-representation; metacognitive decline alone would not overturn that explanation.
Candidate labs / funders
Olaf Blanke — Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne，[实验室](https://www.epfl.ch/labs/lnco/); Peter Lush — Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, University of Sussex; Devin B. Terhune — Awareness & Modulation Lab, King’s College London
Specificity of Seth's formulation
Terms like “certain,” “may,” and “a certain type” make the prediction very weak; without specifying incidence rates, depth thresholds, and criteria for out-of-body experiences, almost any result would be compatible.
Note
'Contested' applies to the composite proposition: there is evidence for changes in sense of agency and body self-experience, but complete loss of critical ability and actual projection have not been established; post-hoc forgetting cannot be taken as unawareness at the time.
Evidence (2, DOI-verified via Crossref)
  • Using suggestion to model different types of automatic writing — E. Walsh; M. A. Mehta; D. A. Oakley; D. N. Guilmette; A. Gabay; P. W. Halligan; Q. Deeley (2014), Consciousness and Cognition
    支持在暗示下改变行动觉察和自主感，但不能据此推断意识整体丧失或批判能力全面停摆。[论文](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2014.02.008)
  • Multisensory brain mechanisms of bodily self-consciousness — Olaf Blanke (2012), Nature Reviews Neuroscience
    汇总身体自我、多感官整合与出体体验的神经科学证据；主观离体感不要求意识实际离开身体。[论文](https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3292)

Cite: Future Mind Institute, Seth Material Research Agenda, claim trance-state-9, https://www.seth.org.cn/en/research/claims/trance-state-9