I’ve told this story before on other sites, but it always bears repeating.

Here is an ancient Taoist story which emphasizes that this world is Nirvana if we could only see it with the eye of Nirvanoception. The tale also illustrates the view of Shunryu Suzuki that, “Strictly speaking, there are no enlightened people, there is only enlightened activity. What we are speaking about is moment-to-moment enlightenment, one enlightenment after another.”

The Truth in the White Mist concerns a scholar called Fan who, despite an excess of worldly honours, finds the evils of the society he lives in hard to bear. On the death of his father, he decides to retreat to the solitude of the mountains and become an Immortal. He finds himself a small hermitage and furnishes it as best he can with the few possessions he has brought with him and whatever he can gather from the forest. Day after day, year after year, he spends his time studying his books, meditating and, as befits a Taoist, communing with nature. He quickly becomes attuned to the pace and rhythm of the natural world and acquires a sort of peace. One thing eludes him however: Nirvana itself, the enlightenment he yearns for as the crowning glory of his life and efforts. Had he left the world of dust in vain? Were all his accomplishments as scholar and healer to no avail on the most important journey of all?

One day Fan had a visitor. He was a man of sagely bearing, but with a youthfulness that betrayed a successful cultivation of the Way. The man enquired generally after Fan’s health and well-being, then broached the topic that was always on his host’s mind. How was it that a scholar of such high attainments had not even found the entrance to the Path of the Immortals which, he added mischievously, was staring him right in the face? Noting Fan’s embarrassment, he warned him against looking for it in the beauties of nature: dawns and sunsets, the brilliance of fast-moving mountain streams, the high banks of snowy-white cloud formations. No, he insisted, look for it in the mists which creep and spread through the valleys like a shroud. And then he left.

Fan spent the next three years staring down the mountain sides at the swirling mists below. But of enlightenment there was none. Passing foresters thought him a true sage because of his stillness and complete absorption. Fan knew better.

Then one day he saw it. Racing down the mountain to the stream where his visitor lived, he burst in upon him, his face shining with delight.

“You have found the Way”, cried his friend, “I always knew you would!”

Fan explained: “I suddenly saw it : these clouds, the sun and moon, the passing seasons, the daily grind ~ they are all in the Way! Why should my thoughts separate me from what has always been mine. Just to live is to follow the Way, to be born as an Immortal! Not to resist life, to be part of it, swept along by it, that is the Way. To have faith in your own destiny, to trust life itself to deliver you where you are meant to be and want to go, that is Immortality!”

Ha ha ha! laughed Fan’s friend, “At last I have found my true master!”

The experiments of Dr Rupert Sheldrake, whose concept of “extended mind” is one of the more interesting developments in biological research this century, seem to have touched off a number of other scientists to follow suit.

The scientific journal Science is reporting the findings of neuroscientist Dr Henrik Ehrsson who has succeeded in simulating out of body experiences under laboratory conditions.

The findings seem to reveal that the mind relies on the senses of sight and touch to locate itself inside the human body. When the connection is disrupted, whether by illness, drugs or experiment, strange things begin to happen. The sensation arises that the mind has left the body.

Ehrsson used goggles, a video camera and rods to confuse the brain and create the effect. A sitting volunteer wore goggles linked to a video camera pointing to his back. Looking through the goggles, he saw an image of his back, from the perspective of someone sitting around six feet behind him. Touching his chest with a rod, which was unsighted to the camera, the split effect took hold.

Dr Ehrsson tried the experiment out on himself, “You really feel that you are sitting in a different place in the room, and you’re looking at this thing in front of you that looks like yourself, and you know it’s yourself, but it doesn’t feel like yourself. This experiment suggests that the first-person visual perspective is critically important for the in-body experience. In other words, we feel our self is located where our eyes are.”

Mystics have been reporting out of body states since time began. They are usually dismissed by science as hallucinations or neurological disturbances. The state really has to be experienced to be understood, however.

Until now science has failed to reproduce it experimentally. This study appears to have simulated the effect in the laboratory, while also validating Sheldrake’s hypothesis of extended mind.