[Transhumanist, Ray] Kurtzweil and Strieber share a common preoccupation with extending their existence beyond the physical, even to the point of completely detaching themselves (their ego-minds) from their bodies. There may be a psychological explanation for this preoccupation, besides simply fear of death [something I believe Strieber talks about].
During the first years of the infant's life, there is a fundamental need to fully separate from the mother's body, to "disenmesh" from her psyche and develop an autonomous, authentic sense of self. For this to happen a strong paternal presence is required to "fish" the child out of the mother's psyche and provide an environment for the child to gradually shift his focus away from the mother and onto the world at large. The father's task is to preside over this transition from mother-dependency to autonomy, to help the child to develop his awareness as a separate body and a correspondingly healthy ego. When--as is so often the case in the Western world--the father is absent and /or indifferent (or, possibly worse, abusive), there is no way for this process to happen. As a result, the child remains hopelessly lost in what Margaret Mahler called "symbiotic psychosis," a "delirious state of undifferentiation between the ego and the object" (Thomson, 2005).[2]
The mother-bonded adult experiences himself as somehow trapped, confined, restricted. He feels prevented (often by some hidden, sinister force) from experiencing reality and himself as they truly are. Without awareness of the underlying cause of this "bondage," there is a natural tendency to place the focus outside of the self, onto the universe at large. At the same time, the feeling of imprisonment is projected onto the the body itself. A very real, deeply felt need to complete the separation from the mother's body is experienced as a need to escape from the body. Such a "complex" could give rise to a preoccupation with "exteriorization" from the body, whether by converting consciousness into digital data and sending it across space-time, or (as in alleged "remote viewing" programs of the US military) accessing a "subtle," "astral," or energy body and projecting it outward, through space and time, to become, like Strieber with his implant, a major Mental Traveler.
The creation of a "mental body"--an image of the body which can be used as a vehicle for self-consciousness to leave the body--is a common feature of occult writing about psychism and "sorcery," and something I've been familiar with at least since my early twenties, when I first read Carlos Casteneda...
... [Horsley continues] I have had my share of "astral projection" experiences, including "transhuman" (and/or alien) states of perception and being. One thing I eventually came to notice was how often I returned from such excursions to an unusually poor state of health, so much so that it would sometimes take an hour or more to feel strong enough to get out of bed. Eventually a Jungian therapist I was seeing informally (the one who recommended [Donald] Kalsched) suggested that all of my out-of-body journeys and dreams of space flight were, at base, an attempt to escape the reality of my body. She advised me to turn my focus around, to the inside of my body and ordinary, mundane aspects of life. I have been following this advice ever since, and my astral journeys and/or visionary dreams have mostly tapered off. Do I miss them? Yes. Am I more grounded in (and accepting of) my everyday self and reality? Yes. Ironically, or perhaps not, the less I experience what I was perpetually striving to experience, the less perpetual my striving has become. I also find it a lot easier to get out of bed in the morning.
Trauma leads to dissociation; dissociation is when a part of the individual's psyche withdraws from an intolerable situation because it is impossible to withdraw physically. Strieber, and countless others in the fields of religion, psychism and ufology, are arguing that dissociation and/or out-of-body experiences that result from trauma are ways to access realms of experience otherwise unavailable to us. While (based on my own experiences) trauma can and does lead to authentic "soul journeys," what is not being discussed, so far as I can tell, is the assumption that, because they are genuine--or to the degree which they are genuine--these visionary states are desirable and beneficent to us.
My own position is that these non-corporeal excursions not only depend on a disconnection from the body but exacerbate it. I would even suggest (again based on direct experience) that this is the sole imagined "benefit" of such experiences, namely, that they allow for a surrogate form of individuation and a "pseudo-enlightenment," one which I suspect is not only no substitute for the real thing but which may severely reduce the chances of it ever happening. If we find a convincing counterfeit for what, at the very deepest level, we are striving for, we may suppress our knowing that something isn't right, in order to settle for the more easily available substitute. Yet the substitute cannot ever satisfy. And meanwhile, there is also nothing quite as addictive as the cure that almost works.
The attempt to escape psychological bondage to the mother by leaving the body (or the planet) behind is the attempt to extend the infantile into the infinite. [end excerpt, "Prisoner of Infinity," Jasun Horsley]
