Andrew Jackson
Davis believed it to weigh about one ounce. Others say it does not weigh
anything. However, being substance, the astral body must have some weight. ~
Sylvan Muldoon & Hereward Carrington, 1973 the idea of a material soul is
not new. The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who lived in the sixth century BC,
thought that the soul was composed of an unusually fine or rare kind of matter,
such as air or fire. However, if it was material it had to have some weight.
Barbara Brennan, the former NASA engineer and now world-renowned energy healer,
observes that ‘aura’ appears to have weight.
Robert Monroe also believes that
the ‘Second Body’ has weight, although much less than the carbon-based body.
(The terms ‘aura, ‘astral body’ and the ‘Second Body’ refer to what is
generally de- scribed as the ‘subtle body’ in the metaphysical literature. The
subtle body has often been loosely identified as the ‘soul’) If the soul has
weight, it means it has mass and is subject to Earth's gravitational force.
This has motivated various researchers, including Noetic Science, to undertake
experiments to weigh the soul.
In 1907, Dr. Duncan McDougall weighed six patients,
while they were in the process of dying from tuberculosis. When death was
imminent, the entire bed of the patient was quickly placed on a highly
sensitive industrial sized scale. In each case, when the patient expired, he
noticed an extremely small sudden change in the weight of the deceased which
could not be ac- counted for by other means.
The missing mass, which this
weight loss represented, was used to support his hypothesis that the body had a
soul which had mass On the death of the visible body, the soul departed, and so
did this mass. The weight of the soul, based on the average loss of mass in six
patients, was measured by McDougall to be 21 grams A paper summarizing his
findings appeared in the journal American Medicine in 1907.
One critic quickly pointed
out that the sphincter and pelvic floor muscles relax at death, and that the
loss was perhaps due to ejected urine and or faeces. McDougall rebutted that if
this were the case, the weight would remain upon the bed and, therefore, upon
the scale. Someone else suggested that the dying patients’ final exhalation
might have contributed to the drop in weight.
To disprove this, McDougall
climbed into the bed and exhaled ‘as forcibly as possible” while his assistant
watched the scale. No change was observed. Another critic reasoned that body
weight was being continually lost as water escapes into the air through.
An Estimate Based on Dark Matter Statistics — © BY JAY ALFRED —
