The Body's Zodiac
NDE's and the Meaning of Self
NDE’s and the Center of the Universe
Recently published research on near-death experiences (NDEs) offers a striking scientific provocation: the self is less a “ghost in the machine” and more a needle on a compass. In the paper “Towards a Neuro-scientific Explanation of Near-death Experiences?”, researchers describe how disrupting a specific cortical hub—the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ)—can trigger out-of-body experiences and the uncanny sensation of relocating outside one’s own flesh.
The implication is profound: when the brain loses track of where the body is, the “self” goes missing too. This suggests that the bedrock of identity is not memory, personality, or even thought. Identity is orientation.
The Gyroscopic Self
The brain is constantly solving a problem so fundamental it remains invisible: the maintenance of a “here.” This is not a philosophical “here,” but a raw, vestibular calculation of gravity, limb position, and horizon. The TPJ functions as a clearinghouse for multisensory integration; when vision, balance, and touch stop agreeing, the brain can no longer anchor the consciousness to a stable point in space.
The result is not merely confusion, but relocation. Patients report hovering above themselves or drifting through ceilings—not because a soul has escaped the skull, but because the brain’s internal origin point has shifted. In these moments, you haven’t lost your mind; you have lost your coordinates. We are not built like statues, fixed and permanent; we are built like gyroscopes, maintaining our “selfhood” through a constant, active alignment with the physical world.
The Subdivided Sphere
This spatial dependence is baked into our earliest biology. Long before a human being possesses language or memories, the embryo must solve the problem of “where.”
In the first days of life, the zygote undergoes a unique process called cleavage. Unlike typical cell growth, the embryo does not expand; it partitions. It takes its singular, massive volume and subdivides it into smaller, specialized territories. This is the formation of the first Biological Zodiac: a sphere of potentiality being mapped into specific “houses.”
Each cell determines its fate by position. Not by destiny, but by location: Inside vs. outside; top vs. bottom; center vs. periphery. This is the organism’s first circular field of meaning organized around a center. Before you had a personality, you had polarity.
Boundary as the First Identity
Life begins when matter learns to draw a line. In the blastocyst stage, the first radical distinction occurs between the Inner Cell Mass (the future person) and the Trophoblast (the outer layer that interfaces with the womb).
This is the moment the “Body’s Zodiac” creates a specialized exterior to protect a specialized interior. A cell membrane is not merely a wall; it is a declaration: Inside is me; outside is not me. We still live within this architectural metaphor today. We speak of “inner lives” and “outer worlds,” of “subject” and “object.” These are high-level expressions of a much older biological imperative: systems must know where they end.
De-Anchoring the Self
When NDEs involve floating through light or the blurring of boundaries, it is exactly what we should expect if this coordinate system collapses.
Without a gravity reference, “up” and “down” dissolve.
Without a body schema, the “fence” between self and world vanishes.
Without a stable viewpoint, perspective detaches.
The profound peace or “oneness” reported in these states may not be a glimpse of a divine realm, but the neurological result of the boundary-making machinery taking a holiday. You haven’t traveled to another world; you have simply lost the map of this one.
The Quiet Terror
The “quiet terror” of this insight is that you do not own your identity; you maintain it. Gravity, balance, and sensory agreement are not background conditions—they are the scaffolding of the self.
When normal brain function returns after a crisis, the “here” snaps back into place. The gyroscope spins up, the coordinates stabilize, and we wake up and say, “I.” It is a return to the center. If anything in modern science deserves the label “mystical,” it isn’t the idea that consciousness survives death. It is the realization that a person is simply matter that learned where it was—and never stopped forgetting.
An African clone farm reveals a hidden world in my latest book - Black-Eye Club
Lines: Identity is orientation; you've lost your coordinates; t(his one touches on what I have been tinkering with in Proprioception and Mainstream kids) maintaining our “selfhood” through a constant, active alignment with the physical world. ( where this is no active alignment with the physical anything...); Before you had a personality, you had polarity.( and as we act as if no longer "need" or value polarity we lose identity making mechanisms); These are high-level expressions of a much older biological imperative: systems must know where they end (poem here- Overlap); You haven’t traveled to another world; you have simply lost the map of this one. (terrifies me...); It is the realization that a person is simply matter that learned where it was—and never stopped forgetting.(This Way Madness lies?)
I have some personal experiences that may relate to the ideas presented in your article and the article you cite that I think may be interesting to know. It ended up being a bit longer text than I wanted for a single comment, but I had to cut out a lot anyway or wouldn’t fit in the comment, suffice to say there’s much to be said about all this, but it's not often I have the right context and opportunity to comment about this. I hope it’s worth the read and not a waste of time!
When I had between 16 to 18 I decided to play with different physical postures and exercises and turns out if you hold your breath, force the blood flux of your head by making pressure (like certain heavy weight lifter wrongly do while pulling iron, reason why I suppose they bleed out and pass out) and then fall your head behind your back while curving your back as in an arch (I'm flexible) you can unlock something like a "syncope (fainting) with transient cerebral hypoxia, sometimes producing brief anoxic myoclonus or convulsive syncope", there is according to ChatGPT.
I did this dangerous game two times, those two by accident, but the second one I was curious to see if that would happen again and why and like a good idiot or insane person I am I did it again and again I had the same result! Luckily I didn't die, since it seems you can quite literally die from this or maybe I could say did die, because apparently I basically induced my brain or just my body to “shut off” for an instant of an instant, unsurprisingly just that was enough to make me pass out and literally disappear. There was no before and after and no transit between one state and the other, no process, I simply disappeared from the face of the Earth, from existence itself, absolute nothingness and I just know that information because I wake up and evidently survived the deed or I think I did unless I'm in some sort of Jacob's Ladder movie situation, in Silent Hill, in the Matrix, in Dark City, in Hell or Limbo and so on. As such I have no recollection of passing out and after that my memory is completely scrambled to a point that I can't tell what happened before and after, in which order of events, all seen to occur at the same time and retroactively, because one seems to be the cause of the other, as strange as this sounds, so it means that although I can connect the memory of a single moment to the next and therefore it's cause so to speak, I can also do the same with this next memory as if the next memory is the cause of the previous!
Moreover the first time this happened to me, I heard a sound like a cooking pressure that became increasingly loud as if I was a machine with steam engine, once the sound became absurdly loud my whole body shut down, as in I lose all control over my body and my body became a rag doll, I just fall off like a sack of potatoes to the outside of the bathroom I was when I did all that to the corridor, since the door was open, but before that I see myself going with my face straight to sink, I have the impression I manage to control a little my arm to put in front of me and maybe twist my body to fall in direction of my shoulder, but if I did that I quickly lost control over the arm too and saw myself hitting my chin in the edge of the sink of the bathroom. The thing is like I say, I can't tell what came before and after, so while I do have recollection of this happening I can't tell if this happened before or after I pass out, I suspect it was after I pass out, since I fall down and then after the effect worn off I regained control over body again and get up and all got well afterwards. But since my memory is scrambled I also have a simultaneous memory of literally shutting down, which I imagine was my brain, but now I "wake up" standing up and my body and face is moving by its own! And I'm also having multiple close ups and cut outs and ins like a movie of my own reflex in the mirror, and each time this happens I hear a noise like a camera or a “tum” as it got fast I hear it like you would hear in a trailer quickly showing you cuts of various scenes until you reach the climax of the trailer, “tum, tum tum, tum, pam”. Until I pass out again, but before that I'm standing in front of the mirror and smiling like a demented as it’s final close up (though I like to make silly faces like Jim Carrey just for fun and that was exactly what I was doing before all that). After that I think I wake up again and I start to hear that cooking pressure noise, which seems to be my own blood pressure in my head! I have other memories as well, but I'm not sure that they happened or not and it may be similar or the same as the second time . I had more clarity to what happened and seemed different although the same.
Now, the second time I did the same thing I did in the first, the moment I put my head back to my own back I pass out, I "wake up" in floor, the thing is, I can't move, but at the same time I can feel and see myself doing endless movements, making endless gestures, speaking multiple things and having multiple thoughts at the same time. Not one after the other in sequence, but literary at the same time, one just posited over the other, continually faster, like all possible gestures, all the potential actions, words, thoughts, intentions I could do, say, imagine and I have at that moment were happening at the same time and they were as real as I am right now writing this comment. Although I’m almost sure that I didn’t move at all, I just stood frozen and stuck in place (in the complete darkness of my room by the way, since it was night and hadn't turned on any light before I pulled this stunt on myself, but I could “see” myself in both first and third person anyway, though not distant enough as if was floating to ceiling, up high over my body, more like an over the shoulder camera like in Resident Evil 4 game). I also start to hear the cooking pressure and steam engine noise as if it’s ready to explode which I suppose it’s my blood pressure in my head, I also head a lot headache at that moment so it’s probably that, until I finally pass down, although this memory is also scrambled because I can't tell if this happened before or after, since they fit in both timelines. If there is such a thing like a "silver cord", the thing that is said to connect and hold your soul to your body, then that would be it.
Funny enough, it seems even those memories of my syncope can be a hallucination, meaning an “hallucination” of myself hallucinating! Since this whole process can cause hallucinations. It may look obvious as you read that, but not quite for me. I didn't had any extraordinary experience, nothing mystical, out-of-body or saw a light or a tunnel and anything like that, all was pretty ordinary and banal, except the circumstances of course (I mean what I thought to be "real", a real fact and could rationalize, not the extraordinary effects or phenomena per se, if that's not clear, I had to cut off the part where I develop this further), which makes it even more insidious because I can't really tell if this all "happened" or not, although I believe so. But I think it's interesting to compare with near-death-experiences exactly because of that, you often see records and testimonies of people who had those sort of experiences who most of the time were fantastical in nature which feeds off all sorts of mystical (although it was for me, the overall experience, in a way, felt more "chthonic", let's say) and religious beliefs as if it was a confirmation or comfort even in a life after death or that there's something more out there like a god or an outer-world, while in my case I just disappeared into pure nothing, so much so that I couldn't capture or have any memory at all.
Or perhaps this "disappearing" is just another hallucination and I was never truly gone? Because at the same time, if the brain” shuts down” the way it did in those circumstances, I suppose it can't properly compute or record any memory for some reason or another. On the other hand it may explain this "vacuum" and "disappearing", meaning I just thought this happened exactly because I have no memory of it ergo “no existence”. What I recorded then could be its absence while I or my brain made an effort to compensate for this “void” afterwards. Well, I suppose that I would only know this absence exists at all if I already had something to compare with or compare with in relation to another or another in a given relational system, structure, matrix, that is recorded, stored and continuous, something one could call a “memory” of sorts. If that’s the case it certainly makes you see the necessity of memory, whatever it is, to literally exist in real life and in existence itself, in the world, in reality, how memory is essential for existing at all and having an identity (similar to the myths and mystery cults of Antiquity in relation to death, memory, forgetfulness, reincarnation and so on [like the Orphic golden tablets or other “totenpass” for example]). I suspect that if you compare it with Computer Science this may make more sense to you. Or maybe I overstimulated my brain or some region of my brain like the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) or/and overloaded it to a point that it “shut down” or “blew up” through the excess of blood pressure and oxygen or other substances and elements or simple an excess of “energy” or something of this kind or another thing or I had the impression to shut down or maybe it’s something else entirely, there also always the possibility of multiple things occurring at the same time. See “A Neuroscientific Model of Near-Death Experiences Reconsidered” by Bruce Greyson and Marieta Pehlivanova (October 30, 2025).