Trusting the senses
When a topic is vast - and the esoteric research actually touches every side of life, although typically in an indirect, metaphysical way - it is difficult to have a common basis. This is something that many people interested in this field encounter. There are certain assumptions, personal criteria, preferences, weighs that we apply e.g. to certain experiences (to some - higher, to some - lower, often without a clear reason), and experiences that people had building the personal, subjective view and thus approach to treating the mysterious things which lurk often far beyond the scientists' ability to conduct a valuable research. A physician, for instance, feels comfortable when they have a very limited environment and is able to measure every single detail they already know about. This is an old, ancient in fact, problem which I'd sum up with this: how to research the unknown.
You cannot do this with the current scientific approach and tools (not just material tools) and I like how Robert Bruce outlined this clearly in his book. But also we'd better not stick to any beliefs forever without any attempt to verify them. You certainly know such people, for example followers of some old eastern cults and religions, who are very negative toward verifying their beliefs and they get easily anxious or angry when someone wants to talk about them. :) However, part of today's science is abstract thinking which allows to predict certain things, usually they are based on the mathematical framework and require measuring things in a material way, and this includes such undefined aspects of the reality as time which turns out to be a big problem when we leave comfortable conditions of the planet Earth.
IMO this is just a beginning for the humanity to think in a more abstract way, they still need clear, "stable" reference points - and the world of matter is very helpful of this the very first step into researching the reality. With esoteric fields it is no doubt also useful to go with abstract approach (and ancient people used symbols for this purpose), but in this case we need of course to go beyond what is measured and believed directly. I am talking about this because I noticed that in esoteric fields people tend to believe in things, thus putting themselves in a position opposite to science. I don't think such approach would survive in this new millennium and people who just believe in anything will finally become extinct - this includes also those believing in the direct results of the extra sensory perception.
One of the ways to resolve this very old problem of deluding oneself that one has in any moment "the best" possible view on the reality is to reconsider the fundamental ideas which are usually unconscious. So in the end, it is consciousness itself playing games with itself. The abstract (or in ancient times a symbolic) way was the approach to the reality without directly referring to the senses - no matter whether they are of a physical nature or they are classified as the extra-sensory perception (this of course includes OBE). We know for sure that we cannot trust our senses (like atoms of matter is not what what we see), they present us with a very limited version of the reality - assuming that they are reliable at all. The astral sphere flexibility as compared to the physical material sphere displays even more evident problems with having the ultimate points of reference. I am 100% certain these are kind of problems which non-physical entities try to solve, as they have no physical bodies just mental processes and thus have no clear absolute references like we have in the material sphere. IMO there's a very handy, western scheme which helps in understanding this, I recently have wrote about it, keeping in mind that the higher spheres become more and more flexible and thus having no clear points of references, and in the end there is pure consciousness - which is always with(in) us (as for example Lao Tzu, among many others, suggested).
