Out-of-body experiences in ancestral traditions were never anomalies to explain. They were mapped, practiced, and held in community long before Western neuroscience arrived. The Yoruba, the Kemetic traditions of ancient Egypt, the Dogon of Mali, the practitioners of Candomblé, Vodou, and Lucúmí — all carried the same knowledge across continents and centuries: the spirit is not confined to the body. The body is a vessel, not a ceiling.
“The capacity for expanded consciousness is not an anomaly. It is built in. It is, in fact, deeply human.”
— Michele Mitchell, Ubuntu Village
The Map the Ancestors Already Had
The Yoruba understood the ara — the physical body — as only one layer of a person’s being. The emi, the breath-soul, could move through realms inaccessible to waking consciousness. The Kemetic traditions of ancient Egypt spoke of the Ba, the soul’s capacity to travel freely, depicted in sacred art as a bird rising from a sleeping body, moving between the worlds of the living and the ancestral dead.
The Dogon of Mali encoded cosmological knowledge of consciousness and spatial perception into their sacred traditions so precise that scholars are still parsing what it means. Across the continent, and in every tradition that survived the Middle Passage — Candomblé, Vodou, Lucúmí, the ring shout — the understanding was consistent: the spirit is not confined to the body.
Out-of-body experiences documented in ancestral traditions have appeared in near-death accounts, deep meditation, ceremony, and dream across every culture in human history. This was never fringe knowledge. It was the center. What our traditions mapped as spirit travel, neuroscience is now beginning to measure.
What the Brain Actually Does
In 2017, researchers identified the anterior precuneus — a region at the back of the parietal lobe — as central to generating the sensation of an OBE. This area is part of the default mode network, the brain’s activity when we are turned inward rather than outward. The anterior precuneus integrates sensory information from the inner ear, tracks the body’s position in space, and constructs what scientists call “the bodily self” — the felt sense that I am here, in this form, in this location.
When that region is disrupted or enters altered states, the boundary between self and space becomes permeable. Consciousness appears to expand beyond the physical body’s edges. What ancestral traditions called Ba, emi, the traveling spirit — neuroscience is now locating in the brain’s own architecture.
This is not a case of science discovering something new. This is science finally arriving where the ancestors already were. The capacity for expanded consciousness is not a glitch or a hallucination. It is built in. It is, in fact, deeply human.
Plant Medicine Is Not a “High”
When Western media discusses plant medicines in relation to altered states of consciousness, the framing is almost always risk — substances people chase for a thrill, dangerous shortcuts that should be approached with fear. That framing erases centuries of sophisticated ceremonial knowledge and pathologizes what are, in their original contexts, healing technologies.
Psilocybin has been used in Mesoamerican healing traditions for at least 3,000 years. Ayahuasca has been a sacrament and diagnostic tool in Amazonian Indigenous medicine for generations, administered by trained healers within carefully held ceremony. Iboga, central to the Bwiti tradition of Central Africa, is used as a rite of passage and a means of ancestral contact — not recreation. These are medicines that require preparation, intention, community container, and skilled guidance, because the traditions that carry them understood that the expanded states they produce are powerful and must be held with care.
The risks that arise when these medicines are extracted from their ceremonial context — used in isolation, without training, without community — are not evidence that the medicines themselves are dangerous. They are evidence that meaning, relationship, and container are not optional. They are the medicine.
Seeking Sensation Versus Seeking Connection
There is a real distinction worth naming between chasing transcendence as an individual experience — extracting the peak while avoiding integration, community, accountability — and entering expanded states as part of a relational, intentional practice.
In Yoruba ceremony, the Orisha does not descend so that one person can have a mystical experience. The Orisha descends to speak to the community, to heal someone who needs healing, to offer guidance the people need. In Vodou, the Lwa rides a devotee not as a performance of individual consciousness but as a bridge between the living and the ancestral forces that sustain life. Belonging is the container. Community is the ground that makes transcendence possible — and safe.
Our work on mirror neurons and communal healing explores the same territory: we are neurologically wired for shared experience. The capacity to feel what another feels, to enter resonance, to move together — this is not incidental to human consciousness. It is central to it. And our piece on music, ritual, and the science of belonging shows how the drum, the circle, the call and response were engineering the neurological conditions for communal transcendence long before we had words like “oxytocin” or “synchronized brainwaves.”
The Question Underneath the Seeking
When someone seeks an out-of-body experience, they are often asking something their culture doesn’t give them space to ask: Is there more than this? Is consciousness bigger than what I’ve been told? Is there something on the other side of the ordinary that knows me?
These are ancient questions. Out-of-body experiences in ancestral traditions were one of the primary ways communities sought answers — not as individuals chasing peak states, but as people accountable to each other, entering expanded consciousness to return with something the collective needed. This is also, in many ways, the territory Ubuntu Village is built around: the deep knowing that the visible world is not all there is, that healing moves through dimensions science is only beginning to map, that what our traditions carried is not superstition. It is technology.
We don’t need to chase anything. We need to remember what was always there. The body was never the limit. The traditions knew it. The science is catching up. And community — the circle, the drum, the presence of people who hold you — is still the safest place to find out what lives beyond it.
The same ancestral traditions that mapped spirit travel have also carefully charted what the soul encounters when the body reaches its final threshold — a journey documented in our piece on Life After Death: Navigating the Different Phases of the Bardo.
Community is the medicine.
The search for transcendence is ancient and universal. Ubuntu Village honors the full spectrum of human spiritual seeking while grounding it in the healing power of community — because belonging is its own form of expanded consciousness.
References
Blanke, O. et al. (2017). Anterior precuneus and out-of-body experiences. Current Biology. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8425774/
Scientists have found part of the brain that triggers out-of-body experiences. NPR, July 2023. npr.org
Michele Mitchell is the Founder, President & CEO of Ubuntu Village Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit rooted in East Harlem, New York, with programs in Kenya, Uganda, and Nigeria. A writer, advocate, and community strategist working at the intersection of ancestral wisdom, public health, and community power, Michele leads Ubuntu Village’s work to center communities as the protagonists of their own healing. She writes from the conviction that science and spirit are complementary, that healing is relational, and that community is the medicine.
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