Decoupled

Decoupling is the same separation that constitutes death, occurring in someone who is not dead, which is why Marsh needs the word. A great variety of circumstances produce it, including emotional trauma, and the many acronyms and names already in use for such experiences are evidence of how often it happens rather than of how many different things are happening. What the framework adds is a common structure. The five elements come apart, and which ones come apart determines what the experience is like. Some who decoupled from the body reported no sense of material form at all. Will decoupled from life appears free of the constraints that normally bind it, and some who have decoupled describe moving throughout spacetime and experiencing any interaction, including interactions that never involved what they considered their self, which suggests it is the will doing the experiencing. The self persists but cannot continue expanding without the assistance of outside wills. The consistent finding Marsh reports is about identification. The fully decoupled I always seems to remain tied to the conscious, even where the person identified as their emotional will or their self before decoupling, which is the observation her account of the five elements is built to explain.

Psychiatry files this territory under dissociation, with depersonalization and derealization as recognized disorders and dissociative identity disorder as the extreme case, and treats out-of-body and near-death experiences as perceptual phenomena to be explained neurologically, with work on the temporoparietal junction offering candidate mechanisms. Parapsychology and near-death research after Raymond Moody, whom Marsh cites, gather the testimony without a shared framework. Contemplative traditions have their own vocabularies for the same states. Marsh's term is broader than any of these by design, since it covers trauma, drugs, meditation, coma and death as one phenomenon with one structure, which is a unification the clinical categories are built to avoid.