Post by KG on Mar 9, 2007 21:50:26 GMT -5
Part 1 Philosophy and Tradition
The most common question I get, from just about everyone eventually is, “how can I AP?” It sounds like a simple question, but the answer is far from simple. The reason it isn’t simple is because of the way we have been taught to think and experience things. Most people tend to think of themselves as one solid object, which is cohesive, singular, and controlled by the conscious mind. The idea of being separated from the body and mind, in any way seems impossible. The idea that we are more than a body being controlled by a brain is almost beyond our comprehension.
Breaking the barriers of the mind
Even in the physical realm, there are three states of matter, Solid Liquid and Gas. Somehow we can accept this about physical substances, but when we think of the self we always think of ourselves as solid, and indivisible. We need to rethink that before we go any further. Think of yourself as a liquid, for a moment, capable of becoming a gas. Liquid, can be poured from a large container, into many smaller containers. It can be combined with other liquids, and by various means separated back out. On a chemical level it can be bound to other liquids. Water can evaporate Later it can condensate, either with the same water it started with or with other waters, which it met on its journey of being a vapor.
The idea of being in anything other than a solid body, or in anyway divided or subdivided from the body seems impossible. The idea that we are more than a body being controlled by a brain is almost beyond our comprehension. No wonder people have to come up with silly metaphors like the one above to even begin to talk about it.
Lets start with the sentence, “I want to go outside my body.” The first question is who exactly is I? Do you mean your awareness? your will? your human thinking mind? your persona? or your higher self? Do you mean you as an individual, staying separate from everything else, or do you want to be one with the universe, and then reassemble yourself, having been touched and influenced? If so how much of that second one can you stand? These questions are things to think of.
In order to successfully AP we must abandon our fear of loosing our individuality and mingling with the universe, on the one hand, and our fear of splitting up into millions of divergent particles on the other. Western people think of themselves as individuals. They don’t often think of cosmic unity where all is God. They also think their conscious mind should control as much as possible of themselves, their environments, and the people around them. We are by nature control freaks. IT is no fault of our own, it is just our nature, and deep down we have to acknowledge that and look past it.
Respect the Tradition
You know how often I say that the internet is such a wonderful thing with all this free information at our fingertips, we are only seconds away from a wealth of information on any subject. It is so easy to learn anything you want to know, but due to that we have to remind ourselves to appreciate and respect that information. We should take full advantage of knowledge first. Read first, comprehend second, and experiment only after step 1 and 2.
People who know me also know that I am opposed to ready made shortcuts, to understanding spiritual processes before you jump into them. I am opposed to just diving into the astral realm, with a caviler attitude, and an imaginary sword. It wold be like a bunch of city raised office workers, still in their office clothes, with no equipment being dropped in the middle of the desert, with no food and water. Any boy scout knows that it pays to be prepared, it pays to go in gradually and work up to the big stuff, and it pays to know what you are doing before engaging in serious survivalist activities… Astral travel is kind of like a survivalist activity in many ways. For God’s sake go camping in your back yard, before you go on a hundred mile trek down the Appalachian Trail with a back pack.
Was I always this cautious? No! I admit it. Did I always know all this stuff… when I first did it? Lord no! It just sort of happened to me sometimes and I couldn’t control it. Did it make a difference when I got a teacher, and some books, and later the Internet…. Absolutely! Everything you can learn is useful.
Many different traditions believe in subtle bodies, astral projection, and astral plains. Yogis, Rosicrucian, Alchemists, various religious groups from all over the world, sought to explain this phenomenon. Here is a sampling.
Eastern view
The Atman..
Some schools such as Advaita see the soul within each living entity as being fully identical with Brahman - the all-pervading soul of the universe, whereas other schools such as Dvaita differentiate between the individual atma in living beings, and the Supreme atma (Paramatma) as being at least partially separate beings. Thus atman can be used to describe an individual soul or the impersonal 'supreme' depending on the speaker's philosophical point of view.
A Yogi View
A materialist thinks he is the body, a religious student identifies himself with the mixture of body and Soul, while a Sage who has attained realization due to discrimination looks upon the eternal Atman as his self, and thinks “I am Brahman”.
Brahman
This Supreme Cosmic Spirit or Absolute Reality called Brahman is said to be eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, and ultimately indescribable in the human language. It can be at best described as infinite Being, infinite Consciousness and infinite Bliss. Brahman is regarded as the source and essence of the material universe. It is pure being. Brahman manifests as Hiranyagarbha, the "world soul", which also can take many forms or manifestations of the thousands of gods. It was deemed a singular substrate from which all that is arises. So in general Brahman, is God, but due to the nature of their perception of God, saying I am God makes sense, because all things are God.
Essentially, it is also beyond being and non-being alike, and thus does not quite fit with the usual connotations of the word God and even the concept of monism. For this reason, some authors use the word 'Godhead' for Brahman, to distinguish it from the usual usage of the word 'God'. It is said that Brahman cannot be known by material means, that we cannot be made conscious of it, because Brahman is our very consciousness. Brahman(Ryke) is also not restricted to the usual dimensional perspectives of being, and thus enlightenment, moksha, yoga, samadhi, nirvana, etc. do not merely mean to know Brahman, but to realise one's 'brahman-hood', to actually realise that one is and always was of Brahman nature. Indeed, closely related to the Self concept of Brahman is the idea that it is synonymous with jiva-atma, or individual souls, our atman (or soul) being readily identifiable with the greater soul of Brahman.
Alchemical understanding,
a word for word translation of the emerald tablet.
True, without error, certain and most true: That which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, to perform the miracles of the one thing. And as all things were from [the] one, by [means of] the meditation of [the] one, thus all things of the daughter from [the] one, by [means of] adaptation. Its father is the sun, its mother[,]the moon, the wind carried it in its belly, its nurse is the earth. The father of all the looms of the whole world is here. Its power is integrating if it be turned into earth. Separate the earth from the fire, the fine from the dense, delicately, by [means of/to] the great [together] with capacity. It ascends by [means of] earth into heaven and again it descends into the earth, and retakes the power of the superior and of the inferior. Thus[,] you have the glory of the whole world. Therefore[,] may it drive-out by [means of] you of all the obscurity. This is the whole of the strength of the strong force, because it overcomes all fine things, and penetrates all the complete. Thus the world has been created. Hence they were wonderful adaptations, of which this is the manner. Therefore I am Hermes the Thrice Great, having the three parts of the philosophy of the whole world. What I have said concerning the operation of the Sun has been completed.
What is real
I can tell you right now that the current pop occulture article is oversimplified compared to the study of these traditions, and doesn’t tell you enough. I will first provide an over view of the things involved in astral travel: The plains, the subtle bodies, and the parts of the self or soul. Note that these are all plural.
Different systems of spiritual practice show these pluralities in different ways. These things can soon get very confusing, but I will try to simplify by combining all the traditions into the basics. There is more than one subtle body, all the traditions agree on that. Traditional numbers vary, but are generally numbered between five, and ten. I am giving you 8 subtle and spiritual bodies… to discuss which is a system with few foreign words. Remember that these can be divided in other ways, and no system is wrong, lists from around the world are amazingly similar. Many use foreign words, t, but it is important that you understand the principle more so than memorizing the vocabulary of dozens of different traditions.
Instead of presenting you with a hodgepodge of different systems, I will just tell you what I find to be true. It is a combination of all these different systems. There could be more than this out there, or you could categorize these things differently, or group them differently. Although these systems are similar they aren’t identical, and rather than quibble over vocabulary I am trying to keep this as simple as possible.
These are my theories all are based in experience, others are based in ancient texts, but understanding these things is difficult, and explaining them is harder. Please bear with me, and realize that despite the fact I am trying to explain everything, I don’t understand EVERYTHING. Experiences vary, and understanding varies, you may not see it exactly the same way as I do, but that is OK. I have a number of questions myself still, but I am trying to tell you what I know, and what I believe to be true.
Here are common questions and areas of debate for people with astral experiences.
1. Where? Inner space, outer space, astral, ethereal, or spiritual world? One thing I always have trouble with… where are we now?
The first question is, is this outer or inner space. This is an area of great debate… the nearest way I can explain it is that the heart chakra is a connection to the spiritual and astral realm. I could say that my heavenly home, is the castle of my heart. It exists in many places at once. It has 32 doors all of which open to different places… and it is also a physical place in Istanbul (Constantinople).
I believe that each of us have multiple existences in the spiritual and astral and ethereal worlds. We access these worlds with our awareness by means of the doors of our house, or we just shift our awareness without even thinking of how, but we are in these worlds whether we think of it or not. For example, one could be experiencing a life as a wolf on one world, and be living in heaven as their higher self, while also living in an ethereal world thousands of miles from their home, and also be living on what seems to be an entirely separate astral planet somewhere else. Theoretically one could have dozens of these kinds of lives, but of course a person’s conscious awareness within the physical form would not be aware of all these different existences, and could only maintain awareness of more than one place for a limited time.
There is a phenomenon I have experienced, where the people who are around me in my castle, or on the spiritual or astral plains appear around me in the ethereal. They seem to be able to project out of me in the ethereal realm. These entities who are with us, can be seen by other adepts. They appear to be sitting near us, or walking beside or behind us. It seems that different worlds register on different levels of the ethereal. For example someone who is with you in an astral incarnation, might appear on a different frequency than someone who is with you in a spiritual world like heaven. It is also possible for people to be with you on many different levels, worlds and plains at the same time, also.
The physical body and the third eye make us aware of the immediate astral surroundings. We can see hear and feel the presence of “ghosts” angels, and pain bodies, and various entities who are resident to different levels and places on the ethereal. I have also wondered if the astral is just ethereal somewhere else. In other words is that planet I live on as a child, a real planet in a galaxy far, far away. If so am I physical there, or am I ethereal? IT could just as easily be that my other astral world is on a dust speck resting on some one's china hutch. (Yes I still remember the Dr Seuss book Horton Hears a Who.) Or is it on a different level of this planet? Sometimes it is easy to figure these things out about a certain situation, but other times it is just impossible to tell.
How big?
Now I have learned that size varies on the astral. There are small worlds, which are like scale models. I have seen these, and sometimes the people are just tiny. Yet when you travel to these worlds your own physical form drops to scale, and you aren't aware that world is small. In any case some things just remain a mystery.
When?
There are worlds going on concurrently with ours which involve ancient events and cultures long past from the modern world. Yet there are Roman worlds still living very much as the Romans did. Egyptian worlds full of Egyptian Gods, and Egyptian people. These aren't just historical reenactments these are new events happening independently of any time line.
There are also layers of the etherial, which are enactments of things that happened in that place before. These account for many ghost stories, and hauntings. These are different than other astral and etherial events, simply because the people are stuck in a script, of what happened before. The dead give away is that they don't react to you, and they keep doing the same things over and over.
The subtle bodies – The worlds – part of the self
1. The physical body(s) Material world the conscious mind and unrefined human persona -
2. The energic bodies – energy fields - aura… can and do overlap any and all planes.
3. The ethereal bodies The ethereal world overlaps the physical world. We can experience them with our Third eye… these worlds overlap, and learning to see them is a bit like learning to tune in a radio with a dial. It takes some practice, but these worlds are everywhere. You don’t have to move your TV set to change the channel on the other hand when you go to different cities you might get different channels.
4. The astral bodies The many worlds of the astral plane where we are either incarnate or may visit for various reasons. In my view these worlds are as real as the material world, but most of them aren’t material.
5. The mental bodies the mental plains or created worlds the mind and will the will center
6. The celestial body – the spiritual plane the higher self - the heart chakra
7. The atman – cosmic consciousness - being one with the universe and God crown chakra
The houses of existence.
The heavenly home… the castle or temple you live in on the spiritual plane
Astral houses…The houses you inhabit on the various astral world
The mental house… the place where you live in your mind the home of your mindscape
The emotional house… the house that expresses the state of your soul
The most common question I get, from just about everyone eventually is, “how can I AP?” It sounds like a simple question, but the answer is far from simple. The reason it isn’t simple is because of the way we have been taught to think and experience things. Most people tend to think of themselves as one solid object, which is cohesive, singular, and controlled by the conscious mind. The idea of being separated from the body and mind, in any way seems impossible. The idea that we are more than a body being controlled by a brain is almost beyond our comprehension.
Breaking the barriers of the mind
Even in the physical realm, there are three states of matter, Solid Liquid and Gas. Somehow we can accept this about physical substances, but when we think of the self we always think of ourselves as solid, and indivisible. We need to rethink that before we go any further. Think of yourself as a liquid, for a moment, capable of becoming a gas. Liquid, can be poured from a large container, into many smaller containers. It can be combined with other liquids, and by various means separated back out. On a chemical level it can be bound to other liquids. Water can evaporate Later it can condensate, either with the same water it started with or with other waters, which it met on its journey of being a vapor.
The idea of being in anything other than a solid body, or in anyway divided or subdivided from the body seems impossible. The idea that we are more than a body being controlled by a brain is almost beyond our comprehension. No wonder people have to come up with silly metaphors like the one above to even begin to talk about it.
Lets start with the sentence, “I want to go outside my body.” The first question is who exactly is I? Do you mean your awareness? your will? your human thinking mind? your persona? or your higher self? Do you mean you as an individual, staying separate from everything else, or do you want to be one with the universe, and then reassemble yourself, having been touched and influenced? If so how much of that second one can you stand? These questions are things to think of.
In order to successfully AP we must abandon our fear of loosing our individuality and mingling with the universe, on the one hand, and our fear of splitting up into millions of divergent particles on the other. Western people think of themselves as individuals. They don’t often think of cosmic unity where all is God. They also think their conscious mind should control as much as possible of themselves, their environments, and the people around them. We are by nature control freaks. IT is no fault of our own, it is just our nature, and deep down we have to acknowledge that and look past it.
Respect the Tradition
You know how often I say that the internet is such a wonderful thing with all this free information at our fingertips, we are only seconds away from a wealth of information on any subject. It is so easy to learn anything you want to know, but due to that we have to remind ourselves to appreciate and respect that information. We should take full advantage of knowledge first. Read first, comprehend second, and experiment only after step 1 and 2.
People who know me also know that I am opposed to ready made shortcuts, to understanding spiritual processes before you jump into them. I am opposed to just diving into the astral realm, with a caviler attitude, and an imaginary sword. It wold be like a bunch of city raised office workers, still in their office clothes, with no equipment being dropped in the middle of the desert, with no food and water. Any boy scout knows that it pays to be prepared, it pays to go in gradually and work up to the big stuff, and it pays to know what you are doing before engaging in serious survivalist activities… Astral travel is kind of like a survivalist activity in many ways. For God’s sake go camping in your back yard, before you go on a hundred mile trek down the Appalachian Trail with a back pack.
Was I always this cautious? No! I admit it. Did I always know all this stuff… when I first did it? Lord no! It just sort of happened to me sometimes and I couldn’t control it. Did it make a difference when I got a teacher, and some books, and later the Internet…. Absolutely! Everything you can learn is useful.
Many different traditions believe in subtle bodies, astral projection, and astral plains. Yogis, Rosicrucian, Alchemists, various religious groups from all over the world, sought to explain this phenomenon. Here is a sampling.
Eastern view
The Atman..
Some schools such as Advaita see the soul within each living entity as being fully identical with Brahman - the all-pervading soul of the universe, whereas other schools such as Dvaita differentiate between the individual atma in living beings, and the Supreme atma (Paramatma) as being at least partially separate beings. Thus atman can be used to describe an individual soul or the impersonal 'supreme' depending on the speaker's philosophical point of view.
A Yogi View
A materialist thinks he is the body, a religious student identifies himself with the mixture of body and Soul, while a Sage who has attained realization due to discrimination looks upon the eternal Atman as his self, and thinks “I am Brahman”.
Brahman
This Supreme Cosmic Spirit or Absolute Reality called Brahman is said to be eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, and ultimately indescribable in the human language. It can be at best described as infinite Being, infinite Consciousness and infinite Bliss. Brahman is regarded as the source and essence of the material universe. It is pure being. Brahman manifests as Hiranyagarbha, the "world soul", which also can take many forms or manifestations of the thousands of gods. It was deemed a singular substrate from which all that is arises. So in general Brahman, is God, but due to the nature of their perception of God, saying I am God makes sense, because all things are God.
Essentially, it is also beyond being and non-being alike, and thus does not quite fit with the usual connotations of the word God and even the concept of monism. For this reason, some authors use the word 'Godhead' for Brahman, to distinguish it from the usual usage of the word 'God'. It is said that Brahman cannot be known by material means, that we cannot be made conscious of it, because Brahman is our very consciousness. Brahman(Ryke) is also not restricted to the usual dimensional perspectives of being, and thus enlightenment, moksha, yoga, samadhi, nirvana, etc. do not merely mean to know Brahman, but to realise one's 'brahman-hood', to actually realise that one is and always was of Brahman nature. Indeed, closely related to the Self concept of Brahman is the idea that it is synonymous with jiva-atma, or individual souls, our atman (or soul) being readily identifiable with the greater soul of Brahman.
Alchemical understanding,
a word for word translation of the emerald tablet.
True, without error, certain and most true: That which is above is as that which is below, and that which is below is as that which is above, to perform the miracles of the one thing. And as all things were from [the] one, by [means of] the meditation of [the] one, thus all things of the daughter from [the] one, by [means of] adaptation. Its father is the sun, its mother[,]the moon, the wind carried it in its belly, its nurse is the earth. The father of all the looms of the whole world is here. Its power is integrating if it be turned into earth. Separate the earth from the fire, the fine from the dense, delicately, by [means of/to] the great [together] with capacity. It ascends by [means of] earth into heaven and again it descends into the earth, and retakes the power of the superior
What is real
I can tell you right now that the current pop occulture article is oversimplified compared to the study of these traditions, and doesn’t tell you enough. I will first provide an over view of the things involved in astral travel: The plains, the subtle bodies, and the parts of the self or soul. Note that these are all plural.
Different systems of spiritual practice show these pluralities in different ways. These things can soon get very confusing, but I will try to simplify by combining all the traditions into the basics. There is more than one subtle body, all the traditions agree on that. Traditional numbers vary, but are generally numbered between five, and ten. I am giving you 8 subtle and spiritual bodies… to discuss which is a system with few foreign words. Remember that these can be divided in other ways, and no system is wrong, lists from around the world are amazingly similar. Many use foreign words, t, but it is important that you understand the principle more so than memorizing the vocabulary of dozens of different traditions.
Instead of presenting you with a hodgepodge of different systems, I will just tell you what I find to be true. It is a combination of all these different systems. There could be more than this out there, or you could categorize these things differently, or group them differently. Although these systems are similar they aren’t identical, and rather than quibble over vocabulary I am trying to keep this as simple as possible.
These are my theories all are based in experience, others are based in ancient texts, but understanding these things is difficult, and explaining them is harder. Please bear with me, and realize that despite the fact I am trying to explain everything, I don’t understand EVERYTHING. Experiences vary, and understanding varies, you may not see it exactly the same way as I do, but that is OK. I have a number of questions myself still, but I am trying to tell you what I know, and what I believe to be true.
Here are common questions and areas of debate for people with astral experiences.
1. Where? Inner space, outer space, astral, ethereal, or spiritual world? One thing I always have trouble with… where are we now?
The first question is, is this outer or inner space. This is an area of great debate… the nearest way I can explain it is that the heart chakra is a connection to the spiritual and astral realm. I could say that my heavenly home, is the castle of my heart. It exists in many places at once. It has 32 doors all of which open to different places… and it is also a physical place in Istanbul (Constantinople).
I believe that each of us have multiple existences in the spiritual and astral and ethereal worlds. We access these worlds with our awareness by means of the doors of our house, or we just shift our awareness without even thinking of how, but we are in these worlds whether we think of it or not. For example, one could be experiencing a life as a wolf on one world, and be living in heaven as their higher self, while also living in an ethereal world thousands of miles from their home, and also be living on what seems to be an entirely separate astral planet somewhere else. Theoretically one could have dozens of these kinds of lives, but of course a person’s conscious awareness within the physical form would not be aware of all these different existences, and could only maintain awareness of more than one place for a limited time.
There is a phenomenon I have experienced, where the people who are around me in my castle, or on the spiritual or astral plains appear around me in the ethereal. They seem to be able to project out of me in the ethereal realm. These entities who are with us, can be seen by other adepts. They appear to be sitting near us, or walking beside or behind us. It seems that different worlds register on different levels of the ethereal. For example someone who is with you in an astral incarnation, might appear on a different frequency than someone who is with you in a spiritual world like heaven. It is also possible for people to be with you on many different levels, worlds and plains at the same time, also.
The physical body and the third eye make us aware of the immediate astral surroundings. We can see hear and feel the presence of “ghosts” angels, and pain bodies, and various entities who are resident to different levels and places on the ethereal. I have also wondered if the astral is just ethereal somewhere else. In other words is that planet I live on as a child, a real planet in a galaxy far, far away. If so am I physical there, or am I ethereal? IT could just as easily be that my other astral world is on a dust speck resting on some one's china hutch. (Yes I still remember the Dr Seuss book Horton Hears a Who.) Or is it on a different level of this planet? Sometimes it is easy to figure these things out about a certain situation, but other times it is just impossible to tell.
How big?
Now I have learned that size varies on the astral. There are small worlds, which are like scale models. I have seen these, and sometimes the people are just tiny. Yet when you travel to these worlds your own physical form drops to scale, and you aren't aware that world is small. In any case some things just remain a mystery.
When?
There are worlds going on concurrently with ours which involve ancient events and cultures long past from the modern world. Yet there are Roman worlds still living very much as the Romans did. Egyptian worlds full of Egyptian Gods, and Egyptian people. These aren't just historical reenactments these are new events happening independently of any time line.
There are also layers of the etherial, which are enactments of things that happened in that place before. These account for many ghost stories, and hauntings. These are different than other astral and etherial events, simply because the people are stuck in a script, of what happened before. The dead give away is that they don't react to you, and they keep doing the same things over and over.
The subtle bodies – The worlds – part of the self
1. The physical body(s) Material world the conscious mind and unrefined human persona -
2. The energic bodies – energy fields - aura… can and do overlap any and all planes.
3. The ethereal bodies The ethereal world overlaps the physical world. We can experience them with our Third eye… these worlds overlap, and learning to see them is a bit like learning to tune in a radio with a dial. It takes some practice, but these worlds are everywhere. You don’t have to move your TV set to change the channel on the other hand when you go to different cities you might get different channels.
4. The astral bodies The many worlds of the astral plane where we are either incarnate or may visit for various reasons. In my view these worlds are as real as the material world, but most of them aren’t material.
5. The mental bodies the mental plains or created worlds the mind and will the will center
6. The celestial body – the spiritual plane the higher self - the heart chakra
7. The atman – cosmic consciousness - being one with the universe and God crown chakra
The houses of existence.
The heavenly home… the castle or temple you live in on the spiritual plane
Astral houses…The houses you inhabit on the various astral world
The mental house… the place where you live in your mind the home of your mindscape
The emotional house… the house that expresses the state of your soul