Read the Entire Series – Journey To Knowing
Meditation and Astral Projection
It usually begins with the decision to step out of your schedule, with its inventory of voices demanding your compliance, to then sit down and simply breathe, slowly and calmly, observing the body ordering its functions, with the inhabiting psyche, serene in itself.
As you acquiesce to your own decision, refusing all invitations to anxious emotions and busy little thoughts, you recall the ease of that eternal calm deep inside that hive of hyperactivity. You have been there before and know that you belong, despite the temptations of the sparkly and trivial. And if undisturbed by the irritation of externals, you can move that psyche on a voyage of projection, passing through the levels that consciousness has created to inhabit and explore.
You are not troubled by anything resembling fear, you know your home base will be there when you return. You know as you have returned before and the landing was always smooth. You know the astral shrinks into the physical like some self-adjusting glove. As it expands on departure, some feel a popping out through the head, others a gently rising balloon, and yet others, like me, suddenly find themselves ‘out’ with no intervening sensations: the automatic exit. The bedroom morphing, the furniture shifting, the window onto the garden. Then the rooftops of the town or the fields of the rural. The sky above, cloudy or clear.
Sometimes unconscious spirits, asleep in their dream of freedom, drift by. Sometimes a conscious one appears, intent on some adventure, and with a bemused and knowledgeable glance, passes by. You know where they are coming from: free from societal constraints, free from heavy bodies and anxious emotions. The world is now their playground, not their prison. Those three dimensions have dissolved.
Some seek a romantic assignment, trying their luck on the open market or hooking up with a regular partner. Like life inside the body, some are reckless adventurers while others are commitment bunnies. In your own ‘early’ days, curiosity had driven you to check all this out so you know whereof you speak. Even that no-holds barred unfettered sexuality, prizing the orgasm above all other mergings, can be tracked if you dare, and you did, to a variety of tatty venues, where brothel is top of the ladder and writhing heap of flesh the bottom, as Robert Monroe reported. Later you uncovered the gifts of the fourth and sixth chakras and the blessings of those mergings. Blessings almost beyond description. Blessings were you say: You had to be there.
But those agenda free projectors, those free-flying ghosts, they gambol like lambs in the fields, their astral bodies pleasure craft touring through the options until sleeping bodies respond to dawn. Others, starting out satisfied, seek only the bliss of feather-light flight. So many landscapes, so much architecture, so many strange and exotic cultures, some of them seemingly improvised on the spot. Years of pleasure while life in rooms plods on below.
All of course, to be more or less forgotten when that rise-and-shine mandate makes its presence felt. As it has, does and will do. Until we each take our bow and exit stage left. But that’s for the stage we call ‘later’. Now we’re moving through the levels, the psyche’s elevator to the bliss of nowhere and back again.
Next is the borderlands, the looming mists and greyish light that look as chilly as they feel. If you allow yourself to dawdle, sad spirits you will see, often enveloped in rueful reminiscence, turned in on itself and gnawing away with guilt, remorse and self-recrimination. You already know they can rarely be helped and you leave them be. When their wounds unwrap themselves so the gift of forgiveness is glimpsed, some other traveler will be the samaritan that just happens by.
Shifting on up or maybe that’s in, you’re never quite sure you just know it’s there, the bleak landscapes and scrappy villages filled with suspicious eyes and nosey neighbours, always ready to accuse and argue. Hiding inside their crumbling hovels, heads peeking out. You walk through wondering if perhaps a chink in someone’s armour will draw them to an encounter, but this time no such luck and you move on to the realms of nicer and tidier, and they open like a smile when you approach and enter.
Yes, it’s the dream of paradise that all cultures dream of as the reward for good behaviour. Here you see the happy dead in their heavenly communities, reunited families having fun, people loving being lazy until the guilt ebbs away. Shouldn’t I be doing something constructive for family and society? This vacation can’t last forever. You can feel such thoughts as you amble and wander. Joy wrapped in pleasure and relief. Ah, the wonder of it all! And the faith based communities with their temples and churches drawing in the devoted with prayer and voices raised in praise, what can they do having arrived at their destination? Await the prophets, give thanks to the deity? Embrace the less fortunate? Where might they be? Well, you’re the traveler, you know but should you inform them? Or should they discover for themselves?
Is there a community on these planes of spirit that does not wonder, in moments of reflection or discussion, about the meaning of it all, this mystery of mysteries they have yet to resolve, despite having arrived at the destination of heaven, where all seems as marvelous as promised? As a traveler, with a plethora of thoughts and emotions absorbed as you move through the areas of despair, doubt, celebration and joy, you know there are few. In a world of such great beauty and harmony, at least for the many, what is left but to bask in the bliss, and praise the deity from whom such magnificence flows? The deity with many designations.
And your own dearly departed, perhaps you owe them a visit on this fly-by? Should you pull off the highway and park in their driveway? Some do, some don’t. As do you. Instead you ascend, as you have been taught to do, through levels more refined and ethereal than the heavens and paradises until you arrive in the light, the radiant void and know yourself as nothing in a sea of knowing.
No you, no other, no prophet, no deity; no questions or answers, no problems or solutions, just the bliss of understanding, the ecstasy of knowing. Seeing all creation, from atoms to planets, as the play of Maya, of divinity unbounded and indwelling. All our dramas and tragedies, sufferings and joys, as games to play in and then pass on.
You’ve been here before and you’ll be here again, and while you are here it seems you have never left. And when you return to your meditation pose, ashram of disciples or sleeping body, you know you’ll have a hard time explaining this to any but a few, and perhaps not even yourself, this body with a name and home.
