Visiting Others in The Astral

     It seems almost miraculous when you’ve been striving to do it, assuming that the advice and methods of others are the way to go.  Paths have been laid out and as you feel your way towards expansion and connection you assume following them is the wise choice.  You are entering a tradition, a hallowed one by all accounts, and humility in the face of its history seems the most gracious beginning.  Except you are not actually beginning.  Just as birth is but the appearance of a start and death the simulation of an ending, so too your ‘first’ exit from the body is but a conscious replication of a long standing practice, albeit an unconscious one.

     You’re familiar with that division between conscious and unconscious action and as a meditative explorer you’ve uncovered more than few examples.  But you hadn’t extended that to lucidity and obe.  You’ve been doing it for years without making it conscious or recalling it.  Your dream life was hidden from you.  Hidden from you by you.  Just as your past lives, here and elsewhere, were hidden from you.  It’s all buried before birth so you can uncover it at your own pace while retaining a comfort zone for your public persona.  You arrive, knowing that family, society and religion will not tolerate deviation from their approved norms.  That behaviour must conform, tradition must be adhered to.

     As the bonds were loosened and traditions lost their grip you entered incarnation knowing that expansion was a distinct possibility, one without punishments.  You explored without the former fear of discovery.  The lifting of that fear of society also helped lift the restraints from the ego personality, the being that defined what was possible and what was not.  Finding yourself beyond the body, floating free, is the very definition of casting off from the harbour of the ego.  There it is down there anchored and here you are, very definitely not there.

     The excitement of this self-extraction can dominate the experience, almost becoming it until you learn to tame the bubbly vibrations and find for yourself the various possibilities that at first seem to be opening up but later seem to have been there all along.  Of course, you begin to see, many have followed these paths before and made the discoveries you are making yourself.  Some of their experiences have made it into the tradition, only to be scattered by time and repression, casual or careful.  You find some and wonder about others.

     I had been exploring the conscious obe experience for years, trying out the experiments teachers suggested, replicating discoveries fellow seekers communicated, when it came to me that I had been doing this for decades, and likely lifetimes, but hiding it from myself.  In this life at least, ‘I’ had decided to allow my process of discovery to unfold at its own pace, hiding my wise eternal self, so that my grieving self, recovering from my father’s early death, might discover the books I needed to illuminate the mystery.  And being naturally inclined to reading and absorbing it took only about five years until I had discovered the worlds of spiritualism, theosophy, nature spirits and esoteric teachings in general.  And as others have noted, the texts often fell into my path with little or no effort.

     In this period, 1969 -1975, my eternal self observed bemusedly as ‘I’ discovered the various aspects of the ancient knowledge that seemed to be freed up for public access in the 60’s/70’s, the “occult revival” as it was often termed.  How do I know this?  Sometime in the last ten years (2010-20) meditations revealed to the conscious explorer, the ‘I’ that writes here, that I had been waltzing about obe since I was a baby (the baby Gordon), switching consciousness as I moved effortlessly from astral being to physical child and then to young adult in the process of discovery.  In early middle age (1998-2008) I became absorbed in Gordon’s unfolding, described in detail in More Adventures In Eternity, being repeatedly amazed at how ‘I’ could ‘do things out there’ so easily I must have done them before.  Done them and then carefully packed them away for another life.   Conscious interaction with Maitreya during 2007 seemed to be, you know, the icing in the cake.  All those ‘Why me? Why now?’ questions had to be worked through, and the text Jesus And The Christ was the result.

     How did my eternal self, as referenced here, manifest in past lives, if at all?  As detailed in You Are History, it found a perch in maybe five past lives, where freedom of thought coincided with an open consciousness, but was only an unconscious ‘angelic’ influence in others.  Now is this free eternal self my Higher Self or a projection of it?  I suspect the latter, but am open to suggestion.  And maybe the tight definition as such matters little.  As we learn to move up that ladder of consciousness, from physical to astral to mental and causal and so on we seem to become different beings with different abilities and qualities.  My astral self seems to have such a complete grasp of life and its expressions there, whereas I, physical Gordon on an obe exploration seems to be always discovering new and fascinating aspects.  My mental self seems to be beyond all the bliss and joy of the astral, swimming in sea of thoughts, fascinated with how they weave a tapestry of refined beauty without all the emotional baggage previously experienced.  My causal self seems to know the pattern of lives lived, the whence, the whither and the why and how they link arms to form a society of their own.  The puzzles of suffering, violence, and general stupidity resolve themselves with the precision of a complex symphony.  On that level one’s previous angry rebellions are resolved as all victims and victors enjoy the courtly dance of time and space.  In my buddhic body, I am just another Buddha, one of many, smiling the smile that sees through all illusions and pities those who cannot, including lower versions of myself.

      Such is a brief sample of the various selves I sense in projection and meditation.  They are present, as potent as any myth or legend, and available for consultation as it were.  They can and will inform your being.  Physical Gordon carries such knowing within him and distributes it as best he can to those who seem ready to listen and see those of pearls of wisdom for what they are and not threats to their pride and self-confidence.  Astral Gordon, free as a bird by physical plane standards, does much the same for those on that level who could use a little nudge to boost them out of their behaviour patterns, which are often replications of their physical life, loosened but not freed from their previous parameters.  Joyous reunions with family and friends can morph into deeper realisations and joys if allowed off the leash.  Keep that in mind as you make that leap from floating about the house and neighbourhood to that vast undiscovered country beyond, where all is possible but not often pursued.