Astral Projection, OBE’s and other spooky things.

We need a dead-icated 8-[ thread about these subjects so they don’t get lost under a sea of Facebook posts, muzak and dinner plates so… I might copy some posts over from the Mundane Babble (aka ‘non-philosophic chat’ forum) to give us a start.

Hehehe. I wouldn’t worry too much about all the dogma. I spent years trying to understand all of that stuff and by the end, I just ended up more confused and further away from where I wanted to be. Are there 3 planes? 4 planes? 7 planes? or more? All of the above - depending on which discipline you study. In the end I realized that it’s an ego-riddled diversion.

It’s the early hours of the morning here and I’m about to crash out but all you really need to know is:
the astral plane is a subtle body/emotional/energetic plane,
the mental plane is a plane of clarity/transparency (head and heart) and
the God plane is where you merge into everything and everything merges into you.

These aren’t planes or places, of course; they’re states of consciousness. Each of these states represents a state of consciousness in which the ego falls away more and more and in doing so, reveals more of your true nature.

I’ll try to answer your questions and post my own experiences here as I get the time. I didn’t want to make posts that just get lost in random threads particularly when people ask the same questions or don’t know the context.

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Bilocation projects your energy but not your soul.
Near death experiences have the actual soul leave.
Bilocation is a practice, in some cases, bettered through work and use.

I just wanted to make that clear.

I would think so. If Chakra is right–that these are different states of consciousness, then from the point of view of someone performing a brain scan on you, it would probably look like the sensory and emotional areas of your brain shutting off, leaving only the cognitive areas (frontal lobe) to remain active.

Souls are made of an energy. Am I missing the difference?

So bilocation is projecting the image of yourself without your consciousness? It’s akin to a carbon energy copy of the physical body?
Bilocation does or does not include remote viewing?

Everything is made of an energy. That doesn’t mean it is the same does it?

Projection of mental energy.

Personally, I’m not that interested in the architecture or structure of various levels; I’m more interested in the personal knowledge that comes from these explorations.

In my experience, trying to work out how many levels there are, what something is made from or how something operates is just relative stuff. Like the proverbial three blind men describing an elephant by touching it on the trunk, leg and tail, we can only come to conclusions determined by our position, conditioned mind and limited senses. Those below cannot see what’s above them. The part cannot understand the whole.

It’s like people arguing over what a pixel means. If the pixel is as large as the screen, they see blurred shapes and fuzzy colours. If they increase the resolution/decrease the pixel size (e.g view it from a ‘higher’ level) they’ll see the pixel was one of millions of pixels that together, formed an image of a face.
At that point, all their beliefs, theories and arguments about the individual pixel become irrelevant.

The astral and spiritual worlds beyond are much like that. We may need basic concepts to help orient ourselves but we must remain aware that our concepts are partial, fuzzy and taken out of context. We need to be prepared for our concepts to fall apart when viewed from a more conscious position. We need to hold our beliefs lightly.

Even at a distance, when we see the face appear out of the millions of pixels we shouldn’t think that now we’ve got it… now we have full understanding. We don’t. Consciousness is in a continual process of opening and revealing and what it’s always revealing is not information about things or entities - even though it may appear like that. Consciousness is always being uncovered… always revealing what’s at the core of the experience - You – the one before your conditioned identity formed and covered it over.

The more you unravel, the simpler everything becomes. It is so simple… so profoundly simple… it can hit you like a brick and make you sob for hours on end like a baby. It’s as though you had been unknowingly carrying an enormous weight and it just drops away and you as clear as glass and as light as a feather.

I want to emphasise that I’m not putting forward something else to believe. Real understanding doesn’t come from concepts, gurus or books. It comes from deep personal experience so if one is genuinely interested in exploring other worlds (which is a metaphor for self-exploration) then you have to go for the experience.
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I tried to explain this to a friend. I said I’m agnostic but i have some temporary beliefs about higher beings.
He seems to want to call me a theist. I tried to explain how if i claim to know the truth about god i am probably full of crap.
Agnosticism is humility. Humility is balance. Balance is propriety. And propriety is pragmatic. Pragmatic is the philosophy of the best things, it’s a type of morality and value. This is why i consider it immoral to believe in a bunch of ill-informed ideas about a god figure.

I don’t have much to say about God other than he’s the creator of a great deal.

You’re a legend, Mr Squiggle. The good news is that the amount of people breaking free from traditional religions, new-age mumbo-jumbo and materialistic atheism is growing rapidly. I’ve noticed a marked increase over the last 15 or so years. Spirituality (for want of a better term) is becoming more experiential, more empirical and more mature.

(I haven’t forgotten your request, WendyDearest.)
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My most memorable astral experiences happened over several periods when I was around 11-12 years of age. At that time, we lived opposite a park that jutted out into the harbour. My bedroom (which I shared with one of my brothers) had big windows that opened onto the park so, for most of the year, we had the windows fully opened each night which made it feel as though we were camping under the stars.

During these periods, I’d wake up in the middle of the night to find myself rising out of my body and floating towards the roof. On the roof, there was always a male figure waiting for me. His shimmering astral body remained transfixed. He never turned to acknowledge me and never said anything. I intuitively felt his silence had something to do with his need to concentrate his energies so I remained silent as well and for the first minute or so I’d look out over the park, harbour, lights, moon, clouds and stars and drink in the awesome beauty. Everything was buzzing with energy. Everything was electric, vibrant and alive. When the time was right, he would rise up into the night sky and I’d follow.

This is what happened almost every night over a period of a week or two then it would stop and start-up again several months or a year later until the visits petered out completely.

With each visit, the guide/teacher seemed to be showing me something. I could recall some of the experiences the next morning but most I couldn’t. One night he showed me something so mind blowing I begged him to let me remember it the next day but rather than explaining why I couldn’t, he showed me a colour I had never seen before and intuitively urged me to memorize it. The colour was a primary colour but not red, yellow or blue; it wasn’t a secondary (mixed) colour either. It was totally new so I spent a minute or so burning it into my mind. Hopefully, this would trigger the memory of the thing I was so desperate to remember.

When morning came, I recollected the experiment but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t recall the new colour. How do you describe red if red (and its derivatives) doesn’t exist in your world? How do you describe something if there are no words that that suggest it?

The lesson was learned: it wasn’t possible for a person in a reduced conscious state to grasp that which can only be perceived in a full state of consciousness. This has major implications for everything we think we know about the metaphysical realms and one of the reasons there’s so much confusion.

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Dear Chakra,
It seems you have experienced an archetypal situation, specifically a rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. The male of your customized myth has brought you an image of your future understanding.

On a physical level of explanation OBEs and NDEs have been traced to a lack of oxygen in the human brain. The brain personifies these activities in the subconscious wherein they become labeled by social memes, creating a mythology that can explain how one thinks and feels about personal physical changes in the growth and development of individuality, synthesis and metamorphosis.
The myth is the chemical activity made sensible. Most metaphysics has as its source subconscious dealings with physical changes.

Or the scientists who have a lot invested in their version of a materialist paradigm have found ways to dismiss phenomena they really do not understand and should be agnostic about. When a Dutch cardiologist first started catalogues NDEs and OOBEs, his collegues and the scientific community dismissed the experience as incredibly rare, nearly non-existent. IOW they dismissed not merely the interpretations of the experience that might challenge their paradigm, but that people were experinecing these things at all. There is tremendous resistence to anything that challenges current models, and anything that remotely goes against materialism itself, will be resisted very hard, but sure they can come up with sober sounding dismissals.

Actually I should have worded it as ‘phenomena that SEEM to contradict their paradigms’ since they tend not to notice how their own paradigms shift and incorporate and cannot be falsified.

How does that explain group NDEs where everyone sees the same angel and what ever else?

I don’t see positing a physical description of these phenomena as any lessening of the explanatory value of these experiences. Mind and matter are complements, not opposites. I simply trace the experience back through the social (memes, archetypes) through the personal (qualia) to the chemical (neuron routes).
Dan, everyone can see the same angel because everyone has the same chemical trajectory for sensing both physical and .subsequent mental phenomena. Taking certain drugs can give some these transcendent experiences. The white light and tunnel experienced in NDEs are archetypes.

Could you have been simply lucid dreaming which would explain the shiny man (Alice In Wonderland effects) and the loss of memory?

Chakra, as an adult, have you ever tried to meditate your sober, wide awake consciousness to an astral plane?

What does experience do to teach us about the self, Chakra? Most answers I’ve seen to this question say that the self is the constant that holds sway throughout the whole flurry of experiences. But then again, many would say that the self doesn’t exist. David Hume, for example, would have us believe that there is no self, just the whole bundle of experiences we go into and come out of. Maybe that is the constant. Maybe the self is just the flow of experience.

Reminds me of a dream I had once–a man (a wizard) who took me on a flight throughout the neighborhood (symbolic of astral projection?)–and though he uttered a few words, he never laughed (despite my best jokes :smiley: ). My impression was that he was a different kind of being who didn’t process humor. Do you suppose your man’s silence represents the kind of being he was and what that says about his style of communication?

:frowning:

Did he turn you to a bumble-bee?

Full consciousness would imply the having of every possible experience.

Every experience should be at least representable in physical form, though it doesn’t mean it always will be. I wonder how Chakra’s experience of seeing a new color would be represented? Did his ethereal body have a fourth cone type in the retina?

Future understanding? It certainly seems like it.

Five years later, when some other entities made contact with our little group (nothing to do with astral or lucid dreams), we were told we each had a particular gift or talent. I was hoping ‘love’ was going to be one of them and I’d be given it. My mother was all about love, love, love so I wanted to impress her but it was not to be. My talent/gift was ‘understanding’.

Understanding? WTF! Understanding is so boring. I was pretty disappointed at the time but years later I had to acknowledge that understanding (or attempting to) is perhaps my key characteristic.

Good call Ierr.
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On competitive spirituality.

youtube.com/watch?v=1kDso5ElFRg

youtube.com/watch?v=cyc_MnHX8FI

I haven’t gathered the sufficient empirical proofs but I would argue that the criterium is valuing power; lets say a combination of will, need, desire, necessity, the amplitude and density thereof in a given field determines whether this field, or context, or paradigm, or reality, is merely one subset of the main existence or if it is the main existence of which other realities are subset.

So, if you astral travel and truly lose your heart to some phenomenon there, it may be that you continue to exist astrally (I wouldn’t call this “live”, as I don’t know what it is) but die, physically.