The Astral

Instructor: Wayfarer
Date: November 9, 2017 (Thursday)

Wayfarer
@here Okay, so we’re about to enter the astral zone. I’m gonna real quick go over what I intend to cover, then I’ve got a kind of “ground rules” thing I’m gonna go through, then we’re gonna talk about the astral. This is going to be a lecture on more or less what it is, not how to get there. In the future I will maybe teach some astral projection, but it’s actually something that is usually better learned from a book, rather than from in person instruction, because you generally need to be not sitting on a computer under time pressure to do it successfully at first.

Wayfarer
I’m going to follow a loose progression from a loose outline I drafted up. We’re going to talk about what the astral is, but I might actually do that later than I had originally written in the draft. We’re going to talk about how it is used in the Olde Dayes, then in the 90s, then how people are using it today. We’ll talk about why it isn’t something we should ignore completely, but why it is something that we should not rely on entirely or work with solely.

Zephyr Cloudrunner
I’m just in time huh

Wayfarer
Yeap, looks like it. 😀

Xeraxir
Made it

Lucina
I’m here and eager to get started

Wayfarer
Before we get to the meat and potatoes cough though I want to just kinda lay out by way of a disclaimer: I’m a salty old guy from the days of dinosaurs in terms of the OEC. I am not the same age of dinosaur as Rainsong but I’m like a cretaceous age dinosaur or like maybe a first mammal.

Rainsong
is primordial ooze 😛

Deo
Does that mean I can’t complain about how I used to go uphill to school both ways in a minivan then?

Wayfarer
This stuff has served me well for nigh two decades, but it doesn’t always agree with the common practices of today. So some stuff I’ll talk about might be dismissive or seem condescending or like I’m telling you you experiences ain’t valid. I’m not. Okay? I might straight up say the words “nah, these experiences aren’t valid” but I don’t know you, right? So you can take or leave a thing, I ain’t personally attacking you if I say something that dismisses your experiences.

Midnight
ready

Lucina
Oki

Deo
Multiple perspectives are important and I’m excited to learn a bit about yours Wayfarer

Wayfarer
That said, the astral can be real weird and it’s entirely possible to experience stuff that is 100% valid and true, you really experienced it, and inasmuch as an experience is valid if it actually happens, those things can absolutely be true while not being at all what they seem. Because the astral is some weird shit.

Wayfarer
So with that said:

Wayfarer
The astral is something that has gone through multiple levels of understanding through a bunch of generations. We see it in Hermetic philosophy, but it is difficult to track the provenance of anything Hermetic. There’s no mention of the astral in those words in, for example, the Emerald Tablet. I believe the astral is very directly mentioned in the Kybalion, but we have to keep in mind that the Kybalion was actually written in the 1900s, despite what the authors claim.

Wayfarer
Claiming ancient provenance for your stuff is a tradition as ancient as magic itself. Ain’t never been a wizard what didn’t claim his shit was older than time itself but it isn’t true. Freemasonry’s from the 1500s at best, for example. Ain’t come from the builders of the first Temple. That’s just what they say. Same thing with a lot of Hermetic philosophy. Gotta be a bit choosy about it, but the stories tell us lessons so we listen to them just the same.

Wayfarer
So the astral comes into our language kinda late. I can’t tell you the exact first time it appears, but another complicating factor is that the current model of the universe is real damn new. And for along time, “astral” was referring exactly to the areas of space ruled not by planetary powers but by stars.

Wayfarer
So for example we exist on Earth and we’re in Earth’s space or realm or plane or whatever. Jupiter’s space is ruled by Jupiter, Mars’ space is ruled by Mars. The in-between space? That’s ruled by stars, right? I mean, you go outside right now, look up, it’s stars. Stars rule the space that isn’t ruled by planets.

Wayfarer
Hence the whole, “astra” thing.

Wayfarer
The ancient conception of the astral is probably not talking about what the modern conception is, and I would wager, but I am not a scholar and cannot say (in fact, I might ask Dr. Al Cummins about this, he might be able to say definitively), that the usage of “astral” as we use it now is probably as recent as the early 1900s.

Rae’Ix Skolv
well… this should serve to be intriguing. few people know their history like this xD

Lucina
^

Zephyr Cloudrunner
Wayfarer knows quite a bit lol

Rainsong
You will find that you’re not the only person who knows anything, all appearance aside.

Wayfarer
There’s a term used by scientists and skeptics and such called “God of the gaps” which holds that as scientific advancement improves, religion (and by extension, magic) shrinks in scope. I think we can similarly observe that the mystical experience becomes somewhat concentrated into those “gaps” for a great many people.

Rae’Ix Skolv
I never presented myself as though I am the only person who knows anything. Please dont start shit like that.

Wayfarer
The term basically goes that it used to be God did everything, lightning, thunder, clouds, stars, and so on.

Deo
This is a lecture, allow wayfarer to speak.

Wayfarer
Everyone ease up, I don’t think she was saying that to anyone in particular, just a general observation. We all tend to think we know a lot. All good. So then.

Xeraxir
I think I know nothing. 😛

Wayfarer
We used to be able to point to the astral, point to the planetary spheres, and go, “yeah, that’s where that power is.” It’s not so much the case anymore, because now we have this complex universal model, right?

Wayfarer
But the experience that went with those things, the kind of mystical connection, that remains. People don’t lose their experience of the surreal because we gain scientific understanding. No matter whether it’s a great big ball of gas or a nuclear fusion sphere or Apollo’s chariot, the experience of the Sun ain’t change for people.

Wayfarer
So what happens more often than not is that the religious story is divorced from the physical phenomenon. Okay, the Sun is there and it’s just chillin’ being a space reactor, and also Apollo is hanging out on a chariot, but they ain’t the same thing.

Wayfarer
The Moon is a big chunk of rocks that orbits the planet, but the influence of the moon is not limited solely to tides. It has the tidal influences from gravity, but it also has the cooling influences and the energetic influences and this and that, and it’s not necessarily the case that they are connected, right?

Wayfarer
So, despite that the astral from Back In The Day was probably talking about stars, that’s not to say that the ancients had no experience of this thing we call the astral now – they just didn’t call it that necessarily, and they spatially located it. In a truly mystic conception, the spatial location and the phenomenon and the mind and all that are interrelated – but we’ll touch a bit on that later.

Wayfarer
So the astral as we understand it today comes to us via a similar pathway as energy manipulation as we understand it today: it developed for many hundreds of years in the grimoire movement, although under different names, then kind of narrowed and distilled down into the enlightenment era mystery schools – your Masonry and Rosicrucianism and Golden Dawn – then sufused out into the public through spiritualism and theosophy, and then through the newage and here we are.

Wayfarer
The key element of the astral remains, however, that it is the space between influences.

Wayfarer
Hermetic philosophy identifies four planes. Depending on what text you’re coming from (Hermeticism is not unified tradition, but many different teachers and teachings under one banner), they are determined by the vibrational rates or so on, and proximity to God, and on and on. These planes are the material, astral, mental, and divine. The Theosophical society expands this out a bunch more – I ain’t really care much for their model but they add a few more. Astral stays in the same place for both: between the material and the mental.

Wayfarer
In the understanding of the ancients, the astral is in between planetary influences. It’s where stars hang out – where planetary bodies don’t go. Because we didn’t have a good model of the universe or the solar system for a long time, it was also believed to be the space between Earth and those planetary bodies. You get all that phlogiston stuff, ideas that space is full of aether, it gets real weird.

Wayfarer
But in this other conception, this Hermetic conception, it stands between material and mental. In that conception, the material plane is vibrationally slow and dense. It’s very “solid.” The Divine is the “highest vibrational rate” and the material is the lowest. The mental is closer to the Divine, and the astral is in between the mental and the material. I ain’t care for any of that. I’m not a guy of “vibrations.”

Wayfarer
But, the Kybalion (again, a fairly modern document! We’re talking Golden Dawn had already collapsed and re-united twice by 1908 when it was published) does talk about this principle of correspondence – as above, so below – and that does seem to be if not an ancient concept, at least a very good one.

Wayfarer
At this point, we have to slide sideways a bit and talk about consciousness for any of this to work, so for just a moment, let’s talk about consciousness:

Wayfarer
What you see, what you experience, the words you’re reading on the screen, the cup next to the computer, the cat, the cold air, the car horn, the itchy arm, everything you experience, arises within your consciousness. You don’t experience the cat itself – you experience a mental conception of it. Because you add a lot to it. If you have a cup, it can be a good cup, bad cup, favorite cup, hated cup, a cup with memories attached, a brand new cup. You can’t get to the cup itself because your mind is always adding some stuff, right?

Wayfarer
You can touch the cup and it feels smooth, but there’s this material thing happening – this contact of your skin to the cup – and there’s also this mental event happening, this “I feel the cup, I am grabbing the cup, why is Wayfarer talking about cups, what the hell”

Wayfarer
If you were touching the cup while asleep, or unconscious, you wouldn’t experience touching the cup at all. This is how we can see that these things are not related.

Wayfarer
If your phone rings and you hear it, an experience arises of your phone ringing. If your phone rings and you don’t hear it, no experience arises. Your phone still rang – you still have a missed call later.

Wayfarer
So, there’s this material world of stuff going on, and it’s just some stuff happening. But the stuff that happens, it affects our mental world, obviously. When the phone rings, it creates a mental event, an experience of a phone ringing.

Wayfarer
The astral is no different in that regard. When something happens in the astral, it happens. We may or may not experience it – it may or may not interact with our mental plane. See, what I described there was the physical plane, but there’s also this higher plane, this mental plane.

Wayfarer
The mental plane is why you could understand what I was talking about with that cup despite you ain’t have a cup in your hands.

Wayfarer
You can conceptualize experiences, you can have experiences completely without any physical basis at all. You can think about a smooth feeling cup that you hate, and you can just aboutexperience it, even with no cup at all present.

Turbo
So, you’re just imagining things really hard in that case, no?

Wayfarer
Even if you’re a (pretty reasonable, honestly) person who doesn’t hate any cups because why would you spend all that energy hating on a cup, you can still conceive of what it is like to hate a cup.

Wayfarer
It’s more subtle than that, really, because you don’t have to imagine stuff hard at all. You can just think about it and know what that experience would be like.

Wayfarer
That’s the mental plane doing its thing. What we normally experience in our day to day lives is the intersection of the material and the mental plane. These two things mash together and create this experiential world. We control the mental plane absolutely because it responds instantly to our thoughts. We are (somewhat) subject to the physical plane because we are (for the most part) bound to its causality.

Wayfarer
But as above, so below, right? Despite the mental plane is completely within our control, we still think about hating our commute when we’re cut off in traffic.

Wayfarer
Despite being cut off in traffic, we still can think about how much we like the song on the radio. This works both ways.

Wayfarer
But dial it back a bit, because we’re actually not talking about anything particularly esoteric at all. Right now we’re just talking about consciousness. Where’s the astral come into play?

Wayfarer
The astral is in between those two. It is an intermediary space that facilitates the as aboving and the so belowing.

Wayfarer
Back in The Day, that’s what it was about. The astral was all about this kind of intermediary space between influences. If you did some work in the astral, that was working between influences – working in a way where you could manipulate those influences somewhat.

Wayfarer
Today, we mostly work with energy in the astral. How come???

Wayfarer
Well, because this stuff we call “energy” is real tricky stuff.

Wayfarer
See, the material affects this energy stuff pretty directly. That “cup” has a slight energetic field to it. You can make someone hate that cup just by thinkin’ hate hard enough at the cup, right? We call this imprinting or programming.

Wayfarer
You mostly see this on metallic objects which for whatever reason imprint easier, and especially on objects that are imprinted through major emotional events. The chair you were sitting in when you found out your friend died feels different for some time afterwards. How come? Psychologically speaking there’s some associative memory involved, but this feeling is really visceral – not only that, but some other people feel it too, right? They sit in the chair and feel uneasy.

Wayfarer
Or I can get real trite and use the murder room example, all those people like “wow the house is haunted because the bedroom where the murder happened feeeels spoooooky”

Wayfarer
At the same time, our mind directs that energy around, right? We can deliberately shape energy, or move it around, or transfer it between things, or imprint it by thinkin’ hard at it, visualizing it, knowing it is doing the thing, whatever our method is.

Wayfarer
The astral as an intermediary place is where those things interact. Not every time, mind. If you’re making a psiball like we talked about last week, the astral never ever has to come into play. It does take a bit more effort to work with energy here, in this kind of material space.

Wayfarer
So, roundabouts I want to say… what, 2003? 2004? The astral stuff started getting pretty popular for energy workers. Previously it had already been fairly popular among newagers and the Robert Bruce crowd.

Wayfarer
Astral projection was a way to (1) get a cool psychedelic experience without drugs and (2) potentially learn a bunch of stuff about whatever and (3) perceive things in a new way while (4) being unconstrained by space and time.

Wayfarer
That was how people were playing with it in the 80s and 90s. You did astral projection as your main thing but you didn’t really do it to facilitate energy work. The Golden Dawn and other ritual traditions talked about it but it was the “where it’s actually happening” between the visualized thing and the physical thing – and this is I believe why it comes to us in the way it does now. Because culturally these things go in cycles, everything old is new again, and so I think around 2003, someone was probably observing some ritual stuff (and how there are energetic effects from rituals) and went “wait, why though?”

Wayfarer
Because we all known kind of intuitively that there are energetic things that happen from ritual stuff. Observing a Catholic priest consecrate the Eucharist was one of my first “oh, fuck me that is crazy” experiences after I had been learning to more directly sense energy.

Wayfarer
But why? Well – as above, so below, right? That’s straight Biblical. “Whatsoever you hold true on Earth the same will I hold true in Heaven” or however that line goes.

Wayfarer
You do a ritual, it directs an intention, that intention gets reflected astrally, that astral energetic stuff kinda sits on the place, eventually the effect “goes off.”

Wayfarer
You draw a sigil, right? Let’s say it’s a spirit trap. You charge that shit up. When you look at it energetically, you don’t see paper. You see a complex labyrinth in like 4 dimensions and it’s glowing and shit. Weird. Except it’s not – you put energy into a thing, that thing gets reflected astrally. For that stuff, I use the term “near astral” – the astral that overlays the physical where we are. There’s the “far astral” also which is where people go to do the fairy land weird experiences they report, right?

Wayfarer
But there’s another thing about that spirit trap, and that other thing causes all sorts of troublefor us.

Wayfarer
If I look at it energetically, and someone else looks at it energetically, and we both describe it – we don’t always describe the same thing.

Wayfarer
Fuck.

Wayfarer
Right?

Turbo
hate when that happens

Wayfarer
Because if we both look at that cup, there’s some things that are gonna be very similar. It’s white, it’s porcelain, whatever. I might like it, and you hate it, but we both see the same basic thing.

Wayfarer
But now we’ve got this energetic thing going on, and now we’re both describing different things.

Wayfarer
oooohhhh shiiiitttttt one of us has to be bad, I guess.

Wayfarer
Except…not really. Because the astral is a fickle bitch. See, the physical world and the mental world intersect in our consciousness – and the physical affects the mental profoundly, but the mental, she affects the physical mostly in terms of imputation. Whether I hate the cup or like the cup is something that is changed by the mental, but whether the cup is white or blue is “concrete.” Our collective karma of phenomenal experience comes up the same way.

Wayfarer
But the mental is very close to the astral. They are neighbors. Energetic stuff can be done astrally or in the physical world, kind of directly. When your mind interacts with the astral, though, the experience changes a lot more. The astral is much “softer” in that regard.

Wayfarer
This means two things:

Wayfarer
The first, obvious, and intuitive thing is that it is easier to work with energy astrally. It is much more “responsive.” This is really good in some ways, and really bad in others.

Wayfarer
It’s good because we can do more, faster, on grander scales, right? But it’s bad because as soon as we stop paying attention to it, it’s no longer held together by anything. If you get distracted in the Really Real World, your computer doesn’t (usually) fuckin’ vanish.

Wayfarer
If you get distracted astrally though I mean hell you can fuckin’ vanish.

Wayfarer
You just come back together when you stop being distracted.

Wayfarer
The second thing, which is less obvious, is that our own mental imputations color things that we perceive astrally a lot more.

Wayfarer
So when we see some trees or whatever “in the astral,” our brain substitutes in whatever is closest to “tree” there. But I’m from the East Coast and Ceahhettan is from the West Coast, and when I think of a “tree” I probably think of something different than him.

ceahhettan
In that two people can be somewhere more or less the same in the astral and see and perceive entirely different things, yes.

Turbo
Can I see a cup and another person see a moo?

ceahhettan
My tree is scrubby and sprawling and probably looks like a California oak. But if my Cousin thinks of an oak tree it’s going to be different.

Turbo
But we’re told it’s a jack-in-the-box

Lykaos
Depends on personal symbolism

Wayfarer
Not only that, but that’s a really concrete example. What if the concept is “vessel” or what if it’s “dangerous” or what if it’s “fuckin’ spikes,” right?

Wayfarer
And that’s it – personal symbolism is big in the astral. It’s way surreal. It’s psychedelic. Our cultural symbolism provides a substrate, but our personal symbolism provides the instantiations as we experience them.

Wayfarer
Actually, I want to go back a little bit – I think the concept of the astral gained a lot of traction in the Psionics “sector” of the OEC after someone decided to try to figure out “where” a chatroom “is.”

Deo
If I may, would you say that the Astral is somewhat akin to a reflection of those actively looking at it and passively connected to it?

Wayfarer
Yeah, I would say that pretty much exactly. So, the thing is this about the astral: it doesn’t stick around. The near astral is almost always in a place. There’s a near astral where my house is and by now that a house is there has “stuck” and is reflected there. If I did some kind of big magical working to make there be no house here astrally, then sooner or later that would reflect down and the house would stop being here. That might take a long time, and it could be countered by my just seeing that the house is still here.

Wayfarer
But there’s also this thing of the astral kind of “arising” however we expect it – it’s non-spatial by nature. The near-astral becomes spatial because it’s reflecting this mental-physical interaction. The astral 7 lightyears away where there’s nothing isn’t reflecting anything, and it’s not reflecting anything to anyone, because there’s nobody perceiving it, until someone goes to look.

Hobbetian
As you mentioned Wayfarer, the astral is a place that is subject to shift and whim. In a sense, why is the astral treated as a ‘higher realm’. I can see understanding it as a different realm, but why it is given a higher status.

Midnight
(i’m still reading. helping someone with something at the same time tho)

Wayfarer
And when they go to look, something is there, because you can’t have a perceiver without a perception, and you can’t have a perception without a contact, and you can’t have contact without an object. When you go look, you become a perceiver. In the physical world, if you look at “thing” you see “thing” because “thing” is there. In the astral, if you look at “thing,” you see “thing” but it’s real damn hard to know if “thing” is actually there or not – because even if it wasn’t there, it is now – you looked at it.

Wayfarer
“But what about this place I go to, I’m real sure it’s real because it’s consistent and other people visit it too and…” Well, yeah.

Wayfarer
Of course. Because human beings ain’t the only ones exclusively able to shape the astral.

Wayfarer
We ain’t that special.

ceahhettan
The more you put thought into it being consistent the more it will be, as well.

ceahhettan
if I want to I can carve a consistent space out of the astral and it’ll stick around for a while on the initial willpower alone.

Wayfarer
We have this near-astral that is being constantly shaped by our experiences and our interactions with it and so on, but other places have their own near astrals. And if you’re, say, a fuckin’ deity, your shaping of the astral becomes that much more so. Which is why some people go “I went to the astral and it was like a totally physical world and completely real as heck” and then other people go “I went to the astral and I felt like I was falling through a tunnel until I hit some water and woke up” and the answer to both is “yes, of course.”

Wayfarer
This is also how we get little pocket dimensions and universes and so on. And another tricky property of the astral is this: the more people interact with it, the less stable it is. If you make your own little pocket dimension that is way fuckoff nowhere and is only ever contacted by your mental plane, it can definitely be made really solid, it will totally stick around.

Wayfarer
But if I go to that place and start thinking about other stuff, it’s gonna get all fucked up.

Wayfarer
Let’s use another example in Really Real World.

Wayfarer
Who here has heard that you should keep your ritual tools hidden and not show them to other people?

Hobbetian
I’ve heard it

Wayfarer
Any idea why?

Hobbetian
comments on r/occult about how you’re basically making yourself vunerable to others, they can find you are basically steal your own energy

Hobbetian
energy from the work, that is

Lykaos
The imprint it leaves could be easy to track back and tamper with.

Deo
I don’t practice ritual but… In context of this I would assume that it’s so others cant put their beliefs onto them.

ceahhettan
Wait is r/occult a reputable source now?

Deo
Their perception may… Alter how effective they are.

Wayfarer
These are okay answers, the idea is there. Deo’s pretty close. Let’s go back to energetic imprinting.

ceahhettan
But yes. Mostly that other people could alter the… oomph for lack of a better word. Same reason I don’t generally let others touch my rune stones.

Wayfarer
Actually that’s it right there. Okay, so, let’s say I make a chair that calms people down, yeah?

Wayfarer
I take a chair and I program at it, I imprint the energy, this is my calm chair.

Wayfarer
Whoever sits in it feels that calm, their fields interact, it calms them down. It’s a great chair, right?

Simica
‘happy place’

Wayfarer
Then Simica comes over. She doesn’t know that’s my calm chair at all.

Wayfarer
She ain’t give a shit, it’s just a chair.

Turbo
Damn you Simi

ceahhettan
lol.

Wayfarer
She looks at my chair, and she thinks “a normal as heck chair.”

Simica
I know, I am a horrible couch potato

Wayfarer
I’m not the king of imprinting, you know? Simica’s got a brain and a mental plane and she imputes thoughts onto things too and imprints things with her thinking.

Wayfarer
I might be a wizard but bein’ a wizard doesn’t make my thoughts special in that I imprint things and someone else doesn’t.

Wayfarer
Fortunately, I’ve been workin’ that chair. I see that chair every day and imprint it to be calm and it’s calm as hell. Simi ain’t probably gonna fuck up my chair with a casual thought. But if it were an extremely sacred chair, just someone thinking about it being a normal ass chair might be enough to diminish it slightly.

Wayfarer
And if it’s an astral chair in my astral house, and Simica thinks “it’s a normal ass chair,” or even, “it’s a couch” … well, it’s much more malleable, isn’t it?

Wayfarer
She might just turn my chair into a couch, and maybe it’s not even a calm couch but like an intimate couch.

ceahhettan
Welp.

Turbo
oh my

Simica
>_>

Wayfarer
And it just happens. Because it’s the astral and I ain’t got the monopoly on owning the place. My thoughts affect the astral, but so do hers, and so on. So you can work stuff in the far astral super easily, but it may very well not survive contact with anyone.

ceahhettan
You -can- kinda shield and protect stuff, but there’s that whole dissolving thing to cope with.

Wayfarer
Now, there are totally places in the astral that belong to bigass spirits. Those spirits maintain those places with their thoughts. They behave a lot more like the physical because there’s local physics and rules and so we can’t just go in and remodel the place as easily. In those cases, it’s not that those places are any more “real” than the place I made with the chair, it’s just that there’s some big fuckoff spirit holdin’ the joint together.

Hobbetian
but in that sense, do you see this realm as quantitatively different from the astral; and if so, in which way ?

Wayfarer
Just like the near astral ain’t actually any more “real” than my little house with the chair, it’s just being held together by (and here we come full circle) correspondence: the physical is reflecting up, and being reinforced by the mental (interacting with the physical) projecting down.

Wayfarer
That’s a dope ass question, and I’m gonna use it to riff mystic for a bit.

Wayfarer
From my own personal, poor understanding of how things work, this realm is not quantitatively different at all – it is perceived as more “real” because of our karma and because of the nature of our sense organs, but in fact it is equally void in nature.

Wayfarer
We have physical sense organs which make contact with physical objects and result in a moment of sense-consciousness which then becomes identified by thought-consciousness and becomes a phenomenal experience which we, due to habitual tendencies of infinite lifetimes, mistakenly identify as “real.”

Wayfarer
When we project astrally, which is a lesson for another time, we project a form what has sense organs and replicate the whole process Elsewhere, but that’s no more real than here. We can tell that our delusions affect us because when we are dreaming, and we need to go outside, we still use the door.

Wayfarer
The wall in the dream is not real, but it’s perceived as real so much so that it affects our behavior in the dream.

Hobbetian
yes

ceahhettan
Maybe in your dreams. I know I’ve definitely walked through walls in my dreams.

Hobbetian
but in the same way: if we can go to the astral and also exist in the physical: where are we located, as minds

Wayfarer
At the end of the day there’s this kind of energy-channel discussion thing where all phenomena are just channels activating according to karmas and the whole experience of all of this is just our own energy system doin’ it’s thing in the void of emptiness, but that gets a bit more into mysticism and spirituality than I’m comfortable going because I’m just a guy who doesn’t know much.

Wayfarer
Where are minds located physically?

Wayfarer
We locate stuff spatially based on our eyes for example so intuitively we’re like “oh we’re in our heads” but nah, because I can think myself somewhere else as a mind, either waking or certainly in dreams, so that ain’t it. Minds don’t exist spatially.

Deo
I’ve seen and experienced evidence that minds exsist somewhat within and somewhat outside the body. In it’s own space, similar to the spirit or the soul.

ceahhettan
Although for certain activities it is useful to locate yourself in your own body as much as possible.

Deo
That in a sense we’re a few components tethered to a ‘physical’ body that acts as a vessel.

Wayfarer
Consciousnesses arise often with spatial information, and they do that here or astrally, either place. It seems to me that full on “vibration until you fall out of your body holy shit I can roll over and look at myself laying there” “full projection” is actually really rare these days, which is kind of unfortunate because people are really into this “astral” but because they only ever do partial projection or imagination stuff, they ain’t really getting the full experience.

Wayfarer
Maybe, I’ve had people tell me I get off on weird tangents about components tethered to bodies so I ain’t gonna chase that rabbit down the hole but yes, there are ways to conceive of us like that.

ceahhettan
See: driving, operating heavy machinery, using knives.

Turbo
Speaking from a position of having gone through the whole omg vibrations falling out of my body thing – I find the experience too jarring, and much harder to keep focus to do any sort of serious working

Lykaos
Practice

Wayfarer
If you get comfortable in that state tho you’re in a good position for a lot of stuff.

Turbo
Oh, I agree

Hobbetian
it was when I did DMT and I felt almost every atom moving at a furious pace that I finally got what that referreed to

Lykaos
That’s more forced.

Lykaos
Imo

Wayfarer
Anyhow, that’s nearly two hours of typing and my wife just got home, so I’m gonna wrap it there. I’m happy to answer some questions as they filter in and hope that was good information that can be somewhat useful. I think I cut short a bit on the current conceptions of the astral, but I really wanted to provide some base level ideas about it because you get a lot of “astral is where you go to talk to Jesus and Odin at a bar” stuff these days and like, yeah, I guess you can do that, but it doesn’t mean that that bar is an actual “place”

ShadowRain
Good lecture, Wayfarer

Wayfarer
Haha I think I followed a Robert Bruce manual instruction despite I ain’t a fan of Robert Bruce, but yeah.

ceahhettan
I mean talking to Jesus and Odin at a bar would be cool though. But.

Hobbetian
thanks for the lecture Wayfarer

Rainsong
Lots of good stuff there, Wayfarer.

Simica
Thank you Wayfarer

Lykaos
:thumbsup:

Rainsong
Thanks for doing the lecture.

ceahhettan
Danke, Wayfarer. I’m going to read through again later, too.

Turbo
Good show, W.

Deo
Thank you wayfarer

Lucina
:thumbsup:

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