Magic 101: Astral Travel
A reminder: if you want to learn magic, you need a teacher. A teacher can make the difference between a bad experience that quickly becomes a lesson and passes away, and years of life problems that you cannot resolve. A good teacher can ensure that you’re never in trouble for too long (unless you want to be.)
One of the most written about facets of magic is astral travel. For many beginning magicians and people who read about astral travel, astral travel appears almost indistinguishable from having a particularly vivid imagination or a drug trip: a flow of images that happens as a result of the attention of a practitioner being turned away from the physical world or because of some sort of chemically induced state. This is an understandable misconception and sometimes the initial experience of astral travel for some people, but it is not astral travel.
Astral travel, while being anything from a single persistent image to a cinematic or flow of small scenes, has a few characteristics that the imagination does not possess: the first of them is that the thing seen in astral travel persists. It seems to almost haunt the mind, remaining in the imagination or mind without the need to be intentionally recalled. Whatever you happen to see, it will persist, coming back at strange times as if demanding interpretation or understanding.
The second characteristic is that often as not the things you’ll see have intense symbolic, literal, and/or figurative meaning. Whatever you see in astral travel, it will not just persist, it will have a meaning that shifts as you examine it and over time. Something about it will disturb you and demand interpretation. It takes some time to build the kind of shared language between your consciousness and the astral world, which a teacher can help make much faster, so it’s not uncommon to have something encountered in that space both haunt you and be completely incomprehensible for some time. The general advice given people who can astral travel is to keep a notebook so that when you have built the right language or encountered a teacher, you can start to unravel the meanings associated with what you’ve encountered.
The third characteristic is that the things you see will evoke an instant emotional or visceral response. Often, this response will make no initial sense to you. The response will be uncharacteristically strong, or strangely disconnected with how you would normally respond to something like what you see in astral travel. Typically, you will want to reject, question, or be disturbed not just by what you see during astral travel, but also by your emotional or visceral response to what you see. The whole experience may even be emotionally or viscerally enjoyable, but still out of character and persistent in your thoughts.
The fourth characteristic is that often, the things you see in astral places are not things it would normally occur to you to think of—they will be things you’ve not thought of before, juxtapositions that are deliberately strange or bizarre. Especially initially, before you have familiar spaces or when you have ventured outside those familiar spaces, almost everything you see will be bizarre. But even after you begin to have familiarity with some set of spaces in the astral or spiritual space, it will still be inherently strange and unexpected. There’s a number of reasons for this, the most relevant of which is that what you see is not what you see. The image is a very small part of the meaning, and we tend to perceive what we can in astral spaces. If you’re surprised what you see, and you often will be, it is only because some part of you recognizes that you are not quite perceiving what you’re seeing.
A teacher makes all this a lot easier (and safer.)
