Astral projection or Dreaming?
Meditationtime Forum Post
Date: Posted 7 years before Aug 05, 2018
MiBeloved 7 years ago
Question:
I have another question, how do you know astral is not dreaming?
MiBeloved’s Response:
Since a person cannot prove astral travel with scientific precision as we would using electronic instruments to measure the occurrences, we have to approach the proof of it in an entirely different way without conning ourselves about it.
There is real astral travel and there is real imagination during dreaming. Both of these things are real, just as if I sit on a Park bench and imagine that I am with my girl friend, that is an imagination. The woman is not there with me but I imagine that she is and I experience loving emotions even though she is not present because my emotions become responsive to my imagination.
So I am honest about it and I admit that it was just imagination and that I am so sensitive even to my own ideas, that I was feeling nice about it.
On the following day again, I return to the same Park bench but this time, my girlfriend is physically present with me. Now the same type of emotions arise and I go through a similar experiences in my emotions with a little more intensity because everything is more reinforced by objective reality.
To be honest, I then explain to you about both experiences and you realize that I am being honest about it and that both experiences carry settled results on my psyche.
In the same way a person who is honest and who has endeavored in meditation and mysticism for some time, should be able to differentiate between an imagination dream, a lucid dream and an astral projection experience.
The more astral projection one does, the more the imagination dreams cease. One who does not astral project consciously will have mostly imagination dreams. Just as in physical life, a high school kid who has a girlfriend and who has sexual access to her, will more than likely rarely masturbate, while another kid who has no girl friend who has a hard time attracting one, may have to masturbate regularly.
Because of having access, the need for a substitute process does not arise. So if someone is astral projecting regularly, and having lucid dreams regularly, imagination dreaming is reduced considerably and that person knows when a dream is not astral projection and is just a creation in the mind.
How do we know that someone can distinguish between an astral projection or a lucid dream and a creation of imaginative events in the mind? We do not know except for our reference to incidences like the Park bench experience. We have to rely on that and not think that we should have proof like in scientific experiences which take place before our physical eyes and electronic means of detection.
Some faith is required and not just blind faith but faith in the life process. For instance how do we know that if Jim’s body is wounded with a superficial gunshot puncture in his arm, that it will heal up. We just do not know for sure. Sometimes a superficial wound does kill someone’s body. But still we have some faith that somehow it will heal up because it is not a vital organ of the body.
Who will heal it? Nature has to heal it ultimately, no matter how sophisticated our medical people are. We are still dependent on nature to do that healing in the final analysis. And we do not really understand how nature is doing that either. But still we have that confidence. A similar type of confidence is required when approaching mysticism.
Just as in healing the body, nature is doing its thing and we have confidence and sometimes nature fails us and sometimes nature supports what we want, in the same way imagination in dreaming, real subtle experiences in dreaming and detached subtle experience in dreaming all are valid experiences and if the person is honest about it and has some clarity of consciousness, that person can report to us truthfully what took place, just like the guy on the Park bench.
In imagination dreaming, everything takes place in the imagination faculty in the mind. That is the faculty in which we daydream, in which we create ideas and images in our mind. In there our minds can dream up all sorts of things. That is like when a man makes a video and then takes it into some software and remixes it and also alters it and produces scenes which are not possible physically. A person can have an experience in the imagination chamber in the mind and that experience is simply a creation of the mind.
A lucid dream is different in that in such a dream, the person is not in the imagination chamber of the mind but in a real subtle world, in another dimension and is experiencing the reality of that place. The same mind is being used to have that experience, therefore what is the difference? How do we know that it is not just another imagination sequences in the mind itself, created by the mind itself? We know because just as on the Park bench, the guy imagined his girl friend being there and she was not physically present, and on the following day he actually took her physical body there, so in a lucid dream, there are other realities which are present outside of the mind, just as the physical woman was present outside of the physical body and brain of the man on the Park bench.
In lucid dreaming the occurrences happen outside of the imagination faculty while in an imagination dream, they occur within that faculty.
In an astral projection the same thing occurs except that the astral body is displaced from the physical one. It is not interspaced into it as it is in a lucid dream.
Let me go over this again:
1. Imagination dreaming occurs in the imagination chamber in the mind
2. Lucid dreaming occurs outside of the imagination chamber of the mind while the astral body remains interspaced in the physical body, fused into it
3. Astral projection occurs outside of the imagination chamber of the mind while the astral body is displaced from the physical one, separated out of it
