What is Astral Travel?
This describes a conscious activity ‘out’ of the body (physical) that is experienced by many people occasionally and by others more often, even frequently. So called Astral Travel occurs when an individual consciously transfers his awareness from his physical body to his astral or emotional body – that bright coloured form that is a constituent part of the aura.
It is possible to develop this experience and many mediums and psychics function this way, using the information and visions gained whilst traveling astrally to inform their client. The astral plane, as it is usually called, is the plane our conscious self rises to temporarily in sleep and permanently at death.
Spontaneous astral projections often occur when we are under emotional stress, or when we are in crisis of some kind. Individuals often have such experiences during hospital surgery, after the death of a loved one, or when extremely emotionally exhausted or pressured.
My own brother-in-law, whilst traveling as a commuter on a busy train to London in the rush hour, suddenly found himself sitting up on the luggage rack, looking down at the carriage and the rest of the train. Such busy, stressful travel was hardly his favourite pastime, and he briefly escaped from the crowded physical rail carriage before returning to his normal physical body.
In such situations, we nearly always experience a ‘rising up’ sensation and find the usual physical boundaries, such as walls, ceilings etc, have somehow become transparent and we are able to move beyond them and continue to see through them.
Some ‘near death’ experiences come into this category, as when I was struck by lightning as a young man, and briefly rose out of my physical body, able to look down on it, lying on the ground beneath.
In astral travel, we can move around the planet and even beyond the earth’s atmosphere so long as we then maintain fear free expansive thinking. Usually, the demands and obligations of our physical life pull us back into physical consciousness.
In sleep, we all experience astral travel, our dreams being a memory of this, although often this recall is muddled and interwoven with negative thought forms that literally float around in the lower reaches of the astral plane.