Astral Sword and Shield

Acrylic on canvas

60” x 48”

You think you don’t know what astral projection is, what an out-of-body experience feels like, but here’s the thing: You do it every night. We live in two worlds. In our dreams, we fly, we fight, we feel deeply. This inter-dimensionality doesn’t go away when we wake; it is all around us all the time.

In Kundalini yoga, there is an honor paid to the Ten Bodies: the physical body, three mental bodies, and six energy bodies. Ancient Egyptians believed that the physical body served as a temporary home for ka, or eternal life force, and the ba, (also known as the soul). They can be separated in OBE’s: astral projection, lucid dreaming, clairvoyance--during trauma, near-death, illness, hallucination, channeling, and remote viewing. Historical references to astral projection lace the texts of many societies and spiritualities, from the Middle Age Kingdoms to the Bible.

Astral projection has a very bad reputation; modernity likes to shun what it does not understand as “dangerous.” However, the Western scientific establishment has been coming along since the 1960s, with parapsychological research affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science; accredited researchers and institutions, including Dr. Robert Morris of Duke University and Dr. Charles Tart of University of California at Davis, have made headway in the field of out-of-body experiencing. fMRI studies conducted by neuroscientists from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet (now calling it an ECE, extra-corporeal experience).