Attending a class in the astral

This night began in a dream. I was at my uncle’s house, getting ready for bed, and within the dream I fell asleep peacefully. Next I found myself walking across a field near where I had just gone to sleep, and I realized it was a dream. I walked for a few minutes in the form of a large cat, a black panther. Then I decided to go beyond the dream and enter the astral. I counted down slowly from five to one, with the intention of carefully moving my awareness back to my physical body, and then coming out of it again.

I felt myself become aware of my physical body, but the change was slow enough that I didn’t move or fully occupy any part of it. Instead I floated straight up and out, and flew onto the street in front of my apartment. I was living in the center of London at the time. It was morning, busy with cars and people, and the hustle and bustle made me feel a little unbalanced.

Meditating on a London pavement

So I sat down cross-legged on the pavement and meditated, focusing on my breathing. I kept my eyes open, so that I stayed grounded in this astral counterpart of the physical. As I meditated, my awareness grew tenfold. I noticed the detail of the pavement, the blue sky, the early morning light and the rustling of the trees. I touched the cold, black-painted bars of the iron fence beside me, and they felt as physical as they do in waking life, if not more.

Then I walked on, along familiar streets, everything identical, until I came to a familiar church near where I lived. Opposite it there is usually a roundabout with a small park in the middle. In the astral, in place of the park, stood a huge white temple, cleaner and more majestic than the church across the road.

A priestess and a hundred sleeping students

I walked up about fifteen steps to a huge wooden doorway, opened it slightly and looked in. Around a hundred people sat inside, and at first I thought it was a religious service. I walked in quietly and sat on the back row. On the platform a woman sat on a humble chair behind an ordinary table. I’ll call her the priestess. This was not a service but a class. My teacher in the tradition of gnosis had taught me that spiritual masters in the astral can be recognized by the robes many of them wear, white and silver, and that is what she was wearing.

She looked at me and smiled while she spoke, and I smiled back. Then I realized she was communicating with me telepathically while answering other people’s questions at the same time. She said to me, “I recognize you. Enjoy the experience, but you don’t have to stay; this is for the public. These are basic teachings.” I stayed anyway. Looking at the people, I had a strong intuition that most of them were projecting out of their bodies unconsciously. Almost everyone seemed overly excited, like people too engrossed in television.

Someone asked a question about God, and the priestess had everyone turn to the Quran and the Bible and discuss it. Then she asked them to take out the masks she had asked them to make: rough, handmade masks of dark wood, each one different, like shamanic masks. It was clear to me that this was a lesson on the ego. Everyone showed each other their masks, proud of what they had made.

Masks turned to gold

One by one, the priestess took each mask, inspected it and tapped it with a kind of magic pen, and it turned to splendorous gold, its imperfections gone. One woman was distressed: “I don’t want my mask turning into gold.” The priestess calmly took it anyway and said, “This is necessary.” She turned it to gold and gave it back, and the woman just stared at it. The excited atmosphere had shifted into silence as everyone looked on in awe. On a deep, subconscious level, something was being learned.

When she came to me, I had no mask. She smiled, gently held up my wrist to show a bracelet with a crucifix pendant, and turned the pendant to gold. I thanked her.

Then the priestess went back to the stage and changed her form into a huge samurai wearing a mask. It was very like a samurai in black armor from an extremely vivid dream I had as a child of about eight. It frightened me then, yet it never attacked me. Watching the priestess, I realized that perhaps it hadn’t been a bad thing at all.

After a while someone new came through the door, and I was surprised to see a colleague from an old workplace, someone who was often sad or hurt in physical life. She came in shouting happily, “Wow, this is amazing! Thank you, I’m so excited to be here!” Everyone clapped. The priestess welcomed her, calmed her down, and said soberly, “Yes, but you must wait, the path isn’t easy, and we have to suffer; you have to accept and work through your suffering.” Then I woke up, and wrote the whole experience down.

What I learned

She didn’t only talk. She knew these people were not self-aware, so she did things with them and showed them things, to make an impression on their subconscious. I believe many of us attend classes like this in our sleep more often than we realize. People sometimes ask me whether astral projection is dangerous. My answer is that you leave the body every night anyway. Wouldn’t you rather know what you are up to?

Watch the talk on YouTubeAttending a Class in the Astral with Unconscious Students