Is the astral real?

[keokutah]

I've run into dreamers before who had no clue they were dreaming, which I concluded because I went up to speak to them to figure out who they were and what they were doing there.

From what I can tell, my conclusion is that the astral realm is really heavily populated with a bunch of dreamers who don't know their dreaming, a bunch of astral travellers and even spirits, and a few times I've met other astral travellers that try to interfere with other astral travellers, but I'm still not sure what the astral realm is.

One time I decided to travel back in time to my home when I was younger and it looked quite different, I think I ended up going back in time a little too far. I was surprised to see a lot of strangers there that I did not recognize,
honestly im not sure if they had anything to do with my home in the past or if they were also random drifters that just happened to be there at the same time as me, I don't know why on earth they would have been in the same location though.

Astral travelling sort of reminds me of Second Life. Teleporting to random locations full of random strangers all the time, and I can't help but wonder why on earth these random people are even at some of these random locations or if they even see the same thing as I do. Usually when I talk to drifters that have no clue they are dreaming, they react to me like they would in real life and think im a weirdo lol.

[Aguia]

In the etheric plane you‘re really near to the physical plane. It is not a plane like the astral, though. Your etheric body consists of your astral body and the etheric (vital) energy which is still connected with your physical body (through the silver cord). The etheric is a kind of connection between astral and physical. The more etheric substance you take with your astral body when coming out, the "heavier" you feel and the more inert the surroundings are, up to a point where the surroundings seem really solid and you can‘t reach through objects. And yes, every object has an etheric as well as an astral existence. In the etheric it is the most likely that it resembles the physical object. It is possible to be "between" etheric and astral – the transition is relatively smooth, though the differences between etheric and astral phenomenons are quite clear. There is a really good website which explains some aspects of the etheric and astral:
http://www.paranormal.de/ballabene/o...ish/alfred.htm

[Aguia]

I do not like thinking about the astral as some "physical" place somewhere, I prefer to differentiate between the finer and denser "matter" if there is some matter at all. But of course it has it‘s own "physicality" and laws, which are totally different from that in our known universe. I think for the practicability it does not play any role if it is seen as the whatever dimension or whatever universe, it is for the beginning just important to know how to behave there and how the laws work.
I think the reality of the astral is as real to us as for their occupants – we can feel and touch this world as well. I once fell into the snow in the astral and it was so cold it hurt me. It was all an illusion though: the subconscious knows, snow is cold, which is why it felt cold, and it hurt because reat cold hurts. Or sometimes I am lighting candles in the astral, I like to do this with my finger: I create a flame on my fingertip. After a while it starts to hurt me and the finger turns hot-red and then black like coal. I think it is only an illusion, for there are no pain sensory receptors in the astral. I believe this because I often had experiences, where it SHOULD have hurt, but I was fully aware that it couldn‘t hurt because I am in the astral, so it just didn‘t hurt, only due to the fact that I was fully aware of it. E.g. someone tried to hit me but he didn‘t succeed because I knew nobody can do harm to me as long as I do not let it happen. Or I fully crashed against a wall while flying but it was by intent and I knew I was only "dreaming", so it didn‘t hurt at all. To move in the astral it is of greatest importance to understand how powerful the mere thought is.

[Aguia]

@keokutah: yes, you observed totally right, there are some areas (or whatever you call it) in the astral, mostly in some earth-near places, where you can see other people walking around while embedded in their own dream world. It's like they are sleepwalking. It proves that even in some dreams we are out in the astral with our astral body, we just aren‘t fully aware and the surroundings are overlayed with our own dream illusions. You can experience that relatively often, most OBEs in which you are not fully aware and the surroundings seem strange and dream-like are OBEs in a state of little awareness, our individual subconscious "dream world" is dominating over the collective vibrancy and appearance. But the difference to "normal" dreams is: it is chronological, it is not interrupted irrationally and you can get conscious and turn to a fully aware OBE.

I know these people who are not really aware of themselves and talking to them can be really funny and strange for they do not really understand what you say and interweave your words with their own inner world of thoughts and pictures (it is like what you yourself look to other astral beings which try to talk to you, when you are in that dreamlike state ). I think it can be living dreaming people but I also met people who seemed to be deceased ones but still confused and caught in such a dream-like state for whatever reason.

How other people see the astral surroundings depends on their state of consciousness and on their own psyche. One of my friends had experiences where he was together with another friend and they both were fully aware, but still the other friend did see slight differences in the surroundings. Just the night before I met again a ghost whom I know since a few months now, and he was afraid of a door that opened before us, I didn‘t see anything out there which was frightening but he was afraid and went back. I could not find out what he saw there which made him afraid.

[Kashii49829]

Is there a way to know when what your seeing is just the subconscious 'layer' over the astral, and which of it is the astral realm? And how someone can learn to say 'it can only happen to me if I let it happen'? Because its something so ingrained in 3rd dimensional reality that some aspects of getting hurt are as a result of physical laws, and many of those laws don't apply in the astral. It would seem like a handy thing to learn before attempting astral projecting consciously.

[Aguia]

The simplest and most helpful thing is to learn sensing the vibrancy of persons, objects, places etc. You cannot learn this before OBEing. You can sharpen your senses a bit by trying to feel the vibrancy of places in the physical, but it will never be like in the astral. In the astral you can feel it very well and sometimes astonishingly precisely. It is "learning by doing". Learning without experiences it not possible in that way.
Sensing the vibrancy will reveal the true nature of a person/ being/ place/ object. The thing is, in many OBEs we are not fully conscious and are not accustomed to concentrate on this special astral sense and not on the seeing like in the physical. But we can train the sensing and the first thing is getting more conscious. E.g.: a friend of mine was in a place once where the buidlings looked really beautiful and nice. When he looked more closely at them he got more aware because he concentrated so much, and suddendly he sensed the true vibrancy of the city or village and he sensed that the beautiful appearance was just camouflage. In reality the place felt negative and was saturated with negative emotions. The persons who lived in this place were like the same: they had a nice appearance but inside they hid their negative feelings and thoughts, they just wanted to look nice so that no one could see their true nature. This is another example for the fact that places are shaped by beings, due to the fact that similar attracts similar and the appearance is shaped by the true nature/ vibrancy.
In an OBE where things are overlayed with dreamlike pictures of your own world of thoughts, you are mostly little aware of yourself. You can train the sensing until you will even sense the vibrancy when you‘re little aware and the dream-like pictures will get less because you see through the illusion. But I have to say too, that a dream-like "overlay" can characterize an object or person or whatever very well and very close to its vibrancy, too. E.g. there is a person which is dull, fat and greedy and you see it as a swine due to that fact, because you may associate swines with that kind of persons. It sounds funny but I experienced things like this very often.
I don‘t think it is always fully possible to see the "real astral landscape", because even the real appearance is subjective up to a certain amount. By sensing the vibrancy you can always know the reality, even if you may see one thing with the same vibrancy in another way than another person.
Sorry that I am waffling so much about this stuff, but I think this is one of the most important things when doing OBEs.

Getting "hurt": of course it is so ingrained in our normal thinking that it cannot be easily overcome. The thing is: training and training and training. It is a good start to KNOW about this fact and try, but if you want you really "get" it and interiorize it, you need own experiences. It is not easy because in OBEing we deal not only with our normal daily concsiousness but with many other and also lower states of consciousness of ourselves, and we need to wholly interiorize a mere knowledge by many experiences until it becomes routine.

[wmsm]

Originally Posted by Aguia

@wmsm: it is really kind of you to share your opinion with us and being worried about us, but I think you landed between some people here who have had many experiences in the astral so far and already learnt a good amount of the laws how this world is working and how to behave there. There is absolutely no point believing the astral consists of devils and demons only. It is a world with beings as varied and even more diverse than in our world, you can find all attitudes and types of people and beings there, but it is not really possible for someone to "masquerade" because the vibrancy cannot be hidden, you can only be deceived by the appearance of a being but it cannot hide its quality. Therefore, the vibrancy can always be sensed and there often is an inner "knowing" how someone is disposed towards you. The point is just learning the sensing.
If you believe in your own opinion this is totally okay, but I think there is no point in trying to convince or frighten someone here.

Fear is a situation owned by the reader, not the discussion.

Religious teachings has had many defined negative implied reviews, and yet it is considered spiritual and holy....why?
Religion became the teaching aspect in the community regarding spirit, and to teach both reviews were taught as the condition of teaching, only because the teaching was advising the negated spirit caused by occultism, which in ancient times was science.

Spiritual enlightenment is the consideration of the personal journey. If a human uses spiritual information with positive, loving reasoning and then are attacked, then this situation imposes another condition that a loving spiritual human should consider.

This is the purpose of teaching.

If a loving human who did healing for no charge, would travel anywhere to do healing without charge advised you of a misconceived evaluated condition, then why do you not consider that my information is real and has an important message?

Spiritual enlightenment is about those who have suffered for the spirit of others, as this too is the spiritual story?

I once only believed in the considerations that my family released negative energy from their own body as the evil intent...to negate or think harm at our family. I also considered that human minds of this kind had been harmed and I lived my life to assist them to heal.

Why then do you imply that my loving spirit and its terrible situation of learning is not yours to learn?

[Aguia]

@wmsm: OBEs are not about religion or something. For me OBEs are a spiritual path in many ways. You seem to be pretty afraid of the astral world because you may have had only negative experiences. I do not say that your opinion is "wrong", it is just that you seem to have a very one-sided view. I learnt about the laws in the astral and I am convinced of the basical principles. I do not want to discuss religion or occultism with you for I am neither religious nor belonging to any "scene".
And you're talking about suffering and learning and so on. I think many of us here have suffered while learning and are still. Everyone has his own way of learning and experiencing.

[Azmond]

You know what... it just occurred to me. This sounds really similar to some words of more or less christian religion people, claiming that we should not go to 4D or 5D in other words, ascend, because that is the realm of Satan and so on. Not trying to insult anyone here, just remembering what I read somewhere from people that held clear religious background. I never understood it either. As long as i remember growing up, and also being raised in christian religion, people always regarded anything else that had to do with magic, esoterics or just energy related work a work of Satan. They never wanted to dabble in such things. They were just too dense and rigid in their beliefs to even consider anything else as a possibility so the label:work of Satan was always there. But they never talked about such thing either. Angles were ok, but that was it. I was really happy for myself to see me go my own way and discover my own set of truths and beliefs and perceptions. It did not bother me that they thought of all those things in such a way.. But then all of the sudden things changed. I came across more and more religious people that started to accept all this concepts and started talking about them, but twisting everything in their own story fueled by religious claims. Aliens became fallen angels, astral is now some burned out fallen atmosphere and so on.. I liked it much better when they just shrugged all this information off and yelled Satan, without really even thinking about it. Why cant astral just be one more layer of existence a bit different then the one we are one, but also similar, that has its own beings? You know, like the ocean compares to land. Why must it be so evil for you? because the place where you live now is so full of love and joy and light right? And what about all the other dimensions and layers and worlds? Are they all burned out body of gasses that exploded? What about mental, unity, spiritual, divine planes after astral? How do you regard them? Is everything besides this plane here evil?

[Kashii49829]

I set this person to ignore so I'm not going to bother with his/her ramblings. If there was a way to block people from a thread it'd be nice..