The excellent new sci-fantasy film "Dr Strange" gives us memorable images of adventures in the astral body. Actually, we go traveling in our astral bodies in dreams almost every night, whether or not we are remotely aware of what we are doing or where we are doing it.
When we become conscious that we can travel beyond the body in this way, we are poised to recognize that if consciousness can travel beyond the body during life, it will also survive physical death. With this awakening, we are ready to practice the everyday dream yoga of becoming lucid in dreams and embarking on conscious dream journeys. This approach is central to Active Dreaming. It is the most important and most accessible source of direct knowledge of the survival of consciousness after death and conditions in the afterlife.
When we become conscious that we can travel beyond the body in this way, we are poised to recognize that if consciousness can travel beyond the body during life, it will also survive physical death. With this awakening, we are ready to practice the everyday dream yoga of becoming lucid in dreams and embarking on conscious dream journeys. This approach is central to Active Dreaming. It is the most important and most accessible source of direct knowledge of the survival of consciousness after death and conditions in the afterlife.
Wherever spirituality is truly alive, this is is understood. In the language of the Makiritare, an indigenous dreaming people of Venezuela, the word for "dream" is adekato, literally a "journey of the soul". Even St. Augustine – who
had problems with dreams when he abandoned his lover for the church and decided
that sex was disgusting – recommended paying the closest attention to dreams in
which the dreamer is conscious he is outside his body. In a letter he wrote
when he was working on The
City of God, Augustine quoted the experience of one Gennadius, “a physician
of Carthage”.
In a dream, Gennadius encountered a radiant young man who led him to an otherworldly city where he heard singing “so exquisitely sweet as to surpass anything he had ever heard”. Waking, the doctor dismissed his experience as “only a dream”. His radiant visitor returned the following night and asked Gennadius whether he had been asleep or awake when they had met before.
At this point, the doctor became aware that he was dreaming. When his guide asked him, “Where is your body now?” he became aware that he was also having an out-of-body experience. This was the preliminary to a teaching session in which he learned that the soul’s condition after death is similar to its condition in dreams, and he lost his doubts about life after life.
The story of Gennadius finds echoes in the experiences of conscious dreamers today. In the wake of Raymond Moody's Life after Life (1975), there have been a flock of accounts of visionary journeys reported during "near-death experience" (NDE). It is not necessary to suffer life-threatening illness to make a conscious journey to explore the conditions of the soul after death.
In a dream that was the gateway to many further explorations, I found myself in a large room where people in a circle were waiting for me. An electric blue fire burned in an alcove. A radiant guide indicated that I was to lead them through it. As we danced into the fire, my guide asked, "Where is your body?"
Now aware that I was dreaming and out of the body, I was briefly tempted to rush back to check on the inert form on the bed. But I managed to stay with the dream and was shown a number of places of teaching for people who seemed to have passed on. At one of these teaching facilities, students of all ages joined their voices in songs of extraordinary beauty. The chorus of one of these songs stirs in me now:
In a dream, Gennadius encountered a radiant young man who led him to an otherworldly city where he heard singing “so exquisitely sweet as to surpass anything he had ever heard”. Waking, the doctor dismissed his experience as “only a dream”. His radiant visitor returned the following night and asked Gennadius whether he had been asleep or awake when they had met before.
At this point, the doctor became aware that he was dreaming. When his guide asked him, “Where is your body now?” he became aware that he was also having an out-of-body experience. This was the preliminary to a teaching session in which he learned that the soul’s condition after death is similar to its condition in dreams, and he lost his doubts about life after life.
The story of Gennadius finds echoes in the experiences of conscious dreamers today. In the wake of Raymond Moody's Life after Life (1975), there have been a flock of accounts of visionary journeys reported during "near-death experience" (NDE). It is not necessary to suffer life-threatening illness to make a conscious journey to explore the conditions of the soul after death.
In a dream that was the gateway to many further explorations, I found myself in a large room where people in a circle were waiting for me. An electric blue fire burned in an alcove. A radiant guide indicated that I was to lead them through it. As we danced into the fire, my guide asked, "Where is your body?"
Now aware that I was dreaming and out of the body, I was briefly tempted to rush back to check on the inert form on the bed. But I managed to stay with the dream and was shown a number of places of teaching for people who seemed to have passed on. At one of these teaching facilities, students of all ages joined their voices in songs of extraordinary beauty. The chorus of one of these songs stirs in me now:
What cannot be seen in the dream
cannot be seen in its glory
Behind the singers rose the buildings of a beautiful university. I have been able to visit this wonderful place of higher learning, meet some of its faculty, and audit some of its classes. For me it is the true Alma Mater, the school of Mother Soul.
Photo: Dr Strange is knocked into his astral body by the Ancient One in the Marvel film "Dr Strange".
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