When I am going into trance, I breathe in the Yoga method shown
me by Dr. Letari. Immediately I get a sensation as though I am
falling, or being pulled backwards. As this sensation comes to a
climax, I seem to be travelling through space at terrific
speed.
I have opened my eyes many times but the only vision I had was of
passing through a dense fog; then, quite suddenly, the fog clears
and I am at a stile. I climb over this stile and immediately there
is a voice speaking to me over my shoulder. This voice is always
with me, explaining everything I see and everyone I meet. The stile
seems to be on the edge of a large field, which rises gradually to
the form of a hill. I walk up the hill, and beyond it I visit many
places.
I have been to the Childrens Land many times and have spoken to
children with whom I used to go to school, many of whom I did not
know had died until I met them. I have paid visits too, to the
Halls of Learning, which seem to me more like the Acropolis at
Athens.
It is always the same stile, the same hill, the same voice, and it
just seems like a large country with so many different towns to
visit.
The most interesting and remarkable experience I ever had during
these visits into the Spirit, happened before I went into trance.
Several sitters had been speaking of consciousness. They had asked
me to describe the Spirit. Was it solid? Did I appear solid? I
promised the Sitters that if I could, I would find out.
I arrived at my stile, the voice came to me. and it evidently knew
my desire, because it said Feel the earth! I did. It was solid.
Feel the grass beneath your feet! I did. That was solid too, and
even had dew on it. Smell these flowers! They were perfectly
natural and had the usual perfume. In fact, everything around was
natural. Then I was told, Feel your body. I did so. It was as
solid as I am materially.
The voice then said, Close your eyes; make your consciousness
passive, or as one would do when pre-paring for a trance state.
Now feel the earth beneath your feet! There was nothing. Open
your eyes. It wasnt dark, it wasnt light. Feel at your body.
It wasnt there. Such is Spirit said the voice. Just a
consciousness holding within it all experiences of your lifetime,
all the joys and sorrows, your desires, achievements and failures,
whence comes spiritual evolution. In your world of the material,
you are able to examine matter; everything is matter. When you
think of the spiritual, naturally you build in your consciousness
another material world.
See: The fourth example in out of body experiences, given by Sir
Auckland Geddes describing an astral projection.
Spiritualism, through the experience of people like Lilley,
tells us the dead have a subtle body and live in worlds in many
ways similar to physical life, except in their beauty, colour, lack
of sickness and pain, and without war and in its possibilities. In
these worlds we can fly like birds, swim underwater like fish,
communicate with others heart to heart, mind to mind, soul to soul,
without the use of clumsy words. We have a body, but it is a body
at its prime, without weight or tiredness. We have clothes, but
they are creations of our thoughts, and we are clothed by our own
love and wisdom. We experience heaven or hell, not as punishment or
reward, but because we create our own environment by our own
thoughts and emotions. Here we explore music, the arts,
creativeness, knowledge, relationships, without the limitations the
body imposes, and with the added wonder of a new dimension of
experience. Our senses are extended so that when we look at
someone, we see not only a body shape and their posture and
expression, but also we perceive their quality as a person, perhaps
through a surrounding field of colour or emanation from within.
When we consider a painting in this world, we not only appreciate
the colours and forms, but we commune with the artist through the
work, and experience for ourselves the artists vision and
feelings, their unique quality and spirit.
With the development of the theory attached to Quantum Mechanics -
The New Physics - a very different view is emerging of time, space
and human consciousness. This vastly subtler view of the cosmos and
our place in it brings a shift also to the way we can look at
experiences such as the projection of the astral body, or the
concept of the astral body itself. These shifts appear to offer an
open door to greater freedom of experience within these areas, and
an entirely new way of explaining them. Well, perhaps not entirely
new, as many of the subtlest of thinkers of East and West have
already written much about these subtlest aspects of Reality.
