CAN WE LEAVE our physical bodies and travel to other worlds, other dimensions? Those who practice astral projection say that it is not only possible, but that it can be a wondrous journey where we can meet human and non-human beings and gain insight into our lives on earth. Donald Tyson, author of Soul Flight: Astral Projection & the Magical Universe (Llewellyn Worldwide, 2007), explains the nature of astral flight, how each of us can achieve it, what we can expect to find in the astral universe, how it relates to the UFO abduction experience and lucid dreaming, and how to avoid any dangers.
Q: There are many books available on astral projection. What are you attempting to provide in Soul Flight that is different than other books?
Tyson: In Soul Flight I wanted to take a look at the entire scope of astral projection in all its forms. Books about astral projection usually follow the model established by Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington in their influential work The Projection of the Astral Body (Rider, 1929). They describe the astral universe in the terms set forth by Muldoon, which in my experience are woefully inadequate.
Muldoon, although a gifted astral traveler, had a limited and materialistic conception of the astral dimensions – he saw the astral world as little more than a double of the physical world, yet this is only one tiny aspect of it. He encountered few astral entities who were not human, because he had the firm expectation that he would see only humans, and the astral level that we travel to is shaped and defined to a large extent by human expectation.
Muldoon was a Spiritualist, so naturally he tended to see the astral universe in Spiritualist terms. His insistence upon the reality of the silver cord, a supposed strand of elastic matter linking the physical body with the astral body, is almost fanatical. He expected to encounter dead people, and at times he did so.
Muldoon’s view, which has become the standard view of the average person, is that astral projection is the actual projection of a double of the physical body beyond the envelope of the skin and out across the material environment. This double remains connected physically to the body by means of a cord that is almost infinitely elastic. According to Muldoon, the astral double actually travels across fields and along roads and through doorways as it explores the astral plane, which in Muldoon’s experience was almost identical to the physical plane, and lay superimposed over it. Essentially, for Muldoon, to project was to walk through the physical environment in an astral body composed of very subtle and usually invisible physical substance that was projected out of the physical body, but always remained linked to it by the silver cord.
All this is hopelessly simplistic and naive. Astral travel is not projection out of the body. It occurs entirely within the mind. The levels of the astral world are mental levels. At the same time, the physical reality that we experience is also a mental creation, and exists as a level of the mind. This is something Muldoon could never have grasped. The astral world can overlie the physical world, so that at times an astral traveler seems to walk around in the physical environment, precisely because both physical world and astral world are mental constructs. They are, of course, different in kind, but both are formed within the mind, and therefore no projection is required. It is more a matter of shifting from one mental state to another – of changing mental resonance.
The astral experience is much broader than imagined by Muldoon and the Spiritualists. I trace its various forms from the soul flights of the primitive shamans of our pre-history, all the way up to the remote viewing of the CIA secret project known as Stargate, which was on-going until 1995. Some of the forms taken by soul flight, as I prefer to call the experience, include: the sabbat flights of European witches, which were induced by the use of narcotic flying ointment; the encounters with fairies that are so common throughout Celtic history and folklore; the bilocation of Christian saints, induced by physical austerities and prayer; the deliberate experiments in astral projection that took place among the Spiritualists, Theosophists, and Rosicrucians; and the close encounters with UFO aliens that are commonly reported in our own time.
Also examined is the close connection between soul flight and such related experiences as dreams and scried visions. Crystal gazing involves a kind of soul flight. There is very little difference between viewing an astral scene and entering it, although most people don’t know this. The alchemist Edward Kelley, who scried for the magician Dr. John Dee, would often find himself suddenly surrounded by the spirits he scried within Dee’s crystal, and would briefly become a part of their world.
Next page: Astral projection and UFO abductions
