In my two previous posts I presented some basic ideas for astral projection and astral travel. In that second post I pointed out that astral travel was about more than going to the moon or visiting a girlfriend or boyfriend. It’s even more that visiting someone to help heal them from the astral plane or to have consensual astral sex with them. Astral travel can lead to the fountainheads of spiritual wisdom. However, as they say in the infomercials, “But wait! There’s more!”

Most practitioners of magick didn’t just chant a spell or wave a wand and woosh!, magick happened. And yet, you wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t believe or hadn’t experienced the fact that magick works. So something else has to be going on. And to understand what, we briefly have to look at reincarnation.

Reincarnation—More than Physical

According to Kabalistic traditions, when a woman and man are making love they set up a vortex of energy which attracts souls waiting to incarnate. An interesting Kabalistic tradition holds that sometimes several souls will actually argue over trying to get into a particular body.

A soul, after incarnation, needs to focus on survival in the physical world. Its highly spiritual nature, by necessity, submerges and becomes the basis of your unconscious or subconscious mind. It ends up playing a secondary role to the emerging ego and personality that form your conscious mind (although it has far more things to do, such as operating your cardiovascular, digestive, and nervous systems below the level of conscious awareness).

Thus, it is your unconscious which is your link to your soul, the spiritual worlds and Divinity. The deepest level of your unconscious, your true “soul consciousness,” functions within, or is said to “exist on,” the Astral Plane. In this understanding of the nature of our existence, it is important to understand that If you had been born with another soul, you would not be the same person. Therefore, the essential part of you that makes you who and what you are, exists on the Astral Plane was in existence before your physical body was created.

Everything that exists on our physical plane, everything you can become aware of through your five physical senses, has an astral double or counterpart. This counterpart is usually known as the Astral Body. Every person has an Astral Body or Astral Double. So does every animal, vegetable or mineral. Everything has a pre-existing Astral Double. You do not have an Astral Body because you have a physical body. Rather, you have a physical body because the Astral Body already existed and needed to join a new “home” in order to manifest for the instinctive purpose of spiritual evolution. While your soul was waiting to inhabit its physical body with the body’s first breath, it was establishing a link between itself and the physical body. This link is the Astral Body. For anything to exist on the physical plane it must first exist on the Astral Plane!

Therefore, in order to create anything and bring it into your life, all you have to do is create it in the Astral Plane.

And that’s what magickal rituals and spells do. They create something on the astral plane, something that eventually must manifest.

The challenge is that this process doesn’t only occur when we perform some sort of magickal rite. It happens constantly. In most instances what we put into the astral plane—either through a willed action (magick) or without conscious intention—gets there by traversing through our unconscious, and without training we rarely have any sort of conscious control over our unconscious. As a result, our unconscious thoughts and concerns may actually end up causing opposition to and then easily overpowering, overcoming, and simply defeating our magickal practices. That’s one reason our magick may not be successful and why learning to master our conscious mind and appropriately program our unconscious mind are important aspects of magick.

So What Does This Have to Do With Astral Projection?

When we perform rituals, we are sending instructions from our conscious, to the unconscious (or subconscious) to create something on the astral plane so it will manifest on the physical. That process looks like this:

Ritual—>Conscious—>Unconscious—>Astral Plane—>Physical Plane

In my previous post I described how the astral plane was not limited to the physical laws that bound the physical universe. Visualize being somewhere and your astral body is there. Instead of being limited by the speed of light, you are only limited by the speed of thought.

If you astral project, and your conscious mind is on the astral plane, you can instantly create something there by thinking it. That cuts out the middle steps. It’s just:

Astral Plane—>Physical Plane

This reduces the chances for error and increases the possibility of achieving your magickal goals. In short, when you are on the astral plane you can more easily create what you want on the physical plane by simply clearly thinking what you want in your mind. By cutting out the extra steps of ritual work, control of energy, and possible problems as the results of your work go through the conscious and unconscious, you can speed up and increase the effectiveness of magick.

This is dependent upon your ability to astral project. Click on this LINK for descriptions of several books that can help you learn to project to and travel on the astral plane.

As I wrote above, it’s possible for us to prevent ourselves from achieving our magickal goals by unconsciously countering our magick. How do we prevent this?

I’ll discuss that next time.