The Astral Ashram Adventure
AC 426B: November 6, 2010 (Boston)
[Part III]
Here's the continuation of the adventure, including the description of the Astral Plane Ashram and what I experienced there.
As described, the inside of South Station resembled a theater. There were tiers of seats. People were constantly coming and going. They would take a seat, rest awhile, interact with others sitting nearby, or watch the central screen. Movie theaters on Earth are set up with tiers of seats in a semicircle and a slightly concave screen to give a sense of depth to the images projected onto it. The theater seats in the astral ashram went all the way around a central pillar, creating a full circle. That pillar was made of light and the events of the movie were projected from within it like a hologram. They appeared real and three-dimensional, yet also made of light. It was possible to see through them to the other side of the theater. But it was equally possible to focus on them to the exclusion of all else, in which case the audience would be drawn into the unfolding events as if participating directly in them. These events could be perceived from every conceivable angle, hence the circular seating arrangement. It was a multidimensional movie theater.
The whole environment rang with auditory messages that accompanied the imagery in the pillar of light. From this, I understood that the multidimensional theater projected experiences that could be translated in several ways: as energy (light), as consciousness (beings–the characters in the pillar), or as information (the auditory content).
The basic ground of reality in Otherwhere is energy that can also be experienced as consciousness and as information. People have differing degrees of development in their inner senses and may perceive only one of these three components of reality, or two together, or all three in various degrees of blending. The clarity and accuracy of what they remember of visits to nonphysical reality depends on how many of these components they respond to and which predominate.
I was more interested in the people assembled in the theater than in the projected images. I gathered that they were educational in nature. Some images involved demonstrations of training equipment for strength and flexibility. These were probably simulations that trainees could enter to develop the strength of their inner senses and their flexibility of consciousness.
The images reminded me of Pilates training devices, which were invented to help people develop core strength, and gymnastics equipment, such as the horse, rings, and parallel bars. Though there are simulations in the Dream Zone lower in the astral plane for developing the abilities of the astral body, the equipment in the ashram involved a higher level of development, including the highly skilled coordination of the inner senses to accomplish complex feats, the equivalent of a gymnastics performance with the astral body.
The development of core strength had to do with the human personality on the physical plane–the challenge of integrating what people knew about the abilities of the astral body into their lives on the physical plane. Without this core strength people would feel discouraged and demoralized when they tried to use these abilities to help less developed souls on the physical plane and were rejected out of misunderstanding and fear.
Throughout the theater, I heard the phrase “Tell your story” repeated over and over in many languages. For some reason, I kept hearing the French version: “Contez vous” [or, more accurately, “Racontez vous”]. It seemed that an essential part of the rest and recharge function of the astral ashram was the sharing of stories about how people at this level of development had interacted with less developed human beings.
The imperative seemed to be: “Get it off your chest. Figure out what worked and what didn’t work from talking with your colleagues. Then get training for what didn’t work. Such training will teach you how to perform better if the problems you experienced resulted from incomplete knowledge of how to use and coordinate the abilities of the astral body. It would also help with difficulties integrating such knowledge with that aspect of your personality which operates on the physical plane, which may hold beliefs that block or distort proper performance or result in abreactions (acting out), especially when you’ve been rejected by others for use of these abilities.”
All around me such conversations were taking place. People were telling stories, comparing notes. The place did somewhat resemble the waiting area in a transportation hub. It had not only the constant influx and egress of individuals and groups and the animated conversations, but also an equivalent of TV monitors showing the news.
There was also everywhere a sense of mission. Important work was being done here. People were being prepared for missions on the astral and physical planes and returning to rest, recharge, and get further training. Here they would get their orders and be dispatched, as from a transportation hub, to the respective destinations.
I noticed a young man sitting in the outermost ring of the tiers of seats. Even though these seats would be the highest in a movie theater, they were not elevated here. People did not need to see over the heads of others to get an unobstructed view of the images projected in the central pillar. Those who turned their attention toward that pillar would have no trouble seeing and experiencing all it had to show them. The program would be perfectly tailored to respond to their needs.
Yet the outermost rows did represent a certain distance from the pillar. That pillar represented a broadcast of energy, information, and consciousness from higher levels of reality–initiatives that had the light of the Source behind them. The closer your seat to the pillar of light, the more clearly you could perceive those initiatives. Individuals at the outer edge were either in the early stages of training as transcendental souls or had not yet self-remembered enough to act on the physical plane from a full knowledge of who they were.
The young man had a thin face and very pale skin. He looked peaked, pinched with worry. His long brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He was dressed in faded blue jeans and an open long-sleeved flannel shirt in red, brown, and white plaid, with a white T-shirt underneath. The T-shirt had a diagram or writing printed on it in brown ink. He was talking volubly with his neighbors. Though he was ten feet away in a crowded room with a lot of activity going on, once his conversation caught my attention, I was able to tune into it to the exclusion of all possible distractions. I was even able to see the scenes he described.
The young man, who appeared to be in his late twenties, was from the plains of Alberta, Canada. Could that have been why I kept hearing the French expression “Contez vous” [“Racontez vous”]? Perhaps he was French-Canadian. I tuned into the middle of his life story.
“So this woman Betty took me in. She lived in a trailer park as a single mom with two young girls. She wasn’t working and needed to bring in some cash, so she rented a room in her double-wide to me.
“It wasn’t the cleanest place to live and I wasn’t there long before things went bad. I didn’t like the way she treated those kids. I think one was seven and the other nine. Betty was always on their case. They weren’t bad kids. They just wanted loving attention. Betty was worn out and just wanted to be left alone. She was full of resentment about her husband having left her for another woman. She just wanted to smoke cigarettes and read magazines in front of the TV all day. I guess she was depressed. If the kids wanted anything, she yelled at them. They were rather neglected, often playing out in the trailer park neighborhood unattended. There were other more attentive moms and some retired couples who understood Betty was ‘going through’ something and took up the slack.
“I wasn’t there a week before I’d sized up the situation. It was difficult to see Betty sitting in her housecoat in the living room smoking, surrounded by a cloud of swirling smoke. It wasn’t the cigarettes that did it, but her aura, full of anger and depression. And then those little girls, all lit up with the wonder of life and seeing their mom needed some loving. Their auras glowed a bright silver-blue white. When they wanted something from their mom, it was more to bring her attention back from her depression, which scared them, than it was from a selfish desire for attention. This was especially true of the older one. The younger one missed her father and acted out sometimes–and was smacked for it.
“I decided I had to do something. I asked Betty if she believed in angels. She said she never thought of it before. ‘Well, what would you say if I told you there’s an angel right here watching over you, a guardian angel,’ I said to her. ‘Like some TV show?’ she said, unimpressed. ‘Aren’t they supposed to make everything right when it’s gone wrong?’ she asked. ‘I don’t see that happening here.’
“It’s so hard to talk to people who are severely depressed. It’s like their eyes get all hard and black and sink deeper and deeper into their faces so you feel like you’re looking down at someone whose fallen into a well. ‘Sometimes I see angels,’ I said. ‘And I see one here. It wants to talk to you, but you’re not listening. If you want, I can sit with you and tell you what it’s saying.
“Betty got this funny look on her face–still looking up from the bottom of the well, but wondering if the people at the top know what they’re doing with those ropes and if the rescue might be worse than the situation she was being rescued from. I should have known better. ‘Stop at the first sign of resistance’ is what our teachers always tell us–and in the heat of the moment, when we get excited about being useful and actually helping someone, that’s the first thing we forget.
“So I sat down across from her and pulled up an empty chair beside us. That was where the angel would sit. I explained that she could tell me anything that was bothering her and the angel would hear. Then I would listen to what the angel had to say and relay it back to her.
“Another funny look. This time it was discomfort with a situation that seemed crazy to her. She felt strange about talking to an empty chair and even stranger about my claim to see and speak with a guardian angel right there in the same room with her, but which she couldn’t see.
“It wasn’t long before her suspicion that I was crazy turned to anger at what I told her about how she was neglecting her kids and not letting in their love. After about fifteen minutes, she was yelling at me to get out: ‘Stop messing with my head, you weirdo.’ Well, at that point I got it. I stopped. It wasn’t the first sign of resistance, but resistance it certainly was. As the Bible says, her heart hardened against me and after a couple hours of stony silence, she told me I had to leave, I couldn’t stay any longer. She didn’t care for herself, but she didn’t want a crazy person around her kids filling them up with stories and doing who knows what else.
“So I gathered up my things and headed down the road in my beater of a car. I drove along the river. There were places to camp along the way. I’d had enough misunderstanding. I was done with people. Maybe I was crazy. I lived out of my car for months, mostly avoiding people. After a while, they didn’t even look to me like people any more. They looked like patterns of wavy lines and dots, circuit diagrams or DNA helices.”
The young man opened his flannel shirt a little wider at this point so his listeners could see the diagram on his T-shirt. There were the wavy lines and dots. But their pattern kept changing.
“That’s how he was reading the forces in play, the energy dynamics between people,” I thought. “He was perceiving them with causal body vision.”
The young man continued. “It wasn’t long before I got scared to meet people. I would look at them and see empty space and patterns of energy. I didn’t know who I was talking to and if I described what I saw, they got scared and said I was crazy. Maybe I was. That much solitude can get to you.
“At a certain point, I didn’t want to get out of my car at all except when I had to get food, gas, or water. I would just drive alone for hours along the country roads where there were hardly any cars.
“You might think I was enjoying the scenery, but I rarely saw it. I was too busy trying to avoid driving into all the cracks and voids that surrounded me. It was as if the movie-like projection of physical reality had been torn away, along with the screen it was projected on, and all that was left was space.
“It’s a miracle I didn’t run off the road into a ditch and die. I even began recycling my own urine, so I wouldn’t have to get out of the car and have to walk through so much empty space, with no secure place to put down my feet. I guess by then I really was crazy, as most people would define the term.
“Someone did eventually find me slumped in my car by the side of the road, incoherent and severely dehydrated. They got me to a hospital and I’m recovering there now. I’m not in a coma, just sleeping a lot, and spending as much time as I can here.”
The young man finished his tale and the people surrounding him nodded their heads in appreciation of what he said. Yes, they knew how hard it was to live with a foot in both worlds. Sometimes advanced souls stood too much on the physical reality foot and lost track of their higher energy bodies and the awarenesses and abilities that go with them. How lonely and isolated, depressed and miserable they felt then, unable to find understanding among the lesser evolved humans surrounding them and longing for connection with their peers and colleagues here on the Other Side.
But sometimes they stood too much on the nonphysical reality foot, and then no one on Earth understood them and everyone thought they were crazy. They’d see with the vision of the higher bodies and lose touch with the hard facts of the physical plane.
But the worst was when neither foot was fully grounded, so they were cut off from connection with and being nurtured by the scenes, dwellers, and phenomena of both sides. All they saw was a yawning blackness, with no place to stand on, nowhere to go, no supports of any kind, physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual. That was what happened to the poor young man from Canada. And there was no one there to tell him what was happening–no other advanced souls nearby on the physical plane and no access to those who were between lifetimes because the inner senses of the higher bodies weren’t developed enough to perceive or interact with them.
The young man got up and moved away from the group he was talking with. He came toward me. I said to him, “I know something about working with angels. If you think it might help, I’d be happy to share it with you.” It was clear he’d been trying to channel information from a higher source to Betty. Having been a channel for nearly thirty years, I thought perhaps I could tell him something about how to approach people with such information without alienating them.
The young man didn’t seem to hear me. He had a glass of water in his hand and was about to drink from it.
“I bet that water will taste good after what you’ve been through,” I said. “But be careful about the water around here. It holds forgetfulness.”
The young man still didn’t hear me. He guzzled the water, his peaked face relaxed. His expression was radiant, beatific. In a few moments, he was overcome by drowsiness and lowered himself to the floor. There, lying on his back with an expression of peaceful sleep, he faded away. He’d gone back to his hospital room or perhaps to another dream.
In Greek mythology, there’s a river called Lethe. The dead drink from it to wash away the bitter memories of their past life so they can experience a blissful rest. In theosophy, that transition occurs between he astral and the mental planes. But this young man wasn’t dead. He was washing away the memories of his period of temporary “insanity.” To do so, he had to share his story with others at a similar level of development here in the astral ashram. Then he could return to life refreshed.
But he also wouldn’t remember his visit to the astral ashram. It would still give him strength and might leave him with a sense of transcendental longing that would carry forward his process of self-remembering. But without a context for understanding it, he would also be afraid of anything he might remember from such an experience, since everyone on this side concerned with his healing process would see it as evidence of his insanity.
What would happen next, I wondered. Would he end up on medication for mental illness? How would that effect the development of his inner senses and process of self-remembering as a transcendental soul? Would the drugs interfere with his spiritual development or give him a chance to stabilize his personality on the physical plane so he could begin to explore the higher planes–perhaps in a muted way, along a slower trajectory, but all in all more manageably?
What would happen if his doctors decided to treat him with electro-shock therapy? I couldn’t imagine how such shocks might disarrange the connections to the higher bodies and what it would then take to bring them back into alignment, if that were possible.
Deep in contemplation, I didn’t realize that someone had come up behind me and was quietly waiting to catch my attention. I gradually became aware of this person’s presence and turned to face him or her. It was an artist friend of longstanding. She has told me about many unusual dreams over the years. Some were precognitive, others sounded like astral travel. I was more delighted than surprised to find her present in the astral ashram. She’s deeply service-oriented, one of the criteria for gaining access to the astral plane ashram.
My friend and I embraced each other. Her face was glowing and she seemed excited and happy to be there. Shortly after I awoke in the morning, I sent her an email asking her to make note of any dreams she’d had that night. When I called her later to see what she remembered, she said that for several nights in a row, she dreamt of being in a school. It was not the school where she works, she said, but a school for adults where she was learning new things.
She couldn’t remember any further details. But she got excited when I explained where I’d seen her. The astral ashram is a school for more advanced souls. She was thrilled that I saw her there. Maybe this corroboration will help her become more lucid within these dreams and remember more of them.
[If I had to diagnose the problem of the young man from Canada according to recently received information on the three aspects of reality–consciousness, information, and energy–I would call him a visionary. He claimed the ability to perceive angels (consciousness). He also claimed the ability to communicate with them (information), though this was not demonstrated in his story.
If he had only these two characteristics, he would be a channel. Yet his experiences of the energy dynamics between people in terms of circuitry and his vision of the blackness of space surrounding his car suggest that the inner sense required to pick up on the energy aspect of reality was developing. He seemed not to have any context for understanding these experiences, which suggests to me that his information sense was un- or underdeveloped. In that case, he would be what Charles calls a visionary.
He seemed not to have had access to training on the physical plane that would allow for the development of the information sense–or to books that would provide context and vocabulary for understanding what he was perceiving. His story is clearly a cautionary tale about developing psychic abilities in an unbalanced way.
My artist friend Judy has had precognitive dreams and vague astral journeys, as well as dreams of the astral ashram. But she can’t remember what these locations look like or what was taught there. Thus she has access to the energy sense, but not to that of consciousness (of other beings) or to that of information.
It seems likely that the senses that allow us to pick up the three aspects of reality are synergistic combinations of the twenty inner senses I describe in The Multidimensional Human. I need to inquire about which ones go into their makeup.]