Astral Travelling

In esoteric Indian Philosophy it is believed that the soul is encased in sheaths, the outmost of which is the physical body. The physical body lives in the material world and is subject to the laws that govern this world. This physical sheath covers the inner sheaths that house the soul. When the physical body is shed, naturally as in the case of death, the soul, still sheathed, travels freely through the higher realms that were otherwise inexplicable or rather inaccessible to it while it was encased in the physical body.

These journeys into the higher realms can also happen when a person has a near death experience. They are widely documented cases of people with near death experience who describe what happens to them in a way that sounds remarkably like accounts of astral travel. 

Similarly in lucid dreams, the dream-body sometimes travels freely into the higher realms without being aware of what it is doing. The dreamer does not know his soul has gone visiting! He is just left with very vivid impressions in his dreams. One possible reason for so many experiences of deja-vu is that the person has visited the place in his dreams before his actual physical visit there.  The soul then has to travel back to the body before the person awakes. This is the reason why sleeping people are seldom woken up in many cultures around the world. The belief is that the wandering soul might lose its way back and the person may be lost!

There are also practitioners of astral travel who consciously seek to detach themselves from their physical selves and travel through the higher planes of existence. This travel in the higher realms by a person who is still alive in the physical body, but who consciously detaches his astral body from his physical one and lets it journey forth is called astral travel.

These practitioners meditate and perform several spiritual austerities to attain mastery in this field. They are then able to consciously visit places and people in their subtle bodies. Many spiritual masters do this to select disciples to offer their guidance or help in times of extreme peril or need. The practitioner’s image that the disciple sees will be exactly like the practitioner. A simplistic way of explaining it would be to use the analogy of holograms. The disciple will see and interact with the astral body as if it were real, not knowing that it is not. This is in essence astral projection.