Beliefs and facts.

I have been having a small disagreement (not even serious discussion) with someone on the internet about astral projection. I was trying to make her see astral projection must not be mistaken for mental projection (also known as remote viewing) or other type of psychic phenomena, which for her all belonged to the same bag, little more than “deep altered states of consciousness” such as meditation. She was intended to claim our disagreement was just due to semantics, and I insisted it is more than that. There is a difference, because I KNOW it, I have experienced it, and I have been doing it, along with lots of research, for two years now. You are welcome to believe in anything you want, you can doubt until you have your own experience, but please, keep an open mind and don’t throw my experiences to the bin just because I use the word “astral”, because you prefer to believe in scientists who suddenly had eye-opener experiences rather than in an “average” person like me (who funnily enough happens to be a scientist too), or because you just can’t understand those experiences and can’t bring yourself to believe in such “lunatic claims”. Reality is much wider than your beliefs or what your eyes can see. Eventually it looks like we were only having a misunderstanding and she didn’t want any help, which is fine with me, but in the meanwhile some feelings turned up.

I often feel so frustrated. It’s like talking to kids. It’s like witnessing those stares of disbelief when you are explaining a dog’s owner that their beloved pet has some “little bugs” (also known as mites) inside his ears, and that’s what’s making him shaking his head or making a bloody mess of his skin with his paws. That stare of disbelief becomes one of bewilderment when you take them to the microscope and invite them to take a look to the sample you took with a cotton swab. I think I have rarely felt such a pleasure in my clinical practice.

With astral projection is just the same. Only when you have experienced it you can begin to KNOW there is something real about it. You can doubt about it and have thousands of interpretations about what kind of phenomenon is. You can choose whatever names you want and try to classify your experiences in a thousand phases like Robert Monroe did. But you just can’t doubt it is REAL. Astral projection is not a fantasy, or “a very real dream”, or the delusion of someone who wants to believe in them. Astral projection is literally that: an OUT OF THE BODY EXPERIENCE. You are in a different body moving in a different dimension. A non-physical reality? Another plane? Those are all different names to explain the same reality. And that reality is a fact. But it seems certain people just don’t want to listen when a fact contradicts their beliefs, and they seem to think you just “believe” in them and you are trying to convince them of something, when you are just trying to explain to them a reality as real as the sun being a star or a disease being transmitted by water due to other type of “little bugs” living in it. It is just one step more from ignorance to actual knowledge. But some just want to go on blind. Others experience it spontaneously or learn to control it thanks to my advice... and then I feel the same pleasure when I see they have finally discovered another small part of the Truth.

Well, yesterday night I meditated a while before going to sleep and concentrating for another of my “delusional journeys” in the astral realm. I got asleep. But before that I started to get flashes from a past life. Flashes that are not new but were very important in that almost forgotten past life. My mother was being raped on a wooden table by a wild and strong man, while I was cowering in a corner gripping a knife in my hand, unable to move to save her. I was only a kid of maybe six, seven years old. I was hearing the screams of my mother, and I was willing to stab that damned knife in his back or his foot to stop him. I am not sure whether I eventually did it. If I did, it is likely I was pushed back or slapped and then I crouched, and I stayed there paralyzed, until he left and my mother and I could hold each other again, both trembling and weeping. That moment marked the rest of my life. Even my family knew it, but they always said I was too young and small to do anything to protect her. That wasn’t comforting to me, and I kept blaming myself for not being able to prevent that from happening. That feeling of frustration was always with me and determined a lot of the things I did afterwards. I grew up to be a really strong man, but I never was strong enough to protect my family. Sometimes you just can’t change things. And that same feeling of frustration is the one that haunts me when I feel there is nothing I can do or say to change the course of nature. I guess human beings are also part of that “nature”. I just can't change people's mindset, I just can't make stupidity disappear from the Earth, that same stupidity that makes people kill others just because they believe in different gods.

And that kills me.

You can give crutches to the lame, but you forget maybe they don’t want to walk faster. You can try to take the blindfold off their eyes, but you forget maybe they are happy in the darkness. You want to make this world a better place to live, but you forget this world doesn’t need to be changed, maybe. It is a place for fools, it is a place to kill and burn, it is a place for confusion and suffering. You only can sit down and watch the madness reign.