Astral journeys
There is a lot of talk going on these days about “astral journeys”. People just lie down and imagine they are flying. This is plain hallucination.
There are five dimensions or sheaths of the body. The first sheath or the first layer of the body is called annamaya kosha or the food body, because what you call “physical” is just a heap of food. The second is called manomaya kosha or the mental body. Today doctors are talking about psychosomatic diseases. If you are tense, you can get stomach ulcer. Whatever happens to the mind also happens to the body. Every cell in the body has its own intelligence.
Right now, the only things that you experience are your body, your mind and your emotions. There is an energy that makes them be, operate the way they do. Without energy, you cannot experience them. For example, a microphone amplifies sound. Even if you don’t know anything about the microphone, you can infer that there is a source that powers it. So the third layer of the body is the energy body, or the pranamaya kosha.
The fourth is known as vignanamaya kosha, or the etheric body, and the fifth as the anandamaya kosha, or the bliss body. Though the last two are not physical, we refer to them as “body” because yoga is a method, not a philosophy.
What is referred to as “astral travel” is leaving the physical body, mental body, energy body and the bliss body intact, and just allowing the etheric body to float around. This means that you can still conduct your physical activity in the world because your physical body, mental body and energy body are intact and you just allow the etheric body to go. That requires a certain kind of mastery. The physical body, mental body and energy body are physical. The bliss body is totally beyond the physical. Etheric is a transitory energy, it is neither physical nor beyond — it is a transition. Etheric body is not something that you can touch unless you are in a certain level of sadhana and intensity within yourself. You cannot just psyche yourself into it. It needs enormous meditation. But people are seen performing astral travel in every nook and cranny these days. This is just hallucination.
Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, an internationally renowned spiritual leader, is a visionary, a humanitarian, author, poet and speaker. He can be contacted at www.ishafoundation.org
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