I think some of the problems with developing an astral body are that people are trying to run before they can walk and give up rapidly when they fail. In the Sefer Yetzirah we are taught to gaze into the mysteries and the following exercise, an enrichment of earlier posts, is to develop your astral eye(s) as opposed to your astral body
- Lie on your back, looking directly up at the ceiling, breathe rhythmically, steadily and deeply, hands folded on your stomach or down by your sides
- Do not do this when you are completely exhausted, it may spur lucid dreaming but this is not the aim
- The Devil's Hour is the best time but this ''hour'' will vary depending on your own circadian rhythm - if you go to sleep at midnight then around 10-11pm
- Actively search the darkness of your mind, focus on keeping your eyes on gazing into the darkness, which may or may not be pixelated
- It may help to visualise that you are pulling yourself up on a rope, this rope runs straight through the middle of your mind, do not try to visualise hands pulling on the rope it is your mind that is pulling on the rope and remember to pull from the centre and back of your mind as opposed to the front, i.e. use the pineal and cerebellum not the frontal cortex
- At this point you will fail if you start thinking instead of looking, the thoughts will be egoic babble about work, health, relationships, etc, you will notice that when you start doing this your eyes will drop in the socket as if you are looking down, this is because rather than gazing out towards the astral you have started to analyse yourself, analysis is bad and will foil your attempt
- Direct your eyes back up and try to keep them mostly central but don't worry if they move around focusing on and searching out different elements that appear in the darkness
- After a few minutes of uninterrupted gazing you will see coloured blobs and/or patterns appear in the darkness, keep looking at them allowing your eyes to focus on one as it appears and then another one as that one dissolves, keep gazing and searching though, you are not there yet
- Patterns do not always appear but sometimes you can be presented with a very organic and intelligent tesselated pattern which appears to shimmer and ripple, this is a very vivid apprehension of the membrane, feel free to enjoy it but you are going to go past that
- After the colour you will see flickers of what appears to be natural light, this light is different from the coloured blobs which are like semi luminous paint
- The light will appear in a variety of different ways, it might seem like as if through a skylight, or a reflection of strong light from a patch of river or a shining coin in the hot sun, the reason the light appears this way is because it is coming through gates in the membrane, on the other side of the gate is a lot more light
- The thing to do at this point is to keep searching and gazing as your facial muscles particularly the muscles around the eyes are acting as your mode of propulsion - as the light from the gates appears gaze if they disappear then search again
- After a few moments of this you will reach a gate and be able to look through it, this is a window on to the astral and you will, depending on where you are at, see some terrific scenery, architecture and creatures
- If you now focus on something in that astral, again using searching and gazing, you will move towards that thing
- If you are having a genuine astral experience then you will probably be rapidly intercepted by some kind of being (typically this seems to be insectoid, in my case the majority have been butterflies) that will ask you questions which you will fail to answer and result with you being kicked off the astral
- Whether you choose to see this plane as an actual place, or your higher mind and source of your imagination, or the realm of the future, or all three intermixed the fact remains that we are not really supposed to be there for a variety reasons - either we are imprisoned/exiled on Earth, or we are not responsible enough to be there, at least as conscious and egoic agents, because we might interfere dangerously possibly with the functions of our own brain
- Don't worry too much about personal dangers the whole realm is very heavily policed for whatever reason from the New Age Gnostic pantheon of ideas you select and you''ll just get kicked out not brain-fried entirely - the point being that you can keep having a crack at it and you will get better at the process of getting on the astral plane
- Staying on the astral requires the manipulation of various keys/letters to give to the beings and gain their favour, protection, but in order to deploy them you will need to be able to carve the astral into these forms, which is an exercise for later
- If your practice is limited to the deployment of shrines, sigils, spells etc for worldy effects which constitute probability surfing you are merely scratching the edge of the mysteries and you need to include more work like the above in your efforts
