I read Robert Monroe’s Journeys Out of the Body when I was in high school, and was fascinated. Monroe’s accounts sounded quite detailed, and the tests that were performed on him seemed well-documented, and I became very interested in astral projection.
Unfortunately (for Monroe and similar authors; fortunately for me) my fascination inspired me to do more studying. I eventually read the comments of the researchers who performed said tests, and their account of the results was quite different from Monroe’s. That began my transformation from almost-believer to lifelong skeptic.
Hallucinations certainly happen. There’s no controversy there.
And there are methods by which one may make oneself hallucinate. No controversy there, either.
The controversy begins when you reach the conclusion that your hallucination wasn’t all “in your head”, but rather, that it was, or included, a journey to a “higher” plane of existence - to wit, “the astral plane.”
You are then making an essentially religious claim, and in doing so you make yourself a target for skeptics, materialists, atheists, etc., who will point out that you have no way of proving that your hallucination was in fact an “astral journey” to “the astral plane.”
A very long time ago, when I was an undergrad, I was given a mimeographed instruction on astral projection. It gave instructions on how to do it. I followed the instructions. I was laying in bed in my bedroom. Then I observed myself laying on my bed, but the view was from a tree branch outside my window. I never did it again because it was scary, as I felt that I was not in control, and I immediately returned to my body.
But then again, it could have been the morning glory seeds I consumed. I gave them up also.
Were the morning glory seeds part of the instructions?
Wouldn’t surprise me if they were. Drug use for the purpose of astral travel is common enough. In the West, that’s been going on since at least the 1840’s.
English is not my first language, but let’s see here…
The first definition for “purpose” over at Thefreedictionary.com is “the object toward which one strives or for which something exists; an aim or a goal.”
In other words, when folks like Paschal Beverly Randolph and the like took drugs, they did so with the aim, or goal, of achieving an astral projection. That is what they were striving for. That was the purpose.
Whether any of them ever achieved anything more than drug-fueled hallucinations is a question of faith. You can’t prove it, and you can’t disprove it.
For the record here, I personally do NOT believe they achieved anything more than drug-fueled hallucinations, but I realize I can’t prove that anymore than I can prove, or disprove, the existence of God.
You could prove it – you could project yourself to see something that you couldn’t see from your body’s position. That is, have someone hold up a card or something across town, project over there, report what the card is. Do that with, say, 100% accuracy, and you’ve probably proven it (or the guy holding up the card is in on it – I’ll hold it for you).
The reason I say 100% is that I can get pretty close to 100% accuracy in identifying a playing card held up so I can see it clearly.
I’m talking about those who claimed to have accessed (and/or genuinely believed themselves to have accessed) another plane of existence, i.e. “the astral plane”, and there mingled with angels and spirits and elementals and whatnot. I mentioned Randolph - he’s one of them.
As for traveling in spirit within this world, you’re absolutely right, of course.