Astral Projection: The Soul's Ancient Journey Beyond the Body
William Blake, "The Soul Hovering over the Body, Reluctantly Parting with Life," engraving for Robert Blair's The Grave, 1808 (Metropolitan Museum of Art) You wake in the middle of the night feeling strangely weightless. Something in you rises, and for a moment you see your own body lying below on the bed -- perfectly still, breathing quietly. You are not dreaming. You are somewhere else, or rather you are you , unbound. This is the experience that thousands of people have reported across every culture and every century: the sensation of leaving the physical body and traveling as a luminous, autonomous presence through space -- sometimes through walls, sometimes to distant places, sometimes to realms that feel more real than ordinary waking life. Astral projection -- also called out-of-body experience (OBE), soul travel, or bilocation -- is one of the oldest and most consistent phenomena in human spiritual history. From the temple priests of ancient Egypt to the sh...