The Traveler's Guide to the Astral Plane: The Secret Realms Beyond the Body and How to Reach Them

This edition first published in 2015 by Weiser Books

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Copyright © Steve Richards 1983

Foreword copyright © Graham Hancock 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, llc. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Originally published in 1983 by Aquarian Press, part of the Thorsons Publishing Group, Wellingborough, England, ISBN: 0-85030-337-0

ISBN: 978-1-57863-580-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request

Cover design by Graham Lester

Interior design by Jane Hagaman

Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Foreword by Graham Hancock

ONE

Suspended Animation

TWO

Are the Experiences Real?

THREE

Swedenborg

FOUR

Astral Sex

FIVE

The Kama Loca

SIX

The World of Boundless Light

SEVEN

Descent into Hell

EIGHT

How to Get There

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

References

Index

FOREWORD BY GRAHAM HANCOCK

From my years as a journalist I've always distrusted armchair theorising and believed I have a responsibility to seek out direct personal experience of what I'm writing about. That was why I did six years of often difficult and dangerous scuba diving for Underworld. And it's also why, as part of my research for Supernatural I travelled to the Amazon to drink the visionary brew Ayahuasca with shamans there. As well as better equipping me to write Supernatural, my experiences in the Amazon changed my life and brought out a new side of my own creativity. I've continued working with Ayahuasca ever since and in 2006, during a series of sessions in Brazil, in a ceremonial space overlooked by images of a blue goddess, my visions gave me the basic characters, dilemmas and plot of the book that would become my first novel, Entangled, published in 2010. Entangled tells the story of two young women, one living 24,000 years ago in the Stone Age, and the other in modern Los Angeles, who are brought together by a supernatural being to do battle with a demon who travels through time.

Personal experiences combined with historical research has led me to believe that in altered states of consciousness we may experience something more than fantasy and delusion, that the realms we may travel in not only seem real to us at the time—they are in some important sense real, not only in themselves but also in relation to the way they interact with and change the everyday material world we all share.

So I was very pleased to be asked to read The Traveler's Guide to the Astral Plane, written by Steve Richards and first published in 1983. It's a valuable contribution to the literature and deserves to be brought back into print. The phrase ‘astral plane’ at first suggested to me that the author might have some back ground in Theosophy. Whether or not that is true, the author is not bound by any school of thought, but takes us on a very readable journey through lore relating to out of body experiences in many different traditions from different parts of the world. In fact if he sometimes seems light on analysis, I think it is out of respect for different cultures and a tactful declining to tryto squeeze them all into one philosophical system. This is a ghost train of a book, sometimes frightening, sometimes lurid but what it reveals is always entertaining. It sweeps us through a strange phenomenon in India, when holy men had themselves buried alive but in a state of self-induced suspended animation for long periods of time. In 1955 this had proliferated and threatened to get out of hand—there were publicised competitions between fakirs—the practise was banned by the Indian government.

Individuals like these holy men who have somehow ‘survived death’ and returned with tales of the other side have fascinated great minds since ancient times. Richards includes Plato's story of Er the Pamphylian, who journeyed through the afterlife and returned to talk about what he had seen there, as well as similar stories from Plutarch. He points to a remarkable agreement on what is discovered. For example, the accounts of the afterlife written by the eighteenth century magus Emmanuel Swedenborg is remarkably similar to the one contained in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, though Swedenborg could not possibly have read that book. In ‘astral traveling’ the ‘astral’ refers to a human being's ‘astral body’ sometimes otherwise called the spirit. Unlike our material body this astral body is said to survive death and then travel to other realms. Sadhus who have themselves buried alive may hope to travel to these other realms without actually or irreversibly dying, but there are, of course, less drastic methods. Richards touches on drugs, meditation and self-hypnosis. He reports that some gifted individuals may switch into this state spontaneously, in Swedenborg's case when he was simply ambling through city streets. Astral traveling, as described by Richards, may involve going to the realms of the dead, speaking to the dead, traveling back in time or into the future, or the spirit traveling out of the body to discover things that it could not possibly know if it had remained confined within the body.

Cases of information gained while astral traveling—‘checking out’—are fascinating because they provide clear evidence that astral traveling is not mere fantasy. St. Augustine wrote about the case of a man who had a vision of a certain philosopher explaining to him certain things he had previously declined to explain. When he later quizzed the philosopher, he said that he had dreamed about giving this explanation! The two had met on some other plane, one in a visionary state, the other while dreaming. There is also the case of a woman who worried about her husband who had set sail to Asia and failed to return. Worried he might be dead and anxious for news she visited a ‘pious solitary,’ a member of a Pennsylvanian Rosicrucian colony. This man went to lay on his bed in a trance, then came back and told her that her husband was at that very moment in a coffee house—which he named—in London and that he would soon be returning home. All this later checked out. Emmanuel Swedenborg was the greatest psychic of the eighteenth century, and there are very many well attested instances of giving detailed information that he could not possibly have known via the five senses. In one of these astonishing feats of clairaudience—he was able to tell the widow of the Dutch Envoy to Stockholm about a secret compartment in a cupboard where her husband kept a receipt she now needed to find in order to prove that a debt had been paid. He was even able to tell her precisely which plank she would have to remove to find the hiding place. Before reading this book I did not know that the greatest philosopher of that time, Immanuel Kant, researched and verified many of the claims made for Swedenborg in a book called Dreams of a Spirit Seer. There are some stories in this book to raise eyebrows and others which are hair-raising. Many modern books on after death or near death experiences focus on going into the light, and being met by loving relatives. Richards discusses the case of another author and researcher, Dr. Maurice Rawlins, who found that many of people he interviewed described something that sounded very like going to Hell. Richards also touches on the ghosts known in Japan as the ‘spirits of lewdness,’ and the initiate known only as E.O.L who brought from lodges in Germany to England certain breathing exercises supposed to arouse the unused sex forces of their female initiates for the purposes of practical occultism. He also relays Qabalistic teachings that entities experienced as the spirits of the dead may sometimes be ‘shells’ that is to say astral corpses shed by the spirit as it rises to higher realms. If all this sounds implausible, I can only say it sounds less so once you have your own experience of traveling into other realms.

– ONE –

Suspended Animation

In the mid-seventeenth century a crew of Indian workmen were digging a drainage ditch outside the city of Amritsar, when they suddenly cut into what appeared to be a tomb in the brittle shale. It contained the body of a sadhu, which showed no sign of deterioration, in spite of the fact that it had evidently been buried there for some considerable time. The workers disinterred the body and brought it to the surface, ‘and in so doing’ says John Keel, ‘unwittingly helped launch another one of India's most fascinating mysteries.’¹

As soon as the sunlight struck the sadhu's body, he began to stir. Within a few moments he was completely conscious. He claimed that he had been buried for 100 years, without food, water, or air, and without suffering any ill effects.

He was the first man to demonstrate the amazing phenomenon known as suspended animation. But he would not be the last. A century and a half later another sadhu would appear in the same part of India and make the same claim.

His name was Haridas, and he claimed that he could with proper preparation, be buried alive, remain underground for any length of time he chose, and be disinterred without experiencing any ill effects. He demonstrated this remarkable skill in the city of Jummu, and later repeated it at Amritsar, and Jesrota. One of his observers was a government minister named Raja Dhyan Singh who apparently brought him to the attention of the Maharajah of Lahore, the famous Rundjit Singh. The Maharajah naturally demanded a demonstration, and one was not slow in coming.

For several days prior to his burial, Haridas flushed his bowels in true yogic fashion, and engaged in other activities for bodily purification including bathing in hot water up to his armpits, and refusing every food except yogurt and milk. Doctors who examined him found that he had cut the tissues under his tongue, so that he could swing his tongue backwards and use it to plug his windpipe. On the day of his burial, he swallowed some thirty yards of linen and regurgitated the whole thing in the presence of several British officers. He then announced that he was ready.

The Maharajah, the French General Ventura, Captain Wade, the British political agent at Lodhiana and the principal Sikh chiefs assembled at a grave of stonework which had been constructed for the occasion. The fakir sealed his ears and nostrils with wax, cast off his clothing, threw back his tongue so that it sealed his gullet, and proceeded to go into a trance. He was then enveloped in a linen bag, which was sealed with the Maharajah's personal seal. The bag was put into a sealed and padlocked chest, and lowered into the grave.

A large quantity of earth was thrown over the chest, and barley was planted on top. Finally, a guard was detailed comprising four companies of soldiers, with four sentries ‘furnished and relieved every two hours, night and day, to guard the building from intrusion.’²

With all these precautions, the Maharajah still had doubts, and thrice ordered the fakir to be disinterred. But each time there was Haridas, just as he had been buried, his body cold and lifeless, but mysteriously preserved from decomposition.

At the end of ten months the fakir was disinterred for the last time. General Ventura and Captain Wade raised the chest from the grave, then broke its seals and unlocked its padlocks. ‘On opening it’ wrote the Captain, ‘the legs and arms of the body were shrivelled and stiff, the face full the head reclining on the shoulder like that of a corpse. I then called to the medical gentleman who was attending me to come down and inspect the body, which he did, but could discover no pulsation in the heart, the temples, or the arm. There was, however, a heat about the region of the brain, which no other part of the body exhibited.’³ The servants then went about the process of his resuscitation. This included bathing with hot water, friction, the removal of wax and