Here’s the thing about being a healer: we have a different geometry of reality than many people do. It’s partly a siddhi thing, as described by Patanjali in his Yoga Sutras; if you start meditating regularly, trying to “cease the fluctuations of the mind,” you automatically begin to experience paradigm-busting phenomena. Sooner or later, you just do. It just happens. Some meditators see stuff, blobs of light, or colorful radiance around folks, or forms of energy-consciousness that used to be living people–or not. Meditators who aren’t particularly visual hear things, or sense things, or simply have wordless understandings that things are other than they seem.
Patanjali cautions against the siddhis, but I think they’re useful. What we experience for ourselves has a deeper impact than what we take on faith. But Patanjali has a a point, and caution is imperative. If you’re not grounded, extraordinary perception can quickly morph into delusion. Think Heaven’s Gate and Jim Jones and all those prophets who wafted astray, and sadly carried others with them.
Over the last several months I’ve become acquainted with noted UFOlogist Budd Hopkins, who is a celebrated artist as well as a researcher into something that a lot of people want to put down to fantasy and mass hysteria, swamp gas and reflection, urban myth and attention-seeking. One or two of his paintings hang in the MOMA. His UFO books are carefully, thoughtfully written and researched. He believes extraterrestrials are here, observing and abducting and experimenting. I’ve told him that I know they’re here in the astral plane, which is as real as the physical plane. But I haven’t verified for myself that ET’s are here in 3-d flesh, if flesh is what they have.
But the astral plane is a reality. Specifically, it’s a resonance of love and spirit, of relationship and dreams. And it’s a wide spectrum resonance. It drops into demonic curses and rises up into the blissful, transcendent songs of angels. It isn’t as dense and concrete as physical reality, but it affects people in the physical plane. It affects bodies and minds and emotions. Medical journals have published studies about the efficacy of prayer, the very stuff of astral beingness, on long distance subjects. The astral plane is palpable. It’s perceptible.
Which brings up another kind of reality I’ve experienced a lot of recently: teenage reality. It’s its own universe of perception and axiom, based on teenagers’ absolute certainty of their own invulnerability, infallible wisdom, and rectitude. They know everything. Based on 13 or 17 years on the planet, and what their friends tell them is so. Negotiating this fanaticism is treacherous, heart-aching, often simply impossible. Reason, decades of experience, logic, concern, love, etc. don’t make a dent in the monolithic dogmatism. A friend of mine said she’d read that the unhappiest people are those with teenage children. It’s at this point that I’m glad that the astral plane is real. The prayers that I constantly utter for my daughters have a chance of reaching them, of helping and protecting them.