|
|
1. Divine Plane |
|
|
|
|
|
2. Monadic Plane |
|
|
|
|
|
3. Nirvanic Plane |
|
|
|
|
|
4. Buddhic Plane |
|
|
|
|
|
| 5.1 |
| 5.2 |
| 5.3 |
| 5.4 causal "plane" |
| 5.5 |
| 5.6 |
5.7
5. Mental Plane |
|
| |
CLASSROOMS: On the mental plane there are many instructional groups to join in. These make for lots of great classroom dreams, workshops and seminars. A good class is one in which I show up prepared with the homework. Sometimes I even help teach. Topics can be surreal. One time a classmate was explaining to me the coefficient of levitation. That year we took a lot of classes on the construction of UFOs. More recently, I gave a well-received paper in a psych class, and other students acted out what happens to people who die in hospitals, to show what kind of help they require from their guides into the afterlife.
|
|
GETTING THE BENDS: What happens if you rise too high too fast in the planes of existence? Swedenborg wrote that after death, angels lift us each up to the very top of celestial heights. God does not cast sinners out of heaven, they cast out themselves, because the pressure of such intense purity is actually painful to them. I have experienced some of this humbling phenomenon in a dream. I was rising higher and higher off the Earth, up into space and beyond. I came to a level where above me were the angels, but I could go no further in my present ego persona. I felt like a diver getting the bends, I would burst somehow from the inside. So I dropped back down to Earth, and woke up in my physical body.
|
|
|
SOUL VIEWS: I have gone through several series of dreams about big vehicles with many windows and people inside. I often interact with the crew, and we travel together to new and fantastic places. Our vehicles include trains, spaceships, and UFOs. But I think the most accurate view was once when my classmates and I were building a landing pad for UFOs. My contribution was to melt down some nails (of my martyhood, I think was the symbolism). Suddenly, I was floating in space before a vast wheel of luminescent pearly hues and many huge smiling faces. It was inviting and playful, but also vastly alien. I could only stand it a moment before transporting back. This was I believe the vehicle of the soul, comprised of many lifetimes and views, travelling through space to distant stars (other consciousnesses).
|
|
 RELIGIOUS VISIONS: When first entering the mental plane, the student will have experiences of great visits by religious figures from their cultural traditions. I once slipped right back into an intense dream state after waking in the morning. I saw from the head of Mary Magdalene, who carried me into the cave where the dead Jesus lay. Inside we were delighted to find Jesus being resurrected by friendly aliens. It was beyond amazing. Jesus looked at us, and blue search lights of love shined from his eyes. I was filled with a blinding light that woke me up, then I was high for days and weeks after. My life had changed. For a time, adhering to my Christian upbringing, I theorized that different segments of Jesus’ life were like tourist destinations for astral travelers. One could be channeled to witness the event which would heal a part of your life. A friend of mine had a great vision of Jesus as a boy, so it seemed a good theory. Years later, I decided that what happened was an initiation into the mental plane, receiving my own mental body, being lifted to me by extraterrestrial teachers. I also had a dream about a year before of meeting Kali in a cave, surrounded by her devotees. She was a powerful goddess who showed me the benevolence and wisdom for which she can be known if you’re ready. So I conclude that past lives as well as present can create the mythic filters on direct spiritual experience.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
| 6.1 |
| 6.2 |
| 6.3 |
| 6.4 heaven/hell |
| 6.5 |
| 6.6 |
6.7
6. Astral Plane |
|
ASTRAL DENIZENS: There are many awesome and wonderful sentient lifeforms to be met on the astral plane. Artist and author Monica Szu-Whitney draws some she’s met and interviewed, finding they each have a function in the universal order.  One of Emmanuel Swedenborg’s more obscure works is a travelogue worthy of Gulliver. Variously translated as “Other Earths in the Heavens” or “Earths in the Universe” (he wrote in Latin), Swedenborg flies somehow (oh we know how by now, don’t we) to other planets where he meets and talks with curious natives of strange looks and abilities, to discover how much they know of their place in God’s plan. Under the influence of such ideas, I had this vivid dream of an underwater being I call Goldfish Man, who walked majestically past. I think the fertile mysterious dark ocean is a good perception of the astral plane.
 In another dream, I met a dwarf who ran a spiritual retreat and rescue center on a tropical island. I could not bear to go outside, which was beautiful and lush, but full of bizarre plants and trees that could move and walk about on their own. That would be another perception of the living astral matter which forms and flows around us. Then there was the time I awoke from a dream in which I had to rescue a little girl from a Halloween party, where only we knew that the monsters were real. It was definitely an archetypal nightmarish astral situation. After I awoke, I closed my eyes and had a brief vision of this six-armed blue entity with eyes up the center, who I felt had protected me. This image soon had a neat synchronicity. I was taking an art workshop with Alex Grey at Omega, and later that day Alex showed me a drawing he’d been working on. It was a similar being with eyes going up the middle, something he’d seen in meditation. So maybe that’s the meaning of the multiple eyes and arms, that this higher Shiva-like helper can see and reach to assist many beings at many levels, especially when approaching scarier energies. Like visceral Tibetan and Hindu art, Alex Grey’s illustrations can be a bit too intense for some people including me at times. But Alex is unquestionably a great spiritual supporter who has personally encouraged the Mystical Art and Talent shows, so he would know a protector like the one I saw.
|
VIKING ANGEL: When my father was dying from cancer, I had some particularly vivid dreams. In one, I felt to be out of body, and I floated down to a lake. A red haired angel glided across the water, shining, from a little Viking boat she had brought with her from the other side. In my dream I felt the ecstasy of the afterlife and the beautiful beings who live there. I held out my arms for her to take me. She shook her head sadly and pointed behind me up the hill, then I woke up. That week I went to visit my dad in the hospital, which was up the hill from a lake just like in the dream. I was relieved when he was discharged home, I thought then the dream couldn’t become a signal that my dad (who is descended from Vikings) would soon be taken across the water (the astral boundary). Alas, he was eventually returned to the hospital, to a room that looked directly down to the lake. I told him the dream and to look for the angel, and he passed a day or so later.
|
|
|
KEEP ON TRUCKIN’: Many dreams are for working |
|
|
|
|
| 7.1 |
| 7.2 |
| 7.3 |
| 7.4 etheric "plane" |
| 7.5 gas |
| 7.6 liquid |
7.7 solid
7. Physical Plane |
|
TEACHERS IN MY ROOM: For a while after my Jesus dream (in which I say now I received my mental body) I would wake up out-of-body in my room and be met by spirit teachers. This probably took place in the etheric body, which stays close to the physical and can see higher visitors. One kind woman had an orange helmet and a big blue spacesuit. When I asked her why the suit, she said slowly and deliberately so I would remember the puzzle “I R Q N Y”. Since dreams can pack multiple meanings, I was able to find many. Best I can figure, it spells “irony” with q in the middle for the question. Kurt Leland explained to me, that higher beings often appear in capes, spacesuits, and other encircling garbs, ironically not protect themselves, but to protect us from their overwhelming presence.
|
|
|
|
through our personal issues, like our peeves and emotional reactions. I have had so many dreams set in different areas of my hometown, that I have a whole map of childhood locations and meanings. The hometown theme shows the familiarity and personal nature of the dream, it hits close to home. I think these are primarily astral experiences, not particularly lucid and set in my personal dreaming zone. This region is centered on my body, which is seen as my childhood house in the dream town, to which I usually return just before the dream ends. Some people have lots of flying dreams, but I’m kind of scared of heights. So when things go well, I stick out a foot and start gliding, just like those keep on truckin’ stickers from the seventies, which is when I was a teenager. I have a blast.
|
|
|
 |
GOD IS EVERYWHERE: One time while my dad was dying, I was visiting my childhood home and sleeping upstairs from him. I woke up and looked around in bed, and to my amazement the room was filled with the most amazing golden white light everywhere. Everything shined with this light, and I just knew with every fiber of my being that this light would always be there to guide and provide me. For the first time in my life, I felt complete and utter contentment – I would know no want for eternity. Thrilled, I turned over to write my observations in my journal. I got down the experience, and turned to look at the light again, but instead I woke up. It was a double awakening! I had seen God indeed, but from my etheric body, which can serve as a midpoint for waking up twice. It’s a kind of transfer station, to download particularly vivid nonphysical experiences. So I did just what I could do in my physical body. I rolled over, opened the empty page in my journal, and wrote it all down again. The resonances were not lost on me, of my physical self suffering below my etheric self, and my father suffering one floor down. Dad was a good guy, and at some level he's helped me more than he knew. Although I think he knows by now, because the few times that I've seen him in dreams since he passed, he talked about learning so much and helping construct a Masonic temple in the afterlife. These days I see my aging self in dreams and think I'm seeing my dad - who strongly resembled me - but the situations are more clearly my own issues now. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
