What Is Astral Projection?
In esoteric tradition, astral projection (also called astral travel, soul travel or soul journeying) means deliberately leaving the physical body in a second, subtle body and moving through the world or through other planes of existence. This travelling vehicle is usually called the astral body or the body of light. Where it goes is often called the astral plane, a realm said to lie between the physical world and higher spiritual ones.
The idea is closely tied to the out-of-body experience, or OBE: the sensation of perceiving the world from a point outside one’s own body. The difference is mostly about intent and interpretation. An OBE is a feeling that can arrive on its own, during sleep, illness, stress or meditation. Astral projection is an OBE someone sets out to have, together with the belief that something real, a soul or a consciousness, actually leaves.
So the question “what is astral projection” really has three answers at once:
- The esoteric answer: a genuine journey of the soul or consciousness outside the body.
- The experiential answer: a vivid, structured sensation of separation that many people report, whatever its cause.
- The scientific answer: an experience the brain produces, with no evidence that anything leaves the body.
Many accounts add one detail: a thin, shining “silver cord” that is said to connect the travelling body to the sleeping one and keep the traveller tethered. The image is old, and its claimed biblical root is disputed, as the section on religion explains.
Soul Flight Before the Name: Astral Travel Across Cultures
Long before anyone asked what is astral projection in those words, cultures around the world described souls that could leave a living body. The details vary widely, and treating them all as one practice would flatten them. Still, the shared theme is hard to miss. More traditions like these are collected in the journal’s folklore and legends section.
Ancient Egypt
Egyptian religious teaching described the ba, one part of a person, as able to hover outside the physical body through the ka, often understood as a kind of subtle body. Illustrations based on the Book of the Dead show the ba hovering over a body. Later writers on astral travel have often pointed to these images as an early picture of the soul moving free.
India
Hindu scriptures describe subtle bodies such as the linga sharira, and the Yoga Vasistha takes up similar ideas. In the epic Mahabharata, the teacher Drona is said to leave his physical body to find out whether his son is still alive. Yogic tradition counts this kind of travel among the siddhis, extraordinary powers said to come from long, disciplined practice.
The idea carried into the twentieth century. In Autobiography of a Yogi (1946), Paramahansa Yogananda describes experiences the author took as evidence of subtle bodies, including a meeting with their deceased teacher, Sri Yukteswar, who explains the astral and causal worlds. The spiritual teacher Meher Baba described conscious astral journeys as a stage on the spiritual path, and held that journeys made deliberately matter more than ones that happen without awareness.
China and Japan
Taoist internal alchemy describes building an energy body through breathing meditation. The Secret of the Golden Flower, a Chinese handbook on alchemy and meditation, contains an illustration titled “The Separation of the Spirit Body.” Chinese stories tell of Taoist immortals seen in two places at once: one body snoring on the floor while an identical figure sings in the next room, until the two merge back into one.
Japanese folklore has the ikiryō, the spirit of a living person that leaves the body. The legend says a strong enough grudge can send part of someone’s soul out to haunt and curse the person they resent. The soul of someone gravely ill or comatose may also wander, but those ikiryō are not considered harmful. The artist Toriyama Sekien illustrated the figure, and it belongs to the same world of stories explored in Japanese urban legends.
The Arctic and the Amazon
In some Inuit groups, the angakkuq, a person with special abilities, was said to travel to distant mythological places and bring back what the community needed, such as ways to end bad hunting luck or heal the sick. Among the Waiwai of the Amazon, the shaman, or yaskomo, is believed to make soul flights: up to the sky to ask the Moon for a newborn’s name, to the peccaries’ mountain to ask their father for plentiful game, or down into rivers to seek help from the beings there. These are living traditions tied to particular roles and responsibilities within a community. They are not techniques for outsiders to borrow.
How Theosophy Gave Astral Projection Its Name
“Astral” means “of the stars,” and the idea behind the word is ancient. In Neoplatonism, in Hermeticism (the mystical philosophy linked to the writings of Hermes Trismegistus) and later in Rosicrucian thought, the astral body was a body of light that linked the rational soul to the physical body. The astral plane was a world of light between heaven and earth, made of the spheres of the planets and stars and populated by angels, demons and spirits. The philosopher Plotinus saw each person as a small world that mirrors the great one.
In the nineteenth century, the French occultist Eliphas Levi made “the astral” central to his work. The Theosophists, a spiritual movement that blended Western occultism with Eastern religious ideas, took up the concept, and they coined and spread the phrase “astral projection.” Much of the modern answer to what is astral projection comes from this period.
Even then, the term split two ways:
- For the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and some Theosophists, it kept its older meaning: journeys to heavens, hells, astrological spheres and other non-physical landscapes.
- Elsewhere, it came to mean travelling around the ordinary physical world without the body.
Later writers tried to keep the two apart. Some Theosophists used “etheric travel” for the second kind. Max Heindel described an etheric double that connects the astral and physical realms, which implies that someone floating around their own bedroom is not in the astral realm at all. The writer Robert Monroe called the physical-world version “Locale I,” or the “Here-Now,” and the author Robert Bruce called it the “Real Time Zone.”
| Term | Where the traveller is said to go | Typical description |
|---|---|---|
| Etheric travel / Locale I / Real Time Zone | The ordinary physical world | Seeing real rooms, people and places from outside the body |
| Astral projection (older sense) | Non-physical planes and spheres | Landscapes with no physical counterpart, beautiful, horrific or neutral, sometimes with a changed sense of time |
| Higher planes | Heavens, after-death realms, abstract states | Meetings with spiritual beings; some Theosophists spoke of the Akashic records, a supposed archive of all knowledge |
Some practitioners describe the astral world as overlapping with dreams, and claim to see other dreamers acting out their dreams with no awareness of anything around them. Traditions divide the astral plane into different levels and disagree about how those levels fit together.
What People Who Report It Describe
For people who report it, the question of what is astral projection has a physical answer: it begins with sensations. Accounts vary, but certain features come up again and again in practitioner books and personal reports. According to those accounts, an episode might include:
- Buzzing, vibration or a rushing sound as the body drifts toward sleep while the mind stays alert.
- A heavy, pinned feeling or an inability to move.
- Floating, rolling or being pulled free, often from the head or chest.
- Looking down at one’s own body, sometimes with the silver cord trailing back to it.
- Moving by thought or passing through walls, then snapping back at a noise or a flash of fear.
Some practitioners connect the familiar jolt of falling just as sleep begins with projection or with a sudden return to the body.
How practitioners say they attempt it
Guides to astral projection, from older occult manuals to modern books, mostly follow a similar pattern. As practitioners describe it, the method usually runs:
- Relax deeply. Lie still and comfortable, often on the back, and let the body go loose.
- Stay at the edge of sleep. Hold awareness in the hypnagogic state, the transition between waking and sleep that is often full of images and sounds.
- Imagine separating. Picture rising, rolling out or climbing out of the body.
- Use the early morning. Many guides suggest trying after waking briefly, when sleep is lighter.
- Write it down. Record what happened right away, before memory smooths it over.
A worked example: one night, three readings
Take a hypothetical night. Someone wakes before dawn, cannot move, hears a roar, feels themselves float upward and sees the room from above. A shadowy shape seems to stand by the door. Then they jolt awake in bed.
That same night produces three answers to what is astral projection. An esoteric practitioner would say the astral body separated and met a non-physical being. A sleep researcher would recognise sleep paralysis (waking while the body is still in the muscle paralysis of dreaming sleep) mixed with hypnagogic imagery. A careful agnostic would note that the experience is real, the interpretation is the open question, and nothing in the account can be checked against the outside world.
Mistakes people make
- Treating vividness as proof. How convincing an experience feels does not show where it came from.
- Not testing claims. A distant place “seen” during projection only means something if someone checks details that could not have been known in advance.
- Calling every frightening episode an attack. Shadowy figures are a well-known feature of sleep paralysis.
- Losing sleep chasing it. Constant attempts can wreck rest. If episodes are frequent or distressing, that is something to raise with a doctor.
What Is Astral Projection According to Science?
Science’s answer to what is astral projection is blunt. There is no scientific evidence that consciousness exists apart from normal brain activity, or that a person can leave the body and observe the physical world. For that reason, astral projection as a real event in the world is generally classed as pseudoscience.
The experience is another matter. Out-of-body sensations really happen, and researchers have documented them arising under specific conditions:
- Brain stimulation: some patients undergoing brain stimulation treatments have reported experiences that resemble astral projection.
- Drugs: ketamine, PCP and DMT (a powerful psychedelic compound) can produce similar perceptions.
- Hypnosis: similar experiences have been reported under hypnosis and self-hypnosis.
- Sleep transitions: sleep paralysis, hypnagogia and lucid dreams (dreams in which the sleeper knows they are dreaming) share many features with projection accounts.
Parapsychologists, researchers who study claimed psychic abilities, have tried to test the idea directly by asking subjects to project to a distant room and describe what was there. Those experiments have not produced clear results. The psychologist Donovan Rawcliffe argued that astral projection could be explained by delusion and hallucination. The search for controlled proof invites comparison with the history of remote viewing, another attempt to test whether the mind can perceive distant places.
Skeptics point out that a brain able to build a full dream world every night can easily build a convincing view from the ceiling. The strongest case for something stranger rests on the intensity and consistency of the reports across eras and cultures, and on occasional stories of travellers seeing things later confirmed. Those stories have not held up under controlled conditions.
Here is how the answer to what is astral projection breaks down by layer:
| Documented | Claimed | Still open |
|---|---|---|
| People across many cultures report out-of-body sensations | A soul or astral body actually leaves the physical body | Why the experience is so consistent across eras and traditions |
| Brain stimulation, certain drugs and hypnosis can produce similar experiences | Travellers can observe distant real places | How the brain builds the sense of being located in a body |
| The term was coined and spread by nineteenth-century Theosophists | An astral plane with levels, beings and archives exists | How consciousness relates to the brain at all |
| Laboratory tests of projection have not produced clear results | A silver cord tethers the traveller to the body | Whether better experiments would ever change the picture |
Is Astral Projection Dangerous, Demonic or a Sin?
Religious answers to what is astral projection vary widely, and no single verdict applies across faiths. In some yogic and Taoist traditions, travel outside the body is a recognised sign of spiritual progress. In others, deliberately trying it is seen as occult practice to be avoided. Because astral projection grew up alongside Western occult orders such as the Golden Dawn, some people class it with witchcraft. Many modern practitioners see it as meditation or a dream practice and nothing more.
The Bible and the silver cord
Writers on astral travel, including Hereward Carrington and Sylvan Muldoon, describe a psychic silver cord that attaches the subtle body to the physical one. In discussions of that idea, Ecclesiastes 12:6 is often cited: “before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken.” Not everyone accepts the connection. Rabbi Nosson Scherman argued that the passage is a metaphor that compares the body to a machine, with the silver cord most likely meaning the spine. Others point to 2 Corinthians 12:2, where Paul writes of a man “caught up to the third heaven,” unsure “whether it was in the body or out of the body.” The scholar James Hankins has read this as a reference to astral planes. The passage itself leaves the question unanswered, since Paul says plainly that he does not know.
The question of danger
Occult lore is full of warnings: a cord that snaps, a traveller who cannot get back, a body taken over by something else while its owner is away. There is no evidence for any of these. The real risks are more ordinary. Frightening night-time episodes can be deeply distressing, and chasing the experience can cost sleep. Anyone whose experiences are frequent, frightening or disrupting daily life should talk to a doctor, not rely on spiritual techniques.
What Remains Unexplained About Astral Projection
None of this settles what astral projection is at the deepest level, because the deepest level is the unsolved question of consciousness itself. Science can show that the brain can produce a sense of leaving the body. Science cannot yet fully explain how the brain produces a sense of being anyone, anywhere.
A few things stay genuinely open:
- Why people with no contact with one another, from Arctic communities to Theosophist drawing rooms, describe the soul leaving the body in such similar terms.
- Why spontaneous out-of-body experiences so often feel more real than dreams, and why they leave some people permanently changed in how they see death and the self.
- Whether the occasional reports of confirmed observations reflect coincidence, memory shaping the story afterwards, or something not yet understood. The record so far points to the first two, but no one has run the decisive experiment.
What can be said plainly is this: the answer to “what is astral projection?” depends on which layer is being discussed. The experience is real and widely reported. The tradition behind it is ancient and spans many cultures. The claim that anything actually travels remains unproven. Readers drawn to that borderland will find more in the journal’s sections on consciousness, dreams and the mind and paranormal accounts. For long-form conversations about the unexplained, the Troubled Minds Vault collects the radio show’s back catalog.
Questions and answers
Do you have to lie on your back to astral project?
No tradition sets a fixed rule. Practitioner guides usually recommend lying comfortably and still, often on the back, because their methods depend on deep relaxation at the edge of sleep. The position is a matter of comfort and habit, not a requirement. Many reported out-of-body experiences happen on their own, with no chosen posture and no intention to leave the body at all.
Is astral projection real?
The experience is real in the sense that many people report vivid sensations of leaving their bodies, and brain stimulation, certain drugs and hypnosis can produce similar perceptions. The claim that something actually leaves the body is another matter. There is no scientific evidence that consciousness works apart from normal brain activity, and laboratory tests of projection to distant rooms have not produced clear results.
What is the purpose of the astral plane?
In Western esoteric thought, the astral plane is an intermediate world of light between the physical world and the higher spiritual realms. It was believed to link soul and body, and to be home to spirits, angels and demons. Theosophists and later practitioners describe it as a place for spiritual learning, meeting other beings, or reaching hidden knowledge such as the Akashic records. These are beliefs, not established facts.
Is astral projection dangerous?
Occult lore warns of severed silver cords, failing to return, or being possessed, but there is no evidence for any of these. The real risk is distress. Frightening episodes, often linked to sleep paralysis, can feel overwhelming, and chasing the experience can cost sleep. Anyone whose episodes are frequent, distressing or disrupting daily life should talk to a doctor rather than rely on spiritual techniques.
Is astral projection in the Bible?
The Bible never mentions astral projection by name. Ecclesiastes 12:6 and its 'silver cord' is often cited, as is 2 Corinthians 12:2, where Paul describes a man caught up to the third heaven, 'whether in the body or out of the body.' Those readings are contested. Rabbi Nosson Scherman, for example, read the silver cord as a metaphor, likely for the spine.
What is the difference between astral projection and an out-of-body experience?
An out-of-body experience, or OBE, is the sensation of seeing the world from somewhere outside your own body. It can happen spontaneously during sleep, illness or stress. Astral projection is the esoteric reading of that sensation: a deliberate journey in which the soul or consciousness really leaves and travels. The experience can be the same. What differs is the intent behind it and the claim about what is happening.
Stay curious. Keep the question open.
Follow the evidence wherever it leads.
