Trigger Warning:
Abuse isn't pretty, and mincing words and
glossing over the details is not helpful to me or anyone who has
suffered through abuse. While I don't plan on going into obscenely gory
detail, I also am not planning on tip-toeing around the truth. So, I'm
sure many parts of my story will be triggering to survivors. Please take
the necessary precautions when reading.
Traveling in the Astral
Basically speaking, astral travel is when the spirit of a person comes
out of the physical body and travels around to different places. The
places can be in different parts around the physical earth, or in
different places within in the spirit world. I've heard some people say
that it's impossible to astral travel more than a few miles or so from
your actual physical body, but this hasn't been my understanding. I'm
not saying what I have experienced is the norm, because I've spoken to
very few people about my experiences, and I don't know what "normal" is,
in regards to astral traveling. So rather than speak as to how this
type of travel is always done for every single person, I'll just speak
to what I have experienced. Maybe some can relate, and maybe for others,
they have had a completely different experience. Also, I have never
studied the subject thoroughly, so I can't speak to the ins and outs of
specifics. I am not an expert; I am simply sharing what has happened to
me.
It's important to understand that astral travel is satan's version of
what God has enabled people to do through His Spirit. Throughout the
Bible, it's recorded as happening many times, often referred to as being
"taken up in the Spirit." This takes place sometimes in the spirit
realm, and sometimes in the physical realm (as recorded with Philip in
the book of Acts). And at times, it's hard for the person to know
whether they are in the spirit or in the body, as Paul speaks of in 2
Corinthians 12.
But speaking to satan's version of traveling within the spirit world,
from my understanding, for the average person, astral traveling requires
a demon to literally possess the body of the person, keeping the body
alive while the spirit is gone for a relatively short period of time.
However, the process is a little different for multiples. Because of
various traumas, parts of our spirit/soul have splintered off into
different alters, so only
part of our spirit/soul travels, while
the rest stays inside the body, keeping our body alive while we are
gone. I still believe the entire process is demonic in nature, however;
the satanic rituals that caused, in part, my dissociation in the first
place made astral traveling an easy thing for me to learn. Moreover,
because of the satanic ritual abuse, there were some parts of myself
that
did have demonic ties; therefore, demons were already inhabiting those parts of myself within the spirit realm that is my system.
I am in no way endorsing astral travel with my account. I do not believe it is a good and natural thing to do. Unless
Creator God
is bringing you to different places within the spirit world, it's best
to stay put right inside your own body. There are demonic spirits that
you can encounter (likely will encounter), and without the blessing and
protection of the Spirit of God, you can get yourself into a lot of
trouble. You leave yourself open and unprotected, and it's dangerous.
As a little side note, it's equally important to understand that our
spirits have bodies. They aren't physical bodies, of course, but they
are bodies nonetheless. In my experience, they
look just like a
physical body, but in the astral, the spirit body of any one person can
change appearance and physical features, depending upon the wishes of
the person at the time. So if you meet a person in the astral, they may
or may not look the same were you to meet them in the physical realm.
One of the skills I was taught early on was how to astral travel. Until I
started the healing process, I never realized or even knew the name for
what I had been doing, but I quickly recognized it as something I have
done since I was very young.
Starting at around the age of seven or eight, two people— a man and a
woman — would come to me at night, in the spirit realm, and would take
me out of my body. It's one thing to have someone come in the middle of
the night and pull someone out of their body; it's a different matter
altogether to learn to do this for oneself. Different people learn how
to astral travel in different ways. I've even heard of people learning
to astral travel by reading books on the subject and following the
recommendations. For me, since I wasn't actively seeking this knowledge
but it was being forced upon me, the man and woman taught me to astral
travel on my own.
Whether or not the place they took me was strictly in the spirit realm
or if it was a physical place as well, I'm not sure. The location
is
a place that is found within my system, however; but it could be both a
physical place and a spiritual place at the same time, as the physical
earth and the spirit realm overlay one another, almost like they are
layered on top of one another.
Nevertheless, these two people would take me to a beautiful place on a
high mountain with a waterfall that cascaded down from higher above. The
water fell into a stream that gave the landscape a natural separation,
with a small clearing surrounded by forest on one side of the stream on
this mountain-side, and a small meadow on the other side. Here, I was
taught to astral travel by myself.
The woman and the man took me to the edge of the cliff on the meadow
side of the mountain and told me to jump off. At first, I was scared,
and I refused to do so.
The woman insisted, "Jump off. When you start falling, it'll help you learn if you lift your chin up and stretch your arms."
I don't believe this is actually necessary in astral traveling, but what she was trying to do is get my mind to accept that I
could
travel in that manner, and the physical act of stretching the arms and
lifting the chin helped to mentally reinforce the act of flying in the
astral. Sort of like a trick of the mind, I suppose you can say.
I still refused to jump off the cliff, so eventually she pushed me off. I
was terribly frightened and started screaming. She flew beside me as I
fell, telling me in my mind, "Pick up your chin! Stretch your arms!
Fly!"
Instead, I hit the ground at the bottom of the cliff, and woke up in bed with a startled jump, sweating and shaking.
Sometime later — whether it was the next night or several nights later, I
don't know — the same couple came and picked me up and brought me to
the edge of the cliff once again, and I was told to jump off. I stood
there on the edge of the cliff and peered down at the long drop, my
stomach feeling queasy. Again, I refused, scared.
"I'm going to push you off again if you don't jump."
The man murmured, "That may not be the best idea to do that again."
The two argued for a couple of minutes about how wise it would be were I
to continually hit the bottom. He didn't think I could do it, and he
was afraid the constant stress might actually cause a heart attack in
the physical.
I wonder now if this little argument was part of their plan to scare me
into following their instructions. Whatever the reason, I took it as a
personal challenge. Since I was going to be forced to do this thing
anyway, I was going to try and prove to the man that I
could do
it. I still couldn't muster the courage to jump off the cliff, however,
so the woman pushed me off the cliff again. Once more, my mind froze,
and I couldn't do anything but watch, helplessly flailing my arms and
legs as the ground rushed towards me. The woman came beside me and spoke
inside my head, "Lift your chin! Chin up! Stretch your arms!"
I clenched my eyes tightly and struggled to do what she was telling me
to do, doing my best to ignore my reasoning telling me I was about to
hit the ground and die. Finally, right before I hit the ground, my body
lifted, and I was flying! I was exhilarated and laughed as I soared
through the air, the woman and the man beside me.
__________
I recall very clearly early one morning, as I was coming back into my
bedroom after astral traveling for that night, seeing my mother enter
into my darkened room, wearing her gray work suit with dark maroon trim,
her purse hanging on her arm. I was floating above my body, near the
ceiling, and I froze with fear, certain I had just been caught and was
going to get in trouble.
"Wake up," she demanded, shaking me. "I'm about to leave for work. Wake up! I have some chores I want you to do today."
After a couple of fearful minutes, I realized she was only seeing my
body lying in bed; she couldn't see that part of me, floating above her
head. I giggled quietly to myself as I slipped back inside my body. When
I awoke a few seconds later, I had switched to my regular front alter. I
told my mother I had been floating outside of my body and had seen and
heard everything she had just been saying. She dismissed my revelation
as fanciful and a dream, and explained it away by telling me I must have
been between asleep and awake, and my eyes must have been open a little
bit, so I could see, but had the sensation of floating.
Well, if I would have been between asleep and awake, then it should have
been relatively easy for her to awaken me. As it was, she had sat on my
bed for a couple minutes, shaking my shoulders, tapping my cheeks with
the palm of her hand, and talking loudly to me. But even with all that
commotion, I didn't wake up until the rest of my spirit had entered my
body.
However, my mother's explanation, although not completely satisfactory,
was enough to make me realize my mother would never believe I had been
floating outside of my body. So I stopped thinking about what had
happened, and tried to rationalize away my "night-time excursions" as
simply dreams.
An Encounter
Not long after I began my training in the astral realm for travel, sex and other things, I had a very special encounter.
The man and woman brought me to the same mountain area, as usual, on the
forest side of the stream, but something new was there. It was a pool
of water, like a Jacuzzi, right there in the middle of the clearing, a
little way off from where the thick forest began. Judging from the
couple's reaction, this was unplanned and undesirable.
They pulled up short, obviously startled, and the woman pushed me back, behind her. "
What is this?" she hissed angrily, looking around the clearing for signs of other people.
The man walked up to the wood frame of the Jacuzzi and peered inside,
not daring to touch the Water that was there. He sniffed instead, then
grimaced, looking around. "We need to find who did this," he said to the
woman. He started off in the direction of the forest.
She stopped him with a word. "Wait. What about the kid?"
He paused and turned back. "What about her? Keep her here."
The women wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Really? That's not smart."
The man sighed irritably, then pulled out of the air a color book with
one hand, and a small box of crayons with the other. He stalked over to
me and squatted down, handing me the color book and crayons. "Here. Play
with this. And stay here. Don't go anywhere, do you understand?"
I took the gifts and nodded quietly.
The woman squatted beside me, too, and hissed fiercely, "I mean it. Don't go anywhere. Stay right here on this spot and
don't move." She pushed my shoulders down, forcing me to sit on the ground, and I sat there, looking up at her.
"Yes, ma'am," I nodded.
She sighed, rolled her eyes, and got up. The two of them quickly walked away into the forest, whispering to each other.
I sat there for a few minutes, coloring. Then I got tired of sitting, so
I stretched out on the grass and tried to color. When one of my crayons
broke, I sat back up and wrinkled my nose. "Stupid crayons." I hated
broken crayons.
I looked around the clearing, then back to where the couple had
disappeared into the forest. I eyed the pool of Water and thought about
going to look at it, but I was too scared to move. I looked back at my
color book, and then something shiny caught my eye on the ground nearby.
I walked over to investigate, finding a small penny that had reflected
some light from somewhere. I looked back up, towards the Jacuzzi, and
standing there was a bright Man, dressed in a long white robe. He smiled
at me and waved His hand at me to come closer.
I looked down at my penny then back at him. "I'm not supposed to move."
He laughed. "That's okay, you can come here."
I thought about it for a moment, wanting to go over because I was
curious, but I shook my head. "I'm not supposed to talk to strangers."
"It's okay. I'm not a stranger." He smiled brightly again. "I've known you all your life. Come take a swim with me in the pool."
I looked back at my color book, then dropped the penny and ran to Him, smiling. "Okay!" A dip in the pool sounded fun.
He picked me up and lifted me inside the Jacuzzi. I started to feel a
little nervous at that point, thinking He was probably going to want to
have sex with me, and I didn't like doing that, even in the astral
realm. But He just sat there beside me, His arm around me, and I held
tightly to Him, feeling comforted and safe and happy and whole.
He whispered to me, "One day you'll come back here, and you will
remember what happened here and now with Me. And you will know I
provided this for you, before you even knew you would have need of it.
Because that is how much I love you."
I looked up at Him, into His eyes, and nodded, not understanding what He
was talking about. Then we heard the noisy approach of the couple,
arguing as they made their way back through the forest to the clearing.
(They always seemed to argue a lot. It seems there's never much unity in
satan's hierarchy, with everyone always jostling for position and their
own selfish gain. The Body of Christ would do well to learn from that,
and learn to be unified within the Kingdom of God, a unity that comes
only by being found in Christ Yeshua.)
The Man lifted me out of the pool and set me on the ground. "Where are You going?" I asked, wanting to stay with Him.
He smiled at me. "I'm not going anywhere. I'll never leave you. I'm here
with you always." Then He disappeared just as the couple was coming
through the clearing.
I frowned, not understanding. He said He would never leave me, and then
He just disappeared! It didn't make sense to me. I turned as the woman
called my name.
"What are you doing?" she asked, stalking up to me and grabbing my arm.
I looked blankly at my arm. It was dry, as if I had never been in the
Water at all. "Well," I said the first thing that came to mind, "my
color broke. I can't use a broken color. Then I saw a shiny penny on the
ground, so I picked it up. But I think I lost it."
"When I tell you to stay put and not move, that means stay put and not move! Do you understand me?"
I didn't, but I nodded. "Yes. I'm sorry."
The woman took one hand, the man took the other, and we walked towards
the woods. I looked over my shoulder, and there the Shining Man was,
smiling at me. I smiled back.
And that was how it came about that I met Yeshua in the clearing of the mountains.
Olly Barnes
mikewick77
