In a world of increasing density and claustrophobia, where mind is colonized by equal measures of boredom and atrocity, and space has been clogged with space-junk and fascist memes, why not project your subtle-body into the infinite luminous expanse of the astral plane? No airfare or phallic rocketry necessary. In three easy steps, travel to the space inside space—or is that the space beyond space…? Anyways, here is the technique.

Lie down and be as relaxed as possible without sleeping.
Eject consciousness by imagining a rope with which to climb out of your body through your belly button.
Fly around the astral plane.

Full disclosure: I have not figured out how to do this yet. I am not sure that I have the knack. And yet the amount of active attention that astral surfing gets on you-tube leads me to assume that many people do have the knack and that they perform astral projection regularly, just as you and I surf the internet. From my naïve position, where I’m attempting to suspend judgment and stop my eyes from rolling, I must ask: what exactly are these astral surfers doing? Clearly they are going somewhere, but to where are they going? Is this a symptom? And if so, what is it a symptom of?

The astral realm, as it is commonly referred to today, finds its historical origin in the frothy mixture of spiritualism and philosophy that came to a boil at the end of the 19th century under the name Theosophy. Madam Blavatsky, Russian philosopher, mystic and principle theosophist scribe, speculated that the astral realm, or the etheric realm—and probably not so different from Agnes Pelton’s Realm of Ether—is a realm made entirely of subtle energy, the prana or chi spoken of by eastern philosophy. Imagine a space made from pure cosmic libido and you get the idea… Blavatsky calls astral projection the forbidden art. The “astal body yearns for the universe.” The Astral realm is made of seven levels, the very bottom of which intersects with our material reality. Every object of material reality finds its double in the astral plane, per the old hermetic rule: as above so below. The theosophists were dreaming up the metaverse long before the digital era.

But why is any of this astral stuff not just mental stuff? Is a good question that might be asked. I guess that it is mental, but that this mental stuff is more real than material reality; it’s the shared powers of an imagination that has no limits.

When in the Ego and the Id (1923), Freud describes the ego as a bodily-ego, and that this is “not merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection of a surface” then we can began to see how the astral body may separate from the physical substrate. The projected surface of the body is phantasmatic; it’s a useful illusion that the mind has about the weird organism that it happens to be. An illustration of this can be found when persons with eating disorders are asked to draw the shape of their body, the representation is often distorted, much larger than their real body; this is the dreamed body; the body as it appears in the mind’s eye; the “residual self-image,” like they say in science fiction. If the lower abdomen is what prevents the human from assuming that they are a god, then the first step to creating an astral body is to dream of a body that does not need to shit—or eat for that matter.

The lucid dream, of course, is one of the main entry points to the astral realm. By some accounts, the dreamworld is the astral realm, or at least one of its lower levels. Dreams of falling and of flying, if made lucid, become portals into astral space.

It is no coincidence that just as Blavatsky and Rudolph Stiener are mapping out the astral plane, and Einstein is mapping the curve of spacetime, Freud is mapping a topography of the psyche. This marks a point in history where “space” is at once collapsing in on itself even while expanding into an infinite horizon. The varieties of space are conflated: astral space, depth psychology and outer space all prefigure one another; like, for example, later on in the century, when McKenna describes the mushroom as a psychedelic starship for embarking into the vastness of innerspace—which is also, at the same time, outerspace. If theosophy is claiming, in effect, that psyche has no limits, then we can find that same limitless quality projected into the impossible distances of the cosmos as described by 20th century astrophysicists.

But while many claim access to the astral realm without substances, substance induced astral projection is also an option; in particular belladonna, or deadly nightshade, mixed into what was commonly known in early modern Europe as the witch’s flying ointment, by which you may fly around the neighborhood/universe on a certain famous broom. (more on this topic coming soon…)

I find it curious that the astral plane, versions of which may be found in a great variety of ancient mythologies, from Egypt to Australia, has, far from being invalidated by our age of science, found its material realization in the world wide web.

In William Gibson’s excellent 1984 novel Neuromancer, the hero and drug-enthusiast Case “jacks-in to cyberspace” and flies around, investigating mysterious global techno-cabals, while encountering rogue AI in the guise of the sinister Wintermute. This book coined the term cyberspace while singlehandedly inaugurating the cyberpunk genre—a likewise weirdly prescient detail: the name of cybersecurity is ice. Here the psychedelic or astral exploration of innerspace is inverted into a pure technology that anticipates our own internet hellscape. What had at one time been a coherent dream of theosophy, the projection of spirit into the limitless realm of ether, has now been co-opted, or re-presented into its bizzarro or bastardized version of the ethernet, but that, crucially, is no less disembodied.

Virtual disembodiment, in the last analysis, is an expedient solution to the problem of having a body.