Astral Origins: Dreams, Spirits & the Veil Between Realities

What is the Astral Realm?

A dream that keeps its timeline. A sudden knowing you can’t justify. A room that feels occupied even when it’s empty. I’m digging into the astral realm through a simple metaphor that’s guided me for years: veils, overlapping layers of reality that we tune into through shifts in consciousness. When we’re stressed and reactive, perception gets dense. When we soften, create, meditate, or drop into presence, the veil can lift just enough to reveal what we couldn’t register before. 

From there, I get practical about astral senses. Not everyone “sees” spirits or symbols, and that doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. You might hear, feel, or simply know. We talk about common doorways like dreaming, lucid dreaming, trance, shamanic journeying, intuition, and even imagination as an interface. I also share why I separate remote viewing, astral projection, and astral travel, and how those distinctions change the way I prepare and interpret what happens. 

We widen the lens with respectful comparisons across human history, from Indigenous vision traditions and trance practices to the modern Western occult revival that popularized the term astral plane. I touch on scientific research into altered states of consciousness, then bring it back to discernment and spiritual protection. The astral can include guides, ancestors, and power animals, but also thought forms, tricksters, and energies that don’t deserve automatic authority. Grounding, shielding, clear intention, and a clean return matter. 

If you’re curious about the paranormal and you want language for experiences you’ve never had a safe place to describe, press play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who loves dream work and intuition, and leave a review with the strangest “too real” moment you’ve had.

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🎼Music Credit 🎶 -

Intro: Us and the Rainbow by Babe Rainbow

Outro: The Calling by Kalya Scintilla 

Transcript

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Strange Moments That Feel Too Real

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Have you ever had a dream that didn't feel like a dream? Have you ever been sitting somewhere and suddenly felt like you weren't entirely there anymore? Maybe you've seen something out of the corner of your eye. Maybe. You felt somebody standing in the room when no one was there. Maybe you've known something you couldn't possibly know and you couldn't possibly explain how you knew it. Maybe you watched a little kid completely zoned out, staring at something you can't see, and wondered, what are you looking at? What if reality isn't just the layer we're looking at right now? What if there are other layers sitting right on top of this one? Today we're talking about the astral realm. I'm Rainbow Raja, alternative medicine practitioner, shamanic minister, and wellness educator. Throughout Realms of Reality this season, we've been exploring different layers through which human beings experience ourselves, consciousness, and the world around us. And this month, we're exploring the astral realm. Last week, we dove into tarot, different ways you can receive and interpret information, and how you can utilize the astral realm this month as we explore it. And this week, I want to step back and really ask, what is the astral realm? How do we perceive it? How might you already be interacting with it without realizing it? Where did the modern idea of astral plane actually come from? What happens when we look backward through human history at cultures all over the world that developed their own methods of entering altered states or non ordinary states of consciousness? And then I'm going to share some of my own experiences and the shamanic map I've developed through my training. As always, take what resonates and leave what doesn't. I'm sharing the map I've developed through my training, my experiences, and the things I've been shown through the astral plane. You don't have to make that your map. In fact, I hope you use the practices this month to make your own. And maybe something I share today will help you make sense of something you've experienced yourself.

The Astral Realm As Layered Veils

SPEAKER_00 3:17

You may be asking, what is the astral realm? The easiest way that I can explain the astral realm is through veils. I was probably about 15 when I first received this image. Imagine sheets layered on a bed or planes of glass. Except instead of them sitting perfectly flat, they're diagonal, overlapping one another, like shards or fractals. There are different planes of reality. We're standing here in the physical plane, three-dimensional reality, because that is the frequency we've been tuned into most of the time, and we have a physical body. So we perceive physical reality because it's dense. We have a body, we have responsibilities, we have laundry. We are here muddled down by the burdens of our human experience. But I don't experience physical reality as being the only thing that occupies this space. There are other realms that overlap it. The veil is what keeps our ordinary perception focused primarily on this one. So in order to perceive beyond the veil, you've got to peel back the veil. This is where vibration comes into my understanding of it. When we're stressed, angry, reactive, overwhelmed, when everything feels incredibly heavy and hard. We experience ourselves very densely. But think about what happens when you suddenly become carefree, lighthearted. You laugh, you play, you meditate, you just sit and enjoy the present moment. You become completely absorbed in creating something. You go outside. And suddenly you're just lighter. To me, it's not only emotional. Our perception changes, and we become less dense. Sometimes it feels like one of those sheets gets peeled back just a little bit. The sun is brighter and the light shines differently. And suddenly you perceive something that was already there, but you weren't attuned to it. And that's how I understand the veil separating these realms. It isn't necessarily that something suddenly appeared. Maybe you became able to perceive it because you suddenly shifted into its realm. Now the realms aren't all the same. There are different layers, there are different dimensions. There's physical reality, there's the fairy realm, which overlaps, then there's the astral realm, or what in my shamanic vocabulary I sometimes refer to as the middle world. Then there are upper and lower worlds used in shamanic journeying. There's what I understand as the Akashic realm or universal consciousness, and some people call it the field. And then there are other states, realms, and dimensions beyond those. And smaller than those, such as the quantum realm, which we cover next month. There's not necessarily stacked layers like floors or an apartment building. It's more like overlap, overlap, overlap, different frequencies, different access points, different consciousness, different rules. Kind of like Venn diagrams, where they can coexist in the same space, but not all spaces are layered on top of each other. So

Fairy Realm Vs Astral Realm

SPEAKER_00 7:16

there is a difference between the fairy realm and the astral realm. If you've been following me this season, you might remember when we explored the fairy realm. I don't experience the fairy realm and the astral realm as the same thing, though there might be people who do. The easiest metaphor that I have is that Venn diagram metaphor, where the fairy realm overlaps with our physical natural world, but it also overlaps with a spiritual realm that is between the astral and the physical. And in my experience and teachings, fairies are closely connected to nature, creativity, magic, and the inner child. And sometimes we don't see them because they don't want us to. And we experience them like muses, a creative idea, spontaneous music or art, playing, laughing, being in tune with something beyond ourselves, and seeing little sparkles of magic. And when somebody cultivates a relationship with nature and respects nature and learns how to perceive that realm, their experience becomes more and more direct. The astral realm feels very different to me. It's like a physical sheet laid over our physical world, but it separates the two. Same geography in a sense. Sometimes it's different time zones and different perceptions. So you might be wondering, well, how do you perceive it? This is

How We Sense The Unseen

SPEAKER_00 8:47

where people get tripped up. They'll tell me, Rainbow, I don't see anything. And that's okay, because who told you seeing was the only way to perceive something? Some people can see it. And they see images and colors and people and ghosts and landscapes and symbols and flashes. And some people hear it. A name, a voice, music, words, sounds. Some people feel it. They walk into a room and immediately think, something's in here. Something feels different. It feels lighter. It feels like there's pressure or the temperature's off, or I feel a new emotion that's not really mine. And their body reacts before their logical mind knows why. And some people just know it. There's no voice, there's no vision. These people, they simply know. They just know information. And that's just how they interpret that information from the astral plane. There are some people who experience these things through dreams, daydreams, imagination, trance, meditation, journeying, play. That doesn't make one person more psychic or spiritually advanced than another. Human perception isn't one size fits all.

Why Perception Styles Matter

SPEAKER_00 10:17

This podcast is all about us growing. Rainbow's Rising is about growing. And this actually connects to something I've been quietly building. Rainbow's Rising is becoming more than a podcast. I've been developing an interactive wellness and spiritual development app called Rainbow's Rising. And one thing that's been incredibly important to me is recognizing that people don't all experience consciousness or learn metaphysics in the same way. Some people need to see it, hear it, act it, feel it, draw it, or simply trust and know it. So the app is being designed to give you different pathways for exploring practices and experiences in ways that work with how you naturally perceive the world. We're getting close to our first beta, and over the next couple of months, you're going to start hearing more about it. Because I don't want Rainbow's Rising to only be something where I talk and you listen and maybe try the practices. I want this to become something we all experience together because we ascend together. That's what I developed this podcast for. So hope you're excited. Now, back to the astral realm. Maybe

Doors Into Altered States

SPEAKER_00 11:57

you are already interacting with the astral realm. There are many different doors. Dreaming, lucid dreaming, daydreaming, meditation, imagination, trance work, shamanic journeying, intuitive perception, getting downloads, channeling. Sometimes a dream is simply strange. And sometimes you wake up and think that wasn't like my other dreams. It had continuity. And I went somewhere and it you perceived something, something different that felt unusually real. Like it had a secret message or meaning. Imagination gets overlooked constantly. I think imagination can function like an interface. Especially for children. Children haven't necessarily learned yet, that they're not supposed to see things. They haven't spent years being told that that's impossible. That's imaginary. That's nonsense. Sometimes you'll see a child simply zone out where their eyes get lost and their attention goes somewhere else. Within my spiritual framework and personal experience, I believe children can naturally move between these layers of perception more easily because they haven't learned to close everything down yet. And humans have been developing intentional ways of accessing unusual states of perception for a very, very long time. The experience is older than the word astral.

Respectful Comparisons Across Cultures

SPEAKER_00 14:01

Before we go any further, I want to make an important distinction. I'm about to talk about traditions from very, very different cultures. I'm not saying all these cultures were practicing astral projection. I'm not saying they're all traveling the astral plane. I'm not going to take somebody else's sacred tradition and history and erase its name and coin it with astral. These traditions have their own cosmologies, spirits, ceremonies, histories, and meanings. What interests me is that across very different human cultures, people have intentionally developed methods for changing and developing their ordinary consciousness and experiencing realities they understand as extending beyond ordinary physical perception. So we're looking at similarities in the human experience where it's different maps, different perspectives and approaches, different languages, different explanations. And for teaching purposes in this episode, I'm just going to compare some of these experiences with what we're calling here the astral realm. And there might be some correlation, but comparison doesn't mean that they're identical. And the astral realm and those types of experiences are very personal to everyone. And I encourage you to explore these different traditions and do your own research, but be respectful when doing so. The Aboriginal Australian dreaming. Let's start in Australia. Aboriginal Australian traditions include incredibly sophisticated understandings of what English speakers commonly call the dreaming. Dreaming doesn't simply mean somebody went to sleep and had a dream. Depending upon the particular Aboriginal culture, it can involve creation, ancestral beings, country, law, ceremony, identity, relationship, and the continuing spiritual structure of reality itself. So I would not call the dreaming the aboriginal astral plane, but from a very early place in history, they did interact with a realm that influenced our physical realm. And when they would go into the state that is the dreaming, the realm that is the dreaming, they were able to bring back gifts and lessons and memories that then they tracked in their physical reality to build and create the future. And there was a correlation between the building of the future, the building of the world through these states, this realm that they interacted with. So I would not call the dreaming the aboriginal astral plane because I think that would flatten everything that their culture developed, expanded, experienced into a very small, marginal, more modern take on what centuries of their culture has been able to develop. Um but it is fascinating that it's very similar how they interact with that plane, the dreaming, and how we're going to explore our own astral realm adventures. So when we're exploring the possibility that humans can experience reality as containing an unseen layer that remains connected to the physical landscape, there's an interesting parallel. Now let's talk about indigenous North American traditions. We see other examples among indigenous peoples of North America. Now, I'm going to state that there is no single Native American spirituality, and we're talking about hundreds of nations with distinct languages, histories, ceremonies, and cosmologies. But within particular traditions, dreams and visions can carry enormous spiritual significance. And the ways that they bring on those states of visions and dreams. And that rings true for other cultures across the planet, across different times as well. And they all have the same thread, which is there are certain ways to induce these altered states where they can meet animal spirits, plant spirits, receive guidance from their ancestors, and visions of what to do next when they don't exactly know where they're going or what to do. And those methods are similar across these different cultures, such as fasting, going into deep solitude, prayer, ceremony, drumming, dancing, sometimes using herbs and other practices that are used to seek spiritual knowledge. Then you have the purification ceremonies, including sweat lodge traditions among particular people. I'm not saying sweat lodges can help you access the astral realm. I'm saying that throughout history, humans have discovered that changing conditions around the body, such as heat and darkness, rhythm, fasting, prayer, sensory deprivation, repetition, all of these things can profoundly change what we experience. And many cultures interpreted these states as genuine spiritual communication. Let's travel south. Across parts of the Amazon, there are long-standing indigenous traditions involving plants such as ayahuasca. Traditionally, these experiences exist inside much larger systems involving healing, plants, songs called icaros, spirits, community, apprenticeship, and cosmology. And people may report extraordinary visionary experiences with animals and beings and ancestors and teachings, other environments and other dimensions. Another environment, being, teacher, ancestor, plant, or source of information becomes perceivable in these altered states. And while in this altered state, you receive healing, inspiration, etc. And then the person returns, and sometimes they return with legitimate answers or visions that actually come to pass. They carry information or they have medicine, they have miraculous like restorative healing that happens spontaneously, suddenly they know songs or know information about the past that they couldn't possibly know. That's extremely interesting to me. Across even Africa, we again have many distinct traditions. There's no single African spirituality, but trance, music, rhythm, dance, divination, healing, ancestor relationships, and spirit possession traditions appear in different forms across the continent and throughout the African history. And something I noticed about the African culture and interacting with this unseen state, this unseen realm, the astral realm, is that they really utilize the body itself as a part of the doorway with their dances, with their physical uh rhythm. That they use with the drum beats. And I believe that when we really look at accessing the astral plane, we should also be looking at how we relate to our body, how we relate to this realm, and finding a way to create a doorway, which is why I'm sharing all these different cultures with you. There is an enormous family of tradition that stems back over a hundred thousand years. Now, this is the culture that eventually gave the Western world the word shaman. And the word itself comes from Siberian traditions, although today many people use shamanism much more broadly. In Northern Eurasian and Siberian traditions, accounts of shamanic practice, including things like drumming, chanting, altered states, spirit relationships, and journeys undertaken for purposes as healing and divination, allowed the practitioner to enter into other realms. And this is where comparison becomes especially interesting to me because journeying becomes an explicit part of the map. And a lot of these cultures share the same vehicle, the same mechanism to get into this altered state, this realm, this world that has been around and accessed by hundreds of thousands of people for thousands and thousands of years. Practitioner is here. But you're also experiencing yourself traveling somewhere else, meeting someone or something, receiving something, someone, and returning. And that is very close to the experiential language I use when I teach journeying and interacting with other realms. There's another layer across Celtic traditions. Now, Celtic covers different people, places, periods, and later folklore. So again, I don't want to turn it into one belief system, but Irish and Welsh traditions contain incredibly rich stories of another. A reality associated with supernatural beings, extraordinary landscapes, altered experiences of time, sacred places, and movement between worlds. There are stories where somebody enters another realm and is there for years, sometimes longer, and they return to discover that time didn't behave the same way, and only mere moments had passed since they entered. These are seers and poets, visionaries. They receive supernatural inspiration, sacred landscapes bloom before their eyes, and encounters with beings that exist outside ordinary human experience. All of these cultures experienced different states of being, different realms where they can interact with beings of plants, beings of animals, beings of guides and ancestors, where they receive information or healing or medicine. And they come back and they retain that information or they receive that healing, they spontaneously experience it. And across all these different cultures, across all that time, different periods of history, there are parallels of how to enter that place.

Where The Term Astral Plane Comes From

SPEAKER_00 26:12

So the reason I use the umbrella term astral realm is the word astral relates to the stars and has a much older philosophical and esoteric root. And the modern Western idea of a specific place called the astral plane really begins crystallizing during the occult revival of the late 19th century. The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875, and by the 1880s, theosophical writers were explicitly using terminology around an astral plane. And by the end of the 19th century, writers were developing elaborate systems involving physical, astral, mental, and spiritual planes. C.W. Leadbeater published an entire work called The Astral Plane in the 1890s. So by the turn of the 20th century, Astral Plane was already becoming an established Western esoteric vocabulary. At roughly the same historical moment, spiritualism had become enormously popular. Seances, mediums, attempts to communicate with the dead, and other experiments involving invisible realities became a part of a major cultural movement. Spiritualism wasn't identical to ceremonial occultism, but these movements existed within the same broader historical period when Western culture became fascinated with the possibility of directly investigating invisible reality. These organizations, such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, took things in a more structured, magical direction. The Golden Dawn teachings included concepts such as clairvoyance, astral projection, traveling in the spirit vision, and rising in the plains. Practitioners used symbols, visualization, concentration, and ritual to intentionally enter those experiences. And they were also concerned with discernment, not automatically trusting everything encountered during an altered and visionary state. When I encounter historical occult material like that, sometimes I find myself thinking, these are different centuries. They use completely different vocabulary. But I recognize the pattern between all of them. Those ideas continued spreading through Western esoteric movements in the early 20th century and into the 1920s. Organizations changed, new schools appeared, writers continued developing ideas involving inner planes, clairvoyance, visualization, and astral travel. And that's part of how we eventually inherited this modern vocabulary: astral plane, astral realm, astral projection, astral travel. But the human experiences that we're trying to describe are much older than those English phrases. Across geography and history, humans repeatedly discovered ways to change ordinary perception. And they all involved the same ingredients: dreaming, fasting, isolation, prayer, heat, darkness, drumming, dancing, chanting, plants, meditation, visualization, ritual. And they reportedly encountered realities beyond ordinary waking perception across the board. I can't claim that this proves that all of those people visited one objectively identical place. What I can say is that there are enough similarities for me to ask: are human beings discovering different doorways into related aspects of consciousness, related aspects of reality, or a completely different world? For what I'm teaching you this month, we're gonna use the astral realm as our umbrella term for these altered states. And this realm beyond the known, where we meet plants, animals, and ancestors, ghosts, poltergeists, parasitic entities, demons, etc. You can explore these traditions and learn their actual histories and decide for yourself what you think is happening. Eventually,

Science Studies The Shamanic State

SPEAKER_00 30:46

some of these questions moved into laboratories. Science has not established a spiritual model of the astral realm as scientific fact, but researchers absolutely studied unusual states of consciousness. And one fascinating high-density EEG study compared 24 experienced shamanic practitioners with 24 controls during rest, shamanic drumming and classical music. Researchers found measurable differences associated with the shamanic state, including differences in neuroconnectivity and signal dynamics. And I love this distinction. Science can put electrodes on somebody's head and tell us that their brain is changing while they journeyed. But the electrodes can't climb inside the journey and interview whatever they encountered. We can study what's happening in the brain, but we can't see what's happening in the brain. So the question of how we ultimately interpret the experience is different. And that's kind of what led people into remote viewing. Russell Targ, for example, yes, the United States government really did investigate whether people could obtain information about distant targets without ordinary sensory access. I'm sure some of you have seen Stranger Things. Everything that they talked about happened in government programs. And those programs eventually grouped under the name Stargate and investigated remote viewing for years. Eventually, their evaluation concluded that remote viewing wasn't reliable enough for operational intelligence use, though I think otherwise. But our government agencies really did investigate projection perception, and I find that fascinating. Because

Remote Viewing Vs Projection Vs Travel

SPEAKER_00 32:45

I distinguish remote viewing from astral projection and astral travel. Let's go into what remote viewing actually is. Think of an internal television. Your body stays here, your soul stays here, you're anchored. You give your consciousness a target, and it's almost like your consciousness has a remote control, and you tune into your internal screen to that target, you tune your channel to that target and observe what comes through. Now, astral projection is different. Think about a projector. The projector stays where it is, but it sends an image somewhere else. And that's how I understand astral projection to be. That you are projecting an aspect or a duplicate of your consciousness, your soul outward while remaining anchored in your body. And I see astral travel as different again. In my spiritual model, in my experience, astral travel involves your soul actually leaving your physical vessel while the body remains behind. Because I understand those three things differently, I prepare for those practices differently. And we're gonna talk much more about that next week.

A Childhood Dream Turns Into Initiation

SPEAKER_00 34:06

But before I studied any of this, before I even knew what astral was, before I knew the history, before I knew the terminology, I was already experiencing things I didn't understand. When I was a child, like three years old, I was absolutely obsessed with cats. I drew cats constantly on everything. I really wanted a cat. But I hadn't really told my parents, and my dad was allergic to cats, so we couldn't really get one. Then one day my mom picked me up from school and said, I have a surprise for you. And immediately I said, Is it a cat? And my mom said, No. Is it a kitten? No. Is it a kitty? It's not a cat. Rainbow, stop asking. So I was stumped because all that came to mind was a cat. And then we got home. And it was a kitten. She was a little black kitten, and her name was Shadow. She was fluffy and adorable, and I loved her. And the very first night that Shadow slept with us, she slept in my bed, and I was about four years old. And I had one of the most vivid dreams that I've ever experienced, that I can still feel it and see it so strongly in my mind's eye to this day. In my dream, my mom and I had gone on a walk with our dog, and we'd found this strange shack in this place called my secret hiding place, which is where I played in physical reality. The shack was not actually there in physical reality. It had manifested in this dream place. But everything else was the same. And when I saw this shack, I did not like the shack. Everything inside of me said, do not go in there. And naturally, my mom wanted to go inside. I tried to discourage her, but she was older than me. She reminded me she was this many years older than me and proceeded to go into the shack. So little four-year-old me was like, now I have to go protect my mom. And so I followed her inside. And inside this room, this building, there was this stone altar. Behind it, on the wall, were strange symbols. They were not English and they looked ancient. And on that stone altar was a small, ancient-looking black box. Everything in the room felt wrong. My skin prickled, and I tried to encourage my mom to leave. Now that she's seen inside the building, let's go, mom, let's go. My mom was like, What's this? And she went and touched the box. You don't touch the box. My mom touched the box, and all these shadows came out. They poured out of this tiny box that just filled the room. It was like black smoke, like ink. They were shaped like fluffy black kittens. Except they expanded and became enormous. They were made out of smoke and ink. And they were dense and they completely took up the room. And my mom and my dog were gone. And then they began to attack me, and I could feel their claws and their teeth. And my first instinct was to kick them or hit them, but I didn't want to. I was afraid that I'd hurt them. And I really loved cats and I didn't want to hurt them. In the dream, I was in this state of like, I don't want to hurt them because I love them. And so I woke up terrified and crying. And I went to my mom and I told her I'd had this nightmare, and I told her what it was. And her advice was to go back to sleep. The dream will resolve itself. I remember that was her exact word. She said, Go back to sleep. The dream will resolve itself. At the time I was not particularly impressed with this advice, and I went downstairs and watched some cartoons until the sun rose. And then I went back to sleep thinking I was safe. But I was not because I went back to the same dream. And the cats came back. This time I was in a different room. There was a bed. Cats came out from under the bed, my dog was there, my dog was running and opening the door so I could get out. And so I ran out of this room into another room where there was a lounge chair with one of those tall standing lamps right next to it. And I had climbed on top of this lounge chair and I grabbed the lamp and I started to swing because I had decided it's either me or these cats. And so I started to swing in it. And every time I was swinging, I was like, light, light, light. And I just remember feeling so guilty, but with each swing, each one disappeared. They just puffed into smoke. None of them were actually hurt. They just disappeared. And once all of them were gone, the wall opened up and revealed all the people I loved across my past, my present, and what felt like my future. People that I didn't even know but could feel that I knew them. They were all watching me fight. Fight these cats, these shadows. They saw me fight. They didn't step in, they didn't help, but they were on the other side of this two-way glass. And so for years I thought this was just a horrific nightmare. Later, when I first started to become initiated as a shaman, my shamanic teacher, Paul Hinsberger, told me that this was an initiation, that without ancestors or people in my lineage to tell me what I was experiencing, I misinterpreted the spirit of Black Cat, and that this spirit was trying to infuse me with its power, with its knowledge and wisdom, and that by fighting back, I dishonored that spirit and had to go through the lessons that it was going to teach me innately. And I had to learn them the hard way. And years after that, I had gone to another shamanic workshop where I received a power animal retrieval. Now, when you receive a power animal retrieval as a client, you're not told what you're receiving. A shaman goes into a shamanic journey, they go into the lower world, which is a higher vibrational version of the astral world. They go and they meet with an animal, and that animal's like, hey, I'm ready to work with this person, and they bring that animal soul back and they infuse it with your body so that you can start to work with the medicine of that animal and learn its lesson. And guess what was brought back for me? Black cat. Black cat, and I still work with her, and she still comes up in journeys and in dreams. And the older that I've gotten, the more that that childhood dream has taken on different meanings for me. Looking back at that little girl holding this lamp surrounded by shadows. Being afraid of hurting those shadows, being afraid that if she fought back, she might hurt the ones she loved. While people that she loved watched behind glass and never stepped in. I understand her differently. Because thirty years ago, I didn't realize what that dream was trying to tell me. It was a message from the astral realm for me. It was mapping out the journey I'd take, how I would experience shadows, darkness, cruelty, pain, and how I needed to learn to defend myself. I needed to learn how to protect myself. I needed to learn how do I experience darkness without becoming darkness before without be being dragged down by that darkness. How do I maintain my boundaries? And how do I keep my innocence and come back from it all? It took me a really long time to learn how to defend myself, how to hold boundaries, how to have self-respect, how to recognize when people, despite the smile on their face, really don't have the best intentions for me, that they have ulterior motives. And now I'm teaching other people those same tools that helped me. And so, really, that animal that I had received in that dream has been teaching me those lessons all this time. You don't have to interpret my dream the way that I do. It's an evolving interpretation as I go through my life, and more is revealed to me. You could even try and interpret my dream psychologically, archaeotypic, spiritually. Take whatever resonates, think whatever you want. Sometimes something happens to us when we're children, and we don't understand its meaning, its language, its interpretation until decades later. And now we're gonna dive into specifically how you can use this to understand your own paranormal situations.

Ghosts Thought Forms Guides Tricksters

SPEAKER_00 44:29

So this is how I differentiate some of the things I've been taught about and experienced. So there are different beings in the astral plane. There are ghosts. I understand ghosts as people who have died, but remain connected to the earth plane. Not because they're negative people, but because they aren't really ready to leave. Maybe they're watching over someone, maybe they're attached to a place, maybe they simply just want to continue experiencing Earth, watching its history, traveling, seeing different cultures and perspectives, interacting with different beings. When I perceive spirits, sometimes they are almost like three-dimensional shadows or three-dimensional colors. Some appear lighter, sometimes blue or pink or yellow or luminous, and others seem darker, more opaque. You see their full outline. But in my own perception, they seem to refract or interact with light differently than physical matter. The closest metaphor I have is something almost plasma-like in the way that they appear. And that's my perception. Um, not a claim that science has established what ghosts are made out of. But it is talked about in um Ghostbusters. So lost soul. A lost soul, in my understanding, is someone who has died and they have unresolved experiences, or they have a lot of trauma and pain that they haven't figured out how to let go of and detach from. And so they're unable to move forward and reincarnate. A lot of times they are confused, they're caught in an emotional loop, or in an like an actual situational loop, depending on how they died. And many times they are desperately trying to communicate with anyone so that they can move on. And sometimes that desperation can feel frightening to the living person who perceives them because they don't understand. So sometimes what we think of as poltergeists are actually just lost souls that are hegging to be seen and moved from one plane to the next. There are other beings in the astral realm, such as thought forms and aggregores. I've also worked with this concept that thoughts and emotions that we continually feed, that we continually engage with, can develop tremendous energetic momentum. Now imagine telling yourself over and over and over and over again. Imagine repeatedly telling yourself for many years, I'm ugly, I'm worthless, nobody loves me, and you hear that either through different perceptions of how other people have talked to you, or through different interpretations of how your life has gone, and you repeat it over and over and over again. I'm ugly, I'm worthless, nobody loves me, everybody hates me, nobody likes me, and for years this is what you believe. Now, from my experience and my teachings that I've I've learned from other teachers, something that repeatedly is fed begins to solidify in our physical reality. So it may begin as a thought, but as you give it energy, it develops density, which then can start to develop its own its own energetic identity and personality, and that thing then starts to feed off of you because you've given it that much power. There are helping spirits too, like guides and ancestors and power animals and other beings that I've seen and experienced being assigned to us or assigning themselves to us from higher dimensions. They usually inspire us and teach us and redirect us and protect us and bring us healing and such. And sometimes they can be almost like an invisible muse, even if you aren't aware they're there, they can be the ones that like pull you back when you're about to step in into oncoming traffic by accident. They're the ones that like make you kind of double take right before something happens. So if you've ever had a situation where you felt like a guardian angel saved your life, or you like barely, barely, barely missed that life or death situation. You don't really know how you avoided it, but you are just grateful that you did. Usually that's when a guide steps in to keep you around and help you stay protected. There are other types of beings in the astral realm, such as parasitic or deceptive trickster-like spirits. Now, I don't assume every spiritual seeming experience is benevolent due to my experience. Within my practice and training, I've worked with and interacted with beings or energetic um entities that had deceptive or parasitic qualities, and that doesn't make them bad. A lot of times, parasites attach to us because that is the only way they can continue to survive in their state. So trickster spirits usually manipulate and redirect us because they have become bored. Because, like I've said, in the astral plane, time doesn't behave the same as it does in the physical realm. Uh, it is not linear, it is happening all at once, past, present, future, and it's really where your consciousness is, like where your vibration is, it's how you are tuned that you can jump time and space in the astral plane. And so for these denser beings that are manipulative, uh parasitic, the they rely on humans for either the A, their entertainment, or B, their source of sustenance, that is how they thrive. And they they need us to be able to manage their either desolation, isolation, or to be able to continue to exist. So there are multiple dimensions that feed into the astral realm. It's kind of like it's kind of like a lobby. There's a bunch of different levels above the lobby, but everybody goes through the lobby in order to get where they want to go. And so something that appears in an altered state doesn't automatically get authority into your life. It's only when you haven't really protected yourself and you haven't really prepared yourself before going into an astral journey that entities and beings can attach to you or interact with you. Which is what brings us into what we're gonna be covering next week.

Protection Grounding And Discernment

SPEAKER_00 52:36

Um, within this shamanic framework that I teach, I don't approach the middle world or or astral realm exactly the way that I've approached upper and lower world in the past. Um it's a little bit of a mixed environment. And because of that, I'm going to be reiterating protection. I'm not saying this to scare you. It's the same reason I put a seatbelt on when I drive. Driving isn't inherently terrifying or dangerous, but it does have risk. And when I wear my seatbelt, I know the risk is significantly less. So before we intentionally explore next week, we're going to learn how to prepare, how to anchor our bodies into the earth, how to create safety around your body, that your body is your home, how to ground yourself, connect yourself firmly into physical reality, center yourself, allow your spirit to resonate with the frequency you want to access. Know what you feel like before opening yourself to other dimensions and impressions, and being able to recognize what is yours and what isn't. We're going to shield and establish our boundaries before we explore these realms. We're going to set our intentions because our intentions create the rules for which other beings and other situations can interact with us. And we're going to know where we are going and why. And on our journey, we're going to use discernment. Just because something presents itself as helpful and light and wonderful doesn't always mean that it is. It can be a wolf in sheep's clothing. And that's why it's really important that you set your intention and that you always bring a spirit animal to protect you because animals, especially in the astral plane, can see through facades. And I also teach you how to return, how to get back into your body and make sure that you're the only one there and that you haven't brought any friends back from the ride. No hitchhikers. So reconnecting with your physical body, releasing anything that isn't yours, and integrating the healings, the blessings, the information, the knowledge into your body, writing it down, thinking about it, sleeping on it, integrating it into your experience, and giving yourself time to understand what was experienced.

Next Week’s Practices And Closing

SPEAKER_00 55:25

So today, I just wanted to help you understand what the astral plane is, where it came from, other perspectives that correlate with the astral realm, and how we can start to look at different ways that people perceive it. We traveled backwards through history and looked at some of the extraordinary ways human cultures have explored non-ordinary states and different realms, different beings in those realms. And we followed the modern Western language of the astral plane through spiritualism, ceremonial occultism, and the golden dawn. And then we even looked at modern scientific research. And I've shared some of my experiences that eventually became the map of my own reality. Next week, we start talking about going through these doors. We're gonna learn how to approach some of them. We're going to start with grounding, centering, anchoring, shielding, setting your intention, learning how to do that properly, and then I'm going to introduce you to some beginner practices for exploring consciousness and the astral realm intentionally. We'll talk about our astral senses, doing dream work, creating a sanctuary, doing journeying, remote viewing, and different ways that I work within the astral realm for healing, guidance, and co-creation. Because I don't want to teach you to escape your body, I want to teach you how to explore consciousness while becoming more capable of living inside your life. This is how we're gonna do it. And if you want to go deeper after I've taught some of these practices, I encourage you to join the Patreon where we do go into more advanced practices with the love and alchemy tears. I don't need everybody listening to this podcast to believe exactly what I believe. In fact, I discourage that. That's never been the point of sharing what I've been through and what I believe. I want you to become just as curious as I was when I started having paranormal experiences. I want you to go, wait a second, is this place what I've been told, or is there more? I want you to remember the dreams, the synchronicities, the the strange occurrences, the things that fall off your wall in the middle of the night. Those bizarre circumstances where you knew something before somebody told you, or that daydream that became real, where you somehow, some way, reality around you changed. And you're like, what happened? People don't remember events happening the way you do. These are experiences that we all have had, but we haven't always had a safe place to talk about them. We haven't always had a safe place to be like I had a dream where aliens came and abducted me and they talked to me about this and this and this, and then had somebody to talk to about it. But this is the place. I want you to feel safe here. I want you to feel safe sharing that time that you talked to a fairy in the forest, or when you saw a UFO, or all of those astral journeys that you've done that felt bizarre and crazy, and maybe you never had anyone to talk to about. Because maybe imagination isn't opposite of reality. Maybe it's just a door, a door to get through what we've been told is reality to a much broader, expanded version of what reality can be. All these invisible imaginary tools that can make reality a lot more enjoyable and so much less agonizing to experience. Maybe humans have been walking through these doors, these gateways, these realms for such a long time, and modern society has shunned it, and that's why we are all so lost and miserable. That's just something to consider. Next week, let's go and explore these doors and see where they lead. I'm Rainbow Raja, and this is Rainbow's Rising, where we ascend together. Have a good day.