When I returned to my body after having been on the astral plane in 1977, I slithered into this apparatus that was almost like a wet suit.
I tapped against it and it felt like India rubber. I wondered, what can this be?
Suddenly it dawned on me that this thing I was slithering into was in fact my body.
Oh! And who am “I” then? “I” am the spirit who was on the astral planes until now, in a lucid dream.
OK.
Then, as I was contemplating, it was as if a Hoover vacuum cleaner began sucking me in. My attention shifted from being sensorily inside this wet suit of a body to gradually being sensorily outside.
Because I was watching something tragic on the other side, I’d been wailing. Feelings have much more rein on the spirit side of life, I found.
When my attention transferred to the outside of my physical body, the wailing became a whimper. That showed me conclusively how emotionally non-conductive the human body is.
Be that as it may, what I was seeing and experiencing meant – again conclusively – that I was not my body. The body could die for all the difference it made to me then. I was independent of it; in fact I operated it, drove it like a car.
It’s me inside – the Babushka-doll spirit, the soul and all its bodies, call it whatever you like – that pulls all the levers and directs the show. I’d rather be outside my body, quite frankly, but this is where I’m apparently needed.
Nowadays we’d distinguish between the third-dimensional physical body and the fourth-dimensional astral spirit. But then I just thought of it as “I.”
The body is the ultimate robot, avatar, genie in the bottle. It takes the blows and the falls.
It takes the ultimate hit at the time of death. I just step outside it and carry on into a world more loving and blissful than we can imagine. I give it no more thought than the car I park to pick up the groceries.
At no point since then have I feared death.
Manner of death? Yes. Death itself? No.
That’s the impact of one minute of seeing that I am not my body, one minute of distinguishing between me and it. Looking at things from the astral, fourth-dimensional level, I am the spirit operator of the body, the god in the machine.