There is much debate about whether there is a difference between "Christian Spiritual travel" and astral projection. In this message, I provide testimonies of both and allow you to decide for yourself. Resources Traveling in the Spirit Made Simple Supernatural Transportation
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| - Hi, I'd like to welcome you to our show. | |
| I'm your host, Prang Medic. | |
| We're talking about life as a child of God and all things related to His Kingdom. | |
| Thanks for joining us. | |
| If you're a new listener to the show, you can find articles and books and other resources on my website www.prangmedic.com. | |
| Now let's jump into this week's show. | |
| Hi, I'm Praying Medic. | |
| I'm going to talk to you today about a subject that is of growing interest to a lot of people, and that subject is spiritual travel, or what some of us call translation by faith, and the question of whether or not Christian spiritual travel is just astral projection dressed up in Christian clothing. | |
| There are three types of people who are probably going to listen to this. | |
| One group of people are convinced that God is actually allowing people to travel in the spirit today. | |
| The second group of people are not convinced. | |
| So they are somewhat skeptical. | |
| They might be even hopeful that this is not astral projection and that God is using people and allowing them to travel in the spirit today. | |
| But they have concerns. | |
| Maybe they know a little bit about the occult, they know about astral projection, and no one has ever given them a convincing argument. | |
| And the third group of people are not convinced at all. | |
| In fact, they're fairly convinced that this, what we call Christian spiritual travel, is really just an occult practice that has crept into the Church. | |
| If that describes you, I would simply ask you to listen to my presentation. | |
| I'm not going to tell you what to think. | |
| Education doesn't consist of filling people's heads with ideas and then telling them what to think. | |
| Education is giving people information and teaching them how to think for themselves. | |
| So my goal is to give you some information and allow you to decide for yourself whether or not this is something that the devil is doing or whether it is something that God is doing. | |
| So the question we need to answer is whether or not astral projection and Christian spiritual travel are the same thing. | |
| I'd like to provide an analogy that will help us understand what we need to do to answer this question. | |
| Imagine that you saw two animals hopping in your driveway outside of your window and you looked and you said, Oh, there's two frogs hopping outside in the driveway. | |
| Well, you may be right, but if you don't go and look at these frogs, you don't know for sure. | |
| So you go outside and you pick up these two animals that are hopping in the driveway and you look at them and you observe them. | |
| And the one on the right, you notice, is rather fat. | |
| Its skin is dry. | |
| It has warts. | |
| And on the one on the left, you notice it's rather thin. | |
| It doesn't have warts. | |
| It actually has spots that look like leopard skin. | |
| Its skin is wet and smooth. | |
| Now, if you know much about frogs and toads, you know that the one on the left is a frog, the one on the right is a toad. | |
| Even though, from a distance, they look similar or they look the same, when you compare them side by side, you can see they're not the same thing. | |
| And I think the same thing can be done for this question of whether or not astral projection and Christian spiritual travel are the same thing. | |
| Think if we just compare them side by side, We can come to a conclusion about whether they are or not the same thing. | |
| I wasn't convinced myself just a couple of years ago. | |
| Actually, just a little over one year ago, I was still wrestling with this question of whether or not spiritual travel that Christians do is actually the same thing as astral projection. | |
| And the reason I wasn't convinced is because nobody had provided for me a convincing argument that demonstrated they were different. | |
| There are a lot of Christians, I have friends who are Christians, who have traveled in the Spirit, and they usually say that the enemy can only counterfeit what God does. | |
| And that may be true, but that statement doesn't help us resolve the problem. | |
| What it does is, it suggests that God has created a way for people to travel in the Spirit, and the enemy has created a way, or has perverted a way, to travel in the Spirit. | |
| That means that there's two different ways, and people who are traveling in the Spirit say, well, we're using God's way. | |
| Well, the question you have to ask is, how do you know that? | |
| How do you know that objectively? | |
| If you're not the person who's doing this traveling, You have to simply believe and take it on faith that what these people are doing is actually something that God has ordained and not astral projection. | |
| If you're a thinking person, you're not going to be convinced by someone saying, well, you just have to trust me. | |
| This is what God is doing, and that's what Satan is doing, and we're not doing Satan's thing. | |
| As much as we would like to trust our friends, I don't think it's wise to trust people unless they can describe the differences between two things. | |
| And the problem that we have with understanding astral projection is that it's considered taboo for Christians. | |
| The idea of a believer studying astral projection, if they went to their pastor or any leader, they would not think that was a good idea. | |
| Because they know that if you start studying astral projection, you might start practicing it. | |
| And if you start practicing astral projection, you might start practicing other things that are used by the occult in the New Age, and that's not a good thing. | |
| So, the Christian community has kind of imposed these restrictions where no one is allowed to study astral projection. | |
| And if you can't study it and can't observe it, you're never going to know, really, whether it's the same thing as Christian spiritual travel. | |
| My situation is, I was working on a book on traveling in the spirit. | |
| And I knew that in order for me to write this book and to help people, I had to answer this question once and for all. | |
| I had to know whether these things were the same thing or not. | |
| So I started doing research and I researched on the internet I looked at all the articles I could find. | |
| I tried to find books. | |
| I looked at all the YouTube videos that seemed to have anything to say about this subject, and I was rather disappointed with what I found. | |
| I did not actually find a single article or video where a Christian leader or anyone writing from the Christian perspective could say even suggest astral projection and Christian spiritual travel were different because of these reasons. | |
| So I knew that if I was going to answer this question, I would have to do my own research. | |
| And that meant I was going to have to read some books on astral projection. | |
| Now, I did not read these books with the intention of learning how to practice astral projection. | |
| My only goal with reading these books was to be able to compare astral projection with what my friends and I do, which we call traveling in the spirit. | |
| So, with that in mind, I'd like to read for you some excerpts from a couple of books that I read on astral projection. | |
| I'm just going to read some accounts. | |
| And what I would like you to do is take notes. | |
| You may even want to get a piece of paper and a pencil. | |
| If you want to, just pause the video, get something to write with. | |
| And you might just take a piece of sheet of paper, write a line down the middle, and on one side, put down astral projection. | |
| On the other side, you might want to put down Christian spiritual travel or translation by faith, whatever you want to call it. | |
| And you can write down the different features of these two things as I read these testimonies. | |
| So, the first book that I'm going to read from is called Adventures Beyond the Body by William Bowman. | |
| When I went on Amazon and I looked around at books on astral projection, two books came up as the ones that are kind of the gold standard that are recommended for people to read. | |
| Adventures Beyond the Body by William Bowman is one, and the other one was Journeys Out of the Body by Robert Monroe. | |
| First I'm going to read some testimonies from Bowman's book. | |
| This entry is dated October 4, 1972. | |
| I silent repeat an affirmation. | |
| I'm now out of body. | |
| For 10 to 15 minutes, I grow increasingly sleepy. | |
| As much as possible, I intensify my affirmations as I drift off to sleep. | |
| Almost instantly, I'm awakened by intense vibrations and an electrical-like buzzing throughout my body. | |
| I'm startled and an intense wave of fear surges through me. | |
| I calm myself down by repeating I am protected by the light. | |
| My initial fear slowly dissipates as I visualize myself surrounded by a protective globe of light. | |
| I think of floating and I feel myself lift up and out of my physical body. | |
| I feel light as a feather and I float upward. | |
| As I float away from my body, I realize that the vibrations and the buzzing have diminished to a slight humming sensation. | |
| Feeling more secure, I open my eyes and I find myself staring at the ceiling which is two feet in front of me. | |
| I'm surprised that I floated up that high, and I instinctively think about looking back at my body in my bed. | |
| Instantly, I snap back into my physical body, and I feel a strange vibration as my physical senses quickly return. | |
| If you're taking notes at home, you might make notes that Bulman, in his first attempt at astral projection, was sleeping. | |
| So he was growing sleepy. | |
| This is at bedtime. | |
| He woke up to intense vibrations, an electrical-like buzzing sensation, waves of fear. | |
| He floated up out of his body. | |
| He, the vibrations and buzzing diminished as he got farther away from his body. | |
| And then as he thought about his physical body, he was suddenly snapped back into his body. | |
| So you just make note of that. | |
| I'm going to read a second entry from his journal, which was dated a month later, November 2nd, 1972. | |
| I awaken to the sound and sensations of intense buzzing. | |
| It feels as if my body and mind are vibrating apart. | |
| At first, I'm startled by the intensity of the vibrations, but slowly I calm myself down and focus my full attention on the idea of floating away from my physical body. | |
| In seconds, I float up and out of my body and hover several feet above it. | |
| I notice that the buzzing noise and vibrations immediately subside after complete separation. | |
| I feel a slight tugging sensation as I fly higher and higher over the city of Baltimore. | |
| The tugging sensations increase and I think of my body and instantly I snap back into my physical body. | |
| My physical body is numb and tingling as I open my eyes. | |
| So once again, if you're making notes, he noticed sensations of buzzing. | |
| He was asleep when it started. | |
| He felt strong vibrations. | |
| He felt like his mind was vibrating apart. | |
| He had the sensation of floating out of his body. | |
| He noticed that he was going way up into the air. | |
| The vibrations and noise subsided the farther he went. | |
| He noticed a tugging sensation, and then he was snapped back into his body very suddenly. | |
| Let me read a couple of more entries from Mr. Bowman's book. | |
| This next entry is dated October 12, 1972. | |
| Drifting off to sleep, I awaken to the sensations of intense vibrations and buzzing throughout my body. | |
| I recognize that I'm ready to separate, and I immediately think about floating. | |
| The vibrations and sounds rapidly diminish. | |
| As I separate and float up to the ceiling, out of instinct, I reach out my arms to touch the ceiling. | |
| But instead of touching, my hands slowly enter the tingling, vibrational substance of the ceiling. | |
| I can feel slight resistance as my hands and arms move through the ceiling. | |
| Moving slowly upward, my body enters and passes through the insulation, the rafters, and the attic. | |
| An intense excitement flows through me as I pass through the roof and float out the top of the house. | |
| Okay, so once again, he was asleep. | |
| He awakens to the sense of vibrations and buzzing. | |
| He separates from his body. | |
| He is floating and then starts to go upward. | |
| The experiences that Bowman has had, these are very typical for him. | |
| They're also very typical of other people who experience astral projection, but just to let you know that these are not the type of experiences only one person has. | |
| We're going to read some more testimonies from another book. | |
| This one is by Robert Monroe from his book Journeys Out of the Body. | |
| Monroe, by the way, was one of the pioneers of out-of-body travel. | |
| He was one of the very first people to try to explain and describe out-of-body travel. | |
| His book is considered a classic. | |
| Monroe actually is a founder of the Monroe Institute, which is a non-profit organization that studies out-of-body travel. | |
| I'm just going to read a few testimonies from his book. | |
| So this was one of his very first experiences. | |
| It was a Sunday afternoon. | |
| I lay on the couch in the living room for a short nap while the house was quiet. | |
| I had just become prone when a beam or ray seemed to come out of the sky at the north at about a 30 degree angle from the horizon. | |
| It was like being struck by warm light, only this was daylight and there was no beam visible, if there truly was a beam. | |
| I thought it was sunlight at first, although this was impossible on the north side of the house. | |
| The effect, when the beam struck my entire body, was to cause it to shake violently or vibrate. | |
| I was utterly powerless to move. | |
| It was as if I were being held in a vice. | |
| Shocked and frightened, I forced myself to move. | |
| It was like pushing against invisible bonds. | |
| I slowly sat upright on the couch. | |
| The shaking and vibration slowly faded away and I was able to move about freely. | |
| Again if you're taking notes, vibrations, he felt like he was in a vice, he felt like he was pushing against invisible bonds, fear, you know, felt shocked, emotional components of that nature. | |
| So, I'll read a couple more testimonies from Monroe's book. | |
| This one is dated November 5th, 1958. | |
| It is the afternoon and here's what he said. | |
| The vibrations came quickly and easily and were not all that uncomfortable. | |
| When they were strong, I tried to lift out of my physical body with no result. | |
| Whatever thought or combination I tried, I remained confined right where I was. | |
| I then remembered the rotating trick, which operates just as if you're turning over in bed. | |
| I started to turn and recognize that my physical body was not turning with me. | |
| I moved slowly and after a moment I was face down, or in direct opposition to the placement of my physical body. | |
| The moment I reached this 180 degree position, there was a hole. | |
| That's the only way to describe it. | |
| To my senses, it seemed to be a hole in a wall that was about two feet thick, and it stretched endlessly in all directions in the vertical plane. | |
| So, if you're taking notes, He felt vibrations. | |
| He said they weren't that uncomfortable, which leads me to believe they were somewhat uncomfortable. | |
| He tried to lift out of his physical body, but was not able to. | |
| took his astral body okay his non-physical body and he rotated it 180 degrees in the opposite direction and when his astral body was facing the other direction he was able to move out of his body. | |
| And then he found another parallel dimension. | |
| This next testimony is from November 18th, 1958. | |
| The vibrations came in strong, but nothing more. | |
| Again, I thought to try the rotation. | |
| When I did, it worked, and I rotated slowly into the 180 degree position. | |
| There was a wall, and the hole, and the blackness beyond. | |
| Going to read one more testimony from Monroe's book. | |
| So this is about a month later. | |
| It's December 27th, 1958. | |
| Upon setting up the vibrations, I again found the hole as expected. | |
| I gathered up courage and slowly poked my head through the hole. | |
| The moment I did, I heard a voice say in utter excitement and surprise, come here, quick, look. | |
| So again, he gets into this routine where he realizes the key to traveling out of body is to set up these vibrations and when the vibrations are being sensed for him to rotate 180 degrees and then exit his physical body and he can then travel in the astral plane. | |
| I'm going to go back to Bowman's book for a minute and I'm going to read one of his observations. | |
| This is kind of a summary of what was typical for his experiences. | |
| He says this, I would find myself sitting up, floating, or rolling sideways out of my body. | |
| The sensations during separation were normally similar. | |
| A buzzing sound accompanied by an internal high energy or vibrational feeling spreading throughout my body. | |
| At the peak of vibrations, I would mentally direct myself away from my body by sitting up or rolling out of my body. | |
| I preferred sitting up because rolling out would often cause a disjointed or disoriented feeling. | |
| I discovered that the easiest way was to simply sit up and step away from my body. | |
| So, in summary, for both Bowman and for Monroe, they typically would go to sleep, experience the vibrations, They would sometimes feel other sensations, buzzing. | |
| They would either sit up, roll out of their body, or in Monroe's case, sometimes he would spin 180 degrees and exit out the back side of his body. | |
| These are kind of how people generally experience astral projection. | |
| I want to, at this point, make note of a couple more things. | |
| This is a journal entry from Bowman's book. | |
| Dated October 17, 1983. | |
| I feel a strange vibration and a tingling throughout my body. | |
| Recognizing that I must be in a vibrational state, I focus all of my attention on the sensation of floating up out of my physical body. | |
| Within seconds, I float up and away from my body, and I slowly glide feet first toward the bedroom door. | |
| With a sense of absolute amazement, I enter the structure of the door and feel its vibrational energy as I float effortlessly through it, keeping my eyes open. | |
| The door looks like an energy fog, shaped and formed into an ethereal mold. | |
| After floating through the door, I think of standing and I'm instantly in the living room, standing next to the sofa, and I'm looking around at the room. | |
| As I look around, I notice that a strange small form appears to be following me. | |
| Staring, I recognize our beagle puppy, McGregor. | |
| I'm amazed because I've never seen an animal when out of body. | |
| He appears surprisingly natural and solid as he wags his tail and looks up at me. | |
| I notice that his eyes are shining, and then I notice something else. | |
| There's a thin filament, like a spider's web, stretching from his body and extending back toward the bedroom. | |
| Out of curiosity, I bend down and I touch the thin silvery strand. | |
| Instantly, the puppy disappears. | |
| I'm startled by the rapid change and I snap back into my physical body. | |
| Bullman in this one notices that his dog is traveling out of body and his dog is following him around in the astral plane and he sees the silver thread or the silver cord, what a lot of people refer to. | |
| Most people who deal with astral projection are pretty familiar with the silver cord. | |
| Not everyone who experiences astral projection sees the silver cord or feels it, but many people do. | |
| The silver cord is generally understood to be the lifeline that connects the non-physical body to the physical body and near-death researchers have figured out that when the silver cord is cut that is ultimately it's the death of the physical body. | |
| The physical body cannot live without the non-physical body so when that silver cord is cut the person dies. | |
| On a website called Astral Dynamics, which is hosted by a man named Robert Bruce, he studies astral travel a lot, and he had this to say. | |
| There is disagreement about the silver cord's existence and location. | |
| Some people claim that it's attached to the navel. | |
| Some say that it's attached to the brow. | |
| Others claim that it does not exist at all. | |
| My out-of-body observations show that the silver cord does indeed exist, but it's seen only when a person deliberately looks for it. | |
| So, interesting thing about the silver cord. | |
| Although it is well known to people who travel by astral projection, With the hundreds of people I've talked to over the last three or four years about traveling in the Spirit, my Christian community, I have not heard one person ever mention the silver cord in all of their spiritual travels. | |
| It's virtually unknown. | |
| If you talk to Christians who travel in the Spirit and ask them if they've ever seen a silver cord, they don't even know what you're talking about most of the time. | |
| We don't see it. | |
| We don't sense it. | |
| It's just not an issue for us. | |
| So to me, it's very interesting. | |
| And it's something to just put in your list of things side by side. | |
| With astral projection, the Silver Corridor is pretty well known. | |
| With Christian spiritual travel, the Silver Corridor is pretty much unknown. | |
| So that we can compare Christian spiritual travel with astral projection, I'd like to share with you a couple of my own testimonies. | |
| I wrote them down, I'm just going to read them here. | |
| One day, while I was on duty, I was dispatched to do a transport coming out of a hospital. | |
| As we parked the ambulance, I felt the Holy Spirit suggest that I might try a spiritual travel experiment. | |
| I got out of the ambulance. | |
| and went inside. | |
| We were picking up a patient who was on the third floor, but my partner and I had a friend who happened to be in the intensive care unit with liver problems. | |
| So we were a half hour early and we decided to stop in at the ICU and check up on him. | |
| As I stepped into the elevator, I focused my mind on my friend and I was like, And in my mind, I immediately saw another reality. | |
| I could see myself passing through the elevator door and then the floor above me. | |
| And then I went in the hallway in the intensive care unit and went down the hallway. | |
| I instinctively knew which room to go to and I found the room that my friend was in. | |
| I passed through the door and looked into the room and saw him sitting in the bed in a hospital gown and his wife was sitting in the chair next to him. | |
| I did notice in this experience that he was smiling. | |
| When I was satisfied that I had seen what I wanted, I exercised my will and I just went back the opposite direction. | |
| So I went down the hallway in the opposite direction, back through the floor, through the elevator door, and then I realized I was still standing in the elevator. | |
| At that point, the elevator door opened. | |
| And my partner and I got out. | |
| We went to the nurse's desk. | |
| We asked the nurse at the desk what room our friend was in. | |
| She told us the room he was in. | |
| We went to the same room that I went to just 20 seconds earlier. | |
| We went in, we talked to him for about 10 minutes. | |
| He was sitting in the bed, in a hospital gown, just like I saw him when I traveled there in the spirit, and his wife was sitting in the chair next to him. | |
| The only difference was, when we actually saw him in person, he was very sad and depressed, but when I saw him in the spirit, he was smiling. | |
| I'm going to tell you about another experience I had that was about a week later. | |
| The following Monday, I was at a hospital where we would stay for long periods of time, in case the hospital needed us to transport a patient. | |
| They provided a small room for us, which had a TV and a couple of recliners. | |
| While I was there, I spent a lot of time sitting in the recliner, seeking God. | |
| On this day, I turned the lights out, and I decided to try walking in the spiritual dimension. | |
| I got comfortable in the recliner, and I closed my eyes. | |
| And almost immediately, I saw in my mind's eye what looked like a farmyard at night. | |
| I saw a barn, a gravel driveway, and a tree bank about 100 feet away, and I could see a barn light that was illuminating part of the landscape. | |
| Although it was definitely nighttime in this scene, In Tacoma, where I was, it was early afternoon. | |
| I tried to move in the spirit by using my will to go forward. | |
| I started walking toward the bank of trees in the distance. | |
| I was able to walk toward the trees. | |
| I looked down and I saw my feet walking on the gravel driveway, and I could hear my feet as they were touching the gravel. | |
| Interestingly, in this experience, I saw that my feet had on hiking boots and what appeared to be military-style pants. | |
| But in reality, as I was sitting in the recliner, I was wearing navy blue uniform pants and black leather boots. | |
| Watching my feet walk was fairly easy, but as I focused my eyes in front of me toward the tree line, it was very unsteady and bouncy, almost as if it was being filmed by a handheld video camera. | |
| It was difficult to make out a lot of details in this scene because my vision wasn't very clear. | |
| I walked for a while and I could tell that I was approaching the line of trees. | |
| At this point I decided that I'd accomplished what I wanted to, so I opened my eyes and I turned on the lights. | |
| Now I'm going to share with you one more experience. | |
| This is an experience my wife had. | |
| One afternoon, it was probably two or three years ago, she laid down to take a nap on the bed. | |
| She never did go to sleep. | |
| She was a little bit restless. | |
| So as she lay there on the bed, She suddenly heard the sound of a radio playing in our bedroom. | |
| Now we don't have a radio but she heard the sound of like a radio announcer and some music so she got up to check out where this radio sound was coming from. | |
| She got up out of the bed and walked around the end of it and then looked back and noticed her physical body was in the bed and she was out of her body. | |
| She walked around the end of the bed toward the door and saw a demon in the hallway right outside of our bedroom door. | |
| And when the demon saw her, it started running toward her. | |
| Now she became angry and just thought, I'm going to kill that thing. | |
| So she went towards it and she grabbed it around the neck and started to choke it. | |
| And at that point, she stood up. | |
| And she walked back around the bed and got back into the bed and laid into her physical body. | |
| Her spirit and body went back together. | |
| And she said she felt or heard like a whooshing sound. | |
| And then she felt the weight of her spirit and body back together in the bed. | |
| In my wife's experience and in my experience, neither of us felt any sense of vibrations. | |
| We never felt any numbness or tingling. | |
| The sense when our spirit left our physical body was effortless. | |
| It didn't seem difficult. | |
| We just did it. | |
| It felt very natural to us. | |
| In fact, my wife didn't know she was actually out of her body until she looked back and saw her body laying in the bed. | |
| I have a friend named Michael Van Vlijmen who has written a couple of books on traveling in the spirit. | |
| One of them is a workbook, and the other one is primarily testimonies. | |
| It's called Supernatural Transportation. | |
| In addition to testimonies, it's a very good teaching book. | |
| If you're interested in this subject, I would highly recommend picking up one or both of his books. | |
| Michael has allowed me to share some of his testimonies, so I'm going to read them. | |
| And I'll give you a little back story. | |
| So Michael developed this habit of praying at night. | |
| So he would sit in this chair and he would pray in the late hours of the evening, just praying and connecting with God. | |
| And so that's, this was kind of a routine that he developed. | |
| And I'm going to share some of his stories. | |
| He writes, "As I would pray and worship in the comfort of my prayer chair, if I felt like I was getting sleepy, sometimes I would get up and walk through the house while praying. | |
| Usually I would take the same path and do laps through the house. | |
| Some nights, this would go on for a long time. | |
| One evening, as I was praying in my prayer chair, I felt myself growing tired, so I got up and began going through my house, doing my nightly prayer covering. | |
| When I had gone through the house and made it back to my prayer chair, my body was still in the chair. | |
| I looked at my body, sitting there in a chair, and it threw me for a bit. | |
| I had done my entire nightly prayer routine with the complete function and awareness of a tangible, physical person, even though I was in the spirit. | |
| So, Michael traveled out of his body in the spirit and wasn't even aware of it until he got back and came back through and then saw his body sitting in the chair. | |
| Once I learned that I could actually move into the spiritual realm like this, I began doing it on purpose. | |
| I would repeat what I had done in prayer numerous times, recreating my time of prayer and waiting on God and looking for the manifestation of moving from the physical to the spiritual. | |
| I walked around as before when I prayed. | |
| What happened was, I began to experience actually going into the spirit for my prayer walks. | |
| So, he was walking out of his body and going around in the spirit. | |
| I would go in the spirit and pray in the spirit. | |
| Then, after I was done praying, I would go back and rejoin my physical body. | |
| So, eventually he learned how to do this intentionally. | |
| Not long after this, I began lying down on the floor to pray. | |
| I would go up to my bedroom and lay down on the floor beside the bed, and I would just pray. | |
| Because the floor was hard, it made it easier to stay awake and pray, and yet being in a reclined position allowed me to relax to a degree. | |
| Again, I began getting up in the middle of the night to do my prayer walks, and many times I would come back to my bedroom to see my body lying on the floor beside the bed. | |
| Then I began to venture out into the yard and around the house. | |
| I did the exact same thing I had done before, only I changed locations. | |
| I would walk around the house on the outside in my imagination, and then eventually a shift would happen, and then I would be outside in the spirit. | |
| I did notice something powerful concerning the manifestation of this. | |
| If the thing I saw myself doing in my imagination was something more extreme, such as imagining myself flying instead of walking, or imagining myself standing on the roof to pray, the shift into the spiritual dimension seemed to happen faster. | |
| I was in the spirit one morning walking around the backyard patio area when I had a brilliant idea. | |
| I decided to take some of the mulch chips from the flower bed and place them on the air conditioning unit and then come back outside in the morning in my physical body to see if the mulch was still there. | |
| This would corroborate my adventure in the spirit that morning. | |
| So, that's exactly what I did. | |
| I grabbed a handful of mulch and I placed it on the air conditioner. | |
| The problem was that when I came back outside in the morning, it looked like only about half the mulch that I had actually placed was still there. | |
| And that only left me with more questions. | |
| So this is an interesting thing because Michael is traveling in the spirit outside of his body and he's able to pick up a handful of mulch and put it on the air conditioning unit, go back inside his house, go back into his physical body, come back outside and the mulch is still there. | |
| Not as much as he thought it was, but there was still mulch there. | |
| I want to read to you one more passage from William Bowman's book. | |
| a connection here that I think is very important. | |
| He wanted to try to understand the nature of the non-physical realm, so he did a series of experiments. | |
| One of the experiments he did was he would take pencils and he would stand them on erasers on the nightstand. | |
| And while he was traveling out of body, he would try to knock the pencils over. | |
| I'm going to read just a short excerpt from the book where he shows the results of these experiments. | |
| Throughout this period, I continued my pencil experiments. | |
| During several out-of-body experiences, I tried to move the pencil balanced on the nightstand and was surprised to find that the vibrational frequency or density of my non-physical body seemed to determine whether the pencil or even the entire room was visible to me. | |
| After several weeks, I finally focused on one of the pencils after separation. | |
| As I moved to the side of the bed, I concentrated on the pencil at the edge of my dresser. | |
| At first, my vision seemed foggy, somehow out of sync, but then it cleared up. | |
| When it was in focus, I could see the pencil in front of me. | |
| However, it appeared like a three-dimensional, hazy form with substance. | |
| I moved closer, I touched it with my hand, and felt a slight vibrational sensation as my fingers passed through the substance of the pencil. | |
| Somewhat frustrated, I tried again, but experienced the same results. | |
| Focusing my attention, I realized that my non-physical body was obviously less dense than the pencil, so he was not able to ever make his fingers be able to touch the pencil and knock it over. | |
| In a related experience, some years later, I was practicing self-hypnosis with a single lighted candle. | |
| After separation, I stood by the candle and decided to blow it out. | |
| To my surprise, it went out immediately. | |
| But upon returning to my physical body, I opened my eyes to find that the physical candle was still burning. | |
| After some thought, I realized that I must have blown out a candle in what I now know as a parallel dimension closest to the physical one. | |
| So, in both the candle experiments and the pencil experiments, Bowman, when he was astral projecting, when he was in his astral body, was not able to make any effect on anything in the physical world. | |
| Couldn't knock over pencils, couldn't blow out candles. | |
| Now, Michael Van Vlijmen, when he was traveling in the spirit, was able to pick up a handful of mulch, put it on an air conditioner, and come back out in his physical body and was still there. | |
| That is a significant difference between astral projection and Christian traveling in the spirit or translation by faith. | |
| When we translate by faith, when we travel in the spirit, we have the ability to affect things in the physical realm. | |
| People who astral project say that they project their astral body into the astral plane. | |
| Well, I don't know a whole lot about the astral plane, and I don't really need to study it. | |
| My main concern is a different plane of existence. | |
| My teaching and all my interest is about the spiritual kingdom of God. | |
| So, when Jesus talked to Nicodemus, which is recorded in John chapter 3, Nicodemus came to him and said, We know you are a teacher sent of God, for no one can do the works that you do unless God is with him. | |
| And Jesus said to Nicodemus, Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a man is born again, he cannot see or enter the kingdom of God. | |
| The kingdom of God is a spiritual kingdom. | |
| It is a spiritual realm. | |
| It's a spiritual universe. | |
| And until you are born again, born of the Spirit, you cannot enter or engage or see that spiritual dimension. | |
| But once you are born again, the Holy Spirit comes inside of us and changes our spiritual makeup. | |
| So that we are then, at that time, able to engage, see, walk in, and affect the spiritual realm of the kingdom of God. | |
| That is impossible for someone to do if they're astral projecting. | |
| They don't have the access to that realm. | |
| So, my understanding and my belief is that we're talking about two different spiritual realms. | |
| One is the spiritual kingdom of God, and the other is the astral realm. | |
| It's not surprising to me that people experience They're traveling in the spirit very differently. | |
| Here's a list that I came up with of the differences between astral projection and translation by faith. | |
| Astral projection is nearly always done while the person is asleep. | |
| They nearly always experience vibrations. | |
| They may experience loud noises, tingling, numbness, fear, disorientation, and other uncomfortable sensations, both as they're separating from their body and when they're returning. | |
| The traveler is almost always aware of being out of body. | |
| They may suddenly be returned to their body. | |
| They may sense the presence of a silver cord. | |
| And they may or may not astral project after a time of preparation. | |
| One of the things that I noticed in my research is people would do these affirmations and meditations preparing to astral project, but many times nights and weeks would go by, or sometimes months, and they would never astral project. | |
| So for them, it was never a guaranteed thing. | |
| It was sort of like hit and miss. | |
| These are the features that I notice with people who experience traveling in the spirit or translation by faith. | |
| So, travel in the spirit can be done while you're asleep or while you're awake. | |
| When someone is experiencing translation by faith, they don't experience vibrations. | |
| Some people have reported feeling sensations of energy flowing through them, but it's not uncomfortable. | |
| They may or may not be aware of going out of their body. | |
| Now, if you remember, the Apostle Paul said he knew a man in Christ 14 years ago. | |
| That is a very common experience when someone is traveling in the spirit in the kingdom. | |
| When a person is traveling in the spirit or when they're translated by faith, they may or may not be aware of being out of their body. | |
| Many times a person travels out of their body and they're not aware of it until they come back or look around and realize, oh, there's my body sitting there. | |
| When someone is translated by faith, they're usually not aware of a silver cord. | |
| Now, we call this experience translation by faith because faith is needed to activate it. | |
| Once your faith is operational, you can travel at will, which is not the case with astral projection. | |
| So, that's a summary of the different features that I see when I compare Christian spiritual travel with astral projection. | |
| You can make up your own mind. | |
| You can decide whatever you want. | |
| I have finally made up my own mind, and I do not believe these are the same thing. | |
| I think there are some significant differences, and I think it's very easy to see them when you line them up side by side. | |
| Yes? | |
| I did finish my book, Traveling in the Spirit Made Simple. | |
| I wrote on a lot more subjects than I thought I would. | |
| There are chapters on the Divine Council. | |
| There's a chapter that helps you understand Operating in the Courts of Heaven, if you're interested in that. | |
| There is a chapter on portals. | |
| There are chapters on many different places you can go in the heavenly realms. | |
| I have a lot of information on the different ways in which we travel. | |
| Trances, translocation, translation by faith. | |
| There's an entire chapter that outlines the biblical basis for traveling in the spirit. | |
| It's a pretty comprehensive book. | |
| If you're interested in learning more about traveling the spirit, I would suggest you pick it up. | |
| I'll leave links below this to my book and Michael Van Vlijmen's book if you're interested. | |
| I hope you have a chance to check it out. | |
| Thanks for tuning in. | |
| It's been great. | |
| I am Praying Medic. | |
| I'll catch you next time. | |
| Well, folks, that is our show for today. | |
| I hope you enjoyed it. | |
| Thanks for dropping by. | |
| If you're new to the podcast and you haven't been to my website, you might drop by and check out the articles I have there. | |
| If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can contact me at admin at prayingmedic.com. | |
| That's A-D-M-I-N at prayingmedic.com. | |
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| I'd like to thank you again for dropping by. |