ForumforAstral
A very old projection - I was seventeen when it occurred.
I remember that this particular day was the first day of school after the summer holiday. I woke up early and began my exercises. After concentrating on mental images for a short while I left the darkness of my bedroom and entered the brilliant light of day on the other side.
I found myself in what was then my parents bedroom and flew out of our balcony. After flying down the nearby street for a short while I saw something I still can't find words for.
At the end of the street there was a landscape of what truly can be described as another world. There were two buildings in the distance in front of me. One of them looked like a palace, with a single dome on top. The other reminded me of church or temple. What struck me about those structures, however, was their utter alienness - their architecture was like nothing I've ever seen on the Earth. It was distinguished, on one side, by its incredible richness, and by its almost organic quality on the other - the buildings looked, so to speak, "organic", there was something in them that reminded me, literally, of plants.
I lost the consciousness before I could reach the buildings. I regained it in the normal world, waking to the incredibly misty morning of September. I also remember that on this particular day the classes began with the arts class.
The experience is important to me for two reasons. The first is that it was the first indication that my experiences weren't purely subjective. The other was that, later on, it was on their account that I made a distinction between three principal areas of the Otherworld - the Shadow (Umbra), which mirrors physical reality, the Near Reaches, which are more or less like our world, and the Far Reaches, where reality becomes unrecognizably different from the world we know. The buildings in question belong - in this model - to the distant Far Reaches.
For a long time I thought I was the only person that saw these kinds of structures - but then I found this passage in Benny Shannon's "Antipodes of the mind". It refers to the visions experienced by the Ayahuasca drinkers:
An informant who partook of Ayahuasca with the Cashinahua Indians told me of a city of strange, circular architecture she had never envisaged or heard of beforehand. A European partaking of the brew for the first time in a private, urban context and who had no prior knowledge about Ayahuasca at all reported seeing what he characterized as being the most bizarre architectures possible: 'The buildings did not have a straight line to them, and some had animal features. They had mouths, yet they were buildings. Some of the buildings also moved. ' Similiarily, Luna describes seeing 'a Hyeronymous Bosh-like city with buildings of organic form, like huge plants or organs of a gigantic animal' (Luna and Amaringo, 1993: 41).
(Benny Shanon, "The Antipodes of the Mind", p.125)
When I read these descriptions, years later, I realized that they refer to what I have seen on this misty morning of September. If anything, it proves - to me - the objective quality of the World Next Door, as well as the fact that there seems to be an advanced culture dwelling within its borders.
