Mystical systems
Astral Projection
Direct answer
Astral Projection: Astral projection is the claimed ability to separate a subtle second body from the physical one and travel in it while the physical body sleeps or rests.
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At a glance
- Also called
- astral travel, astral projecting, astral journey
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Out-of-Body Experience, Astral Body, Astral Plane, Silver Cord
Astral projection is the claimed ability to separate a subtle second body from the physical one and travel in it while the physical body sleeps or rests.
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What is astral projection?
Astral projection is the name given to deliberately leaving the body. In the teaching, each person has an astral body that normally coincides with the physical one. In sleep, trance or deep relaxation it is said to slip out, remaining joined by a cord, and to move about the ordinary world or a parallel astral one.
The experience the term describes is real, and researchers call it the out-of-body experience. What it shows is disputed. Practitioners take it as proof that mind can act apart from the body. Laboratory work points to a shift in how the brain places the self in space, and no test has confirmed that a traveller can observe distant things.
On the tree of the hidden arts: Astral projection.
What sets Astral Projection apart
What distinguishes projection from the bare experience is intent and theory. The projector sets out to leave, follows a method, and explains the result with a second body and a plane for it to travel in. First-hand manuals agree on a sequence: deep relaxation, a stage of heaviness or vibration, a sense of lifting or rolling out, and a view of the room from a new position. They disagree on almost everything after that, including whether the world seen is the physical one.
- Term: astral, 'of the stars', from Latin astrum; projection of a second body
- First popular manual: Muldoon and Carrington, The Projection of the Astral Body, 1929
- Early diarist: Oliver Fox, whose record of his experiments appeared in 1939
- Best-known modern author: Robert Monroe, Journeys Out of the Body, 1971
- Usual starting point: the edge of sleep, with the body fully relaxed
- Laboratory finding: similar illusions induced with video goggles in 2007
Often mistaken for something else: An out-of-body experience is what a person reports, whatever its cause; astral projection is the doctrine and practice that explains it as a second body travelling.
The story behind Astral Projection
The doctrine was assembled by the Theosophical Society in the late nineteenth century from Platonist, Indian and occult sources. Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington published the first popular manual in 1929, and Oliver Fox described his own experiments in a book of 1939. Robert Monroe's Journeys Out of the Body, 1971, brought the subject to a wide public, and he later founded an institute to study it.
Why Astral Projection matters
Astral Projection is the central claim of the art, and separating the claim from the experience beneath it is the first thing a careful reader has to do.
How to read Astral Projection
People say it of both the practice and the experience; the house keeps it for the teaching and says out-of-body experience for what people report.
Astral Projection in practice: an example
Someone who wakes to find themselves apparently floating near the ceiling, looking down at their own bed, would be said in this teaching to have projected.
Where readings of Astral Projection go wrong
Nothing has been shown to leave the body. Sleep is never cut short to force it, and people with a history of psychosis, mania, dissociation or seizures should not attempt it.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- astral travel, astral projecting, astral projection meaning, what is astral projection, astral journey
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
What is astral projection?
It is the claim that a person can leave the physical body in a second, subtler body and travel while the first one sleeps. The experience behind it is known to researchers as the out-of-body experience.
Is astral projection real?
The experience is real and fairly common. No controlled test has shown that anything leaves the body or that travellers can see distant things, and brain research offers another explanation.
Is astral projection dangerous?
The experience itself is not known to cause harm, and the brief paralysis that sometimes comes with it passes within minutes. The risks lie in losing sleep or in pushing on despite fear, both of which should be avoided.
