# Astral projection

Source: https://spiritfold.com/Astral_projection  
Published by the Australian Spiritual Alliance on Spiritfold, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

**Astral projection** is a popular name for the reported ability to leave the physical body and travel, usually while asleep or in trance. The person's consciousness is said to move away from the body, and it is often pictured as an astral body or double.[1] Researchers treat it as a deliberate form of the **out-of-body experience** (OBE): an experience in which a person's view of the world seems to come from a point outside their own body.[2]

## Description

### The experience

People who have out-of-body experiences usually understand them to mean that their consciousness or soul has left the body and can travel freely through space.[2] In the model developed by Theosophists, meditation and occult techniques were said to let the **astral body** (a finer, non-physical body) journey away from the physical one, still joined to it by a fine **silver cord**.[2]

### Three kinds of report

Paul Gillen, studying Sydney Spiritualists in the late 1970s, found that the idea of astral travel joins together three different kinds of reported experience: feeling displaced from the body, sometimes to the point of looking back at it; travelling a long way in a "phantom" body and so learning things beyond the reach of ordinary perception; and being seen as an apparition by people far away. He noted that the name "astral projection" is sometimes kept for cases where the person consciously intends to project themselves elsewhere, and that the idea has been offered as an explanation for clairvoyance.[3] These distinctions help a student, because in each kind of report the person said to be travelling, perceiving or appearing is a living person, not someone who has died.[3]

### How common it is

Out-of-body experiences have been reported in most of the world's cultures and by people of all ages.[2] Surveys by the University of Virginia in the 1970s suggested that around 20% of the general population have had one.[2] In a 2011 study of 63 university students, 17 (26%) said they had had at least one out-of-body experience.[4] The experience may be deliberate, as in the practice of astral projection, or it may happen on its own, including at times of extreme stress or suffering.[2]

### Where the accounts come from, and other explanations

Reports of astral projection come from popular psychic literature and from psychical research. The British scientist Robert Crookall, for example, collected hundreds of accounts from people in all walks of life.[1]

Brain research offers a different explanation. Psychologists including Michael Persinger and Susan Blackmore have produced out-of-body experiences in people held in sensory deprivation by electrically stimulating the brain's temporal lobes. They suggested that what is seen during astral projection is a mental model the brain builds to keep its bearings when sensory input is missing.[2] A 2005 study found that a brain region called the temporoparietal junction is active when healthy people imagine themselves in the position and viewpoint typical of out-of-body experiences, and the authors suggested that disrupted processing there may give rise to such experiences.[5] In the 2011 student study, those who reported out-of-body experiences also reported more unusual perceptual experiences of particular kinds, and did less well on a task that asked them to imagine their own body from another position.[4]

## Scope

### What it includes

- Deliberate attempts to travel outside the body in sleep, trance or meditation[1][2]
- Spontaneous out-of-body experiences, which researchers study alongside deliberate ones[2]

### What it is not

- It is not, in itself, communication with spirits. The experiences grouped under astral travel are described as the living person's own displacement, travel or appearance at a distance.[3]
- It is not a central practice of Spiritualism, whose distinguishing emphasis is survival after death shown through mediumship.[6]

## Traditions and lineage

### Religious background

Out-of-body experiences have long been given religious meaning. In the Hindu Upanishads, the soul's flight through the sky is one of the powers attained by the enlightened, and in Tibet there is a separate name, *delog*, for those who can leave their bodies. Some passages in the Bible, such as Acts 8:39, have been read as describing such experiences, and in the Christian mystical tradition they have been interpreted as a moment of grace.[2]

### Theosophy and the twentieth century

A more practical approach appeared with the rise of Theosophy in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on Eastern mysticism and North American Spiritualism, Theosophists developed a layered model of the human person, running from the material self to the astral self. Writers such as Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater taught that occult techniques and meditation would let the astral body travel away from the physical body.[2] In the twentieth century "astral projection" was widely promoted in practical guides, such as Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington's *The Projection of the Astral Body* (London, 1929).[2]

## Context

### Within Spiritualism

Travel outside the body is woven into Spiritualism's own origins. According to John Buescher, the word "Spiritualism" itself came from mesmerism, where it referred to a higher realm that clairvoyants were said to reach while travelling without the body.[7] Emanuel Swedenborg, whose philosophy gave early Spiritualism a framework,[8] said he learned about life after death by travelling to the spirit world, which J. Gordon Melton calls "astral travel".[6] Melton also lists astral travel among the psychic happenings, along with clairvoyance, precognition and spirit communication, that writers from the late seventeenth century onwards collected as evidence of an unseen world.[6]

Among present-day Spiritualists, members of a Montreal church studied by Deirdre Meintel held that everyone has spiritual gifts, including astral projection, that can be developed.[9]

#### Psychic experience and mediumship

Melton draws the line that matters here: what sets Spiritualism apart from other psychic groups is its emphasis on personal survival after death, demonstrated through [mediumship](https://spiritfold.com/Mediumship).[6] Astral projection, as Gillen's three kinds of report show, concerns what a living person seems to perceive or do away from the body.[3] This distinction matters because an out-of-body experience, however vivid, is not the same thing as evidence that someone who has died is communicating. Australian Spiritualists teach the same line in general terms: in Matt Tomlinson's study of the Canberra Spiritualist Association, psychic work is understood as communication between living minds and mediumship as contact with people in the spirit world, so that every medium is said to be psychic but not every psychic a medium.[10]

### In Australian Spiritualism

Paul Gillen's 1981 thesis on Australian Spiritualism, based on fieldwork in Sydney, found that in practice beliefs about phenomena such as healing by touch, astral travel and clairvoyance were more fully worked out than the idea of contact with the dead.[11] Many of the mediums at the church he studied said they had experienced astral projection, though none regularly. It tended to come at times of medical or emotional crisis and was often linked with gaining psychic powers.[12]

### A Spiritualist perspective

Out-of-body experience has a longer place in Spiritualist thinking than many realise, as the history above shows, and some mediums have reported it in their own lives. Even so, it is not a central practice of Spiritualism. A Spiritualist teacher would see it as a personal experience to be understood calmly rather than a skill to be chased. A teacher would also help students keep two things apart. Psychic experiences, including the sense of leaving the body, belong to the student's own awareness. Mediumship is a different undertaking: it seeks to show, through evidence a sitter can recognise, that a person who has died lives on. Mixing the two leads to confusion, and a student who has had a vivid experience should be encouraged to describe it honestly rather than read more into it than it carries.

That calm matters. The page notes that such experiences have tended to come at times of crisis, and that they can also be linked with medical and psychological conditions. A good teacher would not push students to force them, would not treat them as a badge of development, and would never frighten anyone about them. If someone's experiences are distressing, frequent or leave them feeling unsettled, the kind thing is to encourage them to talk to their GP.

## Astral projection in Australia

### Research by Harvey Irwin

Carlos Alvarado, writing in the *Psi Encyclopedia*, names Harvey Irwin among the psychologists whose work brought out-of-body experiences back into psychology and parapsychology as a research topic.[13] The psychologist Susan Blackmore, who described Irwin as an Australian psychologist, considered his book *Flight of Mind: A Psychological Study of the Out-of-Body Experience* (1985) one of the best reviews of the research findings. The book defines the experience as one in which a person's centre of consciousness seems for a time to be located away from their body. It treats astral projection as a tradition, reviewing what is known about the astral body and the silver cord (which, it suggests, is not found in every culture), methods used to bring on the experience, and the generally positive after-effects people report. Blackmore notes that Irwin contributed much to the finding that people who have these experiences tend to have a greater capacity for becoming absorbed in inner experience.[14]

Irwin's earlier work included a 1980 study, "Out of the body down under", of the cognitive characteristics of Australian students who reported out-of-body experiences. Alvarado cites it among studies that found no difference in psychosis-related symptoms between people who had and had not had such experiences, and notes that Irwin's later model of the experience gives a central place to dissociation.[13]

### Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research

The Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research (AIPR), also called Parapsychology Australia, was founded in Sydney in 1977. The Society for Psychical Research's *Psi Encyclopedia* describes it as the oldest such research institute still operating in Australia. Since 2001 it has published the *Australian Journal of Parapsychology*, a peer-reviewed journal that appears twice a year.[15] In 2012 the journal published a study by Alexander De Foe, George van Doorn and Mark Symmons of 194 people who said they had had an out-of-body experience, some deliberately induced and some spontaneous. The one factor that predicted an induced rather than a spontaneous experience was whether the person had felt a sensation of leaving their body beforehand.[16]

## Safety and good practice

Medical writers note that out-of-body experiences are associated with a range of conditions, including brain lesions (particularly in the parietal and temporal regions), epilepsy, migraine, psychiatric disorders, substance use and severe emotional states such as near-death experiences.[17] This is why an experience of leaving the body should not simply be assumed to be spiritual. The authors of that paper report the case of a 15-year-old whose experience of floating outside his body and seeing it from a third-person view was found, on assessment, to be part of a dissociative disorder; he improved with psychological treatment.[17] The Victorian Government's Better Health Channel advises that anyone concerned that they or someone close to them may have a dissociative disorder should seek professional help, starting with a GP, who can refer to a specialist service.[18]

## Related modalities

- [Remote viewing](https://spiritfold.com/Remote_viewing)
- [Clairvoyance](https://spiritfold.com/Clairvoyance)
- [Telepathy](https://spiritfold.com/Telepathy)
- [Meditation](https://spiritfold.com/Meditation)
- [Spiritualism](https://spiritfold.com/Spiritualism)

## References

1. ["Astral Projection"](https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/astral-projection). *Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology*. Gale. Reproduced on Encyclopedia.com (accessed 11 October 2026).
2. Hayward, Rhodri. ["Out-of-body experiences"](https://www.encyclopedia.com/medicine/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/out-body-experiences). *The Oxford Companion to the Body*. Reproduced on Encyclopedia.com (accessed 11 October 2026).
3. Gillen, Paul. *[The Spiritualists: Gnosis and Ideology](https://figshare.mq.edu.au/articles/thesis/The_spiritualists_gnosis_and_ideology/19431146/1)*. PhD thesis, School of Behavioural Sciences, Macquarie University, 1981, PDF pp. 51–52 (accessed 12 October 2026).
4. Braithwaite, J. J., D. Samson, I. Apperly, E. Broglia and J. Hulleman. "Cognitive correlates of the spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE) in the psychologically normal population". *Cortex* 47, no. 7 (2011): 839–853. [doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2010.05.002](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2010.05.002). Abstract read via [Europe PMC](https://europepmc.org/article/MED/20598679) (accessed 11 October 2026).
5. Blanke, O., C. Mohr, C. M. Michel, A. Pascual-Leone, P. Brugger, M. Seeck, T. Landis and G. Thut. "Linking out-of-body experience and self processing to mental own-body imagery at the temporoparietal junction". *Journal of Neuroscience* 25, no. 3 (2005): 550–557. [doi:10.1523/jneurosci.2612-04.2005](https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.2612-04.2005). Abstract read via [Europe PMC](https://europepmc.org/article/MED/15659590) (accessed 11 October 2026).
6. Melton, J. Gordon. ["Western Esoteric Family II: Spiritualism & New Age"](https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/western-esoteric-family-ii-spiritualism-new-age). *Melton's Encyclopedia of American Religions* (Gale), via Encyclopedia.com (accessed 12 October 2026).
7. Buescher, John B. ["Spiritualism"](https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/spiritualism). *Encyclopedia of Religion*, 2nd ed. (Gale, 2005), via Encyclopedia.com (accessed 12 October 2026).
8. Ellwood, Robert S. and Gracia Fay Ellwood. ["Spiritualism"](https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/legal-and-political-magazines/spiritualism). *Contemporary American Religion* (Macmillan Reference), via Encyclopedia.com (accessed 12 October 2026).
9. Meintel, Deirdre. ["When There Is No Conversion: Spiritualists and Personal Religious Change"](https://cas-sca.journals.uvic.ca/index.php/anthropologica/article/download/2436/2224). *Anthropologica* 49 (2007): 149–162, p. 152 (accessed 12 October 2026).
10. Tomlinson, Matt. *[Speaking with the Dead: An Ethnography of Extrahuman Experience](https://doi.org/10.53288/0465.1.00)*. Earth: punctum books, 2024, pp. 39–40. Open access under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (accessed 12 October 2026).
11. Gillen, Paul. *[The Spiritualists: Gnosis and Ideology](https://figshare.mq.edu.au/articles/thesis/The_spiritualists_gnosis_and_ideology/19431146/1)*. PhD thesis, School of Behavioural Sciences, Macquarie University, 1981, abstract (accessed 12 October 2026).
12. Gillen, Paul. *[The Spiritualists: Gnosis and Ideology](https://figshare.mq.edu.au/articles/thesis/The_spiritualists_gnosis_and_ideology/19431146/1)*. PhD thesis, School of Behavioural Sciences, Macquarie University, 1981, PDF p. 52 (accessed 12 October 2026).
13. Alvarado, Carlos S. ["Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs)"](https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/out-body-experience-obe/). *Psi Encyclopedia*. Society for Psychical Research, London. Created 24 January 2015; last updated 27 August 2026 (accessed 11 October 2026).
14. Blackmore, Susan. ["Harvey Irwin's *Flight of Mind: A Psychological Study of the Out-of-Body Experience*"](https://journals.macewan.ca/lucidity/article/view/730) (book review). *Lucidity Letter* 5, no. 2 (December 1986) (accessed 11 October 2026).
15. McLuhan, Robert. ["Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research (AIPR)"](https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/australian-institute-parapsychological-research/). *Psi Encyclopedia*. Society for Psychical Research, London. Created 3 November 2016; last updated 2 September 2026 (accessed 11 October 2026).
16. De Foe, Alexander, George van Doorn and Mark Symmons. ["Research note: Induced out-of-body experiences are associated with a sensation of leaving the body"](https://hdl.handle.net/10779/rmit.27487905.v1). *Australian Journal of Parapsychology* 12, no. 2 (2012): 177–185. Abstract read via the RMIT University research repository (accessed 11 October 2026).
17. Mudgal, Varchasvi, Rashmi Dhakad, Rahul Mathur, Ujwal Sardesai and Virendra Pal. "Astral Projection: A Strange Out-of-Body Experience in Dissociative Disorder". *Cureus* 13, no. 8 (2021): e17037. [doi:10.7759/cureus.17037](https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.17037). Full text via [Europe PMC](https://europepmc.org/article/PMC/PMC8425774) (accessed 11 October 2026).
18. ["Dissociation and dissociative disorders"](https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtreatments/dissociation-and-dissociative-disorders). Better Health Channel, Department of Health, Victorian Government. Reviewed 17 February 2023 (accessed 11 October 2026).

## Further reading

- ["Astral Projection"](https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/astral-projection). *Encyclopedia of Occultism and Parapsychology*. Gale.
- Alvarado, Carlos S. ["Out-of-Body Experiences (OBEs)"](https://psi-encyclopedia.spr.ac.uk/articles/out-body-experience-obe/). *Psi Encyclopedia*, Society for Psychical Research.
- Blackmore, Susan. [Review of Harvey Irwin's *Flight of Mind*](https://journals.macewan.ca/lucidity/article/view/730). *Lucidity Letter*, 1986.
- Blanke, O. et al. ["Linking out-of-body experience and self processing to mental own-body imagery at the temporoparietal junction"](https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.2612-04.2005). *Journal of Neuroscience*, 2005.
- Braithwaite, J. J. et al. ["Cognitive correlates of the spontaneous out-of-body experience (OBE) in the psychologically normal population"](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cortex.2010.05.002). *Cortex*, 2011.
- Hayward, Rhodri. ["Out-of-body experiences"](https://www.encyclopedia.com/medicine/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/out-body-experiences). *The Oxford Companion to the Body*.