Originally Posted by
shadowofwind
I've astral projected while awake. I wasn't paying much attention to how it felt though.
I can feel my dream body while awake, now that you mention it.
I guess I can't be sure we're talking about the same thing. What I'm calling the dream body just sort of floats in me, and doesn't really feel like anything except floating, very soft, almost like its nothing, even though the feeling of floating is quite clear. I can move it a little bit by aligning something with my spine and the top of my head. When I do that I also feel a kind of current in my nerves, but that current isn't in what I'm calling the dream body. What I'm calling the astral body feels more outward or substantial or electric somehow, more closely related to my nerves. When it was out of my physical body it really felt displaced. I had another experience where its energy sort of inverted, and I could see and hear astrally, but internal to my body instead of external to it. What I'm calling the dream body doesn't have an energy like that, and is closer to my feeling and farther away from my senses, sort of.
Usually I don't think about this stuff, I just feel things abstractly. I don't really think of the subjects I'm feeling as being located anywhere, and I'm not aware of my body when thinking like that. I experience 'myself' as being sort of like a well or a deep pool of water that images spring out of. There's also an atmosphere of sorts associated with this 'water', that comes into me from other people and stays with me for a while. But I have that mostly shut down most of the time, being relatively disfunctional in that area.
I'll give an example of feeling. I'm in a dream, a 'Jew' in a pit with other Jews. There is a woman in the pit with us who is not one of us. She's too proud to speak to me, but she allows eye contact so that I can read her story. She is one of our persecutors, but she chose separation from her people and death, casting her lot with us, rather than being a party to their crime against us. This woman's spirit is feels strong and disciplined, like iron. Her choice, who she is who makes that choice, feels incredibly beautiful to me. Recognizing it, I'm compelled to honor her by aspiring to be true to what she represents. I don't mean compelled as in forced, I mean that I freely choose it, but it is the natural honest choice given what I know, having felt who she is. The most essential content in dreams is abstract, such as how her spirit feels. In many dreams there isn't even a supporting metaphor of sounds or images or location.
The strength of character illustrated by the woman in the previous dream would be more closely related to what I call the dream body than the astral body. This dream body, or something else more subtle associated with it, is somehow above or outside of time and space, and invulnerable. To whatever extent I can find courage, its because I have that confidence of knowing that invulnerable transcendence. Having felt it, even when I'm not feeling it overtly I still feel a trust that its there.
If I get a feeling or premonition of something far away, I would say that's the dream body, not the astral body. Its like I can be multiple places at once.
My ability to think about these things, to feel them, is assisted, at least initially, by being able to feel other people who are aware of such things. This is one reason I signed up for this forum. I would also like to share what I'm aware of so that other people can make it their own, qualified by the extent that other people's motives are in harmony with my ultimate goal. That goal is to solve this problem of evil which you describe. I do not want to seem to be that evil any longer.
I've read that being able to reliably distinguish one's identity as feeling from the astral body, and from various elementals and from everything else, is the key to solving the problem of evil. I'm not entirely sure I believe that, though I'm not against the idea either.