'Consciousness' aside, if an entity has thoughts, that involves a kind of structure, and something like memory. That is almost synonymous with matter, even if it is 'astral' matter, and not common 'physical' matter.
I also think that 'physical' matter, so to speak, has properties which are outside of what is described by scientists. So some of the phenomena we regard as 'astral' may be physical in some sense.
One conjecture I had, which I posted before, is that there is some kind of exotic matter which interacts gravitationally with physical matter which is involved in 'psychic' experiences. Since it has mass in that sense, there's a lot of it in the gas an ice giants, which is why the positions of planets have some bearing on our experiences. There were alignments of massive planets a decade ago when shared dreaming seemed a lot easier for some people. If that is related somehow, it may start getting easier again soon. Anyway, my point is that if your astral entity acquaintances have their own minds, and live in an astral world in some objective sense, they should be able to tell us something more about this sort of thing. If none of them are scientists, they could still at least describe their perceptions of things that are outside of our experience.
One reason I suspect most of these masters are 'dead', is when I read people's descriptions of their interactions with them, they all seem to be drawing on the same humanly accessible pool of ideas. It's the same esoteric quasi-Theosophic stuff over and over again. Typically this repetition is taken as evidence that these ideas are 'truths'. However, these ideas also draw heavily on human scientific ideas as metaphors, particularly 19th century scientific ideas, and they involve fairly significant common misunderstandings of those scientific ideas. So to me they don't hold up as better than half truths, but in any case, true or not, they are definitely limited. On rare occasions when there appears to have been a new thought or insight obtained through any kind of 'channeling' or other dreamlike intuition, it appears to me to have originated in the human world in the near future. So it appears to me that if we're going to learn something new we have to figure it out ourselves - nobody else who knows anything seems to be talking to us about it.
One thing that I have noticed, is that the intelligence of our fates or muses behaves in some ways like a big neural network, and it sometimes makes what appear to be 'mistakes' of that nature, confusing things with other metaphorically similar things. That seems to imply something like a big brain, whether it is made of exotic matter or is a sort of subconscious hive-mind that uses our physical brains.
According to Leadbeater, the sides of a cube appear to be equal length 'astrally', not distorted by perspective like in the physical world. If that's true, then what we regard as physical must be literally some kind of projection from his 'astral', which would have a higher dimensionality than what we call physical. I'm using the word dimension here literally, not figuratively. If your experience is in the same realm as what he was talking about (assuming for the sake of the discussion that he knew what he was talking about), and if you're perceiving it to that extent, then maybe you could experience something like this. I had a dream once where I could see an object from all directions at once. It was a cartoon object, clearly imaginary, but my perspective on it was from everywhere around it at once. So I at least have the ability to imagine something like that for some reason.
I had another experience in a dream when I was about 17 which was topologically different than my waking life experience. I can't think about it clearly when outside of the experience. As a different example to show what I mean by a topological difference, imagine a world in which when you look forward you can see your back, and when you look up you can see the bottom of your feet, and when you look right you can see your left. This is a three dimensional torus. A two dimensional torus, which is a donut shape, can be embedded in a three dimensional 'Euclidean' topology, which is how we usually think about space, but a three dimensional one can not be. It could be embedded in a four dimensional space. In any case, the three dimensional torus is simple enough that I can at least think about it even if I can't place it inside our 'world'. But what I dreamed about back then is somehow more difficult, and I can not think about it. I guess the three dimensional torus is easier because it is merely three dimensional. My point here is that when trying to understand the 'astral' world, it might be necessary to go outside of the kind of topology that approximately describes our physical world. (I think physical space isn't exactly 3D either, but that's a different topic. I'm using the world topology to describe a structural difference, like the distinction between a donut and a ball. Stretching would be a geometric difference. So for example, the shape of a donut and a coffee cup are topologically equivalent but geometrically different.)
When I mostly lost my exotic dreaming ability a decade ago, it seemed to become increasingly abstract, and slipped away from me, as if it was still there but no longer projecting itself into something that I could grasp from my place in this world. Now I still have occasional paranormal experiences, maybe even as many as before, but not much going on in dreams.
One thing I can say is that if the astral pseudo-Buddhist teacher dudes are 'dead', they at least care about this topic of trying to understand the nature of the astral realm. It gets their attention. What I'm interested in is if they can share any actual understanding which I don't already have. An argument against doing that, or an excuse, is that knowledge is power, and we have enough power already. An argument for it is that our 19th century metaphors are kind of lame, and it would be nice to have a more coherent understanding of what we're dealing with.
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