OVO

Yael Ruth Dragwyla is a writer; a ceremonial magickian, and sometimes editor of various alternative press publications.

OVO: What are some of the varieties of non-physical travel?

YRD: The two principal kinds are the out of body (OBE) stuff, where you literally leave your body and go elsewhere, and bilocation, where your mind is in two places at the same time whether or not you manifest physically in two places at the same time. I’ve found by experience and I’ve seen this reported in the literature that sometimes you’re thinking very hard about a place, you’ll be sitting in your living room thinking about a place and people will see you walking down the street in he place that you’re drinking about. They’ll say ‘Hi’ and you just disappear. You’ve bilocated into that city because you were thinking so hard about something.  You my actually have a physical appearance if you don’t have a physical weight or anything there. Your mind is definitely there as well as in your own body, so you’re not unconscious. With out of the body stuff, you actually leave your body. I bilocate routinely when I’m doing a magickal ritual.

OVO: Is this something that anyone could experience?

YRD: Anybody can experience it and I think at least a few times in your life everybody experiences it. If you’ve ever had a dream where you’re walking along an you suddenly stumble and there’s a bad jolt as if you’ve fallen on your face and you wake up, usually that means you’ve fallen back into your body after an OBE dream. Everybody’s had at least a couple of those. Everybody’s had an experience where you’re sitting in a chair and thinking about a place and suddenly it seems almost as if you were there. Everyone almost bilocates all the time but to do it effectively an exactly the way you want to without any hitches (or come close to go anyway), special training of stuff that is already in everybody is needed. People who have been in bad accidents or who were seriously traumatized on a chronic basis as children, a lot of the filters in their brain that are normally present for the rest of us aren’t there and they will tend to have these experiences more often. Therefore they’re the ones most likely to need the training. But this is something we all do at some point.

OVO: What does the training involve?

YRD: One of the things you can do is get the traditional crystal ball or bowl of water, and you gaze into it long enough that your mind gets bored with thinking about things and gives it up while you continue to stare into this thing. You start seeing pictures, pictures in your mind’s eye. When that starts happening you can train the pictures into being where you want them to be. If you keep doing this for quite a while you’ll find yourself projecting your mind at least partially to this other place. If you’re projecting into this bowl of water and you’re in, say, Los Angeles, and you’re thinking about London, you’ll start to bilocate into London. How far you’ll get with that I don’t know. There are all sorts of books on the subject. Another technique is to get a poster of a place you’d very much like to visit and you keep it on your wall. Five minutes a day you meditate on it and pretty soon you’ll be going there in your dreams.

OVO: What is the relation between something like bilocation and modern electronic media, which has some of the same effects as those attributed to bilocation?

YRD: With modern electronic media you have to have all that junk, whereas with bilocation you can do that spontaneously and all you need is your own head. Bilocation can produce more real manifest effects and do it in a real world way than electronics. Electronics is always planted and less complex than real life is. You don’t get get to touch and smell things on TV, you just see them. With bilocation all sorts of real life things am come across. If you actually get an out of the body experience you can pick up everything from music to smells to the way something feels when you rub your hand over it.

OVO:: What about the difference between out of the body experiences and bilocation and the like and psychosis or madness? How can you tell the difference?

YRD: Psychosis is when you loose control. If you can’t stop doing it its madness. It’s as if your body were in full panic mode and everything was frightening whether it should have been or not or your thoughts endlessly drift. The person who is psychotic is in bad shape, because they’re not fully in control of themselves, their thoughts run on in ways they can’t control. They can’t maintain control over their emotions so they drift in a psychological wind. But with these properties of bilocation and OBEs, when you do them spontaneously, if you’re sound and sane you get back home again without any problems. If on top of that you have training in how to utilize these things you get there and come back and you’ve achieved something along the way, you have control over this process.

OVO: What is a way for someone to test the reality of it if someone thinks they can bilocate?

YRD: If you think you’re in a city and you’ve never been there before, try to go to a corner where there’s a street sign. Get the names of the streets, addresses, if possible names off mail boxes. When you’re awake again write all this down as quickly as possible so you don’t forget and go to a library and look it up on a map. If you can, stop and talk to somebody. Say ‘hello’ and engage them in a conversation, in which you ask them about their city. Say you’re a stranger. If they’re speaking in a foreign language that you don’t understand that’s a pretty good test of it.

OVO: Do you know of examples of that happening?

YRD: I’ve read of it in the literature. Beyond that it’s by guess and by god.

One of the things that is very hard to do in dreams and in astral projection is to look at your own hands. I’ve tried it. Raise your own hands in front of your face and look at them. If you can’t do that or if you have trouble even putting the thoughts together to do that, that may be something that tells you that you’re astral-traveling rather than in a normal waking state. If you can think about doing it you’re not in a normal dream. I’d like someday to found my own university of esoteric sciences – for real, such that eventually it would produce graduates who simultaneously have a degree in some esoteric field, like say alchemy, and at the same time in something that would get them a job, a top-level job, working, say, for the government, or cities, or environmental protection. In Kipling’s book Kim the main character says “I thank Allah for both sides of my head.” This culture does not educate both sides of the head as they did in medieval times when they had the Curriculum. The point of the Curriculum was the well-rounded man. We need to do that again but we can’t go back to the medieval way of looking at the world. We know better, so we have to go forward, to a spiritual literacy that is up-to-date with all our experiences, good and bad, in the Twentieth Century. That’s what I want to start some day, real education. Not new age bullshit but education for both sides of the head in a way that is appropriate to the late Twentieth Century and the early Twenty-First.

(from OVO 13 TRAVEL January 1992)