“There is a huge amount of misunderstanding of what astral projection actually is, and what people think it is. And there's also massive misunderstanding about visionary magic. When you're talking about astral projection, journeying, entering the soul garden, things like that, what you're talking about is where, for the most part, the majority of people think that their spirit is locked into their body, that their energy is locked into their body, and that their skin is a barrier and that they go no further, or they have a little bit of an aura around them, and that's it. That's actually not correct. The body is a vessel; the spirit has the ability to spread out. It has no shape, it has no boundary other than the physical body, but it can stretch beyond that, and it can spread right out. It can experience bump up against other spirits, other energies. Your vital force can bump up against somebody else's vital force, or the vital force of a tree or a rock. The mind is the bridge of communication, and within the mind, is the imagination, which provides the vocabulary. What a lot of people think of as astral projection, like I said earlier is this: suddenly you've shot out of your body and you're still looking at your body. You're not out of your body as in you haven't left it. You have stretched because there's no boundary for the spirit, and it's done it in this uncontrolled projected way, which is actually really unhealthy for you. It causes a panic in the body, so it sucks it straight back in again. So it's often very difficult to control and act in what people think of as astral projection. As in, suddenly I'm floating on the ceiling and looking down that sort of thing. Yes, that happens, that is a part of visionary stuff. But it's unhealthy in that it's not as safe, it leaves you wide open for all sorts of problems. It also puts a horrendous strain on the body, so the older you get, the more dangerous it becomes. Whereas working in a more controlled way and understanding this stretching and that being in two places at once is perfectly normal. You don't have to have the spirit just over there and it's left the body. When you do that, if your spirit completely leaves your body, your body dies. It just doesn't work like that. So it is stretched, and maybe that's not the right word. The actual reality is that you're in two or even three different places at once.”
— Josephine McCarthy on astral projection and visionary work, Glitch Bottle #128 (32:40)
