Chapter Nine - What’s Real? What’s Symbolic?

CHAPTER NINE

What’s Real? What’s Symbolic?

SO, YOU HAD an experience. Maybe you floated above your body. Maybe you met a being made of color and sound. Maybe you drifted through a realm that looked like a kaleidoscope of memory and meaning.

And the first question is almost always the same:
“Was that real?”

The answer?
Yes. And also, maybe not in the way you think.

Not Outer Space. Inner Truth.

The biggest mistake people make when exploring astral states is taking everything literally.

We want to map what we see like it’s a foreign country:
“This region has glowing towers. That zone has silver corridors. I passed through the fear cloud and found the castle of wisdom.”

But the astral isn’t a place you travel to.
It’s a reflection of where you already are.

What you see there isn’t a new location.
It’s your consciousness given form.

When your body sleeps and your awareness lifts, your mind stops speaking in words. It switches to metaphor.

You don’t read in the astral. You feel. You see.
A snake might represent fear.
A tunnel might represent transition.
A storm might be unresolved grief.

It’s not about “what happened.” It’s about “what did it mean?”

The same way dreams often reveal what we’re hiding from ourselves, so do astral journeys.

Not with direct answers. With symbols.
And symbols are both real and not real.

They aren’t false.
They’re representative.

Think of it like a mirror maze.
You’re not seeing other places.
You’re seeing yourself, stretched across dimension, time, memory, hope, fear, and future.

Some reflections will feel ancient. Some may feel alien.
But all of them are fragments of your awareness, shown through the lens of symbols you can understand.

And sometimes you’ll glimpse something bigger than you.
Something real in a way that breaks the word “real.”

Reality, in this space, isn’t binary. It’s layered.

Literal reality: What happens in physical space.
Psychological reality: What it felt like.
Symbolic reality: What it meant.
Metaphysical reality: What it revealed.

They’re all real. They’re just different kinds of real.

Don’t waste your time trying to prove what you saw.
Don’t try to convince anyone else.

Just ask yourself:

“What did I learn?”
“What changed in me?”
“How can I live better because of it?”

That’s the realest answer you’ll ever need.