Q: Is there anything called soul travel as practice by Eckankar or other school of thought?

A: Thank you for your question. Yes, there is something called soul travel. It’s associated with confusing beliefs about souls disconnecting from the body and traveling around, observing, becoming ghosts, reincarnating – -beliefs that are ancient and based in superstition. The process is along the lines that intent, or meditation, or drugs can allow the soul to detach, that it remains attached to the body only through a thin silver cord, that it can travel great distances – -to other planets as well – -and as long as the cord is attached the soul will return to the body but if it breaks it won’t return. Eckankar focuses on teaching this technique and other meditation practices promote it as well – -after all, who wouldn’t want to be able to fly off and observe all manner of interesting things?

It’s a mind game deception. Our minds are powerful as well as directable. We do have the ability to direct our mind and a conscious connection so that it may seem we have left our body. Mind can detect information at a distance but “you” don’t leave one place and travel to another. Through practice one can strengthen the connection to the subconscious mind’s psychic abilities and participate in many otherwise strange mind games. Such a practice will disengage one from reality substituting the practical to make it become impractical.

The Urantia Book warns against attempting to augment psychic abilities, offering instead a practical, inspiring, spiritually beneficent cosmology which answers life’s most challenging questions and gives focus to human longings and desires in a logical, positive, and uplifting manner. There’s more than enough in reality to satisfy curiosity and the desire for adventure without veering away into augmenting unreality experiences.

Another of our responders has a few words on this subject as well…

I wonder if you are familiar with The Urantia Book teaching on the soul? I find it to be one of the loveliest parts of the revelation. And it goes like this: When a child reaches the age of reason—anywhere from 5-7 years—and makes a conscious choice for good, that is the time when God sends a fragment of himself to indwell that child’s mind. The Urantia Book calls this fragment the Thought Adjuster. And, it signals the birth of the soul. Thereafter, every moral choice that the child makes results in growth of the soul. The soul is comprised on only goodness, and it is that part of us that will survive us after our material bodies have died here on earth. It grows throughout our lifetime, and will actually be our true appearance when we awaken on the Mansion Worlds of God.

I only add this because sometimes people have a fuzzy understanding of just what the soul is—I know I did, before I read about it in The Urantia Book.

Personally, I would not like to think of my soul traveling away from me. I agree that our minds, including imagination, can play tricks on us—if we are so-minded. But they also can be influenced greatly by our spiritual choices. Maybe your spiritual frame of mind wants to think that your soul can travel to other realms, perhaps, but what does that really mean? There really are only two realms—the material and the spiritual. If you want to travel to spirit realms, you have to go no further than your own mind, where that fragment of God still resides, and get to know him. That is the best spiritual realm of all, and it is in the here-and-now, and will help your soul to grow, and you’ll be conscious of everything.

If you are thinking more along the lines of remote-viewing or something, I would definitely not want to send my soul somewhere less than spiritual. This seems dangerous to me, only because it really could disassociate you from reality—reality being spiritual—and this would not be beneficial for your soul’s growth. I don’t know the limits of the human mind, and I find remote-viewing kind of interesting, but I doubt that it has anything to do with our soul. Again, this is a confusion of mind and soul, in my opinion.

Some additional soul quotes from The Urantia Book:

The material self has personality and identity, temporal identity; the prepersonal spirit Adjuster also has identity, eternal identity. This material personality and this spirit prepersonality are capable of so uniting their creative attributes as to bring into existence the surviving identity of the immortal soul.

Having thus provided for the growth of the immortal soul and having liberated man’s inner self from the fetters of absolute dependence on antecedent causation, the Father stands aside. Now, man having thus been liberated from the fetters of causation response, at least as pertains to eternal destiny, and provision having been made for the growth of the immortal self, the soul, it remains for man himself to will the creation or to inhibit the creation of this surviving and eternal self which is his for the choosing. No other being, force, creator, or agency in all the wide universe of universes can interfere to any degree with the absolute sovereignty of the mortal free will, as it operates within the realms of choice, regarding the eternal destiny of the personality of the choosing mortal. As pertains to eternal survival, God has decreed the sovereignty of the material and mortal will, and that decree is absolute. (5:6.7)

The association of actuals and potentials equals growth, the experiential realization of values. But growth is not mere progress. Progress is always meaningful, but it is relatively valueless without growth. The supreme value of human life consists in growth of values, progress in meanings, and realization of the cosmic interrelatedness of both of these experiences. And such an experience is the equivalent of God-consciousness. Such a mortal, while not supernatural, is truly becoming superhuman; an immortal soul is evolving.

(100:3.6)

Date published:
Author: Staff