I took a vacation on the Astral Plane last month. It was awesome.
For a combination of relaxation, intellectual stimulation, scenic wonder, and mildly exciting (but too dangerous) adventure — all at a low cost — it is hard to beat an Astral Plane vacation.
The absolute best part is the travel is so easy. Your physical body doesn’t even leave your house and you can pack very light. Mostly you just get in the right frame of mind or consciousness, and your soul/chakra/spirit takes the trip to the Astral Plane. Your body stays seated in the lotus position with your eyes closed.
Once you get to the Astral Plane, you have free reign to do almost anything.
It’s hard to judge distances there and the light seems to come from more than one direction. The are clouds, too, but they are in different shapes from the ones on Earth. And there are these globular things everywhere — people told me they were called Orbs.
The TV in my room got over 300 channels but who wants to sit and watch TV when you’re on the Astral Plane? Not me. Too much fun to be had.
In the mornings there is a hiking group leaving from the lobby every hour. You get to see the jagged yet strangely harmonious terrain of the Astral Plane. There are birds in colors I’d never seen before. Trees are wild and convoluted; they grow in more than one direction because the sunlight comes from more than one direction. The rocks seem to glow — well, maybe that isn’t the right word — but some of the rocks looked like my neighbor’s black cat every Halloween when he’d pour DayGlo paint on the animal’s back. Even after a long hike your feet don’t hurt on the Astral Plane.
The ice cream Sundae bar is open 24 hours a day. They have lounges where you can listen to live bands playing 1970s easy listening, heavy metal, Euro club music — whatever. You can try your hand at golf and skeet shooting. I tried to shoot one of the Orbs but it moved out of the way like it was alive or something.
They had a craps table, but hardly anyone was playing.
Everybody is very friendly on the Astral Plane — just the same way everybody’s friendly at a ski resort. They’re on a vacation (at least the part I was visiting) and trying to leave their cares behind. You know you’ll never see these people again — so the friendships are of necessity superficial but they are still real in the moment.
One night I struck up a conversation with a woman at the bar. She said she was from Morocco and her name was Salma. She had warm brown eyes and an infectious laugh. We talked about action movies, Harry Potter books, and exotic tropical cocktails. She seemed to revel being in the Astral Plane, frisky like an old dog was when you took off the collar. Salma raved about how nice it felt to be free of her body, which she seemed to regard as below her pay grade. It can’t be all that bad I said. She said her body back on earth was stuck with migraine headaches and vaginal atrophy. TMI, I thought. Or I thought I just thought it, but she heard me say “TMI”. That’s another thing about the Astral Plane — your thoughts aren’t private. Anything you think the people around you hear as if you spoke.
Salma loved dancing and we hit three different dance halls that night before retiring. The next morning I was eating a built-to-order omelet — the chefs make anything you want — when Salma came in all aglow and wearing a green flowy number. I didn’t notice any vaginal atrophy last night, I told her. Bet you say that to all the girls, she said. Thinking back on it later I realized I literally had never said those words to a woman ever before.
We met this Russian couple — Alexander and Olga. They were both college professors in Moscow. Smart folks who were able to engage in wide-ranging conversations. These are my favorite kind of people. Another great advantage of the Astral Plane is that through advanced technology you can understand everybody and everybody can understand you, so different native languages don’t matter.
Early one afternoon Alexander and I shot some hoops and got in a pickup basketball game, while Salma and Olga went to a painting class. Afterwards we met up in the competitive bridge room. Russians are absolute sharks at bridge while I’m more at the level of advanced beginner. At one of the tables on the other side of the room I thought I saw an Orb sitting at the table and playing cards. I mentioned to Alexander how strange that looked but he was concentrating on bidding for the game at hand and muttered something about Orbs being the best bridge players in the world.
The four of us decided to do some Zip Lining before dinner. Zip lining is one of the most popular activities on the Astral Plane. The teenage kids working the ride strap you in real tight and assure you there’s no danger whatsoever. You zip down through the fragrant trees and over the oddly colored rocks and at one point you actually go through a waterfall. The zip line took me closer to the Orbs than I had ever been. It was really fun.
On the fourth time down the zip line an Orb extended a blob from itself and swallowed up Salma. She was just a few seconds ahead of me on the line but the Orb totally swallowed her up. I screamed her name, but she was gone. When I passed by that Orb I swear it extended a middle finger to me, despite the fact that Orbs do not have hands. It seemed to configure its protoplasm into the shape of a hand just for a second. I felt a malicious hostility from the Orb.
When I got to the bottom the teenage kids who worked the ride were running all around in a tizzy and a Customer Service Rep in a pressed suit was there to tell me that Salma was gone and there was nothing they, or I, could do about it.
I figured I had had enough of the Astral Plane and decided to leave immediately.
So despite ending on a down note, my vacation on the Astral Plane was excellent. I recommend you try it.
