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Thanks for the link Nita - interesting stuff.

Still interested to hear from anybody here who has experience using any "systems" - Qabalistic, Hermetic, Franz Bardon, Golden Dawn, Thelemic (Crowley), etc.

Nice one Jeff, cheers!  

I take your points and pointers, though I want to remain sceptical and to look at this from a materialistic perspective as much as possible, as a working hypothesis, as I say - that's not to say I'm not open to change of opinion; the point is, even if I did leap straight into practice I'd still have some preconceptions (e.g. perhaps the preconception that it's all to be taken at face value, or that it's all the work of deceptive demons, etc., etc.): I'm just laying my particular brand of preconceptions on the table!

In many traditional systems of magick, both Eastern and Western, that involve astral travelling, there are systems of symbolism that you use to "test" spirits.  E.g., one consciously "invokes" a "realm", and one "tests" the entities one meets in one's travels in that realm to see whether the symbolic "language" they give out jibes with what they "should" give out according to the realm you've invoked (in order to be able to discern whether they are telling the truth or are misleading).  In the Western Hermetic systems there are several symbolic structures - e.g. Qabalah, Alchemical symbolism, etc.

Does anybody here have experience of that sort of thing?  Does anybody do the traditional magickal type of astral travelling where they "test" spirits?

Just popping in to say hello.  I'm a 45 year old guy who had a few strong non-dual mystical experiences as a child, but has never experienced anything in the Astral/Lucid Dreaming line other than a few sleep paralysis experiences (sense of presence in bedroom, entities flying about in bedroom) and one or two lucid dreams as a child.  I'm fairly well-read in philosophy, magick, mysticism, and I find I'm now quite interested in learning how to have these experiences - in a sort of experimental spirit.

I guess you could say I'm absolutely open to the idea that people have these pretty strong, vivid experiences of entities, other worlds, chakras, etc. - the whole enchilada!  The only thing I'm sceptical about is the interpretation of and explanation for these experiences.  I'm not sure I buy that these realms, entities, are necessarily how they appear in the astral - even if they are real entities, or representations of real entities.  I think the mechanism of these experiences (how they work) can be explained reasonably well by cognitive and brain science, except for this "otherness" component, which is obviously the most interesting aspect.  

To use normal vision as an analogy: people don't often realise that we only actually have a tiny area that's actually seen by the eyes, in focus, at any one given time, and that the brain "fills in" the rest of the world around that spot, based on memory of previous scanning of the area surrounding the spot, and on general constructive principles.  One has an intimation "as if" one can see the area around one's tv monitor quote clearly, but actually the only bit that's actually in focus, and not a very vague blur, is in fact the spot right where you are following these words.  You are simply imagining that you actually see the rest of the monitor and the room behind it, more or less clearly.

My working hypothesis at the moment is that with astral travel, just as happens with perception, we only in fact sample a small slice of the world and build a story around it (or "fill in" around it) - and these astral entities, if they exist, probably are so strange and unprecedented to our normal way of thinking that our brain "fills in" our astral perception of them in just the same way as our brain "fills in" with our visual perception - only it "fills in" familiar stuff in the gaps where it doesn't know how to categorise what it sees, based on imagery from our unconscious, the culture around us, etc.