Concept

Astral Projection

Intro

Astral projection is the practice of trying to leave your body on purpose, sending your "soul" or "astral body" out to travel in a non-physical realm while your physical body stays put. People who teach it describe floating above their bed, visiting distant places, or meeting beings on other planes. It comes out of Hindu, Theosophical, and New Age streams and has been pulled into Western pop spirituality through books, YouTube tutorials, and meditation apps.

The Christian position on this is firm: do not do it. The Bible records moments when God Himself takes a person up into a vision (Paul to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 12:1-4, John "in the Spirit" in Revelation 1:10), and those experiences are real. But the practice of deliberately inducing an out-of-body state through occult disciplines is something different. It is a doorway, and you do not get to choose what walks through it.

Two reasons matter here. First, Deuteronomy 18:9-14 lists the kinds of spiritual practices God forbids: divination, mediumship, contacting spirits. Astral projection sits in that family. It is the practitioner reaching out into the spirit realm under their own power, looking for experience or knowledge from non-physical entities. Second, the Bible says the spirit realm contains beings who will pose as helpful, "masquerading as angels of light" (2 Corinthians 11:14). Without God's protection and on a path God did not authorize, the practitioner has no defense against deception.

This page lays out the biblical case, the historical Christian witness on it (broad agreement from the church Fathers through African Pentecostalism through Western evangelicalism), and the pastoral counsel for someone trying to come out of the practice.

In full

The practice of deliberately separating one's "astral body" or "soul" from the physical body to travel in a non-physical realm. This page affirms the position that astral projection is a demonic / occult practice forbidden to Christians, distinct from genuine biblical visionary experiences and incompatible with the Deuteronomic prohibition on divinatory and mediumistic disciplines. The position is held essentially uniformly across African Pentecostal Christianity, mainstream Western evangelical theology, and historic Christian engagement with esoteric spirituality.

The affirmative claim

Astral projection is a deliberate occult practice that opens the practitioner to demonic deception and is forbidden by Scripture. The forbidding is not of out-of-body experiences as such, Scripture records Paul caught up to the third heaven (2 Cor 12:1-4) and John "in the Spirit" on the Lord's day (Rev 1:10), but of the practice of deliberately inducing them by occult discipline as a means of obtaining knowledge, power, or experience.

The distinction the page is making:

Biblical visionary experience, initiated by God, passive on the human side, in service of revelation, evaluated by orthodox Christological criteria, never sought as a discipline.
Astral projection, initiated by the practitioner, sought via disciplines drawn from Hindu / Theosophical / New Age / occult traditions, in service of personal experience or "spiritual exploration," with no built-in protection against deceptive spirits.

These look surface-similar (both involve a sense of consciousness apart from the body) but are categorically different in direction, agency, and source.

Biblical grounding

1. The Deuteronomic prohibition

Deuteronomy 18:9-14 is the master text on occult practice:

"When you enter the land which the LORD your God gives you, you shall not learn to imitate the detestable things of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, one who uses divination, one who practices witchcraft, or one who interprets omens, or a sorcerer, or one who casts a spell, or a medium, or a spiritist, or one who calls up the dead. For whoever does these things is detestable to the LORD…"

The list is the master Hebrew taxonomy of occult practice. Astral projection slots into the medium / spiritist / consults familiar spirits end of the list, the practitioner deliberately enters a state in which contact with non-physical entities becomes possible. The Hebrew terms:

qosem qesamim, diviner
me'onen, soothsayer / cloud-reader
menachesh, enchanter
mekhashep, sorcerer
chover chaver, spell-caster
sho'el 'ov, consulter of a familiar spirit
yidde'oni, wizard / spiritist
doresh el-hametim, necromancer / inquirer of the dead

The prohibition is comprehensive: any deliberate technique for accessing the spirit-realm outside YHWH's revealed channels (prophecy, prayer, the means of grace) is forbidden.

2. The Levitical companion

Leviticus 19:31, "Do not turn to mediums or spiritists; do not seek them out to be defiled by them. I am the LORD your God."

Leviticus 20:6, "As for the person who turns to mediums and to spiritists, to play the harlot after them, I will also set My face against that person and will cut him off from among his people."

The category seek them out is what astral projection violates: the practitioner is not passively encountering the spirit realm; they are deliberately disciplining themselves into contact with it.

3. The Saul-at-Endor narrative (1 Samuel 28)

Saul's consultation of the medium of Endor stages a worked example: a king of Israel, in violation of his own purge of mediums (1 Sam 28:9), seeks out a ba'alat-'ov to summon Samuel's spirit. Whatever the actual ontology of what appears (the text is theologically suggestive without being technically resolved), the narrative judgment is unambiguous: the consultation precipitates Saul's death (1 Sam 28:19; 1 Chr 10:13-14, "Saul died for his trespass against the LORD… he asked counsel of a medium"). The text legitimates the prohibition by showing what fidelity to it costs and what violation of it costs more.

4. The NT continuation

Acts 16:16-18, Paul casts out a spirit of python (divination) from a slave girl in Philippi. The spirit is real; its capacities (telling true things about Paul) are real; the apostolic response is exorcism, not partnership.
Acts 19:18-19, converts at Ephesus burn their occult scrolls (50,000 drachmae worth). The early-church practice on conversion was decisive break with occult practice and its accumulated tools.
Galatians 5:19-21, pharmakeia (witchcraft / occult drug-and-spell practice) is listed among the works of the flesh that exclude from the kingdom.
Revelation 21:8; 22:15, pharmakoi (sorcerers) are listed among those outside the New Jerusalem.

The NT pattern: the spirit-realm is real, demonic spirits are real and operative, the apostolic response is exorcism and renunciation, occult practitioners must convert and burn the tools.

5. The legitimate-experience counterpart

Scripture does not forbid out-of-body experience as a phenomenon; it records two NT instances:

2 Corinthians 12:1-4, Paul "caught up to the third heaven… whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows." Paul's note: he did not seek this; he could not return on demand; the content was unspeakable; he uses it apologetically against rivals only reluctantly.
Revelation 1:10, John "in the Spirit on the Lord's day."

Both share four marks that astral projection lacks:

Initiated by God, not by the human disciplinarian.
In service of revelation (apostolic teaching; canonical Scripture), not personal exploration.
Christologically anchored, the content is Christ-centered.
Not sought as a repeatable discipline.

Astral projection inverts all four: human-initiated, sought as personal experience, no Christological criterion, taught as repeatable practice. The category-difference is total.

What astral projection actually is

The practice originates in two main streams:

Hindu / yogic tradition, sūkṣma śarīra (subtle body) doctrine; the soul-vehicle that can travel during deep meditation or sleep. Adapted into modern Western occultism via the Theosophical Society (Blavatsky, c. 1875).
Theosophy and Western occult tradition, Helena Blavatsky, C.W. Leadbeater, Sylvan Muldoon (The Projection of the Astral Body, 1929), Robert Monroe (Journeys Out of the Body, 1971). The 20th-c. New Age framing presents astral projection as a "natural human capacity" available via specific induction techniques (binaural beats, hypnagogic state cultivation, lucid-dreaming bridges).

The induction techniques cluster into a few patterns:

Deep relaxation / hypnagogia, staying conscious into the sleep boundary.
Lucid-dreaming bridges, becoming conscious within a dream and then "exiting" the dream body.
Vibration-state cultivation (Monroe Institute methodology).
Drug-assisted (DMT, ayahuasca, salvia), pharmacological short-circuit to the experience.

The phenomenology is consistent across reports: a sense of leaving the body, encountering "guides" or "entities," accessing information unavailable to ordinary perception, sometimes returning with knowledge or fear. From the biblical-demonological framework, this is exactly the profile of an induced encounter with deceiving spirits, including the standard NT warning that demons can present themselves as benevolent (2 Cor 11:14, "Satan disguises himself as an angel of light").

The witchcraft / soul-travel framework

In African Pentecostal teaching, Helen Ukpabio (Nigeria), Evangelist Joshua Ministries (Nigeria), Smashing Pillars International, Pastor Obed Obeng-Addae (Ghana), and the broader West African deliverance circuit, astral projection is identified with the traditional category of aerial witchcraft / soul travel / spiritual flight. This is the long-standing African witchcraft motif of the witch leaving the body at night to attack victims, drink blood, or attend a coven. The Pentecostal move maps the New Age "astral travel" vocabulary onto this prior category and treats them as the same phenomenon under different labels:

Both involve deliberate separation of consciousness from the body.
Both contact non-physical entities.
Both are sought via discipline (witch's initiation; New Age induction).
Both are demonic in the Pauline / Deuteronomic sense.

The diagnostic vocabulary in deliverance ministry, flying-in-dreams as evidence of witchcraft initiation, swimming-in-dreams as covenant with marine spirits, eating-in-dreams as ritual binding, is sometimes overstretched (and the witchcraft-panic episodes around children are documented abuses), but the underlying classification of soul-travel-as-demonic is biblically defensible and indigenously articulated.

Engagement with the New Age defense

The principal New Age defense ("astral projection is a natural human capacity, not demonic") fails on three points:

Equivocation on "natural." The body's capacity for altered states (hypnagogia, lucid dreaming, dissociation) is natural; the encounter with non-physical entities the practitioner reports is not a fact about human physiology but a claim about another order of being. If those entities are real, the "natural" framing is question-begging.
Absent ontology of the entities. New Age teaching treats encountered "guides" as benevolent by default with no test for spirit-discernment. Christianity supplies the test: 1 John 4:1-3, does the spirit confess Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh? Astral-projection literature offers no such test and is structurally unprepared to detect deception.
The technique-tradition itself is occult. Astral projection's induction methods come from Theosophy, modern occultism, and Hindu tantra, not from neutral phenomenology. Treating the technique as religiously neutral is a category error; the techniques carry their cosmology.

Engagement with the Christian-mystical "biblical astral travel" claim

Some Christian-adjacent teachers (Mike Parsons, certain "courts of heaven" / "third heaven" charismatic teachers) attempt to legitimate astral travel by mapping it onto Paul's third-heaven experience or Ezekiel's translocations (Ezek 8, 40). This fails:

Paul did not teach a technique. 2 Cor 12 mentions the experience under duress and in service of an apostolic argument; Paul does not say "do this", he says "I cannot answer the question of how it happened" (12:2-3). No discipline is taught.
Ezekiel was caught up by the Spirit, not by self-induction. "The Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem" (Ezek 8:3). The agent is the Spirit; Ezekiel is passive.
Philip was caught away (Acts 8:39), same pattern, Spirit-initiated translocation, not discipline.

The Christianized-astral-travel teaching reads the technique back into the texts where it isn't and supplies a discipline where Scripture has none. It is methodologically continuous with occult practice and divergent from the apostolic pattern.

What about lucid dreaming?

A common follow-up: is lucid dreaming itself forbidden? Lucid dreaming as the awareness that one is dreaming is a cognitive phenomenon, it does not by itself involve any spirit-realm transaction. The biblical concern lands on lucid dreaming when it is used as a bridge to astral projection, sought entity-encounters, or other occult disciplines. Lucid dreaming as a self-contained cognitive curiosity (recognizing dreams, exploring dream content, experimenting with dream agency) is not forbidden, though Christian wisdom would treat it cautiously given its standard use as the gateway to the occult techniques.

Pastoral consequences

Renunciation, not dabbling. Christians who have practiced astral projection should renounce the practice, destroy associated tools (Monroe-Institute audio, occult literature), and confess it specifically. The Acts 19 scroll-burning is the model.
Spirit-discernment grid. 1 John 4:1-3 is the operative test for any spirit-encounter: confession of Jesus Christ as Lord come in the flesh. Encountered "guides" who deflect this test are by definition not from God.
Don't naturalize the phenomenology. The temptation in modern evangelicalism is to dismiss reported experiences as psychological epiphenomena. The biblical framework treats them as real and dangerous; African Pentecostal pastoral practice has more wisdom here than disenchanted Western evangelicalism.
Protect the legitimate categories. Visions, prophecy, dreams in which God speaks (Joel 2:28-29; Acts 2:17) are real and not to be dismissed in the reaction against occult counterfeits. The line is who initiates and what is the spirit's relation to Christ.