Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Review: Astral Projection as a Bridge to the Spiriual World

Review:

Astral Projection as a Bridge to the Spiritual World

by Luiz Roberto Mattos

Today I'm reviewing the book Astral Projection as a Bridge to the Spiritual World by Luiz Roberto Mattos.

I received a copy of this book from a Facebook friend who thought I might like it. I'm going to be honest with you: I was disappointed. With a title like that, it had so much potential, but unfortunately, it didn't live up to it.

The premise is good: the author uses astral projection to visit the spirit world where there are unlimited opportunities to learn. On the back cover it says "This book is an autobiography..." so I expected some good OBE narratives.

It tells the story of how the author, Luis Roberto Mattos (nickname Beto) grew up in South America. He was influenced by the Spiritist religion (as in Allan Kardec), and studied metaphysics, yogic meditation, Rosicrucianism, and many spiritual traditions. Then he became interested in astral projection. He gave up eating meat, opting for very light evening meals. He gave up all his bad habits, alcohol, etc., and took up a spiritual life. Then he quit school to pursue his spiritual adventures full-time.

He meets a spiritual master named Sana Khan on the astral plane, who begins to teach him spiritual lessons. Unfortunately, the book quickly devolves into only that: the teachings of Sana Khan. Sana Khan teaches Beto lots of lessons about birth, life, sex, death, the afterlife, reincarnation, and how spirits interfere and influence the living. In a way it reminded me a lot of the movie Astral City, but from the perspective of someone who is still in-the-body.


For the most part, it's all pretty standard New Age teachings. Well, except for one or two things that contradict modern science. For example:
"There are four hundred million stars in the Milky Way, master," I said with some astonishment, demonstrating my awe at the immensity of our structure." (pg. 156)
According to google, there are 250 Billion stars (with a B) in the Milky Way Galaxy, give or take 150 billion. That's 940 times more. But who's counting?

Here are some other things I disagreed with: Mattos talks about how spirits need to be shrunk down in size in order to fit into the tiny human egg at the time of conception:
"And the Spirit will bind to the egg immediately after sperm penetration." (pg. 270)
I tend to favor what Jane Roberts / "Seth" says about the topic: That spirits heading toward birth only visit the womb from time to time. Mattos says the spirits are also affected with amnesia, and he talks about how abortion is a serious spiritual "outrage" (his word) like you're robbing a spirit of its incarnation and denying it an opportunity for spiritual growth. I prefer Seth's suggestion that all these things are carefully planned out in advance, including births, deaths, the lessons, and yes, even the abortions, at a "Higher Self" or "Oversoul" level.

The thing is: I didn't want New Age teachings. I already know all that stuff. I wanted to know about the author's astral projections: how he learned it, the techniques he used, the discoveries he made, what weird quirky things he encountered "over there." But the whole book was almost exclusively just discourse: Sana Khan took me to this place. He said this. He said that. The dialogue was flat; the author breaks up the dialogue by saying things like, "This is interesting, master."

It wasn't just that. It also lacked a feeling of authenticity. If you've had OBEs, you know what it's like. You can tell when someone is describing a real OBE: the strange otherworldly atmosphere, the foreign 360-degree eyesight, the strangeness of how gravity doesn't affect you, the fog floating around; all that "delicious eeriness" Michael Ross talks about. This book lacked all that. The author's OBEs all sounded too..."physical." Sure, he acknowledges the dialogues were telepathic instead of talking, but the dialog was too Earthly. The OBEs were too three-dimensional.

Maybe I'm being too critical. Maybe Mattos was just targeting an Earthly audience. Or maybe because he's from South America, it was just cultural differences (I thought the movie "Astral City" was too physical too, for example). Whatever it was, it didn't work for me.

Another problem is that the dialog was too long and detailed to have taken place in genuine OBEs. There's simply no way anyone (short of eidetic memory) would be able to remember and quote word for word what someone said in an entire half-hour lecture. Not even in real life, let alone from an OBE. I'm lucky if I remember just a few sentences.

Here's another tip-off: the author's story takes place over the course of several weeks, but night after night, without fail, he just effortlessly pops right out of his body to have his nightly lesson with Sana Khan. Anyone who's studied OBEs knows it's just not that easy; not even for the most proficient OBE experts: not William Buhlman, not Robert Bruce, not Akhena, not anyone. It was just too effortless. If Mattos wrote about struggling to achieve the proper focus, or occasionally losing focus during the process of separation, or getting sucked back into his body prematurely and having to leave it again, or having a cat jump on his body while he was out, it would be more believable.


There's enough content; just not enough OBE-related content. The book is 325 pages, each of which is a decent size. The font is somewhat big, so it's an average-sized book.

Except for the preface (not by the author) the writing was pretty good, but it needed weeks of serious editing and proof-reading. The book was obviously scanned in from an older printed manuscript. It's obvious because there were lots of mistakes that would be caught by any human proof-reader, but not by a computer spellchecker. For example, instead of the pronoun "I" the text had, in many places, the number "1." Or "he" instead of "The". Another example: anytime the original text had "rn" it was converted to an "m". So the word "modern" was printed as "modem" (like the old computer modulator-demodulator device). These are the hallmarks of OCR (optical character recognition) from a scanner to a document that was never proof-read. There were glaring mistakes on almost every page.

I'm sorry, but I can only give this book 2 stars out of 5. Most of the New Age teachings aren't bad, but this isn't an OBE book as much as it is New Age 101. There are no OBE tips, techniques, or pointers, except for eating light vegetarian meals.

If it was titled "The Lessons of Master Sana Khan" it would live up to its title. But really, it has almost nothing to do with astral projection.

Bob Peterson
27 March 2018

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3 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  2. Thanks

    Really the cultural aspect is very different here. Here in Brazil the third mainly religion is Spiritism by Kardec and the astral travel studies have a great influence from this religion.

    Our Home (Nosso Lar here) is a spiritual colony very famous here, but there are a lot of others, and the spiritual plane have this characteristic here because the Spiritism, you know, astral plane is molded by our thoughts and creeds and it's normal that here this kind of spiritist environment be more normal.But, of course, this is not a rule and there are another astral environment.

    The book was written on the Richilieu´s style book. Not that all the experience have really happen one after other, or that all the dialogues have been exactly the same of the book... Was just a literature style.

    Anyway, I appreciate your review, spite of I guess a little ethnocentric and without unwilling since when I talk the book to you on the first time some time ago. I know you don't like this kind of literature. But, the author ask me this kindness and I did...

    Thank you for your time. I love your blog.

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