Review: The Astral Explorer
by Kensho
Today I'm reviewing The Astral Explorer by Kensho. The subtitle is "My Journeys To the Astral Plane." The copyright is not dated, but the material is recent, so probably late 2023 or early 2024.
When I reviewed Kensho's earlier book, Out of Body Experiences, I was perhaps a bit harsh. I only gave it three stars out of five due mainly to its small size (just 80 pages) and his general attitude of "I know this is how things are." And he didn't really say who he was or where he got his information.
His new book, The Astral Explorer, is much better. It has almost 200 pages, along with beautiful colored artwork and plenty of his personal experiences with astral projection, and if you follow my blog, you know how much I love OBE narratives.
This book is much more mature in writing, style, and overall information. There's even a section at the end for "About the Author" complete with a photo. Throughout the book, we learn who Kensho is, his range and depth of out-of-body experience, and tidbits about his spiritual journey.
So who is Kensho? While his origins are still unclear, he seems well traveled, well-read, intelligent, and most importantly, experienced. He knows several languages, including Italian, English, and Spanish. According to the book, "Kensho" is a Japanese term from the Zen tradition. Ken means "seeing" and "sho" means "nature, essence." It's usually translated as "Seeing one's (true) nature". He has traveled the world and opened meditation centers in Mexico, the USA, and the Czech Republic. He currently lives in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. He met his Zen Buddhist master, Dharmapa Rimpoche, in 2010 and moved to Guanajuato, Mexico to study under him.
The book starts with his childhood experiences, early OBEs, and his beliefs about the different planes of existence, and other general beliefs about the OBE. Early on he won my heart with this quote:
"But just for the record, after projection has nothing to do with invoking ghosts or entities. it's not related to Witchcraft or working with dark forces. Astral projection is a natural skill that connects to true spirituality. It is one of the highest forms of self-development." (pg. 61-62)
He doesn't number his chapters, but on page 64 is a chapter titled "Fascinating Astral Experiences." It contains interesting experiences in which he talks about "The inner father and mother" who are available to call upon for help with various things. To me this sounded like my "invisible helpers" who always seem to be observing my OBEs and ready to help, but only if I ask for it. On rare occasions, he says, they do become visible.
As with his earlier book, I don't agree with everything Kensho teaches or says. For example, he asserts that humans are given 108 existences of spiritual growth, and if we stop evolving spiritually after that, we face inevitable devolution, until we start reincarnating as animals, then plants, then rocks and inanimate objects, until eventually we're absorbed and restart the whole process of spiritual evolution again. He says some people, in rare circumstances, can make it beyond 108, but it's rare, and spiritual progress must always progress.
That sounds to me like Buddhist teachings he may have picked up from his Zen Master, Dharmapa, but I'm not sure I'm buying it. But hey, who am I to say otherwise?
He spends a considerable amount of time talking about Elemental Spirits, like genies, fairies, gnomes, and such, apparently which he has seen firsthand.
Here's another place I disagree with him: He asserts that:
"In short, lucid dreaming is astral traveling; there is just a different dynamic in terms of the way it happens." (pg. 89)
Well, if you've ever read my article Are OBEs the same as Lucid Dreams?, you know my stance on the matter: I believe lucid dreams are astral projections in which we experience a hallucinated "dream" environment, whereas OBEs are some sort of objective non-physical reality.
Like many other astral projection books, he writes:
"Therefore, when the mind thinks about something, whether consciously or not, that thought will instantly manifest in the astral plane." (pg. 91)
While that may be true in a lucid dream, it's not always the case in astral projection. I've thought about many many things during OBEs that definitely did not manifest. Take, for example, the many times described in my first book in which I thought about visiting various friends and family, but absolutely nothing happened.
Sometimes Kensho seems cryptic, occasionally saying he's not allowed to share this or that, at least not at this time.
One thing that got on my nerves is: in several (four or more?) places he clearly says he will teach this or that in his astral projection class. I felt like he was trying to squeeze the reader for more money, as if buying his book wasn't enough. Then again, he left a good degree and potential career to pursue spirituality, so he has to find a way to feed himself, right? For example:
"In my astral projection course, I teach a powerful dream remembrance technique to start training yourself to remember your dreams and increase your chances of lucid dreaming." (pg. 99)
He has some unique views of astral entities:
"Entities are not human beings...I like to think about them as software or viruses. They are mental matter created by the mind. Just like a virus they feed off energy for survival and exist in the astral and mental planes. Sometimes they can make themselves visible in the physical plane.
Most entities are formed by the "fake personalities," the personalities the deceased left behind. These personalities are like thoughts; created by those people during their lifetimes. It is not the spirit of the dead person, of course, and it eventually disintegrates. But in some cases, this mental matter finds ways to keep living by feeding off energy." (pg. 112)
Sounds like the concept of "Shells" in Theosophy.
Like me, Kensho hasn't had many scary encounters. He writes:
"This shouldn't dissuade us from astral projecting, though. In more than 20 years of astral projection projecting, I've only encountered negative entities a few times. They were not that scary and I was even able to scare them off with techniques that I learned in my esoteric studies and which I teach to my students." (pg. 115)
So here again, he's not being very helpful. Instead of telling the reader how to defend themselves or react to negative entities, he wants to get your business and become a student. Not cool. He does, however, talk about how most negative entities are "mind-creations" and how you shouldn't expect negative encounters. You can openly read my advice about it here, taken straight out of my second book, Lessons Out of the Body: http://robertpeterson.org/psychicprotection.htm
Unlike many astral projection books, he talks about the Akashic Records, and his own personal experiences with them. He talks about how "Akash" is a Sanskrit word that means "ether" or "sky" and his theories behind them.
As with his first book, he talks about the different dimensions and how he believes they fit together. But some of his assertions still seem odd to me. For example, he writes:
"Most animals have a two-dimensional consciousness: they perceive life as a plane: length by width. Any surface or angle is perceived by them as a moving body, they lack the ability to discern between a fixed and moving body." (pg. 144)
Now that just seems wrong to me. Birds, for example, need to think three dimensionally. Their lives depend on it. They need to predict how high up or down branches are. Most of my dogs could follow a laser pointer up a wall, in three dimensions, and many a cat owner has led their cat up the curtains with a laser pointer. And as for fixed versus moving bodies, I remember during a trip to Africa in which I was in an open-air jeep near some lions. Our guides told us not to move our arms or legs because the lions didn't care about us as long as were moving with the vehicle, but if we moved our arms, the lions would see us as like a monkey in a tree: something to eat.
As I wrote in my review of his other book, I believe "time" is the fourth dimension of this world. Kensho writes:
"As it has been discussed, while we have an astral body to which we can transfer our consciousness to explore the fifth dimension every night, the only vehicle we have in the fourth dimension is the etheric body, the body that gives us life, and though this body is endowed with many properties, our consciousness cannot be transferred to it for the moment, because our vibration ties us to the third dimension." (pg. 144)
In my 2002 article about Awareness during Sleep Paralysis, (ASP) I wrote about how it seems and feels (to me) as if, during ASP, our conscious awareness is located in the energy/etheric body, and how to free yourself by transferring your awareness from the etheric body to the astral body. I also wrote about how the etheric body cannot move away from the physical body unless you are a spirit medium, as per the findings of author Robert Crookall.
Despite all this, Kensho talks about having direct experiences of the "fourth dimension" but only through a special rare practice that's rarely taught, called Jinas Science.
Maybe, like before, I'm focusing too much on the negative and where we disagree. I actually enjoyed this book and was glad to read many of Kensho's experiences and get his perspective. He has a good discussion, for example, on parallel lives. He talks about a few special experiences in which he seemed to have a second physical body in another parallel place in which time seemed to move much differently. He's only the second author (not counting my own childhood experiences from my first book) who described that; the first being Robert Monroe's "Locale 3" from Journeys Out of the Body.
I give this book 4 stars out of 5. It's much better than his earlier book, Out of Body Experiences. It doesn't really contain any astral projection techniques; apparently you need one of his classes for that. Then again, it doesn't purport to be a teaching book: it's about his experiences. There's plenty of content to satisfy and the writing is mature. I found only a few typos and grammar problems.
Bob Peterson
09 April 2024
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