Downside of physical existence is all the restraints and constraints. People like to joke that it's better than the alternative. But wiser people (Socrates) have said that we don't actually know if physical living is better than the alternative (physical dying) or not.
To make physical existence more bearable, 3 attributes would be needed:
- absolute mobility
- absolute permeability
- absolute invincibility
So in other words, you would need the ability to move to any position in space instantaneously (basically, ability to fly), plus the ability to pass through any living or non-living object with no damage to either yourself or the object, and you would need to be completely invulnerable to any injury, illness, any attack. And you would need these three attributes all to operate simultaneously.
Because no matter how strong you might feel your juice (The Internal Power Formerly Known As Qi) to be, you and I are incredibly weak. The merest brick dropped on your bare toe, the gentlest slash across your throat with a surgical scalpel, the slightest brush of a Taser on your bare skin, the barest hint of tear bas in your eyes, and bingo - you're in big trouble. That's weakness.
It might seem that the answer is to drop your physical body and operate entirely astrally. That's fine, but it is also what's known as being dead. So you cannot really affect this world.
I like to use an analogy of a hand holding a pen or pencil. The hand is your soul or whatever you want to call the non-material operational essence of your consciousness. The pen or pencil is your body. And a sheet of paper is the world, your physical theater of operation. In that configuration, everything proceeds smoothly. But if the hand is not holding a pen or pencil or calligraphy brush or some kind of proper writing instrument, then you cannot interact with the paper (world) in a properly effective fashion. That's analogous to being dead. Your hand is still fine, you just have temporarily lost the ability to work in a particular limited environment (the paper). We can push the analogy further by saying what if I have no pencil but I smear my finger across the paper? Or if I bite my finger and draw using my blood as ink? That is analogous to operating as a ghost or a poltergeist in the physical world - an improper and mostly ineffective interaction.
Another problem with using astral mode to overcome physical operational limitations is that the boundary between the physical and the astral is not crisp. It's basically a mess. When you first pop out of your body, you seem to be in the normal physical world, the only difference seems to be you yourself, you are functioning as a kind of helium balloon in your everyday world. But as 'time' apparently passes, you start to realize, just as in a good horror movie, that things aren't what they appear to be, and there are subtle but definite differences between the version of physicality that you experience in early astral project mode vs. normal physical mode. These accumulate faster and faster until you are propelled beyond anything remotely recognizable as your normal physical scene.
I believe that a really experienced master of both projection and remove viewing (RV), perhaps somebody like Joe McMoneagle, can learn to delay or at least manage this focus drift, but for most of us, once we are out there we are like a non-swimmer in a rip tide.
... between the salt water and the sea strand.
