mind travel

In one of the Star Trek Voyager episodes, (or was it Next Generation?) visitors arrived whose body matter was nonexistent. At some point in the history of their species, they had become pure energy and as such, could effortlessly travel across thousands of light years. Meanwhile, Voyager - a starship - chugged along, with people and other creatures as passengers, with no end in sight to their journey.

As we earthlings have constructed vehicles for space travel, great amounts of fuel are used to propel the ships outside of the atmosphere. The ships have traveled to the moon, to Mars and Saturn. There are probably private ships that have traveled with destinations unknown to the public. Humans have taken steps outside of their planetary home.

Some of those steps have been costly to the earth. There are the resources used up in the construction and fuel. But there are also dangers to layers of the atmosphere that have perfectly sheltered the earth like a blanket since life first developed on the planet. The atmosphere protects the earth from the sun's rays and heat. Most importantly, it keeps the air we breathe from escaping the earth, fizzling away like air from a hole in a balloon. When we punch holes in our atmosphere with spaceship launches or with nuclear weapons tests, we seriously threaten the well-being of life on the planet, including our own. The oxygen content can thin to levels inadequate for our needs. There have been notable changes in my lifetime.

Over the past decade, I've spent time developing practice in meditation to which I was introduced as a girl in Catholic schools, as a young woman studying psychology, astrophysics, and neuropsychology, and then in yoga classes. The concept of traveling great physical distances via the mind, and experiencing other times and places in the way we experience dreams does not feel foreign. Other cultures have developed such practice in ways most of us westerners have never known about. Using mind travel, there are no issues with whether the atmosphere of destination planets is breathable or toxic, or if the temperatures suit our physical needs, because we leave our bodies behind. I am not accomplished in such things, but somehow I recognize that given the costs of travel in ships, travel via the mind is worth serious exploration as an alternative or additional approach.