“Can a person be in two different places at the same time?” This has puzzled reader Eric Pernito after what happened to him.

“This morning, July 20, 2011,” wrote Eric in Filipino, “something weird happened. When I entered our office, my officemate told me he’d already seen me 15 minutes before I actually arrived. He was then eating in the pantry when he saw me but did not greet me. Then, shortly afterwards, he was shocked to see me entering the office again. He said I was wearing the same clothes. I shall appreciate it if you could explain what happened to me and my officemate.”

Nothing unnatural

Eric, there’s nothing to worry about. Your officemate simply saw your astral body (sometimes called inaccurately the “etheric double” or “doppelganger”) which went ahead of your physical body.

There is nothing unnatural about this. It happens to many people, but very few talk about it because they feel it is a bad omen. This is not true at all.

A human being is composed of seven different energy bodies that vibrate at different frequencies or planes. The most dense of this vibratory levels or energy bodies is the physical body. And the most subtle is the spirit, which is normally invisible to our naked eyes.

In sleep, our astral body goes out of our physical body usually without our conscious awareness or knowledge. When we happen to awaken while still on the astral plane, we may see ourselves hovering or suspended in mid-air above our physical body. And when we see our physical body lying down while we are in the ceiling, the natural tendency is to panic and rush back to our physical body, only to find it is difficult to do so.

This is because when we panic, the vibrations of our astral body are no longer in sync with our physical body. If we relax and not become emotional, we can easily and naturally reenter our physical body.

When our astral body goes out of our physical body while we are still awake and travels to a different place, sometimes ahead of our physical body, like what happened to you on July 20, we have a case known as “bilocation,” or “being in two different places at the same time.”

Strange incident

I recall an incident which happened in a rubber shoe manufacturing company I used to work with in the early ‘80s. The manager of our Plant no. 4 accompanied to my office one Monday morning his audit clerk named Vivian, who was crying because of a very strange incident that weekend.

On Saturday, Vivian did not report for work because she was not feeling well, and she informed her supervisor.

But on the day she was at home, no less than six of her employees saw her in the factory, including a supervisor. One of the employees she met in the same jeepney she was riding on that Monday morning told her the chemical compound that Vivian was asking about had already been accounted for.

When she learned that six people saw her in the factory when she was, in fact, at home resting, she panicked and thought it meant she would die soon.

Only after I explained to Vivian the nature of the astral body, which is sometimes called the “desire body” and how it sometimes goes out of our physical body without our conscious knowledge, did she stop crying. I assured her that what happened was perfectly natural and did not mean imminent death.

When I asked Vivian what her dominant thoughts were that Saturday morning, she said she wanted to go to the factory because so much work had to be done there. That was her desire. So her astral body went there.

My next Inner Mind Dev’t seminar will be on Aug. 13-14, 2011 from 9 p.m.-5 p.m. at Rm. 308 Prince Plaza I Legazpi St., Legazpi Village, Makati. For details, pls. call tel no.: 8107245 or cell phone no. 0920-981-8962; email [email protected] Visit our website: www.jimmylicauco.com