The following story is an excerpt from the book “The Rampa Story”, written by T. Lobsang Rampa. The story is from the time when Lobsang lived in Lhasa, Tibet as a young student of spiritual wisdom, and on one occasion his teacher, Lama Mingyar Dondup, decided to take him and one more student to a planet called Zhoro, telling them: “We will leave our bodies here upon this windswept roof, and we will move up beyond the atmosphere, beyond even Time”. The reason they decided to leave their physical bodies on a cold night while laying down on a roof of their lamasery is, as Lobsang claims, that the soul can reach further when the body is uncomfortable. As the Lobsang’s account contains an interesting teaching about an aspect of life, I decided to share it here.

Here goes the story:

“We lay back and breathed in the accepted pattern for astral traveling release. I was conscious of the wind screaming through the cords of the Prayer Flags which fluttered madly above us. Then, all of a sudden, there was a jerk, and I felt no more the biting fingers of the chill wind. I found myself floating as if in a different time, above my body, and all was peaceful. The Lama Mingyar Dondup was already standing erect in his astral form, and then, as I looked down, I saw my friend Jigme also leaving his body. He and I stood and made a link to join us to our guide the Lama Mingyar Dondup. This link, called ectoplasm, is manufactured from the astral body by thought. It is the material from which mediums produce spirit manifestations. The bond completed, we soared upwards, up into the night sky; I, ever inquisitive, looked down. Beneath us, streaming beneath us, were our Silver Cords, those endless cords which join the physical and the astral bodies during life. We flew on and on, upwards. The Earth receded. We could see the corona of the sun peering across the far ridge of the Earth in what must have been the Western world, the Western world into which we had so extensively traveled in the astral.

Higher we went and then we could see the outlines of the oceans and continents in the sunlit part of the world. From our height the world now looked like a crescent moon, but with the Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, flashing across the poles. We moved on and on, faster and faster, until we outstripped the speed of light for we were disembodied spirits, soaring ever onwards, approaching almost the speed of thought. As I looked ahead of me I saw a planet, huge and menacing and red, straight in front of me. We were falling towards it at a speed impossible to calculate. Although I had had much experience of astral traveling I felt pangs of alarm. The astral form of the Lama Mingyar Dondup chuckled telepathically and said, “Oh Lobsang, if we were to hit that planet it would not hurt them or us. We should go straight through it, there would be no bar.”

At last we found ourselves floating above a red, desolate world; red rocks, red sand in a tideless red sea. As we sank down towards the surface of this world we saw strange creatures like huge crabs moving lethargically along the water’s edge. We stood upon that red rock shore and looked upon the water, tideless, deadly, with red scum upon it, stinking scum. As we watched, the turbid surface rippled unwillingly, and rippled again, and a strange unearthly creature emerged, a creature also red, heavily armored, and with remarkable joints. It groaned as if tired and dispirited, and reaching the red sand, it flopped down by the side of the tideless sea. Above our heads a red sun glowed dully casting fearful, blood-red shadows, harsh and garish. About us there was no movement, no sign of life other than the strange shelled creatures which lay half-dead on the ground. Even though I was in the astral body I shivered in apprehension as I gazed about me. A red sea upon which floated red scum, red rocks, red dying embers of a fire, a fire which was about to flicker into nothingness.

“The Lama Mingyar Dondup said, “This is a dying world. There is no longer rotation here. This world floats derelict in the sea of Space, a satellite to a dying sun, which is soon to collapse, and thus to become a dwarf star without life, without light, a dwarf star which eventually will collide with another star, and from those another world shall be born. I have brought you here because yet in this world there is life of a high order, a life which is here for research and investigation of phenomena of this sort. Look about you.”

He turned and pointed with his right hand to the far distance, and we saw three immense towers reaching up into the red, red sky, and on the very top of those towers three gleaming crystal balls glowed and pulsated with clear, yellow light, as if they were alive. As we stood there wondering one of the lights changed, one of the spheres turned a vivid electric blue. The Lama Mingyar Dondup said, “Come, they are bidding us welcome. Let us descend into the ground to where they are living in an underground chamber.”

Together we moved toward the base of that tower, and then, as we stood beneath the framework we saw there was an entrance heavily secured with some strange metal which glimmered and stood out like a scar upon that red and barren land. We moved through it, for metal, or rocks, or anything is no bar to those in the astral. We moved through and traversed long red corridors of dead rock until at last we stood in a very large hall, a hall surrounded by charts and maps, and strange machines and instruments. In the center there was a long table at which sat nine very aged men, all unlike each other. One was tall and thin, and with a pointed head, a conical head. Yet another was short and very solid looking. Each of these men was different. It was clear to us that each man was of a different planet, of a different race. Human? Well perhaps humanoid would be a better word with which to describe them. They were all human, but some were more human than others. We became aware that all nine were looking fixedly in our direction. “Ah,” said one telepathically, ‘we have visitors from afar. We saw you land upon this, our research station, and we bid you welcome.”

“Respected Fathers,” said the Lama Mingyar Dondup, “I have brought to you two who have just entered upon the state of Lamahood and who are earnest students in search of knowledge.” ‘They are indeed welcome,” said the tall man, who was apparently the leader of the group. ‘We will do anything to help as we have helped you with others previously.”

This was indeed news to me because I had no idea that my Guide did such extensive astral traveling through celestial places. The shorter man was looking at me, and smiled. He said in the universal language of telepathy, “I see, young man, that you are greatly intrigued by the difference in our appearances.” “Respected Father,” I replied, somewhat overawed by the ease with which he had divined my thoughts, thoughts which I had tried hard to conceal. “That is indeed a fact. I marvel at the disparity of sizes and shapes between you, and it occurred to me that you could not all be men of Earth.” “You have perceived correctly,” said the short man.

“We are all human, but due to environment we have altered our shapes and our stature somewhat, but can you not see the same thing on your own planet, where upon the land of Tibet there are some monks whom you employ as guards who are seven feet tall. Yet upon another country of that world, you have people who are but half that stature, and you call them pygmies. They are both human; they are both able to reproduce each with the other, notwithstanding any difference in size, for we are all humans of carbon molecules. Here in this particular Universe everything depends upon the basic molecules of carbon and hydrogen for these two are the bricks composing the structure of your Universe. We who have traveled in other Universes far beyond this particular branch of our nebulae know that other Universes use different bricks. Some use silicon, some use gypsum, some use other things, but they are different from people of this Universe, and we find to our sorrow that our thoughts are not always in affinity with them.”

The Lama Mingyar Dondup said, “I have brought these two young lamas here so that they can see the stages of death and decay in a planet which has exhausted its atmosphere, and in which the oxygen of that atmosphere has combined with metals to burn them and to reduce everything to an impalpable dust.”

“That is so,” said the tall man. “We would like to point out to these young men that every thing that is born must die. Everything lives for its allotted span, and that allotted span is a number of units of life. A unit of life in any living creature is a heartbeat of that creature. The life of a planet is 2,700,000,000 heartbeats, after which the planet dies, but from the death of a planet others are born. A human, too, lives for 2,700,000,000 heartbeats, and so does the lowliest insert. An insect which lives for but twenty-four hours has, during that time, had 2,700,000,000 heartbeats. A planet—they vary, of course—but one planet may have one heartbeat in 27,000 years, and after that there will be a convulsion upon that world as it shakes itself ready for the next heartbeat. All life, then,” he went on, “has the same span, but some creatures live at rates different from those of others. Creatures upon Earth, the elephant, the tortoise, the ant and the dog, they all live for the same number of heartbeats, but all have hearts beating at different speeds, and thus they may appear to live longer or to live less.”

Jigme and I found this extremely enthralling, and it explained so much to us that we had perceived upon our native land of Tibet. We had heard in the Potala about the tortoise which lives for so many years, and about the insect which lived for but a summer’s evening. Now we could see that their perceptions must have been speeded up to keep pace with their speeding hearts. The short man who seemed to look upon us with considerable approval, said, “Yes, not only that, but many animals represent different functions of the body. The cow, for instance, as anyone can see, is merely a walking mammary gland, the giraffe is a neck, a dog—well, anyone knows what a dog is always thinking of—sniffing the wind for news as his sight is so poor—and so a dog can be regarded as a nose. Other animals have similar affinities to different parts of one’s anatomy. The ant-eater of South America could be looked upon as a tongue.” For some time we talked telepathically, learning many strange things, learning with the speed of thought as one does in the astral. Then at last the Lama Mingyar Dondup stood up and said it was time to leave.”