The Astral Bag

Spoken by Master Ching Hai
1988 Taipei, Formosa

In the astral world, there are many empty bags. If we are not careful, after we die, we will fall into one. Once we fall into it, we cannot control it. That’s why we hear of ghosts floating here and there. They cannot stay in one place. They float where the wind blows. If there is no wind, they will stop there. They cannot eat and have no place to live. They cannot talk and cannot just go where they want to; they are not free. It is all because they are caught in this is so-called Astral bag. It is like a kind of plastic bag.

On our Earth planet, there is a kind of hydrogen balloon. It floats in the air and there is a big bucket under it for people to sit in. If we are thrown into that Astral bag, it is the same as being thrown into the bucket in that hydrogen balloon. We cannot find a way to control it. That’s why we say ghosts are very miserable. It is all because while we are still in this world and we still have this opportunity to control it, we don’t control it.

We don’t make use of our precious time in this human world to organize our future life, so when we leave, we are frightened by bad karma (retribution), and we are terrified by other ghosts. We run around with no direction, then we fall into this human body, or we fall into an animal body, or we fall into hell, or we fall into a so-called bag in the Astral world. Then we cannot find a way to control it. Only when we have a human body can we control it. We can decide our future and we can choose where to live. It doesn’t actually happen in the future. Now we can go to other places to live and then go back and forth, back and forth like this. It becomes a habit. Then later on when we leave, we will know where we want to go. Because we are used to going, back and forth already. It is just like this; otherwise after we die, more than half of us will fall into the Astral bag and then float here and there like that. We can live for a few hundred years but it is meaningless and so miserable.

There are many things in this world that are like traps waiting for the floating soul. This is the job of Maya. In Taoism, we refer to the so-called maya, as “yin.” There is “yin,” and there is “yang.” Now we are looking for “yang.” After we pass away, the “yin” has a lot of control. When we are alive, we have yin and yang, we can choose to take yang and not to take yin. After we die, “yang” disappears and we don’t have the choice, we can only have yin. At that time, it will be too late.