I also agree its all down to one's own beliefs. I personally find that simplicity helps greatly in understanding the seemingly infanite dimentions of the ethers. The brake down of the realms goes as follows: 1. The Greater Ethers 2. The Upper Ethers 3. The Middle Ethers 4. The Lower Ethers 5. The Infernal Ethers
What seems consistant to me is that each realm seems to follow its own laws governing chaos vs. order. The greater ethers have the most order and least chaos while the infernal are the oposite. What makes the greater realms seem "heavenly" is the "purity" of the physical laws governing these. While the infernal realms seem "hellish" because of the lack of "purity" in the physical laws governing these realms where "purity" in any of these realms equals the consistancy of the physical laws being true. In places that are chaotic, very little is actually consistant to my personal perception and thus, to me, not true. Because of the level of chaos in the lower ethers its easy for me to percieve these realms as hellish in nature. You can't go to these realms expecting to find "truths" only chaos, change, destruction - great for breaking down personal blockages and habbits as well as finding "infernal" entities that can preform a variety of tasks depending on the complexity of their nature. Inversly I find the upper ethers are increbibly consistant and so vivid to my personal senses (say a city wall stays a city wall and doesn't mutate into some giant wurm). Its easy to find tranquility in these realms because they are purely consistant in how they behave. Thus these realms are good for meditation, healing, learning higher philosophies and abtaining contact with entities living in these realms. I have also found, for me, that I can not sustane a "peaceful" existance on any realm in one extreme or the other. The middle realms is where I find the most freedom. Things are not so orderly that I must obey everything and be utterly humble, but things aren't so chaotic that I have to live in fear of what random event I might encounter. So it is here in the middle that I find myself constructing places on the astral that connect to my dreams and allow my consciousness access to these realms. The middle ethers act kind of like a go between zone and the portals I create in my dreams take to this place, but the portals I create in this place take me to any of the extremes of the realms of chaos or order.
Then I have a whole set of gates in my dreams that take me to my own inner realms, rather than those on the astral. So of which do act as "back doors" to astral places. I think the moral of story is that while simplicity is a desirable start as one avdances things can only get more complex. But as one's awareness and experience grows, the greater complexity they can handle. It took me years to get where I am now.
ps: All the places I have visited during a lucid dream or AP have been sacred to me.
--------------------
|