A few notes on astral bodies and the like

Buckeye and Cardinalis

Sparkill, NY

I’ve pointed out before that what we actually search for in terms of spiritual growth is completely different than what we conceive of in our search. 

What's born within a human being is entirely different than the imaginations, assumptions, forecasts, and projections based on what a person has heard or read about. We actually live within a dimension that we don’t understand in the least, and have a purpose we're only dimly aware of.

Until that awareness is born, we stagger through life propping our belief systems up on the toothpicks of teachings and history, anecdotes passed on through generations. 

All the while, we're surrounded by traces of the higher energy that has penetrated this level of the universe and produced the great works of art, literature, and music that serve as shorthand for the spiritual influence of God.

Yet no matter how great we imagine that glory to be, and no matter how earnestly we try to render it in our cathedrals and our sermons, our paintings and our hymns, it's beyond conception. This is told to us over and over again; and yet the human mind is a stubborn thing that insists on reducing everything of God’s glory into something that can be touched and handled, concentrated in forms. 

Given the fact that creation itself embodies God in just this way through His own intention and purpose, I suppose this is unsurprising. The point is that we owe it to ourselves to acknowledge this: the way we try to shrink things down into what we are. What truly is will not fit inside of us in any way; we can be touched by it, we can participate in it, but we're mere pinpoints, single stitches in an infinite tapestry. If we catch a glimpse of it, it is only a corner; and one can never know the whole of a piece of art on (for example) a church ceiling by looking at a square centimeter of it.

When Gurdjieff spoke of the astral body, or, as he called it, the kesdjan body, I suppose he knew we would misinterpret it in a thousand different ways. Perhaps that’s why he chose an unusual "special" word to describe it. The word, let’s face it, has never been heard anywhere else until he brought it up. Nor did the word handbledzoin, which forms the "blood" of the astral body. There is an intimate connection between the finer substances in air mentioned in the “chemical factory” chapter of In Search of the Miraculous, sensation, and food for the astral body. Hanbledzoin fits in here.

The astral body isn't an allegorical entity. It is an actual second body that is formed within us, and can be sensed and inhabited in exactly the same way as our planetary or material body. If the astral body forms, in other words, it is physically sensed. One’s intelligence, awareness, feeling, and sensation become awakened within it as an actual entity which accompanies the ordinary physical body. 

In this way, when the astral body exists, one lives within it. One acts from it. One thinks from it. One feels from it.

This is what I’m alluding to when I explain that what we aim for in spiritual life is nothing like what we think we aim for when we begin. The astral body is an electromagnetic entity capable of receiving solar emanations as well as the emanations of other planetary bodies; and because every planet in the solar system has its own magnetism, it's equally sensitive in various ways to the influence of various planets, especially the moon. 

Its primary purpose, however, is to receive, digest, and concentrate food from the sun. This activity is undertaken in order to form the third being body, which is a body of feeling in the same way that the astral body is a body of sensation.

I could explain in considerable detail exactly what the astral body feels like in terms of sensation and so on. Yet it would serve little purpose. What one ought to know about this as one works towards developing a better sensation of Being  is that the astral body is a precursor, an intermediary entity intended to lay the foundation for the formation of the feeling body.

We might call the feeling body the essential intelligence behind a human being. Now, one could get into a technical discussion of the material Gurdjieff gave to Ouspensky about the nature of the four bodies and argue about it by characterizing the astral body as an emotional body and the mental body as a body of intelligence; but I will avoid that. Speaking strictly from experience and facts about practice itself, I will simply point out that anyone deeply involved in it already knows that the mind connects with the body through sensation first; sensation — a physical property — awakens, and this lays the foundation for the awakening of feeling. 

Practice proceeds in this order: mind – body – feeling. What order you put the bodies in in a chart doesn’t really matter. The point is that all three bodies must be properly formed in order for the fourth body to grow.

I could explain Gurdjieff’s apparently (they aren't) contradictory comments to Ouspensky on the matter if I sat down and wrote about it extensively, but I have little interest in that at this time. 

The point is simply to bring the understanding to the community that what we are forming within ourselves are actual bodies we live in, fields of awareness. They are fundamentally different from the places our imaginations forecast. To have the astral or mental body is already to inhabit a place very different than the one we begin in.

Because each of these bodies has its own “organs” and “limbs,” as well as its own dietary needs, it’s possible to develop the astral or mental body in a fragmented or partial way. 

It takes many years to grow a second or third being body in such a way so that it is not deformed.

Go deep in your heart, and be well-

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.