Astral body
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Astral body is a term used in Theosophy and other religio-philosophical systems to refer to a subtle body, one of several that are said to exist within and around the physical body, composed of a subtle material. The term is said to have been adopted by the Theosophists from a pre-existent term in English attributed to "the mediaeval alchemists".[1]
The idea of the astral body is rooted in common worldwide religious accounts of the afterlife[2] in which the soul's journey or "ascent" is described in such terms as "an ecstatic (from the Latin ex-stasis), mystical or out-of body experience, wherein the spiritual traveller leaves the physical body and travels in his/her subtle body (or dreambody or astral body) into ‘higher’ realms (‘higher’ in the sense that they are of a higher or non-physical vibration)."[3]
In Theosophy the astral body is "the vehicle of feelings and emotions" through which "it is possible...to experience all varieties of desire". We have a "life in the astral body, whilst the physical body is wrapped in slumber". So the astral body "provides a simple explanation of the mechanism of many phenomena revealed by modern psycho-analysis".[4] To this extent, then, the "astral body" is a reification of the dream-world self.
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[edit] Definitions
The word "astral" means "of the stars", thus astrology is held to be a phenomenon of the astral plane: "The whole of the astral portion of our earth and of the physical planets, together with the purely astral planets of our System, make up collectively the astral body of the Solar Logos". There are "seven types of astral matter" by means of which "psychic changes occur periodically....It has been observed that the movements of the physical planets furnish a clue to the operation of the influences flowing from these changes".[5]
The astral world is also analogous to the world of the dead, according to the Theosophical founder William Q. Judge[6] Judge wrote; "There are many names for the Astral Body. Here are a few: Linga Sarira, Sanskrit, meaning design body, and the best one of all; ethereal double; phantom; wraith; apparition; doppelganger; personal man; perisprit; irrational soul; animal soul; Bhuta; elementary; spook; devil; demon. Some of these apply only to the astral body when devoid of the corpus after death."
Simiarly, according to Powell, the "many kinds of 'heavens', 'hells' and purgatorial existences believed in by followers of innumerable religions" may also be understood as astral phenomena, as may the various "phenomena of the séance room".[7]
[edit] History
Neoplatonism is a branch of classical philosophy that uses the works of Plato as a guide to understanding religion and the world. In The Republic, particularly, Plato had rendered an account of the afterlife that involved a journey through the seven planetary spheres and eventual reincarnation. He taught that man was composed of mortal body, immortal reason and an intermediate "spirit".[8]
Neoplatonists agreed with one another as to the immortality of the soul but they also posited an "irrational soul" and disagreed as to whether this was immortal and celestial ("starry", hence astral) or whether it dissolved after death. The late Neoplatonist Proclus, who is credited the first to speak of subtle "planes", posited two subtle bodies or "vehicles" (okhema) intermediate between the rational soul and the physical body. These were; 1) the spiritual (pneuma) vehicle, aligned with the vital breath, which he considered mortal, and 2) the astral vehicle which was the immortal vehicle of the Soul.
Such doctrines were commonplace in mystery-schools and gnostic sects throughout the Roman Empire until a unity of doctrine was imposed in the great councils of the Roman Christian church. But among Muslims the "astral" world-view was soon rendered orthodox by Quranic references to the Prophet's ascent through the seven heavens. Scholars took up the Greek Neoplatonist accounts as well as similar material in Hindu and Zoroastrian texts.[9] The expositions of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), the Brotherhood of Purity and others, when translated into Latin in the Norman era, were to have a profound effect upon European mediaeval alchemy and astrology. By the fourteenth century Dante was describing his own imaginary journey through the astral spheres of Paradise.[10]
[edit] The Occult
Throughout the renaissance, philosophers, Paracelsians, Rosicrucians and alchemists continued to discuss the nature of the astral world intermediate between the world and the divine but, once the telescope established that no religious heaven was visible around the solar system, the idea was superseded in mainstream science.
In the romantic era, though, alongside the discovery of electromagnetism and the nervous system, there was a new interest in the spirit world. Franz Anton Mesmer spoke of the stars, animal magnetism and magnetic fluids. In 1801 the English occultist Francis Barrett wrote of a herb's "excellent astral and magnetic powers" - for herbalists had categorised herbs according to their supposed correspondence with the seven planetary influences.
In the mid-nineteenth century the French occultist Eliphas Levi wrote much of "the astral light", a factor he considered of key importance to magic, alongside the power of will and the doctrine of correspondences. He considered the astral light the medium of all light, energy and movement, describing it in terms that recall both Mesmer and the luminiferous ether.[11]
Levi's idea of the astral was to have much influence in the English-speaking world through the teachings of The Golden Dawn, but it was also taken up by Helena Blavatsky and discussed in the key work of Theosophy, The Secret Doctrine. Levi seems to have been regarded by later Theosophists as the immediate source from which the term was adopted into their sevenfold schema of planes and bodies, though there was slight confusion as to the term's proper use.
[edit] Theosophy
Blavatsky aligned the term "astral body" with the Indian linga sharira which is one of the seven principles of human life according to her, and the astral light with the Akashic Record, a kind of cosmic memory. However C.W. Leadbeater and Annie Besant (Adyar School of Theosophy), and following them, Alice Bailey, equated it with Blavatsky's Kama (desire) principle (the fourth of the seven principles of man), and called it the Emotional body a concept not found in earlier Theosophy.
Astral body, desire body, and emotional body became synonymous, and this identification is found in much theosophically-inspired thought. The astral or emotional body is understood as a sort of psychic body or aura that is made up of emotions just as the physical body consists of matter. In occult thought, emotions are not just subjective qualia, but have an existence apart from the individual consciousness, and exist on a cosmic plane of existence, in this case, the astral plane.
[edit] Max Heindel
According to Max Heindel's Rosicrucian writings, also, the Desire body is made of desire stuff from which human beings form feelings and emotions. It is is said to appear to spiritual sight as an ovoid cloud extending from sixteen to twenty inches beyond the physical body. It has a number of whirling vortices (chakras) and from the main vortex, in the region of the liver, there is a constant flow which radiates and returns. The desire body exhibits colors that vary in every person according to his or her temperament and mood. The "Astral body" was employed by the mediaeval Alchemists to traverse the "starry" regions, according to Heindel.[12]
[edit] George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff
Gurdjieff refers to the astral body as the "body Kesdjan" or "vessel of the soul": it is of the sun and all planets, just as the physical body is of the earth. While it is not developed one is a "human being only in quotation marks", who cannot be considered in any meaningful sense to have a soul and who will "die like a dog".[13]
[edit] Samael Aun Weor
According to the doctrine of Samael Aun Weor the astral body is the part of human soul related to emotions, represented by the sephirah Hod in the kabbalistic Tree of Life. However the common person only has a kamarupa, body of desire or "lunar astral body," a body related to animal emotions, passions and desires, while the true human emotional vehicle is the solar astral body, which can be crystallised through Tantric sex. The solar astral body is the first mediator between the Cosmic Christ, Chokmah, and the individual human soul. [14]
[edit] Others
Barbara Brennan in her book Hands of Light also distinguishes between the Emotional body and the Astral body. She sees these as two distinct layers in the seven-layered "Human Energy Field" or Aura. The Emotional body pertains to the physical universe, the astral body to the astral world.
The Mother sometimes refers to the astral body and experiences on the astral plane. The Indian master Osho occasionally makes use of a modified Theosophical terminology.
The astral body is widely understood today as the subtle body in which out-of-body experiences ("astral projection"} occurs (see Astral projection). This type of experience is more usually called "etheric" by Theosophists, the popular confusion of terms having apparently arisen due to the popularity of Muldoon and Carrington's book The Projection of the Astral Body.
The emotional and/or astral body is sometimes graphically portrayed as an aura or swirling colours. [15] The aura has not been properly verified in any experiment and is often considered by skeptics an example of pseudoscience.
The astral body belongs to a world view now generally considered superseded. It is rooted in an attribution of physical force, materiality and dimensionality to the psychic world, but the controversy over how exactly this putative energy supposedly mediates between body and soul remains as controversial now as it was two thousand years ago.
[edit] Depth Psychology
Parallels drawn between the idea of the astral and that of the unconscious mind have been noted above, for Sigmund Freud inherited Mesmer's awareness of the animal self, the value of hypnosis, trance and dream, replacing the physical idea of the life-force with a purely psychological paradigm of libido, id and subconscious mind. Later Wilhelm Reich tried to use vitalist biological theory and experiments to re-establish the materiality of the life-force.
Carl Jung has been aligned with the idea of the astral body by Jungians and Theosophists alike.[16] Jung himself drew on alchemical and classical imagery to explore the dynamics and symbols of memory, dream and religious initiation. He saw the astral journey as a paradigm of "modern man's search for a soul", and pictured a collective unconscious memory, driven by archetypal forces and knowable in the symbolic language of dreams and visions.[17]
Moreover, Jung saw this archetypal world as, like the astral plane, an "objective psyche", extending in the world at large, bridging mind and matter.[18] He worked with physicist Wolfgang Pauli in his attempt to lend rigor to an idea largely absent from European science since the renaissance. Early twentieth-century biologists like Ernst Haeckel viewed embryology as a recapitulation of evolution, which implies a kind of organising memory, and a few few modern fringe biologists, such as Rupert Sheldrake, influenced by Jungian ideas and by vitalism, have posited organising fields of life consisting of memories and drives.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Arthur A.Powell, THE ASTRAL BODY AND OTHER ASTRAL PHENOMENA, The Theosophical Publishing House, London, England; Wheaton,Ill, U.S.A.; Adyar, Chennai, India, 1927, reprinted in 1954 and 1965, page 7, online June 2008 at http://www.theosophical.ca/AstralBodyByPowell-A.htm
- ^ Suki Miller, After Death: How People around the World Map the Journey after Death (1995).
- ^ Dr. Roger J. Woolger, Beyond Death: Transition and the Afterlife, accessed online June 2008 at the website of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/PDF/RWoolgerTransition.pdf.
- ^ Powell, op. cit. Ch.1 passim.
- ^ Powell, op. cit. page 9.
- ^ William Judge, The Ocean of Theosophy 2nd Ed. TPH, 1893, Chapter 5, book online June 2008 at http://www.theosociety.org/pasadena/ocean/oce-hp.htm
- ^ Powell, ibid.
- ^ Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, Harmondsworth.
- ^ The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: There are two states for man - the state in this world and the state in the next; there is also a third state, the state intermediate between these two, which can be likened to the dream [state]. While in the intermediate state a man experiences both the other states, that of this world and that in the next; and the manner whereof is as follows: when he dies he lives only in the subtle body, on which are left the impressions of his past deeds, and of those impressions is he aware, illumined as they are by the light of the Transcendent Self
- ^ Seyyed Hossein Nasr, An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines, University of New York Press, passim. Idries Shah, The Sufis, Octagon Press, 1st Ed. 1964.
- ^ Chic Cicero, Chic C, Sandra Tabatha Cicero The Essential Golden Dawn, Llewellyn Worldwide, 2003.
- ^ http://www.rosicrucian.com/images/rccen02c.gif
- ^ Kenneth Walker, A Study of Gurdjieff's Teachings.
- ^ Samael Aun Weor (1953), The Seven Words, Thelema Press, <http://www.gnosticteachings.org/content/category/10/100/103/>
- ^ C.W. Leadbeater, Man, Visible and Invisible; Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light; Dora Van Gelder Kunz, The Personal Aura; Barbara Y. Martin, Change Your Aura, Change Your Life.
- ^ Dr. Roger J. Woolger, Beyond Death: Transition and the Afterlife, accessed online June 2008 at the website of the Royal College of Psychiatrists http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/PDF/RWoolgerTransition.pdf. - "Buddhists from Tibet talk of the bardo realm in which many states of the spirit/soul, i.e. bardos, exist between lifetimes on earth. The Spiritualists in their teachings call it the Spirit World, following the great visionary Swedenborg....In the Celtic tradition, the intermediary realm is often called the Middle Kingdom or the Faery World. Australian aborigines call it the Dreamtime, the Sufis of Persia called it the alam al-mithal or Mythic World, which Henry Corbin (1995) has dubbed the mundus imaginalis. Jung called it the collective unconscious....."
- ^ Karen Gibson, D and D Lathrop, Carl Jung and Soul Psychology,1991, Haworth Press
- ^ Jung, C.G. (1947/1954) par. 420 Collected Works
[edit] Sources
- Besant, Annie, Theosophical Manual No. VII: Man and His Bodies, London, Theosophical Publishing House, 1914.
- Brennan, Barbara Ann, Hands of Light : A Guide to Healing Through the Human Energy Field, Bantam Books, 1987.
- ----- Light Emerging: The Journey of Personal Healing, Bantam Books, 1993.
- Dodds, E.R. Proclus: The Elements of Theology. A revised text with translation, introduction, and commentary, 2nd edition 1963.
- C. W. Leadbeater, Man, Visible and Invisible, London, Theosophical Publishing House, 1902.
- Kunz, Dora van Gelder, The Personal Aura, Wheaton, IL, Quest Books/Theosophical Publishing House, 1991.
- [Carl Edwin Lindgren]. 2005. Debunking Auras and Aura Cameras.
- Martin, Barbara Y., with Dmitri Moraitis, Change Your Aura, Change Your Life, Sunland, CA, Wisdomlight, 2003.
- The Mother (Alfassa, Mirra) Collected Works of the Mother.
- ----- The Agenda
- Poortman, J.J. Vehicles of Consciousness; The Concept of Hylic Pluralism (Ochema), vol I-IV, The Theosophical Society in Netherlands, 1978.
- Powell, Arthur E. The Astral Body and other Astral Phenomena
- Steiner, Rudolf, Theosophy: An introduction to the supersensible knowledge of the world and the destination of man. London: Rudolf Steiner Press. (1904) 1970.
- ----- Occult Science - An Outline. Trans. George and Mary Adams. London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1909, 1969.
- Heindel, Max, The Rosicrucian Mysteries (Chapter IV: The Constitution of Man: Vital Body - Desire Body - Mind), 1911, ISBN 0-911274-86-3.
- Walker, Benjamin, Beyond the Body: The Human Double, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1974, ISBN 0-7100-7808-0; Fitzhenry, Toronto, 1974; Arkana, 1988, ISBN 0-14-019169-0.
[edit] External links
- The Seven Words Online book by Samael Aun Weor detailing the "Christification of the Solar Astral Body."
- Barbara Brennan on the Emotional Body
- Barbara Brennan on the Astral Body
- Light Body - an integrative view