Let’s take a quick review of the various bodies that make up the human being before we advance to today’s topic. The physical body is obvious; it’s the one studied by modern science, made up of earthly materials that we experience with our senses. The etheric body carries our life forces of growth and healing and reproduction—our health and vitality. The astral body houses our feelings, passions and desires, our pleasure and pain. Our I, or Ego, is our eternal spiritual core. It’s the body of our self-consciousness that stays with us throughout all our many incarnations. The I is our true self that directs and transforms the rest of our bodies. (These descriptions are the barest hints of the many functions of each body.)
As we think of these bodies, we can imagine how the health of each one would affect the other. For example, if we are filled with despair, an emotion expressed through our astral body, our etheric body correspondingly loses vitality, which causes our physical body to become unhealthy. Science already recognizes that unloved or lonely people have a harder time healing that those surrounded by love. We can probably imagine lots of other ways that soul-sickness affects our bodies.
When we begin a path of spiritual development, the I begins in earnest to work on the other bodies, usually beginning with the astral body. We’ve begun this work when we try to be kind, we try to contain our anger, we try to reign in our baser instincts. As our I slowly gains mastery of our astral body, we free ourselves to evolve and develop additional capacities, spiritual capacities. These capacities are explained to us by initiates such as Rudolf Steiner. Some capacities we gain include staying conscious during sleep, conversing with friends and family who have already crossed the threshold into the spiritual world, coming to know other beings of the hierarchies such as our guardian angel.
Owning these capacities can arouse disbelief and even scorn from those who haven’t worked long and hard enough through meditation or contemplation and other exercises to acquire them.
Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:
Every time we wake in the morning, we find the same physical and etheric bodies, and we know that fundamentally speaking we can do very little by means of our own forces to transform these two bodies or to develop them to a higher stage… Nevertheless, inner forces must be active through the whole of life between birth and death, and these forces must be continually rekindled if life is to continue. We see at the moment of death what becomes of the physical body when the etheric body is no longer working in it. The physical and chemical forces inherent in the physical body as such assert themselves from the moment of death onwards and dissolve, disintegrate it. That this cannot happen during life is due to the etheric body, which is a faithful fighter against the disintegration of the physical body. At every moment our physical body would be ready to disintegrate if fresh forces from the etheric body were not continually supplied to it.
The etheric or life-body in turn receives what it needs in this respect from still deeper inner forces, from the astral body, which is the vehicle of happiness and grief, of joy and sorrow. Thus, the corresponding inner body is perpetually working at the outer body. The outwardly visible part of us is sustained all the time by the inner forces. How the astral body works on the etheric body and the etheric body on the physical—that is what we would see if we were able to descend consciously into the physical and etheric bodies on waking; but we are diverted from this perception by external objects and happenings.
However, by developing our souls to the stage enabling us to experience consciously the moment of entry into the etheric and physical bodies on waking, we can acquire a certain knowledge of what actually works creatively on our inner being during sleep.
We become conscious of the driving forces of our human nature when we are able to descend into our inner being. What must we do if this is to be achieved with conscious awareness? We must prepare ourselves in such a way that at the moment of waking, external impressions transmitted by the eyes, ears, and so forth, do not disturb us, do not immediately force themselves upon us. We must train ourselves to be able to pass out of the state of consciousness prevailing in sleep in such a way that we are able to ward off all external impressions. When we can do that, we pass the Lesser Guardian of the Threshold.
What is it that we see if we pass through the portal leading into our own inner being? As genuine mystics we learn to know something of which hitherto we had no notion… Genuine knowledge of these bodies into which we descend on waking is only possible as the result of a patient and prolonged approach from every angle to the great truths of existence.
Excerpt from: Macrocosm and Microcosm, Lecture Four: Faculties of the Human Soul and Their Development by Rudolf Steiner. Vienna. March 24, 1910.
As Dr. Steiner states in many places in his work, the transitions from sleeping to waking and from waking to sleeping are sensitive times when we can direct our attention inward instead of outward. Staying as open as possible without thinking about all that the day holds in store for us as we wake and recalling backwards from the last moment to the first of our day before going to sleep are ways that can lead us toward remembering our experiences in the spiritual world while we are asleep.
We have a hard time being patient these days, especially as we try to learn new things. Sometimes we end up with more questions than answers. Instead of being irritated, we could choose to live with a question—to ponder it. We may start by asking ourselves why we curious about all this spiritual stuff in the first place.
We will continue this discussion next year. Happy New Year to you all!