The following article is adapted from a
talk given at an interlodge
symposium held on February 3, 2007 in Philadelphia.
BODY AND ASTRAL
Welcome to the bottom: This is incarnation, but it is also the only
way to get to the top. The place where our karma is most focused is in
our personal lives. It is the place where we need to understand dharma,
duty to race and kin. We need to understand our place as a part of the
radical unity which H.P.B. explains is the reality behind the fact of
brotherhood. For only here can we really put into position the causes
which will finally free ourselves from what we have been bound to.
The image we would like to present to you was presented to us so
strongly by the Renaissance period and the most wonderful paintings by
such as Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel It is the picture, the
wonderful mural of the creation of Adam. You may have seen this
representation of this huge, bearded human form who is God, his fingers
touching upon Adam, the smaller man.
We want to draw your attention to the notion of this creation of
Adam. And notice the fingers touching, and think of this as the inner
man really coming to the fore, the man made flesh as it says in the
Bible. The implications are huge here and we need to see metaphor as
more important than form. We need to see analogy and correspondence as
more important than metaphor. The notion of God creating Adam really
has its basis in the Old Testament. In its Kabalistic mystical sense,
it is Adam Kadmon, as the universal man, becoming somehow restricted,
into form.
From another point of view, an inquirer might ask, “Well, if God is
being represented in a form, then what is man? And, if God is
formless, from the highest point of view and containing all the powers,
then what is man? What is incarnation?” We draw your attention to the
first chapter of The Bhagavad-Gita. William Quan Judge, in discussing
this, explains that Arjuna is being guided by Krishna. He has drawn the
chariot into the field of battle and at this point of commitment The
Bhagavad-Gita begins. In a metaphysical sense, the energy of the
higher man brings the lower man into form.
Incarnation seems to happen by the law of reciprocity - that is say,
we have left works undone. Nature abhors a vacuum. Where there has
been intention laid down and not finished, there is a need within the
universe for completion or harmony to be restored.
We find ourselves moving from one circumstance to another, almost
entirely based on what isn’t finished. The Great Beings that have been
presented to us from the beginning, the Mahatmas, exhibit a life from
the point of view of choice. They are not driven by what has not been
finished, but what needs to be done. This is the dharma that we are
speaking of in which the physical man, guided by his principles, needs
to bring to bear upon the world.
The astral body is the form upon which the physical is modeled. It
is the vehicle which “steps down” the universal life energy and
converts it into a vitalized electricity.
Something as large and powerful as, say, the Saint Lawrence River,
how do you tame
that? What have we done to this great field of power? We have built
dams. Dams have this knack of stepping down the great powerful energy
latent within the Saint Lawrence River and turning it, through
restriction, into electricity. Life and electricity being the same
thing, this enlivens the physical man.
QUOTES FROM WILLIAM QUAN JUDGE
The astral body has in it the real organs of the outer sense organs.
In it are the sight, hearing, power to smell, and the sense of touch.
It has a complete system of nerves and arteries of its own for the
conveyance of the astral fluid which is to that body as our blood is to
the physical. It is the real personal man. There are located the
subconscious perception and the latent memory, which the hypnotizers of
the day are dealing with and being baffled by.
So in looking for words to describe the inner body the only ones
found in English were the "astral body." This term comes near to the
real fact, since the substance of this form is derived from cosmic
matter or star matter, roughly speaking. But the old Sanskrit word
describes it exactly -- Linga Sarira, the design body -- because it is
the design or model for the physical body. This is better than
"ethereal body," as the latter might be said to be subsequent to the
physical, whereas in fact the astral body precedes the material one.
The astral body is made of matter of very fine texture as compared
with the visible body, and has a great tensile strength, so that it
changes but little during a lifetime, while the physical alters every
moment. And not only has it this immense strength, but at the same
time possesses an elasticity permitting its extension to a considerable
distance. It is flexible, plastic, extensible, and strong. The matter
of which it is composed is electrical and magnetic in its essence, andis just what the whole world was composed of in the dim past when the
processes of evolution had not yet arrived at the point of producing
the material body for man. But it is not raw or crude matter. Having
been through a vast period of evolution and undergone purifying
processes of an incalculable number, its nature has been refined to a
degree far beyond the gross physical elements we see and touch with the
physical eye and hand.
The astral body is the guiding model for the physical one, and all
the other kingdoms have the same astral model. Vegetables, minerals,
and animals have the ethereal double, and this theory is the only onewhich will answer the question how it is that the seed produces its own
kind and all sentient beings bringforth their like. Biologists can
only say that the facts are as we know them, but can give no reason why
the acorn will never grow anything but an oak except that no man ever
knew it to be otherwise.
“Theosophical Independence” is produced monthly by Associates of
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