The Astral Body: Emotions, Feelings, Experiences

The Nature of the Astral Body

Keywords: emotions; feelings; experiences.

We move on to the dense level bodies — the astral, etheric, and physical. This is a realm of vibrations given to us through very convincing sensations, the nature of which, at first glance, leaves no doubt. Joy is joy, sorrow is sorrow, and the heaviness of a thick belly and the aching in swollen joints cannot be confused with the lightness and agility of a graceful young body.

The dense bodies are in many ways similar to the subtle ones, and apparently there are direct connections between corresponding pairs of bodies, that is, atmic and astral, buddhic and etheric, causal and physical. Indirect indications of this can be the following observations: emotional reaction serves as a criterion of spiritual truth; wealth is most often associated with food; an event, as a rule, is linked to the movement of bodies in space.

Accordingly, the connections between bodies in the subtle and dense sheaths are also very similar: for example, the relationships between the atmic and buddhic bodies resemble the relationships between the astral and etheric, and the causal body is connected to the buddhic in a way that resembles the connection of the physical to the etheric. Therefore, by regulating one's "lower" life, that is, the interactions of the dense sheath bodies, a person directly influences the subtle — and vice versa.

The energy of the astral plane is the energy of passions, which is much denser and more palpable for a person than the "dry" mental energy. Of course, the "rational" person may delude themselves into thinking that they have learned to consciously control their emotions, but alas, this is very far from the truth. Rather, they have learned to crudely suppress some of their emotions, displacing them into the subconscious and thereby damaging their own astral body, whose culture modern civilization almost completely neglects — everyone is too busy: politicians lead, scientists think, people work, while only isolated simpletons or socially dangerous individuals prone to affects, who are capable of easily murdering someone under their influence, actually feel and experience. However, they usually have a history of a difficult childhood, such as early orphanhood or an incestuous relationship with parents.

The Culture and Development of Emotional Life

The suppression of thought has become the norm of modern civilization. People are told: you should think this way and that, using such and such concepts. And they unquestioningly submit to the global, unshakeable mentality of the era.

For example, a person is accustomed neither to sincerity, nor to patience, nor to respect for their own meditations on any of the bodies. A lack of sincerity leads to meditation being stifled and displaced into the subconscious — sharply degrading in the process. Insufficient patience forces a person to abruptly stop any unpleasant or simply intense meditation before it has finished, and medium-level emotions, which a person considers unworthy of themselves, are displaced into the subconscious, accumulate there, and begin to ferment, becoming increasingly crude until they burst forth in a manner that shocks and terrifies both the person themselves and those around them.

Thus, emotional life is primarily a certain work that a person performs internally (transforming their astral body) and in the external world. This work can be performed consciously or unconsciously, well or poorly, diligently or sloppily, under more or less pleasant and suitable conditions for the person, but it cannot be avoided.

The culture of each body begins when a person separates it from the others and first grants it the right to exist, and then — to its characteristic meditations, without regulating them too rigidly.

Just like the etheric and physical bodies, the astral body can be more or less developed and adapted to perform its work. One person sincerely experiences both strong grief and great joys, without artificially softening their states and generally maintaining mental balance, while another reacts with physical illness or is incapacitated for a long time by the slightest emotional stresses. The latter are sometimes said to have an unbalanced psyche, referring to the astral body.

Some people, considering themselves extremely emotionally vulnerable, make a great effort to protect their astral body, building a thick protective wall of indifference to everything that does not directly concern them. This wall not only becomes a source of antipathy from others, but also extremely weakens the astral body. It becomes frail, pampered, and unprepared for minimally necessary loads. Furthermore, the artificial restriction of one's emotions leads to a reduction in the energy and size of the astral body, as a result of which it is torn by the etheric, depriving it of protection and suffering itself in the process...

The opposite problem arises for people who are too emotional and unrestrained, whose astral body is excessively large, energetic, and chaotic, so that it poses a certain danger to others, even with the best intentions. Abundant emotions, constantly overflowing at the wrong time and place, powerless to change anything for the better, but imperatively attracting everyone's attention, are nothing more than astral debris (if not slop), which others must constantly clean up after the person if they do not want to live in an astral pigsty. "Calm down, there's no need to be so nervous and worried, everything will be fine and sorted out, don't dramatize what's happening so much," — such exhortations usually don't achieve their goal, as they operate on the mental plane, whose energy is too weak against the astral, unless directed with absolute precision. Adequate words, however, stop hysteria instantly, like an icy shower, but they must be found.

The Influence and Harmonization of Emotions on Inner State and Relationships

It's hard to find a golden mean. The solution here lies elsewhere — in raising the vibration level of the astral body, that is, transitioning from crude emotions to more subtle, differentiated, and adequate responses to the processes occurring within the human organism. The astral body is the primary subject through which society manages a person. Modern humans react rather weakly to mental management (persuasion, arguments of reason, etc.). But emotions are the most serious argument for them. They obey them in both their positive (passions) and negative (fears) forms. Simply put, positive emotions are seen as a carrot; negative as a stick, not only in relation to others but also to oneself.

The ability to adequately react to a strong and clearly unfair humiliation without experiencing unpleasant feelings is similar to the ability to do a split or withstand a boxing punch to the stomach. This is achievable, but through prolonged effort, combined with a certain amount of tedious and sometimes painful exertion.

Thus, in the stream of daily experiences, both positive and negative, which a person gradually learns to unobtrusively manage, without strongly suppressing them, but partly civilizing and refining them, the astral body develops its strength and flexibility.

A characteristic problem arising in a proselyte is a sharp feeling of humiliation — an emotion expressing the protest of the lower "I" against the infringement of its rights and dignity. And although a person understands that blessed are the poor in spirit, not those rich in self-esteem and superiority over others, nevertheless, their emotional reaction of acute humiliation in situations that clearly require modest behavior from them can be so strong that they instinctively begin to assert themselves at the expense of others in all possible and impossible ways.

Speaking of a healthy astral body, it should be noted that it is capable of rejoicing to exactly the same extent as grieving, and the latter is not at all identical to suffering. Sadness, mourning, sorrow are normal, though not always pleasant, but valuable states of the astral body, in which it performs work of a certain kind, yielding important results. Just as any person has to climb a mountain from time to time, freeze and sweat, within certain limits this is perceived as something self-evident. Suffering (of any kind), on the other hand, means a severe imbalance of the organism, for example, a large departure of any body beyond the limits of the one above it and significant damage to it.

Let's consider as an example a woman in an unhappy marriage. Her husband is a constant source of her distress: she dislikes that he (on the causal plane) is late from work, his style of interacting with the children, and much more. However, her mental dissatisfaction is immediately cut off by herself, because for all the mental "why" (he didn't warn her he'd be late, didn't congratulate her on their anniversary, didn't do the household chore) there's only one, utterly unbearable answer: "he fell out of love." Therefore, the irritation descends to the astral plane already in the form of a clearly insoluble emotional situation: my husband constantly hurts me for inexplicable reasons; he's a scoundrel; merciless; an utter pig... The emotions of distress, however, are not allowed to descend (by the Leo current) to the etheric body, because then the woman would lose strength for a while and there would be no one to look after the house. Therefore, after emptying her astral body, she lifts the poison of accumulated negative emotions by the Sagittarius current into the mental, starting the same meditation with renewed force: "Why, seeing how much I suffer, did he not smile at me even once all evening?" The answer is already known to the reader, but for the woman it represents a terrible enigma, and the mental meditation again breaks off and again the conflicting energetic quantum descends into the astral body. Thus, a vicious circle of negative mental and astral meditations is formed, supporting each other and additionally supported by the causal plane: the husband occasionally makes mistakes that strengthen the wife's mentality (Gemini current), and the latter, in turn, provokes the husband to inattention and aggression (Capricorn current, i.e., mental programming of his behavior). If the husband goes on a business trip for a while or the wife goes on vacation alone, the three-story negative meditation (causal-mental-astral bodies) turns into a two-story one (mental-astral), as the causal irritant disappears (no contact with the husband), and as a result, the meditation as a whole weakens or even completely fades by the end of the separation. Many families, with a sufficiently strong buddhic body, rely on this. It temporarily breaks the vicious circle of the causal-astral level, sharply changing the main life circumstances of the family. It is clear that breaking the described negative meditation of the wife with causal and even more so mental means is very difficult.

The Interaction of Subtle Bodies in Intimate Relationships

So, one of the main problems of modern people is the inability to experience, that is, to liberate themselves during emotional meditation. Fearing pain, we deprive ourselves of joy, remaining surprisingly insensitive and indifferent in our happiest moments. In other words, a certain emotional amplification should accompany the end of each mental meditation. This is how a person feels a spiritual uplift after successfully expressing their thought.

A specific feature of the astral body is that a person emotionally experiences not what is actually happening to them (i.e., transmissions directly from the causal body), but what they consciously or unconsciously think about it (i.e., a flow from their mental body).

The attitude towards emotions as something lower is directly connected to the attitude towards thoughts as something higher. Both are gross distortions of the order of human subtle bodies and lead to countless unsolvable problems, one of which is sexual relationships.

Sexual attraction as an emotion often contradicts a person's mental attitudes, causing a strong internal conflict that brings a lot of trouble, both in its visible and repressed forms. One of the main causes of conflicts between spouses is the insufficient monogamy of one of them (less often both), simply put, infidelity, although it is understood differently in different families.

In general, a (hetero)sexual act should be defined as any paired meditation between a man and a woman in which the sexual identity of each partner is clearly emphasized for both (i.e., the man feels himself a man and his partner a woman, and she feels herself a woman and her partner a man). Then, sexual acts can be differentiated by the sets of subtle bodies on which they occur, as well as by the subtle bodies where the partners' assembly point is located at that time. Typical examples:

• Buddhic meditation: a "heart-to-heart" conversation and sharing of life stories between two casual fellow travelers on a long-distance train, from which they exit at different stops and part forever;
• Causal meditation: a joint but non-committal trip to the theater, help with repairing an iron (car);
• Mental meditation: coordinating viewpoints on an extraneous topic, e.g., the origin of UFOs;
• Astral meditation: joint emotional experience of a situation affecting both, say, helping an injured animal;
• Etheric meditation: a shared dinner, dancing, gentle clothed embraces, sitting on laps, and similar;
• Physical meditation: embraces and touching erogenous zones without clothes, sexual intercourse in the usual sense.

Control question for the reader: what types of meditations do you allow your partner with others: a) officially and b) in reality?

The author hopes that the reader will not want to answer this question, or at least it will put them in a difficult position: regulating de jure and de facto both one's own and others' meditations is a hopeless and inherently unprofitable business.

Nevertheless, all types of meditations except the physical are officially considered socially acceptable (i.e., not considered marital infidelity), but in reality, only causal, mental, and etheric meditations are. In other words, average social wives and husbands consider the appearance of jealousy completely normal if their partner engages in intense buddhic or astral meditation with someone of the opposite sex: no one else can be of value to them, let alone emotionally affect them!

In a family, many things are not spoken aloud but are understood very clearly, and the mutual chains imposed by spouses on each other are sometimes invisible but felt very distinctly, although their origin is not always obvious. However, the side effect of prohibiting external emotional connections between spouses turns out to be extremely strong and most often unexpected for all participants.

Truly intimate connections and deep relationships on any plane are quite rare, and if meditations are allowed to proceed on their own, they descend to each lower plane, significantly weakening, and most often stop entirely at the astral or a weak vibration of the etheric (what is written does not apply to the type of very crude people living primarily on etheric-physical energies).

The opposition of the mental body to the astral is also manifested in the firm subconscious conviction of almost all people that mental meditations are safe for a person, while in emotional ones, they are, on the contrary, very vulnerable. In common language, the generally accepted opinion is that "the tongue has no bones" and one can think about anything, but one's feelings must be carefully guarded and protected, because they are one's own, that is, personal. Any object a person thinks about, to one degree or another (depending on the intensity of the meditation), becomes a fact of their mental body, meaning it is imprinted in it and gains power over the owner, subtly seeping into both the astral and causal bodies, and then into the rest.

Moreover, a cultured person with a developed astral body necessarily reacts emotionally to any situation they find themselves in, but if it is transient, the emotion quickly dissipates without leaving traces, although it can be quite strong. This is how a good sofa is designed: it's soft to sit on for both a child and a 100-kilogram heavyweight, and as soon as visitors leave, it instantly and without the slightest damage restores its original balance.

Here the reader might be indignant: isn't it immoral to treat the inner life as an obedient instrument! However, one should not confuse the buddhic and astral bodies, although when speaking of "inner life," the latter is often meant.

The Astral Absolute — the source of all vibrations perceived by a person as emotions. Connecting to it gives a person a sensual participation in the grief and joy of all beings in the Universe, the ability to share, alleviate, and enhance others' emotions without violently intruding upon them.