Theos-Talk Archives (October 1995 Message tl00357)

Jerry S:< We only have direct
> knowledge of whats going on upon Earth via our
> physical senses.
<
<Lewis: Then how do you explain paranormal experiences?
<I got the idea that while we are alive the "particles" from all these
<"bodies" are in constant motion, which gives us the ability to "sense"
<all these, but at death the bodies are normally reorganized into
<concentric spheres thus limiting our perceptions.>

How about If you think of your astral body as the body of
your emotions, and your mental body as the body of your thoughts,
and the two acting together as your mind? Does this help?

Yes, the particles of our subtle bodies are swirling
around all the time. I can't "see" them in terms of forms and
colors, by I can "feel" them in terms of vibrations.

Years ago I used to smoke cigarettes. Sometimes
after several good drags, I noticed that I felt dizzy, like riding
a carnival whirl-a-twirl or something. I could "feel" my astral
body swirling around in great agitation, and came to the
conclusion that the inhaled smoke stirred up these astral
particles so much, I was able to feel them. I don't know if
anyone else ever had this experience or not (I quit smoking
almost 20 years ago now) and can only speak for myself.

If you question my quoted sentence above, then
try a simple experiment. Go into a closet or and close the door
or put on a blindfold (block your sight). Put cotton in your ears
(block out your hearing). Don't eat anything (block out your
taste) .... and so on, blocking out all of your 5 physical senses.
Now tell me what is going on in the world around you. You
can't because your connections to the physical world have all
been severed. But your mind still functions, and your feelings
are still there. And you may have a hunch or an intuitive
feeling about something going on in another room. This is how
I explain ESP or paranormal experiences - they come to us not
through our physical senses, but through our astral senses in
the form of desires and emotions, or through our mental
senses in the form of thoughts, or through our causal senses
in the form of intuitive insight, and sometimes through the higher
two (buddhi-manas) or the lower two (kama-manas) acting
together.

I don't know about the reorganizing of our bodies
into concentric spheres after our death. I do think that after
Kamaloka, when we slough off our emotions and enter
Devachan, the outer surface of our mental body hardens
and our mind projects images onto it, like a movie and we
become lost to the world around us. This is also what
happens to some extent during normal dreams. But we
can also have lucid dreams, and we can also have true
dreams in which this hardening is reduced or eliminated
and then we see what is really there. The same is probably
true with Devachan. One problem occurs with this, though.
When I do this in my dreams, I always wake up. I suspect
that this phenomenon will hold in Devachan as well, and
that if we can do this, we will reincarnate rather fast. In fact, I
suspect that this is the magical technique used by some
Adepts to deliberately reduce or eliminate their Devachan.

Lewis:<the descriptions of the
movement of these forces through the chakras and into the aura, for
instance in Besant's STUDY IN CONSCIOUSNESS, suggests to me that
while not fully developed there is a constant interchange of mental
and astral impressions to the physical. It is how we feel or think.>

Agreed. And although I think her book is heavily exoteric,
I learned a lot from reading it. Again, our "bodies" are only such when
consciousness is using them as a vehicle. When consciousness
is focused in our physical body (during the waking state) we can
think of our astral and mental "bodies" as fields (see my posting
to Liesel on fields). When we go to sleep and our consciousness
shifts to the astral plane, for example, then the astral field becomes
our astral body. The word body denotes a structure or vehicle for
some kind of egoic consciousness, and without this consciousness
being present, we can think of it as a field. The "interchange" that
Besant talks about is due to the fact that these bodies or fields
are all connected together by psychomagnetic forces - the Silver
Cord (or Sutraman) is a relatively simplistic, albeit descriptive,
name for these forces acting in harmonious unison.

Jerry S.