Re: Meditation exercise on "separate me"
Posted: Mon Feb 27, 2023 4:35 pm
Ashvin's response already gives the essentials. It can be added that from the perspective of higher cognition the planetary spheres are like one within another. A rough analogy can be drawn with the electron shells of the atom. For this reason the soul or astral body, is actually weaved of all the spheres. In fact that's why the term 'astral' is at all justified. Even in this very moment, our physical body has local nature but the higher in our organization we climb, the more non-local our nature becomes. So even now with our higher members we belong to the Cosmos. It's only that the consciousness of these members is 'sucked in' so to speak in the local sense formations.Stranger wrote: ↑Mon Feb 27, 2023 1:07 pm I have an unrelated question. Steiner wrote:
However, the recent NASA missions to Mars did not find any signs of any civilization there. How do we explain that?When the eye of the occultist has been opened and he looks out into the vast spaces of the world, he beholds a remarkable sight. He discovers that the Buddha has now for his scene of action that planet which in physical astronomy we call Mars; and he can do no other than relate in all seriousness how, since the time when the Buddha acquired the faculty which made it no longer necessary for him to appear again in Earth life, he has been given a new mission. This new mission of the Buddha we can discover by making occult observation of Mars.
As we enter upon this study, the true and original mission of the Buddha becomes clear to us. We find by occult investigation that the beings on Mars who correspond to men on Earth — they are of course of quite a different nature, but for the moment let us call them “Mars men” — at a certain time in their evolution were in a similar condition of need as were the Earth men in the Fourth Post-Atlantean period when the Christ had to come to them. And as Christ became a Saviour and an Awakener to Life, as that was a mission for the Christ in regard to Earth humanity, so is it a further mission for that Bodhisattva after he became the Buddha, to be a Saviour and Redeemer of Mars men. He has to accomplish on Mars an event similar to the event that the Christ had to bring to fulfilment on Earth.
It is important to understand this because it is a main impediment on our way to higher cognition. It's the belief that we are a soul atom that as a whole package is placed on Earth. Then people are very suspicious when it is said that consciousness expands in the spheres because it is imagined that we leave Earth as a rocket and travel in outer space. The fact is that our sheaths already belong there, it's a matter of attaining consciosuness of this. This is achieved by our sheaths becoming resonantly attuned, like fractal levels, such that the experiences in the non-local levels can be 'amplified' through the gradient to the level of thoughts, which surely depend on the local formations of the etheric and physical brain and other organs. In other words, the brain has to become reflective not only for human spiritual activity related to the bodily organs but also for Cosmic spiritual activity that is always present non-locally in the spheres.
Mars men are the human-level beings whose soul nature is dominated by the Mars forces. Part of these forces are related to individualization and dominance. It's for this reason that the ancients understood the Mars sphere as the God of war. The Mars and all other sphere's forces live in the Earthly man too. We are a cross-section of the spheres, so to speak.
Mars men live in Imaginative consciousness, they don't have mineral bodies. Here we can change our notions a little. In esoteric sense, Earth is not simply one of the planets in our Solar system but the state of existence that manifests when the spirit descends into the decohered levels of the Solar 'wavefunction', so to speak. At that level all spheres have their mineral shadow (so in occult sense our rocky Moon, Mars and so on are also Earth) but in the course of evolution our planetary body has been made into the point of balance that allows for mineralization to go so far yet also remain bridgeable to the life of soul and spirit through the gradient of organic biology.
With this in mind, we can have Mars men walking on Earth, Venus men, Mercury men and so on. It's a matter of the dominant forces within the soul organism. Yet there are human souls that are too one-sidedly developed to have proper incarnation in the Earthly spectrum (which requires at least some degree of balance of all planetary forces to have a properly functioning physical body). In the disincarnate state these souls really form 'communities' with corresponding Imaginative structure. After each incarnation we do pass through these spheres. The fact that the Buddha works on Mars men means simply that he's tightly engaged with the sphere of the Mars forces. In certain sense, he has the not easy task to inspire transformations in the Mars nature. This work is accomplished in the Imaginative spectrum of the Mars sphere but we shouldn't imagine that Buddha is far away on the rocky planet Mars. Everything that is accomplished in the Mars sphere has its immediate significance in our Earthly state, as far as the Mars forces that are weaved into our being are concerned.
To be sure, the soul and spiritual activities of the Mars men must necessarily have their projection also in the mineral level. Similarly to the quote about the future human being, these disincarnate human beings' activities have their effects not only in our souls but also in the winds of Mars for example, but the conscious experience is such that these human beings don't feel like "I'm that whirlwind, you're the one over there" or something like that. They don't even perceive a rocky red planet on the surface of which they move. These human beings live psychic life, so to speak. They fight with their soul forces over their perspectives of their Imaginative dreamscape but that dreamscape doesn't rigidify to the level of mineral lawfulness (we need to be entangled with that part of the spectrum in our mineral bodies for this to happen).