AshvinP wrote: ↑Mon Feb 05, 2024 4:01 pm
Guney,
These are productive efforts and thoughts because they at least help you discern where your thinking is bumping into obstacles in this domain of study. Notice how, if you simply didn't make any such efforts, you wouldn't have any feedback for the factors steering your thinking this way or that way. This is why all deeper understanding begins with active thinking, probing the contours of meaning with our thoughts. Before we even get to the factors of temperament, emotions, and such, we have the factors of beliefs, assumptions, and habits of thinking based on those.
The bold comments suggest you are
assuming the 'astral body' must be referring to some substantial object, similar to a brain with neural activity, that is responsible for the life of feelings. If we approach esoteric science with such an unwarranted conception, it is no wonder that we will remain perplexed and feel it is speaking of mysterious things that are simply beyond our ability to perceive and grasp.
At this point, it is probably helpful to shift focus from Steiner and his terminology to first-person phenomenological experience completely independent of terminology. You have been making progress with this approach before.
For ex., reconsider what Cleric wrote here:
So you see, we first have to decondition from our assumptions of what it means 'to know' something. What does it mean to know the physical body, which we generally feel is the most obvious part of our experience? It is not to simply see it in our visual field such as in a mirror, or to think about legs, arms, hands, feet, head, and so forth. Rather, it is the very inner
experience of sensations that transform in a lawful way in response to our spiritual activity. Get a good feel for this - walk around your room and notice how colors, sounds, textures, perhaps even smells, transform in response to your intended activity and feedback on that activity. If the color experience with the meaning of 'wall' manifests in response to your activity, then this provides a basis to steer your walking in another direction (unless you intend to bump into it). The totality of such lawful sensory experiences, the constraints and possibilities we intuit from them, is what we abstractly label the 'physical body'.
Once we orient to this way of 'knowing' our physical body, we can see how the same thing applies to all other bodies. We don't even need to call them 'bodies', they could just as easily be called A, B, C, D or 1, 2, 3, 4 or sensory constellation, thinking-memory constellation, feeling constellation, and willing constellation. The point is that, no matter how we conceive or label our lawful transformation of experience, it will always differentiate into at least this fourfold structure. Our thinking-memory feeds back on our spiritual activity in a
different way than our sensory experience. Regardless of my intent, it will remain daytime or nighttime in my visual field outside. On the other hand, I can remember the experience of nighttime during daytime and vice versa. I find even more degrees of freedom if my imagination is not tied to the constraints of memory and simply explores feelings and thoughts related to day or night.
We can go much further with these sorts of considerations that stay entirely within the givens of our temporally extended flow of experience, but I will pause here. Does this make sense for you and perhaps elucidate a way to think more phenomenologically (inwardly) about the fourfold human organization?