Güney27 wrote: ↑Fri Feb 09, 2024 1:44 am
How can we phenomenologically understand the 4 ethers that make up the physical world?
Güney,
If Ashvin does not have a coherent answer to your question, one can rightfully wonder how in-coherent my thoughts around this question may be
But I have been reflecting on this question a little, and I would like to share a few basic thoughts, as possible starting points, like a warmup for the phenomenology of ether. And I am confident that any misleading ideas would be rectified anyway.
A preliminary note.The folded nature of reality (that Cleric and Ashvin often speak of) makes features of reality increase in one direction, in some sense, but also decrease in the same direction, in some
other sense. For example, we say that our sense-perceptible physical body is the grossest of our four sheaths, the most dense, while the ether body, the soul/astral body, and the true self (“I”) are more and more spiritual. However,
in another sense, our physical body is the one that has required the most powerful and encompassing intelligences to ideate and evolve - intelligences able to 'scoop' (create), shape, infuse and sustain the hard layers of matter. So the physical body is the most basic, in a sense, but also the
least basic in another sense.
Another example: we understand that the purest spiritual world (higher Devachan) is the farest away, the last world one can enter along the path of developing clairvoyance - after the ether and the soul/astral worlds have been attained - but,
in another sense, the type of activity we are more in control of is thinking (pure spirit) while feeling (soul) is less under our conscious control, and the bodily will (ether + matter) is even less under our control, since we can normally move our body at will, but we are entirely unaware of
how our intention transforms into movement. So, in a sense, the pure spiritual world is the highest and most difficult to experience clairvoyantly, but in another sense our purest spiritual activity (sense-free thinking, not mixed up with feeling and/or bodily will and matter) is the activity that we have better control over.
This general principle could be important to remember in the context of your question, because ether is still very connected to matter. Indeed, ether is part of the material world, therefore one may think that it’s the easiest to reach, when developing supersensible perception. (For myself, I have no conscious perception of ether, but I think it is the easiest in some sense, because Steiner says that it’s in the ether that mediums and people with a constitutional predisposition end up perceiving super-sensibly, although without really understanding what’s going on). So, in a way, ether is the most accessible supersensible world. Some people stumble upon it almost spontaneously, or through drugs. Yet, in another way, the etheric body is directly connected with the life and processes of our physical body, so it’s the most mysterious for us, and easy to misinterpret. In this sense, a phenomenological discovery of our soul body seems more proximate and appropriate, since we have a slightly better grasp on our life of feeling in comparison.
In this connection, I would not say that the phenomenological approach to our soul body is easy, Güney
The task is not only to recognize our emotions. It’s also to find out where and how those emotions are rooted, how deep and how branched these roots are - an inquiry that extends well beyond our individuality. Not only that. It’s then a matter of pulling these rooted features out, with the entire root attached! Our being has to be dismantled, as Cleric said, to be purified and reforged. In a sense, this work on our soul body is more laborious and tough, and
less easily accessible, but in another sense, it’s
more accessible - because we are somehow conscious of how our feeling life comes about. Probably it's a more urgent work, too, if we want to stick our head out of the sea of subjective opinions and impulses that obscure reality and prevent objective perceptions.
This being said, here come a few basic thoughts about the etheric body.
❄ ️ First,knowing that our ether body is close to the physical - it even has some spatial character - one could try to become more intensely aware of the sense-perceptible physical body, to begin with. Can we sharpen our normal senses, be more present in them, more attentive to the transformation in time of our flow of
sensory becoming? If we infuse it with more attention, we will become less clumsy, break less objects, etcetera. That would probably create a more solid foundation to extend our perceptual flow into the etheric. Also, what are the 12 senses Steiner speaks of? Is it possible to get a feel for some of them?
❄ ️ Second,I would work with the thought that the chemical elements that compose our body (the periodic table gives an insightful overview of their qualities, almost like a semi-finished puzzle game) would fall apart and be taken over by a variety of laws, if the ether body was not there to continually hold them all together as organism, by means of its various functions. If it was for them alone - the chemical elements - they would do what they do in a corpse. That’s their intrinsic nature. But luckily ether is there, to continually oppose those laws. And the less we are conscious, like in sleep, the easiest it is for the etheric body to keep the dynamic functions flowing properly in the physical body. It means that its ability to maintain and repair the physical body is expressed through time, through flow, through maintaining the functionalities that allow the physical body to transform its states and still remain a unity. We can try to feel, in the physiology of our body, in our intuition of its various internal flows, how these flows make the difference from a piece of dead tissue and a living tissue, that is vivified and enabled to remain a part of an organic whole, through timeful transformation. Maybe some rather macabre thought experiments could help (if one is not disturbed in this way). I can shake my hand in the air. What happens? What would happen if I did the same with a cut-off hand? Or even just that: if I bump into an object with my hand and hurt myself by mistake, I may get a hematoma and a bruise. The living flows are altered. The blood is stuck and the elements try to take over. They want to live by their own separate material laws. They want to defect. Luckily, I can rest, move, sleep, and I can let the ether repair the area. It will reestablish the flows, and the bruise will go away.
❄ ️ Third,is it possible to concretize more this general idea of ether as the means by which flowing life infuses the picture of our physical body as a static compound of chemical elements?
We can ask: what are the various ways in which my body expresses life? Maybe we can do better than just saying: life comes from transformation, it’s what allows the static picture of the physical body to remain integral through transformation in time. This is true, but not enough. A stone also has a flow of becoming, a corpse also transforms, but they are not alive. Maybe we can get more insights if we look closer at the becoming of a body
through time. We want to switch the mode of our attention from static to timeful. That requires effort. It's clear from all the discussions on the process of perception-cognition.
The idea that our bodily life manifests dynamically, through the unfolding of time, has to be maintained in the foreground. We may be used to perceiving a human body as a monolithic unit. We walk down the street, and every person we come across seems so self-contained, so separate from their environment. As that body walks down the street, we don't expect its arms to leak and melt into the pavement, or its head to dissolve in a cloud of rarefied substance. We expect it to remain pretty much integral within its skin-container. However, if we allow even a short time span to really complement that sequence of visual perceptions, we necessarily come to a much more mitigated understanding of that walking body. What really happens to that body through time is a continuous interaction with its environment. Elements continually trespass from the outside in: for example light, water, air, food. Similarly, chemical elements from inside the body continually trespass its supposed borders. These flows of assimilation and elimination are many, and follow various rhythms. The outside comes in and the inside comes out in complex ways, at various paces. Maybe you can imagine that you are an experimental filmmaker. You make an avantgarde short film, or VR, to make the bodily rhythms of assimilation and elimination more perceptible and conscious. You want to show how the apparent no-trespassing nature of the body is illusory. Maybe you accelerate all the rhythms, similar to those plant growth time lapses, but for a human body. And you wrap up all these flows in a continuous loop (
)
In this way, trying to picture and feel this reality as phenomena of our own body, striving to seek a timeful perspective, maybe we can get a sense of the first type of ether, the chemical ether. Chemical ether is the vehicle through which the forces that insure nutrition (assimilation) and elimination can circulate through the chemical elements of the physical body and keep them respectful of the laws of life, against their own intrinsic material laws the elements would otherwise comply with. Nutrition and its circulation, as ideas, as powerful transforming intentions, can’t just run over the bodily elements as is. In order to think these processes into form, these intelligences need a carrier medium to mediate their superior ideal nature, and make it ‘intakable’ by our body. That's what chemical ether does.