The Astral Body

Photo: Man and Nature, from the tapestry "Christ is Born as Man's Redeemer" as seen at the Cloisters of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In this tapestry, Hope and Misery sit between men and the Saints as mediators in his striving for spiritual development

The other day, someone asked why we should “want” an astral body.

I suppose this becomes weirdly aspirational in a Gurdjieff context. Why “want” anything at all other than what we already have, in the sense of life on the planet? Is this life not enough?

No, it seems; and this is why we search. But we’re like men and women searching for life on Mars without looking at the extraordinary creatures that live right beneath our feet.

What is it with us, this fascination to romance what is distant and discount what is near?

It’s akin to our propensity to evaluate what is outside of ourselves as somehow superior to that which is within. I have one childhood friend, now a billionaire, who is irrevocably convinced that his value is objectively measured by how much money he makes each month. I reminded him that when we were twelve years old I knew a person by exactly the same name as his who already had a value but none of the money. We used to have to scrape change together at times to buy the things we wanted. He had a value before he had money; but he’s forgotten that in his pursuit of the outer.

The inner plagues us; it troubles us. Our thoughts may be dark, our perspectives bleak, our desires obtuse, perverse or frustrating. In general and in the larger sense of things our inner life is troubling and so perhaps best avoided; why engage with that which troubles? Better to seek relief in entertainment, no matter how obvious or banal; to seek escape, to deny the troubles of conscience and the upsets of psychology. The diseases of the soul have no ointment to apply.

What is near to us, I wager, is where all the life really is: it is not just at our fingertips but in our fingertips; and in a million million other places in our cells, in the spaces between the molecules we are made of. It’s within these complex structures that the energy we are made of arises; and there is where the value is created, in Being—in what we are and not what we do.

So this idea of another body, an “astral” body, a body of the planets… Gurdjieff called it, opaquely, the kesdjan body… what is it then? Yet another escape from where we are and what we are?  A body that is not us? No one quite knows; and yet the idea is tantalizing, as though we were caterpillars that could perchance metamorphose into… at least… different caterpillars.

So. I will tell you what the astral body is “for;” and why we need one; and perhaps you will thank me for that. But then again perhaps not, because it is not of what people think it is “for” and it does not have the ”uses” one might wish it would have. It has great uses, yes; but they are the uses of the soul and not the substance. The uses for the astral body are rooted in those selfsame dark inner places filled with questions which we’re prone to avoid by choice.