Lecture V

Yesterday, in such words as are possible for these matters, I tried to characterise how the withdrawal from the physical body, and feeling and experiencing oneself in the etheric and astral bodies take place. I pointed out that this experience takes place in such a way that living oneself into the etheric body seems like a flowing out, as it were, into cosmic space, during which one is continually conscious of streaming out into infinity in all directions from one's own body as a central point. Experience in the astral body, however, appears as a springing out of oneself into the astral body. It is at this moment that one begins to feel outside one's physical body in such a way that everything in the physical body that was called oneself is now experienced as something external to one, something existing outside. One is inside something else. I pointed out to you yesterday that the world then confronting us must be called, in conformity with my book, Theosophy, for instance, the spirit-land. It might also be called the lower mental plane. It would be wrong if something derogatory is implied by imagining that when one selflessly and in the right way reaches the point of living in the astral body, one is then in the astral world.