Lecture I

But one fundamental change in the physical body is that the student begins to feel his physical body more strongly than before, and this can take very serious forms, the body becomes more sensitive to the soul-life, it becomes harder to bear. It is extremely difficult to explain this clearly. Imagine a glass of water in which a certain substance, salt for instance, has been dissolved, yielding an opaque solution. Suppose in the normal condition of man his etheric body, astral body, and Self to be the fluid, and his physical body dissolved in it to be the salt. Now cool down the fluid in the glass. The salt gradually hardens, it becomes heavier as it grows more independent. In the same way the physical body hardens from the whole structure of the four principles of the human being. It shrinks, though only to an insignificant degree. This must be taken quite literally. It shrinks together, in a certain sense. Now you must not picture this too intensely, the student need not fear that through his theosophical development he will grow very wrinkled. This shrivelling is an inward densification. But through this the body is really felt as something harder to bear than it was before. It is felt as being less mobile than before. On the other hand the other principles are more flexible. The pupil feels something that—when he was quite healthy—he never felt before at all; something which he had quite comfortably addressed as ‘I’ he afterwards feels as something within him which seems to have become heavier, and he begins to experience it as a whole. And he becomes especially aware of all those parts in his body which from the beginning, lead, as it were, a certain independent existence. And here we come to a question which can really only be fully understood in this connection. We come to the question of meat-diet—of course, we are not advocating any ‘cause,’ our business is only to present the truth of the matter.