Dreams-Part-3
welcome everybody to another lesson on dreams in this series of at home with theosophy so far we have gone through two introductory classes the first one was about the astral plane which is where most of the experiences of true dreams takes place and then this the second class last last week was about the mechanisms of consciousness and how they affect the the perceptions that our consciousness may may have remember we talked about how their physical body has a very basic consciousness of its own with its own tendencies then the the etheric double which is a counterpart of the physical body is is in flow can be influenced by images that are let us say floating around in the form of thought forms and images of that kind and then with also that the astral body which is the vehicle of consciousness that is active when the body is asleep then that astral body also can be influenced by by external thought forms or emotions or vibrations so all these things as we are going to see normally have some some effect on the dreams or how we remember our dreams so we will today we will start examining the more basic kind of dream that that is the the what happens with the physical body so let us start with the reading the ego all these different portions of the mechanism are in reality merely instruments of the ego though his control of them is as yet often very imperfect for it must always be remembered that the ego is himself a developing entity and that in the case of most of us he is scarcely more than a germ of what he is to be one day in the Theosophical view the this ego the word ego comes from the Greek I think I mentioned this in the previous class it comes from the Greek that means islands in the Theosophical view there our sense of eyeness can be expressed on different levels when it is expressing through our mind and emotions in in identification with the body we call it the lower ego meaning the sense the lower sense of inés when that ego that sense of eyeness is expressing through what we could call the soul and in this little diagram you have there on the screen the soul would be at the level of of the higher mental plane in in a vehicle of consciousness that is called the causal body so when that ego is being expressed at that level is called the higher ego now the sense of Imus in the process of evolution can be raised up to the buddhic level in the in this spiritual body and that would be the spiritual ego that is a sense of eyeness where the eye is not separate from the other where there is a sense of being but being in unity so we have the expression of this sense of eyeing us on different levels when Leadbeater talks about the ego he is talking about the how they the soul working at the level of the causal body experiences the world now to experience the world you know the the ego bitter normally talks about the ego as as he Navasky many times talks about the ego as an it because it's beyond gender so let's say when when he is expressing through the lower vehicles of consciousness the mental body the astral body and the physical body with it it's very double counterpart then the ego is in submitted or or is a slave of the limitations of these bodies as we are going to see now the ego itself Leadbeater says here is in a process of evolution at the beginning of evolution of human evolution the ego is pretty much like a baby quite unconscious with an interned consciousness and as evolution proceeds the ego begins to awaken first begins to be awakened by the experience that he has on the lower plains through the body the emotions of the mind then the ego begins to awaken in his soul plane that the higher mental plane and then the ego begins to raise his consciousness to the spiritual plane that's the idea of the process of evolution so in since we are a half way in the cycle in the general cycle of evolution in humanity most of the egos of humanity are still half asleep half awakened and this is why Leadbetter says that it at that level the ego is still a germ of this glorious entity that can become the grass which the ego has of his various instruments and therefore his influence over them is naturally small in his early stages of evolution neither his mind nor his passions are thoroughly under his control indeed the average person makes almost no effort to control them but allows himself to be swept hither and thither just as his lower thoughts or desires suggest so there are two main aspects in the evolution of the ego one is his his awakening again taking the example of a baby we can see that the baby goes through a process of awakening to the external world at the beginning the the babies most of the time unconscious with a sleeping and awakens when there is some discomfort at the physical level he's hungry or there is something that aches and then as soon as that that discomfort is relieved then he goes back to unconsciousness with the process of living little by little this consciousness begins to unfold and begins to be more and more aware of the external world in a similar way this is what happens with a with a ego but another aspect of this is that he has to learn to control and yeah let's say to control the vehicles of consciousness again in the Theosophical view the body has a life of its own as well as the emotions and the mind I'll get to you add in a little bit so then the mind thinks on its own and we can see that when we want to meditate for example many times the mind goes whatever they might want and we have a hard time trying to focus the mind same with the emotions many times we feel things we don't want to feel so in there in the Theosophical view these vehicles of consciousness are alive they have their own tendencies just I frequently use the example of a horse because it's like you are put on a horse when you are barely a child and at the beginning you go whatever the horse wants to go then little by little you realize that you can control this horse and then you make you start making efforts and you begin to succeed on this that is what happens with a ego as they go to accept it begins to realize that he can control the thoughts and emotions that he is not the thoughts and emotions and that is an important part in the spiritual process yes go ahead so this this whole way of talking makes the eager seem like it's some solid thing that's evolving and yet it's it's probably more like an activity that's evolving or an experience that's evolving and it's what do you have to say in your to that yes it's as much a processors our our own psychological eye is so everything is a process and what what I call Pablo for practical purposes we regarded as an entity but again it's a it's a process that is constantly growing and responding to the environment etc so in in that sense they go everything is a process except for the ultimate reality but from that down everything is a process yes however for practical purposes you know we we talk at the level of entities this is would be the relative truth versus the absolute truth but it's good to keep in mind that idea amenable to change then then we usually think objects are mmm-hmm all right consequently and sleep the different parts of the mechanism which we have mentioned are very apt to act almost entirely on their own account without reference to him and the stage of his spiritual advancement is one of the factors that we have to take into account in considering the question of dreams so as we seen in the last class all the the body has a tendency to act by itself and I'm the same with their emotions undermined as the ego begins to to awaken and its influence begins to be stronger on their on the personality then this automatic activity of the vehicles begins to lessen and the idea is as we approach the the end of evolution in the direction towards the end of the human experience the vehicles of consciousness we become real vehicles without this automatic activity that they have on their own this this elemental consciousness but since at this point they still have their own activity then this the this activity has its effect in in what we experience the streams and we are going to see that today it is also important for us to realize the part which this ego takes in the in the formation of our concepts of external objects for example when I look out the window and see a house and a tree I instantly recognize them for what they are yet all the information the senses really transmit is that in a particular direction there is a certain very there are certain varied patches of color bounded by more or less definite outlines so our our interpretation of the impressions that we received through the senses is very important for good and for ill when when we see a tree for the first time we probably cannot recognize what that is we don't remember because we were barely conscious at the time but all we see is a collection of colors and shapes that we don't really understand how they are related now with experience our consciousness learns to relate all these impressions together and generate the idea of objects of isolated objects of course everything is connected and the idea of objects is more a question of concentrations of atoms together than atoms that are completely independent from the rest if we could see at the level of the atoms we could probably see a constant interchange of atoms from a tree to the air to the - to the earth and and we wouldn't see that the limits where there is a tree and there is not not a tree but from the level of perception that our senses bring we learn to discriminate these sensations these perceptions and generate objects now this is something that I remind us and at some point it is so ingrained that is impossible almost impossible to perceive something without bringing the image that our memory generated for example if you will see a Chinese character you can see the Chinese character if you don't know Chinese just as a collection of lines as a drawing but if you see a letter in our alphabet it's very difficult to see the letter as a collection of lines you always see the letter the concept that you learn from the letter so this is the mind that produces that that image that complex image and there there are some questions yes Lee asks why is it so very difficult for a dreaming ego to think about whether he might be dreaming we are going to explore that today today we will explore the lower aspect of this and in in the next class we will begin to explore the higher aspects of of that experience of dreaming and why we cannot realize how we are dreaming it is the mind which from its past experiences experience is able to decide that one particular square white object is a house and another rounded green one is a tree and that they are both probably of such-and-such a size and at such-and-such a distance from me so the point here to remember because this will help us understand certain kinds of dreams is that it is the mind which it is the ego working through what we call mind that brings order to the perceptions if the ego is not there we have just a collection of perceptions but with no particular order the condition of sleep clairvoyant observation bears abundant testimony to the fact that when a man falls into a deep slumber the higher principles in their astral vehicle almost invariably withdraw from the body and hover in its immediate neighborhood while the physical body includes including that finer portion of it the etheric double lies quietly on the bed the eagle floats with equal tranquility in its astral body just above it so this is how a clairvoyance sees it the normally they tarik double stays with the body and the astral body is floating above the physical body now they the consciousness of the ego the lowest vehicle in which the ego is is working is the this astral body and the physical and etheric double are beyond the control of the ego the brain and its dreams when the ego has thus for the time resigned the control of his brain the ladder does not become entirely unconscious as one would perhaps expect it is evident from various experiments that the physical body has a certain dim consciousness of its own quite apart from that of the real self and apart also from the mirror Grigore the consciousness of its individual cells so what happens when the ego is leaves the body behind and it's now using the astral body assets vehicle of consciousness but let bidder says is that the body doesn't fall completely unconscious as you could think may happen when you faint in in dreaming the the this elemental consciousness of the body of the physical body stays with it so when the ego is in in the astral body perceiving whatever he is perceiving on the astral plane the physical body is also perceiving by itself whatever is going on in an independent way from the ego and this gives rise to a kind of dreams that that is what we are going to explore today the consciousness is of course far feebler than that of the man himself and consequently all those causes which are mentioned before as likely to affect the action of the brain are now capable of influence it to a very much greater extent the slightest alteration in the supply or circulation of the blood now produces grave irregularities of action and this is why indigestion as affecting the flow of the blood so frequently causes troubled sleep or bad dreams so while our consciousness the consciousness what that we are saying the consciousness of the ego that is our sense of eyeness it's working through the physical body there are many things that happen in the body and the ego is behind trying to keep the order in our perceptions so many times we may perceive something wrong but the ego corrects that perception or we we may have some our senses for the time being may be working in not a very good state but then the ego is behind trying to put order on this on all these sensations so there is a balance that is maintained when the bodies healthy because of this ordering activity of the ego now when the ego is not there the bodies left on its own and any of these alterations like that we discussed in the previous class like like the flow of the blood for example that if it diminishes when we are awake we may feel a little sleepy but when the circulation of the blood diminishes when the ego is not there and there is no mechanism to to try to bring some balance then that produces far more important effects on the consciousness of the body because the consciousness of the body doesn't have this ability to try to keep a balance at the level of consciousness it knows how to give a balance at the physical level and start different chemical reactions to try the body to try to keep the body working but at the level of consciousness it doesn't have that that ability so things that affect the body may generate chaotic images in in the in the physical consciousness the consciousness of the physical elemental even when undisturbed the strange dim consciousness has many remarkable peculiarities its action seems to be a great to a great extent automatic and the results are usually incoherent senseless and hopelessly confused it seems unable to apprehend an idea except in the form of a scene in which it itself is an actor and therefore all stimuli whether from within or without our forthwith translated into perceptual images it is incapable of grasping abstract ideas or memories as such they immediately become imaginary precepts persons percept so these physical consciousness as we were saying is a very basic one this is why it is called physical elemental is a very elemental consciousness and it's not able to understand anything that is abstract so as we are going to see several examples oh I don't want to talk about them right now but if there is something that is happening at the level of the ego on the astral plane and the physical memory happens to perceive that it will immediately generate an image because it's not as the bidder says there is not able to retain a concept and this image is not necessarily going to be retained in a sequential way we may have all kinds of fragmentary images if for example the idea of glory could be suggested to that consciousness it could take shape only as a vision of some glorious being appearing before the dreamer if a thought of hatred somehow came across it it could be appreciated only as a scene in which some imaginary actor showed violent hatred towards the sleeper so in the dreamers that come from the this this level the dreams that come from this particular level you you have you can have several images that do not necessarily correlate to reality so as we were saying you may have they are the an idea of this glory or an idea of something that can be good or bad but when it is translated by the brain it is interpreted in terms of an image so we need to learn to recognize the physical dreams from more real dreams and we are going to see as we go to to all the different levels of the dreams we will see how we can recognize from where it comes any passing thoughts just in country could image itself only as an actual instantaneous transportation to it and the dreamer would suddenly find himself there surrounded by as much of the appropriate circumstances as he happened to be able to remember it has often been noted that while startling transitions of this sort are extremely frequent in dreams the sleeper never seems at the time to feel any surprise at their suddenness in the mere consciousness of the physical brain there is nothing capable of such a feeling as surprised it simply perceives the pictures as they appear before it it has no power to judge their sequence or lack of it so this is partly an answer to the question that Lee was asking if when we wake up the the images that we remember came from the physical elemental those images of course when we remember them we remember them afterwards we are not remembered remembering the dream as it happens when it was happening all kinds of incoherent things may happen because the physical consciousness has not the ability this power of putting order that we were saying that the ego has so while it is happening all kinds of different things may be going on and the physical for the physical consciousness that's perfectly fine so then you wake up and you remember all these disjointed images and you you say how come that I did I didn't realize that this was so incoherent but you weren't really there it wasn't you you as the ego that was having these dreams it was the physical consciousness responding to the environment either to physical stimuli or to thought forms that are floating around so that level of Dreams is not really a real dream in the in the way that we are going to explore them it is just a fish responds to different stimuli another source of the extraordinary confusion visible in this half consciousness is the manner in which the law of the association of ideas works in it we are all familiar with the wonderful instantaneous action of this law in waking life we know how a chance word a strain of music even the scent of a flower may be sufficient to bring back to the mine a change of law and forgotten memories so there is this this tendency in in our being to generate to associate ideas and we may hear a music as Leadbeater says there and that thinking of something completely unrelated or that appears to be completely unrelated at the end like a tree that we we had someplace so this association of ideas bring all images that that are related only in a very indirect way but do not belong to a real sequence of things that happen and this has an impact also in how the physical consciousness interprets the this phenomena now in the sleeping brain this law is as active as ever but it acts under curious limitations every such Association of ideas whether abstract or concrete becomes a mere combination of images as our association of ideas is often of events really entirely unconnected it may readily be seen that the most inextricable confusion of these images is a frequent occurrence naturally enough a succession of such pictures is rarely perfect perfectly recoverable by memory since there is no order to help in recovery so the physical consciousness also does this but since these images don't belong to a real sequence they are just Association they come to the physical consciousness in in in no were there or there at all or even if they come in in an order the physical consciousness cannot recognize the sequence again remember that all these higher-level interpretation of perceptions belongs to the ego not to the physical senses themselves so many times when we wake up and have this this you know hazy idea of a dream that was kind of chaotic many different things and we cannot really remember what was going on this is the the source of those dreams and something that is important for memories the sequence for example you you can't remember the order of many letters if they they are concepts you can remember the sentence as our association of ideas and then you can repeat the order of the letters if I give you the same amount of letters with no order it's very difficult to remember them so the same happens with these dreams if the dream doesn't have a sequence is very difficult to remember it and that's the the kind of dreams that we are exploring right now they once I just come from the physical consciousness another peculiarity of this curious consciousness of the brain is that while singularly sensitive to the slightest external influences such as sounds or touches it yet magnifies and distorts them to an almost incredible degree among the stories most commonly told is one of a man who had a painful dream of being hanged because his shirt-collar was too tight another person magnified the prick of a pen into a fatal stab received in a duel another translated a slight pinch into the bite of a wild beast so I think probably most of us have this kind of experience where a sound or sudden sensation like that is really turned into something much bigger the level of the the dreams this physical elemental is kind of the axis a guardian of the body and it's always in like on guard to try to defend the body when somebody comes into the room for example and you get startled it's not us your consciousness I'll get startled it's a physical elemental in the body that does that because it's always in this state of ready to fight or flight this is what we call the fight-or-flight response so it seems that when the ego is not there the bringing a more rational perception bringing some control this this tendency to exaggerate is very very much evident in the physical consciousness I guess that this is also why in in the spiritual path it is many times said that we should try to repress the tendency to exaggerate we have a tendency to exaggerate but that doesn't seem to be a tendency that is ours it seems to be a tendency of this more elemental consciousness so when we go into that when we yield to this tendency what we are doing is assimilating model of this elemental consciousness as opposed to you know keep it under control if we want to put it that way so this is also the reason why many times all this little stimuli becomes a dramatic scene it is again produced by the physical consciousness Lee has a question why is it that a person known but by my waking consciousness to be dead makes appearances in my dreams as a living person and my dreaming ego never suspects that that person has already died we are going to explore that in our next class those are a different kind of dreams and so you it may be the person may be dead but for the ego is not because we say that the person is dead all we are saying is that the person doesn't have a physical body anymore so in your waking consciousness you cannot relate to that but every time we go to sleep if we are aware at all on the on the astral plane we relate to that people as we relate to living people too but so for you on the astral plane that doesn't make any difference and is it's a matter of common occurrence but we are going to discuss that in the next class right now we are seeing the more basic kind of dreams that we need to learn to recognize and to you know leave leave aside if when we regarded the reality of dreams you know whenever there is a dream that seems chaotic whenever there is a dream that doesn't really have a sequence or some intelligence behind whenever there is something that is per its induced by external stimuli then we can be pretty much sure that that is not a real dream of our consciousness that that is an activity of the physical elemental it must by this time the evident that even from this bodily brain alone there comes enough confusion and exaggeration to account for many of the dream phenomena but this is only one of the factors that we have to take into consideration as we are going to see this this activity may may be happening along with some more real experience of the ego on the astral plane so when the experience on the astral plane is being impressed in memory and that happens when when the ego can come back comes back to the body then that memory that he has been trying to be impressed in the brain gets confused with all these other things that may have been going on at the time with a so many times we have this kind of mixtures between a real experience and what the physical brain or as we are going to see the etheric brain we're doing so again all there is when when trying to interpret dreams it is so normally it is it is difficult for most people and you can see so many different kind of theories and explanation and it is usually because there is not a knowledge of all the different levels of experience that that come into what we call a dream that we remember but knowing about this and with a certain training during our daily life we can minimize the lower experiences that the experience of the elemental consciousness and we can train ourselves to retain a pure memory of what what really goes on them on the inner planes this oh I'm sorry there is a question what about dreams that involve elements like water and air say I fly a lot in my dreams and also walk on the surface of water yeah again those are astral experiences that we are going to explore in our next next class and in the others and probably that the next one will set up the foundation to understand this kind of experiences and in the following class we are going to really go into what kind of experiences these are but yeah those are non-physical dreams we are exploring today ok number two the etheric brain it will be obvious that this part of the organism so sensitive to every influence even during our waking life must be still more susceptible when in the condition of sleep when examined under these circumstances by a clairvoyant streams of thought are seen to be constantly sweeping through it not its own thoughts in the least or it has of itself no power to think but the casual thoughts of others which are always floating around us so remember or if you are not acquainted with this teaching in the Theosophical view every thought every feeling that we have is a kind of vibration that produces a response in the what we could call the emotional matter around and the mental matter around so this this response that that is produced outside generates what is called thought forms and those thought forms stay floating on the astral plane which is the emotional plane or the mental plane and they stay for a while until the energy of that thought form disappears and then they the form is dissolved in a certain way we can think of them as the echo of our thinking you know if you are in a cave you you speak and then that vibration travels around the cave for a little bit if you speak louder than it will be louder and it may stay longer so these thought forms are like the echo of our thinking and feeling so when we go to sleep we are constantly not only when we go to sleep we are constantly in an ocean of thought forms as we go on the street we we are constantly passing through them and actually if you see when you are not paying attention you are let's say walking from one place to the other if you try to think of what were you thinking during the the you know the the little path that you took if you are not actively thinking of anything your mind was not silent your mind was thinking which is really not true thinking but we're producing all these thought forms that come to your mind and you just reproduce the images so the same happens when we go to sleep we go to sleep and all these thought forms keep going through our aura let's say they keep going through our etheric brain and emotional body a mental body when again when the ego is there there is this we can shut them off if we are actively thinking then they don't even come close because we are irradiating so to say thoughts or even if we are not thinking our presence there may may bring some order to consciousness but again as we said with the physical body when the ego is not there all these thoughts will go through the thick part of our brain and will produce themselves in India deep brain we are living in the midst of an ocean of other people's thoughts and whether we are awake or asleep these are constantly presenting themselves to the etheric part of our brain so long as we are actively thinking our brain is practically impervious to this continual impingement of thought from without but the moment that we leave it idle the stream of in consequent chaos begins to pour through it in sleep then the etheric part of the brain is even more than usually at the mercy of these thought currents since the ego is for the time unless close association with it yeah that's what I just explained a curious fact brought out in some recent experiments is that when by any means these currents are shut out from the breath from this part of the brain it does not remain absolutely passive but begins very slowly and dreamily to evolve pictures for itself from its store of past memories an example of this will be given later when some of these experiments are described so they at the time LeBaron others would and all these teachings come from they are their research let's say on they they would look at people sleeping and dreaming and do some experiments and Leadbetter and some others like Annie Basin had a very well-trained clairvoyance and that's where all this information comes from so there is this the the etheric brain is reproducing all these thought forms that are around that may have nothing to do with you you know you may go to sleep and then you may have a dream that you say why did I have that dream that dream has nothing to do in my life with my psychological life with what I was watching before going to sleep and yet I have this dream you may really have nothing to do with you it may be a thought form that was passing through you know your your room and then the etheric double picked it up and reproduced it so there are all these aspects that in the in the phenomena of dream that are needed to that we need to know but libido says that even if we can't for example we can create an etheric shell that would keep the the external thoughts outside of ourselves and sometimes that is a good idea to do when we cannot sleep you know when you want to go to sleep and you have all these chaotic thoughts are not really yours not know when you are worried about something that is an activity of your consciousness but sometimes there are all these chaotic in consequent thoughts that many times come from the external mental claim so if you create with your willpower and imagination a kind of etheric shell you can keep them away from you so that you can fall asleep now even in these cases it is seen that that in many people they 30w an undisturbed little-by-little begins to produce images of Leadbeater says come from the store of memory so we can see that many of the images come from the physical aspect of our body and from the thirty part to number three the astral body it will be obvious that this part of the organism so sensitive to every influence even during our waking life must be still more susceptible when in the condition of sleep when examined under these circumstances by a clairvoyant streams of thought are seen to be constantly sweeping through it not its own thoughts in the least for it has of itself no power to think but the casual thoughts of others which are always floating around us so the same happens with the astral body if you see there in the diagram the astral body is the one that follows in subtlety there above a thirty devil this astral body is what is also called the emotional body and is that the vehicle of consciousness in which impressions from the outside are turned into feelings or emotions so when we touch an object our physical body will will bring like the physical perception to the brain but that perception in particular is not is not a feeling a sensation in the in the sense that we normally regard sensation that that feeling of of sensation is produced in the astral body as this this stimulus is communicated to the astral body it turns into a sensation and when that stimulus from the astral body goes to the mental body it turns into an idea a concept so we say the surface is rough the sensation the physical perception came through the nerves the the feeling of roughness came or was produced in the astral body and the concept this is rough appears in the mind so the bitter says that the the astral body is constantly responding to external emotions and thoughts and many of us may be more sensitive to all these sometimes you may encounter a person and just don't feel a pleasant sensation about the person without even notice or knowing that person or you may go to a place and have a sense of peace or restlessness or whatever it is in the place this is because your your emotional body is responding to the emotional atmosphere of the person or the place now at that level all your habits are is a sensation then your body your mind tries to make it into a concept and tries to say to try to explain it to to give it a conceptual reality now when the the ego is in sleep in the emotional body there are these two things that are going on at the same time the ego is creating its own activity in the emotional or astral body but the astral body thoughts are receiving influences from the outside and and that also will look just like in in our waking life according to how we feel many times we respond therefore the experience of the ego will be affected by what comes from the outside unless this ego is at a stage of evolution where there is more independence from external stimulus we are going to see all this in more detail in in our next class but here we are go we are sitting there like like the knowledge base to understand what we are going to see in the next class as before mentioned it is in this vehicle that the ego is functioning during sleep and it is usually to be seen by anyone whose inner sight is opened hovering over the physical body on the bed its appearance however differs very greatly according to the stage of development which the ego to which it belongs has reached so as he said before the twelve body is seen normally hovering over the physical body now this astral body has a different appearance according to the stay the stage of evolution of the person so if you are clairvoyant you you can see the astral body if your clairvoyance is deep enough you can see all the other principles like the mental body and the Cosa body that are there too but looking only at the level of the astral body the bidder is now going to talk briefly about the the appearance of this astral body in different people in the case of in top of the entirely uncultured and undeveloped person it is simply a floating wreaths of mist roughly ovoid in shape but very irregular and indefinite in outline while the figure within the mist the denser astral counterpart of the physical body is also vague though generally recognizable it is receptive only on the coarser and more violent vibrations of desire and unable to move more than a few yards away from its physical body in the process of evolution there are two levels in announced that are evolving on one level our vehicles of consciousness are evolving meaning all the bodies the physical bodies evolving and that science knows some about the etheric double is evolving the astral body the mental body the causal body so there is an aspect of evolution that has to do with the form with a vehicle of consciousness and then there is another aspect of evolution that has to do with consciousness itself so when we normally say in theosophy with the unfolding of consciousness because consciousness has everything all the powers of consciousness are are always there in at the beginning they are latent just like we would say a baby has potentially all the powers of a mature mind but at the beginning of life they are latent and they have to be unfolded so what we are looking at at this moment is the evolution of the vehicles of consciousness at the beginning of evolution the bodies are not really bodies you know if we talk about the astral body the mental body are not really bodies in the sense of well defined structures they are more like a mist like a yeah a misty form of astral model that is not very well organized therefore any any perception on the astral plane is kind of vague because the astral body responds like in in a very in specific way as the person evolves and the astral body begins to be more defined more well organized more more sensitive then impressions can be perceived in a far better way so the first thing that he says is that in a person that that is in the that is in the earliest stages of evolution just like like a child not in a judgmental way human souls begin to evolve evolve at different times so there there are people that have been evolving for less time than others and it's just like a bad blooming that are different flowers on different stages so in people that are in the early stages of evolution the astral body cannot really respond to too many things in on the astral plane it responds to them they're more the denser vibrations which are closer to the dense physical experience that consciousness is used to to having there is a question here oh no no that's the same yeah okay okay as evolution progresses the ovoid miss becomes more and more definite in outline the figure within it more and more nearly a perfect image of the physical body beneath it's receptivity simultaneously increases until it is instantly responsive to all the vibrations of its plane the finer as well as the more ignoble though they asked though in the astral body of a highly developed person there would naturally be practically no matter left course enough to respond to the latter so in a certain sense it is like if you think of the evolution of the eye probably a primitive eye can only see the differences between light and dark and the us the eye evolves then consciousness can perceive the details that are coming through the eye consciousness itself has the potential to perceive in a perfectly good way but because the vehicle of consciousness in this case the eye is not well developed then we find the limitation there so as a person evolves on the physical and the astral body also begins to be more responsive it becomes able to respond to all kinds of vibrations on the astral plane not just the more basic ones and well the bidder says that in a highly developed person there would be naturally practically not no matter left course enough to respond to the course feelings because there is also a process of purification as we evolve so the the matter that can respond to what we would call a course feeling it's not very prominent in the astral body of the person can you get an example of coarser versus finer well feeling normally it is said that feeling spiritual feelings feelings of love and the perception of beauty and compassion these are subtle feelings and the feelings of violence or hate or separation or feelings the negative emotions that we normally talk about those are coarser feelings they are delivered of vibe relations they are closer to the the rate of vibration of the physical matter so since consciousness begins to evolve on the physical body it it begins to learn to recognize the more the the coarser vibrations the denser vibrations and in evolution it begins to be able to recognize finer and finer vibrations and what about attachment yes mental so it's a form an emotional form that but again maybe there may be attachment to something higher or lower right so stronger attachment to more material coarser things it's power of locomotion also becomes much greater it can travel without discomfort to considerable distance from its physical encasement and can bring back more or less definite impressions as to places which it may have visited and people whom it may have met in every case this astral body is as ever intensely impressionable by any thought or suggestion involving desire though in some of the desires which most readily awaken a response in it may be somewhat higher than in others so the idea remember at the beginning we said that normally we can see the astral body over you know over the physical body now as a person evolves that and the astral body begins to be more of a body a real body then the that body is able to get away from the physical body and as the consciousness of the ego also evolves and begins to awaken to the astral plane then the the the the ego learns to begin to travel in the astral body as we do in the physical body and again bring back the idea of the baby in the baby both his physical body and his consciousness are evolving even if if the consciousness of a baby were fully awakened his physical body doesn't allow him to move away he the body has to develop more so in the same way the the the astral body has to be developed more so that he can move but also the consciousness has to be awakened in a baby the consciousness to is unconscious or or in this state of introspection that we call sleeping therefore both things have to be developed to some extent to leap to be able to use the astral body si as a vehicle of consciousness when this happens and as we are going to see at this point in evolution most people in humanity are I at least aware to some extent on the astral plane when this happens then the person can travel when the body's asleep the astral body can be many miles away away in different places relating to different people having all kinds of experiences that we are going to explore later and that can account for the experiences that Leda and Li where we're talking about okay Jeannette has a question what determines the type of thought forms that come to one yeah that's a good question to some extent we tend to attract the kind of thoughts that are in harmony with our normal thinking and the same we tend to attract the kind of feelings that are in tune let's say with our regular feeling so if we are worried during our waking life then we tend to attract thoughts that are similar that are you know related to worry we if we tend to have more peaceful feelings we tend to attract more peaceful forms of feeling or or astral influences that is a general rule but also there are certain things that kind of just by proximity in Si as we said in the process of evolution we begin to purify our emotional body so that the lower or the matter that can respond to the lower kind of vibration begins to be less and less but even up to quite advanced stages of evolution we still have some mother in our astral body a mental body that can respond to those to those vibrations so if you happen to be close to a person that has those kind of thoughts or in in a place where those thoughts are produced or you know somebody happened to walk by your your window so by the mere proximity you may be affected by those kind of thoughts so it's not an all-or-nothing answer but generally speaking we we are far more receptive to whatever is in tune with the kind of thoughts and emotions that we have during the day so if we watch the news and that disturbs us or movies or read something that could have an effect either way yes and that's why in the the exercise that we proposed for this week was trying not to to watch anything that would disturb us before going to sleep because if we go to sleep with that kind of vibration in our astral body then we are more prone to attract that kind of thought forms which then will produce the the kind of dreams that we we were talking about okay and Lee has a comment what I find most interesting about dreams is the inclusion of objectivity into dreams such as prophetic dreams and the appearance in a dream of a person who sings a chatty and unfamiliar song with lyrics so intricate that I must presume that the song is not coming from within me yes we are going to talk about the prophetic dreams and remember that there is this this possibility of mixing up different levels of dreaming so there may in what we remember as a single dream there may be an element of something that the ego was really experiencing there may be an element of what the the astral body was responding to there may be also an element of a thought form that was flying by and I was coached by your your theory brain and and the response of the physical brain so when we remember a dream there may be a mixture of all these different elements as we go go on in in the spiritual pattern and we learn to to be more aware with that awareness keeps in control our lower vehicles and then as hard as these vehicles little by little lose they are elemental consciousness then the dreams begin to be far clearer because all this interference is reduced but normally many times we have this mixing up and this is why it is so important I think to know about all these different levels unless you know about this if you try to interpret your dreams and you are aware that there may be different sources for all these stimuli it's very difficult to really do a systematic and serious interpretation of Dreams at least that's what I think this is what we have prepared for today there as as you saw we have explored lie the first level of dreams and in our next class we are going to explore a higher level and then in the following one the the levels that belong really to the to the experience of the ego on on the astral plane and higher planes now is there any other question or comment that any of you have before we close well I hope you enjoy the the information and we are getting closer to to the core of our subject and I'm going to send an exercise as I have been doing in in the past weeks and I hope to see you next next Tuesday thank you for joining us and have a great week thank you