Astral body
The astral body is a subtle body posited by many philosophers, intermediate between the intelligent soul and the mental body, composed of a subtle material.[1] The concept ultimately derives from the philosophy of Plato: it is related to an astral plane, which consists of the planetary heavens of astrology. The term was adopted by nineteenth-century Theosophists and neo-Rosicrucians.
The idea is rooted in common worldwide religious accounts of the afterlife[2] in which the soul's journey or "ascent" is described in such terms as "an ecstatic.., mystical or out-of body experience, wherein the spiritual traveller leaves the physical body and travels in his/her subtle body (or dreambody or astral body) into ‘higher’ realms".[3] Hence "the "many kinds of 'heavens', 'hells' and purgatorial existences believed in by followers of innumerable religions" may also be understood as astral phenomena, as may the various "phenomena of the séance room".[4]The phenomenon of apparitional experience is therefore related, as is made explicit in Cicero's Dream of Scipio.
The astral body is sometimes said to be visible as an aura of swirling colours.[5] It is widely linked today with out-of-body experiences or astral projection. Where this refers to a supposed movement around the real world, as in Muldoon and Carrington's book The Projection of the Astral Body, it conforms to Madame Blavatsky's usage of the term. Elsewhere this latter is termed "etheric", while "astral" denotes an experience of dream-symbols, archetypes, memories, spiritual beings and visionary landscapes.
The Astral Body, Astral Travel and the Dream Body
The term ‘astral’, ‘etheric’, or even ‘dream’ body, refers to the theory that human consciousness can become completely separate from the body, and in this form be free of the limitations the body has. The astral body is said to appear very much like the physical body, with all the features and limbs, but be made of subtler material, or even of thought and emotion. This concept of a finer body most likely arose out of two basic human experiences in the earliest period of human thought. Because while dreaming it is common to be in places far distant from where one is asleep, it was thought that the dreamer actually visited that place while they slept, or that a finer spiritual body had travelled away from the corporeal self and gone to a heavenly or spirit world. Also early human beings, just as occurs today, experienced impressive out-of-body events which at face value again show a distinct self moving at a distance from, and having a life completely independent of, the physical body.
This concept and the experiences it arose from, have led to the development of whole belief systems, such as that of spiritualism and occultism. If you have a good grounding in what is understood about dreaming these are fascinating areas of human thought and experience to explore, as they illustrate the variety of ways human experience can be described and theorised about. See What we need to remember about dreams.
In spiritualism for instance a whole heaven world, or life after death state, is said to exist around the concept of the subtler bodies. With these subtler bodies, it is said we can exist after the death of the physical body, and have total and fascinating involvement in the different dimensional worlds these bodies exist in.
In occultism there is an attempt to define the function of the astral body in the overall process of human existence. Rudolph Steiner, stating his doctrine of occultism, says of the astral body that as long as a person has no organs of perception that can sense the subtler aspects of human nature, the only apparent world is that of the physical body. He goes on to say that during sleep ‘the soul is fully active’… ‘but a man can know nothing of this … as long as he has no spiritual organs of perception through which he can observe what is going on around him and see what he himself is doing during sleep as easily as he can observe his daily physical environment with his ordinary senses.’ In this supersensible world, Steiner says, the astral body is that which brings consciousness to the otherwise vegetative existence of our body. Without the process that the astral body produces, we would exist in a similar way to a plant, in a sort of sleep without traces of self-awareness
