So once in a while, in a Q and A or in a video,
I will mention in passing something like subtle bodies. Usually the context where
I will mention that is when we talk about angels and the manner in which
the church fathers describe angels. And so I thought I could maybe give some
of my own insight on this question. Now, it's important to understand that
my insight is mostly there to help connect the ancient way of thinking with a
more contemporary way of thinking, because sometimes we look at the ancient way of
thinking and we're such materialists that we struggle to see what it is that the
fathers or the ancients are referring to when they talk about something like subtle bodies.
This is Jonathan Peshel, Welcome to the symbolic world. And so,
first of all, what are we talking about when we were talking about subtle
bodies. So the idea is that there are some beings and angels are the
way that it is usually described that do not have corporeal bodies like we They
don't have physical bodies like we do, but they're not also completely spiritual.
That is, they exist in a kind of intermediary realm in which they have
what we could call or what the Church Fathers call subtle bodies. Now,
the Church Fathers don't completely agree on this. You'll find obviously different types of
descriptions. And some of the Fathers tend to oppose materiality and immateriality very clearly,
and so in that sense they'll say angels are immaterial. But sometimes there's
an intermediary like you talk about let's say spirit, soul and body. Mind
soul and body, that's how you translate it. But sometimes there's like a
triple idea, and you have this in between space, which is what we
could call the space of subtle bodies. Now I'm going to read a little
text from you from Saint John Damascene, and it'll help you see why it
is that it can cause some confusion, all right, And so so here's
Saint John Demoscene on angels. So he says that that God he himself and
the maker and creator of the angels. He is the maker and the creative
of the angels. So he brought them out of nothing into being and created
them after his own image, an incorporeal race, a sort of spirit of
immaterial fire. In the words of the Divine David. He makes his angels
spirits, and his ministers a flame of fire. Now, notice already the
problem that we've got here. Now, you know, we say angels are
wind and fire, and so the way that we understand wind and fire is
that they are material things. And so we have lost in some manner the
analogy that the ancients used to use about the things which were invisible, the
things which were ungraspable even in the physical world, as ways to signify that
which is immaterial in the strict sense, that is, things that don't have
bodies, like ideas, like you know, like virtues, like you know,
the things that activate bodies, they themselves are not embodied. You could
say they don't have bodies. But and so you can see already the problem.
So it's like, you know, these angels are made of wind and
fire, and so already materialists can read that and think, well, they
are material. They do have bodies, they're made of wind and fire.
But you can see even he makes this effort to say that they are a
sort of spirit of immaterial fire, right, and so he's using the analogy
of the physical world to describe something which is incorporeal in the strict sense.
Okay, and so he later goes on to try to explain this, and
it's difficult, right, because he says, the angel's nature is rational and
intelligent and endowed with free will, changeable in will, for all that is
created is changeable, and only that which is uncreated is unchangeable. And so
the very definition of creation is that it is changeable. Only God is completely
unchangeable, all right. And then he continues on to describe this, saying
that they can turn towards goodness or towards evil, but they are not susceptible
to repentance, because the angels are incorporeal, all right. So here is
a good description of something that can confuse someone. And so he says,
talking about angels again, seeing that they are minds, they are in mental
places. They are not circumscribed after the fashion of a body, for they
have not a bodily formed by nature, nor are they extended in three dimensions.
But whatever posts they may be assigned there, they are present after the
manner of a mind and energized, and cannot be present and energized in various
places at the same time. And so you know, this can cause serious
confusion because you can think, well that means that angels are You might think
that it means that angels are physically located, that they have that they are
in certain places in certain time, but that's not what he's saying. Saying,
there are in mental places, and they are circumscribed by mental places.
And so, you know the idea, you could understand it very simply that
you know something, you know a mental activator. Let's say the Angel of
of of a virtue. Let's say the Angel of hope cannot also be the
angel of faith because they are circumscribed by their an activating principle for hope,
for that aspect of reality. That is, they're given a role. They
have a role in the world to manage certain aspects of reality, and they
are circumscribed by that role, not circumscribed physically in the world. But it's
because we're so not used to thinking that way, we struggle to understand what
it is that we mean. And so, you know, that's why many
of the church fathers will talk about the notion that angels have what we call
subtle bodies, which is that they're not completely incorporeal in some ways, God
only is completely incorporeal, but that their bodies are not also circumscribed in flesh,
but they have more fluid bodies, more subtle bodies, and so it's
difficult again. And one of the reasons why I'm talking about this is because
I was reading Perilandria again and there's some really wonderful C. S. Lewis's
book, and there's some wonderful insights in that book, and also out of
a silent out of the silent planet, there's some wonderful insights, but some
of them can be very, in my opinion, can be misleading because the
perception of these angels is really uses a lot of material But maybe he's doing
it just because he knows the story and there's no other way to talk about
it. But he talks about, you know, beings that are kind of
made of light, almost in a physical way. It seems like that's what
he seems to be describing. That are you know, that are kind of
like another dimensions of all that kind of stuff. But I think that when
we go down that line too much as materialists, we lose an understanding of
what it is that we can mean by a body of light or a body
a subtle body. You know, it's like a body of light means that
it's a body that projects meaning onto other bodies. It's a body, a
spiritual body that is circumscribed because it's doing a certain thing. But it's also
but it's projecting light on other bodies, it's making sense of their things.
And so you can understand. And so we all, like you know,
you, all of us have subtle bodies in that sense, all of us
also have a physical body, but also a subtle body that is ways that
we influence the world without being directly physically connected to them. And so our
very capacity to make meaning is in some ways a form of subtle body.
So a good example would be, you know, when you look at,
you know, stories of fairy tales or kind of fantasy stories where they talk
about magicians who act at a distance, you know, And so you could
come up with really elaborate, you know, weird kind of New Age materialists
spiritualist ideas about some like subtle substance right with it. Edgar Case came up
with the idea of ectoplasm, which is an actual physical substance, by the
way, which is a subtler physical substance that can make the magician, you
know, act at a distance like all that kind of nonsense. But the
idea of action at a distance through a subtle body is something that you do
every single day and it is quite normal. All you need to do to
experience it is to, I don't know, ask your child to bring you
a glass of water, and then watch the child bring you a glass of
water. That is a subtle body. That is action at a distance through
meaning making, through intelligence and not through actual physical you know, like physically
taking your child to the water and then having them bring the water to you.
You are using your subtle body to affect reality. And so that is
the best way to kind of understand what subtle bodies are. They are related
to meaning, they're related to meaning making, and they energize, you know,
like a mind energizes a body. They energize bodies to move according to
the role that they play, according to the intelligence that they participate in.
And so that is honestly, like they're just the best way to understand a
subtle body. So you can think about subtle bodies like try to find example
examples of subtle bodies in the world. And so a story, for example,
is a subtle body. A story is not encompassed in the world.
You can't. You know, you can write down the story, but even
the writing down of it is not the story. The story is a series
of a series of intelligent points that are brought together in a coherent whole,
and that has an effect on people. And so if I tell a story,
I can affect you through my subtle body so that it will change the
way that you act. I can bring you under my you know, under
my spell if you will, or under my management by using tools of meaning
and tools of intelligent projecting. Right, And so that is the kind of
the way to understand it. So, you know, you could say something
like, let's say, especially the notion of angels that often especially the lower
angels, right, So let's say the angels and the archangels and the guardian
angels. You know, we in some ways are their bodies, you know,
because they act on us. They receive from God and they act on
us, and then we embody the patterns that they rule over as we function
the world. But it's a dangerous way. It's a dangerous to think that
that's the only way to understand it, because the higher levels of angels,
they don't act directly on us. They act through other angels on the bodies,
and they also act through intelligent means from humans or to other humans.
And so very very high angels are so subtle that the type of pattern that
they manage is so high that it manages other patterns. It's the best way
to understand it. And so it's like one angel has other angels below them,
and then those angels all act on the world, et cetera, et
cetera, until you get to the corporeal world, which is managed by this
hierarchy of agency above it, a hierarchy of patterns that comes down upon reality.
And so you could say that all these other levels are in some ways
the bodies of the higher beings, but they are not necessarily corporeal. They're
not necessarily physical bodies that extend in the three dimensions. Saint John Damistein says
that they don't extend in three dimensions. You know, the angel of the
Angel of Hope does not extend in three dimensions. It acts through us and
it finds, you know, it finds its anchor through us. But the
way that it acts on us is like a mind energizing the world. And
so I think it's important. I hope that you can kind of understand.
And it would be a good example to think of examples of subtle bodies like,
for example, you know, if you if you write books, even
the Internet is very much a participation a subtle body. That is the type
of influence that you have online by writing posts, by posting things, by
you know, writing comments. These are subtle influences. They're not They're not
like how can I say, there's not like me hitting someone over the head
with a baseball bat, their action at a distance. There's subtle, different,
subtle influences that are an extension of my own subtle body. And so
a good way to understand, let's say, the subtle body, is to
understand the notion that one part of the extension of me, one part of
the manifestation of me is one which is related to meaning and to you know,
to meaning making. That's a good way to understand it to spirit in
that sense. And what's also, let's say, the last part of what
I want to say is that although I'm pushing towards helping you see the difference,
right to not confuse when the when the Holy Fathers say something like that
the angels are made of immaterial fire to not confuse it with a type of
corporeality, you know in a science fiction way that you know they're they're there,
but they're in another dimension. Of that kind of nonsense. It really
is about how minds activate bodies. But it's not completely disconnected from the analogies
that are used. And that's probably what makes it so difficult for us to
understand it is that in some ways some of the analogies that we use are
proper are proper analogies because they are really direct images of what the incorporeal aspect
is representing. So let me give you an example. It's very simple,
which is that in the Orthodox Church we have a practice which is called the
Jesus prayer, and the Jesus prayer is a is a prayer that you repeat,
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mer see on me a
sinner. And in the traditional ancient practice, the monks would look at their
navel or look at their center, and then they would breathe in at the
first part of the prayer. They would breathe out in the second part of
the prayer, and through that breathing and rhythm they would try to make the
prayer enter into their heart, and the prayer would align with their heartbeat,
so that in some ways their heartbeat was becoming the prayer. And so now
you have two things going on here. On the one hand, you have
the physical action, which is the repetition of the prayer, the breathing,
the standing still, the looking at your center right, the coordination of breathing
in spirit and then pushing it down through attention, you know, like breathing
and pushing the breath down into your center with the prayer. That's a physical
action that you're doing. But as you're doing that, you are also doing
the subtle action, which is, you know, in a more in a
more kind of psychological sense, or in a more purely spiritual sense, you
are trying to make that prayer enter into your center of your being. You're
trying to replace all the flighty thoughts, all the all the all the kind
of distractions that you have in your in your being and replace it with that
prayer. And so the physical action of doing this practice is aligned with the
more you know, subtle action of entering the prayer and the thought of Lord
Jesus Christ, have mercy on me a sinner, bringing that past your thoughts
into your core, into the center of your being, and in some ways
replacing your thoughts, replacing all the distraction, all the chaos or the passions
with that prayer, so that it becomes in some ways the basic pattern by
which you exist, and the pattern of the prayer itself, that is the
pattern by which you should exist. Which is, right, an invocation of
Christ, right, an invocation of the ideal, and then a recognition of
my distant from the ideal. Right, And so it's like that's actually the
pattern of reality. It's a little it's a little hero's journey, right,
It's like, you know, you recognize your loss, and you come back
to the invocation you invoke, you recognize your your distance, and then you
try to remember and come back to Christ. So the idea of remembering God
through this prayer, all these things are all spiritual things that we do.
They're all a spiritual practice that we do. But they are in line with
the analogical physical action that we do. And that is what makes the subtle
body question the most difficult to understand is that it is not completely disc connected
from the spiritual part. The analogies are not arbitrary, they are important,
and they can sometimes be very strict analogy between the two. And so that
means that that means some things that might be a little tricky for materialists and
modernists to understand. That means that when someone experiences this type of agency,
this type of subtle being, it is possible that they experience them in a
way that is very close to or really is a seeing or a hearing or
a physical manifestation, because the analogy between the physical manifestation and the spiritual meaning
is not completely arbitrary and impossible. So what that means is that it is
possible to see an angel, it is possible to hear, you know,
an angel. All these things are possible, and they don't take away from
the understanding that the way that it happens is through a kind of analogy.
That is, it is pointing towards true incomport incorporealness and true spiritual realities.
And like I said, I know that that last part is the part that
might stretch you beyond your limit. But if you can't go there yet,
you can't go all the way there, you might as well at least try
to understand the first part, and that you know, understand that some of
these things are documented in the sense. Let me give you an example of
an interesting documented case. Forget the name of the missionary, but there was
a missionary who went I think it was in Papua New Guinea or somewhere in
the Third World. I heard this from Paul Vanderklay, and then I found
the story later that forget where I saw it, though. So this missionary
is there with these people from another culture, like a more traditional culture,
and the people from the culture say, you know, so, you know,
the goddess is appearing at this place right now. The goddess is there,
and the missionary is like, you know whatever, and so they like
take the man, the missionary to the place where the goddess is appearing,
and they're like, look, the goddess is right there. The goddess is
there on the beach, and everybody can see her. But the missionary can't
see her. He can't see the goddess. And so, you know,
you could come to two conclusions, which is one, everybody is delusional.
Everybody is having a delusion. Okay, you can come to another conclusion,
which is that those people have been trained to let's say, notice subtle patterns
in reality through which they're capable of seeing with their eyes or the eyes of
their heart. At least they're able to see the agency manifesting itself in front
of them as the goddess itself. Yea, And so all right, So
I don't think I've ever pushed you guys as far as I'm doing now,
But you know, I think that meditate on it, think about it,
and you'll see that, you know, if you watch the discussion where I've
talked about with Rap Kelly, where we talked about the possibility of seeing a
face in the clouds and that that face could speak to people, and that
that face could speak to a group of people they could all see it and
it would all be in some ways a principality communicating with them, and that
that is completely possible, and that it is not doesn't contradict a kind of
more material causalities. It has to do with the capacity to notice subtle patterns
that are kind of manifesting themselves in the world. So anyways, I think
I've seen it said enough, and I think I've kind of pushed you enough.
Feel free to comment and to engage in the discussion. If you want
to also engage in the discussion on the circle community of the Symbolic World that
could be fun to do and so yeah. So I hope you enjoyed this
and I hope that it was at least a little useful to you, and
I will talk to you very soon. Bye bye. If you enjoy these
videos and podcasts, please go to the symbolic world dot com website and see
how you can support what we're doing. There are multiple subscriber tiers with perks.
There are apparel and books to purchase. So go to the symbolic world
dot com and thank you for your support.