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The way we sense our environment varies, so that our consciousness is in effect mobile. The flexibility of our sensing activity could be characterized as one archetypal quality of the astral body. Dreaming sleep can be seen as a transitional stage, when the astral body is entering back into the physical and etheric, bringing dreaming consciousness, movement, animation and perhaps some bodily sensation, but has not yet entered in deeply enough to begin to accurately sense the surrounding environment. In the sleeping person the physical and etheric bodies remain, while the astral body releases from them. In the waking person, physical body, etheric body, astral body are all working together. We can most clearly see its character by looking to the difference between a waking and sleeping human being. The quality of our awareness is a reflection of the activity of our astral body, as it moves and weaves through the lower members of the physical body and the etheric body. The astral body does not manifest so much in space or in time, but in quality. While Rudolf Steiner does name it as a “body,” it is not like the physical body which we can touch and see in space, nor like the etheric body which manifests through processes of growth and metamorphosis in time. In anthroposophic medicine, this sensing or “sentient” activity, carried by a spiritual aspect of the human being, is called the astral body. How we sense the world is of course also influenced by how tired we are, how interested we are, how many different things we are trying to pay attention to. There is a mobility inherent in our sensing capacities. But even during waking consciousness, when many of our senses are fully “on,” our engagement through them to the world outside can range from self-absorbed oblivion to frenetic hyper-attentiveness. This happens most clearly in the rhythm of waking and sleeping. It regularly alternates between fully engaging with the surrounding world, and withdrawing from its sensations. Our consciousness can shift its level of awareness outside of the body as well. How we experience our body shifts from the cranial nerves, to the sympathetic, to the parasympathetic nervous system, the deeper we look into the body. Below the diaphragm we come to an even more fully hidden realm-with urges for hunger, for thirst, the need to urinate or defecate-but they are often “gut feelings” as opposed to clear sense impressions, more instincts than intellectual processes. We may become aware of it through exercise or anxiety, through meditative practice or biofeedback, and learn to influence our heart rate, but our daily consciousness is asleep to it most of the time. A step more hidden is the heart rate and circulation. Moving down the body, we then come to our awareness of the breath-unconscious most of the time-but which we can easily consciously direct, both the rhythm and the depth of respiration, with a simple shift in consciousness. It is appropriate that they should stay on. Within our sensing activity there is actually an archetypal spectrum, a gradient of bodily awareness from our head down: most of the senses of our head cannot be turned off (we can close our eyes, but not our ears or nose) and are “on” all of the time. If you are asked “how is your colon or your gallbladder doing today?”-you really shouldn’t be able to give many specifics, except to hopefully say that things are fine.
![astral body astral body](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/51WUX7GPplL.jpg)
On the other hand, there are organs and activities of the body that should remain unconscious in their function, in which case sudden awareness-usually pain-comes as a sign that something is out of order. In fact, if you woke one morning and you were not immediately aware of your surroundings through vision, hearing, smell and taste, you would be alarmed that something was wrong, and something probably would be wrong. For example, it is really good to be aware of some parts of our body. Sensing is in reality a finely nuanced and modulated process, but one which we may not notice until some part of its activity gets out of balance. So much so that we usually take it as a matter of course that we have perceptive capacity for both our body and the world around us.