The combination of the atmanic, buddhic, and causal bodies can be referred to as subtle bodies; the astral, etheric, and physical together comprise the dense bodies; and the mental body is singular and considered the mental.

Life is attention, sensation, and inner changes.

Keywords: emotions; feelings; experiences..

We turn to the bodies of the dense level — the astral, etheric, and physical. This is the realm of vibrations, given to us in very convincing sensations, the nature of which, at first glance, leaves no doubt. Joy is joy, sorrow is sorrow, and the heaviness of a thick belly and ache in swollen joints cannot be confused with the lightness and agility of a graceful young body.

Dense bodies are largely similar to subtle ones, and there seem to be direct connections between corresponding pairs of bodies, that is, atmanic and astral, buddhic and etheric, causal and physical. Indirect indications of this can be seen in the following observations: emotional reaction serves as a criterion of spiritual truth; wealth is most often associated with food; an event is usually linked with the movement of bodies in space.

Accordingly, the connections between the bodies in the subtle and dense shelters are also quite similar: for example, the relationships between the atmanic and buddhic bodies resemble those between the astral and etheric, while the causal is connected to the buddhic in a way reminiscent of the connection of the physical with the etheric. Therefore, by regulating their "lower" life, that is, the interactions of the dense shelter bodies, a person directly influences the subtle ones — and vice versa.

The energy of the astral plane is the energy of passions, which is much denser and more tangible for a person than "dry" mental energy. Of course, a "rational" person may indulge in the illusion that they have learned to consciously manage their emotions, but this is, unfortunately, far from the truth. Rather, they have learned to roughly suppress some of their emotions, pushing them into the subconscious and thereby injuring their own astral body, the culture of which modern civilization almost completely neglects — everyone is too busy: politicians lead, scientists think, the people work, while feelings and experiences are left to a few clumsy individuals or socially dangerous subjects prone to affect, who can easily stab someone under the influence of their emotions. However, they usually have a history of a difficult childhood, such as early orphanhood or incestuous relationships with their parents.

Violence against thought has become the norm of modern civilization. A person is told: you must think this way and that, using these and those concepts. And they unquestioningly obey the global, indestructible mentality of the era.

For example, a person is not accustomed to sincerity, patience, or respect for their own meditations in any of the bodies. The lack of sincerity leads to the suppression of meditation, which is pushed into the subconscious — degrading sharply in the process. Insufficient patience causes a person to cut off any unpleasant or simply tense meditation before it has finished, and the medium-level emotions, which the person considers unworthy, are pushed into the subconscious, accumulating there and beginning to roam, becoming increasingly coarse until they burst forth in a way that shocks both the person themselves and those around them.

Thus, emotional life is primarily a certain work that a person performs inside (transforming their astral body) themselves and in the external world. This work can be done consciously or unconsciously, well or poorly, diligently or carelessly, in more or less pleasant and suitable conditions for the person, but it cannot be avoided.

The culture of each body begins with the person separating it from the others and initially granting it the right to exist, and then — its inherent meditations, without regulating them too strictly.

Just like the etheric and physical bodies, the astral body can be better or worse developed and adapted for performing its work. One person sincerely experiences both strong sorrow and great joy, not artificially softening their states and not generally losing their emotional balance, while another reacts with physical illness or goes out of commission for a long time at the slightest emotional stress. The latter are sometimes said to have an unbalanced psyche, referring to the astral body.

There are people who, considering themselves extremely emotionally vulnerable, put in a lot of effort to protect their astral body, building a thick defensive wall of indifference to everything that does not directly concern them. This wall not only becomes a source of antipathy from those around them but also significantly weakens the astral body. It becomes frail, pampered, and unprepared for the minimally necessary loads. Furthermore, the artificial limitation of their emotions leads to a reduction in the energy and size of the astral body, resulting in it tearing away from the etheric, depriving it of protection and suffering in the process...

The opposite problem arises for overly emotional and uncontrolled people, whose astral body is too large, energetic, and chaotic, posing a certain danger to those around them, even with the best intentions. Overflowing emotions, constantly spilling over at the wrong time and place, are powerless to change anything for the better but imperatively draw everyone's attention to the person, representing nothing more than astral garbage (if not filth) that those around them must constantly clean up if they do not want to live in an astral pigsty. "Calm down, there's no need to be so nervous and upset; everything will be fine and sorted out; don't dramatize things so much", — such reassurances usually do not achieve their goal, as they operate on the mental plane, whose energy is weak against the astral unless directed very precisely. However, adequate words can stop hysteria instantly, like a cold shower, but they must be found.

Finding a golden mean is difficult. The solution lies elsewhere—in raising the vibrational level of the astral body, that is, transitioning from coarse emotions to more subtle, differentiated, and adequate ones to the processes occurring in the person's body. The astral body is the primary subject of a person's management by society. A modern person reacts rather weakly to mental management (persuasions, logical arguments, etc.). However, emotions are the most serious argument for them. They obey them in both positive (passions) and negative (fears) variants. Simply put, positive emotions are seen as a carrot; negative ones as a stick, not only in relation to others but also to oneself.

The ability to respond adequately and without unpleasant feelings to a strong and clearly unjust humiliation is akin to the ability to do the splits or withstand a boxer’s punch to the stomach. This is achievable, but it requires long work, associated with a certain amount of tedious, and sometimes painful, effort.

Thus, in the flow of daily experiences, both positive and negative, a person gradually learns to manage them unobtrusively, not suppressing them strongly but partially civilizing and refining them, developing their strength and flexibility in the astral body.

A characteristic problem that arises for a neophyte is the sharp feeling of humiliation — an emotion expressing the protest of the lower "self" against the infringement of its rights and dignity. And although a person understands that blessed are the poor in spirit, not the rich in self-esteem and superiority over others, nevertheless, their emotional reaction of acute humiliation in situations that clearly require modest behavior can be so strong that they instinctively begin to assert themselves at the expense of others in every possible and impossible way.

Speaking of a healthy astral body, it should be noted that it knows how to rejoice to the same extent that it knows how to grieve, and the latter is not identical to suffering. Sadness, mourning, grief — normal, although not always pleasant, but valuable states of the astral body in which it performs a specific kind of work that brings important results. Just as every person must occasionally climb a hill, freeze, and sweat, within certain limits this is perceived as something self-evident. Suffering (of any kind) indicates a strong imbalance in the organism, for example, a significant exit of some body beyond its upper layers and substantial damage.

Let’s consider as an example a woman in an unhappy marriage. Her husband is a constant source of her distress: she dislikes that he (causal plane) is late from work, his style of communication with the children, and much more. However, her mental dissatisfaction is immediately interrupted by herself, since for all her mental "whys" (why didn’t he warn that he was going to be late, why didn’t he congratulate her on their anniversary, why didn’t he complete a household task) the answer is clear but completely unbearable: "he no longer loves me." Therefore, irritation descends to the astral plane already in the form of a deliberately unsolvable emotional situation: her husband inexplicably causes her pain; he is a scoundrel; ruthless; a simple pig... However, the emotions of distress are not allowed to descend (with the flow of Leo) to the etheric body, since then the woman will temporarily lose strength, and there will be no one to look after the house. Thus, having emptied her astral body, she raises the poison of accumulated negative emotions with the flow of Sagittarius into the mental body, rekindling with renewed vigor the same meditation: "Why, seeing me suffer, hasn’t he smiled at me even once all evening?" The answer is already known to the reader, but for the woman, it represents a terrible mystery, and the mental meditation is interrupted again, and once more the conflicting energetic quantum descends into the astral body. Thus, a vicious circle of negative mental and astral meditations forms, supporting each other and additionally reinforced by the causal plane: the husband occasionally does make mistakes that reinforce the wife's mentality (the flow of Gemini), and the latter, in turn, provokes the husband into negligence and aggression (the flow of Capricorn, that is, mental programming of his behavior). If the husband goes away on a business trip for a while or the wife goes on vacation alone, then the three-story negative meditation (causal-mental-astral bodies) turns into a two-story one (mental-astral), as the causal irritant disappears (there is no contact with the husband), and as a result, this meditation weakens overall by the end of the separation or even extinguishes completely. Many families hold together on this basis, with a sufficiently strong buddhic body. It temporarily breaks the vicious circle of the causal-astral level, sharply changing the main life circumstances of the family. It is clear that it is very difficult to break the described negative meditation of the wife using causal and especially mental means.

Thus, one of the main problems of modern man is the inability to experience, that is, to liberate oneself during emotional meditation. Fearing pain, we deprive ourselves of joy, remaining surprisingly insensitive and indifferent in our happiest moments. In other words, a certain emotional amplification should accompany the conclusion of each mental meditation. This way, a person feels a spiritual uplift after successfully expressing their thought.

A specific feature of the astral body is that a person emotionally experiences not what is actually happening to them (that is, transmissions directly from the causal body) but what they consciously or unconsciously think about it (that is, the flow from their mental body).

The attitude towards emotions as something lower is directly related to the attitude towards thoughts as something higher. Both are a gross distortion of the order of the subtle bodies of a person and lead to countless unsolvable problems, one of which is sexual relationships.

Sexual attraction as an emotion often contradicts a person's mental settings, causing a strong internal conflict that brings a lot of trouble in both visible and repressed forms. One of the main reasons for conflicts between spouses is the insufficient monogamy of one of them (less often both), simply put, infidelity, although it is understood differently in different families.

In general, a (hetero)sexual act should be called any paired meditation of a man and a woman, in which the sexual identity of each partner is clearly emphasized (that is, the man feels himself to be a man, and his partner — a woman, while she feels herself to be a woman and her partner — a man). Then one can differentiate sexual acts by the sets of subtle bodies on which they occur, as well as by the subtle bodies where the partners' points of assembly are located at that time. Typical examples:

• Buddhic meditation: a «heart-to-heart» conversation and sharing their fates between two random travelers on a long-distance train, from which they get off at different stops and part forever;
• Causal meditation: a joint but non-committal trip to the theater, helping to fix an iron (car);
• Mental meditation: aligning viewpoints on an external topic, for example, the origin of UFOs;
• Astral meditation: shared emotional experiences of a situation affecting both, say, helping an injured animal;
• Etheric meditation: a joint dinner, dancing, tender embraces in clothes, sitting on laps, and so on;
• Physical meditation: hugging and touching erogenous zones without clothes, a sexual act in the usual sense.

Control question for the reader: what types of meditations do you allow your partner with others: a) officially and b) in reality?

The author hopes that the reader will not want to answer this question, or at least it will put them in a difficult position: regulating de jure and de facto both their own and others' meditations is a hopeless and inherently unprofitable endeavor.

Nevertheless, socially acceptable (that is, not considered marital infidelity) are all types of meditations except for the physical one, while in reality, only causal, mental, and etheric ones are considered acceptable. In other words, the average social husband and wife consider it completely normal to feel jealousy if their partner engages in intense buddhic or astral meditation with someone of the opposite sex: no one but me can be of value to them, let alone concern them!

In families, many things are not spoken aloud but are very clearly implied, and the mutual chains imposed by spouses on each other are sometimes invisible but felt quite distinctly, although their origin is not always obvious. However, the side effect of prohibiting external emotional connections for spouses is extremely strong and often unexpected for all participants.

Truly intimate connections and deep relationships on any plane are quite rare, and if meditations are allowed to proceed on their own, then for each lower plane, it descends, significantly weakening, and often completely halting at the astral or weak vibration of the etheric (this does not apply to the type of completely coarse individuals living predominantly on etheric-physical energies).

The opposition of the mental body to the astral manifests also in the firm subconscious conviction of almost all people that mental meditations are safe for a person, while in emotional ones, they are, on the contrary, quite vulnerable. In everyday language, the common opinion is that "the tongue has no bones", and one can think about anything, but feelings must be carefully preserved and guarded because they are one's own, that is, personal. Any object that a person thinks about, to some extent (depending on the intensity of the meditation), becomes a fact of their mental body, that is, it is imprinted in it and gains power over its owner, subtly seeping into both the astral and causal bodies, and then to the others.

Moreover, a cultured person with a developed astral body will inevitably respond emotionally to any situation they find themselves in, but if it is a passing one, then the emotion quickly dissipates, leaving no trace, although it may be quite strong. This is how a good sofa is designed: it is comfortable for both a child and a hundred-kilogram fat man, and as soon as the visitors leave, it instantly and without any injuries restores its original balance.

Here the reader may be indignant: it is immoral to consider the emotional life as a submissive tool! However, one should not confuse the buddhic and astral bodies, although when speaking of "emotional life," the latter is often meant.

The astral absolute is the source of all vibrations perceived by a person as emotions. Connecting to it gives a person a sensual participation in the joys and sorrows of all beings in the Universe, the ability to share, alleviate, and enhance others' emotions without forcibly intruding into them.