Angels and subtle bodies

Angels

Angelic beings seem to appear in liminal times and places, when individuals are in crisis or at the turn of the year and Christmas. In this talk, I explore how we might be more aware than we usually think of what our forebears routinely called angels.

Think of Socrates, who was well known to have been accompanied by an daemon, or angel, that guided him through uncertainty and co-worked with him. Or there’s the angelology of antiquity and the medieval world that seems a lot like modern psychology, only it describes the interior life of the cosmos as well as of human beings. And then there’s modern psychotherapy that thinks of individuals as full of personalities and part personalities shaping experience and speaking to us. Might seeing angels actually be the norm rather than the exception?

Subtle bodies

Many wisdom traditions say that the physical body is just one order of embodiment in the natural world. In this latest talk from our series, Rupert Sheldrake and I discuss ‘subtle bodies’ as dimensions of reality. We explore the terminology developed by Rudolf Steiner and ask how it relates to notions such as the dream body. We relate these ideas to those of Aristotle’s ancient notion of the soul, as well as Rupert’s own theories of morphic fields. The conversation ranges over the unconscious in psychotherapy, speculations in science about panpsychism, and phenomena such as angels.

Previous discussions between myself and Rupert Sheldrake can be found on youtube, streamed and on iTunes.