Saturday, October 23, 2010

Finally a correlation between astral and pneuma body

I don't know why I kept missing this when I was reading Plotinus, but I am glad I have finally found a url that spelled it out to me in easy-to-understand layman English.

I believed that the ancient Neo-Platonists must have had a concept for an astral-body as it were, but I couldn't find it in the writing of Plotinus. It was there though. Its called Pneuma! Duh.

The soul(Psyche) forms a luminous body around it called the Pneuma, and as it descends down through the celestial world it becomes heavier and more material. By the time it passes the lunar sphere it is heavy enough to attach to the physical body(Soma) of the earthy domain.
Thanks to :
http://www.societasviaromana.net/Collegium_Religionis/animamystery.php in his wrinting.
"Plato's ochema and Aristotle's pneuma remained distinctly different. In later philosophy Plotinus held Aristotle's pneuma forming around the soul as it travels down through the ourasia. His pupil Porphyry, according to Augustine citing the De regressu animae, held the view that the pneuma forms around the soul and became darker and heavier as it accumulates moisture while the soul descends through the air. The concept of these early Neoplatonists still distinguished the pneuma as the means of the soul attaching to the physical body, functioning in some sense as the soul's vehicle, but still not identified with Plato's ochema. In the Hermetic Poimandres the pneuma is regarded as layers of materiality, stripped off into the planetary spheres as the soul ascends once more to its heavenly abode. It is not therefore something acquired in the process of the soul's attachment to the body, but rather functions as the ochema carrying the soul from the body. With the Gnostics this was taken a step further. The Pistis Sophia describes an antimimon pneuma that is acquired by accretion around the pneuma as it carries the soul through the astral planes, so that increasingly a body of passions forms in layers around the soul, weighing it down into a material existence. Clement of Alexandria mentions Basilidian Gnostics who believed in a prosertemenon pneuma or a prosphyes psyche acting in the same sense. These other bodies, being semi-material, or quasi-material, are then distinct from the pneuma. The subtle distinction made by the Gnostics was easily misunderstood. A crude idea identified the soul with the pneuma. Cruder still was the mistaken notion that Gnostic reference to the resurrection referred to the physical body rather than to the nous in a spiritual body. And further still, where the Gnostic notion held redemption to be the reuniting of the soul into the World Soul, so that the human nous could continue on to reunite with the divine Nous, later Christians saw the physical body rising into spiritual realms."

My assumptions at this point:
I assume that this attachment of Pneuma to the physical body(Soma) probably occurs at the first breath of the infant. And the aura is infact the spiritual light of the resident Pneuma.

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