Posted by [SL: I had the opportunity of publishing this excellent article a number of years ago in my popular free ezine, DNA MONTHLY. Enjoy!]
Katherine Train
“It’s the gap between activities that I can’t stand, the time when one phase of my day ends and the other hasn’t yet started, like the time between work and supper,” says my 35-year-old client who has recently left a drug rehab center for alcohol addiction.
“The gap, tell me about the gap,” I probe deeper. Something must be happening there. On entering the gap, he describes an emptiness, a nothingness, then entering more deeply he experiences the welling up of an immense anxiety. I ask him to stay with the anxiety, to sense it in his whole body, then to enter the sensation and gesture how it feels. There must be something causing the anxiety. Shifting his attention to the inner landscape surrounding the anxious, fearful part of himself, he experiences the presence of a thing. He describes something that lurks in the deep recesses of his imagination and feels as though it is circulating around him. It is very clear to him. It is all head and shoulders, withering to nothing at the hips. It is blue, red and yellow and has the presence of electricity.
This is but one descriptive example of the many imaginations that clients face in the office of a Psychophonetics practitioner. All fear, doubt and hatred experienced by a person coexist with “monsters” that feed on the energy of these expressions, enhancing themselves at the expense of the client’s spirit. We see large, rodent-like monsters with gnawing teeth, witches with long red fingernails, large, dark, swamp monsters that fill the room with their shadowy presence.
Unique to the human being is the capacity to make choices about how we act out of a higher intention and purpose. At times we may observe that aspects of ourselves are split off from this higher nature with varying degrees of alienation. Diverse behaviors range from reactions and projections where a part of ourselves temporarily responds to outside stimuli in a way we would not choose; to deep-seated anxieties, fears, doubts and hatreds that undermine large chunks of our life, keeping us smaller than we would wish to be; to fundamental splits in our actions that we would not even recognize as our own if we saw them. Sometimes it feels as though someone else has slipped in and acted on our behalf. At these times our animal nature that would respond without thought to base instincts and drives reigns supreme over the organizing human part of ourselves. The further our animal nature splits off from our humanity, the more we assume the nature of foreign beings.
According to philosopher and seer Rudolf Steiner, the human “I” is not the only master in the astral and etheric bodies of the human being. Other astral and elemental beings inhabit these bodies. Depending on the nature of the deeds of man, so are corresponding elemental beings given a room at the inn. There is only one aspect of the human body that can increasingly belong to man alone and that is his blood. If, however, he is not perpetually careful to strengthen his I inwardly through a strong and vigorous will, he loses control of his I and other beings can fasten onto his blood. The blood becomes a stronger expression of the I as the I finds its center and inner strength.
In Basel, Switzerland, in October 1911 in his lecture on the Etherization of the Blood, Steiner described the human faculties of the following in relation to their effect on the blood: thinking or intellectual activity; feeling (sympathy and antipathy); and moral impulses or the will to do good or evil. The activities of thinking and moral impulse have a tendency to polarize, resulting in thinking devoid of moral integrity and will activities that are not thought through. Steiner stated that distorted moral deeds will assert their influence on the blood in a negative way.
Thinking, feeling and doing (moral deeds) are manifestations of the two essential activities of sympathy/antipathy and reasoning swirling constantly in the soul. Sympathy and antipathy arise out of desire and reasoning results in mental pictures or vizualizations emerging in the soul. In the swirling they encounter the boundary of the soul at the sense organs to form a perception of an outer phenomenon and a corresponding sensation in the soul. The turning back on themselves of these capacities results in feeling. The working over of the sensation with reasoning results in a mental image that sinks into the etheric body as an aspect of memory. All experiences are met with a gesture of soul and associated resonance pattern represented by the sounds of speech and are stored as a mental picture complete with its coloring of sympathy or antipathy and the meaning placed on it. The soul contains all the mental images acquired in the life of the individual.
Mental pictures carry on an independent life in the unconscious boundaries of the soul and, depending on the feeling and meaning attached to them, are the source of bliss or suffering. They rise to consciousness when triggered by a new perception or sensation with a similar resonance. If left unattended, the images and associated resonance can cause illness within body and soul. One needs to provide reference points to which these mental images can be raised to consciousness in order that the I can rework the experience with new reasoning in the process of creating new meaning of the experience. The conscious reworking of mental images facilitates an integration of soul.
Psychophonetics, a method of counseling, personal development and soul work, applies the principles of Steiner’s Psychosophy in a manner that provides reference points for the mental images to be raised to consciousness. Using nonverbal modes of communication including body awareness, gesturing, visualization and sounding, mental images are brought to consciousness where the dynamics are unpacked in the processes of exploration, blockages released with empowerment, and new capacities invoked in resourcefulness. The sympathies and antipathies associated with the mental image resurface and reasoning is applied with new resources. The disharmony of thinking, feeling and doing are identified and resources encouraged to face the doubt, fear and hatred that block these faculties of soul from finding their integration. It becomes clear during this process that varying levels of disowned and foreign astrality inhabit the clients’ being, experienced as entities in the psyche, and that when experienced and presented to consciousness, choices can be made to integrate them or ask them to leave. The successful outcome of the counseling process is that the I, able to change its relationship to the experience, becomes increasingly present at the center of the individual’s being and less at the mercy of chaotic soul forces.
The concept of disowned and foreign astrality asserting its presence in the blood may be interpreted in the light of the following pleomorphic theory. According to Steiner the astral beings that inhabit the astral body extend their influence into the physical body through the parasites that inhabit the physical body. Since 1800 a stream of scientists have been researching blood in light of an alternative view to the current germ theory. These researchers have been ignored, ridiculed and sometimes persecuted in their time and their work removed from scientific literature.
One such researcher was Antoine Bechamp (1816-1908), a contemporary of Louis Pasteur whose germ theory forms the basis for the current medical model and its resultant pharmaceutical mode of treatment. In his final work, THE BLOOD AND ITS THIRD ANATOMICAL ELEMENT, Bechamp describes an entity present in the blood which he names a microzyma. He envisions microzymas as submicroscopic entities in the blood, tissues and cells of all living beings, plant and animal, which carry in themselves the essential elements for life, disease, death, and decay. His work has been followed by other scientists, most notably Gunther Endelein, Wilhelm Reich, Royal Raymond Rife, the Australian team Glen Dettman, PhD, and Archie Kalokerinos, MD, and presently Gaston Naessens and Robert Young, ND.
Bechamp’s pleomorphic theory maintains that: 1) There is an independently living microanatomical element (the microzyma) in the cells and fluids of all organisms that precedes life at the cellular, even the genetic, level, and is the foundation of all biological organization; 2) Microzymas routinely become forms normally referred to as bacteria, which can subsequently revert or devolve to the microzymian state; and 3) Atmospheric “germs” are not fundamental species, but are either microzymas or their evolutionary forms, set free from their normal animal or vegetable habitat by the death of an organism.
Bechamp insisted that the process of cell breakdown is mediated by microzymian fermentation even in a healthy body. Though there is renewal happening as well, breakdown fermentation eventually takes over, greatly increasing its intensity at death. Microzymas respond to biochemical signals and resolve into forms capable of more rigorous fermentation breakdown, namely bacteria and fungi.
Observation of a blood smear under a microscope reveals the foreign particles identified by Bechamp, Enderlein and others as disturbed phases of the microzymal cycle. Microzymas take on more vegetative bacterial and fungal forms, increasing the fermentation process and resulting in cell breakdown and degeneration—also observed in the blood. Parasites may find representation in the blood as metamorphosed microzymas when the I forces are not strong enough to keep unbridled soul forces in check.
Many people observe that they conduct their lives with varying presence, often expressing that they “do not know who they are” or “there is nothing at the core of them.” Many such individuals experience that they hover just behind or above their physical bodies. Further exploration reveals disturbing mental pictures which have the effect of distorting the thinking, feeling and doing capacities of the individual in a soul that becomes increasingly fragmented. Experience remains undigested until it is consciously engaged, made sense of and named by the I. The process of creating meaning and naming experience ensures the penetration of the I into that pocket of unconsciousness with a resultant strengthening of the I forces and an integration of the soul faculties.
We are in a phase of human evolution in which more and more of our lower nature can become consciously embraced by our higher nature. The opportunity exists for humans to unite intellectualism and moral deed. The active, intentional strengthening of the I and its penetration into the depths of the soul brings about the integration of the thinking or intellectual faculties with feeling and results in moral deeds arising out of these harmonious forces in a process of evolving consciousness and deeper penetration and ownership of all aspects of self.
Copyright © Katherine Train. All Rights Reserved.
Katherine Train is a Psychophonetics Counselor with a practice in Cape Town, South Africa. She employs methods of deep counseling, expression of experience through gesture, and the sounds of human speech to heal and integrate the many aspects of the human being towards more conscious living. For more information visit http://www.psychophonetics.com.
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