How Many Bodies Does One Human Have?
This is a brief response to a recent article by Kimberly Fosu entitled ‘The Four Levels of The Self’. She describes these as four separate bodies: the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual. While I agree on the whole with what she said, I wondered whether this went far enough. It was pleasing not to see the brain suggested as the source of the mind and emotions, rather these other levels/bodies. However, she says that “each level makes up 25% of our being”.
The physical body, emotions and mind constitute what we might call the personality, that which everyone is consciously aware of, thus the lower level of our being. This, according to her, therefore constitutes three quarters of what it means to be human. This does not seem to do justice to the spiritual level/soul, since that “is the part of us that exists beyond time and space. It is what connects us with the universe, to source energy, and to all life”. “It allows us to find a deeper meaning and purpose in life”, and enables us “to access divine guidance”. I wonder whether that might make it much more important than the other three put together.
Perhaps ‘spiritual level’ is too simple a term for everything that lies beyond the personality. Some esoteric traditions, for example Theosophy, say that there are as many as seven levels (including the lower three). That is also what the late Raynor Johnson, great authority on spiritual matters, said. We have to account for intuition, imagination, artistic creativity, the wisdom of the Higher Self, the mysterious source of dreams, parapsychological abilities, and perhaps more. Maybe spirit is comprised of more than one level, if we have to take all this into account.
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
