What is sensation for?

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 Eventually, if we concentrate our inner work, and we truly come into contact with an inner energy that is more alive, we discover that it's quite different than anything we knew before. 

And we discover, furthermore, that this energy is not from this body, the way I understand this body, the body that wants to eat French toast and have a good time. 

No, it comes from a different body. 
I have more than one body. 

That probably sounds strange. Yet the fact is that during the course of one's life, one has the ordinary physical body, and then there is at least one, and really there are more. 

One has one energetic body, which has had various names throughout history. In Christianity, the energetic body, as it is experienced when it receives energy, was called the soul. And the energy of the astral body, the second body, was called the Holy Ghost. 

And so these two terms are still used. The soul, the higher being body, is available to receive the energy of grace—help from above—as it is delivered by the Holy Ghost. In yoga, they have an identical understanding. And yet the words are, of course, different, so that the energetic body is called the astral body. which in our language—because of course they use their own language—in our language it means the body of the stars. 

The body of the stars is an ancient tradition in Western societies as well as Eastern ones. Paleolithic man drew pictures of stars in his paintings on cave walls deep in the earth to represent the fact that the influences from the stars come deep into the ordinary body, down below the surface where our awareness usually lives. And those same stars that were painted underground in caves by early men eventually ended up on the ceilings of chapels and cathedrals in places in northern France and southern Germany and Spain and Italy, where the medieval understanding was indeed that we have the stars within us as well as above us. 

The tradition of this astral or second being body, the body of the soul, has been around ever since there were human beings to sense the action of the soul. The act of awakening a deeper sensation in being is an action not for me, but an action that is undertaken on behalf of the cosmos, because the second being body is here to serve the purposes of the planets and the stars, not my own purposes. I am, after all, a creature under the planets, under the sun, under the other stars, a much smaller creature, a cell in the body of a much greater organism. And it is both my duty and my obligation to serve that greater being body, that greater intelligence through right action within myself. 

So now we come to the pith, the core of the observation that I want to make today, the thought that I had earlier this morning. 

And that is, as we may ask ourselves, why does sensation exist? 

Why should I sense myself? 

What is the reason for it? 

And after all of the layers of the onion are stripped away, and the many different things that can be said about sensation are considered, perhaps this is the most important one:

Sensation exists in order to help me conform to the law. 

I am a creature of objects, events, circumstances, and conditions that confuse me and draw me away from any real being sense of my obligations and my duties in regard to my fellow creatures and the planet. I end up in a world where I do not think so much about what I can give, but rather what I can get. 

Yet in the end, to conform to the law means to understand what I can give. 

So sensation leads me in the direction of understanding my obligation and my being-duty, the duty I have as a result of the fact that I am a creature not just of this earth and not just of myself, but a creature that is intimately connected through every cell and molecule with the entire cosmos—of which I am but one member.

This strange and vast perspective concentrates itself at one point in my own being where I need to awaken to my responsibilities towards my community and the planet, and if I don't do that I will inevitably serve not as a constructive member of this community and this planet, but in fact, I will want to get things for myself, and I will ultimately act in a more destructive manner. 

So my sensation of myself, my sensation of being myself, helps determine everything. As they would say in German, es bestimmt alles. 

It gives voice, gives tone, to the whole. 

And if I do not work every day to have a healthy connection to my sensation and my cosmological being, then inevitably the energies in me—which have been given as a gift for me to cherish and secure and propagate and bring forth into the world—well, all of those energies will deteriorate and begin to orbit not the rest of the planet and the sun, but just orbit me. 

And that really isn't enough. 

So, remember this. Sensation exists in order to help me conform to the law, and the more deeply I sense it, the more deeply I conform. 

Insofar as I deepen my conformity, so will truly miraculous things begin to be revealed to me. Not because I am trying to get them, but because we can only experience miracle through community and in conformity to the law. 

One does not need to go outside of oneself to search for the miraculous. It's already here. 

I just need to remember how to sense it.