Subtle Body Nourishment

Nourishment is important to the practice of yoga. Whatever is ingested in the body by any means determines the type of consciousness which the body experiences. Currently the main systems of nourishment are food and air. The air acquirement is involuntary for the most part, while the food collection and preparation are deliberate.

The physical items of nourishment have subtle counterparts, such that when there is ingestion of food or air, there is a subtle or psychic counterpart such that the subtle body is nourished simultaneously as the physical system processes the materials.

When there is no physical body, the subtle one accesses whatever it can in the astral environment. It may eat or it may not eat but it will ingest subtle air (prana). That is mandatory. The concern is with the quality of that subtle air, regarding if it sponsors dull, enthusiastic or clarifying states of consciousness.

When there is no physical body, the person discovers itself to be only an astral body but in a certain vibrational level according to the state of consciousness it experienced at the death of the last physical system it identified itself as.

Most departed souls remain in a psychic environment which is adjacent to this physical existence. From there they make regular psychic contact with relatives and friends who have physical bodies. Sometimes the departed ones possess the physical people and by that they get food and air which is the counterpart to what the physical people eat and breathe.

A departed person who has great piety, may discover itself to have a heavenly body which functions in a heavenly world (swargaloka). There may or may not be solid foods but there will be liquids and subtle air. These liquids are a type of subtle nectar which when ingested give feelings of intense happiness within the subtle body.

There are however higher subtle worlds in which there is no liquid nectar and there are only ingestion of energy by breathing and not necessarily through a lung system. There may be an ingestion of subtle air through the skin of that subtle form. This would produce bliss feelings within the subtle body on those higher planes.