Spiritual Nourishment

When, in the preliminary exercises preceding the actual practice, practitioners build up the Tree of Life in their aura, the paths are formulated as a consequence, since they are subjective reactions to the objective power of the Sephiroth. The Fountain Breath exercise then unifies the influences of all the Paths and the Sephiroth. This happens because there is only One Power that flows through all the paths and manifests in a ten-fold aspect as the Sephiroth, the outpouring of the Most Holy One that is Mezla, grace, by which the worlds are nourished and sustained. For grace is not some abstract poetic metaphor, but an actual etheric, astral, and spiritual substance. Alchemy names it the water that burns and the fire that flows. It is the First Matter. 

Steiner also emphasized the oneness of the spiritual and material worlds and the importance of balancing cosmic forces. Such lingo is not unusual in metaphysical movements, but anthroposophy goes beyond mystical exhortations. Steiner had some, let us say, unusual ideas about how the spiritual and the material worlds are linked. The soil, he said, is a living organism with a life force that we must replenish constantly. Agricultural chemicals destroy the soil, so we have to nourish it with special composts and sprays in order to make it more spiritually balanced. ... 

In the animal, Nature separates the most subtle, the most spiritual part of the solid and liquid food, to change it in the principle of nourishment. It changes and specifies the purest substance into sperm, flesh, bone, etc., and leaves the grossest and most heterogeneous parts for the excrements. Art imitates Nature in her resolutions and compositions. 

ADHIEC — A Spirit which Conserves Life and Motion in Animals. In Man the Hermetic Philosophers distinguish three constituents which make up his humanity — namely. Soul, Spirit, and Body. The Soul is immortal and spiritual, and derives its nourishment and its life from God, being a kind of extension of the Deity, to make use of an expression which occurs in the Asclepius of Hermes. The Spirit occupies a middle position between the Soul and the Body it unites them together, and has its nourishment from all that is most subtle in Nature, and from the quintessence of the elements, which it absorbs by means of respiration. Lastly, there is the gross and terrene body, which is nourished by the earth and water of which it is itself composed. 

The external Fire should not surpass the internal. The internal fire is a mercurial sap, a nectar of heaven, which makes the materia alive, maintains it and nourishes it until the end of the work. That is how the fleeting spiritual moistness (our moist fire or Azoth) dissolves the fixed, earthly dryness (the fixed natural sulphur). The latter is again impregnated with the fleeting moistness both intensify to a middle-substance (to a dry water), their sign is the blackness."... 

Sun in the twelfth house Intuitive, reclusive, and secretive, you find nourishment in solitude and spiritual activity. You may also become involved in helping others, perhaps through large institutions, such as hospitals or prisons. 

From this, we can assert a priori that, just as material nourishment is capable of supporting our material life if it is wholesome, or on the contrary destroying it if it is a poison so there may exist a spiritual, psychic nourishment wh ich supports our spiritual, psychic life or, on the contrary, if it is a spiritual poison destroys it. 

---