When I was a young child I had a vision in which I saw angels around me. It created a magical higher state and a feeling of lightness that I can still remember. Growing up, a few questions often surfaced in my mind. Why do we need to have a physical body? Why do we need to eat three times a day and sleep for a third of our lives? Can’t we be just spirit and light?

It took years of work on myself to realize that the physical body represents a challenge given to us from the higher world as a test. Our entire lives are an ongoing series of tests through which we can experience intermittent glimpses of that higher world. When that happens, and we become aware of the presence of our higher centers, we can see things from a higher point of view, from our third eye. However, that can happen only with higher, divine help. Because our soul has ties to a physical body–the lower centers, with all their needs and heaviness–for the duration of a lifetime. 

The soul may need preparation and several lifetimes to learn to be in a higher world and sustain it. And how does it get prepared?  Working through a physical body. Surprisingly, our lower centers are the gym for practicing being aware of our higher centers and sustaining higher states.  

At a certain point in the work on myself, perceiving the body as a weight and an obstacle brought me to realize there is a reason for that. It is to come out of a large illusion.  The illusion that our physical body is real and that we can do.  Man cannot do, as Gurdjieff and Ouspensky repeated so many times. 

In order to understand this, we can take inspiration from Homer, as well as many Greek myths. Throughout the Odyssey, the presence of the gods in human life is continuous and tangible. One of the most striking examples is when Odysseus finally returned to Ithaca. He had received the information that his palace was invaded by more than a hundred arrogant suitors. These suitors had been taking advantage of Odysseus’ absence. They were using his palace and behaving outrageously while waiting for Penelope, his wife, to decide to marry one of them.  

He returned home alone after years of wandering, his pride and strength subdued by several tests. He faced fighting alone against more than one hundred strong men. It was an impossible endeavor. But the goddess Athena appeared to him to protect him. She guided him and told him how and when to act.  Odysseus alone would have never been able to accomplish this endeavor without Athena’s help. What was the secret of their relationship?  

The secret was that Odysseus fully trusted the goddess, listened to her, and simply did what she told him to do. Thanks to her advice he succeeded in accomplishing the task.  A divine being and a human being working together – what seemed impossible became possible with divine intervention.  

Athena represents Odysseus’ higher centers. Having experienced in many ways that man cannot do, Odysseus waits with trust and patience for a sign from above. His final test was to wait patiently, subduing his lower centers, until the moment his higher centers allowed him to act.  

This is how the lower and the higher meet within oneself. They meet to establish a divine relationship that shows a human being the existence of higher forces and how to relate to them. That is how a human being can get out of the illusory world and realize that the real world is above. That is how one develops awareness of one’s own higher centers, the divinity within oneself.

The author is an educator who has been studying the Fourth Way since she was a young woman living in Rome.