Life appears to start for us when we pop out of our mother’s womb. We however know that we are constituted from no less than six envelopes of matter. Sequentially, we actually start from the highest, the Causal envelope and work our way down to the densest envelope, the one we talked about in the last presentation, the physical organism. As the decision has been made to elucidate the attributes of each of the six envelopes, starting from the bottom, the next envelope we have to talk about is the etheric, so that will form the topic for today’s discussion.
An analogy has already been presented that shows a rabbit powered by a battery. The rabbit represents our physical envelope and the battery, our etheric envelope. What we learnt last time was that in the formation of a foetus, an etheric envelope has to be constructed. This forms a template along which the various components of a physical body will eventually coalesce. However, this etheric envelope and the physical body it animates, are not part of the principal envelopes that go to make up an incarnating monad. They are constructed by a team of devas that are guided by the Lords of Karma and the Agents of Destiny. When a monad takes possession of its physical body, these devas can genuinely say, “don’t blame us if anything does not work, we were only following orders”!
This envelope is composed of tertiary and quaternary matter. When I say quaternary matter, I am talking about the mineral elements that go to make up our physical body. What is in it for them to hang around and form a platform that a monad is going to enter and then spend the rest of its life abusing? The payoff for these monads is that they get to experience the massively greater energy currents that circulate around a more conscious monad, wherever it happens to be focusing its attention. Being bathed in these higher magnetic frequencies is what assisted a monad to expand its consciousness over aeons of time.
So, we have a physical body with its attendant etheric envelope. Is this the etheric envelope we are going to talk about today? No. A monad, developing in the 4th Kingdom of Nature, has its own etheric envelope. At the moment of birth, when the guardian angel attaches the Life-Thread, the etheric body of the newly formed baby and the etheric envelope of the monad, coalesce to form a single unit that remains attached to the physical organism for the entire duration of an incarnation. Under no circumstances can the monad’s etheric envelope ever detach itself from its physical body. Well, actually it can, but that is called ‘death’!
Although the etheric is always attached to its body, this does not mean it can not wander. This, in fact, is what it does every time you get pins and needles or you are given an anaesthetic. What happens in these situations is that the etheric moves out of the physical body and this causes that part of the body to become inactive. This leads nicely back to the rabbit and battery analogy. If you take the battery out of the rabbit, it ceases to function immediately and only resumes when the battery is reinserted. We need our etheric body to be present and correct for us to be able to do anything? Why? Because it is our etheric that is the real source of energy that drives our body. When we say ‘source’, this is not entirely accurate. The etheric is not the source of the energy, it is the delivery mechanism. Think of it like this; you have an electric circuit in an appliance. The circuit is made out of copper. That copper represents the etheric body. What animates the appliance is the current flowing through the copper circuit. In the case of the rabbit, the current comes from the battery and is called electricity. In the case of the monad, the electricity is called prana and this energy comes from the physical sun. The sun emits a range of particles across the 49 physical spectra. This spectrum covers the whole of Plane-49, from 49:1 to 49:4. This entire spectrum lies in what esotericists call the etheric spectrum. One of those particles, prana, is present in sunlight and is absorbed by our etheric bodies, through our eyes and physically stored in our spleen.
From a physical perspective, the spleen is an organ that removes abnormal and other blood components, stores iron recycled from red blood cells and initiates immune responses. From an esoteric perspective, the spleen stores prana during the day and provides the ‘electric current’ that allows the body to function. When we sleep and more importantly, when we withdraw our emotional, mental and triad envelope from our body, the devas that run our body, use this stored prana to regenerate and build our bodies for the next day. This is the real reason we need to sleep. So the etheric envelope is the ‘copper’ circuit in the body. The prana is the electric current and the spleen is the battery. The battery needs to be recharged and the energy to do that comes from a power station, we call that our Sun.
It is interesting to note that if we are given an anaesthetic and we lose consciousness, the departure of our etheric envelope from our physical body somehow affects the connection between our higher envelopes and our body. If your mental body is not present and functioning, through our physical brain, then we are not conscious of our environment. So the departure of the etheric seems to take the higher envelopes with it. Does this mean that there is no current flowing through the copper wire? No. There has to be current flowing or our bodily functions would stop and we would die. Our physical body functions due to the presence of a molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP). If the production of this stopped, we only store enough of it to allow the body to function for less than two minutes before it would keel over and die. In the same manner, if the etheric envelope were to become permanently detached from the body, the body would die, but all the biochemical processes would not cease immediately. What would be lost would be the coordinating functions that do not come from the brain, but are relayed through it. Remove this control and the physical organism ceases to function. The heart particularly needs to function to pump blood to cells and deliver oxygen that regenerates the adenosine diphosphate (ADP) back into ATP. No ATP, well you know the rest. This is why death is always preceded by the stopping of the heart. The heart is controlled by the autonomic nervous system and this system is considered to be unconscious. It is anything but unconscious. It is just that its consciousness resides with our little helpers, the devas. It is also worthy of note that the Life Thread I keep talking about, attaches to the heart chakra. Coincidence?
The etheric, itself, resides mainly within the physical space occupied by our body and protrudes slightly from it. If the Lord Buddha happened to come waltzing down the street, his etheric envelope would protrude about four miles, but then he is not your average bloke. The etheric envelope’s main function is to provide us with pranic energy that comes from the physical sun. Notice, I continually use the word ‘physical sun’, that is because there is a ‘spiritual Sun’, but that is a topic for another presentation. The etheric envelope also houses our chakras. We know they are the gateways between all our envelopes. Again, these structures will be discussed in detail subsequently.
There is another important fact about the etheric envelope that we need to discuss and that is that is it physical. What does this mean? The etheric spectrum, 49:1 to 49:4, resides within the Cosmic Physical Plane. It is all on plane 49 and not plane 48, which is completely separate and has one more dimension. The Etheric planes function in three-dimensional reality. This means we have the ability to study them with physical instruments. This has already started with Kirlian photography and there are a host of other machines on the market that purport to measure this envelope. What is more exciting is that we can view this envelope with our physical eyes. We do not need to develop clairvoyant vision to do so. With etheric sight, the viewer can see through material objects and potentially magnify atomic structures. This all sounds very exciting and indeed it is. We just need to develop this faculty within ourselves by raising our consciousness through the study to Hylozoics, so pay attention! We have come to the end of the allotted time I give myself for a presentation. We have covered the basics of the etheric envelope and it is time to move on to the Emotional envelope. See you next time.