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Biblioteca Esoterica Esonet.ORG
http://www.esonet.ORG
preceding the symbolic Noon, life takes a series of forms of increasing complexity. As the
Noon point is reached (greatly simplifying the process), the form of the human body
stabilizes and reaches a truly human type of biological organization. Being a manifestation
of planetary life, this human body is ruled not only by instincts, as is every form of life
within the biosphere; it also is intimately related to, because the product of, a particular
region of the biosphere. The structure of the human body is, like a musical theme,
susceptible of numerous variations. In different regions of the biosphere, life produces
bodies of different colors and races, and each type has a special role to perform in the total
rhythm of the biosphere.
At first, however, these types of physical bodies do not have cultural, personal, or
individual characteristics. These develop gradually as relatively superficial modifications
of racial types, which nevertheless retain their basic nature and biodynamic rhythms.
What we today see, touch, and think of as "my body" is a biological formation of a certain
type that has been partially differentiated — and in some cases distorted — by the superbiological
pressures of culture, personal character, and individuality. Such pressures can
be defined as the results of past karma; but this karma is both collective and individual.
The super-biological modifications of a body's basic racial nature are also (and in some
instances even more) the inevitable results of strenuous efforts the person may have made
to neutralize past karma by performing a difficult dharma.
In the esoteric traditions and popular mythologies of many cultures, the term physical
body includes, in addition to the dense material body, a concentric series of subtler
material formations. Though these are usually given the rather misleading name of,
etheric body, they rather constitute surrounding as well as pervading sheaths of a subtler
kind of matter which has a variety of characteristics and functions. To speak of an etheric
"body" is probably inadequate. It operates more as a "field of forces" or guiding field. It
can be regarded as the "vehicle" for the life-energy which it focuses as well as distributes
among the cells of the physical body. It is, in any case, constituted of matter existing at
several levels of tenuity and vibratory energy. 32
As the matter of the dense physical body exists in several states (solid, liquid, and
gaseous), the matter of the subtle etheric vehicles is said to exist in four states. The lowest
one (the "fourth ether") is, as it were, the lens through which karma is precipitated. 33 The
32 While the null results of the famous Michelson-Moreley experiments of the 1880s caused most scientists to
abandon the concept of the ether entirely, recent findings in astrophysics have raised the necessity of
reconsidering the early and probably premature assertions which failed to consider all the factors in the
experiment. These findings suggest that space is not "empty" after all, but "filled" with "an energy-rich
subquantic medium composed of extremely small neutral particles called neutrinos, pervading all space and
interpenetrating all matter." See "The Rediscovery of the Ether" by H. C. Dudley in Future Science, John
White and Stanley Krippner, eds. (Doubleday & Co., New York, 1977) pp. 184-190.
33 In The Rosicrucian Cosmo-Conception, Max Heindi speaks of the "fourth ether" as the "Chemical Ether"
through which "the forces which cause assimilation and excretion work." In other esoteric doctrines, these
forces are related to the solar plexus nerve center (or chakra) connected not only with the assimilation of
foodstuff sustaining the operations of the physical body, but with a subtler type of psychic assimilation. It is
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