Underlying the physical body and giving it shape and form is the etheric body. It is the energy pattern, or frame, or web, of every cell, organ, muscle, limb, and the bone and blood of its dense counterpart. An etheric pattern underlies all forms in the physical, material world. The planet itself maintains its etheric counterpart, the sum total of the etheric forms of its countless lesser lives above, upon and within it.

The etheric body is the intermediary, the bridge between the outer physical world and the inner worlds. Each part of the physical body is in constant and unending communication with every other part of the body through the network of circulating energy within the etheric body. Every individual etheric body is in contact with all other bodies through the basic interconnected field of energy, joining the human etheric network with the animal, the plant, and the mineral networks, as well as with the higher worlds.

This, then, accounts for such phenomena as acupuncture, telepathy, Kirlian photographic effects, psychokinesis, and psychic healing, which is simply the balancing of the energy forces within the body, disease resulting as it does from the damming up and restriction of energy flow. Psychic "surgery" involves operating not on the physical body, but on the etheric structure underlying it. Autonomic body control and dermo-optical perception operate on the same basis. When scientists, medical researchers and psychologists understand and accept the concept of the etheric energies, much that is now unclear will become understandable and at that time, unprecedented breakthroughs will come about as a result.

Where the major energy currents of the body intersect, they form both the motivating agency of every ganglion and plexus found in the body, as well as, in the case of certain major and minor centers, locations of unique evolutionary importance. These are the centers or "chakras" which underlie and control the endocrine glands.

Conjecture concerning the etheric body is rapidly becoming guarded acceptance of the possibility that it exists. The Wall Street Journal, in an article on Kirlian photography, July 24, 1973, wrote, "Precisely what is being photographed is the subject of a growing debate among scientists. Some suggest it may be the aura of a life force allegedly visible to some mystics, but not to the unaided eyes of the ordinary observer."

Time Magazine (June 6, 1969), reported on the work of psychiatrist Augustus F. Kinzel at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners at Springfield, Missouri. Kinzel found "circles of protection" ranging in nonviolent men up to 18 inches from the skin, and in violent men, up to 34 inches forward and 42 inches to the rear, a kind of radar effect.

Dr. Thomas Thissin of Temple University has reported great success in lowering dangerously high levels of serum bilirubin, the toxin causing Jaundice in newly born babies suffering from blood incompatibilities, through the use of phototherapy--fluorescent blue light. No one seems to know why or how it works, but the phototherapeutic effect eliminates the need for complete blood exchange transfusions. Dr. Gerald Lucy at the University of Vermont has also used the same treatment in treating premature babies.

The NEA Science Service reports that at least thirteen different conditions have been found in which, after more conventional methods failed, ultrasound has helped patients when used on muscles transmitting energy through the locomotor system. When focused on the ankle, leg, spine, or arms, the vibrations seem to ease painful ailments, including bursitis and arthritis.

The neo-Reichian movement is forcing a long overdue reexamination of attitudes that led to the discrediting of Reich's work in a more skeptical era. Reich identified what he termed "orgone" energy as universally present in all organic and inorganic systems.

The phenomena of "phantom" pain---that is, the insistence by amputees that a lost limb can be felt, can demonstrate pain, long after it has been severed, can be accounted for by hypothesizing the existence of the etheric body underlying the physical structure. When the physical limb is amputated, the flesh of the severed limb "dies" and its component atoms begin the slow return to nature. The etheric body, however, remains intact and whole. The etheric limb remains a part of the etheric body, while the detached physical limb deteriorates. All sensation originating in the etheric limb is retained and is registered through the nervous system as if the limb itself were still attached.

Similarly, the sensation which we have all felt at one time or another--that of an arm or leg "falling asleep" takes place when the etheric limb disengages from the physical limb--as the etheric and the physical bodies disengage during sleep--and a numbness is felt. The prickling, uncomfortable sensation experienced when we attempt to restore the limb to activity results from the contact of innumerable energy: points re-establishing alignment between the etheric and the physical systems.

Color, light, sound--all have one common denominator. They are vibratory forms of energy, and because they are, the impact upon the etheric vehicle, for good or for ill, can be significant. Scientists at the Kazakh State University at AlmaAta, Kazakhastan, have found that illnesses tend to show up in advance as a disordered play of flares from the etheric structure long before they manifest in the body physical. The Kirlians also discovered that at certain points on the surface of the skin, flares radiate more forcefully than in the surrounding areas. These points appear to match the 700 points on the surface of the skin charted by the ancient acupuncturists.

The rate at which "bioplasma," or etheric energy, fluctuates appears to vary according to the colors which are near it; this relates to both the healing possibilities of sound and color through the etheric body, and to the phenomena of dermo-optical perception, by which certain individuals can sense newsprint and read pages of text as well as identify colors by placing an elbow, a hand, or virtually any skin surface within a few inches of the experimental surface.

The Bardo-Thodol and other Sanskrit works in Yoga indicate that there are 14 principal "nadis," psychic nerves or channels, and hundreds of thousands of minor nadis, in the human body. This is the so-called, "Great Highway," an interesting analogy with the central nervous system and with the sympathetic trunks lying on either side of it. Where the lines of force cross as they repeat in the microcosm of the human body the involutionary and evolutionary arcs of the macrocosmic body, the five centers of the spinal column and the two centers in the head are formed. Here the energies are much more potent than elsewhere, because they are concentrated and focused.

Where the lines of force cross twenty-one times, a major center is found There are seven of these. When they cross fourteen times, minor centers are found; where they cross seven times, small centers are formed, and there are hundreds of these.

While underlying and vital to the physical body, the etheric body is not in reality a separate vehicle of consciousness. It is intimately connected with the physical and with the state of physical health in the body and is the true seat of the chakras, each of which serves a definite and distinct function and is in turn related to a separate color, a sound, a note, a physical planet in the solar system, and to one of the seven primal "rays'' of ultimate energy.

The etheric body plays an important function in retaining the memory of the dream life, and upon the kind of physical body its owner has and maintains. Like the physical body, it, too, dies and decays. Two major roles are played by the etheric body. It absorbs the vital life energy of the universe and distributes this to and through the physical counterpart. It also acts as a bridging intermediary between the physical body and the astral body, and by so doing, it transmits the awareness of the physical senses with which it is in constant contact through the etheric brain structure, to the astral body.

Reversing the process, the etheric body transmits the higher consciousness from the astral and other planes "down," into, and through the physical brain, and through the nervous system. This is how we pick up "hunches," "urges," "inspirations," and "ideas." We do not know where they have come from, or how, but they appear in our minds as ours and often as unique to us, but they have often been implanted in our etheric consciousness by greater intelligences no longer in physical expression.

In this way, great thinkers, creators, philosophers, artists, inventors, engineers have gained inspiration from great minds, once in human life. All human being in the physical body are unknowingly sensitive channels to one degree or another. The more sensitive a person is to these "inner voices," the greater the accomplishments on the physical plane. This is not to say that our own unique genius cannot or will not modify or improve what is brought through. The fact is that there is nothing that is or ever will be that is completely new to the human mind.

The etheric body establishes the magnetic aura on which the highest impressions can play. It is the one energy structure underlying all forms of physical manifestation, establishing the means of energy radiation, the ability both to attract and to radiate, as a result of the type and the quality of energy it is transmitting through the physical form.

The etheric body must be, cannot escape being, the recipient of all energy and the mechanism by which energy is transmitted. No matter where our focus of consciousness happens to be, it is the particular quality of energy carried by the etheric body and the nadis affecting the physical body, which register in the brain cells, triggering messages throughout the nervous system and impelling the physical body into activity.

We know that if we are caught up in an emotional storm or reaction, the physical body is shaken and the pulse rate is increased because emotional energy coursing through the astral body is being transmitted through the etheric body and immediately affecting the nervous system and the glands in the physical body.

Kirlian photography will eventually demonstrate the accuracy of statements such as "green with jealousy," "red with anger," "blue" moods, for with intense emotions there is a change not only in the intensity of energy flow, but also in the general color of the aura itself.

And what is illness? What is disease? All physical disorders have their roots in the blocking or the damming of the energy flow of the body--or in some cases, too free a flow, most often in or near vital organs. The flow is disturbed, disrupted, unbalanced, as a result of thought, eventually works through the physical body as a pain or as an organic disturbance of some kind. This is the true nature of cancerous growths, cirrhosis, heart failures, headaches, gout, and the host of illnesses and disorders to which humankind is subject. By the nature and the quality of our thought, we live-and we die.

When we begin to understand the concept of the etheric body, we will understand much more than we do today of the nature of illnesses and cures, and of sleep and of rest, as well. Each night, when we "fall" asleep, we experience the release of the etheric body--and the astral body--from the physical body, into the cosmic world. There the etheric body or "double," as it is often termed, hovers, close to the physical, and connected to it by a silvery cord of etheric material, literally a lifeline, joined through the diaphragm. In this period, the etheric body is recharged with life forces energizing the physical body for the approaching period of daylight activity.

At what we call "death," the silver lifeline is severed, preventing the re-entry of the etheric body and any further reintegration with the physical. With sudden death or unconsciousness, the shock or impact disengages the etheric body, the impulse originating in the heart and transmitted through the vagus nerve.