Meditative Forms and the Etheric Body: Ancient Spiritual Traditions

There are various meditative forms: respiratory techniques, visualizations, imaginations with symbols, without symbols - and they are not all the same. The action you perform changes radically.

The Archaic Tradition and the Great Seers

First of all, it must be said that this idea that we are only body and soul is a very recent idea, essentially coming from the Enlightenment. Most ancient civilizations and cultures that are repositories of the Archaic Tradition actually consider man as an articulated and complex composite formed by various sheaths or bodies.

These doctrines are very ancient and are found in the East as well as in the West in almost identical forms, thus referring to an archaic or traditional heritage:

In India: we have the Yoga system that minutely describes the vital human energetic currents and describes the emotional and mental bodies
In Egypt: we have a complex system of human metaphysiology with various bodies
In China: we have the Taoist system and knowledge of the energetic man is at the basis of traditional Chinese medicine like acupuncture
In the Jewish tradition: these sheaths were named zelem, a kind of invisible body of man visible only to the intellectual eye of the Kabbalist (Gershom Scholem in Kabbalah p. 162)
In Ancient Rome: we have Plotinus and later Macrobius speaking of an "ethereal envelope" and a "sidereal" or astral body (Macrobius In Somnium Scipionis, I, 111-2)
In Christianity and Gnosticism: they speak of the robes that the soul must wear or shed to proceed in mystical ecstasies
In Germany: we have Paracelsus with his vision of the sidereal body, whose study was then deepened by Jakob Bohme and Georg Gichtel
Finally in modern times: the most famous seers from whom we have drawn much of the material presented today are Helena Blavatsky, Charles Leadbeater, Franz Hartmann, Rudolf Steiner, Max Heindel and others
One of these was Tommaso Palamidessi who left numerous writings on the Cosmography and Occult Constitution of Man and Woman

We therefore mainly refer to the approach and setting of Tommaso Palamidessi which is closer and more congenial to us but which is nevertheless coherent with that of the Archaic Tradition.

The Etheric Body

The first energetic instrument analyzed by clairvoyant investigation is what is defined in modern terms as the etheric body or energo-vital double. It is an index of an individual's health status and is proper to all living organisms such as humans, plants and animals.

This is truly an energetic double of the physical body and is the easiest energetic body to see - at least the aura of the etheric body. This is a kind of semi-luminous and striated atmosphere that under certain luminous conditions and certain environmental conditions such as environments with high negative ionization like in the mountains, or following a strong thunderstorm, or at dawn and sunset observing one's hands against the gray-blue of the sky.

Kirlian Photography

This etheric body is truly one with the physical and seems to be in relation with the electromagnetic fields emitted by the human body, so much so that we often rely on the corona effect of high-voltage machines like the Kirlian machine to have an image of this etheric aura.

In these images, these blue lines are not the etheric body but are electric currents that flow along the lines of least resistance that are in relation precisely with these etheric lines. The machine's functioning is a bit like that of lightning discharging to ground: a strong potential is emitted with very low current and when the potential is high enough, a spark jumps following the lines of least electrical potential, thus impressing a film that produces this image.

The arrangement of these striations changes according to the individual's state of health or illness. For example, if an organ is sick or weak, the striations will be weak and not uniformly distributed, while if it is healthy they will be strong and uniform.

This body is responsible for the form of the physical body. The form organizes itself according to the patterns structured by this body. This body is also the vehicle of prana or vitality.

Oriental Disciplines

It must be specified that this body is not in itself an index of particular interior or spiritual development. Primarily it is an index of how much one is in shape or in health. For example, some time ago I happened to meet a girl who had this type of clairvoyance from a young age along with her sister. She was very facilitated in viewing the etheric, but having studied very little and having no cognition of metaphysiological elements, she had not pushed beyond. Moreover, she considered a Tai-chi practitioner as her spiritual master because from her subtle vision he appeared to be the person she had seen with the most developed etheric that she knew. In reality he wasn't an enlightened being, he was simply an individual who was in very good health.

This kind of error often happens, especially in the New Age, because perhaps people who have a certain sensitivity and facility for clairvoyance, the first thing they manage to see and focus on is precisely the etheric, and therefore they focus on these holistic disciplines whose main purpose is to obtain splendid health and harmony between body and vital energies.

In particular, Oriental disciplines focus very much on this type of vital energy that in India is known under the name of prana and in China under the name of ki. For this reason, many Oriental disciplines like Yoga, but also many martial arts, aim to channel, direct and accumulate large quantities of prana with particular techniques. For this reason, the practice of these disciplines keeps one healthy and often rebalances the body, also allowing the accumulation of considerable quantities of vital energy to the point of being able to...