Our Multidimensional Body

If the nuclei of the atoms in our body were enlarged to the size of baseballs, they would be about 2,ooo miles apart. If you extended a solid steel rod from San Francisco to New York and removed all the space between its atoms, the rod would now be about an eighth of an inch long. Matter as we know it is 99.99999 percent empty space. It seems solid because the vibrations of the atoms fill in the spaces, but really there is ample room inside us for several additional bodies.

And, according to modern researchers (as well as to ancient mystics), such is the case: We contain several spiritual bodies within our physical body, each vibrating at a different rate, in a similar way that information of different frequencies can exist as radio waves jumbled together yet still distinct in the same room, or as telephone messages streaming together along a single optical fiber. As long as they keep their separate frequencies they can coexist as unique entities in the same space.

As depicted in the left figure, the physical body contains an etheric (quantum) body, or what Russian researchers call a bioplasmic body. This etheric body contains our astral body, which in turn contains our mental-causal body, which houses several mental subtler mental bodies. Beings in these mental bodies are often called Beings of Light. Inside all these bodies is our soul. The soul is said to be our real, eternal self, a small ray of pure, undying love and cosmic Light located in the area of the heart but existing in a subtler dimension or plane of reality and, as such, it remains invisible to us.

Death. When we die, we shed the physical body, and usually our etheric body becomes our new outer shell for a few days. Just as a radio broadcast is "inaudible" to a radio that is not tuned to that station, after we die we consist of matter that is so subtle and vibrates at such a fast rate that our new body is invisible to most non-clairvoyant people. It is the etheric body that people often equate with ghosts and appatirions.

A few days after leaving behind our physical body, we are said to shed the etheric body as well and reside in the astral body for a period of time (from a few weeks to a few centuries, depending on a variety of factors - whether we reincarnate, how spiritually elevated we are, etc.) The astral body is said to have the same basic shape that our physical body had, and it is subtler still than the etheric body.

Eventually, after many lives in many worlds in the phisical and astral dimensions, we will shed our bodies with the familiar human form, to became a being of Light. Then we will be residing in a formless mental body, or mental sheath, with an appearance of a living flame, or a ball of living Light.

Ultimately we will shed the mental sheaths and, as a soul - a pure ray of undying, nonvibrating Light - merge with the Source. At that point we still retain our uniqueness while becoming one with All.

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