ORANGEY RED COLORS

As if to fuel us for the coming chills, the oranges and reds appear, predictably, wonderfully. It's bittersweet to see the first turning maple, the deepening orange rowen berries, apples boasting their colors. I find more fatigue this time of year and wonder, on my morning walks, if staring at these vibrant hues, breathing in their essences might lift my operating frequency. But I march on!

How little we really know about the other energies interpenetrating our bodies! We have numerous wisdom writers who affirm the etheric field, and relatively few who can perceive it with hands or eyes, or by some 7th sense. I took this all with a grain of salt until I sat with Dolores Krieger, founder of Therapeutic Touch (a healing modality that is offered in hundreds of medical settings for pain control, calming and sleep, among other challenges). Dee was being filmed at her home in Colombia Falls, Montana and needed a "healee." I volunteered enthusiastically, having benefitted enormously from her work with me through the years.

She began working her hands through my field, discussing her techniques on camera. I was relaxed, drifting, eyes closed. Some time had passed when she asked me to keep my eyes closed and tell her where her hands were. I responded that one hand was near each shoulder. She asked how far from my shoulders? I responded, "Oh, about six or eight inches." She chuckled. "Open your eyes."

To my amazement her hands were over three feet from each side of me! I was much much bigger than I ever imagined, although we now know the field expands and contracts as our health and environment change. Various writers and seers describe the functions of the etheric body. Alice Bailey describes it in this way: "...the relatively negative etheric body is tuned in on the entire etheric substance of the planet. This substance, which underlies all forms, is simply a transferring and transmitting agency for vital energy to the outer dense physical body. Energy sweeps through this etheric substanc, free from all control by the individual human being, and quite unrealised by him because his focus of attention is astral [personality, emotional --ed].

Let me share one other piece from Alice, who,in 1934, channelled a Tibetan who described himself as a humble aspirant who lives in a physical body on the borders of Tibet. He calls himself "a brother of yours, who has travelled a little longer upon the path, and acts as a transmitter of the light and who's work is to teach and spread the knowledge of the Ageless Wisdom."

Alice continues, "The etheric body is fundamentally the most important response apparatus which man possesses, producing not only the right functioning of the five senses and consequently providing five major points of contact with the tangible worlds, but it also enables a man to register sensitively the subtler worlds, and when energised and controlled by the soul, the spiritual realms stand wide open ...it is a tranmitter of a vast aggregate of energies and forces." (Esoteric Healing, p. 84, Lucas Trust)

I am ranging freely this morning with inspiration dear to my heart! But I'm drawn into my smallest astral self quickly by predictable situations: listening to old boys posit their racist, classist positions, seeing my grandson's horrendous clutter in his room, etc. Then it takes but a moment to remember: Ah! I am an etheric being, energetically interpenetrated by enormous and kindly forces!

Are we one? Can we be otherwise? Only our minds that love to separate and name and judge lead us astray. In the etheric body there is no separation, only the will to good that every sentient being on the planet, and the planet herself, generates.