Our ordinary experience and our education has led us to believe that the only substance is physical, but both the ancient wisdom and modern quantum science say that everything that exists has substance. We must accept this principle and realize that even thoughts and feeling are “substantial”—consisting of substance. These are not physical substance but astral and mental substance.

When metaphysicians and psychics, and even a growing number of parapsychologists and other scientists, speak of planes or worlds—physical/etheric, astral, mental, and spiritual—they are recognizing the existence of different kinds of substance. These substances are distinguished by distinct ranges of vibration.

Everything that exists “vibrates.” Our perceptions are uniquely tuned in to specific ranges of vibration that we sense with our appropriate organs—physical as well as psychic (although these psychic organs are different in structure and nature than the physical ones). Nevertheless, some psychic perceptions combine the physical organs with one of the chakras, which we can call “psychic” or etheric organs.

Vibration” refers to movement and “vibrations” are measured by their frequency per second. Touch, sound, odor, taste, and sight are each characterized by particular ranges of vibrations, and all phenomena perceived by these senses occur within defined ranges of vibration.

The following tables are scientific and speculative. They are also visibly incomplete and beg reader input. The intention is to provide a structure for our understanding of the position of Whole Person within the Whole Universe inclusive of all that lies outside of our physical perception.

Levels of Consciousness, Soul & Spirit, and the Whole Person

The above diagram is taken from The Sword & The Serpent, by Denning & Phillips

The Evolutionary Plan of the Psyche

The above diagram was taken from The Sword & The Serpent, by Denning & Phillips

No single view of either Macrocosm (the Universe as a whole) and the Microcosm (the Human as a whole) can comprehend all there is. A Qabalistic approach provides another perspective.

Action on the physical plane/world requires a physical body. We are misled in believing that thoughts, emotions, and aspirations all arise from the physical brain and have no substance of their own or any need for bodies. Instead, we do have an astral body, a mental body, and a spiritual body. And, actually, there are still higher planes and bodies, but they are not pertinent to our subject in this book [the upcoming Psychic Empowerment: Tools & Techniques, by Carl Llewellyn Weschcke and Joe H. Slate, Ph.D.].

Just as we act, feel, think, and aspire while centered in the physical body, so can we act, feel, think, and aspire when we are centered in the astral body, or in the mental body, or the spiritual body. Yet, each body has particular limitations and particular abilities. In the physical body, you cannot think yourself to a different location, but in the astral body you can. In the astral body you cannot reach out and move a physical object as you can with you physical hand. (Actually, you can using your mind by projecting an astral hand, and using special techniques that bring etheric substance—which is a higher vibratory part of the physical—into the astral body, but these techniques usually require training and discipline, as in certain practices of yoga, the martial arts, shamanism, and forms of African and Western magic.)

What you can learn to do is to center your consciousness in the astral body, and use it as a vehicle, just as you normally use the physical body as a vehicle for your conscious mind. Think of it as a vehicle made of a different kind of substance and using a different kind of fuel.

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Written by carlw
Carl Llewellyn Weschcke (Minnesota) is the owner and chairman of Llewellyn Worldwide, the world's oldest and largest metaphysical publisher. He played a seminal role in the rise of Wicca and Neo-Paganism in the 1960s and 1970s and has been called "the father of New Age" for his public sponsorship ...