NEPTUNE’S PRIMORDIAL OCEAN
Some early researchers have related the properties of ether to electricity, such as Dr T. Henry Moray who wrote: ‘ ‘Where ether …is quiescent, we see nothing. Light causes vibrations of this ‘ether’ and it is these vibrations which cause our eyes to detect. All substances are really combinations of one primordial substance, i.e. electricity, or, in other words, electricity is specifically modified ether.”
He went on to say “…all space is saturated with energies which are doubtless electrical in their ultimate energies or very closely allied to electrical action. The relation of matter to energy and energy to matter then becomes the potential of the universe, one continuous series of oscillations, oscillating to and fro like a great pendulum across the universe.”4
Some of the most comprehensive descriptions of the ether in modern times come from the teachings of Dr Rudolf Steiner and his followers. He defines seven etheric forces, with only four manifesting in the phenomenal world, the ancient elements of fire, water, air and earth, which he gives the names warmth, light, chemical (or tone) and life ethers. These four ethers are described as the carriers of the formative forces from the supersensible spiritual world above. Below these four ethers lies the sub-material world, the realm of electricity, magnetism and nuclear forces. Far from being the vital substance of life, Dr Steiner called electricity a ‘fallen’ or ‘corrupted’ ether.
It’s a curious fact that the discovery of Neptune coincided with great advances in the electrical sciences, paving the way for the vast network of electronic technology that our civilization has become totally reliant upon. But as electricity became the dominant force and source of energy, the ancient concepts of the ether with its spiritual qualities were abandoned by all but a handful of dedicated researchers, the heretics of modern science.
Among those were the practitioners of various healing arts who extended their perceptions into the etheric and demonstrated its reality in a very practical way, for example, the Radionic instruments and Radio-Vision photographs of Dr Ruth Drown. Echoing the ancient wisdom she repeated many times:’ ‘There is but One Life, One Substance, and One Energy! All the phenomena are only precipitates of the one energy functioning at various rates of vibration… The Drown Radio Therapeutic Instruments are a means used to catch and hold a certain amount of the Life Force of a patient being treated… In its greater sense, the Life Force is a Light which passes through sublimation into a form of energy, then down to gases, and finally is condensed into liquid, in which state it flows over the nervous system and through the blood vessels. From this phase it crystallizes into form.”
With her Radio-Vision Instrument Dr Drown could take photographs of her patients anywhere in the world. As she said, “the vibration of everything in the world is where we are; we need only take it out of the ethers and pass it through our instrument in order to treat a patient at a distance, or make a picture of any part of his body.”5
Around the same time, during his remarkable bion experiments, Dr Wilhelm Reich was also discovering the universal life energy, a primordial mass-free energy which he called’ ‘orgone.” He called this energy orgone, as Trevor James Constable writes “…to identify it permanently with things organic, with the orgasm and with life. He proved its existence visually, thermically, electroscopically, and later on, at the Geiger-Muller counter and by lumination in vacor tubes.”6
Mark Gallert describes it further… “The indications are that orgone energy is everywhere, throughout all space, and that it pervades even the so-called ‘vacuum.’ It would seem that orgone is, in reality, the cosmic ether for which scientists searched so diligently several decades ago….Dr Reich’s term for the ether is the “orgone energy ocean.”7
Constable, a true pioneer in the etheric sciences, has expanded far beyond the original workings of Dr Reich and has dramatically demonstrated the reality of the ethers with his many successful weather engineering and smog reduction experiments.8 He has also supplied the theoretical link, based on empirical observations made during experimentation, between Steiner’s etheric forces and Reich’s orgone energy.
THE SPIRITUAL ETHER
“Those who for some reason dislike the word ether, scatter mathematical symbols freely through the vacuum, and I presume they must conceive some kind of characteristic background for these symbols. I do not think anyone proposes to build even so relative and elusive a thing as force out of entire nothingness.” Sir Arthur Eddington
If the existence of this primordial life energy has been so well established, why is science determined to ignore it? The problem with the ether concept is that it crosses all the boundaries that have been so painstakingly drawn between the spiritual and the material worlds. Science would rather spend billions of dollars looking for some hypothetical sub-atomic particle that may have once existed than entertain the possibility of a living energy imbued with the qualities of soul and spirit. Forgod’ssake, leave life out of the equation!
Science can measure all the parts of arose, even dissect it and describe the separate bits, but it can’t even begin to convey the rose’s beauty, its perfume, its effect upon the soul. Science is no longer concerned with quality, with essences, with the whole. It has locked itself into a narrow dark world of mental abstractions, even though the scientists themselves still dream, fantasize, have sex, feel beauty and love (or do they?) While science and art were once synonymous, now there is the greatest contempt of one for the other, an abyss between what we feel and what we are given as ‘facts.’ By removing spirit from substance science has given us a dead world, purely mechanical and devoid of meaning.
On the other hand, spiritual science emphasizes that the ‘ ‘ether has not only quantitative but also qualitative characteristics, the latter of which can by no means be separated from the former — that is, supersensible, spiritual characteristics.”9