Image by Felipe from Pixabay

Etheric is the subtle energy field that’s closest to the physical, like a mirror copy of the physical except it contains a lot of extra stuff in it that we can’t see with our eyes. It’s like the HTML code behind a web page. It contains the same text you see in your browser, but also contains comments, scripts, and other data that makes the website work but which you don’t directly see. So think of the etheric as a ghostly energy scaffold that contains the “code” from which physical reality is projected but also contains additional code that isn’t physical.

The human body has a very basic etheric field associated with the atoms/molecules, and a more complex etheric field that makes up the human soul itself and would be called its lifeforce energy field or aura. If a person dies, the latter leaves the body and all that’s left is the physical body and its basic etheric field. By basic, I mean that it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about a rock or water or piece of metal, all matter and energy has behind it an etheric field from which it is projected. Just that living things have an additional etheric lifeforce energy field that makes it alive. Plants and bacteria have this more complex etheric energy field.

The astral is outside of space and time as we know it, but interfaces with the etheric and physical bodies through transducers some call chakras and meridians. They are like wormholes I guess you could say, that bridge different realities or different dimensions. The astral is similar to the etheric in that it’s a subtle energy field, but it’s at a higher dimensional level and more part of the field of consciousness, emotion, will, passion, and thoughts than matter, energy, space and time.

So you can think of the etheric as beneath/around/containing physicality, while the astral is around/within/of consciousness. So it’s on the other side of the veil, so to speak.

Without an etheric body, we would not be alive in the physical body. We would not be able to interface with it and occupy it.

Without an astral body, we wouldn’t have feelings, drives, passions, or personality.

If a person is emotionally blocked in life due to childhood trauma, and later this manifests as cancer for example, a clairvoyant looking at this person would see the following. They would see that the physical body is diseased, as any doctor would, and see that the etheric body is darkened in that area meaning it’s missing healthy lifeforce energy, and then viewing the astral body they would see it symbolically as, say, an energy cocoon with a big hole in it and maybe sharp knives embedded in that spot. In reality, there are no astral knives, but there are foreign emotional energy patterns that have disrupted the person’s astral energy patterns in a way that approximates a wounding.

So as you can see, the astral is interpreted by our mind in symbolic ways, as our brains lack the ability to perceive astral energies directly. Etheric energies can be seen more easily if clairvoyant as various colors and patterns and lines of energy. But the astral, being a higher spiritual phenomenon, is translated by the mind into something it can understand and symbols are the language that translates it.

The etheric and astral bodies together make up what I call the soul. I differentiate that from spirit, which I define as the central core of divinity, individuality, and consciousness that survives death and eventually inhabits new bodies per the process of reincarnation.

The soul is needed to help the spirit interface with the physical body. After death, the etheric, astral, and spirit leave the physical body… after a few days the etheric drops off and disintegrates, and the astral and spirit go on to the astral planes until the astral body too drops off, then you just have the spirit in a state beyond space and time where it can commune with other beings and plan its next life. This is the average/general case, not saying everyone follows that exact timing and sequence.