A Teaching on the Thirty-Three Levels of the Etheric & Astral Planes – Oct 9, 1995
A Teaching on the Thirty-Three Levels
of the Etheric and Astral Planes
October 9, 1995
LECTURE TRANSCRIPT:
What I am going to give you today is taken from one of my lectures, and it’s a chart of the thirty-three levels of the etheric plane and the thirty-three levels of the astral plane. This is germane to the two dictations, and Saint Germain and the Great Divine Director have asked me to put this before you.
Some of you were at the, the conference in Seattle when I released this teaching. If you would like to review this teaching on video, it’s, it’s very good. It’s very important, and it gives you kind of a schematic of how the planes that we live in configure.
So this chart is called “Thirty-three Levels of the Etheric Plane,Thirty-three Levels of the Astral Plane.” So if we, we were going to start at the top here, we would write in “Realm of Spirit.” [Messenger writes on blackboard] This is absolute Spirit. Only Ascended Masters, Cosmic Beings are here. And it is the nirvana of formlessness, the nirvana of formlessness, which you can write under this.
What I want to show you, then, is the etheric plane. [Messenger writes on blackboard] The etheric plane has thirty-three levels, and this is the heaven-world. What we do is we mark the physical plane, let’s say here. Call this the physical plane. [Messenger writes on blackboard] And the integration of the etheric plane and the astral plane is through the physical.
Our four lower bodies are not four separate bands. We are entirely integrated in our beings. Some of us are more centered in the physical, some more centered in the emotional, some more centered in the mental and some more centered in the higher octaves of the etheric plane.
So just to give you an idea of how the etheric plane unfolds, how you can accelerate, the first three levels of the etheric plane are called the realm of wish-fulfillment. You might call it devachan. [Messenger writes on blackboard] Realm of wish-fulfillment. [Messenger writes on blackboard]
Then we start at level five, a line being between four and five. Five through eighteen gives us the following levels. I’ll read them to you.
The eighteenth level is a very high level. For people to go there after passing from the screen of life they have to have a lot of attainment. The eighteenth level is the level from which I receive dictations and you receive them as I speak them. So that, that level eighteen is a requirement for the delivery of the Word and for its accuracy. So you can write that down. Level of dictations. [Messenger writes on blackboard] That du, that doesn’t mean I am always in the eighteenth level of the etheric octave. It means I am there when I am taking the dictations. [laughter]
OK. Then there is tw, if you go to twelve, for instance, it’s the hu, Sukhavati heaven, a certain plane of heaven of certain beings, whether Buddhists or whoever, who have attained to that level and they abide in that level. And if you were to go from level to level, I think you would see yourself going from world to world. But there’s a blending. And as you go higher and you’re higher in consciousness and higher in thought, you merge with higher levels. And if you are giving your decrees and leading a spiritual life and you have a daily routine of communion with God and so forth, you are passing into these levels at higher and higher states as you balance your karma.
Karma is the greatest detractor from being able to go that high. It’s like you, you have to be lighter, as if you were going up in a balloon. You know, you can’t have a lot of ballast.
The Tushita heaven is at the eleventh level of the etheric octave. This is where Maitreya and the Bodhisattvas abide. Level seven, for instance, is the level of human life on Venus. I don’t consider that the human life to be in the physical octave. And there was, there’s a monastery at number five, according to A Dweller on Two Planets, where Semla went.
Now, you go past the eighteenth level and so you would be starting with the nineteenth and going through the thirty-third. [Messenger writes on blackboard] And when you reach the thirty-third, you may go into these, this nirvana of formlessness.
So these are the gradations of your soul moving upward. And right now everybody who’s sitting here has one thing in common—we all have a physical body. We must cherish the body, love the body, love the soul that is in it, because we can make the most progress of anywhere in the universe today in the physical plane. We want to guard the body, eat the diet that is right for us, do our proper amount of exercises, resolve the tensions in our being through psychology if necessary.
I can promise you that if you pass from the screen of life before having balanced 51 percent of your karma, you are going to be racing around somewhere in the etheric octave trying to do deeds of merit that will count for balancing of karma as though you were on earth. It is much more difficult to balance karma out of the body in another plane than it is right here where we are on planet earth. We are in the best place for all of us because this is where we need t, to be to learn our lessons and make our ascension.
So don’t ever think that you can waste time and dawdle around and not use your day to make your ascension. Because if you don’t balance that karma, you are going to be the sorriest person when you get to the other side. So don’t say I didn’t warn you. [laughter] I don’t want the karma to be on my side. I want it to be on your side. [laughter]
OK, so here’s the physical plane. And then we’re going to talk about the astral plane. [Messenger writes on blackboard] So the astral plane goes from one to thirty-three. Same thing. This is a descending scale from one to thirty-three. Going up the etheric octave is an ascending scale.
Now, you don’t have to get very far into the astral plane, like you’re hiking somewhere and all of a sudden your, your right leg goes into a deep pothole or something and all of a sudden, you know, half of you is in the ground.
Well, if you get into the astral plane because you have mixed with people who are astral, who are into whether it’s the soaps or all kinds of perversions or all kinds of nonsense that I am sure you could sit down and make a list on, if you’re in touch with those people and if you tie yourself to such people, they will pull you down unless you are extremely strong and you can pull them up. But many people who are in the astral plane are not interested in being pulled up. They just want to pull you down because they like to hav, keep company with you because you have so much light that they can use.
So I mentioned this yesterday before the dictations that you should look at those people to whom you are tied and be sure that i, individuals are not sapping your light because you open your chakras to them, individuals who are largely centered in the astral plane and have no desire to be anywhere else. They’re very comfortable there. Some of you who have the Bible on the tip of your tongues can talk about the pig that returns to—the dog that returns to his vomit is, is, is the, the thought of it.
So you only have to go down eight steps and you are at the beginning of hell. You have entered hell. So this is the beginning of hell on eighth level down of the astral plane. [Messenger writes on blackboard] This is the Atlantean compound. This is where there are souls who have done [Messenger writes on blackboard] such destruction on earth that it is questionable whether they may reembody at all. [Messenger writes on blackboard]
Then descending from there we get to the very lowest levels. And by the time you get to the thirty-third level at the bottom, you’re dealing with lifestreams who have committed crimes against humanity, who are waiting out their cycles for trial before the Court of the Sacred Fire and the Twenty-four Elders. They have no more opportunity to reincarnate.
But life requires and the Four and Twenty Elders require that they experience the pain that they have inflicted upon others. And so they while away the hours in the, in the very bottom of the astral plane until the time of the expiation of their karma can be noted. So, in a sense, by being in hell they are working through that karma. They are having to pay for what they have done.
It would be too easy if, you know, a mass murderer comes along and kills eighteen people and, like the one we know about, and then he goes in prison and he’s killed. Well, if you look at that the way Christians look at that, you’re going to be saying, “Well, this guy is now dead so he didn’t have to pay the price of this pain that he inflicted on all these other people.”
Not so. That’s not the way the Karmic Board works. The Karmic Board says, “You must pay the last farthing.” And even if you’re confined to the worst prison in the universe, you will be there until you have experienced what you have put upon others. So it’s a very sorry place to be.
If you will look at the Pearl that will be mailed out this coming week, you will find interesting teachings apropos this and the previous Pearl, which you already have.
So now I’d like to tell you a little bit more about why I showed you this diagram.
Many of you know the basic story of Maldek, Maldek being the destroyed planet between Mars and Jupiter, which is now an asteroid belt. There was a war between two opposing forces. All of the people were on one side or the other side. They had a tremendous war, a nuclear war, and they fought to the death, blew up their planet, and that created the asteroid belt.
So what happened was is that some of these lifewaves survived from that planet and the then earth’s evolutions invited these individuals to come and stay on their home on planet earth. These individuals became known as laggards. The word laggard defines them as those who have no desire to attain union with God but to maintain the status quo of the good life, a luxurious life, a rich life, and to enjoy that experience over and over and over again, never desiring to move forward and to go on.
The reason that I am picking up the subject of laggards now is that this particular train wreck that we have seen, though it may have been domestic terrorism on the part of right-wing radical groups or the possibility of any type of terrorism coming from outside the United States— the Oklahoma City bombing, this particular train wreck and who knows how many other situations that have been designed, that look like accidents, are a signal to all lightbearers on earth that there is a determination by laggards, whether they happen to be American citizens, whether they come from any country on the planet. These individuals are not native to a certain race, a t, certain nation, a certain type of people. There’s all kinds of people in all kinds of races and nations who are laggards.
So what we see is the attempt on the part of certain nations who are angry and angry at the United States to attack and destroy this country. Then we see the extreme right-wing and the radical right-wing who are determined that the only way to bring America back where she should be is to destroy, is to do terrorist attacks “because the federal government is corrupt; it’s terrible and it’s never going to come around so we have to take the law into our own hands and we have to do this ourselves.”
And so some of these people have gotten into declaring that they are no longer citizens of the United States. They don’t have license plates. They challenge the laws. They challenge the courts. And because they are so fanatical they become very nasty and they carry a lot of demons with them. So this fringe of our society, which is coming up from beneath, is a major challenge to our nation and it remaining as Saint Germain designed it to be.
So we know that the way to rectify injustice in our government is the way we have been taught since we were children. There are laws. We have means of, of declaring our grievances. We can go to court. We can go to the government. We can doe, go to our representatives. We should use the American government the way our Founding Fathers intended it to be. And if there’s something wrong with that government today because people are misusing it, then we need to get in there and change things the right way and not the wrong way.
And the, the situation of fanaticism is one of the subjects that Saint Germain and, and the Great Divine Director are very concerned about.
Now, getting back to this astral plane. It’s very difficult to get out of the astral plane if you get into it. If you get too far into it, let’s say through drugs or through all kinds of things that cripple the mind and the body, there is no hope at all for getting out of the astral plane, as you have read in your Pearls, except that someone in embodiment who knows how to make the call to the Archangels will make that call, call to Archangel Michael to descend into that plane and rescue that soul. That is their only hope for survival, for getting out of that astral plane once they get too deep. Let’s say too deep is below the eighth level.
So I want you to know because I think it’s a very serious and sobering awareness that we need to have, and that is that there is no Ascended Master who will touch the astral plane or those in it unless there is a grant of energy accorded to him, and that would be a group of chelas decreeing for a certain person who they believe might be a lost soul in the astral plane.
But I have asked El Morya on numerous occasions to go and fetch someone who was trapped in the astral plane who may have just heard about the Teachings; they passed on whether from AIDS or for this disease or the next disease. And El Morya will just look at me and say, “Nothing doing. I won’t touch it. I won’t touch it.”
So I think you should know this. I think you should know that there is not eternal opportunity for salvation. And, and this comes into the category of enlightenment. If you have knowledge, if you know the law, if you know the Path and you know the teaching, then you have no excuse for disobeying that path, law and teaching.
So if you let yourself slide, you let yourself backslide, as they say in the Christian churches, and you start doing this kind of activity or that kind of activity and you get more and more into the astral plane, more and t, more into television, pornography, pornographic movies, it’s ju, it’s, kind of goes on gradually.
And each, each thing you get into you get hooked but you think, “Well, this isn’t too bad. This isn’t really that bad. I can come out of this anytime I want to, you know. I can stop this.” But actually you’re addicted. But not only are you addicted but you’ve tied yourself to beings of that ilk, that level in the astral plane. It’s like they now have you by your ankle and pretty soon they’ll have you by your knee.
So these lower octaves are real, and we need to be aware of this. You need to be aware that when you come into this forcefield that you are coming into a very high place and a very high light. You have a responsibility for protecting that light.
So I think that I have perhaps slightly erred on the side of being a little bit too optimistic, and Saint Germain says I should qualify my optimism. I am an extremely positive person and I believe in the victory of God for all of his chelas, for all of you and all sons and daughters of God. And I have taught you the way to get there and I’ve given you the tools and the Masters have given you the tools.
But I think that Saint Germain wants to point out that sometimes in the way I present teachings I make this journey look a little bit easier than it is. It’s not an easy journey to balance 51 percent of, of your karma and more. It’s not easy at all to balance a hundred percent of your karma because that is when, after you’ve balanced 51 percent, you descend to Death and Hell and you wrestle with those fallen angels. And believe me, it is no picnic. It is no picnic.
So I think that we should all be a little bit more somber, sober—not somber but sober and serious in the matter of our own salvation and realize that just because we come to King Arthur’s Court or we know about the Church or we know about the Path, that doesn’t equal that we’re doing it and doing it effectively.
So I advise you to trim down your lives, get one-pointed on your path, don’t take any chances. You, you need to live as though you had to balance 65 percent of your karma just in case, just in case you really only made 51 percent.
The idea is always to be ahead of the game and always to know that if God calls your soul home today or tomorrow, you have accomplished what you were supposed to do on earth and you can move on. You can move on in the cycles of being. And even if you have to reembody, you could reembody out of the tenth octave of the etheric plane.
And if you achieve that tenth or twentieth octave, you are really in a very high place. You are in a situation of being able to accelerate in etheric retreats and cities with great Cosmic Beings like Lord Maitreya, Padma Sambhava, Gautama Buddha. You can spend time in that etheric octave. You can come back and be a great leader and a great teacher. And that’s fine if that’s what you want to do.
But be sure you have the option of making your ascension in this life. To be sure you have that option you must serve, serve, serve and serve; serve, serve, serve and serve. Whoever needs anything done, help them. Continually render service and love people.
Strip down the things you own, the things you don’t need, the things you have to take care of—all kinds of things that you set up in your life, whether it’s dogs or cats or plants or whatever it is. Realize that every moment of your life counts.
And I am speaking this because God wants me to tell you this. You simply cannot indulge. You must move on. If you’re not ready for your ascension for the next forty years, then spend the next forty years helping people, helping people. Get into jobs that are service organizations where you’re constantly serving people or the public.
So I want you to realize that this, this area is absolutely treacherous. From the first level of the astral plane, from the first step downward you take to the bottom, it is treacherous. And the Ascended Masters and the Archangels will not guarantee you that they will rescue you out of those levels because you went there with your eyes wide open.
The rest of the world may be in the old-fashioned Christianity or the old-fashioned Buddhism or the old-fashioned this or that, but not you. You have knowledge. And you will be held accountable for the knowledge that you have. So you can never say, “I didn’t see the sign. I didn’t know the law. I didn’t know the speed limit.” No, not this group of people. You are enlightened.
Do you see? You can’t get away with things that people who are ignorant of the law get away with, because simply they’re ignorant so the law caters to them and helps them and tries to bring them to teachers so they won’t be ignorant.
That’s the conclusion of my remarks.
END
A Teaching on the Thirty-Three Levels of the Etheric and Astral Planes was a Service with Elizabeth Clare Prophet at the Class of Padma Sambhava: A Cornucopia of Ascended Masters’ Teachings, The Call Compels the Answer given on October 9, 1995 at King Arthur’s Court, Royal Teton Ranch, Montana.
The Etheric Plane
The highest plane in the dimension of Matter; a plane that is as concrete and real (and more so) as the physical plane but that is experienced through the senses of the soul in a dimension and a consciousness beyond physical awareness. The plane on which the akashic records of mankind’s entire evolution register individually and collectively.
It is the world of ascended masters and their retreats, etheric cities of light where souls of a higher order of evolution abide between embodiments. It is the plane of reality, free from the sordid, sin/sick society men and devils have made of the earth planes. Here the golden age is in progress, Love is the fullness of God’s presence everywhere, and angels and elementals together with God’s children serve in harmony to manifest Christ’s kingdom in the Universal Age, worlds without end. As such it is the plane of transition between the earth/heaven realms and the kingdom of God, Spirit, or the Absolute.
The lower etheric plane overlaps the astral/mental/physical belts. It is contaminated by these lower worlds occupied by the false hierarchy and the mass consciousness it controls, including its matrices and emotions of the mass consciousness (i.e., e-motions, “energies in motion”).
Etheric Retreats
Focuses of the Great White Brotherhood, chiefly on the etheric plane, where the ascended masters preside. Retreats anchor one or more flames of the Godhead as well as the momentum of the masters’ service and attainment for the balance of light in the four lower bodies of a planet and its evolutions.
An etheric retreat is a place where an ascended master lives and receives chelas. It is also a mandala and a forcefield that is used by the solar hierarchies to release increments of energy to a planet and a people, light energy that needs to be stepped down by the ascended masters and their chelas for the distribution of that energy among mankind. The retreats of the Great White Brotherhood have been established on the planet almost since the birth of the planet.
Functions of the retreats
Retreats serve many functions for the councils of the hierarchy ministering to the lifewaves of earth. Some retreats are open to unascended mankind, whose souls may journey to these focuses in their etheric body between their incarnations on earth and in their finer bodies (during sleep or samadhi).
Many of the masters’ retreats, including their mystery schools, were anchored in the physical plane during earth’s earlier golden ages and even after the Great Rebellion of the fallen angels and the Fall. In the face of desecration and destruction of their shrines, the masters withdrew their centers and their flames to the etheric plane, hence the term “retreat.”
Astral Plane
The astral plane is one of the four planes of Matter. It is the repository of the collective thought/feeling patterns, conscious and unconscious, of mankind.
The pristine purpose of this band, or frequency, is for the amplification of the pure thoughts and feelings of God in man. Instead it has been polluted with the impure records (vibrations) of the race memory multiplied ad infinitum by an evolution caught in the riptides and repetitive cycles of its own negativity.
The astral plane includes what the Catholic Church has called purgatory and hell. It has 33 levels in descending order of density. Souls who make the transition and have remaining debts of karma are often required to spend some time on the astral plane in order to pay their debts to life by experiencing some portion of the pain they have caused. Following this, many reembody to take up the balancing of karma in the physical octave.
Those at the lowest levels of the astral plane are waiting on “death row” for the time of their second death before the Four and Twenty Elders at the Court of the Sacred Fire. These, too, are required to experience some portion of the pain they have caused life before the end of opportunity come.
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