“You are wrong in assuming that all the matter of the universe apart from the earth or planets is ether and only ether.  The etheric world in which you are interested ends with your solar system.  It ends with each solar system, to the people of that system.  Between each solar system and another there is another form of matter that is not ether.

“This etheric solar world of ours is very large, many billions of miles in diameter; but it is not the whole universe.  You know that the sun and all its planets are revolving around the star Alcyone.  Your astronomers told you that years ago, and they have recently given you the rate of speed as 4,838 miles per hour.

“Did you not see and know that if they had this revolution around a central sun it must be within a solar globe?

“Did you think that the sun and its planets, and other suns and their planets, were tearing their way through the ether like so many fish on a dipsy-hook from a Marblehead fishing smack running before the wind?

“Did it never occur to you that the ether of this solar system must be revolving around this central sun?  The whole solar system, ether and planets, are revolving around Alcyone, and the reason why their minor revolution around the sun is not affected by it is because the solar system is a vast globe of ether, having a thinner and rarer medium to revolve in, the same as our earth has.  It is the motion of a fly in a moving car.

“Now fix your attention on this globe of ether, this solar globe.  You must do it to get the concept before you.  You have known of it all your life without once really apprehending it, for you have never learned to think, or to utilize the knowledge that was given you.  The idea is as new and as strange as if you had never known it.

“What lies beyond the surface of the solar globe?  Something must; something as much rarer and thinner than the ether as the ether is rarer and thinner than prakriti.  Can you not guess?

“It is Prana, the life force of the universe.  As prakriti is made from ether, so ether is made from prana.  It is made in the same way.  Each atom of the ether is the centre of a molecule of prana, surrounded by an atmosphere of pranic atoms, exactly as your prakritic atom is surrounded by an atmosphere of etheric atoms.  You say that each atom of prakriti is the centre of a molecule of ether.  So it is.  But each atom of that etheric molecule is the centre of a pranic molecule.  Each atom of your physical matter is triple, not double.

“You say that all physical phenomena come from the chording vibration of the etheric and prakritic atoms of the two planes of matter.  Yes.  But do you not see that all vital phenomena come from the chording vibration of the pranic, etheric, and prakritic atom of the three planes of matter which are in each atom?

“In the living leaf the three planes are sounding in chord in each atom of it.  In the dead leaf, drying up and falling to pieces, only the lower two are sounding in chord.  The silver chord has been broken.