Question: Is the etheric body the same as the identity body, or is there a subtle difference in these concepts?
Answer from the Ascended Master Mother Mary through Kim Michaels. This answer was given at a conference in Washington, D.C. (USA) in 2019.
Well, in most cases, we use the terms interchangeably. It is simply that in previous dispensations, we talked about the etheric body and now we are talking about the identity body. The reason we are doing that now is that we want to make it clear that the main function of this body is that it stores your sense of identity. That sense of identity is at a higher level than the mental body, and therefore it sets certain parameters for what you think in the mental body. When you are seeking to purify your four lower bodies, there are certain things you cannot change at the level of the emotional body and the mental body, you need to go to the identity body and change it there.
Now, you could of course, make a subtlety and say that we have previously said there are 33 levels in the etheric realm. Therefore, you could say that the higher levels could be called the etheric, and the lower, the identity. But that is a subtle distinction that is not necessarily that useful given the context and the teachings you have now.
You could also make a distinction where you say that on an individual level, it is most constructive to talk about the identity body, and then on a planetary level, you could talk more about the etheric body. But of course, you also have a collective identity body that stores the identity of people. But there are levels of the highest of the four bodies that are beyond that level of both the individual and the collective identity. So those you could call the etheric levels.
Copyright © 2019 Kim Michaels