A
World Infused With Divinity
H.H.
the Dalai Lama, the 17th Karmapa, Black Elk, of the Oglala Sioux, Uncle
Bul, an Aboriginal elder, . . the Hymns of the Atharva Veda
Clarissa Pinkola
Estés:
""Nature and human beings
are not separate. You can be sure that when the land and creatures are wounded
by humans, that those humans are copying their own psychic wounds into the
earth and animals as well; what is wounded and without thought, wounds others..."
"The wounding of land and creatures reaches to the dream world... and
beyond it to impoverish the dreamers as well. Yet there is still time to
intervene... but the time is right this instant..."
Black
Elk:
“The first peace, which is the most important,
is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their
relationship, their ONENESS with the universe and all its powers, and when they
realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its
center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.”
H.H. the Dalai Lama:
The Earth, our
Mother, is telling us to behave. All
around, signs of nature's limitations abound.
Moreover, the environmental crisis currently underway, involves all of
humanity, making national boundaries of secondary importance.
If we develop good
and considerate qualities within our own minds, our activities will naturally
cease to threaten the continued survival of life on Earth. By protecting the natural environment and
working to forever halt the degradation of our planet we will also show respect
for Earth's human descendants--our future generations --as well as for the
right to life of all of Earth's living things.
If we care for nature, it can be rich, bountiful, and inexhaustibly
sustainable.
It is important that
we forgive the destruction of the past and recognize that it was produced by
ignorance. At the same time, we should
re-examine, from an ethical perspective, what kind of world we have inherited,
what we are responsible for, and what we will pass on to coming generations.
It is my deep felt
hope, that we find solutions which will match the marvels of science and
technology for the current tragedies of human starvation and the extinction of
life forms.
We have the responsibility,
as well as the capability, to protect Earth's habitats--its animals, plants,
insects, and even micro-organisms. If
they are to be known for future generations, as we have known them, we must act
now. Let us all work together to
preserve and safeguard our world.”
~ The Earth is a
Living, Breathing, and Constantly Giving Goddess ~
17th
Karmapa
“I have noticed that sometimes people speak of
our planet as a thing. This attitude will not lead to the feelings of closeness
and affection that would move us to take care of the earth. As we know, the
earth is not a dead rock floating in space. It is a living system, in itself as
a whole and in each and every part. I do not see the earth as an inanimate
object – a lump of stone. I think of it as being alive. Sitting on the earth, I
feel that everything exists. In this way, we could easily think of the earth as
a goddess – a living, breathing, and constantly giving goddess.”
Dirk Baltzly:
“Proclus’ interpretation of the Timaeus
confronts the question of whether the living being that
is the Platonic cosmos perceives itself. Since sense perception is a mixed
blessing in the Platonic tradition, Proclus solves this problem by
differentiating different gradations of perception. The cosmos has only the
highest kind. This paper contrasts Proclus’ account of the world’s perception
of itself with James Lovelock’s notion that the planet Earth, or Gaia, is aware
of things going on within itself. This contrast illuminates several key differences
between contemporary theories of perception and the neoplatonic world view. In
particular, it argues that the neoplatonists had a radically different view of
these matters because they assigned the property of truth not only to
representations, but to objects as well.”
The word:
GAIA – produced 92 Million, eight hundred thousand hits on Google. []
This Abstract of an article by Professor
of Philosophy, at Monash University, Australia, and the Karmapa have
much in common.
IMAGE:
Gaia Breath, David
Sparenberg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis
Pierre Hadot:
"Nature has concealed the knowledge of
her being from mankind's coarse senses by hiding beneath the vestments and
envelopes of things; likewise, she has wished that sages should discuss her
mysteries only under the veil of mythic narratives."
As Robert Klein has shown, this doctrine of the imagination as the soul's body
was to have a tremendous influence at the beginning of the Renaissance, through
the intermediary of Synesius' Treatise on Dreams, particularly on
Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno.
A Christian perspective:
"God may be found, heard and
experienced everywhere and in all things and that a true worship of God,
therefore, can neither be contained with the four walls of a sacred building
nor restricted to the boundaries of religious tradition. Every blade of grass,
every sigh of the breeze, every splash of rain, every wave of the sea, every
movement of the earth, every flutter of a bird's wing, every twinkle of a star,
every ray of sun . . . and every breath of man contains the very life of
God."
MACRO MICROCOSM IN DA
VINCI
ALBERT PIKE
The great Masonic philosopher, Albert Pike, []
gives a profound and poetic insight into the Inner Nature of the Hermetic
Axiom, "As Above, So Below."
"Nothing
is really small. Whoever is open to the deep penetration of nature knows this…
All works for all. Destruction is not annihilation, but regeneration.
Algebra applies to the clouds; the radiance
of the star benefits the rose; no thinker would dare to say that the perfume of
the hawthorn is useless to the constellations. Who, then, can calculate the
path of the molecule? How do we know that the creation of worlds are not
determined by the fall of grains of sand? Who, then, understands the reciprocal
flow and ebb of the infinitely great and the infinitely small; the echoing of
causes in the abysses of beginning and the avalanches of creation?
A flesh worm is of no account; the small is
great; the great is small; all is in equilibrium in necessity. There are
marvelous relations between beings and things; in this inexhaustible Whole,
from sun to grub, there is no scorn: all need each other.
Light does not carry terrestrial perfumes
into the azure depths without knowing what it does with them; night distributes
the stellar essence to the sleeping plants. Every bird which flies has the
thread of the Infinite in its claw. Germination includes the hatching of a
meteor, and the tap of a swallow's bill, breaking the egg; and it leads forward
the birth of an earthworm and the advent of a Socrates. Where the telescope
ends the microscope begins. Which of them the grander view? A bit of mould is a
Pleiad of flowers - a nebula is an anthill of stars."
VENDANTA
Andrea Loseries-Leick:
“The
question whether natural phenomena such as plants or stones were sentient
beings and in a certain sense conscious (cetano), was as such not
relevant for the Vedic Indian. He lived in an 'animistic time' with a still
vague borderline between animate and inanimate which even endowed man-made
tools with some sort of consciousness. This must have resulted in a highly
developed fear and for us hardly imaginable dread of hurting or harming
anything alive. In early Vedic times trees were thought to be permanent or
temporary seats of various spirits. Prayers and invocations to plants, also
symbolic wound treatments for cut down tree trunks prove that plants were
indeed considered to be living beings exposed to suffering. Burials could take
place at the root of trees to allow the dead to 'slip into' the roots of the
plant. Such concepts were passed on later in the Upanishads as the doctrine of
rebirth, encompassing several stations of transformation of the dead into
elements such as water, returning into plants and seeds in the form of rain.”
The earth holds manifold treasures
in secret places;
wealth, jewels, and gold shall she
give to me.
She bestows wealth liberally; let
that kindly
goddess bestow wealth upon us! (44)
Your snowy mountain heights, and
your forests,
O earth, shall be kind to us!
The brown, the black, the red, the
multi-colored,
the firm earth that is protected by
Indra,
I have settled upon, not suppressed,
not slain, not wounded. (11)
Hymns
of the Atharva Veda,
tr. Maurice Bloomfield, University of Oxford Press, 1897.
Abraham
Eraly:
“In the eyes of the Vedic people, everything
in the world was infused with divinity, and they saw the gods themselves as
belonging to the everyday world of men. Their gods were not entities outside
the world, but personifications of the forces of nature. And since nearly
everything in nature was personified as a god, or was seen as an attribute of
some god or goddess, Aryans lived, in a real sense, in the thick of divine
activity.
Vedic Aryans saw the
gods not as creators of the universe, but as part of the creation. However, in
later Vedic times Prajapati (the Lord of Beings, here identified as Brahma)
came to be designated as the creator, but not so much an active creator as the
being from whom creation emanated. ‘Prajapati moves in the womb,’ says the
Yajur-veda. ‘Being unborn, he is born in many shapes ... In him all the worlds
stand.’ As Keith comments, ‘The idea of world creation is always in the Vedic
literature regarded in the light of sending out of something already there
rather than of mere bringing into being.’ There was really no creation, only
evolution — the universe evolved out of its own latent potential.”
William
Dalrymple, India A Sacred Geography by Diana L Eck – Book Review, The Guardian,
Friday 27 July 2012
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jul/27/india-sacred-geography-eck-review
Globalisation
is making India more religious. William Dalrymple hails a guide to Hindu
mythologies
As
the Harvard Indologist Diana Eck puts it: "Considering its long history,
India has had but a few hours of political and administrative unity. Its unity
as a nation, however, has been firmly constituted by the sacred geography it
has held in common and revered: its mountains, forests, rivers, hilltop
shrines." For Hindus, as also for many Indian Buddhists, Muslims, Christians
and Sikhs, India is a holy land. The actual soil of India is thought by many
rural Hindus to be the residence of the divinity and, in villages across India,
is worshipped as the body of the Goddess. The features of the Indian landscape
are understood to be her physical features. Her landscape is not dead but
alive, and littered with tirthas,
crossing places between different worlds, "linked with the tracks of
pilgrimage".
“But
the idea of Indian sacredness is not some western concept grafted on to the
subcontinent in a fit of mystical Orientalism: it is instead an idea central to
India's mythological conception of itself, which "continues to anchor
millions of people in the imagined landscape of their country". Hindu
mythology consistently visualises India as a spiritually charged and
"living landscape in which mountains, rivers, forests and villages are
elaborately linked to the stories of the gods and heroes. The land bears traces
of the gods and the footprints of the heroes. Every place has its story and,
conversely, every story in the vast storehouse of myth and legend has its place
… In this mental map, geography is overlaid with layer upon layer of
story."
Indeed
this idea of India as a sacred landscape predates classical Hinduism, and, most
important, is an idea that in turn was passed on to most of the other religions
that came to flourish in the Indian soil. The origins of the idea of Indian
sacred geography seems to lie in India's ancient pre-Vedic religions where
veneration was given to sprites known as nagas
or yakshas.
These godlings were associated with natural features of the landscape, such as
pools and sacred springs and the roots of banyan trees, and were believed to
have jurisdiction over their own areas. Over the centuries, the myths
associated with such features changed, so that a particular sacred pool might
in time come to be associated with Ram and Sita, or a mountain linked with
Krishna or the wanderings of the Pandava brothers of the Mahabharat. Just as the
sacredness of the landscape percolated from pre-Vedic and tribal folk cults
into classical "Great Tradition" Hinduism, so in the course of time
the idea slowly trickled from Hinduism into Buddhism, Sikhism, Indian Islam and
even Indian Christianity.
As
Eck writes in her conclusion: "The affirmation of the everywhere of the
sacred – this is the peculiar genius of the theology given expression in the
landscape of India." No one, she writes, "says it better than the
poet saints of south India who praise the supreme lord who is right here where
the rivers meet, right here where the herons wade, right here where the hillock
rises, right here where the palms sway over the estuary, right here where the
mango blossoms are fragrant. The places they praise are different. The taste of
the lord is different in each. But each one is a 'beloved place', and each one
enables the pilgrim soul to catch a glimpse of the vast reality of God."
Richard Leviton:
“We don’t normally regard agriculture as a
disastrous innovation in human evolution, but one day in Tasmania an Aboriginal
elder named Uncle Bul made it strikingly clear to researcher Robert Lawlor just
how profound an effect the decline of the old hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the
advent of agriculture exacted on the Western psyche. The crux of the problem,
the old man told Lawlor, is that through agriculture “white men have lost their
Dreaming.” That’s a loss of major significance because according to the
Australian Aborigines when “white men”—or any people, themselves included—lose
their Dreaming, they’ve lost the crucial nexus that weaves together Heaven and
Earth, women and men, Nature and humanity, and makes long-term cultural
survival and true prosperity possible.
During trance vision, Uncle Bul sees a “web of intersecting threads” on
which scenes of the physical world, dreams, and prophetic visions are hung like
cinematic beads—an aspect of the original Dreaming that created our world, in
other words. “But inner fears break that glimpse of an invisible webwork,
leaving only a world of isolated things”—and inner fear is
the psychological state of most of Western humankind.”
Robert Lawlor, VOICES OF THE FIRST DAY. Awakening in the
Aboriginal Dreamtime
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Lawlor
The Living Earth
Warren W. Smith
Man can only relate to the earth in a mutually productive manner when he
recognizes the universal spirit, not only in himself and in all plant and
animal life, but in the earth itself as a living, breathing body. For the earth
is alive, it radiates an aura of life just as man does. It is the realization
of the common spirit animating both man and earth that allows man to be
sensitive to the flow of energy in a landscape, to avoid disrupting that
natural flow or to even remove obstacles to a harmonious flow in the manner
that the Chinese Acupuncturist regulates the flow of ch’i in the human
body. Man is the doctor, the protector and keeper of the earth as he would
protect and keep his own mother, for the Earth Spirit is his own mother, for
the Earth spirit is his source and to that source he returns at death. We have
forgotten that the origin of the world ‘matter’ is from ‘mater’ or mother. In
another sense man can be imagined as an intelligent parasite on the body of the
living Earth, totally dependent for his health and prosperity on the life force
of the Earth. And like any intelligent parasite man must realize that he must
not destroy his host, that he must maintain a symbiotic or mutually productive
relationship.
Man cannot pollute the earth without causing disease in his own flesh,
he cannot dirty the waters without fouling his own bloodstream. He can treat
the earth as an inanimate, non-living body, separate from himself, only with
the result of his own death. The ancients realized the intimate relation
between the Earth Spirit and themselves. They sought oracles at cleft and
spring, they sensed the flow of Spirit over and through the earth and its
waters and they represented these forces in their art and religion as the
Dragon and the Naga. They practised landscape architecture by directing
and concentrating the flow of the telluric currents with mounds, menhirs, stone
circles and the megalithic tumuli and pyramids. Man lost his sensitivity to the
Earth Spirit when he became more settled, patriarchal and orientated in his
religion to worship of the sun. The decline of the Earth cult is seen in the
rise of the practice of human sacrifice, when priests tried to stimulate the
spirit formerly present in their stone accumulators by massive release of human
spirit in sacrifice They searched for the contact with Spirit which came so
naturally before. But the flow of the terrestrial current is ever changing,
just like the flow of energy in our bodies is constantly changing. Stones
erected on Dragon paths were found to have lost their power, the Dragon having
moved, refusing to be regulated by man. For why should the parasite be able to
control the life of the host. Why should the child dominate the life of his
parent.
Modern man treats the earth as his source of ‘raw materials’ and the
deposit for his poisons and garbage. He destroys the Earth without regard for
his own intimate dependency on the life and health of the Earth. He attempts to
expand his commerce and industry infinitely without regard to the absolutely
finite nature of the earth’s resources
and ability to absorb poisonous wastes. The ancients of Nepal who
composed the Svayambhu Purana were very aware of the nature of their
dependency on the Earth Spirit. They set aside places for the permanent residence
of the Naga and recognized his relation to fertility and climate and
consequently to their own prosperity. And Nepal has prospered to this day.
Where man regards the earth as his own source and sustenance he does not
destroy her, realizing that her destruction is also his own. Where man lives in
intimate relation with the earth he can be aware of the life of the body of the
earth as he is aware of his own life. Only where man believes, in his
arrogance, that he is separate and unrelated, that the holy Spirit resides not
in the earth and its creatures including himself, but in an exterior, removed
monotheistic Deity, can he treat the earth as if it were already dead and treat
his own body in the same manner.
Sensitivity to the spiritual life force is not confined to the so called
‘primitive’ Pantheists, but has been experienced by man at all times and
cultures. In relatively modern times the life force has been identified as
Anton Mesmer’s Animal Magnetism’, in von Reichenbach’s ‘Od’, and in Wilhelm
Reich’s ‘Orgone’. These men were reviled
and ridiculed by the prevailing scientific establishments, but it is to
them that we must turn for a description in modern scientific terms of the
Spirit which animates us all. For when we have become aware of the Spirit in
ourselves and in our Mother Earth as source and support of ourselves, then we
are able to recognize the universal spirit in every rock and tree, and we begin
to treat all creation as part of ourselves as we are part of all Creation.”
Paul Davies, Esoteric
Dimensions of Deep Ecology
http://www.sacredweb.com/online_articles/sw6_davies.html
from essay "Massacre of the Dreamers, in Untie The Strong Woman" Dr
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
from essay "Massacre of the Dreamers, in Untie The Strong Woman" Dr
Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Black Elk, Oglala Sioux, Quote from Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt,
1932.
Tenzin Gyatso, H.H. the
Dalai Lama, foreword, Dharma Gaia, A Harvest of Essays in Buddhism and Ecology,
Parallax Press, Berkeley, 1990, p.v. February 9, 1990.
Dirk Baltzly, Gaia Gets to Know Herself: Proclus on the World’s
Self-Perception, Phronesis 54 (2009), pp.261-285. [Abstract]
On
Wednesday, August 07, 2013
Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: an Essay
on the History of the Idea of Nature,
translated by Michael Chase. The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2006, p.61.
Note 12. Macrobius, Commentary on Scipio's Dream, I, 2,
17, p. 8 (Armisen-Marchetti).
13. R. Klein, "L'imagination comme vetement de Fame
chez Marsile Ficin et Giordano Bruno," in La forme et I'intelligible (Paris,
1970), pp. 65-88.
Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma, p. 41.
Abraham Eraly, Gem in
the Lotus. The Seeding of Indian Civilisation, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
London, 2004, p.132
Warren
W. Smith, Naga and Serpent Symbolism, From: Mythological History of
the Nepal Valley, Svayambhu
Purana :
translated by Mana Bajra Bajracharya, edited by Warren W. Smith. Avaloka
Publishers, Kathmandu, Nepal, 1978, 78
pp.