Tag: nature

My…tutelage with the mist began, in earnest, only after I loosened my soul and softened my piercing gaze. Until then my eyes did not allow me to see the magic of life around me. In time, however, I slowly came to understand that when approaching nature and spirit, one must enter these realms with a gentle openness of heart. We cannot make demands when encountering the sacred world. It is the overly analytical perception of reality, as well as the belief that we are somehow owed an experience, that immediately exiles us from the richness of the numinous power around us, within us, and within the earth. We have to be open. We must be, as the eloquent Zen tradition tells us, “empty cups,” ready to be filled, without preconceived notions of what awaits us.

In time I experienced a gradual settling in my evolving…mysticism. It was a settling of my striving. This settling informed me that the sacred was all around me, and that, in addition to developing the proper eyes with which to see, I must also cultivate the proper feet with which to walk the path. One gains the proper eyes and proper feet, I have found, by slowing down….

— The Mist-Filled Path, p. 8

It’s important to understand the particular way in which human beings have affinities with the physical world according to the ancients. They believed in a quite literal way that nothing inside us is without a correspondence in nature. Worms, for example, are the shape of intestines and worms process matter as intestines do. The lungs that enable us to move freely through space with a bird-like freedom are the same shape as birds. The visible world is humanity turned inside out. Lung and bird are both expressions of the same cosmic spirit, but in different modes.

To the teachers of the Mystery schools it was significant that if you looked down on to the internal organs of the human body from the skies, their disposition reflected the solar system.

In the view of the ancients, then, all biology is astrobiology….

— The Secret History of the World, Chapter 2

Author’s emphasis.

The story of Agobard and the sky sailors takes us to the heart of tenth-century [C.E.] cosmology, to the way people viewed the world. Natural events were not natural in the sense that nature was an interacting, self-explanatory, independent system. Rather, it was something subject to divine, human, and demonic manipulation. Today we understand the dynamics of nature as independent, interconnected, and self-regulating and ultimately explained by science. For tenth-century people, the borders between the natural and human worlds were permeable. Magic, miracles, and a whole constellation of intermediaries, such as the Blessed Virgin and the saints as well as those in league with the devil, could influence what happened for good or ill through weather, sickness, pestilence, and all types of disasters.

— The Birth of the West, Chapter 1

Myth #3: Druids exist in harmony with all living things.

Druids can barely live in harmony with each other. These people are possessed by spirits of Nature, figuratively but also possibly literally. When one commune meets another, it is like two wolf packs catching sight of each other across the timber line. Sometimes there is murder. Sometimes there are “marriages”. Sometimes they exchange small bits of news and go on their way….

— 7 Myths Everyone Believes About Druids – Goblin Punch

From the shaman’s point of view, water contains universal knowledge because its journey takes it to every corner of the physical universe; rain from the sky soaks deep into underground wells and springs, eventually feeding rivers and lakes, finally leaving the earth as mist and fog and rising to the sky, completing the circle. The fountain expresses this wholeness and completeness for its water is continually recycled. The circular dynamic of fountains (and all springs or rivers) symbolizes the reconciliation of opposites; since water flows through all arcs of the circle, it unites all polarities.

— Fire in the Head, p. 127

The forest, like nature herself, was changeable. Sometimes it was a safe retreat from society, a place for visions and communion with the gods and goddesses; at other times it was a frightening place, dangerous and life-threatening. But however ambivalent, the Celt always found the forest inherently spiritual and, for that reason, exciting. For as the shaman knows only too well, initiation into the mysteries of the spirit can be both comforting and frightful. Like the Green Man of the Forest, the Lord of the Animals, or the Witch of the Woods, nature takes life as well as gives it, for nature is the source of life and death. Like the goddess of the wells, nature is the lovely maiden ready to bestow kingdoms and palaces, but she is also the miserable hag with foul breath.

— Fire in the Head, p. 133