Climate Change, Human Thought and the Elementals (2010)
The relationship between humans and weather is an old one, because in our ancient past, we and the weather were one. Deep within the great primordial life mist, when humans were but an inspirational thought form in the mind of the exulted hierarchies, we shared galactic space with a vast primordial weather-front. Shot through with solar winds, buffeted by gaseous storms and pounded by meteoric showers, we know the moods and manners of weather intimately. The aftermath of that great storm is still surging on in our four-fold nature, shaping our destiny and moulding the wrought work on earth, through the decisions borne in our collective astral body. This old relationship is a business of reciprocity. From the great cosmic entities radiating their message in from the zodiac, to the elemental kingdom working on the front line of evolution, there is a constant loop of gesture and response, ingress and egress, and above all, tension and release.
The physical manifestations of weather are one of the last reverberations of the cosmic creative word. It is a universal song, amplified by the stars, focused through the planets of our solar system and finally, shaped into a specific material form by the conditions resonating in the astral field of the earth. The astral-etheric body of earth is the engine room of potential; it is where weather phenomena are fertilised by the father element of celestial alignments and conceived in the mother element of earth's astrality, which consists of humanity's sympathies and antipathies, animal and plant group soul activity, and the interplay of angelic hierarchies between lower and higher devachan. It is a volatile and super-sensitive place of becoming, and each and every one of us has a stake in the ongoing and perpetual outcome emanating from this dimension, whether we are conscious of it or not. The astral body of Gaia is the collective emotion of the planet and its inhabitants - it is not the logic. Reductive material thinking may affect this field, but it has no vocabulary to explain it. It is where the primal cause of a disturbance meets a supersensible waveform and its sensible particle, it is the place where all the prognostics quit a hovering field of potential and collapse into a present-time physical reality.
Rudolf Steiner said "We must see the earth, not as an isolated entity, but as embedded in a dynamic macrocosm and interpenetrating system of forces". His far reaching view into the spiritual realms shows our solar system to be a great cosmic entity. This is reflected in many esoteric traditions; for instance, in certain Kabbalistic streams, the Tree of Life is shown as a great archetypal human being, with each planet representing an organ or body part. There are ancient, well forged lines of communication between each celestial orb. Dr. Steiner tells us that each physical planet is the outer garment of a specific group of spiritual beings, and each one supersensibly linked into the world song, forever singing itself into being. Just as we experience changeable 'internal weather' when we feel tensions in our body and mind, so does the super-body of our solar system.
There is now no doubt that our weather is becoming ever more extreme and the factors contributing to this upsurge in extreme phenomena are many and varied. Storms and earthquakes can be seen as products of the force field coming in from the cosmos via the planets, and when human thinking and emotion tie in with celestial movements, this creates the life conditions for an extreme event to develop. A storm is essentially an organ 'organising' itself, and as author and anthroposophist Denis Klocek so succinctly expressed, "Weather phenomena are really expressions of the inner soul life of the earth. The soul body is the part of the organism in which it experiences feelings for the collective energies in which the organism is embedded". The distant governing field determining weather events on earth is the celestial alignment of the zodiac. The potentially destructive impulse from this field is either exacerbated, diffused or realigned by the planetary positions impacting earth's volatile astral body.
Elementals of water and air are the blue collar workers in storm creation, they are highly receptive beings, who exist in a state of eternal metamorphosis and sensitive changeability. In their inner nature, the undines, or world chemists, are related to human emotion and dreaming, and the sylphs, or light-bearers, are related to human will. These beings are constantly responding to and acting in accordance with the conditions prevailing in the astral field. This formative field is also home to the over-arching soul of the plant world and the group souls of animals; combine this with the collective mass of human thought and emotion, and they all impact the working balance of earth's astral and etheric body. This is why animals manage to save themselves in times of extreme weather - they have a direct line into the storm's birthing alignment. Also, seen from the opposite direction, their collective stress resulting from habitat loss and human maltreatment, creates disturbances in the group soul frequency, thus affecting the balance in the earth's astral field. Group souls of animals move like trade winds through the earth's atmosphere.
The behaviour of weather seems familiar to us because we create microcosmic weather patterns, or moods, within our own lives. Small storms often behave as if they were a 'shock', or 'cramp', in the atmosphere. When a chain of cramps links into a spiralling organ, a major hurricane is born. The nature spirits of air and water are then pressed into service as they fly along the lines forced upon them by the paths of the planets, and are focussed into specific gestures by the conditions prevailing in the earth's astral sphere. In their excellent book on the sentient nature of weather, "Weather shamanism", Nan Moss and David Corbin point out that "Though the tornado can be powerful and destructive, it is also brief and local. The damage on a worldwide scale is minimal. What looks like chaos is control. It is control and management of energy, of wind and water, of thoughts and emotions. The spirits of weather are managing energy in a systematic way"... and to the question "How does a spirit of weather manifest its force in ordinary reality?" the answer is "Reciprocally. The spirit, the alive essence, takes it all in, all the cues and messages from earth - and gives it back!!" Storms want to touch down and make contact with the earth, and their awesome power always poses the question, "What is the eye of the storm searching for... and who is looking down the lens?".
It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to see that compressed energies, unreleased by storms, can go on to penetrate the interior of the earth. These tensions dovetail into the earth's breathing process, as the elementals are breathed out in spring and summer, and breathed in again during the autumn and winter. The great dance of the cosmos radiates into the plant world during the summer. Then, in the autumn, this narrative begins to filter down into the earth with the retreating foliage and is preserved in the matrices of crystals and ores below. Gathering this universal information into themselves, the earth spirits then stream through their domain of the inner earth, bearing with them all that has come down to them from the starry heights. They are the active intelligence of the earth, the adhesive between spirit and matter, the blue collar workers of Gaia, and they bear one world of form over into another. They are above all, the preservers of continuity and the bearers of movement in solid structures, through the course of evolution on earth. The collective 'emotional weather' of humanity is also received into this domain and carried through the structures of solid earth. The combined pressures and tensions gating in from each diverse energetic current, be they celestial or human, has the potential to cause the forces within the earth to be perilously distributed, thus producing the life conditions for earthquakes and volcanoes to erupt.
So what does this all mean for us as individuals? Like the relationship between weather and humans, the answer is an old one. The answer lies at the working hub of all the major spiritual streams, it is born from the universal truth that every thought produces form at some level and each thought influences the shape of creation. The message is simply this: pay attention to the thoughts you are thinking and pivot them in the direction of grace, whenever and however you can. A simple directive, but so hard to do. Yet we have reached a stage in our evolution where we are inviting ever more serious incursion into our soul-life by negative beings, through the negativity of our thinking - the warning from Dr.Steiner is a stark one, "Lies devour the soul!". He also warned us of the vast spectres created by government and corporate lies and their destructive influence within the astral field of our planet. With the breathtaking greed and self-interest driving world corporations, and the misery of scarcity endured by so many of our fellow humans, another question to contemplate is, just what kind of weather are we incubating with our thoughts, words and deeds? Next time we witness a drone of oppresive, negative judgmentalism rising in ourselves or others, it would be well to remember that like attracts like and our relentless judgmental dithyrambs always sound on for spirit ears and eyes. They might just precipitate the snowflake that triggers an avalanche, the deluge that drowns a delta, or the atmospheric cramps that drive a tornado. If these great negative thought forms, or 'tulpas' as they are called in the east, are allowed to grow unchecked, the memory of hurricane Katrina will fade beneath an even greater out-breath of fury from the weather spirits.
We create and mould reality through our conscious intention and every thought has a fractal effect on the collective. Anthroposophy teaches us that every thought becomes an elemental being, and that our thoughts and words can become a creative tool for the positive transformation of our world. One of the primary directives in 'Knowledge of the Higher Worlds' is to "Find and create a sheath of soul-quiet" and to guard our thoughts when we cross the threshold. By consciously witnessing our thinking, we see how "A cheerful or morose attitude can bring about forces of liberation or imprisonment" for our friends in the elemental kingdom. The great plurality of nature spirits and elementals existing on earth, make up the etheric, or life body, of our planet, but while humanity has been developing individual consciousness and abstract material thinking, they have been ignored and ridiculed by the majority for many hundreds of years. They are the life-force bristling on the edge of present-time and they are forever enchanting and releasing themselves into earthly matter - a matter which is constantly being configured by the impulses and feedback on the front-line of creation. It is now time to openly acknowledge and greet the elementals, they are the generative background presence in every situation. We need to communicate and work with them in every human endeavour. Their assistance is crucial to us at this time and they wish to guide us, but if we continue to ignore them, they will fall prey to the world agenda of Lucifer and Ahriman.
The vast negative thought forms we have created over the millenia, shiver and shake in the earth's astral field, looming, hindering and worsening the potential outcome of astro-meteorological alignments pulsing into the earth. Yet, we have the power to transform and deconstruct these great, dark, forms, by detaching ourselves from the grip of judgement and vengeance, and by consciously spiralling our thinking into higher octaves of creativity - we know what we have to do and we must do it, and in our hearts we know this commitment cannot be forever postponed. Never before has the 6th petition of the Lord's prayer been more imperative and unavoidable, the well-being of the planet depends upon it. In his moving and powerful book "The Occult Significance of Forgiveness", Sergei. O. Prokofieff reveals how 'forgiving the trespass' manifests a shimmering sphere of potential.. "As (man) beholds his past earthly life in the Akashic Record, he perceives in place of every act of forgiveness that he has accomplished on earth what could be described as the emergence of a free 'space', which..is gradually filled with the substance of Christ".
Whilst we are able to predict possible future trends in the weather, we cannot predict a certainty, there are too many variables and as Dr. Steiner said "It is a subject that leads to infinity". Many people have tried to create a definitive model for weather, one of the most famous being the celebrated mathematician, Edward Lorenz. He spent years working on a mathematical formula for weather prediction, but finally gave up, declaring that the weather was not an orrery. He is also famous for posing the question "Does the flapping of a butterfly wing in Brazil cause a hurricane in the Atlantic?". If the flap of the wing lines up with an out-breath from a certain planetary and zodiacal configuration, then I think the answer is almost certainly "Yes"! ..and in addition to this, the anthroposophical lens into nature shows us that the fire spirits resonate in true joy around a butterfly wing.. and fire spirits are, of course, none other than the carriers of human thought.
Recommended reading:
"Weather and Cosmos" by Dennis Klocek
"World Ether, Elemental Beings, Kingdoms of Nature" by Rudolf Steiner
"Weather Shamanism" by Nan Moss and David Corbin
An Article by Susan Raven
CONTENT COPYRIGHT © 2010 SUSAN RAVEN