Meditations on Mother Earth
NOTE: This is a continuation of “Meditations on the Virgin”
1.
How do we picture the earth? When we say “the earth”, what do we imagine? And when we say “the earth as a planet”, what do we imagine? Is the earth, “our planet”, really a planet? What is the earth? – We never ask ourselves these questions, because we take the answers for granted. But what we take for granted are most of the time abstractions that were told to us when we were children, we were told that those abstraction are reality, that what we see with our eyes is wrong, it is not true, it is a deception. The result is that we never pay attention to what we observe, or never observe at all, because we feel quite happy with our abstractions, they make us feel safe. That’s why Steiner describes Man as a cosmic hermit that carries his little cave everywhere, and when we dream we are a lot closer to reality that when we are living in our acquired or borrowed world of abstractions.
We believe that when we are looking at a picture of the earth taken from space, we are looking at the earth, but we aren’t, we are only looking at a flat, lifeless picture on a sheet of paper. And the astronauts who took the picture, were they seeing the earth? The answer is no!, they can’t possibly do that because their eyes and whole body cannot exist at all, cannot live, in outer space. No human eye can look at the earth from outer space. To take the picture, astronauts must first be inside a capsule or a space suit which replicate the earth conditions for them, so what they are doing is observe the earth from a window while their eyes are inside this second, transplanted earth. From inside this compressed earth that protects their body, they are looking at a window that presents to them an image of the earth, they are looking at a diminutive earth from inside a window in their own compressed, mechanically artificial earth.
And what do they see? They see a clearly delimited surface that appears curved, concave on their side, convex on the opposite side. This curved surface rotates –or they move around– so they see its features appear on one side and disappear on the other. After observing for some time how the same features appear and disappear repeatedly, the idea of a sphere (or more accurately, a spheroid) is formed in the mind, even though the sphere can never be perceived by the eyes. As the distance increases (for example, when observed from the Moon), the three-dimensional surface features as well as the curvature become completely two-dimensional and the original concave surface becomes a flat circle, until with increasing distance it becomes a uni-dimensional point. All this time, the astronaut is inside his capsule or space suit, surrounded by death. If he leaves his capsule, he immediately dies.
The astronaut is living inside this purely mechanical reproduction of earth, and he looses his grounding (gravity); he depends totally and absolutely on a machine. It is exactly like the situation of a fetus inside the mother’s womb and amniotic fluid, except that the mother is in this case a machine, and outside of it there is nothing but emptiness and death. Far from leaving earth, the astronaut has come inside an artificial, mechanical world, he has entered into a sub-earth. Instead of leaving the earth –which would be possible only by leaving his body– the astronaut has sunk deep into a dead world dominated by mechanical forces “below” the earth, a sub-world dominated by machine-entities that have complete control on the astronaut’s life. Unlike the human eye which is selfless and translucid, everything the astronaut sees is determined by what the machine inside of which he is living can see.
This sub-earth has very little to do with what we experience as “earth” in our daily lives. The tragedy is that today this abstract view from (or of) outer space is what most people imagine “earth” is, and as a result we utterly ignore what we all actually can see directly with our own eyes. We have an heliocentric abstract picture of the solar system that we take for granted and is one of the greatest obstacles we face when trying to understand the world around us, including the phenomena of the sky and the phenomena belonging to what the ancients called “the underworld”. Instead of learning to read the world-script ourselves, we borrow abstract concepts and call them “knowledge”; but we can re-educate our brain and learn to observe and think more organically, as was explained systematically and extensively by Rudolf Steiner.
I would like to attempt now to follow that path and see how it can help me understand what “earth” really is.
2.
Our immediate experience of the sky on an clear sunny day is that of an infinite, open expanse without borders. When we look at the ocean we see a similar infinite expanse, but with a very clear two-dimensional border defined by the water surface, and we cannot see down through it: the open sea is an “unknown below” which doesn’t yield its secrets openly to us, in it we seem to get lost into something primordial. But when we look up at the clear blue sky, we see all through it into a dimensionless immensity that –unlike the sea– opens itself completely: instead of the dreamlike feeling of loss and the self-extinguishing, waving, hypnotic motion of our soul when we contemplate the ocean, the blue sky is giving itself to us in all its depth and evokes feelings of humbleness and devotion.
The horizon where the sky and the ocean meet is the unidimensional infinity where the immense and dense below and the immense ethereal above become one another. One can feel the water rarifying and disappearing into the primordial sea of light, and the light becoming the salty wavering motion of the primordial expanse of the dense sea below. Now picture the earth’s landscape below the sky instead of the sea, with its mountain, lakes, and fresh water streams, or even –perhaps– the extension of human habitation in cities and roads. The darker blue or white mountains at a distance meet the lighter blue of the sky over the horizon, but the feeling we obtain is now different. How can we characterize this feeling, compared with the feeling of the line that intersects the sea and the illuminated sky?
The most obvious difference is that earth presents to us a living landscape of organic forms, colors, and shapes, unlike the surface of the open sea and the blue sky which are all the same, the earth shows a great variety of forms and we feel very strongly the idea of time and development. As the sky makes our soul soar towards timelessness and eternity and the surface of the open sea makes our soul “rest back” in self-extinguishing primordiality, the earth takes our soul inside of time and development, zigzagging through the ages like a serpent; its developed organic forms contain a story, a script, accompanied by a sense of fullness. When we look at the mountain ranges or the rock formations disappearing on the horizon, we can feel the forces that gave birth to them, like living monuments.
The organized development of forms that stand as monuments of the forces that created them, the feelings of fullness and development, the serpent-like motion of time zigzagging, the echoes of venerable bygone ages, of wisdom accomplished and of love fulfilled… all this is the earth when we look at it. Unlike the ocean and the open sky which feel like something “other”, the earth with its accomplished forms and monuments, with its plants, animals, mountains and streams, with its cloud formations, is there for us, we “have it”, we inhabit it, like we inhabit a lover or a spouse. The earth presents itself to us like accomplished wisdom and fulfilled love that come from the stream of time. This “earth” that our senses perceive directly is not an abstract thought, it is not a picture of the earth from space, it is something more familiar that we call “the land”.
This landscape presents itself to us as forms and their corresponding formative forces that are in a state of development or organic becoming. The formative elemental forces cannot be perceived at first through the eyes, in the same way that human feelings cannot be perceived directly at first, but with time and practice they can be directly perceived. Here exactly the same principles that were outlined in the example of “praying to the virgin” apply. There can be a “time lag” or delay before we become aware of what we have experienced, in which case the formative forces begin to appear first in the pictures we have formed of the experience, and these pictures acquire in our soul a life of their own, which we must quietly observe without attempting to reach conclusions or form opinions.
Like the pictures in our imagination, every part of the landscape or of the land has a life of its own where each form has its corresponding formative force. And everyone of these parts has a correspondence to a process in our own soul, every natural process is also (or can become) a process in our soul.
3.
Picturing the earth from outer space, as a sphere made of mass, rock, gravity, etc., with us living on its surface, is looking at the earth from inside out through a window provided by a machine, and it can only show what the machine can see. The reality that we experience is the opposite: we are living at the center of this sphere, not on its outside surface, and the sphere itself is the idea of the Cosmos that results from the phenomenon of daily rotation and annual revolution, by the rising and setting of the stars and the helicoidal movements of the planets along the zodiacal two-dimensional belt. The sphere itself is a concept or an abstraction, it is not real, what is real is the forces of rotation and of annual and zodiacal revolution that produce the rhythmic alternation of day and night and of the seasons, the cycles of Nature, the breathing in and breathing out of the Cosmos.
This living Cosmos that contains the stars and the planets, the Moon and the Sun, the whole of Creation, all this is “Earth”. This cosmic egg or earth-Cosmos is the solar system as a whole. But for most of us this is at first only an ideal beyond our direct experience. What we all experience is the exuberance of life and mineral forms in a constant state of flux or development, like a river that flows from its paradisiacal origins, always becoming, always renewing itself, always virginal, changing its face like a flow of living wisdom that is telling a story. We experience the darkness every night enveloping the earth, containing everything like inside of a veil, and the Sun rising from the depths and removing this veil every day, radiating from out of itself the openness of space, carrying the light and the warmth that keeps everything alive.
The earth has a countenance that changes over the course of time. In the same way that the idea or concept of a sphere arises in us from the physical experience of rotation, the observation of the yearly changes of the earth gives birth in us to the feeling or intuition of the earth-being, that can’t be observed directly with our eyes. These changes are correlated to the movements and cycles of the Sun, the Moon, the planets and the stars at night, but this celestial script is only the dots or pattern, the notation or musical score: the music itself, the concrete spiritual reality of which these celestial patterns speak, is the earth-Cosmos. This earth is not a material ball of rock with a biosphere on its exterior surface, but a flowing, fruitful incarnation of fulfilled love and wisdom. The living Sophia that we picture coming from heavenly or spiritual realms is the earth-being that we see coming to us from the beginnings of time.
Time, earth, and wisdom are synonyms. Time is the life-tableau or biography of the imaginative earth, and wisdom our ability to hear and understand the earth’s Song.
4.
Let’s recapitulate very briefly: we are not on the periphery of the earth but inside of it, right at the center, and this ideal, imagined sphere is not perceptible, but results from our experience of rotation and zodiacal revolution. The interiorization of these forces does not lead to the abstraction of the earth as a planet seen from outer space, but to the earth-being that comes from the beginnings of time. The “depths of the earth” are not the anti-earth or anti-life layers of liquefied metal leading to a hypothetical nucleus, but the formative forces of time, “the realm of the mothers”, that takes us back to the spiritual worlds and the dimensionless origin of all things, as we approach infinity in our “descent” towards the periphery of the earth-sphere.
This “descent” is Initiation, and as we penetrate deeper into the living earth’s interior, into this most venerable, most sacred, most virginal, most ancient mother, we recapitulate all the evolutionary stages that both earth and man have gone through the ages. This wisdom of the ages is the earth itself, its life-tableau that exists forever like a river without time. We recapitulate the time when the Moon was still inside the earth, the fall of man, the division of the sexes, the origin of evil, the Sun separating from the earth, the ancient Saturn. Initiation is inextricably linked to the formation of the earth, we ourselves become the earth and recapitulate its primal beginnings.
The belief that the spiritual descent into the earth means going inside the dense metallic core and the anti-life forces is a deception. These anti-life forces are outside, not inside the earth. Looking at the earth from “outer space” is entering forcefully into this anti-world, encapsulated in a mechanical uterus, looking at life from afar, and then coming back with a very wrong idea of what the earth is. This machine-encapsulation is actually an artificial death, an artificial form of anti-Initiation: real dying is when we leave the physical body, and doing it consciously and coming back from it is Initiation. This is the only way we can enter into the earth-being and witness the forces from which the earth, life, as well as time itself, are formed.
We normally don’t see these elemental forces, we only see their by-product: the many and varied forms of earth-phenomena that are studied by the geologist, the geographer, the biologist, or the meteorologist. We are led to believe that the energy for all this comes from the Sun, but if we remove this veil of deceptive abstractions and pay attention to what we see, we realize that the Sun everyday goes inside the earth, it spends the night in the Underworld, so the inner earth forces are also solar and celestial, but have gone through a very deep and powerful transformation: here the solar and sky forces become the mineral base of all substances. These alchemical forces are the building stones of which the world is formed
When we perceive with our etheric body, the third dimension is dropped, and we enter into the imaginative world where everything is liquid. We see the elemental forces filling the space left by the physical forms, making then come out as if through a spell. We perceive behind this ever-living elemental action the loving warmth or presence of the Virgin, and as time passes we can see how this Virgin assumes a more venerable and larger shape, until its changing countenance from summer to winter, from draught to rainfall, is transformed inside of us into a feeling of great sadness and sacrifice, a sad song of wisdom that comes to us from the beginnings of time, and we start feeling that we are coming inside this being…
NOTE: the meditations stopped here.