1. The Magical Life

The Magical Life

Magic reveals itself naturally in the serene and contemplative mind of humans. Nature magic or nature mysticism belongs to the oldest spiritual experiences that can be traced back to the very beginnings of humanity and is intertwined in all ancient animistic or original cultures and mystery cults. Nature mysticism is sometimes defined as "the feeling of being immersed in the unity of living nature." The enchanted human dances with dust particles illuminated by golden sunlight, rises with the dawn, swells with the waves, and swims in the enchantment of the water nymphs. He floats in the scents of the plant world, is delighted by the songs of the birds: he knows and is all being, all power, all joy, all pain in all things, inseparable and yet himself. The mystic says that in the experience "all blades of grass, wood, and stone, all things are One." Thus spoke Master Jesus to Judas; "I am everywhere, in the sighing of the wind, in the rays of the sun, in the eye of the ant." Francis of Assisi saw all created things, birds and animals and flowers, sun and moon, even death itself as children of God and his brothers and sisters in Christ. Saint Francis of Assisi was also called the "divine beggar" who left his family and wealth and embraced "Lady Poverty" in his dealings with the poor and lepers. He found unspeakable joy in the imitation of Christ's compassion. During the Mass of the feast of Saint Matthias in 1209, he heard the priest reading the Gospel of Jesus, in which the command of the Lord "Go and speak!" was heard by his disciples. Francis immediately left the church and began to preach the Gospel. He spoke of reincarnation as Jesus had taught. This gained him many followers, including the noble Lady Clair, who later left home and hearth dressed as the Bride of Jesus to join Francis, seeking to be admitted into the Mendicant Order. These forms of mystical asceticism are found in all ancient cultures spread across the world. God revealed to St. Francis the Divine Presence in "Brother Sun" and "Sister Moon" and rewarded his devotion with continuous inner peace.

In Forrest Reid's novel, Following Darkness (London, 1902, p42), it sounds as follows: "It was as if I had never realized how lovely the world was. I lay on my back in the warm and dry moss and listened to the skylark singing as it rose from the fields by the sea into the dark clear sky. No other music gave me the same pleasure as that passionate joyful song. It was a kind of leaping and exultant ecstasy, a clear sound like a flame rejoicing in itself. And then I experienced a strange phenomenon. It was as if everything that seemed to be outside and around me was suddenly inside me. The whole world seemed to be inside me. It was inside me that the trees waved their green branches, it was inside me that the hot sun shone and the shade was cool. A cloud rose in the sky and passed by in a light shower that spattered on the leaves, and I felt its freshness dripping into my soul, and I felt in my whole being the delightful smell of the earth and the grass and the plants and the rich, brown soil. I could have sobbed with joy." Here we clearly see how this person's consciousness expands, releasing sorrow as a healing event and granting invigorating life energy. It should be noted that nature meditations emerged as the first forms of mystical experiences among the oldest nature peoples. From the perspective of depth psychology, the dark sides of these nature meditations emerge in the human psyche as morbid experiences, as described in Greek mythology. Consider, for example, Narcissus and Echo; Narcissus was the beautiful son of the river Cephissus and the nymph Liriope. Echo was a nymph who, after offending the gods, was doomed to silence. She could only repeat the last syllable of what was said to her. Hera (Juno) had pronounced this curse upon her because she was tired of her chatter, but it could also have been the god Pan, who was tired of her love. Pan can be seen as a sensual god, half-man, half-goat, who is in touch with the forces of nature. Echo fell in love with Narcissus. Since she could only repeat him, Narcissus ignored her. Narcissus received his retribution. Egoistic and disdainful of his admirers, he fell in love with his own reflection in a pool of water on Mount Helicon. Sick with self-love, he sat by the water staring at himself until he died, and the gods turned him into a daffodil. Echo faded into a shadow and mourned over his corpse by the water while Eros, the god of love, watched silently.

But the sunny sides of the human psyche transcend and transform these tragedies naturally when we are inspired by the great Source of all Life, which is constantly present in our deepest Self. As the mystic Rumi describes in his verses:

I am the dust in the sunlight, I am the ball of the sun,

To the dust I say: stay. And to the sun: roll on.

I am the mist in the morning, I am the breath of the evening,

I am the rustling in the trees, the singing wave of the sea.

I am the mast, the rudder, the helmsman and the ship.

I am the coral reef on which it is wrecked.

I am the tree of life and the parrot on its branches,

Silence, thought, tongue, and voice.

I am the breath of the flute, the spirit of man,

I am the spark in the stone, the shimmer of gold in the metal,

The candle and the moth fluttering around it,

The rose and the nightingale drunk with its scent.

I am the thread of being, the circle of the spheres.

The scale of creation, the rising and falling.

I am what is and what is not.

I am - O you who know it, Jalaluddin, O say it - I am the soul in everything.

When we live through these verses, we experience the strong identification with the Eternal Source that permeates all living beings and nature. Thus, we rediscover our own Essence, deep within ourselves, every time anew, the umpteenth spiritual rebirth.

Rumi, Jalal al-Din (1273) came from Balkh and emigrated to Konya (the classical Iconium) in Asia Minor, where he was regarded as the founder of the Mevlevi Order of the Dervishes. In poetry, he shows us the mysticism of the Sufi system.

From the beginning, the image of the reed flute reflects the path the mystic follows to the ultimate Source of life.

Listen to this lost Flute Breathing,

since it was torn From its rust-coloured bed, a tone

Of passionate love and sorrow.

The secret of my song, so new,

No one can see and no one can hear.

O, give me a friend who knows the sign

And wants to mingle his soul with mine!

It is the flame of love that ignited me,

It is the wine of love that inspired me.

Do you want to know how love bleeds,

O listen, listen to my flute!

Rumi had strong ties with the Whirling Dervishes, and these led him to the imagery of the power of the rotating wheel or the circling of the celestial bodies, the millstone, and the waterwheel.

The mountain of the sun

I will turn into a mill

And wherever my waters flow,

I will turn you to my will.

In another poem, Rumi speaks of the elevation of the soul to God through progressive incarnations, where in one sense the soul is always in God, but in another it must ascend from the mineral to the plant, the animal to the human to become an angel, and finally God alone. Rumi makes it clear that if we seek God, it is because God seeks us. In one of his writings, titled "It is what it is," Rumi shows how we can fully surrender to spiritual life in full acceptance through silent meditation.

When we leap to contemporary times, it was Carl Gustav Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist, who wrote: God seeks his shadow sides in humans and natural phenomena. Since the oldest nature religions and mystery cults, there have been many subtle beings; both heavenly and exalted forms, as well as dark and sometimes frightening creatures that populate our inner experiences and night visions.

From occult or paranormal observations, the nature beings speak to us very strongly, both in visual radiations, as well as in other resonances or vibrations.

Angels come to us from exalted cosmic atmospheres; All angels look with astonishment and wonder at humans, who seem to be dressed in an incredibly beautiful garment through their holy or loving works (Consciously or unconsciously, every person has a certain beauty within themselves). For the angel without his workings through the consciousness of humans is merely adoration; but the human with his tangible works is a glorification (compared to the devoted Indian person practicing karma-bhakti yoga); therefore, the angels praise the work of inspired humans, in their loving surrender.

The archangel Michael is the leading and enlightened solar spirit of this time. His era has re-entered since 1879 AD for a period of about 400 earthly years. Before him, the spheres of the archangel Gabriel were at work, and after the archangel Michael, the cosmic energy fields of Oriphiel will again reveal their influences more and more through the consciousness of humans and other living beings. The archangel Michael, as a cosmic solar being, is also naturally intertwined with the Aquarius age of esoteric astrology.

All great religions or nature religions and mystery cults have their stories about creation; through an explosion of the creative Power (which also through the material sun of the universe, this solar system has originated) another higher sphere in the universe has emerged as we can consider and experience it. In the Kabbalah, the ancient esoteric work of the Jewish mystical tradition, we can discern the rich sources about the doctrine and the coming to life of the angels. It contains an extension of the version in Genesis and surprisingly shows remarkable parallels with modern scientific insights. God is described here as the Divine Presence, the Great illuminating Source of all life; an almighty, undefinable, formless being in the middle of nothingness (the great emptiness as described in ancient Eastern philosophies). When the One decided to manifest itself in a form, light was created solely by that idea. God 'separated the light from the darkness' and thus created the first opposition. The material universe is characterized by oppositions – light and dark, male and female, sun and moon, yang and yin. The One became Two through this separation. God, the Two in One, then compressed his masculinity into a single minuscule light point. This is the 'word,' the 'logos,' the principle of fertilization, which is then received by the 'deep waters' (in our mother earth the oceans and world seas, but also the amniotic fluid in the womb), the feminine aspect of God, that receives and gives birth to the visible universe. The Macrocosm in the Microcosm, in the human.

These ancient teachings from the Kabbalah show great similarities with the mysticism of Taoism, which originated in ancient Chinese cultures. Thus we speak of the Tao-te-ching. In Confucian philosophy, it meant virtue or morality, and in the veiled mysticism of Taoism, the revelation or power of the Tao in everything. Tao-te-ching, one of the great works of this mystical doctrine, is traditionally attributed to the shadowy Lao-tzu. The book is about the Tao, the Way, the Ultimate Truth of the Universe. Sometimes the Tao is called the One. As meditators, we can read:

Tao gives birth to one.

One gives birth to two.

Two gives birth to three.

Three gives birth to ten thousand things.

Ten thousand things find harmony

By combining the power of the positive

And the negative.

Astrophysicists largely agree that the Big Bang occurred when a single point of incredibly densely packed energy and matter exploded, forming the universe as we know it. With our contemplative mind, we can experience that this 'primeval explosion' must have taken place in an even larger and more spacious universe, far beyond our comprehension. These considerations can only be experienced intuitively or spiritually. The cosmos with its countless stars and planets has further developed on enormous time scales, and our mother earth 'has long carried in it the human as a spiritual being in world development. The magical human as a spiritual being in this wondrous world.

-Karel Meul (in loving memory) Published in the summer of 2008

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