Field and Flower Essences Revisited
Copyright 2011, Donna La Pré, all rights reserved
A concern that people use the essences well prompted writing these additional thoughts. So I thought it might be helpful if I were to unfold and articulate
some more of the inner “missing steps” that make using the essences
more intelligible and also indicate their deeper purpose as a way of discovery
if we are to understand anything about them and the worlds of consciousness
they indicate. The essences invite as much of you as is consciously available,
into the essential “kingdom of goodness”, where life-forms connect
with their spiritual archetypal integrity.
Beginning with the right concepts for using the essences will aid the process. One crucial point is that the essences are not a quick fix. Even though they are in the form of a liquid remedy, contained in a bottle and applied in a seemingly easy manner, much has gone into the distillation you see before you. Working with the essences asks participation from you, to become an increasingly conscious experiencer, as well as “applier”.
One basis for this participation is a profound and patient attentiveness. The moment you set this as a “goal”, “I want to be inwardly quiet and patient”, of course noise and impatiences usually announce themselves! This doesn’t signify lack of spiritual qualification, as a worth-judgement, but rather, reveals the opportunity to develop soul capacities.
One, we can unfold and discover what our impatiences and noise are and do. Two, we can work to develop the kind of attention that building, over time, with practice, instills a core of inner, alive quietness, while periods of noise and impatience simultaneously show themselves. Three, we can continue, over time, to observe how this core and noise, our ability to experience both, more as separate states and co-existing ones and also having one state predominate at times. With a really deepened practice in observing one’s thinking and feeling, eventually it even becomes possible to experience the boundary shifts, from noise to quietude......
The more we deepen our capacities of such attention, eventually the more we can begin or expand being able to sense, feel and think the soul and spiritual realities of the mineral, plant, animal and also human kingdoms.
Therefore, the call is to work towards a meditative and contemplative. You are offering the patterns contained in these liquids as a form of healing and balancing nutriment for the elemental beings in nature, within your land or plants, etc. You are also offering a communication bridge between you and the elementals. As what we give has significance to what is returned, it should be quite apparent, at least intellectually even, that the quality of focus, inner quiet and receptivity are important to an effective course of the essences activities. In other words, your inner preparation and presence is also a factor in what happens, only it takes place with in a different sphere of activity than something more physical, say, than cooking a meal, building a bench or sewing a dress.
In the ancient tradition of contemplative prayer, the active inner work stills the busyness of personal desires, mental chatter and material -world concerns. In a modern and whole body-soul-spirit practice, this effort turns the face of the attention faculty, without losing your inner body-awareness, towards the spiritual world, through the soul. In this tradition, a focus, prayer, sacred word, or image opens a communication pathway to the subtle world. In this case, working with the Earth Essences, it is the subtle world immediately proximate and interfacial to the physical, the etheric elemental realm, that is first possible to perceive,
Now, this pathway, as a field of relationship, requires tending, regularity, rhythm, devotion and intensive “listening. Applying the essences weekly, on the same day of the week each time, creates a devoted space of regular and rhythmic attention. We tend to our own inner state, also the impressions that arise in placing the drops of essence water. How do our impressions of each essence's effects, after application and “listening” and through the course of the week grow, deepen, change? How does the garden and plant, soil, etc. life appear to change or show you something from each week to week?
Each essence conveys pattern-recognition of an inner essence, a perceptible link to the living idea-being of the phenomena involved, of water, of soil, and so on. Every time you apply Water, for example, you have the opportunity to become familiar with the particular hallmark of water, registering on subtle, cognitive levels, of what makes Water “fluid” and distinguishable from the other elemental forms (though each element and being state can never be absolutely separated from each other). In addition, you may begin to notice nuances and facets of each element and form’s hallmark, which expand what is perceived, yet retain the essential. In other words, without ever losing sight of the integral entelechy in the variety of appearances, we can experience begin to experience all the possible permutations, morphological states, as we might see in the water-ness of water. For example water is experienced concretely as a liquid, or bodies of water (rivers, streams, oceans); phenomena of water: rain, mist; as an essential quality: fluidity; and in its temperature –induced changes into other states and elements: cold- ice-solid; warmth-chemical vapors-gaseous.
Further stages of contemplative observation, of entering the phenomena speaking
as themselves can engender a foundation for beholding relationships between
the elements; the etheric streams. Further on the path it may become possible
to perceive the activity and presence of the elementals and Devas, or what
some also call Angels. The essences facilitate a bridge to perceiving the
etheric, (or life-force activities) realm, through something tangible: an
etheric pattern-infused liquid. As part of the learning, we come to see
that physical phenomena are revelations of the deepest source of creative
life-force, in their activities of becoming, metamorphosing from one stage
to another.
We have the artist, philosopher, scientist Goethe to thank for this new method of knowledge, his Theory of Metamorphosis.
“It is not a question of emphasizing the fact that leaf, calyx, corolla
etcetera are plant organs identical with each other and unfolding out of
a common basic form. The essential point is Goethe’s conception of
the whole plant-nature as a living thing, and how he thought of the individual
parts as proceeding from the whole. His idea of the nature of the organism
is his central, most individual discovery in the realm of biology.”
R. Steiner, Goethe’s World Conception
Undertaken in receptive earnestness, with this lively, meditative attention we can open into and hone our perception of the life-force as it moves through the physical forms of nature. The activity of a leaf-form becoming the flower of the plant, or the stem form becoming the ovary is the invisible (non-material) phenomenon that becomes visible to our ability to think with Objective Imagination-capacities, where we can think along and within a life-form’s entelechy. We may begin to sense the connection between nature, ourselves and the spiritual feelings with the deepest spiritual Life-Force that gives rise to all of nature and its manifest forms and activities of life-force .The distinct feelings of Love may arise as issuing from our gardens, or “from” a plant or bird, even an insect or the clouds. We are coming closer to the Being that is the very Heart-Spirit of Nature.
In the course of evolution, in the Earth’s becoming, a great change occurred, 2,000 some years ago when the Sun-Spirit Christ initiated the Earth. Since the 13th century, a new etheric sphere has been forming around the earth, from the emanations of the Etheric Christ and enchristed spiritual beings, humans who worked and spiritually developed the capacities to receive the new mysteries of the Christ. Formerly incarnated on Earth, they will, if we work towards them, through conscious participation in self and world evolution/involution, help us to encounter the activities of the Cosmic Christ, at the etheric level in nature and ourselves and as etheric event in the spiritual regions. A transformative schooling in compassion, healing and streams of Love beyond anything we can imagine behind the feeble words and concepts also becomes possible. This encounter is the foundation seed-bed for eventual deep knowledge of karma, reincarnation, the mysteries of nature, the human being, soul and spiritual worlds, if we actively take up study in anthropsophical spiritual-science.
As this Etheric-ring sphere surrounding the Earth develops from special human works in spiritual development, also the world of elemental nature is undergoing a change. We assist a relatively new etheric counterpart to Nature forming, from the very way we treat and perceive the world of plants, animals and stones if we recognize the spiritual in nature and the elemental beings and act accordingly, even if only “as if” to begin with. The quality of this formation also is contingent upon our capacities to love with even our very hands, our willingness, as well as hearts; with our senses as well as our thoughts; that we become peaceful, receptive to the spirit-equivalent of sun-gold light which we can perceive in the plant world: a fresh, renewing sweetness of breath, perfume and wholesome healing offerings.
Our work in human evolution is to make this appeal a conscious one. The Devic beings, who hold and work with the archetypes of nature forms, also human creations; and the nature spirits, who work in closer, more local and specialized activity with the actual physical forms on earth, require our acknowledgment, recognition and gratitude. They also need our willing participation to communicate with us and help us. Humans are no longer meant to be as naive children, looking to the spiritual realms psychologically as external parent figures. Nor are we meant to be as ruthless, selfish despots, commanding the soul-spiritual to our personal desires, from egoistic motives, which are quite bluntly in consequences and effects, “darkened ”. What we are meant to do, is to eventually come to know the magnitude beyond mere intellectuality: a fully conscious and co-ordinated thinking, feeling, willing, directed activity in our rightful belonging–place to creation, a self-spiritually aware human of the Creative-Creating . Then, eventually, we may come to co-create with the multiplicity of Beings in the body of the Cosmic Christ.
A conscious embodiment of spirituality is a subtle, subtle doing with, in contrast to a doing for or to; or being done or done to. Here, rather it is a state of simultaneous doing with the Spirit Creative-Creating. Our attention becomes whatever we are attending in perception, in everyday consciousness though, this very attention and activity is unconscious, or perhaps fleetingly conscious, as a seeing something out of the corner of your eye kind of seeing.
Our untrained, un-free everyday attention is split into perceptions and thinking, or having thoughts. With a carefully trained and ripened attention, though, we can experience qualities of spiritual individuating presences as intelligent activities, living qualities. A sense of their “movements” which are permeated with the intention of their active qualities is possible to experience. The individuating presences or beings are facets of Love, the great fundament of Creative-Creating, and the forms of its Soul and our own: devotion, balance, faithfulness, selflessness, compassion, courtesy, equanimity, patience, truth, courage, and discernment. *
With wonder, reverence and awe, coupled with a schooling in Goethean scientific
observation, we may find ourselves arriving and returning but always beginning
a new, at a new garden gate, leading into a world-garden of Beauty, Truth
and Goodness.The Earth Essences are like an essence river we can travel
with to this land, at the same time working to heal our portion of land
and garden and ourselves.
*See Rudolf Steiner’s Calendar of the Soul;
also Robert Sardello’s The Power of Soul
If you become really interested in understanding “phenomenology”,
which is rooted in Goethe’s scientific viewpoint, these works may
appeal:
Nature’s Open Secret/Rudolf Steiner
Goethe’s Science of Living Form: The Artistic Stages/Nigel
Hoffman
Goethe’s Theory of Knowledge/Rudolf Steiner
Goethe On Science/Jeremy Nydler, Ed.
The Wholeness of Nature/Henri Bortoft