The Lost Landscape of Mystery

I know, talking to the Fae is not always good idea. Same with not talking to the Fae, if by that term we mean a whole host invisible to our senses entities with their own interior sentient self-consciousness, and lets be honest: opinionated, on occasion unruly, wise the way only someone immortal is wise, … kind of “human” in a way (where do you think we get “our” nature?).

In my book on The Mystery of Evil, I identified six types or classes with which we have intimate connections. The guardian angel is one, the tempter another. Among aboriginal peoples in the US of A there is the story of the two wolves. In the Koran, the sneaking whisperer, from among the jinn and mankind.

The holy spirit is there when we have a bright idea. If we have an addiction, we are intimate with an egregore, a kind of psychic parasite in a way, … attend rightly to this self-created wounded creature, for it tells an interesting tale. Then there are the “pricks of conscience”, what some call the higher ego. These interrogatories between upper and lower involve a kind of courtship, with a lot of fire, and end in a complex marriage as we age.

Three above: holy spirit, and guardian angel, and higher ego. Three below, the tempter, the personal collection of bad habits, and the super-jerk Tomberg called: the “prosecutor”. That Being is pretty much around whenever we are depressed. Kind of a mirror of all our worst flaws – often relentless. We look inside and the dark looks back, mirroring us to us. A kind of personal Dorian Grey’s picture in our own mind/soul nexus. Want to banish it when we finally notice our “depression”? Inwardly ask this “feeling”: What is your name? Three times helps. There actually is a lot of viable folk wisdom to recover, should we try.

Keep the same “model” (six intimate with one) in mind, but expand the scale. Take in the whole world as having billions of folk, all with their own personal Fae.

Among the Fae are certain powers that manifest in what we call the appetites. We could mentally view that world as having communities, of similar “tastes”. Our problem today is that much that is invisible is also visible, except we don’t know it. Wonderful beings are the inside of all the outsides we experience. Our appetites are, in a certain kind of way: holy. They are free of sin.

No hunger, no energy. No desire, no babies. No dancing, no fun.

As a child we are taught, by Mother-gravity, run too fast, fall down, go boom. Today a whole civilization is playing at run too fast, fall down fast, go boom fast. Mother in this Now giving us a time out, to consult with our invisible friends. All alive and with us, in this time of intense personal gravitas.

While I’ve pointed toward this elsewhere, these cognitions are essential: There are Eight Gates to Faerie, and they come in pairs: Living and Dying (the will/fire principle); Waking and Sleeping (the intellect/air principle); Sanity and Madness (the feeling/water principle); and, Remembering and Forgetting (the earth/consciousness principle). Living … Waking … Sanity … Remembering. Dying … Sleeping … Madness … Forgetting.

Many of us know of Faerie in the remembered tales of the little folk. Disciplines like Wicca and such are seeking to re-engage with the Fae. Why? The enchantment of humanity, … the placing of a veil between us and the Fae, began in the Age when the Hebrews fled the polytheistic Egyptian mysteries, to found the first of three patriarchal monotheisms. These three are one Mystery, by the way. https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2020/05/30/for-people-of-faith-of-whatever-rite/

We talk to our pets, and we talk to our plants. The Fae listen. We pray, and the Fae listen. When we see something of the order of: what goes around comes around; or when one door closes another door opens; or the Universe gives and takes – we are observing the influence of the Fae on the course of our individual biographies.

For the Aristotelian mind set, Rudolf Steiner used the terms: the spiritual world. For the Platonists – devotes of the Mother – Faerie* works just as well given the magical mystical aspects which Steiner had to avoid if he wanted folk lost in the enchantment to look up to the spirit, and yet not lose the modern Mystery Way of Knowledge we call Science.

*[the Underworld, the Upside Down, the Lost Cities … each region of the world has its memories – practice spirit recollection where you live.]

As to the “Enchantment” – which Steiner labeled: the Ahrimanic Deception – we run here into a flaw/problem of Steiner’s own personality.

Given the state of the Intellectual Soul, to which Steiner had to speak and write, dealing with the question of good and evil was very difficult. Social life at that time was wound up into that dichotomy like an ever-ringing, badly sprung, alarm clock. This necessary confusion also could not be avoided, for what sane person of that time could imagine that from the point of view of the Mystery there is no good or evil.

Human beings are vested – psychologically – in seeing evil in the world as a means to explain their trials of experience. Steiner was not the one to deal with that problem directly. So even though he wrote such poetic confusion, as: evil is something not in the right time for it, … to deal with the question directly was again a social mind-field facing a genius – of his character and level – trying to establish spirit in a scientific frames of reverence.

Sympathy and antipathy are natural feelings. We go toward the former, and run from the latter – when we can. Christ was, however, terse about this: Judge Not. That practice can lead to recognizing in those feelings a self-generated perceptual element that needs to be raised into full consciousness. That we like and dislike aspects of existence is necessary to the development of “I”ness. The problem comes when we mistake our instinctive feelings for the true nature of the object that arouses them.

So Christ teaches us about the mote and the beam, and how we need to fix our own beam before we ever get around to being able to help another with their mote.

It is possible to think about all the various “dualities” we have, mostly born in our particular culture, and its stories. The Mystery doesn’t use the ideas we have of Good&Evil, but rather Positive&Negative. Why?

Living and Dying. Waking and Sleeping. Sanity and Madness. Remembering and Forgetting. Every qualitative cognition is incomplete without its polar opposite. Hot and Cold. In and Out.

The Mystery … and falling-to-completion human beings.

Any qualitative polarity is at Its Roots, a Unity. “I and the Father are One”. He and She. Us and Them. Visible and Invisible. Studies of the Emerald Tablet are helpful. Issac Newton was quite interested. https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2019/07/27/memories-in-the-dreaming/

The pandemic-Pandemonium is such a polarity/unity. The details of that are important, so I will only offer a link here: https://thecollectiveimagination.com/2020/04/19/she-has-the-whole-world-in-his-hands/

Lurking in the undertow of events, is the emergence of what might appear to be man-made intelligence – super quantum computers, and the potential for Artificial Intelligence that we fear will end up not only ruling us, but perhaps destroying humanity, in a single crushing blow. Sky-net … anyone?

Our movies are full of dark dreams, made and thought into existence by remarkable artists. Art speaks in ways the intellect cannot. Yet, is it not odd that our worry is that something invisible will come to exist in our machines, when we live right in the midst of a sense world, which is already a veil for grand and magical intelligences.

On TV folk wonder about intelligences from other worlds, similar to ours in a material sense, being the teachers of humanity throughout or history and social evolution. UFO’s in the sky are thought to be from other planets, in other galaxies, sending us their envoys – with either dark or benign intentions.

There is a famous scientific question, called the Fermi Paradox. In outer space there has to be empires of intelligent life: Why have they not contacted us?

The enchanter into materialism (all is matter, there is no spirit), is the last act of a Drama as old as Eternity. Steiner named him: Ahriman, and mixed that up with good and evil, in a culture full of legends of demons. When the Wiccans and such “new age” folk re-awoke to the Goddess, a famous scientist was to worry those false ideas – of a demon-haunted world – would destroy all scientific progress.

Among the Fae is a story: It reveals Ahriman, lying at the feet of the Mother on Judgment Day, begging Her forgiveness for all that his Nature seemed to have caused.

There already is an invisible inside to manufactured (nature rearranged) devices. Our technology does not stop being an aspect of the Creation, however. Just as we are the right person, in the right place, at the right time … so are the Fae.

Try to imagine a near cosmic being, whose “nature” (virtue/tale) is “geometry”. This aspect of Faerie is part of a community, whose unified tales are a symphony. God geometrisizes Plato is alleged to have opined. “Man as Symphony of the Creative Word” sez Rudolf Steiner.

The closer we get to the primal unity, the fewer the distinctions that can be made. Ahriman and Lucifer (to use Steiner’s nomenclature) are a polarity, which is also a unity. The unity aspect is also manifested in the Father/Son unity. What Steiner did not do was place the Mother in this tableaux. That why is a less important tale, than what the situation looks like when we seek to understand and know: the Mothers.

Primal Unity: One. First Duality: Father and Mother, or one and many, aka: order and chaos.

Chaos = the Pandemonium … that’s Her. A secondary unity, following the first duality, is the Son. Keep in mind that these Folk are not separate like us, but within each other – united powers, showing different “faces and qualities” according to the requirements of the “situation”.

Most of our modern riddles and worries can be understood and made more pliable if we increase our contact with the Fae. Want to learn about Rogue Weather (that’s Her)? Start to cultivate an I and thou relationship with the Beings of clouds&sky. See the movie Arrival, and get and read Ruskin’s “The Queen of the Air”.

Want to heal the environment of all the crap we’ve dumped on it, and are told will be there forever? What the Fae made, the Fae can unmake. Already there are botanists who study the ancient chaos of our yet preserved forests: old growth, yet virginal and primeval – a laboratory for Her alchemical arts and crafts. We just need to ask, seek, and knock on the invisible doors to Faerie, to find ways to tame tech, to tame corporations, and to build living ships to travel among the planets.

To the stars, no. What we call the stars are effects of the forces of counter or peripheral space, which is not three dimensional, but two. Gravity and Levity (mistakenly called dark matter). “In It (the Word) was Life, and the Life was the Light of the World.”

One of the confusions born of Steiner’s human limitations, is that Steiner readers can have the idea of the Inner Earth being a place of evil, even “black magic.” This mistaken perception on his part, comes from the fact that he sought to “investigate as a spiritual scientist” the Realms of the Mother and Her Court. What he thought he found (good and evil) is something he brought with him that is out of phase with the reality. To go to Her requires surrender. We go as flawed and human. Not to “study”, but to meet and know.

Earth existence, as we know it via the senses, has an Inside, just as do we. This Realm is Faerie, and it is populated by beings of such power and grace that the Greeks called them: Titans. Rogue Weather, that’s Her and Her friends. She holds the reins of the Four Horseman. The Gate of Death is managed by Her, and those human priests/shamans able to visit in full consciousness.

Christ went there on a Saturday. http://ipwebdev.com/hermit/Clarke5.html