Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Fall 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard,  "The Other Worlds of Emanuel Swedenborg" Quest 110:4, pg 29-34

 by Richard Smoley 

The concept of other worlds—that is, the idea that there are other planets in the solar system and, possibly, the universe with inhabitants recognizably like our own—has a longer history in the West than one may first imagine. The idea can be traced back to the Greek philosophers Leucippus (fifth century BC), Democritus (c.460‒c.370 BC), and Epicurus (341‒270 BC), who were the first to formulate an atomistic theory of the universe. Atoms in this sense consist of small, invisible, and indivisible particles of which all things were composed. All things were generated by their combinations and recombinations, including the sun, the stars, and the planets.

Since the number of atoms was supposed to be infinite, it would follow that the number of worlds would be infinite as well. One ancient source characterized Democritus’s views as follows:

He spoke as if the things that are were in constant motion in the void; and there are innumerable worlds, which differ in size. In some worlds there is no sun and moon, in others they are larger than in our world, and in others more numerous. The intervals between the worlds are unequal; in some parts there are more worlds, in others fewer; some are increasing, some at their height, some decreasing; in some parts they are arising, in others falling. There are some worlds devoid of living creatures or plants or any moisture. (Hippolytus, Refutation of All Heresies, 1.13.2; in Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, 417‒18)

This account has proved remarkably robust: the views of a modern physicist could be described in the same way with only slight changes in wording. Democritus’ theory is all the more impressive because there was no empirical evidence for the existence of these other worlds until much later: the moons of Jupiter would not be discovered until the seventeenth century, and exoplanets—planets in other solar systems—would not be discovered until the late twentieth century.

Democritus’ views about other worlds were derived from the implications of his basic theory. The same could be said of all theories of other worlds until well into the early modern era. Aristotle, for example, held quite a different view of the universe, based largely on his own system of physics. The universe was composed of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water, each of which had its own natural motion and place—that is, its own natural position toward which it moved unless otherwise impeded: earth tended to move toward the center of the world; fire moved away from it, with the other two elements occupying places in between. For Aristotle, then, there could only be one world, because if there were more worlds, earth would have two directions in which to move—a possibility that he did not admit (Dick, 14‒18).

The Aristotelian worldview consisted of a central and static earth, around which the five known planets and the two luminaries revolved in concentric circles in this order: the moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, beyond which was the sphere of fixed stars. This picture of the universe, with elaborations by the astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (c. AD 90‒c.168), would prevail in the West until the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century.

Nevertheless, the debate about other worlds and extraterrestrial life surfaced from time to time in antiquity. One example appears in a dialogue by Plutarch (AD c.46‒c.120) entitled On the Face on the Orb of the Moon. Plutarch discusses whether the moon is habitable and indeed inhabited. Although the treatise is more literary than scientific in intent and reaches no definitive conclusion, it does not attempt to prove that the moon cannot be inhabited, leaving the ultimate answer open.

Another, lighter approach was taken in a romance by the Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata (c.AD 120‒after 185) entitled The True History, which tells of a journey to the moon by Lucian and his cohorts. Hailed by some as the first work of science fiction, it is clearly satirical and does not indicate any genuine belief in life on other planets on the author’s part. The book has exercised some influence over the centuries—but almost entirely on satirists and not on scientists (Dick, 20‒22).

 In the high medieval period, Aristotle’s views, reintroduced to the West by the Arabs and harmonized with Christianity by figures such as Thomas Aquinas, came to dominate the world of Catholic thought to the point of approaching religious dogma. Hence at this time the idea of other worlds was in eclipse, and was only rescued in 1277, when Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris (c.1210‒79) issued a condemnation of 219 beliefs that he called heretical; among these was the notion that “the First Cause [i.e., God] cannot make many worlds” (Dick, 28). Again the belief in other worlds was not in itself of primary concern: Tempier was not so much concerned to protect it as to oppose any notion that might suggest limits to divine power.

Other late medieval thinkers considered the possibility of inhabited worlds, including the German cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401‒64) and the Franciscan theologian William Vorilong (d. 1464), who contended that “not one world alone, but that infinite worlds, more perfect than this one, lie hid in the mind of God,” and that such a world could have intelligent inhabitants that “would exist from the virtue of God, transported into that world” (in Crowe, 27).

After Copernicus

The debate about extraterrestrial life began to take its present form with the Copernican revolution, which posited the sun rather than the earth as the center of the universe. By displacing the earth in this way and positioning it as merely one of several planets, the Copernican theory opened new ground for other-worlds discussions, although Copernicus himself did not engage in it (Dick, 63).

It took the original and highly controversial scholar Giordano Bruno (1548‒1600) to bring the issue forward again. In a 1584 work entitled De l’infinito universo et mondi (“On the Infinite Universe and Worlds”), Bruno argued that the stars were suns, these planets had “earths” orbiting them, and that both these suns and these “earths” contained inhabitants (in Crowe, 49). Bruno’s views, on this and many other subjects, attracted the disfavor of the Catholic Church, and the Inquisition burned him at the stake in Rome in 1600. While he was willing to recant on some of his theological criticisms of church doctrine, he held to his belief in infinite worlds till the end.

In the early seventeenth century, the debate resumed with renewed vigor because of a revolutionary discovery by the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564‒1642). Using the newly invented telescope, he observed that Jupiter had four moons orbiting it. This advanced the theory of heliocentrism (which at that time had not yet been fully accepted): if Jupiter could have moons, the earth could certainly have one moon while revolving around the sun.

Johannes Kepler (1571‒1630) took this argument one step further: “Our moon exists for us on the earth, not for the other globes. Those four little moons exist for Jupiter, not for us. Each planet in turn, together with its occupants, is served by its own satellites. From this line of reasoning we deduce with the highest degree of probability that Jupiter is inhabited” (in Crowe, 60‒61).

This argument reveals a great deal about the nature of scientific debate in the era. Kepler was arguing that the cosmos was created for a purpose, namely to serve man, or at any rate a being like him. The sun, moon, and planets could be said to serve man’s purposes (in providing light and heat and so forth), but what possible use to humanity could the moons of Jupiter serve? As a result, Jupiter must be inhabited, because it must have rational beings for whom the moons were created.

As this discussion shows, teleology was extremely important in the causal thinking of the early modern scientists: in order to consider why something should exist, we need to look at, not only what brought it about (its effective cause, to use the Aristotelian term) but its final cause. Without a final cause, a purpose, a thing had no place in the universe—a conclusion which cast aspersions on the wisdom of God in his arrangement of the cosmos, and which was therefore inadmissible. This argument would soon look untenable; in certain ways, the history of early modern science is the history of the expulsion of the final cause from scientific reasoning—to the point where today practically any teleological concept is taboo in mainstream scientific discussion.

Galileo, no doubt mindful of Bruno’s fate, was chary of advancing the idea of other worlds (Dick, 90), although his caution did not save him from condemnation by the Inquisition and lifelong house arrest for advocating heliocentrism.

The French philosopher René Descartes (1596‒1650) showed caution as well. His Principia philosophiae (“Principles of Philosophy”) set forth the first new physical system since Aristotle—one that propounded the existence of innumerable vortices in the universe, at the center of each of which was a fixed star. While this naturally suggested the possibility of other planets with inhabitants on them, Descartes remained carefully agnostic on this point (Dick, 111‒12).

This was not the case with Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657‒1757), one of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment. In a 1686 work entitled Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (“Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds”) Fontenelle explicitly tied Descartes’s concept of vortices to the possibility of other worlds. The Entretiens was a light, witty book, which meant two things: (1) Fontenelle could hide behind the veil of jest in propounding his ideas, which he nonetheless took at least somewhat seriously; and (2) the Entretiens became enormously popular, going through many editions in the late seventeenth century (Dick, 123‒26), widely disseminating the idea of other worlds among the literate public.

The Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens (1629‒95) took a more serious tack but drew similar conclusions in his Cosmotheoros (“Observer of the Universe”), posthumously published in 1698. Like Kepler, Huygens uses teleological arguments to advance the idea of other inhabited planets: they must have life because life better manifests divine Providence than lifeless planets, and without it “we should sink [the planets] below the Earth in Beauty and Dignity; a thing that no Reason will permit” (in Dick, 130).

The second half of the Cosmotheoros discusses the nature of life on these planets—obviously a wholly speculative discussion, although it is based on observed phenomena as the relative distance of each planet from the sun (Huygens believed that, although Mercury would, from its proximity to the sun, receive nine times more heat than the earth, he also contended that its inhabitants would be adapted to these conditions.)

Although Isaac Newton (1642‒1727) did not explore this idea in any great detail, it was in his time and place—late seventeenth-century England—that the concept of other worlds became part of mainstream scientific opinion, being propounded by figures such as Richard Bentley (1662‒1742), William Whiston (1667‒1752), and William Derham (1657‒1735). One reason for this occurrence was that England permitted much greater liberty of religion than existed in the Catholic world, or even in many other Protestant countries. Another was that the great religious wars of the previous century had weakened faith in Scripture as testimony to God’s will and providence, and correspondingly strengthened the desire to see God’s handiwork in the natural universe. Because, as the argument went, the majesty and wisdom of God would be better demonstrated in a plurality of worlds rather than in a single one, many scientists began to incline toward this wider perspective.

Swedenborg’s Scientific Period

	The Portrait of Emanuel Swedenborg, by Per Krafft the Elder, is from 1766. It shows Swedenborg at age seventy-five, holding the soon to be published manuscritpt of his Apocalypsis Revelata ("Apocalypse Revealed"). Image by courtesy of the Swedenborg Foundation.

In an early phase of his thought, the great Swedish visionary Emanuel Swedenborg (1688‒1772) reflects some of these themes and concerns. Swedenborg’s early works were scientific. One of them, ThePrincipia (1734), includes a short chapter entitled “The Diversities of Worlds” (Swedenborg, Principia, 2:240‒48) His arguments here, recapitulating many themes of the debate from the earliest times, argue in favor of the idea of other worlds.

Swedenborg begins with what is sometimes called “the argument from plenitude,” contending that nature “is most profusely fertile and ever essaying at further ends, inasmuch as she is never at rest, but always desirous to advance and extend the bounds of her dominion.” Like many of his predecessors, he argues that divine glory and omnipotence suggest that this is not only possible but likely: “Nor is there anything to prevent us from conjecturing that at the will of the deity may arise fresh systems at every moment; for there is nothing to shew that it is physically impossible” (Principia, 2:240‒41). At the end of the chapter he will say that God “can give birth to nature not only after the manner in which it is presented to our view in this world, but in ways infinitely diversified” (Principia, 2:247‒48).

 Just how diversified? Just how much could these worlds differ from one another? The problem exercised Newton, who wrote in a letter to Richard Bentley:

And since Space is divisible in infinitum, and Matter is not necessarily in all places, it may also be allow’d that God is able to create Particles of Matter of several Sizes and Figures, and in several Proportions of Space, and perhaps of different Densities and Forces, and thereby to vary the Laws of Nature, and make Worlds of several sorts in several Parts of the Universe. At least I see nothing of contradiction in all this. (In Dick, 146‒47)

Swedenborg’s answer is similar but not identical. While he does admit great variances in the properties of other worlds, he also holds that some principles will apply universally: “In every mundane system, the principles of geometry continue to be similar; as also nature and mechanism, as to first principles and force; and that the diversity consists only in the diversity of the series, in respect to degrees, ratios, and figures” (Principia, 2:245‒46).

Swedenborg is arguing that certain basic principles will remain constant in all systems, such as the laws of geometry (non-Euclidean geometries would not be developed until the nineteenth century), as well as “nature and mechanism, inasmuch as its motive forces cannot be separated from geometry.” These principles remain, as it were, axiomatic, but the series and modes in which they operate can vary; the elements may display different properties; in some worlds, even, the animals might be “deprived of the use of their senses” (Principia, 2:246).

From these two passages it would seem that Newton is more ready to admit possible variations in basic principles than Swedenborg is. Whichever view one takes, however, the same question applies: how different can these worlds be from our own before they are unknowable to us? This question is not addressed. While Swedenborg says that the phenomena of these other worlds might differ so much that “the learned of those worlds . . . might excite only a smile from the learned of ours” (Principia, 2:247), he does not ask whether they might differ so much that the learned of these worlds would be totally and irreversibly isolated from us.

Swedenborg goes on to say that these systems, which could arise at different times, would nonetheless display some resemblance to the Earth’s own life cycle: “We may also conjecture, that each earth in its infancy would be similar to ours in its infancy.” Swedenborg associates this “infancy” with the Golden Age of the earth, suggesting that each of these worlds would “exhibit the bloom of youth in its infant state.”

Swedenborg admits that the concept of other worlds is speculative: “from a mere possibility . . . we cannot reason to actuality” (Principia, 2:241). He goes on to emphasize the limits of our knowledge, not only of these putative other worlds, but even of our own: “In the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdom, what we now know is nothing to what we have yet to learn; for of that of which our senses are unconscious, the soul also is ignorant” (Principia, 2:247). Like everyone else before him in this debate, Swedenborg in his scientific phase comes across the immovable barrier created by the lack of empirical evidence.

Visions of Planetary Beings

It would prove otherwise in Swedenborg’s theological period, which started around 1745, when he began to experience visions of unseen realms, including heaven, hell, and the spirit world. At this point, Swedenborg does attempt to provide empirical evidence for the existence of other worlds and other beings—the evidence being his own experience. He begins his short work Other Planets by describing his experiences with spirits from the planets known in his time: Mercury, Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus, and the moon (in that order). He then proceeds to beings from planets outside the solar system, of which he enumerates five. He does not seem to know of any further planets in our solar system, in keeping with the knowledge of his day: Uranus would not be discovered until 1781, nine years after his death.

These experiences differ radically from later encounters with extraterrestrial creatures, real or imagined, in one chief respect: Swedenborg is not dealing with these beings as they lived in physical form, but rather with their spirits. Nonetheless, he makes it clear that these spirits originally had physical bodies on their respective planets, just as inhabitants of earth have.

Swedenborg does not appear to be interested in drawing general conclusions about beings from other worlds, or what this might imply for scientific knowledge; rather he limits himself to concrete descriptions of these inhabitants, their patterns of mind, and their way of life. His work has one chief purpose: to show that “not enough people come into heaven from our world to make up [the] universal human. We are relatively few, and there must be people from many other worlds. So the Lord has provided that the moment any nuance of quality of substance of this responsive relationship is missing anywhere, people from another world are immediately summoned who fill the need so that the proper proportion is established and heaven therefore stands firm” (Swedenborg, Other Planets, 9).

In Swedenborg’s thought, the universal human (maximus homo in Latin) is a gigantic heavenly being of which each individual is a cell. The spirits of the planet Mercury, for example, correspond to “memory, specifically memory of things beyond things of earth and of mere matter” (Other Planets, 9).

It is tempting to look for some connection between Swedenborg’s descriptions of these spirits and the characteristics of the planets as they were portrayed in the Western esoteric tradition and in astrology. In general, the correspondences are present but faint. See, for example, a typical description of the characteristics of Mercury by Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486‒1535) in his classic work De occulta philosophia (“On the Occult Philosophy”):

Mercury is called the son of Jupiter, the crier of the gods, the interpreter of gods, Stilbon, the serpent-bearer, the rod-bearer, winged on his feet, eloquent, bringer of gain, wise, rational, robust, stout, powerful in good and evil, the notary of the Sun, the messenger of Jupiter, the messenger betwixt the supernal and infernal gods, male with males, female with females, most fruitful in both sexes, and Lucan calls him the arbitrator of the gods. He is also called Hermes, i.e., interpreter, bringing to light all obscurity, and opening those things which are most secret. (Agrippa, 2:49, 427)

Some traits of this occult Mercury are echoed in Swedenborg’s Mercurial spirits: in their collection and retention of impressions from many worlds (see Other Planets, 15) they can be said to have a kind of role as messengers; moreover, like the itinerant messenger of the gods, “they do not settle down in one place, . . . but roam through the universe” (Other Planets, 24). On the other hand, unlike the communicative Mercury of the occult philosophy, “bringing to light all obscurity,” Swedenborg’s Mercurians have a “custom of not giving direct answers to questions,” and “have a distaste for verbal speech” (Other Planets, 17).

Although these resemblances are faint, we can still ask whether Swedenborg was somehow influenced by this occult philosophy, which was then much more widely known and respected than it is in our day. The answer is difficult to give, and will certainly vary with one’s approach to Swedenborg’s writings as a whole. Those who take his writings as the fruit of divine inspiration will insist that he was reporting his own spiritual experiences and that he was not at all influenced by these earlier traditions. A more skeptical reader might be willing to see some traces of this influence on Swedenborg.

It is also tempting to correlate Swedenborg’s description of these planetary inhabitants with Dante’s astrological schema in The Divine Comedy, which is particularly evident in the Paradiso. In his ascent through the concentric spheres of the planets (Dante’s schema is based on Aristotle’s), Dante encounters souls at every level that embody the virtues of that planet. The moon, being the most rapidly changing of the heavenly bodies, is the realm of the inconstant. Mercury is the realm of seekers after glory. Venus, the planet of love, is the domain of lovers; the sun is the realm of the wise; Mars, of the warriors of the faith; Jupiter, of just rulers; Saturn, of contemplatives. While not absolutely identical to the occult schema in Agrippa’s Renaissance text, it is certainly close enough.

All of this is very far from Swedenborg. He does not take the planets in their traditional order; his descriptions of the beings of each planet bears only a faint resemblance to their astrological correspondents; he does not view his own journey in the form of an ascent; nor are the planets spheres of heaven. His extraterrestrials are human, or humanoid, with faults of their own. Mercurians, “because of their wealth of experience,” are more inclined to pride (Other Planets, 16). On Jupiter (traditionally the most benign and beneficent of all the planets) we find practitioners of a sinister priestcraft, who “call themselves saints and demand that their servants . . . call them ‘lords,’” and prohibit these servants from “worshipping the Lord of the universe, saying that they are mediators of that Lord and that their requests will be forwarded to the Lord of the universe” (Other Planets, 70). On Venus, those from the side that faces Earth “are savage and almost feral,” as well as “stupid, with no interest in heaven or eternal life” (Other Planets, 108).

On the whole, however, the inhabitants of Swedenborg’s other worlds seem to be better and kinder than those on Earth. Those who inhabit the side of Venus that faces away from Earth are “gentle and humane” (Other Planets, 108), while Mercurians “are completely unconcerned about earthly and physical matters” (Other Planets, 12). Spirits from Jupiter “are much wiser than spirits from our planet” (Other Planets, 61). Those from Mars “are some of the best from all the worlds in our solar system” (Other Planets, 85). Those from Saturn are “trustworthy and modest” and “profoundly humble in their worship” (Other Planets, 97‒98). Swedenborg does not mention the moral characteristics of the spirits of the moon, no doubt because his description of them is so short (Other Planets, 111‒12).

One last characteristic of these extraterrestrial spirits is worth noting. They do not seem in the slightest bit technologically advanced. Of the spirits from Mars, we learn that “the standard diet on their earth was fruit from trees . . . along with vegetables. They wore clothes that they made from the fibers of the bark of particular trees” (Other Planets, 93). Indeed the inhabitants of Jupiter seem somewhat apelike: “they do not walk upright like the inhabitants of our planet . . . but help themselves along with the palms of their hands” (Other Planets, 55).

Taken as a whole, the lives of these beings seem to resemble that of the primitive humanity of the classical Golden Age. Swedenborg himself contends that “the earliest peoples on our planet lived like that” (Other Planets, 49).

The modern notion of technologically advanced extraterrestrials is completely absent from Swedenborg. Contemporary speculations about extraterrestrials, focusing on visitors to our planet from other planets, presuppose technological sophistication: they could not reach us if they were not far more advanced than us. For Swedenborg, this requirement is unnecessary: no spaceships are required to encounter extraterrestrial beings in the world of spirits.

Swedenborg’s vision of other worlds reveals two main themes. The first, and most important, is the vastness of the universe and the complete inadequacy of the earth alone to fully furnish the population of heaven. The second is an emphasis on certain core values—notably the need to acknowledge the primacy of spiritual as opposed to earthly reality and the need for moral sincerity, and the relative backwardness of the human race in this regard.

Swedenborg’s insistence that his encounters have taken place in the spiritual plane and not on earth have meant that his visions have had very little influence on the subsequent debate regarding extraterrestrials. Moreover, there is no evidence at present for life forms in this solar system that even remotely resemble humans.

One’s response to these facts will vary with one’s attitude toward Swedenborg’s thought as a whole. However literally or metaphorically one wishes to take his encounters with the spirits of planets from this solar system and others, they remain an integral part of his powerful and all-encompassing spiritual vision.

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Sources

Agrippa, Henry Cornelius. Three Books of Occult Philosophy. Translated by James Freake and edited by Donald Tyson. St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn, 1993 [1533]

Crowe, Michael J. The Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Antiquity to 1915: A Source Book. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.

Dick, Steven J. Plurality of Worlds: The Origins of the Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Kirk, G.S., J.E. Raven, and M. Schofield, eds. and trans. The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Swedenborg, Emanuel. The Earthlike Bodies Called Planets in Our Solar System and in Deep Space, Their Inhabitants, and the Spirits and Angels There, Drawn from Things Heard and Seen. Translated by George F. Dole. In Swedenborg, The Shorter Works of 1758: New Jerusalem, Last Judgment, White Horse, Other Planets. Translated by George F. Dole and Jonathan S. Rose. West Chester, Pa: Swedenborg Foundation, 2018.

———. The Principia; or, The First Principles of Natural Things. Translated by Augustus Clissold. Two volumes. Bryn Athyn, Pa.: Swedenborg Scientific Association, 1988 [1734].

Swedenborg’s works are conventionally numbered by sections; references are to these sections rather than to page numbers.

With permission from the Swedenborg Foundation, the above article was adapted from Richard Smoley’s introduction to Emanuel Swedenborg’s The Shorter Works of 1758, New Century Edition, trans. George F. Dole and Jonathan S. Rose (West Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg Foundation, 2018), 84–97.

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 Printed in the  Fall 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Trull, David,  "Pachamama, Sisyphus" Quest 110:4, pg 27-28

By David Trull

I am floating in azure water, and I cannot see the bottom. It simply recedes into blacker shades of blue. A thicket of vines dips into this limpid pool, cascading like Rapunzel’s hair from a hundred feet above, conveying the elixir of life to the trees at the earth’s surface. These seem to constantly shed their leaves, which shower me with a shimmering golden snow.

Although I do not speak, and my companions are mostly hushed, it is not silent. A flock of swallows is on the wing, careening in circles, round and round, again and again, crying out to each other in encouragement, in joy. Every so often, one of them departs the swarm to take a rest in one of the countless holes in the walls. I figure they must build their nests inside this pacified molten core, which once burned with unbridled fury.

Swimming with placid strokes, I do nothing but take it in: a cenote on the Yucatan peninsula, one of over 7,000 craters left by the impact of the Chicxulub impactor, the asteroid which concluded the reign of the dinosaurs.

 A few months before I swam in the cenote, I watched my friend’s four-year-old son for a few hours while she ran some errands. I decided to take him to the natural history museum (one of his favorite places). While the museum had all the usual trappings (fossils of undersea life, a planetarium, Native American artifacts), it was its collection of animatronic dinosaurs that drew children from far and wide.

As my young companion was taking in the roar of a T. Rex and the jerky swings of a stegosaurus’ tail, I began chatting with the docent. Because it had been twenty years or so since I had given much thought to the fate of the dinosaurs, I asked if it was still the current theory that the fearsome lizards met their doom at the hands of an asteroid strike. The docent assured me that this was not only still the going theory, but that scientists felt more convinced of it than ever. It was not only the dinos who vanished after this impact, she said, but three quarters of life on earth. The only survivors were microorganisms and ectothermic species like sea turtles and crocodilians. Small mammals (mostly under 25 pounds) survived, but suffered heavy losses. Burrowing species, because of their sheltered habitats, fared best.

This came as a bit of a shock to me. I had always assumed that only the most complex and fragile creatures—the dinosaurs and other large organisms—had perished from the climate changes brought on by the collision.

Curious, I embarked on a Wikipedia safari that evening. My topic? Extinction events. The Chicxulub impactor, I learned, catalyzed the K-Pg (Cretaceous-Paleogene) extinction event with an explosion equal to a million atomic bombs detonating simultaneously. The force of the impact sent countless shards of the asteroid ricocheting back and forth off the atmosphere, pummeling the earth’s surface over and over. The heat generated by this friction sparked mass fires, which consumed the vegetation across much of North America. Afterward, dense clouds of ash shrouded the planet in darkness for over ten years, halting photosynthesis. It is the most recent mass extinction, occurring about 66 million years ago.

The words “most recent” jumped out immediately. This had occurred more than once? I was startled to find that I was quite ignorant about the matter and continued digging.

The K-Pg explosion annihilated 75 percent of life on earth, but this was not even the greatest of the extinction events. The Permian-Triassic event, known as “The Great Dying,” which took place around 252 million years ago, takes home the blue ribbon for most catastrophic. Over 83 percent of genera vanished, as did 57 percent of biological families. When the Siberian Traps erupted in in this cataclysm, they choked the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, leading to oceanic anoxia (the depletion of oxygen) and acidification. Scientists estimate that it took close to 10 million years for life to rebound from this calamity.

But life did recover from the Great Dying, from the K-Pg event, and from the other horrendous volcanic eruptions and dark decades which pepper the annals of deep time.

I concluded my Wikipedia safari wiser, less naive than before. I had always pictured the evolution of life on earth as one continuous line. Certainly it would have had its ups and downs, like a biological stock market, but it never occurred to me that the entire process of evolution has been halted in its tracks multiple times, left to start over again nearly from scratch. I was in awe of its resilience.

The fact that such devastation has occurred multiple times leaves open the possibility, perhaps the inevitability, that such a grim day will come again. While the odds that I will be alive to experience the next cataclysm are slim, the thought of its inescapable return is a bit soul-crushing. That humanity, should we survive or resurface in something resembling our current form, would have to relearn the myriad lessons of our history, would have to rediscover fire, gravity, and the atom—the idea breaks my heart. I realized that at the end of my imagined straight line of development was some sort of final form, some ultimate realization of humanity’s potential, fully integrated with the universe. Considering the ineluctable extinction events encoded in the geological structure of our planet, is such a condition perpetually out of our grasp? Is evolution a Sisyphean task held at bay by the random crashing of comets and the discharge of volcanic pressure?

	Venus by Isabel Mariposa Galactica

As I gazed up at the sky—a golden disk—above me, such fears subsided. It occurred to me how reasonable it was for ancient peoples to worship the sun and the earth. If anything obscures the rays emanating from our star, every living thing perishes. To hinder photosynthesis is to smother life.

During my time in Mexico, I heard much mention of Pachamama. In Incan parlance, she is Mother Nature, the great mother who sustains life on earth. As culture evolves, the ideas of the Sun God and the Earth Mother recede into childlike standing, our dominion over natural forces recasting such beliefs as quaint relics. Yet they are perhaps the most fundamental, if not the most complex, of our spiritual intuitions. When there is a barrier between sun and earth, annihilation is the result. Once the smoke clears, their union miraculously awakens the seeds of life.

I felt that this strange crater, with its orbiting swallows and resplendent golden snow, stood as a monument to this union, to Pachamama and Helios, to life’s irrepressible exuberance. Despite planet-engulfing fires and decades of choking gloom, it would wait patiently for its time to come again. Perhaps some triumphant throne awaits humanity, a future integration of the rational and emotional forces we possess. The cenote is a testament to the endless patience this process requires, the eternal unfolding which must occasionally wait its turn to try once more. As Friar Laurence reminds Romeo and Juliet, “Wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast.”

David Trull has worked as a fireworks salesman, forensic tax researcher, railroad logistician, teacher, songwriter, and musician. He studied philosophy through a Great Books immersion program at Thomas Aquinas College in Ojai, California. A lifelong autodidact, he has advanced his explorations through a self-designed curriculum focused on the intersection of philosophy and theology. Raised in St. Louis, Trull now orbits between Santa Barbara, California, and the San Francisco Bay Area.

           

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 Printed in the  Fall 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Wyatt, Tim,  "Nature’s Secret Empires" Quest 110:4, pg 21-26

By Tim Wyatt 

Unseen and unrecognized by the vast majority of people, there is a hidden commonwealth of invisible, nonhuman entities creating, protecting, and renewing life forms in all of nature’s kingdoms. These unseen empires are widely mentioned throughout esoteric literature but are rarely discussed.

These kingdoms involve vast hierarchies of nature spirits, or elementals, operating in the four elements of air, earth, fire, and water, principally on the etheric and astral planes. At a higher level, there are even more powerful creative figures—the devas (translated from Sanskrit as shining ones), otherwise known as the angelic kingdoms, which operate on the mental and astral planes.

The precise relationship between these two separate evolutionary strands is complex. The devas are on an entirely separate evolutionary scheme from that of humans and are said to be more advanced than us (although some devas have passed through the human stage).

The relationship between devas and nature spirits is sometimes defined by describing the devas as the architects and the nature spirits or elementals as the builders. This is true but may be rather oversimplistic.

Theosophical and other esoteric literature has a lot to say about both classes of entities and the operations they conduct to continue their creative work, as do many sacred and religious texts. So it is interesting that it doesn’t come up as a subject for discussion very often. However, discussing elves, pixies, and gnomes to a nonspecialist audience is always going to be extremely challenging.

There are numerous descriptions of these nature spirits in practically every epoch and culture. In my own country, the United Kingdom, two centuries ago, when these spirits were still seen by some country people, they were often described as wearing clothes in a fashion from two or three centuries prior to that era. Intriguingly, some are portrayed as wearing skintight one-piece suits, like those worn by the often depicted grey aliens or other extraterrestrials or interdimensional entities. Indeed, some apparent sightings of beings supposedly from other worlds could in some cases be devas or nature spirits appearing in the physical spectrum.

Why are these classes of mainly invisible entities so vital to us and our world? Because without these hidden hosts there would be no life as we know it. These entities keep us alive, heal disease, and are central to our reproduction. They operate on animals and plants and in the mineral realms. They even play a pivotal role in the weather, as well as in natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. They are literally everywhere—operating in and immediately beyond our own bodies. They work on rocks, minerals, metals, and crystals. Every living thing in the plant and vegetable kingdom is intimately connected with individual or collective elementals. Every flower bud, tree, and vegetable relies on them as essential construction workers to build their forms.

Animals too have their invisible helpers, with nature spirits maintaining their bodies. These hidden legions create and perpetuate all life on the planet and the planet itself, which is of course a living, breathing organism, of which we are constituent parts.

Both angels and nature spirits feature prominently in the myths, religions, and folklore of virtually all cultures and epochs. In fact, it’s hard to find any exceptions to this at any time in history or any part of the world (until the recent past and present). But now they are largely forgotten. They’ve been banished by supposed rationality, by the hard logic of modernism, and by the resulting deep cynicism.

In recent centuries, these hierarchies have been squeezed further from view and made even more invisible by the domination of materialism and relentless industrialization. Mass migrations from the countryside to cities in virtually all countries has disconnected people from nature. Today these entities are widely seen as the crude superstitions of our allegedly primitive ancestors and are now completely ignored by the vast majority of people, even though they operate in urban areas.

These spirits are humanity’s most vital ally. Without them, we would be unable to live. But with our supreme hubris and arrogance, we’ve decided they don’t even exist. In the coming decades and centuries, this will have to change. We are destined to rediscover and cooperate much more widely with the inhabitants of these covert worlds. But how this will happen is far from clear.

Nature Spirits and Elementals

Nature spirits are often described as being linked to the four elements: the gnomes of the earth, the sylphs of the air, the undines of water, and the salamanders of fire. But this is mainly the Western classification, and there are numerous other ways of regarding them, depending on where you are in the world.

There are thousands of different names for nature spirits: fairies, elves, goblins, the trolls of Scandinavia, the leprechauns of Ireland, little people, the good folk, the djinn of the North African desert. In the Hindu pantheon alone, there are said to be 330 million separate types of spirits. The Australian aborigines call them wanjina, while Native American tribes such as the Zuni and Cree describe them as star people. The Pueblo people call them Anasazi.

When we were more closely in touch with nature, many more people could perceive nature spirits and devas, even though they’re not easy to detect with our very limited five physical human senses. This is because they exist not in physical form but etherically, astrally, and mentally.

The progressive industrialization of the world over the past two or three centuries have made the human mind even more materialistic. Now there is artificial lighting virtually everywhere. Few people experience the existence of these spirits in a dark forest, with only the moon for illumination. The majority live in bustling and busy towns and cities, with no close connection to the natural world. We also live in an age of ultracynicism, where the existence of magic or nonphysical realms is denied and derided and where we only accept what we can see, hear, smell, taste or touch. Today few even believe in the existence of these entities, and only a small minority with clairvoyant or clairaudient abilities can detect them at all, especially visually.

Another important factor banished these spirits from popular consciousness. From the Middle Ages onwards, the Catholic church and its successors went to war against them. It cynically transformed the elemental kingdoms into demon realms controlled by the Devil. They came to represent evil. The church declared these denizens members of a wicked and forbidden kingdom. It condemned those who perceived or communed with them as witches, sorcerers, necromancers, and devil worshippers and dealt with them accordingly, in torture chambers or at the stake. Although the church still believed in angelic presences, it insisted that these supposedly lower orders were not doing God’s work.

Nevertheless, even today people commune unconsciously with devas in woods, gardens, beaches, mountaintops, forests, and places of beauty, as well as in sacred places. A few people intuitively appreciate that this is a spiritual experience.

Why are so many millions of people (including me) instinctively drawn to beaches? The outward reason is that we like swimming in the sea or getting a suntan, but there are much deeper reasons for this attraction. The beach has entities from each of the four elements. There are the earth spirits of the beach itself. There are the undines and devas of the sea. We have the sylphs of the air, often manifesting as shifting clouds. And we have the salamanders of fire operating in places where there is most sunlight.

So, instinctively and unconsciously, many people are naturally drawn to these places where devas exist. They commune with flower devas in their gardens, water devas by rivers or lakes, or tree devas when they walk in a wood. They are in unconscious contact with the spirits of the mountains when they go hill walking. They do it, they enjoy it, but they don’t know why.

Characteristics of Nature Spirits

Elemental beings have two forms: a permanent astral body and a temporary, materialized etheric body. They can change their size and shape at will. They are affected by human thought and emotion.

Some nature spirits may be hostile to humans because we’ve systematically waged war on nature. The sylphs of the air may have been severely disrupted by pollution, electromagnetic radiation, or the thermonuclear explosions we’ve carried out, as well as by general warfare. The gnomes of the earth may resent mining and mineral extraction. (Miners have often reported seeing these entities.) The undines and other spirits of the rivers, lakes, and oceans have also faced pollution and the denaturing of water. The salamanders of fire are evident in volcanoes, wildfires, and heat waves.

Elementals are often portrayed as mischievous tricksters, who are somewhat hostile to humans. In many cultures, they are believed to steal children or abduct country folk at night. Victims are taken into an underground world for up to a year, although it seems like only a night.

Artificially created elementals for magical ceremonies can be potent and long-lasting. Some of these created for powerful rituals during Atlantean times are said to be still lingering on the astral plane.

Another key characteristic of nature spirits is obsession. In his 1920 Blavatsky lecture to the Theosophical Society, “Nature-Spirits and the Spirits of Elements,” D.N. Dunlop observed that nature spirits obsess not only human beings and animals but trees, pools, lakes, stones, and mountains.

Dunlop asserted that elementals could also obsess machines. Given the ubiquity of technology in the modern world, as well as the electromagnetic energy swirling everywhere, might there also exist hosts of machine entities? With the Internet and the rest of the digital infrastructure from satellites to rockets, we may well have artificially created an entire new class of machine spirits. Perhaps the silicon chip and the circuit board are their homes. Elementals may occupy our smartphones, computers, musical instruments, and even cars. Given that these entities respond strongly to emotion, might this explain why our cars won’t start and our laptops go wrong when we are angry or agitated?

Devas and Angels

The devas are a much more advanced evolutionary stream and loosely correspond to the nine different classes of angels outlined in Christian theology: seraphim (the fiery ones), cherubim (those closest to God), thrones (keepers of the celestial records), dominions (acting as God’s chariot and dispenser of justice), virtues (the middle management of the angelic kingdom), powers (in charge of maintaining the natural world), principalities (the border guards between heaven and earth), archangels, and angels.

The Hebrews used the word elohim both in the singular and plural to denote both a monotheistic God and polytheistic gods. This word appears more than 2,500 times in the Hebrew Bible.

Angels operate everywhere from the very local to the interplanetary and even interstellar realms. A mountain, for example, will have an overall presiding deva bigger than the mountain itself, with numerous lesser devas controlling different aspects of it. Towns and cities have their own devas, as do countries, planets, and solar systems. Their work continues ceaselessly and almost invisibly. Devas have an effect not just on the minds of individuals but also on humanity’s collective consciousness.

Characteristics of Devas

Devas don’t have solid physical bodies. They are about knowing and being. Our perception of them, when it occurs, is intuitive rather than pictorial. They are nonhuman, although some are said to incarnate in human form to be near those they love. They are often pictured with what appear to be wings, but these are “streaming emanations.” They don’t die, but they evolve from small tasks to larger ones.

Devas are said to be direct agents of the law of karma (via the Lipika, the celestial scribes which record all human activity and which are sometimes called the Lords of Karma). They intervene when humans cause change incompatible with a particular cycle of existence. They could be linked to the Earth’s energy networks linking sacred sites of power via grids such as ley lines and other networks. Devas have an effect on humanity’s collective mind as well as on individuals.

Film footage exists of mysterious forces interfering with nuclear weapons tests, disabling missiles, and appearing in places where nuclear weapons are stored or nuclear energy is produced. Have they prevented nuclear annihilation? Some claim these are extraterrestrial interventions. But could they be angels?

Types of Devas

There are numerous classes of devas, depending on their function and location. We find them in gardens, woodland, hills, and mountains as well as in streams, rivers, waterfalls, lakes, and oceans. They are found in clouds and weather patterns.

They are attached to particular plant species and can be found in places of devotion or meditation such as churches and temples.

There are devas of the city and the town, which ensure the inflow of prana energy from the sun at dawn, provide protective auras for other devas, oversee the spiritual aspirants of the city, and form links to other towns and cities.

Every household has its angel, known as the spirit of the hearth. They are also found overshadowing places of government, administration, and law courts.

An archangel presides over the solar system, and others—spiritual regents—preside over each planet. There is a world angel as well as national angels. The angel of the sun links it to Sirius.

They assist in the “synchronicity” of research by overshadowing and impressing scientists and artists.

Guardian angels can look after individuals or a group. They form a special school to help people with spiritual growth and assist with the flow of energy in rituals. A large group of angels is involved in healing by overshadowing hospitals and clinics.

The New Age
More than a century ago, C.W. Leadbeater suggested that one priority of the new Aquarian Age would be closer recognition of and communication and cooperation with the devas. He didn’t say too much about the precise mechanics of this process or present any kind of time scale, but he said that it would correspond to an increasing externalization of the hidden hierarchy of advanced individuals, sometimes called the Masters of Wisdom, who guide this planet.

Obviously closer cooperation and communication with the devic kingdom is very difficult when a large number of people don’t believe in these entities in the first place. Perhaps some or all of these entities are angry at the way we’ve exploited, abused, and polluted our host planet, not just in the obvious physical ways but also astrally and mentally. These forms of pollution are just as harmful as carbon emissions or oceans choked with plastic waste.

Possibly only a closer association with the devas and nature spirits can help heal this troubled and challenged world and save us from the many catastrophes we face. The devas and nature spirits could be our most crucial allies, but they’re an invisible army, and few accept that they exist at all.

Furthermore, many classes of elementals and nature spirits are unfriendly towards human beings because of our behavior and vibrations. Folklore abounds with tales of elementals playing tricks on humans, stealing children, abducting hapless people into underground realms, and causing numerous other problems. This folklore also speaks of their good deeds and the way they can apparently bestow good fortune or help ensure adequate crops, healthy children, and prosperous lives.

Any meaningful cooperation with this secret commonwealth is going to be difficult; probably it will only involve relatively small numbers of human beings who are sympathetic towards and knowledgeable about their existence and powers. Given that the devas operate mainly on the mental plane, initially at least it’s going to require individuals with exceptionally well-evolved minds to engage in dialogue.

Those with Vision

A number of Theosophists have apparently had the clairvoyant faculty to observe both nature spirits and angels or devas at work. Dora van Gelder’s book The Real World of Fairies offers fascinating descriptions of nature spirits. She grew up in Java in Indonesia, where as a child she communed with these spirits. She continued this contact after moving to the United States. Her book offers detailed descriptions of different classes of fairies as well as their behavior and how they influence the natural world through vibrations.

The twentieth-century British Theosophists Edward L. Gardner and Geoffrey Hodson also wrote extensively about this subject. Hodson conducted extensive clairvoyant investigations into nature spirits and devas. He provided very detailed descriptions in the many books he wrote about this subject. Some of his impressions were visually realized by various artists, but probably only give a vague impression.

Hodson also clairvoyantly investigated how devas and nature spirits work on the embryo and fetus in the mother’s womb, building physical, etheric, astral, and mental bodies. This gives us a fascinating insight into the process of rebirth.

In his book The Miracle of Birth (written in 1929), Hodson offers a unique view of some of the deep esoteric processes involved in the formation and growth of a baby. Using his clairvoyant abilities, he examined and explored how the physical, emotional (astral), and mental bodies of an individual were formed during the various stages of pregnancy. He asserts that this is far from an automatic mechanical process and involves entities from both the elemental kingdoms and the higher angelic devas.

Hodson explains that the use of the sexual function has a highly spiritual significance. He cautions that its misuse as a purely physical or emotional act without a mental or spiritual dimension can impair the health of those engaged in sex as well as their offspring. “Union which is a mere gratification of animal passion serves but to degrade both body and mind,” he contended. To many, ideas like this sound old-fashioned, even prudish today, but they may well be true.

Hodson observed that at the moment of conception a flash of light descended from the Ego’s highest spiritual level, and this provided the creative impulse, energy, and power for the processes which followed. The combination of positive and negative forces from the sperm and ovum attracted a flow of force from the astral plane.

Hodson described the mental body at the fourth month of pregnancy as an ovoid bubble, with delicate shades of yellow, green, rose, blue and violet in rapid motion. He detected a shadowy human form within the bubble, with continuous interaction between this mental body and that of the mother.

Hodson also detected various angels or devas nearby. One oversees the construction of the mental, emotional and physical bodies. Intriguingly, in the angel’s aura he saw some of the past personalities of the incarnating Ego. Grouped around them were other men and women with whom karmic bonds had been formed in other lives.

He observed that the angel in charge at the emotional level was trying to create the best possible astral vehicle for the child as far as karmic and environmental circumstances would allow. This was part of the mother’s astral body. A stream of energy could be seen entering the top of the astral body and remaining in the head.

The actual building work was conducted by nature spirits, which he described as flashes of opalescent light or glowing points of color. There were hundreds of these spirits absorbing matter from outside, assimilating it, and then discharging it into the fetus. He detected a musical note like the hum of bees emitted from the permanent atom. The child’s etheric double and the nature spirits vibrated at the same rate, producing the sound.

At the fifth month, Hodson observed many streams of force converging on the physical body, with intense activity by the nature spirits at the physical, etheric and astral levels. The fetus appeared to act as a magnet.

As the seventh month approached, Hodson detected a considerable increase in activity as all the processes previously seen speeded up, with the Ego emitting more energy. The focus of consciousness had moved through the mental body into the astral and then into the etheric. He described the connection between the Ego and embryo as a shaft of light. The mental body had now enlarged to four feet high and was brighter and denser than a month earlier. He described it as like snow refracting bright sunlight, and the human form within was more well-defined.

By this time, the astral body occupied a space from the mother’s shoulder to her knee. The “astral” child was in a dream state, stirring occasionally with impulses from the Ego. The baby’s physical body seemed to act as an anchor for the Ego, stabilizing the other bodies being formed.

By the eighth month activity had further increased in all three bodies. It appeared that the Ego was directing more energy into the personality than a month earlier. The shaft of light had grown to around a foot wide. The mental and astral bodies were now fully completed and closely resembled one another. Both had an iridescent pearly whiteness.

At this time the astral angel was closely associated with the baby’s body, half of which was enclosed within the angel’s aura. The angel appeared to be taking the greatest care of the baby, watching closely over it and protecting it from external influences.

Before birth, Hodson said the various angels departed, to be replaced by an even more lofty and potent entity, whom he called Our Lady: the personification of the feminine principle, recognized elsewhere as Venus, Mary, Isis, or Ishtar.

Spirit Types

There are hundreds or thousands of different spirit types, but we’ll explore three.

Kami

The Japanese Shinto tradition is based on the worship of eight million spirit gods known as kami. The word itself means “that which is hidden.” There are three key classes: first, the ancestors of the clans; second, the kami of creatures and objects, as well as the forces of nature; and third, the souls of outstanding dead humans.

Venerated from the earliest times, they represent the sacred or mystical element of all things, but they have the capacity for both good and evil. Sometimes they are associated with illness or sudden death.

Kami possess a life-giving and harmonizing power called musubi as well as a will for truth and sincerity, known as makoto.

They are said to communicate with human beings and can influence human events and natural forces.

Kami are not divine, perfect, or omnipotent. They are not inherently different to humans, but are a higher manifestation of life energy.

There are 81,000 shrines all over Japan devoted to the kami. The Japanese regard them as otherworldly and therefore extraterrestrial.

Mesopotamia

The author and researcher Zecharia Sitchin wrote extensively about the Anunnaki gods of Mesopotamia, led by Enki and Enlil. According to him, they produced the Nephilim, who were descendants of god-human interactions. They were winged gods, sometimes with bird heads, and wearing watchlike devices. Sitchin claimed that the Anunnaki were from the planet Nibiru, which is said to be on a 3,400-year elliptical orbit and is next due near earth in AD 2900. Sitchin said these beings stimulated human evolution whenever they visited.

Tuatha Dé Danann

These constitute a supernatural pantheon from Irish mythology and appear throughout the Celtic world. They’re said to be sky or star people and the parents of the Celts. Although they dwell in the other world, they closely interact with humans. Each member of the Tuatha Dé Danann has particular associations with life or nature.

When Irish mythology was recorded by early Christian monks, they modified the narrative and transformed immortal gods into kings, queens, and heroes of the remote past. They were sometimes depicted as fallen angels.

Cosmic Connections

One particularly interesting “angelic” vision occurred on the Russian space station Salyut 7 in 1984—not once, but twice, by separate crews. On July 12, three Soviet cosmonauts witnessed a bright, almost blinding orange light engulfing the entire station. When their eyes adjusted, they witnessed seven huge angels with misty wings, halos, and human faces with peaceful expressions. They reported that these “celestial entities” measured 25 meters high and 60 meters wide. The cosmonauts also said they had a rapport with these beings, who remained for ten minutes before disappearing.

Five days later three more cosmonauts boarded the space station. During a space walk on July 25, the seven angels reappeared and again spent several minutes smiling at the cosmonauts, who reported the encounter to mission control.

On a different mission, a Soviet cosmonaut received telepathic messages about his past and his family while orbiting around the earth. He called it a “space whisper.”

NASA has also released a picture of a massive devalike winged bird thousands of miles long between the earth and the sun. It offered no explanation.

The Cottingley Dimension

My own interest in these invisible entities goes back to childhood. I grew up in a village in Yorkshire in England called Cottingley, which is famous for one of the most celebrated fairy sightings of the twentieth century.

In 1917, two young cousins, Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, who lived in the village, borrowed a camera and initially took two pictures of what they claimed were fairy folk near a small stream running close by their house. These caused a minor sensation after the writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came across them and published them in The Strand magazine. The Theosophical Society also got involved and sent two of its clairvoyant members, Edward Gardner and Geoffrey Hodson, to investigate. Three years later, in 1920, the girls took three further photographs.

The images were tested by experts and deemed to be authentic. They weren’t universally accepted, however, and many people were entirely skeptical. As a young boy, I looked at these photographs in a book in my local library and was even then very skeptical about their authenticity. But when Hodson visited Cottingley, he said that he too perceived these fairy figures just as the girls had described and photographed them.

The story went quiet for decades. Finally in 1983, when Elsie and Frances were old women, they admitted that four of the five photographs they’d taken were fakes and that they’d used cutouts from a popular girl’s book, Princess Mary’s Gift Book, published in 1914. But they insisted that a fifth was genuine. They said also they had only staged the pictures to illustrate exactly what they had actually seen in and around their home.

How Can We Perceive Spirits?

Although various clairvoyants have been able to see both nature spirits and devas, this is impossible for most people without developed psychic faculties. And in the modern world, what we don’t see we don’t believe.

But this isn’t to say that we can’t perceive these entities at all. As I’ve already suggested, I believe a great many people perceive them without even knowing it. Perhaps others detect an intuitive connection with these hidden worlds. Probably anyone who is intuitively drawn to the natural world may have some deep unconscious inkling that these entities exist.

A few people can sometimes hear the sounds of nature spirits in places like dense woodland in summer, in the tinkling of a stream or waves crashing on a beach, or in the wind high on a hill. But most would deny that they were listening to the musical sounds of living beings at work.

Perhaps these entities might become apparent as the sweet scent of a flower or the touch of something unknown as you walk through a dark forest or garden in bloom.

Others like me, who are reasonably sensitive but not clairvoyant, can somehow sense the presence of these entities without being able to see, hear, taste, touch, or smell them. You don’t have to be out in the wilds. Sitting in my small garden on those few days a year when you can call it summer in England, I can feel that these spirits of the natural world are all around me in the trees and flowers. I can sense their activity. Perhaps more importantly, I can detect a purpose in what they’re doing.

Like many domesticated animals, my cat, Electra, is far more sensitive to these spirits than I am. I often observe her staring at something invisible in the garden or inside the house. She can see what I can’t.

For much of the time, nature spirits aren’t going to appear on any part of the physical spectrum we can see with our eyes, because they operate mainly on the etheric and astral levels. Few have astral vision, although increasing numbers of people seem to be able to see parts of the etheric spectrum—those four unknown planes of the physical spectrum that are not yet acknowledged by mainstream science.

I have a crude and not very well-developed form of etheric vision. It works best on warm, sunny, and cloudless days. Sometimes I can see wisps and vortices of black and grey, like a kind of stylized cigarette smoke. Although they’re in a state of constant flux, they do sometimes form into coherent shapes but nearly always dissipate quickly.

We ignore these hidden realms, invisible entities, and occult forces at our peril. They’re neither recognized nor widely understood, but that doesn’t mean they can be ignored or marginalized into fantasy. Science and some religions have conspired to banish these invisible legions, but ultimately the truth of these matters will be known.

These realities probably won’t be rediscovered in the Christian churches or in the scientists’ laboratories, however sophisticated they are. This knowledge is held disguised and imprisoned within us already. As always, the search must not start in the external world, but by looking much more deeply inside ourselves for the truths concealed there. The truth always lies within.

Tim Wyatt is an esoteric writer, researcher, and organizer. He is an international lecturer for the Theosophical Society and travels widely across Europe. He is the founder of the School of Applied Wisdom in Leeds, Yorkshire, and also helps to run Leeds Theosophical Society. His books include Cycles of Eternity: An Overview of the Ageless Wisdom and Everyone’s Book of the Dead (reviewed in Quest, summer 2021). These are available from www.firewheelbooks.co.uk. His article “The Crisis Was the Catalyst” was published in Quest, winter 2022. A version of “Nature’s Hidden Empires” appeared on the Internet magazine Hermes Risen.

 

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Printed in the  Fall 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard,  "Love for the Living Earth: An Interview with Matthew Fox" Quest 110:4, pg 14-19

By Richard Smoley

The maverick theologian Matthew Fox has been one of the most influential figures on the American religious scene for decades. Beginning as a Dominican monk, Fox was forced out of the order after clashes with Vatican authorities, notably Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI).

            Fox is best known for his book Original Blessing, although he has written over three dozen others. He is also known for promoting his own theology of Creation Spirituality, which emphasizes the blessings of life as opposed to sin, guilt, and redemption.

            His latest book, Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality, published in March 2022, contains excerpts from his writings, which address subjects ranging from creativity to dreams and visions, great mystics of the past, prophecy, activism, and the nature of the church.

            This interview with Fox was conducted via Zoom in April 2022.

Richard Smoley: Your latest book is entitled Essential Writings on Creation Spirituality, so let’s begin by having you explain what Creation Spirituality is.

Matthew Fox: The word creation is really important. For too long, our thinking begins with humans. But the new science tells us a new creation story: the universe has been here for 13.8 billion years, and it is the height of arrogance, I think, to begin with humans. A lot of our ecological crisis derives from this anthropocentrism, from what Pope Francis, in his fine encyclical on the environment, calls the “narcissism of our species.”

Even the Bible doesn’t begin with the human. The first chapter of Genesis has a cosmology that begins with light, and then proceeds to the moon, the earth, the animals, and the plants. Humans come at the very end. All of it is called “good” (which can also be translated as “beautiful”), and at the end it’s all called “very good.”

It is appalling: 95 percent of Christian preachers begin with chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis, which are about us and our failings. But that’s not the story; the story is that we’re part of a drama that culminates in our existence on this amazing earth, with amazing creatures—giraffes, whales, rain forests, and oceans—and it’s called very good and very beautiful.

Creation Spirituality thus begins with creation, not with the human. It’s also feminist, because the wisdom tradition in the Bible  is about finding God in nature—Sophia. In fact, most people experience God in nature.

All this has tremendous implications for the earth crisis that we are undergoing today as we face extinction as a species. Creation Spirituality brings the sacred back to our worldview by acknowledging that the sacred begins with the universe itself. It’s bigger than ourselves, and we, like the other creatures, need to fit in.

This tradition is also prophetic in the tradition of Israel: wisdom is a friend of the prophets. The prophet in us is the person who says no to, who interferes with, injustice.

Many people ask, “Why haven’t I heard of this?” In part because Christianity has been carrying the legacy of the Roman Empire since the fourth century. At that time, Augustine was the primary theologian, and he came up with the idea of original sin, leading to a big detour by mainline Christianity. Original sin is not in the Bible: Jesus never heard of it, and no Jews had ever heard of it either.

Mainstream Christianity begins with the fall, not with creation. Empire prefers the notion of original sin, because it gets people doubting themselves; therefore they fall in line and join the army to conquer people in the name of Christ.

The Celtic tradition does not begin with the human; it begins with the cosmos. There have also been other great souls who begin with grace and spirituality and who inculcate the dimension of the divine feminine: Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Francis of Assisi, and many others. Thomas Aquinas saw the world in terms of Creation Spirituality, not in terms of fall and redemption religion. Julian of Norwich lived through the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century. Everyone at the time was going crazy, but she wasn’t. She was grounded in creation and said that God is the goodness in nature. She goes on about the nondualism of spirit and nature.

This is a very exciting and refreshing worldview. It has been sidelined by mainstream Christianity, but I think it’s coming into its own in our time. It’s exemplified in Pope Francis, not only by his choosing the name Francis, but in his fine encyclical on the environment, Laudato si. One scientist told me that Laudato si is the finest work on science and spirituality that the Vatican has ever produced.

There are real signs that we’re waking up. The question is, is this soon enough?

Smoley: How is Creation Spirituality coming into the social fabric? Is it happening within the churches, or outside the churches, in independent groups?

Fox: Both: both within churches and in spiritual movements, many of which are moving beyond organized religion. As you know, we’re hearing a lot of talk about the terms religion and spirituality. A very high percentage of people under thirty—I think the last figure I saw was 75 percent—don’t identify as religious, but they do identify as spiritual.

Religion moves very slowly: it’s a big ship that doesn’t have brakes, and it takes a long time to shift directions. Time is running out on Mother Earth. The latest scientific statement from the UN says we have at the most seven years left to change our ways if we’re going to prevent the worst effects of sea rising and climate change.

Young people don’t feel loyalty to an institution or a particular church. They’re trying to save the earth. And so they should: they have their future children and grandchildren in mind. Spirituality moves faster than religion.

That’s one reason I’m involved in a new order called the Order of the Sacred Earth. Unlike most other religious orders, it’s not beholden to any particular religion. This is a spiritual order. It’s about gathering people of all generations who have any spiritual tradition to bring to the table, whatever wisdom traditions have to teach us, that will contribute to compassion and to the saving of Mother Earth. But there are also some Creation Spirituality communities, which were founded by some students of mine, and they’re going very strong these days.

It’s not just a Christian thing. At our first ceremony for the Order of the Sacred Earth, there were Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists. It was actually held in a Buddhist temple. One twenty-six-year-old woman came up to me and said, “I’m an atheist, but I’m looking for a community that shares my values. My values are about the sacredness of the earth too, so I want to join.”

All orders have vows, of course, and the one vow we take is, “I promise to be the best lover of Mother Earth and the best defender of Mother Earth that I can be.” Of course, it’s very open-ended.

People from around the world have pods in different countries on different continents. We gather online once a month to share what our particular pods are doing. There are many ways of getting the word out, especially in this time of Zoom conferencing.

Smoley: You’ve outlined how Christianity was diverted off-course with Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. Where is Christianity as a whole right now—Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism?

Fox: The ecological crisis is deconstructing a lot of mindsets around organized religion, around Christianity. I think that is a litmus test. For example, fundamentalist Christians in this country are in denial about climate change. They have this weird idea that Christ is going to come on a cloud after a nuclear war, or after global warming drowns us all. That’s not Christianity. In many ways, it’s not religion, but politics. It’s an attitude of denial, because it’s easier than facing the facts.

Frankly, I don’t think we can look to the organized religions that much for leadership, but Pope Francis has done some very good things, such as Laudato si, as well as his criticism of extractive capitalism and the horrible, growing gulf between the superwealthy and everyone else. During the coronavirus, the billionaires have doubled their wealth, while all kinds of other people have fallen short.  

I give Pope Francis credit for blowing the horn about some of these realities, but in fact the Orthodox church was ahead when it came to ecology, because the Orthodox church didn’t follow Augustine, who separated spirit from matter, saying, “Spirit is whatever is not matter.”

Aquinas in the thirteenth century turns his back on Augustine, saying that spirit is the vitality in everything: a blade of grass, a tree, a horse. There’s nondualism there. Today science says E = mc²—essentially, energy is spirit, so that’s very close to Aquinas’s view of the world. And the Orthodox tradition, refusing to follow Augustine’s doctrine of original sin, has put much more emphasis on the beauty and health of nature.

Right now, however, the Orthodox tradition is splitting over the invasion of Ukraine, so there’s a lot of internecine warfare going on there. The Russian Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow has been a buddy of Putin, whereas many Orthodox churches in different parts of the world—certainly in Ukraine—are breaking with him because he’s not stood up to Putin at all.

This is history, isn’t it? Yet poet Derek Walcott said, “The fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world in spite of history.” I think that’s a powerful statement, and it really applies to spirituality: we have to love this world, we have to love life, more than the disturbances and evil that are exposed in history. There’s something going on deeper than human history, and we want to fall in love with that and teach that. I think that’s the role of the artist, but it’s also the role of anyone who’s a spiritual person.

Smoley: You have criticized the notion of original sin, but even apart from that, there seems to be this very widespread sense, not just among Christians but among the human race, that there is something profoundly wrong with the world. There is the Buddhist concept of avidya: suffering and ignorance. Even primitive cultures often complain that the gods deserted humanity a long time ago. There seems to be a universal sense of something problematic, either in the world or in human nature. How does your theology work with that?

Fox: I wrote a whole book on evil, called Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society. If you look at apes, who are our nearest cousins in the animal world, they too have violence in them: they’re capable of wars and torture. It’s part of what we’ve inherited from our ancestors,  so there are problems that we carry with us.

In my study on evil, I take the seven chakras of the East—the physiological, psychological, and spiritual centers of our bodies and psyches—and relate them to the seven capital sins of the West.  When they’re healthy, each chakra is a point of love, of positive energy, but when they’re off-center—Aquinas says sin is misdirected love. That’s very Jewish: the Hebrew word for sin means missing the bull’s-eye. Hitting the bull’s-eye would be a healthy chakra, but missing it would be comparable to a  capital sin.

Let me give an example. The seventh chakra is the culmination of the kundalini energy: the fire coming up our spine, working through all the other six chakras, and delivering light and good energy to other spirit beings, whether our ancestors, angels, or other humans who are trying to do good in the world. That’s building community when the seventh chakra is healthy. When it’s not healthy but off-center, it manifests as envy.

Envy recognizes the light in others, but instead of linking up with it to do good work, it wants to shoot down the other so that it’s the last one standing, if you will.

I think that the methodology of seven chakras and seven capital sins really works. We need a new language for evil today, because Western religion has so oversold sin that people don’t want to talk about it anymore. For forty-five years, I’ve talked to many Protestants and Catholics, and they tell me the same thing: by the age of fifteen, they’d already heard so much about sin.

We don’t have a working vocabulary for evil in our culture, because I think religion has failed us and has oversold the idea of sin. Because he was a Jew, Jesus never heard of original sin: no one had until the fourth century. As a theological category, it’s dangerous; it creates doubt about our beauty and our right to be here.

Yes, there is this quest to find out what’s missing in our species, but look at this: we now know of fourteen other hominid species who are our cousins, such as the Neanderthals and new ones discovered in Southeast Asia. All these are out of business; they’re extinct. That is a wake-up call: we humans are capable of extinction, and we’re really close to it right now. We have to clean up our violence—what I would call the reptilian brain unleashed.

Scripture says, “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life” [Deuteronomy 30:19]. It’s a choice, a daily choice, not to choose those forces that are oriented to necrophilia instead of biophilia.

Smoley: This brings up the subject of pleasure, because the Christian demonization of sin is closely connected with the vilification of pleasure. What is a wholesome, balanced attitude toward pleasure?

Fox: The book of Wisdom says, “This is wisdom: to love life.” That’s what eros is, I think: a passionate love of life in all its expressions. Poet Audre Lorde says, “I’m erotic when I bake bread, when I make a table, when I write a poem.”

Eros is the wonderful gift of passion that we bring to everything we do. That includes sexuality, love of life, and many other expressions. I think that is to be honored and not held up for suspicion.

The Song of Songs in the Bible, sometimes called the Song of Solomon, is a celebration of lovemaking as an experience of the divine, as a mystical experience. In the Jewish tradition, you’re supposed to practice the Sabbath by reading the Song of Songs with your spouse and making love. Making love is not a sin; it is one of the profound ways in which we say thank you for existence.

Eros very much has its place. When Christ in John’s Gospel says, “I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance” [John 10:10], that’s eros; it’s a very erotic statement.

And of course Jesus himself was criticized for not fasting as heavily as his mentor, John the Baptist, did and for eating and drinking with the wrong people—partying. His meal experiences were important ways of bringing together the rich and the poor. He did it deliberately, so that all together in the same room, they would hear what he had to say and debate it.

The burden put on us by Christianity was derived, I think, more from Greek philosophy than from Judaism. It’s a burden that many are still carrying but can throw off. In undoing that burden, there’s a middle way that sees values as being true to your vows, such as not breaking your partner’s heart. Many young people today do not get married until their late twenties, so obviously there are going to be relationships and experimentation between adolescence and adulthood.

That’s another topic: rites of passage for young people. Christianity has confirmation, and Judaism has the bar mitzvah, but I question whether these are cutting the mustard at this time.

 I draw a lot of energy, insight, and wisdom from indigenous people, who make a big thing of puberty rites of passage, especially for boys, because they feel that the girls have their own natural rite of passage with menstruation. The boys have to have a severe one; otherwise they grow up angry. I think that shows in our culture quite strongly: the lack of a real rite of passage for young people.

While we’re at it, we should also be looking at rites of passage for older people. The whole tradition of elders is very important. It’s not the role of the elder to play golf or play the stock market for the rest of their life. There’s something more serious going on. The elders should be relating to the youngest generation: grandparents and grandchildren. I think it would be appropriate to have rites of passage for elders which are designed with young people in mind and are attended by young people, so they get a fuller view of what life is about. This leadership is a real thing; it’s not just about tapping the heads of grandparents at Christmastime. It’s something important and necessary that goes on between the oldest and the youngest. The middle-aged, the parents, are too busy running the culture to really pay attention to that. I think we need a healthy eldership.

An anthropologist recently gathered a team to answer one question: why did the Neanderthals disappear while Homo sapiens is still going strong?

The previous theory was that we killed them all, but we now know that many of us have Neanderthal DNA in our genes, so we weren’t just killing them; we were making love with them.

This anthropologist found that Neanderthals tended to die around the age of forty or forty-two, meaning there were no grandparents, whereas we Homo sapiens live longer, so there were three generations: two of them raising the kids, not just one. I think that is important information, because it shows that the role of the elder is not about being put in a corner; they play a necessary role. I think this is in the memory of indigenous tribes, who honor the elders. They remember that they made it, not just because of their parents, but because of their grandparents.

Smoley: A great deal of your work has to do with refashioning the God concept. It seems that for many people, the traditional Christian image of God is outdated and no longer plausible; a new one somehow needs to be fashioned. How do you see this happening, and where do you think it should go?

Fox: First of all, I agree with you: it is happening. My favorite mystic, Meister Eckhart, says, “I pray God to rid me of God.” It’s pretty radical statement, but I think a lot of people are saying that prayer consciously or unconsciously today, because we’ve done an awful lot of horrible things in the name of God over the centuries, including killing indigenous religion, cultures, and tribes, slavery, and so much else. And of course God in America has become an overused term; we stamp it on our dollar bills and coins: “In God we trust,” which has led to an irreverence toward the transcendence of divinity.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a book called Naming the Unnamable: Eighty-Nine Useful and Wonderful Names for God. I got the idea for that book, again, from Thomas Aquinas. In his commentary on Pseudo-Dennis, the sixth-century Syrian monk, Aquinas says that every being is a name for God. The Vedas say God has a million names and a million faces, which is cool, but Aquinas is saying God is trillions upon trillions of beings. Every being is a name. I shared that with a friend of mine, who is a cosmologist, and he said it took the top of his head off just to hear that one sentence: every being is a name for God.

That’s what I do in my book with the eighty-nine names. I go to science for some of them, for example, “God is energy.” In his important book The Self-Organizing Universe, Erich Jantsch says, “God is the mind of the universe.” Then he says, “Previously mystics said this, but because I’m saying it as a scientist, a lot more people are going to hear.” That’s true: people listen more to scientists than to mystics, but then again plenty of scientists are mystics today.

Another scientist, whom I met at one of my book signings, says God is the mind of the earth, the earth mind, the earth intelligence. He talks about how there’s not enough time for the eye to have been invented by trial and error, certainly not by chance; it’s far too complex. He says there must have been an intelligence in that.

There was a fellow named Alfred Russel Wallace, who with Darwin birthed the evolution theory. Although he’s not nearly as well-known, he and Darwin worked together, and when they presented the first paper on evolution to the London science society, they did a back-to-back. Together they birthed the concept of evolution, but after many years of working together, Darwin and Wallace split over angels. Darwin said that this all happened by chance, but Wallace said that’s impossible: There’s been too much success in evolution for it just to be happenstance. There must be guiding intellects that assist in the process of evolution, and the word he used for them was angels.

Now I offer many other names for God, such as love, joy, justice, compassion, and beauty and, of course, the divine feminine, Kwan Yin. In the fourteenth century, Julian of Norwich, the first woman to write a book in English, spoke of God as mother and of Christ as mother and of the Holy Spirit as feminine. The point is that we have all these names for divinity. Your question is, which ones will come forward at this time, when we need them? There is, of course, the whole idea of Gaia, Mother Earth as a feminine deity, the feminine side of creation, and that’s found even within Christianity.

I think this is a wonderful time to be living: the lid is off, and we can move away from these images that have been dwelling in our psyches for a long time, like Michelangelo’s painting of God at the top of the Sistine Chapel, which shows an old man with a long, white beard, creating Adam—God as exclusively male.

Eckhart has some marvelous images; for example, he says God is the newest thing in the universe. God is not this old, tired, bearded guy, but the newest being in the universe—young, playful, fresh, invigorated, and excited about creation. One proposal in my book is that God is joy. Aquinas said that the universe was created partly because God wanted to have more company to share the joy of being with.

I think any name we give God opens up all kinds of avenues. We need to get the artists, the poets, the musicians, and the filmmakers on board to carry these new images.

Part of the new science is the idea that that the universe is unfolding and has been unfolding; it is growing and enlarging itself on a regular basis, and all this has to do, I think, with the built-in power of creativity. One of my books is called Creativity: Where the Divine and the Human Meet. I think the powers of creativity and cocreation are integral to whatever name we want to give divinity; divinity is very fertile.

Now we can say the universe is 2 trillion galaxies big, each with hundreds of billions of stars. It certainly stretches the imagination. The Webb telescope is going up in a few months, and it will be sending back, we hope, pictures of the original light of the universe. That’s stunning, because so many traditions around the world use light as the most common synonym for divinity.

When we think of light, we think of ordinary sunlight, but no, this is 13 billion years before the sun. That’s pretty amazing, and it could bring the human race together to wake us up so we cease making war against each other and against Mother Earth and preserve this amazing planet.

It’s time that we get smart and start acting grown-up. The human species has been at an adolescent stage for long enough, and we’ve got to grow up fast.

Smoley: As you said, Darwin had a brilliant idea, which is evolution by natural selection, but unlike Wallace, he made it into the single explanation for everything: all evolution was due solely to natural selection, as the neo-Darwinists still insist. Similarly, Marx saw that history is shaped by class struggle, so everything has to be explained by class struggle. Freud had the sex theory, so everything had to be explained by that. These geniuses seem to have been possessed by their own brilliant ideas. In a practical sense, how do you keep some sense of balance in your own thinking so that your ideas don’t become demons that obsess you?

Fox: I think narcissism comes in here: our ideas become our gods and goddesses, our idols. I think we need an appreciation of a bigger intelligence, wisdom, and love in the world to put our own efforts into perspective. I always say that we have a belly button to remind us that we didn’t make ourselves.

On the other hand, we don’t want to underestimate the good things we can do. Eckhart says that we’re always giving birth to the Christ; the Christ is always needing to be born. The Buddhists can say we give birth to the Buddha and to the Buddha nature, and the Jews say we give birth to the image of God. All that should be celebrated and honored, but that doesn’t mean that we displace the great Christ of the cosmos, which we are serving and we’re here to serve.

Then of course, we need to listen to one another and take criticism. It helps when you live in community: you keep each other within certain boundaries. I think your sense of humor is part of it too—the big laugh at ourselves and our theories.

People can get on their high horse and think that they’re more important than they are. We are all part of the lineage, and intellectually we do stand on one another’s shoulders. For a human, learning is a community effort.

No one is God, but we are all rays of God. The rays of the sun don’t displace the sun. We don’t displace God by whatever name or explanation we use.

Smoley: We hear a great deal about what’s going on in this country today, and this inevitably brings up negatives—gun violence, racial discrimination, environmental desecration—but that’s clearly not the whole picture. Even though those evils are there, there’s a lot of good counterbalancing them. I wonder if you could give us a panoramic view of what you see happening in the United States, neither omitting nor overemphasizing the good or the bad.

Fox: As I’ve said, necrophilia grows when biophilia is stunted. That’s a very profound statement on evil, and it shows us a way out of necrophilia. Life is really about biophilia; we have to fall in love with life on a regular basis.

I say we should fall in love three times a day. I don’t say that to threaten anyone’s marriage or relationship, but to get us out of our anthropocentric mindset. You can fall in love with the wildflowers, with trees, with stones, with animals, with planets, with galaxies, with music, with poetry. There is so much to fall in love with. I think when there’s enough falling in love going around, we will choose biophilia, the love of life, over necrophilia.

I do think there’s a lot of necrophilia happening as well; a lot of it is due to human inventions. We humans invent things, because we are so creative. The modern worldview accomplished a lot: for example, we got to the moon and back on Newtonian science. Electricity and similar developments made our lives better, but we didn’t calculate everything into it—what we were doing to Mother Earth, extracting her elements from the earth and of course killing indigenous cultures to get to these riches.

I think that we’re quite short-sighted about looking at consequences before they overwhelm us, so this generation is paying the bill for 500 years of profound neglect of Mother Earth.

Then we have hate radio, hate TV, and hate politics. It’s not just in someone else; it’s in all of us; we’re all capable of hate. But I don’t think it’s that esoteric to propose that, if you can’t in some way regulate our darkest passions, you can’t have a community that survives.

I do think that democracy is up for grabs in America today, as it is in many places around the world. A lot of it is not intentional, because we’ve got these modes of communication whereby you can pour your hate out, which then links to someone else’s hate. We’re all interconnected, not only about good things, but about bad things too.

We often underestimate the powers of our inventions. Do we have time to catch up before the dark side, the shadow side, overwhelms us? It is a time for being very alert and critical—not just of the other, but of self, of the role that we play in destroying the earth or democracy. How can we contribute together to save both?

We are living in notable times. We’re at a crossroad as a species, as is clearly the case with climate change. We all have to ground ourselves in the things you and I have been talking about: the goodness of creation, the presence of the divine and of love and justice. We have to fill ourselves with those things without being in denial about the suffering.

The present evil is a very powerful force; it’s smart; it doesn’t walk around with a sign on its back saying, “I’m evil; kick me.” It has lots of money in its pocket, and it goes where there’s power, whether it’s religion or government or the military. We can’t be naive about our capacity for evil or our capacity for extinction.

We have to move to the new level of humanity that all the great spiritual teachers, from the Dalai Lama to the Buddha to Muhammad to Jesus to Isaiah, are talking about. We’re capable of compassion, but it’s a bit of work to get there. We can’t be lazy, and we can’t just absorb the values of a materialistic culture. We have to offer something bigger, and that’s part of biophilia.

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