theosophy – Just the Tarot

Do you believe in fairies?

Gnomes?

Water sprites?

Undines, sylphs, elves, salamanders?

In a nutshell, nature spirits?

If you don’t believe in them, you’re right there with the great majority. The few studies that have been done suggest that only about 10% of Americans believe that nature spirits exist. Most of that 10% is composed of children, women, and people who research paranormal phenomena.

IT’S NOT NORMAL

If you tell other people that you believe in fairies, you’re going to get some serious side-eye, at the very least. If you INSIST that you believe in fairies, you’ll be tagged as weird, eccentric, or seriously delusional.

After all, it’s just not NORMAL, is it?

Ironically, as Tim Wyatt points out in this video from the Theosophical Society, it absolutely IS “normal” to believe in nature spirits. Every culture in human history has had frequent contacts with them. Until now.

Our lack of belief in them is actually an aberration. We’re the ones who aren’t normal.

So what happened? Why did we lose contact with them? Wyatt has some interesting suggestions.

URBANIZATION

The onset of the Industrial Revolution witnessed a huge migration of humans out of the country and into cities. For the first time in human history, more people now live in cities than in towns and villages.

And the thing is, nature spirits love . . . guess what? . . . nature. They reside in streams, rivers, lakes, forests, and beaches. They are not present where there is a decided lack of nature, such as we find in the concrete monstrosities of our modern cities.

To put it another way, we’ve lost contact with nature spirits because we’ve lost contact with nature. In our lust for constant construction, high-rises, and endless suburbs, we’ve driven the nature spirits out and they no longer speak with many of us.

That’s what I was trying to portray with the image of the fairy looking down at the cityscape. How sad it must be for them to witness us raping the lands where they once lived freely.

ORGANIZED RELIGION

The rise of Christian theology had a devastating effect on our relationship with nature and the spirits that inhabit it.

It has traditionally taken a very binary approach to life and metaphysics. On one side there’s good and on the other side there’s evil. On one side there’s God and on the other side there’s Satan.

As Wyatt points out, angels were allowed into the Christian worldview, but only because they were messengers of God. Nature spirits, on the other hand, were clearly pronounced to be servants of evil.

Those who believed in nature spirits and communed with them were, in the Christian view, witches and sorcerers and were tortured and condemned to death.

Perhaps the clearest example of that approach was when the Catholic Church arrived in Ireland and cut down thousands of oak trees because the Druids worshiped in the sacred groves. The church literally destroyed the very places where the nature spirits lived.

CYNICISM

What struck me most forcefully in Wyatt’s analysis was the effect that cynicism has had on our belief in nature spirits.

Cynicism is . . . fashionable. We’ve only to scroll through the internet in order to find millions of people who don’t seem to believe in anything. They mercilessly mock the belief systems of others and wear their pessimism like a badge of honor.

The news is fake. Politicians are fake. Liberals are fake. Conservatives are fake. Even viruses are fake.

What’s worse, we find many people who loudly proclaim their faith and simply ignore it in their day-to-day lives. People who claim to believe in a Higher Power, yet spew hatred, vitriol, and distrust.

Which, of course, makes us . . . ahem . . . somewhat cynical about their faith.

In an age when people routinely dismiss what they see with their own eyes, why would we expect them to believe in something that they haven’t seen? It’s far easier to dismiss nature spirits as superstitions of simple-minded people than to take them seriously, even if every other culture in human history has believed in them.

WHAT HAPPENS TO NATURE?

The Theosophists have a very interesting take on nature spirits, angels, and devas. They don’t simply see them as amusing little creatures that frolic around the woods wearing pinecone crowns.

Rather, they view them as organizers of nature. They are the underlying forces that make nature work.

For instance, we might think of a water sprite as living in a river. From the Theosophist’s viewpoint, she’s actually making the river into what it is, overseeing the purity of the water and maintaining the lives of the various animals that live in it.

Orcas Island, off the coast of Washington, is said to have a magnificent deva or angel, who oversees all of the life of the island. Lakes, rivers, streams, forests, mountains, all have nature spirits who nurture and sustain them.

Without the spirits, the earth begins to die and without the earth, we die.

MAKE LOVE, NOT WAR

As near as I can tell, the nature spirits don’t really give a flying fig whether we believe in them or not. They’re not some Tinker Bell spirits who’ll curl up and die if we don’t clap for them.

In fact, they seem to avoid our company as much as possible, thank you very much.

What they DO want is for us to quit making war on them.

Stop cutting down those sacred groves of trees.

Stop dumping tons of garbage into the oceans.

Stop paving over paradise and putting up parking lots.

Stop slaughtering millions of animals every year because it’s, “convenient,” for us.

I’m not asking anyone to share my beliefs. But . . . you might go sit by a stream and think about it.

Maybe ask the stream what it thinks.

A few years ago I was reading a fascinating book called, “You Are Not Your Brain,” and the authors made a statement that was positively shocking to me: “To this day, scientists and psychologists cannot agree on exactly what a thought is.”

At first blush, that sounds completely ridiculous because we all know what thoughts are. They’re . . . um . . . they’re like . . . these little things that jump up in our heads and live in our brains, right?

There . . . I solved that one. You’re welcome.

Seriously, though, there really isn’t a good working definition of what a thought actually is. There’s a sort of reductionist explanation of how our nervous systems and brains produce thoughts. We can hook someone up to a brain monitor and see which parts of their brains light up with activity when they’re thinking about a particular subject. Perhaps their fear center – the amygdala – lights up because they’re thinking of something really scary. Or their prefrontal cortex – the thinking brain – lights up because they’re doing some heavy problem solving.

That doesn’t really do anything but describe the process of making the idea, though. It doesn’t tell us what the finished product is. That theory – that the brain makes ideas – exists cheek by jowl with the stimulus/response model where something in our environment makes us think certain things. Perhaps we see a picture of Donald Trump and we think, “Ohhh, scary clown,” which makes us think of circuses which makes us think of Stephen King horror novels about murderous clowns which makes us think about our overdue library book.

That concept seems to be counter-intuitive when we think about . . . well . . . intuition. When we have intuitions or flashes of insight, it feels as if they’ve popped right up in our brains without anything else making them happen. When someone asked Einstein how he invented the theory of relativity he said, “Oh, it just dropped in while I was playing the piano.”

For centuries, human beings viewed some types of ideas in just that way: as something that came into our minds from an outside source. That’s why the word, “inspire,” means to have something breathed into you. The notion was that something out there – perhaps the Universe or the Gods or the fairies – inserted the idea into your mind.

That’s what’s portrayed in the Tarot card, The Ace of Wands. Wands represent ideas and this is an idea or thought coming into the world in its purest form of mental energy. It’s, “divinely inspired.”

That STILL doesn’t tell us exactly what an idea IS, though. It’s just talking about it’s source, rather than it’s contents.

Now, the Theosophists and Victorian occultists had very specific ideas of exactly what an idea is. They viewed ideas as thought-forms, which is to say, individual little packets of energy produced by our brains and emotions and auric fields. And – important point – they felt that they were independent of the human being once they were produced.

We’ve all seen those cartoons where there’s a person having a thought that appears as a bubble with text in it, hovering over the character’s head. That’s a convenient way to visualize what the Theosophists were talking about. Every time that we have a thought, it’s like our bio-field – our brains, emotional energies, energy bodies – are extruding a little, tiny thought-form bubbles that exists outside of us.

Most of the bubbles don’t last very long because they don’t contain much energy. Let’s face it, many of us are NOT thinking about the theory of relativity while we play the piano. Instead, we’re having really profound thoughts like, “Where’d I put my car keys? Need a cup of coffee. Gotta walk the dog. Did I do the laundry?” So these are little bubbles that appear for a moment, pop, and disappear.

When the thought forms are really heavily charged with energy, though, they stick around. How do they get charged? Well, through emotions and through repetition.

Suppose you just went to bed with someone and you had a super-duper, unbelievable, I-think-my-ears-just-fell-off orgasm at the exact moment that you thought, “I love you.” That, “I love you,” thought is super-charged with energy and it will last. Ditto, if you’ve been badly shocked or frightened by something. The more intense the emotion, the more of an energetic charge the thought-form has and the longer it will exist.

We can also charge the thought-forms with energy by thinking of them over and over and over. On a positive note, we can see that happen when someone thinks of their lover constantly, as we tend to do in the early stages of falling in love. The obsessive thinking keeps adding energy to that same, “I love you,” thought-form and makes it’s last. On a negative note, we can see the same pattern with chronic anxiety and depression. Constantly thinking of things that frighten us or make us sad just increases the charge in the thought-forms and so the depression will linger long after the original cause.

Two of the early Theosophists, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, published a book called, “Thought Forms.” It had illustrations of the forms as they emerged from people’s auras, as seen by psychic mediums. Here’s one of a peaceful thought:

And here’s one of an angry thought.

I would have liked to have seen one of a horny thought – sort of astral pornography, I guess – but the Victorians didn’t roll that way.

So is all of this true? Maybe. It certainly forms the basis for much of what we call visualization and manifestation, as well as the concepts of either cursing or blessing someone. I’ll be writing more about that in the immediate future but for the time being it’s a fun concept to play with. What if our thoughts are actual things that exist in our personal energy space and exert an influence on us and those around us? How can we change the negative thought-forms and increase the positive-forms? Can we pick up someone else’s thought-forms, much like a virus?

Before you dismiss the idea out of hand, remember what we started off with here: the most preeminent psychologists and scientists in the world have absolutely no idea what a thought is. The theory of thought-forms is just as good – and maybe better – than most of their theories.

Remember that my e-book, “Just the Tarot,” is still available – dirt cheap! – on Amazon. In fact, I’m sending thought-forms at you right now. You should buy this book . . . you should buy this book . . . you should buy this book . . .

Tag: theosophy

Fairies, Devas and Angels, Oh My . . .

Thought-Forms, Astral Pornography, and The Ace of Wands