Foundations of Earth Wisdom Sophia as the Ground of Capacities for Experiencing the Spiritual Earth This presentation is the first of an ongoing series of online presentations on Foundations of Earthosophy. The series will include reflections as well as audio presentations.
With this series of reflections on Earthosophy, we enter into the living, unanswerable, always unfolding question: Who is Earth? Spiritually, Who is Earth? And, with that felt question, we enter the further question – How do we come into direct, immediate, bodily presence with the Presence of the Spiritual-Earth. There are Wisdom Traditions who know Earth in this manner – the American Indian, the Celtic, the Shamanic, and the esoteric stream known as the Saturn Mysteries. But, we, this culture, do not know Earth as Spiritual Earth, a Who. Those who revere Earth intuit that Earth is not just the inert stage upon which life happens, but rather, all that lives, including human beings -- are organs of the wholeness of Earth we live within – not on. We attend, closely, to Earth Wisdom traditions as guides of the coming-to-be. With these guides, we enter the deep tradition of Feminine Wisdom as Earth Presences. Sophia, Mary, The Black Madonna, Mary Magdalene, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Sophia of the Apocalypse – we propose, are here, present, as the spiritual-living Earth. There are other traditions, of course. We provide ONE way, the bodily way of feeling, knowing, sensing, perceiving Earth as Spiritual Earth – in full, wakeful awareness. These Earth Presences are also embodied Soul Capacities – We must find the manner in which these presences are already within the embodied soul and awaken to those capacities, which then allow being with Earth in utterly new ways – as our ever-present nurturing companions. Some of the capacities that will awaken through the conversations and practices as we enter the depths of the Spiritual Earth: Sophia Capacities – creative receptivity; sensory tangibility of the holiness of Earth; body-sureness and the ability to nurture; the capacity to ‘see-through’ the prevailing darkness; the capacity to encounter ‘soul-answers’ to life questions within the phenomena of
the natural world; the capacity of the unity of sensory awareness with soul and spirit awareness of the Earth; a new sensory-empathy with Earth in her plight, and resources of creative will response. Mary Capacities – capacity to feel the unity of cosmos and Earth within the interior of the heart; the capacity to ‘read’ the phenomena of the natural world as soul phenomena – weather, animal gestures, temperature…the elements; capacity of imaginal consciousness – the ability to allow the matter of Spiritual Earth to be within and guide the soul. The capacity to live within creative pregnancy of the soul in its unity with the deep Earth. Black Madonna Capacities – the capacity to ‘meet’ and engage the presences of the deep Spiritual Earth; the ability to allow transfiguring of our body through engagement with the presence of the Spiritual Earth; the capacity of inward security of spirit during times of utter darkness; capacity of entering into the deepest levels of the Spiritual Earth, discovering the Light of the Earth, the seed forms of the future ways of life that are now announcing themselves. Mary Magdalene Capacities – the capacity of an absolute devotion to the future unfolding of the Spiritual Earth; the ability to safely follow the way into the multiple layers of subtle invisibility of Spiritual Earth, discovering there the Feminine creative presences, known for centuries by many names, and in our time as the realm of the ‘Mothers’; purification of attachments to fear of death, attachments to desires, attachments; to ignorance of heart, and attachments to anger, revenge, violence. Sophia of the Apocalypse Capacities – the capacity of experiencing Earth as an unfolding, still evolving bodied presence of body, soul and spirit. Such experience awakens through the revelation of the unity of human-earth though creative imagination – earth as imaginal presence; through the capacity of experiencing earth, in full awareness, with the mode of dream-awareness; the capacity of earth-gratitude, of how fortunate we are to beings of Earth; the capacity to experience earth as ‘coming-to-be’ rather than as ‘already completed; the capacity to experience the spiritual aspects of the whole of the mineral world, including the very physiology of our body as belonging with the mineral world of Earth.
Sophia – Wisdom Angel of Spiritual Earth I am the beauty running through the world…I am the essential Feminine. In the beginning I was no more than a mist, rising and falling…I was the bond that held together the foundations of the universe…I am the single radiance by which all is aroused and within which it is vibrant…I open the door to the whole heart of creation…Lying between God and the earth, as a zone of mutual attraction, I draw them both together in a passionate union…I am the Eternal Feminine. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Writings in the Time of War, “Hymn to the Eternal Feminine.” Initiating a Felt Connection with Sophia and Earth Start inside, sitting, eyes closed: Enter into the Silence by placing your attention at the periphery of the body. Start at any place, move attention around, then stillness. Feel a Presence – as if lightly touching you all around your body – this is the Presence of Silence. Then, move your attention to the center of the heart. Notice the change of awareness. After a few moments, it will feel as if heart surrounds you rather than heart being within you. This is the heart-field. Get up, go outside, walk around, preferably on land rather than cement. Let your body show you the movement and the orientation-direction. Gently notice the bodily unity with the Earth. Gently notice the unity of Sky and Earth. Gently notice that wherever you are, you are like a nexus, a momentary nexus of this unity. You are not an isolated ‘self’, surrounded by an objective, independent world/earth. There is a complex unity of body-earth-sky.
Just notice what this is like – notice if something stands out within the whole – it is as if something of Earth notices you.
Mary-Sophia Embodying Spiritual-Earth Wisdom This is a photograph of a small sculpture of Mary from the Medieval Museum in Paris. It also pictures the incredible intimacy between our soul and our spirit when we feel our bodily unity with Earth; soul giving birth—life—animating our true individuality as “Earth spiritual beings” and our part in ensouling Earth. Notice the immediacy of this exchange of breath. This is happening all the time; The Mary-Sophia dimension of Earth is breathing into us. So this is a first little practice: to have a bodily sense of Mary’s presence as an Earth-soul presence. Gently breathe in, through the mouth; feel the presence of Mary— Mary as the embodied Spiritual Earth-Soul. Breathe out; feel the intimacy of your breath intermingling with that of the soul forces, your breath as the animating soul presence and spirit-creating presence within you. When you breathe in you feel, “Oh the breath that comes into me, animates me as a dimension of the Spiritual Earth, occurring bodily.” When you breathe out, you feel a creative unity with Earth.
“And then that girl the angels came to visit“.!Rainer Maria Rilke And then that girl the angels came to visit,!she woke also to fruit, frightened by beauty,!given love, shy, in her!so much blossom, the forest!no one had explored, with paths leading everywhere. They left her alone to walk and to drift!and the spring carried her along.!Her simple and unselfcentered Mary-life!became marvelous and castlelike.!Her life resembled trumpets on the feast days!that reverberated far inside every house;!and she, once so girlish and fragmented,!was so plunged now inside her womb,!and so full inside from that one thing!and so full – enough for a thousand others –!that every creature seemed to throw light on her!and she was like a slope with vines, heavily bearing.
[Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke, trans. by Robert Bly!(New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1981), 35.] The Way of Mary: Embodying Wisdom Mary is an initiate into embodying the Wisdom of Sophia. She brings to the world the capacity to inwardly feel the unity of cosmos and Earth within the interior of the heart; the capacity to ‘read’ and calm the phenomena of the natural world as soul phenomena – weather, animal gestures, temperature…the elements. Through soul presence with Mary-Sophia we enter the embodied capacity of imaginal consciousness – the ability to allow the matter of Spiritual Earth to be within and guide the soul; the capacity to live within creativity of the soul in its unity with the deep Earth. She shifts our soul from individual interests to our inherent union and destiny with Earth. Experience the soul Presence of the Comforter!
Black Madonna Sophia Embodying Depths of Spiritual Earth
Come in reverence to the Altar of the Soul of the World. There you will find the entrance to deep interiority; The Queen of Interiority is the Black Madonna who greets you, who is individualized as your soul, and who holds what purity of interiority bears, namely your Perfect Nature. Your Perfect Nature is soul presence with the interiority of the Earth. The Black Madonna, being of ultimate compassion, of healing, of presence in the times of impossibility. Possibility is always about the future, what could be, what is coming to be – according to our concept of the future. Through the soul dimension of the Black Madonna, we meet the dimension of the present. The present is the dimension of doing in union with the spiritual Earth. Different than doing according to impulse, imagination, idea, need, desire, want. The Black Madonna is the depths of Silence. Find the Silence by placing attention at the edges of the body, and then placing attention in the touch of the Silence. Go deep into Silence, ever deeper, to the point that self begins to dissolve. Notice as the self dissolves there is only Silence turning to utter Stillness. Awareness increases in intensity. Self-reflection, the turning back of consciousness on itself, momentarily disappears. This is the Seeing, just as, in the picture here of the Black Madonna, her eyes penetrate the depths of the world, the depths of the Earth – and there is Liberation.
Mary Magdalene Sophia Heart of Spiritual Earth Mary Magdalene reveals the entry into the heart of all things of Earth, to learn the sacred power of adaptability, like the flowing of water, so that we may enter into heart communion with Earth and become sources of Earth-Light. She is the presence of Love-Light within the body and within Earth. Mary Magdalene and her intimate friend, Christ, know the secrets of the Underworld. Her resonance with Christ as he descended to this region brings the spiritual secrets of the depths into the spiritual Earth. Mary Magdalene, along with Mary, is an embodying of Sophia. She spent the last thirty years of life living in a network of sacred caves where she and her companions engaged in mystical rites of initiation with Mother Earth in order to release a wellspring of strength, spiritual healing, and vision to nourish the soul of people and of Earth. Soul Connection with Mary Magdalene takes place every time we are able o bring any darkness into relation with the whole of our soul-being so that the false and illusory division between ‘light’ and ‘dark’ dissolves. They are both aspects of the Whole, just as Earth is simultaneously darkness and light. Being quiet, relaxed, and going into the Silence by noticing the quality of a presence that intimately embraces us always, can be an entryway into presence with Mary Magdalene. Then, when in the Silence, if we slowly, inwardly gesture the word “deeper”, repeating the word every minute or so, we discover an endless depth of the Silence. As the attraction to the depths of the Silence increases, some aspect of us, of our soul, remains there even when we are back in the light. This presence with the depths becomes a way of seeing, a living imagination through which we see, in sensory presence, through our body, to the unity of darkness and light. As we do so, darkness as darkness and fear and difficulty changes into the possibility of world wholeness.
Lady Guadalupe Sophia Apocalyptic Future of Spiritual Earth
Dark lady, you smile at me across the mountains!The secret smile of ancient people.!What thoughts do you send me, dark, beautiful lady?!Will you someday tell me when I come with great !armfuls of roses!Over the mysterious mountains to your feet?!Dear, dark queen will you give me, too, !Lovely roses in December? Anne B. Quinn * Entering the Depths of Earth: Juan Diego feels the following questions in the presence of Lady Guadalupe,!the Apocalyptic Sophia of Earth. Tomorrow we will see the Apocalyptic Sophia of the Book of Revelations,!and the extreme similarity will be apparent. These questions are indicating the kinds of awareness to be consciously entered in order to sense and perceive Earth as a Spiritual being of body, soul, and spirit. Am I really this fortunate that I deserve to hear this? Am I Dreaming now? Am I Imagining all this now? How do I come awake in this dreaming/imagining? Where am I in this awake dreaming/imagining?
Is this the Spiritual Earth?
Entering the Questions: Within the natural world – relax body, place attention simultaneously in heart and legs. Feel the increase in intensity of body-resonance (tingling of hands); walk slowing with hands toward earth, palms down. Come to a place where there is strong body-resonance. Listen – be with. In this place, notice what is producing the resonance. Look at this with very focused and at the same time very diffuse sensing for several minutes. Close eyes. Be present to how what you looked at now lives within. Notice body resonance. When present with earth-resonance within body, open eyes, stay within sensory awareness of the whole you are present with. Notice bodily-soul feeling. Come into bodily-unity with what is being experienced. Be present with the depth of the Spiritual Earth.
Sophia of the Apocalypse The Future Unity of Universal Human Nature with Spiritual Earth
“Next appeared a great portent in Heaven, a woman robed with the Sun, beneath her feet the moon, and on her head a crown of twelve stars. She is pregnant, and in the anguish of her labor she cried out to be delivered.
(Revelations: 12”1-2) She is the soul of Earth, who uniting with the human soul, assumes for the first time fullness of individual being. The Sun, the Moon and the twelve stars, indicating the constellations of the Zodiac, constitute those elements of the near Cosmos that tangibly affect life on Earth.
The air and the earth help her to escape the dragon’s clutches: “But the woman was given two great eagle’s wings to fly to the place in the wilds…out of reach of the serpent.!From his mouth the serpent spewed a flood of water after the woman to sweep her away.!But the earth came to her rescue and opened its mouth and swallowed the river which the dragon spewed from its mouth.” 12:14-16.
Could she be the very soul of nature that joins with the human being? By giving birth to archangel Michael the woman robed with the sun!unites the three spheres of the universe that god has created:!the angels, nature and the human being. This joining spells the profound transformation of nature, the turn in the tide of its evolution; the presence of a unified human-spiritual/soul earth awareness; the noosphere as described by Teilhard de Chardin. * The Earth-Cosmos Practice: Orienting to Apocalyptic Sophia (From Jose Arguilles)
a) Enter into the Silence; place attention in the center of the heart; with each exhalation of the breath, let thoughts dissolve. b) Make an inner image of the whole Earth –!for example, as seen from space, but much more of a felt-presence;!feel her qualities like ‘force’ currents.!If you only inwardly ‘see’ a picture, then it is a mental image. Feel Earth in her simultaneous day/night presence.!Feel her dispassionate embrace of all beings without exception, without praise or blame. c) Feel the disparity between our present human ‘state’ in our limited-ness through ego-presence and the whole Earth.!Feel the suffering, the hungry, the poor, the sick the refuges, the violence, the confusion, the misery –!all through very particular images of these qualities; images of violence, war, poverty, greed, destruction, etc. Then notice – this kind of suffering is not necessary – it is brought about by very limited views of reality!and ignorance of our being aspects of Earth. d) Breathe in the darkness – the ignorance, sickness, sufferings as imaged, and let them be with, combine with, the light in the core of your heart, and breathe out this light.!(We are not trying to transmute these suffering, but rather are noticing that they are all a distraction from our Earth-presence and are all also projections of our own un-felt destructiveness, and our own simultaneous living/dying. e) Silently, gestural-ly, that is, by silently gesturing, say “ I am one with the Earth; the Earth and myself are one.”