Welcome to Your Designer Planet By Richard Leviton©2005
Picture the Earth as seen from space in the now famous NASA photographs. There it is, our lovely blue-white orb, with its swirling cloud formations, storms in formation, green and beige c ontinents, and massive seas. It’s spinning faithfully, dependably, though too slowly for the eye to discern, giving us the day and night cycle, the cold and hot seasons, and the mounting years. Not bad for an accident of the cosmos, an unplanned freak occurrence. Isn’t this the way science schools us to regard the creation of our Earth, as a fortunate, even surprising, result of blind, mechanical, or accidental forces? Is it? Cracks started to form in this monolithic but deadening assumption in the late 1970s when British atmospheric scientist James Lovelock came up with the Gaia Hypothesis. Lovelock proposed that the Earth is a self-regulating, homeostatic, geophysiological mechanism, almost like an organism, that continually balances all the inputs and perturbances to its system, such as solar-driven geomagnetic fields, flood and drought cycles, and the increasingly injurious impact of human civilization and technology.
Of course, he used the term Gaia, the ancient Greek name for the spirit of the Earth, only metaphorically. Lovelock resisted the extrapolations by many of his hypothesis to mean the planet was in fact ensouled with some huge angel. But his Gaia Hypothesis made a valuable contribution to a new way of thinking about the Earth. In many ways Lovelock’s was a subversive model, threatening to undermine all our “scientific” assumptions about Earth, for if it is a self-adjusting geophysiological system, somebody must have designed it to work that way. It’s too rationally ordered a system to be a mere chance or serendipitous happening. Now let’s take this line of thinking way beyond the comfort zone of the Gaia Hypothesis. Picture the Earth again, but this time place little twinkling stars at all the sacred sites, pilgrimage destinations, holy places, even archeological ruins you know of or have visited. For example: the Great Pyramid of Giza, Glastonbury Tor, Lourdes, Fatima, Mount Shasta, Mount Fuji, Chaco Canyon, and how about bucolic Monticello down there in unassuming Charlottesville. Clairvoyants will affirm that at each of the Earth’s many thousands of sacred sites, many of which have been forgotten or not recently rediscovered, there is something
else, like the soul within or around the physical body. In general terms, this something else could be called a Light temple, some form of structured light space that serves as a place for meditation, prayer, or vision. The ancient Irish, for example, talked about how their old gods lived in gorgeous, otherworldly castles and citadels accessed through the sidhe, the barrows, cairns, hills, and other landscape protuberances or structures, which were like portals. So we have this second layer of planetary reality, lying upon or just above the Earth like an aura and filled with marvellous spiritual p alaces and beings. Let’s take this a few steps further into the really wild Outback of Earth reality. It’s well -established now that the human has many subtle features not normally visible (except to psychics) such as the aura (it has seven layers), chakras (there are many), and nadis (minute threadlike energy channels). The essential point is that all this subtle bodily architecture seems to have a purpose: it’s involved with our health, emotions, states of mind, and spiritual well-being. Some say this is the natur al landscape for the soul which is perhaps its director. The Earth has an equivalent matrix of energy centers, envelopes, circulation pathways, and numerous nodes,
switching stations, and the like, and these are similarly purposeful and ensouled, maintaining the Earth’s health. We could reasonably suggest they are crucial components of the Earth’s geophysiological mechanism whereby it regulates itself on a soul level and makes suitable adjustments from there to maintain physical reality and Nature here—the ecosystem in which we all live, “we” meaning all forms of organic life. The numerous sacred sites and their “otherworldly” Light temples are part of this global organism, carefully programmed cells, molecules, and organs. But they have something to do with us, too, just as our own auric layers, chakras, and nadis have something to do with our consciousness, emotions, and health. Here’s what I think it is: Over the last 22 years I have been visiting many of these Light temples on the other side of physical sites and ruins, and I’ve found that amidst their wild diversity of types and shapes and experiences offered —here some of the terms from myth are serviceable, such as Grail Castles, dragons, Cities of the Gods, Moon Temples, Cosmic Eggs, and many more—they have a collective purpose. Not only are they functional parts of Gaia’s planetary body, t hey are mirrors for parts of ourselves, not so much just the bodily-based personality but more like what
C.G. Jung means by the Self, the potentially individuated totality of what a human being is in fullest, awakened expression. The sites, I’ve found, with their various inner or Light temple features, mirror the structures, contents, and personages of the spiritual worlds. It’s like getting a guided, experiential tour of the Seven Heavens and all their suburbs and exurbs, starting from right in our own backyards, such as from Monticello. Yes, Monticello, and in fact all of Charlottesville , is part of this purposeful picture. Thus far in my research and inner world forays, I have identified 23 different Light temple features within Charlottesville, all of which participate in the upkeep and on-going life of the Earth. Such features are accessed through familiar features in the local landscape: Monticello has half a dozen, Ashlawn several, the University of Virginia campus, Shadwell’s Mountain, Carter’s Mountain, even downtown Charlottesville—all these places are part of it, important, in fact, indispensable cells, molecules, and organs in Gaia’s body. The “it” they are all part of is what I call the Designer Planet. Welcome to your designer planet! I propose that the Earth in all its complexity, from natural systems,
species diversification, and its wealth of sacred sites and otherworldly destinations, was carefully planned out, designed, and executed for a purpose: to have the physical environment and its subtle underpinnings support the human experience of higher consciousness states while fully, organically embodied. The fantastic array of sacred sites and their inner Light temples and their purposes all support this by creating this vast, omnipresent mirror of the final outcome: what we will look like, how it will feel, the way reality will be, when we get there. Of course, all this presupposes a designer. This is not landscape design, certainly in any conventional sense. It is terraforming, shaping a planet to manifest conditions suitable for humans to achieve a massive, long-term purpose. Who could design a planetary landscape at such a level? Indeed, Who? That’s the subject of my article, “Ray Masters in Your Backyard,” next month in
Echo.
— Richard Leviton, the author of 13 books, including most recently, The Emerald Modem: A User’s Guide to the Earth’s Interactive Energy Body (Hampton Roads, 2004), Signs on the Earth (Hampton Roads, June 2005), and Encyclopedia of Earth Myths: An Insider’s Guide to Mythic People, Places, Objects, and Events Central to the Earth’s Visionary
Geography (Hampton Roads, November 2005). He frequently conducts experiential guided tours of sacred sites, linking myths with psychic reality, including a new series underway at Charlottesville.