Image by cocoparisienne
Narrated by Marie T. Russell.
How do you experience elemental beings? Can you consciously make it happen? And how do you distinguish between truth and fantasy?
Experiencing elemental beings is generally prohibited by mental blocks. These mental blocks tend to come up particularly when you begin with practical exercises. You think your own perceptions are figments of the imagination, or fantasies, and you are so full of mistrust that nothing remains. So right away you throw out the baby with the bathwater.
This mistrust lives in the air of our Western culture, which is based on natural science, and is thus breathed in by all of us. There is something good about it. The passage through the mistrust can lead to an ennobling and purging of your spiritual perceptions. Without mistrust you would take every inner perception for real, even if your own wishes, ideas, and state of being overshadow and distort it.
For me, spiritual experience has become a neutral, everyday affair. There is a method for achieving objectivity of one’s experience, so that you can truly speak of spiritual research. This is true for the perception of all spiritual phenomena and beings, for ether forces, angels, the deceased, Christ, and also for elemental beings.
How Do I Arrive at Objectivity in Spiritual Experience?
When it comes to this question, the following points appear important to me:
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In spiritual experience, the human being is themself the organ of perception. Just as physicists clean their instruments in the laboratory and pay attention to the temperature and humidity, it is equally necessary to constantly keep yourself clean and stay in shape. A regular meditation practice, inner purification, and work for soul balance are required. It is important to practice concentration of thought, equanimity of feeling, constancy of will, openness, and positivity.
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In concrete perception, maintaining lack of intention is paramount, for intention covers or distorts perception. If I myself want something, then the being cannot make itself heard. I try with every spiritual perception to test if I am truly in an unintentional space. Here I am always a little skeptical, for I know that in the depths of soul, much is hiding that could interfere.
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Crucial is an experience of evidence, a feeling of truth. We know this experience of evidence from every physical sense perception. That there is a floor here I do not need to prove, for I see and touch it and experience the truth directly; likewise, in spiritual experiences we should have this experience of evidence, this feeling of truth. There are spiritual experiences that feel false. This should motivate me to look at them more closely.
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Communication with others is indispensable. In principle, elemental beings can be perceived in a similar way by all who have trained themselves in this direction. If I say that a big water being has its focus at this specific location, this should also be experienceable by others. In practice, this cannot always be achieved. We are all still in the beginning stages of the cultivation of our spiritual organs of perception.
The best training occurs when we communicate with others and meet in person to help transfer skills between colleagues. Communication prevents one-sided and false interpretations. The quality of every scientific endeavor is built on communication between scientists. -
In spiritual science this is also the case. Only through bringing information together and comparing experiences can a whole picture be created, for naturally, everyone, through their human constitution, life experience, conceptual upbringing, karma, and so on, has their specific point of perception. You get closer to the truth the more viewpoints you take into account. Objectivity is not created through negation of subjectivity but through taking into account and incorporating the subjective standpoint.
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In natural science, you often want to create objectivity by getting rid of the human being and, for instance, only relying on technical measuring instruments; however, a measuring instrument is also subjective and only delivers information from its particular position.
In spiritual research, it is wholly impossible to push aside the human being, for the human is themself the only instrument of perception. You get closest to objectivity if you are aware of your subjective limits and try to incorporate other standpoints. -
I find the comparison with other places and times very helpful and practical. Spiritual experiences are often subtle and hard to grasp. Only if I try to have the same experience at a different location can I usually clarify my experience. Also, I like to try to come into a spiritual perception on different days to exclude the influence of the mood of the day.
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Results of spiritual perception are in principle repeatable and verifiable, but there are limits to this. In order to repeat an experience, you need to be able to reproduce the same conditions as the original. The more complicated and specific the experiences, the more difficult this becomes.
Being able to repeat an experience is also not random, because individual spiritual entities create specific spiritual experiences, and perhaps an elemental being or angel is not interested in repeating the experience to satisfy the criteria of natural science. -
Continual spiritual scientific study and refining of concepts seem indispensable to me—only with refined concepts are refined perceptions possible. If I only have the concept “energy” or “vibration,” then I will only be able to experience “energy.”
Only if I can conceptually differentiate between ether force, elemental being, angel, the deceased, and Christ can I then also perceive these differences. It is no different in the physical world. An enthusiastic specialist can discover so much more than the dabbling amateur will ever notice. -
Assured spiritual experiences only come about through experience, and years of practice allow an inner map to be created. You can grasp experiences in a clearer way and put them in perspective because you have already seen a lot.
When you first experience something spiritual you are often excited, but it is better to stay calm. Routine creates calmness.
The Biggest Problem with Spiritual Research
The biggest problem facing spiritual research is that it is relatively unestablished in our culture. The natural sciences engage thousands of professors and billions of dollars in research, and natural science is a subject in school. Spiritual research, on the other hand, does not even exist in public consciousness. If you are working on this you are often looked at askance.
The ostracized nature of spiritual research means that it is hard to find the courage to take it up. We make methodological concessions or hide the spiritual behind words that sound scientific. As a result of these missing structures, the potentials and resources of scientific research are not properly used.
Where Should Someone Turn To Receive An Education In This Domain?
We lack connective networks, educational possibilities, spiritual scientific congresses, libraries, and research projects. In order for a spiritual impulse to find root in everyday life and ripen, it needs to be chewed through by many people and internalized, and we must receive training in perceptive possibilities.
It is my dream to create a Foundation for Spiritual Research to make this a reality. I hope someday to find people who can and want to contribute the necessary funding for such an endeavor.
©2021 (English); ©2008 (German). All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted with permission of the publisher.
Findhorn Press, an imprint of Inner Traditions Intl.
Article Source
Answering the Call of the Elementals: Practices for Connecting with Nature Spirits
by Thomas Mayer
We all live in the realm of elemental beings. They permeate our souls, our thoughts, our feelings, and they co-create the world around us, yet we are often completely unaware of them. They, however, are eager to be perceived and acknowledged by us because their future and ours are fundamentally connected.
Elementals act as carriers of the emotional level of the world. Through sharing his encounters with fairies, dwarves, giants, and others, the author reveals their urgent call for help, an entreaty to anchor the elemental beings again in the awareness of humankind through recognition, acknowledgment, and conscious connection. Let us support the elementals in their crucial, life-giving work, through which they in turn support us in preserving the Earth we live on.
For more info and/or to order this book, click here. Also available as a Kindle edition.
About the Author
Thomas Mayer teaches meditation based on the work of Rudolf Steiner. He is a civil rights activist and author of several books on elemental beings in German. The cofounder of the organization More Democracy, he has organized many referendums in Germany and Switzerland. He teaches throughout Europe and lives near Basel, Switzerland.
Visit his website (in German) at ThomasMayer.org/
