How can we live harmlessly?

Dearest readers,

Before our presidential elections in 2016, I was collecting signatures to help get the Green Party’s Jill Stein on the ballot in the State of Georgia. Among the people I approached for the petition was a young organic farmer at a local outdoor market. As we discussed farming, life, philosophy, and a variety of fascinating topics, this sensitive young man told me that while many idealize farming and rural life, in reality, farming is all about killing living beings. He seemed genuinely distressed, for while he was dedicated to producing quality food for humans, his practice destroys the lives of insects, plants, and small animals despite his best intentions.

Is it possible to live harmlessly? And if not, what intention can we set as human beings to live compassionately, loving and honoring self and all of Earth, her creatures, plants, trees, soil, rocks? What can we do in our daily lives to preserve and honor life? How can we change our habits and the way we think and act to move towards harmlessness?

My heart is deeply connected to Gaia, and each day I communicate empathically with small mammals, birds, trees, clumps of moss. On my way home from work today, I saw with horror that two beautiful live trees had been uprooted at a construction site where they had previously been cordoned off. Believing the builders had intentionally preserved the stand of old trees, and I cried as I sat at the stop light, sending my loving thoughts and prayers to Mother Earth for the loss of these beautiful beings.

The vegan and vegetarian movements are an increasingly heeded response to the call for heightened consciousness about the beauty, intelligence, and dignity of farm animals. Many people are not aware of the intense suffering of farm animals. How many know that calves are systematically removed from their mothers on dairy farms, and that these calves are often brutally murdered. The cows are constantly impregnated so that they continue to give milk, and their babies are taken away from them each time. At the end of the cow’s useful life, she is slaughtered.

If we project this suffering onto a human mother, we can easily imagine the soul-crushing distress that these animals must experience. How would we feel about human beings treated in this manner? Human slavery does exist, and over twenty seven million human beings, including young children, suffer the unspeakable cruelty of forced prostitution, pedophilia, slavery, and organ harvesting. Billions of farm animals today live as slaves, treated as inanimate objects. The level of consciousness today that supports human and animal slavery is indeed very low.

Most people also don’t give much thought to human farm workers who are more often than not exploited, underpaid, exposed to harmful chemicals, with long working hours and no benefits. Much produce is picked by children who don’t have the opportunity to go to school. The vegan and vegetarian lifestyles are, alas, far from harmless.

I believe that young children instinctively understand, love, and honor all animals. If adults model compassionate behavior to children and if it were to become unthinkable to eat any animals, this dietary standard could quickly shift. Also, as human consciousness rises and the energetic frequency of human thought and DNA shift, our bodies become less dense. The light body flourishes on a lighter diet. It is going to become easier to eliminate meat from our diets.

 

As we become more evolved spiritually, our bodies follow suit. As human evolution progresses, humanity will eventually collectively adapt to a new cellular structure and eat less and less. At some point, our bodies will need only light and perhaps water to thrive. When we transform from humans to quantum, multi-dimensional light beings, we will be able to live harmlessly. Until then, we can strive to live consciously and compassionately.

Today, even if we make the choice to avoid consuming animals or at least to decrease consumption or choose only to eat animals who were raised with love, respect, and dignity, we are still not living harmlessly. We are living consciously, but not harmlessly. Plant life is conscious. Our planet is conscious. Everything we do creates harm. When we pull up weeds, mow our lawn, eat vegetables, we are creating harm. Life as we know it in our current human form cannot be sustained without creating some harm. However, plants and animals raised with love, care, dignity, and respect contain a higher energy frequency than plants or animals raised on industrial or feedlot farms. Our energetic vibrations affect everyone we touch.

Nature shows us this. Animals who are carnivores eat other animals, but they are not greedy. They never take more than they need to live. And when they die, they too are either eaten or return to the soil. When we grow plants with conscious intent and love, and when we give gratitude and thanks for the lives sacrificed that we may live, we move to a place of love. Gratitude is a necessary complement to consciousness. This is the reason humans pray over food. We are all part of nature.

Because humanity has for centuries avoided being part of Nature’s food chain, we have lost sight of our place in nature. By consciously working to release conditioning, negativity, fear, judgment of self and others, shame, lack or poverty consciousness, greed, and other mental and physical blockages that keep our energy levels, thoughts, and behaviors base and low, we can make room for more light and love in our lives each day.

 

The most important and most misunderstood aspect of love and unity consciousness is self-love. Without self-love, we all remain in the dark. God never judges us, but we human beings never cease to judge ourselves and one another. Until we are able to release all of this negativity, the light and love which are already inside of us cannot be expressed. Self-love is mastery. When we master self-love, we become beings of light. This is how we were designed, and the reality we will one day create collectively as light beings is known as “heaven on Earth”.

Today, we all have a unique opportunity to open up to the light and love that is inside of our hearts. We are being supported by the Universe, by the sun, and by the inhabitants of our galaxy, as well as by Gaia. The human being never stops evolving. We are all at different places in our personal evolution. We can all choose to look into our own hearts and find love for self, our fellow human beings, and for all of the living creatures on Earth, as well as for our home planet. Just knowing that everything we perceive is an expression of consciousness and sentient energy is a great start. Reality is love. We create reality using our hearts. It is time to start living responsibly and consciously. Living harmlessly starts here.

 

Daimons and demons: mediators between the earthly and the divine

Hello dear readers,

In the ancient world, people actively maintained relationships with ancestors, animal spirits, and cosmic entities. The human imagination played an active role in communicating with the natural world. At some point, humanity was diverted from our connection to nature. I believe that when Christianity was established as a religion, in a diversion from the original teachings of Jesus, the church as well as certain political and economic forces made a concerted effort to demonize nature, the feminine, and humanity’s connection to our personal higher self.

Shamanistic healer and psychotherapist Dr. Steven Farmer explains that the daimon, a sort of genius and animal spirit that was a revered protector in many societies around the world, was transformed into a feared “demon”. The natural world and all that was earthly or below ground was transformed into a shadow arena, relegated and downgraded to being the realm of only dark energies: demons and the devil.

Suddenly only the cosmic arena, the male pole of spirituality, was considered a source of good, light, and salvation. Thus, heaven became relegated to the sky. The spiritual became distant and separate from our bodies and the world we live in every day. And nature, women, the feminine, the animal and plant kingdom and those who were versed in the healing arts of plants, animals, and the imagination became evil and were feared.

Women, who had once been the highest priestesses and sources of great wisdom were suddenly considered inferior, with smaller brains and lesser abilities than men. Nature and the bowels of the earth became the domain of hell, torture, dreaded punishments. Sexuality and the body, which came from the Earth, were included in this litany of evil. Man and woman were officially divorced from their own bodies, their own intuition, direct connection to the personal higher self, and from a consciously loving and connected relationship with our planet and with nature.

In fact, the daimon (Greek: in-dwelling spirit), of which spiritual writer, psychotherapist, and historian James Hillman speaks in his wonderful book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, is the voice of our higher self. As we live in our temporal earthly bodies on this planet, we are always, if we so choose, connected to our higher self through our intuition and our imagination. The pineal gland in the brain, also known as the third eye, is the gateway to our higher self. Images of the pineal are ever-present in ancient art, architecture, and sculpture. The winged snake symbolism refers to the connection of the earthly to the cosmic realms. Mystics believe we all have many spirit guides, ancestors, and other wise and benevolent sources of energy who accompany us along our path. Because we are born onto this planet with free will, they will not interfere with our lives unless we call upon them for help.

Like the daimon, Earth herself is alive and seeks to communicate with us. Shamanic wisdom teaches that there are three worlds: the lower world, which is located inside the earth – under the ground; the middle world, which is where we live; and the upper world, which would be the cosmos or heavenly domain. The shaman is trained to navigate all of these worlds. He or she has special guides or helpers which are often in the form of animals. These spirit or power animals would have been called daimons (Greece) or geniuses (Rome) in the ancient world.

By grounding ourselves in our bodies and connecting to our planet Earth, it becomes easy to recognize that all of creation is one family. When we become aware that the lower realms are just as sacred as the middle and higher realms, we gain increased wisdom and balance. Our current society is in chaos. For too long certain factions in our society have suppressed necessary knowledge about ourselves and our reality from us.

The human being is a very powerful creator. Once we reopen our hearts, imaginations, and balance our minds, bodies, souls, and spirits, we will intuitively  embrace and revere the feminine once again. We will understand that the sacred feminine is equally important to the sacred masculine, and humanity will become more cooperative and compassionate. It is my hope that by restoring credibility to intuition, emotion, and to the feminine, our health will improve, and our societies will become more peaceful.

The feminine point of view is all encompassing, nurturing, and intuitive. The female brain uses both lobes and makes connections between apparently unrelated ideas, thoughts, feelings. The creative conceptual mind is necessary for the advancement of technology, social structure, and for the health of our planet. Knowing that all people, plants, animals, and the planet herself are interdependent is so important. People who are religious often talk about going to heaven. Do they know that home is inside of each of us? We are here on Earth to learn to love self and one another. This is true purpose of life: love and consciousness. Our insight is a dear friend, not a demon of whom we should be afraid. By demonizing our inner wisdom and our higher self, we are cut off from our own power and our own ability to heal our own bodies, hearts, and spirits.

I think it’s time to rehabilitate the daimon and take back our power to see within and beyond the veil.