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The Archive of Stanley MessengerA Preparation for the Next ImpactFrom Crop Circles – Harbingers of World Change, Gateway Books 1991 |
THIS IS ABOUT understanding corn-circles. These mysterious things have been with us some years now, and several excellent books intro ducing the phenomenon have been published. I do not wish to repeat the coverage that these books have already given. My purpose is somewhat different.
The appearance of these remarkable figures is comparable with the flood of UFO sightings of twenty years ago, in the sense that it has challenged to the depths the way in which people look at the natural world. In doing so it has polarised observers very clearly into different streams with different attitudes. Like many another phenomenon of nature the thing in itself is straightforward enough. Existential, one might say! There they sit like birds in the wilderness!
What is not at all straightforward, however, is people, their levels of awareness, their background and training, their temperamental dispositions, their prejudices. The more stark the phenomenon the more penetrating the searchlight it directs upon people’s capacity for observation and thinking, for emotional honesty, for simple objectivity and non-attachment.
There was once a famous cartoon, probably in an early edition of Punch. It showed a sturdy Victorian countryman, surrounded by open-mouthed children and a toddler or two, standing in the entrance to an animal stall at the zoo, where a giraffe stood munching its hay. They had clearly been contemplating each other for some time, and it was difficult to say which was the more astonished.
The countryman, better placed to reach a conclusion, finally shook himself, thumped the ground with his stick, and turned to go. "All I know", said he, "is that there ain’t no such animal". So we had with corn-circles a phase of simple disbelief on the one hand, countered by wild fantasising on the other. Either they were all hoaxes, or we were about to be invaded by beings from outer space. Since UFOs had failed to deliver, this was to be the next round of warning signals. So much for UFOs having been as far as possible swept under the carpet by military security! These creatures would not be so easily disposed of. And so forth.
The universal hoax proposal could be summed up in a single acronym: APICHTID. A priori it can’t happen, therefore it doesn’t! In our scientific age many people don’t get beyond this, understandably. As the evidence mounts the position of people whose whole sense of reality is invested in leak-proof mate rialism becomes tragic. So much is invested in such beliefs that a few people have been driven to establish inexplicable incidents as mischievous artefacts. The alternative for them is a kind of madness.
It is obviously very difficult to assess the wild variety of alternative views which have been put forward. First there was Dr Meaden and the ‘plasma vortex’. Then George Wingfield began to point out serious errors in Dr Meaden’s actual physics. The laws were correct enough, but the attribution was wide of the mark.
In parallel with the activities of those who wanted to establish mechanical causes for crop circles came the much more numerous efforts of those who sought imaginal causes. The whole range of mythology, symbolism, archaeological and spiritual lore was invoked in an attempt to place the crop circle phenomenon in context with the mysterious and the paranormal. ‘Mythological’ speculation has grown in a number of interesting ways, but it is not yet robust enough to present a serious challenge to more ortho dox approaches. Behind all this, there was a feeling that everybody was standing, hand over mouth, asking "Whatever next?". "What on earth is happening?"
This is approximately where matters stood at the end of the 1990 season. The corn-circle phenomena are beautiful, mysterious and redolent of spirit. How ever, there are energies at work which may be too easily linked in a speculative and undisciplined way with ancient wisdom. We need to get beyond spec ulation and into attuned discipline. This means being more scientific than scientists. Ancient wisdom demands and deserves this.
In the book The Crop Circle Enigma Dr Meaden’s theory is clearly described by him, sitting amongst much other imaginative material and factual anec dote, where it offers an uneasy challenge to less thorough but more broadly-based work. Meaden’s coherence gains an unfair advantage from its narrower aim. If the work of others is sometimes less thorough, it is because it covers an enormous field of speculation and is only at an early stage of assess ment. The balance is bound to alter as evidence accumulates in the years to come.
Many people are worried by crop circle events. As if wars, economic uncertainties, political insecurity, threat of educational and medical breakdown and environmental toxicity were not enough! I want to try and address these fears. But I cannot pretend that this can be done in an undemanding way. It is my belief that the phenomenon itself is exactly that, a demand upon humans to stand up and understand the world in a deeper way.
For many people it is precisely this sort of demand which is so frightening. Read the first chorus of T S Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral. We want things to be ordinary. "We do not wish anything to happen". And later on, Thomas a Becket’s sad and compas sionate conclusion: "Humankind cannot bear very much reality".
All the same there is much misunderstanding involved in these fears. Our education predisposes us to think that we need to be very intelligent to understand the world. Not so. There is increasing evidence that as the world increases in complexity the heart proves a more reliable guide than the head. Women seem to have more natural talent for under standing this. Buf men are often better at articulating it, particularly when it comes to understanding what, for instance, Rudolf Steiner meant when he said:
"Hearts must begin to have thoughts".
I think Eliot’s Becket was wrong. I think that mankind can bear a great deal of reality.
The problem of CCPs (crop circle phenomena) is not simple. Understanding it means setting out upon a path of knowledge. But that path is not meant to be tackled unaided. I try to demonstrate here that in CCPs we are being provided with a new door to go through. We have ignored such doors in the past. We shall ignore this one at our peril. The aid is there within our hearts’ intuition.
THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH
What question does science actually ask about crop circles and upon what assumptions is this question based? I want to try to break a deadlock which is growing in the way we look at the crop circle mystery.
This deadlock is by no means a new phenomenon, and is in no way special to the crop circle mystery. It is implicit in the whole way in which science impinges on the consciousness of those whose sense of wonder feels its way into the realm of the new. This is not to say that scientists are not themselves imbued with wonder – very little progress would be made if research scientists were not initially awe-struck by the mysteries they unravel.
The direction that science has taken, however, tends to replace wonder by something rather less starry-eyed. As a result science has become rather different in tone from scientists. Science has grown up in the last three centuries as a monolithic belie f system, commanding the same kind of fearful respect once accorded to the Catholic church. It has come to be reified as an authority in itself. Most of the time we forget that this structure is something we have built ourselves, just as we built religion ourselves.
Why has it become possible for us to create this eidolon (fetish), this form we project into our think ing about the world, and call ‘science’? It is because the scientific process is real! The scientific method was the biggest leap forward in human conscious achievement for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. I want to demonstrate that it has been over taken recently by an even greater achievement. But this in no way diminishes the stature of the scientific method.
In what sense then has science become an eidolon, a belief-system, an idol? Idols can be built only on the solid foundation of true insights if they are to stand up. We can only create the false out of the substance of the true if it is to convince people. In spite of the monolithic structures we build to contain, and in the end to imprison, our spiritual growth being of our own construction, the power they embody is real and effective. All religions are idols in this sense, and scientism is presently the most powerful religion of all.
We need to be clear on this point, otherwise we are in danger of polarising ourselves into a number of different groups and believing them to be mutually exclusive. Is it perhaps because it is we ourselves who have tied ourselves up in such a strait-jacket of limitations to understanding, that realities are provoked into breaking out, attempting to re-establish some balance between our observation and our thinking? Are we being required to look again, not at the methods of science, which are impeccable, but at the extremely narrow parameters and axioms upon which these methods have been built? Have we not confused the method with the conclusions we have drawn from it?
It is not scientific method which has gone astray. We have failed to re-examine at each stage the axiomatic assumptions upon which this method has been based. In this way our judgement of what is real, and the proofs we demand for its establishment, have come to depend on a philosophy of science which we believe no longer needs reappraisal and updating. We no longer basically question the nature of the cognitive process. We think we know how we know things. However, as our knowledge grows, questions of how knowledge is acquired grow with it. This understanding has immediate relevance to ord inary observers and thinkers. They deserve some thing better than a monolithic belief-system.
I can hear cries of protest from generations of hard-thinking philosophers, who believe themselves to have examined how we know things quite exhaustively. I believe many of them have failed to notice, and have built upon, errors of observation and judgement very far back in the philosophical process which accompanied the development of science in the early nineteenth century – in Emmanuel Kant, for instance, with his ‘ding an sich’, the thing-in-itself. Kant failed to observe the part thinking plays in the creation of phenomena.
Such errors of observation are never without per sonal and feeling-based connotations. Even giant minds can harbour prejudices which blind them to simple truths. Very complex systems can be built up on foundations which harbour quite simple errors, which resonate to the tendencies in the age in which they arise. Both mechanistic theories in physical science and behaviourism in psychology are limit ations of this kind. They carry man’s view of the world only so far, and then reality overtakes them.
However, in our crop circle mystery cereologists are dealing with the outcome of these old errors at a new, more basic and much simpler point. Ordinary people inherit the results of these high-flown philosophical errors unconsciously. The huge structure of science conceals from them the fact that they no longer know what they actually perceive, and how their thinking is related to it. Thus ordinary people no longer know what part of their perception relates, through their thinking, to a real world, and what part is a construct, which they project upon reality in order to conform to the consensus reality they imbibed with their mother’s milk from day one.
Post-Freudians like Fairbairn and Winnicott believe that this sufficient reality is the only reality mankind is capable of relating to. Almost from the first moment we draw breath, we are actually conned out of objectively examining the inner perceptions we carry through birth into physical life. We accept instead a consensus ‘reality’ which for the most part we don’t question. Until, that is, some apocalyptic event, either through our sense-perceptions or through an inner spiritual crisis – such as a near- death experience – catapults us into facing sup pressed memories of early life or even life before birth.
So long as the material world out there plays our little game, and pretends to be as real as our projections would have it be, we think we have a usable stability, a consensus reality we can live in. Then along comes something like crop circles!
Dr Terence Meaden’s ‘reality’ is one such creation. It starts with certain assumptions. He shares these with the majority of scientific researchers. There are many other starting points for serious inquiry into reality. If these are ignored we close the door into huge areas of understanding. This is what science mainly does, and this is why it is for the most part no more than a belief-system, a religion like all the others.
However, beyond a certain point this system breaks down. Reality calls our bluff. It is not any longer prepared to play our game – this self-deceiving game in which we say that our thinking, our cognitional process, is not a valid part of reality, and that this observed world has its own separate and independent existence out there, separate from the construction we put upon it.
There is no separate reality out there! We create our own reality!
A lot more could be written in this vein, and no doubt needs to be, because the breakthrough of new phenomena is only just beginning. A whole new way of looking at the real world is growing up within human consciousness, and we see it reflected back as an apocalyptic explosion of new phenomena. Before this happens we need at least to begin upon the process of looking within our own consciousness at what we mean by knowing. It is a whole science, bearing the formidable and scarcely-used name of Epistemology – the study of the method and the grounds of knowledge. Formidable it may be, but we need to have some grasp of it, otherwise this new time will overwhelm us. We will be thrown into a mental and emotional turmoil we can’t handle.
In the light of this, can we perhaps begin to look at the situation "Science versus the Rest" in a somewhat different light? This is not a matter of right and wrong explanations: it concerns people’s way of looking at the world, which is an inseparable product of their background assumptions, and that these remain very largely unexamined!
For those who have developed themselves within current scientific disciplines, only certain questions are valid. There is a prescribed pathway along which these valid questions may be refined, focused and put to the test. The answers arrived at become the new frontiers of "our" knowledge. This "our" is central to the result. It is the idol or eidolon of scientism. What it chooses to ignore is that "we" together don’t know anything! Only individualised intelligences know things, and our path of knowledge is our own responsibility.
If we take this individual responsibility, and share its results with others who do the same, wonderful new channels of communication are opened up. We recognise that the channels of communication, like the knowing process itself, take place essentially within consciousness. There is real communion of minds. Moreover we then start to recognise that there is a larger mind beyond our individualism. Genuine cognitive questions are raised and some times answered, which for the trained scientist would be frivolous and scientifically invalid.
However, it is very important to recognise that the scientist’s own questions and the path they lead him on are no less valid. Failure to appreciate this ignores a discipline, and thus exposes wider-based inquiries to charges of turgidity, sometimes childish fantasy, and worse still a nominalistic word-game, a juggling with symbols which never manages to look at the phenomena for what they themselves actually are – within our consciousness and out there. In order to look squarely – from a perspective which includes the whole range of possibilities opened up by the thoughts I have been developing here – at what science actually asks and answers we have to see clearly that the only thing the scientist asks is how events take place.
The scientist asks HOW?
A scientist doesn’t actually ask "What?" or "Who?" or "To what end?". For a student of, and product of the 20th Century scientific-materialist process, these questions are actually meaningless. There are no things to ask "What?" about, there are only behaviours of energy in an outside world. There are no persons or beings to ask "Who?" about. These matters are already pre-decided. Being is a sort of ‘standing eddy’ in the path of certain energy move ments. There are no purposes to prompt the question "To what end?". Purpose is, to a scientist, no more than a subjective projection on to a reality consisting of processes: tables and chairs are not things in themselves, but they are energy-processes. It is we who make tables and chairs into things because we have an innate knowledge of Being in our spiritual nature. But the scientist denies the reality of this level of Being: this is what being a scientist implies.
The above considerations become extremely perti nent to the whole crop circle mystery if Dr Meaden’s ‘plasma-vortex’ theory, or any other scenarios which seek a mechanical explanation for crop circles, are allowed to dominate the field.
This will only happen as long as we are only asking "How?". However, epistemology itself has a broader base. There are axiomatic starting points, percep tions of the nature of perception itself, and of the thinking which arises intuitively to match it, which open valid paths and such questions as, "What is this phenomenon?", "Whose consciousness manifests here?", and "To what end do these events tend?".
These starting points transcend the axiom implicit in what has become the philosophy of science in our time. They in no way invalidate the question "How?", and they in no way invalidate scientific impeccability. But they do lead into realms of valid knowledge which are closed to mechanistic science. These are realms of wonder and of the miraculous, which also have their reality.
INTELLIGENCE AND INTELLIGIBILITY
What is implied in the proposition that crop circles are the product of intelligence?
I tried in the previous section to defuse the battle that has been developing among crop circle buffs – cereologists – between what we may call Scientific Explainers and the Rest. This Rest, among whom I include myself, is a far less coherent body, a real rag-tag-and-bobtail of open-ended views, or no views at all. All that unites us is our intuition that, however coherent and consistent the mechanistic view is, there is something about it that doesn’t ring quite true.
The materialist asks only one question: "How does this phenomenon work? I seek an answer" says he, "which does not violate the laws of a science which I have, to the maximum extent of my capacity, mastered. I believe myself to understand the parameters, the limits within which man’s capacity for knowledge operates. Within these limits only certain questions are valid, and I am only interested in answers to valid questions. The rest is pure speculation, even downright nonsense".
I hope I am not misrepresenting the mechanistic position, because there is great strength in it. It owes its strength to the limits which it sets itself. These are not limits derived from a logical process, they are limits of choice. Once that choice is made its conse quences can be impeccably logical. But this is only after a certain starting point has been chosen, not frivolously or arbitrarily, but out of a deeply-held conviction that only one view of the world leads to knowledge of the world.
This is a view which starts with sense-observation and then tests, by setting up a hypothesis, and creating a process in which confirm ation or denial of that hypothesis emerges from further sense-observations. This process is named proof, and where new phenomena are concerned it can be a long, exhaustive and exhausting process, in which certainty is hard to come by.
The dignity, as well as the arrogance and exclusive ness of science derives from the rigorous training and discipline required. However, in the course of devel oping scientific discipline, many scientists forget that the original starting point – the conviction that only sense-experience (empiricism) and thinking based upon it constitute valid grounds for certain know ledge – was not the result of a logical process, but of an intuitive conviction. It was an axiom, something requiring no proof, but an immediate observation excluding other possible observations, allowing no question to go beyond it or to invalidate it.
Exclusive, self-validating axioms have enormous strength so long as consciousness remains wholly fixed upon them. Look at Euclid’s ‘a point has position but no magnitude’. Starting from there, and deriving from it secondary definitions about lines, areas and volumes, Euclid laid the foundation for the whole of spatial geometry as most of us know it. Had he started instead from ‘an infinite sphere has magni tude but no position’ he would instead have devel oped projective or spherical geometry (in which the finite world is perceived as deriving from the infi nite). If that had been the direction in which human consciousness had been evolving at the time of Euclid he might well have done so, and changed the course of history. But it was not evolving in that direction, and Euclid also was a product of that fact.
Why is it that the mechanical approach to the crop circle mystery, while perfectly logical and valid, at the same time rings false, violating the intuition with which we react directly to the impact of the events seeming to lie behind the phenomena themselves? It is because human consciousness is no longer moving in the same direction as it was, even as little as two centuries ago, when the sense of human evolution was aimed at attaining an ever more exact relation to the physical world.
That process is now complete.
It has been complete for a long time. That is why we have the feeling that further efforts to understand the universe by the methods of physical science have started to move away from reality instead of towards it. The language of higher physics moves further and further from anything that the total human being can experience as real. It is because scientific method has now overshot the mark of its usefulness, that we now have an intuitive sense of violation when we see science used as a means of corralling, taming the pristine creative newness of an entirely new manifestation of sense-perceptible reality – crop circle phenomena.
Dr Meaden’s plasma-vortex theory, for example, is a description which does no more than brush the surface of this phenomenon. In fact it is precisely because sense-perception linked with logical analysis have reached their limit, that this real world has started to behave as it is doing in the crop pictogram phenomena.
It is this behaviour which prompts us to speculate about the part that intelligence plays, or appears to be playing, in the production of cereological phe nomena. I stress that we should not here be anti-materialist. Starting from different axioms about the nature of observation and thinking, our understand ing stands beside scientific observation as an addition to their understanding. So far, for the most part, our grasp is sporadic, muddled, speculative and scrappy. In some respects science can run rings round us – to coin an appropriate phrase! We need to do better than this. Our gut feelings need to be embodied in a much more exact understanding if they are to become something we can claim as knowledge.
Efforts in this direction are going to take us very far afield. Ultimately they will lead onto a path of study and research into a science of exact observation and thinking, an exact Science of Realities, or spiritual science, which goes beyond what is observ able by the senses, and beyond the empirical thinking which can only process sense-observable phenomena. The foundations of such a science of the spirit alrcady exist in the world, and have done so for many decades.
What I hope to convey is that, if a few hints are offered about the nature of intelligence and the way in which it manifests, it will lead people to ask more precise questions about why, with these cereological events, the manifestation of intelligence in the sense perceptible world is taking a new evolutionary step.
Stages of intelligence in natural phenomena
The first thing to recognise is that intelligibleness is the presence of manifest order which consciousness can recognise. And intelligence, at some level, is awareness of order.
In that sense all that manifests to our senses as matter is ordered and hence intelligible. However, if we take a step further and purport to recognise different orders or kingdoms in nature mineral, plant, animal etc – we give expression to an intuitive feeling that, as we ‘ascend’ toward ‘higher’ orders of nature, we are looking at the operation of different principles. We feel that the difference between a mineral and a plant, or between a plant and an animal, is a difference in kind, not just in degree.
Physical science denies this. It says our feeling is at fault here. Science says we confuse the steep increase of complexity in a plant, due to the special chemical character of the carbon atom, with the emergence of a different principle of operation. It is at the frontier between minerals and plants that the conceptual division first appears – between those who believe that in all phenomena everything lies on the surface and can be fully accounted for by what manifests to the senses and sense-based intelligence, and a second group who believe something different. As suggested in the case of the crop circles, the difference is between those who are content to explain everything in terms of how it operates (which is valid in the case of the mineral kingdom) and those who perceive that in a body which can grow, metamorphose, repro duce, and die, the body not only manifests a mech anism of operation, but it also betrays the presence of an element not detectable by the senses.
There is an overriding form, say these people, an archetype, a ‘what’ rather than a ‘how’, in the plant, which bears a different relationship to time from the linear cause-and-effect sequence operating at the mineral level. Changes in the mineral, like crystall isation or solution or oxidation, can be accelerated or reversed by factors operating from outside.
Those happen in the plant too, if a leaf is injured or falls, but they take place in the context of an overriding formative tendency which is irreversible.
Our observation of any moment in the life of a plant is like a still picture in a cinematic sequence, of which all the other stills in the plant’s past and future exist on another time-scale, invisible to us. Without the total sequence the particular one we are looking at is without its full meaning. The total being of the plant exists on a level which is inaccessible to our sense observation. But it is not inaccessible to our thinking. Our thinking takes place as a real event on the same level of existence as the plant archetype. At this level there is no temporal sequence. The whole of time is permanently present, accessible to thinking. At this level thinking is not a processor of successive sense observations, but the direct observer of an extended event within time.
It is this level to which we can give the name ‘Etheric’.
It is particularly important that we do not make the error of observation which is made by physical science. If we permit ourselves to let go of the scientific obsession that thinking is simply an energy-response in the brain to what the senses receive from the physical world, then the above description of the way in which exact observation of the whole plant alters our relationship to time can become an actual experience for us, instead of just another theory. What starts simply as a new thought becomes a perception of what thinking is, and where it is. Thinking becomes a perception for us when the extended plant, seed via leaf to seed, becomes a perception in our image-forming consciousness. This is what Einstein did when he arrived at the unified field. It is what Sheldrake is doing in his picture of the morphogenetic. instead of seeing a single moment of a plant in space, and thinking the whole sequence of pictures in time, we start to see the whole plant in space-time, with our combined thinking-perception.
All the time, what we are talking about is thinking moving over into perception, loosening itself from the illusion the brain imposes on it, becoming a reality in itself. This is the path of the etheric, and a path to the understanding of crop circles, where they come from, what their challenge to consciousness is, and what we can do about them. These phenomena are warning signals that a fundamental evolution of our perception of the world, and the thoughts we form about it, is urgently overdue.
Etheric manifestations can have physical counterparts, but their origin is not physical. When people claim to see auras physically they are not contacting the true etheric level. This can only be perceived by willed, feeling-imbued thinking. However, the etheric level of energies can sometimes affect the more rarefied levels of physical energy and transfer its forms to them, often in a somewhat distorted way. Some sensitive observers can perceive these effects physically, the degree of distortion depending on the soul-orientation of the observer – particularly on whether fear or love dominates the feeling.
In the first instance what Rupert Sheldrake is describing as a morphogenetic field is a description of the interface between the physical and the etheric levels of manifestation. Active, feeling-endowed thinking can reverse the process of manifestation, elaborate these physical perceptions, raise their energy levels, and move over into etheric clairvoyance.
The etheric, however, is only the first layer beyond the physical. Beyond the plant level there lies the realm of sentience, where the animal archetypes operate. Beyond that again is a third level, that of individualised self-awareness, where it is possible to observe what is characteristically human. The most important thing to grasp is that these insights and the realities which lie behind them approach you from inside your consciousness, not from outside it.
We have an intuitive feeling that intelligence is manifesting in these forms which have appeared in the crops. I have given you a very brief introduction to the etheric realm, not at all to deeper realms. But even grasping this much gives the possibility of a more mature approach to seeking the nature and scope of the intelligence manifesting there.
The question is, at what level is crop circle intell igence manifesting? And why?
THE SICKNESS IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND ITS INBUILT THERAPY
How do we find our own path to healing through cereology?
When something can happen in nature or in life, and it doesn’t, there is a misplacement of energy. Some thing else happens instead. Often what happens instead is some form of sickness or distortion. The appearance of the capacity for manifestation may, of course, be timely. Then the emergence of the phenomenon is normal and mature. If it is delayed the result appears as a deficiency condition. If it is premature there is a monstrous form.
In the bony system, for example, at the moment when a bony formation should appear, correct tim ing results in the appearance of healthy bone. If for some reason this fails to happen, the moment passes, the body goes on developing and, for example, cartilage appears but fails to ossify. In the opposite case the impulse to form bone may precede the moment when the developing process indicates that it would be appropriate. This could result in an ankylosed joint or an exosteosis.
Dysphasia (uncoordinated timing) between poten tial and manifestation is an inbuilt feature of organic life. Much depends on it. It is not necessarily to be regarded as sick or evil. An example described by Rudolf Steiner in the plant kingdom is such plants as Henbane or Deadly Nightshade (hyoscyamus and belladonna). The flowering phase of a plant stems from the astral world, one level above the vegetative etheric level. From this world comes the geometrical starry form of the flower, the colour, the perfume, the relation to the insect world, pollination and growth of the ovule, ripening of the fruit, sweetness, flavour and so on. Not till the seed is set do we contact a still higher level.
However, the astrality of colour, perfume etc, may sink below the normal flowering level into what should be purely vegetative. In henbane, for example, the colour purple and some of the chemical processes which would operate normally in the flower and fruit invade the purely vegetative realm of the leaf, whose proper sphere is that of photosynthesis and nourish ment. The result is that when the plant comes into relation with animal or man this relation is disturbed. We describe it as poisonous. The relation is distorted.
Consciousness however may rise into this situation in a redemptive way. Instead of accepting the destructive, death-dealing effect, we may through consciousness transform its energies into the opposite pole of healing. Henbane may be made into a medicine instead of a poison.
At the present time we have an analogous situation to this in the realm of the crop pictograms.
In a cornfield the normal outcome when physical substances in soil and rain come into relation with the colossal etheric fertility invested in last year’s corn-crop is corn, millions of tons of the stuff. Crop-circles may be miraculous, but they are nothing like as miraculous as a bursting ripe ear of corn! Millions of them stand there every year, radiating the fertile nutrient energy they have drawn from the sun, transmuted by the crystalline, hexagonal, forming might of silica and carbon on earth, into hundreds of millions of fragrant grains of power.
The formative dynamic of silica is essentially vertical. The corn-stalk is nearly all silica, an element which stands between the sun and the earth with an essentially vertical, gravitation-balancing dynamic, stretched like a bow-string and finely tuned to the recording of the subtle forms and movements deployed between sun and earth.
Clearly the provenance of events described in this way lies deeper than the mechanical processes which bring them into visibility. In Sheidrake’s terms, the cornfield is a morphogenetic powerhouse, a place in which forms are straining at the leash to manifest. And straining towards them is human thinking, a phenomenon of the same nature as the forces oper ating in the plant, here manifesting at as high a concentration as anywhere in the plant kingdom.
By remaining too long in the mechanical mode human thinking has strained its capacity to evolve, almost to breaking point. We are seeing a kind of breakdown in the formative process. At a point of minimum resistance there is a kind of lightning strike between human thinking resisting its own expansion into etheric perception, and the plant world thereby forced into producing inappropriate, damaging, even poisonous forms. It is the obstinacy and fear in human thinking which forces these to appear as physical forms, rather than rising to meet them in the etheric.
There is a situation here on earth at the present time which can only be met by expanding conscious ness. The human thinking which forms its picture of the nature of physical reality has driven itself into a bottleneck. Increasingly the pictures we form of the processes going on in mineral form, plant life, animal sentience, and human awareness are coming into direct conflict with the actualities. The evolution of earth processes continues apace, and human consciousness remains stuck in a fixed view of reality, now close to bursting point. The pressure by now is colossal.
There is in fact a perfectly organic and healthy way in which humans can keep pace with the present changes going on in earth energies, and in the new etheric forms trying to manifest through them. This is to loosen up our thinking. What I have described as active, feeling-endowed thinking not only enters the energy-field where the processes which give rise to cereological phenomena are happening. It also starts to live in them and learn from them. It learns to participate with the energies, breathe with them – also to hold them back from premature manifest ation in physical form.
What it amounts to is this. Like the poisonous substances in henbane an element is bursting through from the astral level into physical manifestation where corn is the normal condition. If we simply meet this manifestation with materialistic thinking on the physical level where it appears to be, it can act as a poison. The poisonous effect shows itself in a simple form as headaches, shock symptoms and time-displacements, due to a misplaced relationship with the etheric realm where sequential time orig inates. One might expect that further developments along these lines would start to affect growth pro cesses, possibly of a cancerous nature, and also damaging effects on the developing embryo.
Nature always manages to produce appropriate remedies whenever an imbalance produces sickness. Materialistic thinking has become mankind’s most serious disease. We have the opportunity to heal this sick condition by bringing the thinking down, out of the dead brain-mirror, into the active, feeling- endowed will, and entering the etheric levels from which thinking itself arises. The crop pictograms, bursting into physical form out of an intense organic nourishment source, are being offered to us as a natural remedy for our now extremely serious epist emological condition.
How are we to make use of this remedy?
The first thing to realise is that it is we ourselves who are producing it. One of the signs of this is that the more attention is paid to them, the more crop circles appear. In a comical sense the cereological crazy-gang who insist it is all a hoax have a twisty sort of truth on their side! Without the sick abnormality of our own conceptual life the matrix of natural phenomena would not be producing abnormalities of its own. In that sense it is we who are ‘doing’ it though not in the crude sense the hoax-boys imagine. But it is certainly we who, by the limited scope of our ‘reality-projection’, are yanking down the prolixity of etheric formative expressions onto a relatively crude physical level.
So what we think of as the physical world is a hoax??
Not too far out, as some of the more imaginative early science-fiction testifies!
Incidentally, have you noticed how the actual physical sight of a freshly formed pictogram shoots directly into the nervous system, at solar plexus, or even heart level, and administers a most unpleasant and possibly even damaging shock? This shock can be considerably enhanced, as Janet Trevison has shown, if you happen to be holding a bar-magnet in your hand at the time!
It has been my aim in this account to open a path of discovery and healing which every person who encounters the cereological phenomenon can follow. It is important to realise that this path of discovery is unique to each person. It is your own imagination you have to activate and get to work on the visualisa tion process, not mine. And it will be your own new world you are entering, and your own conceptual and perceptual healing you will be bringing about. The medicine is not off-the-shelf. It is custom- designed for each patient, directly out of the wisdom of that one’s own higher being.
Cereological events are no more than one aspect of an apocalyptic explosion of energy changes leading mankind to an immense transition of new conscious ness, and into a new time. With crop circles we have a distinct descent into form, "with such permanence as time has" (T S Eliot). The challenge to mankind to change his thinking becomes more urgent – to meet reality head-on, to go more than half-way to meet what is presented to our consciousness, and to master it with our hearts as well as with our dying heads.
HEALING OF CONSCIOUSNESS AND HEALING OF PERCEPTION
(a) How to take the medicine offered by crop pictograms
We used Henbane as an example of how a poison can be converted into a remedy. If we try to apply this analogy to the recognition of crop pictograms as potential healers of our cognitional and perceptive processes, we can only take it so far, since both aberrant phenomenon and psychic effect lie already in the etheric, manifesting in the physical only in directly.
In ordinary chemotherapy a poisonous substance is used in a controlled dosage to counteract directly another chemical process which is perceived as caus ing an illness. This is a gross over-simplification, but serves to mark the contrast with homoeopathy, where a different principle is involved. To grasp this we have to understand how the operation of the etheric is related to the corresponding area of the physical, to which it is related as formative principle. We could use the analogy of a mould used to cast a clay or metal object. The mould is the inverse coun terpart of the resulting object. The object is the substance, the mould is the form, and this form is inside out.
In using a poisonous substance to produce a homoeopathic remedy we reverse the process used in chemotherapy. We contrive a method of producing a kind of anchor which will hold the form which gave rise to the poisonous substance (namely the etheric body of the henbane plant or whatever), while we proceed to dilute the actual substance virtually to vanishing point. The further we dilute the substance the further we extend the etheric form as a sphere surrounding the little lactose pill or drop of dilute alcohol we are using as an anchor.
When we administer the dose we can conceive of this etheric sphere sucking back into itself the henbane-like activities which are manifesting in the patient as symptoms. The form sucks the substance back into itself, so the stronger the symptoms the stronger the suck has to be. That is why the higher, more diluted potencies in homoeopathy are used for the more severe conditions. The etheric form of a poisonous substance retained by a little lactose pill is a true opposite of the substance used in its creation, not just a dilution of it. Hahnemann, who invented homoeopathy, believed, perhaps too simplisticly, that the poison used should exactly imitate the symptoms it was designed to cure. In the scientific belief-system all this is the purest gobbledegook!
Now, how does this scenario relate to the crop pictogram situation? Essentially my notion is that the corn-circle phenomenon is basically an etheric activity which we are not yet perceptive enough to see. Nature is screaming out to us that it is high time we were perceptive enough. This cry takes the form of a spilling over of the etheric into physical manifestation. This is having a toxic effect on our perceptual field and concepts.
Am I justified, moreover, in going further, suggest ing that the phenomenon constitutes a major spiritual-scientific challenge, a challenge to turn the tables on it and construct from it a therapeutic path to heal our whole consciousness, not just that part which misperceives corn circles?
Are we now to overturn pseudo-science and raise our whole consciousness, perceptive and conceptual, onto a higher level? Furthermore am I right in positing that these cereological events have been offered us by nature (of which our own nature is the substantive growing point) for this very purpose?
From another point of view, is this not a manifest ation of an attempt at self-healing by nature itself, in its perception that a major aspect of human activity – particularly in the way that humankind perceives events and forms concepts of them – is pathological in it?
We can only begin to answer these questions by doing so in a scientific manner, using the scientific method, which is the golden core of cognition in our time. We shall be using a true spiritual science, based on axioms which take the etheric into account. Without doubt this will also lead us to ask true scientific questions about higher levels of being also. This scientific path of observation, experimentation and thinking will carry from the start a very different mood from much that we think of as scientific in our day. We are also starting out from a much deeper starting point than does most contemporary scientific research. In rejecting the limitations of their axioms, we are in a. sense returning to the nursery class.
We are allowing each individual his or her say in what he or she knows. For as I said earlier ‘we’ know nothing. Only the individual knows things. So we will find ourselves discounting much of what con temporary science takes for granted as common knowledge. After all it is our own very consciousness we are investigating.
We have to start from the admission that we as cereologists know practically nothing. We also have a lively expectation that there will be new fields of unforeseeable wonders thrown into our laps every other week. Perhaps one of the chief contributions we will have to offer the scientific world is quite a new dimension of humility. At the same time, in rejecting some of its certainties we are gaining others. We may know nothing, but we are beginning to know what knowing is.
(b) Where to start?
As in all science, paths begin with intuitions, wheezes, crazy notions. The rot sets in when the results of these congeal into orthodoxies.
I shall offer here a notion which may turn out to be an insight or may not. It has always niggled at my mind that this loony phenomenon is happening in cornfields! We are so busy gawping at strange shapes, electric shocks, and time-displacements that we largely fail to notice precisely where they are happening. These events are busily invading one of our chief sources of nourishment: our daily bread, forsooth!
Please note the following: perception and thinking are grounded in organic bodies – us! Perception and thinking are at the end of their tether. Organic bodies nourish themselves on corn. They eat bread.
Perception and thinking are based on organic processes, nourished by something that is going over the top. Perception and thinking are going over the top in places where their nourishment is coming from.
Are these half dozen observations linked by noth ing but coincidence? Or are we faced with a coherent sequence here?
How do we hit back?
Suppose, for example, we were to make homoeo pathic preparations of corn which has been subjected to forces which have resulted in crop pictograms. Suppose we used as our diluting agent corn which has not been so influenced. In other words we potentise crop pictogram flour in ordinary flour. We could do this at first according to standard homoeo pathic precedent, say 6X and 30X (dilutions of 10-6 and 1O-30).
We then face a wide range of questions. Normally we turn flour into bread and eat it. We, however, are going to make medicine out of flour. Heat destroys homoeopathic remedies. So we can’t cook our cereological flour into bread. We shall have to take cereological flour pills. What have we then actually done? The mind boggles. We have taken a substance which has been subjected to forces which have made crop circles out of it. We have used homoeopathic methods to dilute this substance to near vanishing point, using an excipient of the same nature as the presumably altered substance. We hope the form ative influences which, in their unhomoeopathised form, acted on our consciousness to produce aberrations in our perception and thinking, will now as remedies have a corrective effect on the latter.
What does that mean?
Does it mean that we now simply revert to our ‘normal’ way of perceiving the cornfield, where we now perceive no crop circles, experience no buzzing in our ears, no shocks to our solar plexus and heart chakra, no time-displacements, no funny shadows across the field which are not quite parallel? Surely not.
What I am hoping is that we may be giving our organisms, by removing the toxic effect of the assault on our perceptions, the maximum chance to exper ience the situation at a healthy level. We then maxi mise our efforts to raise consciousness to a level where we can perceive the realm which gave rise to the phenomena in the first place. It occurs to me to say: "First put upon yourselves the armour of light". I have an idea we are going to need it. This is not a game.
All pathology results from something which at one level or another we have failed or are failing to do. We fail to rise to a certain challenge in our lives, whether to correct some error in how we are living or whether to take some step relevant to the point of development we have reached. As a result of this failure we become ill. We needed the illness in order to seek healing in the form of a remedy which nature at the same time provides. In seeking the remedy we perceive at the same time the step we should have taken, whose failure led to the illness. We are offered another opportunity to take the step.
in this case our failure to rise to a perception of the world, for which foursquare materialistic images and thoughts are no longer adequate, is resulting in an explosion of phenomena into our perceptual field which cause aberrations there. These aberrations have a pathological aspect, both physically and psychologically. Healing of them should open doors of perception, through which a further opportunity would be offered to raise our consciousness. Doors may open, but they have to be walked through. New paths of enlightenment, appropriate to the stage of development mankind has reached, already exist in the world, have done so indeed for the greater part of this century. Not much notice has been taken of them. The doors in general were not walked through. So they have not entirely evolved to keep pace with changing spiritual needs.
Like remedial plants crop circles also have a mean ing of their own apart from the therapeutic one into which we shall increasingly be able to enter. I have a strong feeling that the two processes are twin aspects of the same thing, and that this is what the aberrant phenomena are telling us. We have reached a point where we need both the sickness and the cure. if it were not so the phenomena would not have occurred.
So we reach the most challenging conclusion of all, that crop pictograms may well become a next step in the present rapid evolution of channelling pathways, one in which we may be learning to see the written language of the spiritual world, as well as hearing its voice in our speaking. But this demands that we allow the vision to heal by transcending its purely material form and rising to the level in which we can perceive what is being said at the level at which it is spoken. This is the etheric level from which our thinking comes, from which the pictograms come, and from which the corn itself comes.
If we can achieve this out of our own guided consciousness directly we may not even need the medicine. We shall see.
The Archive of Stanley MessengerA Preparation for the Next ImpactFrom Crop Circles – Harbingers of World Change, Gateway Books 1991 |
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