Gardening with spiritual connection ~ Joseph Rael echoes Rudolf Steiner

Beautiful Painted Arrow part 1

Bio-dynamic agriculture and Joseph Rael's perceptions have many traits in common, most importantly the connection of all levels of existence through the cultivation and consumption cycle. We help the plant achieve its 'nirvana' by consuming it in the most mindful way.

http://helgaleena.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/gardeni...

http://helgaleena.wordpress.com/2011/12/26/teachin...

Beautiful Painted Arrow part 2

As in Anthroposophical education, the entire body and all the senses are used to learn. Once a young child has made this connection, all other learning can proceed in the most effective manner. All the beings and planets are connected and we are what we eat. That is what it means to truly be humans.

Now as Jupiter turns direct, it is time to expand our intentions for the unfolding year, spiraling out into the longer days as solstice has passed.  Mindfulness in every facet of our incarnated existence is ancient, and it is universal. We fall into illness when we forget that we are, as Carl Sagan put it, "made of star-stuff"-- that it is as important to think of the consciousness of the foods we consume as it is our own, that there will always be planetary influence upon us at every level, and that the lunar tides are merely the closest and most obvious tides, the solar radiations the most ubiquitous and pervasive radiations, and the spaces between molecules just as vast as those in the cosomos.

When you click on the links to the videos of traditional mystic Joseph Rael, you will hear things that are so familiar and yet so outlandish at the same time.  And he doesn't give a flying corncob whether people think he's high, and he's not trying to get laid by groupies; he is gentle and humble and matter-of-fact about listening to the sounds of squash, not making a Frank Zappa joke.

But I think you will conclude, as I have, that the planet will be much improved if we all learn to 'call any vegetable', even just one.

Those who have studied the principles of Bio-Dynamic agriculture, or the Waldorf school system, or the movement art known as Eurythmy, will easily note the echoes of Rudolf Steiner's practical theosophy for the European mindset.  Less focus has been placed upon North American traditional agricultural practices because the teachers were so thoroughly displaced from their ancestral settings by the colonizers. Survival depended upon nomadism and vagabondage for a crucial century in most areas.

Just as manuring began to ameliorate the depredations of slash-and-burn upon the Old World, so can true mindfulness of all levels of consciousness, of ourselves, our crops, and our domestic animals, begin to repair the 'factory-farming' myopia that leads us to produce foods full of misery and empty of nutrition.

There are cycles. Compost and mycelium need to return essential componds to the soil; algal mats need to remove excess from the water and return it to soil.  Fires will turn excess acidity back to ashes.  And humans can be part of it in many ways. Time to choose them.