Climate Mysticism

Using the  international language of climate change action, this is a proposal for of a new voluntary, collaborative initiative:

Climate Mysticism (PDF, 122p) would be a low-cost, environmentally-sound technology for carbon removal based on indigenous knowledge, practices and technologies. It takes into account the latest scientific knowledge. It's largely based on the enhancement of forest and ocean carbon stocks and sinks, accelerating the rate of photosynthesis, and enhancing natural sequestration in way that ensures the integrity of all ecosystems  and the protection of biodiversity and Mother Earth. It's a high emission reduction proposal based on best practices with the potential to be scalable and replicable. The goal, as articulated by the world, is to hold the global temperature rise to below 1.5  ̊C above pre-industrial levels.  It addresses the urgent threat of climate change by:

1. mitigation: empowering significant removals of greenhouse gases and adaptations in a way that can be verified and certified, by enhancing sinks and reservoirs of greenhouse gases, with measurements and reports consistent with the international COP/IPCC process;
2. adaptation: providing resilience, risk management, climate-proofing, including safeguarding the fundamental priority of food security and the particular vulnerabilities of food production systems; and
3. capacity building: promoting regional cooperation and regional networks; increasing synergies of cooperation, identifying best practices and experiences, education, training, public participation to enhance actions; participating with the Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action (NAZCA) platform; mobilizing strong and ambitious action by civil society and non-Party stakeholders to catalyze efforts to strengthen mitigation and adaptation action; and enhancing economic diversification by creating quality jobs; promoting and taking the lead with sustainable lifestyles and sustainable patterns of consumption and production.

There should be an expert organization to facilitate Climate Mysticism, to create a concrete roadmap, to enhance the provision of urgent and adequate finance and capacity-building,  to strengthen enabling environments, and to scale up these efforts and to support its implementation. 

Creating a Network for Superintelligence

I was reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom (2014), about replacing humans as the dominant life-form.  

I believe that computer artificial intelligence (AI) is mostly arrogant, ignorant hubris. Human brains are quantum supercomputers whereas the quantum computers that we build are too delicate—they operate at -459.6°F, the coldest place known in the universe, isolated in an environment without vibrations, electromagnetism, or heat,  and cost $10 million per computer.

The better possibility, in my opinion (but not Nick Bostrom's opinion) is known as "collective superintelligence", distinct from AI,  as the enhancement of networks and organizations that link human minds in a system that attains superintelligence.

Superintellignece is defined as greatly outperforming the best current human minds. It's important to reduce the limiting factors or overhead—distortions, inefficiency, equipment costs, time and attention burdens, mission creep, status games, falsified information, and other agency problems (where individual preferences diverge from those of the system as a whole).

Nick reviews the primary ways to enhance human cognition:

• Education, training, methods, and conceptional frameworks
• Neurological: nutrition, reduced pollution, adequate sleep and exercise, and prevention of disease
• Drugs to improve memory, concentration, and mental energy (known as nootropics).
• Notepads, spreadsheets, and visual software
• Networks for collective intelligence: norms, conventions, and tools for communication and collaboration (such as the Internet, with great unexploited potential for aggregation).

The problem is, humanity is pretty stupid—it's destroying itself with climate change and habitat destruction, causing the fastest and largest mass extinction in Earth's history. The situation is dire and necessitates urgent, dramatic changes. Otherwise, humans could go extinct within our lifetime. The main cause of this—of habitat destruction, pollution, disease, and over 50% of climate change—is a lethal mix of industrial farming of animals that causes extreme suffering to and kills over 100 billion animals per year, unnecessarily, for it's selfish, greedy, slothful, gluttonous vices and sins of mistaken perceptual separateness. People who can't see that we're all interconnected, interdependent, and one, contribute to the collective stupidity and insanity. According to ancient, ageless wisdom, there really is only one sin—separateness, which undermines the ability to create community and superintelligence. (Unity, p.519). 

For example, the pioneer ecologist, Michael Phillips says in Holistic Orchard, that "accepting food without nutrition—as 99% of people do—is a result of a loss of species intelligence." Even the majority of plant based (vegan) food, which is (or contains) industrially processed, is significantly lacking nutrition or contain deadly toxins, and is therefore undermining or destroying our supercomputer's neural networks, and thus limiting our individual and collective intelligence. The physiology of how foods destroy or enhance our brains is described in Power Foods for the Brain.

This leads to the first few guidelines for creating Superintelligence. Establishing minimum standards for members of a Superintelligent network or organization constitutes an institutional innovation for the enhancement of the quality of the network. The other essential component is increasing the quantity of people engaged in this network.

• Veganism cuts across issues of education, training, concepts, nutrition, preventing pollution and disease, and cultural, ethical, and spiritual norms, and enhancing brain development. The transition to veganism includes detoxification, fasting, and cleansing internal and mental pollutants. Simple herbal supplements, probiotics, and nootropics are part of the mix. We must evolve ourselves to higher standards of vegan nutrition, incorporating local, fresh, raw foods and with living water and living light—including quantum nutrition for our quantum brains.
• Growing our own food and eating local food and medicine that is holistically grown is also essential.  Eating industrial foods undermines intelligence and fitness in numerous ways.
• Adequate sleep (7 hours a night), exercise (1 hour a day), sun (30 minutes a day) and meditation (1 hour a day) are also essential for optimizing our intelligence. There are tens of thousands of scientific articles on the various benefits of these simple practices, which must be integrated. 

It should be clear to my audience that veganism has gained the status of "super-credibility": it's a well-proven fact that veganism is the most effective dietary option (and lifestyle/ethic of ahimsa/nonharming) because of it's significance for optimizing intelligence, genius, health, athleticism, the welfare of animals, environmental sustainability, and so on. Not being vegan is generally a significant problem of consciousness for 99% of people: it undermines the individual and collective evolution of consciousness. The "omnivore" or carnist belief/ideology that violence is acceptable, is intellectually bankrupt. (Unity, p. 135) Furthermore, there are increasing levels of veganims associated with the higher levels of light (photon) emissions, from 1,000 to 145,000 units, for people on increasingly refined diets and meditations: Level 0 vegetarian or aspirational vegans; Level 1 plant-eater for personal health reasons; Level 3 vegans are motivated by compassion for the animals, environment, society and self, and an expanded sense of self; Level 3 raw-vegans eat about 80% live, organic food and water; Level 4 spiritual vegans eat organic, live, individualized foods, with moderate intake, and spiritual fasting; and Level 5 vegans can live from light, known in Yoga as inedia,  a siddhi, or "supernormal ability." (Unity, p. 134, 297 citing Yoga Sutras III:31). 

It should also be clear to my audience that meditation is essential to achieve supernormal abilities, including supernomral intelligence and genius. Siddhis are perfections, accomplishments, attainments, and supernormal abilities of the Atman (self), reflecting spiritual awakening. (Unity, p.16, 357). Siddhis are psychic phenomena and examples of supernormal human capacity recognized and explained by our quantum biology—which is why our quantum biology has a distinct advantage to AI, despite the promotion of AI by experts such as Nick Bostrom and others. (Unity, p.310, describing the limitations of quantum computers, which operate at -459F, and the advantages of our quantum supercomputer brains.) Siddhis are innate yet largely unrealized faculties of consciousness.  Examples of Siddhis include energy healing, telepathy, changing the weather (or atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or solar radiation), prophecy, materialization (of things like food), teleportation, interstellar travel, and bestowing siddhis to others. However, supernormal abilities are often an obstacle to higher levels of spiritual awakening—moksha, samadhi, Nirvana, or Enlightenment—because they are generally worldly pursuits. (Unity, p. 451, citing the Yoga Sutras III:38). The evolution and attainment of Siddhis necessitates diligent moral and ethical behavior, meditation (samyama), and training—part of the norms and conventions of a Superintelligent Network.

Establishing a Superintelligent Network of small groups of Yogic Vegans—ethical vegans who meditate and can achieve supernormal Siddhis and genius (p. 180-86)—could, through mass collaboration, have infinite potential impact in instituting some sane policy such as eliminating CAFOs, coal, reducing the size of the military and conflicts, campaign finance reform, creating tens of millions of agroforestry jobs, institute WFPB healthcare, etc.—which represents a comprehensive, multi-trillion dollar shift in global economics and sustainability. This Network could also help solve existential threats of  catastrophic climate change, the incalculable cost of several meters of sea level rise to the majority of humanity living in coastal megacities, reverse mass species extinction, replace fossil fuels with zero point energy (and/or the superfuel thorium), replace the Internet with Akashik telepathy, and expand the intelligence and consciousness of humanity.

This is the next quantum leap in civilization, which evolved from tribes of plant gatherers to nation-states of farmers to industrialists. This networking of groups of Yogic Vegan integrates the frontier awareness of humanity and is a transformational force based the ideals of meritocratic governance, democracy, justice, peace, equality, and freedom--and would fulfill the inspirational and incredible prophecy for upcoming Golden Age of a thousand years of peace for humanity. (Unity, p.351, 380-83).  The fate of our crumbling civilization that's addicted to fossil fuels, coal, violence, animal suffering, depends on quantum leaps in awareness. This Golden Age of peace, awakening and Enlightenment is on the horizon.  Its manifestation necessitates enhancing networks and organizations to embrace the norms and genius of Yogic Veganism.

Collective Superintelligence is about the group dynamics of consciousness, where collective practices in meditation are exponentially more powerful in groups. It's the same principle at work with bringing other energy together: two loudspeakers produce four times the sound of a single loundspeaker. Three radio broadcasting antennas will create a focused beam nine times as powerful as one. It's the exponential effect of constructive interference, a universal principle of field behavior.  Humans radiate peace, order, coherence -- and information --they produce an effect that exponentially grows with the number of mediators.  

There is decisive strategic advantages for a speedy transition (days or weeks), with a fast rate of diffusion in human organizations.

Frontier Science: Possibilities

Science in the service of advancing our civilization's evolution could undertake a number of projects that would dramatically accelerate this process. 

This science would be grounded in higher consciousness. From the enlightened worldview in which all things are alive, everything is consciousness, everything is Self, the Supermind (Mind at Large) saturates the universe, and one has cosmic/universal omniscience—there are infinite quantum-spiritual possibilities that are created by our thoughts and beliefs. People with this expanded worldview are potential Superhumans with supernormal capacities can significantly influence our inner and outer environmental health and harmony.

This perspective is part of our Higher Purpose: to evolve ourselves and civilization, to understand reality, to experience transcendent oneness, to be of service to "others", to develop our divinity and divine powers, and to evolve consciousness itself.

Specifically, the following are possible scientific projects that could bring about transformational and evolutionary changes:

1. Changing the Atmosphere: Tests to confirm that groups can dissolve atmospheric methane (similar to how tests already confirm that individuals can dissolve water toxins and change acidity levels). Then, training larger groups to dissolve the 5,000 to 10,000 Gt arctic methane bomb (compared to 35 Gt human emissions). Similarly, other tests could confirm that groups can be actors of solar radiation management (SRM), to facilitate environmental stability (confirming previous tests).
2. Increasing Photosynthesis: Tests to confirm that groups can enhance photosynthesis in forests and ocean algae (similar to how tests already confirm that individuals can increase the growth of sprouts and plants). Then, training larger groups to (a) facilitate forestation projects to draw down carbon dioxide to 280-350 ppm, and (b) facilitate agricultural projects to prevent famines.
3. Changing the Weather: Tests to  confirm that groups can prevent storms and facilitate beneficial rains (confirming worldwide traditions in "weather working"). Then, training larger groups to predict and prevent catastrophic superstorms that are increasing in frequency and severity.
4. Increasing Biodiversity: Tests to confirm that people can create new plant species. Then, training people to create resilient and nutritious plant varieties to facilitate human and environmental health, healing, and higher consciousness.
5. Genetic Evolution: Tests to confirm that people can consciously evolve their genetics to enhance their (and other's) abilities, intelligence, perceptions, and awareness.
6. Connection with the Spiritual Internet, AKA Akashic Record: A project to develop reliable ways for people to connect with, record, and use the Akashic Record to facilitate individual, community, and global evolution. (This can replace the current Internet, which is vulnerable to disruptions in the energy grid.)
7. Materialization: Tests to confirm that people can materialize things such as water, ice, minerals, plants, medicine, and tools. Then, training groups of people to possibly materialize polar ice caps to stabilize Earth's habitability for humanity.
8. Free Energy: Projects to replace fossil fuel energy with Zero Point Energy.
9. Protection from Nuclear Radiation: Tests to confirm that people can eliminate harmful nuclear radiation and safely eliminate nuclear waste.
10. Changing Consciousness: Related to all of the above, tests to confirm higher states of consciousness that can facilitate (a) energy healing, (b) inter-dimensional perceptions, and (c) facilitating other's higher consciousness and enlightenment.

All of these phenomena are already confirmed and known to be possible by an elite group of so-called "superhumans." It is worthwhile to now demonstrate these things in a "controlled" environment to a skeptical scientific community and to the general public in order to facilitate a transformation in humanity's worldview and evolution. Perhaps these projects should be monetized into billion-dollar businesses, to solidify their legitimacy and efficacy—and also help facilitate a comprehensive transformation in the world's monetary system as well. These projects reflect our world's greatest challenges, which are amazing opportunities to demonstrate the incredible potential of our consciousness.

Transformational Awareness

What are the secrets of the elite, top 1% of the most successful business-people, athletes, politicians, leaders, scientists, philosophers, yogis, enlightened saints, geniuses, secret societies, and the happiest and healthiest peoples and communities?  Discovering these unbelievable mysteries is a core theme in my book Unity (a free PDF), and their secrets are distributed throughout.

People aspire to a higher standard of living, to achieve goals, and to emulate the upper social strata.  It's for our spiritual and ego satisfactions. There's a special urgency to shift from the ritual buying of destructive foods, housing, and transportation. The implication is a complete transformation in thinking and living.

These secrets—ideas that are generally unknown to the masses and not properly understood—involve very practical methods to dramatically improve our lives. I focused on the interconnected issues of food and climate change because I consider these two of the most important issues facing humanity, but the ideas are applicable to literally everything.

In terms of food, the secret "mystery" of the most successful organizations involves veganism. It's nearly impossible to overstate the importance of a plant-based diet and an attitude of empathy and respect towards other people and also non-humans. Basically, if you want to be happy, healthy, sustainable, and/or Enlightened, then it's critically important to be vegan.

In terms of solving the climate change crisis, we need to recognize that the outer environment is a reflection of our inner environment. This isn't just a metaphor. The unifying message of the highest regarded yogis, saints, spiritual masters, geniuses, et al., is that everything is an interconnected ocean of energy-consciousness. Our environment can be profoundly effected by our thoughts. This is why it's very encouraging to see meditation and yoga becoming more "mainstream." One you perceive this, even if just for an instant, it changes your life.

Developing the ability to effect our environment by "thinking" is like training for any other skill. One doesn't become a master at a musical instrument, qualify for the Olympics, or start a billion-dollar business without a ton of practice, passion, and dedication. Likewise, one cannot prevent storms, facilitate rain, provide energy medicine, or reduce atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to 280 ppm through focused meditation without significant training. It takes about 10,000 hours of practice, according to some, or about 10 or more years of discipline according to other traditions.  Directly perceiving this energetic "nondual", "unifying" reality of our environment is the core of the Mystery Initiations of many secret societies.

With climate change, we need to both dramatically change our lifestyle and culture to reduce our fossil fuel energy consumption, but we also need a group of dedicated energy workers/warriors—perhaps 144,000, a sacred number—to facilitate a dramatic re-balancing for environmental stability. I'm looking for these people who can initiate the leading edge of their community to the Secrets. They are the catalysts for a transformational shift in humanity to awaken from its nightmare slumbers to an evolutionary shift in consciousness.

An awakened culture is unfolding. Communities are breaking their destructive addictions to junk foods, drugs, automobiles, and debt. It's becoming easier and easier to embrace a healthy, just, and sustainable society. Local economies are enriching communities and the environment. People are discovering their life's purpose. The seeds of hope and excitement are growing and flowering. The mysteries of life are being revealed and accessible to everyone for the first time in history.

Discoving the Climate Change Solution

I was reading the "nondual" teachings of Adyashanti's Falling Into Grace, and the ideas about one's life mission and prayer resonated with my experience about discovering the solution to climate change. (Nondual is the idea that the universe and all its multiplicity are ultimately expressions of one essential unity. I regret that I barley even mentioned "nondual" as the essence of unity in my book UNITY!) 

One night in 2012, between long bare-foot trail-running on Vermont's Long Trail, I was laying down underneath the stars. The running itself helps me enter into a trance, an altered state of consciousness that enables my consciousness to be receptive to flashes of inspiration, ecstasy, and transcendence. After a long day of this, in a state of exhaustion, my mind was going a million-miles a minute about what to do about climate change. 

Gazing at the stars, I was trying to embrace a larger perspective and expand my capacity to contribute to the ideas about the sustainability revolution. I was racking my brain about how to bring about harmony and balance to Earth.  

I realized how it's necessary to synthesize and integrate the climate science with "weather shamanism" to bring forth harmony and balance for the social-environmental catastrophe.  

As I deepened my meditation practice, I experienced a rapid unfolding of awareness about the nature of reality, profound interconnectedness, and the application of spirituality to climate change. I experienced what Adyashanti expresses:

Bring forward your mission in life. Discover your true autonomy. It's a flowering of existence. Live out that unique expression of oneness—it's transformative.

The more aware we become, often the more capable we are of having life hand us bigger and bigger situations as our capacity to accept and embody our spiritual essence grows. Life responds to that growth and in many ways it tends to demand more and more from us.

Spiritual freedom isn't freedom from life; it's freedom to live life and the capacity to allow spirit to flow out into the world.

It sometimes feels strange to write about spirit and spirituality-and it's especially strange to talk, write, or think about the concept of God. I was not raised religious or spiritual and I only embraced a spiritual perspective in the few couple years.  I'm still not completely comfortable with it, although I know it's truth from direct experience in a way that's indescribable.

This was the night that I prayed. This was the first time that I've ever sincerely prayed: "Give me the awareness for me to help solve the climate change crisis. Give me whatever is necessary."  

Adyashanti writes, 

"true prayer is very powerful. It's when you open yourself to the entire universe from a place of not knowing and not expecting anything. It's about opening our consciousness and ourselves to the flow of truth, the flow of clarity. It's when we realize our true spiritual essence which manifests as everything we see. It's when we're committed to genuine transformation."

This was the night that I had a profound realization about the evolution of human capacities, capacities that many people don't even know about. As humans pursue our path of growth and development, we can psychoactively activate our higher capacities and expand our possibilities. It's an extraordinary development, where humans awaken these capacities. It's a quantum leap. It's the evolutionary edge and it's incredibly significant. It's the unfolding of a new era, a new age, a new horizon. 

I later discovered that Ken Wilber calls it Superhuman, and Dr. Radin calls it Supernormal, which is based on what Yogis call supernatural abilities. The solution to climate change involves encouraging, training, and coordinating groups of people who have awakened their supernormal and superhuman capacities; people who are at the leading edge of culture and humanity. These are the people who can bring forth what is needed in the world.

I'm now working on expressing this insight in an effective way. The world is yearning for a transformational evolution in sustainability, consciousness, energy, and leadership for dealing with the climate change problem and the numerous interconnected issues. I'm grateful for all of the amazing people that have contributed to my understanding and encouraged me to articulate this important idea. I'm bursting with enthusiasm to share this with the world.

It's far bigger than me and, in a way, I wish I could just hand it off to someone who's more capable and competent; I wish I didn't have this burden of awareness. I feel guilty for not being more active in sharing it with the world and accelerating its implementation. It demands that I act from the highest level of existence. I'm very grateful for the flow of spirit and clarity. I got what I wanted. But it's overwhelming and difficult to integrate into a "normal," healthy life.

The journey since my night on the Long Trail has been frustrating and challenging but I can see the implications. I can see the unfolding of the spiritual solution to climate change and it's astonishing.

Weather Shamanism

With climate change, the techniques of weather shamanism are essential to our collective survival. We need to make changes to safeguard the vitality of the world.

The spirits of the weather want us to work with them. In times past people all over the world spoke to, prayed to, and worked with the spirit of weather, but today our culture has forgotten him. Our culture now sees weather as chaotic interactions of purely physical forces.

Humans affect the weather by our psyches and emotions; our perceptions and experiences. Due to erratic mental and emotional energy that humanity sends out, the weather spirits are no longer able to give rain where it is needed, and withhold it when it is not needed.

There are still viable cultures around the world that carry on in the knowledge that everything embodies spirit, a normally unseen life force and sentience that inhabits rocks, animals, plants, trees, places, rivers, storms, mountains, oceans—everything. Many of these cultures work with the spirits of weather and understand the need to honor and relate to the spirit world for the overall maintenance of harmony and balance of society.  They see this intentional relationship as a special duty for humans and they attend to this responsibility through the enactment of community rituals. When people and Nature are in harmony, then magic and beauty are everywhere.

A Different View: A New Story

"We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are." -Talmud

We need to re-frame our worldview—our ideas, ideals, descriptions of reality and how to live our lives; our inherited, culturally transmitted story, perception, and how we interpret our experiences. We forget that our worldview is not the only truth nor the entire truth of reality. Shamans speak of this as learning to dream a new dream of the world and of ourselves in the world.

For thousands of years the shaman has deliberately set out to suspend at will the confines of ordinary worldview through experiencing that ecstatic state of oneness, unity, and state of harmony.   

Compassionate spirits can teach us how to conduct our lives in sustainable and harmonious ways, which involves expanding and transforming our worldview into a more inclusive paradigm. It is an enormous challenge and the stakes couldn't be higher. We can learn how to live in good relationship with our world, in our present evolution of self and times. We need to know how to restore balance where it is so sadly lost.

Weather working is ultimately healing work, to help maintain and restore balance and harmony and relieve pain and suffering in the world.

Changing the Weather

And Jesus arose and rebuked the wind and said to the sea: Peace, be still. And the wind ceased and there was a great calm. -Mark 4:39

Weather working is not weather modification—activities designed to forcibly change the weather through mechanical means.

• In 1891 the US started funding weather modification research. 
• In 1946 the GE lab created silver iodide for cloud seeding experiments named Project Cirrus. 
• In 1962, Project Stormfury targeted hurricanes.
• In the 1960s and 1970s the US DoD used cloud seeding over Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. 
• In 1996, the US Air Force published Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025. (52p PDF)

Scientific American Presents published an article Cloud Dancers (Spring 2000), and Science News published Squeezing the Clouds (July 1999), but weather modification remains a field of dubious reliability.

Perhaps the most disturbing of all is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), created in 1993 by the US Air Force and Navy, in Alaska. It's designed to manipulate the upper atmosphere (iososphere) with a "phased array antenna system,"  that focuses radio-frequency energy that can superheat selected areas.

Weather modification is dangerous: A single thunderstorm can dump 125 million gallons of water. There's enough electricity to meet the power needs of the US for 20 minutes, the equivalent of a 120-kiloton nuclear bomb.

From the eyes and heart of another worldview—a shamanic worldview—we can move beyond the limited activities of weather modification to consider the apparent miracles of weather working, the art of influencing the weather from a spiritually oriented perspective. Our ancestors regularly engaged in weather-working practices through their relationship with weather's spiritual side. Weather working is exercised for the survival and well-being of the community. Miracles can indeed be expected.

• In the 1880s in South Dakota, Wovoka (aka Jack Wilson) created the "Ghost Dance" or "Friendship Dance". Wovoka is most famous for producing ice in a river on a sweltering day in July. He could accurately foretell storms and bring on drought-relieving rain and snow.
• In the 1970s in Alberta, Canada, Chief Johnny Bearspaw of the Stony Indian tribe successfully weather-worked under contract by the Walt Disney company's film production studio, Calgary Productions.
• Tibetan Buddhist monk Yeshe Dorje Rinpoche worked to avert bad weather from the  Dalai Lama's ceremonies as well as to bring the timely blessing of rain at other ceremonies.
• Rainmaker Matt Ryan was hired by struggling farmers in Montana to help relieve drought-stricken areas.
• We find evidence of ancestral weather-working knowledge and practices in the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, Polynesia, and Europe—just about anywhere there is weather and humans. 

Weather working involves a worldview that embraces all the earth's inhabitants, animate and inanimate, as alive and aware beings who are capable of responding to human desires, needs, and actions. Those who understand this relate to Nature as if they are truly a part of it, as if they are seen and, in turn, responded to by the natural world wherever they go. Our ancestors knew that their actions and thoughts mattered and could make a difference in the world around them.

Stepping Through: We Find and Cross the Threshold

The idea of weather working sparks a passion in people, testament to the incredible powers of creation and destruction that weather exercises in the world. It reaches down into our vulnerability and basic safety. People often react with emotion and sometimes anger.

We are asking the spirits for teachings, for their guidance on how to relate to them, to honor them. If we are worthy, they may teach us how to work with them. The deities are mighty:

• Aeolus, Greek god of wind
• Sila, Inuit diet of sky and air
• Ehectl, Aztec god of the winds and Tlaloc, god of the rain
• Frigg, Norse fertility goddess of the earth, sky, and clouds
• Anu, Babylonian sky god
• Adad, Mesopotamian rain and storm god
• Lei Kung, Chinese god of thunder, Tien Mu, god of lightening
• Cuycha, Inca rainbow deity
• Yahweh, Biblical supreme sky deity (eg, the Genesis Flood, out of disgust with mankind). 
• Indra, Hindu storm god (who once held the highest place in the hierarchy of the Vedic pantheon).
• Many others

These beings are conceived of as alive and sentient, and sometimes open to persuasion.

The Spiritual Nature of Weather

In the "middle world" of "ordinary reality" of Earth, the atmosphere and Earth unite in a dynamic dance of creation, destruction, and re-creation. The middle world itself is a miracle. It is the duality within the one, separateness where there is none. When we feel the dance between Chaos and Order, in our hearts, we call it emotion. When we see it in the sky, we call it weather.

I began to merge with the weather, to become one with it. . . . I feel the weather bringing oxygen and removing the filth of civilization.

What we think of as "reality" can be altered. We can intentionally expand our "filters" to accommodate other possibilities. Our gates of perception open to the sacred. The shaman understands that nonordinary reality worlds can feed our world with vitality and beauty and so actively work to encourage just this to foster a greater experience of well-being for the inhabitants of Earth. The shaman journeys and chants, dances, sings, and meditates to open their perception to become a "hollow bone," a vehicle for the transmission of healing, harmonious energies to help transform ordinary reality. We are all capable of this ecstatic state, to open and expand, to harmonize and align with states of harmony. As we do so, we allow beauty to permeate more of our world.

Nature is a portal to the grace of this world. It nourishes our beings, inspires us, and helps us restore lost balance and well-being for ourselves and others. The more present or at home we are in our bodies, the more we are able to receive and to resonate with that beauty and reflect our own luminosity out into the world.

Form: Life Force and it's Transformations in the Middle World

Form is sacred and contains great power. Form is a patterning, an ordering of energy, and it takes power to bond that energy into a particular order and shape. Form is not permanent or fixed. Forms are ephemeral.

We exist in physical form, yet we lack an acute awareness of our more subtle, energetic forms and sensory capacities.Somewhere in our prehistory, thousands of years before the widespread use of written language, it's possible that ancestral humans could hear and see things that we aren't aware of now. They could see and feel beings, spirits of Nature, that we now think of as mythological. Long ago, people, plants and animals could change their forms and all were equal in worth.

The perception today is a state of "none sense," our habitual nonsensory way of life and lack of holistic understanding of our reality. We are all endowed with a multitude of innate sensory capacities beyond the five senses. Yet our culture's worldview tends to support and validate only our material based senses while the others are generally ignored.

A life enhanced by focused intentionality is the deliberate act of absorbing the unlimited life force of the natural world.

Many struggle with the illusion of a sense of separation. It's an opportunity to remember ourselves in the greater, grander reality of true unity. But walk the edge: learn to merge well and frequently, yet remember your own essence, your own being and form.

There's an underlying energy, a substratum of life force with creative movement through all things, be they rocks, weather, or our own thoughts.

What is Weather? Emotion, Reciprocity, and Change

Origin stories  recount the beginnings of all forms and created things as birthed from a great dark void, a primordial ocean. Weather is the emanation of the conscious life force of the void. The void produces waves of energy that enter our world as an individual spirit of weather, shaping into form to guide the wave to materialization for this physical plane. The luminous field of pure being has a central pulse, like our bodies, that sends the waves. It's the theater of the Great Mystery for weather spirits to play, dance, and manifest their essence in form.

Weather, like the rest of us, is filled with individual expressions and manifestations of personality and mood. We often use language that speaks to our emotional kinship with weather: A "stormy relationship", "foggy thinking", "sunny disposition", "whirlwind tours", "thundering a reply", "got it in a flash", "runs like the wind", and so on.

Your thoughts are your weather system adjusting and moving and changing as energy moves through you. Stand back and watch your thoughts and feelings, as they are the clouds ever moving and reshaping, bringing precipitation and shade to you, your own weather system. You are a part of weather—it is a part of you as your thoughts. Thoughts are your weather.

Earth is a whole living organism and the abberant weather conditions represent stressors—changes, imbalances, obstructions, and energy surges in Earth's field, just like the etheric field of an individual.

Our relationship with the forces and spirits of the weather we experience every day provides a potent calling and opportunity to live gracefully and successfully with the challenges and gifts of change.

Weather spirits are spirits of change. Humans are not in control. Embrace change: align with the forces of change. Embrace weather. Open to the changes it brings. Open to the teachings of those changes. Open to your lack of control. Love the weather.

Chaos, Order, and Power at Work

Reciprocity is an active mirroring that teases apart the union, the oneness of all things.

Origin myths speak of an original primal state of chaos—a dark place with no form or order, a place of pure potential. Out of this darkness flares a point of light; from chaos emerges order; from formlessness, form.

There's a Celtic tradition where the shaman voluntarily enters into the affairs of chaos and purposefully engages in battle with the dangerous and destructive forces of chaos that are afoot in the world. Those powers cause harm, destroy life, and disrupt the natural order of things. Yet this destruction plays a necessary and important role in maintaining the balance between life and death that makes existence possible.

Apparent imbalances today, according to the Koyukon elders in Alaska are attributed to the loss of medicine people, those willing and able to work with the spirits of the animals and the elemental forces of Nature.

The Shaman's work is about restoring order when chaos moves in. It's important to do this work without blame.  Wovoka's Ghost/Friendship Dance is a sacred community ceremony to align with the ancestors to restore lost beauty, lost harmony, and lost order to a ravaged world. Today, all of us need to work to restore order from a place of compassion.

Many indigenous elders and shamanic practitioners see a growing state of imbalance and a distressing lack of order or harmony in our world's ecology. Nevertheless, there is room for optimism in our ability to participate in a rectification, a restoration of balance and vitality to the world.

Webster defines power as possession of control and authority over others, which describes our culture's predominant understanding and relationship with power. For indigenous traditions, however, the concept of power embodies all the elements of the natural world. A primal world force or energy exists everywhere and enlivens all things and beings of the universe. In the languages of these traditions the essence of power carries a quality of sacredness.

• Orenda - Iroquois
• Wakan - Lakota
• Shakti - Hindu
• Mana - Hawaiian
• Chi - Chinese
• Djang - Aboriginal (Australian)

This power is accessible to those who know how to use it for a variety of needs, including the need for rain or sunshine. Power is what makes things happen. Power is conscious. It is the role of human beings to learn how to appropriately interact with power so that the cosmic order and harmony of the universe may be served.  True power is the sacred life force of the universe that exists in all things. . . . One important aspect of relating to power is clarity of purpose.

The Faces of Weather

Every weather event, each storm, breeze, or drop of rain, is a manifestation in this world of the power of the weather spirits. The creative force behind all acts and manifestations of weather's power does not, itself, have a specific form. What is has is potential, the potential of unformed energy. This energy of potential has spirit and gives birth to spirited forms or elements of weather. We can perceive a particular form when this energy is ordered into a state of coherency, when energetic particles or waves are in alignment.

Weather is a master teacher of form and of form changing. By exploring form, you will find teachings of metamorphosis. Your form, your body, is sacred. Being of form, you are far more able to relate to form than you are to concepts and words alone. Through the vehicle of a form, you are better able to identify and receive, to bring a concept home to yourself. This is why symbols are so useful to you. Form is your portal to understanding the weather's world, and why you were given "only" experiences of weather's changing forms.

To learn about weather from its various personas, we need to cultivate and access a certain level of awareness. We need to know about boundaries—especially our own. We need to know that deception or illusion is all too possible as we look at the world. Too often we gaze at clouds and just see "clouds"; if we studied them in school, we may identify them as cumulus, stratus, cirrus, cumulonimbus, and so on, and stop there. None of this is wrong, yet it is limited in scope and perception.  Shamans can recognize and relate to the clouds as sentient beings, as spirits manifest, and able to divine accurate information from them regarding matters in one's life as well as for healing others.

I was floating in clouds, fluffy and light; I became fluffy light clouds. It was intoxicating. Then I became gray, heavy clouds with lots of water and pressure; then I was on a lightning arc and I became the lightning arc. . . I was hot and crackly. I was hot wind, blowing the fire around . .  then I felt wet and was a pounding rain. I heard, "These are the faces of weather, they are to be studied, to be enjoyed, to be feared, and to be loved. But most of all, these faces are your faces, these conditions are your conditions. You make the weather as surely as you walk each day." 

The Sacred Nature of Storm

Once in a while a helping spirit journeys with me into a storm and I am able to briefly merge with its power, as one of its elements of cloud, wind, rain, or lightening. I began collecting storm waters from each that passed over for the use in ceremony, for offering healing to the sky. This is one way we can work spiritually to help balance the toxins that are routinely pumped into the very air and atmosphere we depend upon for life.

Storms serve essential roles in the continuance of life and fertility in our world. Most journeys for learning about weather working provide teachings on topics of cleansing, with storm as the restoration and maintenance of balance, a wake-up call, and a fresh start.  The role of storms is not to bring destruction, but to bring rebirth.

Toxins and pollutants weigh down the air and wind and rain and cause interference and chaos. The storm gods tell the shamans to help, to "heal the heart." in order to see the weather and its role, and honor the weather. . . . The weather gods tell shamans, "You humans work well together in crisis, well in chaos, so go and work well together—here is your crisis.

Enlivened Relationship With Nature: The Way In

How do we know if we are in a trance? It usually involves a feeling of expansiveness of the self, as if your boundaries suddenly become permeable or are suspended. It's an enhanced awareness and you know unequivocally that you are one with the universe or Nature, and that all is well after all. Such experiences can inspire a lasting and welcome opening of the heart along with an abiding sense of trust in life.

When storms threatened, despite their potential for destruction, bless them with hope that proper recognition and honoring will ensure at least some measure of protection.

People of power, those consciously in touch with this truth of unity within diversity,  have been known to change their forms at will and thus are able to influence the behavior of other forms or beings. These shamans know the common language of Nature.

It can be a lot of work, and it takes sustained effort to free ourselves and enter, at will, into heightened states of conscious awareness - yet the results are worth it.

The Dance of Power: First Steps

So firm was the belief of the Maori in mana that those who were held to possess it in high degree were credited with amazing powers, such as control over, or power to influence, natural phenomena. Such highly endowed people could cause the sun to shine, mist to disappear, and many other things equally marvelous - Maori Religion and Mythology by Best.

This is the time of water and water's power on Earth to create change and to cleanse. The tragic tsunamis and floodings and mudslides and big storms unleash the waters, and we are in that process now. Know storms as creative beings and don't be obsessed with their destructive side only. Honor and communicate with the storms.

To consciously relate to weather is to dance with weather. It is an act of focused intention, with clarity of purpose and presence in the moment. When inspired and energized by love it can become an ecstatic act of power. Spirit teachers repeatedly speak about the power of strength that is enlivened and intensified by compassion. Align with the power of compassion when you spend energy and time on behalf of another. Shamans know that to successfully call upon the assistance of their helping spirits is to work with a power that is infused with unlimited compassion.

The Navajo people see no choice but to perform: "humans are the earth and sky aware of themselves." We find the creative principles of unity (we are all part of the world and each other) and reciprocity (we and the world affect and mirror one another.)

In developing a relationship of this kind with power, we have to understand more about the nature of power and where we stand with power. We need to gain clarity about the hidden nature of our personal need for power before we can reliably relate with the weather in a clean, effective, and safe way; otherwise we are only courting trouble. This kind of knowledge doesn't come easily, and the learning of it is an ongoing task. Depending upon our individual perspectives and intentions, our understanding of power varies widely and wildly. We are all capable of wielding the power to destroy and, in turn, of suffering the destructive effects of powerful acts motivated by fear. Likely we have always lived with the power of fear, which when in balance motivates us to exercise caution in the risks we take, yet when out of balance profoundly inhibits our ability to live life fully.

…I have to convince the tornado to withdraw or rein in its fearsome and wondrous power - to express its beauty in a place where none will be harmed.

It may be that our spiritual muscles are weakened due to our reliance upon modern technology, but they aren't gone, and they will respond to the proper types and amounts of exercise.

For the Lakota people, "crying for a vision" is a sacred rite that involves a period of fasting from food, water, and human contact in a place of power such as a mountain or hilltop. Other peoples in North America seek their visions within the utter darkness of caves. Such a quest is a practice found worldwide in one variation or another, with the common ground of being a solitary experience in Nature, with some amount of suffering.

Weather calls us to align ourselves with the direction and expression of natural power, and to do so possessing a clarity of purpose to restore and foster harmony and balance in our lives and world.

Any attempt to wield "power-over" with weather in our efforts to influence weather yields unpredictable, possibly undesirable, or even regrettable results… Relationship is the key. Relationships promotes harmony for your life and your world. This is what really matters.

To Honor Hurricane: A Divine Tempest

Even though threatened with the real possibility of injury or property damage, those who could work with the challenges from a shamanic worldview found opportunities for valuable lessons and personal growth. They were the ones who could step beyond their fears and find a place of acceptance and grace. They did not forget that we have the option of relating to that which could otherwise victimize us, and so they were able to claim their own stance of strength and endurance.

Honor the weather. This is the kind of honoring that combines respect with love for the storm, or any other element of weather, as another living being, and that recognizes that, no matter how we may feel about its effects, it is a being with a purpose - a divine purpose, if you will. Honoring allows for the role that we each must play and creates a space for true collaboration.

Weather Working: A Closer Look

There's a bewildering variety of attitudes and styles of weather working in the world. A basic model that embodies three discrete levels or categories, nested together in a series of concentric circles. Don't grasp the model too tightly: everything is connected behind many facades and so the multilevel theory is useful only if we understand that the distinctions can overlap and meld into one another.

In the model of the concentric circles, the innermost circle is the heart, the central core to all the outer circles. This is the place of weather dancing, the harmony in relationship that permeates and enlivens all the other circles. At the outermost circle, the farthest removed from the heart place, is weather modification, more about power-over than relatedness. In between the innermost and outermost circles we have the place of weather working, consisting of practices that may lean either way.

In its highest sense, weather working is performed on behalf of something - a place, a community, a situation - for which real healing is needed, and not based on what we may personally desire.

Weather dancing is about harmony, respect, and love in relationship with the spirits and forces of weather.  From this place we find the dance that engenders a spiritual alignment of allowing and honoring the uniqueness and sacredness of the other, of even occasionally becoming the other. The essence of weather dancing is capable of radiating outward and through the other lays, infusing them with its harmony - just like our great and brilliant sun radiates its shine throughout our solar system.

The spirits are here - all we have to do is acknowledge them. Relatedness, compassion, empty, receptivity, desire - perhaps this is all it task to work with the weather in a healing way.

Our presence, focus, and genuine appreciation - along with appropriate timing - can sometimes tip the scales.

THE PRACTICE OF WEATHER DANCING

Weather Dancing: Metaphor for a Spiritual Practice

Weather dancing occupies the innermost circle as the heart, the core of it all. Weather dancing is no less than a guiding metaphor for the power and beauty of being openhearted - a transformative spiritual practice.

The power is the dance of relationship, and the ecstatic moments are there in the dance, in the alignment of our beings with the beings and energies of the weather.

The practice of weather dancing also insists that we cultivate a genuine attitude of humility, or we could find the forces of weather ignoring or humiliating us - or worse - for excessive self-aggrandizement. At the same time it requires a healthy ego. We need an ego that is sufficiently strong so that we have the necessary self-confidence to willingly risk, and especially the risk our familiar sense of the rational. Our comfort levels - physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual - can and will be challenged. When we open ourselves to new opportunities for learning and personal growth, our egos will want to rebel from the possibility of failure as we encounter challenges and face the need to risk, again and again. The "demons" of self-doubt and lack of trust in the universe, in the compassionate spirits and sacred relatedness of all that is, lie in ambush at every twist and turn of our dance with weather.

As when we ask a big favor of a friend, it is a genuine relief to feel noticed and worthy of an agreeable response, a sure indication that the relationship is in alignment with a mutual purpose. Practice with a strong sense of clarity coupled with a balanced ego, with an intent to bring healing - or else it can weaken us or harm others.

What particular story is life and the world showing us? it takes intention, focus, and practice - lots of practice - to broaden our abilities to "see" and understand. Explore how you can broaden your radar and magnify your abilities to tune in to the greater, overall reality. The sea, for example, can present a different face of colors, shapes of waves, aromas, and sounds. Likewise, the "ocean" of our atmosphere has an unending variety of expressions of weather.

Ceremony: Dance of Alignment

The use of ritual and the tools of ritual, such as dancing, singing, praying - engaging in that which aligns heart, body, mind, and spirit with your intention - creates a magnetic attraction for the weather spirits.

The wind and the rain are all within the shaman. The shaman's consciousness extends to include them within their very being. This is what is behind those breakthrough, peak experiences of ecstasy: our sense of expanded being-ness in the world. When it happens for us it is a rare and genuine state of grace and it inspires a feeling of true belonging in Nature, with a consciousness of no separation - of unity. It is the essence of alignment.

There has to be an exchange of effort - an offering of your effort first - in the working, in the asking. Weather expends energy, and to ask a cloud or a storm to bring rain requires a reciprocal act in which you expend some of your energy.

Ritual is a way for us to retrieve and raise your own power as  you direct intention to align with the power of weather. Weather the offering is praying, singing, dancing, honoring, or some other form, it requires an expenditure of energy on our part as we seek to align with the weather spirits. It is through ceremony and its elements that we can contributor our exchange of effort.

I call to the power of the Thunder Beings,
I call to the power of the Earth,
I call to the power of the East and West,
I call to the power of the North and South.

Behold, the time has come,
The time has come to unite as one,
Behold, the time has come,
To encircle the Earth with our love.
 - The Thunder-Being Song, Sandra Ingerman, sung loudly and for as long as one dares.

The ancestral understanding is that ritual and ceremony are primary ways in which humans can do their part to hold the world together - to maintain the cosmic order that engenders the balance and vitality all beings depend upon for life. The recognition of humans as vital to the well-being of the world is cross-cultural in its scope. Taken seriously, it is an invitation to shoulder a great responsibility, for the harmony of both our world and the spirit world, for behind it all we are all connected. We were created, the Navajo people say, to restore the beautiful, with sustaining songs and stories; to keep the world in motion in dance, in ceremony and ritual.

The Hopi Indians say that they don't make it rain with their ceremonies. Rather, the ceremonies drive away the disharmony that prevents the rain from falling. The Hopis call the disharmony exorcised by their ceremonies "akina."

Many places suffer from drought, too much rain, shortages, many problems. There is a reason for this misfortune, for you have not been doing ceremonies, gathering together, thanking the Earth, the gods, the Sun, the sea for your lives. This is missing. Without celebration, the gods are unhappy and bring misery to us. The ceremonies, gathering together, celebrating together - this is the love or energy that the gods live on.

All ceremonies are composed of various elements that are utilized worldwide. The use of prayer, meditation, symbols, offering, chanting, singing, and dancing all provide ways to stimulate us, to help us concentrate, to focus our intention, and to show up in our power as we engage and align with the spirits in ceremony. Each ceremony has its own intention and combination of elements, with an invitation to the helping spirits, and through these we are able to concrete, to conjure, to manifest in this world. Give the spirits an opportunity to be heard. Shamans recognize the sacred responsibility of humans to dream the world anew, and it is through ceremony that the dreams are empowered.

Ethics of Weather Working

As we grew into our relationships with the forces and spirits of weather, we were surprised to experience a diminishing desire to try to change anything. This is a good sign that our aim is true, although it is always a thrill when the weather spirits do agree to a request, which reassures us that we are aligned, if only for one instance.

Some droughts are necessary to heal the land in ways we do not understand. It is needed to heal the ignorance of people. Through this ignorance, people live in disrespect for the natural world. Becomes of their lack of respect too many people abuse the waters that give them life. People have forgotten the sacredness of water and how to live with water. Therefore, the rains are withheld for a time - long enough to attract the attention needed for more people to yearn for harmonious relationships with water, with weather, and with Nature. The drought can be healing.

There are times when it is crucial to attempt to intervene in a particular weather's course - when the time and place are right.

Thich Nhat Hanh called for the aware human to work for the maintenance of balance and overall harmony in the world - as the old-time shamans did for their communities: "The individual and all of humanity are both a part of Nature and should be able to live in harmony with Nature. Nature can be cruel and disruptive and therefore, at times, needs to be controlled. To control is not to dominate or oppress but to harmonize and equilibrate. We must be deep friends with nature in order to control certain aspects of it. We should be able to prevent to a large degree the destruction that natural disasters cause, but we must do it in a way that preserves life and encourages harmony."

Whenever we weather-work there are choices to be made. We have to straightforwardly ask ourselves, why do we want to do this? Will it promote harmony and restore balance? Are we working to heal or are we working on behalf of our own personal desires, to serve our egos for any reason? You must come from the heart. Both the desire and the need must come from the wisdom of the heart. There may be a desire to work for rain, but no need for it. Any working like this will serve only ego. This can create trouble. To have desire without the need is empty of heart.

It is the shaman's responsibility to consult with the spirits not only to master specific techniques but also to learn how to work with the forces of Nature to bring about what is best for the most people, animals, plants, land, and ideally, the entire world. Weather spirits are not obliged to work for compassionate ends. Shamans think of power in the world as an amoral, neutral force, neither good nor bad. The power derives from how the power is directed and what is objectives are. The calling, for those practicing weather dancing, is to align with these forces and spirits from their own place of heart and wisdom, in collaboration with the reliably compassionate helping spirits of the upper and lower worlds. This partnering can include trustworthy and compassionate spirit allies in the middle world as well. In this way, no harm comes from weather working.

Weather workers who are not aligned with harmonious forces can create substantial harm. Even though these people intend no harm, when they work from a place of carelessness or hubris - basically ignorance - their workings can go awry, causing great difficulty for others and lifelong regret. Then there are those who intentionally work to cause suffering for revenge, to satisfy a grudge, or to cause a loss of power or prestige to a competitor or enemy.

Warao rain shamans solicited and expected to receive foods, items, and favors as needed. This illustrates an ethically gray area in which the shaman is willing to invoke trouble and hardship in the interests of ensuring proper behavior among the villagers. The Warao shamans conjures up the frightful images of hunger and starvation to enforce selfless normative behavior.

Ted Owens could influence the weather, with numerous documented and notarized testimonials about Owens's ability. (See The PK Man: A True Story of Mind Over Matter, Mishlove, 1987). But he seemed to act with reckless disregard for the suffering produced in the wake of his demonstrations. It's possible that Owens' enfant terrible behavior (unconventional or controversial behavior or ideas that shock, embarrass, or annoy others) represents the puerile (childish, trivial) manifestation of an emerging evolutionary talent latent in all humanity.

Sandra Ingerman, in Medicine for the Earth, writes about the ethical safeguard: There is no issue of personal gain in attempting to influence the weather. The guiding principle is to ask for the highest good for all life. Keep a close watch for any ego inflation and choose ceremonial times at which it is difficult to determine the amount of influence your efforts exert upon the weather. it's important not to take credit if you are successful in working with weather. When we move into a place of self-importance, saying, "Look at what I did," we forget that we are just one small piece of the puzzle.

Healing with Weather

The ancient Greek god of the medical arts, Aesculapius, who still serves today as spiritual muse to physicians and other health practitioners, was the son of the sun god Apollo. Aesculapius is associated with a healing atmosphere. The classical Greek work asklepios denoted a gentle radiance of the sky such as we experience in the air after a storm.

Life lived in harmony with the cycles of Nature is essential for good health and longevity, according to thousands of years of traditional Chinese medicine. 

• Chinese practitioners may note the kind and quantity of wind within the patient's being. 
• Similarly, for the Dine of the Southwest, wind is as much a part of a person's physical and emotional health as it is a force that creates and sculpts our environment. In their tradition, winds become a part of us from our beginnings in the womb. They keep us alive and guide us throughout our lives. Maleficent winds can move in and ruin us if we lose touch with the beneficent winds. 
• The Tzutujil Mayans see humans as compose of internal weather patterns that mirror and respond to the emotions and health of the external "Big Weather" patterns of Earth. Symptoms of loss of health are described in terms of "weather bloods."
• The K'iche' Mayan shamans in Guatemala teach that the body is a microcosm of the world, and diagnose illness with the aid of lightning and the atmosphere o the outside world.

It's about balance and harmony, and it's weather's job to cleanse out the negativity and balance it with positive energy. When we hate the weather we are refusing the healing it brings and blocking the cleansing for ourselves as well as that part of the planet. We must accept the weather, welcome it, and know it is part of the bigger picture.

We get in the way of the healing that weather brings when we hate it, rather than reaching beyond our personal likes and dislikes to a place of respectful acceptance.

Carrying On

Throughout their lives our ancestors were deeply conscious of the life-sustaining workings of weather. The old ones knew their lives depended upon their ability to live with and relate to these powerful forces.

Remain wary of our culture's predilection for dilettantism regarding spiritual ways. It is all too easy to play at things and risk deluding ourselves into thinking we are living our practice. Furthermore, we have to show that we are truly willing to show up for the teachings and are worthy - strong enough to receive and carry the work, the medicine, the power. Ancestral teachings and traditional peoples today say that this requires suffering. But suffering is not a negative thing; it refers to forces that are pressing or pushing on us that we can feel very strongly. Suffering helps us become strong so we can withstand the winds and storms of life.

As weather dancers, the truly important calling is to love the weather and to relate to weather from a place of personal authenticity. No one else can prescribe exactly how to do this for any one of us. Essentially we're on our own, unless we come from and live within an indigenous, ancestral tradition of established ways of relating. We can, however, look to the core of shamanism about the underlying common ground shared by a variety of similar and dissimilar traditions that shows up over and over. The connection to Spirit and the Other World is a dialogue that goes two ways. We call on the spirits because we need their help, but they need something from us as well. They look at us as an extension of themselves. Shamanic practitioners understand that the need and desire for harmony between the worlds is mutual - yet it's not all up to the spirits. We have an important role to play in our willingness to work with the helping spirits. Intentional collaboration between humans the the spirit world is a necessity.

One has to reach beyond cultural prescriptions or bonds to bring in something new. To go against established tradition can be a formidable task, and even dangerous, a challenge the old shamans may have had to face from time to time. We are all supported and tempered by our circumstances. What counts most in shamanism, other than ethics, is the willingness to bring forth what is needed in the world now. And that may be something that is entirely new or something ancient that is renewed for today.

Those of us practicing shamanism within our culture have a doorway through which we can intentionally create favorable change for our world. Through appropriate acts of spontaneity, we can continue to follow the lead of the helping spirits so that the work and knowledge can evolve and stay fresh. Throughout, the presence and power of love makes it all worthwhile - and possible - as it weaves everything together.

Source: Weather Shamanism: Harmonizing our Connection with the Elements (2009, Moss & Corbin).

See also: Esalen Institute's The Way of the Shaman: Nature, Power and Healing ($650 Workshop); The Way of the Shaman (Harner, 1990).

Quantum Nutrition, Take II

My first, more comprehensive, post on Quantum Nutrition is a bit . . . long-winded and repetitive. And I admit that even this post is somewhat dense and difficult to understand. It's the nature of the subject combined with my own lack of articulation. Although I do have direct experience with this, I'm relatively inexperienced.

I'm trying to clarify the most important messages and to encourage the evolution in food consciousness. Veganism opens the door to this quantum leap in understanding and a gigantic evolution in health and expanded consciousness. 

Fundamentally, quantum nutrition is food that adds light (as biophotons) to our energetic system. Besides sunlight, the food with the most light is a wild or home-grown, authentically organic, living plant. Plants are densified sunlight!   Sea salt minerals and "structured" water (from springs or in watery fruits and vegetables) can also add significant light to our bodies. 

Furthermore, fasting enhances one's ability to absorb and assimilate pure light energy because it helps purify the body's crystalline cellular structure and nervous system, allowing us to enhance our ability to absorb and even transmit light. (This transmission of coherent, harmonious light-energy is the foundation for energy healing!)  Fasting literally puts us into harmony with the sublime vibrations of the universe. A decision to fast is a decision to become aware.

• The Transformational Power of Fasting: The Way to Spiritual, Physical, and Emotional Rejuvenation (Buhner, 2012).
• Spiritual Nutrition: Six Foundations for Spiritual Life and the Awakening of Kundalini (Cousens, 2005).

A plant-based, live-food diet reduces impurities, and fasting accelerates the purification process, reducing the resistance for the flow of electrons in our body, which enhances the ability for our crystaline cellular,  sub-cellular (DNA), and neuronal structures to absorb, store, amplify, and transmit these EMFs/photons. In other words, fasting is an acceleration of our body's crystalline purification and quantum EMF-biophoton production and perception.

Food and water also contain more or less light depending on the consciousness of the person growing, harvesting, preparing, and consuming the food.  Giving love to our food is an important and powerful practice because plants are like batteries, storing the energy of our intentions and thoughts. Our prayers can purify and energize the food, which, in turn, purifies and energizes ourselves.

Thus, quantum nutrition focuses on living, organic, wild, home-grown plants; fasting, eating lightly, being well-hydrated, mineralized, and eliminating mental and emotional tension.

As mature vegans, it's more than what we eat, but how we eat: mindfully, with love, attention, and gratitude. This creates a measurable, coherent EMF field around us that attracts and effects others. This is the beginning of becoming a force for healing, for creating coherence, harmony, peace, and compassion in others.

Biophotons are both absorbed by and emitted from the DNA of all living cells. Cells and nerves communicate and regulate not only through chemicals but also through the quantum processing of EMFs/photons. This light in our cells vibrate with quantum frequencies, at a level ten-million times smaller than the atom. 

Food Energy Assimilation

The food we eat also has its own unique subtle vibration and energy field. The more coherent the food's energy, the more healthy it is for our body. Our cells attract nutrients by creating a specifically programmed resonance that matches the nutrient's resonance. The nutrient resonantly and molecularly links to the EMF, releasing its energy into this field, re-energizing it and recharging the subtle energy body. In this way, it's not the quantity of food that we eat, but the quality.

In other words, cells create EMFs that are message signals that tune into the frequencies of nutrient energy. Healthy cells vibrate in resonance with incoming nutrient EMFs. This creates a harmonic resonance in the crystalline membrane and protein complexes of DNA and RNA. The transfer of harmonic resonant energy is how cells send information and self-regulate.

Veganism is great because it eliminates molecular toxins (such as pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, dioxins, etc.) that bio-accumulate up the food-web in meat and dairy. Perhaps more importantly, especially for quantum nutrition, veganism eliminates the "metaphysical toxins" in animal foods: the energetic vibrations of the fear, anger, despair, violence, pain, and suffering of the animals are literally in the flesh and dairy that non-vegans eat, and cause these people to feel that same fear, anger, and depression. This fear and other negative emotions are a literal vibration stored within the cells of the muscle and milk. And this incoherent and disharmonious energy scrambles our own EMFs, causing disease. Dr. Will Tuttle explains the Metaphysics of Food in The World Peace Diet (p.135-52).

Living plants, especially those that we grow ourselves, are full of biophotons and harmonious, radiant energies that enhance the functioning of our cellular and sub-cellular systems. Plants contain the vibrations of the positive energies of the Earth: beauty, life, and cooperation. This is the foundation to quiet our mind and to understand that we are manifestations of consciousness. 

Veganism is synonymous with freedom, liberation, justice, compassion, empathy, health, and wholeness.  -Dr. Tuttle

Next, an 80% raw food diet is even better than a traditional vegan diet because cooking food destroys the plant's biophotons. Organic fruits, vegetables, and grains have at least five times the amount of biophotons as conventional foods. And growing the food has twice the biophotons as industrial organic foods.

Quantum nutrition establishes or restores coherence with the body's energy field. Biophotons are coherent, healthy energies that protect against incoherent or rogue fields that cause disease. Healthier people emit more biophotons. The average person on the standard American diet emits about 1,000 units while a vegan emits about 43,000 units, a raw-vegan emits about 83,000 units, and a person on the quantum nutrition diet emits more than 114,000 units. 

The evolution to quantum nutrition is the evolution of food consciousness. It can literally lead to Enlightenment. It's just as important as meditation to achieve higher consciousness. Having awareness of our quantum reality and being conscious of our expanded quantum self involves a dramatic shift in perspective. People often say that this person has been enlightened. (I describe this phenomenon and perspective in Unity, in the sections Experiencing Unity, pp.206-40, and Quantum Reality, pp.256-63).

The end game here is that the body's highest potential and evolutionary function is perfection and purity on the molecular level. This purity allows one to create coherence in the body's subtle-energy system (chakras and meridians), and also amplify cosmic energy and develop awareness of at-Oneness with the Universal life-force, becoming One with the Divine energy of the so-called zero point field (ZPF). The ZPF refers to the essentially limitless amount of energy in the "empty" space around us.  Increasing our food consciousness involves actualizing our fullest mind-body-spirit potential. The "veil of illusions" of ordinary perception is lifted, and we develop an awakened normality.

Becoming aware of the ZPF is a process of the evolution of consciousness. The brain is an organ that limits or "filters", not creates consciousness. Quantum nutrition is about expanding our perception and consciousness.

Perception: Neuron Sensory Gates

Our perception and senses of the environment are regulated by specific neural gateways that regulate the inflow the infinitely large sensory environment in which we exist. We unconsciously restrict sensory information, but we can train ourselves to open these doors of perception of the nervous system. Similar to how psychedelic ("mind expanding") drugs suspend the brain's filtering action, the combination of quantum nutrition and meditation is a more reliable and safe way to achieve this awakening, this refined perception. 

Neurons fire with the opening of "voltage-gated ion channels", AKA the sensory gating channels, which are sensitive to the internal and external electromagnetic fields in the body, the environment, and in food. (The body creates an EMF because the hundreds of billions of neurons have voltage differences across the neuron's cell membranes).

In other words, EMFs/photons open or close the neuron's sensory gates. The neuron sensory gates are in a superposition: the photons, as a quantum component, can be consciously absorbed, or not. The photons can remain a field/wave of possibility, or "collapse" into a particle, being absorbed and causing the neuron to fire. The collapse of the wave-particle duality is a function of one's will, implying that consciousness has a critical role in defining the nature of our reality.

• Photons are electromagnetic fields (EMF).
• Photons open and close the neuron sensory gates. 
• Thoughts are EMF/photons that extend into the environment.
• The particle/wave photons are "entangled" with everything in the environment. (For example, your thoughts can effect the neurons/perception of someone else instantaneously).
• The body's EMFs/biophotons display quantum phenomena of interference/coherence, superposition, uncertainty, and entanglement...!

Expanded perception involves building more neurons and resetting unconscious sensory gating parameters. Quantum nutrition is an intentional re-programming of one's default, automatic, subconscious sensory input. As more neurons fire, and more neuron gates open, the metaphysical background the world begins to emerge. We begin to see and think differently.

The pineal gland, or third eye, is the body's master regulator for EMFs. The leading theory is that it transmits the cosmic ZPF through its biophoton emission ability, and its ability to produce DMT, a powerful form of serotonin, the most important molecule to the development, function, and maintenance of the neural network.

Quantum nutrition involves the transition from dense bio-molecular food being the predominant energy, to less dense, higher-energy foods. Pure quantum energy (prana, life force, ZPF) can enter through the crown chakra, which is connected to the pineal gland. For some, this may be the only source of energy. This is the ultimate quantum nutrition. For the average mortal, however, quantum nutrition is about increasing this ZPF energy source.

Up Next: The Leading Edge of Vegan Evolution

Quantum or spiritual nutrition involves recognizing and developing one's ability for plant-spirit communication and developing relationships and co-creative partnerships with the plants—recognizing individual plant sentience, feelings, emotions, and vital life force. (Unity 323-31, 332-34).

• Plant Spirit Healing: A Guide to Working with Plant Consciousness (Montgomery, 2008).
• The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature (Buhner, 2004), describing how to synchronize heart fields, and EMF dynamics.
• Plant Spirit Medicine: A Journey into the Healing Wisdom of Plants (Cowan, 2014).
• Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World (Harpignies, 2007).

UPDATE (March 21st)

From the website Beautiful On Raw

I discovered another book: Quantum Eating: The Ultimate Elixir of Youth:  (2012) by Tonya Zavasta

• the quantum body we occupy...
• raw foods as concentrated sun energy...
• the circadian rhythms of vital organs...
• should we sun-block the sunlight?...
• breathing for optimum weight...
• oxygen therapies... and many more.

Quantum Eating combines modern science, ancient rejuvenating practices, and leading-edge thought. This comprehensive system can give you the keys to a deep and abiding health, youthfulness up to 20 years younger than your numerical age and a fresh, joyful outlook. The Quantum Eating lifestyle is not for everyone, only for those of us who’ll accept nothing but the best.