Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer. Buddha at the Gas Pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people. I’ve done about 525 of them, or 530 or something by now. And if this is new to you and you’d like to check out previous ones, please go to batgap.com, B-A-T-G-A-P, and look under the past interviews menu. This program is made possible by the support of appreciative listeners and viewers. So if you appreciate it and would like to support it, there is a PayPal button on every page of the site. My guest today is Susan Raven. Susan is a longtime student of anthroposophy. Is that the right pronunciation, Susan?
Susan: Yep, that’s great. Well done. [LAUGHTER]
Rick: And an experienced workshop facilitator. She has worked with the methods and exercises prescribed by Rudolf Steiner for seeing into the super-sensible realms and has also trained with Dorian Schmidt, director of the Biodynamic Research Institute. Susan is author of the book Nature Spirits, Remembrance, a Guide to the Elemental Kingdom, featured in the Cygnus magazine, Nexus, Star and Furrow, and Catechist. Susan is also a singer-songwriter and has produced two CDs entitled Glittering Cities and Raven Song, which are regularly played on local and regional radio stations, including the BBC. Sometime during this interview, we’ll play her song, Glittering Cities. So insert it into the interview. Susan lives in Wales. And so I’ve really enjoyed reading her book during the past week. It’s filled in some gaps in my understanding, I would say. And I think that there will be a lot in this interview which will be new to BatGap, but very important. I’m really glad we’re getting the opportunity to cover it. Thanks, Susan, for doing this.
Susan: Thank you for asking me.
Rick: You’re welcome. By way of a little bit more introduction, let me just say that people who have been listening to this show regularly have many times heard me allude to the idea that there’s a sort of a field of intelligence, or we could say field of consciousness, but it’s not merely consciousness, it’s intelligent, underlying and permeating all of creation. And that there are impulses within that field, which we might call laws of nature, and these impulses are responsible for the manifestation and orchestration of the material universe, or the apparent material universe. But I don’t think we’ve ever really gone into any great detail on what these impulses are, or if they are impulses of intelligence, whether they are conscious entities or what they are. And I think this is interesting because in my understanding, or in my opinion, spiritual awakening includes not only awakening to one’s essential nature, the self, and maybe it’s icing on the cake, but it would be nice if it also included an experiential and intellectual understanding of mechanics of nature how the world works. And I think that this experience and understanding could have tremendous implications for the world in which we now live and the problems it faces, particularly environmental problems. So we’re going to cover that and a whole lot of other topics during this interview, but I think maybe I would like to let Susan do her own introduction here and lay out the groundwork of how she came to this work, what it is, and what we would like to cover today. So go ahead, Susan.
Susan: I came to this work when I moved out of London and I moved into the Welsh Highlands and Uplands, and it was this living life force, this quality of the landscape that really spoke to me. And I had found my way to anthroposophy, which is the philosophy of Rudolf Steiner. And for those of you who do not know who Rudolf Steiner was, he was a great seer, a great scientist, and he’s best known for starting the Waldorf schools and Steiner education.
Rick: The Waldorf schools, I didn’t know that. There’s one of those in my town here, a little town of 10,000 people. We have a Waldorf school.
Susan: That’s what he’s most famous for, but he was born with a great faculty of being able to see into what I’m going to be calling the super sensible realm. And he then gave many, many lectures over his life, and he gave a lot of lectures on the structure of the spiritual world. And I’m going to call this the super sensible world, and by that, I’m going to be calling it the etheric life forces within the manifest and unmanifest world, and what I call the astral world. So the etheric is all about color, gesture, streaming, movement, and the shaping forces just beyond our visible reality. And then the astral realm is more about beings, inspiration, that feeling of being watched, speech, being, space, vast space. So, when I speak about the super sensible realm, I’m incorporating both of those streams, the etheric and the astral.
Rick: May I interject something here? Perhaps it would be useful to just say that, to think of creation as having a range or strata from gross to subtle to transcendent, like an ocean has surface level waves, depth of the water, and then some ocean floor. And so, ordinarily, people’s perception is limited to the area of the waves, and they don’t, they’re not scuba divers, they don’t explore the deeper realms of the ocean. So using that metaphor, ordinarily our attention is held by the concrete material gross surface level of perception, but there’s a vast range of subtler perception that’s possible for a human being to access, and if they do, they begin to discover all sorts of things that have been there all along, but that they and most people were totally unaware of.
Susan: Yes, it’s a step down process. You can maybe condense it down to consciousness, process, form, and the whole universe is a life form. It thinks, it imagines, and it creates. And there’s a whole choir of intelligences, beings that implement these grand and great imaginations and these great, grand ideas. And around us are the preserved imaginations of the gods. And so, I see the elemental kingdom and the nature spirits as a way of really understanding oneness, because this extraordinary enigmatic word, oneness, well, how are we all one? And so, I see the elementals as this connective tissue. So, there are the elementals of in my bones, in my blood, in my skin, to air, to aura, to tree, to sap, to trunk. So, it’s this whole connective tissue of beings that are upholding the imaginations and the ideas of the Creator.
Rick: What were those three words you said, from something to process, consciousness to process, to form?
Susan: Form.
Rick: Yeah, it’s interesting, there’s actually Sanskrit words corresponding to that. It’s rishi, devata, and chandas. So, they understood this in that tradition.
Susan: Yeah. With that in mind, matter doesn’t create form, it fills the spaces outlined by invisible forces.
Rick: Say that again, matter doesn’t create form, it fills the space.
Susan: It fills the space created and outlined by subtle beings and forces.
Rick: So, then you would say that all matter, this book for instance, explain it in terms of this book as an example.
Susan: Right. Or with a plant.
Rick: A plant.
Susan: With a plant or a book is that you have the ideal of the plant. This is the original ideal of the higher hierarchies. And this is rain down on the earth. And you have elementals, for instance, around the space of a plant. You have the seed in the earth and you have elementals around the earth. And as that seed comes up, it fills the spaces of the prototype and of the idea of the plant.
Rick: So, to put it in other words, you could say perhaps that the plant has a subtle body which is not material and that subtle body exists whether or not the material plant has come into existence, but the material plant comes into existence in correlation with the subtle body of the plant. Would that be correct?
Susan: Yes, and that subtle body is a mixture of streaming, it’s streaming, it’s color. When you begin to develop this process of actually seeing into the etheric field, which is this field of subtle color, movement, streaming, you begin to see, as you say, this ideal form of the plant, this subtle form of the plant that the form then goes in to fill.
Rick: Wasn’t it Plato who talked about ideal forms?
Susan: Yes, exactly.
Rick: Okay.
Susan: And so with the book, it’s being held in its integrity by gravity. And so we will be talking about the earth elementals, they are the ones that look after gravity. So, I can go into the four different elements and the elementals that are aligned to it. Would you like me to do that?
Rick: We’ll definitely get into that. I’m thinking now of what science would say about this book, which is that as you go into the microscopic, it becomes less and less a material thing and more and more empty space and that anything which appears to be material is just some kind of probability wave or something. There’s really nothing substantial, it’s all just probabilities and something somehow congealing into something that appears physical. I think that that probably correlates with what you’re saying about the elementals and all.
Susan: Yes, they’re sort of hovering between the enfolded and the unfolded, the implicit and the explicit. They’re on that cutting edge, they are the last reverberation of the cosmic creative word that underlies all existence. They are that last vibration before things drop down from the wave to the particle.
Rick: So, they’re like middlemen in a way between the unmanifest and the manifest. And as such, they play a role in connecting the two or bringing things into manifestation and then conducting their existence once they are manifest, I would presume.
Susan: Yes, it’s like the architect, there’s the architect, there’s the project manager, and then there’s the workers, and they’re the sort of last reverberation. They’re the one holding the integrity of form.
Rick: Actually, that leads to a question that I had in the back of my mind, the architect, the project manager, and the workers. In much of your book when you talk about the elementals, they sound to me to be rather microscopic or at least very small, like there might be elementals around a bird or a single flower or a bee or something like that. But it would also seem to me that as we go to larger and larger structures, they would have their corresponding intelligence or deva or something that oversees them, like the entire Earth or the entire galaxy or that kind of thing. There must be hierarchies of larger and more powerful and more influential beings that correspond to every size of structure and creation.
Susan: Yes. Now when I speak about the size of elementals, I always stop and I say, “May I have permission to speak about your size?” Because we as humans love to fit everything into a concept. We like concepts that fit, but we have to soften them. We have to soften that demand to have things fit a shape and a size. Because in some ways it’s almost bad manners in this realm to be demanding to know what a shape and the size of an elemental or a nature spirit is. So going into this highly conductive, highly sensitive realm of extreme intelligence and extreme feeling. So with permission to say what size they are, they are many sizes and they can change size. But as you’re right, there are the smaller ones that are holding this integrity, and then there are the larger ones. You can have a nature spirit. It’s between an elemental and a nature spirit. And I would say an elemental are the smaller ones. The nature spirits are bigger. They are overseeing a community of elementals. So for instance, a tree spirit or a nature spirit of a tree would be overseeing the elementals of the undines of the sap, the liquid. The gnomes of the roots and the bark. They would be overseeing the sylphs who are the light bearers and the salamanders or fire spirits who are taking care of the generative warmth that ripens the fruit and creates the seeds. So you’d have an overarching intelligence. And also you then have the bigger, or those who oversee a larger space. For instance, there’s what we would call a genus loci or spirit of place. Each area has this genius loci or overarching spirit of place. It is overseeing the elementals and nature spirits of a particular area. And on my path, this has been a really important relationship with the genius loci. It is through the genius loci that I’ve been allowed to enter the mysteries further and further into the intelligence of the land and its elementals.
Rick: So, you’re saying that corresponds a little bit to human geography, that Wales has a genus loci and Scotland has one and South Africa and different places?
Susan: Folk spirits, they’re called folk spirits. If you’re talking about a large country, one would call it a folk spirit. A genius loci is more like, again, you’re making me, you’re forcing me into giving weights and measures and numbers. Hold it lightly. It’s a breathing, moving, living thing.
Rick: Sure, they don’t fight over boundaries like the Israelis and Palestinians or something.
Susan: No. For instance, the genius loci that I’m in constant contact with, I would say, is about a two to three mile radius. It’s overlooking my particular area that I live in.
Rick: One thing you notice as you travel from country to country is that there’s often, and even sometimes from town to town, is that there’s quite a different feeling, even sometimes when you cross a border. So whatever the impulse of intelligence would be that corresponds to the collective consciousness of a particular town or country, do they somehow organize themselves to focus their jurisdiction on jurisdictions that humans themselves have somewhat arbitrarily formed over the years?
Susan: Yes. I mean, social activity calls in a new being. A new being appears with a social activity. For instance, it can be a physical social activity of a gathering of people in a village or a town. It can also be an initiative. For instance, the initiative of Buddha at the Gas Pump a few days ago, I said, with warmth and respect, may I meet the being of Buddha at the Gas Pump. And there is a strong and light-filled and gracious being that is well and truly formed from your years of work, of interview.
Rick: Interesting.
Susan: Yeah.
Rick: Is it the kind of thing where, if you had like a rock concert or something, a being forms around the collective consciousness of that group that has assembled?
Susan: Yes, and then it can disperse, but something which is ongoing, for instance, if your initiative or something like anthroposophy, it’s a very well-established being.
Rick: Interesting. Another question that I wanted to ask you a few minutes ago that I don’t want to lose is you were talking about a tree, for instance, and how the different elementals, which we’ll get into in a few minutes, are responsible for different aspects of its functioning. Are there also, this would somehow relate to things Rupert Sheldrake says, would there be some kind of, either elemental or some sort of impulse of consciousness that would correspond to an entire species of trees, or let’s say an entire species of birds, say geese. Does geese worldwide have a certain deva that is corresponding to them?
Susan: Yes, it is, or the being that, who brought forth the idea of the goose. It is the archetype of the goose, or the archetype. And these, again, we’ll go back to Plato and his eidos, his ideas, these are the great beings who are overseeing the becomings.
Rick: There was an interesting article I came across a while back, and I actually sent this to Rupert Sheldrake, where some species of bird or something which had completely gone extinct in some Indian Ocean island or some place, actually came back into existence and it was clear that it couldn’t have come in from any sort of hidden birds that had been forgotten about. I mean, it was really extinct, but this thing was again, began to be found and Rupert found that fascinating, he thought it validated the concept of there being a collective consciousness or whatever of that species.
Susan: Yeah, I think many of the, you could say the angels of a particular species or the archetype of the being who gave of the archetype of a particular animal, they’ve pulled them out of the physical world, but they’re ready in the etheric and astral to come back in again.
Rick: Interesting. So theoretically, dodo birds, dinosaurs, all kinds of species which may or may not ever come back, we wouldn’t necessarily want them to, there’s still the template of those on some level.
Susan: Yes, and also their becoming, their potential of becoming.
Rick: Right.
Susan: I would say they’re just out of the physical world and into this life force world which is the etheric world and astral world. They’re pulled back because the conditions here are so appalling in certain places where they used to live. I feel that is very much a truth, that they will come back. But what comes back has to align with what our karma is and conditions on earth.
Rick: Yeah, right. We got that point. All right, so a few minutes ago you wanted to start getting into some details and, Irene just wrote me a note, she said, “The dodo birds have taken human form.”
Susan: Great!
Rick: Good one. So you wanted to get into some details about different types of elementals I believe, and I kind of postponed you a bit, so we can start to get into that now.
Susan: Right. Well, I think first of all, I’m going to give you, I’m going to run through actually what an elemental is, and this came to me over quite a while because the impulse to write this book was to really make the whole process of understanding the elementals and the nature spirits a much easier process for people to come to. And also, those who actually believe in elementals and nature spirits, they need to find a vocabulary that helps them into this world.
Rick: Yes, and since you said the word “belief,” I just want to throw in that everything we’re talking about here is really not something to be believed in or disbelieved in. Take it as a hypothesis. Take it as something that potentially you could empirically or experientially explore, given the right unfoldment of your capacities. And you can be as skeptical as you like, but if you possibly were to do X, Y, and Z over a period of time, you would begin to acquire the ability to experience the things we’re talking about if in fact they truly exist.
Susan: Yes, I mean, there are so many people who, Findhorn, David Spangler, who’s a very highly skilled seer. I feel it is a consequence of a path, of taking your path of enlightenment. It is a consequence. You will come to see these beings. You will come, even if it’s not seeing them, communicating and feeling with them and having a knowingness about their existence is a consequence of it.
Rick: And also influencing them and being influenced by them. There’s a verse in the Gita which says something about how you support the gods and they support you. There’s this reciprocal kind of relationship that develops.
Susan: Absolutely. It’s this plurality of nature spirits and elementals that are longing and aching for a co-creative relationship with human beings. Because for years and years we’ve been weighing, we’ve been measuring, we’ve been thinking about explaining and philosophizing and talking about stuff. It’s now time to talk to stuff. And it’s because there is profound truth when you can find this thread of pure attentiveness from your heart or from your body and sending it into the phenomena of nature. And along this thread of attentiveness, if you’re quiet and still enough and you have enough love and respect and gratitude, you will begin to get the wisdom of nature in its purest form. And it won’t just come in words. It comes in a whole range of feelings, symbols, because the nature spirits, they read us, not the words, it’s the feelings that coat the words. So there’s this whole palette of feeling. And then one mixes this all together with symbols. I don’t like to use the word download. A lot of people use the word download. I prefer to say a gift of advanced comprehension, which brings feeling, symbology and words and messaging as well. And we are so starved of truth. There are so many lies spinning around the planet. And this is having a really detrimental effect on the etheric field of the earth and the astral field of the earth. And there is a deep and profound hunger in people to know the truth. When you begin to open up and build these capacities of communication with nature, you receive pure truth. And one gets a kind of truth in a language that you don’t use between human and human. And this, if anything, should be or needs to be an impulse while we go into this world is to gather truth, a kind of truth that comes from nature herself. So it is learning this new vocabulary, which uses the whole body as an instrument of diagnosis. I mean, there are many, of course, we have some highly sophisticated sensors that can pick up all sorts of things, but they don’t really pick up the elementals yet.
Rick: Oh, you mean man-made technical sensors? Yeah, sure, like x-ray machines.
Susan: Yeah.
Rick: Detectors of different types.
Susan: We take something like bio-photons, they’re so close to what, for instance, Rudolf Steiner would describe the silks, but they’re not the same thing. You can’t say they’re the same thing. We as human beings are advanced enough if our organs of perception and our capacities for seeing into these subtle realms are awoken and nurtured. We can then begin to go into this realm and access pure truth. And this is what we are so hungry for at the moment.
Rick: I love this point. And it’s one that I’ve thought about a lot over the years. If you think about it, the human nervous system, even a single cell in the human nervous system is more complex than any instrument that mankind has been able to build. It’s more complex than the Large Hadron Collider. Now obviously, instruments like that and microscopes and telescopes and so on, they serve particular functions that the human nervous system and body weren’t designed to perform, but this instrument, the human nervous system, has capabilities that man-made instruments will never be able to perform, and you’ve just been getting at that really. And I was engaged in some conversation with somebody on Facebook a while ago and he was saying, “How do you know that all this stuff that we talk about with spirituality and all the different things is not just some kind of function of brain chemistry that’s imaginary and as gratifying as it may be, has no correlation with reality?” And I was a little bit hard-pressed to answer him, but I think you helped to do that just now, which is that if this instrument is properly refined and attuned, it actually can know truth. It can tune into a level of nature which is real and true and know it with greater certainty than ordinarily we can know anything.
Susan: Okay, and there’s ways of verifying this. The more you do this work, and it’s opening up the imagination to accommodate these realities, and you have to almost neutralize knowledge. You have to go into a place of complete no-bias, unbiased, neutralize this knowledge, and you have to clear this stage within your inner life to allow what these beings wish to convey to us. Our ancient ancestors were highly tuned into nature, and they were working with the elementals and the nature spirits, and we lost that capacity in the cycles of evolution in order to develop the intellect. And now it’s time to use this highly sophisticated intellect we have and shoot it through with feeling, sensing. Use this intellect alongside our ability to be an empath, to have empathy. So when one begins to get a message or symbology or answers when one sends out questions to the elementals, you begin to develop the capacity to know what is fantasy, what is truth, what is imagination, and when you are being influenced in an impure way, because not all nature spirits and elementals are working for what I would call heavenly ruling will. They’re working with impure human will. So how do you know, so I’m going to anticipate a question, how do you know that what you’re receiving is the truth? If you get images, if you stop in your imagination, and you start trying to pull them into something else and they keep snapping back, that’s one way. Another way, when either if you’re out in nature or you’re doing some research and you receive an imagination and it gives you an energy, you feel a real sweetness from it, it has a giving quality, something that is impure and that is illusion is taking from you.
Rick: You might feel drained or something.
Susan: Yeah, it’s taking from you. And also, if you have a being that comes into your inner screen with a message, “Who am I working with?” That’s the first question. “Who am I working with?” This is if you’re unsure.
Rick: Yeah.
Susan: “Who am I working with?” What’s your mood? They don’t like to be followed with that question, “What is your mood?” And so these are sort of three immediate things I would use to find out, “Is this authentic and is this real?” And after a while, if you’ve been doing it long enough, you know. And also, it’s working. When I say working, exploring. There’s the solitary path and a lot of my life is a solitary path, walking these uplands and communicating with the nature spirits. And I’ve had many profound experiences that break the heart and also inspire song. But I think what’s really key is when groups of people come together who are developing these capacities, and we set about an experimentation and an investigation, like looking into tree disease or animal disease and communicating with the being of the disease itself, because there is a being of a disease and it’s summoning this being and speaking with it. And then when you have, let’s say, 10, 12, 20 people all doing the same work, and we all come in with very similar symbols, messages, feelings, sensing, then the skeptic has to take this seriously.
Rick: Yeah, that’s the scientific method, replication, right?
Susan: Yeah, it’s replication, but it’s like, “Is this real? Do I believe in it? Does it correlate with others? And is it repeatable?” Those are the main scientific mandates, but you have to be very careful with this. Is it repeatable?
Rick: Yeah.
Susan: Bad manners. Why did you ask me twice? I’ve given you the answer. They don’t know. They don’t understand why we do triple blind testing. Why have you asked me? You’re dealing with beings that are not human beings. You’re dealing with something that’s highly conductive, highly sensitive, and they don’t live by our rules. And therefore, that’s why we have to neutralize knowledge. When we go into an experimentation of, let’s say, looking into a plant disease or an animal disease, I don’t research it beforehand. I go in completely neutralizing the knowledge, begin to get images and messages in, and then I do the research afterwards to work out what material I’ve received.
Rick: The thing you said about repeating reminds me of a story I heard the other day where somebody did a DMT trip and this being came to him and said, “This is not the way. Don’t do it this way.” And then a few weeks later he did another DMT trip and the same being came to him and said, “Hey, I told you not to do it this way!” A question came in, let me just pop this in here before we go on. This is from Carol. She wants to know, “Do we know what she means that they oversee the elementals? What does ‘oversee’ mean?”
Susan: I would say that a nature spirit is an organizing intelligence. It’s receiving the prototype or the ideal form from the higher hierarchies. And it’s, let’s say for instance, you have a nature spirit of a rock. It holds the memory of the evolution of that particular area. It’s overseeing the setting of limits to matter. It is, and by that word ‘overseeing’ it is holding the wisdom of the phenomena.
Rick: Hopefully that answers Carol’s question. I have another question for you. Shall I ask it or do you want to say something more right now?
Susan: Ask it, if there’s more she wants to know from that.
Rick: Okay, another question from me. You were talking about how the time has come when we’ve, I forget how you said it, but if we look at historically how there were apparently ancient cultures that had a lot of wisdom and then we got into the Middle Ages and we got into the sort of the Inquisition and very fundamentalist religious attitudes and all sorts of bizarre ideas about the truth, which many of which still exist in certain circles. And then the scientific revolution came about and scientists, people who initiated that said, “Wait a minute, we’re going to just somehow do this more objectively and systematically. We’re going to try to exclude subjectivity because it’s so vulnerable to delusion and try to figure out what’s actually going on in the world.” And to a great extent, this has worked. All the technologies that we see in the world today are an outcome of that initiative. But underlying that initiative, Descartes being largely responsible, is the notion that the world is inanimate, it’s dumb stuff, it’s just matter. And springing from that assumption is the feeling that we can do whatever we want with it, extract whatever resources, dig up the earth here and burn down this thing there, and so on. And that has brought us literally to the brink of extinction in my opinion, if not extinction then tremendous catastrophe. So what you were saying a few minutes ago is interesting because what you’re saying is that there is now a new stream entering collective consciousness or human mentality which hopefully will remedy this imbalanced situation that we find ourselves in. So let’s talk about that a little bit. I’m sure you can take it from here.
Susan: Yes. First of all I’ll talk about our way of looking. It is the way of looking which came with the whole impulse of science or through from the Renaissance and through the Victorian times. We really don’t know the power of the human gaze. We really don’t know how powerful that is. And we’ve been taught a way of looking at things, and as you’ve pointed out, we’ve been taught a way of looking at Earth’s beauty and grace as mere resource. And that way of looking has been taught over generations, and therefore it’s kind of condensed. It has had an effect on nature. It’s pushed and expelled the beings from nature so that they’re actually in this kind of limbo because we haven’t acknowledged them. And our way of looking, we stamp nature with a kind of form with our way of looking. So when we begin to look in a different way and we begin to accommodate the idea that it is a living intelligence, these beings will then actually be able to come back into nature and we will be able to perceive them, sense them, and feel them much more.
Rick: That’s interesting. So in other words, if we regard nature as dumb stuff that has no sentience, no innate intelligence, then it almost, we almost create that reality.
Susan: Exactly, it dies.
Rick: Yeah, we put the intelligence into remission or into submission, and we create that reality for ourselves.
Susan: Absolutely. So we need this new way of looking. That’s part of the way. It’s developing our capacities, developing a new way of looking that allows these beings to thrive. And what was the rest of the question you asked?
Rick: I’ll ask you some more that will help. We were talking a little bit before we started the interview, you and I together, about the environmental situation and how there’s a group here called, these days called Extinction Rebellion. And there are a number of, and they’re not just crazy teenagers, there’s a number of very serious, well-credentialed climatologists who feel that we’ve brought our species and many other species along with us to the brink of extinction. And if you look at the data, it’s a little hard to argue with them, at least argue with the possibility that they may be right. And I’ve often said on this show that I acknowledge that and it’s a grave concern, but I feel that somehow this spiritual awakening that seems to be happening around the world is not coincidental. It’s nature’s response to the mess we’ve made and that in ways I don’t thoroughly understand, it may save the day. And I think perhaps you can elaborate on that with reference to the elementals and the impulses of intelligence which orchestrate our world.
Susan: Rudolf Steiner said that at this particular point in time, the beginning of the 21st century, there would be a new entrance of some new elementals. He called them the Christ elementals. And these elementals would permeate science, there would be a chemistry permeated by a Christ impulse, there would be a physics, there would be social activity that would be permeated by the Christ impulse. Now those are his words. We can see this everywhere with the ascension, the idea that we are ascending. Whether you call it the Christ or the mercy of Allah or the Anun, whatever it is, whatever path it is, we are being permeated by new elementals. And you can see this in the scientific work coming from Paul LaViolette, for instance, with the super waves that are coming into the earth, these massive out-breaths. And you can also see it in ancient prophecy. I mean David Wilcock has done great work with his Ascension Mysteries book about bringing in how so many of the ancient prophecies would speak of this time and that there would be this huge fire from the sun or there would be this solar cleansing where the righteous would be lifted and the evil would be burned. But essentially this correlates with Rudolf Steiner saying we would have this new out-breath of elementals and nature spirits that would bring a new way and would support nature in this dilemma because the earth is groaning for us to wake up. And so, there’s that terminology, the new elementals coming in.
Rick: You do say something I think in your book, and I’ve read it elsewhere, that there’s a phenomenon associated with the precession of the equinoxes in which a vast stream of subtle energy is supposed to hit us from the center of the galaxy or some such thing, and that’s supposed to have a profound transformative and enlivening effect on us all.
Susan: Yes, and that was part of the superwave, and I interpret that with the higher hierarchies, an out-breath from them and these new elementals that are coming to help nature at the moment. And also, again in Anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner speaks about the angels coming closer and closer to us at the moment. And how we are being met by our efforts, our efforts to reconnect with nature, our efforts in morality, and our efforts to ascend, all the effort that we make is going to be met with angelic response, even more so than before.
Rick: I pulled a few quotes from your book. Here’s something from page 151. First, you quote Eckhart Tolle as saying, “Humanity is faced with a stark choice, evolve or die.” And then you go on to say, “At some point in the millennia to come, the drawbridge between the upward and downward path will be pulled up. Those who have consistently served the gods of unremitting materialism will lose their chance to evolve into the next stage of human evolution. A new species of human is emerging and the old ways will no longer serve us. The new path of service is one where we serve the greater whole, and those who cannot bear the light of the new consciousness will incarnate elsewhere. Humanity as a species will begin to split.” So there’s that. And just an addendum to that question, I’m wondering how, you’re talking about the angels moving closer to the earth and this higher consciousness coming in and all the elementals getting enlivened, I’m wondering how that will actually play out in terms of, if you can say, in terms of things on the concrete level that need to change. Institutions, and so on, that have no place in a more enlightened world, and practices the burning of fossil fuels. Are people just going to wake up one day and say, “Oh, this was wrong, let’s change it,” or are they going to be forced to change it because, well I just read a book called “This Changes Everything” by Naomi Klein, it’s basically “Capitalism vs. the Climate” is the subtitle, and she’s saying if we don’t change it voluntarily, we’re going to be forced to change it because the situation as it exists is so completely untenable that it’s going to just, it’s going to shoot itself in the foot and cause its own destruction.
Susan: Absolutely. I’m going to bring in a blackboard drawing by Rudolf Steiner. Can you see this?
Rick: Yeah, hold it up close so we see it. It looks good.
Susan: I think this is good for people to see. That is a blackboard drawing of his, and in that drawing he says that at this time there’ll be a splitting, this splitting of humanity, and that our angels will have to go with us whatever we choose, and there will be this upward path of evolution and then the downward path into materialism. But I think everyone will evolve, it’s just at different paces of time, and how easy it’s going to be is going to be how many of us begin to, as I say, connect with the Earth and speak to her as a living being, and speak to her legions of nature spirits and elementals, and work with her, because she knows exactly how to get through this, and we can learn from her. As I said, we can think and explain and philosophize about things, but you can’t get to the essence that way. You have to use different capacities, and it has been so mind-dominated for so long that we need to be using heart capacities, we need to be using all our chakras, as I say, these senses, and we need to be speaking to the Earth and all her ecosystems to get the resolutions and the solutions to get us out of this difficulty. And it’s possible, it’s very possible.
Rick: One thing I would add is that the key to doing what you just said, I think, is to get in touch with the Self, capital S Self, pure consciousness, to get to the very root of our being, and then once we have located that and learned to operate from there, we can get to the core or the essence of the world at large.
Susan: Oh yes, we need to be working on ourselves in order that we can tune ourselves to the bandwidth. And we are looking at our morality, our diet, everything, as I say, to make this instrument of diagnosis as effective as possible. The main path for seership that Rudolf Steiner provides and the one that I’ve gone on is the six steps of path of self-development, and I’ll just quickly go through those. This is objectivity of thinking. So most of our thinking is just swinging around. It’s very difficult to really control our thinking. So there’s exercises of taking an object, holding it, and thinking of nothing but that object. Let’s say a match, for instance, for five minutes. You don’t let any thought go off the match. The entire history is one logical thought after the other for five minutes. And this creates a sort of clearance around the head because usually the head, there’s this intense weaving light around the head in our thinking. And we need to get this light to be as calm and as poised as possible. And that’s just holding this object, once it was a tree, it was a seed, it was a tree, it was cut down. You go through the whole history of this match until it’s lit for five minutes. And as I said, it brings this clearance in the head. The second one is …
Rick: Also, you’re focused, obviously. It reminds me of the difference between ordinary light and laser light. Laser light is photons, just like ordinary light is, but it’s coherent photons. It’s photons which have gone into synchronicity with one another.
Susan: So, you’re working on, and it’s this clearance that’s the most important thing. Your room of thinking becomes clear and poised. Then the second one is about exercising your memory. I will do something at 11 o’clock, I will touch my ear, and I will make this meeting with myself, and I will endeavor to keep that meeting. You get it at 11 o’clock, I’ve touched my ear, I’ve done what I said I was going to do, I’ve remembered, I’ve stretched my memory.
Rick: Do you set a reminder, or you just have to remember to check the time?
Susan: No, when you start, you forget, and of course, everybody goes, “Oh, I’m hopeless, I can’t do it,” which is, you can’t allow yourself to indulge yourself with that. I start off by saying, “Tomorrow, I will touch my ear at some point,” and then I come down into meeting it at a particular time. Again, something happens, and this little subtle shift in the soul happens when you begin to do this. Then the next thing is control of feeling. These are exercises where you summon joy, for instance. You think about something that has brought you great joy, you summon the memories, you drop the memory, and you then experience and focus on pure feeling. What is joy doing with me now? You’re sensing these great clouds of feeling around the chest, and you sit in it, and it’s like pilot waves, just experiencing pure feeling. Because we so rarely, it always has thoughts and memories with it. It’s learning the craft of pure feeling. And then you try something like sorrow, and just see how it affects your body. And sorrow is a real gravity-driven, it can pull you right down. So that when you’re actually out in nature, you will get feeling pulses. And when you’re exercising your feelings through all these extremes, you then begin to have a whole palette of different feelings that you can then receive from nature. And then the fourth one is seek truth, beauty, and goodness. And that’s the positivity, whatever’s happening to you, what am I learning here? What’s the gift? What’s the miracle in this dilemma or this calamity I’m in? A lot of spiritual paths have that. It’s always seeking the positivity. And then there is the fifth one is open-mindedness, impartiality, taking all sides. And I know that that’s definitely an ethos for Buddha at the Gas Pump, I mean on your home page. It has to be, let’s take all sides. Walk in the other person’s shoes.
Rick: Yeah. My point on that is that if you really want to, if you’re interested in enlightenment, then what is it? It’s actually becoming the totality. And what does the totality do? It actually incorporates all diversities, howsoever divergent and contrasting or paradoxical they may be.
Susan: Yes, and it’s really entering them. And if you’ve had an argument, maybe that person was right. I’m going to just stand in their shoes and be them and look at me. I mean there’s a German word, unbefangenheit. And when you speak these words, they appear on the inner screen as colors and forms. So you begin to see words as forms. And again, this is the language and the vocabulary of the nature spirits. And then the sixth, which is quite advanced, it’s just collating all of these and finding out what the next question is going to be once you’ve accommodated all these six steps to self-development. But after a while, you’ve actually then tuned yourself into this hopefully moral, joyful, unbiased human being with an open mind ready to have a loving interaction with nature and her intelligence and her beings.
Rick: Yeah, I would say it’s a lifelong process. It’s not like you’ve ever done it to the extent that it could possibly be done. It’s like education. Someone might say, “Well, I’m educated. I’m completely educated.” How ridiculous does that sound? I can’t learn anything more.
Susan: Yeah.
Rick: Yeah. That’s great. I love those.
Susan: But especially the feeling. We do hours and hours of this work of word meditation, for instance. And also, it’s working with time. We would meditate. For instance, when you next do your two hours meditation, or your game, work with these words “having time”, “having time”. And just have a real experience of what time actually looks like, how it manifests itself in color and form. Shall I give you an example of an interaction with a genius loci and what can actually come from building up a relationship in that way?
Rick: Sure. Yes, please. And I thought of a question during our little break, and I will ask it. But you go ahead and say your thing first, and I’ll just bring my question in when it’s relevant.
Susan: Okay. So, the genius loci, it is the spirit of a place. And each of us, we all live in a location. There will be a spirit of place wherever you live, whether it’s a city or it’s the uplands, it doesn’t matter where, there will be this spirit of place. And asking to have a meeting with this being, genius loci, I respectfully ask to have a meeting with you. So, you send out this question. So, when I arrived in this particular area, that was my question, genius loci, I respectfully ask for a meeting. And almost every day, I am in a prayerful conversation or interaction with this genius loci. So, why do I do it? One, because I’m constantly giving thanks for the beauty that is around me. We have this beautiful water coming up from our own spring. We have this amazing landscape. So, I’m in the state of gratitude. And then it’s, what can I do for you, genius loci? And you don’t immediately get an answer. But then after a while, for instance, I would go out for a walk, and I’d feel an enormous pressure to go to a particular place. And this is one example, enormous pressure to go down a hill to a particular place. Why am I being taken here? Why are you guiding me here? What is this incredible pressure I am feeling from you to go to this particular place? So, when I arrived, and I felt this being say, “Stop,” and then I looked down into a little dell, and there were bags and bags of dead lambs.
Rick: Lambs, baby sheep.
Susan: Yeah. And they’d been thrown by rogue farmers, because they did not want to pay the money to have them taken away. So, they’d piled them all into these bags and thrown them into this dell. Also, the British telecom man had been working on some of the cables, and they just left lots and lots of bits of cut cable, and they’d thrown it down into this dell.
Rick: A dell is like a little ravine, I suppose.
Susan: A little ravine, yes. And you’d never have seen that if you’d driven by. You wouldn’t have seen it if you’d walked by. But here was this deeply wounded, polluted place that was causing immense stress in the nature realms, both physically and in the super-sensible spiritual realm as well. So with my interaction, I was then put to work. So when we’re thinking, “Well, what can we do? What can I actually do?” If you connect with your genius loci, after a while you are directed what you can do to be of use and to be of service.
Rick: Alright, so obviously there are messes like that around the world that are not hidden. We have the Alberta tar sands being dug up, we have copper mines in Mexico that are 100 square kilometers, there’s the Amazon burning, Australia burning, even the Arctic is burning in certain places. There’s a plastic garbage patch in the Pacific that’s twice the size of Texas. So there are all these situations. So what do the genius loci of those places think about that? And obviously I think they would like us to clean them up or stop causing the destruction, but it’s easier said than done. So how would you comment on that kind of thing?
Susan: It’s very, very easy to be utterly overwhelmed and then be just be frozen. That was a small thing. It was in my small area, took me a day for the Paribas to clean it up and sort it out. And to sing songs, put the rescue remedy and just generally bring these elementals and the nature spirits back into a health bearing place. With a massive, as you say, open mining, I think this is why we get so many weather anomalies and why we get volcanoes and this disruption. It is the anger of the gods or just the anger of the nature spirits. But there is an enormous amount of support too, because technically if you were going to look at this in a purely physical way, the whole planet would have died by now if it had not been, I would say, from the angelic and the nature realms upholding and absorbing our immorality or our thoughtlessness.
Rick: I wonder if they’ve even had a hand in averting nuclear war, which could have quite suddenly killed the planet.
Susan: Yes, many people say that the off-planet races are responsible for that, but there are huge, vast nature spirits that are created when a nuclear power station is built.
Rick: That are created?
Susan: Yes.
Rick: Good ones or bad ones?
Susan: Well, what’s good, what’s bad, they are.
Rick: You spoke of malevolent nature spirits and benevolent ones, so when something like a nuclear power plant or a huge open pit mine or something like that is created, do malevolent spirits congregate there?
Susan: Again, it can be the nature of the behavior of the human beings on the site. You could say that some of these open mines are needed.
Rick: You could say that.
Susan: You could say they’re needed at this point in our evolution.
Rick: Yeah, they may be needed to create things that we don’t really need, but given what we think we need, they’re needed.
Susan: Yeah. I’ll give you an example. I went in another conversation with the genius loci. I had to do a conference about nature spirits, the reality and the responsibility, and I asked the genius loci, “Where shall I go to get my talk? What do you want me to say?” And who was I expecting to go off to an ancient and beautiful woodland? I was taken off to an open landfill site. The genius loci said, “Go to the landfill site. Meet the elementals there. Learn from the elementals of that landfill site.” So getting access to it, I had to connect with the organizers of the landfill, and I said, “I’m an industrial artist. May I please go onto this land?” Because I can’t say I’m going to go and speak to the elementals, sadly. One day we will. So I went into this landfill site, and let’s not sweeten this at all. Utter filth. We have the nappies, the plastic, the filth, the black leach water coming out of the hill. We’d had storms and rain. The place was, the stench was unbelievable in this place. And I just was there for about two hours meditating on the elementals in this place. And then the trucks came in with the new load. They emptied their load, and it emerged like a sort of sleeping goddess. It seemed to mirror all these beautiful Welsh hills surrounding it. And there in the middle of this landfill was this sleeping goddess of all our rubbish, surrounded by black stench leach water. And so my question to the elementals and to this being of all our rubbish was, what do you represent? What do you represent? What is your relationship to humans? And the message and the heightened communication that I received was, I represent a chronic epidemic of self-sabotage. She was sick, and she was ill. And I said, how do you feel? Myself lies lamenting on the ground. Raise it. So these deep and profound connections that we can have if we find this stillness. But what was redeeming this place? One, it was the nature spirits of the surrounding hills were just sending in what I would call these beams of support for this particular area. So the nature spirits come in, and they support it. And it was also the morality and the behavior and the manners of the people who worked in that landfill site. Never underestimate the attitude of the human being and how powerful that is. All of those men on that site, one, they were really polite. They had a great sense of humor. The manager, Tony, took me around the whole place and really gave me time explaining what everything was and how it all worked. There was a chivalry there. I was the sole female, and there was no nonsense at all. And also, there were some young men there who built up this incredible skill, for instance, of winding strawberry nets into these really compact balls so that they would make as small amount of space as possible when they went into the landfill. So it was this attitude of human beings that created a moral, sort of morphic field to counteract this result of our chronic self-sabotage in the physical form.
Rick: Interesting. When you say that, it almost makes me feel like the human beings working there were kindred spirits of the elementals who were trying to pour in life into the area, that they were just sort of on the same basic wavelength trying to make the best of a bad situation.
Susan: Yeah, I mean they’re doing the best they can, their sense of humor, and they’re doing a good job with a bad symptom of our chronic self-sabotage. So that’s an example. So it’s very easy, and you can say, “Well, that opencast mind is horrendous. What are the human beings like in there? Are they doing their very best?” And also, one has to remember that these really big nature spirits that oversee a huge area, they’re out of space and time, they’re out of time, they’re seeing this incident as possibly a punctuation in their equilibrium. But it comes to the point, how much can nature bear our thoughtlessness? I mean, learning about elementals and actually having an experience of them has much more power than moral sermons, because we get to have a physical and very real response to our thoughtlessness. And for instance, with the experiments we’ve done, contacting tree diseases, summoning and speaking to the diseases themselves, this is extraordinary. For instance, there’s the sudden oak death, and we have the ash dieback. These are two very, very pernicious and difficult diseases at the moment.
Rick: Yeah, we have the emerald ash borer over here, which is basically wiping out all the ash trees. They’ll probably go extinct at the rate things are going.
Susan: Yeah, ruled by the sun, and the sun, the rays coming in the sun, they’re being deeply distorted by radio waves, deeply distorted by the geoengineering and the chemtrails. So the wisdom of light, the pure ideal and the idea of the ash tree, the idea that is gating through the sun onto the earth and onto the trees, that pure signal is being scrambled not only by the geoengineering, but also, this was one thing that came up very strongly when we spoke to the being of the ash dieback, it is the amount of lying. Lying creates a substance in the soul field of the earth, these huge morphic fields of thought forms. If they are lies, they have a profound effect on the health, the physical health of nature. And of course, in the past 20, 30 years, lies can go around the planet so quickly, and they can be believed by a huge amount of peoples very, very quickly. So they create these really solid thought forms. But luckily enough, with the truth media, there’s a huge effort, some wonderful sites that are doing their very best to pull apart the mainstream media stories. These thought forms are actually not so heavy now. But all these things have an effect on the health of nature. And something like the sudden oak death, that was similar. That disease spoke about the amount of sorrow, incredible sorrow there is on earth, one for the endless wars and loss of life and illness. We’re so ill. I mean, human beings are so ill. However, all of these diseases, although they may have a different vocabulary, the basic answer they all give as to why you hear disease is, “We fill the space you leave behind.” We create the conditions for these elementals, which are the primary force for the disease, to actually exist.
Rick: So let me … point of clarification. So you’re saying that if there’s a lot of lying going on, as there certainly is in the world today, or if there’s a lot of sorrow or trauma of some sort, that can actually take form as a disease that might wipe out a species of tree or something like that. It sort of funnels or channels into something of that nature.
Susan: Into nature. And we asked why, and this is the most moving and profound thing that keeps coming up from these trees is, “We are doing it for you so that you don’t get sick.”
Rick: Interesting. So it’s like they’re taking on our karma or something. They’re absorbing the stuff, sacrificing themselves for our sake.
Susan: Yeah, the Sota, the sacrifice, yeah. And this comes up again and again.
Rick: But everything is reciprocal and interrelated, obviously, so as the trees die, then our possibility of our existence is further jeopardized.
Susan: Yeah. So one of the key things is, making a meeting or summoning the guardian at the gate of lies guardian at the gate of lies, please be with me always so I can recognize a lie and that I won’t speak a lie either.
Rick: I don’t want to take us off beam here, but speaking of lies, it seems like there’s an epidemic of, well, there’s a whole term fake news, and then there’s all these conspiracy theories and all this stuff being propagated on Facebook and YouTube and so on. I mean there’s this shocking number of people who think the earth is flat, and you can start looking at videos about that and reading websites about that and spend days and weeks and months on that particular topic, getting more and more brainwashed if that’s your proclivity. And the same thing with the moon landing being faked and all kinds of other things, and some much more harmful than these conspiracies. But there’s something in human mentality which seems to be more prevalent these days from my perspective that makes people susceptible to misinformation, and it’s really dividing societies. Everything’s becoming much more polarized, I think, as this kind of stuff propagates.
Susan: Yes, definitely. I’m going to just get a quote here from Rudolf Steiner about lies, which I found, and this really moved me very much. He’s talking about our ancient ancestors, I would say probably Diluvian, but he says, “In those ancient times, a lie had infinitely greater power than it has nowadays. If at the present time everyone who tells a lie were to suffocate as the result, I think the fear of suffocation would be too great to allow people to risk telling lies. For the thought expressed in the word contained a power to give form to the air in the larynx and then suffocate the human.”
Rick: There’s an interesting thing in many of the Vedic stories where, well, firstly, there’s a Vedic saying or phrase which is called “ritambhara prajna,” which means “that level of intellect which knows only truth,” and there are all these stories about sages who function from that level, who are so true in themselves and so true to their word that whatever they say must come true. And sometimes there are stories where a sage will speak something in anger or something and “Oops, it has to come true because he said it,” and that’s how the whole Srimad Bhagavatam came about. Some guy said, “You’re going to get bitten by a snake in a week,” and he couldn’t take it back. It was because he could only speak truth, and if he said it, it became true.
Susan: Truth is substance. I mean, speaking words, words are substance. We create substance on these super-sensible realms with every word we speak and every thought we think. And everybody can help us back from the precipice by patrolling our thinking and our speaking and our ability to forgive. And everybody can do that.
Susan: Now, Susan, I want to make sure that we don’t burn up all of our time going off on, this stuff is all very interesting and I don’t really consider it tangential, but you did want to talk about chapter 5, and I don’t think we’ve really touched upon it yet.
Susan: I’m going to go through the four elements and the elementals of the four elements, because this actually gives the substance and structure of the ether and the astral that I’ve been talking about. So I’m going to start off with the element, the mineral element. Mineral falls the farthest and the hardest to serve life. I’m going to use the word “gnomes.”
Rick: When you say it falls the farthest and the hardest, you mean it becomes more dense and concrete and perhaps entrapped in that concreteness than any of the other elemental forms?
Susan: Yes.
Rick: Okay.
Susan: I’m going to use the word “gnomes,” and I will ask everybody, I will implore everybody to reboot that word. It is simply a word to indicate the elementals and nature spirits of solid form. So what are they made of? We’re made of flesh and blood. What’s their substance out in these spiritual realms? Their substance is intellect and intelligence. They are the intelligence of form. That’s why we see in sort of colloquial art, these beings with great big heads, a truth comes through in art. So they are also a component part of gravity. It’s their intelligence that holds gravity, that is part of gravity, and that is holding and setting limits to matter in a particular way. So that’s their substance. They also hold the memory of place. So when you begin to have a relationship with these beings, you can often be taken into the history of a place. You can feel its history in the cycles of time. They’re made of what I would call active cleverness. That’s why they are so useful for the adversary forces. We have ruling will, which is coming down from the hierarchies, the highest idea, the highest imagination. And then we have human will. And elementals don’t have an inherent morality. They are taken hold of by that which is stronger and more influential than they are.
Rick: So when you said ruling forces, you might mean like a despotic government or something?
Susan: No. I’m talking about the ruling will of the hierarchies.
Rick: Okay, the will of the higher beings.
Susan: Yeah, the will of the higher beings.
Rick: Higher intelligences.
Susan: Yes, so we call that the pure ruling will, the law, if you like, the laws.
Rick: So they’re humble servants of that.
Susan: Yes, but they can be taken hold of by the adversary forces as well.
Rick: Adversary forces. So are you saying that there’s some kind of subtle battle going on between the gods and the demons as is sometimes depicted in mythology?
Susan: Yes, definitely. And this battle’s going on in the etheric, which is the subtle forces just beyond the physical. This is where the real tussle is.
Rick: I laugh because my former teacher was once asked why these gods and the demons are always depicted as battling one another, and he said, “Well, if they didn’t, the creation would cease to exist.”
Susan: Yes, because I would say where do the elementals live? It’s between the joy of giving and the sorrow of form. They are enchanted. They’ve dropped this form, this hardest form. They have to do time in form.
Rick: Yeah, they’re in solitary.
Susan: But we can enliven them, and we can allow them to recycle more with our appreciation and our gratitude and our love.
Rick: We liberate them.
Susan: We liberate them, indeed. And so I’ll then just move briefly on. So that’s it, that the gnomes, the elementals of solid form, they are pure intelligence. That’s their substance. With the undines and the water beings, their substance is dreaming, a dream, the substance of dreaming and the substance of emotion.
Rick: Dreaming meaning regular human dreaming?
Susan: Well, if you think what a dream is, for instance, they would hover over the seed and dream the plant.
Rick: I see. So they sort of conceptualize things into existence in a way, or dream things into existence.
Susan: Conceptualize too hard. They’re much more mobile and conductive than that. Dreaming is more mobile. So their substance is dreaming, and in many of the shamanic practices, it’s entering the dream of the plant. And this is what we’re doing, we’re entering the dream, the kingdom of the elementals of water, the undines. So that’s their substance. And again, they’re highly mobile, highly conductive. And it’s also emotion. So when we have these great clouds of emotion that are emanating out of our body, this is very much akin to the substance of the undines. And then the sylphs or air spirits, they are the light bearers. They bear the light to the leaves and the fruit. And then it’s very much the shaping and forming of the plant and the fruit, the light, the information and the wisdom on the light.
Rick: I would just like to interject here that I suspect that you would say that all of this, this whole way of explaining things is completely compatible with scientific understanding of things such as photosynthesis and Newton’s theories of relativity and any other laws of nature that science has discovered. It’s just a different, completely different language or completely different way of explaining it, which actually takes into account certain things that science hasn’t even considered existing.
Susan: Exactly. Rudolf Steiner always said that the laboratory table needs to be treated as an altar.
Rick: You mean the periodic table of elements?
Susan: Yes.
Rick: Oh, the laboratory table that a scientist would work on. I see, right. S Yeah. Each element is a being.
Rick: Yes.
Susan: What we need to do is take this step farther, as I said, to go from talking about stuff to talking to stuff, by knowing that each, behind every element, there is a being and it is communicable.
Rick: Yeah, so gold, argon, oxygen, nitrogen, all these different elements, they have a intrinsic intelligence that is specific to them and that we can think of as a being.
Susan: Yep, and we can communicate. We just need to learn how to do it and to integrate that with the weights and the measures and the categories of science.
Rick: Call me gullible, but it makes sense to me.
Susan: And the thing is that, more and more scientists, Bruce Lipton and Gregg Braden, they’re all followed deep spiritual paths. They know this and they’re bringing it through. And my teachers, both of my teachers are highly skilled seers. Dennis Klocek of the Rudolf Steiner College in Sacramento, he’s an incredible seer and a true master, and also a great scientist. They’ve done the exercises, they’ve opened their capacities to see into these realms, and they’re brilliant scientists.
Rick: You might want to encourage them to go to the Science and Non-Duality Conference and speak there, or you yourself. You’re probably aware of that conference. It’s not far from Sacramento every October, and a whole bunch of scientists and spiritual people get together and intercommunicate.
Rick: This is the way out of the impasse, is to speak to nature and learn how to do it. This is the whole key. But it’s getting to know the components. So we have this components, which is intelligence, dreaming, emotion. We come to the sylphs, and that is like their substance is wishing and willing. So these have velocity. A wish has a velocity, a will has velocity. You have just stand up on the rocks and get the west wind coming off the Irish Sea and you can really feel what the will of the sylphs is. You can feel this component. And then you come to the salamanders or fire spirits, and their substance is generative warmth. Not dead warmth, this generative warmth that minimizes the cosmos into a seed. It’s taking that high ideal on the heat, in the fire, and into the seed. So generative warmth, wishing and willing, emotion, dreaming, and acute cleverness, intelligence, these are all substance, and this is what these beings, this is their substance, and this is what they’re made of.
Rick: When you yourself listen to science presentations or read science books and things, when you hear, let’s say, you might read a book, let’s say, about Einstein and all the things he discovered and all that, do you find yourself correlating or translating that knowledge, or maybe a better word would be supplementing that.
Susan: Supplementing, perfect.
Rick: Yeah, that knowledge with what you know. And I’m sure you wouldn’t find it conflicting or contradicting, it’s just like, okay, if you bring in this dimension as well, it becomes a much richer understanding.
Susan: Yeah, it’s literally, it’s completing the circle of life. It is going from the physical out into the spiritual and back again and being inclusive with it.
Rick: And it’s really so important because, as we’ve said, our main problem here in the world is that we have, we’re like guns in the hands of children or something. We’ve acquired all these powerful technologies, but without the deeper spiritual dimension which could render our technological know-how benign and we could still benefit from it, but without, creating so much harm and damage.
Susan: Yes, I look at the 5G receivers and I just think, well it could be pulsing in love.
Rick: Huh, well what do you make of that? Let’s take 5G as an example. It’s a big controversy right now. Some people feel it’s more threatening than climate change, I don’t know about that, but here in my town there’s a lot of fuss about, how to keep it out and what would happen if it got implemented.
Susan: Well, the elementals are being forced to do time in a form that is inimical to life.
Rick: So, in other words, 5G or any technology uses certain laws of nature or elementals in order to function, but it’s like they’ve been enslaved to do something harmful.
Susan: Exactly.
Rick: And they don’t like it.
Susan: Yeah, absolutely.
Rick: But somehow or other we can bend them to our will if we are…
Susan: That’s what, it feels like that. You need to detach them from the intention. That’s how, this is what I wish for and are asking for more and more information from the nature spirit. How do we detach the elementals that are enchanted into forms that are inimical to life, how do we detach them from the intentions that are impure?
Rick: Yeah, well…
Susan: When I get an answer I’ll let you know.
Rick: Yeah, please do. But, it seems to me that certain technologies are always going to be harmful. They’re never going to be benign, and elementals, whatever the involvement of the elementals, they are going to be inimical to life, to use a phrase you just used. So what happens? Do somehow the elementals withdraw their support and such technologies fail or become obsolete? Or what’s the resolution of this stuff?
Susan: We have to rise in consciousness enough that the intention can no longer survive. Because, obviously we live in a world of duality, and everything inimical that’s made, its opposite has to be made as well. But these solutions rely on us rising in consciousness to be able to access the solutions.
Rick: Right, so let’s take another example. Genetic engineering, and companies like Monsanto and so on, what they’ve been doing with it. So what you’re saying is we need to rise to a level of wisdom where we think, “Well, that’s not a good idea actually. Creating seeds, Terminator seeds that can’t regenerate so that you have to keep buying them from this company, why would we want to do that? So let’s get into organic agriculture, or permaculture, or whatever.” So you’re just saying, “If we wise up, then we just will drop these harmful technologies and use more positive alternatives.”
Susan: Yes, because we will access solutions and ideas the lighter and more conscious we become.
Rick: Yeah.
Susan: And again, it’s also asking the elementals themselves, “This is happening, what is the solution?” And it’s being open, just asking this question of nature, “What as a human being can I do?” Now I’ll just give an example of one of the strongest messages I had from, let’s say, the gnomes, the earth elementals, or the earth nature spirits. Most of the time when I actually see these beings, I don’t see them all the time and I don’t want to see them all the time. It’s the array of responsibilities that come to you when you are in these heightened states and you experience these beings is extraordinary. So most of the time it has been when I’ve been in a state of joy, gratitude, beauty. There’s only one time that I actually was catapulted into their realm when it was negative and that’s when I went on a walk and I was berating myself for doing something wrong. And I was catapulted into their world and I was shown this expression. We create this stench, we create the most almighty stench in these subtle realms and a clamor when we berate ourselves and are constantly in argument with ourselves. That is one of the most potent negative things that we can send out onto the ether. And I think you’ve interviewed that wonderful speaker, Matt Kahn. Oh yes. He’s doing incredible work with teaching people how to clear that out of the system. I remember the first interview I ever saw with him, he said, “If the whole of humanity put their hand on the heart and said, ‘I love you,’ and truly meant it, the disease and the ocean would be healed within seconds.” So it’s a beautiful idea, but I can see the super sensible science of that. Because again and again, the negative elementals and the diseases are saying, “We fill the space you leave behind.” So we have to create a space, a super sensible, etheric, spiritual space that has more and more joyful elementals in it. And then these diseases will recede and our consciousness will flower and we will get more and more gifts of enhanced comprehension on what to do to pull ourselves back from this precipice.
Rick: Yeah, I think that all the solutions obviously exist and there are solutions for every problem that the world faces, and it’s just a matter of, as you say, getting attuned to the deeper wisdom so that they can come forth. We might also say it’s a matter of deserving. There’s that saying, “Deserve then desire.” And if we can increase our deserving ability, then our receiving ability will be enhanced.
Susan: And that comes again to the self, we do deserve and by endless berating we deserve to treat ourselves better as well, to add to this deserving.
Rick: A question came in from Yvette in Grimsby, Ontario, Canada. She asks, “In reference to the ideas of Terence McKenna who asserted that plants offer hallucinatory experiences and teachings,” this is related to the ideas of plant medicine of the indigenous people, “do you see some plants, plant entities, as being more conducive to being our teachers and contacts, or are all plants equal in this capacity?” I guess she’s saying, is corn potentially as potent a teacher as ayahuasca and the entity that is associated with each plant?
Susan: It depends on the question. I think they are all equal. I’ll give you an example. I had a question with an old yew tree. And I asked a very, very simple question, took myself down into this yielding, my place in this sheath of soul quiet, and said to this tree, “Who am I? Who am I?” Now the yew tree shot, gave me this gift of comprehension of just how ancient a human being can be. You can pick up a tiny stone of, or a tiny piece of silica, and that silica can take you up into the cosmos and show how it used to be aeroform, and how it’s come in this aeroform and gifted itself to the earth. It’s a major part of the earth, silica. So I think all earth’s phenomena, all of nature can give us powerful insights depending on what we need to know. Regarding the, let’s say for instance, the psilocybin or the ayahuasca, I think especially the psilocybin is now proving to help a lot of people with schizophrenia.
Rick: And depression and alcoholism and all sorts of things.
Susan: Yeah, I mean it’s a great gift, this plant, as is cannabis, the cannabis plant as well. I’ve found that in the past I have taken the psilocybin as a young teenager, and I’ve experienced what it’s like to see the elementals when you take a substance like that. And I’ve also experienced it going through this route as well. With this route I find it’s much more precious because I’m in my own sovereignty and I’m developing these capacities. When you take the psilocybin, it’s in charge. The being is completely in charge. And you really need to be prepared, very well prepared, to take something that is going to be in charge of you. I’m not saying it’s wrong or it’s right or anything. But at the moment I feel working with the nature spirits through this more laborious or harder route is giving, for me personally, a greater reward.
Rick: Well the word prepared I think is key. Anybody can swallow a substance, regardless of how full of impurities they may be, how twisted or stressed or whatever their nervous system is. But if we go the route that you’re describing of working out these impurities and untangling these twists and purifying the system and clarifying our faculties, then these perceptions and abilities will dawn naturally when they’re ready to do so, when it’s appropriate.
Susan: And you are definitely in your own I am and your own sovereignty.
Rick: Building a proper foundation.
Susan: Yes, absolutely. But they’re great teacher plants. They’ve changed many people’s lives, the psilocybin for the good. But I do really, in answer to this question, I think every plant has a wealth of wisdom to give us.
Rick: Yeah. I took down six pages of notes to ask you. I haven’t referred to them too much. But is, go ahead.
Susan: Was it the thought and the fire spirits you wanted to know?
Rick: Oh, there’s all kinds of things. I just want to make sure that you feel that, by the time we wrap this up, you have had a chance to say all the things you want to say. And obviously we could go on for four hours or six hours and not run out of things to talk about. But I just want to make sure that we hit the most important points.
Susan: I’d like to just go through methods of connecting with them. Drawing a plant is a really good way of connecting. Sitting down with a piece of paper and a pen or a pencil and sitting down and drawing a tree. This beautiful merging can happen between the two of you. It’s like you’re stroking its aura when you’re drawing it. This is a great way. Always ask permission. May I communicate? And good manners and also chivalry, this word chivalry. And it’s, pointing, this whole business of pointing and naming and labeling. I’ve felt some of these trees really tense up when they’re pointed at. So we have to be careful of our manners around them.
Rick: You mean if you’re walking through the woods and you say, “That’s an oak tree. That’s a maple tree,” and you’re pointing and saying that, it insults them in some way?
Susan: It can do. If that’s all you’re going to do. It’s like ticking off a list.
Rick: It’s trivial. It’s superficial. You’re not recognizing the profundity of what it actually is. You’re just calling it a name.
Susan: Yes.
Rick: Yeah, okay.
Susan: So here’s some questions. Also this business of yielding. Is going into meditation, let’s say with a plant or a flower or a beautiful rock or a lake yielding? So Steiner has this beautiful phrase, “Yielding into beauty brings forth pious devotion to infinity.” So you yield yourself into this beautiful plant and this part–
Rick: Humility comes to mind.
Susan: Yes, great humility. And observation then becomes this chivalrous participation in its life as well.
Rick: Someone named Joan sent in a few questions. Maybe I’ll just ask all three and you can answer them all in one response. She asks, “Do elemental beings look like vibrating light to you or do they have clear outlines? Can you see emotions and thought forms floating around? What sounds from the spiritual world can you hear?”
Susan: The sounds, spending time at a waterfall and going down into this no time, the meditation when everything slows right down and the water almost stops. One is surrounded by tones. Yes, I definitely feel those and it’s through those tones that I get really good inspiration for my songs.
Rick: Speaking of your songs, we’re going to, maybe at the end of the interview what we do and we’ll conclude and then we’ll add one of your songs in for people to listen to before the final end of the recording. And then are there other questions about emotions or what they look like?
Susan: And what I actually see. It’s very translucent, shimmering light that’s winking in and out of physical sight. And when they do appear, one is just in this state of such humility and gratitude that these exquisite, dear and beautiful beings have deigned to show themselves to you. It’s very, very moving, incredibly moving. And when they show themselves in these shimmering lights, you get a huge sense of the enormous amount of work that they do for our sake. So yes, I see them in different colors, mainly in the violet hues.
Rick: I have a friend who sees subtle beings quite routinely and if he’s in a group of people sees them around each person doing whatever they do. And when I first discovered this, I was in an elevator with him at the San Francisco airport and I said, I’ve told this so many times but I’m telling it again, I said, “Hey, are there any in this elevator?” And he kind of just smiled and we got out of the elevator and he said, they just said to me, “Don’t point us out to people. If they’re meant to see us, they’ll see us.”
Susan: Yeah. I think what I’ll do to sum up is to say a beautiful prayer that came to me.
Rick: And also maybe even before you do the prayer, there’s a practical question here which is that you give workshops of some sort and someone named Maria wants to know how long it takes the average workshop participant to see with her spiritual faculties. So I guess we want to make people aware of what they can do to interact with you if there are workshops and this and that.
Susan: Yes. I give a set of workshops, levels or stages one to three. They’re called Communicating and Co-creating with the Elemental Kingdom. It depends on you and your inner life. What have you done with your own inner life? How much of your past have you processed? How much forgiving have you done? It’s the same formula. But I would say the nature spirits are doing everything they can to come and meet us at the moment. They’re doing everything they can to meet us. And when a group of people come together with the intent to communicate, the whole synergy of the group, most people who come to the workshops I run have an experience with the nature spirit or they find something in them has changed and they are able to see their dilemmas or their difficulties in a very different way from their interactions with the nature spirits.
Rick: Do you do them over there in person? Do people have to come to Wales or are they online webinars or what?
Susan: No, I would be very reluctant to work in this particular part of the spiritual path online. You have to come and we need to be on the earth. I do them in Britain, yes. I haven’t yet come to America to bring them. And I also teach ritual. Now, of course, there are many of the indigenous people they’ve brought through over eons of time, these old and ancient rituals. And these rituals, I think have contributed to the fact that we haven’t gone over the precipice. We’ve held this wisdom for the good of us all, the benefit of us all. And these rituals work. However, with the new elementals coming in, there is a place for new ritual. New rituals to be formed that are these gifts of enhanced comprehension. And it includes eurythmy, which is expressing through movement. This is a language the elementals can read. Is human being in ritual and movement. So I teach these forms that have come out of the Biodynamic Research Institute. And these rituals create fountains of well-being where the elementals can come and refresh themselves. These are new rituals. Some people are against new rituals, but we’re in new times. There’s new elementals. We need new ones as well as the old. I’m not saying either is better. We need as many as possible. And I want to recommend to people, so many of us think, what can we do? I’m going to recommend this book. It’s called Universe of the Human Body with Gaia Touch Body Exercises and it’s by Marko Pogacnik. Now I have some very simple exercises that everybody can do in my book.
Rick: Send me a link to that and I’ll put up a graphic of it.
Susan: He is a very advanced, very skilled seer and he’s been working with Gaia and the elementals for many, many years. And he’s been asking them, what can we do? And it is full of exercises and rituals you can do as a group or as a human being. And they really work. I can really feel the effect they have on nature when you do them. So I highly recommend those. Is there any other part of the question I haven’t answered?
Rick: Well, you were going to, no, that’s it. But then you were going to do a prayer of some sort, you said. And I interrupted you.
Susan: Okay. So this prayer came to me a while ago. And if anybody would like a copy of this prayer, come to my website and I can send it to you. It is a prayer and petition to the nature spirits and elementals. And we have to, just before I start, we have to remember that we are nature spirits too. We are spirits in nature. And we do need to declare this out in nature so that they know we are kin. “I remember, I am a spirit of nature too I respectfully seek admittance to your domain that I may, with grace and reverence, co-create with the beings of your world. In the name of love, I allow you to instruct me and I prepare a place of warm welcome in my heart and mind for your world wisdom to enter my soul. May the responsibility it brings ripen my understanding deepen my feeling and guide my willing that I may walk as a true human being through the kingdoms of nature in which we all share the life, the gift of life.”
Rick: Thank you. Well, this has been wonderful. I’ve really enjoyed the whole week of reading your book and now talking to you for a couple of hours. It’s been very enriching for me. We want to end with your song, “Glittering Cities.” Is there anything you want to say to introduce the song?
Susan: This song, “Glittering Cities,” came to me after a period of real calamity and challenge as often true and beautiful inspiration does. It’s called “Glittering Cities.” I had a profound dream where I was taken to these beautiful and exquisite etheric cities. And in the morning, I woke up and I said, “Where have I been?” I was reading a book by Rudolf Steiner called “The Reappearance of Christ in the Etheric.” I flipped open the page and this page was all about Shambhala. So I was touching the fringes of Shambhala.
Rick: Explain what Shambhala is for those who need that.
Susan: One can describe it as an ancient fairyland, an ancient land which has the pure springs and wells of ancient wisdom.
Rick: And this is something that actually exists in some etheric or subtle level?
Susan: Yes. It’s a place that you can reach. And I was taken there and these words just came, flowed out afterwards. And I’m also recording a new album. And these are songs from the land and the nature spirits. And if anybody would like to see or hear a preview of the songs, the song, it’s to go SusanRaven.com. I think I sent you one. It’s called “The Other Truth.”
Rick: You did. I’ll be sending the links to these things. I’m putting the links to these things on your page on Bat Gap. It’s interesting to consider, and I don’t mean to take us off track here, but it would seem to me, maybe you could comment on this, that if there are all these beings on subtle levels, they must have communities of some sort.
Susan: Absolutely.
Rick: And even dwellings of some sort that they dwell in. Maybe I’m anthropomorphizing them too much, but they get together for meetings or whatever, collaborate.
Susan: I think it’s schools of elementals.
Rick: Schools, yeah. Do they procreate? How do they come into existence?
Susan: The higher hierarchies, they’re able to create life itself, and this life is then distributed into legions of elemental kingdoms and nature spirits.
Rick: Do you think that’s how life originated on the planet? A lot of times you hear, “Well, there was this sort of sea and then lightning struck and it created somehow life sprang into being,” but do you think really it was the hierarchies or the higher intelligences that decided to introduce life at the appropriate time when the planet was habitable enough?
Susan: Yes.
Rick: Interesting. I bet you they were also given the vastness of the universe, and I bet you, and according to ancient traditions, there actually are planets which are like spiritual planets where the whole thing is a celestial realm, but it’s an entire planet inhabited by celestial beings, subtle beings, higher forms of much more highly evolved life than we have here on this planet.
Susan: Yes, Steiner speaks of the Venus beings and the Mars beings and the Mercury beings, these subtle beings and their relationship.
Rick: The Vedic tradition says that the Pitrs, or forefathers, live on the moon, and when I first heard that, I thought, “Well, the moon has air, how do they live there?” But again, we’re talking about the subtle realms.
Susan: We’re talking about the subtle realms.
Rick: Yeah.
Susan: We’re so conditioned with this small, compact seam of reality, and it is so vast. The minute you can break open this calcified demand to squash everything down into concepts and spreadsheets, once you can just soften that up and ask, they’re all waiting for an awake and aware and willing humanity to work with them. They have the answers, and when we work in collaboration, we can pull through this.
Rick: Yeah. I was in a brief conversation the other day with someone who was speculating as to whether life exists elsewhere in the universe and all that stuff, and I said, “Life is, everything is life.” I mean, if you really see into the essence of things, you realize that the very center of the sun, which we consider to be completely inhospitable to life, is full of life.
Susan: Absolutely.
Rick: It depends on how, you just have to understand what we mean by life. Sl It’s full of exalted beings that are fighting their way through chemtrails. I mean, it’s just, it’s the conceit of it to think that a chemtrail can scramble the wisdom of the sun. It’s trying.
Rick: Yeah. I don’t want to get into the whole chemtrails thing a little bit.
Susan: No.
Rick: But there are actually people who are proposing that we geo-engineer the climate by putting sulfur dioxide crystals into the atmosphere and iron crystals into the ocean to try to mitigate the temperature increase that we’ve caused on the planet and the lack of the ability of the ocean to absorb carbon dioxide. And these things would be such a gamble, they would really magnify the problem many-fold if we, and again, it’s this arrogance of human so-called intelligence over resorting to nature’s intelligence, this tendency to try to dominate nature rather than attune to it.
Susan: Engineer it, yes.
Rick: That conceives of such so-called solutions.
Susan: Nature, once we show our humility, begin connecting with her, she can mend herself faster than we believe it. If we show willing, when the 5G’s turned off, when they stop spraying the skies, Gaia and all her ecosystems of nature spirits and elementals will go into overdrive as long as we join with them.
Rick: Nature bats last. I forget who said that. Great, thank you Susan, it’s been really a pleasure. And now we will let everyone hear that song, so we’ll just segue to that song.