A book of this nature involves a great deal of research in many areas of spiritual experience. In particular I would like to thank Sheila Beber, Lita de Alberdi, Khadija, Zaneta B. Matkowska, Lily Cornford and Maria Phylactou.
Many people within the religious community have been extremely helpful in providing me with information. I am particularly grateful to Gregorios Archbishop of Thyateira and Great Britain, Revd Allen Morris, Dr Richard Mortimer, Rabbi Jonathan Magonet, Malcolm Thomas, Revd Brian Woodcock, W. Tomlinson, Richard J. B. Willis, Revd Geoffrey H. Roper, Revd David M. Chapman, Revd A. Ward Jones, Revd Angela Robinson, Revd T. R. Barker, Revd M. H. Burden, Gillian Crow, Sarah Cohen, Ani Lhamo, Andrew Fergusson, David Coffey and Jane Clements.
Three special people were involved on this journey, and to them I am most thankful. In my search for the truth I was assisted by Julia Stonehouse, who helped me to wade through the literature and with the research into the energy of essential oils. As the fragrant threads and aromatic clues came together, we both felt the impact of enquiring into the spiritual and vibrational realms of fragrance. Lily, Julia’s daughter, helped by always having the smile of innocence. And I’m grateful to my daughter, Emma, who offered her unique perspective when we experienced sweat lodges and sacred plant journeys together, and for her patience and love.
Also by Valerie Ann Worwood and available from Bantam Books
THE FRAGRANT PHARMACY
THE FRAGRANT MIND
If you have difficulty finding pure essential oils suitable for the purposes outlined in The Fragrant Heavens, the following professional aromatherapy suppliers can be recommended. Essential oils can be obtained from Earth Garden by mail order and by calling into the shop. Aromatherapy treatments are also available as well as details of the author’s workshops and seminars.
Earth Garden
Essential Oil and Herbal Dispensary
2, Fairview Parade, Mawney Road, Romford
RM7 7HH England
For information please enclose a stamped addressed envelope.
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The scientist’s religious feelings take the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, in comparison with it, the highest intelligence of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
AS EACH DAY dawns, pure sunlight sparkles in dew drops, shimmering on the grass, and on the leaves and flowers of the world. Walking through the woods, light filters through the leaves, creating a green haven of peace. The plant world is full of beautiful sights; there isn’t a tree or flower that doesn’t look good.
Although we might think so sometimes, providing aesthetic pleasure is not the most important thing about plants. By taking carbon dioxide and water from the air and, with light, converting it into carbohydrates, plants are the ultimate production machine, purifying the air and providing food and medicine for humans and animals alike. Plants are both the lungs and the larder of the earth. They are the conduit between the light of the heavens, and the dark of the earth, channelling energy from the sky into the crystalline structures of mother earth, to be reflected throughout the planet.
Plants are magnificent. The tallest tree in Redwood National Park, California, is the height of twenty-six London double-decker buses stacked on top of one another. These trees can live over 1,000 years, but even one only 800 years old has stood through the coronations and reigns of thirty-five kings and queens of England. The size and longevity of these masterpieces of creation is humbling, but to actually walk amongst the immense trees of an ancient forest is more humbling still.
The smallest seed is awesome in its capacity to create another plant, perfect in every detail, including its store of seeds for future generations. Plant seeds have been found in archaeological sites and germinated, thousands of years after they were dropped – testament to the monumental capacity of tiny seeds to hold life.
Most of us live not in a living, breathing jungle but in a concrete one. We can redress this balance somewhat, by bringing the essence of plants – essential oils – into our homes, but to understand these fully we need to reacquaint ourselves with their heritage, their source – plants in their natural habitat.
The trees are the teachers of the law.
Brooke Medicine Eagle
In the 1950s something happened in an ancient North American forest. The event was so poignant that it went down in folklore but, because of the ‘Chinese whispers’ effect over the years, there are now two versions. In one, the central character was a US Forest Service employee, and in the other he was a Ph.D. student conducting research for his thesis on the age of trees in a bristlecone pine forest.
The man walked deep into the forest for many days until he found a tree he thought might be the oldest. He planned to extract a sample using a core drill, to enable him to count its rings and date it, but the drill didn’t work. For some days he tried to fix it, without success. He also had a saw. He looked at the saw and he looked at the tree; he thought about the long walk back to get another core drill, and about the importance of his research. So he cut down the tree and dated it. It was 4,000 years, old enough to have lived through most of known human history. When Moses was a baby, this tree was already five hundred years old.
People have different relationships with nature. Some, like the man in this story, don’t treat it with the respect it deserves, making it a sacrifice to the human ego. Others claim that plants have intelligence, soul and the capacity to communicate, and would no more cut down an ancient tree than cut down a grandmother. Attitudes differ. Some people hear the forest sing, some don’t.
One hundred and forty million years ago most of the northern hemisphere was covered in redwood and other trees. Mankind made its appearance maybe 200,000 years ago and has, especially in the last 200 years, remorselessly cut the forest down. As early as 1905 American congressman William Kent and his wife Elizabeth recognized the potential ecological danger, and bought 295 acres of redwood forest in California, for $45,000, naming it ‘Muir Woods’ after the conservationist John Muir. He wrote to the Kents, ‘You have done me great honor, and I am proud of it.’ We owe thanks to them all because today Muir Woods is one of the few remaining enclaves where you can stand amongst these magnificent trees without hearing the sound of a distant saw indicating that clear-cut logging is heading your way.
It is a humbling experience to stand under ancient redwood trees. In Muir Woods I felt like a three-year-old in the presence of very large, old and wise men, in awe yet certain I would be completely protected. I did not want to leave their presence. Leaning on a red-wood that extended too high into the sky for me to see its top, I felt the energy flooding into me, a cosmic river of refreshment for the soul.
I heard the drone of a distant saw but knew in this protected forest island it must only be someone cutting dead wood and undergrowth, to clear the ground. Even so, it reminded me of other areas of the world where international logging consortiums are destroying huge areas of precious forest, and I felt an overwhelming emotion of sadness and guilt. I apologized to the trees on behalf of human beings. Strange as it may seem, the trees spoke to me, directly, without voice, from their heart to mine. They conveyed to me their resignation, deep sadness and incomprehension as to why we should want to do such things.
To someone living in a large city, a long way away from trees, having a conversation with a tree might seem an odd thing to do. But when you are actually out amongst them it seems the most natural thing in the world. I can fully understand why traditional Native Americans, when planning to cut down a tree to make a totem pole or boat, asked permission, and gave thanks directly to the tree making the sacrifice.
My love of trees started when I lived in Switzerland and used to take my dog for a walk in the forest late at night. When the moon and stars illuminated our path we walked on and on, for my pleasure rather than for the dog’s convenience, as the silence and majesty of the forest filled me with feelings of reassurance and gratitude. It was there, high in the mountains, that I first sensed the living connection between the night sky, the trees and the earth. Many years later, in ancient redwood and cedar forests in North America, this impression was reinforced. Standing under a thick canopy of stars illuminating the sky, I sensed that trees, particularly very tall, ancient trees, act in some way as planetary antennae. The very tops of the trees seem to attract starlight and other cosmic energies, ‘earthing’ that energy as it travels down through the trunk, into the roots and the earth. I also wonder if the trees don’t also transmit information back into the sky, sending vibrational energy, including human thought energy, out into the cosmos. I have no scientific proof, of course, but the thought remains: these giant trees are receivers and transmitters of energy, crucial even to cosmic balance and human spiritual growth.
Anyone who studies trees knows that there is still a great deal to learn about them, especially in terms of energy and communication. Even in terms of mechanics and chemistry, areas we think we know so much about, new discoveries are being made all the time. Scientists of the British Columbia Ministry of Forests only recently found that certain tree species can share resources by using an underground network of fungal threads. Seedlings of Douglas fir, paper birch and western red cedar were subjected to carbon dioxide containing different carbon isotopes. Two years later, 10 per cent of the carbon-type fed to the birch was found in the fir. Both species share mycorrhizal fungi, which created the network of threads between them, and the carbon travelled along this complex connection. Because this same fungi does not connect with cedar, its particular experimental carbon composition was unaffected. Meanwhile, in Kenya, scientists have discovered that as well as sucking water up from the deep earth a ‘substantial’ amount of water is transported downward by trees, to the dry sub-surface. These are pretty fundamental discoveries, which tell us a great deal about the working of trees we did not know before, in an area – the mechanical – we thought we already understood.
In British Columbia, Canada, the drive to harvest large-dimension lumber is in full swing, as logging companies race to bring down the last remaining trees before politicians accept what environmentalists have been telling them for years and bring the harvest to an end. Standing in these forests is scary. You can hear the drone of mechanical saws and you know you’re standing among doomed giants. These magnificent trees are silently performing crucial ecological tasks for the whole living planet; they have lived through so much of human history and yet are helpless to stop our saws cutting through them. This helplessness, coming from such powerful, massive living things, is infinitely sad.
I was intrigued to hear about a woman who claims to have heard the forest sing. Living deep in a forest in British Columbia, where the loggers cut 1,000-year-old trees, Gladys McIntyre earns a living planting seedling trees. In June 1990, in a part of the cedarwood forest called Howser Creek, Gladys found herself thinking about the ‘immense verticality’ of the trees when ‘a profound vertical alignment took place in me in response; and suddenly I felt about twelve feet tall. I wondered for a moment if this was soulic consciousness, then I was struck in my solar plexus by an impact of sound. It grew to an upwelling, crescendoing symphony of sound, in range and tone unlike anything I had ever heard before! Emanating from the forested hillsides across the valley, it was unquestionably a great hymn of adoration, of joy in Creation and praise to the Creator! Words cannot possibly express the magnitude of this joyous sound, nor my absolute awe at witnessing it.’
But from being a song in praise of the Creator, the song abruptly changed from ‘overwhelming joy to abject sorrow’. Gladys writes: ‘My cognitive mental faculty seemed to be translating information received by my soul from that incredible presence at worship over there.’ It said, ‘O noble and worthy, exploiters and conquerors, have mercy, have mercy, do not end our singing which allows the conditions necessary to all life on the planet as you know it.’
Reports as powerful as this can easily be dismissed as the workings of an overactive imagination, so I went to visit Gladys, to try to get closer to the truth. I found her living with her husband Vince, growing organic vegetables that are exquisitely formed, massive, and with a delicious, vibrant taste. Those vegetables positively vibrated and shone in pure, verdant, colourful perfection, well-loved and content. Gladys is a person clearly in touch with the laws of nature, and as sane as you or I.
I came away thinking that if the forests do communicate, Gladys is the right person to hear it. But she is not the only one. In another ancient forest a young woman and her boyfriend went to sit on a splendid mountain ridge to admire the forest view. But instead of feeling glad to be in the splendour the girl became overcome with a sense of panic and fear coming from the forest. Sick with anguish, she had to return home. Days passed, but the sadness wouldn’t go. The girl felt driven to return to that part of the forest, to try to understand why she had been so affected. When she arrived she was horrified and stunned to discover the whole area had been clear-cut to the ground.
Although to ‘civilized’ people communicating with trees may sound bizarre, it is in fact something that’s been going on for a very long time. Indeed, trees have long been central to spiritual culture. In ancient Egypt the ‘world tree’ was associated with a ‘sycamore’, possibly the sycamore fig that gave shade to the goddess worshippers in their ‘groves’. Kabbalah, the mystical aspect of Judaism, has its ‘tree of life’ and has traditionally been taught to men over forty while they sat under trees. In the last book of the New Testament, Revelations 22:2, we hear that the tree of life is in ‘the midst of the street’ in Heaven. Buddha received enlightenment while sitting under a tree. The ancient Assyrians had many tree cults, with the tree of life sometimes depicted as a cedar, fir, date or pomegranate. The Chinese associated the tree of life with the peach, and in later times the cassia, while in Norse mythology it was the ash. A Polynesian legend says ‘out of this magic breadfruit tree a great goddess was made’. The sacredness of trees is universal, and this may not simply be because they routinely offer up their bounty, but because they have a spirit we can feel.
When we suddenly remember to water our plants, is it because the plants sent us a message across the room – ‘hey, don’t forget about us’? Why shouldn’t they talk to us, we talk to them. People in their high-rise apartment blocks, or in their gardens, say to their plants, ‘You look lovely today,’ or, ‘What’s up? You’re looking a bit off-colour’, and then fuss around them, administering love and fertilizer – organic, of course. Chatting to plants is a regular occurrence, even for royalty, and some plant aficionados play them music, taking care to choose something they like.
Edward Bach, famous for his Flower Remedies, attributed certain medicinal qualities to plants because the plants themselves told him what they were. An entire Western healing system is thus based on plant communication, and has inspired further plant-human exploration. Meanwhile, in many cultures it is considered quite wrong to become a healer without first having had dreams or visions relating to the plants to be used. In other words, the spiritual realm is seen as the source of accurate information. Cultures that are very much in touch with the earth and all that grows in it believe unreservedly that plants have a spirit. Obviously a plant is unable to speak, so to communicate with it we have to get into the spiritual ‘space’ we share with it. If you want to know what a plant can do, go to the source and ask it. To indigenous peoples, that’s the logical thing to do. There are variations on this cultural theme; with some people believing the spirit of the individual plant conveys the information; or that each species of plant has a kind of ‘overall’ spirit which communicates; or that there are a variety of nature spirits; or that it is the voice of the Creator who speaks. These are all variations on a theme: you can speak to, or through, a plant.
The Yaqui people of northwestern Mexico have an oral tradition going back 4,000 years, to 2000 BC. Around AD 1500, because of the oppressive actions of the Spanish conquistadors, the Yaqui were forced to make their sacred traditions secret. Seven lineages were chosen to preserve them, through sacred oral and family traditions. Through many subsequent generations the sacred way of the Yaqui was kept alive, underground, as the bullets flew overhead. Now that we are older and wiser, hopefully, the knowledge can re-emerge. Indeed, it is time for us to know it.
Cachora Guitemea is a man who carries this knowledge, passed to him by his father and mother. A Yaqui traditional spiritual healer, Cachora is a highly respected Native American elder. It was, then, a great privilege for me to be privately invited to spend a few days in the Mexican desert with Cachora to learn about sacred plant medicine. We were accompanied by both our daughters and the mutual friend who introduced us. Although Cachora is over eighty and has white hair, you would never guess his age – either from his appearance or from his extraordinary energy. His face is lit up with a joy that defies time. And, despite his boyish love of jokes, you never forget that you are in the presence of great wisdom and positive intent.
Cachora teaches that we must respect plants. Permission must be sought from the plant before picking it, and if the plant is required for ceremonial purposes sacred chants and mantras are said aloud, in honour of the plant or tree. All plants have souls and spirits that guard and protect the species. It is not that every individual plant has its own, but that there is a species-spirit, which has a place within plant hierarchy, depending on the sacredness of the purpose the plant is put to.
Many plants also have animal spirits attached to them, says Cachora. The connection may be derived from the fact that an animal eats from the plant and thus distributes the seeds; or because the animal eats smaller animal pests upon the plants; or because the animal uses the plants as a food and medicine.
Cachora is quite plain about the underlying principle of healing herbs. He says that healing takes place when a person connects into the plant spirit, becoming the plant, and understanding its personality. Using spirit as the method of transference, the plant’s energy or healing properties are transmitted to the person. Once the spirit of a particular species has come to be known, and its use and purposes memorized, its strengths and weaknesses understood, then in times of ill-health, as body, mind and spirit are one, by calling on the spirit and taking into one’s mind the spiritual essence of the plant, healing can take place.
Plant life must be respected and spoken to, says Cachora, for it is part of the universe, part of ourselves, our heritage. I understand this to mean that everyone evolved through the plant, and through the plant cycle of crystalline life – we are all part of the same consciousness pool. Getting to know plants involves looking at them closely, communicating with them with honesty and integrity, and with gentleness. Human thought is the greatest obstacle to plant communication. You have to get beyond thought, into empathy and feeling, through focus and concentration.
On this amazing journey I encountered a magnificent six-feet-high white sage bush, a grandfather of the species which, having seeded many generations of plants, was an elder in its own right. So vibrant was it that the leaves seemed to send out showers of sparks, but I was rather taken aback when the large bush bowed its body to greet us. As there was not a hint of a breeze I turned to my friend beside me to verify what had happened. I could tell from her wide-open eyes that she could! Then the sage spoke to me, in a silent block of communication, clear and precise.
There are many indigenous peoples in the world who feel the spirit in nature, and work with it. Certain themes emerge. One such idea is that some plants should not be picked because they are too sacred – too old and valuable to their ‘tribe’. Just like us, plants need their wise elders. They say you should ask a plant if it is OK to pick it. A plant may say no, it may agree – and it is respectful to explain who the plant is for, and what is wrong with them. The plant will then know it is not being needlessly sacrificed. Another is the general idea that the spirit of the plant is a communal one, shared by the species as a whole, so that when you communicate with a plant you communicate with its species-spirit. When I spoke to the large sage bush I spoke to the spirit of the species, but through the wise old bush who happened to hold a great deal of communal species wisdom and could express more information more clearly.
When you think about it, this is not dissimilar to the way horticulturists and gardeners view the plants in their care. Older plants possess an authority that seedlings do not. Also, each species has its own nature, and individuals within the species have their particular character. We speak of animals in much the same way, describing a breed of dog as being generally ‘good with children’, but individuals within the species may not be good, with children in general, or with a particular child.
Many Western gardeners ‘tune in’ to their plants in essentially the same way as do indigenous peoples. Looking at a bed of roses, next to a bed of hollyhocks, we might perceive each species to have a different emotional tone. Each species looks different, grows differently, with different kinetic qualities and character – in much the same way as people have different characters. The more species we grow, and the longer we work with them, so our ‘instinct’ about plants develops (as instinct develops over time when using essential oils).
The difference between our approach and that of indigenous peoples is the way we learn about plants. We spend time reading gardening books, while they sit with a plant for hours, days even, getting to know it. They’ll respectfully bring it little presents, in gratitude for what it offers and to let the plant know they care. They go to plants as a pupil goes to a wise person, to learn. Western horticulturists, on the other hand, often feel that they are the holders of information, and that it is their job to control the plant, which they see as their property.
We know, of course, from ‘companion gardening’ that plants can influence each other in terms of preventing pests and disease. This is often accomplished through scent, as aroma molecules from one plant waft over another, exerting their beneficial influence. Stephen Harrod Buhner relates an interesting anecdote on this subject in Sacred Plant Medicine. He was sitting with a lichen called usnea, which has powerful antibiotic qualities, when suddenly the usually subtle ‘feeling tone’ of the usnea increased in intensity, Buhner felt his ‘personal boundaries’ dissolving, and the plant appeared as a youngish man. The plant-man told him that usnea’s primary role is to keep the earth’s lung system healthy, by being an antibiotic for the trees on which it grows, adding that as a by-product of this intended role, usnea can also be used to treat individual human lung infections. Imagine how much more we could learn about plant interaction, and how many new medicines we could discover, if more of us could hear what plants have to say.
Plants are sensitive, sentient beings. There has been a great deal of research in this area, starting in 1966 with the work of Cleve Backster, then a New York expert in the field of lie-detection working for law-enforcement agencies. One classic Backster experiment involved plant murder. He put two plants next to each other in a room, along with six of his students, who each picked a piece of paper from a hat; one of the pieces of paper carried instructions for the murder. The people with the five ‘blank’ papers left the room with Backster. In the room the ‘murderer’ ripped one of the plants to shreds. Backster then returned, attached the remaining plant to a polygraph machine, and called the students into the room, one by one. There was no response on the machine to the five innocent students, but when the murderer entered the pen flew across the paper as the silent ‘witness’ recognized the guilty party.
The implications of Backster’s work on plants are staggering enough, but he has also done experiments with other life forms, including eggs, shrimps and human mouth cells – the implications of which are equally amazing. Backster had to conclude that all nature is essentially unified, not separate.
The planet earth hums. It emits a low-frequency radio signal, the earth’s ‘vibration’, which is known as the Shumann resonance, and it can be detected coming off trees. Researchers in America were curious to know whether this vibration could be altered with human thought and feeling, and connected an oak tree to a machine described as being not unlike those used to measure brainwaves in humans. A group of people circled the tree and, saying a traditional Native American prayer, sent it love. The charts reportedly went off the scale. Although the measurements couldn’t indicate whether the tree was happy to receive this love, or whether it wanted everyone to go away, clearly some form of interaction was taking place.
Plants respond to human thought, and to the human energy field. You can prove it for yourself in the following thought experiment devised by Marcel Vogel. Pick three leaves from the same tree or plant and place them by the side of your bed. (Vogel put them on glass, presumably so that he could view the underside without touching the leaves, but a sheet of paper will do.) Each morning when you wake, concentrate on just two of the leaves, sending them love and pleading with them to live. Imagine them green and healthy-looking. Ignore the third leaf. Don’t touch any of them. After seven days the two chosen leaves should still look fresh, while the ignored leaf should be shrivelled. Do the experiment when you wake because that’s when you’re most physically and mentally relaxed. It’s absolutely vital to approach this with a pure heart, because plants know what you think. Don’t try to fool them because you’ll only be fooling yourself. Expect the experiment to work.
Another classic experiment was originally devised by mathematician and healer Daphne Beall. Fill a container with water and energize the water by putting both hands around the container, without touching it. Relax, and visualize white-light energy coming out of your hands into the container. Imagine the water becoming bright white; do this for ten minutes. Then put an organic, non-genetically manipulated tomato in the water. Fill a second container with water, and put another similar tomato in that container without giving it any thought. Leave both containers overnight and in the morning take the tomatoes out of the water and place them somewhere where they can sit for two weeks without being moved. Make sure you have a way of remembering which is which. The tomato placed so briefly in the energized water will prove to have a much greater lifespan.
An energy connects us to plants. In some people the energy is very obvious, when they transform a neglected piece of earth, with fairy dust, into a resplendent garden. We call this ‘having a green thumb’. Almost everybody, natural gardeners or not, has empathy for the glory of nature.
Human–plant interaction involves the study of light, physics, astrophysics, metaphysics, botany, biology, harmonics, electromagnetics, hydrology, mineralogy, and a dozen other things including neurology, philosophy, spirituality, theology and psychology, to name but a few. Perhaps that is why it is so little researched – we don’t know whose academic territory it is! The answer may be of course that it is everyone’s territory, because there is only one territory, in that we are all part of the connecting whole.
People have always been spiritual, at least we can say so from looking at palaeolithic cave art and the many images and objects people have created since that time, say 30,000 years ago. Indeed, spirituality has been the drive of much, if not most, culture and art throughout time – think of the temples, sculpture and paintings. People used to believe so sincerely in an afterlife that they made sure their relatives were buried with goods they would need there, including sometimes a fortune in gold jewellery. Today we may question the existence of an afterlife, and any jewellery goes in the will. Sometimes, we don’t seem very spiritual at all. Yet, even we feel it strongly – there must be something else . . .
Where does this spirituality come from? Put another way – what has made people think there is a life after death, and an intelligence that embraces the universe? Some sceptics would say that spirituality is just an ongoing tradition of superstition – that people don’t have spiritual experiences, they just think they do. These people can point to certain evidence. For example, the crystals in granite, being radioactive, cause brain stimulation including hallucinations, which may explain why it was used to build the neolithic dolmens (shelters) and to cover the walls of important rooms, like the King’s Chamber in Cheops pyramid in Egypt. People sat in these places and ‘tripped out’ – more or less like an acid trip (LSD). They thought they were having spiritual experiences, but may have been playing with their own minds.
The same sceptical attitude could be taken towards the spiritual use of sound, dance and plants. Sound, in the form of chanting, singing, or the repetition of mantras, sets up a vibration which changes brain functioning and could cause a ‘spaced out’ feeling. Dance can do the same thing. Certain plants are psychoactive – they have an effect on the mind or psyche – and have been used by shamans for millennia, from South America to Siberia, to facilitate a state of trance, and another perception of reality. Some say these activities gave a false impression of ‘spirituality’, and fear and superstition did the rest.
This is a very one-sided point of view, for there are many other types of spiritual experience which involve neither stones, sound, dance nor plants. The basic spiritual experience is love, with some people falling in love after a very long time of knowing each other, or instantly – seeing a stranger across a crowded room. When that loved-one is far away, they can be thought about, scanned for on the distant horizon, located, and their spirit bought into the heart. We seem connected in a way that defies the laws of place. Love is spiritual. Also, nature is spiritual, with many people saying their strongest feeling of spirituality is when out amongst nature, on a mountain top perhaps, admiring the view, overcome with a strong sense of there being a beneficent intelligence watching over us all. Many people have spontaneous spiritual experiences, when they suddenly ‘get it’, and become devout. Others have near-death experiences, see the other side, and come back certain of an afterlife. People hear voices – including some of the central characters in the Old Testament – when they’re just walking along, not expecting revelation. And people have been bumping into angels for millennia.
It’s because the spiritual realm is there that we have this thing called ‘spirituality’. When people use stones, sound, dance and plants, they are seeking to make the connection with something they already know is there. These things are not the reason for spirituality, but a means to spirituality. People want to reconnect, and they feel they need help.
When Aaron burnt incense every morning and evening, it was not to create two little pockets of ‘spiritual experience’ within the day. Aaron felt the spirit all day long. He burned incense to concentrate his mind on the subject . . . and because God had told him to. Likewise, Buddhists don’t burn incense to receive the enlightenment of Buddha’s words, they already know them, and believe them to be the right path to follow in life: incense is burnt to experience the enlightenment directly, to connect with something they know is there.
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