Earth, Heaven or Hell?
august 2008
In Western society, planet Earth plays an ambivalent role in our hearts and minds. Historically this attitude can be traced back to Greek philosophers, who came to the perception, that there was a perfect and thus timeless transcendent world of the Gods and an imperfect, dynamic material domain. Imperfect was seen as not good, thus bad and we can understand that this can also be perceived as “evil”. In the next paragraph more about about this line of thought in “The Earthly Hell”. Pre-Christian cultures and many other cultures like those of native Americans, Mother Earth or Mother Nature could grow to a divine status. This is approached in the paragraph “The Heavenly Earth”. There is a conclusion or conjecture about the function of the planet in “The Beehive” and I end with “A personal note”.
The Earthly Hell
The ancient Greek philosophers didn’t considered the Earth as Evil. The Earth was an Emanation of the divine realms, so intrinsically it was considered ‘good’, because it came out of something ‘good’. Under the influence of Gnosticism, the name given to the believe systems of early Judaic-Christian groups in and around Alexandria, the perception arose that Earth was an Evil place. In the Sethian myth (Nag Hammadi codex, The secret book of John) it was revealed that the Aeon Sophia created the demiurg Jaldabaoth without consent of the father (The First One). This Jaldabaoth created the Earth and the human being after he saw an image of God reflected in the waters. Because the human represented God, but not blessed by the light of God, God sent his light into the human, so that these dark worlds created by the demiurg would know of God. Jaldabaoth was a jealous God and put these first two humans in the prison of Paradise. After which the pre-existent Christ in the disguise of a snake ‘seduced’ these humans to eat from the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge. That helped for the human beings were cast out of (or liberated from) Paradise (note 1).
Also Buddhists and in a lesser degree the Hinduists have a negative view on the Earth and earthly existence. Life means suffering and the first goal of life is to escape from the cycles of reincarnation. For the Buddhist this meant to extinguish the flame of desire, for a Hindu who followed the path of the fakir, to not participate in the normal earthly ways. Thus ascetism, chastity or other extreme ways of behaviour were traditional ways to escape Earth. Earth is an illusion that exists because of ignorance and desire.
The Heavenly Earth
The Earth as a divine being has reappeared in Christianity as the figure of the mother of Jesus Christ, Mary.
Leo Armin called the Earth a Blue Emerald entity (note 2). Blue Emerald, or Aquamarine is the 10th station of a 16 fold template of layers of consciousnesses.
It puts her amongst the divine beings. An appreciation of the Earth would be possible if we go into the nature of Aquamarine.
Aquamarine forms with Green Emerald and Sapphire a trinity. Keywords that belong to these three stations respectively are wisdom, compassion and righteousness. Righteousness or justice and compassion can be seen as two sides of the coin called wisdom. Righteousness or justice can be hard and must be hard at times, but righteousness calls for discrimination, not to exploit or to make less, but to be able to see what is and give recognition to that. The opposite of ‘to discriminate’ is to ‘equalise’ is making every individual thing unrecognisable, because there is no difference being made. Recognition is one of the most fundamental needs of humanity (note 3). For the identity of a person can only grow against the identities of other persons. Recognition will lead however to compassion. For recognition is in essence to ‘see’ what or who someone is unto his higher self. Compassion is understanding the situation of another person against the Higher Self of that person. Righteousness can be found in earthly expressions as ‘what you sow, you will reap'. In this saying recognition can be seen at work, one is given back or reflected what one is. This is one of the explanations of card number 3 of the Tarot, the Empress, of the Tarot, symbolising the features of planet Earth. In this giving back what one is, there is no room for false sentiments or romantics. But the criteria lodged in the station of the divine Sapphire could well be different than common human moral. It asks for wisdom to deal with righteousness and compassion and to usher everyone to his/hers place in the divine realms. This makes the Earth as an entity, a divine one.
The Beehive
The conclusion about the role of the planet Earth can now be understood as a heavenly beehive (note 4). When a human is born, a spirit has come on Earth that than will develop a second spirit as a result of the engagements here on Earth. A human is thus twice born (note 5). Once as a carnal human being and secondly as an eternal second Self Spirit to exist somewhere in the universe. There is therefore a good reason that Earth is depicted as a mother. She bears life to all the corners of the universe. Resistance, longing, desire, a little hardship and a bit of painful experience now and than are necessary ingredience to grow that Second Self.
Many people have the feeling of not belonging to this Earth. It seems as if the spirit is in exile. Buddhism and esoteric teachers will teach you about the possible destiny of a human away from human life on this planet. Implicitly a view can arise that the Earth is a place of evil, injustice and hardship. And for a lot of people and in many circumstances this is the case. However we could start to appreciate that the less fortunate sides of life are also a part of life in this universe and "dark" mostly means simply things not understood. Therefore I painted Mary ass rooted in dark matter in which the seven lower gemstations are shining. It takes probably just growing up to value the difficulties of life.