“Each person possesses within himself [or herself] the powers and latent faculties necessary to become aware of a many-dimensioned universe.”

— Paracelsus

I so agree with this!

And much more that I found in the wonderful book I wrote about at this link on my personal website:  http://jeaneisenhower.com/writereditor/paracelsus-rudolph-steiner-and-aliens/

In case you don’t want to visit that site, I’ll paste it all here as well:

“Paracelsus, Rudolph Steiner and Aliens”

an essay by Jean Eisenhower
inspired by the Secret Life of Nature by Peter Tompkins

Rebel Western scientists of antiquity have left important work behind which sheds light on the UFO/ET subject.  The work of Paracelsus and Rudolph Steiner was included in a fascinating book published in 1997 by best-selling author Peter Tompkins, titled The Secret Life of Nature: Living in Harmony with the Hidden World of Nature Spirits from Fairies to Quarks.

Paracelsus was born in the Swiss canton of Schwyz in 1490, where he was given the impressive and maybe, to those with Western sensibilities, humorous birth name Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim.  A contemporary of Martin Luther, he became an alchemist, which means he was born into a family with connections to power, as alchemy was taught only within a secret society, pledged to keep those secrets from common folk.  Nevertheless, Paracelsus broke from those strictures.

According to Tompkins, Paracelsus may have been a greater reformer than Martin Luther, as he tackled not only religion but medicine and physics as well.  In his society, academic writing was done exclusively in Latin, for one’s fellow academicians to approve or disapprove, with no involvement of common people.  Paracelsus flaunted this tradition and wrote a treatise on nature spirits in the common German vernacular used by his local community, making his wisdom available to all. For centuries afterward, his work was used as a primary source for innumerable writings by others.

Paracelsus gathered his data by going straight to his source, Nature, in which he steeped himself deeply.  He also asked herbalists, faith healers, gypsies, hermits, witches and anyone else who claimed knowledge of the healing arts – aside from doctors – what they knew.  He discovered that their lore had a form and structure which matched his own experiences of intelligent, immaterial beings working within nature.

The rebel alchemist defined these spiritual intelligences as “elementals,” which he explained perform important tasks, that we in the first world today call “forces of nature.”  These elementals are also identical with the beings that mystics and primitive societies call spirits of mountain, sea, storm, etc.

Paracelsus went so far as to publicly burn the books of Galen – ! – whose writings had held the course of medicine for over twelve-hundred years in a highly rational track limited to certain precepts, along with the books of Avicenna, the Persian physician whose textbook was a standard in Europe for the previous couple hundred years.

Paracelsus further scandalized his fellow doctors and academicians by telling them that “each person possesses within himself the powers and latent faculties necessary to become aware of a many-dimensioned universe.”

This radical idea, that humans have the potential to perceive a multi-dimensional universe, we still wrestle with today, at least in “first world” cultures.   Many would also argue that authorities in this very culture are working hard to keep this awareness from us.
Four hundred years after Paracelsus, in the same Swiss canton of Schwyz, Rudolph Steiner expanded on Paracelsus’ work with lectures on the role of “nature intelligences” in the growth and development of the material world.

Steiner was born in 1847, in Croatia, in a village so remote that nature was a powerful force for him as a child.  He became highly clairvoyant in his young years, perceiving a world far beyond that which his parents could conceive.  To master both worlds and communicate about the one to the other, he trained himself thoroughly at the Technical University of Vienna in physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry, optics, botany, and anatomy and gained a doctoral degree in philosophy.  His doctoral thesis was that clairvoyance – the practice of seeing into other realms – would have to be integrated into the scientific approach if “the half-truths of materialism were not to drag the world into a materialist and mechanistic disaster.”
Steiner wrote prolifically about the spiritual realms, defining “spiritual science,” which includes everything in creation, including humans and their psychic powers, all in a “symphony of life” created and maintained by natural intelligences who work according to patterns passed down by higher intelligent beings, everything ultimately a manifestation of the Source of Creation.

The upshot for humans, according to Steiner, is that if we ignore the nature beings, we cut ourselves off from understanding anything real, including our own health and how to heal.  Alternatively, understanding our relationship to the “invisible” realms and participating in them will assure our individual and collective survival.

Intelligent information moves through everything, according to Steiner, including things Western science defines as “not alive,” such as rocks, rivers and sky.  Communication from extra-terrestrial worlds, he said, is conveyed from the cosmos down to certain nature beings, whom he called sylphs, and by them into the leaves and petals of plants, through their trunks and roots, and thereby to beings who live underground, whom he called gnomes, who traverse that realm of earth and mineral as freely as we move through our atmosphere.

Any element of nature can convey this extra-terrestrial wisdom to humans, including gnomes, though those beings, in particular, don’t have much respect for us and often laugh at humans, stuck as we are in our rational concepts which frame and limit what we can perceive.

As our culture has been trained for millennia to perceive only the materialistic world authorized by Science and Academia and to deny all precepts of what’s dismissed as “animism,” we struggle today with concepts of alien beings and vehicles that don’t fit into the paradigms of what we’ve been taught.

According to Steiner, mankind’s “fall” came about with this denial of our ability to communicate with nature intelligences.  This denial cut off communication to extra-terrestrial and other higher intelligences of Creation.  Our destiny, however, is to expand our minds to include contact with these beings, including those nearest us in nature, and also beyond to extra-terrestrial and the intelligences above them, until we eventually accept responsibility for managing and designing material life on this Earth.

Of course, many in the halls of Science and Academia would say that this is exactly what they are about; and they would deny any role in cutting us off from basic wisdom.  However, it was precisely their materialistic “half truths” that Paracelsus warned would lead us to disaster.

As someone who has experienced the profoundly destructive outer edges of Science (as a CIA mind control subject as a child) and who has also experienced the healing powers of Nature in a “shamanic initiation” (which included alien contact, typical of shamanic initiations), I can’t help but ask the hottest contemporary, if simplistic, questions:  What about the stuff we call evil?  Are some of the spiritual hierarchies not working for our best interests?  Are some of the aliens “good guys” and others “bad guys” – maybe angels and demons?

My inclination for the last few years has been to assume that alien beings are trans-dimensional (spiritual) beings, some of them working in our best interests, and some of them seeming to work against us.  Further, I’ve contended, it’s our very important work to learn to discern which is which – which I have famously failed to do at times.  So I was keenly interested to see where Rudolph Steiner came down on the question of evil.

Paracelsus denied the existence of demons.  Similarly, Steiner refused to categorize things we call evil as evil.  Rather, he said, certain hierarchies of intelligence above us, called angels in the modern Western world, gods in the ancient, devas in the Hindu, and other names in every culture, chose to deviate from the program of perfection by which they’d always been patterned – and limited – and allowed themselves free will, thereby allowing humans this possibility too.  It opened up profound transformative possibilities for Creation – and with it risk.

We’ve seen this risk played out nearly to completion in our world today, with nuclear bombs, multiple wars, ongoing slavery, global child sex industries, global economic thievery, mind control, and more.  And it is into this world, coinciding quite precisely with the advent of atomic bombs and institutionalized mind control, that these apparently trans-dimensional vehicles and beings have suddenly come in great numbers into human awareness.

The question in my mind, in part prompted by other writers on this subject, has lately been:  Are these beings responding to the horrors we’ve unleashed, hoping to mitigate or correct them, or are they orchestrating them?  Writers on the subject of alien contact today come down on both sides of this question.

The shamans from every continent who came to visit Harvard psychiatrist John Mack, when he was working with alien contactees, answered this question of evil regarding the nature of ET beings in a less polarized fashion.  The African shaman Credo Mutwa said the mantindane (African term for what we call the “gray aliens”) were seen as unwelcome but necessary “troublemakers,” often required to wake up an individual in a shamanic initiation.  The shamans prompted Mack to interpret the entire alien phenomenon as a “wake-up call to humanity” or, more cynically, a “consciousness program for the spiritually impaired.

Many primitive cultures have also softened the concept of evil, focusing instead on lessons taught through “trickery” – depicted by characters throughout time, from the Celtic Loki, Native American Heyoka, and Greek Cupid to the beings I’ve experienced, who gave me powerful “spiritual” signs, leading me to go exactly where I didn’t want to go and shouldn’t have gone – all apparently lessons to teach me discernment.  So I’ve also begun to drop my knee-jerk reaction to think of them as evil, in favor of simply recognizing that they taught me invaluable lessons by trickery.

According to Dionysus, student of Plato, spiritual beings fill the entirety of space, in “realm upon realm,” and some followers assert that there is nothing in existence but these intelligences, which usually are invisible but sometimes take forms that we can see.  A curandero acquaintance of mine put it this way:  We live in an ocean of spirit.  A student of Dionysus, as well as a follower of Chris, was Paul of Tarsus, whose writings survive in the New Testament, where he is quoted as asserting that we must learn to “discern the spirits.”

Today, as we watch the world unfold in dramas almost beyond belief, strange shapes appear in the sky, change colors and morph into different forms.  People from every walk of life, from Peruvian tribespeople to American Presidents, pilots and police officers report things we’ve come to call UFOs and alien beings, and we forget that they’ve been reported, along with healings and other favors, throughout history in every culture.

Hippocrates induced people for thousands of years to call these phenomena and the healings and other favors that often attended them “mythology” and “superstition,” effectively putting a lid on any public discourse; but the lid has been jumping now for decades, and it won’t stay down.  Gardeners in Findhorn have been talking to devas, churches spring up around teachings of Swedenborg and Blavatsky, books by Blake and Goethe enjoy a renaissance, and Christians reconsider Jesus’ response to his followers that we would “do all these things [healing miracles] and more.”

While many of us have freed ourselves from mainstream constrictions, we still wonder:  Are some of the aliens in league with structures of power, such as our governments?  Undoubtedly.  Are others trying to wake us out of our educated and entertained entrancement?  I’m sure of this also.  And I also believe the evidence is strong that “aliens” exist in great diversity, and their story is far more nuanced than a simple good-versus-evil drama.

Our personal and collective work, it seems, is to learn to discern these elements of the drama, these elemental beings, if you will, and work with them.  According to Paracelsus and Steiner, the many mystics they consulted, and those who’ve followed them through the centuries, the beings we perceive can take any form they want, usually choosing a pattern pre-existing in the mind of the person who perceives them.  So, whether they be tricksters and liars or pure helpers, they spring in form from our own minds, but are by purpose and intention leading us from higher dimensions, following the patterns of Creation, into our next phase of evolution, whatever it will be.

To help us create a better world from the mess that we find around us, the words of Paracelsus and Steiner – as well as Paul and Christ – have application to this issue:  immaterial beings are everywhere and can take form at will (though not everyone sees them), and we are charged with learning to discern them and work with them to create a better future.

As the natural world is destroyed by misguided “half-truths of materialism,” we have less communion with nature and less potential access to those intelligences, so beings who want to help us must get our attention in new and novel ways.  Perhaps this explains the increasing numbers of UFOs in the skies today and alien beings in our bedrooms.

Paracelsus and Steiner encourage us to drop our constrictions of rational thought and engage in this subject experientially.  Rather than sticking to the nuts and bolts of the UFO phenomenon, as if it were the “safest” approach and might provide the “rational” proof most needed, I believe we should listen to the experiencers who’ve spoken to the beings and consider what their messages might be for us.  Paracelsus said, centuries ago, that we had the latent ability.  It’s time to wake it up.

It was, after all, because of the experiencers that shamans traveled from the jungles and forests to visit Mack and say to him, “We were wondering when you white people would begin to get it.”

Tompkins is also author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Secret Life of Plants.
Thompson 111
Thompson, p 111.
Mack, Passport to the Cosmos, p. __
Tompkins, p 135.