Harding, Stephan. _Gaia Alchemy: The Reuniting of Science, Psyche, and Soul_. Rochester, Vermont: Bear & Company, 2022. --- --- Origin of the word "imaginal": > The right [brain] hemisphere is that of the "imaginal". This beautiful word was coined by French writer and philospher Henri Corbin, based on his studies of Arabic and Persian texts written by Islamic theosophers of the past. Corbin coined the word imaginal to make it quite clear that he was referring to a dimension of reality not discernible by our everyday awareness, which creates the “imaginary” world of our deepest fantasies that have a quality of objectivity about them. The concept corresponds well with Jung’s collective unconscious. According to Corbin, the sages from whom he drew his ideas cultivated what he called their cognitive imagination to such a high degree that they accessed the archetype of the Self dwelling deep in the mundus imaginalis, in the “imaginal” realm. This is also the realm of the alchemists. > The alchemist is the child in us who pays attention to the living stream of nature as revealed by dreams, myths, and stories experienced as the promptings of a second psychological center within us that runs deeper than our limited yet essential everyday ego. > The alchemists thus cultivated vitally important ancient aspects of the psyche left behind and forgotten by modern science and by the modern world as a whole. Connecting with this hidden part of ourselves gives us the widest possible mental perspective and helps us find the deepest meaning in our lives as members of the Gaian community of life. As we’ve seen, Jung called this lost aspect the Self, which he sometimes referred to as the “two- million-year-old self.” This is our long-forgotten ancient, aboriginal, archaic personality, which links us to the distant past, to our early human ancestors, to the evolution of the first living cells on our planet, to the formation of our solar system, and to the supernova explosion that created it. Ultimately, this leads us back to the energy behind all things. --- Wolfgang Pauli sought psychological help from Jung to deal with his overdeveloped intellect and lack of feeling, and this resulted in a profound collaboration between them. They produced the Pauli-Jung conjecture, which states that matter and psyche are "twin manifestations of an ancient, underlying, intelligent, teleological whole." Jung called this deepest reality the "unus mundus". Synchronicity is a big clue that cause and effect (the rules which govern matter) do not give a complete description of reality, and that meaning (the rules that govern psyche) is equally important. --- Clearly, our global economy is literally calcinating the planet by triggering catastrophic global heating. As a result, the global economic system is starting to break down (dissolution), a situation the current Covid viral pandemic (itself a product of globalization and the subsequent economic over-connectedness) is helping to accelerate. Separation will happen when countries and communities find themselves physically isolated after the current system has broken down. We’ll then have the chance to organize and consolidate into localized pro-Gaian economic systems (conjunction) connected digitally with each other around the world, creating a new planetary economy based on local nodes linked mostly through digital information transfers via the internet (fermentation and distillation). If all goes well (which is highly unlikely), we’ll enter into a deep coagulation with Gaia in which human consciousness will help bring about new levels of planetary self-realization, which we cannot easily imagine now from the standpoint of our current mainstream state of consciousness. --- --- By working with Gaia alchemy to integrate our four ways of  knowing it sometimes happens that a miraculous appearance  of Mercurius, of nondual Gaia, lives itself into one as a vastly  widened awareness of this particular moment we are experi-  encing now in Gaia, and of this moment’s immense signif-  icance as a moment of consciousness of Gaia.  This for me is the deepest magic: to love science and alche-  my both in equal measure and to experience them integrating  within me into the true salt of life. This is my own personal,  highly individual, Gaian Philosopher’s Stone. To put it alchem-  ically, Mercurius sometimes appears when I am in service to  both science and alchemy, when I offer my consciousness as a  place where they can meet and conjoin in a sacred marriage for  the benefit of all.   For me, the alchemical message is quite clear: I cannot  properly engage in depth psychological work with alchemical  images (and hence with the healing powers in the uncon-  scious) unless I am able to cultivate the lived experience of my  inner distillation (nonrational, but with its own strangely para-  doxical reason). This is only possible for me by linking this  lived experience intimately to Gaia’s own wider distillation in  this moment and throughout geological time. It seems that  working alchemically with Gaian science takes us through a  threshold into a profoundly healing sense of Gaia’s living pres-  ence, which makes us more able to work with more conscious-  ness toward healing the tragic situations of our times.  Our identification with Gaia grows as we ponder, contem-  plate, and visualize the strange, hard-to-pin-down parallels,  connections, and feedbacks between our personal psycho-  logical distillation and that of our living planet. In doing this,  somehow, we may become wiser, more resilient, and of more  use in working for Gaia’s self-regulation (and our own). This occurs when we putrefy our current psychological attitude and  distill the resulting spirit, which comes out of that messy, rot-  ting ferment. We put that spirit into the alchemical flask of our  deepest nature and distill it further with a gentle inner warmth  so that any remaining impurities in our worldview drop back  into the distillation flask, allowing our Gaian perceptions to  sublimate and condense into a richly alchemical way of life. The  image to work with here is the citrinitas, the yellow substance:  the precursor of the glowing red rubedo of coagulation, which  is our Gaian Philosopher’s Stone. --- Azoth mandelas pulled from the web: ![[Azoth Mandela.png]] ![[Azoth Mandala2.webp]]