WORK WITH PLANTS
(lecture)
Vladimir Antonov
Translated by T. Danilevich
We tell you all the time about Love. It is not possible to come to God without having learnt to love His Creation. Love is altruism, giving oneself away. True Love can not be egocentric. "Love" of oneself is distortion of Love. On the spiritual Way there is no place for such a formula: "I Love you that is why be so kind as belong only to me and love me!".
We can learn true altruistic love in the sphere of sexual relations, in child-rearing, through serving people on one's work place (if we treat our work as a service rather than as a means of making money and receiving other boons), and even in queue for something of which very little is left and I see that another one needs this more than I do...
Love as compassion, tenderness, patience, readiness for self-sacrifice and so forth is the basis of ethics. And ethical component is the foundation, pivot of the growing spiritual person. Not only spiritual leaders can help us learn to love, not only other people but simple plants as well if we would like to study. Plants are live, feeling beings, capable even of emotional reacting. Plants are, as we are, physical bodies with incarnated units of life in them.
This is the way to treat plants if we want to learn love. Plants are living beings. And we can learn to love any such being unfolding capacity of emotional love in ourselves. The more objects each of us has learnt to love the wider, more perfect is our love. But there are also other possibilities of esoteric work with plants. For example, every plant, like any incarnated being, has a bioenergy shell around its "body-cocoon". One can train in perceiving the bounds of "cocoon" with one's hand, one can develop clairvoyance striving to learn to see them. And the ability to see "cocoon" from one's own "cocoon" comes easier with the consciousness spread within it.
But there exist still more interesting possibilities. So one can, training his consciousness, become a tree. So that to do achieve this one has, for example, to approach the tree's trunk with one's back, attune with it in emotional love and consciousness "pour into" the trunk through the back.
Then we can easily feel ourselves, say, a pine, or can look at the world around us from its body, as if by means of its eyes. In this process one's "I" vanishes.
It is of immense importance learn to vanish. There exists the opposite way, characteristic of some occult and black magic schools, way of nurturing one's "I": "I am a master over here! I will command! Everyone is to revere Me!" To contrary, sound religious trends cultivate humility — humble sense of oneself. And this is not a dogmatic goal in itself! There is a really principal meaning in this. Only then each of us can merge with God bringing one's personal evolution to the victorious end when he learns to be nothing, to vanish.
One can not "break into" God. In God it is possible only to vanish. That is why in buddhi-yoga the stage of Nirvana in Ishvara is preceded by the stage of Nirodhi where a person learns to transfer one's "I" into the state of "no-I". So that to become God -"I" must die.
One should keep this in mind from the very start of his Path being utterly cautious about appearance in oneself of arrogance, pride, egocentrism. Otherwise it will be very difficult to cope with it. With the help of plants we can refine ourselves by means of attunement with them. Plants differ in "subtlety-rudeness" value. So, oak energetically the rudest type of trees of the North European part of Russia. As to pines, firtrees, birch some poplars here is a lot to learn from them.
A person who easily gets involved in rude energetic states, not able of removing them can not be called a yogi. But the trees mentioned above keep peaceful and subtle ever. Bioenergetic activity of a tree depends on the season. So, birches share their subtlety with us most intensely in the spring, at the period of sap-movements. The best work with pines is in the summer, when it is hot, and with firtrees during in cool period of the year.
There exist also bioenergetic differences between plants within the bounds of one species. So, plants growing in unfavorable conditions, for example, in thicket or on inadequate soil etc., bioenergetically are weak. And healthy, sound trees growing freely, are usually full of energy. But among the latter one can find rare individual trees standing out due to their unique power. These are so called "plants of power". Those are not necessarily trees. Sometimes small plants also possess these qualities, for example, separate specimen of dreopteris fern. And in conclusion of this talk we shall dwell on relations with plants. Some specialists in bioenergetics in this country have been fantasizing on the subject that some trees give energy away while other take it, so one can "charge" from the former and be fearful of the latter as of "vampires" and so on. These fantasies are brought into being among other factors by scarcity of the information that can be got through the dowsing rod and pendulum as distinct from the possibility to enter into harmonic relations of emotional love with plants, merging one's consciousness with them.
In reality there are no plants that "suck" the energy out of people. As well as we have no ethical right to treat the vital force of other living beings as consumers. Let us emphasize this! This is the principal point of ethics on the spiritual Way. There is no place for consumers in yoga! There is place for love-giving, love-harmony.
Spiritually advancing person establishes relationship of love with plants. Let us approach a tree with love, attune with it in the harmony of subtle emotions, give it our Love-tenderness and then it will respond with its love. Only then, when the two meet, each of whom directs the vector of his love not to himself but to his partner, — then only true harmony is settled between a person and a plant, between two persons, between a person and God.
