Energy Beings, Language and Vibration, Relationship Protocols
VIDEO 1: Energy Beings, Language and Vibration, Relationship Protocols: 13 minutes
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
- Ilarion speaks about communing with the Living World. Have you ever experienced a sense, out in the Living World, that you were communing with it? If so, how did you know? What did this feel like?
- Ilarion explains that languages are birthed vibrationally in relationship to place. If you speak more than one language, do you notice different feeling qualities evoked in you when you speak different languages?
- Ilarion talks about speaking to (communicating with) plants. Does this make sense to you or sound mystical? The documentation on this subject, with various Indigenous peoples, is quite consistent. When asked, often by western anthropologists, how a particular Indigenous people knew how to use some particular plant, or venom in hunting, or how they knew to create a particular admixture of plants, they often explain that the plant told them. Have you ever spoken to a plant? Or communicated with one?
- Ilarion speaks about a protocol for relationship with all living beings. He explains that many modern medicines, which distill or extract specific chemical constituents of plants, are used outside of the context of relationship. How does this impact your thinking about healing? About medications?
- Ilarion explains that all offspring of earth are sentient beings. What would it mean to experience a lake or a boulder as sentient?
AWARENESS PRACTICE
Read these instructions first, and then try it. Once you've tried it, journal about it, or document or reflect on it in a creative way. Ilarion speaks about us as energy beings. He suggests that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Many modern people rely heavily on vision as an orienting sense, and a way of knowing themselves. So this is a simple meditation that involves contacting Self without sight. First, make sure you are feeling relatively calm. This exercise is not recommended if you are upset or stressed out. Find a place that is safe and comfortable to sit indoors. Now close your eyes. Take a moment to feel yourself. With your eyes closed, how do you know you are still there? It sounds like a silly question, but how do you know it is still you? What can you feel in the dark? See if you can direct your attention to your body, to your breath, to your sensations, to your emotions. See if you can 'feel yourself.' Now, go outside to someplace that you like. Make sure you are physically safe. If there are people around, approach this very gently, because it can feel quite vulnerable with eyes closed. The point here isn't to keep the eyes closed if they want to open, but rather, if you feel safe, to allow yourself to settle into feeling without vision in a place in the Living World, and notice how that feels. So perhaps you'd like to do this alone, if possible. Or in a place you do feel safe with eyes closed. After this, compare what it was like to close the eyes and feel yourself indoors versus outdoors. What did you notice? What stood out to you? What, if anything was different?
