Tag Archives: plato

Visions of Love, Gardening with Theurgy: An Imaginative Practice to Empower Plants

Plants are people that participate in our world in wondrous, mutualistic ways. Plants serve as the foundation of our human lives, in so many ways, grown by Solar rays of a very high Source. Plants bridge us and the Sun. How can we serve plants? A mystical practice, known as a type of theurgy, is one way to empower plants to give greater gifts as they go forth in life, using the power of human mind to imagine and visualize colors and light.

Definitions of theurgy tend to be vaguely described, as hints of it seep out from the mysticism of various traditions. Definitions often include compelling or querying supernatural beings and deities. I offer this definition based on my learnings and experiences on alchemy:

Theurgy is the mental animating of matter, so to bring out more of matter’s inherent qualities and potential capacities, without imposing a state or process on the matter that is not in harmony with its nature and natural laws of cause and effect [1].

There could be a lot to unpack here, but I will leave that to your own inner and outer inquiries. I raise this work to share an ecological application of it. Based in imagination, it is the use of visualization and color to enliven objects with their vital three-part nature.

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Philo on The Name: Panpsychism and Panentheism

Philo was a Jewish philosopher living in Hellenistic Alexandria, Egypt, of the Roman Empire around 20 BCE to 50 CE. He thought of “Logos” [1] along the lines of Plato’s “theory of Ideas” or “theory of Forms” [2]. These are related to panpsychism [3] and the role of archetypes in that consciousness context. For more on that subject, see the post All is Mind.

Philo identified the metaphysical “Logos” with HaShem [4] (an ineffable name of G-d, Hebrew for “the Name”, Tree of Life). Following these connections is one clue connecting the Kabbalistic Tree of Life with a metaphysics of panpsychism and mystical Jewish panentheism [5].

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo#Logos
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms
3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panpsychism
4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo#Knowledge_of_Greek_and_Hebrew
5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panentheism

Image via https://update.gci.org/2017/10/primer-on-panentheism/

Thanks to the Source. A little more info about Philo:

“Philo visited the Second Temple in Jerusalem at least once in his lifetime.[10] Philo would have been a contemporary of Jesus and his Apostles. Philo along with his brothers received a thorough education. They were educated in the Hellenistic culture of Alexandria and Roman culture, to a degree in Ancient Egyptian culture and particularly in the traditions of Judaism, in the study of Jewish traditional literature and in Greek philosophy.”

via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo#Life