This writing are from a meditation teacher Jessica Snow
aether magic
By now, as our tour of the elements comes to its grand finale, I bet many of you have realized why I’ve been directing our awareness to the elemental realms in this political season.
I have been doing so in order to re-order our awareness of “the world”. This re-ordering has two paradoxical, but absolutely real benefits:
- Humanity is obsessed with this vision of ourselves at the top of the pyramid with everything else “beneath us”; under our purview. But obviously, when we connect to the elements of water, earth, air or fire we pretty quickly arrive at the truth of natural law being “bigger” than human law and vastly more interconnected and powerful. So tuning into the elements helps us by “right-sizing” our sense of ourselves (humanity) in the context of just being little earthlings on a small planet within the ever-expanding universe.
- When we begin to tune into and commune with the elementals, we gain access to new kinds of power and intel. Not the kind of power and intel that we lord over others, but the kind that, once you are tuned into it, just emanates from you. To be more specific, working magically with the elements results in the kind of evolutionary power that allows each of us to become a blessing to all - human and more-than-human - that we come into contact with. Again, our sense of ourselves is “right-sized” in a different way - we are empowered through our connection with the elements to fill the “us-sized hole” in the world; by doing the things that the energy of life itself would like us to do. In other words, emboldened by the conscious presence we’ve shared with earth, water, fire and air, we are better able to show up and take our place in what Mary Oliver called, “the family of things”.
Today, for our fifth and final installment of this series, I draw our attention to the mysterious fifth element - sometimes referred to as aether, quintessence or spirit.
Aether is the one element that is least bound to earth and seems to make its moves somewhere above the terrestrial plane while definitely affecting the terrestrial plane.
Sometimes referred to poetically as the “bright upper sky”, in old Grecian times, this aether element stood for everything we don’t understand about the way things work. In modern times, we might call aether dark matter, the superconscious, or the infinite field of all potential. It’s the irrational, the unexplainable, the unknowable. Aether marks the edges of human logic and then radiates out infinitely from there - showing us without a doubt that there is more we don’t know than we do know.
Aether is mysterious because it is the element that we are least able to consciously perceive. But we know it, from the inside out, when it shows up in our lives.
Whenever something good happens that we didn’t see coming, whenever in an “ordinary moment” we feel especially blessed, whenever the worst never comes; we are in the presence of aether.
As magical people, it is extra-important to connect with this fifth element, as it is responsible for supernatural and/or magical phenomena.
When I was dividing up our favorite meditations by element, I kept having the insight that they could ALL be filed under Aether. Any time we go into our inner realms, aether is there waiting for us. Any time love is in the air, aether is present. Any time we cast a spell, or make a wish, aether is the one who fulfills it. Any time we ask for magical protection, aether is the one that gives it. Any time we reach out to any other element, aether is also there, behind the scenes, acting like the “secret ingredient”.
As hard as it is to describe or pin down, the element of aether activates all magic.
If the earth element is related to our physicality, and as the water element is connected to our feelings, and as the fire element is connected to our passions and the air element to our minds; the aether element is connected to our intuition, magic and visions for the future.
Whatever happens today on the global, historical scale, we absolutely must stay connected to aether. It the element that points us towards our highest and best evolutionary path and brings the help and healing that arrives from behind the scenes just in the nick of time.
Luckily, aether is just as easy to connect with as all the other elements.
- Connecting to aether can be just as simple as closing our eyes and seeing a spark of it inside ourselves; where it has always been and always will be. And then opening our eyes and understanding that that spark is completely connected to all other sparks in existence via the infinite, invisible, prismatic web that underpins everything we know.
- Another trick for communing with aether is to practice “seeing” it as energy and information imbued into or overlaid onto all ordinary reality.
- Contemplating the interconnectedness of all things is another way to tune into the aether, as it is the element that weaves all the other elements into the vast tapestry of existence.
- We also connect deeply to aether when we perceive events without getting too caught up in judgments and preferences (for example, “this happened and it is bad” or “this happened and it is good”); and instead witness the flow of events and engage our powers of gentle inquiry by using phrases like, “isn’t that interesting?” or “what might I learn here?”.
- The aetheric realms are also available any time we meditate, dream, make magic, create or feed our visionary aspect.
Read the full post here: behind the scenes - Jessica Snow's PARALLEL SOCIETY
