Leilani Kritzinger

Johannes Kepler — who devised his revolutionary laws of planetary motion while defending his mother in a witchcraft trial — was ridiculed for seeing the Earth as an ensouled body that has digestion, that suffers illness, that inhales and exhales like a living organism.

Of late, however, scientists have resurrected the name of an ancient goddess, Gaia, to express the idea of Earth as a living body on which we depend for life.

The magicians were the sensitives, those who were most susceptible to these other-than-human solicitations, who could pick up from these other beings an easy resonance, or a reverberation within their own organism. And this enabled them to work as intermediaries.

A recent theory of consciousness posits that intelligent awareness can emerge when the components of a large system have a certain level of interconnectivity. Neurons in the human brain reach the critical threshold. In the presence of these chattering cobbles, it seems obvious to me that, according to that definition, Earth is hyperconscious.

But if at the heart of every world religion is a mystical tradition, at least one or many, then at the heart of the mystical traditions, one finds—always—the magical tradition, which is a particular form of mysticism. It's the mysticism of this world, of the body's world, the body's engagement with the Earth around it. It's a mysticism that has no

BILL MOYERS: Scientists are beginning to talk quite openly about the Gaia principle.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: There you are, the whole planet as an organism.

BILL MOYERS: Mother Earth.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And you see, if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than as being thrown in here from somewhere else, you know, thrown out of th

So much of the world is not made by people, and paying attention to that is important to me.”

Just as there's been a fear of the body and embodiment—something about being whatever else I am, if I'm a body, I'm subject to all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I am vulnerable, I am going to die.

There is no boat to bring you through the dark ocean of your anguished body…but your body itself. Storm and vessel are the same.