If You Go Looking

Devas

EL/1/O

The organising intelligences

Not beings in a forest, but intelligences behind whole systems.

In Theosophical usage, a hierarchy above elementals and nature spirits, associated with entire natural processes. Findhorn in the 1960s made the idea practical. Note that the word is borrowed from Sanskrit and carries a rather different meaning in its home traditions.

If you go looking

Commercial ecosystem

A large modern workshop and retreat economy has grown around this.

Who should be careful

Reading the code

EL/1/O

Earth-native, liminal · embodiment 1 of 5, consciousness with no persistent form · source: occult system · key

Dates

Theosophical use: late 19th century

Findhorn: 1960s

Related

Top of the Earth-native esoteric hierarchy.

Nature spirits →Elementals →Astral entities →

Terms used on this page

EL: Earth-native, liminal

Origin code

Sharing the world with us, ordinarily imperceptible, able to become briefly visible. The oldest and largest branch.

Degree of embodiment: 1, consciousness with no persistent form

Scale, 1 to 5

5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.

O: occult system

Source code

Produced by an esoteric school that organised inherited material into a scheme: Paracelsus, Theosophy and their descendants.

Theosophy

Movement, from 1875

Introduced planes of subtler matter, hierarchies of nature intelligences and inhabited planets on the spiritual rather than physical level. Supplied the vocabulary (vibration, density, ascended teachers) that channelled ufology runs on eighty years later.

Findhorn

1960s

A community in Moray whose members described receiving horticultural instruction from plant devas: the point at which the Theosophical hierarchy became a practical gardening method.

Commercial ecosystem

Documented harm

A paid economy has grown around this tradition, whether readings, courses, retreats and private sessions, or books, tours and media that keep promising more. Not automatically predatory, but it does mean some of what you will read was written to sell something, and that people in distress are a market.

Deliberate contact work

Read this first

The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.

Who should be careful

Practice-side

Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.

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