Discovering Spiritual Concepts in Nature

What we experience in the world always begins as the outermost surface of things. If it is a flower, we see the light that is rejected by the plant. If it is a green leaf, the plant itself absorbs all the red and rejects the green. We never see the plant itself with our eyes, but an appearance. Similarly, with the human being, we see skin, hair, nails, and teeth–all products that coalesced out of a formerly living process. Anything we can see with our eyes has “died” and become real—its potential has been exhausted and it has become actual. Which also means: what is most dynamically alive is invisible to the eye.

Anything we can sense with our bodies of the outer world is a product that has “fallen” out of the dynamic living world. Sugar, for example, is a bit like salt inasmuch as it belongs to a process that has condensed from subtler forms where it was not yet solidified. The ancient Greek term crystallos means ice. An ancient hypothesis about rock crystals was that they were a kind of water that had become frozen and had remained so that they would no longer thaw at ambient temperatures–considered mythologically, this is not that far from the truth. 

If we take this idea seriously, it is as if green plants are red behind the green we see and only reflect green. Conversely, limestone appears white because it rejects all light which hints at its inner dark voracious character. It is as if the world we see is a sort of photonegative of the objects “in themselves." Of course, plants do not exist in themselves but rather live as part of an entire web of life. The appearances of plants disclose something of what they seek to absorb and reject: their sympathies and antipathies.

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