Daily Theosophy

All this took place long before she lived among the cockroaches. In dreams time and sequence do not count very much. You can dream of now, of the past and sometimes even of the future – and mix it all up in the same dream.

(17)

(The big tree in the Rainforest)

The big tree in the rainforest

Just as suddenly as she had become a crystal-clear round jewel, she now found herself as a huge tree in the midst of a tropical rainforest. She was very big, almost two hundred feet high and towering above all other trees. She had an enormous canopy full of smelling white-and-pink flowers. The smell was especially loved by bats, who came in large quantities at night to drink her honey, and she was also popular with monkeys and marsupials. When they visited the whole of their hairy stomachs would be full of pollen. The biggest bats came in the middle of the night, and in the beginning of the evening night moths came too. Because she was so high, everyone who climbed or flew to her top had a tremendous and very good view. The view went to all directions: an endless seas of green leaves of different forms and colors (bright green, dark green, brown, yellow, red), and various types of pink and purple and blue and red and yellow flowers. She was also visited by a lot of buzzing insects like bees, beetles, flies, hoverflies, butterflies, but she was in the habit of closing her flowers around six in the morning, and open them only at sunset, so that the daytime insects could only take the left-overs. Then there were many birds and a lonely sloth. She was the queen of the rainforest, respected by all other trees because of her grandeur, beauty, nobility and stature. Her task was to protect and inspire and rule the tropical rainforest. Her influence was felt from horizon to horizon and beyond.

Down inside the forest the atmosphere was mysterious. It was rather dark, because most of the sunlight was caught by the leaves in the canopies, in the tops of the trees. It was very quiet and quite silent, apart from an occasional chirring cicada, cricket, or a bird cooing or shouting from afar – which made it all the more mysterious. The sounds of the insects went on day and night. Some made little high-pitched chirping sounds – each second again and lasting half a second, or a split second, and went on doing that for hours and hours. Each of the little sounds seemed to be born out of the silence and to disappear in it every time again – each like little cosmoses of sound being born and dying and being born again. Others produced loud continuous tones – which they did by rubbing the edges of their wings together, and could be heard over a long distance. In thaat case it might be one long chirping tone on one pitch, but with very fine variations within each second, almost to fine to distinguish unless one listened intentionally and with concentration. That is how they inform each other about their presence. All of them together spread a mysterious multi-surround-sound, a happy and hypnotizing sound, so that with them it seemed almost more silent, more quiet, than without them. More symphonious it becomes even when it starts raining: all the millions of big raindrops hitting the leaves of the canopy create both soft and roaring sounds, and drops will fall through on other leaves and branches and on the dead leaves on the ground. All these silvery transparent drops create their own pitch when they hit a leave or cling together as little streams. The rain sound arrived well before it reaches your part of the forest, but the sky may be already be filled with thunderous and echoing sounds. Nobody spoke, because there was nobody to speak.

Only few plants were growing down on the ground. They were only stems and stalks of plants which had their leaves high up, or young plants, because it was too dark to grow up. And there were molds and mushrooms. It was always moist. Here and there was a stalk no more than a few feet high with a few leaves: such stalks were waiting many years there and were just standing and staying alive while ants were creeping over them and some mosses grew on their few branches and leaves. They just waited, because plants have no feet or wings to go anywhere, and their roots force them to stay on the same place. But they didn’t want to either – they didn’t even know that a thing like walking and flying existed. They could go nowhere except by growing upwards. They waited until the day that by any chance a big old tree would fall over while dying. Then immediately they would shoot up, growing as fast as they could using the light coming through the whole in the top of the forest, and to try to reach the top of the forest. Then their place would be secured for decades or even hundreds of years. But many didn’t make it, because the space was limited, and died halfway to try another time. All creatures in the forest lived according to how they felt they should live, mostly very peaceful. Evil didn’t exist in the forest because there were no humans.

If you go into such a forest (they still exist today) it is either very boring or very exciting: it depends on the development of your mind. If you don’t pay attention you see “nothing” but stems and eternal shade, and you complain about the warmth and humidity, or you are afraid of all the dangerous creatures you imagine in your mind, but are not really there. But if you have trained your mind and eyes and ears and nose to become more subtle the forest never bores, it becomes more and more exciting.

In the cooler parts of the Earth (which also came under Praja’s rule) you see that most tree stems are the same. But in many tropical forests they are all different, because there are hundreds of species of trees, not only pines and birches or beeches and oak trees and chestnuts and a few more as in the colder regions. All of them have a different bark, with a different structure. Because each tree species has its own character, each species has solved its problems and challenges in a different way. If you know all the stems you can recognize all the trees without ever seeing a leaf or a flower of it. If you feel the trees with your hand, or embrace them or just look at them with your feeling, you notice that they are all vividly alive, and all of a different character because of their different plant feelings. While doing that you may love all of them in a somewhat different way. Most are just beautiful for humans. And on these stems are walking and creeping many creatures like a variety of ants, all of them as busy as if they are the most important creature in the world. They are the most important creature on Earth, because they are equal parts of the Heart of Adi and have build themselves bodies of the same materials that are available for everyone on earth, and which came from the wider cosmos – just as all other creatures are the most important creatures on Earth. But without ants, the world could not exist, I think.

On the forest floors you find fruits of various trees which fell down or were dropped from above, and some small animals come to collect them. There is a subtle variety of smells down there – and all are unpolluted by car gasses or factory smokes. The smells in total are like messengers of health by themselves, even if they came from dead plants. They fill the forest air.

The forest is also full of invisible beings. You can not see them of course, but you can sometimes feel that different places bring you different moods and feelings. So full is the forest, especially around the growing plants, that if you could see them, you wouldn’t be able to look very far in front of you because of their density. They are the friends of plants and animals and help them to build their bodies, and are all around. People who can see them tell us that they change their forms and colors all the time, and that these forms are sometimes alike things we can see (like gnomes looking like humans), but many take forms you can hardly imagine until you have seen them. Nevertheless, each has its own basic form to which it returns all the time, and thus can be recognized as a species. They may also change their form when somebody only thinks of them. But they abhor most humans, because most people are very noisy with unnatural and disharmonious sounds that do not fit nice with Nature and many people think coarse thoughts (like gossip or jealousy or needless concerns, or about the things someone wants to have) – what they can feel though not understand, and many humans stink and throw pollution around them. Forests and other spots in nature protect themselves sometimes with the help of some biting and stinging insects, enough for most people to stay away. In cities with cars nowadays such invisible beings have become rare.

So, if you have eyes to see, ears to hear, a nose to smell, a tongue to taste and feeling to feel this forest is a paradise – if your mind is silent enough not to blur out the silence of Nature. Because few people who have a mind are able to keep it calm: they are always afraid they miss something when they do not think fervently all the time – and just by doing that they miss a lot.

But, as I told, when Praja was that big tree in the middle of that forest, human beings did not yet exist then – and you can imagine how that feels only by going very deep into a tropical forest, where nobody ever comes. Praja’s influence is there all around.

Praja had, because she had taken the form of a tree herself in this part of her dream, roots. She was completely balanced despite her gigantic crown towering above the other trees. Her roots under the ground spread as wide as her crown, just under the surface of the soil, not very deep like trees in windy countries. She had a very nice, almost intangible  feeling in her roots, especially the tiny roots which branches out from the bigger roots. The tiny roots, hardly thicker than a hair sucked water and dissolved minerals from the soil, and were given fluid foods by other creatures who were no plants and no animals, but molds. The molds were just living threads which had grown from tree-root to tree-root

and together formed a huge net of thin living threads, and that net was as big as the whole forest – but just underground. They can do something that most plants can not do: As soon as a leaf falls on the ground, or a fruit, or the droppings of a monkey or marsupial or other animal fall down from the canopy, or when an animals on the ground leaves his or her body to die, these molds start growing in their direction. They “attack” the dead leaf or fruit or shit of corpse or whatever it may be and start to turn it into some fluid. They take the nutritious things all through their long thread bodies towards the minute hair-like roots of the trees. On the other hand the roots of the trees give some things to the molds that molds can not make by themselves. The trees produce food for the molds high above in the leaves in their canopies with the help of the sunlight, then transport it all the way down to the ground through their branches and stem and into the roots, so that the molds can have it. These molds are called mycorrhiza. In this way gigantic trees and thin threads under the ground live together, work together, and help each other. All living beings are there to help each other – even though they themselves may not be conscious of the task they perform because they only follow their automatic ways and impulses. But Praja was fully conscious of all these things, because she could understand the hearts and their connections of all these beings.

(18)

(all beings are there to help each other)

Wise people long ago knew these things also. For example, a wise man in India, more than two and a half thousand years ago,