being disconnected or isolated, the angels had to go on vacation. Their main task is connecting and interconnecting, and there was not much for them to do within the world machine.
I like the idea of the angel as connector. The tradition is that some connect in terms of knowledge and guiding, some in terms of healing, some in terms of defending, some in terms of inspiring. So it makes sense, in a time when we’re rediscovering interconnectivity, that these angels who seem to connect one pole of a relation to another are going to have a lot of employment. We should put up a sign: angels needed. There’s plenty of work for angels in a period of interconnectivity.
Rupert: And of course interconnectivity within fields is not a one-way process. If I have a big magnet with a strong magnetic field, and I place a smaller magnet nearby, the field of the bigger magnet both influences and is influenced by the field of the smaller magnet. If I move the smaller magnet, this affects the entire field.
Matthew: Now there we have a good analogy for healthy hierarchy or holarchy. There is mutual influence, where the big magnet is not just telling the little magnet what to do, but there’s a give and take.
Rupert: Gravity, even according to Newton, works on that principle. All matter attracts all other matter in the universe. There’s the idea of a mutual connection there, not just a one-way influence. Following Einstein, we now see this mutual interconnectivity as mediated through gravitational fields, all contained within the gravitational field of the universe, the universal field.
Insofar as we think of whatever affects us as being mediated through messengers or invisible connections, or angels, then something of what’s happening to us and what’s happening to the world will be conveyed back through the angelic field to more inclusive levels of organization to more inclusive fields of consciousness.
Matthew: The image of fields is so much healthier to me than the basic image we get of a ladder. A field is three-dimensional.
Rupert: Angels operate in fields of activity, coordinating and connecting. Material bodies are mutually exclusive—you can’t have two billiard balls in the same place at the same time—but fields can interpenetrate. For example, the room in which we’re sitting is filled with the earth’s gravitational field, which is why we’re not floating in the air. Interpenetrating the gravitational field is the electromagnetic field, through which we see each other, which is also full of radio waves, TV transmissions, cosmic rays, ultraviolet and infrared rays, all sorts of invisible radiations.
These also don’t interfere with one another. Radio waves interfere with one another only if they’re at the same frequency. But all the radio programs and TV programs in the world can coexist, interpenetrating the same space and not canceling one another out or denying one another. Even if we take only the fields that orthodox science currently recognizes—quantum-matter fields, electromagnetic fields, and gravitational fields—they all interpenetrate. And so the idea of angels as fieldlike allows us to see how they too can interpenetrate.
Matthew: What I like about the word field is that it is an everyday word. Field has a sense of space to it. It feels like an invitation to play: one plays in a field. Also, things grow in a field. A field is generative; it is a place of life and activity. It’s also about having your feet on the ground. It’s matter, it’s earth, it’s life bubbling up from below. It’s an honoring of the lower chakras. I think fields are a wonderfully rich metaphor for bringing angels down to earth, and yet they are three-dimensional. So I want to honor the word field in its nonscientific connotation. It too speaks to us of something everyday and something welcoming.
We can also rediscover the meaning of the word receptive. In a way, a field is a mirror. It’s pulling in the light and converting it into life through photosynthesis and into food. Wonderful things come from fields. Obviously all food comes from fields. Pastures and orchards and romping places and ball games. Gaia is a playing of fields. She invites people to play.
Yesterday, here in London, I was watching football players kicking the ball in Regent’s Park, and I had this experience that Gaia is not just land—Gaia is these two-legged creatures with a rubber ball playing on the land. But for all that play you need fields to play in. And what are relationships? What is a marriage but an effort to create a field? What is a home but a field? Children, bringing new beings into the world, and bearing those who die and everything that passes in between. It’s living life in fields, fields of interconnectivity.
Rupert: When Faraday first used the word field in science, he was using an ordinary English word that had all these implications already built into it. The primary meaning is agricultural field, and this gives rise to the general sense of a field as a region of activity, as in “battlefield,” “field of interest,” and “field of view.” A field is where you do something. To make fields, the first agriculturalists usually had to cut down the trees. Then they grew things in the cleared space. If we stop cultivating fields, if we stop carrying out the activity of agriculture, the fields revert to forest, as in much of New England. Then we have another kind of field, the natural, self-organizing field of the forest.
Participation and Revelation
Wherefore all things share in that providence which streams forth from the superessential deific source of all; for they would not be unless they had come into existence through participation in the essential principle of all things.
All inanimate things participate in It through their being; for the “to be” of all things is the divinity above Being itself, the true life. Living things participate in Its life-giving power above all life; rational things participate in Its self-perfect and preeminent perfect wisdom above all reason and intellect.
It is manifest, therefore, that those natures which are around the Godhead have participated of It in manifold ways. On this account the holy ranks of the celestial beings are present with and participate in the divine principle in a degree far surpassing all those things which merely exist, and irrational living creatures, and rational human beings. For moulding themselves intelligibly to the imitation of God, and looking in a supermundane way to the likeness of the supreme deity, and longing to form the intellectual appearance of It, they naturally have more abundant communion with him, and with unremitting activity they tend eternally up the steep, as far as is permitted, through the ardour of their unwearying divine love, and they receive the primal radiance in a pure and immaterial manner, adapting themselves to this in a life wholly intellectual.
Such, therefore, are they who participate first, and in an all-various manner, in Deity, and reveal first, and in many ways, the divine mysteries. Wherefore they, above all, are pre-eminently worthy of the name angel because they first receive the divine light, and through them are transmitted to us the revelations which are above us. …
Now, if anyone should say that God has shown himself without intermediary to certain holy men, let him know beyond doubt, from the most holy scriptures, that no man has ever seen, nor shall see, the hidden Being of God; but God has shown himself, according to revelations which are fitting to God, to his faithful servants in holy visions adapted to the nature of the seer.
The divine theology, in the fullness of its wisdom, very rightly applies the name theophany to that beholding of God which shows the divine likeness, figured in itself as a likeness in form of that which is formless, through the uplifting of those who contemplate to the Divine; inasmuch as a divine light is shed upon the seers through it, and they are initiated into some participation of divine things.
By such divine visions our venerable forefathers were instructed through the mediation of the celestial powers. Is it not told in the holy scriptures that the sacred law was given to Moses by God himself in order to teach us that in it is mirrored the divine and holy law? Furthermore, theology wisely teaches that it was communicated to us by angels, as though the authority of the divine law decreed that the second
