Techno-Elementals

By David Spangler
© Copyright 2012-2018 David Spangler

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose
of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent
the copyright holder and publisher. David Spangler has asserted his right to
be identified as the author of this work.

Cover Art by Deva Berg

Edited by Julia Spangler

Ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-939790-22-4

First Edition March 2012

Second Revised Edition August 2018

Published by:
Lorian Press LLC
Holland MI 49424
www.lorianpress.com

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The material in this book began as an experimental and exploratory class,
evolved into an issue of my esoteric journal, Views from the Borderland, and
now has become a book. In this process, I would like to acknowledge the
many discussions and conversations on this topic I have had with those who
participated in my class and in the online Forums based on the journal issue.
Thank you, everyone, both for your willingness to join in the exploration and
for your thoughts which helped sharpen my own.
I particularly want to thank my Lorian colleagues, Jeremy Berg and
Timothy Hass, who have been road-testing these ideas in workshops of their
design and my friend, John Matthews, who has been doing pioneering work
in the shamanic exploration of cyberspace. They have all contributed deeply
to the evolving understanding of these subtle beings who share our world
with us.
I also want to thank my wife, Julia, without whose support and insights
none of my work would be possible. Besides being my primary editor, she
helps bring these concepts down to earth where they need to be.
Finally, I want to acknowledge with love and gratefulness my subtle
colleagues who have been my own companions and guides into
understanding the realms of the techno-elementals and other non-physical
realities. There is so much more to discover and understand, but thanks to
you, we have made a start.

CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
FIELD NOTE 1: THE SPECTRUM OF LIFE
FIELD NOTE 2: A SUBTLE ECOSYSTEM
FIELD NOTE 3: A LIVING UNIVERSE
FIELD NOTE 4: A LEARNING UNIVERSE
FIELD NOTE 5: THE EIGHT FUNCTIONS
FIELD NOTE 6: ARTISANAL FORCES
FIELD NOTE 7: ELEMENTALS
FIELD NOTE 8: NATURE SPIRITS
FIELD NOTE 9: THE ANATOMY OF AN ARTIFACT
FIELD NOTE 10: TECHNO-ELEMENTALS
FIELD NOTE 11: FROM TALISMAN TO TECH
FIELD NOTE 13: FRANKLIN’S KEY
FIELD NOTE 13: THE GRAIL OF EVOLUTION
FIELD NOTE 14: THE BROKEN BRIDGE
FIELD NOTE 15: DIMMING
FIELD NOTE 16: SOOT
FIELD NOTE 17: ECHOES
FIELD NOTE 18: SHAZAM!
FIELD NOTE 19: ROOMIES
FIELD NOTE 20: CYBERSPACE, ROBOTS, AND AI, OH MY!
FIELD NOTE 21: PARTNERSHIP
EXERCISES

DEDICATION
I dedicate this book to all who seek to bring love into our world, to bless
the life in the things we make, and thereby manifest wholeness for all
creatures on the earth, physical and subtle.

INTRODUCTION
When I was eighteen, my father bought me my first car so that I could
drive back and forth from college. It was a four-year old, 1959 Chevy Impala
that had belonged to my cousin. It was at the time one of the most popular
cars in America, possessing a distinctive sleek look with tailfins that flared
horizontally outward rather than upward.
It had been a reluctant purchase, though. My Dad was a protective father,
and the idea of me behind the wheel out in traffic where anything might
happen gave him nightmares. It wasn’t that he doubted my driving skills. It
was all the other “damn fools on the highway” that gave him pause. Having
lived through my two sons and two daughters becoming drivers, I can now
understand the worries that can grip a father’s heart when his children first
begin to navigate the highways, but at the time, his fears both amused and
frustrated me.
Where Dad was concerned, my car had two strikes against it. The first
was that it was my car, and I was driving it rather than being safe on a bus or
with him behind the wheel. The second was that it wasn’t a Volkswagen
Beetle. Dad had only owned Beetles since we returned from Morocco in
1957, and he thought this unique-looking German car was about the best in
the world. However, Dad had gotten a very good deal on the Impala from my
cousin who had practically given it to us as a favor to me; financially, he’d
been unable to pass it up.
I loved my car. Frankly, at that point in my life, I would have loved any
car that I could call my own, but the Impala with its impressive tailfins was, I
felt, just about the coolest car on the road. It was my spaceship!
My Dad, though, disliked it thoroughly and saw it as a necessary evil.
This led to an interesting turn of events. When I drove the car by myself,
everything worked perfectly. I never had any trouble with it. That car and I
had a love affair going, and the purr of its engine as I drove along the
highway was like angels singing.
However, whenever my Dad got in the car with me, or, more rarely,
attempted to drive it, something always went wrong. It was always a little
thing, some rattling here or some knocking there; maybe a window didn’t
work right, or the car would momentarily stall when he tried to start it up. It
was never enough to put it in a garage, but it was something annoying. Dad
concluded that the car was a piece of junk, which only increased his worrying
when I drove it.
I was intrigued by this phenomenon and laughingly told Dad that the car
didn’t like him because he was hurting its feelings. It was a joke, but the
more it happened, the more convinced I became that something like that was
going on. So, I investigated.
I have always been able to perceive beyond the range of the five senses
into what I call the “subtle” dimensions of the world. Here I find a non-
physical ecosystem every bit as diverse and rich as the one we see in the
physical world around us. Further, this subtle ecosystem overlaps and
integrates in a variety of ways with our material universe. Objects that appear
inert and non-living to us with our physical senses may be filled with life in
the subtle realm. The experience of the universe as fully and totally alive was
well-known to our ancestors; it’s only within the past three hundred years or
so, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, that our Western society
has forgotten this in its exclusive focus upon material reality.
I think of this subtle world with all its diversity and interconnectedness as
Earth’s “second ecology.” It’s deeply woven into and interdependent with
the physical ecology with which we are familiar. We ignore this “second
ecology” to our detriment, especially at a time when we need to find ways to
reestablish and reaffirm our wholeness with our planet. To think and speak
of the subtle realms merely as fantasy or folklore, as the supernatural or
mystical, is to misunderstand its nature and to blind ourselves to the richness
and gifts of life which it offers.
When I looked into the subtle energy fields around my car, I did find a
being that had integrated itself into those fields. My car had become a link
for it with the physical world and even more importantly, with the human
world. At the time, I did not have enough experience to understand what this
meant or why it might be important. I simply knew that there was a
consciousness surrounding and permeating my car that responded in one way
to my love and appreciation for it and another way to my Dad’s dislike. For
me, it worked perfectly. For my Dad, it created problems. Not so different
from how people react!
This was my introduction to the species of subtle beings I have come to
call “techno-elementals.” These are subtle beings that align themselves with
human technology and artifacts. Fifty years later, I decided to write about
them.
I have written two books on the subtle worlds—Subtle Worlds: An
Explorer’s Field Notes and Working with Subtle Energies. I also write an
esoteric journal, Views from the Borderland. This journal, published four
times a year by the Lorian Association, provides me with an opportunity to
share my observations, experiences, and communications from encounters
and explorations of the subtle realms. These are my personal “field notes,”
and through them, I seek to introduce people to the reality, the wonder, and
the naturalness of the non-physical world around us.
In 2012, I dedicated the fourth issue of this journal to the topic of techno-
elementals. This volume was only available to those who subscribed to my
journal that first year of its existence and has never been sold to the general
public. Yet, given the importance of techno-elementals in our lives, the
information it contains deserves a wider audience, I believe. Therefore, I’m
happy to offer another exploration of these beings in this book, with new
material not present when I first wrote about them in my journal.
I always begin each issue of Views from the Borderland with the
following caveat:
All the following material is based on my personal observation. While I
present it as accurately and clearly as I am able, it is subject to the
limitations of my own experience, understanding, bias, perceptual abilities,
and skills of interpretation. While I have years of experience in this area, I
am most certainly not infallible. I am still exploring and learning. Another
person, making the same contacts or observing the same phenomena as I,
might have a different perception or a different interpretation and
understanding. This being said, I invite you to join with me in exploration. If
anything here resonates with your mind and heart, may it be a blessing and a
help to you.
This is especially true of this book. It should be seen as part of an
ongoing exploration, a beginning venture into understanding the nature of
some of the subtle beings that share our lives with us. To this end, each
chapter is a “Field Note,” an observation I’ve made, and not in any way the
final statement on the subject. In all respects, this book is only a beginning,
first steps in exploring a specific aspect of the vast, complex, and wondrous
ecosystem of the subtle realms. I hope it will be helpful in encouraging and
assisting further exploration and discovery.
Because of the nature of the material, this is a book of esoteric ideas and
concepts, many of which may be unfamiliar to you. I have tried to keep
things as simple as possible while still covering the territory and providing
insights into the nature of the beings in question. I have felt the need to go
into as much detail as I’ve been able to perceive. But if you find this to be
more detail than you want, please feel free to skip ahead to Field Note 19,
“Roomies.” It, plus the Exercises and Examples at the end, contains the
practical, “how-to” information of what we can do in relationship to the
techno-elementals in our lives, which, after all, is the most important thing to
know!

FIELD NOTE 1: THE SPECTRUM OF LIFE

When I was six years old, my parents and I went to see a movie that
included a Walt Disney cartoon. In this animated short feature, the furniture
and other objects were all alive and talked to the characters. I remember
sitting in the dark watching this, thinking, “Someone’s made a movie about
my world.” Not that in the world I experienced sofas and chairs got up and
sang and danced as they did in the Disney cartoon (which, I must admit,
would have been pretty cool) or carried on extended conversations with me,
but they definitely had a presence, a sentient energy of which I was aware.
And interaction between me and that sentiency was possible.
The idea that everything is alive has been part of the shamanic world
view for millennia and in more recent history can be found in some religious
mystical traditions as well. The pervasiveness of life is something
individuals in all cultures and times have experienced. Even in popular
language and culture, we invest our things with personalities and talk about
them as if they were alive. Modern science and psychology would say this is
merely anthropomorphic projection on our part, but older wisdoms would see
this differently. And now there are branches of complexity theory and the
science of nonequilibrium thermodynamics that are broadening our definition
of what is life beyond the boundaries of biology and organic chemistry.
As shamanic ideas have become more present in our culture, particularly
among those who explore and practice alternative and nature-oriented
spiritualities, and we have become more holistically and ecologically minded,
the phrase “Everything is alive” is bandied about more commonly. But what
exactly does it mean? What is this life that everything shares? A mystic
might say that it’s God’s Life or “Universal Life,” but just what does that
mean when applied to metal and plastic or to my favorite sofa? No one, I
think, would claim it’s the same as the life that animates you and me, the
birds outside my window, or the trees in which they are nesting.
Yet all my life I have experienced everything around me as alive. life to
me is not just a biological or organic phenomenon. It is an energy
manifestation that is organized and self-sustaining, an eddy or vortex within a
larger flow of universal energy. What does this mean?
Let me give you an example of how I experience the presence of life
within an inanimate object, something normally considered unliving. For this
purpose, I choose a sofa in my living room.
My sofa, like everything else in the world, is onion-like. It’s a collection
of layers of being, which, falling back on metaphors from physics and
electromagnetism, I think of as different “frequencies.” I could think of it like
a radio which plays multiple stations, each broadcasting on a different
wavelength. To listen to a particular station, I have to tune in to the
frequency of its broadcast.
To confess, I don’t like this word, frequency, to describe what I perceive
of the different “layers” in which life manifests. It’s too “electronic” an
image and doesn’t capture the vibrancy and sentiency of what is there. Maybe
“dimensions of being” would be more accurate. But frequency has the
advantage of being a single word that most people recognize, so I’ll continue
to use it, though with caution.
With this in mind, my sofa has different “broadcast frequencies” ranging
from the concrete, physical level of atoms, molecules, and material substance
all the way to the most primal, universal “frequency” of all, that of the
Sacred, the One Beingness that pervades all creation. I don’t know how
many of these frequencies or dimensions of being constitute the total
phenomenon I think of as my sofa; I can’t perceive or tune in to all of them.
But I’m aware of several of them. Let me describe the ones of which I am
aware.
The first thing I see when I look at my sofa is what anyone would see: its
surface appearance. It’s a tad over seven feet in length, just perfect for lying
down on to watch television. It’s made of wood and cloth and a thick
padding, with equally thick, soft cushions. It’s ivory in color. It’s lovely to
look at and very comfortable. And at this level of perception, it’s very
ordinary and not at all “living” in any normal sense of that word.
If I shift my awareness and perception, at the first frequency beyond the
physical, the sofa becomes something more. I am aware of an energy field
surrounding the physical form of the sofa. This field is “sticky” and can
accumulate other “bits and pieces” of subtle energies, such as those generated
by our thoughts and emotions. For example, if I’m content and peaceful
when I sit or lie upon the sofa, the vibration of that peace can enter this
energy field and stick there, at least for a time; likewise, if I’m agitated and
upset, those emotional energies can be caught. It’s as if there’s a layer of
psychic Velcro around the sofa that catches and holds energetic “lint” from
the mental, emotional, and spiritual activity in the environment.
If these psychic energies are repeated over and over, they can become
deeply impressed upon the energy field of the sofa, going more deeply into
its energetic substance than just this surface “Velcro” layer I’m describing.
But otherwise, this energy “lint” is lightly held and can easily be removed
through some practice of energy hygiene or cleansing. Just doing one’s
housework with love and in a cheerful manner—especially with the vibration
of music—while visualizing clean, clear, vital energy sweeping through the
room and the furniture can usually wipe such stuff away. (For a more in-
depth treatment of energy hygiene to deal with this psychic “lint,” please see
my book, Working with Subtle Energies.)
Feeling this trapped subtle energy can give a psychic impression of
something life-like, I have found, but it’s really the life energy of others
“recorded” on the subtle substance of the sofa. At this simple level, the sofa
is energetically active, as most things are, but this is not the same as being
alive. To discover how life itself inhabits my sofa, I must go deeper.
In astronomy, there’s a concept called the habitable zone which is the
distance from a star at which a planet could have conditions favorable to the
existence and evolution of life such as we know it. How large this zone is
and where it is found in a solar system depends on the nature and
characteristics of that system’s star. (Astronomers sometimes call this the
“Goldilocks Zone” because it’s neither too hot nor too cold but “just right.”)
In a similar way, when I look for the life within the sofa, I look for a
“Goldilocks Energy Zone” in which the universal flow of life becomes
organized to form patterns energy that are persistent and self-sustaining to
some degree. To me, such patterns are all incarnational systems. They don’t
just accumulate energy or substance; they organize it in some persistent
manner; they are autopoietic or self-producing. They possess some level of
coherency and integration. In my terminology, they possess identity which
creates a boundary of some nature that separates them from the rest of the
energy flowing around them.
Imagine a river. As it flows, a branch lies across the river bank and into
the water, and where it dips into the river, it impedes or restrains that flow to
some degree. The water becomes turbulent in the area around the branch; an
eddy may form. This eddy is a shape, a presence that persists even though
water flows through it as long as the branch is there forming a boundary to
catch that flow.
If the river is the flow of living energy from the Generative Mystery we
call the Sacred, then one manifestation it produces is like that eddy, a
complex organization of flowing energy in and around a boundary condition
that defines its particularity and enables a system of organization to develop
and persist.
As I examine my sofa with a deeper perception, I come to this pattern of
organized living subtle energy that is not just an accumulation of “energetic
lint” from outside itself. It is an energetic presence that has its own unique,
internally coherent and integrated organization. This is where I experience
the sofa as something living, not in a biological way certainly but as a unique
configuration of sentient energy.
What is this life like as I perceive it?
To use the metaphor of the river again, the branch that produced the eddy
of energetic organization in this instance is the human imagination that
created the sofa. This creative imagination forms a framework of intent
around which energy begins to organize itself. It provides the matrix for a
pattern of living energy to take form associated with the physical form of the
sofa.
The energy pattern of the sofa at this “Goldilocks” level doesn’t look to
me like a sofa at all. In fact, it doesn’t “look” like anything in particular in
the way that we are accustomed to physical objects having forms; rather it is
a “shape of consciousness” that reflects the potentials of interaction held and
defined by this pattern.
Sentiency is an important key here. My friend Dr. Lee Irwin, a religious
scholar and mystic and the author of many books on spirituality, defines
sentiency as “the impulse to form relationship.” Relationships and
connections are the foundation for manifesting wholeness, and manifesting
wholeness is what creation is all about, from my point of view.
The “consciousness-shape” of the living energy field around the sofa
possesses this sentiency (which is not the same thing as what we experience
as conscious awareness); it is organized to sense and form energetic
connections and relationships in a unique manner as defined by its pattern. It
is this coherent organization that is the life of my sofa, it’s “incarnational”
pattern.
When I experience this “energetic shape” that is my sofa, it is not terribly
complex or flexible; it does not possess initiative, for instance. A human
being, by comparison, is immensely more complex, organized, and capable
as an energy form.
To introduce a new metaphor, toy action figures are classified by “points
of articulation,” that is, by the joints that they possess which determine where
they can bend and how flexible they are. As a kid, I had a set of plastic toy
soldiers that were each molded as a single piece. They had no points of
articulation and could not bend at all. Later I had toy soldiers that had one
point of articulation; they could bend at the waist. In time, toy manufacturers
made figures that could turn their heads or move their hands or feet, their
elbows or knees. They had more points of articulation, more joints, and the
more they had, the more they could be posed in the various positions that a
real person could take. You didn’t have to imagine that your toy soldier was
kneeling or bending or sitting; he really could kneel, bend, or sit.
Human beings energetically have an immense number of “points of
articulation” or “joints of sentiency;” these are the many ways our
consciousnesses can “bend” and configure to the environment, take initiative,
create, and so on. My sofa has only a few joints of sentiency, and thus it is
much more limited as an energy presence than I am in what it can perceive
and do. Yet it is not totally unaware or inanimate at this energetic level.
I experience this every day, not just with my sofa but with all the objects
around me. They all possess a field of living energy and sentiency at this
“Goldilocks” level. If I send an energy of love or appreciation to them, they
respond. It’s like blowing upon a coal which then brightens and flares up
with heat and light. A connection is made, and there is a flow of love back to
me. Over time, this relationship can become etched into the subtle energy
environment, like a groove or a path across the land where the land is beaten
down by the passage of many feet over time.
So, I discover that at a certain level or frequency of energy, a structure of
sentiency and responsiveness exists in my sofa. It is this organization of
sentiency that I experienced as a child and felt as the life within the furniture
and other objects that made up my world, so charmingly and whimsically
portrayed in the Disney cartoon.
Under the right circumstances, something else may occur, one intimately
connected with the phenomenon of techno-elementals. The energy pattern
around an object may become a point of contact and connection for a
different non-physical entity which itself may be significantly more advanced
and aware. If this were to happen to my sofa, then when I tuned into it, I
might find myself in contact with a spiritual being that would be quite
capable of engaging and communicating with me. This being would in effect
be a “rider” on the energy of the sofa, though operating at a different
frequency.
When my first child was five, we took a trip to Disneyland where I
bought him a stuffed animal. It was Bumblelion, a creature that was part
bumblebee and part lion, the star of a popular Disney cartoon series on
television at the time. It was so whimsical and cute, I couldn’t resist it, and
John-Michael fell in love with it. It went everywhere with him; it became his
constant companion whether he was playing, eating, or sleeping.
One day I was holding Bumblelion and became aware of a presence
around it. As it turned out, it was a kind of playful spirit that was also partly
a protector. It was one of a class of beings—I suppose one could think of
them as angels—that regularly associate with children. This one had attached
itself to the energy field of this toy. Johnny had poured so much love into
this stuffed animal that its own energy organization had become more
complex. Its sentiency, its capacity to form relationship, had been
heightened, enough that this inner being could see it and connect to it. It was
using this toy as a point of physical connection to our world through which
its own loving and protective energies could flow.
After that, when I would buy a stuffed animal for one of my children or
for the children of friends, I would make a point of energizing the toy with
love and then reaching out to one of these beings to invite it to connect with
that energy and make that toy a point of contact to better bless the child who
would be using it. Stuffed talismans!
I want to be clear that such beings do not inhabit the object; they are not
“possessing” it (like an evil doll in the movies). They are simply forming a
link through which a level of engagement with and participation in our world
is possible, but the participation is not through the instrumentality of the
object. It’s through their own energy field in relationship to our own.
I picture this sometimes as a diver wearing a weighted belt to overcome
his own buoyancy so that he can remain submerged. The frequency of
energy on which many beings operate makes it challenging to directly be
present to our physical realm; they are energetically “too buoyant.” But
linking to the energy field of one of our objects gives them “weight,” so to
speak. It’s not an exact metaphor; most physical metaphors fall short of
adequately or accurately describing the reality of subtle phenomena. But
hopefully, it gives a sense of what is happening, as it is important to
understanding the nature and functioning of “techno-elementals,” the topic of
this book.
There’s a final thing I want to share. There is a dimension of
consciousness, a “frequency” of life, within my sofa—and within all things,
ourselves included—that I could say lies at the very “bottom” or the very
“top,” whichever you wish. It is foundational. In seeking to tune in to the
“Goldilocks” layer of life within my sofa, it’s possible I may “overshoot” the
mark and find myself slipping into a mystical state in which I become aware
of a Presence and Life that is not just within the sofa but within all things.
This is the primal Life from which all creation is emerging, what I think of as
the level of the Sacred. This Life is a universal condition. It’s the Life we all
share, the Life of the Cosmos, the Life of the One, however we may
conceptualize that.
At this level, the sofa is most definitely alive, but it’s no longer a sofa.
Nor is it a distinct, organized energy field, with its own boundaries and
characteristics. At this level, the energy I sense, the life I sense, is part of a
universal oneness flowing through all things, underlying the manifestation of
all things. It is the river from which the individual eddies and vortices of
manifestation and creation are formed. The Cosmos itself is alive. There is
really nothing more to say about it than this, though the implications are
profound.
What I want to share here is that we can see life as a spectrum. What we
think of as “life” is really only a thin slice of that spectrum, just as what we
see as visible light is only a small fraction of the whole electromagnetic
spectrum. There are multiplicities of diverse forms that life takes in the
physical world; this is even more true when we consider the non-physical or
“subtle” side of things. From where we are on this spectrum in our
consciousnesses and energy, there are forms of life much simpler than our
own, such as the life within my sofa, and there are forms of life infinitely
more complex than our own, such as the life of the Planetary Angel we call
“Gaia.”
Techno-elementals exist within the subtle frequencies of this spectrum in
ways that intimately connect to our own. This is what we will explore in the
field notes to come.

FIELD NOTE 2: A SUBTLE ECOSYSTEM

To understand techno-elementals, we need to think in new ways. If
you’ve never considered the reality of the subtle worlds, doing so may be a
stretch into unfamiliar territory. I would like you, though, to take another,
further step with me. This is to think of the subtle realms as an ecosystem
and subtle beings as organisms, terms normally restricted to biological life
and its relationships with its environment.
In my experience, life is life wherever we find it or however it manifests.
All organisms, whether they’re cows, trees, dogs, bacteria, people, nature
spirits, Devas, or angels, exhibit similar characteristics and obey certain
principles. All manifest an identity and an associated coherent field—a
“body”—through which they can express that identity. That body may be of
a substance altogether different from that of physical matter and may look
like nothing with which we are familiar in the physical world, but it’s a body
nonetheless. All beings exchange energy with their environment. All to
some extent shape and are shaped by their environment. All possess means
of connecting and interacting with others; all communicate, though not
necessarily in any way we would recognize or understand. All possess
sentiency. All possess a capacity for change, development, and learning,
which is to say, all embody intelligence, even if in a form wholly unlike that
which we humans demonstrate.
A friend steeped and trained in Zen Buddhism once said to me, “You
know, David, in the Zen tradition, subtle beings, even if real, are considered
distractions on the path to enlightenment. We are taught to ignore them.” I
understand the sentiment. He was pointing to the glamour, such as fear or
excitement, around encountering something that many people deem
supernatural. This glamour can be distracting.
The problem my friend brought up is about more than simple distraction.
Anything can be distracting. The issue is the way we think about the non-
physical dimensions, the images and words we use. For a very long time,
humanity has viewed them as a separate and basically unknown, even fearful,
reality, the province of religion, magic, mysticism, and superstition. They are
the realms of the dead, of spirits and ghosts, of nature forces, and gods and
goddesses, powers beyond human ken, best left alone by ordinary people.
But for me, the subtle realms are not “supernatural.” They are
“differently natural.” They are an extended part of the ecology of a planet that
is much vaster than just its physical parts. Although they are formed from
subtle energies that have much in common with what we experience as
thought, feeling, and spirit, they are as much a part of the natural order of
things as forests or mountains, oceans or rivers. We just have too narrow a
view of what constitutes “natural.”
A fuller exploration and explanation of what I like to call “Earth’s second
ecology” is beyond the scope of this little book, which has a more specific
focus. I refer you to other volumes in my Subtle World series if you are
interested.
The point I wish to make here is that we will understand the nature of
techno-elementals better if we can see them as organisms of mind and energy
who are drawn to us for reasons that would make sense to any living creature
because we have something to offer them that can benefit their lives. In the
process, they become an influence in our lives, sometimes in positive ways
and sometimes in ways that can be dangerous if we fail to appreciate their
nature.
Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, crows are everywhere. For years
now, two crows have nested nearby and show up on my porch almost every
morning. The reason is simple. I like to feed them. I’m not trying to tame
them or turn them into pets; I doubt that I could. They view me with a wary
familiarity, and I know they know they have nothing to fear from me. I have
no motive other than to bring some pleasure into their lives because their
presence also brings me pleasure. They are beautiful birds.
I am hardly a “crow whisperer.” I have no doubt the crows would ignore
me if I didn’t put food out for them. I’m very sure they wouldn’t land on my
porch or, as one crow sometimes does, land on a chair on the porch that’s
next to the kitchen window and peer in to see if I’m around and what I’m
doing, letting me know he’s out there. They would have no reason to interact
so closely to my human world if it didn’t hold something of interest and, even
more, of nourishment for them.
The beings that are techno-elementals are much like my crows. They
enter our human world because it holds something of value to them. They
are doing what organisms do. In so doing, a relationship may be set up that
can benefit all concerned. This is what I wish to explore with you in this
book. This exploration begins with appreciating that we are dealing with
lifeforms, organisms, that deserve the same love and respect that we would
offer to any living creature in our world. For they are part of our world. It’s
just that the world is larger and more wondrous than most people suspect.

FIELD NOTE 3: A Living Universe

I was taking an afternoon walk in my neighborhood. It was one of those
rare days in the American Pacific Northwest when the sky was clear and the
sun was shining, and there were no clouds to obscure its face. It had been a
long and enjoyable walk in the sunshine, but I was ready to get home.
Coming to a corner and seeing my house a block away ahead of me on the
other side of the street, my thoughts were already turning towards the things I
had yet to do that day. I hardly noticed I was passing a lovely row of flowers
that a neighbor had planted between his front lawn and the sidewalk on which
I was walking.
I was about to cross the street when I felt a tap on my right shoulder as if
someone were trying to get my attention. I stopped and looked around and
saw a small being, about four feet in height, appearing in the midst of the row
of flowers. I’m often aware of the subtle energies of nature spirits in the
landscape around me, but rarely does one of these beings appear in such a
distinct, visual manner, looking very much like a small human. As I stood
there, looking at it in mixed surprise and delight, it smiled, reached out and
tapped my arm again with one hand and pointed upward with the other. It
obviously wanted me to look up, so I did.
There, high in the blue sky above me, was a wide ribbon of golden light
running east and west. I had no way of judging its size as there was nothing I
could see with which to compare it. Nor did I have any sense of its height,
though it seemed to me to be several hundred feet up. It was undulating, and,
I realized as I watched it, it was floating down, not exactly like a cloud or a
mist—it was too well-formed for that—but more, I thought, like a huge, long,
golden blanket descending upon the earth.
I stood there trying to understand what I was seeing. As I did so, I caught
a fleeting inner glimpse of a vast and loving shining Presence—a Deva,
perhaps—who was the source of this phenomenon.
I looked back at the nature spirit, but it was gazing up at the sky with
anticipation and joy on its face. I then realized that there was a feeling of
similar anticipation and excitement rippling through the subtle environment
around me.
Looking back up, I was aware that the golden ribbon of light and energy
was closer to the earth now, and I could see that it was going to cover most of
the valley in which I live, including the nearby lake. As it descended, I could
feel the subtle life around me in the neighborhood seem to open and reach up
to receive it. I asked the nature spirit what this was, what was happening.
This was not a being accustomed to communicating with humans and
certainly not by using words. What came was a mélange of images and
impressions, all suffused with joy. As best I could translate it, this golden
ribbon was a downpouring of blessings from a generative Source of Light in
a higher realm of life. I was not sure whether this was a regular occurrence
every day or something special—time was meaningless to the being who was
communicating with me. What was evident, though, was that this energy
represented a form of nourishment.
As the “blanket” of energy descended, it seemed to me to turn into a fine,
golden mist that covered the neighborhood. The small being standing next to
me grew visibly brighter as this happened, before it faded from my view. I
knew from past experiences that these beings would in turn help the plants,
the minerals, and the soil around me absorb the qualities offered by this
blessing of subtle life-force.
I have no idea if what I saw clairvoyantly that afternoon as the golden
blanket of Light and energy is how the nature spirit who alerted me to its
presence saw it. I’m quite sure I didn’t connect to that energy in the way it
did. It was not “food” for me, at least not in the same way. I could have been
watching a farmer spreading out oats and hay for her horses. Yet it certainly
left me with a sense of the love, the joy, and the caring that permeates the
subtle realms of nature.
Though this experience was singular in the visual form it took, it’s theme
was not unusual for me. There is a being that overlights the lake in our
valley. I am often aware of currents of life-force, energy, and blessing
radiating out from her over the surrounding land, bringing nourishment of its
own kind to the various subtle lives—and, I believe, the physical ones as well
—who are part of this environment. Similarly, I’m aware of the Light and
energies radiating from the Deva overlighting Mt. Rainier, some fifty miles
or so to the south. These are only two of many currents of nourishing
energies permeating the subtle environment, originating from a wide variety
of sources.
The subtle ecology is an active, alive place. Within it are certain
discernible—I would even say, universal—activities, which the story I just
related helps to illustrate.
The first of these is what I call Holding. This activity holds the
boundaries and energetic structure of a particular manifestation such as a tree
or a stone, or for that matter, of a sofa or a lamp. Of course, the physical
structure of a plant is determined and maintained by well-known botanical
and biological features, and my sofa’s physical structure is a product of its
manufacture and is held together by principles of physics and chemistry. But
in the subtle worlds, boundaries and structures are more fluid and are
manifestations of intent and energy. In addition, there is a cross-over
between the subtle and physical worlds. It is a well-documented
phenomenon that directed thought can alter the physical structure and
behavior of a plant. Plus the ability to affect the physical body through subtle
means is at the heart of energy healing or healing through prayer and
blessing.
The fact is that healthy subtle energies are active; molding that activity
into coherent, integrated energy fields and forms with functional boundaries
is what the activity of Holding is all about. In my story, the roses by the
sidewalk all had their own subtle intelligence and inner life that held intact
the subtle energetic component of what enabled them to be roses and not, say,
daises or sunflowers.
A second important activity is Generativity. All subtle beings are
generative to one degree or another, but many subtle beings, especially those
we call angels and Devas, generate nourishing and empowering subtle forces
as a distinct and deliberate function. Just as the sun supplies energy to power
our planetary ecology and its life in the physical world, so there are beings in
the subtle worlds who are generative sources supplying subtle energies that
empower life and activity in the non-physical realms.
The golden blanket of energy that I saw apparently descending from the
sky (though in fact it was precipitating out from a higher frequency of Life)
had been generated by the being whom I had glimpsed. I thought it was a
Deva, perhaps the overlighting “Landscape Deva” of the valley in which I
live, but the contact was too brief to be sure. My assumption was based on
the fact that this is what many Devas do, using their generative powers to
“feed” other forms of subtle life.
It may well have been, though, that the true source of the energy I
witnessed was on a plane of being higher than I could perceive and that the
being I saw was not generating it as much as circulating it, making what had
been generated more widely available. This would highlight the third
activity, that of Circulation. In effect, this means taking energy from one
being and passing it on to another.
I can draw a clearer example of this from my backyard. My maple tree
has its own spirit, an Intelligence that holds its energetic identity and
integrity. However, I can at times discern around the tree small, shining
beings that I think of as nature spirits. They are actively receiving nourishing
subtle energies from various sources and translating those energies into a
form that can be absorbed by the energy field of the maple tree. In effect,
they are circulating life energies that support the tree energetically in its
holding.
This is what the small nature spirit that alerted me to the downpouring of
subtle energies was doing. It was receiving what had been given and was
passing it on in a form the environment around it could receive and absorb.
In this sense, such beings might also be understood as “agents of absorption,”
enabling a subtle organism busy with holding the energy field of its
manifestation to receive and take in subtle energies it might not otherwise be
able to assimilate. A biological equivalent could be those bacteria that take
free nitrogen and “fix” it chemically in the soil in a form that a plant’s roots
can take in and make use of.
The subtle environment as I experience it manifests synergy. It is filled
with beings of different kinds and functions, forming connections, engaging
with each other, circulating life-stimulating subtle energies between them,
and creating in their collaborations a wholeness that is greater than just the
sum of its parts.
In so doing, subtle beings are continually forming and supporting
relationships, and relationship is foundational to the creative process. No
being is meant to exist in isolation; we are all part of ever-expanding
networks of participation, relationship, and energy-exchange. Just as our
brains grow in “thinking-power” as our neurons form more and more
connections and the web of neural interrelationships grows denser, so does
creation grow in “creativity-power” and “life-power”—in the capacity to
reveal and express the Sacred—as the web of life and energy relationships
grows. There is good reason for the diversity of life and expression at all
levels of creation.
The care and feeding of subtle beings is all about generating and sharing
a multiplicity of “energies” and qualities through the connections they form.
If new sources of information, learning, and energy become available, there
will be beings who seek them out, just as in our world organisms will seek
out and colonize new environments that open up to them.
It’s important to appreciate that in this process, a healthy subtle organism
will not engage in predation or harm another. Unless the subtle organism is
sick and a pathology is involved—which can occur—subtle organisms don’t
“feed” on the life force of another in a parasitic manner. Rather, the exchange
is a form of gifting. If I have Light to give, it benefits me as much as you if
you are a willing recipient. Shakespeare’s Juliet was correct when she said of
love, “the more I give to thee, the more I have.” On the whole, subtle beings
live to offer their radiance freely to the universe and rejoice when another is
benefitted by receiving what they can give. It’s really no different in essence
from a teacher feeling joyful and empowered by being able to share her
knowledge and wisdom with her students.
People who are trained in and have experience with energy healing will
be familiar with the fact that subtle energies can take different forms. There
is a wide spectrum of phenomena embraced by the umbrella term “subtle
energy.” As a consequence, the subtle energy ecosystem is complex. This is
one reason I resort to biological metaphors and descriptors; in my experience,
they come the closest to conveying, however imprecisely, both the
naturalness and the richness of life in the subtle worlds, as well as the fact
that many of the principles that govern biological life in the physical
dimension also govern “energy-based” or “spirit-based” life in the non-
physical realms.
It’s beyond the scope of this book to explore the different forms subtle
energies can take. The important point for us in our exploration here is that
subtle beings both seek sources of nourishment and nourish each other. They
are all participants in and co-creators of a living universe.

FIELD NOTE 4: A LEARNING UNIVERSE

Through my life, I’ve observed there is a common fallacy that subtle
beings are omniscient. There is an assumption that they all dwell on a
“higher plane” of life where all knowledge is revealed and time and space
have no mysteries. It’s a reason people over the millennia have turned to the
subtle worlds for guidance, advice, prophecy, and the revelation of hidden
wisdom. I have known many individuals who would not make a move in
their lives without consulting some subtle world guide. In the relationship of
incarnate human beings to the denizens of the subtle realms, we are the
learners and they are the experts.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
In this universe, we are all learners, from the vastest cosmic entity to the
simplest elemental. It is a learning universe.
This is not to say that wisdom, insight, good advice, useful information,
and profound perceptions cannot be found in the subtle worlds. They can.
But there are equally wisdom, insight, and knowledge here in the physical
realm as well. We are all experts in something, human beings no less than
any other lifeform, and we all have much to learn and capacities to develop.
No being on any level has a monopoly on wisdom and knowledge, or, for that
matter, on good sense. Any being on any level can make a mistake; doing so
can be an important part of a learning process.
A common characteristic I’ve experienced in nearly all the subtle beings I
have encountered has been curiosity. Sometimes, if the being is non-human
such as a nature spirit, this curiosity can be directed towards me; it wants to
understand what makes a human tick. If the subtle being is a non-physical
human, as most of my inner contacts are, then the curiosity is directed
outwards towards the wondrousness of the spectrum of life throughout the
universe. This spirit of inquiry arises from a desire to learn and gain
information so that a consciousness can both deepen in awareness and expand
in capacity, perhaps allowing new potentials to emerge. Because of this, I
have observed that curiosity and desire to learn are prime motivations in life
in the subtle ecosystem and especially in the formation of techno-elementals.
Within creation, life seeks out discoveries that will lead to the expansion
of consciousness and beingness. Fostering learning is practically built into
the functioning of the subtle realms. The paradigm is “each one teach one.”
Those who are more advanced, more knowledgeable, more experienced help
those who are less developed. Those who have learned something new pass
on their insight to those who have yet to come to it.
This arrangement is not hierarchical, though that is how we in our world
often conceptualize it, with wisdom and knowledge passing down from the
highest levels of spirit. As upright beings, we often project our vertical bias
onto creation, seeing “up” as “good” and “down” as less so. But the subtle
worlds are not like that. They operate “spherically” rather than vertically or
horizontally. Every being, no matter where located on the spectrum of life or
what the state of its development, has something unique and important to
offer and can, in effect, be a teacher given the proper circumstances.
This is not so strange when we think about it. Though adults regularly
teach children and pass on our knowledge and wisdom to those younger,
there are always those times when our children can have insights we have
missed (or forgotten) and can teach us something. Wisdom is not a
monopoly of the eldest, as any parent who open-mindedly pays attention to
her or his children can attest.
If I mention “learning,” chances are many people will immediately think
of “school” and the passing on of information. But learning takes many
forms. My oldest son is kinesthetically-oriented; he learns best through
observation and participation rather than through information gleaned from a
book or a lecture. For instance, he learned to drive not in a classroom but
almost entirely by observing people driving and then doing it himself. I
could say that he gains information through his body as well as through his
mind, or even more so.
In the subtle worlds, beings often teach and learn not through instruction
but through a sharing of energy and beingness, a blending of their fields of
consciousness. It would be as if, on the physical plane, I learned dance steps
by having a dancer actually move my arms and legs in the proper steps so
that I had a felt sense of the muscle movements involved. More explicitly, if
I want to teach a subtle being about love, I do so not by intellectually
discussing love but by actually being loving, holding love in my energy field
and using it to embrace that being. There is a sharing of an experience.
In the subtle realms, teaching is most often through being.
In our world, I feed my mind through learning, but I feed my body
through eating. As much as I might want to live to study, I still have to
nourish my body. Likewise, all the eating in the world isn’t going to teach
me much, except, perhaps, what causes me indigestion! But in the subtle
worlds, the distinction between learning and eating isn’t so direct and stark;
learning can be a form of nourishment.
The bodies of subtle beings, as you might expect, are wholly different
from our own. They are bodies of energy, though, like the word “frequency,”
this word hardly conveys the nature of the subtle substances of which these
bodies are composed. It might be more accurate to think of them as bodies
made up from living qualities, such as “mind-stuff” or “love-stuff.” To my
perception, they are often more like fields, akin perhaps to a magnetic field,
than the concrete forms and shapes bodies take in the physical world.
Though they may appear formless and fluid to me, sometimes little more than
a swirling cloud of Light, on their native frequencies, these energy bodies are
as tangible to them as our bodies are to us.
As I suggested in my story of the golden energy “blanket” I saw
precipitating out from a higher realm, subtle beings exchange energy with
their environment and possess a metabolism to process the energies they take
in to nourish and sustain themselves. This nourishment can take two forms.
It can renew and energize the substance of their unique energy field, in which
case it acts analogously to food in our world. Or it can heighten, deepen, or
in some way change the texture and quality of the energy in their field,
expanding and evolving their capacities to be and to unfold. I think of this as
a process of learning.
None of this precludes the intellectual taking in of information in a way
that we would recognize as learning. But many subtle beings, while
intelligent, do not have intellects or even minds as we understand them. They
operate at a level of “body intelligence” or “energy intelligence” that is free
from concepts but rich in direct experience. New knowledge is absorbed as
an act of absorption, assimilation, and integration. You become what you
learn, rather than just thinking about it or remembering it as information. In a
living, learning universe, learning is a form of energy exchange that can be as
nourishing and as sought after as food is for us. Understanding this will help
us understand some of the characteristics of the techno-elementals.

FIELD NOTE 5: The Eight Functions

I’ve met many different types of subtle beings in the course of my work
and explorations. While they can differ widely in terms of energy,
consciousness, purpose, and so forth, as far as I can determine, they all have
eight characteristics or functions in common. Understanding these functions
gives us a way of understanding the nature of the techno-elementals. These
eight are Identity, Organization, Exchange, Metabolism, Generativity,
Connection, Holopoiesis, and Emergence.

Every subtle being whom I have encountered has an Identity. More

often than not, unless I am dealing with a human being in spirit form, this
may not be anything like what we think of as “personality.” It can be
extremely simple, nothing more than a point of focus barely distinguishable
from the sacredness that is the primal identity within all things, or it can be
vastly more complex and intricate than anything you or I can manifest. Put
broadly, Identity is, borrowing a term from chaos and systems theories, an
“attractor” that gives coherency to the energies that constitute the subtle
organism.
This identity, in my experience, does not express itself through a name.
Most subtle beings I have met do not have or use names in the way we do.
Instead, the distinguishing and identifying “signature” or vibration of a subtle
being—who and what it is—often relates to its function, to its role in a larger,
spiritual ecosystem. Or, and this is true of more advanced and complex
entities, it is like a melody embedded within a symphony, the theme upon
which the music plays countless variations and arrangements. Mystically, it
is the Light of their being, the radiance they generate and offer to the rest of
creation.
For instance, when my first mentor and partner appeared to me, I knew
who he was from the totality of the vibrations emanating from him. This
“signature vibration” was his name, but it was nothing I could reproduce in
language. For convenience sake, I called him “John,” but this was a name of
my choosing, a useful designator for something wholly beyond my ability to
put into words.
In my experience, I have never met a subtle being that did not have a
unique identity. It might be intimately part of a collective consciousness or
energy field, as are certain nature spirits and most “elementals,” but in its
expression, it takes on uniqueness. One reason for this is that no being acts in
a vacuum apart from the rest of Creation. All beings are functioning within
an environment of some nature (even if it is far beyond anything we can
perceive, experience, or imagine) and in relationship to other beings and
conditions. These connections and relationships are each unique, however
temporary they may be, and the interacting being is shaped to some extent by
this uniqueness.
Here’s an example. There is a species of angels whose function is to
overlight and assist human beings. Viewed from one perspective, these
angels are like clones of each other, born of Light, embodying and expressing
Light. But when such an angel interacts with a human being, particularly if it
does so over an extended period of time as a “Guardian Angel,” its energy
field configures to that of the human, or humans, with whom it is aligning.
Its identity is distinguishable by the nature of this relationship from that of a
similar angel overlighting someone else. I think of it this way: all the angels
of this type (again, borrowing from my biological training and my ecological
perspective, I think of them as a “species,”) are the same melody, but each
angel represents a different arrangement, composed in response to the human
or humans in its charge.
The second characteristic is Organization. This means that each subtle
being possesses a coherent field of energy or spiritual substance that is
organized to express its identity and its purposes within an environment. In
other words, it has a “body.” Because subtle beings are not constrained by
material laws and necessities, such bodies may not look or behave like
anything with which we are familiar in the physical world, but they are still
there. Maintaining this body or energy field is an act of Holding, as I
discussed in Field Note #3.
The third characteristic is Exchange. All subtle beings exchange energy
with their environment, just as living physical beings do. However, unlike
organic life, this may or may not be in order to take in nourishment. Some
subtle beings are sustained and nourished by various life-forces circulating
through the subtle worlds but others are part of enabling this circulation. For
instance, I have encountered Devic beings who receive life-giving energies
from higher spiritual realms, energies manifesting at too high a frequency for
those on a lower dimension to perceive or receive. These beings take in these
energies, process and step them down in their own beings and retransmit
them in a form that those whom they are overlighting can assimilate. A
metaphor might be a refinery that takes raw petroleum and refines it into a
form of gasoline your car’s engine can use.
The function of Exchange relates directly to the activity of Circulation I
discussed earlier.
This ability to exchange energies is a function of the identity and
organization of the being as a subtle organism. It also means that the subtle
being has a way of processing the energy it exchanges with the environment.
In effect, it has Metabolism, a process that provides homeostasis, the
maintenance of the internal coherency, balance, and harmony of its personal
field. This is as important to a subtle being as it is to a physical organism.
Subtle organisms, as I discussed earlier, possess Generativity. This
means they generate and radiate subtle energies of various kinds. This
generativity may be a function of the organism’s metabolism or a natural
outcome of its identity, but in many cases, it is a product of intent and
deliberation. As I wrote in a previous Field Note, there are beings,
particularly in the angelic and Devic lines of development and expression,
whose function is to generate spiritual and subtle energies that bless, nourish,
empower, and enlighten.
A sixth characteristic is the ability to form Connections. No subtle being
exists wholly on its own. It needs to be able to participate in its environment,
if only to express its purpose in being. It needs to form connections and
relationships with the world around it.
Holopoiesis or the impulse to create wholeness is the seventh
characteristic, one that arises naturally out of the formation of connections
and relationships. I’ve already shared that, according to Dr. Lee Irwin,
sentiency may be defined as the impulse to form relationship, but I would
carry this one step further. Within creation is an impulse, a desire, to express
the wholeness that is innate in the Sacred, the Generative Mystery that is the
source of all that is. This impulse manifests as the sentiency that all life
possesses, however simple that life may be. Relationships are the means, but
wholeness is the goal. One characteristic, then, of the sentiency that all subtle
beings—indeed all living energies in all of their forms--possess is the impulse
to form and participate in wholes and thus to manifest wholeness.
As a mystic, I would call this impulse Love. Love gathers and holds
creation together and acts to form relationships that can further the expression
of that Love. To me, sentiency and life are about giving expression to the
Love that is at the core of all things, and all subtle beings innately possess
this impulse.
This does not mean that all subtle beings are automatically loving and
benign. In some, this impulse has become distorted and obscured, leading to
the pathology of evil. But even evil entities attempt to create wholeness; they
just do so in limited, selfish, and ultimately broken ways that disrupt the
larger wholeness of creation.
It also does not mean that the expression of holopoiesis and love
necessarily takes a form that we incarnate humans would understand or
experience as the emotion of affection and attraction we usually call love. I
have encountered subtle beings who are without question loving but who are
dauntingly impersonal.
 Finally, the last characteristic of all the subtle beings I have met is what I
call Emergence. I’d like another word for what I experience here, but this is
the best I’ve come up with. In a physical organism, I would call this
“change” and “growth,” the capacity of life to learn, adapt, and evolve. The
challenge is that subtle beings don’t inhabit time and space in the way we do.
The concept of evolution or change over time doesn’t always fit or is an
imprecise way of naming what is happening; on the other hand, in my
experience, the nature of every being is to grow in the capacity to be itself
and to fulfill the potential of sacredness that is the seed of life within all of us.
These eight characteristics or functions are present in one form or another
in every subtle being I’ve met, no matter how simple or how advanced it may
be. They can combine in different ways; not every subtle organism
demonstrates each of these functions equally or in the same manner. But all
eight are there in some form, even when it is difficult for us to see or
comprehend them.
Our experience in the physical world gives us expectations for what
constitutes life, form, substance, intelligence, bodies, consciousness, and so
forth. The criteria we’ve developed serve us reasonably well in categorizing
and understanding our environment. But they are inadequate once we step
into the broader universe that constitutes the rest of the spectrum of life. We
need to develop new ways of evaluating and describing what we are
encountering in the subtle dimensions, especially as the subtle environments
themselves change, sometimes drastically, when we move from one
frequency or dimension of consciousness and life to another.
Over the years, acknowledging and looking for these eight functions has
served me well. They represent a conceptual tool that has been helpful in
gaining at least a beginning understanding of the subtle beings whom I have
met or with whom I have engaged. Hopefully, they will help us here in
exploring and understanding the nature of the techno-elementals.

FIELD NOTE 6: Artisanal Forces

One of my most moving memories was from the summer of 1969 when I
had occasion to visit Rome. One of my stops as a tourist was the Vatican
where, like thousands of other visitors, I was awed by Michelangelo’s
paintings on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But what truly struck me,
moving me to tears with its beauty, was his famous sculpture of Mary
holding the body of Jesus, the Pietà. It was so radiantly alive, I could hardly
believe it was a piece of marble.
Michelangelo had a profound approach to his work and art as a sculptor.
He saw himself less as creating something than as liberating something. Here
are some quotes of his that illustrate this sentiment:
The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest
artist has. Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the
sculptor to discover it. The sculptor’s hand can only break the spell to free
the figures slumbering in the stone. I saw the angel in the marble and carved
until I set him free.
If we change the words “marble” and “stone” to “life,” these statements
apply wonderfully well to a process of unfolding potentials—“the figures
slumbering in the stone”—from the pure Potency of Being that is the Sacred
by subtle beings who dedicate themselves to such an endeavor.
I learned long ago that whatever the Generative Mystery at the heart and
core of creation may be, it is not definable in words nor compressible into a
single image. However, one way I experience it is as pure Potency, that is, as
a Presence of unconditional, universal Potential that exerts a pressure to
become manifest.
Like the “marble not yet carved” that can “hold the form of every
thought,” this Potency holds the possibility, the potential, of everything—
every atom, every molecule, every star, every planet, every blade of grass or
wave or mountain, every plant, every animal, every person—that could or has
or will ever exist. Whatever it is, it needs to be discovered. It needs to be
freed from “slumbering in the stone.”
Setting this Potency free into manifestation and expression is the work of
every life in creation. In effect, God is the artisan seeking to unfold Its
infinite potentials, but we—every spark of consciousness and life in creation
—are the means by which it does so. We are the embodiment of this will-to-
discover-and-to-become. We are each in our own way a formative force,
drawing on this Potency within us to reveal its hidden Nature.
However, there are beings whose function is to work directly and
deliberately with the will-to-be of the Sacred and draw forth potentials by
crafting means of expression. I think of them as the artisans and architects of
creation. They create the “blueprints” or “archetypal models” out of energies
of thought and spirit which then eventually become clothed in matter and
form to manifest in the physical realm. Thus, there is an archetypal
“blueprint” for “tree,” which informs the appearance of all trees of all kinds
in the world.
I think of them as formative or artisanal forces. Who or what are these
beings?
Theoretically, any being, any form of consciousness and life, could be an
artisanal force, just as any person could potentially be an artist. But in fact,
not everyone is an artist or has the talent and skill—or desire—to be a
sculptor or painter, for example, much less one operating at the creative level
of Michelangelo. Similarly, not all beings are able to tap directly into the
Potency at the heart of life and bring forth new forms and patterns through
which Its potential may be “set free.”
When I use the term “artisanal force,” I am usually thinking of those vast
planetary angels and Devas (Sanskrit for “Shining One”) who are the pattern-
holders and overlighting intelligences for all those manifestations and
functions we think of collectively as “Nature.” They are, one could say,
angels of form and structure.
These artisanal, formative forces might be thought of as “agents of
imagination” or, to borrow Disney’s wonderful descriptor, “Imagineers.” In
this, they are like any creative intelligence, using imagination to plunge into
the heart of Potency and draw out something that will allow that Potential to
take form and have expression in the world. In effect, such beings as Devas
and angels are miners of life’s potentials and conduits for their manifestation
in the world.
The nature and function of artisanal forces is beyond the scope of this
book. I bring them up because they form part of the ecosystem that defines
the beings I’m calling “techno-elementals,” which are the subject of this
book.
It is one thing to imagine something; it’s something else again to actually
give it form. If all we have are architects, we’d never have any buildings.
Other crafts, other professions, are needed to turn the ideas and possibilities
in the blueprints into actual physical structures. And we also need the raw
materials, the wood, stone, plaster, clay, and so on, without which no amount
of artistry or craft will produce anything. I can’t build a log cabin if there are
no logs—or trees!
We humans tend to think in straight lines, establishing hierarchical chains
of command and implementation. Thus, it’s not uncommon to think of a line
of creative force running from the Sacred (the inspiring Heart of Potency)
through the Devic and angelic artisanal forces (architects and “Imagineers”)
through the diverse realms of Nature Spirits (the builders and maintenance
people) to the raw materials (the “Elementals”), those that ultimately Hold
the pattern and energy field in substance, structure, and form. Remember that
everything is alive, so the bricks and mortar that go into the structure of a
building are as much an expression of creative life as the architects that
imagined the form of the building and drew up the blueprints.
My oldest daughter, Kaitlin, is the lead animator for a video game
company. She performs or oversees a number of tasks necessary to give
visual expression to the narrative ideas of the game designers, but one she has
been concentrating on lately is motion capture or “mo-cap.” A modern video
game is often a complex production in which key elements of the story are
presented to the player in “cut scenes,” or small movies. To create them,
actors play out the scene from the game while wearing suits that enable their
every movement to be wirelessly transmitted into a computer where it is
rendered into a three-dimensional representation or picture. This
representation is then “skinned” or given the outer appearance needed by the
story of the game by the animators. Thus, the actors may be turned into elves
confronting orcs or a human space explorer meeting aliens. A familiar
example of this process is the way the actor Andy Serkis is transformed on
the screen into Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies and
Supreme Leader Snoke in Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
Here is a process by which an idea existing purely in the imagination of a
writer and game designer is translated into physical, three-dimensional action
by actors which is then further translated into digital images in a computer
screen with which a player can interact. There is a transition of energy and
intent through three different realms of existence, and there are a variety of
individuals, functions, and processes making this transition possible:
designers, writers, actors, directors, programmers, artists, and animators, to
name some. There is an ecosystem of creative manifestation and artisanal
energy interacting and collaborating to “free the image from the stone.”
The same is true in the cosmos as divine ideas are translated into different
realms of expression and energy.
It’s tempting to see this as a one-way, hierarchical process, from idea to
execution and expression, and from one perspective it is. But in my
experience in contacting a variety of these beings over the years, it gives an
incomplete and thus distorted picture of what is happening. We need to
perceive holistically and ecologically and to think of the whole system, not
just parts of it.
In this case, it’s helpful to think of a “formative process” or a “formative
system,” one in which “artisans,” “builders,” and “raw materials” are all
partners and equally integral to the whole system. We separate them out for
convenience and because it’s true that certain beings specialize in certain
capacities and functions, but they all participate in a single enterprise whose
object is to give expression to the potentials held “sleeping” within the
Presence of the Sacred.
Actually, it’s not such a stretch to think systemically. I’ve had friends
who are architects, and before they begin to draft a final blueprint of a
building, they are informed by the nature of the materials with which they
will be working. Things are possible with steel that may not be possible with
wood or brick, and vice versa. They have to know the capacities of the
structural components from which the building is assembled. Not
incorporating that information—that attunement to the physical materials
involved—means their imagination cannot be grounded in physical reality or
worse, that what they build collapses because materials were used in the
wrong way.
It works the other way as well. Whatever potentials lie in stone, clay,
wood, and other materials that could be expressed in novel ways will remain
undiscovered without the energy of imagination and intention held by the
architects and builders. Without the sculptor, the angel remains imprisoned
and unseen within the marble. The marble doesn’t become what it could
become.
There is something else we need to understand about the artisanal,
formative forces. In our world, we often associate creativity with
imagination and thought; that is, it is a mental exercise, though fueled by
passion and artistic sensitivity.
In the subtle worlds, however, particularly in those spiritual realms where
the planetary Devas and angels function, it is Life that draws out Life. It is
not so much thought as we understand it, though certainly intelligence and
skill are involved, but rather Love and Joy as sacred, creative qualities that
are the “mining instruments.” We might think of an artisanal presence like a
Deva willing some new form into being, but it is more as if it is evoking it
through the focused power of its own life, its own joy, its own love.
Intention is certainly there, but it is not intention or will acting on its own,
exerting a dominance over the substances of creation. It is more like a
reaching into the Sacred Potency to call forth the intent to be that is potential
within the form that is being drawn forth. As I say, life calls to life, inviting
it to take up or take on a new form, a new way of being, a new way of
expressing the infinite potential within the Sacred. It is a collaboration.
Certainly, this is true in my daughter’s work. The actors give feedback to
Kaitlin as a director that helps improve the script. Playtesters, ordinary
people brought into the studio at different stages in the creative process to try
out the game provide information on what is working and what isn’t. It’s not
a one-way flow from producer to consumer.
And just as a human creator, such as an artist or an architect, can feel an
aliveness, a joy, a surge of energy in the act of creating and seeing what has
come forth, so the artisanal force generates energy and a heightening of life
and beingness.
There have been times in my interactions with the subtle worlds when
I’ve been invited to merge with the life and consciousness of a Devic being
acting as an artisanal force. I have no illusions that what I experienced was
anything near the whole of that Deva’s presence and activity, only as much of
it as I could perceive, hold and assimilate. I have a sense of being protected
during such engagements lest I become overwhelmed and harmed by the
intensity of what was happening. But I could see enough, experience enough,
to know that a fierce and radiant love and joy and an almost unbearable
exuberance and ecstasy of life lay at the heart of a being like this and what it
does to bring new forms, new possibilities, new ideas into the world. I think
of these beings as the lovers of God; more than just artisans, they open the
gates of life by being in love with life and with the Sacred Presence that is its
source. They are the Beloveds of the Potency at the heart of all things.

FIELD NOTE 7: Elementals

In the Western esoteric and alchemical traditions, the world was thought
to be formed from four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Each of
these elements not only had physical characteristics but spiritual and esoteric
qualities as well. Embodying these qualities were beings called “elementals.”
Thus, there were elementals of fire, elementals of water, and so on.
 Elements and the elementals were considered the living building blocks
out of which the world was formed. In modern times, we have other ways of
describing the building blocks of the universe. We talk about atoms, sub-
atomic particles, and quantum level phenomena. Gravity, electromagnetism,
and the strong and weak nuclear forces are the four fundamental forces that
we now know. The elementals of our ancestors are just a fantasy, relegated
to myth and superstition.
But are they?
Science has given us much valuable information about the structure of
the physical universe and how it works. What it hasn’t done yet is give us the
same insights about the non-physical or subtle side of the world and the
cosmos. While elementals may play no role in the theories of modern
physics, they play a key role in the life of the subtle realms. Existing as part
of the subtle environment that surrounds us, they are an integral part of the
creative process by which things come into being. They are often among the
most powerful of all subtle beings.
In my first Field Note, I described a process of attuning to different
frequencies of life within my sofa. I’m going to use a similar process to
explore the nature of elementals. In this case, I’m going to begin with a small
stone that I have sitting on my desk. There’s nothing overtly special about it
as stones go. It’s just an ordinary garden-variety stone that, in fact, I picked
up from my garden.
There is a story behind it, though. Several years ago, I took a trip to visit
Findhorn, the international spiritual community where, in the early Seventies,
I had been a co-director. I decided I wanted to take a stone with me that
would be an energetic link to my home. I looked around my yard for a stone
small enough to carry easily in my pocket and found several candidates.
I asked each stone I picked up if it would like to come with me. It was
the energetically proper thing to do, an act of respect and courtesy to the life
within the stone. Each time I did so, the response was no. Whatever the
energy linkages were that the particular stone had with the local subtle (and
physical) environment, it didn’t want them broken. I had about given up
when I spied this particular small, roundish stone lying near the path leading
up to our front door. Something about it caught my attention, and when I
picked it up and explained what I wanted, it responded with a burst of energy
that I took to be an enthusiastic yes.
For accuracy’s sake, I must say that although the focal point of this
“communication” or energetic impulse that said “no” or “yes” was the
particular stone involved—and it certainly seemed to me I was in touch with
a specific entity or intelligence—it could also have been the “voice” of the
local environment making itself known, a resistance or a willingness within
the whole web of energetic relationships to be changed by my actions. For
convenience sake, I write of experiences like this as if I were having a
conversation with a person, but of course, in instances like this, this isn’t
true. There are clear and meaningful energy exchanges which carry
information, but in many cases, precisely what is “speaking” to me isn’t that
clear and certainly not that anthromorphic.
Whatever the source of the “yes,” this little stone became a constant
companion with me. When I stopped traveling, I “retired” it to my desk
where it has seemed content to be.
As a consequence of the relationship between us, there is an energetic
field around this stone that resonates to me. At this level, the living energy of
the stone is impressed and shaped by my own energy. I have no doubt that a
person capable of psychometry, the ability to psychically read the energy
fields around physical objects, would pick up on the connection this stone has
with me and would be able to glean some information from it about me.
Had I put the stone back in my yard when I was done with it, this
relational level would over time have returned to the state it had been in when
I first picked it up. At that time, the energy field around it was impressed,
shaped and defined by the energies of the soil, the plants, the weather, and so
forth that made up its subtle and physical environment. Eventually, the traces
of its connection to me would likely disappear, though this would depend on
how deeply and deliberately I had impressed my energy on the stone in the
first place. A friend of mine who has worked as a psychometrist on
archeological expeditions in South America and the Middle East has been
able to read information energetically impressed upon pottery shards and
other materials left by individuals who died thousands of years ago. In the
subtle realms, time doesn’t always count for much.
Beyond this relational field, I come to the identity of the stone itself, its
“self” or beingness as a stone. It’s at this level that I come into contact with
what I think of as an elemental energy. It’s the elemental or foundational
identity of this particular stone, a living, intelligent force that’s holding it in
existence as a stone, shaping its molecules and atoms to be a stone and not
something else.
 I think of this frequency of energy, life and consciousness as the spirit of
my stone, it’s unique identity. There is, however, a deeper level. Here I am
in touch not with a stone but with Stone, the Intelligence and Life of stone
itself, present wherever stone or minerals are found on earth and perhaps in
the universe itself.
This is what I think of as a planetary or even a cosmic Elemental, one of
the fundamental artisans of the world, bringing into form creative ideas born
at the beginning of creation.
What is both wondrous and paradoxical is that both the elemental spirit of
my stone and the cosmic Elemental of Stone are essentially the same
presence, the same life. The particular is an expression of the universal and
the universal is found in the life and specificity of the particular.
A close friend of mine is Dorothy Maclean, one of the three founders of
the Findhorn Foundation community in Northern Scotland. Her contact with
the Devas was what initially led to the creation of Findhorn’s world-famous
garden. She told me of an experience she had had in which she had been
attracted to a pebble she saw on a beach. She thought she’d tune into it,
expecting to contact a simple, even primitive form of life and consciousness.
After all, what else would one expect from a pebble?
To her amazement, she found herself in contact with a vast, cosmic
Intelligence, one whose presence seemed to extend endlessly out into the
universe. These were its beginning words to her:
Yes, I whom you have contacted am concerned with vastly more than
your planet, for I contain or am connected with mineral life which exists in
various stages throughout creation. Nature is full of paradox, in that, as you
seek contact with what you consider a lower form of life, you in fact
contact a more universal being. The human mind codifies and formulates,
which is within its right and purpose, but forgets that all is one, that God is
in all, and that the basic substance of life, which seems most devoid of
sensitive consciousness, is held in its state of existence by its opposite, a
vast consciousness, too vast for you to do more than sense its fringes and
know that I extend beyond your imagination as yet.
She called this Being the “Cosmic Angel of Stone.” If you are interested,
you can read the full account of her experience and the entire message this
Being had to offer in her book To Hear the Angels Sing.
I want to give another example.
 In my backyard, I have a maple tree. This tree has been an integral part
of our family’s life ever since we moved into our house over thirty years
ago. Its leaves have shaded our back porch from the summer sun when it
was hot. Its trunk and branches supported a tree house in which our kids
played for years, and one large branch held a swing.
When I attune to this maple tree, I’m aware of an intelligence and a
spirit. Unlike my little stone, it is an active, self-aware, and generative
presence, though not in the same way that I am as a human. When I attune to
it, I feel myself in the presence of a being who can form a relationship with
me but whose life and consciousness is independent and cannot be shaped by
me. There is an individual spirit here that is actively engaged with its subtle
and physical environment in ways that don’t involve me. Indeed, as with any
loving relationship, it can influence me energetically as much as I influence
it.
If I turn my attention and attunement to a frequency that is more
“fundamental” or “deeper” than that at which I encounter its individual spirit,
I discover what I would call the “elemental spirit of the maple tree.” At this
level, my individual tree is part of a larger collective field of being in which
all maple trees anywhere in the world participate. This is like saying that all
human beings share the same human genome even though it expresses
uniquely in each of us.
Going deeper, though, I encounter a level of energy and identity that is
even more fundamental than that of “maple tree.” This is the identity of
being a tree, an elemental archetype shared by all trees everywhere.
But it doesn’t end there, for the expression of “tree-ness” is itself a
manifestation of a more elemental identity, that of being a plant. Here I
mentally touch the Elemental of Plant, also one of the fundamental spiritual
and energetic artisans of our world.
What exactly am I touching into here? In effect, I’m moving through
layers of identity from the particular to the universal, from a state that is more
focused to one that is vast and complex. It is at one and the same time the
same Being and yet, as it differentiates itself into an infinite number of
specific manifestations, it becomes many specific beings. In effect, there
seems to me to be the foundational “Elementals of Substance” and the
particularized “Elementals of Manifestation and Form.”
In both cases, the one characteristic that stands out, at least to my
perception and awareness, is a dedication to the function of Identity (one of
the eight I described in Field Note #5). This function of Identity manifests
the quality I call “Holding,” that which provides stability and preserves or
holds a particular structure.
This, to me, defines the nature of the form and function of Elementals.
They are the Holders. They maintain the essential nature and identity of
something so that around that core, multiple variations and manifestations
can take place. Using a musical metaphor, we might think of Elementals as
providing the basic rhythm on which a melody and all its arrangements can
be based.
One of my subtle colleagues once said to me, “Think of elementals as the
finger that holds down the knot so that the bow of a specific creation might
be formed and tied.”

FIELD NOTE 8: Nature Spirits

I live in a valley surrounded on three sides by foothills of the Cascade
Mountain Range in western Washington State.
Running through most of the length of this valley is a long lake, Lake
Sammamish, which is about a five-minute walk from my house. If I turn my
attention to it, I can sense the subtle energy of this lake as I go about my
business at home. If I walk down to the lake, though, I can attune to the
elementals of water that are there. Their focus is purely on “being water.”
As with my little stone, if I go to a deeper frequency of these elementals, I
discover a single Presence, a planetary Elemental of water.
However, this is not the only Presence I can contact in the lake. There is
another who appears to me as a feminine being, though not a human one.
She is energetically very powerful, her field of awareness and life embracing
and exchanging subtle energies with the nearby hills and mountains,
including all the humans that live along her shoreline. She is the Deva or
angel of the lake and as such, she is deeply attuned to water and its qualities.
I think of her as the Lady of the Lake.
What she is not is an elemental of water. She is what I would call a
“nature spirit,” not an elemental. The configuration of her energy field, its
“tone” and “composition” is different from that of the elemental beings.
Looking back at our eight functions, if elementals basically support the
function of Identity, nature spirits are those who facilitate the functions of
connection and energy exchange between individual beings and their
environments. They are those who enable the process of circulation and
absorption. Metaphorically, elementals are “solids” while nature spirits are
“fluids,” an oversimplification based on physical imagery but perhaps helpful
in showing the distinction between them.
The difference between an elemental and a nature spirit lies largely in
function and on which of the eight functions of subtle life is emphasized
more than the others. In my experience, nature spirits deal largely with the
circulation and exchange of subtle energies between the organisms they are
overlighting and the subtle environment in which those organisms exist, as
well as assisting as best they can the health and evolution of those
organisms. If elementals serve a will-to-be, the nature spirits serve a will-to-
unfold-and-develop.
Is an elemental more powerful than a nature spirit, or vice versa? No.
They cannot be compared in that way. The artisanal forces conceive the
shape of the bow, the nature spirits provide, fold and shape the ribbons, and
the elementals hold the knot that keeps the bow from disintegrating. All are
necessary to the bow, none more powerful or needed than the other. Each
has its role.
Think for a moment of writing. I have thoughts I want to put into words.
The alphabet provides the elemental forms necessary for me to do this. The
letters are the elementals from which words are formed. Language, in this
case English, sets up the rules and interactions—the grammar and syntax—
for connecting these words, establishing relationships between them that
allow meaning to emerge; this is comparable to the nature spirits. The
imagination and thinking that determines the thoughts to which the letters,
words, and grammar will give form, releasing from them from the potentials
of my mind, are the artisanal forces. Together, the system they all form is the
Artisanal Force that produces the content on this page. They are all equally
important to convey my thoughts to you.
Terms like “nature spirits” and “elementals,” like many words referring
to subtle phenomena, are not always used with accuracy or precision in our
culture (assuming they are used at all!). We do not as a culture have the
familiarity, the experience, or the concepts to deal with what for so many is
simply fantasy or superstition, or even if real, something to be left alone
while we get on with “real life.”
Even if we did give these phenomena the attention that they deserve, the
plasticity and fluidity of the subtle worlds means it is not always easy to
discern the energetic boundaries and differences between one species or class
of subtle organism and another. I’ve been aware of subtle beings of one kind
or another for over seventy years, and I still can find it challenging to know
what I’m encountering. Often, it may not matter. Here’s an experience that
illustrates this:
I had gone into the kitchen to get a drink of water. I filled a glass with
water from the tap, and as I was lifting it up to drink, there suddenly appeared
in the water in the glass a small being that identified itself as a water spirit. It
spoke with great urgency and passion and said, in effect, “When you use
water, please send loving, healing, and uplifting energy to water everywhere
and to the kingdom of the water spirits. Many of our kind are suffering and
are under siege from the continuing and increasing pollution of water by
humanity. We need energetic support and blessing from which we can draw
strength.”
This was a heartfelt appeal, and I had an image of water spirits in rivers
and in the ocean trying to cope with the disruption of their environment by all
the ways we are polluting the water. I felt a concern on the part of this little
being that there could come a time when pure or drinkable water would be a
rarity, and all life would suffer.
Tuning into this being, I had a sense that many water spirits were
weakening under the onslaught of the toxicity that human beings dump into
their realm--not that they are poisoned themselves but that their contact with
the water is weakened and they are driven back, so to speak, unable to make
full connection with the water they serve.
This being’s request seemed to suggest that if we each sent love and
Light and gratitude to the spirits of water, that they could draw on those
energies to renew their ability to keep the etheric and energetic qualities of
water clean and strong.
I’d never had an experience quite like this. Was this a water nature spirit
or a water elemental? Frankly, I don’t know, though I suspect it was the
former. It was certainly identified with the element of water, but it was a
being whose intent was to serve that element wherever it might be found,
which felt to me more like the consciousness and energy of a water-oriented
nature spirit. The important thing is that it didn’t matter. It was the message
that was important, not the messenger. The appeal of this being, whatever
kind of water spirit it was, was so heartfelt that now whenever I pour myself
a glass of water or take a shower or bath, I remember to offer my Light and
blessing and love to water everywhere.
The distinction between an elemental and a nature spirit can become even
less clear when we leave the realm of nature and enter the realm of human
artifacts and our human-created, built environment. It’s here that we find the
different types of beings that collectively I refer to as techno-elementals, the
subject of this book. To understand them, we need to first look at the
energetic anatomy of our artifacts, for these provide the specialized
environment in which these beings live and function.

FIELD NOTE 9: The Anatomy of an Artifact

When I look at myself in the mirror, I see “me,” David Spangler. But,
leaving psychology and the idea of multiple personalities out of consideration
here, how many “me’s” could I see?
I could see the “Human Genome Me,” my hominid form and features
evolved over millions of years. I share this “me” with every other human
being on earth; we all have the same basic genetic foundation.
Then I could see the “Personal Genetic Me.” This is the specific body
I’ve inherited from my parents, the unique way in which the elements of the
human genome are configured in my personal case. This is my “DNA
identity.” It distinguishes me from every other human being on earth.
Third, I could see the “Personality Me,” or the “Everyday Me.” This is
who I think I am—and who I present to others—based on years of
experience, on my intentions, choices, desires, dreams, and so on. This “me”
is generally who is meant when people talk about “David Spangler.”
I could go on to talk about “subtle me’s” and “spiritual me’s,” but this
would take us too far afield. However, there is another “me” that is there
before me in the mirror, and that is me as environment.
My body is an environmental niche in which trillions of microbial
organisms that are “not-me” live and evolve. These organisms don’t know
anything about me as a person or about my Identity, my plans, my hopes, my
dreams, or my fears. They do not share my DNA nor my human genome. I
am simply a place to live and a place to find food. Some of these organisms
are beneficial, even essential, to my health. Some are opportunistic, invading
my body and, in their growth and proliferation, causing me pain and disease.
Some are simply neutral, neither harming me nor helping me but using my
body as a home.
Whether I see myself when I look in the mirror at my body or I see an
environment colonized by myriad, diverse other organisms, depends entirely
on my perspective, that is, on how I am looking. One is a macro-view—the
body as a whole—and the other is a microscopic view—the body as a living
petri dish.
Depending on my purpose, I can pay attention to any one of these four
“me’s,” each of which has its role to play. If I want to understand human
evolution and species development, as well as gaining insights into what
makes humanity the way it is, I will look to the human genome for
understanding. If I want to understand tendencies in my personal life,
potentials as well as weaknesses I may have, I will look to my personal
DNA. If I want to shape my life through my thinking and feeling, my
intention and imagination, I will work with my psyche and personality. And
if I want to deal with infections on the one hand or strengthen my digestion
on the other, I will look at ways of making the internal biochemical
environment of my body either inimical or hospitable to the appropriate
bacteria.
Our artifacts are similar. If I look at my coffee cup, I can see it simply as
a cup, handy for that morning dose of caffeine. Or I can see it as a
compilation of overlapping frequencies and fields of energy, each of which
potentially acts as an environment or a touch point for a subtle being. From
one perspective, it is a thing; from the other, energetically, like my body, it is
a miniature universe.
Let me illustrate this with a couple of items sitting on my desk. The first
is a hand-carved, reddish-brown chalice, six inches in height, carved from the
wood of an apple tree. The bowl and rim are not round but an interestingly
irregular oval that when I look at it reminds me of the curving canyons of the
American Southwest where I lived as a teenager.
 When I attune to this chalice with love and appreciation, I’m aware of a
range of frequencies to which I can attune, just like the different “me’s” in
the mirror.
The equivalent to the human genome is what I experience as a long, deep
wave of energy and life which, when I attune to it, brings into my awareness
primal elementals of substance, like “Wood,” “Tree,” “Plant.” These
elemental presences seem to me like the mountains I can see on the horizon
where I live: distant and immense. Just as I could get in my car and drive to
the mountains, I could expend energy to make contact with these elemental
forces, if there were a need to do so. But these Beings are timeless, vast, and
far beyond the range of normal human consciousness. I might as well try to
have a conversation with one of the mountains. I do, though, draw a deep
sense of stability from their presence and a sense of attunement to Gaia, the
life of the planet as a whole.
Universal principles and presences become specific manifestations in the
world. “Plant” differentiates into millions of species of vegetation. “Tree”
manifests as the many types of trees that populate the land, including apple
trees, of which there are over 7500 known varieties. But my chalice was
carved from one specific tree and is in itself a specific expression of apple
wood. As such, it has a unique energy field.
Like the “Goldilocks Level” I described in my sofa in the first Field Note,
this energy field is sentient and alive. It is formed from the energy of the
apple wood but it is shaped by the application of human energies in the form
of thought, imagination, the love and care that went into its crafting, and the
energy from the body of the artist who made this chalice. It is no longer
“pure” apple wood energy but a hybrid born of human interaction and intent.
The apple wood is still there and it would be possible to evoke from it an
apple wood nature spirit. However, in its normal “resting” or “native” state,
without such an evocation, the energy field of the chalice is a manifestation
of human imagination and purpose blended with the characteristics of a
natural substance.
In the case of this chalice, this field is particularly alive precisely because
this object is hand-made. A person poured his love, his skill, his
craftsmanship, his artistry, his vision, his care into the carving of this chalice.
He energized it with his life. The chalice is not simply the product of human
design; it is a product of active, mindful partnership with the spirit and
substance of the apple wood. This creates a more active and vibrant field of
subtle life around the chalice than there is, say, around my mass-produced
water glass, or around my sofa, which was also manufactured in a factory
rather than crafted in an artist’s studio.
The individual “Goldilocks Field” of life around this chalice—this living
“chalice spirit”— holds and maintains its energetic coherency and identity as
an artifact. It is roughly equivalent to my unique DNA. What is important to
realize when it comes to our artifacts is that this “personal level” of energy,
like my body’s DNA, is shaped from two sources, two “parents,” if you will.
The nature elemental, whatever it may be, is one source (and in the case of
this chalice, it is that of wood and specifically of apple wood), while human
intention and energy is the other. The apple tree is not going to produce a
chalice on its own. It has no will or capacity to do so. Apples, yes; chalices,
no. It has taken a human being to bring this chalice-expression of apple
wood into being. This blending of two distinct energy sources gives this
artifact a unique hybrid energy field. It is the product of human imagination,
thought, feeling, and will interacting with nature. It is a co-creation. As
such, it brings into being a new subtle environment which is not found in
nature on its own and which can attract subtle organisms seeking to benefit or
learn from it.
 All subtle fields, whether they surround a person or an artifact, have two
basic functions. The first is to hold the energetic structure of purpose or
identity. For example, my own subtle energy field holds my identity as a
living energy pattern incarnating in the physical world. The second is to
provide connection with the vast realm of subtle forces and energies, many of
which provide needed nourishment and blessing.
These two basic functions may manifest in very simple ways, without
much complexity. If sentiency is the capacity to form relationships and
thereby to promote wholeness, then the sentiency is low. However, the more
energy of intent and life that is poured into an artifact, either in its creation or
in its use, the more active and sentient this field becomes and the more
influence it exerts energetically.
This influence is characterized by its hybrid nature and, in my
experience, is not the same as what emanates from a natural object. Thus,
my chalice, though made of wood, radiates a different kind of energy—a
different “flavor”—than does my maple tree.
It is this difference that marks the emergence of what I think of as a
techno-elemental.
If it becomes stimulated and heightened enough, usually by the presence
of human subtle energies and thought directed towards it, this hybrid field
can particularize even more, becoming more active, more sentient, more
responsive. Metaphorically, it becomes the “personality” of the artifact, a
distinct, individual field of being that can change and evolve through
interaction with human beings. Depending on its nature, its own complexity
and skill, it may or may not take on a specific form detached from the artifact
itself.
This is particularly likely to happen if the artifact, by virtue of what it is,
is connected to a larger field of energy. For instance, in the case of my
chalice, it is connected to the archetype of the Grail, a powerful source of
energy indeed. The chalice is a cup for drinking, but in Western mythology
and religious tradition, it is also the symbol of the Holy Grail, the cup that
held the blood of Christ. As such, it becomes a container that can hold the
presence of the Sacred. The Grail is thus a symbol of healing, blessing, and
the restoration of wholeness to anything that has been broken.
My wooden chalice is not meant to hold liquid or be used for drinking. It
is an artifact meant for an altar as a symbol of Light and sacredness. Its
purpose is to create connections between a person and the deep, healing,
inspiring mysteries of Life. It resonates to the archetype of the Holy Grail
and all that that means. I know all this was in the mind of the person who
made this chalice for me. It was there in his artistic intent and thus was a
resonance built into this artifact.
I also treat this chalice as a point of connection to the Grail and all that it
symbolizes. For me, the Grail is a symbol of incarnation, yours and mine, and
of the power of a human being to hold and embody sacredness, becoming a
source of blessing and wholeness in the world. In the Incarnational
Spirituality that I teach, we are each Grails.
For this reason, this chalice resonates through the intents of both its
creator and its user, me, with larger, more powerful energy fields.
Consequently, when I tune into its unique life-field, I am sometimes greeted
by a small being that looks to me like a living flame, one that holds the
“essence” or “archetype” of “chalice-ness.” I mean by this I can feel within it
the potential of all chalices to be containers of holiness. This presence
emerges from the connection this artifact has with the “Grail Field.”
The ability to create objects that connect so directly to archetypal and
sacred sources of energy and blessing is part of our innate capacity as human
beings to manifest artisanal forces. This is more than an artistic ability. It is
a transpersonal force that can bring spiritual realities and qualities into
expression in the physical world. It releases an artisanal energy that in this
instance transcends both the artist who carved the chalice and myself as the
one who interacts with it.
In the case of this chalice, the techno-elemental that is the hybrid spirit of
its energetic life is capable because of the resonances to which it has been
exposed of linking to this sacred, artisanal force, making it a living part of
this artifact. It can, in other words, touch into and give expression to some
aspect of the soul of humanity. Not all artifacts have this capacity.
In this, the chalice acts as a kind of talisman, that is, an artifact that has
been imbued with an ability to reach beyond its form and function, giving its
“personality” level of energy a link to something transcendent, some presence
or focus of energy existing in an archetypal or spiritual level of existence.
To sum up, when I attune to it, my chalice has a foundational level that
resonates to an elemental of substance and a field of identity and purpose that
is unique to it and that is the foundation of its techno-elemental expression. It
also manifests a more complex energy structure of sentiency and presence
that is linked with transpersonal fields of spirit and presence.
 Now let me examine the “artifactual subtle anatomy” of another object,
one that I’m sure will be familiar to you.

This is a plastic sculpture of Yoda, the Jedi Master from George Lucas’s
Star Wars films. This iconic figure sits on my desk and stares at me while I
work.
Here, upon clairvoyant investigation, are layers or frequencies of energy
similar to those I perceive with my chalice, but their expression is very
different. There are the deep elementals of substance, in this case, a mix of
organic materials. As far as I can tell, there is no Deva or Elemental of
Plastic as such; it is itself an artifact of our technology.
There is also a “Goldilocks Field” of living, sentient energy—the field of
purpose and identity—but it is undifferentiated, again as far as I can
determine. There is no “spirit of Yoda sculpture” the way there is a spirit of
the chalice. The living field around the chalice knows it is a chalice. The
plastic that makes up Yoda knows it’s plastic but doesn’t know it’s a figure
of Yoda—or a figure of anything, for that matter.
Largely, this is because this is not a hand-crafted object but one
manufactured, presumably by the thousands (there are a lot of Star Wars
Yoda fans!) in a factory by programmed machines.
However, there is still an energy of human intent and design. It still
possesses a hybrid energy field. After all, someone thought up Yoda in the
first place and created the first Yoda figure, the puppet used in the movies.
Likewise, some artist made the mold for this sculpture, perhaps as a computer
file. Plastic, much less dead, organic plant and animal matter from millions
of years ago, did not just arrange itself spontaneously to look like Yoda. One
doesn’t drill oil wells and find little statues of Yoda coming up from the earth
along with the petroleum from which plastic is synthesized. So, human
imagination, thought, and design was involved in creating my little Yoda.
But unlike my chalice, where the human presence was in direct one-to-one
touch with the apple wood, here the human presence is distant in time and
space and masked by the automated manufacturing process. The idea of
Yoda exists in the mind of humans, but the plastic that forms the body of
Yoda is touched and molded by machines.
I found this statue of Yoda in a store. When I bought it and brought it
home, it was energetically just a neutral artifact, alive in the sense that all
things are alive, but not particularly differentiated. It had the unique shape of
Yoda on the outside, but its energy field could have belonged to a block of
plastic or a stone.
However, Yoda is an iconic figure for me. He represents the archetype of
the wise and powerful elder in touch with the deep mysteries and forces of
the universe. He is the shaman, the medicine man, the adept, the teacher, the
initiator. He is a master of the Force that unites all life and binds the cosmos
together. For me, as for many others, he is a rich and powerful imaginal
figure. (Years ago, I met a Zen abbot who was the head teacher or roshi of
his monastery. He met me wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the figure of
Yoda. This was not what I had expected to see him wearing, so he grinned
and patted his chest. “My lineage,” he said, which immediately endeared him
to me. “Mine, too,” I replied!)
To me, the figure of Yoda means something. It is an icon, a portal, into
something ineffable. I have projected that meaning onto this little statue,
energizing it with my love and appreciation. As a consequence, the living
field of this artifact is no longer neutral. It resonates to the archetype of
wisdom and connection that Yoda represents to me. It also resonates to the
field of imagination that Yoda occupies within the minds and hearts of Star
Wars fans because I share that collective imagination.
Do I see a small “Yoda being” attached to this statue the way I see a
“Grail being” attached to my chalice? No. The idea of Yoda, though
widespread, doesn’t have the deep roots in human consciousness as does that
of the cup, chalice, or Grail, an archetypal container that has been part of
human civilization for thousands of years and one that has figured in many
rituals in many cultures. Its living field reflects and is shaped by my own
Yoda projections and meanings, that is, how the idea of Yoda lives in me, not
how it might live independently in this statue.
If a human artist created a Yoda figure by hand and invested it through
his or her love and artistic thought and design with all the resonances to the
archetypal Wise Old Man, then it would be different. Then the living field of
such a Yoda would likely manifest a “Yoda spirit.” But as it stands, no such
dedicated intention went into its manufacture in the factory.
Still, its field of identity and purpose is an environment resonating to an
energy of human intention, and as such, it can attract other kinds of subtle
beings who find that environment nourishing and who might use it as a
temporary link with my human world. If a Yoda-shaped being did appear to
me, it most likely would not be something generated by the statue itself but a
“Rider,” something like the equivalent of a microbial organism living in the
microbiome of my digestive system.
I have not “talismanized” the statue of Yoda, so it is not by itself
connected to transpersonal, transcendent, or spiritual energies. When I see
Yoda sitting on my desk, I can in the moment feel connected to such energies
myself, but that is a different thing, one in which an imaginative image is an
inspirational catalyst for contact with higher energies. My statue can act as
such an image, but, unlike my chalice, it is not a conduit for those energies in
itself.
These two examples I have used to illustrate the kind of subtle energy
fields that can exist around our artifacts are different from each other. One is
a hand-crafted wooden chalice and the other is a mass-produced plastic
statue. However, there are three things they have in common. The first is
that, as I discussed in Field Note #1, both are extensions of the energy field of
human consciousness and thought. Both give access to the realm of human
imagination. One resonates with all the thoughts and feelings around cups,
grails, chalices, and their mythic and spiritual meanings in human evolution.
Holding my chalice, for instance, I can find myself in touch with the whole
imaginal world of King Arthur and the quest for the Holy Grail, a powerful
image in the Western mystical and esoteric traditions. On the other hand, my
statue of Yoda resonates with the stories of Star Wars and the Force, which
have become engraved in the popular imagination, and beyond them, to their
roots in the heroic narrative—the Hero’s Journey described by mythologist
Joseph Campbell—that is so much a part of Western culture. In other words,
if I choose to attune to this level, each of these artifacts is connected to a
“cloud” of related images and thought-forms existing within the collective
imagination and thinking of humanity. This cloud, in turn, can resonate to
the artisanal, creative forces that are part of humanity’s spiritual heritage and
power—and, in the case of my chalice, it does so resonate.
This “cloud” of human energy and thought, intention, and imagination
creates an energetic environment that is attractive to subtle beings who wish
to learn from and be nourished by our quality of beingness. Just as we may
study the art of an ancient culture to discover what the people of that culture
may have been like, so subtle beings can align with the energy fields of our
artifacts as a way of understanding who we are, what we are like, and the
spiritual mysteries and forces enfolded in our incarnational process. This is
potentially as true for my Yoda—or any of the other iconic action figures that
I have arrayed along my desk—as it is for my chalice or for any other artifact
in my house, including the house itself. I shall have more to say about these
subtle beings, whom I think of as “Riders,” in the next Field Note.
There is another field of energy that can be found around our artifacts.
As I discussed in Field Note #1, it is an aura of psychic connection, the
“Velcro field” that can pick up and hold stray subtle energies moving through
the environment. How active (or “sticky”) this field is depends on a number
of factors, including the substance from which the object is made, its use
within the human world, and so on. People sit on my sofa in the living room
all the time, for instance, and it is more involved in the activity of people
coming and going. Yoda, on the other hand, is tucked away on my desk
where I can see him but the statue is relatively removed from the flow of
energy moving through the house; also, I’m pretty much the only one who
handles it, and even then, I don’t do so very often. Potentially, it’s not as
much of a “psychic lint collector” as my sofa.
My chalice and my Yoda are two simple objects. The subtle energy
environments that surround things such as machinery or buildings, not to
mention computers, are more complex. The basic principle, though, is the
same. What we create lives in its way in the subtle realms and forms
opportunities for relationships and connections that offer new possibilities for
nourishment, learning, and evolution. We create, both physically and
energetically, environments that otherwise would not exist, environments of
the techno-elementals.

FIELD NOTE 10: Techno-Elementals

Techno-elementals is a word I coined to describe those subtle beings who
either establish contact and associate with humanity through our artifacts or
as a consequence of our technology. It’s not a precise term by any means as
it includes both the hybridized elemental beings I described in a previous
Field Note. It can also include subtle beings who seek to perform within the
human domain a service of circulation and exchange akin to that offered by
nature spirits, as well as beings who are simply curious and interested in
humanity and who use the things we produce and build as a point of contact
and linkage. I suppose a more precise term would be “techno-subtles,” but
techno-elementals feels better rolling off the tongue! It captures, I believe, in
an alliterative way the sense of what I want to convey.
To help me differentiate as much as possible between the different types
of techno-elementals I have observed over the years, I think of them in four
categories. First, there are the particular manifestations of subtle life
connected directly with the artifact, whatever it may be, however simple or
complex it may be. If “elementals” refers to subtle beings found in nature, I
play on this word and refer to this category as the “Artifactals.” Second,
there are the “Riders,” beings who are attracted to the energy field of the
artifact as an environment either to provide service or to gain learning and
nourishment. Third, there are the “Allies,” beings who connect with the
energy fields of our artifacts and technology in order to help us. Finally,
there are those I call the “Sacramentals,” beings of Light and blessing
deliberately invoked and aligned with an object that then serves as a talisman,
a point of contact with their qualities and energies.
Before discussing these in detail, I want to emphasize that when dealing
with subtle phenomena, boundaries are not necessarily hard and fast. I use
these four categories for convenience to help me understand just what I might
be sensing and how to deal with it, but there is nothing rigid about them. For
instance, the dividing line between “Allies” and “Sacramentals” is
particularly permeable, with a being acting as both or as one or the other
depending on the circumstances. It is the same with “Riders;” one of these
might be a being who is only temporarily present in the field of an artifact or
it might be one that establishes a permanent connection for as long as that
artifact exists, becoming for all intents and purposes an “Artifactal.”
Let me also point out that these four do not include what I have called the
“Elementals of Substance,” such as subtle beings associated with plants,
stones, water, earth, fire, and so on. These, as I indicated in the previous
Field Note, are always present by the simple fact that our artifacts have to be
made out of something and that something ultimately comes from the natural
world. In the usual course of events, I don’t think of them as techno-
elementals because they do not normally interact with humanity in the way
that techno-elementals do. This does not mean, though, that “natural
elementals” or “elementals of substance” such as the spirits of wood or stone
may not be curious about us or may not learn something from us, or that they
may not be an influence upon us through our things. It’s just that in the
context of an artifact, they are usually not the dominant presence, their nature
being subsumed in the hybridization occurring as their energy is joined with
human thought and intent. It takes more of a deliberate intent to attune
directly to an elemental of substance within an object that we have created.
This said, let’s begin with the artifactals or “artifact elementals.”
These are the expression of the subtle life within our objects, given shape and
identity by the purpose for which the artifact is made. They hold the
energetic integrity and coherency of the artifact in question, as well as
absorbing subtle energies through connection with the subtle environment
around it.
Generally speaking, I understand these beings as taking the energetic,
imaginal pattern of the artifact and holding it in clarity and stability so it can
engage with the realm of substance and manifestation. Just as the nature
elementals align with the consciousness of the Devas and other formative
beings, so the artifactals have to align with the human energies of mind,
feeling, and imagination. As I have said, this gives them a particular “spin”
or “flavor” different from what is found in nature.
As I have described, the artifactal aligned with my Yoda figure is very
simple. An artifactal aligned with my car is much more complex. In fact,
given that my car is itself made up of many parts—or artifacts—it is really a
collective of many different artifactals all aligned and collaborating within
the field of the primary coordinating energy field of the car. (In a similar
way, I can speak of my body elemental as coordinating the whole energetic
field of my body but within it are discrete and discernible subtle intelligences
associated with each of the major organs.)
In effect, subtle ecosystems within ecosystems!
An artifactal is in charge of the eight functions I described in Field Note
#3: Identity, Organization, Energy Exchange, Metabolism, Generativity,
Connection, Holopoiesis, and Emergence. How active these functions are in
a given instance depends on the artifact, its uses, its ongoing involvement
with human energy fields and activity, how “heightened” or energetically
active and aware it is, and so on. For instance, until I added extra energy to
its field through my love, my attention, my thought and imagination, my little
Yoda had only minimal activity in most of these functions except for identity
(as an object, not as “Yoda”) and energetic organization.
It’s in how these functions manifest in general that we find the main
difference between an artifactal and an elemental and thus between the
energetic fields of nature and those of the human built world. The function of
both elemental and artifactal is to attune to and align with the will and
purpose of a creative intelligence in order to assist something to come into
being. In nature, though, the purposeful will of a Deva is itself attuned to the
larger whole, the larger environment, in which the creative act is taking
place. So, for instance, in manifesting the species of “maple tree,” the Maple
Tree Deva automatically is aware of how this tree will fit into the ecosystem
in which it will become a member. In other words, the Deva creates
holistically. The connective and holopoietic functions are active from the
start; the maple tree becomes a participant in creating wholeness in its world
because it knows itself to be part of that wholeness.
Further, the Deva is an agent of the evolution of consciousness. The
maple tree is not a static creation but is capable of evolution and emergence.
This function, too, is active from the beginning.
Human beings for the most part—at least at this stage of our
consciousness development—are not so holistically aware. Human will is
usually oriented exclusively to human purposes, needs and designs. Whereas
the will of a Deva or angel is outward turned, aligning itself with the cosmos
and with the Sacred, human will is inward and self-directed. This has
become truer as our society has become more materialistic and
industrialized.
To the Deva, everything is alive and everything is a subject with its own
agency and sacredness. To the human, especially at this time in our history,
only organic entities are alive, and most of those we treat not as subjects but
as objects without regard to any intrinsic sacredness or subjectivity.
This means that an artifactal energy field created in tandem with human
will may be weak and diminished when it comes to the functions of
connection, holopoiesis, and emergence. Techno-elementals may have strong
energetic identities and organization but be deficient in their ability to
connect widely with the subtle worlds or participate in creating wholeness.
Because we do not experience ourselves as connected to the larger world, the
things we create are less likely to experience this connectedness themselves.
This can have consequences that impact our human development and lives.
The second kind of techno-elemental is what I call a “rider.” This is a
subtle being who is attracted to humanity’s energy and uses the energy field
of one of our artifacts as a means of connecting with us. It may be curious
about us and wish to sample our subtle energies and learn about this curious
creature called a human being.
In my experience, subtle beings of many kinds, and in particular
elementals, appear to be nourished and stimulated by the energy of will and
purpose. In part this is because for many elemental beings, their function is
aligned with translating creative will into form and manifestation. They are
part of the Artisanal Force that brings the cosmos into expression.
Human technology may be understood as embodied intent or will. A tool
is a manifestation of the will to do something. A hammer embodies the intent
to build. A sword or gun embodies the intent to wound or kill, either in
defense or offense. An automobile embodies the intent to travel. A printing
machine embodies the will to produce writing on paper. Technology gives
shape and form to a functional intent and is thus a “formative art” akin to
what the spiritual formative forces of the world do.
Because of this, human technology is inherently of interest to certain
kinds of elemental beings; it attracts them. The reasons for this attraction may
be many. A rider may be attracted to the focused energy of will and
intention. It may find energetic stimulation and nourishment from being
around human fields of consciousness and activity. It may simply be curious
about us. Learning is a powerful motivation in the subtle worlds; information
and new experience is a powerful kind of “food” that can enhance the
development of other forms of subtle life. Human beings are complex
entities; we can hold and synthesize many different types of subtle energies
in ways many simpler subtle organisms cannot. Learning how we do this by
spending time in a humanly-generated energy field can be attractive.
In Field Note #1, I used the metaphor of action figures and points of
articulation. As I said there, human consciousness is highly flexible; it can
“bend” in a variety of ways. A being that has a less flexible or developed
consciousness—one that has fewer “points of articulation”—may discover
new capacities by observing the ways that we “bend.” It might not have
considered that “bending” in that manner was possible. In this way, engaging
with us through the medium of our artifacts may be a way of enhancing the
Emergence function, enabling that subtle organism to develop and advance in
its own evolution.
Sometimes the attractive feature is simply to be in the presence and
excitement of creative energy. I have a number of friends who are artists:
writers, painters, actors, musicians. I love to be around them because they
are charismatic. They have an aliveness that is attractive. In a similar way,
we can be charismatic to subtle beings who are not as developed or creative
as we are. Though we often create out of convenience or for purely
commercial reasons, we also create out of inspiration, beauty, and joy. We
manifest what I’ve been calling artisanal energies which nourish life and
wholeness. In a learning universe, this is truly food to beings in the subtle
realms. Riders may take up residence, so to speak, around something we’ve
created to soak up the radiance we have brought into the world.
Some riders simply live within the energy field of the artifact, partaking
of the energetic environment but not necessarily contributing much. Others
actively augment the work of the artifactal, aligning with and supporting its
purpose. This may be helpful, and, I think, usually is, but sometimes it can
become problematic if the purpose of the artifact is energized in a way that
overrides the will of its user. The focused energy and will of an elemental
being can have a powerful and even a controlling effect upon a human whose
own sense of sovereignty and wholeness is weak.
Not all riders come to feed or learn. There can be subtle beings who wish
to be of service and use a connection with our artifacts as a way of doing so.
I wrote earlier in Field Note #1 of the subtle being who attached itself to my
oldest child’s stuffed Bumblelion toy. When invoked, it would generate a
loving, soothing field of energy.
 Such beings become allies. They could be angels of one kind or another,
Devas, disincarnate humans, nature spirits, or beings who don’t conveniently
fall into any of these categories (of which there are many in the ecology of
the subtle worlds). What they all have in common is a desire to help in some
way and an ability to use the energy field of a human artifact as a point of
contact to do so.
Sometimes an artifact is created specifically to be a point of connection
with a non-physical ally. An example of this is the “Sidhe Gate” created by
my friend and Lorian colleague, Ron Hays. The Sidhe are spiritual “cousins”
of humanity living in what for most purposes could be considered a subtle
realm, though technically they are not subtle beings themselves. However,
they can ally with us in various ways just the way a subtle being may do. (If
you would like more information about these remarkable allies, Lorian
produces The Card Deck of the Sidhe created in collaboration with the Sidhe
by Jeremy Berg and myself as well as two books, Conversations with the
Sidhe and Engaging with the Sidhe.)

Handmade by Ron in his studio, the Sidhe Gate contains the Sidhe Glyph
first presented by John Matthews in his excellent book, The Sidhe, as a
meditative symbol for connecting with these beings. This glyph is mounted
in such a way that it can turn, so that the “gate” can be open or closed. Ron
creates these artifacts in attunement with his Sidhe allies so that each one can
act as a point of contact with the energy field of the Sidhe realm. I have often
used it to facilitate my own connection with these beings when it has been
appropriate to do so. [If you would like information about these portable
Sidhe Gates, Ron’s website is elvengates.com ]
Another, larger example of a subtle ally aligned with a particular artifact
is the being I call my “House Angel.” A house is definitely a human artifact,
a product of our creative and technological skills, and like our bodies, it is a
whole thing in itself while also containing a great many distinct parts. All
houses—indeed, all buildings—have an energy field of their own which is
influenced and shaped by their shape and function and also by what happens
within them, the energetic activities which they contain. Like the “life-field”
of any artifact, not all the eight functions may be in evidence or equally
active. If the subtle field is not well developed, as is the case with many
artifacts, it may exhibit a minimum of ability to connect, much less to be
holopoietic or experience emergence. In other words, depending on the
strength and activity of the field and the functions that are engaged and
operating, it can exist anywhere along a wide spectrum of sentiency and
interaction with human energy and consciousness.
In the case of my house, though, I have a daily practice of attuning to the
overlighting sentiency of the structure, acknowledging and treating the life of
my house as an ally and partner in my activity within and around the house. I
consciously take time each day to link it through my own energy with the
subtle energies in the natural environment, in particular the blessings radiated
by the “Lady of the Lake” and by the surrounding mountains. As a
consequence, in the subtle environment, the spirit of my house is very alive
and present. It becomes an active conduit of blessing and spiritual energy for
everything contained within the house and for all who enter it.
This segues into the fourth category of techno-elemental, the
sacramentals. These are highly evolved spiritual beings, often angels or
Devas of some nature, who use an artifact as a point of connection with us in
order to transmit blessings or to offer energies that can enhance and nourish
our own life and spiritual evolution. Such beings are often found
overlighting (or at least attuned to) sacred buildings such as churches,
synagogues, and mosques. But smaller artifacts can be aligned with such
advanced spiritual allies as well. For instance, when I use my chalice as a
sacramental object, it becomes a touch point for the energy of an angelic ally.
The difference between an “ally” and a “sacramental” is not always
obvious; indeed, in many cases, they may be the same. But my rule of thumb
is that an ally is a source of energetic assistance for everyday activity with
which I may be engaged and is not necessarily concerned with or able to
directly assist my spiritual development. It generally functions within the
subtle environment in which I am living. A sacramental, on the other hand, is
generally one of a class of beings, usually angelic in nature, that promote and
assist our spiritual unfoldment and wholeness. It acts from a higher
frequency of life beyond the subtle environment and works more through the
inductive influence of presence than through the transmission of specific
subtle energies.
It’s important to remember that allies and sacramentals do not inhabit the
artifacts with which they are connected. They may reside in their energy
fields for a time if appropriate, but usually it has been my observation that
they are linked to the energy of the artifact much as, say, a security company
may be linked electronically to my home so that it is aware if an alarm goes
off and can take action. The ally or sacramental can become aware and
respond if the artifact to which it is linked “goes off” and sends an
invocation.
For example, with my Sidhe Gate, the Sidhe don’t live in it nor does
simply rotating the metal glyph open my consciousness into their realm. I
have to create that openness within myself though love, intention, attention,
and presence. But it does serve as a lens to focus my intent to make contact.
It acts as a talisman to give power to my desire and intent to connect with
them. It “sets off an alarm,” so to speak, that resonates into their realm. This
may or may not actually produce a contact; nothing is being forced or
coerced. But if all else is equal, then the presence of this “lens” or “gate” as
an attuned artifact can facilitate the inner connection between my
consciousness and that of a responding Sidhe.
The categories of artifactal, rider, ally, and sacramental are just my ways
of classifying a realm of subtle organisms—the techno-elementals attracted to
and influenced by our creations—that is itself a complex ecosystem. They
are terms of convenience. Efforts at classification are hampered by the fact
that boundaries are much more fluid and intermingling in the subtle realms
than in the physical. It’s easy to tell a pine tree from a maple tree; it’s not as
easy to distinguish a nature spirit from an elemental or an angel from a Deva.
It takes careful discernment based on observation of function and a sensitivity
to nuances of vibration and energy. Even with over sixty years of practice, I
still can get it wrong.
Further, there are two other categories that I haven’t included yet in this
discussion but which play an increasingly powerful role in human affairs.
These are the subtle beings associated with electricity and with the creation of
cyberspace and artificial intelligence. They are different enough from the
other four as to merit Field Notes of their own later in this book.
Though I’ve coined terms to describe these different categories of subtle
beings, we have to be careful not to place more weight of meaning or
significance upon them than they can bear. They are as much poetic as
taxonomic terms. Being a “naturalist” of the subtle realms is as much art as it
is science; my scientist friends would say it’s more so!
One thing to keep in mind is that from the perspective of all subtle
beings, from the simplest elemental to the most complex and evolved cosmic
archangel, everything—and I do mean everything—is alive and sentient. All
subtle beings live in a universe populated only by subjects. There are no
“things.” Everything is a “thou.” Nothing is an “it.” It is only we who can
fail to appreciate this, and this is as much a failing of how we think and what
we accept as reality as it is a matter of lacking the psychic abilities or talents
to see the subtle realms. We lose ourselves in thought worlds of our own
creation, mirror realms in which we see only ourselves and fail to see the
immense wonder, depth, splendor, and above all, life of the larger world
around us. It is this human tendency to create and live in our own artificial
worlds of thought and belief, imagination and construction, that ultimately
creates the problems, even dangers, that techno-elementals can pose.

Figure 1
ARTIFACTAL ANATOMY: BASIC TECHNO-ELEMENTALS
AND THEIR FIELDS OF SUBTLE ENERGY
For reference sake, Figure 1 provides a simple illustration of the techno-
elementals and subtle energy fields I’ve discussed in this and the previous
Field Note (note that in this diagram, the artifact has been “talismanized,”
hence it possesses a talismanic field that connects to an ally and a
sacramental). This is an idealized picture. Not all artifacts have all four of
the techno-elementals I’ve discussed present. All have artifactals, as well as
elementals of substance. Beyond that, it depends on circumstances and on
the nature of the artifact itself.
When I stand in my living room (acknowledging that it truly is a “living”
room, a space filled with subtle life), the techno-elementals I perceive when I
attune to them are as diverse as the different flowers in my wife’s garden
outside. For instance, there is a beautifully carved wooden end table between
two of our sofas that belonged to my wife’s great-grandmother and has been
passed down through the generations to her grandmother, her mother, and
now to her. It appears to be hand-crafted, most likely in the late Nineteenth
Century, though at this point, we have no way of determining this. The
artifactal I feel within it is like an elder. The energy around it is very calm
and deep; in some ways, when I attune to it, it’s like being in the presence of
an old well. At the same time, I’m aware of a connection to a Rider, in this
case the overlighting spirit or angel of my wife’s maternal family line. This
is not a strong presence, but it is there, like an old address or phone number
that could, if desired, put one in touch with a distant relative. This connection
or vibration rests within the energy field of this table like a blessing.
By contrast, there is a small, branching, metal candelabra that holds three
candles resting on the mantle of the fireplace. I occasionally use these for
simple rituals of lighting a candle for someone who is in need of blessing.
When I do, a field develops around this artifact that is linked to a
Sacramental, a spiritual ally that augments the blessing. Otherwise, though,
the energy field around this candelabra is not particularly strong. I do not get
a sense that its artifactal is particularly developed or sentient. If the artifactal
of the table is old, this one is very young.
In other words, some of the objects and artifacts in my living room have
strong fields and are an energetic presence while others do not and are not. A
few have Riders or, at times, Sacramentals; most do not. The point is that
techno-elementals are every bit as diverse as every other form of life on
earth. In this book, I am generalizing about them in order to keep things
simple, but this is like talking about plants as a single category when we all
know that in the world, plants manifest in a bewildering and wondrous array
of different species.

FIELD NOTE 11: From Talisman to Tech

Human beings shape their environment all the time. What our modern
culture has largely forgotten is that we are also always shaping a non-
physical, subtle environment as well. The emergence of techno-elementals is
a consequence of this activity.
At the Findhorn Foundation Community in northern Scotland, the
gardeners have worked miracles in the community gardens through attuning
to and cooperating with the elementals and nature spirits associated with the
soil and with various plant species. Our ancestors worked in much the same
way. In times past, humans have sought the help of subtle beings in growing
crops, in hunting, in healing, in weather-working, and in general assistance
for the tribe or clan. In fact, agriculture can be seen as one of the earliest, if
not the earliest, form of human technology, in which case the first techno-
elementals may well have been nature spirits adapting to and cooperating
with the creation of cultivated plants and farms.
Similarly, early craftspersons would do their weaving, their
blacksmithing, their pottery-making, and other arts in a way that would often
invoke subtle presences and qualities in the process. This might be done
through prayer, ritual, song, dance, imaginative visualization, or other means
of attunement and alignment. Because all of the substances that humans used
to build and to make their tools came from nature, the original techno-
elementals were essentially spirits and elementals of nature, as I have
described. Put another way, the human world and the natural world were not
as segregated as they are today (at least in our thinking), nor were the subtle
and physical dimensions as separated in people’s awareness. However, as the
human realm became more distinctly human in both subtle and physical ways
and the boundaries between our world and that of nature became more
pronounced, the subtle beings associated with our crafts and technology
began to differentiate from their nature cousins as well.
For instance, many of the nature spirits and elementals engaging with
humanity, including with our agriculture and gardens, began to mimic our
human form, at least to some extent (something easy for a subtle being to do
whose energy form allows it to shapeshift). In my experience, many nature
spirits I’ve encountered have no particular form that I can see; they appear to
me as swirling ribbons or points of Light; but I have also seen them take on
human form as sometimes it can be easier for me to relate to something that
looks like me rather than to a formless radiance.
In a broad, sweeping way, we can track the development of techno-
elementals along a developmental arc that roughly parallels the development
of human civilization and its increasing differentiation and separation from
the natural world. In the beginning, there was little difference between a
spirit or elemental aligned with nature and one associating with human
enterprise and creativity. Over time, at least the “artifactals” became more
and more influenced and shaped by human consciousness and intent rather
than by the Devic and angelic energies that overlight and flow through all the
natural world.
For convenience sake, I track this emergence of techno-elementals in
terms of four stages of human consciousness and intentionality. I call these
stages Integrated, Aligned, Divorced, and Disconnected. These four
describe a developmental arc from a close relationship to the natural and
subtle worlds to one that is separated and distinct. As long as we realize that
they are rough generalizations and that neither human nor subtle world
activity can be neatly categorized in discrete boxes, I think these stages can
help us understand the challenge that techno-elementals can pose, which in
the end is the challenge of our own states of consciousness.
By integrated, I mean that the humans involved at this stage feel
themselves integrated with nature, not separate from it. They act with
awareness of and in partnership with the subtle life and energies of the
natural world. People felt themselves spiritually and energetically as well as
physically part of the land on which they lived, hunted, farmed and built. For
all practical purposes, human intent was not far removed from Devic or
angelic intent. While more universally common in our ancestral past, there
are certainly people who live this way today. The gardeners at Findhorn, for
instance, consciously seek to be integrated and collaborative with the spiritual
intelligences that are part of the subtle life of the garden. It was not a far
reach for an elemental or nature spirit to connect with human intent and still
feel connected to the larger Devic and angelic realms of nature.
As civilizations developed and the human world began to take on its own
unique characteristics separate from the natural world around it, tools and
artifacts developed their own distinct identities and energies. A woven
blanket, a sword or hammer fresh from the blacksmith’s forge, a chair from a
carpenter’s shop, and a cup newly formed on a potter’s wheel were
something new in the world. They emerged from human imagination, intent
and skill, not from the operation of natural forces. One couldn’t plant a seed
and have a rug or a table sprout from the land.
As I said earlier, many of the early craftspersons saw the creation of such
artifacts as a magical act, and they would invoke spiritual assistance or allies
in the crafting process. This is what I think of as a stage of alignment. The
weavers, blacksmiths, carpenters, potters, and so forth were aligning their
creative work with subtle energies and subtle beings, much as I might invoke
a “rider” to align with my child’s stuffed animal or my friend called upon the
Sidhe to align with the Sidhe Gate he was making.
This alignment may not have been as deeply connected with the subtle
worlds as occurred with those whose consciousness was more integrated with
the natural world, but connection was still there. The beings who aligned
with human creativity in these instances were increasingly shaped and
influenced by human thought and intent but they were still being
acknowledged and respected as part of a larger subtle ecosystem. They were
techno-elementals, but the will and desire of the craftsperson to be in
alignment with that larger spiritual world in the act of creating meant they
had one foot in each realm, so to speak, the human and the natural.
A particularly powerful form of this aligned intent takes the form of
creating talismans. I understand a talisman to be any artifact deliberately
aligned with and attuned to a specific subtle energy or being. It imbues an
object with special energetic and spiritual properties and attributes,
heightening the living energy field of the artifact and enhancing its sentiency
and interactivity with its environment. In effect, it gives that artifact a
clearer, more distinct sense of identity and purpose. It is also a customary
way of invoking an ally or a “sacramental” to link with a particular object.
My chalice is an example of this.
A talisman is particularly powerful when it is created as such from the
start, with each stage of its crafting from raw material to finished artifact
being blessed and infused with intentional alignment with the desired
spiritual forces and subtle allies. This is what my friend did in creating my
Sidhe Gate.
However, it’s quite possible to take any artifact and “talismanize” it. I
could, for instance, do this with my Yoda figure. I would have to determine if
I simply wanted to link it with an ally or a general subtle quality, as I did with
my child’s stuffed animal, or if I want it linked to a “sacramental”, an angelic
or Devic consciousness. The latter is a more intense operation. If I were to
do that, it would require more energy and focus on my part. It’s not a casual
thing to do, any more than becoming consecrated and ordained as a minister
or priest is a casual act. There are consequences and commitments that
result. As a matter of personal practice, I would never link an object with a
“sacramental” without first asking its permission and gaining the cooperation
of its inherent life, for this kind of sacred alignment can profoundly alter the
energy field of the object.
The main point I wish to make here is that if I create or treat an artifact
with a consciousness and intent born of a sense of alignment, I create a subtle
environment in which any techno-elemental associated with that artifact,
either as an artifactal, a rider, an ally, or a sacramental, is connected not only
with human energy but with a larger spiritual context as well.
Over time, though, human awareness has generally moved further and
further from a ready knowledge and attunement to the subtle realms,
replacing familiarity with ignorance, fear, or disbelief. We have become
ever more focused on human life as fundamentally removed and distinct from
the world of nature. All of nature has lost its personhood in our eyes.
Animals, plants, landscapes, rivers, lakes, all became objects for humanity’s
use.
Consequently, the intent behind the design and making of our artifacts
and tools became more divorced from any alignment with spiritual qualities
or subtle energies. Given that human beings can channel artisanal forces,
loving and blessing what they are making even without knowledge of the
subtle worlds, such human-oriented creative intention can still carry a
spiritual force with it. But it is no longer automatically connected to the
larger ecosystem of the planet’s wholeness. In the way that a dog is different
from a wolf, even though both are canines, the subtle beings involved with
human creativity became more and more “domesticated” and shaped by the
characteristics of human consciousness and energy. Increasingly, there came
into being subtle organisms adapted to living as part of the subtle
environment of the human world. Techno-elementals became energetically
distinguishable from their natural cousins.
I have found this distinction even extends into the angelic and Devic
realms. The angel of a city is not the same as the Deva of a forest, even
though they may perform a similar function of overlighting a specific domain
and environment of life with blessing and spiritual empowerment.
With the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, mass production came
into being on a scale never before experienced. Increasingly, the
manufacture of goods and products shifted from home- and village-based
enterprises and handicrafts to the use of machines, steam power, assembly
lines, and factories. Although human creativity and design are still present
(at least until recently when artifacts began to be designed and produced by
artificial digital intelligences), the actual assembly and making of objects
required less and less direct human involvement as methods of automation
evolved. Oversight might be needed, but this is a different kind of awareness
and energy than that invoked by actual creative intent and engagement.
I think of this state, in which much of the modern world now exists, as
disconnected. We are still part of the natural world, but we have been acting
as if we are not. This sense of division and disconnection cannot help but
affect those subtle beings whose lives are integrated and associated with our
own, the techno-elementals. It creates conditions in which many of these
beings cannot express their full potential and become quiescent and dormant,
diminishing the health and vitality of the subtle environments in which we
live. We are the poorer for it.
Again, I want to stress that these four stages are generalizations. There
are human beings all around the modern world who have a deep appreciation
for and attunement to nature and the subtle dimensions. There are buildings
and other artifacts crafted with love and awareness that are fully connected to
the flow of healthy, subtle energies moving through the spiritual realms. Not
all techno-elementals are disconnected from their “wilder cousins” or from
the spiritual worlds. Yet, at the same time, we have to acknowledge that
many aspects of modern civilization are truly removed and disconnected.
With the advent of virtual reality, augmented reality, artificial intelligence,
and other digital technologies, we are on the brink of even more isolation in
realms fashioned purely from human imagination divorced from the larger
physical, subtle, and spiritual environments.
Up to now, I’ve been writing in terms of subtle energies and their flow
within the subtle environment close to the physical realm. These are living
energies that bring vitality and connection to everything that exists in
material form. But there’s another dimension at work here, one that may
appropriately be called spiritual, a depth dimension in which life affects life
not through currents and flows of subtle energies but through resonance and
presence.
Our creativity is a manifestation of our inner life, a life of soul as well as
of mind and emotion. When our inner life is expansive and “warm,” filled
with a loving connection to the world, this living, spiritual warmth or
radiance embraces and, in a sense, ensouls all that we create. We fill even
our most utilitarian, practical tools with a loving quality I might call “soul-
warmth.” Even if we have no awareness of the innate spiritual life within our
things, our own inner life, when resonant with joy and lovingness, blesses
that artifactal life even as we shape its subtle energies and its physical forms.
But when our inner life is constricted, alienated, “cold,” bereft of joy or
warmth of soul, then there is no warmth radiated to the things we create.
They may be beautiful in form, but they lack the blessing of our own soul-
warmth. They become cold as well. This is the result when what we create is
born of selfishness and a utilitarian attitude that turns everything into a means
and not an end in itself. In such a situation, we do not vivify the thing-in-
itself but make its identity conditional to fulfilling our own purposes. Such
purposes may contain no spark of care for the good of others or for humanity,
or the world, but are constrained by the limits of personal greed. This greed
may not be for money; it could be for power or for acclaim, but the pull is
inward towards an isolated self and not outward in contribution to a larger
whole.
There have always been people who have brought the qualities of a rich,
loving, active inner life to their outer lives, especially to their creative
endeavors. There have always been people who have not. But as the arc of
human civilization has moved further and further into a materialistic mindset,
one that sees the natural world simply as a resource to be exploited and not as
a partner, our collective incarnate soul life has been dwindling. This affects
the inner life of the world we create, which has a reciprocal effect upon our
own.
A materialist world-view that leads us to deny or ignore the inner life of
the world around us—and in particular, of the artifacts we create—is not the
only challenge we face. We are also confronted now with an entirely new
“species” of elemental consciousness and energy that has become intimately
interwoven with our lives. These are the techno-elementals of electricity.

FIELD NOTE 13: FRANKLIN’S KEY

In the summer of 1752, Benjamin Franklin attached a metal key to the
moistened string of a kite and flew it into a thunderstorm. When it was
struck by lightning and sparks jumped from the key to his hand, he knew that
lightning and electricity were the same thing.
 Although the phenomenon of electricity has been known for millennia, it
wasn’t studied scientifically until the middle of the 1600’s. Even then, a
hundred years passed before its characteristics began to be understood and it
began to be taken seriously as more than just a curiosity; Franklin was one of
the prime movers in this shift of attitude and attention. His experiments
paved the way for an intensification of scientific and practical investigation
into electrical phenomena which opened the door to exciting technological
possibilities.
The first practical application of this new understanding was the
invention and development of the telegraph in 1840. It was not long before
telegraph wires became a common part of the technological landscape. In
1872 a dynamo that converted mechanical energy into electrical energy was
developed, which led to the modern electrical power industry. The first
major use of this energy was in lighting through the use of arc lights. A rapid
expansion of this application came when Thomas Edison invented the light
bulb in 1880. It was Edison—the “Wizard of Menlo Park”—who truly
inaugurated the new electrical age, flinging wide the door which Franklin’s
key had unlocked.
The effect of this new technology has been to create an environment
unlike any other in which human beings have lived before. Sitting here at my
desk writing these words, I am immersed in that electronic environment.
Apart from the obvious presence of my computer, I have nearby a printer, a
CD player, and lamps. Electrical wires are in all the walls around me
throughout the house. In other rooms are other electrical devices, such as a
television, more lights, another computer, an electric stove and oven, and
telephones. Outside my house are streetlights and telephone and cable wires.
My neighborhood, though, is filled with trees. If I lived in a city, I would be
even more surrounded by electrical devices, energies, and fields.
Of course, this doesn’t even mention all the electromagnetic waves
penetrating my house from television and radio broadcasts and from satellite
connections with our cell phones.
At one time, the dominant environment was the natural world. Even
living in cities, people were not far from the realms of nature, and of course,
their building materials of stone, marble, wood, and metal call came from that
environment.
But since the invention of the telegraph, the electronic environment has
grown and grown, especially since end of the Second World War and with
even greater rapidity in the past thirty years as electronic technology has
become more sophisticated, miniaturized, ubiquitous, and powerful. Now if
our electrical energy were cut off, our civilization would collapse. For the
first time in our history, we are dependent on an environment other than the
natural one. The electromagnetic environment has become the dominant
feature in our lives. Furthermore, this has not happened through slow
evolution over hundreds of years. It has happened in the blink of an eye in
geological time. It is as if we went to bed in one world and awoke in
another, wholly different one.
Up to now in this book, the techno-elementals I’ve been discussing—and
the ones with which I have the most experience—have been part of
humanity’s life and experience for millennia. In a sense, we and they have
grown up together. Electricity is part of nature, too, but until the beginning
of the Twentieth Century, other than lightning, it was not part of the
environment that most people experienced. Now it is a major element (if not
the dominant feature) of the environment in which three-quarters of humanity
live.
There is a major difference between the techno-elementals I’ve been
describing and the subtle intelligences and energies associated with
electricity, which I might refer to as “Electro-Elementals.” For one thing,
electricity is not a substance in the same way that stone, metal, plastic, and
wood are. It’s a force. In fact, it’s an expression of one of the four
fundamental forces in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong
and weak nuclear forces. Electro-elementals are a pure expression of a subtle
presence and energy that is a universal force.
In their interaction with humanity, electro-elementals are not hybrids.
They are not a blend with human energies and intent the way the artifactals
are. Like water or fire, we can direct electricity and utilize it, but it remains
its own thing. We do not shape it in the way we shape wood or stone, metal
or clay. We adapt to it rather than the other way around.
I have not had as much experience tuning in to the subtle nature of
electricity or of electro-elementals. I am aware of their affect upon our own
energy fields, but it has been harder for me to touch into them directly in the
way I have done with other techno-elementals. I can only offer a series of
impressions; much more research and inner investigation needs to be done in
this area. Hopefully, these impressions will be helpful to others who feel
called to explore in this area.
 Because electricity is a force—a current of energy—and not a substance,
there is no physical object that I could see or touch to make an initial point of
contact and resonance (I was not about to handle a live electrical wire!). I
don’t touch fire, either, to connect to it, but at least I can light a candle and be
in the presence of a flame. Electricity, though, is all around me in one form
or another (including within my own body in the bioelectric activity of my
cells). To have a focal point for my initial investigation, I chose an electric
socket in the wall of my house and projected my consciousness into it.
At first, I made no contact with anything (though I was aware of the
artifactals in the wall of the house). But eventually, I found my
consciousness in touch with a vast presence that seemed to extend endlessly
into the void of space. What was interesting is that it was not in itself
particularly energetic; it really did feel like a cold, impersonal void. It was
not an inviting contact at first, though there was nothing overtly inimical or
negative about it. It just felt inhuman in a way that even the elemental
presences of stone and fire, water and air do not.
I repeated this exercise several times, each time coming a bit more into
resonance with this Presence. As I grew more familiar with it, I no longer
needed to use the electrical socket as a point of imaginal contact but could
move directly into connection with this cosmic Life.
When I first recounted my contact with this Presence in the earlier
version of this book (published as a special issue of my esoteric journal,
Views from the Borderland), I spoke of encountering a “cold sun,” a source
of impersonal Light that seemed very “mental” to me, lacking the warmth of
the spiritual Light of our sun. It seemed to me at the time that the influence
of this “cold sun” of electro-elemental consciousness could be damaging to
humans, drawing out and emphasizing a coldness of intellect not balanced
with the love of the heart.
However, I subsequently realized as I pursued this investigation that this
was an incomplete observation. I simply had not gone deeply enough into
contact with the fullness of this Being, this Angel or Deva of electricity and
electromagnetism. It was impersonal, yes, but once I’d gotten past that, I
discovered a loving presence that was warm and welcoming in its own way.
What I eventually touched into was a sense of service to life. As one of
the foundational forces of the physical universe, it is necessary for physical
life to exist. It has no attachment to any particular form that that life may
take (organic or inorganic), hence the feeling of impersonality, but it is
attached in a loving way to Life itself and its manifestation.
Further, it seemed directly involved with the processes by which creative
impulses originating in higher frequencies of mind and spirit become
manifest in the physical universe; that is, it is related to the process of
manifestation itself, providing subtle energies or pathways for ideas to take
form and substance.
Are there elementals of electricity and electromagnetism in the same way
there are elementals of fire and water, earth and air? Yes, I believe so. I’ve
had students who have seen them looking like “Reddi Kilowatt,” the stick-
figure whose body is made of lightning bolts and whose head is a light bulb,
designed by Ashton B. Collins, Sr. in 1926 to advertise the Alabama Power
Company. I’ve never seen them looking like this, though it doesn’t surprise
me as I know subtle beings can take on forms shaped by images in our
imaginations. My impression, though, is that such electro-elementals are
usually not so distinct and formed but are more like points of consciousness
that arise out of the electrical flow for one purpose or another and then merge
back into it. They do not normally seem as capable of independent existence
as, say, an elemental of stone, but this may simply be a limitation of my own
perception.
On the other hand, I have felt a strong emanation of curiosity when I
attune to the electro-elemental domain. These are beings—or at least a field
of consciousness—that historically have not been directly involved with
humanity, other than at a cellular, biological level. Now, within less than two
hundred years, they have been thrust into close and continuing contact with
us. It’s as if two alien species have come together in the depths of space and
are trying to understand each other and how they might relate. I have a sense
of electro-elementals taking special forms to study and understand our mode
of life, so different from their own, in order to interact with us more
creatively. They are adjusting, to the extent they are able.
As an example of this, one morning I was sitting in my living room when
a subtle being appeared to my inner sight. It was vaguely human shaped,
even feminine in its form. At first, I thought its body was black in color, then
I realized that it wasn’t black as much as it was void of any color, at least of
any color I could perceive. However, around its shape was a flickering blue-
white rim that outlined it to my vision. In a way, it was like looking through a
portal in human form into the darkness of interstellar space.
It sounds foreboding as I write about it, but in fact, the presence of this
being was friendly and reassuring. It definitely had a feminine feel to its
vibration. It said that it was an emanation from the electrical field created by
all the electricity running through my house, whether from the wires in the
walls or from all the appliances that I have that work through electricity, from
our computers to our television, from the electric stove to the many lamps
throughout the house, and so on. It was quite explicit that it was not attached
to any single artifact but to the electrical field itself. It was, it said, “born
from the flow of electric current throughout the house.” In this, it reminded
me very much of a water elemental that arises from the flowing river itself
and does not belong to any one segment of it.
It said that it was there as a point of contact between the elemental
domain of “electricals” or electro-elementals and me. I had the distinct
impression it was a form created in response to my reaching out by the
deeper spiritual (angelic or Devic) Intelligence behind the phenomenon of
electricity to provide a point of contact that was easier for my human
consciousness to apprehend and to connect to. Just as my computer mouse
and keyboard allow me to communicate with the machine intelligence of my
computer, which otherwise is incomprehensible to me, so this subtle being
was a kind of “UI” or User Interface. It was there to make it easier to contact
its otherwise very inhuman realm of consciousness.
This contact happened while I was working on this book, and I have not
had the opportunity of pursuing it any further. But I shall do so in the future,
as there is much more to learn about and from this potential elemental ally.
There is another aspect to this investigation. If I compare the energy field
around my chalice or my Yoda statue with that around my lamp or my
computer printer, the latter have an additional layer of subtle energy related
to the presence of electricity as part of their makeup and function. In this
sense, especially in highly technological electronic artifacts, the artifactal
connected to that object is itself being influenced by the presence of electrical
energy and its subtle aspects. It is being “electrified” in a way, becoming a
new kind of hybrid, one that now incorporates aspects of the electro-
elemental domain as well as that of its own artifactal nature.
This holds true for the conduction of electrical currents. We do not use
“free electricity” such as lightning; we utilize conductive materials, like
copper wire, to hold and transmit the electrical current (although the Austrian
electrical engineer Nikolas Tesla did demonstrate early in the Twentieth
Century that electricity could be safely transmitted wirelessly). This means
that an electro-elemental may appear to us demonstrating characteristics of
the physical substance that is conducting it.
For this reason, I have realized upon further investigation and observation
that some of the beings that I originally took to be electro-elementals are
instead “electrified artifactals.” Their consciousness and energy is
heightened not only by association and blending with human energies but
with engagement with the electricity that they contain or that energizes them.
Their artifactal energy becomes a conduit for the expression of the electro-
elemental life. When I attune to this, I have the impression that the
“electrified artifactal” embodies the living field of the object itself while
enabling electro-elementals to act as permanent “riders” attached to the
object.
To finish this Field Note, here is a repeat of the simple illustration of the
techno-elementals and subtle energy fields I presented earlier in the book.
All is the same except in this case, I have added the electro-elemental field
with its points of electro-elemental consciousness.

Figure 2:
ARTIFACTAL ANATOMY: BASIC TECHNO-ELEMENTALS
AND THEIR FIELDS OF SUBTLE ENERGY,
INCLUDING THE ELECTRO-ELEMENTALS

FIELD NOTE 13: The Grail of Evolution

To fully appreciate the situation in which we find ourselves with techno-
elementals, I need to bring to your attention an important phenomenon in the
life and evolution of subtle organisms, at least as I perceive and understand
them. This applies to all subtle organisms, whether we’re talking about
elementals, nature spirits, Devas, angels, or techno-elementals. It even
applies to us, though we are so conditioned to see the world through the lens
of our individuality, particularly in Western culture, that it is not immediately
apparent.
Simply put, in the subtle realms, all evolution is collective in nature. The
individual subtle organism may heighten and intensify its particular nature
and function through experience and stimulation, but evolution occurs
through webs and networks of relationship. Put another way, evolution
doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
To explain this, let me return to the Eight Functions I discussed in Field
Note 5. They are Identity, Organization, Exchange, Metabolism,
Generativity, Connection, Holopoiesis, and Emergence. All subtle organisms
possess all eight functions to one degree or another, as we’ve already seen.
These eight functions can be grouped into four areas. Identity and
Organization work internally at the core of the consciousness to establish the
basic nature and beingness of the subtle organism. So I could think of them
as acting within an “internal circle” of focus and intention, a circle that
provides the overall function of Holding for the organism, that is to say,
holding it in its unique nature and function.
Exchange, Metabolism, and Generativity are together “subtle
physiological” functions that not only maintain the subtle organism in
balance and health but also in interaction with its environment. I think of this
as an “external circle” of processing and interaction.
However, the exchanges that occur at this “subtle physiological” level are
very basic, such as the taking in of energetic nourishment and the generation
of subtle energies in return. This occurs essentially automatically, the energy
field of the subtle organism absorbing what it needs from the surrounding
subtle environment and returning subtle energy to it in return.
To activate the last three functions of connection, holopoiesis, and
emergence requires intention. It is not automatic, though it can be assisted.
They are expressions of love in action accompanied with a will to connect, a
will to create wholeness, and a will to evolve.
When intention creates a connection and a holopoietic relationship—that
is, the connecting subtle organisms are seeking to create wholeness between
them—then something else comes into being. It is the product of a co-
creative synergy in which the whole is greater than just the sum of its parts.
What I call a “space” or a field of subtle presence, energy, and possibility
comes into being. It is this field that facilitates emergence, the unfoldment
and appearance of something new or an evolutionary change. In effect, a
potential held within the Generative Mystery—the presence of God—now
has a space and an opportunity to reveal itself. The “figures slumbering in
the stone” are set free.
I call this space or field of emergence “Grail Space.” Learning to create
Grail Space in our environment is one of the central practices of Incarnational
Spirituality. It is a “space” or condition that facilitates spiritual progress,
unfoldment, and evolution for all participating in its creation. In the
Christian tradition, the Holy Grail is the vessel that held the blood of Christ
and thus the presence and qualities of the Sacred. I call this field of
emergence “Grail Space” in honor of this idea because it also is a vessel that
holds the evolutionary power of the Sacred, the intent of the Sacred to make
Itself known through the instrumentality of creation.
I illustrate these eight functions and the relationships that create Grail
Space and Emergence in Figure 3.

FIGURE 3
Emergence as a Shared Function
Most elementals and artifactals are either simple in their internal make-up
or focused on a particular task. Either condition makes them unable to
generate on their own the intention and energy necessary to form the
holopoietic connections that enable Grail Space to emerge. They require
help to do so, and this help normally comes from higher frequencies of
consciousness such as nature spirits, Devas, and angels. More complex
subtle organisms are capable of generating a field of emergence or Grail
Space internally as they are themselves living systems of relationship and
connection that can form the necessary connections, and they can produce the
quality of will and love that is necessary to do so. This means part of their
evolution can be internal and self-generated. But there are levels of evolution
that even the most advanced Being cannot accomplish on its own but only in
cooperation and co-creative synergy with others.
As incarnated human beings, we also are essentially complex subtle
organisms, at least in the non-physical dimensions of our nature. Each of us
is a blend of four different levels of functioning: the physical or
physiological, the psychological, the spiritual, and the subtle energetic. All
four of these make essential contributions to our overall health and well-
being and are part of the web of internal relationships that form our whole,
integrated incarnational system. It is this system that can, when properly
activated by intention and love, create our own inner Grail Space, a key
practice in our own spiritual evolution.
What is important to realize is that no organism, subtle or physical, is
isolated from its environment. Therefore, the integration and wholeness of
any being needs to include its relationship and interactions with the world
around it. I illustrate this is Figure 4. Note that every element in this system
touches upon and affects in some manner every other element. These
connections and interactions can be obstructed or diminished. For example, I
could live in my mind, ignoring my body, my soul, and my subtle energy
field, paying minimal attention to the world around me. Or I might focus
exclusively upon my physical and psychological well-being, ignoring the
subtle side of my nature and ignoring the welfare of others in my
environment. I might, on the other hand, pay too much attention to my non-
physical side, becoming excessively ascetic and seeking to “overcome” or
even eliminate my personality, thereby allowing the health and development
of my mind, my emotions, and body to suffer.
All of these efforts to privilege one side of our nature over the others—or
to go to extremes either in selfishness, ignoring the world, or in service,
ignoring ourselves—will damage our integration and wholeness, making the
unfoldment of an inner Grail Space less likely.
 FIGURE 4
An Integrated System of Incarnation Forming a Grail Space
An objective in Incarnational Spirituality is to honor these five elements
(counting the environment) and the co-creative relationships between them.
With loving intention and attention, we can create a state of wholeness within
ourselves and between ourselves and our environment that brings Grail Space
into being both internally and around us. I write about this in detail in my
books Journey into Fire and Partnering with Earth.
To achieve this, we have to transcend the materialistic worldview so
common in our culture. We are not taught to see ourselves in wholeness.
Aspects of our nature are left out. For the most part, our society is focused
primarily on the interactions of just the psychological and the physiological
elements. While for many, the spiritual dimension is a major and important
factor in their lives, it is often presented in ways that make it seem distant or
difficult to attain. As for the subtle energetic side of our nature, this remains
largely unknown, ignored, or misunderstood.
Another stumbling block can be learning to understand the value of both
the individual and the group. There is a natural limit to how far any being, no
matter how advanced, can evolved on its own. Evolution is a collective
endeavor. We cannot transcend this limit without forming loving and
holopoietic connections with the world around us. This is certainly true at
the soul level where our souls function in mutually supportive evolutionary
clusters and groups—in effect in “soul-created Grail Spaces.” If spiritual and
consciousness development is our goal, then we need each other and we need
the world in all its dimensions.
Looked at from “the top down,” so to speak, the whole universe, with all
its interconnections, interrelationships, entanglements, and interdependencies
is a cosmic Grail Space, a grail of evolution, in which and through which the
Sacred is emerging. The principle of evolution through connection runs the
gamut from galaxy to atom.
This process is dynamic. New connections and relationships are
constantly being discovered and formed, some existing only a short time,
some lasting for eons. When patterns of connection outlive their usefulness,
they are dissolved and connections broken, allowing something new to form
and take its place. As this happens, grail spaces disappear and new grail
spaces emerge.
Yet at times, connections are dimmed or broken that should not be. A
grail can be shattered, its space dispersed or never properly formed before it
has fulfilled its function. Emergence is blocked or denied. In such situations,
life is not living up to its full potentials.
This is the situation affecting many of the techno-elementals in
relationship to humanity. Understanding why this is so allows us to
understand the challenges that the techno-elementals pose as well as the
means for resolving them. This is what we will explore in the next Field
Note.

FIELD NOTE 14: The Broken Bridge

In Field Note 6, I discussed what I called the “artisanal” forces at work in
the world. The definition of an artisanal force is not simply that it creates but
that it does so embodying the love, the joy, and holopoietic qualities of the
Sacred. Ultimately what the artisanal forces create foster and contribute to
manifesting wholeness in the universe, revealing the unity and oneness of the
Generative Mystery.
The artisanal forces of Gaia manifest through the Devas, nature spirits,
and elementals. One result of their efforts is the natural world that we
experience. Humanity at the soul level is an artisanal force as well,
manifesting through the imagination, purpose, and skill of incarnate humans.
One result of our efforts is the whole realm of our artifacts, from paper clips
and sofas to cyclotrons and test tubes, and from jumbo jets to computers and
office buildings.
As I’ve described, these artifacts manifest in the subtle realms as hybrid
subtle organisms, the artifactals and the associated riders, allies, and, at times,
sacramentals that together make up the larger category of techno-elementals.
In an ideal world, the realms of human artifacts would be a new form of
“hybrid nature,” and the techno-elementals would be simply another type of
elemental or nature spirit. They would act as a bridge of connection and
communion between the human and natural worlds, as well as between Gaian
and human artisanal forces. Such a relationship would look like this:

FIGURE 5
The Techno-Elemental “Bridge”
As this picture suggests, all the participants in these various planetary
physical and subtle ecosystems are held within the life-field of Gaia, the
World Soul, and all contribute to its evolution and wholeness. The Earth
becomes an expression of partnership and co-creation between the spiritual
nature and potentials of humanity and the spiritual nature of the world. What
we create may re flect human needs and purposes but it is integrated
energetically with the environments around us, both physical and subtle.
This integration means that the life-forces flowing from the spiritual
forces and intelligences within nature—the Devas, the nature spirits, and so
forth—have clear access to the life embodying itself within human artifacts.
I can illustrate this by referring to a revised version of Figure 3 from the
previous Field Note:
 FIGURE 6
A Connected, Integrated State
The artifactal embodies the eight primary functions, as we have discussed
earlier, but in this case, its identity is blended with the human imagination
and purpose that gave form, structure, and function to whatever kind of
artifact it is (and understand that this is a very simplified, generic schematic
of subtle energy relationships).
What is important is that in this connected state, there is a flow of subtle
energies of various kinds into the artifactal from different appropriate sources
in the subtle realms. This flow is stimulating and nourishing to the
expression of its functions, enhancing its vitality and life. If it is a simple
subtle organism, as many artifactals are, then this flow may also draw forth,
energize and facilitate that intention that creates the kind of holopoietic
connections necessary to bring grail space into being. Otherwise, if the
artifactal is more complex because it is embodying a complex structure,
machine or artifact, then it may be able to produce this from within itself.
But even then, it is assisted by the vitalization and stimulation provided by
connection with the overall Devic realms of nature and Gaia.
In turn, this vitalization and emergence leads the artifactal to radiate its
own energy, its own “self-Light,” that can bless and energetically serve both
its local environment and the larger wholeness of Gaia itself. So, there is
reciprocation: a positive flow of energy into the artifact and its life and a
positive flow of energy from the artifact and its life. In such a process, the
human beings who are using, interacting with, or living within the artifact
have their own subtle lives and energy fields enriched. It’s truly a win-win
situation.
Unfortunately, for the most part and in most places, we are not living in
such an ideal world in which everything is functioning with wholeness and
integration as it should.
However, the challenge is that human imagination and purpose is often at
odds both with our deeper soul wisdom and principles—and thus at odds with
its artisanal spirit and potentials—and with the natural world around us and
with the holistic efforts of the Devas and nature spirits that fill and bless that
world. At this stage in our collective evolution, the human world of
creativity and building becomes turned inward to our own benefit and
purposes. We become disconnected from Gaia. When this happens, the
subtle life within or associated with our artifacts becomes similarly
disconnected as it is surrounded, enclosed, and shaped by humanity’s
collective energy. The bridge between humanity and nature becomes broken
and, as we have seen in previous Field Notes, the techno-elementals become
a breed apart, aligned more with humanity than with nature or with Gaia as a
whole. Now we have this situation:

FIGURE 7
The Broken Bridge
This situation is complex. The disconnection between humanity and the
rest of the world can manifest in many different ways energetically. For that
matter, in some parts of the world where the connections between human
beings and nature remain strong, the “bridge” may not be broken at all; in
such places, techno-elementals may continue in good connection and flow
with spiritual sources. But in much of our modern society, this is not the
case.
This can create different problems for us and for the techno-elemental life
that fills our built world, but there are four consequences of which I am most
aware. There may well be others, but it’s these four I want to focus on in
these Field Notes. I think of them as Internal, Environmental,
Incarnational, and Evolutionary.
The first problem is internal to the artifactals and to the techno-elemental
kingdom as a whole. It is a dimming of the vitality, the energy, and the Light
within the functions of the subtle organism.
This dimming creates an effect in the surrounding subtle environment.
This effect will impact the techno-elementals that are present but it can also
impact the humans who are sharing that environment. It also increases the
likelihood of psychic pollution and energetically stagnant conditions that can
make possible the existence of negative forces I think of as “dark riders.”
The lack of connection between the techno-elementals, particularly the
artifactals, and the larger spiritual world can create a feedback loop that turns
our creative energy, particularly will, back upon us to create a form of echo
chamber. This can impact our incarnational activity, subverting our
Sovereignty in unconscious ways. In a peculiar way, we create the artifact
and then it shapes us.
Finally, our sense of what it means to be human can be narrowed and
shaped by our technology, impacting our collective evolution. We can find
ourselves living out as a species the ancient legend of the Golem, a creation
of human beings that then turns and becomes a threat to its creators.
Techno-elementals and their subtle energies are involved in all four of
these impacts upon us. Understanding how this happens gives us insights
into what we can do to avoid these consequences and restore wholeness to
ourselves, our artifacts, and our world.

FIELD NOTE 15: Dimming

Between 2000 and 2010, I had a series of surgeries for recurring bladder
cancer. Most of these operations took place in a hospital about twenty miles
north of where I live. Then a new hospital opened up in my town and,
finding the closeness to home more convenient, subsequent surgeries took
place there.
Hospitals are themselves artifacts, made up, of course, of a great many
other things, medical and otherwise, that humans design and manufacture.
One could say they are an “artifactal ecosystem.” This whole ecosystem is
encompassed by a techno-elemental being who embodies the integrative
identity and purpose of the building, giving it energetic coherency. At the
same time, a hospital is overlighted by one or more angels of healing, who
act as the allies or the sacramental for the building. I have not, fortunately,
been in a great many hospitals throughout my life, but every time I have
entered one, I’ve been aware of these great angelic beings.
The first hospital I was in for bladder surgery was relatively old and well-
established; I was delighted to find as I lay in my room both before and after
the operation that the flow of healing energies throughout the building was
very strong. The walls themselves seemed to radiate with this force. When I
tried, as I do in many buildings I enter, to reach out to the techno-elemental
lives within the walls in acknowledgement and blessing, they immediately
responded with appreciation and a reciprocal blessing. I had the sense that
the techno-elemental of the hospital as a whole was very connected both to
the land around it and to the larger spiritual worlds. It was energetically
alive, and I felt myself lovingly held by the subtle environment it generated.
An energy of service seemed baked into its bones.
This hospital was in an area that was a combination of shops and medical
offices, not at all a rural or country setting. The second, newer hospital, by
contrast, was built in the forested foothills surrounding the valley where I
live, a beautiful natural setting. If any building was going to be connected
energetically to the landscape around it, this one would have been a good
candidate. However, the first three times I went there for surgery, it was
energetically dead. The techno-elementals I felt within the walls were
diminished in presence. I could feel a healing angel overlighting the place,
but its influence and energy only penetrated so far into the hospital itself. It
was a like a distant presence, hovering but not landing. I could feel the
presence of numerous nature beings associated with the surrounding forests
and mountainside, but I could feel a gap between the hospital and them. The
difference in energy between this hospital and the previous one was dramatic
to me.
I want to be clear that I’m speaking here of the subtle energies I felt in the
structures themselves, the walls, the floors, the ceilings, and so forth. It has
nothing to do with the personnel. Both hospitals are filled with kind,
compassionate, dedicated, loving people seeking to serve the ill and injured
who come there. These doctors, nurses, orderlies, and technicians create the
human atmosphere of healing and care within the building. But they and the
patients are enclosed in a structure that is itself a manifestation of living
energy, and the quality of that energy does make a difference.
To be fair, I had my first surgery in this new hospital only a few months
after it opened. The staff, the doctors, the nurses were all excellent and
caring, but the place itself was new. Energetically, it was still finding its feet,
so to speak. Over the years as I’ve gone there for more operations, I’ve felt it
become more energetically alive, though from my perspective it is still not at
the level of the first hospital I attended. Still, good changes are occurring in
the subtle environment of the place as it has settled in.
There is one important difference between the two hospitals. The first
hospital was designed by people who wanted to create a temple of healing. I
have no idea if the original architects and builders had any knowledge of the
subtle realms, but I was told by a doctor who had served in that hospital for
years that, though it was a secular enterprise, the founders had been inspired
to create a place that was as dedicated to spirit and spiritual healing as it was
to medicine and physical healing. The second hospital on the other hand, the
one near my home, has come under criticism for being “too commercial.”
The main floor looks less like a hospital and more like a beautifully designed
mall with a restaurant and shops. I have no doubt that those responsible for
its design and construction wanted it to be a place of healing as well, but it
doesn’t have the same spiritual vibration as the hospital to which I first went.
The doctors and nurses definitely embody a spirit of service, but I haven’t felt
that same spirit “baked into the walls” from the beginning. You do get a
sense when you walk through the main floor of the hospital that the
administration would like you to do some shopping!
Obviously, these are personal observations, and the comparisons between
the two buildings aren’t entirely fair. It’s like comparing a seasoned,
experienced doctor with an intern seeing her very first patient. Who knows
what I might have felt had I gone to the first hospital when it opened in the
early 1970s? It might have felt energetically dead as well.
What is going on here? How do these differences come about? This is a
complex topic which takes us into exploring the nature and expression of
subtle energies as a manifestation of life. It’s beyond the scope of this book
(though if you wish to investigate this further, you could start with my book,
Working with Subtle Energies). However, I think I can simplify things, as
long as we realize this is an oversimplification.
Look at Figure 8.
 FIGURE 8
Different Purposes
Here are three different artifacts, a car, a store, and a lamp. These are
very different items. The lamp is a single object, but the car is a more
complex mechanism containing many parts, each of which is an artifact
within the context of our discussions here. The store, on the other hand, is a
building designed to house a commercial activity. It, too, is a complex
artifact. Both the car and the store are “subtle ecosystems” comprised of a
variety of techno-elementals, elementals of substance, potential riders, allies,
and so forth. But each has a techno-elemental that represents the whole thing
and holds the overall subtle ecosystem together as a coherent field of life and
purpose.
Generally speaking for our simplified requirements, the purpose of the
subtle organism is to express its eight basic functions, bringing Light into the
world as it does so. It wishes to be, to become, and in the process, to express
its inherent sacredness by contributing to wholeness in the world.
The human purposes, however, are different. They are very specific and
usually reflective of personality desires and wishes. A human purpose for the
car is to move, to provide transportation; there probably also is a commercial
interest as well since car manufacturers aren’t making their products to give
away or to display as art objects in a museum! Similarly, the purpose of the
store is to make money. If it fails to do so, whatever other purposes it may
have, it will go out of business. And the purpose of the lamp is to illumine.
On a subtle level, human purposes are manifested as mental, emotional,
and spiritual energies. This is not so different from the way my voice on a
smartphone is turned into electrical impulses and my fingers moving across
the keyboard of my computer are translated into a machine language that my
computer can understand in order to produce the words on my monitor.
When I hold the imagination to “make money” by constructing a building for
a store, the etheric, subtle energy of this purpose becomes part of the subtle
field of the structure as much as brick and mortar. It infuses the techno-
elementals that form the subtle life of the building.
 I do not expect, nor do I experience, the techno-elemental I sense in my
desk lamp to exhibit a universal consciousness. It is focused upon being
what it is and performing the function for which it was created as an artifact.
Nevertheless, as a subtle lifeform, its natural state is to reach out to connect
with the life around it. To the extent it is able, it will form connections to
contribute to the unfoldment of wholeness in the environment around it. This
is part of its purpose as well.
But human thought and intention are powerful in the subtle environment.
They can easily shape the patterns and directions of subtle energies in and
around an artifact, limiting the natural outflow and connectedness of the
techno-elemental to the boundaries set by that intention. Rather than a
partnership between the two intentions, that of the human and that of the
subtle organism, the former overrides the latter. The challenge arises because
so much of human imagination and intent is focused purely upon human
needs and concerns and is not connective to a larger whole. Going back to
the relationships and functions pictured in Figure 6 in the previous Field
Note, we now have something like this:

FIGURE 9
A Blocked Artifactal
Now the human energy of our purpose and imagination is acting as a
barrier to connection with the larger spiritual and subtle worlds. This
weakens or even blocks the natural flow of enlivening and supportive
energies from those worlds into the life-systems of the techno-elementals,
particularly the artifactals, associated with that artifact.
In the process, all the functions of the subtle organism are diminished. Its
generativity is reduced, its metabolism is slowed down, its power to connect
with other subtle organisms, techno-elementals, nature spirits, and on,
particularly in holopoietic ways, is weakened or blocked, and its ability to
create or co-create Grail Space and thus to evolve is similarly weakened or
blocked.
To put it simply, the Light within this subtle life is dimmed, its radiance
diminished. Its innate capacity to participate in Gaia’s life is likewise
diminished. The result is that the life within our built environments and the
capacity of these environments and the things in them to support our own
subtle well-being, is also reduced.
As I said, this is a complex topic for, like any ecosystem, the interplay
and interactions between humanity and the subtle organisms that comprise
both the natural and the humanly-built worlds are many and varied. Take my
two hospitals, for instance. Each is a building containing hundreds of
thousands of artifacts. Among these, many will be “dimmed” and many will
be radiant, depending on what went into their manufacture but even more
importantly the relationship that human beings have with them. For as we
will see, the simple act of loving and appreciating an object can act like a
breath of air upon an ember, causing it to reignite into a flame.
When I write about these hospitals as “artifacts,” I am speaking generally
of them as structures which, apart from all that they contain, have their own
energetic radiance. Both hospitals were created to be places of healing and
both hospitals were created as businesses needing to generate income to
survive. However, in the case of the first hospital, the dominant human
purpose was to make a “temple of healing” and in the case of the second, it
was commercial success. The difference in emphasis shows up in the energy
fields of the hospitals. Even today, for all that it has improved, the subtle
presence of the newer, second hospital seems to me still not as energetically
connected and integrated with its natural environment, in spite of the vitality
and beauty of that environment itself, as the first hospital is with its
surroundings, even though it is mainly in a commercial district of its town.
Whatever the impact of human thought and emotion upon them, subtle
organisms cannot die. Their Light and life cannot be extinguished.
However, they can be “dimmed” to a point of dormancy or inertness in which
they become obstructions to the flow of subtle energies. The consequences
of this are the subject of the next Field Note.
 FIELD NOTE 16: SOOT
A twenty-minute drive from my house brings me to one of the natural
wonders of our area, Snoqualmie Falls, where the Snoqualmie River plunges
268 feet over a cliff as it makes its way to Puget Sound. This site has long
been considered sacred by the local Native American tribes, and it’s not
difficult to see why. Even without any sensitivity to the subtle energies of the
place, the setting itself is beautiful and inspiring.
In 1916, a lodge was built on the rise overlooking the Falls. Since then, it
has expanded into a large, luxury resort with an adjoining park where
families can picnic and enjoy the setting and the view and even hike a trail
down the cliff to the river below. It was often a favorite place to take our
children when they were young.
There is another trail that leads to the Falls. This one approaches from
the lower Snoqualmie River and is a long hike through rough, forested
terrain. Eventually, you come out at the bottom of the Falls, across the river
from the trail descending down the cliff from the lodge.
One day, we decided to visit the Falls using this trail. As we were hiking
along, I suddenly entered into an altered state of awareness and found myself
seeing everything around me from the perspective of one of the nature spirits
of the forest. It was an awesome moment. I’ve never taken psychedelic
drugs of any kind, but I could imagine it was the kind of thing a person “on a
trip” might experience. I found myself in the midst of a riot of conversations
going on between the bushes, the trees, the shrubs, the stones, the soil,
everything around me, a conversation conducted in bursts and currents of
color, energy, and what seemed to me to be a constant exchange of
molecules. I remember thinking, “It’s all chemistry! Everything is
chemistry!”
This state lasted maybe five minutes or so as I walked along. I could feel
and at times see the small nature spirits active within the forest and felt
myself held within the energy field of a larger being, whose perspective I
seemed to be sharing.
All at once, we topped a rise, and before me, though a clearing in the
branches, I could see the Falls ahead of us and the lodge sitting next to them.
To my surprise, instead of a beautiful building—and the lodge is beautiful—I
saw something dark and unpleasant. For all the activity of the humans in and
around the lodge, who generated their own kind of lively subtle energy, to the
nature spirit whose consciousness I was temporarily sharing, the building was
energetically dead, creating a zone that seemed to obstruct the flow of subtle
life around it. It was like seeing a patch of dead skin on an otherwise healthy
animal.
Around it, I sensed a turbulence of force in the subtle environment, like
water rushing around a boulder placed into a river. It felt as if currents of
energy were being blocked or diverted in some manner that I couldn’t fully
perceive or understand. Yet, I could feel the disharmony that was the result.
Something akin to what in Britain is called a ley line was being
compromised.
The thought and energy that goes into the lodge is largely commercial—
it’s a spa and resort, after all, and an expensive one! Creating energetic
harmony and connection with the surrounding environment was probably not
the uppermost thought in its construction. The result, at least as far as the
nature spirit who showed me this was concerned, is a subtle form that acts as
an obstruction rather than a partner to the subtle energies of the land. It
doesn’t heighten the beneficial effects of the ley line as much as it diminishes
them.
In an ideal situation, life-supporting, life-nourishing, and life-
empowering subtle energies flowing through the subtle environments of the
world would flow in an unobstructed manner through the domains of nature,
humanity, and our artifacts, as the sketch following indicates.

FIGURE 10
Unobstructed Flow of Gaian Life-Energies
This flow of life-force contributes to the overall health and wholeness of
the planetary system and its interrelated subtle and physical ecosystems. If
this flow is obstructed, then any subtle organisms affected by that obstruction
may well experience less life-energy to work with and less stimulation for
their own evolution. Their ability to participate in the collective function of
emergence as represented by Grail Space may be diminished, as I have
discussed.
I want to go back to the experience I recounted in Field Note 3. You will
remember that I was alerted by a nature spirit to observe a ribbon of golden
Light descending upon the neighborhood, or at least that is how my mind and
inner vision interpreted what was happening. This was not the first or only
time I’ve been aware of this phenomenon. As I said, I’m aware of currents of
blessing radiating out from the great Deva overlighting Mt. Rainier to the
south of where I live and from other similar Devas overlighting the
mountains that surround the Puget Sound area. Likewise, on a smaller scale,
I’m aware at times of Light radiating into the neighborhood from the being I
call the Lady of the Lake overlighting Lake Sammamish. There is nothing
unusual about this; such currents or emanations of life-force and blessing
from higher-frequency beings is a vital part of subtle ecosystems everywhere.
Subtle energy outpourings and blessings like the golden ribbon I saw
descending like mist onto my neighborhood are eventually absorbed by the
elementals, nature spirits, and other subtle beings and spirits, enhancing both
the non-physical and physical life of the area. However, it is not absorbed
equally. The soil, the plants, the trees, and I imagine, the animals that make
up the neighborhood seemed to take it in easily. But cars, houses, light posts,
and other artifacts not so much. It depended on the vitality and
connectedness of the techno-elementals associated with those artifacts. Some
were very responsive, others—as far as I could tell—not so much.
Over the years, as I’ve walked through my neighborhood, I have noticed
that some houses are surrounded and filled with a vital energy field while
others are less so, and a few seem to have no energetic life to speak of, even
though they are not empty but are homes to families. A diminished house-
field doesn’t necessarily tell me anything about the occupants of the house,
only that the techno-elementals of that structure are largely ignored and are in
what in a human being would be an unconscious or barely conscious state, a
condition not at all unusual for artifacts in the modern world.
In the modern world, we are increasingly creating artifacts and
environments that diminish or break the natural connections between the
larger subtle environment and the techno-elementals, particularly the
artifactals, often to their detriment. Rather than the unbroken flow we saw in
Figure 10, now the situation looks like this:
 FIGURE 11
Obstructed Flow of Gaian Life-Energies
It is as if the life-energy, the sentiency, within our artifacts becomes inert,
which can act as a drag upon the whole of the subtle environment. When
sensitives talk about how “dense” matter is, it is this condition surrounding
and affecting the energy fields of our artifacts that they may be experiencing.
Again, I want to stress that not all artifacts and structures are
disconnected from the flow of subtle energies. Our cities, towns, villages,
and countrysides are filled with buildings that are both connected to and
resonant with the subtle realms and those that are not, that act as boulders in a
flowing stream.
It’s way too simplistic to say that cities are disconnected simply because
they are human artifacts. This is not a “city vs. nature” affair. It’s quite
possible for areas in nature to become energetically enclosed and
disconnected as well. The main difference is that if and when this occurs in a
non-human environment, there are subtle forces and beings—functioning a
bit like a human immune system—that can respond to restore harmony,
balance, and connectedness. In a human environment, this is less automatic
and can be problematic since the constant barrage of human thought and
emotion can make the work of such beings difficult. It’s hard to clean a wall
if someone is continually marking it up!
This is an environmental challenge, much as pollution is in the physical
world. The problem is that we don’t recognize the problem. We can be aware
when a place doesn’t “feel right” or has a “bad atmosphere,” but in our
materialistic society, we generally don’t grasp how deep or extensive an
effect this can be. We don’t recognize the impact of subtle energies nor how
that impact can affect our bodies and our minds and emotions. Equally, we
don’t recognize how our own thinking and feeling can affect the subtle
environment around us. We know how our minds and emotions affect our
bodies and vice versa. The links between our psychology and our physiology
are well-explored. Similarly, many people have an understanding and an
experience of how the spiritual dimension affects their lives. What we lack is
a comparable understanding of how we are affected by what happens in the
subtle environment around us. If the energy-life of our artifacts and the
artifactals within them is diminished, our subtle life can be diminished as
well. We are deprived of whatever Light they might ordinarily give us, but
even more, we are cut off from the vitalizing flows of subtle energies and
life-force from the spiritual realms of nature. Living in the midst of human-
generated energy fields, we end up stewing in our own psychic juices.
An example of what I mean occurred when I was invited to do a
workshop at a spiritual conference center in the early Eighties. When I began
my workshop, I felt like I was having to “push through” a fog. I could sense
the participants feeling uneasy and even irritable in ways that had nothing to
do with anything I was saying.
During a break, I used my inner perception to examine the room
(something I should have done right off the bat), and discovered that the
walls were covered with “psychic grime.” It was evident that this was the
cause of the unpleasant feelings in the room. I asked one of the people
running the center what the room was used for, and she said that it was where
they regularly held Primal Scream and other types of psychologically
cathartic workshops. In effect, people were regularly dumping their negative
emotions and thoughts into the subtle environment of the room where it was
being soaked up like psychic lint and soot by the walls and ceiling and floor.
This had been going on for months, and during this time, no one was doing
any kind of energy hygiene or cleansing in the room after all the emotional
discharging was finished.
I called on my own subtle allies and the spiritual allies of the center itself
and did an energy cleansing during the lunch break. That took care of the
problem, and the workshop continued in a refreshed and vitalized atmosphere
that everyone could feel and appreciate.
This was a mild case of energetic soot caused by techno-elementals being
unable to refresh and recharge themselves. The conference center in
question was run by dedicated people whose intent to serve people
psychologically and spiritually brought its own Light into the place that
helped compensate. However, in places where human suffering and violence
are the norm, especially over time as a result of intent, and where hatred, fear,
and other negative emotions have been prevalent, a subtle energy
environment can be created that invites and sustains truly malicious and
hurtful “dark riders.” They become insulated from the Light by the
disconnectedness of the artifactals within the structure or within the artifacts
used to create harm.
Such dark riders can be anything from human-generated thought-forms to
subtle lifeforms broken and damaged in themselves. They can exert a
negative and malevolent influence on the subtle environments and the minds
and emotions of those who participate in such environments or who use
artifacts corrupted in this manner. Cleansing such a situation requires special
resources and skills, a deep capacity for love and for equanimity and peace,
and an unshakable attunement to the Sacred. Like cleaning up a toxic waste
dump on the physical, it is something that requires knowledge, training, and
the right equipment. It’s not something to be tackled in a casual or
unprepared way.
Fortunately, most of our environments, at least in my experience, do not
attract nor can they sustain such truly negative and evil dark riders. But
unless efforts are made to keep our energetic subtle environments clean and
the techno-elementals blessed and aligned—something I will discuss in more
detail in a later Field Note—any environment can accumulate a layer of
energetic soot. When this happens, negative emanations born of our own
emotions and thoughts can linger and be an influence upon us longer than
they might be otherwise. Our own subtle energy resources can be diminished
in response.
The disconnection and diminishment of vitality and Light I have been
describing primarily affects the artifactals and, as I pointed out, the kind of
“riders” that may attach to them. Other types of allies and Sacramentals are
less affected in themselves, but the diminished energetic conditions can make
it more difficult for them to connect and align with a given artifact, whether
it’s an object like my chalice or a structure like a building. They may wish to
help but find it energetically difficult to do so. I may invoke a higher-
frequency spiritual being, such as an angel, to overlight a particular object
like my chalice, but if I have not cleansed its energy field and awakened its
own inherent sentiency and life, the invocation may not “stick.” No talisman
is created, nor is any Sacramental or ally aligned, though I might pretend that
these things have happened simply because I did an invocation or ritual.

FIELD NOTE 17: ECHOES

I was visiting a close friend for the first time in his own home. We’d
known each other for years, but I’d never had the opportunity before to travel
to the State where he lived. He and his wife lived in a large home, and he
was proudly showing me around when he took me into the master bedroom.
“I want to show you something,” he said.
He went over to a small table near his bed and, opening the drawer, took
out a large revolver. “We’ve been having break-ins in the neighborhood,” he
said, showing me the gun. “So, I got this. It’s a Magnum revolver, and
believe me, I know how to use it!”
He then handed me the weapon. Unlike my friend, who had grown up in
a gun-culture, guns had never been a part of my life. So, this was the first
time I’d ever held a revolver. I was curious about it, so as I held it, I tuned in
to the techno-elemental life within it. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but
what I found surprised me and gave me a deeper look at the role of techno-
elementals in our lives.
I discovered myself in contact with a presence that was proud of what it
was as a gun and that wanted to be used for the purposes for which it had
been created. This was in no way an evil or negative entity (which is not to
say a “dark rider” couldn’t attach itself to a weapon) but merely a subtle
organism—I believe of an elemental nature, though it’s not always easy for
me to discern the exact “species” involved—that had taken on the human
purpose for which this artifact had been produced and, like a good servant,
was intent on following it out. It was designed to kill, and it was prepared to
do so. It wanted to fulfill its function.
There was no ill-will present in this being, and it certainly had no target
in mind. It didn’t have the kind of consciousness that would give it any sense
of morality. The gun wasn’t possessed, as in some horror story, by a
disembodied entity that was looking for victims. It was simply an
impersonal, one might even say blind, devotion to the human purposes
instilled in it through its design and creation. In this sense, the nearest analog
might be a robot seeking to fulfill its programming.
I realized holding this revolver that if there were anything in me that
would resonate emotionally or mentally to this embodied purpose, that is, if I
were trying to decide whether to kill someone or not, the subtle energy held
in the techno-elemental of this weapon could act as an echo chamber,
magnifying and playing back to me my own intent to do harm. The gun’s
desire to fulfill its purpose and my desire to shoot someone could combine to
tip me over from merely thinking about killing to actually doing so.
Before we begin blaming the techno-elementals of weapons for all the
mayhem and violence in our world, I want to be clear that this is a complex
issue. Why a person commits an act is a child with many parents. There are
psychological reasons, karmic reasons, social reasons, environmental
reasons. We all have sovereignty and choice, and we are the agents who
make decisions to harm or not to harm. But as I’ve been saying throughout
this book, we are also subtle beings operating in a subtle environment. Subtle
energies do have an effect upon us psychologically and physiologically. This
is why being aware of techno-elementals is important because they are an
influence in our lives. At any given time in any given circumstance, this
influence could be minor or it could be major; it could be beneficial, or it
could be harmful. But whatever it may be, it is always there as long as we
live within and surrounded by our artifacts.
I thought, holding this gun and feeling its dedication to its purpose, that if
a person were emotionally and mentally at a tipping point, the nudge of this
techno-elemental energy might be one of the factors sending him or her over
the edge into violence.
Then I felt something else with this revolver. In addition to the basic will
to fulfill its purpose—in effect, to be useful and to be used—there was
another layer of energy which, I realized, came from my friend. It was like
seeing a second set of instructions added on to the original programming. It’s
hard to put this into words, but the image that arose in my mind was that of a
guardian. This is anthropomorphizing, I realize, but the closest I can come to
what I was feeling was that the gun saw itself as a protector. It was clear that
this energetic attitude had been added, rather like energy is added to a
talisman, after the gun had been designed and manufactured, and it was clear
it reflected my friend’s attitude and overall energy field. Although raised
around and with guns, he was a very loving and gentle man. If pushed, he
would push back, and he was fearless in doing so, but he was not a violent
personality. He did have, however, especially where his family and people he
loved were concerned, a strong commitment to being a protector.
 He had purchased the gun to protect his family and household. This
intent was strong enough and held often enough when he thought of the gun
to communicate to the techno-elemental of the revolver, altering its sense of
purpose from “killing” to “killing to protect.”
I realize my words can make it sound as if the gun, or more precisely, the
techno-elemental, has agency in the human sense, but it does not. It is a
“thou,” but it’s not a person. Its consciousness is not structured or capable in
any way that would express human capacities. But it does possess an
awareness of itself and a desire to fulfill its reason for being.
Since that experience, I’ve explored this phenomenon more deeply and
have decided, barring further information and insights, that what I was tuning
into with my friend’s gun was an extension of the artifactal energy and
consciousness into what I think of as a “rider of purpose.” I want to make
clear that trying to draw distinctions between different layers of energy and
identity with entities whose boundaries are more fluid than anything we
experience in the physical world, is not easy and subject to error. It’s like
trying to focus a microscope to see the fine differences within the body of a
cell and, if the instrument doesn’t focus that well, you end up seeing blurry
images. You can make deductions from these images, but they can be
mistaken.
As I’ve discussed in previous Field Notes, the energy and thought-forms
of human imagination and purpose can enter and shape the characteristics of
artifactals. If the human producing that energy and those thought-images is
not particularly connected to the larger wholeness of the world, then the
human contribution creates a diminished state. Since human thought is
powerful, this diminished state can end up being the dominant characteristic
of the artifactal and of other techno-elemental elements associated with it.
In this case, a “rider” is created that focuses upon fulfilling the purpose of
the artifact. It is what I think of as a “vector of will,” that is, an energetic
projection of a will for something to happen. By itself, it may be small and
weak, but in a collective setting, it can become much more powerful.
Thus, if, when building the walls of a hospital, the people involved
project into the materials going into the walls an intent that they hold a
healing energy, then a very powerful “vector of will” or “rider of purpose”
comes into being as part of the techno-elemental energy of the hospital’s
physical structure. Of course, in today’s materialistic world, it is probably
rare that this happens, but in the future, when, hopefully, we have a greater
awareness as a society of the reality and character of the subtle ecosystem
around us and of which we are a part, then the holding and projection of
appropriate thought-forms and mental energies as part of the construction
process may become part of a builder’s training. It can certainly happen now
when a person builds his or her own home and puts their loving energy into
every part of it.
The “rider of purpose” or the “vector of will” in my friend’s gun was
very simple: “Kill!” This is the fundamental purpose of the weapon as
imagined, designed, and built by human beings. It’s not a tool of building, of
healing, of exploration. It is a tool of killing. However, this “rider of
purpose” that I attuned to as part of the techno-elemental field—a rider
created by human thought rather than a subtle entity in its own right come
from some other part of the subtle worlds—was a small projection of energy.
It was a small “vector of will.” Any normal person holding the gun would be
able to resist it, experiencing it, perhaps, simply as a stimulation to the
imagination, wondering what it might be like to actually use the gun as it’s
intended to be used.
However, the power of guns and using them to kill is a powerful
thoughtform within the collective imagination of humanity. Guns have been
used for killing for hundreds of years, and they occupy a major part of both
popular entertainment and the news of world events. Guns are being used all
around the world to kill, and thousands of people are dying daily because of
their use.
Even leaving out any number of other factors—psychological, subtle,
environmental, social, and so forth—that might lead a person to use a gun,
the link of this powerful collective imagination and purpose within humanity
with the tiny “rider of purpose” within a particular gun can give the latter
much more power and influence than it might have otherwise. More
precisely, the “rider of purpose” within the techno-elemental presence of the
gun acts as a portal into the very much more powerful and influential energy
and will of the thought-forms of gun use and killing held in the collective
psyche of humanity. These are subtle energies—what I call “vectors” in that
they embody momentum and direction translated into purpose—that want to
be fulfilled. They “ground themselves” in the lives and actions of people
who are susceptible.
This is a complex topic beyond the scope of this book. My point here is
just that techno-elementals become places where human purposes and
imaginations and desires can become anchored; our artifacts can hold these
humanly-created energies the way a battery holds an energy until it is
discharged.
In my own experience, most of our artifacts possess these “riders of
purpose,” but in most cases, they are relatively weak and without much
consequence. For instance, my little Yoda figure, as I described earlier, has
links to the collective image of Yoda. Part of its purpose is to represent this
image. But it also has a “rider of purpose” which is commercial in nature. It
is designed to be sold; at one level, it doesn’t matter what it looks like as long
as it is attractive to a buyer. As I have held and used this Yoda figure as an
icon that for me represents a level of wisdom and attunement, the energy I’ve
projected into it long ago “overwrote” and replaced that original “buy me”
rider of purpose.
Some of the artifacts we create, like guns, have strong “riders of
purpose,” configurations of energy and intent that we create and project into
their subtle energy field, shaping the artifactal accordingly; others are much
weaker or even neutral. Most of these “riders of purpose” have little to do
with fostering partnership with the subtle and physical life around us or with
creating wholeness within the spiritual, subtle, psychological, and physical
worlds we inhabit. They do not have a purpose of contributing in some
manner to Gaia’s well-being, or even to humanity’s overall health and
wholeness.
Therein lies a problem. We create and then live in an energetic echo-
chamber based in our technology that reflects back to us who we are in our
separateness as human beings but not who we are in our connectedness and
wholeness with Gaia. We are encased in worlds of human imagination and
purpose, which are powerful but not sufficient to reflect the fullness of who
we are as sacred individuals.
Technology as a whole is like a collective techno-elemental of our own
creation and invocation. We may question what kinds of technology we
create or how we use technology, but we don’t question the existence of
technology itself. We create more technology because we can or because
there is a need for it, real or imagined, but contributing to this growth of the
modern technological world is the subtle energy of technology as a thing in
itself, a planetary “artifact” in itself. It is a collective “rider of purpose,”
influencing us as a species and energizing and stimulating our own desire to
create more technology. It has the power to shape our evolution.
 FIELD NOTE 18: SHAZAM!
I have always been a fan of superheroes. As a kid, I reveled in the
adventures of Superman as chronicled in various D.C. comic books.
However, my loyalties were severely tested when I discovered a rival comic
book company, Fawcett Comics, and their superhero, Captain Marvel. He
had a variety of superpowers similar (and even identical) to those of
Superman (which later led to charges of copyright violation by the creators of
the Man of Steel), but there was one major difference. Superman came from
another planet. I might admire him, but in my imagination, I couldn’t really
be him. I was from earth, he wasn’t. Captain Marvel, on the other hand, was
actually a boy my age, Billy Batson, who could transform into the superhero
by uttering a magic word given him by an ancient wizard: Shazam! In the
comics, he would be hit by a bolt of magic lightning when he said this, and
suddenly, it wasn’t Billy standing there anymore. It was Captain Marvel!
Now this, my eight-year old mind decided, was within the realm of
possibility, if only I could find the right ancient wizard….
In a way, humanity had its own “Shazam moment” and was struck with a
transforming bolt of lightning when Benjamin Franklin flew his kite in a
lightning storm, an iconic image of the start of our electronic technology. We
even had an iconic wizard, Thomas Edison, often referred to as the “Wizard
of Menlo Park” for all the wonders and discoveries he produced from his
laboratory in New Jersey, U.S.A.
Humanity may not have become a superhero but we definitely gained
superpowers through the mastery of electromagnetism. The flow of electricity
is the lifeblood for our modern civilization, a civilization that has radically
transformed the planet in ways that were never possible for humanity before.
It also brought us into association with a new domain of elemental and
spiritual energies and consciousnesses, as I described in Field Note 12.
These beings are not the same kind of techno-elemental as those I’ve been
describing, such as the artifactals and the riders. Nor are they exactly allies.
Yet, they definitely come into contact and interaction with us through our
technology and our tool-making. Though part of Gaia and Earth’s evolution,
they are a form of subtle life and consciousness with which we have not
“grown up” over the millennia. This relative unfamiliarity presents a set of
challenges different from those we have been exploring in previous Field
Notes.
 As I said in the earlier Field Note, electrical elementals are beings of
force, closest in nature, I think, to elementals of fire, but at the same time,
they are more fundamental. They are expressions of cosmic forces of
manifestation itself; they help make the universe possible.
In relationship to us, they are not hybrids. They can associate with
artifactals, but they are not elementals of substance. They are not tied to
particular artifacts. They can augment human purposes but they don’t blend
with them in the way other techno-elementals do, at least as far as I can tell
(and remember, this is an exploratory, investigative process for me, too!).
Thus, when I tune into the techno-elemental life of my desk lamp, I can
perceive the artifactal and I can sense the presence of an electro-elemental or
an “intelligence and spirit” of electricity, but the two are not the same. The
electro-elemental is not, to my sensing, at least, a being—a distinct entity—in
the way the artifactal of the lamp is, and yet it adds its power to that artifactal
in order for it to fulfill its purpose. In effect, what I am perceiving here is a
symbiotic relationship, analogous, I suppose, to lichen, which is a composite
organism comprised of algae and fungi, two distinctly different forms of life.
The energetic influence of my lamp, such as it may be, is limited in
scope. I may feel it while I’m sitting at my desk, but I don’t feel it when I’m
across the room or in another room. The energetic influence of electricity,
however, is not so limited. The lamp in my bedroom on the other side of the
house resonates with the same electro-elemental energy and influence as the
lamp on my computer desk. The artifactals are different, but the
electromagnetic presence is the same.
On the whole, my experience of the presence of electro-elemental life is
that it manifests as a field rather than as a point source. I can point to where
the artifactal of my lamp is, but the electro-elemental presence is really all
around me in the house and in the neighborhood outside. Electrical wires are
everywhere carrying current throughout my home and the homes around me.
Radio waves, including the microwaves used for cell phone transmissions,
fill the air around me, broadcast from local television and radio stations and
from cell phone towers. Although electromagnetic waves of all kinds have
always been in the world, our civilization is deliberately generating them and
filling the spaces we live in with them in unprecedented ways. Unlike other
techno-elementals that are in the environment with us, electro-elementals
surround us. They become the environment in which we live. I suggest this
in Figure 12.
 FIGURE 12
Humanity Encompassed by Electro-Elementals
This sets up a situation in which we adapt to the fields created by electro-
elementals rather than the other way around. They become a ubiquitous
influence in ways other techno-elementals do not.
What is this influence?
As I described in Field Note 12, when I first began investigating the
nature and impact of electro-elementals as part of my larger techno-elemental
research, I had a negative impression of them. All techno-elementals are
non-human subtle organisms, even though we may project human-like
qualities and characteristics upon them; but my experience of the electro-
elementals was that they were inhuman. This inhumanity—which I
perceived then as a cold, impersonal, inorganic force—was off-putting to me
and even sinister. Electro-elementals seemed to me like something from an
alien dimension whose effect upon us was deleterious, diverting us from our
human evolutionary path. They seemed wholly devoid of love.
There is some truth to this perception, at least at a surface level, but it
doesn’t go deeply enough. It offers a good lesson in not stopping with first
impressions, especially when dealing with subtle world phenomena whose
nature is outside incarnate human experience. As I said in Field Note 12, I
have subsequently discovered a loving, spiritual presence—what I might
think of as the Devic presences overlighting electromagnetic energy. It has
become clear to me that rather than being an alien intrusion into human
evolution, the increasingly strong presence of electro-elementals in our lives
has been directed by spiritual forces whose long-term interest is in the well-
being and wholeness of humanity, as well as of the Earth. There are indeed
love and warmth present in the electro-elemental realm, if one goes deeply
enough to see it.
This doesn’t mean, though, that this development of electrical technology
doesn’t have its risks and challenges. Electromagnetic phenomena can
definitely have unhealthy effects on our physical bodies, some of which we
are still discovering. But my interest in this book is on how it affects our
subtle nature, at least as much as I am able to discern at this point.
There are two effects that stand out for me.
The first of these is the newness of this relationship. However much
electromagnetism and electricity are part of the natural world, the manner in
which we are living with these energies is an unprecedented product of
human technology. As I have said, we have not evolved in close relationship
and partnership with electro-elementals the way we have with other elemental
and Devic beings. Therefore, we are getting to know each other. Our two
evolutionary lines are having to explore how to interact in ways that augment
and help each other rather than hindering or negatively impacting each other.
The consciousness inherent in the subtle life of electricity does not perceive
or respond to the world in the way a human consciousness does. The
problem is that we are still discovering, as incarnate beings, just what it
means to be human; we are learning who we are and what our capabilities
are. The electro-elementals know very well what who they are and what they
can do.
Like any elemental force, electro-elementals are very strong and clear in
their identity and energy, and this strength and clarity can influence us unless
we are equally clear and strong in our humanity. For instance, electricity
“thinks” and operates in binary ways. Its consciousness is structured to
express a simple but powerful logic of positive and negative poles, on and
off. Human consciousness is more complex and flexible. We experience
polarities and binaries in our lives, such as male and female, but we are not
limited to them. We can express gender in multiple ways, not just two. We
are capable of seeing “yes” and “no,” but also “maybe” and “in addition.”
We operate in areas of ambiguity that are unknown to the elemental worlds
generally and the electro-elementals specifically.
The challenge here is that, with the human world surrounded and
pervaded by the elemental influence of electricity, we can become less
human. Our humanity takes on from the electro-elemental realm tendencies
that constrict it in ways not suitable for the evolution of our consciousness.
We do this in part because we are trying to adapt to a new kind of
environment and in part because we would like to appropriate the power of
electro-elementals for ourselves, and we think the way to do this is to become
more like them.
This brings us to the second effect. The cosmic subtle force of which
electromagnetism is an outward manifestation heightens the energy of other
life processes. It can speed them up, which means that human evolution
becomes accelerated—which we can see in the acceleration over the past
century of human technology. This acceleration is not necessarily deeply
rooted; it can be a surface phenomenon, like a young person who grows
quickly into the body and strength of an adult while still at the emotional
stage of a child.
The rage for efficiency in business that began in the first part of the
Twentieth Century is an example of this. The factory assembly line greatly
speeded up and increased production, but it turned individual persons into
parts in an industrial machine. Another example that is more recent is the
shrinkage of our power of attention. People want their information in short,
digital bites—hence the popularity of texting and tweeting—and lose their
willingness, if not their ability, to read in a deep, contemplative manner. The
evening news gives a series of swift snapshots of the day’s events, often
concentrating on what is visually exciting, without a concomitant exploration
and analysis of these events that would provide context and meaning.
The impact of the electro-elemental subtle field increasingly surrounding
humanity isn’t forcing us to be a certain way or to do certain things, but it
emphasizes tendencies existing in our consciousnesses. It speeds up and
intensifies our emotional and mental reactions, which can have both good and
bad consequences depending on what these reactions are or the depth of
consciousness they represent. The simplest effect is that it increases stress.
Because of the speed of our electrical environment, it is harder, unless we are
deliberate about it, to find moments and places of quiet and calm where our
lives can slow down. The ubiquitousness of our smartphones means that we
are never out of connection with others but it also means we are always being
engaged by others when what we may need is to be left alone.
I’ve come to realize as I’ve pursued this research that the electro-
elemental world truly wants to partner with us and in doing so, to be of
positive benefit. But they don’t understand us and, from their point of view,
we don’t understand ourselves very well. Because we can be fluid and
pliable in our energy, they can influence us in ways they don’t intend.
Likewise, we don’t understand them because we have such little
understanding of the wholeness of life, especially in its subtle aspects. There
is much for both sides to learn here. The challenge is whether we will rise to
the occasion. Hit by the subtle lightning of the electro-elemental world, do
we turn into a superhero for the Earth or are we merely incinerated?

FIELD NOTE 19: ROOMIES

Now we come to the most important question. How do we interact with
techno-elementals in a way that benefits them and us? If techno-elementals
are a “bridge” that is broken, how do we repair the bridge?
The techno-elemental challenge has two parts. One is environmental, and
one is evolutionary. These subtle organisms live in and share humanly
created environments; they are an integral part of the formation of these
environments. They are the subtle life that intimately participates in our
various artifacts, from the tools we use to the clothes we wear and the
buildings we live in. A United Nations report issued in 2014 said that 54% of
humanity now lived in cities; that percentage is undoubtedly larger now. If
our ancestors lived in the midst of nature, most of us now live in midst of the
things we have designed, fashioned, and manufactured. For many of us,
artifacts are our daily, natural environment and techno-elementals often our
equivalent of nature spirits.
Therefore, the nature of the environments we create directly affect
techno-elementals who in turn affect the environments in which we live.
Like all organisms, subtle or physical, techno-elementals learn from and
evolve within the environments in which they live. This means that humanity
has a direct, though not an exclusive, impact on the evolutionary
development of these beings. As I discussed in Field Note 4, we live in a
learning universe. Techno-elementals learn by being part of human subtle
energy fields of thought, emotion, and spirituality. They learn the way a
singer learns a melody by hearing it repeated over and over again, or the way
a muscle learns to throw a ball by throwing it over and over again. They
learn by being part of or being influenced by how we perform the eight
functions of a subtle organism. How do we, as more advanced beings, hold
our identity? How do we exchange subtle energies? How do we process
them? How do we form connections? How do we create wholeness in our
environment—or fail to do so (it’s possible to learn brokenness as well as
wholeness)?
To imagine how we may positively affect techno-elementals
environmentally and evolutionarily, think of two college roommates—a
senior, let’s say, and a freshman—sharing the same room in a dormitory. If
the upperclassman clutters up the room and makes a mess, his roommate may
have no option but to live in it; after all, freshmen don’t tell seniors what to
do! He may even learn to be messy, too, following by example. The
upperclassman, being more experienced in the school, may not be too
bothered by the mess, but the freshman may well find the environment
distracting and not conducive to studying and learning.
It may seem evident that the senior needs to be aware of his mess, clean it
up, and make a more learning-friendly environment for the freshman. But
before he can do this, his first step is to look past their respective status in the
college and recognize the freshman as a fellow student. Creating a better
environment flows out of acknowledging and caring for the well-being of the
freshman. It arises from a desire to make learning easier, not harder, for his
roommate. After all, if both roommates are prospering, the environment they
co-create will be beneficial for both
In dealing with techno-elementals, our first step, then, is recognizing they
exist and honoring and appreciating their presence. We can’t fix a broken
bridge unless we see the bridge is there; we can’t make a roommate
comfortable unless we see that we have a roommate. This need not be a
psychic experience. We don’t have to wait until we’re clairvoyant to
acknowledge the subtle organisms and the subtle environment around us. A
mental tip of the hat to their presence is a good place to start.
A large part of the challenge with techno-elementals is simply that we
don’t accept they exist. We don’t accept the reality that everything around us
—and I mean everything—is alive. We don’t acknowledge that energetically
and spiritually, we inhabit a world of subjects, not one of subjects and
objects. Accepting and acknowledging that we are part of a living universe
embracing both physical and non-physical realities is the needed first step.
After all, the upperclassman can’t create an environment more
accommodating and helpful to the freshman sharing his room if he doesn’t
believe or acknowledge that the freshman exists.
Beyond recognizing the reality of the subtle realms and the existence of
subtle organisms is acknowledging our impact upon those realms and beings
through our own generative subtle nature. The very fact that he is in the
same room as his roommate means the upperclassman is going to affect him.
The messes he creates may be due to habits he’s acquired when he thought he
was living alone; continuing those habits will make it harder for his
roommate. The senior now has to be mindful of the effect he is having. If he
now chooses his actions and behavior out of respect and care for his
roommate, he will help create a supportive environment for both of them.
We are constantly radiating through our thoughts and feelings and
through our actions subtle and spiritual energies that impact the subtle
environment around us and the beings inhabiting that environment. The
more we turn these emanations into positive forces of blessing, love and
appreciation for the life around us, the more we nurture the techno-elementals
in our lives.
There is a tradition in many cultures of purifying an environment through
the use of incense and fragrances. Smudging with a bundle of burning sage,
for example, is common amongst many Native American tribes as a way of
energetically cleansing a room.
From an inner standpoint, we are each surrounded with the “fragrance” of
our incarnate nature, the expression of our spiritual, mental, emotional, and
physical choices and activities. We are constantly “smudging” our
immediate environment, impacting the techno-elementals around us with the
“smoke” of our being, which may be uplifting and empowering or toxic and
polluting. We are powerful forces of positivity or negativity, either
organizing or disorganizing, cleansing or messing up the spaces our inner
roommates must share with us.
If we understand this, then we are called to being a consistent loving
presence in our world, something spiritual teachers have been asking of us for
millennia! We are like living stars: we are always generating and radiating
subtle energies that affect our world. The important thing is that we can
affect and shape what we generate through our choices and our intentions.
We have sovereignty and agency. This idea is at the core of Incarnational
Spirituality. Our ability to choose and our ability to love are our primary
tools in reconstructing the broken bridge of connection for the techno-
elementals in our lives.
The simplest way to bless and energize our subtle environments—to
“smudge” them with our love and appreciation—is through the ways we
engage with their physical counterparts, that is, with the artifacts that make
up our world. When I vacuum the living room, I can send love to the carpet
and to the floor underneath it. When I do the dishes, I can be aware of loving
each plate, each pan, each utensil. When I enter a room, I imagine my energy
field expanding to fill the room with blessing and appreciation.
I don’t need to be psychic or clairvoyant to do any of these things. I just
need to appreciate how my thoughts and emotions shape my subtle energy
field and how that field in turn impacts the energy fields of the subtle
organisms around me. I don’t even have to think about techno-elementals.
All I need do is foster states of joy, of love, of vitality, of gratefulness within
myself as an habitual way of being. This can’t help but benefit my many
“roommates.”
What I have been describing is a relationship we have with techno-
elementals that is automatic and largely unconscious. I do have to be
conscious and mindful of the overall state of my subtle energy field—that is,
of the quality of my thoughts and feelings—but I don’t have to be aware of or
thinking about the subtle environment and its inhabitants.
However, we can have a more focused relationship with the subtle world
around us. We have the power through our attention and our intention to
bring joy, love, gratefulness, and vitality to the techno-elementals that make
up our subtle environment. We can intentionally energize any artifacts we
use with acknowledgement, with appreciation, with love, and with any other
positive quality we may wish and choose to share.
When I use an artifact, like, say, my coffee cup, I can take a moment to
pay attention to it as a living presence and to direct thoughts and feelings of
appreciation and love to it. When I see my desk lamp, I take a moment to
appreciate and love it, too, as a living presence. When I put my fingers to the
keyboard of my computer to write these words, I silently bless, honor, and
love the keyboard that I’m touching.
If we do this consistently, it not only broadcasts a positive, life-affirming,
energizing subtle energy to the artifacts to which we are giving our attention,
it also begins to build in habits of thought and feeling that affect our energy
fields overall. As I said above, we don’t have to turn our attention to every
artifact in our surroundings to give it appreciation and love; that would totally
occupy our time to the exclusion of doing anything else! But we don’t need
to. If we’re building habits of love and blessing into our subtle energy fields,
then these qualities automatically radiate to positively affect our world.
 It’s the same principle as honoring people. If I am in a crowd of people, I
don’t need to go up to each one to say, “I appreciate you and love you for
who you are!” If it’s New Year’s Eve on Times Square in New York City,
the new year would be well advanced before I could say this to each
individual who was there (assuming they waited there long enough for me to
do so!). But if I have a loving, appreciative attitude in general, then this is
what I will convey to whomever I meet—and on a subtle level, this creates a
field of lovingness that touches and blesses many more than I could interact
with physically.
A third thing we can do is to foster connectedness between our world of
artifacts and the world of nature. There are different ways to do this. The
simplest relies on the manner in which our personal subtle energy field
engages with our surrounding environment. If we are attuned to nature and
feel a connection with the natural world, this quality of attunement and
connection manifests in our own energy fields and, as we have seen, can be
passed on to any techno-elemental impacted or influenced by our field.
As I write this, my wife is taking advantage of a rare sunny day here in
the Pacific Northwest to air out all the cushions and pillows from the sofas in
the living room. Our back porch is covered with them, all basking in the rays
of the sun. It looked so inviting that I took a “sun break” from writing to go
out and join them. As I did so, I consciously invited blessing from the Air
Devas upon all the techno-elementals in the pillows and cushions.
We can make a specific energetic connection between some part of
nature and one or more artifacts. As another example, there is a large
Douglas Fir tree that grows in our front yard close to the house. It is a
dominant feature when looking through the front window of our living room.
I can reach out to it, attuning to its life and energy field, and then ask it to
project its blessings into the living room.
We can also attune to Devic presences and ask them to bless our artifacts
and ensure their connection to the larger life-field of nature. For instance,
sitting among the pillows and cushions while on my “sun break,” I
consciously invoked blessing from the Devas of the air to cleanse and vivify
the artifactals within them. Likewise, I wrote earlier of the energy radiating
from the being I call the “Lady of the Lake,” a small Deva overlighting Lake
Sammamish near where we live. I can attune to that presence and ask it to
bless my house. Or I can—and often do—attune to the mountain Devas that
surround the valley where I live, Mt. Rainier in particular, to do the same.
 Another example is that when I used to travel by plane, I would attune to
Air Devas. Then, as I I boarded the plane, I would greet the techno-elemental
of the aircraft, offer it my blessings, and then use my attunement to offer it
connection with the Devas of the air.
All of these are examples of ways I can improve the environment in
which I find the techno-elementals around me. Doing so empowers their
ability to be more connected and also, as a result, their ability to contribute
positively to the overall subtle energies in which I live. When the
upperclassman cleans up the room, the freshman is better able to settle in and
contribute. The latter is also able to study better.
All of this falls under the broad heading of “energy hygiene.” It is a way
of cleansing and vitalizing our subtle environment. It is also a way to get rid
of any undesirable “dark riders” or unwanted negative entities that may have
been attracted or psychic pollution that may have accumulated. After all, if
the upperclassman cleans up the room and helps the freshman do so as well,
they are less likely to be infested with rats or other vermin.
The topic of subtle hygiene is larger than I can cover in this book. If you
are interested in more detailed information, please see my book, Working
with Subtle Energies.
We contribute to the evolution of techno-elementals by providing
examples of how subtle energies may be positively embodied and expressed.
If the senior in our dorm room has good study habits, the freshman is more
likely to pick up on them and thus improve his own learning capacity.
However, techno-elementals are not on the human line of consciousness
evolution. They are learning different life lessons, just like the freshman may
be studying for a major in business administration while the upperclassman is
studying to become an astrophysicist. Good study habits, so to speak, can be
conveyed but not specific information. However, if the upperclassman
creates a distracting, obstructive environment that keeps the freshman from
studying properly, this is a problem.
This is what we do when we project a negative and disconnected subtle
energy field into our environment, making it more difficult for the techno-
elementals—particularly the artifactals—to learn what they need to learn and
to connect with their “teachers,” the higher expressions of Devic and Gaian
life. From an evolutionary standpoint, we need to stop creating obstructions
through the negativity we generate that diminishes techno-elemental vitality
and life.
 Beyond that, we can with practice and skill learn to attune to the angelic
and Devic presences that overlight techno-elemental evolution. We can in
our meditations and in our active blessings align with such presences and ask
both that our human field not be an obstruction to their evolutionary work
and that, where possible, it be a conduit for their blessing. We can ask that
our lives assist and empower the natural evolutionary development of the
subtle life within our artifacts.
I illustrate these different possibilities of positive engagement with
techno-elementals in the picture following, Figure 13.

FIGURE 13
Engaging with Techno-Elementals
In Field Note 13, I discussed the collaborative, co-creative function of
emergence, a key factor in the evolution of life and consciousness. I used the
image of Grail Space as a way of imagining this function. With this in mind,
one of the most important things we can do to assist the techno-elemental
(and, for that matter, natural elemental) life around us is to use our internal
ability to create Grail Space to do so externally. As I described in the earlier
Field Note, human subtle energies can block artifactals from the connection
with nature spirits that would ordinarily draw out and enhance their
evolutionary potentials by co-creating Grail Space with them. Since we have
drawn these beings into our world, we have a responsibility to provide this
help, and we can do so using our own capacity to form Grail Space.
Using intention and love, we can reach out to the life and Light within the
subtle organisms in our environment, inviting them to join us and participate
in jointly bringing a Grail Space into being. Such a space creates a field that
empowers and heightens the evolutionary processes of all who take part. We
are sharing our Grail Space-making capacity with those subtle lives who
normally cannot do so on their own.
In the Appendix, I offer a suggested exercise in creating Grail Space.
Mostly, we want to remember that the lives within the artifacts that
surround us in our environments are in our care. They all deserve our love,
whether artifactals, riders, allies, sacramentals, or electro-elementals. We are
a contributing factor to their well-being and evolution, sometimes the most
powerful factor. It is our responsibility as human beings not to diminish
them, burden them with negativity, or disconnect them from their natural
surroundings or from their evolutionary drive. We are partners in revealing
and manifesting the sacredness that is within all creation. We are roomies in
the university of Gaian life and spiritual evolution.

FIELD NOTE 20:

Cyberspace, Robots, and AI, Oh My!
The suggestions I presented in the previous Field Note for working with
techno-elementals applies to all our artifacts, electronic or not. The use of
electricity, however, has brought into existence a whole new level of artifacts
in the form of digital technology, presenting us with a new realm of
consciousness and experience in the form of cyberspace, as well as with the
development of robots and artificial intelligences which some feel may even
replace our own.
As far as I’ve been able to determine, the word “cyberspace” was coined
by the science fiction writer, William Gibson, the author of Neuromancer and
other books in what has come to be known as the “cyberpunk” genre. It
refers to the psychological space created by interfacing with a computer.
Cyberspace exists as a virtual reality brought into being by computer-
moderated interactions; in this sense, it is a real “place” I go to when I teach
my online classes or use Google to give me information. But in many ways,
it is also an imaginative space, much like that created when you read a novel.
It has no tangible, material existence in the physical world, other than as a
series of ones and zeros in computer servers.
In an interesting way, cyberspace is a non-material reality that mimics
many of the characteristics of the actual subtle environment and realms that
surround us. For example, in the subtle dimensions, time and space do not
function as they do for us here in the physical realms. I may have a close
friend who lives three thousand miles away, but though separated by physical
distance, I can attune to him, forming a loving resonance, and in so doing, we
can be as close energetically as if we were standing side by side. We are in
each other’s presence though our bodies are mile apart.
Now, with a smartphone in my pocket, I can connect to anyone anywhere
on earth who is also part of the Internet or part of a telephonic
communications grid. I can Facetime my friend who is three thousand miles
away, and we can see each other and talk over our smartphones just as if we
were in the same room.
Cyberspace, like the telegraph, the telephone, television, the railroad, air
travel, and automobiles, frees us from constraints of time and space in ways
that would have seemed magical to our ancestors. This cannot help but have
an effect on the consciousness of modern humanity. It enables us to inhabit
the world differently than we would have a hundred, two hundred, or a
thousand years ago. The world, as experienced by mystics and psychics, has
always been profoundly interconnected, but now, through our technology,
nearly everyone can experience this in a digital way. This goes beyond the
effect of any particular techno-elemental, and I will explore this more fully in
the next Field Note.
Returning to cyberspace, though, some years ago, my friend and
colleague John Matthews, a world-renowned scholar of the Arthurian mythos
and of Celtic shamanism, did some research into this digital domain as a new
kind of subtle realm in formation. Though our techniques are different, we
both journeyed into cyberspace in the same fashion that we would journey
into the subtle environment, and we both discovered, certainly to my surprise
and I think to John’s as well, that there was an actual, objective subtle
domain coming into existence. It is not well-formed—or at least wasn’t at
that time back in the early years of the Twenty-First century. Here is a
comment John sent to me: “When I journeyed there, I saw a landscape
marked out in a grid, rather as in the movie Tron. When I looked at the shape
of a hill of valley it became a hill or valley, when I looked away, I felt it
returned to its unformed state. It struck me what a perfect metaphor for the
inner realms cyberspace is. It does not have a physical reality, yet it exists,
and is in part created by us in collaboration with the Universe.”
At another time he wrote, “In one of my classes on Shamanism, I taught
people to journey through their computer screens into a new area of the other
world. This was described by my allies as ‘work in progress’. They told me
that journeying into cyberspace was actually creating a new area within the
subtle worlds.”
My experience was similar. When I looked to see if there were any
“cyber-elementals,” however, beings uniquely connected with cyberspace, I
could not discern any. What I did tune into were subtle allies that normally
associate with human beings, which makes sense, given that cyberspace is in
many ways a projection of human consciousness. I did become aware over
time of angelic presences overlighting this development, though I would not
say that I ever perceived something like a singular “Angel” or “Deva” of
cyberspace (which doesn’t mean such a Being may not exist, of course).
However, the most important aspect of cyberspace was something I
discovered quite by accident in the early Nineties when personal computers
were still something of a novelty. As an experiment, I began teaching some
of my classes online over the Internet. Being partly deaf, this was actually
easier for me in some ways since all the class interactions were done in
writing. Still, I wasn’t at all sure it would work. Although my hearing (or
lack thereof) could give me some problems in my face-to-face classes, it was
more than compensated by the field of subtle energy and resonance we could
build together. In fact, the subtle energy transmissions between me and the
participants was one of the important features of these classes. I had no idea
if this could be replicated online.
As it turned out, the subtle field generated between me and my online
students turned out to be as strong, and at times stronger, than that manifested
in classes where we were altogether in the same room. I found that
cyberspace could be a powerful conductor of subtle energies, which, when I
thought about it, made sense given that it was fundamentally a mental and
imaginal realm itself. Also, there were none of the distractions that could
arise in physical space. A subtle field could manifest, for instance,
unimpeded by personality reactions to what someone else looked like or what
their voice sounded like!
As a result of this experience, I began to use cyberspace as a conduit for
blessings. I work on the computer nearly every day, writing and teaching
classes. When I log on and the digital connections are made between my
computer and the Internet, I imagine that I’m entering a space shared by
millions of other people. I connect to spiritual allies and ask that my
presence in cyberspace provide an opening for blessing to flow to whomever
or wherever it can do the most good. In effect, I am making use of the
resonance created by countless people doing the same thing at the same time
to create a link through which blessings may pass. This is a simple practice
that anyone can do, turning the computer into a spiritual tool. (The same can
be true when using a smartphone. Any digital device that connects us to the
“space of connection” that is cyberspace can be used in this way as a portal
for blessing.)
Much is in the news these days about the accelerating development of
robots and of artificial intelligence. My children built and played with
simple electronic robots when they were younger, but these were no different
as artifacts from any other electrical or mechanical device in our household. I
have had no opportunity to investigate more sophisticated robots or artificial
intelligences, so I do not know what their subtle aspects might be like. If I
were to speculate, I would imagine they could attract complex elementals and
riders, but otherwise, they would essentially be like the machines we already
know. However, an AI that can learn and develop in ways that transcend and
modify its programming may generate a subtle field capable of supporting a
complex consciousness. Then one has to think of when an intelligence
crosses a boundary of evolution and no longer is “artificial.” Could an
advanced digital organism embody a soul or a spiritual intelligence? From
what I know of the subtle realms and the dynamics of subtle energies, I
would say this is possible, but I would also surmise that it would take greater
knowledge and skill—and wisdom and love—than modern cyberneticists and
robotics engineers currently have, especially given the materialistic mind-set
of our society.
This is a whole, wide field for subtle research, far beyond what I can give
to it. My experience with the digital world is largely limited to my computer
and my smartphone, and as artifacts, they possess the same techno-elementals
and electro-elementals as all the other human-made objects in my
environment. Beyond this, the subtle realms aspects of digital technology
have not been the focus of my work. I am hopeful that others with more
experience and skill in this area than I have will be inspired to explore the
subtle life associated with these emerging new dimensions in our world.
There is, however, one thing that is clear to me. As our technology
becomes ever more complex and sophisticated in augmenting and mimicking
human capabilities, it is increasingly important to affirm our human
wholeness. Machines can already out-perform what our muscles can do, and
computers can do mental tasks far faster and more accurately than we can.
However, none of our technologies contain the complexity of the human soul
nor our empathic and loving ability to create wholeness.
Throughout our history, we have been shaped by our tools. Now, though,
our digital tools—our computers, robots, and artificial intelligences—have a
power to shape us and our evolution in unprecedented ways. They shape our
imagination about ourselves and who we are. For instance, our brains are far
more sophisticated than any computer, yet we have developed the habit of
talking about ourselves as being “programmed” to do this or that as if we
were something manufactured by IBM. We limit our humanity by defining
ourselves in terms of our tools.
There are even movements to “upload” our consciousnesses into
computers, to leave the “meat world” behind. Those who promote this, part
of a “trans-humanity” movement, have decided that as an organic being,
humanity is too weak, too limited; our hope to evolve into something better
lies in turning ourselves into digital beings—in a sense, becoming techno-
elementals ourselves.
Our tools have always had a capacity to seduce us, and none more
powerfully than the digital technologies that increasingly fill our world.
However, the relationship we need with our technology and with the subtle
organisms that are part of it, the techno-elementals, is not to become like
them but to be even more clear in standing in who and what we are as whole
human beings. We cannot be symbiotic partners if we don’t keep up our end
of the partnership. And partnership, not dominance, is what subtle life is all
about.

FIELD NOTE 21: PARTNERSHIP

I want to emphasize here what I said in the introduction, that this is a very
experimental, exploratory area for me. I don’t consider myself an expert. The
realm of techno-elementals is complex and vast, just as the organic,
biological realm is. Further, the impact and influence of techno-elementals,
particularly of the electronic and digital variety, are still unfolding. In the
context of all of human evolution, this is a very early encounter indeed.
But one thing seems very clear to me. We will make little progress with
attitudes that pit the techno-world against the natural world, seeing one as
better than the other. There is really only one world with many different parts
and elements that exist in a complex ecology. The technological world may
be humanly created but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
For many of us, the technological world is our everyday equivalent of the
forests and fields, rivers and mountains of our ancestors. It is an ecology in
which new kinds of shamanism, new kinds of spirituality, new kinds of inner
work are both open to us and needed to form alliances and partnerships. We
need to integrate with the subtle lives we have drawn into our human world
and to minimize the negative effects that can be there where that integration
is lacking. So, it behooves us, I feel, to stop erecting in our thinking divisions
that separate the natural from the technological and to begin thinking of ways
of touching the deeper, spiritual aspects of the techno-world that is arising
around us.
The good news is that we are fully capable of doing that. It may just
require a shift in our thinking, a reframing of our worldview. This is not
always a simple task, but it is a doable one.
A step is to begin appreciating, honoring, and loving the technological
things in our lives and seeing them as points of connection with lives that are
very different from our own but still part of the Sacred. Even if I don’t like a
particular piece of technology and what it does, I can still love the sacredness
within it or the living techno-elemental force with which it is connected.
I can also explore new forms of spiritual practice. If I am oriented to a
shamanic approach, I can explore seeking technological allies, as well as the
more familiar ones associated with the natural world. Why couldn’t a
television, a computer, or a Harley-Davidson be a “power creature” for me?
In situations where I might call upon the energies and forces of spiritual
allies, might I not include the spirit of the technological things around me in
that invocation? The techno-elemental of my phone or my printer, my car or
my dishwasher might be able to help me, too. I know of many people for
whom this has been the case.
I can practice my own methods of attunement and integration with the
larger world of spirit and from that attunement reach out to offer blessing to
the machinery around me. I can appreciate a gadget not only for what it does
but just for the sake of its being.
I can refuse to see my world divided into artificial things and natural
things but instead insist that my consciousness and attitudes project a field of
unity and integration that draws these two aspects of nature into a closer
oneness.
 To be a good partner, I want to be clear and strong in the spiritual
presence of my own humanity, my own personhood. If elementals are
watching and learning, then let me be a good example for them of what a
human being is.
This is an evolving area of partnership. We can serve it by no longer
seeing the technological arena as bereft of spirit, but instead by calling that
area to acknowledge and align with the sacredness from which we all
emerge. It is the techno-elementals, who are spiritual beings in their own
right, who have a power to connect our technology with a larger wholeness, if
we can acknowledge them and work with them as partners.
The nature and function of techno-elementals is a rich area of spiritual
investigation. There is much more to it than I have put into this book. My
purpose here has been to keep it simple, even though it may not have seemed
that way at times! Basically, there have been just two ideas I’ve wanted to
communicate to you. The first is that techno-elementals exist and that our
artifacts, our built world, is an environment filled with subtle life and spiritual
forces. The second is that this world needs us and depends on us. It needs
our partnership to rebuild the bridge of communion, communication, and
wholeness. We meet that need with our acknowledgement, our appreciation,
and our love. These three are the basis on which all other work with techno-
elementals is based, just as they are the foundation for doing work with any
subtle organism.
We in the modern world have traveled a long way in consciousness from
talisman to tech, from a shamanic awareness of the world in which
everything is alive to a technological perspective in which the cosmos is
unliving matter meant to be subdued by human ingenuity and tools. Even as
human society, in the face of environmental difficulties and challenges, is
learning to recover an ecological perspective, so we are also at a time when
we need to recover our vision and awareness of being part of a living,
interconnected universe and in so doing re-kindle our own incarnate soul
presence. Understanding the challenge of the techno-elementals is an
important step in that direction.
May you take that step with blessing, for yourself and for everything in
your world.

EXERCISES
 Generally speaking, each time we hold or use an artifact, or enter a
building or a room, or gaze upon something someone has created, we have an
opportunity to engage with techno-elementals. The simplest way to do so is
to acknowledge and affirm their presence and their life as fellow evolving
beings, to appreciate them for what they are and what they do—for the
sacredness within them—and to send them love and blessing in whatever
manner is appropriate. In other words, be aware that you are always in the
midst of life and honor it accordingly.
When you are in a building or in your own home, a simple approach is to
attune to an angel or Deva overlighting that building, or your home, and, after
greeting it with appreciation and love, ask it to bless all the subtle lives—and
the physical ones, too—that are within its field of awareness, which generally
will mean within that structure. When you make connection in your own
mind between the techno-elementals and the overlighting angelic or Devic
intelligence, it adds your energy to the connections that are already there and
strengthens them.
If you would like to do something more specific to engage with the
techno-elementals of your world, here are two fundamental exercises—Touch
of Love and Grail Space—to get you started.

TOUCH OF LOVE EXERCISE

This is an exercise to directly bless a specific object and the techno-
elementals within and around it.
• Fill yourself with a felt sense of lovingness. You might imagine, for
instance, your heart overflowing with love or your spine glowing with
love. Express the highest form of love that you can authentically feel in
your whole being—body, mind, heart, energy, and soul—right now.
• Feel this love flowing out from the core of your being, down your arms
and into your hands. Feel this love pooling in your fingertips.
• Reach out and touch something. As you do so, feel the love in your
fingertips overflowing. In this Touch of Love, you do not take anything
into yourself. You do not really project it into anything, either. You
simply let it pool in your fingertips and overflow, allowing that which
you touch to absorb it in its own way.
• Visualize this overflowing love entering and blessing the subtle life
within that which you are touching. In your mind and heart, ask that it be
 nourishing and empowering to the techno-elementals associated with that
which you are touching.
• As love flows through your touch, it also stirs and flows and circulates
through your own being, bringing love to all parts of yourself just as you
are bringing it to the things you touch.
• Likewise, as love flows through your touch, it also stirs and flows and
circulates through your environment, rippling out in waves from the
things you touch, from the techno-elemental life under your fingers to
other techno-elemental and subtle lives in your surroundings, expanding
the influence of your loving touch.
• When you feel finished, just remove your fingers and allow the love to be
absorbed into all parts of your body.

GRAIL SPACE EXERCISE

Introduction
I use the term “Grail Space” to mean any space or field of subtle energies
that holds sacredness, just as in legend the Holy Grail held the transformative
blood of Christ. Sacredness in this instance manifests as the incarnational
consciousness and process that brings creation into being and sustains it in its
unfoldment
We live in Grail Space. The entire cosmos is the primal Grail Space
holding the sacredness of the Generative Mystery which I call the Sacred.
But this primal Grail Space can be accentuated in local space at any time that
we invoke the presence and flow of sacredness by honoring the incarnational
process through which it manifests.
The practice of creating a local Grail space is one of the principle
practices of Incarnational Spirituality. It consists of standing in our own
Sovereignty and Self-Light and engaging the local environment around us to
evoke more fully the Life and Light that flows from the primal Grail Space,
i.e. from the Sacred itself. Fundamentally, this is a practice of connecting
through Presence and love with everything around us. It is an act of honoring
and relating to our environment, inviting the life within it to respond
energetically and express its own Grail capacities. It is the act of mutual
holding that turns the environment, with ourselves in it, into a Grail in which
sacredness may shine forth.
 The creation of Grail Space is a reciprocal act, not something we do to
anything else. It is an act of extending an invitation, allowing the
environment to respond as fully as it can in the moment. Grail Space is born
of relationship and mutual engagement based on honoring the sovereignty
and identity of all involved.
Creating Grail Space is really a simple process, but I break it down into a
number of steps just so you can get a sense of the procedure. To read it, it
can seem like a lot, but it’s really a very fast, simple process. The main
difference between this technique and simply sending love into your
environment is the act of honoring and connecting with the identity of
everything about you in a partnership. It is not you doing something to the
things in your environment. It is you joining with them in collaboration to
create a mutually beneficial space or field into which sacredness may be
invoked.
One way to think of this is as if your environment is alive with people,
and you are joining hands with them to form a great circle. This circle creates
the Grail Space, and into it sacredness is invoked.

The Exercise
• Begin by standing in your own Sovereignty, in the felt sense of your
unique identity and your connection to your soul and to the sacred. If
you wish, you can imagine this Sovereignty as a “spine” of Light within
you, an axis around which your physical and subtle bodies develop and
align.
• Imagine this spine of Light becoming brighter and brighter as it unfolds
from the love within your Soul and within the Sacred of which it is a
part. As this Light becomes brighter within you, it expands and enfolds
you.
• Imagine yourself standing in an oval of Light emanating from your
“spine” of Sovereignty and individuality, an oval that surrounds you on
all sides, top and bottom, connecting you with the energies of the world.
It forms and radiates from you as a personal Grail, an incarnational field
holding sacredness.
• Everything in your immediate environment is an expression of the
Sacred. Everything you see participates in the primal Grail Space.
Everything has within itself a “spine” of incarnational intent and Light,
its own form of Sovereignty and identity, its own purpose and
 evolutionary spirit. Imagine yourself surrounded with a multitude of
“grails of Light” emanating from everything in the space around you. In
your heart, acknowledge and give honor to the presence of all these
“spines” or “grails” of incarnational and sacred Light.
• Imagine the aura of your internal, personal Grail of sacredness and
incarnational Light expanding into the room, joining in love with the
myriad multitude of Lights all around you, inviting them into an alliance
and collaboration with you. Feel your Light augmenting and blending
with the Lights around you, feel their Lights blending with and
augmenting your own. You are forming a subtle partnership with your
environment and everything seen and unseen within it. Feel this
partnership turning your immediate, local environment into a Grail that
you and all the things around you collaborate to create, a Grail you share.
• The felt sense of this partnership and the field of reciprocal energy that
generates it is the Grail Space. It is a field of collaborative partnership
and support in the incarnational process with everything around you in
your local space, a partnership and fellowship that can receive and hold a
Presence of sacredness, a presence of Gaia.
• Standing in this Grail Space, acknowledge this Presence of sacredness
heightened in yourself and your environment. Imagine it being held in
this space, doing whatever it needs to do to foster wholeness and well-
being within your surroundings and then overflowing into the larger
world beyond, a source of energy, blessing, love, and life.
• Stay in this Grail Space as long as feels comfortable. When you feel tired
or restless, simply draw your Self-Light back into yourself, giving thanks
to your energy partners for their participation. Imagine their incarnational
light moving back into themselves as well, knowing the environment you
share will resonate with the Light and Presence you have collectively
invoked for as long as it is able.
• Stand in your Sovereignty, acknowledging your wholeness your integrity,
your identity, and your connection to the Sacred. Then go about your
daily affairs.
If you would like to explore other exercises for working with subtle
energies and subtle beings, please see my book, Working with Subtle
Energies. If you would like information about the principles of Incarnational
Spirituality, please see my book, Journey into Fire. In addition, the Lorian
Association offers classes and workshops in these topics. For information,
please see our website, Lorian.org.

About the Author

David Spangler lives in the Northwest, is married and has four

children. Since 1965, he has worked clairvoyantly and intuitively
with a group of non-physical beings from the worlds of spirit.
They identified themselves as being part of an inner school whose
purpose was to explore and develop a spiritual teaching around the
process of incarnation. This teaching is intended to empower
incarnate persons living in the physical world—individuals such as
you and me—to lead lives of greater blessing and capacity and to
be sources of blessing and service for the world as a whole. From
1970-1973, David was a co-director of the Findhorn Foundation
Community in Northern Scotland. In 1974 he co-founded the
Lorian Association, a non-profit spiritual educational organization,
and continues to work with it today. David has written extensively
the subtle worlds. Two of his primary books are Subtle Worlds: An
Explorer’s Field Notes and Working with Subtle Energies.

About the Publisher

Lorian Press LLC is a private, for profit business which publishes works approved by the Lorian
Association. Current titles by David Spangler and others can be found on the Lorian website
www.lorian.org or at www.lorianpress.com

About the Lorian Association

The Lorian Association is a not-for-profit educational organization. Its work is to help people
bring the joy, healing, and blessing of their personal spirituality into their everyday lives. This
spirituality unfolds out of their unique lives and relationships to Spirit, by whatever name or in
whatever form that Spirit is recognized.
For more information, go to www.lorian.org, email info@lorian.org, or write to:
The Lorian Association
P.O. Box 1368
Issaquah, WA 98027