When you start to study nature and plants you come to realize their healing and spiritual significance and that through patience, love and kindness they will begin to impart their wisdom, knowledge and language to you. No other plant in history has been more revered or worshiped than the lotus or blue lotus flower and its legacy spans millennium and in all cultures around the world. As unreal as it may seem, it is actually possible to communicate with plants and animals and even minerals of the natural world. Plants have spirits that can heal and bring balance and homeostasis back to the body and are considered living beings. All that is required is an open heart and the desire to listen and willingness to start using all of your senses. Be still and listen to what Nature is trying to teach you. According to the late Sufi Master Dr. Hakim Awyan in Carmen Boulter’s documentary, The Pyramid Code, ancient Egyptians utilized 360 senses and were just as much focused on the after life as much as they were in present life. That sure is a long cry from the 5 sense model (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste) credited to Aristotle that we have been taught to accept and believe. The Blue Lotus was an important plant used in every Egyptian ceremony from birth, marriage and love, to death and the journey after life.
Plants are intelligent beings and we live in a symbiotic relationship with them. Humans release carbon dioxide,as plants take in carbon dioxide. Plants release oxygen, as humans take in oxygen. Humans inhale the oxygen that plants exhale. We co-exist in a continuous cycle of life with everything on Mother Earth. Almost all living things need oxygen, and they use this oxygen during the process of creating energy in living cells. Just as water moves from the sky to the earth and back in the hydrologic cycle, oxygen is also cycled through the environment. Plants mark the beginning of the oxygen cycle. Plants are able to use the energy of sunlight to convert carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates and oxygen in a process called photosynthesis. This means that plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. Animals form the other half of the oxygen cycle. We breathe in oxygen which we use to break carbohydrates down into energy in a process called respiration. Carbon dioxide produced during respiration is breathed out by animals into the air. Tony Wright (Author of the book ‘Left in the Dark’) presents his fascinating and quite controversial theory of human evolution based on our lost eco-sexual and symbiotic relationship with plants and that our neurological system is fed and nourished by fruit and plant sex organs and hormones, therefore suggesting that sex with plants, particularly flowers and fruits drive human consciousness.
Through years of research and study I have discovered and collected some amazing facts about lotuses, blue lotuses, and sacred blue water lilies. Blue Lotus is also known as the Egyptian Water Lily. Lilies and lotuses were the actual first flowers to have risen from the primordial waters of life, water being a sacred vehicle of life, and were some of the first plants to have evolved on Earth. The water lily family, Nymphaeaceae, is an old and evolutionarily primitive one, and is grouped with buttercups (Ranunculus) and magnolias in the order Ranales. Furthermore, fossil evidence suggests that nymphaeas have not changed much over the past 160 million years. All they have done is move about the globe, keeping in the tropical and temperate zones. Another well known genus in this family is Victoria, the giant amazon water lily. Water in and of itself is a magical element and these beautiful biological vehicles utilize it as a powerful transmitter and super highway. The sacred lotus gently raises it’s beautiful petals above murky and muddy waters and shines it’s face to the sun. The lotus has long been revered by Egyptians, Buddhists, Hindus and Muslims for thousands of years as a symbol of wisdom and awakening. Its medicinal properties have been recorded in all the major spiritual texts including the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead and the Vedic Sutras. Scientists and spirituals alike have all admired and been of awe of the lotus as an amazing life form.
Lotus flowers have the ability to regulate their body temperature to attract insects. Researchers D. Roger Seymour and Dr. Paul Schultze Motel, physiologists at the University of Adelaide in Australia have discovered that the lotus has the remarkable ability to regulate the temperature of its flowers to within a narrow range much like humans and other warm blooded animals, and incredibly maintained a temperature of 86 to 95 degrees Fahrenheit, even when the air temperature dropped to 50 degrees during their experiments. Does this mean that the lotus has the ability to turn up the heat for the benefit of their cold blooded insect pollinators? “We had no idea that they’d be doing this.” said Dr. Schultze Motel. Physiological ecologist Dr. Ken Nagy at University of California, said about the lotus, “to suddenly bump into a flower that’s hot is astounding. Warm blooded animals have a very sophisticated nervous system for sensing temperature and controlling heating and cooling. Now here’s a plant that’s doing exactly the same thing.”
Plants are sacred sentient beings and are capable of communication, and some even compose music. Just ask the researchers at Domanhur, a community in Italy where plants are to use musical scales and also making their own music with the use of a synthesizer. Since 1975 researchers at Damanhur have been experimenting with plants, measuring the reactivity of plants to their environment and their capacity to learn and communicate. Music is often used to stimulate the growth of plants but The Plant Orchestra the brain child of Anders Lauge Melgaard and Christna Ertl Shirley reverse this situation and let plants make music themselves. If plants are able to communicate with us then what can we learn from their world and kingdom? Since we actually live in a symbiotic relationship with plants, do we actually contain biological receptors in our DNA for plant knowledge? The heart touching documentary The Botony of Desire touches that very subject and shows how the apple, the tulip, marijuana and the potato may have evolved because of the human relationship with the plant world and how our desires merge on some unseen level.
Lotuses and lilies are the most sacred and spiritual of all flowers in human history. Why do you think we see gods and goddesses sitting on lotuses and their petals sprouting from all the major chakras? Is it because the lotus and the lilies are portals into other realities or vehicles of life and consciousness? Their spiritual significance is immeasurable and no ancient ceremony was complete without the Blue Lotus or Blue Water Lily or the Lotus and all ancient texts and temples were adorned with these breathtaking flowers.
In Hindu, Chinese, Japanese, Muslim, Buddhist and Egyptian religions lotus flowers represents awakening, spiritual growth, and enlightenment. Just as the lotus flower emerges from the water clean, the lotus also represents purity of body, speech, and mind. The lotus symbolizes an awakened mind, which grows naturally toward the warmth and light of truth, love and compassion. The lotus may appear fragile on the surface, but it is flexible and strong, securely anchored under the surface of the water. Just as the lotus flower emerges from the water clean, it also represents purity of body, speech, and mind. The flowers are also symbolic of immortality and resurrection because people observed that they would grow from the bottom of dried up pools after the rain.
The Mahayana sect of Buddhism maintains that all souls emerge from a lotus. The mantra, Om Mani Padme Hum means (Oh Jewel in the Lotus) signifies not only the jewel of man’s divinity living within the lotus, the cosmos, but also the jewel of cosmic divinity living within the lotus, or human. In other words, the mantra is saying, “I am in you and you are in me,” thereby stating the unity and brotherhood of all beings, as well as their inner divine potential. This is one way of expressing the principle of “as above, so below.”
Robert Lawlor, a well known symbolist states that “The lotus in both Egypt and India symbolizes the union of the four elements; earth, air, fire, and water. The roots are in the earth, it grows in and by means of water, its leaves are nourished by air, and it blooms through the power of the sun’s fire. The lotus is therefore the perfection of the fourfold order of the natural world.” In China water lilies are thought to have been grown for many years. There is a beautiful passage by Chou Tun-I of the eleventh century T’ang Dynasty: “My favourite flower is the Water Lily, how stainless it rises form its slimy bed, how modestly it reposes on the clear pool, an emblem of purity and truth. Symmetrically perfect, its subtle perfume is wafted far and wide, while there it rests in spotless state, something to be regarded reverently from a distance and not to be profaned by familiar approach.” It has also long been cultivated by the Japanese
So not only was the lotus heralded in ancient Egypt but in India, China, Japan and other parts of the world as well. In ancient Vedic texts the sacred sky blue Blue Lotus, Water Lily, or Nymphaea Nouchali is called Ambal and is the national flower of Sri Lanka where it is known as Nil Manel or Nil Mahanel. Nil means blue in Sinhala the Sinhalese name of this plant is often rendered as Blue Lotus in English. The Utpala flower also translated as Blue Lotus is considered on of the top 10 most sacred flowers listed in the Ayra Sanghata Sutra (a Mahayana Buddhist scripture). The true magical Indian and Egyptian lotus is the Nymphaea nouchali var. caerulea (syn. N. caerulea) and Nymphaea lotus.
The Blue Lotus is considered an ethno-botanical or entheogen meaning it has the ability to alter and shift consciousness. It is a psychoactive substance that has been used in a religious, shamanic, or spiritual context for over 5,000 years. Entheogens can supplement many diverse practices for transcendence, and revelation, including meditation, psychonautics, psychedelic and visionary art, psychedelic therapy, and magic. Ancient tomb and temple paintings and carvings indicated that the Egyptians inhaled the perfume of the flower to absorb the molecules that make up the fragrance and added it to wine to be drunk to induce some hallucinogenic or otherwise altered state.
OSHO, the great spiritual master talks extensively and vividly about the Blue Lotus in one of his early Darshan Diaries entitled ‘The Rainbow Bridge’. “Neel Kamal, neel means blue and kamal means lotus. In the East, the Blue Lotus is the symbol of enlightenment, of the ultimate attainment, realization. Blue is the color of depth. That’s why the sky looks blue eternal, abysmal depth, with neither a beginning nor an end. And the lotus is the most beautiful flower of the East, and the Blue Lotus is rare. There are many kinds of lotuses; the blue lotus is very rare. Its original place of growth is deep in the Himalayas. It grows only in the purest of waters. It has become the symbol of ultimate enlightenment, because it is so rare. The blue lotus has a fragrance which is almost otherworldly, it appears as if it doesn’t belong to the earth. And that is the fragrance of the Buddhas. They live in the body, and yet they are not in the body. They walk on the earth, yet their feet never touch the earth. They eat, and yet they never eat. They are and they are not; their presence is almost absence. In them, absence and presence have become one.
Think of the Blue Lotus, meditate over it. With closed eyes, visualize a Blue Lotus opening. It will help you tremendously, it will become your meditation. Whenever you have time, just close your eyes, see the Blue Lotus as if your head is turning into a Blue Lotus and it is opening. It will not be long before suddenly one day you will start smelling something strange, some new perfume that you have never known before. It comes from the deepest recess of your soul, it is your own perfume.”
Blue Lotus is a powerful healer on the many levels and layers of the physical body and acts as a powerful general tonic and relaxant and rejuvenate. It is also a psychoactive vehicle, portal or worm hole to travel into other dimensions and realities beyond the physical. It seems to have the ability to seed other Universes with Life, It’s health and life promoting properties are unparalleled as a general tonic in almost all the major cultures. Blue Lotus contains phytosterols, bioflavonoids, and phosphodiastrates, the active ingredient of Viagra.
Many sacred paintings and texts show gods and goddesses sitting and resting on Lotus flowers as well as Lotuses sprouting from their chakras. Some gods and goddesses actually have blue skin perhaps suggesting the nature of their otherworldly qualities and connection to the Blue Lotus and spirit realms. In Vedic scripture the body of Lord Krishna, an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, is described as being like a bluish new-grown lotus flower. Lord Brahma, the creator of the universe and Lord Vishnu, the preserver of the universe are depicted sitting in lotuses as sacred vehicles through time and space. Were sacred lotus’s and lilies actually the gods and goddesses of the ancient Egyptian and Vedic texts? Do humans owe their very existence and consciousness to these beautiful and exquisite and often overlooked manifestations of androgynous form? Is the Lotus a type of inter-galactic spirit plant merkab, or cosmic space ship used by the plant kingdom to explore the inner and outer terrains. Do the gods and goddesses actually seed life in other worlds through the lotus flower? If so, what a lovely and fragrant way to travel in total bliss and ecstasy.
Lord Brahma is said to have been born from the lotus that was growing out of the navel of Lord Vishnu. Is the Lotus a sacred vessel that deities use to seed this world as well as other galaxies? Do humans owe their very existence to the plant kingdom? Was there a time in human evolution that plants were gods and creators of life on Earth? I will let you ponder and decide for yourself if this could be possible. No matter what your belief, the Blue Lotus is a powerful spirit plant for anyone wanting to increase sacred fire, beautify the body and connect to the celestial realms.
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