Lecture 1 of Transformation of Substance, given at Rudolf Steiner College in February 2012.

In this lecture, Dennis takes up the four elements not as substances but as stages of change, and follows them through a mineral, a plant, an animal, and human thinking. He tells how learning is one of those stages. So is waking from a dream.

He begins with the alchemical worldview, whose goal was to bring spirit and matter into contact through human consciousness. In that view, heaven had a problem and it was the human being, and nature had the same problem. Whenever we change something in the natural world, even by selecting which seed to plant, we loosen its connection to the divine world it reflects. What we have that nature doesn’t is freedom in our thinking, and in the alchemical picture that freedom is also what repairs the link. Your consciousness, he says, is the greatest tool you’re holding on your land.

From there he describes the four elements as phase shifts rather than substances, with akasha at the center, and uses them to read what is happening in a mineral, in a plant, in an animal, and in your own thinking. He shows a molecular structure inside a mineral that looks like a cross-section of a leaf, and asks why it should. He explains what a colloid does when it meets a membrane, which is what the potassium and calcium in your blood are doing. He also gives a sacred dreaming exercise done by taking a picture of something changing in nature into sleep with you, and seeing what has arrived by morning.

This is day one of five, one element each day, ending with consciousness. The full set is Transformation of Substance, and the lectures were later transcribed and edited into chapters of Sacred Agriculture.