Animals or animal symbols always appear where their associated energetic qualities are present.
There are animals we love more and those we love less. In reality, none are better or worse than others; each fulfills its role in our world. How we feel about them depends on our perceived and actual experiences, memories, and beliefs related to that animal, the emotions and programs associated with it, and how much of the animal’s energetic quality is present in our personal energy.
The rat is not a favorite for many. Looking at the traits associated with it, the reason becomes clear.
It’s as clean as a cat and as smart as a dog, yet it’s not a cute pet. Why?
Due to its secretive lifestyle, it carries a somewhat dark, shadowy, manipulative energy that is strongly survival-oriented. While it can show empathy toward its own kind for a while, this lasts only until a sufficiently tempting reward appears, allowing it to disregard this trait. Its constant hoarding of food and hiding suggests an ongoing sense of threat and anxiety.
(In human terms, this energy might manifest, for example, as hiding and stockpiling food during a war.)
Looking at the image, it silently screams communication—a connection preserved in the German language: “Rat=advice/counsel,” “Ratte=rat.” (The image is a brilliant capture by nature photographer Charlie Hamilton James.)
Thus, the rat’s energy is tied to communication, but not its lofty, elevated form. Due to the animal’s lifestyle, it’s more about the hidden, “behind closed doors” type, which in our everyday world manifests most prominently in politics, the communication of secret sects or congregations, and, due to the rat’s tunnel-building nature, the all-encompassing flow, flooding, and spread of “worthless,” self-serving, self-interested information. Today, this is primarily the internet, much of the media, and social media.
The physical, tangible form of this spread in our lives is commerce. According to the general perception of diseases and pathogens, it’s infection.
2020 - The Year of the Rat. Based on the previous paragraph, I don’t think it needs explaining how this manifests in our daily lives today…
The rat is associated with spreading the plague, which, even if not directly true, adds important context to the story.
The “disease” diagnosed as the plague involves the Yersinia pestis bacterium. The condition typically includes inflammation of the lymphatic system and blood vessels, accompanied by fever and headaches. It earned the name “Black Death” from the bluish-black spots caused by hemorrhages resulting from vascular damage.
When examining this condition through the lens of biological natural laws, we learn that the connective tissue changes in the lymphatic and vascular systems—due to their biological function—are linked to emotions tied to “flow obstruction” or “circulatory hindrance.” In everyday life, these are emotions related to conflicts where something or someone continuously obstructs or hinders the expected flow of life, making us feel restricted in our freedom or range of movement.
As long as we can’t resolve this flow-related conflict, this unexpressed tension within us triggers changes in the organs responsible for ensuring flow (to adapt to the conflict situation). In the active conflict phase, this manifests as an unnoticed connective tissue degeneration. Once the circulatory obstruction is resolved, the conflict is solved, or we express the related emotions, the connective tissues begin to swell and undergo inflammatory regeneration. In this tissue-proliferation process, bacteria aid rebuilding. For the lymphatic and vascular systems, this results in a widening of the diameter of lymph vessels and blood vessels by the end of the post-resolution phase.
The plague refers to these inflammatory, edematous, feverish regeneration symptoms in the post-resolution phase.
Here, too, the more intensely we experience the obstruction and the longer it persists, the more severe the symptoms we experience in the post-resolution phase.
What was this extraordinarily severe and collectively experienced obstruction that medieval societies might have faced?
One starting point is that the plague’s spread is linked to the Silk Road—the trade routes connected to Inner Asia. According to theories, the “pathogen” reached Europe via caravan routes, “spread” by the fleas of certain rodents.
These land and sea routes facilitated trade, cultural, and technological connections between continents. However, on land, bandits, and at sea, pirates disrupted their smooth operation. To avoid constant looting, new routes were sought both on land and sea. This situation prompted Columbus’s ships to sail west, aiming to reach Asia from a new direction.
Another factor was that the Middle Ages were an era of mass migrations. Following the fall of the Roman Empire, various ethnic groups appeared and settled in its territories, with entirely different values regarding society, law, culture, and religion compared to the locals. The presence of plundering, barbaric, vandal tribes eliminated the prior sense of public safety, making travel, goods transport, trade, and life itself—or the “flow of life”—dangerous.
The stable settlement of peoples, the urbanization of capital, and the strengthening of military powers reined in this “barbaric chaos,” restoring a centralized, controlled power system and public safety to people’s lives.
Interestingly, this societal change is reflected in the accused plague-spreading rats. The domestic rat, linked to the “disease,” is characterized by forming groups without strict hierarchies or pair bonds. In contrast, the later-appearing brown rat forms much more organized communities, with strict hierarchies within extended families and struggles for position. The brown rat’s spread is credited with reducing the plague, as it displaced its “plague-spreading” domestic relative.
In our era, we are undergoing a similar shift in thinking (a dimensional leap), including in our views on diseases. A new way of thinking cannot be operated under the rules of the old system. To use it, we must let go of our attachment to the familiar—something we’ll either be forced to do or choose willingly. A two-dimensional system’s limits cannot sustain a three-dimensional life. When we face or dare to confront our fears related to a situation, we discover new abilities, and obstacles disappear.
When the energetic quality within us changes, our environment changes with it.
When we talk about conditions, every condition arising within us reflects our need for some kind of change or transformation. Until we feel ready for change, biology—biological special programs—makes the decision for us.
The current global panic over pneumonia-turned-pandemic is about clinging to the crumbling walls of an outdated societal and belief system (on both societal and individual levels), even though we know these old programs no longer serve us and don’t align with the energetic changes within us. We fear losing our hard-won societal status or power positions. We’re afraid that if the glittering house of cards—built on the expectations of worldly value systems—collapses, we’ll be left with nothing, becoming worthless or redundant without our positions or belief systems.
Change and growth are continuous; there’s no need to build new Towers of Babel. Dependence on old ideals and dogmas doesn’t halt evolution—it only increases our pain.
