Clouds are an alchemical symbol. Like all alchemical symbols it is derived from the visible, physical properties of nature but the meaning pertains to the invisible and psycho-spiritual properties within ourselves.
Alchemical Symbols of Nature
Alchemical symbols of nature include minerals such as salt, sulphur, mercury, gold, and silver. The four elements of nature- earth, air, water, and fire. Plants such as herbs, flowers and trees. Animals such as lions, dragons, dogs, birds, snakes, and fish. Planets, stars, the sun and moon, mountains, bodies of water, and rainbows.
Clouds as Vapor
Clouds are collections of water vapor that rise from bodies of water such as rivers, lakes streams and oceans. Vapor is lighter, ethereal, can drift and expand in ways that water in liquid or solid form cannot. For liquid to become vapor requires heat, and it leaves behind any impurities as it rises. Vapor is transmuted water.
Rain and Ice
As clouds gather and increase in density they condense into rain. Rain is one of the life-giving and cleansing properties of water that nourishes the plants, animals, crops, and all living things.
Clouds also magnetically gather around mountains where they concentrate back into a liquid form or a solid form as snow and ice. Ice as the solid form of water represents energetic potential in a static state, it must be heated into liquid or vapor to become usable.
The Sexual Waters/Waters of Life
“See how the water of a puddle on the road gradually evaporates under the heat from the sun and becomes clouds, and ultimately energy, lightning and thunder. All the water from the seas and the rivers becomes clouds and finally lightning and thunder; that is, energy. The same happens with the Ens Seminis [sexual substance in men and women].”
-Samael Aun Weor, Lecture on Transmutation of the Sexual Energy
Water in the liquid state is our internal sexual waters, the aquifer from which we draw our basic vital energy. In normal life the sexual waters are never purified, just drawn upon for use. The vital energy is naturally dissipated throughout our lives through physical, sexual, mental, and emotional discharge. To transmute is to purify the sexual waters.
Transmutation is a practice to heat, transform, and clarify the sexual waters. Using breath, willpower, and meditation the purified energy moves up the spine where it gathers like clouds in the higher centers.
The image above shows Mercury-Hermes, the intelligence of the sexual energy, emerging from clouds and holding a lit candelabra with seven candles, representing the awakened seven chakras.
Clouds and the Being
It is common to see depictions in many religions of God and heaven surrounded by clouds. When the transmuted sexual waters are formed as clouds the consciousness, which is contained within sexuality, is purified and awakened. God, the Being, can communicate with us, help us, work through us, when the consciousness is awakened.
Clouds may imply a blockage like one’s vision was “clouded”, but the clouds provide an appropriate form for the mystery of the Being.
Clouds and Heaven/Nirvana
Likewise with heaven or nirvana. Heaven is not an external place but an internal state of consciousness where we are vibrating in the higher dimensions, either temporarily or in a permanent way. Clouds make heaven and God invisible to those with the consciousness asleep. With the consciousness awakened we are more attuned to that which is subtle, hidden invisible, vaporous, and ethereal and can experience the reality hidden in the clouds.