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Energetic Reality
All clear creators will connect with the concept of the following article.
Date: 12/30/2005 8:30:33 AM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 1709 times Connecting to Energy
by Irini Rockwell, MA
One morning I was listening to the classical music station. The
announcer introducing Beethoven's Fifth Symphony was lamenting how many words
had been spoken trying to explain the meaning of this powerful piece of
music. Finally he said, "It's just pure energy! Pure Beethoven!" I
burst out laughing as I realized that he was essentially urging people to
get beyond their concepts and connect directly with the power of the
music. Yes!
The world we perceive, conceptualize, and think we know is only a
surface reality. Underneath it lies a magical realm, more elusive and yet
more vivid. Every philosophical, spiritual, and religious tradition,
every art form, in every corner of the globe, in every century of human
existence, teaches about this deeper reality. In this book we refer to it
as the surprising and powerful force called energy. To move through the
world without connecting to energy is like learning about being in love
from reading romance novels. Just as we don't really know love until we
love, so we are not truly in the world until we engage with it
energetically.
Energy is the vibrant aspect of being -- the quality, texture,
ambience, and tone of both the animate and the inanimate, the visible and the
invisible. It is the basic vitality of our existence. It pervades our
inner, psychological world as well as the outer, phenomenal world. It
exists in what we see, smell, taste, touch, hear, and feel. People express
their energy through attitudes, emotions, decisions, and actions.
Furthermore, we each display energy in our own unique ways -- through body
posture, facial expressions, mannerisms, word choices, the tone and
tempo of our voice.
Energy is life force, our natural power or strength. It resides in our
breathing. When our breathing changes, our emotions change, our
movements change, and our perception of the world changes accordingly. When
our vital energy is obscured by strong emotions, opinions, and concepts,
our perspective narrows and our strength diminishes. When we are free
of such blockages, our power is free and expansive.
From moment to moment our experience is made of bodily sensations,
feelings, thoughts, and perceptions. We string these myriad and constantly
shifting elements together to create what we call "I" and "my
experience" and "the world." For example, when we eat an apple, we see it, touch
it, taste it, and then decide whether we like it. Altogether this is
our "apple-eating experience."
When we are not bound by the solid sense of self that comes from
building a story line or making our experiences into an identity, we can
connect with our innate energy. Without the filters, the energetic quality
of our existence is more fluid, fragmented, illusory, and shimmering.
With no solid sense of "me" to block the flow, it is pleasurable to
experience ourselves.
Energy is also a way of understanding karma, the Buddhist view of cause
and result. The energetic makeup of a situation produces (causes) a
corresponding energetic situation (result). Our thoughts, words, and
actions have their inevitable outcome. Traditional Buddhism sees that these
patterns follow us through lifetimes and so create our karma, good or
bad. Working with ourselves, our energy, is the key to creating good
karma.
The forces of nature are elemental energy in the raw. Earth is solid,
firm, and trustworthy, a good foundation and a nourishing ground. Water
is fluid, changeable: it can be forceful and flowing or still and
reflective. Fire is playful and intense, quixotic and passionate, impossible
to grasp. Air might manifest as a light, refreshing breeze, which seems
harmonious, or as a harsh hurricane.
Elemental energy is harder to experience in cities, where we fortify
ourselves against the elements by creating constructs, much as we fortify
ourselves against energetic reality by creating story lines. We confine
earth to potted plants and manicured gardens; water to sinks, bathtubs,
and toilet bowls; fire to the fireplace and stove; and air to fans,
vents, and air conditioners. There is nothing wrong with this, though
domesticating the elements tends to distance us from their magic.
We can evoke energy through creative expression. For example, in an
autobiographical dance theater piece, I moved through many different
emotional states, focusing not on specific life events but on their
emotional energy. In pounding a hanging duffel bag (as a boxer would) and
repeating the line "Could, would, should, go do" until it became a screech,
I evoked a masculine energy. The feelings I had about my mother's dying
took the emotional energy of the query "Mother, why did you die on me?"
and turned into a cry as I ran across the stage. The experience of the
evoked energy had more impact than the words.
We can also see people as manifestations of different energies. Imagine
for a moment that good friends walk into your living room. Instead of
seeing them as the Jenny or Steve you "know" so well, erase your
familiar picture of them and notice their energetic qualities. See a perky,
fun-loving, fluidly moving Jenny. See a slow-moving Steve, with a soft
smile and accommodating manner, who never gets ruffled. Both are
expressing their particular energies -- their quality, tone, and rhythm; their
dance; their song.
Most of the time we think of the physical world as composed of solid
material, yet it also has an energetic aspect. A table is a "table." We
rarely notice the energy the table radiates. A shiny, smooth table
radiates a different energy than an old, beat-up table. The big thing in the
yard that has roots, a trunk, branches, and leaves -- we call it a
tree. We know a few things about tables and trees. Yet naming things and
having concepts about them is different from experiencing them on an
energetic level.
In new environments we are more likely to be aware of the reality of
energy because we have fewer preexisting ideas through which to filter
our immediate perceptions. Awareness is heightened further if we are
unfamiliar with the language, because we are less apt to get distracted by
words. I once traveled by train through a long tunnel in the Alps that
took us from German Switzerland into Italian Switzerland. Although at
the time I didn't know what had changed, I felt the difference in my
surroundings vividly and immediately after emerging from the tunnel. I
knew with my whole being that I was in a different energy space, a
different ambience. The air became soft and warm, colors were brighter, and my
body relaxed. The freshness of my sense perceptions connected me with
the people and the place.
Providing the right ambient energy for a situation can enhance it. A
language school in Minnesota exemplifies this by creating different
"villages" for each language taught there. Each village is a miniature
replica of a country, with the appropriate architecture, food, and so forth.
People learn more easily because the language is evoked by the energy
of the surroundings.
To illustrate: I spent my early childhood years in Turkey. When I was
eight and my sister was ten, we took a two-year sabbatical in the
States. Upon returning to Turkey on the boat, my sister and I realized we had
completely forgotten our Turkish. Dad's lessons on deck made no impact.
The end of our journey came; the boat neared the port of Istanbul. It
eased up to the dock, and the walkway was placed. Our Turkish friends
came running up to us, crying out warm greetings. And down we ran to
them, answering in perfectly fluent Turkish, completely oblivious to the
fact that our language memories had returned!
All world cultures have found ways to explore, celebrate, and express
energetic reality in their religions, art, and philosophical traditions.
In Greek and Roman mythology as well as in Eastern religions such as
Buddhism, Hinduism, and Shinto, different deities symbolize different
energies. In vajrayana Buddhism the five wisdom energies are traditionally
presented as the five Buddha families and are personified as symbolic
deities. As such they have been around for over a thousand years. Native
Americans recognize elemental energies as spirits. Buddhists and Hindus
evoke particular energies by chanting mantras, repetitions of certain
sounds or words. African and Australian peoples use ritual dance to call
up energies or spirits.
Novelists, musicians, painters, dancers, and poets all tune in to the
world of energy in their art. Music expresses a full range of energies,
from the pizzicato of violins to the rhythm of drums to the driving
beat of a rock guitar. Classical ballet, European folk dance, and slam
dancing each evoke a unique energy. In visual art the impressionistic
canvases of Monet and van Gogh display an energy quite different from the
abstractions of Mondrian or Klee. The works of art that come to be
considered classic are often those that most gracefully and powerfully evoke
the universal energies and communicate them to their audience.
Sciences like acupuncture and feng shui and body disciplines like
martial arts and hatha yoga work specifically with energy as a medium of
healing. These disciplines are based on working with the meridians, or
energy channels of the body. The basic principle is that our energy moves
along certain lines, but in the course of life, particularly when we
are ill, the energy becomes blocked. Acupuncture or postures that work
with energy are ways to unblock this energy. Psychology has noted the
importance of energy in body-centered therapies like bioenergetics.
Cognitive science and the study of perception bring the physical and
psychological worlds together through theories about energy.
Energy can be used to enhance function, as athletes and dancers know
well. Watch the swings, falls, jumps of a gymnast and see how they align
with energy. As a dancer, I often found that if I focused only on the
technical aspects of a movement -- lifting my leg above my head, turning
on one leg with my body arched back, leaping across the room -- the
move was difficult. When I connected with the energy of what I was doing,
the movement was easier and more enjoyable. I would use an image --
reaching my leg to the sky, rooting my supporting leg in the earth as I
threw my body into the turn, and then experiencing myself as weightless
as air on the jump.
Feeling is a word that we use for both physical and mental experiences.
Feeling joins body and mind. It is more complex than the physical pain
we get from banging our knee. It is more subtle than an emotion like
anger, or thoughts about what we have to do tomorrow. Feeling is like a
sixth sense, the ability to tune in intuitively to what is happening. It
joins intellect and intuition, heart and mind. It is the way we
experience energy.
A colloquial language acknowledging the power of energy has grown up
since the 1960s, when we might have heard people talk about energy as
vibrations, as in "picking up the vibes" of a person or place. The verb
grok came into being; it means to understand the full situation
intuitively. When we "grok" something, we pick up the "vibe" in a way that
transcends concepts. Nowadays we might say that a person has "presence" or a
place has "atmosphere." An event might be characterized as "intense" or
a person as "mellow." These terms simply acknowledge that each person
and situation has a perceivable energy.
Working with energy plugs us into our experience in a way that reveals
its illusory nature as well as the illusory nature of the world around
us. We see that the world is not as solid as it seems; it is made up of
energies constantly in flux. There is nothing, yet there is something.
For instance, a favorite view in a natural setting is infinitely
changeable, depending on the time of day, the seasons, the weather. There is
no one view. We could hardly say it is the same place in February as it
is in August. And so it is with our bodies, the elements of which have
come together in a form that we call "human," which will dissolve when
we die.
Irini Rockwell
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