Shamanism for the Age of Science: Awakening the Energy Body - Kenneth Smith 2018

Ethics
Building a Creative Life

A key aspect of intelligence is the ethic behind it. Ethics are governing principles of Ethics has become a well-developed line of inquiry with highly specialized divisions including deontological, or rules and principles, and teleological, or examination of behavior based on the purpose or end result. And new areas continue to emerge. Human nature ethical inquiry, for example, presupposes that behavior should be measured in line with how it affects personal development.⁴ This not only means ethicists have developed an interest in the tenets associated with psychological well-being, but that the divisions represent the grooming of a profession’s cohesion. Consistent with the development of models for self-actualization, this correlates with an evolution of ethics from social rules to the individual.

Individual and social ethics form foundations for intelligent, if not creative, behavior. There are no set answers; even centuries-old religious dogmas change. There are, though, bits and pieces to be considered in light of the energy body model, where ethics influence cohesion and represent growth toward core: the concept being to remove obstacles that prevent awareness of your natural condition. As food for thought, some considerations of an energy-based ethic follow.

Compassion

Compassion may be defined as “deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the wish to relieve it.” Holding to this definition, Toltecs may not have compassion. They may be able to empathize with or understand another’s plight. They may be able to apply a lesson found in another’s misfortune to their own lives, thereby avoiding the same trouble. They may render assistance. But they won’t think that other people are powerless to the extent that they have to be coddled. They won’t think the other person has to be changed, shown the light, or saved. The best of Toltecs have been born, says don Juan, from squalor. We all have the means to command our lives, he maintains, and so there is nothing to change in anyone. Yet shamans are often drawn to healing professions, and the desire to relieve suffering is clearly evident. The attitude associated with behavior, including nonattachment, might therefore be the defining element of compassion.⁵

The overall awareness of the person aiming to be compassionate, as well as having a grasp of the immediate situation, determines the effects. Compassion might be the salve that soothes and awakens or it might be just a personal power play to make someone conform. Being overly compassionate, for example, diminishes objectivity. The concern given to a situation can reduce your ability to assess the meta-problem. You have increased difficulty sensing the underlying problem causing the personal distress, rendering you unable to take effective action for a long-lasting remedy.

This is why some Toltecs strive not to care. This doesn’t mean they are blasé or callous. And it certainly doesn’t mean they lack gusto. It means that they strive for a level of objectivity to be able to act precisely and effectively. They are cultivating the keen indifference that will allow them to be successful. But it doesn’t mean to be overbearing as don Juan says that balancing experience, wisdom, and knowledge requires kindness. Charles Tart says that conditions for “effective compassion” include having a range of personal experience, empathy that promotes objectivity, motivation to help, and the application of intelligence to resolve the suffering.⁶

Judgment

Judgment is a form of closure. It stems from interpretation and binds you to a particular emotional and mental disposition. Even at its best, judgment keeps you locked in the throes of fundamentalism. You may even want to physically attack others, starting a street fight or a war.

Judgment removes you from potential. It requires that you constantly justify your high-horse attitude, and requires you to work overtime to maintain that manner of self-reflection. What is ethical in one culture may not be in another. What is held sacred by some cultures may be heresy to others, even though people in both strive to do good deeds. Judgment can therefore be oppressive.

Being nonjudgmental doesn’t negate discernment; the difference being judgment carries an emotional charge, a sense of condemnation, whereas discernment lends itself to objectivity. It also doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to take steps to avoid difficulties or rectify injustices. It does mean giving freedom to the world to be as it is, which grants more reliability to your assessments of others and yourself, thereby giving you room to gain wider perspective. This stance permits the understanding that promotes positive change rather than ongoing strife. From yet another angle, a nonjudgmental attitude helps awaken your energy body. Stepping away from judgment provides more energy to handle the abstractions of the unknown as you ply them into your practical, known world.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness of the transgressions of self and others offers a release of the assemblage point, a release of a cohesion bound by judgment. But it doesn’t mean being a whipping boy. It’s a relaxation of tension that opens you to growth by ceasing to expend the energy required to maintain a non-forgiving attitude. Forgiveness abounds, but only after a shift in cohesion permitting a new relationship.

In Why Forgive? author Johann Christoph Arnold provides stories of the sojourns to forgiveness by various people that demonstrate why forgiveness has value. They clearly show that forgiveness enables us to free ourselves from the emotional debilitation of being tied down by bitterness, heal the emotional and physical disorders caused by the lack of forgiveness, and restore our primary relationship with God.⁷

In The Power of Forgiveness, a documentary by Martin Doblmeir, concepts put forward included forgiving oneself of transgressions as doing so leads to compassion and this may be a step before one can forgive others. The positive effects on health with forgiveness activating specific areas of the brain also have a place in the film, helping build a case that humans are biologically created to forgive. One interviewee is Azim Khamisa, a man whose son had been murdered. Trained in Sufism, Khamisa said forgiveness and compassion are “higher frequencies” whereas fear, hatred, and vindictiveness are of a lower order. In addition, the documentary brings to the fore that forgiveness connects you with the environment since you’re no longer creating separation through condemnation.⁸

Power and Control

An effect of perceiving the world from subject-object relationships is objectifying the world, which sets the stage to view people and the world as objects subject to manipulation. It’s an extension of closure. While we need to exploit the world to survive and prosper, we need to do so with care and balance as being part of the world. The manner in which you exercise control over yourself, others, and the environment, therefore, makes all the difference in your life.

The more control you have over your energy body, the more ability you have to actively mold your world. This is why control is one of the barriers to ontological development. It is difficult not to want to control your world; closure is innate. You may even want to be compassionate, to change things for the better, to relieve suffering, yet these can lead you to become a dictator. The effects of control on behavior can be very sneaky.

Business expertise and political skill, for example, expand the more a person learns and gains experience in those arenas. This makes the person more capable to enter positions of power. The capacity for power derives from being aware, more aware than the norm in a given situation. Other forms of awareness, such as psi and mystical experience, also provide evidence that increased awareness may be parlayed into holding sway over others as found in cults. How a person uses enhanced awareness directly impacts the personal connection with core. Distractions loom at every turn. Decisions represent the energy you have aligned with or wish to align; they indicate your cohesion. Some would say they represent who you are.

At the craftsmanship stage, when will is pulled from its dormancy, you can modify your circumstances by aligning with emanations of your choosing. The many forms of personal desire now tug at your sensibilities. As a preventive or corrective measure, don Juan says that it is a shame to align with the human world and forget that the assemblage point is a quality of being human, but it is even more of a loss to use this knowledge of the assemblage point for personal gain.⁹

Toltecs, says don Juan, are like anybody else pursuing a vocation. They can be good or bad. Since they’ve learned to move their assemblage points, they can easily injure others. But, he advises, we must move past ordinary considerations. We must be governed by morality and beauty. This involves the development of an ethic based on personal freedom rather than on the accumulation of power. Part of this ethic is the practice of impeccability, which automatically gives others their freedom as well. Don Juan says a person of knowledge—an artisan—would never under any circumstance harm another person.¹⁰

The guiding principle is that knowledge of the energy body is to be used to reach your core, not for control of any other type. Core is the essence of how you are created, and this release to a higher will, rather than to desire, delivers the principal characteristic of modern Toltec ethics. These teachings sprout from the energy body and highlight developing a natural relationship rather than having a conditioned relationship with the world. Creating a life based on expression of core is not considered personal desire. At each step, this measurement becomes an intricate and delicate balance.

In practice, you wouldn’t will an outcome or even test the possibility of your ability to do so. And you wouldn’t exploit others. When you work for a good life, any change that needs to come will come of its own accord by virtue of your ethic. By not using your resources for control, you can develop an exquisite relationship with the world. And, as don Juan says, there will come a time when you have all of your resources and abilities in check, and you will know when and how to use them. By then, you will have become the true artisan.¹¹

Love

Love can be approached and defined in many ways. It can mean leaving things alone or taking action. It can be romantic or platonic, spousal or filial, tough or unconditional. It can be focused on a rock or into the depths of infinity.

Perhaps love is awareness itself, or perhaps it is the feeling of expansion. After all, when we fall in love we usually become more aware and feel as though we are stretching out. We are also more allowing, accepting. As a mode of expansion, love serves to allow a natural energy field.

Love forms an essential part of Christian theology. And love is at the center of Hindu Bhakti mysticism. Shamanic philosophy, which emphasizes deep understanding free from bias, also calls into play love, citing it as the only thing that offers joy and freedom. It carries so much weight it is something to be given freely to the world, to life, in the face of any circumstance.¹²

Don Juan says that Toltec seers see love as specific colors representing bandwidths within emanations, clusters that are part of what create different life forms. Even then, only one emanation is of the human domain.¹³ Having a limited number of colors pertaining to one emanation doesn’t support a worldview in which everything is love. In this instance, maybe the human aspect of the universe has been anthropomorphized to include everything. Perhaps the Toltec meaning needs to be recast. Yet if love is a form of energy, then perhaps the seers’ determination is accurate. Different colors may represent different kinds of love, or it could be that love is a defining element of an entire bandwidth and one might then feel as though love is universal when aligning with an emanation. In any case, teachings on love are usually found in ethical systems. Whatever the orientation, love is a major component in living a conscious life.

Responsibility

His Holiness the Dalai Lama places each individual act in wide perspective. Two people sharing a well must be mindful of their actions in service to the other; each country needs to recognize that one faltering economy affects other economies around the world; and each driver needs to understand that the pollution of one car adds to the destruction of the entire environment.¹⁴ Accepting the obvious means that each person carries immense responsibility for the self and the whole.

Quantum entanglement also speaks to interconnectedness, where the behavior of an object needs to be accounted for in terms of those objects in relation to it, and that objects may influence one another regardless of the distance between them. In other words, objects may be inextricably linked at a quantum level and to describe one requires understanding its counterpart. We can stretch this out to considering that all objects, everywhere, are connected in some manner. There is also thinking that the effects of entanglement may continue even after the physical link dissipates, such as when an object disintegrates or is destroyed.¹⁵

How this plays out is where arguments erupt. There is debate, for instance, as to the extent and influence of entanglement and what conditions need to exist for the intermingling to occur. Nuances of the argument rest with diligence of examination, with a clear sense of the lenses being used to investigate and interpret because the models used to investigate determine the results; they establish fences of assumptions regarding the nature of reality. With all camps providing petitions of evidence, characteristic of discovery (and perhaps with any line of thought) what is true today will change with time.

Yet even if quantum entanglement dynamics are found to be limited to precise circumstances, common usage of the term is allowing the concept of interconnectedness with others and the environment to gain a foothold in daily thinking, thereby reshaping other debates such as considerations of the human impact on global warming and of political intervention to prevent genocide. Over the ages, mysticisms have put forth the interconnectedness of all aspects of life as a formative tenet of their ethics, and now science is determining the validity of such a phenomenon even if it has yet to be extended beyond quantum mechanics.

Guidance for developing responsibility can be found in the body of ethics we use, be it religious or secular. Richard Sennett, in The Corrosion of Character, cites how the environment, zeroing in on the workplace, shapes personal responsibility. Often one ethic may be stated as part of the corporate culture but the forces within have a different effect, taking personal and societal tolls. He also cites a weakening of character in the modern workplace where people renounce accountability.¹⁶

Personal responsibility is where the rubber hits the road on the excursion toward infinity. It provides your immediate connection to your life and those about you. It produces the driving force of building a life. Responsibility, as an example of shamanic ethic, means that you are ready to die for your actions.¹⁷ This is pretty crisp, clear, and clean. It falls to individual responsibility to summon those resources to reach core.

Character

The sum of all these attributes represents a person’s character, or ethical strength. Character for Toltecs, as measured by impeccability, is the main ingredient of realizing the stages of awakening. Throughout Castaneda’s books, don Juan delivers lessons on a complex style of character marked by saving energy, being deliberate and independent, and constantly stretching into the unknown. According to him, the backbone of a warrior is marked by humility and efficiency.¹⁸

Taoism holds fast to virtue or “uprightness.” This is a perfect attainment of harmony based on the latent, innate power of the individual. Likewise, Maslow regards character as the deepest part of a person. He outlines five character attitudes and says changing any of them changes the person. These attitudes pertain to self, significant others, social groups, nature and physical reality, and, for some people, supernatural forces.¹⁹

A common aspect of these approaches is the quest to find and nurture your own innermost qualities. Whether you call it actualization, individuation, or virtue, the core value of each system is precisely that: core value. Ethical behavior emanates from each individual’s core, from securing a relationship with the creative source of life rather than with social standing alone. Through finding your natural place in the world, you can better serve all.