Shamanism for the Age of Science: Awakening the Energy Body - Kenneth Smith 2018
Creating Your Life by Living A Path with Heart
Building a Creative Life
Now we get to the heart of building a quality life. In Toltec, Buddhist, and other traditions this has come to be known as living a path with heart. To fully engage life with abundant meaning, Jack Kornfield offers a range of perspectives and practices relating to inner transformation. Throughout his book, A Path with Heart, he provides insights on individual and group growth. For instance, he deals with self-knowledge, expanding awareness, altered states, ethics, and applying meditation to psychotherapy.43
Don Juan boiled down the process of creating a path with heart to using your death as a way to focus your involvements in life. The trick is to consult death in a way that it doesn’t encumber, to use death as a tool to battle fear rather than be a morbid fixation. When making a decision, for example, make it in the light that it may well be your last act on Earth. From this perspective, there are no small or large decisions, just behaviors, which may be your last act on Earth. This helps bring to light the deepest drives and core values of a person.44
When you are suitably focused, the shamanic criteria for selecting the elements of your path are based on peace, strength, and joy. Once several pursuits have been initiated, you are on your path.45 Rather than pursue money as a primary objective even though you really don’t like the chase, for example, you involve yourself with something else. Viewed in the context of an energetic logic and ethic, having a large bank account is not errant, but going after money when it doesn’t resonate with your core stultifies your growth. After several years of grooming your life based on peace, joy, and strength, you will have built a life with that foundation. It’s not only a matter of living your life, but how you live it.
Other teachers suggest similar approaches to finding, expressing, and living core meaning. To penetrate the shrouds of awareness that interfere with developing a full and complete life, meditation and healing-technique teacher Stephen Levine also advises us to use death as a focus to bring ourselves to life. He advocates that this helps us live in a way as to “directly experience the moment-to-moment process that is our lives.” And he also holds that it is fear that becomes the major impediment to this awareness.46
A leader of the positive psychology movement, Paul Pearsall points out the conditions of thriving include living a strong life, a deliberate life. He notes that peace and joy are aspects of flourishing. Like others, he advises, “Don’t die until you’ve lived.”47 Reflecting increased investigations into metaphysics; positive psychology shares commonalities with classic traditions. Both find that awareness and flourishing go hand in hand, and both aptly highlight the common focus relating to personal and group development.
People usually derive meaning in their lives from group values rather than from within. Jung tells us that this makes individuation impossible, as the self is never developed, let alone lived. For individual imagination to become alive and functional, we need to be able to step away from the group. At the same time we are social creatures who derive value from participation with the group. The balance is to seek individuation while keeping an eye on what you can offer others. In this way, you learn to be yourself while being part of the group, which is a measure of self-actualization.
Personally and collectively, peace, joy, and strength characterize heightened consciousness. When these qualities manifest, the pieces of a path with heart—the activities you decided to pursue—provide the means to solidify other gains. A life formed in such a way will help you reintegrate your daily awareness after you’ve stepped into an altered state, for instance.
Whether or not you explore OBEs or other psi experiences, ontological growth automatically produces altered states of consciousness of the normal and paranormal by the simple fact of stretching into the unconscious, the unknown. How a person experiences this extension is often determined by training. A Toltec may have an OBE to better experience infinity while a Zen practitioner becomes more aware of infinity within a single breath.
Organizing and implementing expanded awareness within a Toltec, Zen, or other psychological path is the same, though, as it is part of the trajectory of gradually becoming more aware en route to creating a new baseline state of consciousness. While stylistic, creative paths share the common denominator of providing a practical means for stability along the way. Applied to the energy body, being skilled with altered states does mean you’re just learning an unusual skill in relation to your normal life; you’re engaging a process of reworking your life from the inside out. Everything changes.
Your path with heart is a way to begin working with cohesion. It balances the forces inside and out. This produces more awareness as your life awakens your core. Remember, all of the influences throughout your life shape cohesion, the determinant of your perceptions and behaviors. Finding out who you are, how you were created, is a matter of continual discovery. Living a path with heart offers a means to purposefully condition your energy body toward this end. This ongoing development is a solid step toward being; the consciousness Levine says allows us to “directly experience the moment-to-moment process that is our lives.”
Perhaps we have stepped away from this life-bestowing relationship with the world because we have found too much security in the artificial stability consensual models provide. We continue to abandon the navigational rudder of silent knowledge and heightened consciousness as we surrender time and again to group consensus rather than to a higher, and possibly highest, creative power. Whether this is an effect of free will or whether we are following a time line of human evolution contained in a particular emanation that stands unchanged throughout eternity, the effect is the same. Either way, when we lose our sense of the greater possibilities of freedom that imagination bestows, we have no means to regain our natural heritage. The effect is a reduction in what we think can be done and what might actually be lived. Building a creative life entrains cohesion to a natural order, an arrangement emanating from infinity and found in the ever-present moment.