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

Elements of Being
Living the Unfolding Moment

Keeping in mind Heidegger’s assertion that being is a unitary phenomenon and must be understood as such, here are aspects of that oneness:

1. You experience a sense of eternity within the present moment. All time seems to emanate and expand from the present. You can also witness time in different ways, such as linear, nonlinear, or simultaneous. This flexibility in perceiving time diminishes when the main focus of attention is not on the present.

2. Hand-in-hand with this sense of eternity is the sense that you want to pay immediate attention to whatever is occurring. You are in the midst of eternity and the present is just as good a place to be as any other; actually, it is the best place.

3. There is always the perception of newness. No matter how many times you travel along a certain route, there is always an impression that this is the first time you’ve passed that way.

4. You feel peaceful, relaxed. You might also feel a sense of wellbeing, from calm joy to ecstatic bliss.

5. You place the bulk of your attention on the environment and less on yourself. As you walk down a road, you pay more attention to the street, trees, people, what is happening in general, and less on your problems, concerns, joys, and other personal deliberations.

6. You feel a sense of rightness, of appropriateness. Everything in the universe is right and proceeding just fine. This might also be thought of as unconditional love.

7. You think less and use other faculties more. Thought removes us from experience (even the experience of thinking). The more we think and groom symbolic meaning, the more we extract our awareness from the essence of our lives. Putting an experience into words is not the experience; words represent the experience. Reason and thinking have value for developing certain kinds of knowledge, but they can limit us to the personality of reality and keep us from the direct experience that feeling, seeing, and imagination provide.

8. You feel more in touch with your core.

9. You feel confident. Your perception has a good, clean edge that enhances clarity.

10. You recognize that any reality you perceive is a reflection of yourself. You know that the way you deal with the world stems from the way you have trained your perception. This meta-cognition serves to reduce reflecting about the world in favor of heightened experience.

11. You have an innate sense of purpose. You feel meaning in your life.

12. You feel nonattached. You strive to do your best, but you are not tied to the results of your actions.

13. You feel balanced. Your physical and nonphysical energies work in harmony without the need to labor for balance.

14. You are and thus have less a need to know, at least in ordinary terms. You know you don’t know what the world truly is, and that is just fine. You are comfortable with the magic of infinity . . . so fundamentalism doesn’t take hold. You do keep tuned to further learning, though, as this revitalizes cohesion.

15. You are aware of multilevels of experience occurring simultaneously. The more you learn about a given procedure, the more likely you are to apply that knowledge. The more you apply knowledge, the more you will innovate, or arrive at new applications. While in a state of being, learning, application, and innovation take place automatically. You generate effective solutions without the usual effort expended on this kind of task. These levels of experience work automatically as part of a natural, spontaneous order within your life.

This list could go on. But even trying to describe being by listing attributes may be somewhat foolhardy, because it is a state of consciousness beyond description. If you are in it, overanalysis will almost surely take you back out of it. But by knowing what to look for, you can begin to align your perception in the direction of this experience. In a nutshell, being consists of a continual, direct connection between self and world. It results from consciously awakening, the deliberate effort that leads to the natural condition of being fully conscious of being conscious.