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

Becoming
Living the Unfolding Moment

Maslow maintains that self-actualization is everything that a person can become, an ultimate achievement. But we can’t see what we can become because we are dominated by whatever need pulls at us.⁵Becoming necessitates constant venturing into the unknown. It suggests the ability to move toward, or maintain, being, to move with life’s experiences by saturating yourself in each moment and, at the same time, by completely letting go of each moment. It is an unfolding. The conditions of your life emanate from that instant. Viewed in this way, learning is becoming and vice versa.

Maslow asserts that “being and becoming are not contradictory or mutually exclusive” and that both are rewarding.⁶ Both require simultaneously connecting with potential and allowing that connection to give rise to actuality. Maintaining being requires constant becoming and constant becoming takes you to being. Neither is static, excessively closed, or dogmatic. The two arise from a continual dance with learning and imagination, with potential, and with infinity. In this dance you entertain possibilities and move toward those that resonate with core. But if you identify too much with these goals, you will once again pin perception to the definition, to the thoughts, rather than to the experience. That prevents you from awakening completely, removing you from the very energy of the venture. You then succumb to closure, which blocks becoming.

As you awaken your energy body, you automatically activate latent capacities of perception. Developing these gives rise to factors that are similar to those found in becoming and being. For example, don Juan says that seeing is the greatest accomplishment of an artisan because seeing places you at the doorstep of mastery. Yet a person can lose oneself in the intricacies of what is being seen. The person may become less objective and more obsessed, ending the robust ontological development of the energy body. The immediate consequence is that the person fixates the assemblage point rather than coming to terms with its nature, its relativity. This is a key point, he says, in understanding the inherent properties of perception.⁷

The skill is to remain unbiased in order to allow seeing to reveal more of what humans and the world are. This is possible only through becoming. It is the descriptions of reality that ensnarl us, states don Juan. If we remain unbiased and free as we learn, we stand a chance of complete awakening.⁸

Physicist Roger Jones helps place this in another context. He notes that Newtonian science contended that there is a clearly defined, objective world that exists independently of observation. With the advent of quantum physics, the role of the observer came into consideration, as did the notion that what is being observed can’t be separated from the observer; by the very nature of quantum theory the observer and that which is being observed are entangled.⁹ The consciousness of the observer directly influences what is being observed. The point here is that when measured against infinity there is no ultimate accounting for what is perceived, no encapsulating it. A new model, as measured by a new assemblage point position, will always emerge as we get better at perceiving infinity.

Flow

A main characteristic of being is flow and flow aptly characterizes becoming. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explores this in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. He says that joy, creativity, and total involvement with life are all aspects of flow, and comprise conditions of optimal experience. Furthermore, Daniel Goleman says that being able to enter flow is “. . . emotional intelligence at its best; flow [italics mine] represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performance and learning.”¹⁰

Accordingly, deliberately entering flow is not a haphazard, farfetched proposition. It challenges you to jettison everything that holds you back, and then catapult your awareness into regions that remain unimaginable for most. Flow occurs from adeptly navigating potential. A degree of abandon fosters it. You have to push forward. Relaxation is also needed. Even in strenuous athletic activity, relaxation is a main ingredient for optimal performance.¹¹ Developing a natural energy field also requires relaxation. Energy cannot circulate when constrained. A natural energy field has no ordinary definition; you don’t have to maintain it by force. Residing in a natural field maintains flow. And this works hand-in-hand with heightened consciousness.

Timing

As Heidegger maintains, time offers the possibility of moving forward, of becoming.¹²Being results from residing in the continuously developing moment and for this timing carries the day. Timing in this sense means you have keen awareness of your place in the world and how to effectively navigate your path through daily life. An unnatural pace blocks imagination and learning, and thus becoming, and therefore you need to discover your natural pace in all activities; it’s not like you have to behave only one way. Emotional intelligence establishes a strong step in discovering your innate timing. Too many thoughts about the world and you lose your sense of the world. This refined balance with the world automatically leads to peak experiences. Timing, then, stems from awareness of the moment, allows you to connect directly with the world, and promotes quality of life.

Another effect of timing is experiencing a shift from reviewing time to looking into the face of on-coming time, another element of being. Usually, we view time as linear, aligning our perception in a manner that we view time moving from the past to the present to the future. To make a decision, we call upon past experiences and project that information into the future, thinking the stability and predictability of the future is held together by events of the past. While this rings true to some extent, it produces self-fulfilling prophecy by weaning out potential; especially potential that doesn’t immediately connect with our known world. Life then unfolds by the conditions we give it. We also see continuity in another’s behavior based on our experiences with them, and then get disgruntled if their behavior doesn’t fit our expectations. As we hold the order of our world to a linear progression of time, it becomes a major force affecting our perception. We forget it is a convenient arrangement to help us make sense of our experiences, and lose ourselves thinking it is the only way the world works.

To face time, you maneuver your cohesion to a new coherence, a new assemblage point position. You face upriver, so to speak, to witness the origins of time. This has the effect of enabling you to hook onto potential, to nonlinear time that spreads in many directions. This helps manage flow. However, time and flow may be viewed as entirely separate dynamics. Flow results from achieving a solid alignment with an emanation and then feeling the resonance of energies, whereas time and timing are the measurement of this action.

To have proper timing, you need to gain masterful control of your energy body, which involves a highly refined balance with the world. Proficiency with timing therefore rests in the artisan stage.¹³ As an artisan, you can step away from the familiar and bring potential into play through becoming-being. To make a good go of it, your instincts must be sharp. You have to sense how to behave in the given moment and from this awareness have your livelihood provided for; in other words, from the moment you automatically lay the groundwork for what will be needed in the future. To derive concrete value from being, it has to facilitate and augment survival.

Timing allows cohesion to adjust naturally and helps you remain aware of core, causing more of the energy body to awaken. Thinking then reflects becoming rather than functioning as mechanical and static projection-reflection. Feeling turns into a measurement for timing, thereby enhancing emotional intelligence. Valerie Hunt’s “mind field organizer” of emotions then allows for the formation of new cohesions. In the shamanic framework, we can relate the capacity of mind to the overall energy body and the organization of mind to cohesion. Completing the loop, thinking then flows, or becomes, from this emotion-based organization of perception. This entire endeavor brings about awareness of will, the epicenter of the cornerstones and the ballast for the entire energy body.