Shamanism for the Age of Science: Awakening the Energy Body - Kenneth Smith 2018
Will and Intent
Living the Unfolding Moment
If we really can’t talk about being, then why is there all this talk? First, it is the nature of humans to reflect and project, to examine their conditions and figure out the possibilities. To manage this, modern Toltecs learn to reason their way out of reason. Part of their emerging style is to make leaving reason in service of developing the whole of the organism an entirely reasonable proposition, in which reason gradually gives way to will. This is the proverbial slippery slope, as reason also likes to have its way, so to speak, and fixate attention. Excessive closure and fundamentalism often result from well-crafted rational arguments. Like other aspects of ontological growth, the balance between reason and will requires deftness. The way to learn any ontological skill is to actively engage it, to discover for yourself what it takes to bring you to life.
Will is the governing force of cohesion and a determinant of the location of the assemblage point.14 To awaken will, you have to step outside of your thoughts . . . all of them. At the same time, you tap capacities of yourself that provide all of the sense that thinking provides, plus more. You can’t cut off your thoughts and hope everything will come out just fine. If you arbitrarily leave thinking behind without another form of guidance, you will find yourself without means on a stormy sea. The stages of growth act as channel markers to allow you to gradually, steadily, and surely form a new relation with the world. To load the chances in favor of success, your venture must be conscious, not random.
As the basic force of cohesion, will is a primary means to shift cohesion. Will always performs this function; however, for most, will remains latent, doing its work without conscious awareness, which results in a diminution of potential. In the Toltec model, sustained being presupposes having activated will and having done so while oriented toward a natural field. It is quite possible to activate will but remain in the craftsmanship stage as will permits many conditional energy fields, some of which prevent further growth.
The mirroring quality of perception results from the reflective properties of the energy body’s membrane, the spherical-like boundary of uniformity. In normal circumstance, the mirrors bounce back to you the self-made images of your inventory. The problem is that we get lost in our own reflections. We don’t even know that will and the energy body form part of our anatomy as it was never introduced into our inventory. There was not a mirror so labeled to reflect it. The shamanic inventory kept it alive and therefore deserving of this recognition. In actuality, there are no mirrors. It is only a way to illustrate the mechanics of perception; specifically, the reflection that occurs throughout cohesion and at all levels. Bioenergetically, the perception of reality results from the coherence among all pieces of your inventory. The better connected the logic holding it all together, no matter if it is of the first or second fields, the clearer your picture as coherence reflects this harmony and a more integrated cohesion forms.
Disharmony, or lack of coherence, may express itself as near- or farsightedness, to illustrate by common reference. If you’re nearsighted, you won’t establish a positive connection with the environment and your considerations will be highly self-reflective. Far-sightedness means you don’t have a viable personal relationship with the environment, as you are too responsive to the entrainment influences of the world. You are “out there” rather than in your body. Either way, you don’t have a felt sense of your energy body and how it connects to and harmonizes with the environment. Arousing will begins an orientation for balance within and without.
When you develop this spherical quality of perception, you may perceive a greater environment outside the membrane, which facilitates connecting with a broader range of emanations. Continuing this exploration, you begin to glimpse the third energy field. Infinity resides in each of the three fields. It’s a matter of continual development as to how far you enter and explore them. The first and second fields are within and without the energy body while the third field is exclusively outside the human emanation. However, you can have a relationship with all three.
To get to the artisan stage requires placing an emphasis on reaching unbounded potential as represented by the third field. The artisan has grown beyond ordinary and nonordinary considerations, beyond the first-field behaviors of consensus society and the second-field activities of the shamans. The artisan has also eliminated self-reflection. But even if you’re not an artisan, balancing with the three fields to whatever degree possible minimizes projection and optimizes timing. In addition, as you focus your awareness toward the third field, you more skillfully navigate the barriers of perception.
The transition to will occurs with shifts in your baseline state of consciousness, especially when targeting the stages of development. While bringing will out of dormancy, it is common to have altered states that cause glitches in your behavior. Your memory might not seem as sharp. Or you may stumble for words when you’re usually eloquent, for instance. During a business meeting, you may experience interruptions in your thinking as imagination abruptly commands your attention. This is normal as talking is an indirect function whereas will places you in the immediacy of the moment, and thus you’re engaging in a radical shift in your relationship with life.
Over time you’ll get a better grip on such nuances. As will activates, for instance, your speech emanates from your entire body rather than from mental formulation. Put another way, by using will speech may originate from imagination, feeling, or seeing as a response to your internal or external environments. Instead of being an expression of subject-object relations, talking results from your entire self and is guided by intent. You may hear others talking but rather than go through your normal mental deciphering, the talking translates to awareness through feeling as it assesses the words and provides meaning. As you learn talk and listen from the body rather than from the brain it unfolds into a new, daily-life pursuit. It’s a different cognitive style.
A permanent baseline shift toward will occurs when you are able to place the accent of your daily life on feeling and imagination. Rather than go through the day referencing what you have learned, you sense the fuller energies of the world by giving precedence to your emotional intelligence and imagination. From this, you allow learning and thinking to come and go like the ebb and flow of the tides. Your life takes on a dreamlike quality reflecting heightened consciousness. An activated will places you in a cosmological inspired stream of events, as it were, whereas before your life was governed by convention. You stay focused and grounded, though, by intent.
Intent consists of the deliberate focusing of will.15 Will is unbridled energy, whereas intent is the harnessing of that energy. For example, becoming is developed through consciously applying intent for that result and intent guides the uses and results of imagination. Intention doesn’t exist solely for these purposes, though. It is a natural ability affecting all spheres of life that is beginning to receive rigorous examination. As mentioned in chapter two, intent is under scientific scrutiny as a determinant in remote healing.
Csikszentmihalyi also says that consciousness is “intentionally ordered information.”16 “Order” includes all kinds of organization, not just verbal information. It both reflects and results from a stable cohesion of any magnitude. This type of awareness exists as a result of thinking combined with anything that enhances cognition, yet it is not thought itself. It exists in its own realm, a precursor to enacting all forms of behavior. It is also the natural world. Oceans contain order, as do jungles, as does the universe. How humans perceive that order is another matter. To supplant the order of an ordinary cohesion for that of being requires extended, intentional effort as you enter into the natural order.
Csikszentmihalyi continues by saying that intention is the force that maintains order.17 We thereby have the stable intent of being and the intent of movement found in becoming. By relaxing into this pair, and by remaining vigilant to the work, you bring both to life. You become conscious. In so doing, you bring yourself to life in a most remarkable and intelligent manner. Humans generally entrain to the intents passed down unquestioned over generations. We then assume a fundamentalist posture as we live our lives by rote, and limit our options to those given us through status quo teaching. The group consensus of the era reinforces this as it informs us of our reality. In contrast, if you have the ability to manage your life, to produce positive experiences, to keep growing in leaps and bounds, and all the while have your awareness flooded with life each and every moment, then you are an intelligent human being.
Will allows possibility. Managing this is where intent comes in. It keeps cohesion focused, keeps awareness ordered, and maintains your daily requirements for life. It also allows you to access new order, new cohesions. By the time you get to a natural field, you are well beyond ordinary meaning. For, as don Juan says, his will keeps him alive regardless of his personal choice, or regardless of anything he thinks or sees about the world.18 Having stepped into imagination to that degree, he has become a living part of all creation.