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

Navigating Infinity
Living the Unfolding Moment

The stages of personal development are steps to awaken the energy body. Being is an effect of taking these steps, a derivative of long and arduous work. The active ingredient of being is found in becoming, the motion of creativity. Sustaining being requires a precise life.

In the film Apollo 13 astronauts returning from the moon had a disabled spacecraft. Based on the true story of NASA’s Apollo 13 trek into space, the film depicts oxygen tanks rupturing, electrical systems failing, and the astronauts truly put to the test. In order to reenter Earth’s atmosphere safely, they had to navigate their craft within a paper-thin margin. If they had failed they would have bounced off Earth’s atmosphere like a billiard ball, to be sent hurling through space to meet their certain doom. Likewise, sailing the seas of infinity requires navigating a razor-thin margin. The odds are staggering, but don Juan and others have hit the mark. Why not you?

To do so, you need to be in flow as this is the measure of your personal relationship with the greater environment. To stay in flow, you have to let go. When you let go, you open yourself to many different influences. Timing plays a critical role in helping you stay focused. You then retain purpose of mind and manner. You must have your bearings as the heart and mind required to navigate infinity require discipline. In addition to your general ontological development, there are a variety of navigational tools.

Cognition

Cognitive guidance arises from the influences that produce awareness and govern our behavior. Most often, this is seated in mental activity. As previously mentioned, however, remember that emotional intelligence enhances reason. Goleman points out another side where reason balances emotions. For instance, he says that uncontrolled anger results from a lack of cognitive guidance. He says it’s an inability to control base-level emotions through the application of reason. He also indicates that many of our emotional memories that have evolved over thousands of years may be out of date, “. . . especially in the fluid social world we humans inhabit.”¹⁹ If so, these emotional guideposts produce behaviors that haven’t kept pace with the world we’ve built. As a result, we’re out of touch and out of balance.

Thought focuses energy as do emotions, rendering the intermeshing of emotion and reason an avenue along the stages of awakening. Goleman points out that thought is a major influence in determining which emotions are experienced.²⁰ In addition, thought is sufficiently powerful in that it creates entire worldviews, entire realities. But, again, these are intellectual constructions. The meaning of cognition, and so cognitive guidance, needs to be stretched out to cover any mode of perception that promotes awareness, understanding, and knowledge. As emotions organize perception, they need to be understood as a part of cognition, along with the other cornerstones, chakras, and anything else that increases consciousness and learning. Cognition, therefore, intimately intertwines with ontological intelligence.

In this light, metaphysical systems are cognitive technologies. These philosophies contain worldviews and techniques that bring the worldviews to life. These systems can help you learn becoming, which then allows your thoughts and feelings to enter more expansive orders of awareness. But a metaphysical guidance system that accounts for so much can be quite intimidating. A good system can account for anything you experience. The problem, then, is that you might lose yourself in the gyroscope and not sail the ocean in front of you. To avoid this danger, a good guidance system teaches you self-guidance, not dogma. A viable system offers exactly this: a form of guidance, not a completely accurate picture of reality. When you aim your intent, the guidance it provides keeps you on track. You then develop your own guidance system. You learn how to think, feel, and see for yourself, which transforms outer guidance into inner guidance. When you learn this, you are on your way to activating will, which delivers even more powerful forms of guidance. In terms of cognition, you are substantially more aware.

Instinct and Intuition

Another form of guidance is rendered by the often-subtle perceptions of instinct and intuition. The difference between them is that instinct is “any natural and apparently innate drive or motivation,” whereas intuition is “immediate understanding, knowledge, or awareness derived neither from perception nor reasoning.”²¹ Instinct is often considered a more biologic response and intuition a general awareness. Both result from a direct connection with the environment. In each case, your capacity to respond to the guidance makes all the difference. For instance, insight may result from a burst of energy and yet the revelation may be weak and have no lasting value regardless of the degree of euphoria accompanying it. This is different from the intense but “quiet” information made conscious during a mystical experience. As with everything else in your life, the task is to pay attention and come to your own terms, claim your own knowledge.

In the bestselling book Blink, Jerome Malcolm says that experience educates intuition and instinct. There is no question that experience educates instinct, especially when instinct is often considered an effect of conditioned responses. Habituated behavior formed in part from eons of evolution based on self-in-relation-to-environment awareness. Organisms generally have the innate capacity to learn from current situations and exhibit new instinctual behaviors. The imperative to survive provides the incentive to learn, to develop new responses, and to pass this along to offspring for continued modification.²²

On the other hand, it may be that experience allows the person to accept the awareness; that is, the person permits the information to become conscious based on having an established sense of it. Behaving in new ways makes the energy body glow, says don Juan.²³ In other words, experience expands the conscious field. Repetitive behavior forms cohesion. A scientific correlate is that behavior and experience affect neural pathways. With an increase in the types of behaviors, or a repetition of specific behaviors, more of the brain is activated.²⁴ Correlations between brain functions and cohesion make brain physiology a useful reference for the study of the energy body and vice versa.

Healer Carolyn Myss uses intuition to diagnose physical disorders. Her skills stretch to being able to apply them nonlocally, with great physical distance separating her and the subject. And Einstein found that there is no logical path to the elementary laws of physics; arriving at them was a function of intuition. Don Juan maintains that intuition is totally accurate unless the information is clouded by personal considerations. This assertion is backed by psychological research demonstrating that intuition can be highly accurate, but prejudice and fear can lead one in the wrong direction.²⁵

Intuition often delivers awareness that transcends all the information available by facts. Even though you may not have a reason for holding a point of view, it might be the more enhanced perspective leading to a wiser decision. It often requires years of experience to know whether intuition-related impulses arise from habit or genuine guidance, with difference being the maintenance of a conditional field or orienting toward a natural field.

The effective use of instinct and intuition provides the guidance to remain in the moment. A person who is being doesn’t think, at least in exclusively mental terms. That person remains in touch with a greater sense of order provided by the complete energy body, and this is fed to consciousness by instinct and intuition. Well-developed implementation of these innate capacities reflects a marked degree of proficiency with silent knowledge, and this type of relation with the world turns learning into art.

Experts

Whether you need new plumbing or a surgical operation, advice from experts may save the day. This type of guidance is especially valuable when you either cannot clearly discern your way or you follow poor inner guidance. Within the stockroom of mirrors, there are plenty of false images and echoes. Often these distortions result from excessive personal desire, unethical power plays, fear, or worry. External reference points can offer good feedback to enable you to test and measure inner guidance. An expert may deliberately help you to orient yourself, or at least provide a sounding board so you can work through the problem. Experts can help you to break through the projective effects of conditional fields that shape your perception.

Other sides of turning to experts show that we have a marked tendency to look outside ourselves for answers, blindly follow authority, and relinquish personal responsibility: the epitome of warped guidance. To counteract this tendency and help you to stay true to your path, it is good to remember that, whatever their specialty, experts abide by their models. After all, that’s where their expertise comes from. But there are times when experts know so much they have forgotten the basics. Lack of touch with the fundamentals may even lead to fundamentalism.

In his critically acclaimed book, How Doctors Think, physician Jerome Groopman explains that doctors may make incorrect diagnoses due to “attribution errors,” where diagnosis is based on stereotypes. When a diagnosis stems from this form of projection, it may lead to the patient receiving the wrong treatment. Similarly, Shunryu Suzuki tells us, “In beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in expert’s mind there are few.” The Zen student is encouraged to reclaim his or her “original mind,” which equates with consciousness that is neither closed nor full. It is empty yet attentive. It is assured and peaceful.²⁶ This teacher sounds like Maslow describing B-cognition.

Environmental Indications

New weather patterns, melting glaciers, and disappearing species are examples of the world providing guidance. Guidance derived from environmental conditions of one sort or another has long been honored. In his landmark book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Julian Jaynes outlines several forms of guidance based on divination. From the arrangement of sticks on a floor to the swirl of oil, to various forms of omens, humans have always sought to make sense out of their world by looking directly at it, or rather seeing into it.²⁷

Toltecs have developed a sophisticated manner of reading omens by forming a language based on symbols that permits communication between oneself and the world.²⁸ Specific colors, for example, carry precise meaning. That meaning is conveyed when a certain color appears, especially if it manifests in an out-of-the-ordinary manner. For example, if to you the color orange means danger and you’re considering whether or not to walk down a street and a nearby orange car honks, the communication—the guidance—is to not walk that street. The siren of a police car provides guidance and in a general fashion so do the laws governing specific behaviors. Certainly a road hazard sign is an environmental indication worth heeding.

The way in which this type of communication has formed is similar if not identical to the manner in which written, cultural languages develop. The use of environmental indications relates to how cohesion has formed. The meaning and value ascribed to them is a step-by-step process of connecting with the environment and making internal adjustments. Changes in cellular behavior are a sign something is happening in a scientific experiment, and this is the version of reality most of us participate in. The accurate use of omens highlights one aspect of having developed an equally legitimate, albeit different, shamanic reality. There’s no reason why you can’t access both.

At the level of being, the necessities of personal navigation take on even more delicate distinctions. A natural field requires you to step beyond conditional fields of science or shamanism to participate fully with the environment. Whatever occurs in your life is part of a pattern, new or old. The pattern may be unfolding or a remnant of that which is passing. The key is to pay attention. The means of navigation, from intuition to personal omens to rules of the road, are then learned as you progress along your path.

Meditation and Prayer

Another form of guidance unfolds from meditation and prayer. It comes from listening to what bubbles forth from your consciousness, either from just being aware or by asking a question that, in a sonarlike manner, results in some form of revelation. Sometimes meditation and prayer are difficult to separate into discrete functions. Other times, they are driven by specific religious or psychological techniques. Psychologist Charles Tart refers to meditation as “practices intended to change the quality or state of consciousness of your mind.” Prayer, he maintains, “is effective insofar as there is a ’supernatural’ or nonordinary order of Being or beings who might respond to it.”²⁹

Meditation has been scientifically shown to affect emotions in a positive way and in some studies meditators reported a higher level of contentment than non-meditators. And prayer has been shown to promote healing, whether the patient is nearby or at a distance from the healer.³⁰ Both meditation and prayer use intent but in different ways. Meditative guidance can be the more passive while prayer the more active. In both cases, the quality of guidance stems from how well one is focused on, or attentive to, the abyss of infinity. How well you allow something beyond personal considerations to occur determines the results.

Path with Heart

With all the energies swirling about, you need focus to get on in the world. You need a rudder. This is where the path with heart plays a significant role. In the previous chapter, the guideline given for this path centered on participating in those areas of life that provide peace, joy, and strength. The objective is a life with meaning, ownership of the one book that is yours in an infinite library. In the more expansive pursuit of personal development, a path with heart plays other critical roles.

A path formed in this way also orients you to core, your natural intent. As a result, your life closes off in natural ways. You can’t do everything, which means the items you select automatically perform the learning functions of closure while simultaneously remaining open. You augment your life rather than force it to conform to rules that don’t match your sensibilities. The elements of your path—livelihood, family, profession, and so on—are not the real deal. Living your life in relation to these elements is the vital act. The lesson is learning who you are and how to parlay that into a good life. A path with heart represents a way of navigating infinity.

As you form a natural energy field, you automatically align with and experience events resonating with your core, matching your nature. You don’t have to be everything to everyone. You don’t need to know everything. You can have biases and incorrect assumptions. Your energy body is a spark of infinity not the entirety of it, resulting in inherent limits to awareness and knowledge as well as the breadth of wonder. You just have to be your complete, natural self.

This orientation also helps you find your personal timing, your individual relation with yourself, those about you, and the greater world. Your sense of connectedness with all areas of your life enhances your passion. Timing then enables you to sustain being. The circle of infinity forms yet again as being enhances your connectedness with the wide-open world and with your personal path. The more you find your path, the better your timing. By the time you reach the artisan stage, your timing demonstrates moment-to-moment precision.

Reflecting your growth, the elements of your path change over time. Knowing that any path might end, or that you might step off a path at any moment, helps to center you in the moment and to prevent you from thinking about how your life should unfold. While you can’t do everything, you can learn to become and be as you let your life unfold naturally. Don Juan says that this results from proficient seeing and is marked by the capacity to seemingly vanish while remaining totally present, to become nothing while becoming everything.³¹

With pure learning, what you see today is different from what you observed yesterday or will tomorrow. The entire universe is becoming, and conditional fields blind us to that awareness. By orienting yourself to core, the circumstances of your life occur of their own accord. You then find your own place in the world, and gracefully live it.

Becoming-being contains the atmosphere of ongoing renewal, of continual discovery. It is a radical reformation of your baseline state of consciousness characterized by a natural field: awareness that has been there all along but is discovered only in the moment. It also reflects complete entrainment to your personal emanation. This enables you to consolidate your life, including setting the stage for the future while remaining steadfastly in the present. Managing your life so that you tune yourself to this requires developing the many facets of body knowledge.

Body Knowledge

In some way, the shape or form of all guidance hinges on body knowledge, learning all of your innate capacities. Each navigational tool requires paying attention to what the body senses, and to how you relate to any given event. By using your entire body—your entire anatomy—you gain the ability to connect intimately with the world. Doing so is more athletic than academic.

Body knowledge reflects a silent-knowledge understanding of cohesion and its connection with a multidimensional environment. Generating it consists of a shift in the assemblage point that brings about immediate awareness of circumstance rather than reflecting on it. The degree to which you can step beyond self-reflective processes to allow a greater awareness to come forth marks the development of body knowledge.

In their book, The Body Has a Mind of Its Own, science writers Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee point out the nature of human perception as consisting of interoception and exteroception, or the quality of consciousness to constantly map changing conditions within and without the body. By relating these to specific areas of the brain, they maintain that internal mapping generates homeodynamics or the regulation of internal conditions. External mapping connects awareness of your body to your environment and vice versa. These processes help connect the body and brain, what they refer to as body and mind. No matter one’s definition of mind, their work demonstrates that connecting aspects within self and self with the environment provides “. . . the foundation for emotional intelligence.”³²

As a brief summary of shamanic-related process, full body knowledge is governed by will and directed by intent. Developing and maintaining being centers on body knowledge. It is a natural effect of continually shifting potential into realization, of staying in touch with infinity and allowing that connection to pull the best out of you. The cornerstones of perception are all functioning, and each mode of perception is joined into a unified whole, making it possible for you to have a unique relation with the world. Your path with heart provides an avenue to this level of realization. Your life will then evolve to something beyond your current imagination. This directly pertains to cohesional intelligence as the awareness the body provides hinges on the functioning of the energy body.

M-Cognition and Transpersonal Bioenergetics

M-cognition—which covers muscle to mystical aspects of mind—represents body knowledge at its finest, a practical utilization of an extended human anatomy. It also illuminates an orientation to becoming-being. A person who has achieved being has awakened his or her energy body, and has probably used the specialized procedures of a specific metaphysical, psychological, or religious tradition. If this type of cognition were accepted and encouraged as a matter of group consensus, it would mark a radical transformation in the current human baseline state of consciousness. As don Juan says, when a person is aware, such as from the disciplined edge of awareness being instills, no external forms of guidance are needed as one is fully capable of navigating infinity by one’s own resources.³³

This is where M-cognition deserves further research and illumination as it concerns the development, process, and daily practice of ongoing being, thereby incorporating everything that goes into grooming and deliberately maintaining this behavior. For this book, coining this term serves as an exercise in imagination and hopefully helps you come closer to understanding being. The same applies to transpersonal bioenergetics. This term carries the necessity to tackle the same subject from a multidisciplinary approach. A wider, more detailed map of the environment needs to come forth, not only for a general orientation to life, but to make better sense of the energy body: how it is created, what sustains it. M-cognition establishes a reference for this quest.

While the terms may not stick, they highlight examining the human condition from other angles. Perhaps expanding what is currently known about B-cognition and transpersonal psychology satisfies this purpose without any fancy footwork of added terminology. That’s fine, as the ability to be should be the focus, not contrived nuances. Consolidating all of these perspectives into a map that enables a greater understanding of human consciousness and the world we live in is the work of hand and heart. A first step is that of gaining awareness that these options exist in the first place. Then coming to terms with this requires the development of the appropriate cognitive tools and abilities. This prepares you to embark on the grandest of adventures, a voyage into the unknown navigated by your conscious participation with infinity.