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

Two Sides, Three Fields
A World of Energy

Knowing the two sides of the energy body is basic to understanding its structure and use. Simply, they are the right and left sides. In terms of bioenergetics, they are the first and second energy fields. In terms of psychology, they are the conscious and unconscious. In Toltec terms, they are the known and unknown. Learning and imagination—which respectively emphasize stability and rapid expansion of awareness—are the two fundamental, integral approaches to develop both sides of the energy body. In these terms, Castaneda referred to learning as “stalking” and imagination as “dreaming.”

Developing the two sides may lead to awareness of a third energy field, a dimension that exists outside the energy body yet impacts it as it puts pressure on the energy body, giving it shape and substance. Emanations of energy arising from a single source, the source of all creation, form an underpinning of this field. These packages or streams of awareness have powerful influence on the shape of the energy body and what happens within it, thereby determining the assemblage point position. This falls neatly within the definition of bioenergetics, as the flow and transformation of energy between the energy body and the environment is taken into consideration.

The third energy field can also be understood as the supraconscious, a domain of awareness that contains the other two fields, yet extends into a far vaster environment. Purposefully tapping awareness of the third field created a line of demarcation between the ancient and modern Toltecs. Doing so eventually removes you from the craft of Toltec practices and places you in a more sublime arena, that of the self-actualized person, someone who has achieved a fundamental transformation in his or her energy body by activating the full range of innate abilities.

While Maslow put forth self-actualization as the capstone of psychological development, C. G. Jung regarded this as individuation.²⁷ In essence, both approaches look at becoming more human as determined by a natural order of how one is created rather than by the definitions and confinement of human-made order. Although I don’t think either had the energy body in mind, in principle there is no disparity; all of these viewpoints deal with fulfilled, complete, psychologically healthy people. That there can be common denominators among established lines of thought only serves to demonstrate the viability of continued investigation concerning what it means and what it takes to achieve this level. The founders of transpersonal psychology have suggested that the study of actualization should be a new branch of psychology called ontopsychology, a hybrid term incorporating ontology and psychology.²⁸

Ontology can be defined in many ways. Here it pertains to your relationship with life as a whole. It is part of metaphysical inquiry that deals with being, with essence. Metaphysics applies to those time-honored philosophical traditions that concern the nature of reality, including the underlying principles of reality formation. Focusing on deliberate awakening, these approaches to understanding the expanse of the human condition invoke metacognition, or thinking about thinking and being able to know that you know as well as how you know.²⁹ Transpersonal psychologies and some energy-based psychologies find a natural place within this field. The energy body perspective of consciousness serves to advance ontopsychology, and its subdivisions, in providing objective references and schematics regarding how to become self-actualized or individuated.

Regardless of its divisions, branches, or schools of thought, psychology is still psychology. If we use the root derivation of the term, it is “the study of mind.” Perhaps the energy body as a whole is what philosophers call “mind” and at the core of it resides what theologians call “soul.” And perhaps the two sides also correspond to the left and right hemispheres of the brain, while the three fields relate to the vertical partitioning of the brain into the reptilian, paleomammilian, and neomammilian sections.³⁰ In days to come, this extended bioenergetic anatomy could provide a more in-depth basis for many disciplines.