Inner Energies
Scientists of the twentieth century discovered that the entire
visible universe consists of matter-energy. All matter, including
our bodies and our planet, may convert to energy and vice versa.
All forces arise through the interaction of matter-energies. No
surprise, then, that the matter-energies within us determine the
quality of our inner life. Just as we cannot see electromagnetic or
gravitational energy, but only the results of their action, so too
we cannot measure or objectify inner energies. But we can
experience their action directly. For this we need an acquired
taste, a comprehension of what to look for, and a gradual
refinement of our perceptions. The understanding of energies brings
crucial support to our spiritual path, because energies provide the
fuel, the light for all our experiences.
Each energy defines a particular mode of being, a particular kind
of world. The energy with which we operate at any given moment
determines the kind of experience we have, the kind of world we
live in, and the possible modes of operation of our will. The study
of the spiritual worlds and their associated sacred energies is an
ancient endeavor, with roots in Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, Sufi,
Taoist, Kabbalistic and other sources. J.G. Bennett gives a
particularly clear and modern account in his book Deeper Man [1].
His concepts and terminology form the basis of this presentation of
energies.
The inner energies constitute a hierarchy. Actions undertaken with
a higher energy can organize and subsume a lower energy. Lower
energies can form a field in which higher energies may be
contained, created, and transformed. Remarkably, we are able to
transform a wide range of energies within our bodies and souls. At
the simplest level, we transform food and oxygen to create the
energy that powers our bodily actions. But this human ability to
transform energies runs right up the scale toward the most sacred
and likely stands as a major reason for the existence of life.
Spiritual practices include methods for recognizing, containing,
creating, and transforming progressively higher and finer energies.
At first we study the energies to recognize their presence and
action. Later we must shoulder the burden of learning not to waste
our energies unnecessarily or misuse them. Finally, we contact,
collect, organize, and transform energies directly, gradually
refining our ability to do so.
As we advance on the path, the higher energies grow even more
important to us, because only through their action on us can we
find real transformation. And by becoming an instrument for the
descent of the higher energies into this world, we serve not only
our own soul, but also our fellow travelers through this
life.
Energies characterize the stages of spiritual development. The
pure-hearted occupy a spiritual station of a higher energy than the
rest of us. When we are more deeply present, we live in a richer,
more substantial, and more truly satisfying world than we
experience with a perennially scattered attention.
In the articles linked below, we briefly describe each step in the
scale of energies beginning with the energy of our physical
life.
See Vital, Automatic, Sensitive, Conscious, Creative, Love, and
Transcendent energies.
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Vital Energy
I once saw a just-captured, rather fearsome leopard pacing its cage
in a Mexican jungle. Exuding strength and vitality, this dignified
predator was no zoo animal. Stunningly beautiful and powerful, the
leopard radiated a palpable, rippling energy. Some people, such as
athletes in top condition, also exhibit an abundance of vital
energy, the energy of physical life. When the glow of vital energy
abounds, our bodies wax vigorous and ready for action. When the
level of vital energy drops, our bodies grow tired or ill. Proper
rest, food, exercise, and energy breathing feed our vitality and
contribute to good health. Emotional stress, unnecessary muscular
tensions, fidgeting, overconsumption of alcohol or food, and other
wasteful activities sap our vitality.
In our spiritual life, vitality matters because a depleted or
distressed vitality may limit the quality of our contact with the
higher energies. Conversely, contact with the higher energies often
produces a remarkable cascade of vitality. Proper care of our body
creates the vitality that supports our very life and sets the stage
for our spiritual work. But the diminished vitality of aging and
illness may inhibit our inner work. So while we have the vital
strength, we work.
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Automatic Energy
Have you ever gotten into the shower, shampooed your hair by habit,
and a moment later stood there in the shower wondering whether you
had shampooed yet? Have you ever looked for your glasses, only to
find them on top of your head? My favorite example: sitting at
dinner, frantically looking all around for my fork, until I finally
discovered it in the least expected place – in my hand. To see the
automatic energy in action like this is a sobering event. Whatever
we do under the automatic energy, we only partially experience and
only vaguely remember. We live and act in a pre-programmed mode: if
A happens, we do B, every time, and without the consideration or
participation of our cognizing self. Nevertheless, the automatic
energy has its important uses.
Awkwardness reigns when we first learn a complex task, such as
driving a car. Its unfamiliarity forces us to think about where the
gas pedal is, where the brake pedal is, which foot to use, where
the rearview mirrors are, what the traffic signs and signals mean,
when we have the right-of-way, and so on. Thinking how to drive
makes us clumsy and inefficient, as we use the mind to do the
body’s work. Eventually, we learn to drive with ease when it all
becomes automated: the appropriate responses emerging without
needing to think of them. Our body drives the car while our mind
freely engages in conversation, listens to the radio, plans our
day, or considers higher level driving strategies like how to bail
out of a traffic jam. The driving itself happens
automatically.
The automatic energy can work in the body, in the mind, and in the
heart. We learn to play a musical instrument, play a sport, brush
our teeth, walk, type on a keyboard, speak and read a language,
know the product of 7 times 8, recognize a face, and recall a name
— all with the help of the automatic energy. For such purposes, the
automatic energy finds its appropriate place: directing repetitive
or simple processes, thereby freeing up the higher energies for
tasks befitting them.
The nearly continuous stream of random, loosely connected, aimless
thoughts and images that flows through our mind usually carries us
with it and prevents us from being fully present in the moment.
This persistent current of automatic thought all too often captures
our attention, drawing us into passivity in a dreamlike world,
disorganizing and usurping the higher energies of sensation,
consciousness, and creativity.
Another problem with the automatic energy occurs when it acts in
ways that deplete us. Our habitual and unnecessary muscular
tensions burn energy we could better use elsewhere. Our bad habits
drain us: smoking, excessive drinking, overeating - all due, at
least in part, to misuse of the automatic energy, letting it
control rather than serve.
Automatic emotional reactions to life situations, such as anger,
rage, fear, jealousy, lust, greed, timidity, and sadness, may be
appropriate and even useful for a brief period. But when we allow
our automatic energy to run with them, unseen by consciousness, our
thoughts and feelings dwell on the reactive emotions. We wallow in
them to the point where they take a central role in our inner life,
controlling us. All manner of social and psychological troubles
result.
The automatic energy, while useful and even necessary, does not
bring us into real contact with life. To our unrecognized
misfortune, we live almost exclusively under the domination of the
automatic energy, enthralled by our habits and conditioning,
forever repeating similar patterns of behavior, inner and outer.
Our lives pass us by without our participation. Centered in the
automatic energy, we are, in effect, asleep. We relish anything
that temporarily alleviates the dullness. We even go for strong
reactive emotions or thrill seeking, substituting them for a freer,
more satisfying, non-automatized way of living. The proven remedy
is to embark on a path of spiritual practice leading to greater
wakefulness and greater awareness in the midst of normal
life.
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Sensitive Energy
The basic energy that fuels our inner work and that forms the
material of the lower body of the soul is the sensitive energy,
which brings vibrant color and vivid impressions to our life. This
energy fuels what we ordinarily consider to be awareness,
connecting us to our perceptions, to the present moment. Within the
sensitive energy we find our medium for actual contact with the
particulars of life, for noticing the large and the small. We can
breathe. We can taste our food. Though not yet fully awake, we are
not as asleep as when the automatic energy dominates our being.
Choice, initiative, and independence from merely reacting to
events, all become possible. Life is enriched and natural, no
longer so habitual.
The possibilities enabled by the sensitive energy are immensely
important to the quality of our inner life. Lasting benefits accrue
when we explore and understand its role in our emotions, in our
thoughts, and in our physical perceptions. We can learn specific
spiritual practices to manage, collect, contain, and transform it
into higher energies.
In the body, the sensitive energy enhances our kinesthetic and
proprioceptive impressions. We can sense directly that we actually
have a hand or a leg. Under the automatic energy we move without
contact with our body; unless we stub a toe, we walk with no
awareness of our feet, like our half-awareness when we drive. The
sensitive energy, however, provides a visceral, organic awareness
of our body in movement and at rest, bridging the chasm between
mind and body. In later sections we suggest methods for learning to
be in touch with the sensitive energy in the body, to experience
and even direct its flow. When we refer to the Energy Body, we mean
the sensitive energy. Intentionally sensing the body affords a
powerful grounding in the present, a most useful method on the
spiritual path.
In the mind, the sensitive energy enables us to be aware of
thoughts as thoughts. With the automatic energy, thoughts pass
through our mind and we pass along with them, carried unawares by
our thought stream. With the sensitive energy, we know our
thoughts, we know their meaning, and can solve problems by
intentional thinking.
In the emotions, the sensitive energy brings awareness of the
spectrum of feelings passing through our heart. With the automatic
energy, our emotions have us, we lose ourselves in them. With the
sensitive energy we feel our emotions as emotions, without being
completely lost or entrapped in them.
As the highest energy under our direct control, the sensitive
energy provides the immediate, tangible substance of our spiritual
work. Through practice we can collect and organize it into a robust
whole, the basis of the lower part of our soul, a firm foundation
and container for the higher energies, a platform from which to
live a less-dreamlike, more natural and organically joyful
life.
The world of the sensitive energy corresponds to the worlds known
as Asiyah (Action) in Kabbalah and Ajsam (Bodies) in the Sufi
cosmology.
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Conscious Energy
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Though the reality they point to is fundamental to our
possibilities, we use the terms “conscious” and “consciousness”
rather loosely. Usually we mean them to indicate a simple sensory
awareness. So when we say “I am conscious,” or “I am conscious of”
something, we actually refer to the working of the sensitive
energy, the substance of our awareness of our bodies, thoughts,
emotions, and sensory perceptions. Here we adopt a quite different
meaning for the term consciousness: the spacious, empty, infinite,
cognitive field that forms the ever-present background of all
awareness. In this sense, the full experience of consciousness is
rare and fleeting in our lives. But to taste true consciousness,
you need only place your attention through the gap between
thoughts, into the cognizant space surrounding your thoughts.
Reworking an analogy due to J. G. Bennett (Energies 1964, p. 90),
if we compare the sensitive energy to the images on a movie screen,
the conscious energy forms the screen itself. Consciousness enables
us to be aware of our sensitive awareness. The still pool of
consciousness underlies, permeates, and surrounds our ordinary
awareness, in the relationship of context to content. This
cognizant stillness of pure consciousness corresponds to sitting in
the darkened movie theater with no images on the screen, nor sounds
from the audio system. Like the screen during the movie, the subtle
blank slate of consciousness remains profoundly difficult to
recognize, because of its inherent emptiness. Chronically immersed
in and concealed by our sensitive energy, consciousness usually
remains indistinct and lost to us. The sensitive energy movie so
captivates us that we lose ourselves. Transported by the images, we
forget the theater, the screen, and even our own existence.
Sensitivity affords awareness of particulars, the content of life:
an arm, a leg, a thought, a sound, the person in front of us.
Consciousness affords contextual awareness. We recognize thoughts
as just thoughts. With the automatic energy, thoughts run on their
own by association, bouncing off each other and off sensory
impressions. With the sensitive energy we are in contact with the
meaning of our thoughts, we can engage them, intentionally direct
them, and think sequentially on a subject or problem. We can think
logically: if A then B, if B then C, and so on. With consciousness,
we move to a higher perspective to see thoughts as thoughts. In
conscious thinking, we can focus on a topic, allow our thoughts to
gather around it, and see what combinations offer new insight. We
can think holistically, seeing and considering all aspects at
once.
Automatic emotions react on their own to thoughts, to other
emotions, and to external events, thereby driving our feelings
haphazardly and with no oversight. The sensitive energy puts us in
contact with what we are feeling. We can feel our emotions. But we
can also feel consciously. The conscious energy enables us to see
our emotions as emotions, to let them come and let them go, to not
be under the spell of identification that we are what we feel. In
the same way that we are not the objects we see, we are also not
our thoughts or feelings. The paradigm of conscious emotion is
equanimity, a pervasive tenor of peace and calm. But any emotion
can be conscious. Conscious anger, for example, is an awakened
person’s response to evil deeds. Conscious emotions do not come
from egoism and we are not identified with being the feeling. We
allow the emotion appropriate to the situation and, while we feel
it fully and deeply, we are never overwhelmed or controlled by the
emotion. There are also higher emotions that come from beyond
consciousness, such as love and compassion for all, and longing for
the Divine.
Consciousness brings awareness of ourselves and our surroundings as
a whole. Lacking boundaries, more than personal, consciousness
permeates everything. We cannot have it, but we may participate in
it. Yet consciousness also provides a distinctive sense of being
ourselves.
Attention is a form of will and acts through the conscious energy.
Since attention can direct our senses and our sensitive energies,
it must use a higher energy, in this case consciousness. The
conscious energy responds directly to will, to attention, and
mediates the action of our will in the sensitive and lower
energies.
The pivotal importance of the conscious energy in our spiritual
work cannot be overstated. Consciousness both connects us with will
and forms the frontier of the truly spiritual realms. Spiritual
practices, such as presence, work to raise consciousness out of
sensitivity and give us access to it. Awareness of bodily
sensations organizes the sensitivity into a less chaotic and more
stable vehicle in which consciousness may assume its rightful
place.
The conscious energy resides in an eternal, timeless dimension,
deathless and unchanging, not subject to the conditions of space
and time. Coming into the vast stillness of consciousness is like
entering a large cathedral, temple, or mosque. The expansive
ceiling and cavernous space open to a new kind of freedom and a
substantive peace. That great hall of peace is always here, just
beneath our ordinary perceptions, where consciousness invites our
participation in the world beyond me and mine. Though our contact
with consciousness certainly varies, it constitutes the
all-pervasive bedrock of our inner world, the continuum of
cognizance, the plenum of peace.
At the same time, many of today’s major writers and commentators on
spiritual subjects overrate consciousness, confusing the ultimate
expansion of consciousness with God. Consciousness is indeed
unbounded and infinite. The alternative names applied to
experiences of the true nature of consciousness include presence,
non-dual awareness, and in its more expansive form, cosmic
consciousness. Spiritual seekers can mistake the boundlessness and
peace of consciousness for nirvana or for the ultimate nature of
God. While God may manifest at the level of the conscious energy,
God also resides beyond this and all other forms of consciousness.
Indeed, consciousness is merely the ground on which God walks. We
may more aptly consider God to be associated with Will, with the
action of Love and the Divine Purpose than with any of the energies
such as consciousness.
Who uses the energies? At the level of our limited world of
sensitivity and below, we do. At the level of the universe, God
does. The Divine is no more identical with consciousness than we
are with the electricity we use to power our gadgets. Nevertheless,
we must work to understand and to live in consciousness because of
its critical role in forming our being and because it brings us
closer to will, to “I am.”
The world of the conscious energy corresponds to the worlds known
as Yetzirah (Formation) in Kabbalah and Arvah (Spirits) in the Sufi
cosmology.
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Creative Energy
Beyond and veiled by consciousness, behind the spacious stillness
within, lies the realm of the creative energy, an ocean of bliss
and light, the Primordial Sacred Sun, the hem of the garment that
God wears. To become directly aware of the creative energy we must
steer our perception outside consciousness itself. Although we
might enter the creative world through an act of grace, our reach
typically falls far short of that world. Nevertheless, the creative
reaches us. So instead of attempting to describe the world of the
creative itself, we will look at how it manifests in our
life.
The creative makes new connections and opens doors of opportunity.
This energy can bring order out of the chaos of the higher
energies. The creative domain encompasses synchronicity and karma,
sowing and reaping the results of our actions, creating and
selecting possibilities. It ushers events into our lives, events
meant for us. The power of sex and the perception of beauty derive
from this energy.
Only in emptiness can something new be created: the white canvas,
the blank sheet of paper, the formless lump of clay. The creative
energy introduces us to our essential emptiness, a prerequisite for
entering the true depths of the sacred. The reverse also holds: to
contact the creative energy we must empty ourselves, through an
inner act of surrender. This act of emptying oneself of oneself
opens a channel to the creative realm of the spirit, opening our
heart to joy, generosity, and peace. The event releases an influx
of the lower energies that we experience directly and
unambiguously. Vitality, for example, pours down when the creative
energy touches us, completely changing the state of our body.
Superhuman feats of strength in dire circumstances are powered by
the creative energy.
By its name, we would expect the creative energy to be intimately
associated with the arts and sciences, and indeed it is. In any of
the arts, the artist knows the crucial role of surrender,
surrendering to the work, to its needs, to its possibilities.
Discipline and training in the methods of the art prepare the
artist to be a vehicle of art. Cultivating spontaneity helps open
the channel to the creative. The artist empties herself, allowing
her acts to be guided by the creative power, often accompanied by
ecstasy. This is perhaps most obvious in music. The great musician
gives himself over to the music in an ecstatic embrace, becoming an
instrument of the music.
Similarly, in the spiritual path, we must empty ourselves to become
instruments of the Divine Will. In this emptying, in our malleable
nothingness, the creative energy creates our being. It is said that
the perfected human, the great saint, the bodhisattva, achieves the
station of being centered in the creative energy, able to transmit
the higher energy of universal love. Thus, the creative energy
serves as the abode of the heavenly host, the devas, the creative
wisdom, responding directly to the Divine Will. This is the place
of the demiurge, the elohim, agents of the intelligent force that
continuously creates and sustains this great universe.
The world of the creative energy corresponds to the worlds known as
Beriyah (Creation) in Kabbalah and Imkyan (The Possible) in the
Sufi cosmology.
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Love and Compassion
The sacred energy of love and compassion, the Great Heart of the
World, embraces us all, without condition, unifying all of life,
unifying the whole creation within the warm spirit of kindness,
appreciation and concern. With good fortune, we may meet people in
whom this unfettered love shines strongly, allowing all around to
bask in its light. The great saints and bodhisattvas, utterly
emptied of themselves, transmit such love and compassion. In some
instances of communal worship, the substance of this boundless
ocean of love may envelop the whole assembly. It may enter a true
marriage and may inform the bonds between parents and children.
Whenever we look into another person’s eyes and recognize the
sameness, that that person and I are the same, not really separate,
this is love.
Despite appearances to the contrary, Divine love and compassion
suffuse every corner of the world, even our own. Divine love stands
before the awesome contradictions in our lives: our God-given
freedom that offers the promise of profound joy as well as the
suffering attendant on living. The Divine heart of compassion
celebrates the beauty of the freedom within each person, a
celebration made bittersweet by the price of freedom: inevitable
suffering.
When we hear of or see another person’s misfortune, and we feel the
pang of their suffering, and are moved to extend the help that lies
within our power, this is compassion. For this we need strength,
because suffering lies all around us. The daily news’ litany of
catastrophes and evil deeds, large and small, could devastate us,
were we awake to the whole of it and lacked the strength to bear
it. But awakening through spiritual practice brings its own
strength. And the suffering we see is more than balanced by the joy
that flows to us along with love, protecting the compassionate from
being overwhelmed by the force of suffering.
Universal love lies far beyond its pale imitation in the lower
energies, where emotional attachment turns from “love” to hate,
jealousy, or despair. Nevertheless, the world is so constructed
that it remains within our possibilities to participate in love
knowingly. But that can only happen to the degree we empty
ourselves of ourselves.
Self-referential motives, self-centeredness, attachment,
expectation of something in return, grasping, setting of
conditions, partial-heartedness - none of these have any place in
love and, in practice, completely block the action of love. Placing
ourselves first and at the center forecloses the possibility of
love. Yet moments do come even to us, perhaps with our children or
our pets or unexpectedly with a stranger, when we are briefly free
of egocentric attachment and the true heart of objective love opens
within us. In unguarded moments, our natural response to people is
friendship, one of the faces of love. To be able to love is a goal
lofty and worthy enough to sustain our long journey along the path,
drawing us ever forward.
Our common mother, the Earth, also loves, loves each one of us and
all life in her biosphere. Like a self-centered and petulant child,
we only too rarely return this love. And like a child, we so take
for granted the love of our mother Earth, that we do not even
recognize it. Yet her love is there for us individually, in nature
and in the city, if we can but open to it. One simple expression of
it manifests as the beauty with which nature adorns herself. And
there are other more direct expressions we may perceive, including
a reservoir of spiritual energies within the Earth that we can draw
upon. But as a species, we need to mature and not expect the Earth
to continue indefinitely absorbing every insult and injury we pile
upon her. We push these limits at the Earth’s, and our own, peril.
The Earth gives and gives and gives, perhaps more than she can
afford. But because our material strength now exceeds our
collective wisdom, the Earth needs us to find a place in our hearts
for her. By our inner work, by opening to higher energies, by
purifying our will and intentions, we help cleanse our collective
will, raise our collective level of being, and give back to the
Earth and to human society. And we do this for love.
Love manifests in many forms, but always serves to unify. Love’s
unmistakable hallmark dissolves our veils of isolation and
separation, allowing us to become more fully ourselves within the
sweet scent of merging. Out of love we are born, and into love we
depart. In between, we seek love and love seeks us.
The world of universal love, a world beyond all forms, even beyond
the world of light, corresponds to the worlds known as Atzilut
(Emanation) in Kabbalah and Lahut (Boundless) in the Sufi
cosmology.
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Transcendent Energy
The names abound: God, the Most High, the Unconditioned, the
Divine, the Unfathomable, Allah, Nirvana, Brahman, Adonai, the
Real, the Deathless, the Omnipresent, the One, the Unique, the Tao,
the Absolute, Ein Sof, the Void. Not only does everything arise
from the transcendent Source, but It also exerts the one powerful
attraction on us all. Every other attraction merely misappropriates
and distorts the primal draw of the Source. We call the abode of
the Source the Transcendent Energy, the holy mountain.
With a wild, chaotic, and powerful freedom, this ultimate energy
acts as the direct vehicle of the Divine Purpose, the Will of the
World, the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe. Beyond space,
beyond time, the Transcendent intimately touches everything within
space and time, working through Its intermediaries of universal
love and the creative energy, endowing life with freedom and the
possibility of return.
By creating a coherent soul built of the energies of sensitivity,
consciousness, and the creative, emptied of attachments and
personal desires, with a profound yearning to serve the Greatness,
a human being can have real hope of contact with the Transcendent
Energy and the Divine Will. The deconditioning of our mind-heart
opens the door to the Unconditioned, and utter surrender is the act
of walking through.
