The Powers

Some spirituality talks about various powers that open up as awakening occurs and experience deepens.

Having experienced a huge amount of what people have called powers, I wanted to share my perception of them. I’m actually going to start by renaming them to ‘the forces’.

This is because awakening to the depths of reality means that everything is just the Universe expressing itself. Unless people claim to have altered their genetic make-up or physical manifestation of their beings, then powers are just the part of life being a process that plays out through experience.

When people talk about mastering power – it is my belief that this is actually about getting out of the way of the forces. It’s allowing them to express themselves fully through us.

‘The forces’ seems like a more descriptive name of their conditioned nature; they aren’t something we can do – they are processes that happen through us.

The forces can be understood in the four aspects of experience:

• Body: Physical matter
• Heart: Love
• Mind:  Consciousness
• Soul: Karma and our interconnected story

If you took any of these out, the experience of what it is like being in and being this Universe would fall over. It would be an entirely different experience where everything would be unrecognisably different. A completely different dimension or plane of existence.

One of things that can open up as we deepen our experience is being able to experience each of these aspects separately – we can get a sense of connecting with the realms of pure love or pure consciousness, for example.

Getting out of the way of the forces is removing all the trauma, contraction and fixedness that we hold around these things so that our being can be a pure, unfiltered expression of each of these forces.

Experiencing any of these in full force without resistance, even for a moment, is a powerful experience to have. Losing this sense of a separate self fully to a pure expression of these forces is incredibly disorientating, overwhelming and dangerous, if not done in an extremely safe and supported environment.

However, once it’s integrated, it can become part of how you are interacting with others.

These things ebb and flow like everything else – they aren’t something you attain in any fixed way, they are just things that flow through the unfolding of events like everything else.

When spirituality talks about obtaining powers, it sounds as if it is something that you get; something that you overlay onto your experience. In actual fact you are just opening to the forces that are already there. They are already moving through all of us in every given moment. They are what we are built from.

The Forces & Awakening

If we want to start opening to these forces, which is really what awakening is, we need to create safe spaces for these things to be expressed through us.

We don’t need to overlay another layer of control or fixed ideas about what should be there when we access them, we need to hold space for opening to what is already there. These forces create and include all aspects of life, so it is a process of exploring and befriending our darkness as much as opening to our light.

Once you have fully opened to each force in a sustainable way, it becomes something that is simply expressing itself freely through you in each moment, something very simple. You don’t need a system or concept to describe it, it is just there in your experience.

None of this is an on and off system, it’s a grey scale, which we are all moving around in at all times. We face different levels of contraction in different scenarios and the point of awakening is to remove the amount of contraction we feel in a wider range of scenarios. To liberate the energy so that it can flow more freely through us.

Our fixed ideas of what this is going to give us – peace, happiness, admiration, respect – have nothing to do with this process. They are just more fixed ideas and contractions that stop us from opening to what is actually there, which is just as likely to be sadness and pain as happiness and joy, for example.

The whole thing is working together as a system to work out the best way forward and expressing this through the entire body of us, all beings and the Universe. It is inherently harmonious. It is inherently magical and mysterious. It is inherently working in the favour of generating more joy in the Universe as a whole in the long-run.

Ultimately awakening is not about getting a thing and neither are the powers, or the forces. They aren’t something special or separate to the rest of life. They are just life expressing itself through us in this moment. Just like literally every other thing is.