Post ten of ten, in section Buddhism
One of things that Buddhism describes in many different ways, are the powers that can open up as awakening occurs and experience deepens.
This is one of the aspects of contemplative practice that is most at odds with a Western scientific materialist worldview.
I have experienced a huge amount of what people have called powers, but I prefer to relate to them as sensitivities to the underlying magic, mystery and interconnected nature of experience. I have found that renaming the powers to ‘the forces’ can be a helpful perspective shift that helps move away from grasping and more towards a heartful opening to the depths of what is present in experience.
Importantly, staying connected to the heart and its innate qualities of compassion, joy, equanimity and kindness allow for you to connect to these forces in a way that perpetuates connection to truth and goodness, rather than getting sucked further into delusion and unhealthy self-view.
Some of the ways in which the powers or forces can manifest are energetic connection and interaction, healing loving energy, being able to hear or feel others people’s inner worlds, transcending the physical realm, slowing down or speeding up time, transformational experiences, seeing the depths of people’s soul and karma, getting downloads or insights into otherwise unknowable information like past lives, being unperturbed by things on a nervous system level, seeing the true nature of things, synchronicity, opening up radically new possibilities for people’s relationship to experience, zooming in and out on any part of experience endlessly, connecting with or visiting different realms, being in sync with the weather or cosmic or global events, evoking and sharing an experience with others, giving a transmission, knowing what is important in any given moment, contact with the divine, dissolving experiences, making experiences more dense or alive, and working with the metaphorical nature of experience in a deeply revealing or empowering way.
Most of these things occur on a completely different dimension or plane of existence than Western scientific materialism and an aspect to awakening is opening to this wider and more inclusive experience of reality.
While these are more resonant and open ways of being, it’s also possible to retain a rational approach to reality with these things. It’s useful to retain a sense of open curiosity and investigation rather than generating a whole load of ideas of what these experiences mean.
When you experience something powerful and new, it’s easy to get swept up in it and want to show it off or share it with lots of people. Staying open to these experiences, while also taking time to investigate the depths of what is really happening means that things are more likely to stay grounded and real.
I developed Shared Imaginal Practice as a gentle introduction to some of these more intuitive realms where you can access and play with these forces in your inner world in a safe, rational and connected way.
“The practice opens you to synaesthesia and senses beyond what people assume is possible.”
A participant of Shared Imaginal Practice
The Forces & Awakening
Awakening to a broader range of experience includes these more magical and shamanic realms. Experiencing the full force of these powers can be incredibly disorientating, overwhelming and dangerous, if not done in an extremely safe and supported environment.
To do it in a way that is wholesome also requires you to integrate your darkness, as much as your light. Once the power or force is integrated in to your way of being and understanding of the world, it can become part of how you are interacting with others. In the same way that effective communication is in many ways a super power and can be used for both good and bad, it’s worth investigating your intentions going in to any interaction.
It’s also worth recognising that these things ebb and flow like everything else. They aren’t necessarily something you attain in any fixed way, they are things that flow through the unfolding of events with a life-force of their own, just 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 it is more like you are connecting to the underlying forces that are already there creating experience. The forces are already moving through all of us in every given moment. They are what we are built from and it’s a process of noticing this more and more and making more space for them to be present in your connections to self, other and world.
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.
A good analogy for this is how the basic biology of human experience could be described as a miracle, for example the ways that cells know what vitamins or minerals they need and can communicate this to the liver, or the way that a mother’s touch can soothe a baby.
In the same way, there are still many different levels of magic and miracle that create your experience that science doesn’t yet include or have an answer for. A part of this is because the limited scope of science’s current understanding and a part of this is that there is a certain way of being that doesn’t fit into the mind’s controlling understanding of experience. It is a more expressive, metaphorical mode of being where there is more space for things like magic to occur.
Being able to relate to the powers or forces in a way that is open, spacious and curious is much more likely to lead you to discover the underlying true nature of experience and help you cultivate more authentic connection with yourself and others, rather than leading you into greed, selfishness and disconnection.
Cultivating a sensitivity to the full range of experience, including your darkness and challenges, is what opens the door to the forces and these deeply powerful ways of being.