"Good and Bad" Energy
Sunday 07 Oct 2012
Most of us do not give too much thought to the energy we generate when we go about our daily responsibilities and tasks. Mostly we follow our inclinations and intentions instinctually. Most of us do recognise that we have a choice when it comes to moral questions, especially when they "prick our conscience" against the background of our instincts. Indeed it is this ability to notice "the moral question" that separates our human condition from the animals. Normal human beings in normal situations have enough complex conditioning to feel empathy and compassion with other living beings. This allows us to reflect when the situation is required.
This whole question came into sharp relief for me when I was watching Tony Robinsons "Gods and Monsters" series on television. The show explores why our ancestors believed in things like fairies and witches with an ability to turn into demons that could possess sometimes very ordinary people. Mentally disturbed behaviour could easily be blamed on such demons. The show tries to explain why European civilisation in the 16th and 17th century believed enough and were fearful enough to sanction inquisitors and judges to ruthlessly extract confessions and use very dodgy logic to condemn what we know now to be innocent people. Forty thousand people lost their lives in this way --- over this time.
Tony showed his audience that we still have vestiges of this fear and ignorance in us today, but the way he went about it, I believe muddied the waters he was trying clarify. He attended a university and arranged for "champions of modern science" in the form of students from the medical faculty to bring enlarged copies of photos of their parents and loved ones without telling them why! He then gave them a knife and asked them to slash and destroy the pictures. Of course they could not do it. Tony told them that he would give them another copy of the picture and that it was just a piece of paper. They still could not do it. He cajoled them and called on their rational judgement to see clearly --- all to no avail. Tony felt he had shown up the same blind ignorance that could be harnessed and redirected to condemn witches. He called into question what he sees as our ignorant unenlightened blind prejudices. In some circumstances this way of seeing things may be fair enough but from a wider perspective it is a blinkered view that highlights the unbalanced nature of modern scientific rationalism. It dismisses and gives no value to the impact our intention has on our conscious energy flow. In fact the experiment provided good evidence of what conscious energy actually is.
Conscious energy is a very real thing. It may not be something that can be scientifically measured or quantified yet, but there is no question of its existence. It can be seen flowing into the body of new born child and can be seen leaving at death. It animates us and in turn we condition it. This energy flow in turn gives us our direction. In effect we reap as we sow. Consciousness with its flow and meaning is all about intention. The result of Tony's experiment would have been different if he made his request with different language. For example he may have asked the students to cut out the best features of their families faces, or perhaps to cut the photos up and rearrange the pieces in a funny way. The fact that they could not cut the photos in the way that he asked is all about the energy he was asking them to bring to the picture. We subconsciously know what energy we are creating and it is hard to do something when we have the awareness that we do not want to do it.
Back in the 16th and 17th century our potential awareness was subsumed by superstition and fear. Eventually though our awareness caught up and we realised a law was needed to protect us from the ignorance of burning witches. Today we can still easily see many areas where our prejudices run in front of our deeper awareness. This prejudice invariably stems from ignorance and fear. It can lead to situations similar to the dark ages where our natural reflection of empathy and compassion is lost in the noise. Right around the world --- on a daily basis there are people murdered and killed in various situations. War, skirmishes and lawlessness, even planned events where Governments enlist perpetrators to act on their behalf. These men and women are trained to be able over-ride their natural empathy and compassion --- to see their enemy in terms less than human and unworthy of life. Again it is about the way our intention conditions our consciousness. Notice how many combatants are starting to reap the results of these actions today with severe mental illnesses along with other strong evidence from wars that show many soldiers fake combat and deliberately shoot over people's heads.
This makes me think of a Buddhist story, where the Buddha was extolling the virtues of developing Loving Kindness in our hearts. He said that even if there are people with so much hate for you that they are sawing you in half with a two handed saw, one must establish a mind of equanimity and loving kindness towards those people. The Buddha is not necessarily asking you to like what is happening, but to understand and intentionally develop the bigger picture of consciousness in our minds. To do this we must intentionally develop Compassion, loving kindness, sympathetic joy and equanimity.
