Projecting Energy

Recently I learned how I project or rather don’t project energy. I was sitting in the office of my alternative health practitioner who also happens to be an advanced Buddhist meditator. He came out of his office with a patient, picked up the next file, and then looked around the room until he noticed me and motioned me into his office. He said, “Normally I’m aware of the patients in the waiting room and can sense who is here and not here. But,” he continued, “I didn’t notice you. Apparently you have an ability of not projecting your energy so people are unaware of you.”

Of course that put my thought machine in motion, although virtually anything can be a catalyst. For eight months at the lake house I have been working with a counselor/psychic who first envisioned me somewhat disconnected from my body with most of my energy floating above me in something like a balloon. I believe that’s a perfect description of me because I know and I’ve been told that I don’t fully, or even partially, inhabit my body. If there is anything uncomfortable or potentially upsetting I resort to my flight instinct which translates as “I’m out of here”.

My wife of seventeen years has had a difficult time. “It’s a challenge,” she says, “to have a relationship with someone who isn’t here most of the time and desires not to exist.” I’m certainly not the main character in the novel “The Time Travelers’ Wife” but that’s probably how it seems to her. In fact she says the title of my biography could be “The Man Who Was Not Here.”

Now, with the adoption of a rescue Goldendoodle, this is beginning to have even more complications. Our new girl Sophie is a mirror image of me. She’s afraid of people and runs away from them but then looks back with what I project as an incredulous look of “why didn’t they like me”. She and I also share what appear to be many other neuroses but that can wait for another entry. [Stay focused, Charles]

So, yesterday we took Sophie to her third training session. Jenny, Sophie, Jeff and I walked into the training area. Jeff is the alpha personality and there is no doubt about it. He looked at Sophie and in his commanding voice said, “Sit!” Sophie and I both sat down. He gave her a down command and she lay down. I restrained myself and remained sitting on the stool. He pointed a finger at her and said “Stay!” I’m certain he’s a superhero because energy shot from the finger and Sophie stayed.

Jenny looked at me and said, “Jeff has more energy in his index finger than you have in your body”. Unfortunately I had to agree. Jeff added, “Dogs are pack animals and they want a leader who will keep them safe and assure the survival of the species.” Of the three humans in the training area I knew if I were a dog I would choose Jeff first, Jenny second and Sophie third before me. I thought of watching the “Survivor” television show when Jeff Probst asks, “Can you outwit, outplay and outlast” and I always answer aloud, “NO! I couldn’t do it.”

So, later this week Sophie and I are going to the lake house for “boot camp”. She and I will have to survive on our own and, hopefully for her, I will step up to the challenge. By the time we return to Yellow Springs I will have learned to project energy so I’m not invisible to others, so that she feels that I’m the leader, so that she feels I will keep her safe and assure the survival of her species, and…hopefully she’ll even sit, lie down and stay on command.

Emanuel Swedenborg’s Conversations with Angels

Swedenborg was a mystic who wrote about his visits to Heaven and his conversations with angels. Of course there are those who believe and those who disbelieve these accounts. Personally I have no difficulty with them even though they are couched in Christianity because I think that in the beginning the afterlife will appear very much as we expect it to appear.

I particularly like this section from the book “Conversations with Angels”*

Pp 108-9 ‘So what is heavenly joy? they asked the angel.
The angel gave this brief answer: ‘It’s the joy of doing something that’s of use to yourself and to other people. The joy of usefulness derives its essential quality from love and its outward expression from wisdom. The joy of use, arising from love, via wisdom, is the life and soul of all heavenly joys. They have fabulous parties in heaven that cheer the minds of angels, raise their spirits, delight their hearts, and refresh their bodies; but for them these parties come after they have been useful in their jobs or duties, which are what give life and soul to all their happiness and pleasure. But if that life and soul are missing, the accompanying joys gradually become joyless—quiet at first, then petty, and finally dreary and annoying.’”

And this:

P 138 “…The outward delights of Paradise are only delights for the body’s senses, but the inward delights of Paradise are delights of the feelings in your soul. The outward delights have no soul. So the life of heaven is not in them unless the inward delights are in them. And any delight without soul related to it gradually gets feeble and dull and is more tiring to the mind than work.”

This concept is explained in the introduction: “In the physical, natural world, we take the reality of what we see for granted. When we look around a room, we see various objects of particular shapes, colors, sizes, and textures. These things constitute our reality…Our so-called ‘objective reality,’ therefore, is conditioned by our perception. In the spiritual world, however, reality—the appearance of things—is a function of internal state: what one sees corresponds to what one is.”

I find Swedenborg’s conversations enlightening and uplifting because they correspond to my beliefs and expectations about the “other side”. Though as a Christian he encountered Angels and Heaven I expect to meet Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and hopefully take my place in the Jewel Tree.

*Conversations with Angels: What Swedenborg Heard in Heaven edited by Leonard Fox and Donald L. Rose Translated by David Gladish and Jonathan Rose