The Anti-Stress Police

There is a relationship between mindfulness and force.

Generally speaking, I don’t see how much force I use in ordinary life. This question of force is a subtle thing, because I don’t study it much and it takes a quite precise presence of natural intelligence to see it in action. A certain kind of intimacy.

When I manifest in the outward world, when the inner life that creates my being encounters the outer world and other people, I project the statements I make and the mannerisms and gestures that I use with a certain amount of force.

This is a subtle force, as I said, a spiritual force, a very fine energy that is actually transubstantiated in-the-moment into a less fine energy in order to manifest. Because finer energy is tremendously powerful, when it is transubstantiated "downward"—out into life— it undergoes what you might call an explosive reaction. That is to say, a tiny amount of finer spiritual energy releases outward energy in exponential proportion.

There are mechanical regulators in us that are meant to determine how much spiritual energy is used in outward expression. Due to our lack of mindfulness, they function very automatically and are frequently dysfunctional or broken. This results in the release and use of much more energy in our outward manifestation than would otherwise be necessary. For example: we want to dominate others. We're loud, abrasive, obnoxious, unthinking, and in general careless with our opinions. We throw them around like they were bricks and the world were a glass window. These are just a few examples.

I should mention here that people’s regulators for transubstantiation vary quite widely; this is why some people have a high amount of energy and others seem sluggish. Your own daily capacity for transubstantiation of this energy is also highly variable, as you know from personal experience. But generally speaking, each person’s overall transformation of spiritual into ordinary energy has a dominant character, and if you observe them carefully you can know a good deal about them just by watching this. That character is, by the way, regulated by a consistent set of inner laws which can be known with study. This is not, however, a matter of studying ordinary psychology; the subject is complex and takes years to begin to understand.

We see the dysfunction of this force of transubstantiation happening every day with folks; one can hardly read the news without coming across a story about someone who opened their mouth or swung their arms, said or did something damaging or harmful to others, and is now out of a job or even in jail, with lawsuits stacked up against them.

Before we had the “miracle” of the Internet, these events were usually limited to one’s immediate personal circle and as a result, generally speaking, did overall less harm; but now public shaming has become the norm, and folks forget that they themselves make mistakes just like this almost constantly.

A form of alcoholic denial is afoot, sans alcohol. In alcoholism, alcoholics love to surround themselves with other people that drink more than they do so they can secretly compare themselves to them and say to themselves, “See? I’m not that bad.” It’s a way to keep drinking and pretend you don’t have a problem. We are doing the same thing in this habit of public shaming; we just don’t see it.

In any event, you can see the negative outward consequences of a failure to understand the relationship between mindfulness and force. Mindful behavior, mindful intelligence — which is organic — results almost at once at an improved balance between life and the amount of spiritual energy that is released into it. It's a conduit to our natural regulator. We need, however, to know that our natural regulator exists in the first place, and that it is often dysfunctional, before we can help it function better.

In the circles I work in, the standard trope is to discuss it in terms of relaxation. It’s said that we are too tense. And I’m sure that’s true. But it isn’t just the tension and the need for relaxation that needs to be examined. It’s the question of this spiritual force, how it is encountered, ingested, concentrated, and released back into life that makes a difference.

In yoga, spiritual force is often described using the word "prana;" and one of its practices, pranayama, is about the use of breath to regulate spiritual force by ingesting air (which contains fine substances that can be extracted for spiritual purposes, *under certain conditions).* That is a whole discussion unto itself;  and although pranayama is discussed extensively as a breath control practice in literature, its relationship to organic sensation and the concentration of finer substances is almost never discussed and is not at all so well understood. The matter goes far beyond the question of mechanical or mindful breathing practices.

The center of gravity in this question is the impressions we take in. Every impression of life that we have, whether it is inner or outer, involves the transubstantiation of psychic or spiritual energy. The balance in this practice is critical, because while the energy that is expressed is expressed through physical means (the mechanical action of molecules and cells), it is undergoing a transformation from metaphysical to physical states as this takes place.

An individual’s outer force is determined by the quantity, quality, and mindfulness of the substances that mediate this transformation. These substances, you see, are not just expressive; they are also mediators; and there isn’t just one of them. They blend together in interactions just as complex as those of the digestive system; and as you will, I think, easily understand, there’s no way we are going to regulate mechanisms that fine by thinking about them.

Take the following example by way of illustration. If we, as organisms, tried to use our intellects to run our digestive system and tell it what things to extract from each food, and when, and how much, we would quickly die, because we have no idea whatsoever at the level of our own intelligence how to regulate a system that tiny and that complex. The digestive system is so complex, and has so many accessory organisms participating in it, that modern science has not yet begun to unravel its functions.

The substances that regulate our psychic expression are even more detailed, complex, and subject to regulation by parts of ourselves quite different than our intellectual mind.

This means we have to do something other than just think about how to regulate our transubstantiation and use of psychic force.

All disciplines of meditation and mindfulness have risen up around this question, but they rarely seem to explain exactly why there’s a need for them. All of it centers around this use of force. If I try to use my intelligence to restrain myself, I quickly find out that no matter how hard I think about this or that, I can’t stop myself from doing whatever the bad thing is. Whatever that bad thing is — whether it’s drinking, yelling at my children, fighting with people I don’t agree with politically, and so on, I’m going to do it anyway. The energies which make all of my ordinary activities possible, the amount of energy I transubstantiate from my inner to my outer life when I manifest, is excessive in one way or another. And because the system is delicately balanced, if even one thing goes wrong, it can lead to an explosive outburst.

It’s a good thing that the system is, to some extent, self-correcting; yet we are leaky vessels in this area, constantly losing more inner force then we ought to, and constantly overexpressing it in our life, where it frequently blows up in our faces in one way or another.

Coming to a relationship with the sensation of our inner being and understanding the finer nature of that inwardness is the first step towards having a different respect for it and not flushing all our spiritual energy into the sewer system of our ordinary life. This means, in a certain sense, becoming spiritual plumbers and understanding the hydraulics of our psyche, its inner workings, as opposed to its outer convolutions.

The word "stress" is constantly used to describe how we are in life; we're "stressed out. " (Actually, we're stressed IN; but never mind.) Consequently, there is an impressive amount of energy put into stress reduction. In one of the standardized ironies of modern life, it's sold to us as aggressively as the stress it's supposed to counter: dear candidate for relaxation: the anti-stress police are watching you.

All of this anti-stress practice ultimately centers around the question of how much force we put into our ordinary lives and the way that we transubstantiate spiritual life. One of the difficulties, however, is that so much of the effort begins in the intellectual and psychological parts of ourselves. By the time our inner energy manifests in these two areas, it's already removed from the spiritual realm and has undergone a transubstantiation that degrades its level from relatively finer materials to relatively coarser ones. It doesn't operate at the root of the problem, but is merely a treatment of the symptoms.

This is why it’s often said, those interested in questions of this nature, that we need to engage in inner work.

Inner work is an effort to come into relationship with and better understand the nature of the soul — the inner part — as opposed to the psyche, the outer one. This is a quite difficult, because the psyche is on public display and all of its results are as well. It is what is obvious, what can be — metaphorically speaking — seen, tasted, touched, smelled. It is accessible.

But the soul is a hidden thing. It's as invisible to us as all those little cells in our digestive system chomping on the molecules in corn chips, asparagus, and brownies. The soul feeds on impressions, not brownies; and although the brownie is rich in impressions when I encounter it and take a bite, I don’t quite understand the relationship between the brownie and the impressions that the soul takes in. I think — because modern science and physiology say it's so — that the only thing the brownie feeds is my bowels.

What we feed the soul is essential to understanding the relationship between our inner and our outer world, and leads directly to the question I began this essay with, which is the relationship between mindfulness and force. Human beings ought to spend a great deal more time thinking about this specific question as they attempt to understand why we're so violent and uncaring in so many of our manifestations.

In order for our impressions to feed us better, our attention needs to be at the exact point where we encounter them.

I’ll leave it at that for this morning.

Go. and sense, and be well.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.