This week I start Joy of Living 3, which is about cultivating wisdom. I've been re-reading this year's old posts and notice a mistake that I made in writing that wisdom was having a conceptual awareness of how things work. In fact it's the opposite. Wisdom is going beyond a conceptual awareness of how things work. Wisdom is having an experiential awareness of power and powerlessness and knowing how to choose power.
Many years ago, in my late twenties I had a series of disturbing dreams that led me into psychotherapy. I'd been experimenting with lucid dreaming, waking up in my dreams, cultivating the ability to fly. But somehow this power started to grow out of control. I started to feel it in my daily reality and it terrified me, this magnetic energy. My psychotherapist asked me why I was giving so much power to a force outside of myself. Gradually I stopped being aware of it, my neurotic symptoms abated, and discovered a gentler form of this magnetic feeling energy in tai chi.
But it hit me yesterday that this power was never outside of me. This power was in me. This was a concrete experience of how powerful my mind was. For some reason I wasn't ready to own that power.
I am now. But when I say that there is a danger of it sounding narcissistic. I don't mean by this that I alone have this tremendous power. I believe this power is a sort of commons. A shared power that is accessible to all and that anyone can harness as long as the rules are respected. This power is both a place and a self that we all share, only too few people know of its existence.
Every day now I spend more and more of my time in this place, resting, drawing from the source and giving back by sharing this knowledge and bringing this energy into all I do, whether it's writing my book or keeping my home tidy and liveable.
In cultivating this power for myself I cultivate it for everyone. And in cultivating it for everyone, I cultivate it for myself.
And it is an actual, real power, not a concept. I can feel it, I can breathe it, I can taste it.
And I can make it last.
