When this book arrived, on a busy day last winter, I judged it by its glowingly purple cover and tossed it aside. It had a New Age bargain basement feel, and I’d already been through the racks of ill-fitting truths with designer labels. My closet, my mind, was full.
A couple of months later, I started reading it and found out I was wrong. Richard Moss knows what he’s talking about. He’s a 36-year-old California physician who in 1977 experienced “a process of spontaneous energetic awakening of such intensity that it radically transformed my life.” Enlightenment, folks — though Moss doesn’t seem to be setting himself up as another guru, rather as a fellow journeyer who affirms again and again the power of unconditional love and the futility of spiritual short-cuts that enhance the illusion of separateness.
Thanks to Celestial Arts (231 Adrian Road, Millbrae, California, 94030), publishers of The I That Is We, for permission to reprint this excerpt.
— Ed.
Human beings possess a reality of inner space that has been all but ignored in Western civilization’s obsessive preoccupation with outer phenomena. Though we are all intuitively aware of the energies beyond the superficial levels of our selves, there is a profound existential fear associated with the journey of self-discovery. Faced with seemingly limitless freedom, we fall back in dismay and opt for a very limited range of experience.
Far from willing to explore our human potential, we are afraid to venture beyond a cautious high, and we quickly reject our lows. Any behavior that might carry us beyond our own narrow band of acceptable feelings is unthinkable, and we banish it instantly. When our Beingness cries out for expression, we are willing only to intensify the acceptable emotions: We create some minor crisis; we become angry. We have sex; we become happy. Soon, without noticing, we are addicted to this range of sensations. We have to be emotive, for within the range of energies we permit ourselves there is no other recourse for experiencing contrast and intensity.
In our culture we have an addiction to intensity that is almost always confined to the coarser emotions. Subtleties and nuances are beyond the scope of those who use most of their psychic energy just to avoid inner knowledge. Even with the maximum range of intensity we permit ourselves, we limit the amount of energy with which we empower our consciousness. We stop short of a potential to go beyond ourselves because we imagine that we are in control and must remain so.
Only by extending beyond this self-imposed limitation, by plunging into a profound unconditional state of deep soul-felt love, can we begin to understand the real functions of our emotions and behavior. We can then come to know how they function to create our existence — to define the very psychological space of our incarnation.
Let me give you an example. Recently I went into deep retreat with my closest and most committed students and associates. There were hot springs at the site we chose. A series of tubs contained water ranging in temperature from the low 50s to about 117 degrees Fahrenheit. In the middle range were several tubs containing water from about 98 to 108 degrees. For several days, none of the people would enter either the coldest or the hottest tub. I overheard people commenting on those extremes. “You’ll never see me in those!” or “Who needs to torture himself?”
The mind is very tricky. It decides that such extremes represent a context of stress or torture and closes off whole realms of experience from which many benefits might accrue. However, my friends were right in a way. At the level of their awareness when they arrived at the hot springs these extremes were perhaps too threatening — even inappropriate.
The limit was in their minds. It represented the range of energy they would allow themselves to experience. Fear of the extremes of temperature was acceptable to them and they had not as yet considered transcending it. However, as the days went on, the strong consciousness that grew out of the group process began to expand their awareness, and the range of what was possible, appropriate and beneficial also expanded.
Finally one evening I announced that, as a ritual signifying our commitment to transcend our limits maturely and wisely, we would all immerse ourselves in all of the tubs. As part of the ritual there was to be silence and no change of facial expression. We would begin at the most comfortable temperature, move to the 108-degree tub, from there to a pool of 74 degrees, thence to the hottest tub and finally the coldest. Complete relaxation and “allowing” would permit us to sense into the changes, so that from one perspective in consciousness (the place of total acceptance) each tub experience was identical to every other.
All of the thirty-five people accomplished the ritual with ease. They experienced a tremendous release of energy and great joy. The next day many wondered how they could have denied themselves the magnificence of this range, with its accompanying depth of relaxation and sense of inner mastery. Few things make human beings feel better than an experience that stretches the sense of aliveness and shows us we have grown.
The tub ritual was in no way torture, nor did it require the evolvement of stoic self-control. A higher energy state — one could call it love — and a basic well-being had happened within these people through their work and meditation together. This fuller quality made it possible to enter the ritual without any kind of repression. Certainly there were chattering minds doubting to the last minute whether it was safe or wise. But the experience was right, and it transcended the boundaries of the intellectual mind’s reaction. Throughout the vicissitudes of the journey of awakening the eventual sense of joy, wholeness and radiance is final proof that we have extended our limits through love.
The initial avoidance of the hottest and coldest tubs is a metaphor for unawakened human life. Most of us are narrow and constricted, so that the love in us cannot flow fully. We confine our experience of love to sex, and our sensations to a small band of emotive experience. There may be a lot of power in these emotions, but the energy is still of a low order. At higher, finer levels of energy, our awareness participates in such feeling states as reverence, gratitude, trust, wonderment, awe and unconditional love. To fulfill this potential we need to learn to retain the energies with which we are already comfortable and expand ourselves to encompass energies beyond our usual range. We thus become radiant beings, imparting a quality that evokes an energy all around us. The intrapsychic and interpersonal experiences of these states are entirely different from those available at so-called ordinary levels of consciousness. In the awakening process love transcends the boundaries of our self-imposed or conditioned half-hearted living by incorporating and allowing the whole range of our experience, not by closing some part off.
I have found that the use of the words energy and love produces anxiety and irritation in some people. This is because these words imply an interior dimension underlying the world we know. It is not a dimension continuous with our present knowing. It is a quantum leap beyond that. It is a transformation.
In Newtonian physics the word energy is no problem. A block slides across a table and we can measure the force needed for that movement to occur. We never question the energy represented by this action even though it cannot be seen. We are comfortable with the idea that (within a carefully defined system that we are usually unaware of) all energy is measured in its effect.
When I use the word energy I am referring to the force (or quality of consciousness) operating at a particular moment that allows us to perceive a particular reality. At one level of energy we have access to certain moods; for instance, if we are exhausted (low in energy) it is easy to become irritable and impatient. At another level of energy, when we are rested, we may feel on top of the world; our senses relay the news that coffee tastes wonderful and the sunlight on the leaves imbues us with great joy and peace. To the ordinary human awareness this is referred to as feeling good or not feeling good, but the underlying energy state is not perceived directly — it is recognized through our behavior, and through our sense of vitality.
Just as the eyes see light and translate it into an image and the ears hear sounds and translate them into signals, there is a largely unrecognized dimension of human capability that experiences energy more directly than as feelings, attitudes and impressions. For this dimension of human awareness, energy becomes a living current. Sometimes this is called kundalini energy. In acupuncture it flows in the meridians. It is also referred to as chi energy or as being in communion with the Tao. But even here the energy is often inferred, not directly experienced in the same way we experience with eyes and ears. Very few people who discuss it are capable of igniting this dimension in others. Thus it remains intellectual rather than catalytic. The important thing in my work is to bring the awareness of self as energy into direct experience so that the sense of this energy is a direct bodily experience of a force that transcends what we know ourselves to be. It is alive and real, and once it has been awakened in a human being, that person is gradually dissolved into it, or transformed by it.
This energy or force of consciousness is not easily defined, but with it comes a qualitative shift in how life is experienced. The knowledge of this energy is a kind of cultural myth that is alive in the hearts and souls of human beings, and being born as a direct experience at varying levels in thousands of people each day. The sense of this energy is the revelation of another hidden dimension underlying ordinary consciousness. Despite resistance on the part of science and “objective reason” to such ideas, an appreciation of this hidden reality is becoming increasingly common in collective consciousness: Thus Star Wars could talk about “The Force,” to the delight of millions of people of all ages.
But the use of words like love, energy, underlying reality and multidimensional still creates a problem for some people. They may feel the words imply there is something they do not know. A frequent response is “I already know that” or “It doesn’t matter anyway.” People who are very linear and rational and who exercise a lot of control over their emotions and their daily lives resist these words the most. To embrace the words and the feelings from which they arise might create a sense of illogic, non-rationality or loss of control. Yet the rational and linear aspects of consciousness are really quite limited. They are valid only as long as one has carefully defined and controlled the context being explored and this is not possible in the awakening process. Once a sense of the underlying dimensions implied by words like love and energy begins to enter the picture, an absolute reality disappears. There is an element of insecurity and uncertainty in the embracing of these words.
I am not interested in making someone uncomfortable or in taking control. The words are unavoidable in the exploration of inner spaces. To appreciate them means that the world is experienced more totally than through limited physical sensation, intellectualization or emotions. A more subtle “body” is needed. We have to sense into experience, and feel into these words. The subtle Self that is responding to energetic forces is infinitely greater than the self of ideas or emotions. It responds and resonates to energies and levels of experience that less-developed levels of consciousness can never know directly.
This Greater Body or Self is the reality that communicates between the formless and unseen underlying aspects and the outer experiences that we once thought absolute or objective. Direct experience of words like love or energy implies a full-body feeling that includes every level of self. Reality seems to become a dance of energies, and through these energies each of us is connected to experience and to each other. This energetic dimension is so much more inclusive and primary than emotion or thought that if the energy of love sweeps through you, any thoughts or emotions you were formerly experiencing, no matter how powerful, evaporate. To embrace the Greater Self is to become vulnerable to flows of feeling that are quite nonrational and can create tremendous peace when you can finally release into their intrinsic harmony — or tremendous discomfort until this release is achieved.
We have talked about energy. Now let’s take a look at the word love. It is the word of our time, and perhaps the word of all time. The core of Christ’s teaching was the love of our fellow humans and the love of God. Christ consciousness is often referred to as love. But what is this quality of love? Christ said that he came to bring a sword. He also said that those who honored the Law as he did were his family, clearly differentiating personal family and the family of man united through a deeper principle. Certainly very few of us would equate love with a sword or with non-intimate relationships beyond family and loved ones. Yet in my experience, the equation is very real.
To embrace a love that is beyond the level of personal and sensual love is to enter into an experience of such magnitude that the whole personal self is dissolved into it. At every point in my own inner nature where I held to a memory or a need — the old ways of fulfilling myself — the greater energy turned this into pain. I was too small for the energy. I had to let go, to surrender, to grow. It wasn’t until I reached harmony within the greater energy that I recognized this force was part of a larger reality. The feeling state of this recognition is a profound love but its existence is not compatible with the rigid grip of ordinary awareness.
We are not talking here about a philosophical embrace of love as a primary way of being that is above all other imperatives of life. In fact, one must do this to initiate the process of transformation. But this philosophical stance is only the first step, though it can go on for a very long time. Often it creates all kinds of troubles, such as avoiding relationships and fearing to explore the emotions fully. We would rather believe that love is something we can do, than something that destroys our doing and takes us into another dimension.
Nevertheless, if the idea of love is not embraced, there is no way to gain objectivity about the reality dominated by personal imperatives and emotional reactivity and need. Transformation begins with the embrace of love and leads to the first essential step, which is the transmutation of emotions. When you begin to tell yourself that your emotional stance in life is a distortion of your potential to love, then you have invited a flame into your life that will gradually destroy and transform you.
Still we have not come to a sufficient expansion on the word love. Who is the beloved of Kabir, and of Rumi and Gibran? Who is the lover who came to Whitman? Despite what we think we know about their personal lives, these poets speak of a transcendent lover. The romantics would like to believe that these songs of love are a sanction for personal attachment to another individual, but the lover they truly celebrate is an experience of ecstasy in transcendent consciousness.
I use the word love as a koan. The koan is a teaching tool of Zen Buddhism. It presents the rational mind with an unsolvable question, such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” The answer is a total state of awareness; another dimension of experience. It is not an answer in any ordinary sense at all. Similarly, I use the word love not to tell anyone anything, but to evoke a larger relationship to experience. I use it to symbolize and suggest, to invite the experience of a larger harmonious perspective. Love can be discussed only as a tool to expand perspective.
I use the guiding invocation of unconditional love as a way to put the rational mind aside and begin to sense into another dimension of Self. Acknowledging the quality of this love to be unconditional, one moves toward a state of consciousness characterized by the intrinsic harmony and well-being of love, but not requiring any qualifying context. It does not require a person outside of ourselves to love. It does not require that someone recognize our goodness. It does not require that the world respond to us just as we want.
When that gate opened for me, and I was swept into worlds that I could never have conceived, I had already set this love alive inside me. Through my seeking for it and my intuition of it, something in my consciousness recognized that the central place at which all experience resolves is love, without regard to any outside condition. Thus I could know that we do not have to earn this love, that it is given to us by life itself, unconditionally. It was not easy for me to awaken into the deeper energies, nor is it easy for others who are beginning to reach into other levels of awareness. But with the embrace of unconditional love, the stage is set for resolution and harmonization.
Unconditional love is the embracing of all experience and the bringing of all the varying intensities to the level of the heart. At the heart level, unconditional love, which is an alive, vibrant, valueless state of awareness, replaces the varying intensities of mood and uncontrolled emotion and lifts the energy of these states into a finer, more radiant quality.
For example, an experience of emotional intensity can be sensed around the solar plexus. The solar plexus is the power center where our “body” extends out into existence through our ideas, beliefs and plans. It is the home of our adrenal glands, of fight and flight, and of the emotional response that results when these ideas about reality set up an interference pattern with actual reality. Think about what it is like to feel jealous or to be caught in the pain and reactivity of possessiveness. Now recognize that the energy (the underlying consciousness force) that is giving rise to these feelings of jealousy can itself be worked with, rather than the content and issues we think are crucial. If this energy, that at one moment is operating from the emotional level, is transmuted to the level of the heart (brought up into another potential, like turning the crude force of a waterfall into electricity), an amazing discovery is made. The very situation in which we are threatened, feel hurt and jealous, can in a moment become a sense of peace and oneness. We can come into harmony with a larger reality — one that was obscured by our earlier orientation. It is then possible truly to resolve the interpersonal issues without supposing that the reasons for the initial feelings are absolute and must be dealt with on their terms.
The first time I personally had this experience I was profoundly moved. One of my closest friends had come for a visit and an obvious attraction had sprung up between him and my girlfriend. I was feeling contracted, angry and hurt. Realizing this, I shifted my awareness and simultaneously asked my consciousness to release this energy into unconditional love. Miraculously, the contraction of my guts and the sense of anger and possessiveness suddenly lifted away. I was suffused with a radiant warmth that seemed to project from the chest. A wave of heat passed through the room and the others also felt kindled in it. The issue of jealousy no longer had meaning for the rest of my friend’s visit, and gradually diminished out of my life.
All emotional states (in fact, all levels of experience) are relative: Shift the quality of the underlying energy and the nature of experience changes. Of course the key to such fluidity is to be able volitionally to move to a higher level of energy. It takes a higher principal to refine the reality of a lower principle of being. Unconditional love is of so much greater fineness and magnitude than the dimension which manifests in emotional experience that it literally dissolves or resolves the emotional configuration of energy.
As these processes, such as the instantaneous ability to shift levels of consciousness, began to open in my life, I began to experience the deep existential question of what is real. For this I have no rational answer, but I can expand to contain the questioner and there rest into a sense of higher Beingness. Thus when people have asked me why this process has to be seen as fundamentally spiritual, my answer is that without love, in its deepest and mystical sense, there is no way to work safely with the forces of reality. Without love there is nothing to let go into. One either willingly moves toward a spiritual center within oneself or, if fortunate, is made spiritual by the evoked experiences. The alternatives, as we shall see, are not good.
The episode of the transmutation of my jealous emotion, which happened years ago, was just the beginning for me of a process in which the transmutation of the energies of my consciousness was guided at the level of the heart. I discovered that the crucial element in the deeper awakening of consciousness is the willingness to allow all discordant intensities of feeling to be transmuted into an intrinsic harmony that is both expansive and uplifting. This must not be construed as denial or rejection in any way. I am not talking about trying to create a prettier reality.
The first step in a genuine movement toward awakening is the realization that all experience is relative and the direct consequence of its underlying energy dynamic. An outer analogy is the experiment in which medical students who learned certain material while drunk later tested better on this material when they were again drunk. They tested poorly if they were sober. Even intelligence is not an absolute based upon the accumulation and retrieval of information. Intelligence and behavior are functions of consciousness that are entirely consequent to the basic energetic state. We are all in a sense drunk within the energy level of our present state without ever realizing it. One must develop the ability to sense into the energetic level and the capacity to alter the quality of this energy.
The second step lies in acknowledging that the ability to refine energy (as opposed to merely increasing it) requires a commitment to and direct realization of unconditional love. Love is the great transmuting force that can take any fixed energetic/existential pattern and allow it to resolve into harmony on a much greater scale. Without unconditional love as the center from which to consecrate our Beingness, the ability to shift and transmute energies can become just another manipulation of our ego power. It is essential to understand this. Recall the example of my working with critically ill patients, where their shift in perspective proved only temporary because it was not founded in unconditional love so much as it was in my ability to be persuasive.
Just because we call something spiritual does not mean that it liberates in the unconditional sense. Remember the great religious wars, all of which were based on the assumptions of right vs. wrong, the True Christ vs. the Antichrist, and so on. Such polarities always grow out of judgment and the desire for power. We need to sense into the difference between power- and emotion-bound consciousness and the levels revealed though unconditional love.
The heart, anatomically the midchest area, is at first a metaphorical center of meaning in life and gradually opens into a direct experience of a new dimension. It is the center for the direct sensing of the energies that represent unconditional love. It is metaphorical at first because we cannot make unconditional love happen by thinking about it. I tried over and over to tell myself that I could choose love and release a particular pattern, that I didn’t need to feel a certain way, and so on. But that didn’t change anything. Finally I began to notice where the energy was in and around my body, where sensation was concentrated, and all the thoughts that were part of this state. Then I remembered how I felt when I was in the sense of deep well-being and love. Here, as I said before, the energy emanated from the midchest, the heart center. Thus, I finally learned to place my awareness at the heart and began to learn how to transmute energy consciously.
I called this early process the “knock down-drag out fight” because I was willing to sit with my experience until it transmuted, even if it took a week. At first the state I was working to transmute would intensify and my being would seethe like a volcano, and then as I stayed with this I would become blank. Still I kept returning my awareness to the heart and waiting. It was not enough that I drifted off to other thoughts and the whole process seemed unimportant, or that I had a wonderful creative insight. I soon learned that this displacement of awareness into acceptable territory was not transmutation. I waited until I was suffused with a deep feeling state of well-being that emanated from my chest. Then I would re-examine the issue from this higher state to see the assumptions about reality that had allowed it to configurate in the first place. I found that in this expanded state I could marry divisive issues to each other and could appreciate the energy process inherent in their activation.
Gradually this transmuting capacity became more and more natural and automatic. It even went beyond emotional issues to touch upon issues that, for want of a better word, are of the soul itself. One day I realized that even the existential fear that at times would sweep through me early in the awakening process was in fact a miraculous sensation of embodiment to a higher level of my being. Thus even deeper patterns and reality frames began to transmute into a more and more unconditional and eternal sense of Self. While it is difficult to state what this transmuting mechanism actually is, it seems to be a refining sense of acceptance.
The heart is the point of balance in consciousness through which we become aware of the full spectrum of our humanness — the feared and the hated as well as the loved and revered. Coming from the heart level is the continuous process of learning to let go of everything and anything that closes the heart to the embrace of Now. Rather than reacting to a particular situation, one recognizes that there is another level at which the elements of the situation could be allowed to have a new relationship. This overview reveals an energetic force that can be changed and molded by a disciplined and sensitive awareness.
To work in this dimension represents a quantum leap from the dimension of analysis, interpretation and rationalization. It moves out of the realm of ideas and behavior and into an area of formless states where life is an ongoing medley of energetic forces. It is almost impossible to describe the incredible richness and newness that imbues life when this realization is discovered and we begin to live it.
It is a journey of many mistakes and of taking risks. After all, if a sense of a new quality of energy is to be achieved, then some of our favorite feelings will have to be set aside. Few of us are aware of how addicted we are to such sensations as excitement, anger, possessiveness, sadness, righteousness, self-importance and success until we are asked to make room for an entirely new experience. But once a deeper sense of harmony and balance has been embraced, the energies available to our consciousness gradually become so enormous that we could never again safely manifest them in our old limited and conditional ways. A process of radiance and well-being begins to replace the dimension of uncontrolled, addictive emotions and power.
There is nothing conditional or judgmental in the love I am describing. The greatest mistake we can make (and it is a common one when we are new to all of this) is to think that love is better than some other quality of experience. No, love is not better. If you think so, then the love you espouse is personal and conditional. The love to which I refer embraces all experience equally and unconditionally. When it arises for the first time in one’s life, it makes all other ways in which we have known love seem crude.
Unconditional love as an invocation is only a way of processing experience and a tool for transformation. It is also a state in itself, and when its tremendous presence flames within you, you are not saying “This is love!” You are not saying anything at all. To talk about this presence later is already a distortion. It cannot be talked about accurately. Unconditional love is quite beyond words. When it is there, you are not.
In embracing unconditional love you surrender all emotions and thoughts that separate you from well-being and harmony. This is the essential commitment in transformation and it must be renewed every day. Love is a daily celebration of aliveness and permission to go deeper.
©Copyright 1981 by Richard Moss, M.D.
