Regaining Lost Power
The shattering causes a fright for a hundred miles.
And he drops neither sacrificial spoon nor chalice.
I Ching, Comment to Sign 51
You can look at the world with the eyes of a victim
or as an adventurer on his way to the treasure.
Paulo Coelho
Healing means regaining lost power. When I speak of “power,” I do not mean power over others, but the presence of one’s own power, the presence of perception in critical situations, the presence of an image of a higher self without vanity, and the presence of a higher connection. It is not power over others, but power over ourselves. It is the ability to make the decision to stop an emotional movement that pulls us down, to think or not to think a thought, to carry out a reaction or not to do so. It is the ability to step out of the old reactions of fear, anger, or revenge, and to be so deeply connected with what we wish to achieve that it cannot be taken away from us.
So what do we want to achieve? For example in love? In the encounter with someone we desire? At a political conference? In a tense situation with our friends or opponents? In our personal and professional lives? Before attempting to answer these questions, we must first find some of our lost power, for we need this power to both understand and answer these questions.
The peace movement is dependent on the personal power of its protagonists. It is dependent on their presence of mind, their boldness, their positive way of dealing with their own and others’ mistakes, their ability to love and not least, their sexual powers. In all areas, it is a matter of not “falling out of one’s Hara,” i.e. not giving away one’s own power to others, not becoming a victim of the perception of others, and of retaining “the blue sphere of power” in any situation. Their opponents, both human and political, have their power only as long as others are afraid of and project on them. The whole world of fear is a virtual world in which images of the past are projected onto present or future situations, thereby giving power away to others. Good mental training is required to see through these connections. No fear is based on an objective reality. Instead, every fear is based on a projection that only becomes real if it is seen as real and if one reacts to it with fear.
These are central insights that come from years of studying our connections in life. Every good Samurai warrior knew of them. These things need to be learned and practiced so that they can be applied at the right moment. Up until now, many opportunities in our lives have been lost because we give precedence to our powerlessness instead of our power. We slip away and are simply not there for long periods of time in everyday life. We are then so absent that we go into a supermarket and believe that what we find on the shelves is serious reality. In this case, we have given our power away to things. Or else we believe that we simply have to have a special dish. Such seemingly normal needs and desires are well suited to quickly disconnect us from the higher frequency and imperceptibly dump us at a lower frequency where we may like our food, but where we are not equipped to deal with an unforeseen situation of fear. Maybe it is enough for a beautiful woman to appear for us to fall into neediness and lose the “blue sphere” on the spot. We will then be so scared that even the best morsel of food will get stuck in our throat. This is normal for us mortals, but it doesn’t have to stay that way.
There are clear indications for how to regain power and for how a peaceworker can gain inner victory. First, we should be fully clear about the fact that we always have access to the desired power if we do not chase it away, for we are the children, the partner, and the organs of God and the universe. Then we should be clear about how we humans have lost our power and what we can do to regain it.
A part of our power was taken away from us already in early childhood. Our parents thought that we were very irrational, sweet little children with snub noses. In reality, we are cosmic beings who have come from the other world, and first of all have to learn to cope with life on Earth. For this, we were well equipped through our mind, our perception, and our ability to learn. At the time, we were more awake and alert than we have ever been since. If you look into the eyes of a baby, you see an incredible wakefulness. In many ways, we knew much more than our parents did, for the memory of our existence in the cosmic space was still fresh. It was not until we had gone through years of a strange kind of “upbringing” that we learned to be as “reasonable” and as narrow-minded as they were. When we were trivialized and treated as small and therefore insignificant beings, we often reacted with desperation or attacks of rage. We could not do more, for the adults were much larger and stronger. To the adults, our unruliness was yet another reason for making us conform to their norms. They thereby became a higher authority for us, and we began to believe that we had to be like them. Even if we rebelled, we still became like them. They, themselves, had already given away most of their power, but how were we to know that?
The continued dispossession of power occurred through three things: by restricting our drive toward insight (curiosity), by restricting our urge to be active, and by restricting our sexuality. Curiosity, the urge to be active, and sexuality are all parts of the fundamental power with which every human being comes to Earth. How much true power a person can develop during their life depends on to what degree they are able to follow these three basic aspects of power and integrate them into their life. Let us remember with what eagerness we once wanted to know what was hidden behind a castle wall, where the entrance to a cave led to, or what was inside a chestnut. As children, we have an almost metaphysical curiosity that seeks and finds something quite interesting behind the exterior signs in life, almost in the same way that Parcival sought the Holy Grail. Whoever is curious lives in perception. Strong curiosity can overcome almost any fear. It is a true power in life – a power of healing and of liberation.
Providing people with ready-made answers to the most elementary questions and prohibiting them from carrying out their own investigations was a diabolical measure in human cultural history. Those who sought answers that were different from those provided by the state and the church risked their lives. Truth was punishable by death (see Giordano Bruno and the entire history of the heretical movement). Maybe this – in addition to the sexual restriction – was the strongest method used to take power away from people.
Healing means regaining one’s lost power in all areas. This may sound like a heroic definition, but deep down it touches a core issue, and why should we not be a bit heroic? It means that we must find a “path of power” which immunizes us positively against our old susceptibilities. Don Juan (Carlos Castaneda’s teacher) calls it the “path of heart.” Here, power and love, strength and heart do not contradict each other; instead, they come together. The path of power consists of following the energies of life and not external laws or emotional moods. Every situation contains a certain amount of Mana energy, which we can use either for or against ourselves, depending on our behavior. Those who take the path of power learn, step by step, to connect with these energies. This does not mean that they will always have external success, but they will gain power. Jacques Lusseyran, the blind resistance fighter during the French Résistance, wrote that for some time he went “victoriously from defeat to defeat.” This is a very unusual learning process, for we keep running into situations where our old habits result in paralysis instead of empowerment. We are faced with entirely new learning tasks, especially in the areas where we so far have reacted with fear, anger, and defiance. We are beginning a basic training course of life. Eventually this training will make it possible for us to gather so much power that we no longer need to react to dangers with fear, for we are in good hands and safe through a higher form of connection. We no longer need to avoid the old zones of fear in our lives, for they contain what we need to learn to gain final insight and peace. The whole world is now the stage on which our amazement about existence plays out.
In our exercises, we have often practiced following and retaining power. I can recommend this exercise to everyone, without exception. One evening, during a trip through the Algarve in southern Portugal, I went to play billiards with a female friend of mine. I was looking forward to playing in such a way that my power stayed with me, and I secretly enjoyed the idea of showing her how good I was. It began well, but after a while, nothing seemed to work any more. Somehow, I could not hit the balls correctly. Several times, I found myself saying “Shit!” in a totally serious and identified way. Not even the woman’s erotic flair could keep me from doing that. I was in deep disagreement with something, I felt that life was treating me unfairly, and I became irrationally angry at the game and at the world in general. “This always happens when one feels good!” I soon noticed that I had completely lost my focus. A few bad shots had been enough to throw me off my path of power.
In his wonderful book “Thought Forces,” Prentice Mulford describes this process when he unsuccessfully tries to push a wheelbarrow along a garden path without any inner agitation. Every day of our lives, we waste our power by automatically surrendering to our inner habits and dialogues. After the game of billiards, I met the gaze of a spectator and lost my power through my eyes, because I was ashamed of my bad game. It happens that easily. It took a while before I could regain the frequency of power and return to being connected. It was a teaching. This is what life can be like if one is engaged in training to regain lost power. One can easily imagine in what inner confusion one can suddenly find oneself when engaged in this training in the area of sex and love. There are, in reality, two world processes that we go back and forth between: one is the process of the ego world and the other is a process of the universal world. Freedom definitely emerges – also when playing billiards – on the side of the universal world.
Regaining lost power. This power is not one’s own power in terms of the strength that one has, it is the power that one has naturally through the connection with the powers of God and the universe. There are no limits to this power – it has gone through many people, and has resulted in many “miracles.” Why did Jesus have the power to heal the sick, and why did Ruediger Nehberg have the power to cross the Atlantic in a pedal boat and survive his incredible adventures? Why did Reinhold Messner have the power to conquer all 14 mountains in the Himalaya that are higher than 8000 meters? Why did Johannes Hus have the power to sing as he was burned at the stake? Why did women such as Hildegard von Bingen, Elsa Brandstroem, Maria Theresa, Ruth Pfau, and others have the power to carry out their great healing work? Because they were all connected to their higher power. They, and many more, provide living testimony to what human beings can do if they have reconnected with a higher power. Ghandi was a single individual. He succeeded in liberating the large subcontinent of India from British colonial rule. Would it not be possible for us today to liberate ourselves from the old civilization and its false matrix?
This is an edited excerpt from the book The Sacred Matrix by Dieter Duhm