Walking an Integral Path with Practical Feet
Charlotte Sun, RN, PhD Director 吉纳喜道院 Genesee Valley Daoist Hermitage
Note from the author: This article was originally written in 1996 as a chapter of a book by request of Craig Matsu-Pissot, a student of mine, who was editing a collection of essays discussing what it means to be human. At that time, he stated that he was concerned about the loss of connectedness, one human being to another, as individuals seem to becoming more isolated and less engaged with nature as they pursue the quest for what is seductively modern. To my knowledge, the book was never published. The manuscript has been edited. Names and places have been added for biographical clarification. When a person perceives the world as an integrated whole, living in modern society can often be a challenge. Joseph Chilten Pearce in Magical Child (1) noted that all children have “special powers” at birth and that they are taught by parents, authority figures and society-at-large to distrust those powers or to essentially suppress them. He wrote that by age 5, most children are socialized to conform to the belief system of their parents who were socialized to conform to the belief system of their parents, etc. and the dominant societal values which do not place importance on intuition or knowledge gained from trusting our senses. What is “special power”? Special power is the conscious awareness of subtle energy. It is the conscious awareness of the inter-connectedness of all things. It is the primal knowledge that we are born with which reveals the essence of creation. It is expressed as the subtle energy which flows throughout the universe and flows throughout our body-mind-spirit and which is the antecedent to all being. Cheng-quan was in graduate Ph.D. studies when she had the opportunity to review Pearce’s research which The Empty Vessel — Page 12
brought to consciousness that she was well into her teens before she began to realize that other peoples’ physical, psychological, and spiritual perceptions differed significantly from hers. They did not exhibit “special powers.” They did not see subtle energy or demonstrate any particular sensitivity to the interconnectedness of all things. Prior to the awareness that other people who were close to her (family, friends, classmates, teachers, and other authority figures) did not seem to experience life as she did, she was under the illusion that everyone could see energy fields, feel subtle energy, and recognize that this energy was the underlying basis of life itself. Although her awakening was not dramatic and happened over time, as her awareness increased, so did her sense of separation from her peers. Her willingness or ability to go along with the crowd diminished because her perception of inter-connectedness disallowed her to participate in many of the activities of children which are competitive, alienating, clannish, spiteful or hurtful. For example, she did not willingly participate in competitive sports and remembers reluctantly standing on a gym court during a ball game. Without her conscious participation, the ball forcefully landed in her hands (which was actually quite painful), and the team she was on won the game. The other players enthusiastically gathered around her and congratulated her for winning the game for them. She was stunned. At a very early age, she realized that patterns of speech which detracted from others were competitive. She found it more satisfying to listen attentively to the words of others instead of interjecting comments about herself into every conversation. Why was she still exercising “special powers” beyond the age of 5? A simple answer would be to say that her parents did not shut her down. Another answer would be to state that she did not reveal her “special powers” to others and therefore she was not pressured to relinquish them. In retrospect, it would be safe to say that both answers are true.
