Autotranslucence

You were never taught anything
Me neither, given no substance
Except paper, stuffed-throat of paper
Here to rot and gag on
We sit here knees-down in the desert and know that
While we are finally here and it is no illusion
No one gave us maps to this place
No helpful guides with thirst-quenching waters
Their citadels forced smoke into black horizons
But did not touch our soft hands for this
Did not knead suppleness into our soles
Gave nothing except incorrect directions

And yet we found this place
You are here, daughter
You found it. Your compass cannot be lost
Only buried. And you can hear the victims singing
And the winds wailing and your eyes will keep opening
Every time the dust blows them shut
You are beloved here, even though the sharp gusts pin
And ache, and you feel estranged and abandoned

Beloved child, beloved
That you feel estranged and abandoned
That you seem estranged and abandoned
That the pounded pavement offers you no shelter
That the concrete breaks your skin
That is true and
It is true that I love you

I am–you want to know what I am!
You want to touch and grab me
Like a perennially-accurate set of your own directions
Hoping that you can skate there, rather than dive and
Swallow mud
It isn’t like that
You are in the letting-go, in the purposeless air
And while there is nothing, that is where something becomes
You cannot know, and you beg and scream to know
You cannot know, and I will give you what I can,
Which is unknowing

Is there a murmur sung from here?–I am unpracticed, recent as I have been
In the above-ground place, surfing on warm water
Is there? I am a daughter of God; she there
As the vastness of everything, she finds me in particular
Scoops me up out of all, 
Rough, endless hands cupping a tiny bird
Tiny broken-winged creature, living helplessly in her palm
I may be destroyed but I am here and will be here even if annihilated
No help, no conviction, no abject certainty of any kind
Carrying her unborn daughter with her in fragile times
As this–this is how I pray.

I—
do not worship anything in particular
But if I did, I’d revere
The sweet simple sound of breath
That specific note saying
“I’m alive! We’re alive! It’s all going along
well in here, be glad for it!”
I’d revere
That way that muscle supports bone
That when you stand you stand
Upright, and with sight to the horizon
And with the unity of all matter in flesh in a direction
Unquestioned and yet it lets you sit
And stand, and run, and fuck me when you
want to

I’d revere not you
Not me, but the boundless unpinnable
Gossamer threads that bind us
Making a ghost of our holies
The ones we accumulate and
The ones we carelessly leave behind
Strewing visited places with our love
I’d revere that look in the eyes of a third
Person, when they drink a glimpse of
That holiness, and I wish I could
Unbuckle my cup and pour a fountain
Of golden richness down their throat and
Over their face

I’d revere the ache I now feel for every other human
To be loved
To be this extraordinarily cherished
The grief, now, knowing this
Knowing this blooming blushing everyday
And then glancing over at the other
Blindfolded, and wishing I could take our love and
Pour it liberally into their parched souls
Watch the light bodies fill and thirst slake
And watch the poignant recognition hit that
This was what life could be after all

This is all to say
I love you
I love you
I love you
And I feel the fill of that cup until
The end of time
I feel the rock that we are down deep
In the base of what is me but is not mine
Far settled down in ancient history
I feel the knowing looks of ancestors
Who found this
The endless capably-altering substance
That we are, that of the moon
And the sun, that of all things—

—I love you, and this is rich
And that is it.

I force-felled fire, from inside

The raging storms, and while

The weak climb desert highways

I bask, on ancient funeral pyres

Hot-top, that past is ridden

With fast and quaking shale

That pale, that hidden, that withers in it

And gives its gawkers fortunes in it

And in the wild, hawks blazes in it

And in the still, meek-fills us with it

And in the heart, finds God within it

And so, the last we speak so softly

And so our bones fall, powdered, gently

And though the rains bear back our tensions

That this is the honest voice

That this the legitimate scar

Doles fair hot countries out of its own knowing

That this—this place, this taste, this breath

That you are not at the tomb’s-gate waiting for the dead

That your sound is not made of waiting

That it is the clear, fast, visible one

With whom you must make your pact

For in the darkness, birds are crying over this

Its cool, inhospitable nature telling you

‘You are not it

But we are not it either.’

Low.

She had started that way, hunched, coiled; less an accumulation of tension than the absence of it. Her limp body found the same shape as the ground beneath her–whether that ground was the soft fabric of a couch, the painful sponginess of an old mattress, the unyielding flatness of a floor. 

Her ache was similar to the one from yesterday, and the day before–an ache full of dread, full of anger too weak to give itself full voice. She knew enough to know she was dying like this, but not enough to know the way out. Her saviours over the years had all come and gone, arriving on gilded wings in feathered tunics full of neon and pizzazz, and leaving slumped and drained, more like photos taken at a slow frame-rate than ghosts. But also like ghosts.

The only ones left were not the sparkly little things, but the big guns. The monstrous boulders and oceans from deep below her. The ones that could not be bowled over, but also, rarely moved.

She stood up and looked into the eyes of God.

Jesus he was, in the intricate garb of the one on the Spanish postcards. Surrounded by an ecstatic border and lights coming from all parts of his body, this was the man with the ruined face–the face with its beard and long hair and bland look of concern. The hands out, forward–not actually touching her, or comforting her–merely sticking out mechanically in a gesture that forced you to recognise it, not as compassionate, but, as ‘compassionate’–the sort of thing kids do when they want to get credit for being good. He was, in his entirely, in some top layer, full of that smarmy self-protective ‘charitableness’–the image of one who would prefer that you see them as the image of good, rather than someone simply good first and foremost. His layers shone and stung her, and she hated it.

‘What did you do with my family?!’ she yelled, wishing she had something undignified to throw at him like a banana milkshake.

His little statue face gave the tiniest of upturns at the corners of his mouth. His eyes seemed to see her. Nothing else changed. Fucking outturned cup-hands still fucking outturned. Merry-go-round enamel statue hands. 

‘Fuck you! What did you do with them?!’

At this point, her rage was waking her up, making her more alert. She became poised, in the kind of stance where she could spit on him from this distance if he weren’t just too far away and if he weren’t a God.

Why did she still give him the capital G? She asked himself. Why bow to him in that way, when she could not bow to him when he was before her? The shape of the large G felt good in her mind–it felt open, clear, eternal. Fuck. He did have that going for him.

‘I have been moving through you, my child.’

She almost wasn’t paying attention enough to hear what he said, and the words overtook her ability to hear them for a minute, then came slamming in at an accelerated pace, like a giant train braking furiously to avoid overshooting the station. She mildly panicked at how to respond.

‘I don’t know you. How can that be true?’

‘You know that isn’t true. You have known me in many of my forms. You have seen through more of my false images than most. Do you think the only way to love is to obey? You yourself know better than that. Your love is more valuable than obedience.’

She blushed–he knew her. He knew the furious reading she’d been doing the past months, and in particular, that awful speech that had wrecked her for years:

‘I am ashamed that women are so simple
To offer war where they should kneel for peace,
Or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway,
When they are bound to serve, love, and obey.’

‘You knew that. You saw me, in the empty room with those words. You let me read them–I was so young! You let me believe that the most powerful ones in my world had truly known this, truly accepted this. I was only a child!’

‘But you weren’t a child, Joanna. You were a vessel for the great unfolding to come. I knew that it hurt you to read it.’

‘I was so confused! How could I know what was right?! They were the authority! They said–’

‘Yes they did. I watched it, years ago, before your time. I watched this whole game emerge, the struggle, the killing–’

‘And you didn’t fix it then?!’

‘What kind of being do you think I am, Joanna?’

‘A miracle–’

The words had come out of her mouth before she’d even checked if they were appropriate to say. She felt embarrassed. It felt like fawning.

‘You are a tool of control! You might be other things, but I–we–have all known you as that.’

He smiled. There was a kind of excitement behind it, like he was suddenly also a spectator and hotly anticipating the next moment, the next move. He moved gently as he spoke next.

‘You are ‘we’, aren’t you? You are all of them–every relative of yours, every woman, every man–’

At this point she fell to her knees and started sobbing. Dozens of images flooded her mind at once. The dark church her grandmother attended–how immobile, how solemn. Back up at her grandmother’s apartment, perched atop a stack of smaller apartments, with the great Monseigneur leaning back in a recliner, his robe white and his hair white and his face pink with the softest undertone of blue–him leaning back and laughing and then–the same moment overlaid–her uncle telling her in hushed tones years later that the same Monseigneur had been called by the bishop to investigate claims of child sexual abuse in another parish; and so he had gone, he had heard the stories and the anguish with his own two priestly ears, and he had returned to the bishop and reported blankly that there was nothing to be found, even when years later the stories would come spilling out just as people had been spilling out of their churches in decades since. His glinting, smiling face, rocking back, knowing–ignoring–clinging to this performance here, to her grandmother adoring him, and in doing so stamping on the anguished faces of children who had been touched roughly in the dark.

The emptiness of her father’s face at the mention of God; emptiness that concealed disgust; the forever closing of doors that years of ordained brothers had pried open with a crowbar. Her aunt, whispering stories of whippings and beatings and denigration only years later when it was safe to hear. Her step-grandmother, with that empty ache where the love her parents might have provided was clumsily infilled by the harsh nuns at the orphanage. 

The stories and the images spilled out and over and it was as if, having gotten into a full bathtub, she was pushing the tub to overflow merely by the volume of these images, their souls, and the cry of distance as she, herself, was seemingly the only one who would look at them; that all the others have turned their backs in horror and fear and self-preservation.

He looked at her, and he felt it all.

From her kneeling, she looked up through wet eyes.

‘This is your church, Lord. This is what it became. In all the years I spent within it, I did not see you once. When I reach up through the memory of my ancestors, as far back as I know how, I cannot see even a glimpse of you. And you have the gall to remind me you were here?! They have destroyed each other in your name and as a babe I merely played in the ashes.’

Empty, pregnant silence. She looked out–searching, grasping, holding. She wanted to believe the whole thing was not dead, that it wasn’t just the end of some inebriated silly carnival parade that properly left town before she was born. She wanted to see him; she wanted to know why. If she could trust him she so desperately would. 

‘I have come today, Joanna, like an angel. You see me like this. You see me and conclude I must seem to others this way, that all of them look up at the heavens and see the same face you are looking at.’

He touched his own cheeks, making his point astoundingly clear.

‘I am not available for everyone. Call it a structural fact or the work of the devil or something technical about eyes and ears and seeing and listening, but I am not automatically, undoubtedly there.

I mean, I am there in some sense, but I am not always there–ready-at-hand, if you will. Whether or not I am available to someone has to do with the myths and dances and shadows of your collective social vision–can I be available to you if you are all in the dark?

In the same way that the chance to practise towards enlightenment is only available to one given the precious gift of human birth, and the gift of the appropriate teachers, and the time and space and willingness to practise, so too is seeing me not a given. 

Your ancestors–not the ones this last hundred years, but the first Celts to learn to read the bible; the farmers who became preachers in Anglo-Saxon territory thousands of years ago–those ancestors who you will never be able to claim as uniquely yours because their work happened before the work of censuses that arose from within the Church–they laid foundations. They paved routes, and carved icons (really, portals), they tested their words as if with tuning forks to find the ones that would make hearts shudder and fall open to me; they could not do it with sticks in mud, but had to develop what would later be referred to as religious technology. They did not make me as their God, but they made me available as their God. 

And I see that their work is what you most admire. How your breath catches in admiration of those who wrote the Bible and practised actions (prayed, fasted, walked pilgrimages) that would bring me about–bring me around, bring me closer to them. How you long to sink into the results of their labours–the churches, the songs, the scriptures, the relationships with those deemed holy.

And yet I see more of you, and you see more of it than most. You long for the relief of surrender but see clearly enough to know that each of those once-holy objects has been corrupted in time–twisted, by many hands, to make it better for seeing personal gain, personal security, the vision of thyself-as-god in the world, than for seeing me.

So you step inside a church and hope that it will bring Me to you and instead it brings flotsam and jetsam; not only psychic waste but psychic damage–the will of a few sucking from the will of the many. And, as the many rightly flee, those few become more desperate; their prey are diminished and they cannot sustain or grow their force through the blood that is available to them.

These parasites are dying, Joanna–dying of their own accord. They are dying precisely because they are borne of greed, and greed can only trap others as its victims for so long. 

You see a priest in Catholic garb these days and most of the time you must stifle a laugh–and I see that! What you are truly looking for is holy, and the stance he wears (for most of them) is not holy. That he takes my name and speaks on my behalf is an unfortunate side effect of my substance, or lack thereof–I cannot grab the mic from him and correct any misconceptions. That he can take my name and act as my messenger even when he is not, or even when the walls around him act in concert, deliberately, to obscure my message–that is one of the actions of God. 

I am always empty, arising, revealing, obscuring, destroying–always, always, and in this image just as much as in all religious icons, big and small. I as the ant perform each of the five actions. I–as the writer of the book in which you learned these five actions, from the wisdom translated from a religion you had never previously heard of. 

It is not that it is impossible for me to be fully visible to all, forever. It is. It is of the same kind that all beings may one day be enlightened. To ask for the technical details now is to ask the wrong question. You are a vehicle for my will–you and not the priest with the fire and brimstone sermon, not if I do not come through him to you. And that is a purely subjective question, you see–you are the one who can answer the question of whether the priest is a messenger of God, just as that same priest will have his own answers. 

You do not have to trust anyone who will hoodwink you. And, you must not avoid anyone who will bring you closer to Me. That is the closest I have to specific instructions; the closest I have to a formal documentation of my Will. 

The fact that those two kinds of being are often hard to distinguish–that, my love, my lady, my child, my world–that is your work, the work of a lifetime. Can you bring others closer to me, without being an agent of betrayal yourself? That–my love, my lady, my child, my world–that is your work, the work of a lifetime.’

And in that moment, he no longer appeared in front of her, but instead arose within her.

It is not our hope that the world be perfect
That it turn out, spherical, its own approximation
It is not our hope that all its wrinkles be flattened
And it open, peeling, like reams of white paper
This fistful of world needs be its own—
Veins darting in wrong directions
Blood pumping into places it was never expected
And yet this is that—
That quest we’ve given ourselves
To see this flat spherical universe printed in A4 and know
Know something of the fraction of buzzing blooming life
That we might ever start to find within it.

oh, honey darling–

melt out of your sugar-coat shell and let it 

crack; honey-butter down your butt crack

i beg you; melt so i can live in it

inside rather than outside that door

and you can live there too; we’ll find each other

muddy and golden, holding each other as fast

as you used to hold your breath;

i want to live inside this river,

find its force fully felt, not flung 

into corners shaped out of weird neurotic

configurations; i know you found them once but

baby, they aren’t needed no more!

we’ve got feet for finding floor

and i’ll find you there just as surely as

you found me, in the clear white air;

i know where we’re going because i

live there.

It’s not enough to know how to
Fire up your own discontent
There’s a battle to be fought, and all of us
Spawned on the losing end
We’re pressed to accept our fate
Single sprinkle in a tube of
Hundreds-and-thousands
Single seed in a muesli made
According to immovable standards
How pathetic of you to think
You could ever control your own mind?
How ascetic you’d must needs be
To have a chance of being alive
I cannot accept this thing I know:
That my life lives merely under
Forces much bigger than its own
I wriggle in my childish car-straps
Away from soaking same-same sludge
Aching and shock at having so much power
—and yet again so little of it
Shaking and shame at having so much power
—and yet again so little of it.

I have wanted to write a post for a long time, on a subject that seems mundanely obvious to me, but very much not so to most of the people in the culture around me. The subject of this post is chi, qi, prana, energy, and ‘energy work’ as a discipline. 

I became fluent in seeing and using this thing starting a few years ago in much the same way that a swimmer becomes aware of how to surf waves when they’re hanging out in the ocean and all of a sudden there’s a giant wave behind them.

That is to say–I became aware of it all at once, as a matter of survival, while extremely out of my depth, and with no reliable teachers around to help me learn. 

There’s a reason why it was so hard to find reliable teachers which is intrinsic to the subject (which I can describe more later) but in some ways there was no good reason why the kind of information I needed at the time was lacking. Over these years I’ve cobbled together both a theory and practical capacity that works very well for me, doesn’t require beliefs that distort anything else about the rest of my life, and I think is pretty helpful to the people in my life. 

I’m going to lay out here how I think chi works:

We have nervous systems that get into states of arousal and relaxation and are much more sensitive than our conscious awareness is most of the time–unless we’ve specifically trained our conscious awareness.

This is more true for ‘sensitive’ people–people who, for genetic, personality, or cultural reasons, tend to have nervous systems that respond more often and more extremely to stimuli than the nervous systems of other people around them.

In addition, there are ways our self-system (body, mind, attention, nervous system, all that) can keep particular perceptions out of our conscious mind, either for simplicity or to solve a problem. We can, with training, learn to perceive these things in our ordinary consciousness that were previously shut out. This can be stuff as simple as ‘the sensation of the muscles in our big toe’ and as complex as ‘the behaviour we enact when we encounter the cousin we get extremely triggered by’.

There are cultural patterns of this, and in Western, professional, polite culture, it’s common to keep a lot of detailed sensory perceptions around physical bodies, shameful emotional experiences, or disgusting phenomena out of our ordinary conscious perception. From the perspective of someone trained to perceive ‘energy’, default Western attention is very ‘dull’ when it comes to perceiving the physiology of emotions, and pretty smart when it comes to ‘verbal explanations of stuff’.

People’s nervous systems tend to get influenced by how they perceive other people’s nervous systems behaving. This is pretty smart, because the purpose of a nervous system is to get a body to do things, and being aware of the details of someone else’s state is a really practical way to prepare to respond to what they might do!

A very simple example is that if you are walking alone and you see a stranger walking alone and they seem scared, your bodymind will begin to get scared, somewhat–because either that person is afraid of something you should be afraid of too, so your bodymind is getting prepared, or, because they might be scared of -you-, in which case they might attack you to protect themselves, and you want to be ready to respond to that!

(I should point out that when I say ‘you’, many people will interpret that as ‘the experience of being conscious and perceiving stuff’, and I mean both that -and- ‘everything that happens within the bounds of your body and your mental space that you can’t perceive right now, as well’. You may not notice your heartrate increasing when that stranger’s heart rate increases but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening to ‘you’.)

This ‘tendency for your nervous system to get influenced by the state of another’s nervous system’ is a big part of what I think of when I think of someone being ‘sensitive’, and what many people mean when they call themselves ’empaths’.

(People who are physically bigger and stronger, or confident that they have enough money and social capacity to protect themselves in most situations tend to be less sensitive or influenced by other nervous systems because they don’t, in practice, need to so much. Also, some people grew up in environments where people were often unpredictable by other methods (like, by asking them what they were going to do) and so their bodies can learn to be extra sensitive to other’s nervous systems as a survival strategy.)

So, one part of ‘energy’ is the experience of having your nervous system get influenced by another person’s nervous system without having the conscious perception of what changed to make your nervous system change. This makes it feel like the change was ‘magical’ or ‘spooky action at a distance’, but I’m pretty confident that people can, with training, learn to perceive, if not from a distance then at least with touch, all the signals that their body is already subconsciously reacting to, and with enough perceptive skill there is no ‘unexplained influence’ or changes in your nervous system that can’t be explained by something happening in your body or mind or in what you are able to perceive of someone else’s body or mind.

This doesn’t mean those perceptions can’t be really subtle though! I have, for example, made pretty detailed and accurate predictions about what my partner’s nervous system looked like over text–but this came in the context of having spent hundreds of hours with him in person, having felt his body very closely, and having watched his behaviour over years, -combined- with the very limited sense data of how he phrased something over text. I could not do that with a stranger unless they very strongly fit a personality pattern I knew well.

One of the things that makes ‘skilled intuitives’ get better over time is that they have quite detailed models of people in general and specific people in particular which are combined with this perception data, so they can make predictions that (whether they are right or wrong) seem to predict things that can’t be known. And, good intuitives train this capacity by noticing when their predictions were wrong and incorporating that feedback–see this post on how occultists train in divination practices for more detail.

So, ‘feeling someone else’s energy’ can be explained by nervous systems wanting to copy each other, cool–but what about auras? Psychic attacks? Energetic sickness? Moving chi with your mind?

Let’s start with the concept of ‘moving chi with your mind’. To me, this is extremely straightforward to explain -unless- you believe a) that your thoughts have no influence over your nervous system, or (bizarrely) b) that your nervous system has no influence over your body.

I meet a lot of people who believe a), and I think this is one of the most bizarre outputs of Western science-influenced culture because it’s easy to notice evidence to the contrary. If you notice you believe your thoughts have no influence over your nervous system (which, remember, regulates how aroused or relaxed you are, whether you’re ready for sleep, food, sex, exercise etc), one easy way to try to refute it is to try and think something that changes how your body feels. Listening to a guided meditation that tells you to relax; imagining the person you’re most attracted to standing in front of you wanting to have sex with you–there are other ideas but these two are I think pretty obvious for most people. 

Once you can notice the ways in which your thoughts influence your nervous system, you can also notice the other way around–notice how when you’re exhausted you tend to have grumpier thoughts, or when you’re scared you tend to have more pessimistic thoughts. This makes sense–our mind is getting information from our body about how it’s doing and that is fed into whatever is producing the thoughts we can consciously notice!

Another thing I think is true (that you can check for yourself with enough practice) is that nervous system changes can influence not only -what- thoughts you think, but ‘what it feels like to be conscious’ at all. Medicine acknowledges this when it includes ‘brain fog’ as a symptom of various kinds of illnesses, but you can check the next time you are sleep-deprived, if your vision feels narrower and you feel a bit stupider, or the next time you feel energised, if you notice you feel like you can ‘see farther’ and your thoughts seem more interesting and you have better ideas. The idea that our default nervous system state in many cultures makes our awareness ‘dull’ is a problem approached by many spiritual traditions aiming for ‘awakening’; one thing they mean by awakening is literally ‘a sense that your conscious experience is more alert, and aware of more stuff’. 

(When I use the word ‘bodymind’ instead of ‘body’ or ‘mind’, I am taking as a foundational assumption the idea that your physical body and the contents of your mind are part of the same system, and that there would ideally be a better word that didn’t seem to imply that they’re two separate systems stuck next to each other.)

So, if it’s possible to get better at perceiving things normally outside your conscious experience, it’s also possible to get better at noticing how your thoughts influence your nervous system and your nervous system influences your thoughts, and through this process strengthen the feedback loop between the two. I’m not sure exactly whether it’s that better noticing leads to a stronger impact or merely to better noticing the impact but the outcome seems to be the same regardless–that you can develop the ability to ‘control your nervous system with your thoughts’. There are lots of caveats and I wouldn’t recommend just ‘trying to control your nervous system with your thoughts’ because a lot of us have belief patterns that can make that worse if we don’t go carefully, but you can notice that at least the connection exists and is possible to strengthen. Cool.

Ok, so getting to ‘controlling chi with your mind’. I think that ‘chi’ (or prana, energy, qi, whatever) is the name we have for the most useful kind of thought to have in order to make useful changes to your nervous system. I think it’s evidently useful because a similarly-shaped concept has emerged independently in a bunch of different internal arts traditions that didn’t interact with each other.

Basically, chi (or prana etc) is consistently understood as a flowing, liquid-but-electrical phenomenon, that you can direct by holding the intention to direct it in your mind, and that can extend beyond the limits of your body.

I think this is an incredibly useful mental experience–I hesitate to even call it a concept because it involves quite a lot of perceptions that are certainly not intellectual, although they do happen ‘in the mind’. AND, I think that because it is so useful, two things occur:

• Practitioners who use it risk expanding it to understand non-nervous-system-ish phenomena in a way that isn’t anywhere near as useful as it is for nervous system functioning (they develop woo beliefs that make them worse at doing other things)
• People who are not skilled practitioners see the ‘mental experience called chi’ as a causal explanation of a physical phenomenon, they look for it but don’t see it because they have not developed their perceptive abilities enough to see it, and also see people who talk about it being worse at reasoning about e.g. how vaccines work and conclude that it is merely a bad, wrong, harmful scientific theory that no one should believe

I think that this unfortunate weird conflict arises because of something intrinsic to how ‘holding a mental intention to influence chi’ has to feel in order for it to work well.

When you are thinking about a scientific theory, your body is very–precise, is one way to put it. You might talk in a very ordered, even, way, and hold mental images of structures in order to mentally navigate around the concept you’re considering. You rarely feel the urge to run, or cry, or express a vivid emotion to someone else. There’s often a feeling of neatness, and a desire to compare mental concepts to other concepts to figure out what they are like. We learn about the nervous system this way, if we learn about it at all. We learn labels and functions and diagrams.

For some reason that I can’t quite fully explain, this mode of being is not the right one to be in if you want your thoughts to be influencing your nervous system state the most strongly. The state it is better to be in involves less structured talking, less structured thoughts, and instead involves things that are vivid, emotionally impactful and nonverbal–images, sounds, direct perception of your surroundings. We can get more into this state if we’re caught up in a highly engaging movie–the room is dark, we aren’t afraid of being seen, and it’s socially acceptable to express stronger emotions in a movie theatre so it can feel easier to do so.

In this state, the images we see or imagine make a more direct impact on our nervous system, AND it’s harder to ‘think about things logically’.

‘Chi’ is a well-adapted mental experience that relies on being in this second, more imagistic, nonverbal state to influence nervous system activity. You don’t get to a calm nervous system by thinking ‘I am going to relax my nervous system’; you get there by imagining a ball of light sitting above your head and then bursting and pouring golden liquid down your body.

This is the kind of image that makes it easier to start driving your nervous system like a car using the mental experience of chi–you can release amplified tension by ‘feeling’ the chi release out of your body at all directions, or regain your sense of self-confidence by ‘pouring’ your chi into the ground. These images aren’t arbitrary–I think there are likely complex mappings between specific ‘intentions to move chi’ and different impacts on nervous system state, and I’m not aware of any Western scientific research that has been able to document these.

I think it’s entirely possible to get very good at using the mental experience of chi to influence your nervous system physiology while not getting confused into trusting that chi is a substance like water, or that it has out-of-body functions like moving the planet on its orbit. I think the most sane physical understanding of ‘what chi is’ is something like ‘patterns of change within a complex system that has parts that are tightly influenced by each other’ but that can be hard to understand. I think most people are not good at either scientific reasoning or subtle energy manipulation to be aware of when their understanding of one is being influenced by blindspots in the other, and then combined with a bunch of tribalism we’ve ended up in a situation where what is taboo for one camp is blindingly obvious for the other. But so it goes. 

Ok so now let me talk about auras and psychic attacks. Roughly, I think it makes sense to think of an aura as ‘your mental experience of your nervous system baseline, overall, and how sensitive or guarded you feel towards potential influence on your nervous system.’ Really obvious stuff ‘weakens your aura’ by literally weakening your body–being sleep deprived, having a draining emotional relationship, feeling worried about money all the time. For some people, they want their aura to be guarded–they want to feel confident that the condition of their nervous system will not be affected by anything outside of them or their control. For some people, they tend to have a ‘weak aura’, which you can roughly understand as ‘lots of things influence them consciously and subconsciously, and they have very little control over what influences them, leaving their nervous system state at the mercy of their surroundings’. 

For me, I aim for a ‘strong, sensitive aura’, which roughly means ‘my nervous system picks up on a lot of stuff, but I am very capable of being uninfluenced by anything I am concerned about being dangerous, or experiencing it in the moment without having lasting effects. i think I mostly succeed, except for rare exceptions. I’ll give two stories to explain what I mean by this.

One: I recently took a call as a suicide hotline volunteer with someone who that day was experiencing a first psychotic break and feeling possessed by a violent Joker-like character. Not only was he occasionally talking in a way that indicated he might do something dangerous (which was naturally scary to me), he was also extremely terrified and confused himself and that came out in his voice and his ideas. 

If I were to be ‘energetically closed, with a shut-off aura’ to him I might speak in a very flat, formal, unaffected tone, and avoid imagining him as real human deserving of care as I heard his voice. That might protect me from feeling the impact of his emotions and arousal on my nervous system but leave him feeling alienated. If I were to be ‘energetically oversensitive, with a weak aura’ I might speak in a tone that increasingly matched his, which might make him feel understood, but also would make me feel a similar kind of insane state to him and perhaps amp up his fear even more when I was mirroring it exactly. Behaving like that would probably leave me feeling exhausted, and possibly physically sick– nauseous, feverish, or weak afterwards. 

The approach I took (which I think I could still have improved on) was to let myself notice what he was feeling, and then do some mental moves for myself during the conversation that meant that perceiving that level of terror didn’t make me as afraid or as energetically aroused. These are mental moves involving my body–the image I used was one of ‘venting’ or ‘off-gassing’ energy throughout my torso, so that any tension that arose in my body during the call didn’t stay there for long. If I had handled it 100% capably, I would have been capable of having the intense, one-hour call and then ending it in a state of relaxed nervous system readiness, and taking a different call immediately afterwards. As it was, I mostly succeeded, but I needed to do more ‘off-gassing’ or ‘venting’ for maybe an hour afterwards–but once I was done, I could easily go to sleep at a normal time a few hours later and sleep comfortably. This particular experience was at the limits of my capabilities and, like building a muscle, I could imagine taking on an identical experience in a year after building more strength and handling it 100% with ease, and being capable of even more intense challenges than that. 

For the second example, I want to talk more about the sense that someone is ‘doing something’ energetically to you.

I had an experience recently while I was at a public event, where by the time I was there, for unrelated reasons I was already feeling muscle soreness, fatigue, emotional strain, and cumulatively something like a ‘weaker aura’. 

I then happened to run into a man who knew me but that I hadn’t seen in a long time; within a few minutes of conversation with him I felt my mind go blank, an inability to hear what he was saying, a vague numb feeling of panic, a sense of confusion, and a loss of perception of the sensations of my body. I have a very strong relationship with my body, so noticing those perceptions go away was a really concerning sign. 

I excused myself mid-conversation and walked away to be out of earshot of others. At that time I had no idea ‘what had happened’–that is to say–why I had had such a strong reaction; only, that if such intense signs came up I would respond to them immediately and not repress them. I then tried to direct my mind to the sensations in my body, and I imagined the loving embrace of someone who I feel incredibly safe with, which let my body trust (along with the knowledge that I was out of earshot) that it was safe to perceive what I was experiencing.

It took a little while, but soon sensations arose–the impulse to throw up, a kind of shocked scream, and nausea like I’d been kicked in the stomach. All of these are to me signs of a nervous system working against quite intense distress–wanting me to take some action to protect against something quite bad.

Without knowing -what- the bad thing was, I imagined the safe person I know I would have access to if I needed them, let whatever movements and sounds take place that needed to take place, and ‘moved my chi with my mind to rebalance it’. 

In somewhat blunt woo terms ‘my aura had been violated’ and in that moment of rediscovering the sensations I was discovering what kind of violation it was and what I should do in order to ‘restore my aura’s integrity’.

In this case, I learned that I had felt some kind of forceful too-deep intimacy from him, combined with social pressure to accept his behaviour towards me (from him and the social situation we had been in). 

After resting, ‘rebalancing chi’ and contemplating it for a while I went back and began a new conversation with him, now with much better ‘energetic protection’ in the form of avoiding behaviours, the presence of others, and a commitment to allow myself to do ‘things that looked weird’ if I needed to do that in order to keep perceiving my bodily sensations.

In that conversation I established all sorts of boundaries and then was able to discuss the violation with him, in a way that didn’t make me feel violated again (props to him for being able to have that conversation; many men would not have known how). 

In both stories I describe the experience ending with me reaching an ‘energetically neutral’ state–my nervous system is in a state of ‘relaxed readiness’, I’m able to perceive all the sensations in my body, my mind is clear and free of worries.

My understanding of psychic attack and particularly ‘energetic sicknesses’ of various kinds is that they involve experiences like the one in that second story, but where the person ‘attacked’ gets stuck in the overwhelmed or shut-down nervous system state for a long time, sometimes even months or years. This is pretty bad for your body–your nervous system likes being ‘relaxed and ready’ and when it’s stuck in overdrive that worsens the health of lots of other things, like your digestive system and your immune system.

(This is, by the way, I think why people who grew up in abusive environments are more likely to experience digestive and immune issues–they spent long periods in nervous system overwhelm and their body wasn’t able to repair the digestive and immune system functioning the way it should.)

When I tell stories like this to people with scientific rationalist-materialist mindsets who ‘don’t believe in chi’, they frequently surprise themselves with how open they are to accepting the story as reasonable because they thought they believed ‘chi isn’t real’. A few things seem to consistently arise as barriers to understanding the kind of phenomenon I’m describing in these stories more closely:

• There is no one whose worldview they respect who seems to talk about chi; the only people they see talking about chi are people whose reasoning they don’t think is very good
• They personally don’t perceive any of the sensations that seem to be involved, and so conclude they don’t exist (in part because they haven’t see these perceptions as ‘something you can get better at’)
• Chi as a concept seems to have been soundly refuted by science, so they reason that the phenomena it relates to must be delusions (possibly social memes gotten out of hand)

This post is in part an attempt to bridge the reasoning gap between scientific materialists who trust the science of physiology and (perhaps a little less) the science of psychology, and people who are fluent in manipulating subtle energy but perhaps don’t know or care how the thing they do is explained by science.

I should point out, this whole model I’ve laid out here is one I’ve developed and have seen a few dual-paradigm practitioners agree with–but not many. I think if science could figure out how to study chi without assuming ‘chi is a phenomenon’, and design research processes that account for the subjective impact of the specific mental-content-that-behaves-similar-to-a-belief like the mental experience of chi, we’d have a much better science of psychology!

(Note: One major problem is that as someone who is much, much more fluent in subtle energy now than I was four years ago, I’m much more capable of evaluating a subtle energy practitioner like a bodyworker, in case I need their help–but I wasn’t when I was younger and inexperienced, which was when I desperately needed them! I would like there to be a better way for energy-illiterate people to evaluate energy practitioners that is better than ‘do I believe that the story they are telling about energy is true’. I don’t know the answer but I think recognising that a practitioner’s epistemology is -not- what dictates the quality of their skills is a good start!)

I fell in love with myself
Felt that deep locked-in belly shape
Rocked the zigzags out of it
Felt into loam,
Final belly ground,
Full foundation
And what I got from you—
Where I fell with him,
And with her—
The bottoms I hit with each of them
Pushed me deeper into the womblike earth
Where I meet myself

Oh, holy hope
Soft bird with blurry wings
You move so fast when you sing–
Sometimes my reckoning creeps in–
Lagging far behind

Oh, holy mouth
Reverberations streaming out
And when you doubt–doubt merely
slips into the endless stream;
I cannot stay in its 
Frequency

I want to love, but I feel quiet
Melted, given, broken, filed;
Abiding tiny earthquakes 
I cannot justify
I want to love, and my love is mouthless
Giving dumb telepathic gifts
I’m too weak to shout about

I guess I’m asking you for something
Incomprehensible, futile;
For dog whistles and whale songs
For metaphor held like a glow, and things
Pinned to your back in the night
I’ll keep talking to you
In a lovers’ Basque you never learnt;
A love without a dictionary

I can’t even say whether I want this, exactly–
It’s so quiet our construction sounds
Drown it out