Empire. War. Wealth. Fame. These might be some words that spring to mind when you think of power.
Examining influence through a militaristic, economic or political lens makes for fascinating study, yet also creates an intellectual web that keeps us from understanding the true nature of power. To know the essence of what moves us humans, we must turn our attention closer to home.
The Power Of Us
Fundamentally, power is about relationships. An empire is a hierarchy of networks which rules across many demographics. Money enables the exchange of goods and services between people. Fame involves the masses in a one-way relationship with a ‘divine’ person via worship.
In daily life, we notice the presence of power in our schools, workplaces and families. Teachers control a classroom and set the agenda, managers influence and direct their employees, and parents have almost absolute control over the lives of their young children. Even in relatively egalitarian friendships, each person allows the other a certain amount of influence over them. All of the above involve multiple people bound together, influencing each other via a seemingly-invisible force. But what is this phenomenon exactly?
The Power Of Rules
The answer lies closer again, deep in the mind, where our beliefs run the show from behind the scenes. Here we find the ‘rulebook’ of our ‘correct place’ in the world. Who we are, how we should act, what we are capable of, and what we are incapable of.
What stops you from answering back to your superior, or attacking a police officer? Power does. Awareness of this psychological map reveals the extent to which outside forces have shaped our lives through moulding our beliefs.
Now we are almost at the core, but still not close enough. We need to look closer, much closer, where we can observe how power flows and functions within us in its various forms. We need to become aware of our inner sensations, feelings and impulses in response to the people and structures which influence and control us. We need to get visceral by exploring the emotional nature of power.
The Power Of Energy
Beneath our social structures and belief systems lies the heart of power — our emotional world. Emotions such as pride and love aim to propel us forward in order to grow and connect with others. Negative emotions such as shame and fear look to hold us back in order to rethink our approach or for self-protection.
Our emotional anatomy also consists of archetypes, each of which possesses a unique set of traits and energetic forms. The ‘magician’, for example, encourages us to find clever solutions to problems. The ‘great mother’ turns us into a selfless nurturer, and the ‘king or queen’ into a leader who is invested in the prosperity of his or her people.
Modern psychology also reveals personality types, such as the goal-oriented psychopath and the self-centred narcissist. It is true that the pathological versions of these are highly destructive. Yet the psychopath becomes indispensable during a time of upheaval and crisis, where survival hangs on the capacity to act decisively without emotions holding you back. The narcissist, in its healthy, integrated form, gives us the audacity to take on the world and expect the time and attention of others when we need it.
By understanding the anatomy of how we express power energetically, we will have cut right into the heart of the matter. At the very centre of this vibrant yet hidden ecosystem lies the end of our journey into power — and the beginning. There we are met by a paradox, the discovery of a place which does not exist, and which through its non-existence gives rise to power.
The Power Of Nothing
This certain ‘somewhere’ at the centre of us is impossible to pinpoint. What comes out of it, however, is the raw force which gives life to power, and we confirm its existence by growing our awareness of its many forms. That is, like space or silence, we can only know this force exists if we pay attention to what forms around it.
We have many names for this phenomenon, some of which are ‘spirit’, ‘mana’, ‘inner fire’, ‘primal warmth’, ‘passion’, ‘eros’ and ‘love’. Arthur Schopenhauer referred to it as the ‘will to life’; the internal urge which not only drives us to continue living, but to improve our lives and the world around us. Sigmund Freud referred to it as the ‘life instinct’.
Something compels us not only to persevere, but to learn, discover, evolve, achieve and connect, even in the face of tremendous hardship and pain. Something compelled you to read this article. The term ‘libido’ comes close to describing it, but this word often gets confused with sex. In spiritual teachings, it is called ‘Chi’, ‘Prana’, ‘Kundalini’ or ‘The Divine Urge’. Wilhelm Reich, the Austrian doctor and psychoanalyst, called it ‘Orgone energy’, and even controversially went as far as to create a device which could collect it.
As compelling as it can be to try to dissect and understand this phenomenon, it will not serve our understanding of power. Instead, what we should be concerned with is power as it can be mindfully observed and experienced within ourselves. The maturing of our wisdom, the intensity of an orgasm, the terror of panic, the crushing weight of shame; these are all ways we can confirm the presence of this force in tangible and practical ways. To avoid ambiguity or confusion, let us simply call it life energy; the force which gives potency to power.
A Spectrum Of Possibilities
A helpful analogy to understand life energy is what Alan Watts refers to as ‘the spectrum of love’. Like all the different colours in the spectrum of light, Watts states that love has different forms and intensities. He likened red to sexual passion, violet to a sense of wonder, yellow to the glow of friendship, blue to human endearment, and so on.
This same paradigm can be applied to life energy, except that life energy encapsulates not only love, but all emotions, with fear being its most unadulterated form. Think of fear as the colour white, which when put through a particular filter, becomes other colours. The ‘primary colours’ of life energy are shame, pride, love and hate, which when ‘mixed’ together create infinite shades such as guilt, irritation, self-assuredness and fondness.
The primary emotions influence power as follows:
Love is fuel for pride. Loving others empowers and legitimises them to act and grow, and loving yourself empowers and legitimises you.
Pride assumes legitimacy in the world, which by association attracts love via worship. That is, the more you are loved, the more pride you have. The more pride you have, the more people are likely to love or follow you. This is why confident people usually go far in the world.
Those inflated by pride can forfeit some of it by exhibiting healthy shame and submitting their love to another person. It is a case of giving instead of taking in order to ‘deflate’ pride.
Those who feel their needs are not being met or that others are taking advantage of them can use hate to make demands or push back.
Subtly hardening through hate establishes boundaries and reduces people’s influence over you.
Love and hate temper how much power and influence we hold over each other by regulating the strength of our attachment to each other.
If a person cannot assert their boundaries through hate or earn love to fuel their pride, they experience shame to compensate. As a result, their pathway to power becomes blocked from within.
These four emotions can be organised on two axes as follows, with one axis governing how we connect, and the other governing how we grow and actualise:
For the ‘connection/actualisation continuum’ to apply, there must be emotional engagement. When a person is indifferent, then power cannot be had. To experience power, we must first engage that person by polarising them and drawing them into the realm of emotion. We achieve this by creating the promise of transcendence through higher states of being. Without this, power falls flat, and we must instead resort to fear-mongering, shaming, brainwashing and other forms of manipulation to arouse the other person’s emotions.
The Immeasurable Path To Greatness
Whether it is through manipulation, threat of violence, or by offering the masses a pathway to transcendence, the great people of history successfully exploited the connection/actualisation continuum to their advantage in order to move humanity in radical directions.
Looking at the lives of the great men and women in history, including all that they achieved in the harshest of conditions, gives us a glimpse into the limitless nature of power.
Joan of Arc, a seventeen-year-old illiterate farm girl, led a French army to raise the Siege of Orleans and immortalised her name. Genghis Khan united the clans of Mongolia and forged a brutal empire across entire continents, leaving behind an orgy of death and conquest. Jesus and Mohammad captured the hearts and minds of countless people, spawning two monotheistic religions which now dominate the globe.
Like atomic energy, life energy is unfathomable in its potential, limited only by imagination, capable of both creating life and destroying it. Under the right conditions, the life energy of one person has the potential to move nations. All that is needed for the combustion process is an engine for power, and a spark to light it.
A Recipe For Power
Like a fire needs oxygen and a spark, before life energy can manifest as power, it needs two main elements; one of these is context, and the other is legitimacy.
Contexts are the engines where life energy has the potential to burn. Some examples of context were provided at the beginning of this chapter — an empire, an economy or a relationship. Within context lies a need for power. That is, empires, economies and relationships fulfil core needs for survival, security, food, connection and perhaps also greatness and domination if that is your cup of tea.
In cases such as the Mongol conquests or the rise of Islam, there was no decipherable core need. We can study these seismic historical events for generations yet never fully grasp why they happened. What they did offer was transcendence, a pathway to a higher state via worship and conquest. Our fascination lies in how the context in these examples spontaneously erupted from nowhere and grew to epic proportions.
And yet, once these eruptions of power had expanded to their greatest heights, they morphed into power structures with rules and customs that allowed people to exchange life energy in order to have their personal and spiritual needs met.
Legitimacy, the second element, is the spark needed to fuel the blaze. Consider the above examples again. An empire has a divine ruler, and above all, a sense of purpose and greatness which its subjects subscribe to. Families are legitimised by blood, marriages by oath, societies by laws, religions by prophets, dictatorships by fear, monarchies by ‘God’, and friendships by a promise to meet each other’s needs.
For most people, authority over their lives is legitimised only from outside — by parents, teachers, managers or society. Trending brands tell us what we should wear, government laws tell us which behaviours to follow, parents can even go as far as dictating our career and life ambitions for us.
Yet outside influences, while compelling and oftentimes well-intentioned, can hold us back from our true potential. That is, looking for legitimacy outside of ourselves can keep our inner fire contained, never burning to its greatest possible heights.
Unleashing Your Power
For those of us who have spent a lifetime waiting for permission to pursue our ambition, a paradigm shift is needed — a remapping of our belief system. We achieve this by turning our attention inward and following the trail left behind by our life energy, which takes us on a journey of profound transformation.
Start by meditating on your shame, which includes what makes you feel guilty and the ways you see yourself as ‘inferior’ to others. Shame is the energetic form of believing you are flawed, and releasing it through mindfulness frees up enormous reserves of life energy.
Deepen your relationship with your anger, and learn to hone it for boundary-setting. In some cases, you might need to rediscover your anger after having repressed it for a lifetime.
Consider who you love and submit to, and whether they have your best interests at heart. The fawning response comes second nature to those who feel helpless. The people-pleaser aims to assert control passively through others, which robs them of their power.
And finally, meditate on what holds you back from pursuing your ambition. Perhaps it is fear or anxiety, or maybe you believe that you have no right to power. Where did such a belief come from? Do you need outside approval to legitimise your right to power, or can you discover it in ‘hidden’ places? Remember, the source of all power is a place within you that does not exist. Look there for clues.
Remove yourself from situations where people shame, exploit and control you. Establish new contexts of power, even if it means starting off alone. Begin by exploring the most important context for power: Your True Self. Within this infinite space lie your limiting beliefs, your trauma, your ingrained thought patterns, and of course, your divine potential.
Practice emotional release meditation every day. Take ownership of your True Self. Master this most important of contexts, and then establish contexts in the real world, which will be enhanced by your spiritual growth. When in doubt, follow your inner flame. Let your instinct guide you.
Take this blueprint for power, and apply your divine, creative touch to it. You are unique, your life is unique, and your journey toward power will be unique. Pursue your rightful path with courage, and the world will be a richer place for it.
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I liked this article….
Question - what if we oriented our entire being toward God and were grateful and focused our energies on Him, and could see that our gifts were from Him and for Him and we left all outcomes to Him, would the world be different?
I feel like the characters in Brothers K help us understand life. Especially how to orient “ desire” ( ie our power)