If the world were mechanical and soulless, then life would have appeared due to the concatenation of a series of statistical peculiarities, thanks to which, under very specific environmental conditions, molecules would have been able to reach degrees of complexity of such magnitude that the simple inorganic chemical reactions that can be found on any planet would evolve in the form of elaborate metabolic pathways, capable of synthesizing increasingly varied organic compounds. Some of these processes would manage to sustain themselves, repeating themselves over and over again. In this way, metabolisms would self-organize until they formed the first unicellular living beings, which would be nothing more than complex chemical-replicating machines. Little by little, these organisms would improve their ability to move and manage the surroundings, as well as to maintain their own homeostasis with respect to the environment, all with the sole aim of obtaining new materials in order to continue manufacturing new molecules. Their reproductive capacities will serve to ensure the perpetuation of the different metabolic automatisms that have been successfully developed until a certain point. As time goes by, more complex modalities will appear, multicellular living beings, as a response to the accumulation of discoveries by cells regarding how to continue creating molecules, and, above all, due to the increasing difficulty of acquiring resources in a world in which many are competing for them. Thus, progressively, solutions will continue to be found to organize and replicate matter in new ways, while ineffective strategies will be fallen by the wayside. The only truly important thing at this point will be the survival and reproduction of the fittest and best-adapted individuals. Evolution is an automatic product of life within ecosystems, and life is an automatic product of the evolution of the universe. The different species coexist in a constant and fierce struggle to obtain, use and accumulate material and energetic resources. Due to the recurrent appearance of scarcity, this competition not only occurs between different species, but also takes place amongst individuals of the same species, which will cause, among other things, the appearance of sexual differentiation. All this, let us remember, is nothing more than the expression of a mechanical world and its natural and inevitable compulsion for repetition and replication. Here, life has no meaning or purpose, it is just an extravagant and uncommon means of perpetuating the automatisms of the universe, the product of physical laws.
Even with all this, in this mechanistic and reductionist world, evolution makes something as peculiar as us appear: human beings. Conscious entities endowed with enormous (albeit not always evident) intelligence: rational and emotional beings capable of asking questions and seeking answers. Creatures who continue to find new ways of organizing atoms and who will create language in order to build societies and civilizations, developing agriculture and livestock, politics, religion, ethics, philosophy, science, mathematics, economics, architecture, engineering, painting, sculpture, music, cinema, books, the Internet... Millions and millions of forms and functions for lives without soul or transcendence, beyond the very service that they render to materiality. All the possible options for evolution and learning within this mechanical world, from the purely biological to the intellectual, social and cultural, are found in Emoenergetica, within what is known as horizontal development.
On the horizontal path we invent false intentions and noble objectives, we create gods and demons, we imagine heavens and hells, we pursue goals or flee from our aversions, we live in our fantasies or we deal with our realities. All this in an intent to create an artificial meaning for our short existence within horizontality. In any case, the possibilities here are no less than fascinating. Sometimes a desire to adorn our lives with a golden mantle prevails, we do not mind following a rough path, and we strive to learn, grow, prosper, and conquer, often competing against each other to feel more than others, inspiring and following as role models those who have achieved what almost everyone wants and longs for: charisma, status, and influence, all under the threatening possibility of failure. In other instances, human actions are reduced to an attempt to maximize happiness and lessen suffering as far as possible. However, in a world of an exclusively horizontal nature, the choice of doing things right or wrong, ethically speaking, is irrelevant.
The mechanisms of pleasure and pain initially appeared as an adaptive biological function that helped living beings to recognize dangers and needs while motivating them to seek food and shelter, thus increasing the chances of reproduction. In humans, these mechanisms have become so complicated that, to some extent, they have lost their biological function. It is possible to gratify ourselves with what hurts us and shy away from that which would be beneficial; we can even dedicate our lives to inflicting pain on others or ourselves and we may even decide not to reproduce or to die. Have we become something akin to a disease for the cosmos? Although flat and shallow, horizontality is considered by some to be profound. Little more can be aspired to in a universe that does not care if you live or die, love or hate, win or lose, are in pain or feeling pleasure, because you are just another automatism. We even have to contemplate the idea that, if the cosmos were only a huge automaton, the feeling that we choose would probably be an illusion, as would consciousness. Perhaps, despite our desires and concerns, we are not really a disease for nature, but an intermediate solution, that which is necessary to create the supreme automaton, a replicating artificial superintelligence capable of populating and transforming the entire universe, far beyond the handful of planets on which life based on carbon and water can be found.
Alternatively, we might lean towards the idea that awareness never needed to be created, since, in its most intimate nature, it is timeless, abstract and infinite. Individual life would be a finite and concrete expression, the result of the obligatory symbiosis between the two natural aspects of the Eternal: the Nagual, which harbours the essence of the selfhood, and the Tonal, which gives rise to the automaton. The former is predominantly abstract and materializes by manifesting itself by means of the latter. The latter, in turn, can only make sense when experienced by the former. Thus, awareness would be what creates the infinite worlds through the interaction between the five classes of attention (perception, automatism, memory, representation and manifestation) since these, in particular the mechanism of perception, have the intrinsic power to intertwine the observer-nagual with the observed-tonal, the mind with the body, which forms part of the local environment-universe. In fact, here too we would serve something greater – to the awareness itself. If this is the true foundation of reality, then it is of paramount importance for human beings to increase their knowledge of it. The impulse to know more about our nature as conscious entities would be the first stone of the vertical path.
There are three things that believers in the purely mechanical universe cannot explain: life, consciousness, and free will. This is because they have focused all their theories on the tonal, which is where the automatic natural laws are reflected, where matter takes form, where energy is transformed. Yet they have forgotten, or rather they insist on denying, the nagual, which is the aspect of the universe responsible for providing life, consciousness and the ability to decide to the tonal. On the other hand, many of those who aspire to know the vertical path call the nagual “God”, but are simply confused: either nothing is divine, or everything is divine, including the tonal and all its parts.
Emoenergetica propounds that the aspirant to vertical development should become an example of integration and synergy between the nagual and the tonal. Consequently, their path must commence with attention to horizontal development. One must acquire skills, understanding and knowledge about the world in which we live and how to thrive in it, while also caring for, nurturing and exercising the physical body so that it is in the best possible condition at all times. For many self-proclaimed spiritual aspirants, both within and outside the religious dogmas, this proposal will come as a surprise; I am also sure that a good many will oppose it. All I can say is that the vertical path is so steep and complicated, that if you don't accumulate enough talent to at least resolve the relationship with yourself and the everyday world, you should hardly expect to succeed in the battle you are going to have to face in order to take command of the place from which you could directly contemplate the Eternal itself. Over the years I have encountered a multitude of people who only seek the spiritual path as a way to evade the responsibilities of everyday life, or as a refuge from the aridity and harshness of living, or as a tranquilizer to alleviate the fear of dying, or as a self-indulgence that makes one feel special or chosen. Laying the first stone on the vertical path is easy; the subsequent ones are progressively more difficult to fit in, and even to find. That is why it is often unlikely that anyone who glimpses the beginning of the path, or simply likes to talk about its existence, will actually walk the Path.
Within Emoenergetica there is a first landmark toward which to aim, a specific direction towards which the vertical path must lead: the eradication of the egoic mind, or in other words, the realization of the original being. Impeccability in the everyday world and righteousness will be necessary here as a means to help the aspirant truly become a spiritual warrior. This has nothing to do with ethics, nor with managing to place oneself at the top of the social pyramid, nor even with freeing oneself from pain or discomfort. To act correctly and with virtue is only a highly efficient means of accumulating the energy of consciousness instead of wasting it. That said, we will undoubtedly have to relearn what is right and what virtue is, because it is quite possible that the world has taught us wrongly. Unlike the heavens that many religions offer after death, realization can only be achieved while we are still alive, hence the imperative need to reorganize all energy resources as efficiently as possible. Although just as difficult, the vertical path is best traversed with a good map: this map must contain both the territories of the original mind and those of the ego.
As I have already stated, Emoenergetica adopts the premise that our mind is split in two. The egoic mind is part of the automaton and therefore does not really possess the capacity to decide. What the ego can do, and in fact does, is to create strong impulses and automatisms whose only purpose is to recruit the maximum amount of energy possible. At their hardest core, these mechanisms are based on emotional dependence (need for attention, affection, and support), on the pillars of the ego (feeling of superiority, feeling of inferiority, feeling of personal importance, and feeling of offense), and on emotional deviations (manic schemes, phobic schemes, depressive schemes, addictive schemes, obsessive schemes, and compulsive schemes). Basically, the ego behaves like a parasite that manages to divert towards itself the greater part of the energy of awareness and attention that would otherwise be used exclusively by the original mind.
Following the conclusions reached by a part of Central American nagualism, Emoenergetica considers that our true destiny is to be explorers of infinity, and that this journey has been interrupted by the encroachment of the egoic phase on the system of life on Earth. The endless cycles of social injustice, inequality and conflict experienced by human societies throughout history will not be solved by more resources, more education or more technology, given that this struggle and the predatorship that we experience is inevitable as long as we remain in the egoic phase. It is also assumed that our present perceptual and intellectual capacities, while fascinating in this human form, are abominably castrated when compared to the innate possibilities of the original mind. Although from the horizontal point of view, it is logical to think that our genetics and the brain development we have achieved are the architects of the high cognitive development that we possess, for example, in comparison with animals, both nagualism and Emoenergetica coincide in that we are much more than a physical body, and that our true abilities are far beyond our imagination, due to the undeveloped potential of our possibilities as energy-perceiving cocoons.
The vertical path has two distinct forms – the luminous path and the tenebrous path. These two paths also exist in the horizontal world. The luminous path is the one that tries to avoid unnecessary harm to other conscious beings. The tenebrous path is that which encourages the use of other beings exclusively for personal gain, regardless of whether this increases their suffering or not. Most humans stand, horizontally speaking, in a position that is a mixture between the luminous and the tenebrous paths. This is due to the conflict that the ego is permanently creating in our mind.
The way in which humans first began to know the vertical path was through the modification of attentional states, generally and, initially in ancient times, by means of the use of hallucinogenic plants. What must have happened at first occasionally and by chance, evolved towards the creation of rituals and formulae, the preservation and use of which fell into the hands of the figure of the tribal shaman. The different generations had to gather knowledge about the seeing of energy and the soul; they soon began to realize that dreams are the main connection to our energetic side and to some worlds beyond this physical plane. In this way, they gradually learned to control their dreaming attention in order to travel, interact and communicate with forms of life very different from our own. The main drawback to this is that most of these entities, even those with superhuman capacities, have the same problem as we do, their mind is divided in two, and so they, in their own way, are also slaves to the ego. The dark side is the ego. Even so, if there is any truth in the traditions that speak of it, the ancient shamans acquired a great deal of knowledge about energy and attention thanks to these beings. As I stated at the beginning of this book, the few teachings that have reached us from ancient nagualism have done so thanks to the anthropologist Carlos Castaneda. Although he used other terms, his teacher Don Juan warned him again and again of the dangers of falling into the tenebrous side of consciousness, just as the sorcerers of antiquity had done.
Emoenergetica is only interested in the luminous path. In its vertical aspect, this is the one that goes through the death of the ego and the consequent rebirth of the original self in this world. We will explore this path in subsequent chapters in a modern and clear way. We will work on the four emoenergetic disciplines (relaxation, meditation, introspection and recapitulation) and will discover how to practice them; we will learn about the virtues; we will unravel the ego in each of its parts, uncovering even its most inaccessible hiding places. Interestingly enough, this may also be a work of reference for understanding emotions, feelings and human psychology from a very conventional point of view. We will also talk about the suitability of additionally practicing some type of physical training focused on vertical development and the importance of taking care of the subtlesoma – for example, by receiving Bioenergetic Resonance adjustments.
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The Vertical Path by Chema Sanz is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.