Making Emotion Visible
Energy symbols are a waveform language developed to depict the invisible world of our identities, fears, and desires as waves of energy that create and impel emotions, beliefs, and behaviors. In this language, fear waves cancel desire waves. When fear and desire of the same magnitude occupy the same space and time, they cancel, leaving a moment of lucidity, neither desirous nor fearful, just present.
This is an awakened state, even if only briefly experienced. For those who seek awakening, wisdom, enlightenment, or a higher plane of existence, energy symbols offer a visual language that can lead to self-realization and freedom from misbelief.
Can energy language remove what blocks to our ability to be present and behold the beauty of what is before us? I believe the answer is “yes.” Let me explain.
Energy symbols serve as a map to free ourselves from polarity, from fear, and from desire. These symbols stimulate understandings we already have. A wave that moves upward and then down, like a hill, represents rise and fall of intensities of desire.
Think of this as a wave of self-definition. The dot represents the self. The wave of desire rises above the tranquility of the self, up a mountain of aspiration. However, whatever goes up must seek its opposite. That is the nature of polarity. Yin and yang. Similarly, a wave that falls like a precipice below the ‘self’ dot, then slowly rises back to the center, symbolizes a wave of fear hitting, then receding:
Think how waves of self-definition begin deep in our past, in childhood. Waves of identity are created when, as children, learn to see ourselves through someone else’s eyes.
“You look like a rag doll! Sit up straight!”
How often do we form subconscious opinions of ourselves when someone is angry when something someone says or does pulls us out of our own centeredness? Suddenly we view ourselves from an external point of view. It may be complimentary:
“You are so talented! You’re the best little violinist in the whole world!”
Or, angry:
“You idiot! Clean up this mess!”
Positive or negative, these experiences introduce inaccuracies, misbeliefs, fears, guilt, delusions of grandeur… the list goes on and on. Some kids grow up to be great violinists to be sure, but how many struggle to please their mothers only to discover they really didn’t have any true interest to begin with? Even if a parent’s positive reinforcement moves us toward a goal in life, we are still divided by incorporating another person’s point of view. A parent compliments a child in order to move her or him in a direction the parent desires. But that’s not necessarily the direction the child wants. Let’s see… Is becoming a famous violinist my goal, or my Mom’s goal?
If we receive positive encouragement, we should ask “Is this the direction I wish to take?” For example, if a father tells his daughter, “You’ll make a great president of my business. You’re smart and shrewd with your allowance!” he splits the poor lass’s consciousness in two. The father’s desire to have her become what the father wants her to be is injected into her subconscious before she can possibly know what she herself desires out of life.
Too frequently, we are pulled off-center by anger. “Jesus, pay attention, clumsy! Don’t knock your milk over! You’re so careless!” Or, “You took the last cookie! Selfish!” This creates a wave of seeing ourselves as clumsy or selfish. When the wave inevitably moves in its opposite phase, we are impelled to do things to prove to ourselves and to others we are not clumsy or selfish.
Negative energy is felt with absolute clarity before we learn the meaning of words. We are pulled to split our originally unified awareness into two parts: our own natural internal reference versus images of ourselves from external, sometimes hostile, points of view. Where do you suppose neuroses, self-hatred, and conflict originate? Much suffering comes from seeing ourselves through someone else’s eyes. If we receive a compliment, before long we fear losing that wonderful view of ourselves if our admirer becomes disillusioned. Whether with insults or compliments, outside voices lead us away from the untrammeled peacefulness of seeing existence through our own inner eyes.
As we mature, inputs pile up. Soon a myriad of desire/fear waveforms swirl through our consciousness. We believe these waves of fear and desire–induced by input from others–are who we truly are! We’re trapped in polarity.
What safeguards us from this inevitable phenomenon? Here’s a thought. When a wave of desire within us falls into the same time/space as a wave of fear within us, by the law of wave dynamics the two cancel one another. They vanish and leave us with a moment of lucidity. We see clearly and we are back to feeling like…. ourselves. This keeps us sane and healthy, even happy. But this feeling comes and goes. We don’t know why we have good days and bad ones.
Yet another safeguard can come into play. You go to the store to buy groceries. In front of the dates you want, a person stands staring at soft Medjools, fleshy Mazafatis and delicate Thoory dates, for no apparent reason. He seems hypnotized. You wait, politely, until finally you’re mad the idiot can’t decide which dates to choose. You yourself always know exactly what you want.
Finally, you walk up to him and say, “Excuse me, may I get in here please?” He turns and looks at you, and in that instant, your world suddenly crumbles, you witness a future, an eternal future, looking into those smiling eyes. You’ve just fallen in love.
Love underlies polarity. Suddenly, a conflict preventing the experience of love is canceled. Without knowing it, you define yourself as confident and fearless in one area, while in that same area another person has defined himself as fearful. The opposite is also true. Your new love is confident and creative in areas where you are cautious and fearful. When eyes meet, thanks to the loving magic of the universe, your polar waves of identity, without any conscious awareness, counterbalance another’s waves. If the cancellation is mutual, two souls are opened. Lucidity arrives for each and, depolarized, each is free to love what exists right there in front of him, instead of desiring a fantasized love he hopes will make him whole. A barrier of fear and forbidden desire between you and another person dissolves when prejudgment is stripped away. You have fallen back into natural love, original love, the source of everything.
Energy symbols make emotional transactions visually clear. Love is the state we all live in when we recognize definitions given by others are not who we truly are. We can free ourselves from those false identities we hold on to so tightly. We can disconnect old wounds from their influence over what we think and feel.
The painting above shows how identity waves reinforce or cancel one another. An orange serpent of fear shares contours with a yellow bird of hope, but fear outweighs hope. Random waves float left and right, untethered, lost in other shapes and forms. The painting depicts how we experience the mélange of convictions, feelings, emotions, longings, and fears we carry from past conditioning. The being in this painting has an inchoate self-identity largely shaped by others. He or she is unawakened.
When we suffer guilt, shame, or depression, we can ask, “Through whose eyes am I seeing myself?” We can step back from the immediacy of untoward emotions like those depicted in the painting above randomly bumping left and right. You can undo the hypnotic trance state of believing you are something defined by others. Your negative narrative is a hypnotic trance, after all, not something real.
Almost always, when you experience emotions we commonly identify as negative, you are outside yourself, looking at yourself with the eyes of others. To purge the eyes of others from your imagination, focus your own eyes on whatever is directly in front of you in the present, material world, not the imaginary world of fear and shame. Do this until you see through your own eyes. Consciously restore your view of yourself. To truly see through your own eyes transcends the judgments of others. You will notice that the dot of self, sheltered by balanced waves, resembles an eye. Our ‘self’ is how we see ourselves.
Above, the awakened figure in the center of the Last Supper in Energy Symbols is clearly different from the apostles. A white figure against a blue-grey background represents balanced polarity. The viewer sees an awakened soul. The apostles have colorful, attractive, and haphazard waves of identity representing their ideas of who they are. These waves of identity, in bright colors represent random intensities of fear and desire. Their colorful waves separate the apostles from the quiet grey energy universe they inhabit. Their strong egos result in a false conception of being alone and separate in the universe.
The awakened one has no colorful identity. The waves defining him symbolize perfect cancellation of fear with desire. The circle at the center resembles an opened eye, lucidity, and open spaciousness. Since the Christ figure has no identity, it is indistinguishable from the rest of the universe. He becomes the Universe. This is the awakened state of consciousness. This is our heritage from which we are increasingly separated as outside influences penetrate our consciousness. This is our destiny after we finally resolve the conflicts and confused ideas we are taught. The awakened Jesus said to onlookers, “You can do this and more.” He worked miracles not because he had supernatural powers, but because he empowered people to see their natural, universal selves. We are all the same when we shed the thick coating of desire, shame, guilt, and fear life incessantly sprays on us. We can realize our destiny is not to be Jeff Bezos, but to be rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, with rocks, and stones, and trees. We are the universe when we drop false concepts of ourselves. We know who we truly are when we know we are nothing—and everything—all at once.
I use a religious scene as a way of making visible the path to our own awakening, but I follow no religion. Awakening evolves when we stop identifying with what others say we are and allow pure, unpolarized awareness to emerge into our consciousness. We give up nothing–only our false concepts of who we are–in exchange for living as our universal and eternal selves.
© 2023 Ross Drago
