This is What I Mean When I Say “Higher Energy”
There is a whole world out there that we can feel but cannot touch or see. It is made of energy that is far more powerful than our cars, our houses, our jobs and our bank accounts. One kind of energy splits the atom, but there is another variety that we sometimes encounter when we pray, meditate, have a near-death experience, or sit at the deathbed of a loved one. It feels a little like love and something like peace, and it might be accompanied by a sensation of floating or tingling. Here I refer to it as higher energy, but it is known by many names—bliss, enlightenment, grace, higher consciousness, even heaven. The idea is so broad that one ancient Indian philosophy simply calls it “That.”
The first time I felt it for more than a minute or two, was when I fell in love in college. Until that day, New York seemed dirty and loud and I experienced her people as short tempered and unpredictable. Walking to class, I avoided the homeless lady a half block from my dorm, as if her existence cast a shadow on my own. My nineteen year old egomaniac self wondered how I could live in a world where people slept on the street, without running water or blankets in winter? Poor them and poor me for seeing them.
Then I met a guy and he was so nice to me and I was so nice to him that we were able to create a space around us where we were our authentic and vulnerable selves and, suddenly, the whole world looked new and felt different. I felt light walking down the street, as if I were floating. It felt as if I could share that feeling with others rather than judging them for not having it. The homeless woman on the corner had beautiful eyes I noticed and her smile seemed to share contentment, which was believable. She was fully human to me in a way she had not been. Because I was feeling my own humanity, I got to feel hers, rather than being scared of her because she lived differently from how I did. I didn’t need to cut myself from the woman because my good feeling was coming from inside me, from that safety and trust in the love relationship. I went from very much disliking Barnard College and New York City to loving them both and from hating my Freshman English teacher for giving me a D+ on my first paper to scheduling an appointment with him so that I could learn how to write an analytic paper.
To touch on higher energy is similar to reaching out of one’s canoe and touching the pads of your fingers to the surface of a lake. Only the fingers touch the water, but somehow we can feel the expanse of the lake and we can feel it far more broadly than that.
