Looking Into The Nature Of Subtle Energy

There are many ways we can approach a discussion of subtle energy--i.e., of what it is, and what it isn't. One of the more relevant ways of doing so, in line with the central enquiry informing recent writings posted here, is to look at how the use of subtle energy plays a role in managing people.

How do leaders get the most out of those whom they are given to lead? How does management inspire the workforce? How do presidents mobilize the populace? And, in turn, how do parents and educators alike encourage the best in children? It can't just be a matter of supplying the requisite degree of gross energy, can it? It is not just a matter of feeding our children, of giving a paycheck to our employees, of providing safe communities for our citizens. Doesn't an effective leader, parent, manager, or educator use subtle energy to guide, inspire, and encourage others?

We will often see real leaders and educators employing the use of dreams and visions, purpose and meaning to inspire others to mobilize themselves. You don't just feed people and let them wander about in the desert of meaninglessness (postmodern nihilists or otherwise!). Rather, one can more effectively mobilize the energy of the gross realm if there is skill in how the energy of the subtle realm is dealt with. And mayI say that disregarding the energy of the subtle realm is never an option for the effective mobilizer of peoples--in fact, it can't even happen.

Hitler didn't mobilize the German people through dangling carrots of material wealth before their eyes as much as he mobilized them through the use of subtle energy (and obviously towards a very (self) destructive and inhumane end. Like the energy of a fire that can destroy a house or burn well-contained in a hearth to warm a house, subtle energy can serve various purposes, depending upon the designs and intents of those employing subtle energy to mobilize people. Advertisers use and employ subtle energy--in a sort of media-drenched voodoo--to mobilize the masses to pursue various products and services. Images and emotions rule in advertising (which is a point any marketing expert certainly understands).

Yet one cannot fix the power of an emotion or an image in space and time. It shows us just how directly the energy of the subtle realm can affect the energy of the gross realm: that a vision coupled with enough emotion can become a force that change the landscape of the material world.

There is no seeming substance to the energy of the subtle realm; it is not as fixed and solid... not as concrete... as the energy that becomes manifested in the gross realm. For example, a mere thought or idea does not appear to be as potent as the explosion of an atomic bomb as it sears across the landscape; yet, in truth, that thought or idea is far more powerful and potent--there is much more energy contained in that little, immaterial thought than is in the atomic bomb. If only because there is no bomb apart from that amourphous initial thought that sets the ball rolling in the gross realm.

It is perhaps why Ken Wilber has implored, time and time again, that the world cannot be transformed by focusing on material conditions alone; the gross realm is not where the answers lie. It is a change in consciousness (the subtle realm, if you will) that results in a transformed world: healing in the subtle realm = the eventual healing in the gross realm. In Wilber's own words, 'The revolution, as always, will come from the within and be embedded in the without.'*


*Wilber, Ken: Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (P. 197), Boston, MA: Shambhala, 1995.