Journal of Sacred Work

Intuition is more important than IQ…I never discovered anything with my rational mind.  – Albert Einstein

Where attention goes, energy flows. – The Second Principle of Loving Care

    Einstein, the man with the wild hair and the brain of a genius. Einstein, the man who sticks his tongue out at us from this old photo. Einstein’s wisdom changed the understanding of energy in the world. His insights can help us focus on the direction of our human energy.

   We are born with a certain level of intuition. Education teaches us to use our rational capability to analyze problems. Now, along comes one of the greatest thinkers in history telling us to solve problems through intuition rather than through rationality – to stick our tongues out at traditional analytical problem solving.

   The great genius is appealing to us to do what is described in the remarkable book Blink. Relearn what we knew as small children. Trust the wisdom of our intuition. This doesn’t mean ignoring the facts. It means putting intuition in balance with rationality.

   Where attention goes, energy flows. More than a nice rhyme, this statement can change our lives. It can awaken us to the awareness of the energy flowing through us and how we might redirect it. Intuitively, we know that various kinds of powerful energy flow through us each day. We can attend to this energy or ignore it…   

  Imagine that you are driving to work and someone cuts you off. The energy of anger rises within you. How long will you allow that energy to dominate your life? A moment, a minute, an hour?  Subconsciously, you know that you are in charge of your thoughts and you wouldn’t want to yield this power to another – especially a stranger you can’t even see. Consciously, you are angry.

   Awareness of the principle of the value of your positive energy may enable you to shake your primitive retaliative response and convert that energy from negative to positive. A cognitive process may put you back in touch with the wisdom of your intuition and the problem of negative energy may begin to be resolved.

   Interested in opening the doors of your life to more positive energy? Let’s go one step further in this journey.   

   Consider the flow of positive and negative energy through you each day. If you are experiencing excessive stress, it may be that you are allowing certain forces to dominate your life. You can change that. Assume there is someone in your life you think of as an enemy. Every time you think of this person, you feel the poison of hostility rising within you, drop by drop. In a way, your thoughts are arming your enemy with toxins with which he or she is hurting you. The more you think of your enemy with hostility, the more poison flows through you.

   How do you change that energy? Martin Luther King, Jr. said that the only way to convert an enemy into a friend is through love. The short answer to cutting off the poison you are allowing your enemy to pour into you is by changing your thoughts to something more positive. But this may be a temporary solution. A deeper pathway is to re-think your idea of this person. He or she was once a baby who, like you, was born with the divine spark. This awareness does not require that you endorse this person’s behavior, but it does call us to remember the fundamental humanity of the other. For in the course of our anger, we may have begun to objectify our enemy, converting him or her from a person to an "it," a sort of devil, a thing.

   This is what national leaders do when they are seeking to awaken followers to war against alleged enemies. They objectify and simplify opponents into one-dimensional definitions. During WWII, Nazis objectified Jews as "rats." This enabled thousands of otherwise sane Germans to commit murder. After all, if the "other" is simply a "rat," killing wouldn’t be so bad, would it? Indeed, it would become a duty. For that matter, Americans objectified Germans and Japanese enemies with various ethnic and racial epithets, all with the goal of inciting enough hatred to justify killing.

   In a smaller, but still insidious way, this same process is used to objectify patients. This is what leads some caregivers to reduce human beings to "the gallbladder in 5028" or the "the frequent flier" entering the ER, or "the screamer" in the ICU.

   All of this is about converting the other to an "it." And this is what Martin Buber was talking about when he talked about the human passage from "I-it" to "I-thou," a personal transformation in which we see the other person holistically as someone with whom we relate at the most human level. This passage is central to living love. We need to move our energy to an awareness of the other from it to thou.

   In our day-to-day lives, we can dissolve the toxin of hatred by redirecting our energy into far more positive pathways. By consciously opening ourselves to the light of love, we can allow love’s energy to surge through us, driving away some of the darkness and dissolving hatred’s poison.

   This is why it is so important that we become present to this second principle. Where is your energy right now? Einstein tells us that E = mc2. More importantly, he tells us that the real answer is not in the formula on the blackboard but in our heart’s intuition.

   The human energy formula is: Love = our energy x God’s.

   So ask yourself this question many times across the day: where is my energy right now? As a caregiver, this single question may help you to re-energize your life by consciously invoking new patterns of positive thinking.

   This doesn’t mean you become Mary Poppins. It doesn’t mean you ignore suffering and sadness. It means you allow energy to bring you courage, light and compassion. It means you become a person who lives love.

-Erie Chapman