Defy Your Limits

by Sean McNamara

  Tension, Relaxation, and the Flow of Energy

  Imagine a garden hose. When you bend it enough, it prevents the water from flowing through it, and pressure accumulates. When you release it, the bend disappears and the water flows freely through the rest of the hose, dissipating the pressure. This describes the relationship between your mind, body, and energy.

  If your mind is filled with stress, pressure, and judgement, or if it’s distracted, multi-tasked, or racing with thoughts, it’s in a state of tension. This prevents the flow of energy. Because a person’s state of mind is mirrored in his or her body, if the mind is tense, then the body will be tense as well. If the body is tense, then that prevents the flow of energy.

  During your training sessions, you will need to cultivate both a relaxed mind and body. Fortunately, it’s easier than some would assume. The beauty of the body and mind is that they are in relationship to each other. Instead of trying to relax a tense mind by working on the mind, you would direct your intention to relaxing the body.

  Do you notice how people breathe when they’re angry, upset, or scared? You’ll see their shoulders rising up and down, and in some you’ll also notice their necks straining with every breath. Meanwhile their stomachs are frozen, unmoving. Now think of how babies breathe while they’re safely and happily sleeping in their cribs.

  Their tummies resemble little balloons, inflating and deflating with every inhale and exhale. Experienced meditators breathe the same way while in their seated meditation posture. This is how most people breath when they’re deeply relaxed and content.

  Meditators know that if they want to relax their minds, they can do so by first relaxing the body. To relax the body, they breathe in a relaxing way. This is why we use the Mind-Stopping Breath technique. It promotes the flow of energy toward anything you place your attention on. In our case, we place it on the object.

  Energy – What Are We Referring To?

  Let’s review some basic facts about the human body, facts that even children are aware of. The body has various networks running through it which accomplish different tasks. We have our cardiovascular system, comprised of the heart and the circulatory system. This system is so obvious that we can see the veins under our own skin.

  We also have a nervous system, which includes the brain, the spinal cord, and the network of nerves that spread throughout the body. There are different kinds of nerves, performing different functions. Some stimulate muscles, others transmit pain. Others tell the brain where our body and limbs are positioned in the surrounding space.

  Information is sent along this system through the use of electricity and chemical structures like hormones. The long strands of nerve tissue in the spinal cord can be easily seen, for instance during spinal surgery. Yet the nervous structures and connections inside the brain itself are far more difficult to discern without the assistance of microscopes and scanning technologies.

  We now know that the heart and brain both emit electromagnetic fields. Other producers of electromagnetic fields include our planet, thunderstorms, your microwave, the sun, and every electrical outlet in your house. They’re everywhere. For the most part, they are measureable with technology, but invisible to the naked eye.

  We should remain open to the possibility that there are other types of electromagnetic fields that we haven’t learned to measure with instruments yet. Like electromagnetic fields, the subtle energy system of the body is also invisible to the naked eye. Some people claim to see it, and this is what has generally been referred to as the “aura.”

  Highly refined systems such as Chinese medicine and acupuncture have mapped out how this subtle energy flows through the body, similarly to the cardiovascular and nervous systems. These modalities have been in development for thousands of years.

  Anyone who doesn’t believe in subtle energy is probably unaware of its use in other parts of the world. In the early and mid 1900’s, the Chinese government promoted the widespread use of acupuncture because of its efficacy and its affordability in treating many types of illness. They built hospitals and research facilities specifically to employ and further develop this healing modality. Today, acupuncture has spread across the world.

  The Chinese word for energy is “chi”. The Sanskrit word for it is “prana.” Both of these terms have entered into normal use outside of Asia, accompanying the spread of martial arts and yoga. One way or another, subtle energy has been a very real part of life for thousands of generations across the planet. It’s not some unproven New Age belief, as some still think.

  The topics of exactly how subtle energy flows through the body, the various types of energy and their relationship to our greater consciousness are beyond the scope of this book. There are various theories of what this energy actually is, but there still is no generally accepted consensus. Regardless, those who have learned to use it and those who have experienced its healing power all agree that it’s real, and it works.

  I won’t rely on exotic language for this telekinesis training method, so I refer to the phenomena of chi and prana by the English word “energy.” Electricity and heat are also forms of energy, as indeed everything we call “matter” is composed of energy. When I use the word energy however, I am not referring to those other types, only to the subtle force that flows inside our bodies and all around us.

  The earlier exercise Energy Follows Attention has already given you a direct experience of feeling the energy in your body.

  Invisible Mechanism, Observable Effect

  When you use your cell phone, or when you stream a movie onto your laptop via wireless connection, can you see the signal? No, of course you can’t. But you know with full confidence that if conditions are right, like having a charged battery, and if you take the proper action, like pushing the correct buttons, that you will achieve the desired effect, the transfer of information.

  It is the same with telekinesis. For all four levels, your task is to create the right conditions, such as relaxing your body and quieting the mind, and to take proper action, such as directing your attention and intention toward the object. During the many hours I have spent practicing telekinesis, I have never felt a physical connection between my body and the object. Even though I have felt a variety of sensations inside parts of my body, no reliable pattern energy felt outside my body has emerged.

  In this type of telekinesis, you do the technique, but you can’t see or feel anything reaching out across space and touch the object. You can only wait, applying the mental and physical instructions, until the object moves.

  When you become proficient at the breathing technique, you will be able to affect the direction and speed of the object, which will give you more confidence in the telekinetic effect. At that level, though, you still will not feel any kind of physical link with the object. This can be a difficult concept for some to accept.

  It’s like going fishing in a strange parallel universe where some of the rules have changed. You have your pole, and there’s a fish in the water. Yet you have no fishing line. You simply sit there working with your mind according to the instructions. The fishing pole is like your body. When your mind and your pole are just right, a fish will jump out of the water and land at your feet – no fishing line involved.

  Lest the fishing analogy strikes you as unreasonable, remember that you go through a similar process every time you make a phone call, watch TV, open a garage door, have an X-Ray, send a text, wave your hand in front of a paper towel dispenser, and so on. Something is being transmitted, you just can’t feel the transmission itself.

  Interconnectedness

  Telekinesis is neither miracle nor magic. There is a mechanism behind it which is still largely unknown. Even though people know how to actualize the telekinetic effect, and we theorize the involvement of subtle energy, we don’t know all the intricate details of what happens.

  If someone calls it a miracle, it is only because they don’t understand it. For our purposes, we can assume that it has its place
in our universe, this place where everything in it derives its identity from its relationship to everything else. We are all interconnected on many levels.

  If you could shrink yourself to the size of a skin cell, you would witness a constant exchange of chemical compounds and microbes entering and leaving the body, transported by air, temperature, and moisture.

  When you are in conversation with someone, who you are changes as you gain new and different information from that person. Some of that information is verbal. You also subconsciously receive and transmit information through physical cues, how you hold and move your body. We also gain information about other people and our world through our sense of smell, taste, hearing, and touch.

  Many people are aware that they can gain information intuitively, in ways that don’t depend on the five physical senses. A mother can just know that something is wrong with her child, either one room, one mile, or one country away. People can have dreams that hint at or directly show an event yet to come into their lives.

  The sun’s electromagnetic field affects that of the earth, and the effect ripples into our atmosphere, reaching all the way into our bodies.

  It will be useful for you to contemplate the various ways that we share connections and affect each other. Think of it as the transmission of information. Science has already shown that physical matter is mostly composed of empty space. Even what we used to regard as subatomic particles, when looked at more closely, resemble brief events more than they do things.

  As you continue your telekinesis training, consider that you may simply be sending information across a short distance, altering the behavior of the object. An even more provocative hypothesis would be that you’re affecting the information in your entire environment.

  It’s almost as if you’re re-programming your experience of the object and its relationship to the table it’s resting on, its relationship to the room you’re in, and especially its relationship to you. This idea may not bring us much closer to proving how telekinesis works, but it will help to pull telekinesis out of the realm of hocus pocus and abracadabra.

  How Physical Perception Separates Us from Reality

  There are neuroscientists today who say that the brain operates as a filter, or an input reducer. It receives information via the physical senses, then sorts, labels, and organizes that data, finally delivering a greatly reduced package of experience to our waking consciousness.

  Much of the leftover information is kept elsewhere, what some call our subconscious mind. We know that what we receive through our eyes, ears, nose, tongue, and skin isn’t everything there is out there.

  If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it still make a sound?

  The answer is “no”, because sound is something that requires an eardrum and a brain in order to manifest in one’s experience. When a tree falls, waves are sent through the air. If someone is in the area, those waves will enter the ears. They will stimulate these organs to transmit information to the brain through the nervous system, which will then convert it into what you call “sound”.

  If a brain and eardrum are absent, so is sound.

  It’s the same with your eyes. Color doesn’t exist out there, it’s something your brain produces for you when particular wavelengths enter the organ of your eye, sending information through the optical nerve to the brain. The actual process is far more complex than that, but I’m sure you understand the point.

  We can only see a limited section of the full electromagnetic spectrum. If the frequency of the waves is outside those limits, our eyes don’t perceive them.

  There is so much happening inside and outside of us that we just can’t perceive. When you look out at your world, all you’re really seeing is a translation of those few signals which our physical organs are capable of registering.

  What you see, hear, taste, touch and smell is not that different from what the screen on your cell phone presents you with. The real world out there is composed of innumerable wavelengths and brief events in space, all transmitting more information than our human personality can handle in one moment.

  Wouldn’t you agree that the more we learn about reality, the less impossible phenomena like telekinesis seem to be?

  Our Minds Are Not Entirely Our Own

  Language is a significant factor in how our brain filters and sorts our experience. Because we learned language from our parents, we automatically absorbed their points of view on religion, politics, interpersonal relationships, history, ethics. We also absorbed their beliefs about what is, and isn’t, real. This is why the beliefs and attitudes of our species change so slowly.

  A novel thought is a rare thing. When we think, we usually recycle ideas adopted from other people. Along with that, we choose our communities by how much our inherited thoughts match those of other group members. This is how we, as adults, seek out religious groups, social circles, and careers.

  In a strange way, then, if you’re the black sheep in the family who is interested in the paranormal, metaphysics, or non-religious spirituality, some part of your psyche may feel threatened, even if most of you is on board with this material. Deep down inside, we fear rejection by our communities. It’s a survival instinct, because being part of a community has always been the best guarantor of a long life.

  You are an intelligent being capable of free will. When you hear the contradictory opinions and proclamations of your parents, teachers and friends in the back of your mind, disguised as your own thoughts, know that they are not.

  Telekinesis, like other psi phenomena, is your opportunity to see and do things that aren’t even possible in other people’s version of reality. Telekinesis is a special way for you to obtain unique information about the world. This will help you become your own person, with your own ideas, rather than remaining a duplicate of someone else’s social programming.

  This is possible not because of the telekinesis itself, but because this training is a vehicle for learning to be open to the unknown.

  We Have Two Minds

  We are still establishing mental models here, ideas which provide a framework that we can operate from. The mind is defined, dissected, and analyzed in many ways by neuroscience, psychology, transpersonal psychology, parapsychology, physics, metaphysics, religion, and spirituality. For the purpose of telekinesis training, we will regard the mind in yet a different way.

  Let us divide the mind into two types. One is the conceptual mind, the thinking mind. We experience this when we’re speaking with someone, writing an email message, forming opinions, engaging in problem solving, and when we’re daydreaming.

  The other type is the nonconceptual mind, the one which operates without words and without logical structure. Compared to the conceptual mind, we could say this is the silent mind. We experience it especially during meditation, on the boundary of being asleep and awake, and in moments of grace and awe. Let’s establish that the mental factors of attention and intention live here, in the silent mind.

  Both types are usually simultaneously present throughout our waking experience. They work together to produce our experience of being conscious and alive in these bodies. For example, you may be with a friend when a craving for coffee arises in your mind. Your thinking mind structures the words, which you say aloud to your friend, “Want to go get a cup of coffee?”

  Just before uttering those words, and after the craving arose, you decided to invite your friend to coffee. Before your mouth, tongue, and vocal chords began producing language, there arose the silent, invisible intention to speak. It was an ultra-fast event in your mind. It came and went without you ever noticing it.

  During each Level Three and Four training session, you will practice isolating and prolonging that usually brief experience of intention. You’ll see that the noisy thinking mind can rob your intention of potency.

  Let’s return to the idiom of the boiling pot. It’s an image which applies to both intention and attention. Visualize yourself sta
nding at your kitchen stove, and the pot of water is resting on a burner. Your goal is to boil the water. When your attention and intention are in effect, the pot remains on the burner, absorbing the necessary heat to boil the water.

  Yet every time you get distracted, or your mind gets flooded with thoughts and emotions, you lift the pot off the burner. When that happens, it loses the accumulated heat and it’s not until your mind settles and re-establishes a steady attention and intention that you set the pot back on the burner. Our two minds, left unmanaged, work against each other during telekinesis.

  Keep in mind that this isn’t a “right or wrong” type of activity. It’s something that comes naturally over time. The more time you spend in training, the more familiar you’ll become with these subtle aspects of mind at an experiential level. Over time, your intention and attention will become steady enough to actualize the telekinetic effect.