CONSCIOUSNESS AND SEARCH FOR THE AUTHENTIC SELF          The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)    When I was 39, in 1986, a very brief unexpected experience affected me most deeply, changing completely my priorities and my life.      Midlife Crisis        Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told to. Alan Keightley, Author In November 1985 I had migrated with my husband and two children, 8 and 10, to Sydney, Australia, to start a new life and continue a successful career as highly qualified and experienced town and regional planner. However, a few months later, my marriage broke up, while prospective employers kept telling me that I was overqualified unemployable without local experience. Disillusioned and broken, in severe midlife crisis, feeling marginalized for the very first time in my life, I could not trust anything any more that I had previously accepted as a cultural model for either personal or professional ‘success.’     To start my life from a scratch on the only aspect of myself that I could still trust, I needed to find the way to re-connect with my self-referenced Authentic Self.    Authentic Self    As a child I relied on and stood firmly for my wholesome inner orientation system, which allowed me to Know naturally the truth about myself, things, people and situations. My mother acknowledged the accuracy of my inherent Knowing by saying, “You must have been born knowing it all!” Since I was three years old I thought in response, “Everyone is born like that! You and other people have forgotten it by accepting to live up to other people’s expectations, while I don’t." (I still believe that.)   Without needing to learn by trial and error what was appropriate for me or not, my whole Being Knew it by my observation of and trust in my congruent emotions, intuition, sensations and thoughts that should but sum it all up, rather than come to me before all the rest of my Knowing. My parents’ love and my father’s unconditional support had saved my Authentic Self and inherent Knowing from an early suppression. Official education, however, which did not take into account at all how I felt, what I sensed, or what my real interests were, affected my inherent natural Knowing detrimentally, in spite of my vigilance to preserve it. As an adult I still had some flashes of that systemic, instant and appropriate Knowing, but couldn’t access it at will. During my midlife crisis the only light at the end of the tunnel was my Authentic Self and Her inherent, accurate Knowing - but I did not know how to reconnect with Her.       Looking for Help    I went to two free community counselors, yet each told me that I was intelligent enough and did not need to see them again. But on a meager sole parent’s pension I could not afford a private counselor. As a very skeptical person and an adamant atheist I did not believe in miracles at all, yet without having any idea how to pull myself by my boot straps, I thought metaphorically, “I need a miracle!” My first friend in Australia suggested that moving a crystal around my body could help me heal from all the overwhelming problems. Having come from an extended family with ten prominent, loving medical doctors in three generation, I had a firm belief that healing could only come from taking a physical substance into one's body or surgery, and felt really disappointed that my intelligent and highly educated friend could even consider such nonsense as waving a stone around one’s body to induce any change in it, let alone heal one’s huge, multifaceted psychological trauma like mine. Angry at whatever brainwash led him to such a belief, to win my argument against it and to save him from such a blatant superstition, I decided to debunk what was responsible for his delusion. The opportunity presented itself at the end of 1986 Confest at Bredbo, NSW, where a small fee covered all events, so I could attend a crystal healing workshop without additional expenses, to find out and expose the truth about surely a heavy mental manipulation to be presented there.      Crystal Healing Workshop      When we thought that we had all the answers, suddenly all the questions changed. Mario Benedetti (1920), Uruguayan writer    To my surprise, without telling us anything at all about crystal healing, the facilitator gave us each a crystal, asking us to observe our sensations as we would place it on various parts of our body. Then we would share our experience with the whole group.   I could not understand any of my experiences in this exercise:  - The amethyst cluster that I was given felt cold in my left, yet warm in my right hand, even though in high summer heat both my hands internally felt equally worm. How could this relatively big crystal change in an instant, while passing between my hands, several degrees of its own temperature back and forth, no matter how many times I moved it from one hand to another?! - As I put the crystal against the center of my forehead, a beautiful symphonic music that I had never heard before played deep within my head, without my ears being involved at all. If I removed the crystal from my forehead for a while, then put it back on, I would hear in my head another section of that same music, as though the concert went on in the crystal irrespective of whether I ‘listened’ to it or not by holding it on my forehead. I couldn’t hear any music when I placed the crystal on other parts of my body. How and why could I hear through my forehead when I only ears were naturally able to hear sounds?!  Other participants shared equally unique and puzzling experiences. I thought they had to be due to our individual sensitivity to something completely irrational in our subconscious, and did not believe the inanimate crystals would have had anything to do with it.    Without commenting, let alone explaining anything, the facilitator just thanked each person for sharing. That was the exact opposite of brainwashing – just being invited to explore the unknown by experience! I never heard of, let alone experienced such group learning, yet I appreciated it straight away, since I always preferred to find things out in my own way, rather than be taught or told what to think.   The facilitator’s genuine interest in and acceptance of each participant’s experience, no matter how strange it appeared even to our own selves, was soothing and healing to me. Compared to this type of learning, all my education that required students to understand the same ‘right’ against ‘wrong’ answers, was in fact a stressful brainwash. That insight made my animosity towards this workshop vanish, yet I remained skeptical, disbelieving the possibility of crystal healing.    Complementary Experience    It takes two to speak the truth - one to speak and another to hear.  Henry David Thoreau (1817-62), US Philosopher    Next, we were to work in pairs. One partner was to silently move a crystal for a few minutes at a small distance from the body of the other, who was to keep her/his eyes closed. We were to pay attention each one to our own sensations, then share our respective experiences, swap roles using the same crystal, and share again.   An unknown overweight woman who looked quite tense and uneasy, who was sitting next to me, became my partner. She laid down on her belly, while I started moving slowly the clear needle-shaped, one-point quartz crystal parallel to the axis of her body from head to toes. My crystal holding hand and wrist too sensed some very subtle force, like a thick air, as though opposing my hand’s movement above my partner’s occiput, between her shoulder blades and over her feet. Convinced that there was no such thing as mini zones of thick air, I felt annoyed at and dismissed as unreal whatever gave me that illusion. To prove to myself that the air was everywhere the same, I repeated the movement, firmly decided not to be prone any more to any illusion, since I was sane, not a delusional schizophrenic. To my growing annoyance, I still sensed the thick air over the same areas, only a bit weaker. I thought that it must have been my misperception, due to a memory of the previous run and the subconscious expectation to find it again. But since it was weaker, I thought that I could erase this stubborn memory by repeating the same movement a few times, and confirm that way to myself that my mind was normal and healthy.   It took me six runs to eradicate the last remnants of my sense of thick air. I was glad to have been able to prove to myself that the weird imaginary ‘force’ had never even existed. This was consistent with my science based education and its paradigm claiming that phenomena which cannot be consistently repeated are not real. I felt victorious over my initial delusional perception, glad that it could not last against my determined search for truth above all and knowing how to look for it.   Embarrassed about having wasted my time by fighting my twisted perception of something unreal, I did not feel like sharing my experience though.   I was highly surprised to see my partner get up looking happy and smiling broadly, eager to share first.  With sparkling eyes, she thanked me warmly for having made disappear -  • Her strong acute occipital headache, that she had since she woke up that morning, without knowing why  • A bad two years old chronic pain between her shoulder blades, that doctors could not explain nor relieve   • Strong aching in both her feet, from having worn tight new sandals the day before.        Insight                      You may drive out nature with a pitchfork, yet she'll be constantly running back. Horace (65-8 BC), Roman poet    My partner's sharing struck me as a lightning bolt out of the blue sky, and induced an instant paradigm shift: it indicated that I had, in fact, accurately sensed the subtle energy patterns around her body! The ‘thick’, stagnant air corresponded to her painful parts, and by sheer intention to thin them out I would have achieved not only that, but by the same token made disappear her acute and chronic pains, or known and unknown origin, that I did not even know existed! That threw away my firm belief in etiology and diagnosis as prerequisites for any healing! Talk about cracking my mind instantly and most gratefully open to the Unknown, and elated about using my hands to sense the energy patterns around the human body, and my mind to just intend to smooth them in order to heal in no time all kinds of pain!   I also realized that we could learn the full truth only by sharing honestly with each other our unique experience, that we could not understand each one on our own. Grasping the truth required our complementary sensations rather than finding them or any other data to be identical, as the reductionist science methodology required.   This woman’s sharing and my insight about the cooperative path to truth set me free from the big embarrassment about my sensations while moving the crystal above her body, so I happily shared it with her.   Also, my belief that it was worth listening only to someone more knowledgeable than me vanished. My partner was as ignorant as I was about the whole event which made her pains disappear, yet our sharing melted away my having held on pedestal high education as a rather stupid intellectual arrogance. Instead, I felt humble for the first time, and grateful for realizing that by openly sharing our respective lack of understanding and our simple sensory self-observation we could reach a clear and most valuable new understanding of a most significant natural healing process that can be available any time anywhere, provided people learn by experience about it and use it!   I had all those insights in a split of a second from hearing her sharing, and at the same time sensed a pleasant warm flow all through my body, which instantly made me feel much lighter, and greatly joyful about my mind and body being perfectly realigned, just as I needed them to be ever since I was a child. Fully alive again as my precious, whole, Authentic Self, I felt most grateful for having had my inherent, perfectly accurate sensory Knowing fully validated, and also for having become aware that I could access it easily whenever I wanted. Simultaneously, I felt a huge, several meters wide all around us, invisible, most benevolent Presence, as though smiling lovingly, totally supportive of me, happy for me having got it all correctly. Brought up not to be superstitious by believing as a little girl even in Santa Claus or fairies, let alone God, experiencing by my whole Being such Presence was the last thing I would have ever expected. However, I had no doubt whatsoever that this Presence was absolutely True, irrespective of my or any other person’s beliefs. My Knowing that became the cornerstone of my consequent unshakeable Faith based on my own experience rather than on any religion, teaching or tradition.   I felt happy beyond words, or anything I’d ever experienced before. For a long while I had difficulty finding out how to put it into any words, it felt ineffable. Eventually I found this metaphor to describe my state: Enveloped most lovingly by the palpable yet invisible Presence, I felt as though I was at one and the same time the unheard, silent most beautiful symphonic music, its composer, the orchestra playing it, its each member as an excellent, wholesome, sensitive individual player, its great director, and the large delighted and grateful audience. That experience remains the most exquisite one I ever had, and just remembering it makes me complete, wholesome, looked after by unconditionally loving and Guiding me Universal intelligence, and overall happier than with anything else.    In few moments before my partner and I swapped roles, my whole body-mind- energy Being processed this experience and its huge implications without any need for words, at the speed of light, giving me a major insight that the whole of Reality. Contrary to what I was made to believe up till then by matter-only-matters parents, education, science and culture, actually consisted of closely and for healing purposes most significantly inter-related subtle energy patterns and mater, including human body.       Sensory Intelligence     I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I've felt it. Igor Feodorovich Stravinsky (1882-1971), Russian composer    This experience indicated that I’ve never even lost the sensory basis of my natural Knowing. My education and conditioning would have only made me lose trust in my sensory intelligence, because Western mainstream culture was based on suppressing body sensations in the name of doing the ‘right’ thing irrespective of how one might feel in and of oneself. That suppression of one’s natural self-referencing would have provided the corner stone for the hierarchical social structure too, that relays on masses following the authorities’ standards and knowledge.   The reductionist hard science has contributed to that structure by excommunicating for a few centuries the subjective intuitive and sensory based Knowing, deemed unreliable because it is unique par excellence, and accepting only the ‘objective’ measuring as more reliable than the human body – as though the materialistic scientists did not interpret all data according to their own subjective bias!   From the first day at school I had a sensory, emotional and mental awareness of the incompleteness of the Western reductionist paradigm, practically ruling out my natural Knowing. Even though I aimed at maintaining it, by the time I had midlife crisis I believed that I had lost it. To reconnect with it I thought that I needed to find the way beyond any cultural conditioning, including especially the Western scientific epistemology. Therefore I was amazed that the intellectual in me had displayed during the first part of our exercise such a dogmatic pseudo-scientific attitude. But I was glad that I have identified that inadequacy in myself as part of the ‘Trojan horse’ that got me into this crisis, and I let it go. From then on I decided to explore the energy phenomena by my senses and with a much more open mind than my high Western education allowed for.               Energy-Matter-Psyche    Normal day, let me be aware of the treasure you are.  Let me learn from you, love you, bless you before you depart.  Let me not pass you by in quest of some rare and perfect tomorrow.    Mary Jean Iron    Since my partner’s energy patterns appeared to be the subtle expression of her painful parts and heavy mood, and me changing energy field around her painful body parts induced in a few minutes the relief that medical doctors and their science could not achieve in two years, it seemed that her physical body, its physiology and her psyche would have had the mutually causal relationship with the subtle energy patterns which I sensed around her body Also, I’ve sensed a strong warm energy flow all through my body the very instant I heard her validating my sensory experience, which instantly cleared my mind and healed my negative emotions. Thus is appeared that sensory-physical-physiological, emotional and mental aspects in both of us were tightly correlated with energy patterns and their dynamics..  We had each sensed my partner’s energy, her as body pains, me as sensations in my hand and wrist from their surroundings. Since everyone had some sensations, it would indicate that all humans would have been naturally sensitive to the subtle energy aspect of Reality, without needing any ‘sixth’ sense to register it. If so, the only real issue would have been that certain cultures denied and/or suppressed people’s awareness, understanding, honoring and using their full sensory perception in their search for truth.   I never doubted the reality of the psycho-somatic link. In fact, I thought, on the basis of plain everyday observation of people’s facial expressions and body language, that denying it was nonsense. And yet, paradoxically, without anyone ever having tried to prove that a split between the mind and the living body was even remotely possible, the medical science was based on the assumption that body could be treated on its own. It seemed that presumably objective mater-only- based science had solidified the Western cultural denial of the energy aspect of reality, and that missing link would have precluded the rational explanation and full acceptance of the natural, most obvious mind-body correlation.   It appeared that grasping the truth about the energy-mind-emotions-sensations-body relationship had brought me a healing relief in all kind of senses, and made me function as a whole Being, which was exactly how I used to experience my Authentic Self early on. That would have been the way to heal and function according to the Natural Design of living human Beings, which I considered and happily experienced yet again the most desirable way to Be.  If there was a distinct energy field around and in our bodies, then quite likely the whole of Reality could have consisted of energy as much as of matter. I knew that Einstein had proved the energy-matter correlation theoretically, but it still did not filter down to everyone and certainly not to my own awareness for any practical purposes up till this time. At the time I was unaware of quantum physics too. Nor did I personally come across anyone who would have had an ongoing awareness of the subtle reality or its possible healing uses in their everyday life. It was not surprising either, since the conventional medicine, based on reductionist science, seemed either unaware or in denial of the energy reality and its potential for healing.    This experience made me fully aware of the energy reality and of its crucial natural role in healing, and for understanding life in general. Cultural denial of the energy reality and its importance looked to me like trying to run a marathon of life by using only one half of human body and mind, and only one out of two healthy feet and legs. Thinking, “No wonder humans have countless ongoing, unsolvable problems, while they ignore the whole half of energy Reality! About time to shift paradigm, to embrace our energy-material wholeness” as this experience shifted mine. Therefore II decided firmly to keep exploring experientially the energy aspect of reality and its interaction with human mind and body by self-healing, and helping other people heal. Ever since, it remained the main focus in my private and professional life. By keen observation of my own and other people’s energy and by cross-connecting it with each one’s other aspect and relationships and events in our lives, my assumptions about the significance of energy awareness and its potential in healing kept being confirmed. In the mid1990s I studied several modalities of natural or complementary healing in order to complement my inherent ability to read and heal the energy blueprint of all inter-related aspects of our being – physical, physiological, emotional, mental, intuitive, spiritual, and energetic. In last few decades, the mainstream society, including an increasing number of the medical practitioners, has grown to accept, appreciate and use the energy awareness and energy healing to deal with all kind of issues and conditions. There are also many energy field imaging devices. Different colors indicate different energy blueprint qualities and their manifestation in material reality.       computerized whole body aura photo