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All human beings worship power. Where they differ is in their conceptions of power. There are many different ways to understand the nature of power and the source of power-and most importantly, in how to reach the underlying goal of possessing real power.

Many forms of power are illusory. In the world today, we are witnessing a major devolution of power. The old forms of power are dissolving, many apparent power centers are being unmasked as false fronts, or divided within themselves and therefore powerless, and in general, people are discovering that when they get what they thought would be a sense of power it turns out to have been a mirage.

We need to develop a unified field theory of power. Today, because of the fragmentation of the disciplines of scientific knowledge, there are many different theories of power that have not been integrated. The lack of coherence regarding the understanding of power has been a major block in the attainment of power. To a physicist, power means something very specific. To a politician, power means something else; while to a sociologist or culture theorist, something different from that. To a corporation director, it means something else again. To a military general, it has still another meaning; to a historian, yet another. And to a psychologist, power is understood in yet other terms.

To a Sat Yogi, a scientist of ultimate reality, all the above-named approaches to an adequate concept of power are limited. They must be integrated, synthesized, and transcended through a far more inclusive understanding that takes into consideration the widest conceptions of the nature of the real. If we do not factor into our search for power a deep understanding of the nature and potentialities of consciousness, of the relationship of psychic energy to physical energy, of the being of the intelligence that operates the forces of physical Nature, and that maintains the matrix of space and time, then our conception of power can only be a bad joke, a petty psychotic delusion. This is the unfortunate situation that many of the most seemingly powerful and power-hungry individuals and institutions are in today. It results in the instantiation of a karmic law: the more power of an illusory kind that is amassed, the more real power slips away.

Let us begin our understanding of the process of gaining real power with the following hypothesis: real power is good. The more real power we have, the better off we are. In the classical societies that preceded ours, this was openly accepted. The Supreme Being was recognized as being both All-Powerful and the Highest Good. But a break occurred with the advent of Christianity. Unlike the Old Testament God, who gained victory for Moses and the Israelites, enabling their liberation from Egypt and the conquest of the Promised Land, the God of Christ did not save His son from death on the cross. God was seen as no longer having that kind of power.

Church historians would say, of course, that we must take a longer view of the match: though the Romans killed the personal body of Christ, in the next round it was Christianity that took over the Roman Empire. And if the real battlefield of power is the collective field of human consciousness, then what shifted in the triumph of Christianity was a formal recognition that the power of love is in the end greater than the power of brute force.

But the match was still not over. The power of brute force has made a terrific comeback. The recognition of the power of love has again gone into eclipse, perhaps more deeply obscured than in the time of Jesus. When non-violent Buddhist monks petitioning for economic justice and political freedom are mowed down by a military regime in Myanmar, this becomes another object lesson in the nature of power.

Have the teachings of the world's religions been in vain? Are they a wishful delusion? Was Mao right that power comes from the barrel of a gun? If so, civilization is doomed. We shall destroy ourselves as a species and then no one shall have power. The suicidal logic of brute force has been revealed with utter concreteness in this historic moment when the major military establishments have their nuclear triggers cocked and ready for the final Armageddon that will eliminate from the face of the Earth all the current contestants for power. But the implications of this fact have not yet sunk deeply into human consciousness.

Let us return to the individual level of the analysis. Parents who have the responsibility of raising children generally understand that their job is to encourage the development of real power in the child. This is the purpose of education in general. On the psychological level, we know that real power is a function of self-control. Beginning with the attainment of control over excretory functions and motor capacities of the body, the growing child develops gradually more control over mental and emotional impulses. The ability to delay gratification, to concentrate the mind, to think abstractly, to visualize future goals, to strategize, to refine concepts, to understand other people, to engage in mutually beneficial relationships, all these abilities increase the individual's real power. At some point, the child consciously recognizes itself at a crossroad. The child can either indulge in fantasies of power or engage in the pursuit of real power, in which case its fantasies are put to use in a sublimated modality, and its desires are attained at a more mature and realistic level. The sacrifice of the illusory omnipotence of the infantile ego results in a gain at the level of real power.

However, if the understanding of power remains at the level of the desire for domination (often out of the fear of being dominated by others), then the growth of real power remains stunted. Just as some people never grow out of the illusion that power is a function of weakness, and therefore they seek to dominate others through helplessness and/or feeling victimized and guilt-tripping the people who are psychologically enmeshed with them; and others never outgrow the wish to be the object of desire for those they consider to be wielders of power, in order to seduce that power away from them; in the same way, the majority get stuck in the illusion that through rising in some social hierarchy (which may range from a couple or family system to a neighborhood gang to a sports team to a corporation or government), they will attain the holy grail of ultimate power. This immature conception of the nature of power-and of reality-results in an immature culture that promotes the very suicidal logic that is now subverting the potential of our species to survive.

The wager of a Sat Yogi is that another kind of power is possible to attain, through disciplined experimentation and inner transformation, one that has the capacity to alter the destiny of our planet and enable the restoration of our devastated environment. This is a kind of power that both Buddha and Christ were alluding to in their teachings, but which can be fleshed out more scientifically today, thanks to advances in the many contemporary fields of knowledge. It is indeed the eternal power of love, but also it involves much more than that: the power of wisdom that can harness the forces of Nature, and of the very matrix of time and space, in fact, the power to download and merge with the intelligence that is the creator of our entire universe. This is real power.

It is beyond the scope of this essay to explain the entire experimental protocol and paradigm of Sat Yoga. Suffice it to say that the power sought by a sat yogi is a continuation of the power search that starts the ego on its way through the world-beginning with a mastery of cultural meanings, through wide reading and encounters with the arts, the disciplines of every field of research, meetings with living intellectuals and masters of literature, music, philosophy, and inner development.

As the individual grows in real power, there is a concomitant humbling of the ego-a realization of how little one knows and can accomplish as an individual, and how vast the universes, both the physical and the symbolic. As real power and psychological security and self-esteem develop to the maximum, there is an increasing awareness of an even higher universe, beyond the grasp of the symbolic intelligence of the egoic mind. One realizes that every new stage of growth requires a sacrifice of the power gained at a lower stage. At some point, the individual recognizes the need to jettison the ego itself as an organizing principle, in order to ascend to the higher levels.

One likewise sees all too clearly that those who have remained stuck at the lower understanding of power as domination, egoic prestige, an abundance of sexual conquests and material possessions, may gain their dreams of greatness, but even then they are miserable. To the ego, no amount of money is enough. No amount of fame or status is sufficient. And the higher one climbs that fool's hill, the more enemies one makes, the harder becomes one's heart, the less rewarding are the rewards. Material success proves barren, ultimately pointless. One recognizes finally that one had merely been running away from oneself, living in a fantasy world to avoid the awareness of aging and mortality, the ego's impotence and sense of lack-in other words, living an inauthentic existence. And in the obsession to gain the delusions of power one has lost the only important things in life: real love, friendship, wisdom, the experience of life's sacred dimensions, the presence of God within.

There is always blowback from the efforts to gain egoic power. That is the law of karma. Because the ego is only a partial and contingent reality, its power is always at the expense of the whole. And therefore the whole will never permit egoic power to expand beyond an acceptable limit. Uncontrolled ego power is equivalent to a cancer in the body politic of the planetary consciousness. The cancer must be removed. The collective consciousness has antibodies to rid itself of cancerous cells, but if the cancer escapes detection for too long a period and grows beyond the power of the antibodies to destroy it, then the cancer will metastasize until it destroys the entire body. That is now occurring in the collective body of the human species. The problem cannot be solved at a political level. We must gain a new kind of power.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that the entire system of power relationships at every level is now breaking down. One byproduct of this chaos in human affairs is the breakdown of order in Nature as well. Global heating is causing a rise in sea levels that will destroy many of the world's great cities, as has already happened to New Orleans. The massive growth in the size and frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, and other cataclysmic geophysical phenomena, including earthquakes, tsunamis, wildfires, drought, and infectious diseases are also no coincidence, but a strong message coming from Nature of the karmic blowback that is only beginning.

Those who have awakened to this situation will seek a way out, but all ways out are blocked but one. The only exit is inward and upward. We must gain the higher ground of elevated consciousness. That is the way of Sat Yoga. We must begin by worshipping real power: the power of the Absolute. Unless we sacrifice all lesser forms of power to the one real power, our garden planet is doomed. And since taking care of this planet was and remains our karmic responsibility, we cannot absolve ourselves of the effort to save her from our own predations, to save the beauty of the natural world that was given to us as a gift and that we have ruined with our greed and arrogance. Only through unconditional surrender to the one real power, to the point of becoming willing instruments of that power, egoless servants of the real God, can our desired destiny be fulfilled.

We must learn again to worship Power. We must worship the true Power, not the false powers, and we must worship the one Power with all our heart, mind, and will. The final showdown between the one real power and all the false powers is about to begin. Every one of us must choose which side we are on. The blessing spoken repeatedly by the Jedi Knights in the film series Star Wars had it backwards. We should not pray, 'May the Force be with you,' but rather, 'May you be with the Force.' The Power is indeed within all of us. But we must choose to be loyal to the Power of God, rather than to the seductions of the ego.

Namaste,
Shunyamurti

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