I decided to rename the “Newsletter” to be “Love-letter” instead, for the simple reason that there is no new(s) in my writings. I am dedicated to practical learning about the human mystery and hence most of my thoughts are related to discoveries known to a man already for many centuries, if not for millennia. However, they have not had the opportunity to be popular and widely known. Also, today this knowledge does not reach the understanding of the listener and people choose to not know much about why they are born or what the hell they are supposed to do here. Topics that are perfectly possible to answer for each individual and which would raise one’s life out of the mediocre dreams that we are busy catching. Love-letter means that this is my way of sharing my love for life and I hope that this helps to nurture your desire to become curious about yourself as a magical being of the universe.
So what exactly do I mean when I use the words mystery or magical being. Starting from a more standard touchpoint - power. Do you want to have power? Today many would answer "No" as the main association is to have power over other people, to be the ruler or even dictator. But power has many faces. Some of them are very popular today, like financial power, and everyone has their own favorite skill-power: the power to sing, the power to program, the power to understand the law, the power to be a parent, etc. These are all different forms of power a person can have.
If I ask you again - do you want the power of some form? If you still answer "No" then I either did a lousy job explaining what I mean by power or you should not be reading my love letters as you clearly have passed the stage in evolution where I can be of value. Indeed, in every ability you wish to grow, you are looking to have more power. If I want to become a better home chef then this means that I want to increase my power to work with food. If I want to be better at dancing then I am increasing my power of dancing skills.
Power of leadership, power of politics, power of academic degrees, and physical power (power of your own body) are in the same way different aspects of power like the power of friendship, power of writing, or speaking in Spanish. The etymology of power shows that it is an alteration of the Latin word posse which means ‘be able’. Wanting to increase any of your abilities means wanting more power. I hope that you are now more interested in power.
Personal power
As power denotes general power then I am denoting the power a person has in a form of any ability as Personal Power. The level of Personal Power you have is the sum total of all your abilities in all areas of life. If you gain in abilities then you also gain in personal power and same way if you do not use some ability then you also start losing personal power.
It is not difficult to see that any ability is dependent on your personal experience of doing something. If I have the ability to do electrical work at the house then this means I have experience in doing it. The more experience you have in using your ability the more personal power you have in that topic. If you want to increase your personal power then you need to get more experience which also means you need to practice it.
Now you might be thinking that if I can read the instruction manual then I still have the ability to do electrical work even when I had zero experience with electricity before. Notice that without the manual you are still powerless and in the direct sense of the term you do not have the power of doing electrical work but what you might have is the ability to do work according to the written instruction manual. This is also an ability but a different one. Not everyone can pick a manual and do the work, it is a skill on its own and hence if you can, then you have this type of personal power that you have acquired through previous experience in following written instructions.
Ok, what about the case when you have never read any manuals before, and then you pick one, read it, and then are able to perform the action. This is an indication of yet another skill, and that is the skill of learning. Very beneficial skill indeed and generates a lot of personal power every time it is put into use.
Information vs knowledge
Let's define information - any theoretical explanation of something. The manual you read contains information. This love letter for you contains information. If you meet your friend and he will explain to you how he is doing pancakes then this is also information. Youtube, google, etc. All about information. Information is not power but it is potential for power. Hence it is still important for us. Information makes it possible for us to get the theory which you then can put into practice and grow your abilities. Once you have put something into use and you have your personal experience then you call this Knowledge.
Knowledge means that you have personal experience in the subject matter. From here it follows that the process of increasing your level of power is to take information, put this into practice, and get your own experience which gives you an (increased) ability to do something. An interesting aspect arises from here - no one can give you the knowledge and personal power. Regardless of how much power the other person has on that topic, he or she cannot simply give it to you. Passing power to another person means that it transforms back into information - a potential for power. Each of us has to fight for his own personal power and others can at best point out what is the best way of doing it.
What is learning?
Learning is tightly connected to increasing your abilities as you might have noticed. It involves understanding the theory - information - and then using it by putting the theory into practice. It is also interesting to note that some things we can do but we cannot explain how exactly we are doing them. You can walk but it is almost impossible to explain what muscles and in which order should be tensed and relaxed. This means that you can also learn without understanding! Sometimes the understanding comes way later than the ability itself.
What exactly happens when you try something that you have not done before? You are entering the unknown in terms of the experience of this type. How to work with the unknown I have shared in this letter but a brief recapping is that for the unknown we are using one of our features which is super under-valued - our feelings (not emotions), our gut feel, our ability to work with irrationality. Again a power on its own. Are we teachings this in schools already?
Once you try the unknown then through your experience some of it becomes known to you, your small bite of personal power is taken and the ability starts to grow. I am learning to play drums and for starters, this is quite unknown to me but not completely as I have seen others play them many times.
First I watched a video on how to tune a snare drum. I got the information and then I tried it out myself. For that, I used my feeling to match my actions to the feeling I got when watching a video. This step of comparing the feeling I got from the video to the one I get from my practical tryout, is often overlooked. If I am not good at working with such use of feelings then learning for me must and will be difficult.
Now our process of increasing our personal power looks like this:
Information = potential knowledge = unknown for us -> using your feeling you put it into practice -> personal experience = knowledge = new personal power.
Perception
I bring here another term and that is perception. In Latin percipere ‘seize, understand’, coming from per- ‘entirely’ + capere ‘take’, ie. decisively taking in entirely in order to understand. We perceive the world through our organism. When we learn something then it means that we are changing the perception. Coming back to the drumming example: when I learn to hold the drumstick, then this means that my perception of this action changes. I did not know how to align such a perception before and now I am learning this new alignment. I understand that this is a bland statement but bear with me as this adds another dimension to our power generator.
Information transforms into a personal experience by practicing a new alignment of perception. Hence you can also state that personal power is the product of perception. This small secret, which is not even a secret, changes the whole concept of increasing our personal power. It follows from there that the most efficient and effective way of gaining power is to learn to align all possible new perceptions. Each perception illuminates one aspect of our awareness.
The saying that I want to materialize my full potential means that I want to be able to perceive my awareness in its fullness, aka achieving a Total Awareness = Total Personal Power.
There are many ways to explore your potential and therefore have more power. The most common way is to learn new skills constantly. Of course, if you have the skill of writing a book then you have the power to be an author of a book and this opens up next opportunities. However, there is also a more direct way of generating more personal power and if you did not already guess it then this is learning about yourself. This is the shortcut to becoming a powerful being in this magnificent universe.
May the force be with you ;-)
Rein
This is our monthly letter to share our views and understanding of what is happening around us, complemented with photos by Anu Martinson. If this speaks to you, hit the Subscribe button to be among the first ones to receive the fresh letter in your inbox. If you got interested in what is this journey, find us on social media or just click the chat button.