Within each of us is the capacity to feel deeply. Not only is this felt-sense applicable to emotions, it is directly related to how we sense the world around us.
In our western culture, we have a ‘consensus’ as my friend calls it, a collective, unspoken agreement that we are living in a visible world and that is pretty much the gist of it. Science, reason and proof rule our psyches—even as we have this unique, current challenge with facts and information. We are not in sync with the ‘feel’ of things. We are not in touch with our unseen, non-physical reality.
Oh, I know, many of you actually are. But as a whole, our western societies have an agreement that we don’t work with the unseen, unless we call it God and put it in an acceptable worship space. Other than that, the unseen is an uncivilized, untamed wilderness, and those that converse in that realm have been relegated to a dimension of disapproval. Or the uncivilized and/or uneducated. Or more simply, flat out weird.
Well my friends, things are shifting. Our world is opening up. Those of us that know what it is like, that actually live in this in-between world, now have a space to step out in ways that were, at the very least, not previously embraced. In fact, it’s quite necessary now to speak about this secret kinesis of things in order to bring us into the world of our dreams.
The ancient Athenians had a word for this communion with the unseen worlds. They referred to it as an act of touching and being touched by the mythic, the world beyond our human world. They called it aisthesis, which means ‘to breathe in.’ We actually do it quite naturally, this touching and being touched by the non-physical. The challenge of this process is that it is a non-thinking, non-linear part of us that knows this territory. This feel, this sensing, this touching and being touched back, is a listening and communion that is done through our heart. The gateway in is only through feel, and our minds definitely do not feel.
We get to this place by really seeing something, beyond its everyday familiarity to us, and allowing space for a response. When we actually make that connection—which could be with anything in our midst…a pencil, a pet or a tree—when we truly see a thing beyond our ordinary knowing of it, and create a thread or space for it to respond to us, we literally take a spontaneous breath. We open up. We actually breathe in the essence of this unseen relationship. Hence the term aisthesis, to breathe in.
The ancient Greeks had a society that made room for a deep knowing of the imaginal worlds inside of us, and the relationship between this inner world and our outer world. They gave space for the world beyond the human world. I suspect you reading this might know a thing or two about the unseen, imaginal or non-physical world. That world, to many that we encounter, is quite foreign, and often frightening. This was a very strange realization to me, since I’ve always had a relationship with my imaginal, unseen world. I simply don’t talk about it much, because it was not accepted readily in our society.
But things are changing fast. And it is ever important for us to be able to reach into this world and live here more and more, in these spaces in between this current world and the ‘world beyond this world’; the world of our imagination or dreams. It is from this world and in communion with this world that the impossible happens. It is from this world that we receive inspiration, ideas, dreams, intuition and guidance. All of these interactions just noted operate on different levels, but they are all part of the unseen. It is from our connection to this unseen world that we have the ability to create a new reality. When we do it en masse, then we create an entirely new world.
This space is where healing occurs. It is where miracles happen. This is where the Artist creates. It is where possibilities previously unimaginable suddenly pop into our conscious mind. It is the space where Einstein daydreamed, and where children disappear to when they get that far-off look in their eyes. We know this space. We only have to remember it, then breathe it in, and breathe it out into existence.