Energy Games

This is a summary of the fifth insight, from James Redfield's "Celestine Prophecy"

We're supposed to get our daily energy from the Sun, not by taking it from other people.

1. Food is the first way of gaining energy, but the food must be appreciated.
2. After consciously eating and living, you become more sensitive and you learn to be energized socially and in other ways.
3. To be open to more options in your life, you must become aware and more conscious.
4. When you are living more consciously, you will begin to feel full - or fulfilled: a sensation of "enough."
5. When you appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of things, you are receiving energy and also giving energy to them.

Our enculturation teaches us to become disconnected from reality - the real source of energy - and then try to obtain what we need from others by controlling them to get their attention. This habit is always unconscious at first; the key to letting it go is to bring it fully into consciousness.

1. Your particular style of controlling others is one you learned in childhood that best gets others' attention, to get the energy moving your way.
2. Our parents and siblings operate(d) in a drama themselves, trying to pull energy out of us as children. We had to have a strategy to win energy back.
3. This style is something we repeat over and over again. It's called our unconscious control drama.
4. Each person must reinterpret their family experience and discover who they really are. Once we do this, we can go past these control dramas and see what is really happening.

We manipulate others for energy either by forcing people to pay attention to us, or by playing on people's sympathy or curiosity. There are four basic styles:

1. Aloof: in order to get energy coming your way, you withdraw and look mysterious and secretive. You hope that someone will be pulled into this drama and try to figure out what's going on with you. When someone does, you remain vague, forcing them to struggle, dig and try to discern your true feelings. As they do so, they give you their full attention. The longer you can keep them interested and mystified, the more energy you receive.
2. Interrogator: sets up a drama of asking questions and probing into another person's world with the specific purpose of finding something wrong - and then criticizing. If successful, the person being criticized finds himself becoming self-conscious around the interrogator and paying attention to what the interrogator is doing and thinking about, so as to avoid criticism. Interrogators pull you off your own path.
3. Intimidator: someone who threatens you, either verbally or physically. You are forced, for fear of something bad happening to you, to pay attention to them.
4. Poor-Me: someone who tells you all the horrible things that are already happening to them, implying perhaps that you are responsible, and that, if you refuse to help, these horrible things are going to continue. Someone around whom you feel guilty, even though you know there is no reason to feel that way. Everything they say and do puts you in a place where you have to defend against the idea the you're not doing enough for them.

People use different dramas for different situations, but most of us have one dominant control drama that we tend to repeat, depending on which one worked well with the members of our early family. We create new relationships with people who fit with our control style.

1. Interrogator parents tend to create aloof children. When someone continually asks you questions, only to find something wrong with your answers, you must get vague and distant, to try to say things that will get their attention, but not reveal enough to give them something to criticize.
2. Intimidators tend to create poor-me children or other intimidators. If someone is draining your energy by threatening you with physical, mental or emotional violence, being aloof doesn't work; you can't get them to give you energy by playing coy; you are forced to become more passive, and guilt-trip them about the harm they are doing. If this doesn't work, then as a child you endure until you are big enough to explode against the violence and fight aggression with aggression.
3. Aloof parents tend to create interrogator children. If you were a child and your family members were either not there or ignored you, playing aloof would not get their attention. You would have to resort to probing and prying and finally finding something wrong in these aloof people in order to force attention and energy.

Once we become conscious of our control drama (by reviewing our first family relationships), we can move beyond it to focus on the higher truth of who we are and the path we are on.

1. Look past the energy competition that existed in your family and search for the real reason you were there. Every human being, illustrates with her life how she thinks a human being is supposed to live.
2. Ask yourself what each of your parents stood for.
3. Each of us must try to discover what our parents taught us about this as well as what about their lives could have been done better.
4. What you would have changed about your parents is part of what you are working on in your life now - particularly in your relationships.
5. Every person begins their spiritual life in a position between their parents' truths. You were born to take a higher perspective on what they stood for. Your path is about discovering a truth that is a higher synthesis of what those two people believed.
6. If you look closely at all the things that have happened to you since birth, if you view your life as one story, you'll be able to see how you have been working on this question all along.