The Unseen Forces Within Us

The Unseen Forces Within Us

Reflections on Manly P. Hall, Stillness, Self-Awareness, and the Inner Life

Reading Manly P. Hall's Unseen Forces has made me think about something I have been observing for a long time: how much of human life is shaped by things we cannot immediately see.

Hall was writing in the language of esoteric philosophy. He talked about elemental beings, thought forms, astral forces, ghosts, and the "Dweller on the Threshold." I don't necessarily have to accept every one of these ideas literally to find something meaningful in what he was asking.

For me, the more interesting question is this:

What unseen forces are shaping the way we live?

We tend to think of forces as something physical. We can see a strong wind moving through the trees. We can see water flowing down a river. We can see a machine operating.

But there are other forces that are much harder to see.

A thought can be a force.

A fear can be a force.

A habit can be a force.

A memory can be a force.

A desire can be a force.

And so can the culture surrounding us.

The Invisible World Around Us

Hall begins Unseen Forces by talking about nature and the elements. He describes earth, water, fire, and air through the language of elemental beings.

What interests me is not whether I can prove that these beings exist.

What interests me is the larger idea that nature contains processes and relationships that are operating whether we notice them or not.

That idea feels very relevant to the way I think about ecology.

A forest is doing something long before we arrive to study it.

The soil is alive with relationships.

Water moves through the landscape.

Seeds respond to conditions.

Plants communicate chemically.

Animals respond to one another and to their surroundings.

Human beings enter this system; we do not create it.

That realization requires a certain humility.

We live in a culture that often gives us the impression that everything exists for us to use, purchase, manipulate, improve, or consume.

Hall's older language gives me another way of looking at the world.

Perhaps we should sometimes stop trying to control everything long enough to observe what is already happening.

That brings me to stillness.

Stillness Is Not Doing Nothing

I have become increasingly interested in the difference between stillness and simply being inactive.

Stillness is not emptiness.

It is not laziness.

It is not withdrawal from life.

Stillness can be a form of attention.

When I become still, I can begin to notice things that are normally drowned out by activity.

I can notice my own thoughts.

I can notice how quickly my mind moves.

I can notice desires that I did not realize were there.

I can notice when I am reacting instead of responding.

I can notice how much of what I think I want may have been placed there by someone else.

That last part is particularly important to me.

Because we live in an extraordinarily commercialized culture.

The Commercialization of the Inner Life

We are constantly being told what we should want.

What we should wear.

What we should eat.

Where we should travel.

What we should look like.

What kind of house we should have.

What kind of car we should drive.

What we should be afraid of.

What we should aspire to.

Even aging has become something that we are encouraged to purchase our way out of.

There is always another product, another treatment, another experience, another subscription, another upgrade.

The message is often subtle:

You are not quite enough as you are.

Something is missing.

And the solution is available for purchase.

This is where Hall's idea of unseen forces becomes unexpectedly contemporary for me.

Perhaps one of the most powerful unseen forces in modern life is conditioning.

We can absorb an idea so gradually that we no longer recognize it as an idea that came from somewhere else.

Eventually we call it a preference.

We call it our personality.

We call it our taste.

We call it our ambition.

But where did it come from?

Who Is Speaking Inside Me?

This question has become increasingly important to me.

When I say, "I want this," who is actually speaking?

Is it really me?

Or is it advertising?

Is it social expectation?

Is it fear?

Is it comparison?

Is it something I learned as a child?

Is it something I absorbed from the people around me?

Or is it something that emerged from my own deeper experience?

This is where I see a connection between Hall's thought forms and modern life.

Hall believed that repeated thoughts could create forms in an unseen realm.

I can also understand the idea in a much more ordinary way.

If I repeatedly think something, eventually that thought begins to organize my experience.

If I repeatedly tell myself that people cannot be trusted, I will begin to see evidence everywhere.

If I repeatedly tell myself that I am inadequate, I may begin to organize my life around proving that belief true.

If I repeatedly believe that I need something outside myself to be complete, I can spend my entire life searching for the next thing.

The thought becomes a structure.

And eventually we may forget that we built it.

The Inner Life Can Be Crowded Too

We often talk about being overwhelmed by the outside world.

But I think the inner world can become just as crowded.

There are memories.

Opinions.

Fears.

Desires.

Images.

Advertising.

Other people's expectations.

Old conversations.

Old wounds.

Unfinished experiences.

And now we have an enormous stream of digital information entering the mind every day.

The smartphone has made it possible to carry the outside world around with us constantly.

There is always something to read.

Something to watch.

Something to buy.

Someone to compare ourselves with.

Something to react to.

The result can be a strange condition in which we are physically still but mentally never still.

This is why I keep returning to the idea of stillness.

Perhaps stillness is one way of creating enough space to determine what actually belongs to us.

The Dweller on the Threshold

This is the part of Hall's book that stays with me most.

His "Dweller on the Threshold" represents the unresolved aspects of ourselves that we eventually have to confront.

I don't have to imagine the Dweller as a literal supernatural being to understand the metaphor.

We all have things within us that we would rather not examine.

Fear.

Jealousy.

Pride.

Resentment.

Need for approval.

Old assumptions.

Desire for recognition.

The need to be right.

The fear of being wrong.

The fear of being invisible.

Sometimes we can spend years organizing our lives around things we have never consciously examined.

That is what makes self-awareness different from simply having thoughts about ourselves.

Self-awareness requires observation.

It requires the willingness to sit quietly enough to notice what is actually happening.

The Outside World and the Inner World

I have become interested in the relationship between these two worlds.

The outside world influences the inside.

But the inside also influences the outside.

A person who is constantly afraid may create a very different environment from someone who feels secure.

A person consumed by competition may experience relationships differently from someone who values cooperation.

A person trained to consume may see the world primarily as a collection of things to acquire.

A person who develops awareness may begin to see relationships, ecosystems, communities, and knowledge differently.

This is one reason I think our inner development matters.

It isn't simply a private spiritual exercise.

The way we understand ourselves affects how we treat other people and how we interact with the world.

Knowledge and the Inner Life

This is also part of why I am drawn to slow learning.

We are living in a period when information can be produced almost instantly.

Artificial intelligence can summarize a book in seconds.

Search engines can produce thousands of results.

Social media can deliver an endless stream of information.

But information is not the same thing as understanding.

And understanding is not the same thing as wisdom.

Sometimes we need to slow down.

Read the book.

Think about what we have read.

Ask questions.

Look at the references.

Compare perspectives.

Let an idea sit with us.

Perhaps learning itself needs a little stillness.

This is something I have experienced through my work with Wikipedia. There is value in taking the time to look at a source, investigate a subject, find the missing reference, and add something carefully to the shared body of knowledge.

It is a different rhythm from simply asking a machine for an answer.

What Are We Creating?

Hall's discussion of thought forms leaves me with another question.

What are we creating with our thoughts?

Every day we contribute something to the world.

We contribute through our words.

Our behavior.

Our relationships.

Our work.

Our attention.

Our choices.

And perhaps most importantly, through the mental patterns we continually reinforce.

If fear is constantly reinforced, what kind of world does that create?

If suspicion is reinforced, what happens to community?

If consumption is constantly reinforced, what happens to our relationship with nature?

If competition becomes the dominant value, what happens to cooperation?

And conversely, what happens when people cultivate curiosity, generosity, patience, creativity, and awareness?

These are not merely abstract questions.

They become visible in the world.

Returning to Stillness

Perhaps this is what I take from Manly P. Hall's Unseen Forces.

I don't need to accept every supernatural explanation in the book to appreciate the invitation to look beneath appearances.

There are forces operating around us that we don't immediately see.

And there are forces operating within us that we may not have learned to recognize.

The challenge is to become more conscious of both.

For me, stillness provides a doorway.

When everything becomes quiet, I can begin to distinguish between what I actually think and what I have been taught to think.

Between what I truly want and what I have been encouraged to want.

Between a genuine response and an automatic reaction.

Between knowledge and information.

Between being entertained and being alive.

Between the external world and the inner life.

Maybe this is the real "unseen force" worth investigating.

Not whether there are invisible beings moving around us, but whether we are aware of the invisible forces moving through us.

And perhaps self-awareness begins with something very simple:

Stop.

Become still.

Observe.

And ask: Who is speaking?