About Losing Power, and the Body Electric
I was one of millions of people who didn’t have electric power to plug into for about ten days recently. That’s why I didn’t post anything last week — even cell data was down, although they did allow for cell towers to have electricity, so we could text and call for as long as our phone batteries lasted.
Right after, I had a conversation with someone who pointed out that, on Facebook, people were saying things like: “I was out of power.” “Words have meaning,” he said; it’s a bad idea to claim you’re powerless.
I agreed with him — although I had used that expression myself once of twice, I caught myself, and switched to saying “electricity”. But even that is not quite accurate.
We were, indeed, out of the kind of electricity that comes from a power socket — no denying that. But we weren’t out of electricity: we couldn’t be. Our bodies are, on one level, electro-magnetic dyamos. That was something I learned in healing from the dread neurological-autoimmune-biochemical illness: I saw and understood the body on that level, and when I did, I began to start healing.
But our bodies are not the only thing running on electromagnetism — the entire universe of matter runs on it, is what I get. The web of life is not just a metaphor; it actually exists, on many dimensions and levels, from the mycorrhizal networks that serve as an underground communication and delivery device for plants, to currents in the sky and ocean, and our own nervous systems. If you’ve ever seen microscopic photographs of our nervous system, that’s what these networks look like to me when I “see” it with my inner eyes.
And not just to me, as I found out. In his book on ESP (which he did extensive rigorous scientific studies on in the 1970s), physicist Russell Targ quotes a description of Indra’s Net, from the Vedic tradition: “…there is a wonderful net that has been hung so that it stretches out indefinitely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant taste of the deities, there has been hung a single glittering jewel at the net’s every juncture, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number.” (Francis H. Cook, translator. The Jewel Net of Indra: The Avatamsaka Sutra).
And, adds Targ, “This description of Indra’s Net is what nonlocality looked like to the Buddhists in the time of Christ. We are the jewels in the net.” (Russell Targ, The Reality of ESP).
What I do as a healer is a little different even among other energy healers — so it was a relief to me to read this. This is how I get a very basic level of reality from which all matter is patterned– this net, and the dark matter it floats in, that gave it birth.
I have heard other people talk about (and illustrate) “grids”, and I suppose this is what they mean by them. But to me, a grid implies something stable, something squared-up, like fencing, or a checkerboard. When I see these networks, they look much more like something I once saw on a flight from LA, taking off over the ocean.
The sun was hitting it at an angle that lit up all the interlacing currents below, each pulsating, moving, and sparkling into the others, in an endless moving tapestry, an endless weaving. We are part of that tapestry — part of it physically as well as energetically. Years ago, in school choir, I sang a musical version of Walt Whitman’s poem, “I sing the body electric.” And science has borne that out, on smaller levels — and is beginning to bear it out (or at least look in that direction) as Indra’s Net, the thing that ties us all together.
So I was not powerless when the grid of human-made electricity went out; and though it was not altogether a great experience and put me far behind on many things, I remembered I had plenty of power. It’s a good thing for us all to remember, it seems to me: we seem to be so trained to say, “The power’s over there, I can do nothing about it.”

No. The power is in here — and we have limitless options to what we do about it. And if we start living that truth, we have more and more options about what we can do with all those seemingly insoluble problems we have in the world. We have our own dynamic energy, our own power source, the infinite power of Indra’s Net.
If you’d like to assess what kind of energy you have, and if it’s aligned with that net, you’re welcome to take a quiz about that here: https://www.sundayoliver.com/test/energy-assessment-alignment-quiz/