By Charles E. Smith | Bio

During the second year in my transition from a static world to an
energetic-based point of view, I took a training program with a Mexican
teacher, Victor Sanchez, who had studied and lived with the Toltec
Indians in northern Mexico. Victor had developed a coherent conceptual
framework that was very much based on energy. Lorin Smith didn’t have a
lot of explanation for what he did. He just did it, and I saw that he
was working with fundamental energies. Victor Sanchez, in contrast, was
a scholar as well as a teacher. He said that the Toltec Indians
believed that the world does not consist of objects. Rather, they
believe the world consists of interacting energy fields and that the
systems with greatest available energy will prevail.

This made
a lot of sense to me. You know, if you go too close to the sun, you’ll
burn to a crisp. People with money and power usually prevail over
people without money and power. In times of effective revolution, the
disenfranchised gather their collective energy, which becomes greater
than the establishment, and thus prevail. Companies with the most
committed, purposeful, concerned people, with the best products, tend
to dominate the market. Having good ideas and strong intentions are
important, but what’s essential is the available energy. Sanchez’s
argument was that human beings are double beings. Part of us is purely
energetic: the energy of the sun, the heat, the vitality, the spirit in
us, the part that can fly. And the other part of us is careful,
survival-bent, linear, and prone to organization, power and control.

In
the background was my fascination with Albert Einstein’s formula
(E=MC2, energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). Einstein
changed a worldview based on the notion that the output was energy.
I’ve spent a long time looking for a similar formulation because I
could see that most people in organizations treat each other like
things, like objects. One deals with human resources, not human beings.
It seemed to me that if organizations could be construed in energetic
terms—the way Einstein did it for physics—a shift could be produced of
equal magnitude as that which occurred from Newton’s mechanical system
to one that had far more flexibility and power. The more mechanical,
the more procedural, the more non-human a system was, the less energy
there appeared to be.

© 2008 Charles E. Smith. All rights reserved.