How to Live through a Pandemic

A 5-Lesson Course on Being Human

Introduction

Congratulations on choosing to learn how to activate all five of your human capacities. 

While such an effort can take a lifetime of practice, you’ll feel more alive as you progress and you will have new tools for meeting this pandemic with your full humanness.

Let’s get started.

Our five human capacities, which we also call dimensions throughout the course, are the inherent abilities we humans have to create our bodies, our lives, and our world. They have existed in us always. But in our rush to pursue our desires and materiality, we have cast some of our dimensions aside, forgotten them, or misused them. 

It’s time to call them all back into right use and bring them into balance.

We’ll begin with a true story from one of our students who is familiar with the five dimensions:

Years ago while in the grocery store, I noticed two toddlers in a grocery cart, sitting happily while their mother shopped. She was a distance down the aisle but they, as a family unit, felt connected, and she had her eye on them. As I slowly walked by, I heard the children in the focused play of feeling sounds.  Back and forth they would say, “ooooh,” then pause and say, “ahhhh.” And it would start over: “ooooh,” a pregnant pause, then “ahhhh.” They’d laugh but they were also intent and kept on saying these two sounds over and over. 

Just as I was about to move away from them, they got to another sound. Now the procession went like this: “ooooh,” “ahhhh," . . . then, after a slightly longer pause, the younger child said with complete joy, “eeeee!” This last sound was softer, but there was so much clarity in it when they reached it! They were saying all these sounds with a smile and a knowing. I left the store that day with something more than groceries. It felt so good to feel what these kids were exploring.

Young children, before they are fully indoctrinated into our world, have a tap into their inherent abilities. These toddlers were voicing the sounds corresponding to three of our five human dimensions: U ("oo") dimension, the realm of potential, where we are all connected and from which our physical bodies manifest; A ("ah") dimension, the source of our emotions, intuition, imagination, universal spirit, and inspiration; and I ("ee") dimension, our reason for being alive.

These three dimensions, and two more, were understood as the basis of our humanity before the first acupuncturists ever took out their needles. The sound of each dimension is a vibration that, in toto, creates the human body. These sounds were perfected at a time in which language wasn't symbolic. There were no fixed words for "dog" or "sun" or "apples" or even “devices.” The sounds were an expression of the moment, in the moment. Every spoken interaction carried an intimacy; it was a connection in the feeling body. There was a consensual grasp, from the feeling body, of what those sounds meant. The word was alive.

A remnant of this kind of communication still lives in certain Asian languages. In Thai, for example, there can be five different meanings or words for what looks to an English speaker as a single word spelled in just one way. It is the speaker's inflection or tone that delivers the meaning they intend.

By renewing our connection to all five of our human capacities, we can establish an entirely different framework for living, one no longer based on desire or fear, but on a sense of the whole, giving us security and confidence.

To reawaken our dormant capacities will require some active intention on our part. But there couldn't be a better time. Really. The feeling of insecurity most of us have in the face of the pandemic can be replaced by an inner security, an inner knowing that tells us what needs to be done, if anything, and when. And that ability is the only real security.

We hope you find this mini-course—five lessons in five emails—beneficial in navigating the times we're in and bringing you to an inner security. As much as possible, we've tried to go beyond the conceptual in these lessons and ask you to do the same. 

In the lessons, you'll have the opportunity to use the sound of the dimension as a means of accessing that dimension within yourself. 

Here again is how the course will work: Each week, we'll send a link to a new lesson. We ask that you read the lesson, then apply it to your day-to-day life throughout the week. If you need more than a week to explore any of the lessons, please do so. The next email will be in your inbox when you’re ready.

You may want to work on the lessons with others. If so, have them sign up for the course here). We’ve discovered that insights and understanding happen more quickly when exploring the territory with another person. 

May your journey to becoming fully human, with all five dimensions alive and well, be a fascinating and rewarding one. You will have begun to become your own last healer.