← Encyclopedia of Embodied Energy · lesson 45/164
The collective current
The collective current holds fourteen of the 36 channels in the chart's circuitry. Its business is sharing. Either it works out a pattern and tests it, or it gathers experience and tells what it found — and in both cases, what is learned is meant to leave the person who learned it.
What it is for
The collective current is read as being here to contribute to everyone. Not to one's own people, as with the tribal current, and not by being the exception, as with the individual current, but by adding to what humanity as a whole knows and has lived. Its products are meant to be passed on: a method, a correction, a story, a lesson drawn from a hard year. Keeping it to oneself tends to feel wrong from the inside.
Its two streams
The two streams run in opposite directions in time, and that is the clearest way to tell them apart.
Understanding — patterns proven by repetition. It looks forward: if this held before, it should hold again, so let us test it and improve it. Some accounts call this stream "logic".
- Channel 4-63 — doubt refined into answers
- Channel 5-15 — rhythm within the flow of life
- Channel 7-31 — the influential guide
- Channel 9-52 — concentration's quiet power
- Channel 16-48 — depth become skill
- Channel 17-62 — opinion made precise
- Channel 18-58 — correction toward joy
Sensing — meaning gathered from experience over time. It looks back: something was lived through, and only afterwards, in the telling, does it make sense. The tradition calls this side "abstract".
- Channel 11-56 — ideas told as stories
- Channel 13-33 — the keeper of stories
- Channel 29-46 — saying yes to discovery
- Channel 30-41 — dreams fed by desire
- Channel 35-36 — the appetite for experience
- Channel 42-53 — cycles begun and finished
- Channel 47-64 — making sense of the swirl
The shape of the current
Each stream runs the whole height of the chart. Understanding starts in the Drive centre and the Instinct centre, passes through the Vitality and Self centres, and rises through the Head and Mind to the Throat. Sensing starts in the Drive and the Feeling centre — the appetite for something to happen — and climbs by way of the Vitality, the Self, the Head and the Mind to the Throat as well. Several collective channels end at the Throat, because a pattern or a story is not finished until it is said.
How it is read
A chart leaning collective is read as one that works something out, or lives something through, on behalf of more people than itself. Its gift is a contribution others can use; its shadow, on the understanding side, is correcting people who never asked for it, and on the sensing side, chasing experience for its own sake without stopping to tell what it meant. The tradition's advice for both is that collective insight is best shared when it is asked for. Advice given unasked is often not heard, however right it is.