Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy website.
It was don Juan’s contention that what human beings crave more than anything else is the experience of exploration beyond the narrow confines of the everyday world. From a clinical perspective the shaman’s would diagnosis boredom as the core mental health disease in this world.
All of our spiritual endeavors, be they mainstream or alternative, are attempts to shift beyond our rational fixation and experience magic: worlds within our world, worlds beyond our world. All addictions are similar attempts to experience life from a different perspective, to enter the magic. The trouble with addictions is the small print of this Faustian contract. The entity that grants us access to the magic forever holds the keys and we become its slaves, selling our energetic souls for a few moments of release.
In the area of relationship, the experience of falling in love transforms the mundane into the exceptional, another magical world. So powerful is the energetic transformation of “twitterpation” that, despite its transitoriness and lack of relational foundation, we go for it again and again, hook, line and sinker. Today with our technological wizardry there is no end to new possibilities for connection as we twitter, facebook, share, and match in abstract worlds that conquer the limits of space and time. The challenge of the web is its web. We must be careful not to get caught in giving over to this medium our inner ability to access other worlds. The world wide web can become another addiction, another Faustian permutation. We Americans are deeply challenged by this easy access as it so readily serves our dominant extroverted culture and makes it increasingly difficult to be satisfied with our aloneness and solitude.
The shamans discovered that the practice of recapitulation secures, for the individual, inner access to the magic. Every time we relive an earlier experience in our lives we are practicing entering another world, through our own volition. In this current moment I return to an apartment I once lived in. I feel the textures of the floor, of a golden cover on a pool table in the living room. I am seeing Jeanne in her slender long black dress, radiant. I move throughout the rooms encountering the furniture, the feel of the walls, the colors, as I gently move my head from side to side, breathing the recapitulation breath. I feel the mood of that apartment as I slowly encounter every detail.
Now, as I return to this world, I have experienced a minor shift of my assemblage point, having entered that prior world. The more we practice recapitulation, the more we learn how to volitionally shift into other worlds. The shamans suggest that, along with intent, recapitulation further enhances our dreaming abilities. In dreaming, our assemblage points are naturally dislodged, available to transport us into whole new worlds. Through recapitulation we sharpen our ability to become lucid and take charge of these journeys in infinity. The more we recapitulate, the more we enhance our ability to make these magical shifts in our waking life as well.
Recapitulation is a very pragmatic tool, available to everyone, in any moment, to begin the journey into the magic, satisfying our deepest needs to access our hidden potential, overcoming the disease of boredom. Try it!
As usual, should anyone wish to write, I can be reached at: chuck@riverwalkerpress.com
Until we meet again,
Chuck