I opened The Wheel of Time, that book of knowledge from the shamans of ancient Mexico, written by Carlos Castaneda, to the following quote on page 139, taken from Tales of Power:
Only as a warrior can one withstand
the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot
complain or regret anything. His life is an
endless challenge, and challenges cannot
possibly be good or bad. Challenges are
simply challenges.
A warrior greets the new day affirming his knowledge: I am a being on my way to dying. This affirmation sets the orientation for the day. These might be my final moments in this world, let me soak it up fully. Each encounter might be my last, let me be fully present. What challenges will greet me this day? Where might I shed more of my human form? Who will offend me today, offering me the opportunity to lose my self-importance?
Self-importance is that human demon that supports our notion of being special, of deserving special treatment. It leads to a life of conditions: good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable. It creates a structure to live and die in.
The warrior strives to peel away any attachment to this structure. For the warrior, the intent is to learn to flow, to be able to meet the unknowable without conditions. This world, this life, offers infinite opportunity to learn to flow without conditions.
The warrior welcomes all challenges as opportunities to break down any vestige of specialness. For the warrior, abuse, trauma, regret, hatred, meanness, loss, offense, etc., are the golden tyrants this world offers to hone and prepare our awareness to leap into infinity and journey forward into new worlds and new challenges. The warrior uses these challenges to release all attachment to these experiences, through recapitulation, and embraces the advances in detachment such recapitulated tyrants have afforded. A warrior knows only love, for the transitory and the infinite.
If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.
Until we meet again,
Chuck
can you help me to be a warrior????
Yes, if you are ready to detach with unattached love.
So, how do the Shamans raise their children? Is their attachment, gentleness, comfort so that the ego can safely develop before it is to be shed? I know we need to have an ego before we can learn to “hold onto consciousness, outside the static structure of the ego.” I guess I’m reacting to the notion that “abuse, trauma, regret, hatred, meanness, loss, offense, etc., [should be seen ONLY as]the golden tyrants.” I wonder how an abused child is helped to heal? Hopefully he is not only encouraged to view the abuse as a challenge…hopefully he is allowed to “complain.” When we have been treated harshly we tend to treat ourselves harshly and sometimes our complaints being met with compassion and acceptance is the key ingredient in being able to move through our attachment to the trauma.
Dear DKS,
I have little information about how shamans raise their children. From what little I do know the children of shamans tend to take their parents on quite a ride! That certainly has been my experience, though I don’t identify myself as a shaman.
You raise an extremely cogent point around trauma and children. Firstly, anyone who has suffered abuse as a child is thrust, willingly or unwillingly, into a shamanic journey, through a direct experience of their energy body in a dissociative out of body experience. This journey, once begun, cannot be completed, or as you say “healed,” until there is a full recapitulation, which creates cohesion in a formerly fragmented self. A child, as you point out, needs to develop an ego structure capable of recapitulation. Childhood is rarely the time to either begin or complete a recapitulation. The vicissitudes of recapitulation can take many years, in fact a lifetime, and includes, indeed, the need to complain, rage, hate, etc., as well as support and compassion, as one goes through the process. My point in this blog is that in an ultimate sense, healing requires total detachment and that in fact, from the shaman’s experience, it is the ability to arrive at that place that best prepares us for our definitive journey.
Chuck
So, if I am a Shaman warrior, the purpose of our journey here is to prepare us for our “definitive journey” -what we call “death”- and everything we encounter are our own private lessons in detachment? “Detachment” has always sounded like such a cold and unemotional process, when in reality, it is our very emotions that lead us to that place. Although on one hand, I instinctively know that the avenue to detachment is through love and compassion, sometimes it feels like it goes against everything we have been taught. So many barriers must be broken down before we can even begin to “detach”, which will ultimately lead us to healing….guess it wasn’t meant to be an easy process!
Dear Debbie,
Shaman warrior or not, this life is preparation for what comes next. How could it be otherwise, for we know that we are beings who are going to die? And then what? The shamans have simply gifted us thousands of years of their experiences. Like the Buddhists, they have come to the conclusion that, unlike any journey we may take in this world, our definitive journey requires that we not only pack nothing but that we unload everything. Love and compassion represent the feeling states that let you know you are properly emptied, detached, and prepared for your definitive journey. However, there are no short cuts to this prized state, you can’t “just forgive.” You have to do all that you have to do first. I encourage all to read Jan’s blog of today to gain insight into the process of recapitulation. -Chuck