Look beyond your daily lives to another reality. Perceive life as one side of a many faceted spectrum of possibility. You live most of the time focused on one side of that spectrum. Know that there are many others.
Continue to be open to life as it comes to you, but always with awareness that there is indeed more to life than what you now perceive. Seek not explanation at this point, but do seek experiences.
Ask the universe to provide you with a glimpse of a new reality—even just a brief one—and you will begin to understand the possibilities that exist, just waiting to be encountered, even in that world you now live in.
Encounters of awe are the awakenings that the human spirit dares to expect yet often rejects. I ask you now to remain open and nonjudgmental. Without trying to figure things out in a rational way, let yourself be open to the possibility that anything can happen and everything is possible. That’s all you need to begin to perceive differently: Be open to possibility! Let it come to you in whatever way it finds appropriate.
And just what is possibility?
Possibility is the unimaginable experience that shifts you, the moment of awe that lifts your heart and frees your mind. It is the moment when everything becomes clear. Grasp that moment in memory, in deep knowing, for sure enough, as quick as it arises, so will it sink away again, far from conscious awareness.
But the memory will linger in the sinews of your body; have no doubt. The awe will course through you and you will know its possibility to both affect you and eventually change you.
Look for those moments of awe and possibility. Without denial of such possibility, go into your day and your week with innocent hopefulness, without doubt, and without fear. Ask for experiences of awe, with openness, alertness, and willingness to be changed.
And then, when the time is right, ask to be shown why you are given those moments, those glimpses of awe. What do they mean? What are they asking you to do to change your life, your circumstances—inner and outer—and perhaps your future, in this world and another?
For the first time in ten years I decided to truly stalk the role of student. I’d selected an advanced seminar in Stamford, CT. My intent for the weekend was to clear the way for learning, to remove all the filters of identity and judgment that don’t allow for something new, that keep us frozen in the familiar.
I was driving a rental car with Rhode Island plates, our own car still in the body shop since a recent fender bender. I had a new trac phone with an unmemorized number. I arrived at my destination with the hope that I would know no one and that I would share nothing unnecessary about myself that might freeze me in an old identity or tug at my self-importance. “I’m simply a therapist here to learn.”
After parking my car a woman approached me on the walk to the college, obviously headed to the same seminar. After some smalltalk about the weather she asked me where I was from. I went to tell her, but drew a complete blank. I stumbled, slightly embarrassed, but actually quite fascinated. No matter how hard I tried, I had no idea where I was from!
I knew my name was Chuck Ketchel, as I easily picked out my name tag at the registration desk, but for several minutes I couldn’t swim my way back to the surface of Red Hook, NY. The best I could laughingly say to her, finally, was that I was from the Hudson Valley. She smiled and disappeared. I didn’t see her again for the duration of the seminar. Or, if I did, I didn’t recognize her.
My experience in the training was magical: I learned, my intent fully realized. Don’t have concerns about early Alzheimer’s for Chuck! This was a shamanic move—what the shamans would call using INTENT to STALK a different position of the assemblage point.
For the shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s lineage, the assemblage point refers to a point on our energetic body where the energy fields that impact us are assembled. This assemblage of energy becomes our description of reality, how we see and define the world we live in.
When the assemblage point moves to a different position on our energy body, new energy fields are assembled and with that we experience a new world. A new world can mean something as simple as achieving a new perspective on life or as drastic a perception as encountering strange entities in a never-before experienced world.
Where did I come from and who am I now?
Engaging intent, as I did when approaching this seminar, is one way to shift the assemblage point. My intent to leave my old world behind, suspend judgment, and simply learn something new, shifted me and I became a stalker. In shamanic terms, stalking is maintaining the ability to calm the self and hold together when confronted with an unfamiliar reality.
Every time we recapitulate, we shift the assemblage point to a world of prior experience. When we dream, the assemblage point moves freely, allowing for experiences in many worlds, particularly outside the body. Many jolts in ordinary life can move our assemblage point as well, including traumatic incidences and subsequent flashbacks.
The other night, my daughter startled me awake with a phone call and a frightened voice, which she has given me permission to describe.
“Dad, I’m so upset! I feel so homesick,” she said. “I just watched a movie with Joel—Faces in the Crowd—about a woman who suffers from face blindness. Suddenly I looked at Joel and I didn’t recognize him! I didn’t want him to touch me. It was really freaky. I knew who he was and yet I didn’t! I feel in my body like I have at other times. I might be at a supermarket on the deli line when suddenly the voices around me seem very loud and my body becomes very light, like I’m disappearing.”
I assured Erica that these are normal events and that at such times we are being challenged to experience different worlds. Her experience describes that of being at the gates between worlds when energetically vibratory experiences and unfamiliarity reign and we might experience faintness, nausea, buzzing, fear, and a longing for home.
One foot in this world
In these states, infinity is beckoning to us. As the shamans say, we are experiencing a shift in the assemblage point, asked to assemble and enter a new world with a consistency of awareness far more heightened than normal. At such times we are challenged to hold onto awareness in two worlds at once, to not forget who we are, but to take in the far vaster knowledge that we are presented with as reality shifts. We are challenged to remain present and aware while we allow ourselves to have the experience of being infinite beings and take in the truth who we really are, where we’ve been, and where we are going.
The other night, while Jan was in trance—a shift of the assemblage point—I asked her to go to the place she was in just before she was conceived in this life. Her awareness took her to a vast ocean, accompanied by the sound of deep breaths, long inhales and long exhales, in concert with the amplitude and rhythm of the gently rocking waves of this unending ocean. She sensed her awareness shifting to a dark, contained space as I asked her to move on to conception, where a more constricted breath ensued.
Jan’s experience—her shift in her assemblage point to the vast sea of awareness before the stalking of a new life, that is, an identity to be constructed by the circumstances she was born into—reveals the true holographic nature of reality. No matter how many pieces you cut a holographic image into, under the right lighting conditions the original whole is revealed. Everyone of us is part of the same hologram—we all belong to the same vast sea of awareness.
When we enter this world, our awareness shifts from sea to container. We become a definite thing, born out of an infinite sea of interconnected possibility. And when we become that definite being, we forget our vast roots, our previously infinite lives.
Infinity beckons and I'm going!
Our task in this life is to solve the riddle—the specific challenges of the life we are in—and then to go beyond and recover all our truths, all of ourselves, and truly find our way home, back to awareness of the vastness of it all. This is the true essence of homesickness of which my daughter spoke. But oh, how we want to cling to the comfort of unchanging familiarity and the security of home in this life!
Shifts of the assemblage point, promptings from infinity to awaken to our true fullness, are rampant in our time. The familiar world is rattling us daily, as new worlds are finally being allowed to become known. We live in an exceptional time for mass evolutionary advancement, as the world continually bombards the fixation of our assemblage points, prompting them to move, and jolting us to awaken to a new reality as well.
As much as it may assault our senses, our feelings, and our sense of safety, we can now hear the words: “anal intercourse in the showers of Penn State between a coach and a child.” This is a real world that exists, spanning way beyond the walls of Penn State. The truth of that hidden world, with all its discomforts, is now a world we can know exists. We can live with the truth of that world. We can stalk that position of the assemblage point. By allowing ourselves to know and validate the truth of that world we can change, and indeed change the world we live in.
However, the process of allowing the truths of other worlds to be let in—shifts of the assemblage point—is indeed unsettling. Reactions range from nausea, dizziness, sadness, fear, homesickness, vibratory energy states, to yes, actually forgetting where you come from!
These are all transitory states. The real challenge is to achieve cohesion when you find yourself in another world. That is: calm yourself, recognize and actually be in awe of the experience while maintaining a dual focus.
As I stood in the lobby of the University of Connecticut last weekend—a man with no home—I knew who I was. I knew I had a foot in this world. I knew I’d return to it when the seminar was over. But, I especially knew that I was on an adventure to learn something very important—and that I did! We always do if we allow ourselves, or intend ourselves, into new or old worlds of discovery, what the shamans call shifts in the position of the assemblage point.
Today, I follow up on last week’s blog, Wounded Children. I ask the question: What is suffering? And why is it so necessary?
I grew up in the Catholic religion. I went to Catholic schools and learned that Jesus wanted us to be innocent children, to be free of sin, yet the world itself did not support me in my endeavors. The world was full of sin and yes, suffering. I suffered as a child, as most children do. As much as I tried to live a sin-free life, there was no getting around sin, it was everywhere. I realized that everything, even breathing could be considered sinful.
In my weekly forays to the confessional, as often as I tried to articulate my sins, I found no actual release from them. Any absolution was momentary at best, because as soon as I walked out of the church I was back in sin-ville. As a child, suffering meant not only trying to find ways to deal with what happened to me out in the world, but, on a deeper level, it meant dealing with the fact that I would never be holy enough. I was a sinner and so I must suffer.
Illusion?
My child’s perspective was not all that far from the Buddhist perspective, which accepts that the reality we live in, samsara, is indeed an ocean of suffering. Samsara is an endless cycle of obsession and illusion, the more we try to escape it, the more it assaults us. Until, that is, we turn to it and ask: What is life trying to teach me? Why is it so necessary to suffer?
The Shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s lineage tell us too that this world is an illusion and that we are born to struggle with breaking through that illusion. They tell us that the world constantly assaults us in an effort to wake us up to this fact by presenting us with things that we want to push away and other things that we want to constantly cling to in our efforts to uphold that illusion. But in the end the Shamans contend, as do the Buddhists, that we must face the illusionary reality of the world and break it down, one illusion at a time. By challenging our perceptions, by challenging the way we think and act, and by challenging ourselves to face our deaths as new life, we offer ourselves the opportunity to break through the endless suffering of being human.
If we believe that all lives are meaningful, that our personal suffering and the suffering of everyone else in the world is important, then perhaps we might understand the necessity of it. Samsara, illusion, is endless. We are all being confronted with the truth of this as the revelations of sexual abuse swirl through the media, assaulting our personal illusions, coming into our homes on the nightly news. Our illusions are being shattered.
From a Buddhist and Shamanic perspective, this is very good. Such shatterings offer us the opportunity to view the world differently, to accept the necessity of suffering as a means of breaking us out of endless samsara. In my book, The Man in the Woods, I present the sufferings of my child self. It’s often hard for people to fathom that I suffered such abuse and yet survived the experiences. But I know that my own experiences are not all that exceptional. I hear stories of equal or worse horror every day, of abuse that went on for just as many years or even longer.
I am both humbled and hopeful as I hear the stories being told to me personally or by the media. And yet I know that, as people face their personal suffering, they are facing the shattering of their lives. But I also know that this shattering is the necessary breakthrough point to new life.
The universe itself is challenging us to face the reality of samsara and the necessity for it now. As a catalyst to shattering our illusions, constant exposure to the horrific reality of sexual abuse against innocent children is a mighty force. This exposure alone has the ability to change our world as we discover what has been kept hidden for decades, but even more deeply meaningful as we face our personal secrets.
When we are finally ready to face our personal suffering, we are ready to shatter the illusions that we have constructed in an effort to both get us through our lives but also to protect us so we could survive. When we face our inner turmoil, the suffering and the illusion of it, we face the fact of the world as indeed samsara, endless suffering.
On the bright side, in facing our personal suffering, in shattering our illusions about who we are, we begin to see the world differently. Suffering becomes understood as the means to enlightenment as the Buddhists present it and the means to accessing the warrior self as the Shamans suggest. In recapitulation, in deep inner work, in allowing ourselves to sit through the horror of the news, facing the truth of human suffering, we offer ourselves a new opportunity to evolve beyond this world of endless suffering.
Both the Buddhists and the Shamans use suffering and death as the greatest teachers and advisors. Both the Buddhists and the Shamans are aware of death at all times, preparing for it, using the challenges in this world to break through to a new awareness that we are all beings seeking enlightenment.
The reason we must suffer is the same for all of us. We are being challenged to grasp the truth of suffering as our greatest teacher, so that we may crack through it and make our deaths as meaningful as we want our lives to be.
In samsara we prepare for new life; in suffering we discover what that might mean. With each new life we are offered the opportunity to discover the illusions we steep ourselves in, that are presented to us in myriad ways by the world outside of us and by our inner reactions, disturbances, and challenges to that world. We are all here to live deeply meaningful lives—that I have no doubt about.
As I look around at the world each day and discover yet another reason to be disappointed in my fellow humans, to be distraught, disturbed and disgusted, I know I am being challenged to not turn off the television set. I am being challenged to face samsara and to ask others to face it as well. It is only through facing the onslaughts of horror that we can change the world.
We must face our inner darkness—mirrored unrelentingly, it seems lately, by the outside world—and ask everyone else to do the same. Suffering leads to enlightenment. I keep that in mind.
The I Ching tells me that it is time for incremental steps to change, that nature has a way of clearing things out and that the human being too, in small steps in the right direction, will eventually arrive in an evolved place. I read that the stars and planets ask us too to take small steps this week; to remain aware and pay attention to each moment and what we are doing, to be clearly aware that everything matters. What guidance do you offer us, Infinity, as we go into a new week?
Infinity answers with the following guidance:
It is logical to want to correct, protest, or confront that which is wrong, unjust, or disappointing outside of one’s self, but, truth be told, it is only in inner work that true change will happen. Change will not come to the greater world in the right alignment with truth until all people upon the earth bravely face their own truths, their own fears, their own disappointments, and the meaning of their personal anger and discontent.
True change, however, rides upon the winds each day. Opportunities abound to notice and act on behalf of the self and thus on behalf of all humanity, and the natural world as well.
A perfect world may not be possible you think? Perhaps it is a pipe dream? There are too many choices, opportunities, and forces to make it possible?
Do not fall into despair, Dear Readers. Grasp instead at the utter necessity of each one of you to resolve the issues of the self, to free your personal energy to explore the far greater meaning of life beyond the self, not as ego in the world, but as spirit energy in the world.
The grittiness of life pushes for change. Take personal steps each day to confront the self as to reason and purpose, as to why and wherefore, as to thought and action. Be proactively self-reflective. On a very deep level find out what matters most to the personal self and then ask why. Go deeper now into the self than ever before and question that which you have settled upon as truth, as identifiable self.
Can you go even deeper? Can you disassemble your set ideas of self until you are nothing but energy, with no attachments or issues? Can you dare to be nothing of importance? To self or others?
That is what all of your small steps of change are leading to. Disassembling the self in tiny increments, facing evil, disgust, negativity, fear and turmoil in the darkness of the self will provide a greater understanding of how others react in the world outside of you.
You are all the same. Face this fact and you will face the truth of life: You are all the same. And in the end you are all nothing but energy.
I don’t know if there is a more revered coach in that most masculine of sports, football, than 84-year-old Joe Paterno, affectionately nicknamed “Joe Pa.” Once again, the truth of sexual abuse has reared its ugly head and brought down another father—Pater in Latin—of the reigning order.
Simultaneously, Herman Cain, the pride of the Koch brothers and their American Enterprise Institute, finds himself steeped in the mire of sexual harassment charges.
Earlier this year we witnessed IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn, France’s heir apparent, being brought down by charges of sexual abuse.
The old king is dead!
All of these incidents, combined with the major revelations of worldwide sexual abuse within the institution of the Catholic church, are signs of the end of an era. An end of an era is represented by death of the father—he who sets the rules.
In ancient times, the people of a kingdom would kill the king in a failing kingdom, declaring: “The King is dead. Long live the king.” Out with the old, in with the new! This is the time we are in now—The king is dead. Long live the king!
It’s the end of an era that put football, church, business, and the affairs of state over the truth of sexual abuse, rampant in the shadows of abuse of power. It’s the end of an era that has allowed for rampant greed, through the abuse of masculine power, to the detriment of the 99% of the world. It’s the end of an era that denies the animal in the human animal. We must reckon with the fullness of our being, of who and what we are and what we really need. This is the challenge of the new king.
Last week, I blogged about the energetic wave of the new era impacting Greece and Italy. Since then both Prime Ministers are stepping down. Greece is installing a banker. This is an old-world father, an IMF move to settle the markets, to restore the status quo. In Italy, similar moves are being made to force the Italians, like the Greeks, into indentured servitude. It won’t hold: Pater-no! The King is dead. Long live the King!
The 1% is “Pater.” The 99% say “NO!” This does not mean the end of wealth. Wealth is part of nature; wealth has a legitimate place. But it does mean the end of unbridled greed as the dominating Father of world principles. The facts of life simply cannot uphold the legitimacy of that world any longer. The facts, as they are rapidly revealed in our information age, immediately shatter the old world spins on reality.
Unsettling truths revealed.
Worlds are colliding now: worlds of greed, worlds of denial of need, worlds of suppressed truth of sexual abuse. Truths are being revealed; truths too unsettling to uphold the reigning order of suppression and trickle-down survival.
As we move from fall into winter now, from decay into darkness, may we all reconcile with our deepest truths, mirrored so powerfully in the outer world right now.
With the end of Pater-no the seeds of new life are planted deeply in Mother Earth, with new life and a new era surely on the spring horizon. Pater-no!
