All posts by Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Energetic Ascension

The Intent of Infinity…

Don Juan was clear: invite the intent of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico into your life and it will flow through you.

When Carlos Castaneda wrote The Wheel of Time, he was struck by the realization that a very ancient intent had methodically guided his 13 year apprenticeship in the shaman’s world. I recognize that since my early childhood, from the age of six when I lived in New Mexico, my life has unfolded under the influence of that same intent. Of course I did not know that at the time, nor am I anything special now, but I recognize that it flows through me nonetheless, advancing its evolutionary agenda: the advancement of human consciousness into its energetic dimensions. We are all energetic beings. When are we going to get that this is our true nature?

We have all heard about the “fiscal cliff.” In fact we are indeed on a cliff, though the “fiscal cliff” is a manufactured construction that distracts us from the real cliff and the real dangers we all face. Astrologer Len Wallick writes: Anybody who is conscious knows that Earth is already in crisis. Anybody who is practical knows that the crisis confronting our planet was brought on by human beings. We have mined the oceans to depletion, deforested nearly all of the land, and poisoned the air. Clearly some type of ascension is in order.

He goes on to say: Indications are that the only deliverance to be had will be what we provide for each other, which could lead to some amazing results if enough people accept that responsibility. *

That ascension, I believe, is in living life differently, as energetic beings, finally embracing and utilizing our greatest human potential. Energetic beings recognize that everything has life, that everything has equal value, and that everything is part of the same interdependent world of energy. From this place, the greed of selfhood über alles, the culprit behind our current cliff, is dismantled and we shift into balance.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico exposed the pursuit of self-importance as the energetic fixation that has led us to the cliff. In today’s world, technology has delivered us Facebook, twitter, etc., and although their value in advancing the ability to communicate and share information rapidly is undeniable, their very deep shadow is self-importance and it is indeed leading us to a cliff.

Facebook is now the alternative abstract universe that the bulk of the world lives in, email now an ancient relic. Walk down any street, drive on any road—the majority of eyes are cast downward, checking the latest notifications so readily delivering their energetic charges. New York City last weekend was the quietest I’ve experienced it in decades. People quietly read and text. Even phone messages or direct dialogue are becoming obsolete as staying connected all the time monopolizes the bulk of human energy. The energetic fixation on feeling worthy, valued, loved, and connected through electronic means has absorbed the lion’s share of humanity’s attention. This brand of self-importance distracts us from our evolutionary potential and positions us on the cliff. This is not interdependence, this is codependence centered around the needs of the self.

I am an energetic being…and so are you!

Family, tribe, possession, accumulation, specialness—are these not the attachments at the heart of the Middle East crisis, bringing the entire world to teeter on the brink of yet another cliff? As energetic beings, everyone and everything is family. Everything is equally interconnected, equally valuable. As an energetic being there is no possession, no accumulation—how could there be? Everything is as it is, in its place, part of an interconnected whole. As an energetic being there is nothing to attach to, for everything is constantly changing, flowing—through you and me, and through everyone and everything else too.

Attachment freezes the true nature of reality, and this is what brings us to the cliff. This is what has wrecked our planet and brought us to the global warming cliff, the climate change cliff. As energetic beings, we all share equally; we are the same energy coursing through the same interconnected whole. Mutual interdependence focuses on maintaining the necessary energetic balances that keep our world safe from falling off the cliff.

The intent of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico has moved through me to completely revision PTSD. As Jan pointed out in her blog** this week: PTSD is completely curable through the shamanic practice of recapitulation. I take no personal credit for this discovery. I am simply a vessel of this ancient intent moving through time, finding relevance in what I do. I’ve been available to accept it into my life and work and so it flows through me. In addition to the healing potential of recapitulation, the evolutionary imperative of the shaman’s intent—that all beings discover and utilize their energetic potential—is revealed and given credence as it is experienced and trusted in the unfolding of the recapitulation process.

Also, as Jan pointed out, the two of us have completely allowed our practice and our weekly messages to spread and evolve on the wings of energetic intent. What we need appears; what needs us finds us. That is where we live now, on an energetic plane. To get here is not a leap of faith, but an energetic leap that has already been taken by many others. This is the leap our world must make now too, ascension to life on the energetic plane, always within our midst.

Ancient healing intent…

This is the road to taking true responsibility, leading to a new way of living that supports and balances the interdependent coalition of all beings. As we free the vast pool of energy currently fixated on self-importance we are able to step back from the cliff and take stock of who we truly are, energetic beings, one and all.

Chuck

* You can read Astrologer Len Wallick’s full article here.

** You can read Jan’s most recent blog here.

Chuck’s Place: Enthusiasm

In the temple of calm enthusiasm with the big Buddha at The Buddhist Association of the United States in Carmel, New York.

We are in the time of enthusiasmI Ching hexagram #16—where thunder, the arousing, awakens the receptive earth below. The leader awakens enthusiasm in those he leads. Obama rouses the populace to enthusiastically support change, an end to needless greed.

Guidance suggests that enthusiasm move along the line of least resistance, that is, movement based on truth and nature, as expressed in the Tao, and not on the cogitation of delusional ideas. In their hearts the people know the truth and can accept change in accord with it. In contrast, the people resist change that does not flow with the truth of the heart. We ask our leaders to lead in the truth, not in the delusion. We must ask the same of ourselves, as we lead ourselves through the decisions of our daily lives, always, but most especially in this time of enthusiasm.

From where do we receive our enthusiasm, our impetus to right action? We are baited constantly by enthusiastic offers of energetic spice, promising contentment and fulfillment: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, another cup of coffee, another romantic hit online, another glass of wine. When we take the bait and attach, we enter the tunnels of excitement and receive energetic spikes, the bounty of the entity gods, but nothing lasting.

The I Ching counsels retreating to the temple in the time of enthusiasm, offering prayer and music to the ancestors and the gods. In this manner, we experience sacred communion with God. With this connection we intuit the direction to be followed, as the arousing is felt from the true source, the SELF, God, the Atman in all of us.

The sacred temple of our time is found in our own practice—be it meditation, sacred music or dance, or perhaps even Facebook—as we traverse the path that eventually takes us to the bridge leading to our infinite selves. From this infinite place we see, we know, right action. We can rest and rejuvenate in the bliss of this calm unattached energy, energy that informs right action along the least line of resistance; action in harmony with and originating from the Tao.

Beware deluded enthusiasm, recognizable in erratic bipolar spikes of energy and restlessness. True enthusiasm comes in calm energy that finds the middle way.

Enthusiastically calm,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: The Dreamer Behind The Dream

Gathering and deciphering the jewels…

I am deeply thankful to the dreamer behind the dream who leaves me with my last dream, closest to waking consciousness, that will guide me to clarity in making a most painful but necessary decision. In the movie Lincoln, Daniel Day Lewis’s physical representation of Lincoln leaves no doubt that he was crucified by the weight of his decisions. However right, we must all bear the pain of our decisions. Lincoln’s only solace, as a visionary acquiescing to his role in correcting the course of human affairs, was in knowing, at the deepest level, that his decisions were really not his at all, but were his own surrender to the dreamer behind the dream.

This morning, I pondered Einstein’s theory of relativity and the dreaming body, wondering if it was worthy of a blog. I opened William Buhlman’s book, Adventures Beyond the Body, at random. The dreamer behind the dream winked at me as the page I opened to had the heading: Einstein’s Dream! So, here it is. Now that was an easy decision!

Einstein proposed that time simply is relative. If we traveled in a spaceship at the speed of light for 40 earth years, we would actually only physically age several hours of earth time. Nonetheless, we will have had experiences of the equivalent of 40 earth years in those few hours. We will return young and refreshed, while earth and those upon it would have aged 40 years. This is what happens in our dreams every night.

As our physical body enters sleep, our dreaming body takes flight through universes of experiences—we are indeed multidimensional beings. In but a few minutes of earth time we will have traveled through years of dream experience. Years ago, I realized that if I tried to remember all my dreams in the night there was no time left in the day for anything else. My current intent in dreaming is to journey with awareness and bring back only the most important key elements. Every night presents new opportunities for journeys and discoveries.

Dreaming with awareness is the science of the 21st Century, though actually it’s just a rediscovery of ancient knowledge and practice. For instance, the ancient Hindus knew more about relativity than Einstein. The dreaming body, what the Hindus call the astral body, is actually capable of traveling beyond the speed of light, breaking Einstein’s cardinal rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. In an instant the dreaming body can project itself to the moon.

Often in dreaming, the dreamer behind the dream takes charge and sends us to waking consciousness with strange experiences and symbols, challenging us to crack the nut open for our answers to dense reality problems—that is, the problems of waking life. These strange jewels are the gifts accumulated through a night’s dreaming, as we travel through our life in other dimensions. They are meant to guide our decisions, which in turn will effect our greater interconnected whole being. In my dream, the dreamer behind the dream presented me with just the jewels I needed to make both my most challenging decision and the decision about what to write for this blog.

We discover through these journeys in dreaming that we are never alone, and some day, I’m quite certain, we will all meet face to face with the dreamer behind the dream of this infinite adventure. Until then, we are free to enjoy, discover, and explore infinity with abandon, every night, relatively free!

Intend to dream with awareness,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Resentment

A pragmatic guide…

Resentment is an emotionally debilitating condition that, when unresolved, can have a variety of negative results on the person experiencing it…” –Wikipedia

It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while.” –The Big Book/Alcoholics Anonymous p.66

Resentment is an intense stored anger that is re-experienced every time the person or circumstance that is causally linked to the offending event is triggered or remembered. Resentment binds our essential energy as it tyrannizes the central nervous system with a frustrated unrelenting cry of anguish. Resentment victimizes the felt victim in an avalanche of self pity. This fixation on self and self pity, for the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, was the number one reason human beings do not realize their full spiritual or, as they would say, energetic potential.

Like the Hindus, who hold that the Atman (The Eternal One—The Source—God) lies deeply embedded in the center of the physical body inside the hard-crusted shell of the ego, those shamans realize that the obsession with ego self as the only self, as the almighty self, must be broken open to truly discover and release our spirit potential. Those shamans purposefully put themselves under the thumb of horrific tyrants to learn to break open their attachment to ego self, manifested in self pity and its resentments, or perish defending it. For them, a ruthless obliteration of obsession with the ego self, with feelings of entitlement or resentment, was the only hope of releasing spirit energy and reaching total freedom, or enlightenment.

What lies at the center?

The Big Book, “the bible” of AA, asks its practitioners, in step 4 of this modern shamanic healing art, to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves in a process that parallels the shamanic practice of recapitulation:

We took stock honestly… Being convinced that self, manifested in various ways, was what had defeated us, we considered its common manifestations.

Resentment is the “number one” offender… From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically. In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper. We listed people, institutions or principles with whom we were angry. We asked ourselves why we were angry. In most cases it was found that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships (including sex) were hurt or threatened. So we were sore. We were burned up.” –The Big Book pp. 64-65

The founders of AA realized that alcohol was the ultimate petty tyrant for alcoholics that freely fed the delusion of ego self as the all-important almighty one, displacing the true spirit self. Under the brutal tutelage of this petty tyrant, alcoholics are led to a systematic destruction of the ego self, as the meaningful accomplishments and relationships of a lifetime are burned up as the almighty ego self maintains its hegemony. The alcoholic must break its attachment to ego self and self pity to be released from its superior lethal delusions evoked by spirit alcohol. In recovery, the ego self is broken open and humbled to surrender to the leadership of true spirit self, the higher power, and is thus saved from its delusional demise. The pathway to ego surrender is the dismantling of its attachments to self importance.

What do we find in the dismantling?

The Big Book pragmatically instructs in the dismantling of self pity: “We turned back to the list, for it held the key to the future. We were prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how?

This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves: “This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him?” –The Big Book pp. 66-67

This technique takes us to the teachings of the Buddha of Compassion that all human beings are struggling beings—like ourselves. Rather than be offended, release the self and “offender” alike with compassionate energy. This doesn’t mean we have to be friends, for truly we can only really be connected to those traveling at similar speeds as ourselves, but we needn’t disdain the journeys of others that have disrupted or intersected with our own. This is the shaman’s appreciation of tyrants: No, they are not our friends, but they teach us to shed our complacency with self pity so that we may resume, full force, our egoless spirit journeys through infinity.

The Big Book goes on to instruct: “Referring to our list again. Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened? Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely. Where were we to blame? The inventory was ours, not the other man’s. When we saw our faults we listed them. We placed them before us in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly and were willing to set these matters straight.” -p. 67

The fire is within…

In this example, taking responsibility of our faults is fully owned, releasing the self from the burden of projected self truths. Once fully acknowledged, resentment is burned up and fully released in humble self-acceptance. Released resentment is the fuel that launches spiritual evolution, the stuff of recovery in AA and the stuff of infinite journeys in the shaman’s world.

Let us approach the stored energies of resentments to set us free, in a thorough 4th step in AA or in a thorough recapitulation, completing our shamanic journey in this world or in the shamanic world—or both!

Chuck

NOTE: I find AA and The Big Book—its lineage stemming back to the nagual psychiatrist Carl Jung—to be a most valuable, pragmatic guide to healing and spiritual evolution, in the same class as Magical Passes, the pragmatic guide to healing and spiritual evolution from the Shamans of Ancient Mexico.

Chuck’s Place: I’m Sorry For Your Loss

I practice detachment…

Early Wednesday morning, as we sat and sipped our morning coffee, I remarked to Jan: “I wish I could say, had the election gone the other way, that I would have felt equally relaxed this morning.” But the truth is, I wouldn’t be, and so I engage this truth as an opportunity to practice detachment.

I think of Sixto Rodriguez,* plodding through life with equal reaction to lost stardom or hard labor, giving most of his money away; money and fame simply not relevant to his deeper fulfillment. He teaches that all outcomes are equal: simply live fully, impeccably, and without attachments.

As my models from Carlos Castaneda’s lineage always state: “I am a being who is going to die.” This awareness takes us beyond this life to the death that awaits equally in every moment, presenting the ultimate relativity of the world we find ourselves so deeply attached to. We are beings in eternal transition, in eternal flux.

Carlos once talked about the roles we choose to play in this world, urging us to play them to the fullest. Today he might have pointed to a Todd Akin and rather than judge him, he might have said: “Okay, be it—be the best, the most outlandish conservative you can be—be impeccable in playing out your chosen role; leave no stone unturned; hold nothing back!”

In an ultimate sense, Carlos, like Sixto, pointed to the illusory, transitory world we find ourselves in, that will, like

“Worn-out garments
[be] shed by the body:
[as] Worn-out bodies
Are shed by the dweller
Within the body. (-from the Bhagavad Gita)

And the dweller beyond the illusion of the body is the Atman, the eternal one inside all of us. Embracing the Atman, we release ourselves from attachment to the illusion, and can then play to the fullest, with sheer abandon and delight, the role we’ve chosen to live in this life. Don Juan suggests, however, that that role truly be a path of heart.

I am deeply appreciative of the Republicans—so deeply spirited—who so blatantly expressed themselves with such abandon. Only the full revelation of their heartfelt agenda could mobilize the conscience of a nation to reflect deeply and decide which path of heart the majority would take to responsibly lead this world into the future.

This is indeed a momentous 2012 decision, and humanity chose its course. There will be many more choices and challenges ahead, but a higher level of consciousness has risen above the sedating mass hypnosis of billionaire money. People discovered the truths of their own hearts and waited to vote, despite the obstacles.

And so, for those who lost—I’m sorry for your loss—and I’m deeply appreciative of the necessary role you played so vigorously in advancing all of us, an integrated whole, into a future of real possibility, beyond the Mayan calendar end. We have advanced, consensually agreeing to further this dream on solid ground.

Chuck

* Sixto Rodriguez refers to the man presented in the movie Searching for Sugar Man, previously mentioned here and here.