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Chuck’s Place: What the World Needs Now is Recapitulation

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Are we all ready to face the real truths that are so obvious?

Jeanne was diagnosed with cancer in 1994 right in the midst of our move to Tivoli, New York. Simultaneously, Carlos Castaneda was launching Tensegrity, a modern format in which to pass on the knowledge of the Seers of Ancient Mexico. Around the same time Jan, living in the deep South, was also diagnosed with cancer while at the same time being energetically stirred to make the trek back to the Hudson Valley, called to a new potential destiny. All three of these energetic events, Jeanne-Carlos-Jan, were about endings and new beginnings.

For Jeanne and I, it was to mark the final stage of our life together in this world as we began preparing to meet again on new energetic terms after her death. For Carlos, also soon to die, it marked the end of his shamanic line. Carlos, a socialist at heart, broke all the rules of secrecy in shamanism and offered everyone equal access to the tools of his shamanic line with the launching of Tensegrity. Tensegrity offers practitioners the tools to discover the energy body and the opportunity to evolve to new levels of human possibility. Jan was to heal from cancer, move North, and discover the need to end her sixteen-year-long marriage. On a profound personal level, an old illusion of herself was to die and she moved deeply into energetic life.

The energetic cord that was to bind these three events together was the shamanic tool of recapitulation. Jeanne and I were introduced to recapitulation at a workshop we attended led by Carlos. Recapitulation aided Jeanne in leaving her human form, landing her in her energy body, like a bodhisattva—an evolved being available to guide others still in this world. I introduced Jan to recapitulation, the tool that allowed her to discover her unknown self, shed her attachment to a horrific past, and revamp her energy to become an energetic channel able to connect with Jeanne in her evolved energy body state. Through Jeanne’s channeled messages to Jan, Jeanne expanded the practice of recapitulation outside of the shamanic format, to include the triggers and synchronistic events of everyday life as energetic promptings to recapitulate.

Personally, the day I introduced Jan to the tool of recapitulation was the day of my full coming out. It was my transformation, as I dared to openly use a shamanic tool in my clinical work. Up to that point, though I was well aware of the value of recapitulation as a tool for healing deep trauma, I relied more heavily on EMDR, a therapeutic tool with some similarities to recapitulation. However, it was really a subset of the far more comprehensive practice of recapitulation.

I introduced Jan to recapitulation over a decade ago. As is evident from my writings and work over the past decade, I can’t say enough about the healing value of recapitulation as a tool to fully heal from the deepest and most horrific of life’s traumas. In a couple of weeks, Jan will be releasing the first of three books, The Recapitulation Diaries: The Man in the Woods. This book, almost three years in the making, is a detailed description of every important facet of her recapitulation process. With this publication we enter a new era in our work as Jan makes available, to anyone, guidance on how to do recapitulation, how to discover who you really are, how to release the self from illusions about life and life’s experiences, and how to revamp energy to enter new and fulfilling life.

Before he left this world, Carlos fully understood and appreciated the value of the internet as a communication tool. His foresight has proven true. We will be publishing Jan’s book first on Kindle, the wave of the publishing future. We discovered, with out last book, The Book of Us, that the old structures of the publishing world could not serve as a medium for our ideas and experiences. In fact, none of the old structures work for us. We find ourselves constantly being energetically led to new formats.

A bit of Carlos’s socialist heart has rubbed off on us as well. Jan’s Kindle book will sell for $.99 (yes, ninety-nine cents!) making it available to everyone. It isn’t about the money—it’s about the energy and evolution. On the other hand, you do have to pay. Carlos and the other seers of his line discovered that you have to pay, no matter what world you’re in. If you give it away, it simply is not valued. Perhaps it’s just the nature of evolution; without challenge we simply don’t grow. But there doesn’t have to be greed—the number one cause of our crumbling world.

The relevance of the shamanic tool of recapitulation for our rapidly decaying world is obvious. Don Juan predicted that for human beings to survive now, a mass redeployment of energy, such as occurs through a recapitulation, was critical. Human beings need to be willing to drop the illusions that can no longer sustain the world, face the real truths, and move forward in a new energetic configuration.

What the world needs now is recapitulation on a personal, interpersonal, national, and international level. We see the sentinels of illusion busily trying to guard and uphold a world that is crumbling around them. And then we see many brave seekers recapitulating and preparing to lead a new energetic possibility.

Everything is possible—and a new recapitulated possibility is happening!
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Tricksta!

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What happens when we’re tricked? We’re trapped, caught in illusion.

The game of peek-a-boo is both exhilarating and terrifying for the baby. Suddenly you, the adult trickster, are gone—evaporated, disappearing into thin air. For the child, a moment of excitement, anxiety and anticipation ensues, and then joyful release at the sheer magic of you popping up again, out of nowhere! “Do it again! Do it again, and again!” More fear, anxiety, excitement, and utter exhilaration, please!

The trickster is magical, playing a mercurial game. The encounter with the trickster leads us onward to higher awareness. Eventually, we figure out the game: when you leave, when I can’t see you, you still exist, and your reappearance is no longer magical. This achievement is called object constancy. Peek-a-boo is no longer a game the child wants to play. Trickster can’t catch the child now. It’s boring. On to new tricksters—illusionists who both excite and terrify, but ultimately pose a challenge to move on to greater consciousness. In the broadest sense, trickster is the boundary-crosser, a being that challenges our complacency and security, and forces us to confront the deeper truths of reality.

And what are those truths? That life isn’t fair! That all kinds of possibilities exist in the universe, both good and evil and, ultimately, nothing can protect us from encountering those forces in some form. We must reckon with them, master them, and go deeper into life, deeper into the mystery.

Trickster or Tricksta?

Tricksters come in all forms, some are gentle and playful like the rabbit, the monkey, the fox, and the coyote, all found in legend and folklore. These are the tricksters we seek to adore, encounter, and learn from in childhood.

The truth is, tricksters come in many forms, and some may deliver lethal blows, to adults and yes, to children as well. Tricksters appeal to our innocence, that curious, open part of ourselves that trusts and seeks fun, play, attention, discovery, and love. Our innocence is drawn to the excitement the trickster brings, along with the tension of being caught, once again, by the trickster’s illusion.

Life without the trickster is too boring, stagnant, predictable, and routine.

The predatory trickster—what I here term “Tricksta,” following the slang term for gangster as “gangsta”—is the most challenging of all tricksters. Trickstas trap the innocent to feed their own predatory appetites. Trickstas are the most formidable of tricksters. Trickstas don’t care “if you live or if you die.” Each time I contemplated Tricksta this week, these lyrics triggered in my mind, an incessant replaying of the 1968 Steppenwolf version of The Pusher: “The Pusher don’t care, if you live or if you die.”

Innocence gets caught in addictions. Perhaps the innocence of exploration, adventure, or the innocent push of inflation, to be a hero—take the heroin plunge. Perhaps it’s the regressive push to soothe lost innocence in a chemically altered calm world where the demons of intense feeling are kept at bay. The pusher is the Tricksta that lures this innocence, then ensnares it, imprisons it, and feeds off it while it sleeps unknowingly in the poppy field. It’s always scary with addiction because Tricksta really doesn’t care if you live or if you die. If you’re to live you must awaken and release the self from the clutches of Tricksta. Free the self from the slumber of inertia and numbness. Tricksta drives a hard bargain. It’s all on you whether you resume the journey or perish.

That same predatory energy goes in search of the energy of children, trapping, tricking and manipulating their innocence. No child is a match for Tricksta’s trappings, though it might take a lifetime to stop blaming the self for the encounter. Tricksta is a deeply impersonal energy that challenges whomever it chooses to touch at the deepest level. Tricksta is indeed the darkest side of trickster. Tricksta has no mercy. Often the only defense is to forget childhood encounters with Tricksta. The benefit of forgetting is survival, the cost: lost innocence and guarded living.

At some stage in life, spirit knocks and announces to our adult selves that it’s time to resume the journey. This is the beginning of recapitulation, where the illusions of a lifetime, especially the past, are released along with Tricksta’s ancient grip.

Innocence is restored, older and wiser, with truth fully in hand. Time to go onto deeper, fuller adventures—real life adventures and fulfillment.

Don’t take it personally,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Life Flows Without Judgment

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Life is a flow of energy. Judgment is a freeze frame of that flow of energy—an attempt to understand and value it—but clearly, judgment is not life. Life flows; judgment is static.

Life flows... and flutters...

Don Juan Matus pointed out that human beings are perceivers, perceivers of the flow of life energy. He hypothesized that human beings went on to become judgers because it was an efficient way to manage the challenging dimension of life energy. Don Juan believed that the ability to quickly interpret and categorize energy in solid form gave our ancestors an advantage in defending themselves.

We can experience this today by simply walking in the road. We might see a flutter of movement in the distance. We then quickly judge that movement to be a skunk or possibly a rabid raccoon. With this in mind we plan our approach. Funny how many treacherous leaves and fallen pieces of bark I’ve encountered as I’ve approached these flutters in the distance—the dangerous jungle of the street I live on!

Carl Jung, like don Juan, agreed that human beings are perceivers who perceive through the functions of sensation and intuition. Don Juan would likely call these functions organs of direct knowledge—knowledge obtained independently of the mind.

For Jung, the ego, or the mind, develops the discriminatory functions of thinking and feeling to decide what things are and what value they have. These are the freeze frame functions of judgment, the solid interpretations of energy that don Juan spoke about. With judgment we create exhaustive categories of what life is, how it works, and also assign all this knowledge a place in our lives.

In the modern world, the judgment functions and their host, the mind, have become so dominant that the channels to direct knowledge are lost, devalued, and even ridiculed.

How often do we ask our bodies directly what they need using our innate sensation function? More likely we must research the latest study or be told by a professional what our bodies need. How did our ancestors ever know what to eat before we had science and Science Diet!

Intuition is vision into that which can’t be seen—a direct tapping into the flow of life energy. Intuition completely bypasses the mind. The rational, judging mind has little use for intuition, as it only deals with solid facts—the freeze frames of life’s flow of energy.

What I observe is that life continues to flow regardless of how we judge it. Life is, forever and anew, approaching us with both challenge and support. Challenge may come in the form of loss and deep trauma and support may come in the synchronicities of guidance and encouragement, presented in signs all around us.

Most of the time, life energy is moving us along in the most amazing ways. Unfortunately, because we are dominated by the judging functions of the mind, we miss the magic always active in our personal lives.

I constantly notice how bogged down we become in feeling bad about ourselves. We miss how the daily events of our lives unfold in such a meaningful and helpful way. Even more amazing is how we are continuously supported in our growth and evolution, in spite of the negative judgments we daily place upon ourselves.

Life continues to both challenge and support us regardless of how brutally we judge ourselves or how low our self-esteem. The real problem is not in our flow of energy but in our judgments. Often our judgments are so fixated that they refuse to take in the reality of the life we are actually living. Our judgments generate a negative interpretation regardless of the facts.

It seems as if we fear that if we truly accept ourselves as acceptable to life, we will invite the wrath of some higher power to level us. The fact is that bad things happen to good people and bad people alike. Life happens as it will. Energy will flow regardless of our judgments.

Judgment has no control over life. Judgment does, however, have control over what we allow ourselves to see and know about the lives we are actually living. Judgment is the ultimate spin-doctor.

If you judge yourself to be bad or a failure today, life will still bring you supportive energy tomorrow. Life is deaf to judgment. The real question is whether you will be able to be aware of the wonder of the day and the amazing gifts being offered. All that judgment does is fog the screen, but beyond the fog life continues to both challenge and embrace without judgment.

Can you suspend judgment and show up for the real show? And, even if you can’t allow yourself to get too close to the real show yet, life continues to challenge and embrace you anyway. The truth is, you are wanted by life to live and explore fully. It’s why it brought you here, as the eyes and soul of ever-evolving infinity.

Without judgment,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Nothing But Fluff

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I sat this morning editing the final version of Jan’s soon to be published The Recapitulation Diaries—Year One: The Man in the Woods. I encounter this dream. With Jan’s permission I include that dream here followed by her reflection upon awakening.

Talking heads

October 21, 2001
“I dream a strange dream about a bodiless head that rides on a small electronic platform that looks something like a large gray plastic model of an aircraft carrier. The features on the face are hard and set, metallic looking, the eyes glaring. I’ve stumbled into a large empty apartment building, unaware of its presence and apparently I’ve disturbed it while wandering around in this vast space. The head on the platform bolts out from underneath a pile of debris where it has lived for a long time and skims along the floor, the face mean and angry. It pursues me around the empty building for some unknown reason. Eventually I turn and attack it and the head falls off the platform. It crashes to the floor and explodes. I’m surprised to see that it’s no more than a pile of fluff, nothing but bits of paper and plastic.”

“In the morning I wake exhausted, tired of feeling so empty, so hollow. The crazy head chasing me doesn’t make me feel any better, but it does make me think that perhaps the praying mantis picking at my head [an earlier dream] was trying to alert me to something besides just the memories. Perhaps I’m not supposed to go after the head, not just supposed to dig through my head for the memories, after all. The head doesn’t really hold anything inside, as this dream shows; it’s just a lot of stuffing. Where do I look then? Where do I go for the memories if not into my head, into my brain, to the place where memories are supposedly stored?” [End of excerpt from book.]

Moments after reading this I opened Carlos Castaneda’s The Wheel of Time, in anticipation of writing my weekly blog, to the following:

“The internal dialogue is what grounds people in the daily world. The world is such and such or so and so, only because we talk to ourselves about its being such and such or so and so. The passageway into the world of shamans opens up after the warrior has learned to shut off his internal dialogue.” — p. 117

Jan’s dream and subsequent reflection illustrate that the mind, the home of the internal dialogue is merely fluff. The internal dialogue upholds the world that we all agree upon, with the consequence being, the creation of a consensus reality. To create a world is indeed a magical act, however, the truth is that it’s just an interpretation of energy spun by the internal dialogue.

Internally, Jan had upheld a world through an internal dialogue that created a story about her past that did not represent the truth of her experience in childhood. She was at a stage in her recapitulation where she needed to free herself of her mind. In order to do this, she had to confront her fear, which had allowed her internal dialogue to spin reality to protect her from painful truth. By confronting her fear and shattering her mind she was soon to free-fall into deeper truth. To discover these truths, as she reflects in this excerpt, she had to go outside the mind and allow her body to reveal the truth unfiltered by the mind. As Carlos points out: the passageway opens once the internal dialogue is silenced.

What keeps us attached to the internal dialogue is fear. We must be willing to confront our fears to get to deeper truth. Confronting the fear does not mean that the fear goes away. What it does mean, however, is that we insist upon pursuing the truth regardless of the fear. Fear continues to be present but it doesn’t stop the journey.

In recapitulation we intend to learn the truth. We don’t attach to the internal dialogue but go directly to the body for a full accounting of life lived.

The mind is a wonderful thing to lose,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Give Generously to Those Below

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Returning from vacation, I consult the I Ching for a picture of Now.

Collapse is imminent!

I receive the image of a house whose walls can no longer carry the weight of the roof, now on the verge of collapse.

In a dream, I’m stuck beneath the streets of New York City in a narrow crawl space. I look around at the thick wooden beams and wonder at the weight of what is above, the buildings, the restaurants, the parties taking place, all the people dancing. How long can those beams support it all?

The country is galvanized around raising the debt “ceiling.” From all sides there is fear of imminent collapse.

The I Ching counsels shoring up the walls of the house to avoid collapse by giving generously to those below. In the context of a nation, this means to take care of the real needs of the masses, the true backbone of the country.

Ironically, the Tea Party Republicans are agents of change here, bringing attention to the fragility of the economic structure. As with the “ceiling” structure of an overburdened roof, continuing to raise the debt “ceiling” will lead to inevitable collapse.

In the recent past, the Republicans had no problem raising that ceiling five times under President Bush and seventeen times under Reagan. Suddenly though, they’ve elevated it to a monumental crisis under President Obama. Despite the hypocrisy and thinly veiled overt ploy to bring down Obama at all costs, even if it means bringing down the nation itself, the bottom line is: the more you raise the ceiling, the greater you weaken the structure. That is, unless you strengthen the supporting walls.

The Republican strategy is to strengthen the walls by stripping the social supports to the masses while greedily filling the coffers of the wealthy. The slogan is: No raised taxes on the wealthy at any cost!

The I Ching clearly states that this strategy will lead to definite collapse. Synchronistically, we see this illustrated by the tumbling Murdoch empire built upon total greed and corruption. Unless the structure of the nation shifts to truly caring for the needs of the common citizen, the nation will collapse as we see reflected all around the world in the revolutions of the Arab spring.

On a personal level, we are challenged to assess the stability of our own psychic structures. Inwardly, the “roof” of our personality is the ego, built upon the supporting walls of our instinctive selves and the deep well of our spirit selves.

Is the roof of our personality, our ego self, giving generously to the needs of our instinctive self, our body, and to our spirit self, the foundational reason for our current life in this world?

Is our ego in alignment with our spiritual purpose? Is our ego properly nourishing our body as well as caring for the physical environment we inhabit in this world? Is our ego insisting on remaining in the wrong relationship out of fear of loss, abandonment, and aloneness? Does our ego control others overtly or covertly to serve its own agenda? Is the ego willing to face the truths of life lived or does it remain in illusion, inflation or deflation, or comfortably numb in addiction?

If our ego is off on its own greedy agenda, accumulating more and more for itself, overburdening the roof while neglecting the supporting walls of the house, that structure is in imminent danger of collapse; collapse of the personality into depression, or even psychosis.

Inwardly, giving generously to those below requires the ego to serve the deepest needs of the self. The ego, in this alignment with the self, is in no danger of collapse. To the contrary, it is likely to find itself in the place of abundance, generously and gratefully supported by the wellspring of life.

Doing masonry work,
Chuck