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Chuck’s Place: Beyond The Sprawl

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On a road trip through America, struck by the metastases of stores, hotels and restaurants. “Each town looks the same to me,” carbon copies, endless chains of unchecked greed, growth and expansion, a malignancy from sea to sea, and across the seas. We are sold on the notion that economic recovery equals economic expansion, the only cure for our slump.

Meanwhile, as we self-soothe, bathing in our personal history of self-importance on Facebook, this marketing goldmine with its own metastases—tentacles penetrating every lead, refusing to let go of any attachment— is now deemed unstoppable and has not escaped the eyes of investment giant Goldman Sachs, now offering Facebook stock to its wealthy investors. Remember Goldman? One of the investment leaders responsible, through its greed, for bringing down the economy a few short years ago.

Our world reflects our most dreaded disease: cancer. This is so, not only because of the carcinogens we create and consume, but also because our governing modus of survival is unchecked expansion. In a nutshell: how can I generate, market, expand, and accumulate MORE!

The God of Now is MORE! The rational mind is firmly in control, and regardless of lip service to the contrary, death=lights out. The only heaven is accumulation in the now. This is The Matrix we live in and feed. And it’s not just the puppet masters of the evil empire who tweak the local ambience to feed our illusions of specialness in their big box wonderlands. If we examine the habits of our lives, we are sure to discover the dominance of more in some form, whether it be in electronics, food, spirits, romance, objects, information, etcetera, etcetera.

The modern world has lost its connection and respect for ancient wisdom. China, the land that gave us The Middle Way, the ancient cure for excess, has completely metastasized. Like a pancreatic cancer, it spreads its ravenous greed, consuming all that lies in its way, including Tibet.

We are indeed at the climax of a dying age, as the ancient Hindus, in their Vishnu Purana text wrote, describing our age with amazing accuracy: “It declares that men will know they have entered the Kali Age when society reaches a stage where property confers rank, wealth becomes the only source of virtue, passion the sole bond of union between husband and wife, falsehood the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner religion.”

On a global scale this age must burn itself out for new life to begin. Jeanne came to realize that sometimes cancer is the necessary remedy of transformation.

And lest I seem negative and hopeless, I am in fact quite optimistic. The seeds of a new era lie within us all. First, we must allow ourselves to see the truth of The Matrix, time for the red pill. Next we must disengage from the tentacles of The Matrix that feed upon and are supported by our vital energy.

Yes, we are free to reclaim our energy by facing all the truths, inner and outer; the stuff of recapitulation. As we filter through our experiences and reclaim our energy, we harmonize and achieve an inner calm, perfectly capable of sustainability outside The Matrix. We reclaim our birthright as energetic beings, freed to step outside the illusions of The Matrix, freed to live in infinity, NOW! Happy New Year!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

NOTES: Each town looks the same to me is a quote from the Simon and Garfunkel song Homeward Bound. The Vishnu Purana text is from the book Tantra, The Yoga of Sex by Omar Garrison, p. xix. The Matrix refers to the movie of the same title, Chuck’s favorite movie, thus far and now.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Magical Books

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Some books simply are magical. Every time I pick up any book of Carlos Castaneda’s—books I have read dozens of times over the past forty years—I encounter new knowledge. These books are alive with an energy that takes me deeper in my journey of awareness. They inevitably lead me into heightened awareness where my clarity of knowing is unparalleled. I experience directly the intent of the seers of ancient Mexico. Carlos channeled that intent in those living books by completely removing his self-importance from their pages. He reserves his words for precise descriptions of his experiences in the seer’s world.

Recently, while rummaging through the books at the local recycling center, I came upon the big book, AA’s “bible.” Though I’ve read countless works on recovery, I never actually read this book. This book is also a living book, a magical book. Unpretentious, blue, with no outer appeal, in fact, rather anonymous looking, it nonetheless called out to me.

As I began to read through its pages, I recognized the evolutionary intent it channels. AA is the most successful mass movement for evolutionary change on earth. The guidelines of that intent are clearly spelled out in shamanic terms. For change to happen one must beckon a power beyond the ego. The ego must then open to a shamanic journey with that power to experience genuine transformation. In preparation for that journey the guidance requires a complete loss of self-importance, in fact, in AA everyone remains on a first name basis only. No one is more important than the other—there is no hierarchy. No profit is to be made from the program and no one is rejected; all are equal. (I think Senator McCarthy was barking up the wrong tree when he was seeking out the true communists in America in the nineteen-fifties!)

Furthermore, the growth of AA was predicated on the energetic law of attraction, clearly spelled out in the book, attraction versus promotion. The guidance also strongly recommends one’s individual encounter with the truth in the form of a moral inventory and making of amends. This is a version of recapitulation that enables the seeker to put down old burdens, erase the constraints of personal history, preparing the ground for freedom and transformation.

In describing the magical origins of AA, the book chronicles the role of C. G. Jung. After failing to cure one of AA’s founders, the dejected patient pressed Jung for any glimmer of hope for what to do next to heal. Jung, offering little hope to this advanced alcoholic patient and without any further guidance, suggested he might experience a transformation through a spiritual experience. “Here and there, once in a while, alcoholics have had what are called vital spiritual experiences,” Jung told him. (p. 27 in Alcoholics Anonymous Third Edition.) He did indeed go out and have a spiritual experience that channeled the path to AA, and the rest is history, as chronicled in the big book, a living viable path for transformation.

Jung himself, the son of generations of protestant ministers, was faced with the personal experience that dogma and belief could not serve the needs of his soul. As Aniela Jaffé writes in C. G. Jung Word and Image: “In his eyes, the ability to believe was a gift of grace, one which he (Jung) and many others no longer shared. That loss justified the search for new approaches to the numinous.” This was the impetus behind Jung’s suggestion to his alcoholic patient to go out and seek a spiritual experience.

Jung himself recorded his own spiritual journey in The Red Book, another magical book. In this book Jung chronicles his personal confrontation with powers greater than himself, a series of numinous experiences that ultimately paved its own path to wholeness in the form of analytical psychology. This book, like other magical books, is bereft of self-importance and hints at a means for each of us to discover our own individuation.

The common thread running through the magical books of Carlos Castaneda, AA, and C. G. Jung is that they all channel the energy of transformation and evolutionary intent, offering access to a personal spiritual transformative experience. Whether the journey happens in the shaman’s world, supported by a nagual, or in psychotherapy under the guidance of a therapist, or in “the rooms” supported by the AA community, it is only a personal experience that will lead to genuine transformation and change.

These magical books speak to our time, where the grace of dogma and belief can no longer serve the spiritual evolutionary needs of a planet in crisis, in dire need of transformation. However, to go beyond dogma and belief and truly achieve transformation each one of us must individually take the journey, and see what happens!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Reincarnation in a Pear Tree

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The inspiration for the title and theme of this blog began with a story Jan told me as we talked about reincarnation this past week. Here, in her own words, is what she said:

My grandfather was a builder and developer. When he retired from major construction projects such as building skyscrapers, churches and apartment buildings in New York City he put his creative energy into building houses in the hills of the Hudson Valley where he had purchased an old farm in the nineteen-forties and where he maintained a second home. As I remember him telling the story, he was getting ready to bulldoze a new road through an old orchard of gnarly apple, pear and plum trees. Always sensitive to nature—indeed the homes he built were more than likely to be nestled among tall trees—his choice of where to build was always planned so as to do as little damage to the natural environment as possible. On that day, he attempted to push his way through a row of old fruit trees, but one small, dead looking pear tree would not fall before the powerful machine upon which he rode. He described it as standing as solidly as if made of steel, and although he had knocked off quite a few large branches, almost halving the tree, he felt that it deserved to live as long as it desired, so he moved his road slightly to the left in order to accommodate this most auspicious pear tree.

As he worked on his housing development he watched with delight as the little pear tree blossomed, grew leaves and bore fruit. Later he stood on the back of his truck and picked the ripened pears, marveling at the mystery of this half dead tree, as year after year it continued to produce the biggest, juiciest and sweetest pears he had ever tasted. Years later he would still drive by, stop and stand on the back of his truck and reach up into the branches, filling his hat with golden pears.

I too picked pears from this magical tree. When waiting for the school bus or walking past it I never failed to recall my Grandfather’s story of how it had survived the bulldozer. It was a story I heard him tell many times and always with the same bright sense of wonder in his voice as the first time I’d heard him speak of the sturdy little pear tree that refused death and always produced such succulent life.

Years later, my youngest brother, when he was about eleven or twelve, asked me if I believed in reincarnation and immediately an image of that same little pear tree came to mind. When this same brother died a few years after that the little pear tree again instantly appeared before me. In fact, whenever I hear or think the word “reincarnation” an image of that little pear tree immediately floats before me. I see it now, a little golden pear tree, its trunk, leaves and fruit bathed in glistening golden light, and I am reminded of my grandfather and my brother, and the energy of all life, never ending.

The old gnarly pear tree is our old soul that continues its journey through infinity, manifesting new lives, new adventures, in the fresh fruit of our current life, our current incarnation. Though this life, this incarnation, will end as all fresh fruit ultimately breaks down, the life of our soul endures, accruing all the experiences of our current incarnation, constantly evolving onward to new adventure.

On the evening of December 9th, Jan and I sat calmly watching the flames in our wood stove, drinking a glass of wine. This was a special wine we had ordered, having to wait weeks for its arrival. I had just picked it up before coming home. This wine is a fair trade red organic wine without sulfites from South Africa called “Live-a-Little” Really Ravishing Red. On the label is an illustration of a woman dancing freely among the stars and a man in the background hanging from a crescent moon.

The phone rang. It was my daughter, Erica. She shared how well she’d done on her finals, then asked: “Are you guys doing anything special?” I paused, thinking: Well, it’s a Thursday night, why would we be doing anything special? I replied: “No, not really, why?”

“It’s December 9th, Dad…”

Suddenly, I was transported back into another life, a prior incarnation. Nine years ago, Jeanne died on December 9th. And, for the first time in nine years, I had not relived our personal passion play, amazing as it was. So fully interwoven now is Jeanne in the fabric of my current incarnation as we face oncoming time, that I was totally living outside the caboose, which represents looking backward and living in a life we have already lived. (Refer to last week’s blog.)

Deeply sensitive to my daughter, and all my children, seeds planted from the fruits of my journey with Jeanne in this world, I journeyed back a bit into that life as I spoke with Erica. How tender and vulnerable the transition between lives after the death of a beloved parent. How necessary to visit and revisit the caboose of anniversaries, to never forget a past, precious life.

For myself, I am in awe at the seamlessness of my flow through December 9th, fully available to oncoming time. Someone had even recently mentioned a woman dying of cancer at age 47, such a young age. I thought, when I heard it: Yes, that’s how old Jeanne was when she died of cancer. Even this “trigger” had not the power to awaken me to the cusp of December 9th. Earlier in the day of December 9th, a client had asked me about Jeanne’s life and death. I shared in detail her deepest issue and how her death had led to its resolution. Even this had not the energy to awaken me to a past life of December 9th!

Jeanne flows through me and many others as I enjoy the fruits of my current life. My attachment to memory and the specialness of that past life recedes as new days—oncoming time—are freed of old associations and obligations. The only real obligation to be fully present to life is to merge all lives into a living whole that partakes in life NOW. This is life in the pear tree; life that can handle the full impact and integration of all lives lived, venturing forth to new adventure, next year’s crop.

The ultimate irony and humor of the universe is that the celebration of December 9th was well prepared for and pictorially presented on our bottle of “Live-a-Little,” with Jeanne still dancing in infinity!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Facing Oncoming Time & Recapitulation

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In his book The Art of Navigation Felix Wolf shares the following anecdote from Carlos Castaneda.

“The Nagual always maintained that the average man traveled through life in the caboose, always looking back, always keenly aware of his personal history, his experiences, and his identity as an accumulation of the past. It was one of his favorite analogies. A warrior who wants to become a man of knowledge, however, has to turn around and face life as it unfolds in front of him. Instead of facing receding time he has to face oncoming time, as he put it. Life in the caboose versus life in the engine.” (From page 60. *)

Isn’t the shamanic practice of recapitulation in fact living in the past, the exact opposite of facing oncoming time? Is there not a contradiction here? Doesn’t recapitulation strap us firmly to a seat in the caboose with a view out the back window, at life that has already passed us by? What about total presence in the NOW, the coveted goal Carlos describes as being seated in the engine, directly perceiving oncoming time, engaging life to the fullest? To answer these questions and resolve this seeming paradox we must first explore what it takes to truly live life in the moment.

Both the seers of ancient Mexico and the Buddhists place a premium on reaching a state of inner silence to become mindful, fully aware and present in the NOW. Toward that end Buddhist masters prescribe the practice of meditation where we learn to quiet our restless hearts and become keen observers of all that presents. The molding of this observing self that allows life to be known directly, without the interference of the thinking, judging mind, prepares us to be innocently present in the moment, freed of the cogitations of the mind that interprets versus lives in the moment. Achieving detachment from the ceaseless internal dialogue of the mind is certainly a major component of mindfulness. Like the Buddhists, the seers of ancient Mexico employ their own active meditation practice of magical passes to achieve this coveted state.

Another major component of mindfulness is access to a fully integrated self. How can we be fully present if parts of who we are remain fragmented, unknown and tucked away in the luggage compartment of the self? Furthermore, the legacy of our hidden baggage is the burden it places on life in the present. For instance, if we carry deep wounds of loss, abandonment, negligence, and violation, we will surely be limited in opening to all that life invites us to in the present moment. Recapitulation is the shamanic practice that frees us from these limitations and fully unites the self to be present in the NOW.

In recapitulation we allow ourselves to be taken on a train ride to all the stations of life already lived. We arrive at each of these old stations with our present self keenly observing, taking the journey with our younger self that has been stranded at the station, frozen in time. Our present self opens to the full experience of our younger self, and thereby faces fully the confusion and struggle that once froze our younger self. Often we discover in recapitulation that our younger self was forced to leave its body under the impact of overwhelming trauma and hence the full truth of that moment was never consolidated and made real. In recapitulation the full truth of the past becomes known, allowing its burdens to be released. The energy and innocence of the younger self is freed and united with the present self, firmly seated in the engine, facing oncoming time.

Part of what we encounter as we face oncoming time are triggers that take us out of the present moment. Meditation can help us to remain present in spite of a trigger, but it can’t help us to fully open to the moment if the trigger signifies a lost, frozen part of the self. Life often places triggers in our path to awaken us to discover our lost selves. We cannot simply transcend our triggers and fully open to life without recapitulating the truth that lies behind the trigger. We must be open to completing all our journeys, especially the train wrecks buried deeply within the self if we are ever to be fully available to life in the NOW.

Recapitulation, then, is actually a major component of being able to face oncoming time. Freed from the past we can allow life to approach us with all that it offers, unfiltered, without limitation. From this vantage point, firmly seated in the engine, we can read clearly the signs and synchronicities life presents us with to guide our evolutionary journeys, in infinity—NOW!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

* NOTE: The book mentioned in this blog is available through our Store listed under the category of Shamanism.

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Chuck’s Place: Recapitulation & Beyond

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There are many worlds awaiting our discovery, but first we must discover those closest to home, inside the self, in the body. Discovering a new world requires breaking through a barrier of perception formed by walls of the familiar world we’ve come to know and love, or hate, but in either case cling to, for the comfort of the known, the consistent, the people we can count on, the things our sanity and security can safely rest upon.

When we encounter a trigger we are really being offered an invitation to discover a new world, close to home. Triggers are ushers, potential awakenings, stirrings from the Spirit to explore beyond our known world. This is the journey of recapitulation.

To leave the world of the known is always a challenging affair. We are confronted with having to assemble the details of this unknown frontier into a graspable world. Then the challenge is to remain cohesively in it, allowing ourselves to experience the reality and full truth of it. Ultimately we are challenged with merging the world of everyday life with that of our newly discovered experiences.

When, for instance, we turn our awareness to sensations or pains in our body, and suspend the familiar judgments of the known world that identifies them as indigestion, infection, or muscle fatigue, our body might suddenly be ushered into the memory of another time and place filled with frightening images, powerful emotions and painful sensations. Can we allow ourselves to stay in that world and discover the full story or will the energy of this encounter be so overpowering that we quickly shut it down and return to the security of the known world, dismissing the journey as but a strange daydream? So powerful is the pull to stay confined within the familiar walls of everyday life that we may not only never discover the fullness of who we are and where we’ve been, but we may never tap into the fullness of our potential, the world where everything is possible.

When we shift worlds and remain cohesively in them we discover hidden treasures. In recapitulation we reunite with lost worlds of the self. Beyond recapitulation we tap into the magical potential of the self. In The Second Ring of Power on page 106, Carlos Castaneda asks don Juan how he might help a mortally ill dear friend in the hospital. Don Juan replies:

“…You can cure her and make her walk out of that death trap,” he said.

“How?” I asked him.

“It’s a very simple procedure,” he said. “All you have to do is remind her that she’s an incurable patient. Since she’s a terminal case she has power. She has nothing to lose anymore. She lost everything already. When one has nothing to lose, one becomes courageous. We are timid only when there is something we can cling to.”

Don Juan offers advice to free this woman from her attachment to this world, and her disease, using the boost of her pending death as a catalyst to enter another world where everything is possible, where she has the potential to completely heal.

Once we have learned the art of shifting into other worlds—through recapitulating and discovering the magic of the unknown self—and are able to maintain cohesion in those worlds, we are further freed to explore infinity. Ultimately, the treasures and magic we uncover and integrate, as we follow our triggers and ushers into unknown worlds, provide the skills that enable us to volitionally travel freely into ever-new awakenings in infinity.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck