direct knowledge | Riverwalker Press

Carlos Castaneda in conversation with don Juan, excerpted from A Separate Reality:

From where I was seated I could see the group of boys through the glass window… After three days of watching them go like vultures after the most meager of leftovers I became despondent, and I left that city feeling that there was no hope for those children whose world was already molded by their day-after-day struggle for crumbs.

“Do you feel sorry for them?” don Juan exclaimed in a questioning tone.

“I certainly do,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because I’m concerned with the well-being of my fellow men. Those are children and their world is ugly and cheap.”

“Wait! Wait! How can you say that their world is ugly and cheap?” don Juan said, mocking my statement. “You think that you’re better off, don’t you?”

I said I did; and he asked me why; and I told him that in comparison to those children’s world mine was infinitely more varied and rich in experiences and in opportunities for personal satisfaction and development…

“Do you think that your very rich world would ever help you to become a man of knowledge?” don Juan asked with slight sarcasm… “Can your freedom and opportunities help you to become a man of knowledge?”

“No!” I said emphatically.

“Then how could you feel sorry for those children?” he said seriously. “Any of them could become a man of knowledge. All the men of knowledge I know were kids like those you saw eating leftovers and licking the tables.” –from pp. 20-22.

We in America still live in the richest economy in the world. Do our freedom, opportunity and richness make us people of knowledge—people able to see and align with the true nature of reality? Do our educational institutions enlighten us or merely groom us to uphold an old world order? This old world order is so out of balance that nature is leading the revolution now to bring it down.

Nature has delivered a profound blow to the country of Japan. Perhaps we can ignore dead sea turtles in the oil-polluted Gulf of Mexico as new drilling leases are approved for oil companies, but can we really ignore radioactive waste filling the ocean? Who really feels reassured at the suggestion that by the time this waste finds its way to the human dinner table the radioactivity will be negligible and fit for human consumption? How can we ever really feel comfortable eating fish again? Are not the oceans all interconnected?

Don Juan challenges the worldview that privilege and wealth create advantage. In fact, he would argue that privilege and wealth lead to complacency and clinging to delusional beliefs. Don Juan would likely suggest that what appears as compassion for Japan is, in fact, displaced self-pity emanating from a deeply threatened old world order.

Our world of solid objects may be maya—sheer illusion—but even illusion requires some integrity to hold it together. The Newtonian dimension of our world—that of dense solid energy—is so out of balance that nature is unleashing its own corrective measures to root out the culprit: GREED!

The invasion of greed into the quantum level of reality through nuclear energy has now completely exploded. In a world of interdependence and interconnectedness, no amount of prosperity can insulate us from nuclear fallout. We are all in it together; we all live in Japan now.

Traumatized Japan is not a victim. Japan has been jolted awake. Japan is challenged to take the lead and overthrow greed, and align itself with needed change: a new world order in balance with nature. Can we all take that lead, see reality and become a people of knowledge?

Can we align our actions, policies and intent with what the seers of ancient Mexico call direct knowledge, or the Taoists call the Way: right action based on truth? This is our challenge: Truth or Consequences?

Citizen of the new world,
Chuck

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The primary function of the womb is reproduction: the production and continuation of the life of our species. Shamans maintain that the womb has a secondary function, rarely accessed, as the epicenter of evolution. For shamans, evolution is a function of intent and the ability to perceive and interpret energy in new ways.

Shamans call the womb a “perceiving box,” capable of perceiving and interpreting energy as direct knowledge, completely independent of the cogitations of the mind. This is not a rational process, but a living, irrational process, like life and nature itself.

Shamans claim that women’s access to direct knowledge is unparalleled. In fact, it happens so easily that women take it for granted or simply dismiss it. In contrast, men, lacking a womb, must work very hard to gain access to direct knowledge and highly prize that achievement. For shamans, this is the advantage men have over women; since they work so hard for it, they don’t dismiss it. When this topic was touched upon at a Tensegrity workshop I had attended, the question arose as to the fate of women who no longer had their wombs due to hysterectomies. We were assured that the womb center was fully present in the energy body, regardless of changes in the physical body. Perhaps the major reason women dismiss their access to direct knowledge is reason itself, the reigning fixation of awareness in the modern world.

Women, like men, are socialized to cultivate the mind by mastering rationality. The ability to understand and explain life in rational terms is deemed a measure of intelligence and is a core component of self-esteem. Simply knowing, without knowing why one knows what one knows, without being able to establish a systematic rational building block of facts, in modern terms is deemed both laughable and primitive.

As we watch the nigredo of oil sweep across the Gulf of Mexico, what is it that we know? How much oil dumps into the Gulf each day; how the oil will be encircled and contained; how the leak will be capped; what the effects will be on the shrimp industry; how government and industry will work together to solve this regrettable miscalculation? What does the womb perceive? What does the womb know about life and where it is headed under the dominance of rationality in our modern world? Who will value what the womb knows?

In my clinical work as a psychotherapist I have often been struck by the knowing of the womb, as reported by women clients at different times in their monthly cycles. Of course, the regimentation and orderliness of the modern world has socialized women to devalue and override the stirrings and moods of the womb, though the knowing womb frequently overrides such repressive efforts by outbursts of irrationality. In my experience, the knowledge that can burst forth at these times, though exaggerated by the energetic process needed to overcome repressive efforts, frequently reveals truths that ultimately become major life changes, though they may take decades to realize.

For shamans, the future of our evolution rests in our ability to break the fixation of our awareness on a world of solid objects and a mind of reason. The ability to perceive energy in new ways frees our evolutionary potential. Yet, even in this world of solid objects, might we free ourselves of the dominance of the rational? As we observe now the destruction of life on our planet, as it is reasonably rationalized away in quantifiable, descriptive terms, masquerading as control and order, might it not be time to listen to the knowing of the womb, the bearer of life, the seat of evolution?

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck Ketchel, LCSWR

Riverwalker Press

Tag Archives: direct knowledge

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Chuck Ketchel, LCSWR