Let your intent shine through the burdens of unconscious intent… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
“Saying something aloud is mysterious and magical… The loud and clear voicing of your intent is the secret of secrets. Do it… Assume responsibility to stand in front of the boundless. It isn’t weak; it doesn’t respond to supplication…” -Carlos Castaneda, December 1993, from a lecture at The Phoenix Bookstore in Los Angeles, California.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico contend that we are magical beings. Our magic is to manifest ourselves through stating our intent. It is true that we feel stuck and weighed down in our lives by burdens outside of our control. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico acknowledge this fixation but explain that we find ourselves so burdened because we’ve yet to consciously assume responsibility for our true intent.
We enter this world with a powerful set of inherited programs, what Carl Jung identified as the collective unconscious. The social systems—family and culture—heavily influence which programs become activated, whereby shaping the intent we have manifested in the creation of ourselves.
We internalize the tactical commands of our socialization and repeat them through our internal dialogue, dialogue that daily reconstructs the familiar burdened self that we feel so encrusted in. This is our intent unconsciously manifested.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico recommend that we carefully examine the repetitious patterns of our lives as a first step towards assuming responsibility for our link to our true intent. Unless we can begin to disrupt the commands we give our intent unconsciously, through our internal dialogue, we will not be in a position to state a clear unambiguous, non-contradictory intent.
Finally, Carlos advises that the greater intent of the universe does not respond to supplication, that is, to begging. We must be firm and definite, stating our intent out loud, with true conviction. Do this daily to continuously renew the link to intent, stating it loudly and boldly, while simultaneously observing and discarding the old intents of the molting self. Then we should go on with our lives, knowing that our intent will be realized, in its own time, in its own way.
Find your intent and stick with it… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Hold to the fine line of intent, the intent for your life, the intent which you personally have set in your conscious state of being, as well as the bigger intent of your spirit in alignment with universal intent. What this means is: Do not lose connection to yourself as a being who is seeking greater purpose in life, with the far greater intent to evolve as a spiritual being comprised of energy.
Shift focus away from the mundane tasks of life throughout the day. Even as you must deal with mundane tasks, constantly return to that fine line of spirit intent. Reconnect with it and then go back to your daily life. In this manner will your unconscious awaken further, and your awareness will gather to you the strings of your intent that have been flustered and frayed by life and reweave them back into that finely honed sense of self as an interconnected, whole being on a journey of the utmost importance. Keep that always in mind too, that you are on a journey of the utmost importance. Let it unfold as it will.
Your job is to maintain awareness so that your travels through life may be synchronized with your spirit’s intent. You will get there, to that place of easy alignment, by acquiescence to the truth that you really have no control. Once you arrive at that insight it’s pretty easy to take the journey along that finely honed line that I speak of. I do understand that that is the hard part, acquiescing to your journey, especially if it’s been a pretty rough one. Keep in mind that all beings have rough journeys. It’s the nature of life; it’s how you learn the lessons you need to learn. You are not alone, nor are you special, you simply are. There are plenty of things to do to get you to that place of acquiescence.
Begin by forging a new self constantly. Make the decision to change and then do it daily. Each time you visualize your fine line of intent—whatever that line may look like to you—see yourself shifting into position, equally honed, alert, impeccably pointed in the direction you know you need to go in. It’s not that hard to do once your begin the process. You just have to keep reminding yourself that you are on a journey of change and evolution; you have to say: Yes, I’m ready. Let’s go!
And then you have to act on your own behalf by taking full responsibility for yourself, for your actions and decisions, for your internal dialogue, for the journeys you have thus far taken, and for the things that keep you stuck. Constantly shift body and mind throughout your day, and begin to notice the changes you yourself enact simply by being fully aware of yourself as an impeccable being on a journey of fulfillment.
Travel onward with your own intent as your guide now. Let it lead the way.
One recent morning we noticed that a pair of wrens had taken up residence in a bluebird box in our yard. What I know about wrens is that their delicacy belies an underlying fierceness. Tiny and cute, they bob and flutter about, but they are warriors of the most impeccable kind. They chirp loudly and incessantly, very loudly in fact, demanding to be heard.
We watched as our new move-ins prepared their nest, poking sticks and grass through the hole in the bird box. When a stick was too long to fit in sideways the wren was smart enough to poke it in headfirst. I wondered if it was mere nature or did they actually have to think about it the way we humans do. The wren did not seem to think at all, it simply did what it needed to do to get the stick in. I also noted their impatient nature. If one of them was inside the box and the other arrived with a mouthful of nesting material, it just could not wait long before opening its mouth, announcing loudly that it was there, immediately dropping its mouthful of sticks and grass. Impatient, I thought, but the wren has so much energy that it didn’t seem to matter. In an instant it was back on the branch awaiting its turn to go in the box, a new clump of grass in its beak. As you can see, we watched them for quite a while!
It was a calm morning, and it was the weekend, and we felt honored that the bird box—probably a little too close to the house for bluebirds to take—was finally being occupied. Suddenly a pair of bluebirds swooped down and a scuffle began. Wrens and bluebirds were on the ground in a swirl of blue and brown; in the branches too, with wings fully extended and cutting, like drawn weapons. There was a lot of noise, the bluebirds peeping and the wrens angrily answering back. The battle raged for quite a while. It was a sight to behold. In fact, other birds appeared to watch. Robins and house finches, bluejays, and even a pair of goldfinches showed up and stood around on the ground, circling the fighting birds like spectators at a wrestling match. One of the wrens even dive-bombed me later in the day. I guess I appeared threatening in some way. Size didn’t matter, they were going to protect and defend their right to occupy!
In the end, the tiny wrens won. Their tenacity, their determination, and their fierceness never waned as they fought off their foes. I was pretty sure the bluebirds would never have wanted the box anyway, as they like their privacy and our human presence so close would have bothered them, but perhaps they just couldn’t resist the call to battle. Like a pair of roaming thugs, perhaps they simply couldn’t resist the challenge.
Afterwards, I thought about the wrens as tiny shaman warriors. Having set their intent to nest in the bluebird box they were not about to give it up. As tiny as they were, they were determined to maintain their ownership. They fought impeccably. As soon as the battle was over they resumed their nest making, assured that the bluebirds would not return for another attack. I paused and thought about myself, about the intents I have lately set. Am I that impeccable? I wondered.
A few days later, as I write this blog, I hear the wrens happily chirping away. I see one of them fly out of the box and the other poke its head out the hole. They are happy. They have great energy. They are firmly settled and working on their next phase of life, becoming parents and raising their young. I feel privileged to have been an observer of this part of their journey. They will not, however let me photograph them!
The wrens seem to live by certain rules. Once a decision is made they uphold it with utter determination, impeccably. They are fiercely protective of their right to live where and how they choose. They are warriors of intent. They also know how to play, how to let loose and sing out, boisterously and without restraint, daring the world to interfere, to try and thwart them from their intent. That, I think, is a warrior’s impeccability—to never break from the intent, no matter what comes from outside, no matter how grave or threatening.
This is what Jeanne asked us all to ascertain in her message the other day, to observe and learn, to determine what the signs and situations in our own lives might mean to us as impeccable warriors, intent on our own paths of change and growth. She asked us to constantly be aware of what is happening around us, and to use it in our inner work. If I had been too busy to notice the wrens, perhaps I might have missed an important message. If the wrens had not fought back they might have lost their home.
The wrens have taught me something about intent, about sticking to plan, no matter what comes along to interfere. By observing their determination to face off outside threat, I understand what it means to fight for what is right. I’m here now; I intend to occupy this space. This is my time; this is my life. This is where I belong and I will not give up. There is a lesson in everything as Jeanne implied in her message. We just have to sit with it long enough to discover what it might be.
The portal presents itself… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
“We just went through a portal,” I said to Chuck, after an unusual weekend about a month ago when everything seemed strange and different, when we’d lost all energy and all we could do was lie around in a daze, moaning about our inertia. Suddenly, everything became clear. “This is just what we asked for!” I said. “This is exactly what we need!”
Indeed, we had set the intent to shift. With spring on the horizon and so much left undone, it was time to rev up and face the truth: we were bored. We were suffering from the winter blues. Boredom became our catalyst, but there was something even deeper that was stirring, our spirits calling out to us from beyond the veils of everyday life, calling us to keep going, to not forget that we are beings who are going to die.
“Make this time in this world extraordinary,” Carlos Castaneda said to his audience on August 7, 1995 at a workshop in Culver City, California. “Make this time in this world extraordinary.” Such simple and yet such provocative words! What more could we need to jolt us back into truly living!
Just what was it that had gotten us into such a bored state to begin with? The answer is: “The encumbering weight of Me,” wise words also spoken by Castaneda at that same workshop. “We have let something win by default and we will never actualize our possibilities,” he went on to say. “It’s worthwhile to get rid of this encumbering weight.”
And so began a great unencumbering. Weighed down by all we carry within, recapitulation was the necessary and effective antidote. In the weeks that followed our portal weekend, the portal itself seemed to narrow. Holding us in its tight embrace, we faced what we needed to face. Such were the inner workings of our intent to shift, while on the outside our lives flowed along, the energy of our intent and the honed energy of being in the portal keeping us focused and alert. Suddenly it was time to shift again.
“Make this time in this world extraordinary.” – Photo by Jan Ketchel
We spent the weekend in Manhattan. Quickly planned for, almost spur of the moment, we arranged for a couple of key events. The rest of our time there was spent on the Upper West Side, in the dream that is New York City, in the vastness of energy that only a big city can provide. We entered the flow of that energy for the time we were there. By the time we were heading home on Sunday night, our energy had honed to accomplish the return. With little attachment, we left the city and all of our experiences behind. We entered the next dream. Chuck drove us out of the city and then I took over the wheel. My intent now was to seamlessly flow northward along the energy lines that led back to Red Hook where we live. The empty Taconic Parkway stretched before me. We were the only car on the road.
I made the decision to speed up. I have a perfect driving record. I’ve never gotten a ticket, not even a parking ticket. Well, maybe one $10 parking ticket back when I lived in Brooklyn in 1983. I thought St. Patrick’s Day was a federal holiday, and so I decided not to put a coin in the meter. It was only a ten cent fee, and something told me to do it anyway, but I didn’t. When I came back to my car there was a ticket stuck to the windshield. But on Sunday night there was no uncomfortable feeling to accompany my decision.
“I don’t want to get a speeding ticket, but I just cannot let this opportunity go by,” I thought. “There’s no one on the road. This could be fun!” And so I sped up, not enough to risk being pulled over, but certainly enough to enjoy the ride, the thrill of the open road.
After a while, I noticed my mind starting to wander, thoughts of the weekend seeping in, one dream overlapping another. I had to stay focused. “Okay,” I said to myself. “You are in a new dream. You have to wake up and stay awake in this dream.” And so I dreamed within my dream. I entered a video game dream, with the intent to maneuver past all obstacles. Keeping my attention honed, I played to perfection. Following the narrow beam of the headlights, I sped along, into the ever-narrowing portal of the night.
The next morning arrived, the intent of my video game dream still operative as we began our week with a similar intent: to flow seamlessly and without distraction, to make each moment important and fruitful, to, as Castaneda said, “Make this time in this world extraordinary!”
Time to pop out of the video game dream… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The week progressed. Energy and attention honed to work. By the middle of the week I began to feel as if I were in a vise; my energy felt like it was being squeezed out of me. “Oh my God, I never left the video game; I’m still driving down the Taconic!” I thought. “I have to wake myself up and dream a new dream!”
With that intent, a new dream began. Instantly things shifted. I felt myself pop right out of the video game and land with a plop, my energy released, my mind suddenly clear. “I just escaped the wormhole I’ve been in all week,” I said to Chuck. “You were there too! We were dreaming the same dream. We were stuck on the Taconic, still driving in my video game dream. Welcome to our new dream!”
And what is the new dream? Well, it’s really pretty simple. It’s just what Carlos Castaneda said to his audience that day in Culver City: “Make this time in this world extraordinary!” Keep dreaming a new dream. Set the intent and let it happen. It really works!
From the moment I opened Carlos Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan – A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, in the early 1970s, I was hooked by the energy of the intent of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico. Many people I have encountered over the past 40 years, who opened Castaneda’s books, were similarly affected. Others could barely get through a chapter.
There are many paths to knowledge. We are all challenged to find for ourselves the one—or the many— that resonate with our heart’s intent. The issue really is to discover our individual energetic configuration and what is needed to uniquely advance it forward. The challenge is to get beyond the self-importance of “my method” and wake up to the fact that we are all part of the same transformative dream. The secret is grasping the awe, the awesomeness of this all-inclusive dream.
Carlos Castaneda’s shamanic family, of this generation, was preceded by 27 generations of similarly configured small shamanic groups. Carlos’s generation was the end of that shamanic line as previously configured. This ending/transition coincided with the 1960s and the dawn of a new era in human consciousness. Castaneda has been considered the Godfather of the New Age. I think Carlos was an insinuation of a possibility. I think there were many Godfathers, and Spider Grandmothers too, ushering us into this evolving dream.
Castaneda and his shamanic partners merged with the intent of their sorcery line and launched a new shamanic configuration: No secrecy, no hierarchy, all knowledge, open to the masses. In this new and daring configuration, the Nagual—the traditional head of a shamanic party—resides in each one of us. This is similar to the Buddhist’s view that we are all the Buddha. Though we may participate in life as a mass, we are all charged with the individual responsibility of meeting the challenge to lead ourselves to freedom. Castaneda was uniquely suited to herald in this transition, as his mother had been a committed socialist.
In this new line of shamanism, the core culprit to be wrestled with is self-importance, which leads to greed. Freedom is to be found only through piercing through the veil of the greedy self that has led the world as we know it—our concensus reality—to the brink of destruction. How timely the unleashing of this shamanic guidance on the worldwide stage!
Carlos was fascinated by the energetic potential of the masses to effect great energetic change. He would sit on the stage and look out over us in the audience of his lectures and workshops and marvel at the energy circulating and building through the crowd. Everyone who has been drawn into the energetic dream that he and his cohorts unveiled is part of dreaming this dream forward, a new world built on the solid footing of the intent of affection—the Shaman’s version of the Buddhist’s intent of compassion—to lead us beyond the crumbling walls of self-importance and greed.
I was deeply immersed in Castaneda’s world throughout the 1990s and emerged to discover my small part in this vast dream of transformation. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was to retrieve the tool of recapitulation from the shamanic world and apply it to the clinical condition of PTSD. I had realized, while in that shamanic world, that EMDR shared a bilateral similarity with the recapitulation breath, but I realized it fell short of accessing the magic and awe of the shamanic world—the gateway to evolutionary change. It took me a while to fully grasp the true potential of these two tools, when used in combination, to offer total healing from PTSD. The intent of this shamanic dream is not simply about healing, however, it’s also about freedom.
Carlos dreaming it forward…
We all want to heal; we all need to heal. But let’s face it, we’re all going to die anyway. The real challenge is to maintain awareness and continuity at death—to continue the dream, to dream it forward, as it transforms into new arenas in infinity. From this perspective, PTSD is a portal—the initiation into a shamanic journey that opens the door to the magical tools to intend a new world. Trauma offers us a glimpse of the awe of that new world.
All shamanic journeys begin with some form of traumatic knock, as we take journeys beyond the body—beyond the confines of the reality we’ve been socialized to uphold. PTSD is the unsettled legacy of those journeys as we brace ourselves to straddle the different worlds we have experienced. In recapitulation, we reconcile those worlds and are offered the opportunity to launch ourselves into new worlds of possibility. In recapitulation we are offered the opportunity to experience the awe, unfettered by the crumbling constraints of a world previously upheld by fear, greed, and self-importance.
All who take up the challenge of facing and aligning with their inner truth are part of the mass energetic current of change that is now sweeping through our world, the same mass energy that Carlos would stand before us and speak of with awe. We are all dreaming it forward.
It’s not about believing, it’s not about allegiance, and it’s definitely not about self-importance. It’s actually the end of self-importance. Everyone, everything matters equally. That is the key to affection. It’s not about one practice or another being the one and only practice; it’s about doing whatever resonates. It’s about dreaming forward a new dream now, founded on truth and affection—a dream that soars on the wings of intent.
