“I remember the moment in my recapitulation when I realized that the story I’d always told myself about my life was utterly false. That’s the shattering moment of surrender to the truth.” Quote from Jan Ketchel during a recent morning discussion.
Beyond story, simply perceiving what is… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
We are a story loving species. Can’t get enough of a good story. Our days are spun into archetypal dramas that draw us like moths to a flame. And when we encounter the unknown in our daily lives, our thoughts rapidly fill in the blanks, hand us a plausible explanation, a reality to uphold, the fictional novel of our life and times.
In 1931, in one of his Vision Seminars, Jung described a patient’s vision: “I looked into his eyes and saw therein a great river full of writhing bodies. A few men stood upon the bank and called with a loud voice to the struggling masses in the rushing water. The water cast a few souls upon the bank. Then the men who stood there lifted them up and showed them a star and a sun. This I saw in the eyes of the old man. The old man said: “You have perceived” and he sank into the earth.”
This vision reveals the possibility of true perception, simply what is beyond the veils of our stories. Jung interpreted the river of writhing bodies as, “Like the wheel in Buddhistic philosophy, death and rebirth, the curse of that eternal illusory meaningless existence. In this vision we find the same principle as in Buddhism, the consciousness of what is happening as a redeeming principle.”
Jung goes on to say: “…that river only makes sense if a few escape and become conscious, that the purpose of existence is that one should become conscious. Consciousness redeems one from the curse of that eternal flowing on in the river of unconsciousness.”
Jan’s opening quote about her detachment from the novel of her life, as it devolved into the collapse of the world she had always known, landed her into the bowels of truth that ultimately released her from the current of unconsciousness, spitting her out upon the shore to become a riverwalker, one who walks along the river’s edge consciously grounded in the truth.
Consciousness is pure perception. Consciousness is life outside the story. Total acceptance of what is, of what was, is the bridge beyond the confines even of the story of time. Timelessness is infinity, and freedom from story releases us to perceive all that is beyond story time. In Buddhism this state is known as diamond mind, the true nature of mind.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico called this state inner silence, the springboard to infinity. For them the storyteller within is the incessant internal dialogue that interprets, that is, puts into story format all that we encounter. Freedom from the mesmerizing spells of the internal dialogue is both simple and the hardest thing to achieve.
Suspend judgment, the Shamans recommend. You don’t have to stop the story, but with consciousness you simply acknowledge what it is—a story—and cease to give it attention. You step outside the river, the current of thought, label it for what it is, and like Buddha, don’t attach. Simply perceive what is, beyond story.
Can you handle the cognitive dissonance? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
While reading Felix Wolf’s The Art of Navigation, I’m ignited with sudden clarity regarding cognitive dissonance. Describing it to Jan, I crisscross my arms overhead in an abrupt gesture to demonstrate the clash of dissonant energetic currents. At the exact second that my arms cross in the air above my head, loud crashes impact each of the two large living room windows. A cardinal hits one, a blue jay the other. Momentarily stunned, they each fall to the ground and then fly off. I took this dramatic synchronous event as a sign to write this blog.
Felix Wolf, a fellow traveler whom I’ve never met, has also deeply immersed himself in the shamanic world of Carlos Castaneda. Though Carlos ended his shamanic line, the energetic permutations of his knowledge vibrate in new ways throughout the world. For Felix it has emerged as the art of navigation, for me it has been the clinical application of recapitulation.
What comes alive for me in Felix’s writing is the emphasis the Nagual, Carlos Castaneda, put on using cognitive dissonance to achieve the coveted state of inner silence, the springboard to infinity. Carlos explained that the mind, with its modus operandi of rationality, constructs a world with a river of energy that flows in one direction only, its true north being reason. Our internal dialogue, the flow of thoughts in our minds, groups its interpretations of reality along this flow of rationality. What the mind can’t handle is the experience of a thought, fact or event that flows in the opposite direction of its reason. When that happens there is an interruption in the operations of the mind that lands us momentarily into a state of inner silence.
In inner silence we are treated to perceptions devoid of inner dialogue, devoid of the mind’s normal interpretative system. For a moment we step outside the incessant internal dialogue box of the matrix into a world of energy. Joseph Campbell once wrote: “Every now and then, while I’m walking along Fifth Avenue, everything just breaks up into subatomic particles and I think, ‘Well, Jesus Christ, that is what it is.'”
When I was in my very early twenties, Jeanne and I, still in our young marriage, lived and worked in Manhattan. Jeanne, employed by an international importer, had met a young man at a trade show and was smitten with attraction. The depth of her feeling did not go away. What threatened me most was that she was attracted to his spirit. How could this be? I was spirit man!
I allowed these colliding currents of energy to crash. I asked myself the question: “Are Jeanne and I not meant to be together?” Immediately the world grew quiet and I dropped into the most peaceful calm state I’d ever known. I stayed there for a while, utterly calm, no thoughts. I emerged greatly perplexed by the meaning of this experience. I refused the thought that we would end. I awaited the return of my mind to overrun the thought of ending, but I never forgot the experience.
In holding together through our recapitulations we are able to see what’s there… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Twenty-five years later, I lay next to Jeanne as she drew her last breath in Switzerland. I was confronted with the dissonance of the person I cherished the most in this world, now dead before me. In that moment, the world went silent and a very deep sense of calm swept over me. It stayed with me for hours.
Several years ago, Jan and I sat in the office with the intent that Jan would channel Jeanne. Jan sat opposite me. As I looked over at her, her form suddenly blurred and before my very eyes she transmogrified into Jeanne; it was like a scene out of the movie Ghost! My reason was overcome by an incontestable contradiction. All went silent and I entered that state of deep calm.
In each of these experiences I was able to hold the dissonant energies together and be transported into the calm of inner silence. However, this is not always the case. Frequently, the collisions of dissonant experiences generate a fragmentation that takes years and deep work to weave together, master, and release to the calms of silence.
In the psychological world, trauma is identified as the mind’s encounter with an incredible disruption to its reason, to its normal expectations of order. This can be the traumatic impact of being in a sudden earthquake or being subjected to unexpected behavior, such as physical or sexual abuse at the hands of a “loved one.” These ruptures in normalcy fragment consciousness, as the normalcy of the mind’s expectations are disrupted, sending one out-of-mind and often out-of-body. In such cases, cognitive dissonance leads to a dissociation that requires a recapitulation to recover the fragmented self and the energy needed to withstand the dissonant energies of the shattering experience before one can release to the deep calm of inner silence.
Shamans spend years recapitulating their lives, piecing together the ruptures in their minds that once led them into states of non-ordinary reality. When we are capable of sustaining the full truth of our own recapitulation experiences—reconciling the dissonance—the mind ceases to be dominant and we reach inner silence with what was or what is, freed from the judgments of the inner dialogue, delivered at last to the place of deep calm.
With recapitulation and reconciliation, we are now capable of seeing and being in the greater reality with deep calm. We are now able to explore dimensions of reality that exist beyond the narrow bands of reason. We are able to participate in infinity, with utter calmness.
The machinations of the mind are like the squirrel’s incessant chewing… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
May we see our encounters with cognitive dissonance, those ruptures in the continuity of the mind’s expectations, however shattering, as opportunities to accrue moments of inner silence. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico maintain that all our inner silence moments in life accrue until they reach a critical mass. At that point we are capable of living in inner silence at will. Cognitive dissonance—like planes that suddenly disappear without a trace—are opportunities to launch ourselves into an expanded reality through inner silence; a reality we are now charged with evolving into as Planet Reason enters its waning stages.
Nature is on automatic pilot… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Reasoning, or thinking, is a function of consciousness. The far greater share of our mental functioning operates on automatic pilot, in the vast realm of the unconscious mind.
Although we can consciously decide to breathe, to breathe deeper, to adjust the rhythm and length of a breath, the majority of breaths we will take in our lifetime will happen automatically, outside the purview of our conscious awareness.
Our unconscious is filled with billions of such preset programs that we all share and inherit from the evolutionary journey of our species. This was why Jung named the deepest level of the unconscious the “collective,” versus personal, as at the deepest level we all share in common the same preset programs to react and survive as living human beings.
The unconscious mind does not need to think through eons of experience in order to gain the precise knowledge of how to react to a given need or stimulus. I was once deeply wounded in the palm of my hand on a beach. I was alone. I passed out; that is, consciousness left. When it returned, I discovered my hand packed in sand, the bleeding completely stopped. I was good to go. The program to “dress” that wound lay dormant and ready in the unconscious. It was triggered to action upon contact with the stimulus of the wound as it pushed the ego out of the way and took care of business. This is the essence of instinct—inherited habits to address adaptive needs to ensure survival.
With the advent of consciousness, human beings have a new source of habit making. Utilizing our faculty of reasoning and learning, we introduce new patterns of behavior into our lives. When we learn to drive, for instance, we—with consciousness—repetitively practice a series of behaviors, such as learning to brake and drive with one foot, learning to turn the wheel, to park, and to stay in lanes with others going in the same direction. Once these tasks are consciously mastered, they slip into the realm of the unconscious, as habits that react on demand, as needed, when we drive. After awhile, driving starts to require minimal consciousness—in fact, we easily daydream while our unconscious reacts to all the stimuli we encounter as we safely take our journeys.
The unconscious is a habitual mind that reacts to needs and commands. This fact lies at the essence of hypnotic suggestion. Like the habit of driving that we ask the unconscious to perform when we enter our cars, the unconscious awaits orders constantly throughout the day. Hypnotists are aware of this part of the mind that responds to suggestion, and speak directly to it.
The truth is, we are all our own hypnotists. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico identified our inner hypnotist as the internal dialogue that incessantly barks orders at the unconscious mind, manifesting in how we see ourselves and construct our world. That internal dialogue may tell us that we are inadequate, unattractive, unfulfilled, undervalued, underserving, etc. Of course, it can also deliver other consistent messages that support a sense of worthiness and adequacy, but this is less common. We become so entranced by the habitual definitions of our internal dialogue that we construct a personality and sense of self according to its dictates. We become entrenched in a familiar definition of self that, however uncomfortable or unfulfilled it may be, persists because of the constant redundant messages and orders delivered by the incessant internal dialogue.
Ready to dive in and create some new waves? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico suggest that we interrupt this automatic flow of messages by canceling the internal dialogue and consciously delivering new suggestions, what they call intent. Intent is the mantra of a new, consciously delivered, command, bent on manifesting a new sense of self, as well as a new world.
When we coin a new intention—i.e., I am calm—and repeat it religiously, like a prayer, we are delivering new working orders, entering a new habit into our unconscious mind that will activate the programs associated with manifesting that intent. We must be religious in our practice—highly repetitive—if we are to push aside the old messages, the conflicting old messages of the reigning internal dialogue, which can only serve to confuse, that is, deliver mixed signals to the unconscious mind. And mixed messages, as we know, confound the manifestation of change.
We must be disciplined and persistent in our practice. Remember, it took a long time and a lot of practice to truly master the art of driving as a guaranteed habit. It is the same with manifesting and inhabiting a new habit. Perseverance and repetitive practice will, ultimately, manifest intent in new habit!
Every morning as we awaken, if we pause for a moment, we can observe the process of our transition from one world to another. In that moment we stand between worlds, between the world of dreams—of higher vibrational energy body states—and the world of ordinary reality, the one that our dense physical energy body wakes up in and prepares to live the day in.
We might also notice how we call that waking world to us, what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico refer to as calling the intent of life in the human form. That intent is stored in the habits and beliefs we enact as we enter the day. As soon as we awaken, our internal dialogue awakens too and begins its spin, reminding us of who we are in our human form.
“Oh yes,” it might tell us, “I am a being who is afraid of people in authority.” Or it might suggest, “I am a being who is afraid to lose my job,” or “I am a being who doesn’t feel attractive,” or “I am a being who must clothe over my flaws,” or “I am a being with physical ailments that I must create tension around to feel present in my body.”
It’s possible that our internal dialogue may produce the following as well, “I am a being who is tired in the morning,” or “I am a being who must stay anxious in order to remain focused,” or “I am a being who must rush around and worry,” or “I am a being who is sad and lonely.”
Once we’ve established our link with the intent of who we are in human form, our internal dialogue is geared up to remind us incessantly throughout the day with its repetitive mental thoughts of who we are and who we are not. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico say that every ounce of energy we have is given over to upholding the intent of who we are and how we define this world, so much so that all the possibility of perceiving or conceiving of life beyond the structure of that intent is completely screened out. Our intent to uphold who we are and what this world is comprised of is completely sealed off by the gatekeeper of the mind, constantly chattering away, repeating the same old phrases.
What does your Gatekeeper say?
We see an exact replica of this internal dialogue in our digital age. The speed and constancy of our hunger for nonstop digital input into our central nervous system to define and know our world is matched only by the incessant internal dialogue inside our minds that nonstop feeds us our stories of who we are and what our world is made up of. We’ve become terrified of a pause, a gap, a movie that streams too slowly, calmness, aloneness, a quiet moment with no input, a gap that just for a moment throws us a glimpse of another world.
We constantly long for change, yet we grasp at the familiar. The truth is though that our internal dialogue keeps us stuck, as the world we currently uphold seduces us to believe that faster delivery of information or quicker connection is all we need to experience our unrealized potential. But, in actual fact, this is our world swinging us to the Rajas pole, our world of ordinary reality on a manic speed trip. Inevitably, the great revving up then alternates and swings us in the opposite direction and we crash, as we ride the pendulum that Jan wrote about in her blog this week. But the truth is that even this bi-polar swing remains safely locked in the boundaries of ordinary reality. How could it be otherwise when what we hear in our heads are the same mantras repeated over and over again.
As I have often written, don Juan Matus states that to truly travel in the unknown we must be extremely sober. Sobriety bears the tension of the pendulum swings of this world. In sobriety we offer ourselves the opportunity to avoid the lure of the extremes. The seduction of the extremes is transcendence—the opportunity to achieve a spiritual experience—a going beyond life in the mundane, with the boring repetition of our stuck patterns. It’s a trap, however, and that trap is called addiction—the use of excess to offer the opportunity to glimpse beyond the mundane, beyond ordinary reality. Such excess may result in death through the recklessness of daring or the suicide of depression.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico suggest a real alternative to breaking the patterns of the mundane, offering an opportunity to truly discover and live our unknown potential: Redeploying Intent.
Calmness is good!
Just as we semiconsciously and automatically call the intent of this world to us each day upon awakening and monotonously repeat it to ourselves throughout the day, we can consciously call a new intent and engage in repetitive practices to fully realize and reenforce that new intent. That new intent might be to dream lucidly, to peer beyond the known self into the un-recapitulated self, to heal the body, to experience fulfillment, to unite with the divine—the possibilities are endless.
All that is really required is that we soberly state our intent in words, that we repeat it often, letting it become our new personal mantra, a new personal prayer. In stating our intent incessantly, mindfully shifting our attention away from the ever-present internal dialogue that has so far controlled us, we offer ourselves the opportunity for real breakthrough and lasting change leading to fully realizing our greater potential.
Each one of us can make room for the realization of our personal intent. To do so, we must take back our energy that is currently entwined in the habits and beliefs of our incessant dialogue, ridding ourselves of the gatekeeper of the mind by disrupting our familiar habits, routines, and mantras. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico never look in the mirror to break themselves of attaching to self-importance. Perhaps that’s something to give up, only using a blurry mirror to groom or shave.
Take an energy inventory. How do you personally spend your time each day? What is your incessant dialogue? What activities steal your energy? Cut out the unnecessary, particularly activities connected to upholding self-importance, i.e., constantly checking Facebook or some other digital drain, or that mirror. Enjoy the pauses afforded as energy accrues, recouped from habit.
Engage in something new and creative…
Engage instead in physical activities and practices, such as simply walking, yoga, meditation, martial arts, dance, tensegrity, playing an instrument, or something else that shifts attention from the internal dialogue to bodily awareness. You will be supported by the ancient intent implied in many of these practices, as well as the creative that always seeks engagement.
Finally, I suggest embracing the sober not-doing of knowing that your intent will be realized. Have no attachment to the outcome of the realization of your intent, simply intend it, with the clear certainly that it will be realized. And then, as Carlos Castaneda was so fond of saying: See what happens!
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.
