Tag Archives: law of attraction

Chuck’s Place: I Am Nothing, I AM

I am nothing, I AM…

We are beings of suggestion. In shamanic terms, what we intend is what we suggest, and that we become.

Our power lies in maintaining ownership of our intent. As suggestible beings, we are subject to the influence of many outside and inside intents, beyond our conscious awareness, that have the power to put us into trance. Once entranced, we manifest the dictates of those prevailing intents.

Take, for instance, waking in the night to a worrisome thought. If we are unable to fend it off that thought commandeers our central nervous system, and we become victim to its drama and a sleepless night. The thought was just a traveler in infinity, seeking an entertaining night in the theatre of a human body.

The truth is that thoughts are just illusory bait with no substance. In and of themselves they cannot hurt us. What does hurt us is our own energy giving them life, if they hook our attention. Their lifeless drama comes alive through the fear and anxiety we lend them as they take over our imagination.

Parasites they may be, but guides they are as well, those thoughts that manage to take root in our fertile soil. We are shown where our weaknesses are when thoughts penetrate our walls. And those weaknesses likely call us to our recapitulation journey, where we are given the opportunity to retrieve a lost part of our Soul and thereby shore up our wall.

We may have to journey through a nostalgia, a sensitive memory or longing, with its requisite emotions. We may need to feel, to release, and to witness the fullness of this nostalgia before its energy can be freed to join us in our current life. This recognition and appreciation  allows for an old nostalgia’s completion, as it gracefully frees its energy to go forward into the self of now. And, with that, a fully permeable wall of total detachment from the nostalgia forms, as there is no longer a vulnerability left in us to cause a trigger or fear.

As beings of suggestion, we must face just how powerful the law of attraction really is, as it manifests the dictates of an intentWe do manifest what we self-hypnotically tell ourselves. When the mind entertains a thought in the night, the little soul of the subconscious delivers us a body riddled with anxiety, the intent of the thought manifested.

Carlos Castaneda taught that a merchant mentality is the ruling intent of our time. This is the ego-Soul fixated at the solar plexus chakra. Even the highest ideals of the New Age, those glimpsed at the heart chakra, are contaminated by fame, self-importance, and the profit motive. On the surface we turn to the light, but beneath the surface we unknowingly cling to security and self-interest, the merchant ego-Soul state.

Our intent is thus unconsciously fragmented, whereby confounding intended outcomes—the groundhog day scenarios of our lives. Without facing the fullness of our personal shadow merchant selves we remain beings of contradictory suggestions, who often then surrender our personal intent to outside influences, to make things happen.

Once a year, in a faraway land, the King, the great world father, stands before his people and proclaims the greatness of his kingdom. “Ours is the richest and strongest kingdom of them all,” he reassuringly proclaims. “The state of our economy is the envy of the world.” Many are moved to tears and applause, even those who would challenge the Gaia-destroying consequences of his policies. Calmly, he warns that the greatest threat to safety and continued success would be to question his rule. This mythological example exemplifies the reality of our current lives.

Many are lulled to surrender their personal intent, to resolve their inner contradictions and find hope and security by internalizing a powerful outer intent and manifesting its demands. The world—inner and outer—is a marketplace of such powerful intents, each vying for the most consumers. We are, by birth, hypnotic beings who must learn the art of consciously taking charge of our own intent!

Taking charge requires the following:

  1. Observe the content of the inner dialogue. Our personal intent, our personality, is a manifestation of the words we repeat to ourselves incessantly. The little soul listens to those words as instructions for the physiological creation of body and emotion.
  2. Change the tense of self-descriptive verbs and adverbs in inner and outer dialogue. “I will never” becomes: “In the past I never.” A further evolution is a positive and definite instruction: “I intend…”
  3. Shield the self from the marketplace of intent, both in the inner and the outer world. If an alien “idea” seeks to seduce from within, stop it in its tracks. This might take the form of identifying it as “thought” and shifting attention away from it, but it might require blatant warfare: “OUT!!!!!!!!” Yes, it may be necessary to return to the issue in recapitulation, but that will be on one’s own terms; never give over being in charge.
  4. Limit exposure to outside intent. Everything we read and listen to has its own intent, even as simple as liking a picture or quote. Liking something is an exchange of energy. Carlos Castaneda actually stressed this point to the level of inanimate objects in museums, where adorned objects feast upon and drain the energy of viewers. Of course this doesn’t mean not to go to museums, he stated, but one must be careful to guard the influences upon one’s energy, even in such an innocuous circumstance as appreciating a work of art.
  5. Archetypes are our true original parents. “I am the Lord, thy God…” These authoritative influences upon one’s personal intent are constantly and automatically projected onto high office holders. Recognize these projections, whose intents so easily supersede one’s own personal intent. Go to the heart center. What is the intent of one’s own High SOUL? Reconcile with that intent, taking full responsibility for life in this world.  

Taking charge ultimately requires raising the ego-Soul’s consciousness from the marketplace arena of the solar plexus to the quiet and clarity of the heart center. The proving ground for this ascent is the assumption of legitimate power by ego-Soul.

The fact is that ego-Soul is an orphan, separated from its wholeness as a condition for undertaking life outside infinity, in the finite space and time of this world. This sets up the foundation for all of humanity: inadequacy and inferiority. The trapping to compensate for this inadequate state of being is to enter the marketplace of self-importance and attach to its offerings to elevate the ego-Soul’s validity. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico countered this trapping with the mantra: “I am nothing.” The intent of this mantra is to refuse  identification with the false gods of the marketplace.

However, this is simply not the full truth. Indeed, “I am nothing” is the counter to the crutch of inflated self-importance, but, despite the fact that I am nothing, I AM! Can I strip away the crutch of self-importance, with its emphasis on validation and esteem, and simply acknowledge the purity of the fact that I AM. And with that acknowledgement of I AM, I am announcing that I am responsible for figuring out and taking charge of the life I am in.

Ultimately, it rests with ego-Soul to take charge of life in this world and that might even, at times, mean having it venture beyond the intent of its own High SOUL. In the final analysis, it is ego-Soul that has taken up this journey in space and time, a life that will end in this form some day. Take charge, refuse the not-I intents of the marketplace, and realize the wholeness of the I AM intent in this life.

I am nothing, I AM,

Chuck


Chuck’s Place: Staying Positive

Is it chaos or a work in progress?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

What we think is what we get. Make the central focus of life calmness. From the place of calm we find the freedom to be at ease, with the mind as a tool to find clarity and channel the truth. Without calm the mind is blown about in free association with all its resultant emotional storms. These are the storms that breed negativity, as we feel ourselves overwhelmed by the anxieties of thoughts seeking to birth in the center of our minds.

We get to calm by weeding the mind of invasive thoughts that grow bigger as they seek to root in the energy of our attention. We cultivate the mind by being in charge of where we place our attention. As all gardeners know, invasive species are a fact of life. However, like the gardener, we can be in charge of which thoughts receive our greatest care and which we discard as mere weeds.

There are infinite seeds of thought that seek to take root in the soil of the mind. The mind is daily flooded with a highly charged marketplace of thought-offerings that vie for the currency of our attention. The outer expression of this is eloquently mirrored in the insatiable attention-seeking behavior of political leaders, whose viewpoints thrive on the food of our attention, rendering us powerless and energetically bankrupt.

But we are not victims. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico confirmed that although extreme trickery is allowed in all realities, in the final analysis we must sign up or agree for our energy to be taken. Even in the most extreme of captive circumstances, pointed out Victor Frankl, referring to his stay in a death camp, are we still free to choose the attitude we will take toward our circumstances.

From the place of calm we arrive at detachment. Detachment does not mean dissociation. There is a distinction between objective emotion and subjective emotion. To be mindfully present does not free one from the power of emotion. In fact, it insists that we be fully present to all that is: thought, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Objective emotion is genuine reaction to the truth.

The story is told of the teacher monk who cried at the death of his son. His students were flustered at his display of deep emotion, this apparent failure of detachment. He replied that his son had died. What more appropriate time to shed tears?

Subjective emotion arises from thoughts that stray from actual reality, thoughts that catastrophize as they hook into the present and enhance it to archetypal proportion, leading to dissociation from reality.

From the place of calm detachment we see the truth and know right action. This is positive action, because whatever action that might be, it is the necessary response to the truth. If we know right action and act in accordance with it, we are in deep alignment with inner truth and feel positive, regardless of the phase of the moon. Ending a relationship, leaving a career, even leaving this world if it’s truly time to leave, brings with it an inner certainty of rightness of being that launches one’s full energy into new life.

The world is now undergoing deep transformation. Nature is daily acting out these fundamental changes. Of course, we are all free to ride the thoughts of illusion that deny the truth, or play it for profit. An alternative is to accept what is objectively there but not fall prey to catastrophic interpretation and attachment.

If we realize that our collective thought energy is what feeds the machine that controls us—or, put another way, generates the reality we live in—we are free to employ our thought energy, our intent, on positive outcome. State, for instance: “I intend a world aligned with the truth.”

See what happens!

Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Magical Books

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