I was present when Carlos Castaneda stated: “If you truly want to love, love with a blank check.” For many years I struggled to fully understand what he meant. My assumption was, don’t hold back in your giving; be of complete service, of unlimited support.
He often spoke of the merchant mentality as dominating what humans called love. Love, as a commodity, is traded, with the expectation that one is entitled to a higher, or at least equal yield, for one’s loving investment in another.
Thus, giving a gift is traded for appreciation. To give of oneself comes with the expectation that one be equally given to now, or certainly at some future date. After all, it’s only fair. Why should I do for you if I get nothing in return? It simply isn’t worth the investment!
Carlos made reference to eden ahbez’s songwriting hit Nature Boy as a journey with love. eden refused to capitalize his assumed name, as to him the only words worth capitalizing were God and Infinity. While living outdoors with his family, under the “L” in Los Angeles, he gave Nat King Cole’s manager the song he had written, Nature Boy, which Cole subsequently recorded with overarching success.
The song ends with these lyrics: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love and be loved in return.” Carlos pointed out that eden later stated that the song should have ended after ‘just to love’ rather than ‘and be loved in return.’ This captures Carlos’ criteria for love clarified to its purest.
Who, of course, could deny the exhilaration of a true meeting in the mutuality of love, where love simply flows, no walls. That kind of meeting is a genuine experience of love, as it harbors no contract of entitlements. Nonetheless, it is often a fleeting experience, as need and expectation soon enter the playing field, muddying the waters.
Jan reminds me of a time when we were walking in the dark and I stated, “If you’re going to do a good deed, do it in the dark.” When I thought of this the other day, I wondered if perhaps that was what Carlos meant by a blank check—a check filled out to be cashed, but with no reference to the sender.
The merchant of love is the ego. The ego demands recognition, validation, and attention. With these filters, true love can hardly show through. Thus, the technology of the blank check, and the invitation ‘just to love,’ are valuable steps on one’s personal path of heart.
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 intent. We 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:
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.
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…”
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 overbeing in charge.
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.
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.
