We are in a time of extreme imbalance. Imbalance is the result of accumulation in excess. Accumulating in excess is the precursor of change. When a river swells to excess with accumulated rains, it must, of necessity, overwhelm its banks and flood the lands—a time of great change indeed!
The accumulation of angst through decades of stagnant repression has broken through to revolution in the Middle East Arab Spring. The accumulation of excessive wealth in the hands of the few has sprung another spring of protest upon the “wall” of Wall street.
The excessive stranglehold upon the economy—from whatever tainted, purist, or natural source—presses now upon the spirit to relinquish its attachment to materialism in excess as a source of meaning in life. The flood of deprivation drowning the planet is pressing human life into a new, sustainable balance.
There is no restraining the floods of change currently unleashed upon us. No corrective action can shore us up or return us to an old world balance.
We are in a different world now. The environment is rapidly shifting, the masses are wiser, more interconnected than ever, and the ruling platitude of unlimited growth and expansion has proven unsustainable.
We find ourselves truly at a major evolutionary juncture: Accumulation in excess as a way of life, as a planetary economy, is unsustainable. What will come next?
What is called for is a new paradigm that separates true needs from want, hunger from appetite. Accumulation in excess derives not from true need and hunger but from want and appetite. Want and appetite are abstractions, projections of value attached to things. From this projection derives the equation: more things = greater value. This is the equation of addiction. Addiction is accumulation in excess. Addiction is the human condition at this current evolutionary juncture.
The ethereal impulse behind addiction is spirit. Spirit seeks greater life, greater possibility. Spirit projected onto matter always seeks more for completion: more love, more alcohol, more numbness, more freedom, more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more money, more food, more, more, more.
Material balance
If we are to find safe passage through this time of great change we must satisfy spirit in spirit terms. We must lift our spirit’s longings off our material world and allow our beleaguered planet to restore its balance.
We are energetic beings. Energy is the home of spirit and spirit longing. The ultimate adventure that awaits us is our energy body, the body that lives on beyond the material world, the body that journeys in infinity. We all have access to it in this life, but only if we shift. The more we cycle in excessive accumulation of material things, the longer we remain in avidya—ignorance—yet to discover that all that glitters is not gold.
Fulfillment in this life requires us to explore and meet our deepest needs: material and spiritual. But if we refuse to recapitulate—where we free our spirit from our material experiences—we remain frozen, unable to find fulfillment in spirit or body. One cannot substitute for the other. A spirit being who shuns the body—a spirit in excess—results in a being in need of reincarnation. Likewise, a physical being who shuns the spirit will find itself steeped in addiction, bound to the spirit, projected onto matter.
With spirit soaring
Such is the condition of now. Accumulation in excess—unsustainable and uncontainable. The walls are coming down in floods of revolution. May we find safe passage as spirits soaring in material balance.
In dedication to the soaring spirit of Steve Jobs,
Chuck
What needs to happen today for me to become more of me? To me, life is all about shedding: shedding roles, shedding skins, cloaks, crusts, and predicaments to reach the true essence of self. Think of a fruit surrounded by a tough skin, a bitter skin, a sour skin. If we did not remove the skin we would not be able to enjoy the delectable sweetness of the fruit within. Shedding the skin and figuring out who we truly are takes work. In my case it took a full and deep shamanic recapitulation into my very soul, into the darkest self where I met my enemy and went to battle against what had been living inside me my entire life. The process was one of shedding the fearful enemies that hid so well inside. No one but I really knew of their existence, no one but I dealt with them daily, no one but I kept them imprisoned inside me.
I continue my shedding process every day as I ask myself: What can I shed today?
A long and difficult journey in microcosm
Last week a very subtle inner shift allowed me the freedom to become a little more of the me that I have been allowing to emerge and live. This is autumn, a time of great shedding and most meaningful change and transition. Synchronistically, in the news, Amanda Knox, a young American woman convicted of killing her roommate in Perugia, Italy four years ago, was released from prison. After a long and difficult period of truth-seeking a simple reversal of the decision made four years ago—guilty or not guilty—sent her back home to Seattle, a free woman. Though that decision was deeply meaningful and simultaneously controversial, when it came down to the verdict it was one spoken word that set her free. I see this case as a metaphor for our times, underscoring the need to make decisions that allow for drastic change. These times ask us all to question deeply, ourselves and our world, to find out the truth and to act on it. I have no idea what her truth really is, no one will ever know except Amanda Knox herself perhaps, but we can all learn from her story.
The other day, someone, in a rather accusatory tone, questioned me: “Why are you so fabulously happy all the time?”
“Well,” I said, “I’m done with despair and besides, I spend most of my time with one foot in this world and the other in the ecstatic, why wouldn’t I be happy?” It was all too much for my questioner to fathom.
I didn’t just wake up one day and find myself straddling these two worlds; not at all, I had to go through the deepest, darkest despair to arrive at this place of light and balance. But it was always my choice to take the journey that led to this place, in a gradual yet intentional process of shedding the old self.
So that brings me back to my declaration of independence from Jeanne as teacher and guide that I so boldly declared last week and have, since then, experienced in so many ways. I find that she taught me well. In finally taking her up on her insistence that I could do it on my own, as she so often urged me, I find that I have freed myself from yet one more self-imposed imprisonment. I freed myself from a role that in reality only I was attached to. And all it took was months of inner struggle!
We do tend to imprison ourselves: in labels and declarations, in our student-of-life roles, in our promises that we made a long time ago. It was only in shedding promise after promise that I was able to evolve into someone who is “so fabulously happy all the time.” Although those promises were made when they were extremely necessary, they now no longer serve who I truly am. I don’t mean to imply that I don’t get sad or depressed, but I’ve learned to face the truth with a different outlook now. I take in the broader truth, the long-term perspective that I am a being who is going to die, but also that my life is a never-ending journey. I now, constantly and consciously, focus on urging myself to take the next step, subtle or otherwise.
Who, indeed, can I become today? It may take only a tiny shift in perspective, in action, in thought or inner perception, but it may be a life-changing decision on my part, in the end capable of catapulting me further than I ever thought possible.
As we head into deeper autumn now, as we notice what is happening in the world around us, such as the case of Ms. Knox, can we ask ourselves the same questions that were asked about her? Do I deserve imprisonment for the rest of my life or do I deserve to be set free? What role do I want to play: that of the prisoner or that of the free spirit? The main question, however, is: Where do I imprison myself?
Most of us do keep ourselves shackled to old ideas of the self when, in fact, we’re actually being urged to change, to keep taking the journey of the evolving self.
Who will I become today? If I pay attention to the synchronicities and signs in my life, those that resonate both inside and outside, I may be able to let go of despair, shed an old skin and release the sweetness within, bursting with ripeness.
I face my own shedding process each day as I question myself and ask myself to shed my self-importance or my fear of my evolving spirit, as I once shed old feelings, during my recapitulation, of unworthiness that I did not deserve to walk upon this planet. I take another step each day upon this earth as I wander my path, asking to be guided, knowing that I do indeed deserve to live just this life upon just this planet.
Yes, I fully accept that I am a changing being and that I am a being who is going to die, but before that event I intend to fully live, “so fabulously happy,” as is my choice.
Before I begin today’s blog I note again: The paperback version of The Man in the Woods is now available for purchase through Amazon. Simply click the book icon in the left sidebar and it will take you directly to the Amazon page for the paperback book. If you desire to purchase the Kindle version you can find that here in the Kindle store. We invite reviews and are most grateful for feedback—of any sort. Please post comments on the Amazon page under customer reviews. Thanks for reading and keeping in touch!
Today, I address the shadow. We all have one. I met my own as I began the process of recapitulation.
Doing a shamanic recapitulation was not an easy process, but it was one I just could not avoid any longer. Try as I might the darkness of my shadow, which had been looming ever wider for years, finally swept over me and in one fell swoop I took the journey it offered. I let myself get swept into its darkness, but not without a firm grip on reality, with a place to anchor myself as I went deeper and deeper into its secrets. You see, the shadow holds all of our secrets—our secret desires, our secret fears, our secret pain, our secret thoughts—our secret self in all its myriad presentations.
That which is disagreeable
I thought I was living an eventful and meaningful life, full of creativity, but when I finally faced my shadow and asked it to take me into its depths, I could not deny that my life had been both controlled and unfulfilling. I knew for most of my first fifty years on this planet that something else needed to happen, but I just could not get a grasp on what that was. As Carl Jung said: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. The latter procedure, however, is disagreeable and therefore not popular.”
In my experience, meeting the personal shadow was indeed a most disagreeable process, but also a most transformative and enlightening one as well. I am also convinced that the world will not change if we do not face our individual shadows, for the collective shadow grows ever more prominent and domineering the longer we turn from our own, as we let the world outside of us bear the brunt of our personal darkness.
By the time I was done with my recapitulation I was not the same person I was when I had started the process three years before. I no longer viewed the world in the same way. I found myself totally changed, in a different world.
As I mention in the introduction to my book the idea of hiding the truth of what sexual predators do to children is abhorrent to me, thus I chose to be explicit in describing some of the things that happened to me as a child. In so doing I address the shadow, the facts of life that society chooses to keep in the darkness. Until we bring such behaviors into the light they will remain active in the dark, as that which is suppressed will find some other means of expression.
So, although I challenge my readers in my book, I do so because I refuse to carry the darkness of the sexually abused child within. It must be exposed. Only in exposure do I believe the world of the sexual predator can be dismantled and true healing happen.
Can we really change our world? Yes, but only by totally exposing the truth. We all carry burdens, in the darkness within where all that we could not face or allow to live resides. During my recapitulation I learned that by releasing myself from my own darkness I released my children from having to carry forth the burdens that were mine to resolve and release. My secrets, until I faced them, burdened them as well. They had to live with a frightened and depressed mother, and I found that as abhorrent as the sexual abuse I suffered. Family secrets burden every member of the family.
In turn, society’s secrets burden every member of society. What we are not allowed to speak of must be repressed and that repression results in disturbance somewhere. Our individual psyche will only take so much before it takes the liberty of letting us know that it is being overburdened. Our collective psyche works the same way.
There are many ways to heal and to face the challenges of the psyche. I found recapitulation to fit me perfectly. That is not to say that it will fit everyone, but if one is interested in facing the troubling messages coming from the deeper self, manifesting both innerly in mental anguish and outerly in the craziness of the world we live in, recapitulation offers a structure that is both spiritually and experientially enlightening and magical.
Each day I wake up full of energy, no longer depressed or afraid, but in a totally new world. Even though it’s exactly the same place, it does not at all present itself the same way because I do not accept it on the old terms. This is what I wish for all. Though I know it is asking people to take a journey that is as Jung said “disagreeable,” I know it is well worth it. If we really want to change our world we must begin within. This I have no doubt about.
I applaud all who seek spiritual and mental health and garner the courage to face the darkness within. The journey of the self is the most challenging and transformative. No matter how one elects to take it, know that it matters greatly to the self and the world.
We are roused to fear in the presence of real or imagined danger. Under the influence of fear our body mobilizes the energy to confront the danger or in some way find safe refuge. Fear gets triggered in different ways. In one instance, there may be actual danger in the environment. In another, fear may be generated through the machinations of the mind. Finally, fear can be triggered by the un-recapitulated self utilizing life circumstances to bring attention to the unknown self.
The energy made available by fear may be quite useful and lifesaving in the case of an actual threat. However, the activation of fear through the wanderings of the mind’s eye generating images and thoughts of danger in the absence of it can be quite draining and incapacitating. Many techniques of meditation and mind control can be helpful in reeling in this roaming mind that stirs up trouble where there is none. The ability to stay in the present moment, focused on the reality at hand can greatly diminish the unnecessary arousal of fear in reaction to imaginary thought.
However, there are also experiences where fear is activated by some trigger in the environment where there is not an actual threat, but the encounter is nonetheless deeply meaningful. These experiences are stirrings by the spirit geared to awakening the conscious mind to the unknown or un-recapitulated self.
As we go through our life journey we are confronted by many experiences that may threaten our ability to keep going, keep growing, and keep functioning. Those experiences that threaten our growing selves are often forgotten to our conscious selves, stored away in a dark corner or shadow of the self. Those experiences remain part of the truth of our life experience but become dissociated from our sense of who we are, and are not part of the life we believe ourselves to be in. This defensive action of our growing selves to push aside experiences that could hold us back is a necessary compromise to our growing selves.
If we are too sidelined by a traumatic experience we might find ourselves completely frozen out of the world we live in, unrelated and disconnected to life around us—a condition akin to schizophrenia or autism. These are conditions of stuckness, very hard, but not impossible to emerge from in this life.
On the other hand, the ability to keep growing, despite an inner fragmentation—that is, a disconnection from parts of the experience of life lived—allows the growing self to gather skills and knowledge of the world that may prove to be extremely valuable in eventually recovering the lost parts of the self whereby bringing them into wholeness with the known parts of the self. This is the process of recapitulation.
In the case of recapitulation, fear can be viewed as a barometer of the experiences of the lost or frozen self. Seen from this perspective, fear marks the trail to be traversed in recapitulation.
Essentially, triggers from recapitulation are the psyche’s use of the raw material in our daily lives as its own language to show us where we need to go. For instance, as Jan describes in her book, The Man in the Woods, simply seeing a stick on the ground was enough to trigger her into a painful recapitulation from childhood. Obviously, a stick on the ground is not an object to be feared. It’s just a stick on the ground. However, when the spirit of recapitulation is activated, nothing can be taken at face value. The psyche is intent on using any life circumstance ranging from a word, a smell, a taste, to an encounter, a pain—virtually anything to jostle awareness to awaken suppressed memory.
The mistake that is often made around recapitulation triggers is to apply rationality to eliminate the fear. Recapitulation triggers are completely rational if you understand their language, and that language is largely associative, not literal. Once the language of recapitulation is learned, the journey of recapitulation becomes clearer.
The skills of meditation and calming of the central nervous system are valuable and useful during recapitulation, however, it must be understood that to recapitulate a traumatic experience includes allowing oneself to enter into a most feared experience of unknown depth. Fear is part of the experience that must be recapitulated. It simply comes with the turf.
With practice, one becomes used to identifying the triggers and signs of recapitulation and more adept at handling the fear and facing the unknown. Of greatest value during recapitulation is the grounding that the present self can maintain, knowing that it is entering an altered state in a very real way. The experience is being relived and deeply re-experienced, but also observed by an awareness grounded in a time and a self separate from that experience. Of ultimate value is knowing that once the recapitulated material is fully known, it is no longer unknown—no longer a fear from an un-recapitulated self.
When I first began channeling I could not for the life of me wrap my mind around the term. I just could not accept that channeling was what I was doing. It felt almost hokey, much too new agey for practical me. Instead, I preferred to say that I was connecting. Connecting became the term I used.
“I’m connecting with Jeanne,” I’d say. After a while I did accept the term channeling, since it seemed to explain to so many others just what it was that I was doing when I went into a deep meditative state and saw visions that somehow tumbled down on the page in front of me into words that made sense. I couldn’t really explain how that process happened, but as I went deeper into my personal history, recapitulating my past, I found that what I was doing was not all that unique. I learned that I was nothing special.
Now, as I face new steps in my personal story, I must also face what it is that I am supposed to do next with this most unspecial self.
Fearful, in the beginning, of attaching to the new age world, I have since understood its significance in our lifetime, but only as I have also understood the intent of the ancients, intentions set a long time ago. Once I understood that all knowledge is available to all of us, I was able to embrace the new age idea of channeling, finding it rooted deep within the shaman’s world.
As I did my recapitulation I found the answers to the questions I was asking about myself, seeking to know myself on the deepest levels. I wanted to find out as much about myself as I could, the answers to why I had the life I had, why I lived in the world I did, both my past and the world I live in every day. In the terminology and perspectives of the shaman’s world, and in the descriptions of experiences that mirrored my own to a tee, I found resonance. I also discovered that the shamans of ancient Mexico have a term for that new age phenomenon that we call channeling, that I had such a hard time embracing. They call it: reading infinity.
The practical me finds grounding in the shaman’s world, because I have learned that the shaman’s world is none other than this one. I don’t have to go anywhere else to have experiences that are meaningful. Everything I need is here. If I truly want to have shamanic journeys all I have to do is stay present in this life. There are plenty of experiences just waiting to take me journeying.
The so called new age phenomenon that has swept us off our feet for the past forty or so years is in fact also based in the world the shamans describe. New terms may have been applied, now commonly used, but in reality they are ancient practices that our modern world has eschewed in favor of modern science. The chemistry lab has replaced reality. Real experiences of body, mind, and spirit have been pushed aside; the ancient holistic approach to the human experience relegated to a few new agers. In fact, the intent of the ancients courses through all of us. We are all ancients and we are all new agers, we are all holistic phenomena just bursting to live in this world, in our own times.
In a pamphlet that he distributed to the participants of the Westwood Tensegrity workshop in 1996, Carlos Castaneda wrote the following:
“Silent Knowledge was an entire facet of the lives and activities of the shamans or sorcerers who lived in Mexico in ancient times. According to don Juan Matus, the sorcerer-teacher who introduced me to the cognitive world of those sorcerers, silent knowledge was the most coveted end result they sought through every one of their actions and thoughts.”
“Don Juan defined silent knowledge as a state of human awareness in which everything pertinent to man is instantly revealed, not to the mind or the intellect, but to the entire being. He explained that there was a band of energy in the universe which sorcerers call the band of man, and that such a band was present in man. …Silent knowledge, don Juan explained, is the interplay of energy within that band, an interplay which is instantly revealed to the shaman who has attained inner silence. Don Juan said that the average man has inklings of this energetic play. Man intuits it, and gets busy deducing its workings, figuring out its permutations. A sorcerer, on the other hand, gets a blast of the totality of this interplay at any time that the rendition of this interplay is solicited.”
“…In his effort to clarify his point further, don Juan gave me a series of concrete examples of silent knowledge. The one I have liked the most, because of its scope and applicability, is something that he called readers of infinity.”
Carlos goes on to describe how the readers of infinity viewed energy, as if they were watching a movie. This ability to shift into viewing energy as it flowed in the universe, without attaching to the permutations of the mind, allowed them to access a far greater intent: all knowledge, just waiting for all of us to leave the busy workings of our minds so we too can access it. Here is how Carlos described this ability to read energy:
“Don Juan made it very clear to me that to be a reader of infinity doesn’t mean that one reads energy as if one were reading a newspaper, but that words become clearly formulated as one reads them, as if one word leads into another, forming whole concepts that are revealed and then vanish. The art of sorcerers is to have the prowess to gather and preserve them before they enter into oblivion by being replaced with the new words, the new concepts of a never-ending stream of graphic consciousness.”
“Don Juan further explained that the shamans who lived in Mexico in ancient times, and who established his lineage, were capable of reaching silent knowledge after entering its matrix: inner silence. He said that inner silence was an accomplishment of such tremendous importance for them that they set it up as the essential condition of shamanism.”
Honing intent... grounded in this world
Personally, I find these descriptions fascinating. Channeling is indeed reading infinity as described by don Juan. The words appear and if one does not capture them in some way they are gone, the next ones taking their place. Access to inner silence, I can attest, is achievable through our life experiences, through blunt trauma, as well as in the inklings of reading energy that we all experience at various times throughout life. The challenge is to allow ourselves to go without fear and without judgment, by simply taking the journey as it is presented to us.
Can we hone our sorcery skills in order to be able to reach inner silence? Yes, we all can, as I did during my recapitulation. But the real challenge is, can we achieve these abilities while remaining firmly grounded in this world, staying in our everyday reality? Yes, that too is not only possible but essential.
We live in this world and we must stay in this world, have our experiences and make them relevant in our personal lives and for our times. We must not only learn to read infinity, but we must root our learning in our world so that a better balance of old age and new age may be achieved. We must help our world evolve into a holistic world once again, where the old-new phenomena are not only accessible but made meaningful and important to our times and our evolution. We must not dismiss what we don’t understand as hokey, as I once dismissed channeling, too afraid to face what it might mean about me personally.
It’s through deep inner work that we learn how to access infinity volitionally. But it’s also through deep inner work that we may lose our fears and attachments to the personal, to our self-importance, and learn that we are nothing special. Discovering that is discovering the root of the ancient sorcerer’s intent. When we get to that place, we can then turn our attentions to working on our greater personal intent for this lifetime, whatever that may be.
