Sorry this is so late in getting out today!
Written by Jan Ketchel and including a channeled message from Jeanne Ketchel.
Over the past few weeks we have been exploring, with Jeanne, practical techniques for navigating through life while confronting our issues and embracing our journeys. As many of you know, back in 2001, I began a very intense three-year personal journey, a recapitulation, as the seers of ancient Mexico call it, reliving the most important and transformative moments of my life. However, it was not until I actually began that recapitulation process that I was able to clearly perceive those moments as the most important and transformational, before that they were either merely disturbing experiences or totally unknown memories. I also learned that if one has a knowledgeable, aware, seasoned guide as one takes the recapitulation journey, one is indeed fortunate, even though the bulk of the work to be done lies within the self, both the questions and the answers.
During my odyssey into my self, as I took that recapitulation journey, I was offered daily opportunities to break through perceptions, judgments, definitions, and just about everything I had previously been taught to emerge on the other side of myself in a new world. In more modern terms, I took a transpersonal journey, working from where I was in my life at the time and going far back through myself to emerge in the prebirth world of the so called collective unconscious, as termed by Jung. This transpersonal world is what I would describe as access to all knowledge, all worlds, through all time. It is where ancient wisdom resides, and where all things are possible.
Lately, Chuck and I have been studying the work of Stanislav Grof, who over the past half century or so, has explored the mystical experience in great depth, and who coined the modern term transpersonal to describe the realm of the collective unconscious. He was disturbed by the fact that within Western modern science and psychology there was nothing to define the mystical experience, no categories existed and no credence was given to this most ancient of experiences. Experiences of the sublime, such as out-of-body and near-death experiences, as well as transcendent meditation experiences were given little or no value. In essence, experiences in the ancient pre-scientific world were pooh-poohed, dismissed as meaningless and crazy in the face of real hard-proven scientific fact. Grof seriously began to explore and document mystical experiences and attempted to bring this ancient wisdom into mainstream psychology. It still sits somewhat on the edge, though many, many people in the West have been offered validation and acceptance of their experiences of the unexplainable through his work and that of many others.
Anyone who has had experiences of the mystical knows how impossible it is to dismiss the experience, especially in cases when it has been transformational. Of course, it can be pushed aside as meaningless or disturbing, which is what I once did in an attempt to stay in tiptop control over everything in my life, but as time went on it became increasingly more difficult to do so as the experiences began to intrude on real life. It was not until I was ready to receive the messages that these mystical experiences were attempting to deliver that I could finally turn and look them straight in the face. I believe everyone has had experiences of the mystical and sublime and, when ready, these encounters will be accepted into conscious awareness.
In undertaking a recapitulation journey, if properly guided, we learn not only how to use these experiences to continue our life’s journey, but we may also be afforded the opportunity to use them to transport us to the transpersonal realm, where all knowledge exists, the personal, the pre-personal, and awareness of the interconnectedness of all energy, including us.
I have, and I say this with great humility and thanks, learned to transport back to the transpersonal quite easily. Through my recapitulation process I eventually learned to trust the mystical experiences I had, to allow myself to go where they took me, documenting my journeys, gathering from them the truth of the real possibility that all of us can access this transpersonal world volitionally. Although Grof led many experiments into the transpersonal using LSD, I have never used drugs. I didn’t need them. Life itself was enough of a catalyst to get me where I needed to go, as it rocketed me into the surreal over and over again, both before I ever heard about recapitulation and then certainly once I began that journey.
Once I learned to cultivate those experiences, understanding them as meaningful experiences of awareness, I gained a personal understanding of the mystical and how we can use it to guide us, through understanding not only life, but death and the greater universe as well. Now, after ten years of journeying by choice, I know I can never stop. It is my path, my intent, and my most personal challenge as well. Unfortunately, I can’t live there all the time, much as I would like to. In the meantime, I am happy to write about it, and help others achieve the peace it offers.
What I am getting at today in this blog is the true fact that we can all do this. I am nothing, no one special. I call myself by no name except the one I have in the real world, and even that I am not that attached to. In all the work I do, I seek only to offer guidance based on what I have learned through my experiences in the transpersonal world, the shamanic world, a world where everything goes, where one is able to access the darkness as well as the light, where one can experience the mystical without fear. It is my greatest wish that all of you be able to do so too, to allow for the mystical be a fuller part of your personal journey, without fear.
Once again, I turn to Jeanne, my personal guide and yours, and ask her to offer some insight into how we can access her world. How can people access your world, especially those who do not have access to means beyond their control, as I did, or just perhaps do not realize they do? Jeanne, what guidance do you offer us today along these lines?
Access to the mystical, as Jan terms it, is really only available through the self. One cannot have such experiences through others, but only through personally challenging the self, for otherwise there is no meaning to be had. In reading of such experiences one gains great benefits; by that I mean: the benefit of suggestion. Use of suggestion and awareness of possibility lead to intent, and that is the key to becoming open to all experiences, no matter what world one wants to enter.
Say you wish to get a new job. A new job may or may not magically appear, but I guarantee that if you set your intent for a new job, visualize yourself in it and set your specific requirements, that job will materialize. Intent works very specifically.
Intent can be used in all cases of desire. It can result in negative as well as positive challenges. You can intend illness, death even. You can intend a fuller life, drastic change in your personal experiences upon that earth. Your intent affects you, but others as well. If you keep your intent focused on the self, on doing inner work, on challenging the self to learn how to become nonjudgmental and pure, you are doing not only the self, but the entire world a favor. So, all of that being said, if you begin to set your intent in a certain direction, you will have experiences.
If you wish for experiences of the mystical, I suggest you begin a process of intending such experiences, but you must then be ready for what comes. I do not mean to alarm you, but you had better also set your intent to be able to withstand the process that will undoubtedly unfold. You must also set your intent to become aware, so that you do not dismiss what comes to you. You must be able to comprehend that it is truly happening.
Yes, I agree with Jeanne wholeheartedly here. This aspect is perhaps the most important. If you aren’t able to recognize the mystical experiences as such you will miss a lot. I still have to train my awareness, to find ways to allow myself to accept the truth of my personal experiences without the rational mind interfering, whether psychic knowing or experiences of the sublime. Noticing them and fully accepting them can be a challenge, as the rational will always step in to correct, that’s its job; and then there is the ego to deal with too, but that is another blog. What else should we set our intent to do, Jeanne?
Intent must be embraced wholeheartedly and used wisely, in an all-encompassing, thorough manner. Do not shirk yourself from having a full experience by laziness or over-eagerness. It is a serious matter and a serious process to engage in, this desiring entry into other worlds. One must be ready. You may already be at the point of readiness, but use practical and intelligent steps in setting your intent, otherwise you may not notice or be able to fully comprehend your experiences. But that being said, I do not wish to thwart any effort or desire for action. Take action on your personal behalf with innocence at your core. You can even set your intent for accessing innocence, for an experience of pure innocent energy, for instance, and you will surely have it.
As I mentioned, your awareness is key, as well as your attention to how your mind works, for it will pop up immediately to tell you that, “Oh, that didn’t just happen.” If you listen to that you will of course not be able to fully access the experiences that you so desire.
For what reasons can you suggest that people might want to access the mystical, Jeanne?
There are, of course, a multitude of reasons, personal and otherwise, but I would suggest that, to begin with, you stick to the simplest reason: to have an experience of energy, because that is really what this is all about, experiencing the self as energy. You can do this while awake, asleep, in meditation, volitionally. Or you can call upon the universe to give you the experience and then be ready for what comes; be alert, and wait for its arrival. If you ask for something you will receive it, but in what form you do not know; so you must be alert and understand how the universe sees fit to address you at this time in your life.
Beyond that simple reason—to simply have an experience of the energetic interconnectedness of all things—a far greater purpose of such experience is to gain personal awareness and insight, so you can understand why you are you, what you are alive for, where you came from and why, and where you are going. The greatest purpose in life is to gain awareness and that involves awareness of energy, how it works—not intellectually as so many do—but by personal experience. And, as Jan suggests, accessing the mystical, simply because you want to, is a good way to start.
I also warn that if you are not ready, that is okay too. But I ask that you begin to open to the truth of the mystical anyway, that you begin training yourself to trust that it is possible, that you will one day be ready, and that you will be better prepared when that day comes by your openness to and your awareness of the possibility that everything is available to you, the mystical as well as the rational.
Good luck, My Dears, as you challenge yourselves into having new experiences. You can do no great harm to yourselves, if you stick to practical and sober means. And please be patient.
Thank you, Jeanne!
Please feel free to post comments or respond to this message in the post/read comments section below. And thank you for passing the messages on!
Most fondly and humbly offered.
