Don Juan Matus told Carlos Castaneda that the view of human beings is frozen, fixated out the back window of the caboose of a train that is moving forward into oncoming time. Humans are not free to face life as it approaches, like the engineer who drives the engine car, but instead see only the rails of life already lived.
This fixated view is the product of our self-importance, which reigns supreme over our ability to assimilate and interpret reality as it funnels all events through the filter of “me,” thus depriving us of the fuller view of life, as it truly is, in real time. The sorcerers of don Juan’s lineage strove relentlessly to become beings of no importance; mindful shamans, fully present to life unfolding, in the engine car of life.
The shamans place no blame on humans for their narcissistic predicament, in fact, removing judgment is the primary mechanism to freeing all events from being rendered as a reflection of self. For example, I’m standing on line at a store, calmly waiting my turn to go to the register. Up walks a being who cuts the line and proceeds to the cashier. I see red. I’m offended, in fact I’m incensed! Who do they think they are? Do they think they’re special, that I don’t matter! It’s not fair; we all had to wait. This person must be stopped, confronted.
No one is saying anything, though obviously everyone has noticed. I’ll be the hero! I won’t allow my self-importance, my value, my significance to be undermined or negated. Not again. Not like when I was a powerless child. Why do I have to be the one to stand up? Why is it always me that has to take the risks and maybe get hurt? Am I afraid I’ll be hurt? Will my voice crack? Will sound come out if I open my mouth? Am I supposed to turn the other cheek? Isn’t that just a copout? Is it okay to be angry? Is someone noticing that I’m nervous? Etc., etc., etc.
LET ME OUT OF THE CABOOSE!!!
This is an example of the incessant internal dialogue of “me” that reports and constantly gauges all events in terms of my self-worth, self-importance, self-esteem, etc. If I, on the contrary, feel worthless, then the dialogue switches from offense to pity, and a stream of comments that construct and reinforce my inferior self spew out. Perhaps I’ll realize, as I stand on that checkout line, that I don’t have the right to exist and hence have no right to complain about any injustice perpetrated upon me. Either way, “me” is the common denominator of the internal dialogue. Feeling unimportant is equally attached to “me.” It’s still all about “me,” however diminished that “me” may feel.
Now that’s more like it! – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Being of no importance is being mindfully present, without obligation to change, fix, or defend anything. Without importance there is no offense. How can I be offended if I have no importance to uphold? I might choose to act or not to act when standing on that checkout line, but my criteria for action will not be to defend offense to myself. I might indeed challenge the perpetrator, but won’t be offended by the outcome of my challenge—it simply doesn’t matter. There’s no self-importance to defend. I am not attached to the outcome; in no way is it a reflection on me. The mirror of self-refelction no longer mars my view when I lose my importance.
As a being of no importance, I cherish and have gratitude for all who might offend me. You give me the gift of breaking the mirror of my self-refelction, as I break through my attachment to being offended by you. So thank you! Through your gift, I further unburden myself of the weight of “me,” too cumbersome to carry on my journey through infinity. I’m ready to hop out of the caboose and move up to the engine car. Deep gratitude for helping me to lighten my load and to clarify the view—the view of a being of no importance facing oncoming time. And quite a clear view it is!
Breathe in the healing energy of the first morning light… Photo by Jan Ketchel
In an intense moment, in an out-of-the-ordinary experience, when I was at the beginning of my recapitulation journey, Jeanne Ketchel told me that this—recapitulation—would be my work now. At the time I took it to mean that all of my time and energy would have to go into my process of reclaiming my energy from my abusive past, until I was done. Later I understood this missive on a deeper level. She was actually telling me that recapitulation would be my work, period, now and in the future. And so it has become. What started as a deeply personal search for truth has evolved into a life’s work—on many levels.
Recapitulation is both what I spend my working life on and also what I spend my personal life on. My view of the world and life in general have been so greatly changed by my deep inner work, especially this process of recapitulation. I am not in the shaman’s world, but I found my way to a practice, a way of doing life that is deeply resonant. The Shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s line released tensegrity into the world, including the recapitulation, with the intent that it find its way to those who are energetically ready for it, ready for a way to change and evolve. It has helped me greatly to broaden my understanding of the world and my life in particular, and so I accept it into my life. In my own way I practice it daily.
When I met Chuck he had already understood that the world of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico offered certain techniques that could be utilized within a therapeutic setting. He saw how the recapitulation breath, the sweeping breath, mimicked the bilateral process of EMDR. He understood the value of recapitulation, not only as a deepening tool, but also as an agent of real change in a deeply transformative process. For the real process of recapitulation asks us to change ourselves so deeply that we shed all self-importance, so that we are more readily available to navigate life without fear, without feeling offended, without feeling special. If we are to experience all that life has to offer, Chuck discovered, we must do more than just manage our traumas and stresses, we must totally heal from them so that we may become receptive, constantly evolving beings.
As I work now to finish my second book in The Recapitulation Diaries series, I encounter my recapitulating self over and over again. I reencounter all I sorted through, all that held me captive, all that I struggled to shed. Insights blossomed the deeper I went into my inner world. As I took on the questions of my own ego or lack there of, I encountered and systematically dissected just what it was that held me captive and defended. The answer more often than not revolved around self-importance: that I was scared, that I was worthless, that I was afraid of everything, that I could not speak and break the pact of silence I’d upheld for almost fifty years. All of these things might not sound self-important, but they were. I discovered that any attachment to self had to be revealed for what it truly was and meant. And then even that had to be discarded. In regaining my energy from my abusive past, by taking it back from my abuser, I freed myself. I healed. That was the beginning.
Buddha sweeping away the veils of illusion, breathing in new energy… Photo by Jan Ketchel
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico suggest the process of recapitulation for everyone, as a path to freedom. They do not relegate it to healing from trauma, but as a means of healing ourselves of the world we have been raised in, taught to adhere to and trust. They suggest that only in facing the beings we became—through a systematic process of socialization that began the moment we are born—can we dismantle that old world and gain enough energy and perception to live differently in this world, while simultaneously learning what it means to be sober enough to enter other worlds with impeccability.
In order to begin taking this path to freedom, they suggest making a list of all the people we have ever encountered and then doing a new kind of systematic process, a process of recapitulation that involves investigating ourselves in every situation we’ve ever been in, within every relationship. In questioning why, how, and for what reason we got into certain situations—whether by choice or by force—we offer ourselves the opportunity to change. As we do deep inner work we begin to see our lives from a greater perspective. For even as we go deeply into minute details of who we are and why we are the way we are, we begin to gain a far wider view of life in general and ourselves as beings on an evolutionary path. Eventually, we ask ourselves: If I am here in this life facing this situation, what does it mean in the context of my soul’s journey? What am I supposed to learn so that I can evolve? In gaining a bigger perspective we gain meaning for our lives, our eternal life included.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico suggest doing a recapitulation of our lists and then going back and doing it again and again. Each time we go back we discover more about ourselves and we also shed more of our self-importance. We gain a greater respect for the journey we’ve taken while we also totally let it go.
Once our past has been recapitulated, we also discover that who we have become since then must be recapitulated too. Who was I yesterday? What can I change in my life each day? What can I shed today that will help me to change and grow? Life requires this of us, as each day new memories come asking us to pay attention to the messages they carry to us. In the midst of my second year of recapitulation—even though I often hated doing the recapitulation process as I was constantly being dragged back into horrific memories—I understood that it was, as the Shamans of Ancient Mexico discovered, really a lifelong process. Once begun I knew I would be doing it my whole life, gladly. How could I not when I saw the value of it? I saw myself changing, felt my physical body changing, felt my very cells and my brain changing on a daily basis.
And so now, as I finish my second book, I am once again recapitulating. I breathe the sweeping breath over my old traumas, releasing them again. They no longer bother me as they once did, but still I breathe them out and breathe in new energy. As I breathe out the old self, even the new recapitulated self, I am aware that even that deeply changed self must not be attached to. I must breathe her out and turn toward new life and a new self yet again.
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.
On a road trip through America, struck by the metastases of stores, hotels and restaurants. “Each town looks the same to me,” carbon copies, endless chains of unchecked greed, growth and expansion, a malignancy from sea to sea, and across the seas. We are sold on the notion that economic recovery equals economic expansion, the only cure for our slump.
Meanwhile, as we self-soothe, bathing in our personal history of self-importance on Facebook, this marketing goldmine with its own metastases—tentacles penetrating every lead, refusing to let go of any attachment— is now deemed unstoppable and has not escaped the eyes of investment giant Goldman Sachs, now offering Facebook stock to its wealthy investors. Remember Goldman? One of the investment leaders responsible, through its greed, for bringing down the economy a few short years ago.
Our world reflects our most dreaded disease: cancer. This is so, not only because of the carcinogens we create and consume, but also because our governing modus of survival is unchecked expansion. In a nutshell: how can I generate, market, expand, and accumulate MORE!
The God of Now is MORE! The rational mind is firmly in control, and regardless of lip service to the contrary, death=lights out. The only heaven is accumulation in the now. This is The Matrix we live in and feed. And it’s not just the puppet masters of the evil empire who tweak the local ambience to feed our illusions of specialness in their big box wonderlands. If we examine the habits of our lives, we are sure to discover the dominance of more in some form, whether it be in electronics, food, spirits, romance, objects, information, etcetera, etcetera.
The modern world has lost its connection and respect for ancient wisdom. China, the land that gave us The Middle Way, the ancient cure for excess, has completely metastasized. Like a pancreatic cancer, it spreads its ravenous greed, consuming all that lies in its way, including Tibet.
We are indeed at the climax of a dying age, as the ancient Hindus, in their Vishnu Purana text wrote, describing our age with amazing accuracy: “It declares that men will know they have entered the Kali Age when society reaches a stage where property confers rank, wealth becomes the only source of virtue, passion the sole bond of union between husband and wife, falsehood the source of success in life, sex the only means of enjoyment, and when outer trappings are confused with inner religion.”
On a global scale this age must burn itself out for new life to begin. Jeanne came to realize that sometimes cancer is the necessary remedy of transformation.
And lest I seem negative and hopeless, I am in fact quite optimistic. The seeds of a new era lie within us all. First, we must allow ourselves to see the truth of The Matrix, time for the red pill. Next we must disengage from the tentacles of The Matrix that feed upon and are supported by our vital energy.
Yes, we are free to reclaim our energy by facing all the truths, inner and outer; the stuff of recapitulation. As we filter through our experiences and reclaim our energy, we harmonize and achieve an inner calm, perfectly capable of sustainability outside The Matrix. We reclaim our birthright as energetic beings, freed to step outside the illusions of The Matrix, freed to live in infinity, NOW! Happy New Year!
If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.
Until we meet again,
Chuck
NOTES: Each town looks the same to me is a quote from the Simon and Garfunkel song Homeward Bound. The Vishnu Purana text is from the book Tantra, The Yoga of Sex by Omar Garrison, p. xix. The Matrix refers to the movie of the same title, Chuck’s favorite movie, thus far and now.
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.
