Let your intent shine through the burdens of unconscious intent… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
“Saying something aloud is mysterious and magical… The loud and clear voicing of your intent is the secret of secrets. Do it… Assume responsibility to stand in front of the boundless. It isn’t weak; it doesn’t respond to supplication…” -Carlos Castaneda, December 1993, from a lecture at The Phoenix Bookstore in Los Angeles, California.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico contend that we are magical beings. Our magic is to manifest ourselves through stating our intent. It is true that we feel stuck and weighed down in our lives by burdens outside of our control. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico acknowledge this fixation but explain that we find ourselves so burdened because we’ve yet to consciously assume responsibility for our true intent.
We enter this world with a powerful set of inherited programs, what Carl Jung identified as the collective unconscious. The social systems—family and culture—heavily influence which programs become activated, whereby shaping the intent we have manifested in the creation of ourselves.
We internalize the tactical commands of our socialization and repeat them through our internal dialogue, dialogue that daily reconstructs the familiar burdened self that we feel so encrusted in. This is our intent unconsciously manifested.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico recommend that we carefully examine the repetitious patterns of our lives as a first step towards assuming responsibility for our link to our true intent. Unless we can begin to disrupt the commands we give our intent unconsciously, through our internal dialogue, we will not be in a position to state a clear unambiguous, non-contradictory intent.
Finally, Carlos advises that the greater intent of the universe does not respond to supplication, that is, to begging. We must be firm and definite, stating our intent out loud, with true conviction. Do this daily to continuously renew the link to intent, stating it loudly and boldly, while simultaneously observing and discarding the old intents of the molting self. Then we should go on with our lives, knowing that our intent will be realized, in its own time, in its own way.
I notice this happy face smiling at me when I open the milk carton…another good sign perhaps? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
I wake at 3:45 a.m. to wind gusts that shake the house and rattle the furniture on the deck. I wonder if the umbrellas will blow over. I try to fall back to sleep but another gust comes along. I see the trees against the night sky bending low, pushed to breaking by this sudden shift. The night has been calm. We have our bedroom sliding door open wide to the deck and the night air. We love to watch the sky at night and awaken to the sounds of the birds, the phoebes and cardinals especially. They are our alarm clock. Another gust comes through, and another and another. Now I can’t fall back to sleep. I wonder what’s coming, for I sense that these are winds of change.
Later, as I’m drying my hair, the hair dryer goes on the fritz. In fact, it totally blitzes out, shoots a flame, smokes and fizzles out. It’s fried. Change, I think. Yup, change is coming. Am I ready for it and what will I do with this opportunity?
Astrologically, I read that we are in for some interesting energy, so my sense of change feels in alignment with the planets. I look forward to change, to new possibilities, to the challenge of doing things differently and of becoming someone new. I wonder what else, besides the wind and my hair dryer, will be the catalyst. Something else is sure to come along to support me today in my quest and desire for change. I know for a fact though that I must be my own instigator of change. I must be my own arbiter, my own catalyst, and yet I am thankful for the signs that show me that the time for change is now.
The fact that the cicadas are here this summer is right in alignment with the idea that it is high time to make some big changes. They have been singing their way through the days, letting us know that we don’t have much time left. And it’s true, we don’t, they don’t, none of us do. As the Shamans of Ancient Mexico like to say: We are beings who are going to die.
Here it is, trying like heck to turn over… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
I thought about those shamans yesterday. I was just about to check the hot tub water chemistry when I noticed a large bug on the hot tub cover. It was on its back, trying desperately to turn over. A cicada. I watched it for a while, remembering how don Juan had once told Carlos not to interrupt the progress of some critter crossing the road, a snail perhaps. He told him that he had no right to interfere, for he did not really know the snail’s story. I tend to not interfere with nature myself, knowing that nature can pretty much take care of itself. However, it was taking the cicada a long time to flip itself over and I was getting impatient. Of course, I could have come back later, but I wanted to test the water now.
After a while, rather than actually touch the cicada, I blew at it hard enough that it was able to flip over and fly off the hot tub cover. Satisfied I opened the lid and went about my business. A few seconds later as I went to the other side of the hot tub to turn on the jets, I stepped on something that went CRUNCH under my clog. UH-OH! I looked down and in a moment of horror realized that I had just killed the poor cicada that I had tried to help! I was devastated. I had interfered and had caused a death. On the other hand, that cicada, as far as I knew, had been singing its heart out for days that it was going to die. It was right. We are all beings who are going to die. However, I couldn’t help wondering how it would have fared had I not interfered.
Chuck mentioned this morning that as long as we keep the thought of our death uppermost in our minds then no moment is any more significant than another. At the same time, every moment is precious too, but all the moments really carry the same message, letting us know that time’s a wastin’! What have we been putting off? What do we want to accomplish in our lives, in our next moments? Why wait?
I sense that new opportunity arrived on the wind in the middle of the night. It loudly proclaimed its presence. It said, stay alert and grab this opportunity to make those changes that are so badly needed. This is a personal challenge as well as a universal challenge. We are all being asked to go deeper into our inner world and make changes there, while we are being pushed to live differently in the outer world as well.
Doesn’t this cloud look a little monsterish? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The wind is not always good, the shamans like to warn, but it does suggest a stirring of energies. This one, by all accounts, is a good wind of change, bringing us to a new level of awareness. If we are ready to grow, it’s time to latch on, dig in and go with it. Change! It’s the kind of wind that will take us far and we could all use that kind of help in our efforts to evolve and grow, individually and as a human race.
It’s time, the wind shouted in the night. In the most bone-shattering way, it said: This is it! This is the time of your lives! This is what you have been waiting for, so don’t miss the opportunity! Go with the flow of it. Acquiesce to what you know is right, to what must be done to move you beyond the pale, beyond the horizon, beyond the old self.
I wish you all well in your inner work and your outer work. It feels like they will now come into greater and more fruitful alignment. The winds bode well!
From the moment I opened Carlos Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of Don Juan – A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, in the early 1970s, I was hooked by the energy of the intent of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico. Many people I have encountered over the past 40 years, who opened Castaneda’s books, were similarly affected. Others could barely get through a chapter.
There are many paths to knowledge. We are all challenged to find for ourselves the one—or the many— that resonate with our heart’s intent. The issue really is to discover our individual energetic configuration and what is needed to uniquely advance it forward. The challenge is to get beyond the self-importance of “my method” and wake up to the fact that we are all part of the same transformative dream. The secret is grasping the awe, the awesomeness of this all-inclusive dream.
Carlos Castaneda’s shamanic family, of this generation, was preceded by 27 generations of similarly configured small shamanic groups. Carlos’s generation was the end of that shamanic line as previously configured. This ending/transition coincided with the 1960s and the dawn of a new era in human consciousness. Castaneda has been considered the Godfather of the New Age. I think Carlos was an insinuation of a possibility. I think there were many Godfathers, and Spider Grandmothers too, ushering us into this evolving dream.
Castaneda and his shamanic partners merged with the intent of their sorcery line and launched a new shamanic configuration: No secrecy, no hierarchy, all knowledge, open to the masses. In this new and daring configuration, the Nagual—the traditional head of a shamanic party—resides in each one of us. This is similar to the Buddhist’s view that we are all the Buddha. Though we may participate in life as a mass, we are all charged with the individual responsibility of meeting the challenge to lead ourselves to freedom. Castaneda was uniquely suited to herald in this transition, as his mother had been a committed socialist.
In this new line of shamanism, the core culprit to be wrestled with is self-importance, which leads to greed. Freedom is to be found only through piercing through the veil of the greedy self that has led the world as we know it—our concensus reality—to the brink of destruction. How timely the unleashing of this shamanic guidance on the worldwide stage!
Carlos was fascinated by the energetic potential of the masses to effect great energetic change. He would sit on the stage and look out over us in the audience of his lectures and workshops and marvel at the energy circulating and building through the crowd. Everyone who has been drawn into the energetic dream that he and his cohorts unveiled is part of dreaming this dream forward, a new world built on the solid footing of the intent of affection—the Shaman’s version of the Buddhist’s intent of compassion—to lead us beyond the crumbling walls of self-importance and greed.
I was deeply immersed in Castaneda’s world throughout the 1990s and emerged to discover my small part in this vast dream of transformation. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was to retrieve the tool of recapitulation from the shamanic world and apply it to the clinical condition of PTSD. I had realized, while in that shamanic world, that EMDR shared a bilateral similarity with the recapitulation breath, but I realized it fell short of accessing the magic and awe of the shamanic world—the gateway to evolutionary change. It took me a while to fully grasp the true potential of these two tools, when used in combination, to offer total healing from PTSD. The intent of this shamanic dream is not simply about healing, however, it’s also about freedom.
Carlos dreaming it forward…
We all want to heal; we all need to heal. But let’s face it, we’re all going to die anyway. The real challenge is to maintain awareness and continuity at death—to continue the dream, to dream it forward, as it transforms into new arenas in infinity. From this perspective, PTSD is a portal—the initiation into a shamanic journey that opens the door to the magical tools to intend a new world. Trauma offers us a glimpse of the awe of that new world.
All shamanic journeys begin with some form of traumatic knock, as we take journeys beyond the body—beyond the confines of the reality we’ve been socialized to uphold. PTSD is the unsettled legacy of those journeys as we brace ourselves to straddle the different worlds we have experienced. In recapitulation, we reconcile those worlds and are offered the opportunity to launch ourselves into new worlds of possibility. In recapitulation we are offered the opportunity to experience the awe, unfettered by the crumbling constraints of a world previously upheld by fear, greed, and self-importance.
All who take up the challenge of facing and aligning with their inner truth are part of the mass energetic current of change that is now sweeping through our world, the same mass energy that Carlos would stand before us and speak of with awe. We are all dreaming it forward.
It’s not about believing, it’s not about allegiance, and it’s definitely not about self-importance. It’s actually the end of self-importance. Everyone, everything matters equally. That is the key to affection. It’s not about one practice or another being the one and only practice; it’s about doing whatever resonates. It’s about dreaming forward a new dream now, founded on truth and affection—a dream that soars on the wings of intent.
Bring the heart out of the shadows of love and into the light of true affection… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The other night we watched Bruce Wagner’s 1998 film I’m Losing You. It packs a shamanic wallop. We’re left with the emptiness of a group of characters ruthlessly chasing love amidst a harrowing set of losses, exposing the love compulsion at its most hideous. Most disturbing is the power of that compulsion to preempt a genuine participation in life and relationship. Last night we watched another movie with a similar theme, the 2011 film, The Newlyweds.
I know the world that Bruce Wagner was immersed in when he wrote the novel, in 1996, upon which the screenplay and movie I’m Losing You are based. I was totally consumed by that same world, the world of Tensegrity and Carlos Castaneda. Bruce, alias “Lorenzo Drake,” was in the inner shamanic circle, and in fact married the nagual woman Carol Tiggs. This was at the time that Carlos was mercilessly poking fun at the search for love that dominated our world. Carlos would constantly point out that we seek love, but underneath we are really merchants caught in the contract of what we are getting from, or what we are owed in, our loving interactions.
I’m Losing You glowingly highlights that even in the midst of extraordinary opportunities to avail ourselves of the shaman’s greatest wake up call—to use death as an advisor—we are trumped by the flyer’s mind that seeks refuge in a zombie-like pursuit of love.
After the movie, I dreamed of being on an old treelined parkway rest stop on Long Island in between the northbound and southbound lanes. Traffic streamed by in both directions without letup. I was crouching at the curb of the north side picking up garbage. I came across an old, well-worn, 33 RPM album entitled, “I Love You.” I picked it up, read the label, and then pushed it vertically into the mushy sod so that it stood up straight in the grass. I then walked over to the picnic area in the grassy median where two tables had been pushed together. People were anxiously awaiting their reserved time to have their children’s birthday parties there. One parent was haggling over not paying 18 dollars for an extra umbrella for the table. The sense of the scene was that it was a pedestrian, quick drive-thru birthday party factory.
My dream seemed to validate the well worn love recording at the energetic highway of our lives, with its cookie cutter rituals defining our behaviors.
Carlos stated that the Shamans of Ancient Mexico saw that love had been co-opted and corrupted by the flyer’s mind of self obsession. (See last week’s blog Don’t Ask Why.) Those shamans linked instead to affection, an independent wave of energy accessible to all, our true birthright. Once accessed, affection naturally flows through us.
To access such affection, Carlos suggested that we learn to love by giving with a blank check. That is, affection means giving without ever expecting a return on the investment: Giving without attachment to the outcome. This kind of affection takes the “me” out of the equation. You owe me nothing in return for my gesture of affection. I give it freely, no strings attached. I require not even an acknowledgement. You truly owe me nothing.
This is the true nature of affection: Selfless love, conscious acts of affection without self-reflection. I feel it; I give it; I don’t look back.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico were tenacious in their disciplined effort to retrieve their energy and free themselves from the constraints of the social order. These shamans saw the social order as the indexing arm of the interpretive system of our minds, which is both inherited and reinforced through the process of socialization we are all born into. These preset indexing categories interpret and define our fixed reality and deprive us access to our full birthright—access to unlimited worlds of possibility.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico discovered that our interpretation system is completely restricted by a biased obsession with self. This constriction manifests in a lifetime obsession with worthiness, attractiveness, lovability, ranking, valuation, and validity.
As a psychotherapist deeply engaged in the intent of healing, I realize that all of these human concerns are profound challenges that require examination and action if we are to free the self from their restrictive reach. I have benefited from the perspective and methodology of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico to free the self to move into its own deeper potential.
The shamans define discipline not as a compulsive commitment to self-improvement routines, but as a persistent and unbiased examination of the self. They suggest that we not begin our inquiry into the self with the question, “Why did this happen to “me?” To those shamans this question is likely to trip us into a victim index of interpretation with follow-up statements like: “It’s not fair!” “I didn’t deserve this!” “I’m entitled to _______!” “I’m so bad!” “I’ll never be good enough!” “It’s my fault!” These statements are likely to further drain energy by entrenching the self in a depressed mood of hopelessness, futility, and surrender. Of course many of these statements may have some validity. However, they tend to bias the self toward an entrenched victim interpretation of reality that can see no world of possibility beyond this fixation.
Examine what is… Photo by Jan Ketchel
The shamans suggest that we begin our inquiry into our lives with the questions: “What is the situation that I am in?” “What do I need to do to change it?” “What can I learn from the situation I find myself in?”
Beginning the inquiry from this different perspective avoids the trappings of self-pity or self-defeat that the why question is likely to trigger. Such unbiased examination remains descriptive and factual, freed of judgment. Such examination is objective, focusing on what is, not whether I’m good or bad for being in it, whether I’m being punished or rewarded, whether I’m worthy or unworthy, whether it’s fair or whether I deserve it, whether I’ll ever be loved, etc. Those kinds of judgments have no validity in an inquiry into reality that seeks only to know the true nature of what is.
From the perspective of what is, I can examine my life as a being born into a family of characters who socialized me within the greater macrocosm of the social circumstances of the time I was born into, further elaborating that socialization process. From this perspective, I can see the pitfalls of that socialization and identify the opportunities available for learning to extricate myself from the limits imposed by the experiences of that socialization process. From this ability to know reality unfiltered by the judgments of worthiness, fairness, etc., I can retrieve my energy previously encased in such judgments and engage in actions to free myself from the bondage of a constricted reality.
Change what is and become fluid… Photo by Jan Ketchel
From this linchpin, I enter the fluid possibility of expanded reality—a life open to fulfillment in unlimited possibility—beyond the why, into the what is of the infinite.
