You are part of the greater whole, part of the energy that forms your world. If you are right within yourself the world too has the possibility to get right as well. If you are calm the world around you calms. If you are healthy the world around you is healthy. If you are loving the world around you is loving. If you are angry the entire world comes at you with anger too. If you are fearful the entire world can appear as a fearful place. If you are off in any way within the self the world will be off too. You have that much power that you affect everything inside of you and outside of you, and that is power indeed.
Each one of you has a responsibility to use that power on yourself so that everyone benefits. It’s the universal law of the composition of the whole; where one part is off the whole is off and where even one small part is right the whole too is potentially right. Stop worrying so much about other people. Get right within yourself and watch how you affect the whole world. Ask yourself, “How am I like what worries me? How am I like what I don’t like in the world outside of me?” Get right within and watch the world get right too.
I share a passage I was reading this morning from an old favorite of mine, Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. He reminds us “that everything changes is the basic truth for each existence. No one can deny this truth, and all the teaching of Buddhism is condensed within it. This is the teaching for all of us.”
He goes on to say, “Without accepting the fact that everything changes, we cannot find perfect composure. But unfortunately, although it is true, it is difficult for us to accept it. Because we cannot accept the truth of transiency, we suffer. So the cause of suffering is our non-acceptance of this truth.”
Those of us who have difficulty accepting our own truths may also find difficulty in accepting the transiency of life. Often we want things to stay the same so we don’t have to feel or re-experience what once caused so much distress, that which fragmented us and sent us into depression, dissociative habits, and any number of behaviors that we deemed necessary for our survival.
The truth is that life is all about change. Life would not exist without constant change. We know this to be truth in our own lives. If we don’t change nothing happens, we stay the same, and yes, we suffer. We aren’t able to more fully live and embrace life if we are afraid of making a move to change something in our lives. In the end we may even find pleasure in our pain and in our refusal to change; we elect suffering over change.
Recapitulation is all about daring the self to accept the changing aspects of life. It means we are saying that we are ready to face what holds us back so we can finally live in this world. Otherwise we remain entrenched in a world that is not real, a world where perhaps only fear and loathing exist, where change is given the boot, and we miss out on the true reality of this world. I spent most of my life in that other world. It’s what my books are all about, the rediscovery of my traumatic beginnings but also the discovery of just how entrenched I had become in the world I had created for myself in order to feel safe.
If we can dare ourselves to investigate just what it is that has us in its grip we slowly begin to find ourselves evermore ready to accept the changing aspects of life. And it’s then that we realize change is life, and that in daring to change ourselves, through the deep inner work of recapitulation, we offer ourselves footholds in new life, in a changing world. As we do deep work on ourselves we begin to trust and enjoy that changing world in previously unimaginable ways.
As we accept that life is change we begin to flow with all the changes that come our way, bidden and unbidden, knowing that this is how life is, and that this time will soon change too. Every time we accept that life is change we let ourselves experience more of living and eventually we are flowing right along, no longer afraid of change, no longer suffering in the way we once did.
Part of accepting that life is change and change is life is accepting that which we run from, that which we hide from, that which scares us the most. It entails turning and facing and finally accepting what once happened to us without judgment, without self-hatred, without fear but with compassion for our frightened self, with kindness for our traumatized self, with love for our noble and strong self.
We remember that those bad times in the past eventually changed too and that new things happened to us, so we see that we have already learned the lessons of change, but to learn those lessons in full awareness is what the process of recapitulation entails. To consciously elect change and allow ourselves the benefit of life in a new way is to readily accept what life offers us to help us grow and evolve.
Then we understand what Suzuki means when he says, “When we realize the everlasting truth of ‘everything changes’ and find our composure in it, we find ourselves in Nirvana.”
The road to Nirvana—to composure and to acceptance of all that is as it changes, without attachment—is one well worth traveling. If I can do it, so can you!
-A blog by J. E. Ketchel, Author of The Recapitulation Diaries
Even in your giving remain modest, for how can you give when you have given it all? How can you be generous when you have nothing? How can you give when you have depleted your stores, whether of goods or energy? How can you be of giving heart when your heart is exhausted? To be available to others, to help, to be giving and compassionate is well and good, but often being available, helping, and giving is exactly the worst thing to do. Support and respect the need for all to take responsibility for the self. Give responsibly when appropriate, but don’t forget to protect yourself and your energy so that in times of even greater need you have more to give. In the meantime, let gifts of loving kindness and good will be present in every breath you breathe, every thought you think, and every prayer you speak. In this way, no modesty is required.
Remain steady. Like a sturdy sailing vessel, turn and take advantage of the winds of change to carry you onward. Keep to your course of loving kindness and compassion no matter what transpires. In this manner will your steadiness, your composure, and your unwavering message of goodness and kindness endure and when the winds have died you will be found to not only have survived but thrived in the changing times. By your constancy, your commitment, and your keen ability to keep an even balance sail on. Know that by doing so the winds you create in your wake will effect all that surrounds you. For though your vessel may be but a tiny drop in the vast ocean of energy, so is the ripple effect powerful energy and even the ripples created by one drop of water effect the whole. Even one small boat on the ocean currents makes waves. You have the power to create your own good winds and waves of change in these evolutionary times. Take a bad wind and make it good.
My body stilled as I stared in heightened awareness at the fish, equally frozen, some twenty feet below the ocean surface. Effortlessly, without thought, I gently sank as my fish awaited my spear, the first I was to shoot, ever, after many weeks of trying.
Immediately following the calm of this numinous encounter I was overtaken by a surge of hunter energy that possessed me to shoot wildly in a feverish effort to add to my bounty. My spear missed every fish.
Frantically I raced to reload my spear, great pressure exerted to reset the spear in the back of my slingshot style gun. This time the spear missed its setting completely and forcefully penetrated the palm of my hand. I blacked out.
Next thing I knew, I opened my eyes to find myself sitting alone on a deserted beach, spear and gun at my side, my injured hand packed in sand. I brushed aside the sand, no bleeding, only the imprint from the back of the spear stigmatized into my palm: a Zia, the Pueblo Indian mandala of the sacred circle and the four directions. The gods had meted out both their punishment and their healing. I had been initiated into the human hunter clan. My hubris was humbled. I was taught moderation and respect for life.
The Age of Aquarius was ushered in with overwhelming numinous energy. The Beatles, themselves a four-sided mandala, heralded an archetypal influx of spirit energy that put the world into trance and opened human consciousness to infinite possibility. If I put my original Meet the Beatles on the turntable right now I am immediately delivered to that energy; it is sacred shamanic music.
The 60s broke open direct experience of the spiritual dimensions. There were many casualties of excess. As the Modern Age has progressed so has the shattering of limits reached every sphere of existence. Most excessive has been the human population, which treats the world as its oyster, with little concern for balance, health, or the sanctity of all life on the planet.
Like my mishap in loading my gun our world is now being humbled by nature to temper its greed and disrespect. Nature has delivered its hurricanes, fires and floods with volcanoes abrewing. Nature has taken possession of world leaders, rendering them untethered hot air balloons, catapulting the demise of greedy rule.
The destructive side of Nature also shows up in a human psychosis that results in a mass killing spree. This storm reeks its havoc through human psyche and human hands. Nothing is impervious to nature’s intent for change.
Indeed, Mr. President, it is “pure evil”. Evil, however, will always take charge when the will of the ego has transgressed the laws of nature and thrown the world into untenable imbalance. Are we ready to question why the uninitiated human hunter is allowed to be armed with an arsenal? If we cannot submit to moderation we must suffer the consequences of excess.
How far will nature’s destructive side need to go? When will it deliver its healing balm? Destruction is leading us to the healing. Love that transcends greed is birthing in the Caribbean. Necessity is so great that only true human compassion can ensure survival.
Nature has launched an all-out offensive to shift human consciousness, to bring it to truly embrace moderation or face further destruction. Until we are solidly fixed in this new attitude as a species we can expect the destructive side of nature to continue to unleash its war on our old attitudes of superiority and unbridled greed, like the inflation I experienced as I voraciously sought to possess all the fish in the ocean!
But nature, as I experienced sitting upon the beach, wants us to learn not to perish. Nature nurtures life and nature heals our wounds. It’s Nature’s Way. May we join nature’s healing intent: drop the greed, embrace compassion and accept moderation. Moderation is indeed nature’s intent for our species now. May we find our way there and be healed.
