I have to make a decision. Before I fall asleep I ask for guidance. I dream. Guidance comes in my dream, repeated over and over again. I can’t deny its rightness.
Nonetheless, in the morning I struggle, so I turn to another oracle, the Tarot. I ask for guidance as I shuffle the deck and, spreading it fanlike over my heart, I pull a card. The card I pull succinctly and powerfully corroborates the dream guidance I’d received the night before. I know what to do; yet I still hesitate.
I must make a major decision that I know will impact my life, perhaps more than imaginable. I cannot help myself. I turn to yet another source of guidance. I ask my question as I flip through the pages of the I Ching. I let the book fall open. Once again, there is my answer, the same one.
Now I know I must go the next step, but before I do I take my three answers, the same and yet from different sources, and I meditate until they sit inside me, firmly planted, my intent set. It feels right.
Into the fire
Without planning to I make my move at the moment of shift from one astrological sign to another. I climb out of the deep well of contemplative Scorpio and step onto fiery ground, into the sign of Sagittarius, into the unknown. I must continue my earthly journey, on a quest for greater knowledge, awareness, and meaning. It’s all that matters. It’s right.
We all have much to deal with as we take big steps in our lives. But once we know the undeniable truth we cannot sit quietly. Our body, psyche, and spirit will not leave us alone until we face what we must, and they will not desert us either. They will bring us the gifts we need to take our rightful journeys.
We live in truth-speaking times. We must all dare ourselves to seek our own truths and then take them to a new level. It isn’t enough to simply know the truth. The energy of now asks us to act on what we know, to dare ourselves to transform our inner world and our outer world. That’s what I’ve done with an important issue in my own life.
I am calmly present now, though I sit in the fire. Fire is energy that will not stop. I wait for what comes next. It will be what I need.
As I watch the students on the campus of UC Davis getting pepper sprayed I am sick to my stomach, and yet I personally know what horrific things people can do to others. And yet I also know that the intent the students have set and act upon is so right. They too are making radical yet deeply significant decisions. The night they silently sat and watched as the UC Davis chancellor walked out of a meeting was chilling—their silence more powerful than the aggressive, abusive action of the campus police. This is the energy of now. It asks us all to be as brave as those young students, to calmly act on what is so right.
As we head into the Thanksgiving weekend, I offer thanks to the movements that will not stop what is right, no matter what comes to thwart the truth. I experience deep gratitude for those who dare to face their personal inner struggles, and a prayer that they may find the certainty that their journey matters as much as the journey the world now takes, for they offer energy to the entire movement of change. I salute my fellow human beings who dare to face the oppressor and say, no, not anymore.
We live in times of great change and I am thankful that I get to be a small part of it. I am thankful for the three signs I recently received that offered me the vision of certainty that I most needed at the moment. I wish that all may receive such visions of certainty and dare to take the next steps on their personal journeys.
It’s the time of fire. Let it burn through all doubt and denial, through the blockages and obstacles that will invariably appear. Let it clear the way for new growth. Even as we head more deeply into this season of change, we are not lacking in energy. It’s not really asleep; in fact it burns quite brightly.
The signs of change are all around us. Happy Thanksgiving!
Just wanted to make a shameless plug for The Book of Us, which is on Amazon in a new Kindle version at the very reasonable price of 99 cents. It looks better too now—Kindle having updated their digital formatting process since we first published it in 2008.
If you haven’t read it—Chuck and Jeanne’s story—you might enjoy it! There are some especially great chapters on working through the difficulties in their relationship that I think everyone should read.
To access The Book of Us, click on the icon in the left sidebar which will take you to Amazon and then click on the Kindle version. Easy enough!
Oh, and have you seen our new Main page? I’ll be back in the morning with a new blog post! -Jan
Look beyond your daily lives to another reality. Perceive life as one side of a many faceted spectrum of possibility. You live most of the time focused on one side of that spectrum. Know that there are many others.
Continue to be open to life as it comes to you, but always with awareness that there is indeed more to life than what you now perceive. Seek not explanation at this point, but do seek experiences.
Ask the universe to provide you with a glimpse of a new reality—even just a brief one—and you will begin to understand the possibilities that exist, just waiting to be encountered, even in that world you now live in.
Encounters of awe are the awakenings that the human spirit dares to expect yet often rejects. I ask you now to remain open and nonjudgmental. Without trying to figure things out in a rational way, let yourself be open to the possibility that anything can happen and everything is possible. That’s all you need to begin to perceive differently: Be open to possibility! Let it come to you in whatever way it finds appropriate.
And just what is possibility?
Possibility is the unimaginable experience that shifts you, the moment of awe that lifts your heart and frees your mind. It is the moment when everything becomes clear. Grasp that moment in memory, in deep knowing, for sure enough, as quick as it arises, so will it sink away again, far from conscious awareness.
But the memory will linger in the sinews of your body; have no doubt. The awe will course through you and you will know its possibility to both affect you and eventually change you.
Look for those moments of awe and possibility. Without denial of such possibility, go into your day and your week with innocent hopefulness, without doubt, and without fear. Ask for experiences of awe, with openness, alertness, and willingness to be changed.
And then, when the time is right, ask to be shown why you are given those moments, those glimpses of awe. What do they mean? What are they asking you to do to change your life, your circumstances—inner and outer—and perhaps your future, in this world and another?
For the first time in ten years I decided to truly stalk the role of student. I’d selected an advanced seminar in Stamford, CT. My intent for the weekend was to clear the way for learning, to remove all the filters of identity and judgment that don’t allow for something new, that keep us frozen in the familiar.
I was driving a rental car with Rhode Island plates, our own car still in the body shop since a recent fender bender. I had a new trac phone with an unmemorized number. I arrived at my destination with the hope that I would know no one and that I would share nothing unnecessary about myself that might freeze me in an old identity or tug at my self-importance. “I’m simply a therapist here to learn.”
After parking my car a woman approached me on the walk to the college, obviously headed to the same seminar. After some smalltalk about the weather she asked me where I was from. I went to tell her, but drew a complete blank. I stumbled, slightly embarrassed, but actually quite fascinated. No matter how hard I tried, I had no idea where I was from!
I knew my name was Chuck Ketchel, as I easily picked out my name tag at the registration desk, but for several minutes I couldn’t swim my way back to the surface of Red Hook, NY. The best I could laughingly say to her, finally, was that I was from the Hudson Valley. She smiled and disappeared. I didn’t see her again for the duration of the seminar. Or, if I did, I didn’t recognize her.
My experience in the training was magical: I learned, my intent fully realized. Don’t have concerns about early Alzheimer’s for Chuck! This was a shamanic move—what the shamans would call using INTENT to STALK a different position of the assemblage point.
For the shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s lineage, the assemblage point refers to a point on our energetic body where the energy fields that impact us are assembled. This assemblage of energy becomes our description of reality, how we see and define the world we live in.
When the assemblage point moves to a different position on our energy body, new energy fields are assembled and with that we experience a new world. A new world can mean something as simple as achieving a new perspective on life or as drastic a perception as encountering strange entities in a never-before experienced world.
Where did I come from and who am I now?
Engaging intent, as I did when approaching this seminar, is one way to shift the assemblage point. My intent to leave my old world behind, suspend judgment, and simply learn something new, shifted me and I became a stalker. In shamanic terms, stalking is maintaining the ability to calm the self and hold together when confronted with an unfamiliar reality.
Every time we recapitulate, we shift the assemblage point to a world of prior experience. When we dream, the assemblage point moves freely, allowing for experiences in many worlds, particularly outside the body. Many jolts in ordinary life can move our assemblage point as well, including traumatic incidences and subsequent flashbacks.
The other night, my daughter startled me awake with a phone call and a frightened voice, which she has given me permission to describe.
“Dad, I’m so upset! I feel so homesick,” she said. “I just watched a movie with Joel—Faces in the Crowd—about a woman who suffers from face blindness. Suddenly I looked at Joel and I didn’t recognize him! I didn’t want him to touch me. It was really freaky. I knew who he was and yet I didn’t! I feel in my body like I have at other times. I might be at a supermarket on the deli line when suddenly the voices around me seem very loud and my body becomes very light, like I’m disappearing.”
I assured Erica that these are normal events and that at such times we are being challenged to experience different worlds. Her experience describes that of being at the gates between worlds when energetically vibratory experiences and unfamiliarity reign and we might experience faintness, nausea, buzzing, fear, and a longing for home.
One foot in this world
In these states, infinity is beckoning to us. As the shamans say, we are experiencing a shift in the assemblage point, asked to assemble and enter a new world with a consistency of awareness far more heightened than normal. At such times we are challenged to hold onto awareness in two worlds at once, to not forget who we are, but to take in the far vaster knowledge that we are presented with as reality shifts. We are challenged to remain present and aware while we allow ourselves to have the experience of being infinite beings and take in the truth who we really are, where we’ve been, and where we are going.
The other night, while Jan was in trance—a shift of the assemblage point—I asked her to go to the place she was in just before she was conceived in this life. Her awareness took her to a vast ocean, accompanied by the sound of deep breaths, long inhales and long exhales, in concert with the amplitude and rhythm of the gently rocking waves of this unending ocean. She sensed her awareness shifting to a dark, contained space as I asked her to move on to conception, where a more constricted breath ensued.
Jan’s experience—her shift in her assemblage point to the vast sea of awareness before the stalking of a new life, that is, an identity to be constructed by the circumstances she was born into—reveals the true holographic nature of reality. No matter how many pieces you cut a holographic image into, under the right lighting conditions the original whole is revealed. Everyone of us is part of the same hologram—we all belong to the same vast sea of awareness.
When we enter this world, our awareness shifts from sea to container. We become a definite thing, born out of an infinite sea of interconnected possibility. And when we become that definite being, we forget our vast roots, our previously infinite lives.
Infinity beckons and I'm going!
Our task in this life is to solve the riddle—the specific challenges of the life we are in—and then to go beyond and recover all our truths, all of ourselves, and truly find our way home, back to awareness of the vastness of it all. This is the true essence of homesickness of which my daughter spoke. But oh, how we want to cling to the comfort of unchanging familiarity and the security of home in this life!
Shifts of the assemblage point, promptings from infinity to awaken to our true fullness, are rampant in our time. The familiar world is rattling us daily, as new worlds are finally being allowed to become known. We live in an exceptional time for mass evolutionary advancement, as the world continually bombards the fixation of our assemblage points, prompting them to move, and jolting us to awaken to a new reality as well.
As much as it may assault our senses, our feelings, and our sense of safety, we can now hear the words: “anal intercourse in the showers of Penn State between a coach and a child.” This is a real world that exists, spanning way beyond the walls of Penn State. The truth of that hidden world, with all its discomforts, is now a world we can know exists. We can live with the truth of that world. We can stalk that position of the assemblage point. By allowing ourselves to know and validate the truth of that world we can change, and indeed change the world we live in.
However, the process of allowing the truths of other worlds to be let in—shifts of the assemblage point—is indeed unsettling. Reactions range from nausea, dizziness, sadness, fear, homesickness, vibratory energy states, to yes, actually forgetting where you come from!
These are all transitory states. The real challenge is to achieve cohesion when you find yourself in another world. That is: calm yourself, recognize and actually be in awe of the experience while maintaining a dual focus.
As I stood in the lobby of the University of Connecticut last weekend—a man with no home—I knew who I was. I knew I had a foot in this world. I knew I’d return to it when the seminar was over. But, I especially knew that I was on an adventure to learn something very important—and that I did! We always do if we allow ourselves, or intend ourselves, into new or old worlds of discovery, what the shamans call shifts in the position of the assemblage point.
Today, I follow up on last week’s blog, Wounded Children. I ask the question: What is suffering? And why is it so necessary?
I grew up in the Catholic religion. I went to Catholic schools and learned that Jesus wanted us to be innocent children, to be free of sin, yet the world itself did not support me in my endeavors. The world was full of sin and yes, suffering. I suffered as a child, as most children do. As much as I tried to live a sin-free life, there was no getting around sin, it was everywhere. I realized that everything, even breathing could be considered sinful.
In my weekly forays to the confessional, as often as I tried to articulate my sins, I found no actual release from them. Any absolution was momentary at best, because as soon as I walked out of the church I was back in sin-ville. As a child, suffering meant not only trying to find ways to deal with what happened to me out in the world, but, on a deeper level, it meant dealing with the fact that I would never be holy enough. I was a sinner and so I must suffer.
Illusion?
My child’s perspective was not all that far from the Buddhist perspective, which accepts that the reality we live in, samsara, is indeed an ocean of suffering. Samsara is an endless cycle of obsession and illusion, the more we try to escape it, the more it assaults us. Until, that is, we turn to it and ask: What is life trying to teach me? Why is it so necessary to suffer?
The Shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s lineage tell us too that this world is an illusion and that we are born to struggle with breaking through that illusion. They tell us that the world constantly assaults us in an effort to wake us up to this fact by presenting us with things that we want to push away and other things that we want to constantly cling to in our efforts to uphold that illusion. But in the end the Shamans contend, as do the Buddhists, that we must face the illusionary reality of the world and break it down, one illusion at a time. By challenging our perceptions, by challenging the way we think and act, and by challenging ourselves to face our deaths as new life, we offer ourselves the opportunity to break through the endless suffering of being human.
If we believe that all lives are meaningful, that our personal suffering and the suffering of everyone else in the world is important, then perhaps we might understand the necessity of it. Samsara, illusion, is endless. We are all being confronted with the truth of this as the revelations of sexual abuse swirl through the media, assaulting our personal illusions, coming into our homes on the nightly news. Our illusions are being shattered.
From a Buddhist and Shamanic perspective, this is very good. Such shatterings offer us the opportunity to view the world differently, to accept the necessity of suffering as a means of breaking us out of endless samsara. In my book, The Man in the Woods, I present the sufferings of my child self. It’s often hard for people to fathom that I suffered such abuse and yet survived the experiences. But I know that my own experiences are not all that exceptional. I hear stories of equal or worse horror every day, of abuse that went on for just as many years or even longer.
I am both humbled and hopeful as I hear the stories being told to me personally or by the media. And yet I know that, as people face their personal suffering, they are facing the shattering of their lives. But I also know that this shattering is the necessary breakthrough point to new life.
The universe itself is challenging us to face the reality of samsara and the necessity for it now. As a catalyst to shattering our illusions, constant exposure to the horrific reality of sexual abuse against innocent children is a mighty force. This exposure alone has the ability to change our world as we discover what has been kept hidden for decades, but even more deeply meaningful as we face our personal secrets.
When we are finally ready to face our personal suffering, we are ready to shatter the illusions that we have constructed in an effort to both get us through our lives but also to protect us so we could survive. When we face our inner turmoil, the suffering and the illusion of it, we face the fact of the world as indeed samsara, endless suffering.
On the bright side, in facing our personal suffering, in shattering our illusions about who we are, we begin to see the world differently. Suffering becomes understood as the means to enlightenment as the Buddhists present it and the means to accessing the warrior self as the Shamans suggest. In recapitulation, in deep inner work, in allowing ourselves to sit through the horror of the news, facing the truth of human suffering, we offer ourselves a new opportunity to evolve beyond this world of endless suffering.
Both the Buddhists and the Shamans use suffering and death as the greatest teachers and advisors. Both the Buddhists and the Shamans are aware of death at all times, preparing for it, using the challenges in this world to break through to a new awareness that we are all beings seeking enlightenment.
The reason we must suffer is the same for all of us. We are being challenged to grasp the truth of suffering as our greatest teacher, so that we may crack through it and make our deaths as meaningful as we want our lives to be.
In samsara we prepare for new life; in suffering we discover what that might mean. With each new life we are offered the opportunity to discover the illusions we steep ourselves in, that are presented to us in myriad ways by the world outside of us and by our inner reactions, disturbances, and challenges to that world. We are all here to live deeply meaningful lives—that I have no doubt about.
As I look around at the world each day and discover yet another reason to be disappointed in my fellow humans, to be distraught, disturbed and disgusted, I know I am being challenged to not turn off the television set. I am being challenged to face samsara and to ask others to face it as well. It is only through facing the onslaughts of horror that we can change the world.
We must face our inner darkness—mirrored unrelentingly, it seems lately, by the outside world—and ask everyone else to do the same. Suffering leads to enlightenment. I keep that in mind.
