#707 Chuck’s Place: Welcome to Shadowland

August 7, 2010 Chuck Leave a comment

Monday evening, Jan and I were walking to our car in the garage when Jan noticed that the side mirror on my truck, which was parked next to the car, was dangling, obviously having been struck. I was caught completely unaware, blindsided in more ways than one. Just an hour before I had driven home from the office. How could I not have noticed? Could I have done it myself while parking? Could I be that unconscious? Upon examination, it became evident that I couldn’t have done it while pulling the truck into the garage. Might somebody have struck the mirror and elected to drive off while the truck was parked at the office? I might have, at this thought, gone to a vulnerable, victimized place, but instead I found myself deeply pondering—how could I not have noticed, no matter what happened? What does it mean when the mirror that alerts you to what is coming up upon you is knocked out and you don’t even realize it? Welcome to shadowland.

Within twenty-four hours of this incident, having temporarily taped the mirror in place, Jan and I were together in the truck on a mission I had reluctantly agreed to. I stewed within, with feelings of anger, frustration, helplessness, powerlessness, and suspicion. I had indeed been blindsided. Welcome to shadowland.

Twenty-four hours after that, as I drove home alone from the office in my truck, listening contentedly and distractedly to NPR, the radio suddenly turned to static. All stations were lost. I turned off the radio; time to tune inward and shed light on shadowland. Jan and I later processed our drama, and the projections receded. With new awareness, we moved forward, enlightened by our excursion into shadowland.

Synchronistically, possession by and projection of, the shadow had been the theme of the week for many people I encountered, and it was my intention to write about it for this blog. It wasn’t until Thursday evening that I had the opportunity to read Jan’s blog from Wednesday, Recapitulation & The Shadow. Indeed, shadow is the energy of the week.

In his frustration with his students, who always tried to pin down his tentative concepts into final definitions, Jung is said to have remarked, in an exasperated state, that the shadow is the whole unconscious. In the broadest sense, the shadow is the part of us that stays in the dark. We may be completely unaware of this part of the self, though others might see its effects upon us quite clearly in our daily functioning. We may be somewhat aware of our shadow, but nonetheless, be completely rejecting of it, mortified and shamed by this inferior, under-socialized, underdeveloped aspect of ourselves.

Shadow requires light and an object to exist. When light encounters an object, it casts a shadow. If we understand consciousness as light and object as ego, we can understand shadow as intimately connected to ego, as the rejected or unknown, cast off part of it, which is sentenced to live in darkness. In the darkness the shadow exists as a living personality, an alter ego with a life of its own that is often experienced in the blindsided moments in our lives, when we become beings not in our right minds.

When we are born into this world, we are all socialized as we go through the various stages of development. We quickly learn what behaviors and traits are acceptable and those which must be repressed or abandoned. This necessary socialization causes a core fragmentation in the developing self. Traits and instinctive reactions, like strong emotions such as anger or intense expressions of basic needs, may be met with frowns. Interests and potentials might be discouraged for the sake of a standard curriculum or conventional wisdom. Hence, our shadow self contains many unlived potentials as well as basic instincts. Shadowland is also the container of traumatic experiences that are imbued with all kinds of intense energies awaiting the recognition and reconciliation that only consciousness can provide in some form of recapitulation.

In the meantime, these rejected siblings of our egos combine their energies and seek opportunities for recognition and life outside of shadowland. Freud identified verbal faux pas, what we call Freudian slips, as opportunities the shadow seizes to insert its point of view into our lives, much to the shame of the ego. Projections onto others, whom we don’t like yet find ourselves hopelessly, energetically bound to think and feel about, are other opportunities for our inner shadow to find a place in our lives. These attachments give our shadow vicarious life, as our ego remains unidentified with them yet, nonetheless, compulsively bound to include them in our lives. Finally, there is direct possession of our ego by our shadow self. This can happen when we alter consciousness through substance or lack of sleep, or simply through direct ambush by the shadow, as in the case of an intense mood, emotion, or unshakeable belief that takes possession of consciousness. At these times, we feel compelled to act out, live out, the personality of our shadow, as our ego is completely blindsided.

It is only with great effort that we might restrain ourselves in times of possession, yet until we can, we will not have the necessary energy to begin a process of recapitulation where we discover the deeper truths of the self. This recapitulation process opens the door to acceptance of the shadow, without judgment. This acceptance depotentiates the volatile energies of the shadow, born of rejection from consciousness. This process also opens the door to new possibility for life, as the deep well of energy and creative potential contained in the shadow may find new forms of expression.

Ultimately, developing a relationship with the shadow is the key to a fuller, richer life where the deeper resources of the self can be accessed and lived in an individuated state. Failure to do so results in fragmentation and extremist tactics on the part of the shadow, which is forced to become a terrorist who must blindside us to make its truths known. Would that we might comprehend the role of the terrorist on the world stage at this time. Would that, both on an individual and collective level, we would voluntarily visit our own shadowlands and reconcile with our own darker truths, rather than continue to project and war with our disowned shadow selves.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Recapitulation & The Shadow

August 4, 2010 Jan Leave a comment

In The Active Side of Infinity Carlos Castaneda writes about the time when don Juan first introduced him to the concept of recapitulation. Don Juan describes recapitulation, on pages 142-143, thus:

“The old sorcerers used to call it recounting the events in your life, and for them, it started as a simple technique, a device to aid them in remembering what they were doing and saying to their disciples. For their disciples, the technique had the same value: It allowed them to remember what their teachers had said and done to them. It took terrible social upheavals, like being conquered and vanquished several times, before the old sorcerers realized that their technique had far-reaching effects.”

He goes on to say that, as time passed and events took place in the history of ancient Mexico and the old sorcerers disappeared, a new crop of sorcerers, disciples of the old, came along and renamed the old technique recapitulation. The essence and main point of recapitulation shifted to a process for making space within.

Don Juan explained to a bewildered Carlos that in order for him to teach him everything he knew he had to first make space within Carlos:

“The challenge I am faced with,” he says to Carlos, “is that in a very compact unit of time I must cram into you everything there is to know about sorcery as an abstract proposition, but in order to do that I have to build the necessary space within you.” He goes on to say: “The premise of sorcerers is that in order to bring something in, there must be a space to put it in. If you are filled to the brim with the items of everyday life, there’s no space for anything new. That space must be built. Do you see what I mean? The sorcerers of olden times believed that the recapitulation of your life made that space. It does, and much more, of course.”

What don Juan was proposing to Carlos, in actuality, was that he must go into his shadow, into the dark side of his unconscious, the same shadow side of ourselves that Carl Jung suggests we must all deal with in order to become whole. Don Juan went on to explain the technique of recapitulation to Carlos as a process of making lists of all the people he had ever encountered and then recollecting every encounter he had ever had with each person on his list. He suggested that he accompany each memory with a breathing practice of slowly fanning the head from side to side while slowly and naturally inhaling and exhaling.

As Carlos dutifully began the process of making his lists and recollecting the events of his life he discovered that the process took on a life of its own. He writes, on page 144 in The Active Side of Infinity:

“Ordinarily, my recapitulation took me every which way. I let the events decide the direction of my recollection. What I did, which was volitional, was to adhere to a general unit of time. For instance, I had begun with the people in the anthropology department, but I let my recollection pull me to anywhere in time, from the present to the day I started attending school at UCLA.”

When I read this I was struck by how accurately it explained my own process. My own unconscious led me on my recapitulation journey and often my biggest challenge became acquiescence to where it suggested I must go. Sometimes, like Carlos, I went whining and complaining. As he says on page 141 in The Active Side of Infinity:

“There was some part of me that resented immensely being bothered. I wanted to sleep for days and not think about don Juan’s sorcery concepts anymore. Thoroughly against my will, I got up and followed him.” As don Juan says on page 146 in the same book: “The power of recapitulation is that it stirs up all the garbage of our lives and brings it to the surface.”

Sometimes I just did not want to sift through any more garbage and I would turn away, tell Chuck I was done, and attempt to walk away. I too just wanted to sleep for days, but my unconscious, that most helpful partner, always found a way to drag me back to awareness of the process, its meaningfulness becoming more apparent each day. As I had experiences within the context of recapitulation in cahoots with my shadow, and the process took on a life of its own, I began to quite readily take the journey I was being shown was my true journey in this life, because as don Juan suggested, it does more than just make space within.

When I began my recapitulation I didn’t even know that such a thing existed. I hadn’t read any of Castaneda’s books after the first three when I was in my twenties and I wasn’t at all versed in the language or concepts of the sorcerers of ancient Mexico when I began working with Chuck. I was only slightly familiar with the work of Carl Jung at the time as well, though I had also read some of his works when I was in my early twenties. However, with awareness that I had perhaps planted the seeds of this convergence of the sorcerers world and the psychological during my twenties, I understood that my unconscious and a whole series of synchronistic events were leading me to the moment when I could no longer avoid my shadow, the dark side of myself that I had been running from for most of my life. As the process of this confrontation with my shadow unfolded, under Chuck’s guidance, the idea of recapitulation began to emerge.

Now, many years after I did the bulk of that work of encountering my shadow through the process of recapitulation, I am taking the time to read the later works of Castaneda. My own experiences are being further clarified in terms of a shamanic journey as I read of his encounters with don Juan and his line of sorcerers, and the apprentices of his own generation. More often than not, the shamanic terms, as presented by don Juan, mirror the psychological terms, as presented by Jung.

These two concepts, the recapitulation and the shadow of the unconscious work hand-in-hand. Using the technique of recapitulation, in whatever way it unfolds as guided by the unconscious, together with daring to look into the shadows of the self, the concept of emptying in order to be filled with new energy becomes clearer. It does indeed work as a means to achieving wholeness, and much more.

I do not mean to imply that the shadow ever rests or that recapitulation is ever done, because if we are going to constantly grow and evolve they must remain active participants in our lives. Personally, I have found these to be two most interesting and inviting companions as I continue my journey.

If you wish, feel free to share or comment in the Post Comment section below.

Sending you all love and good wishes,
Jan

NOTE: The Active Side of Infinity is available for purchase through our Store in the Shamanism category.

Messages from Jeanne

#706 Find Common Ground

August 2, 2010 Jan Leave a comment

Jan Ketchel channeling Jeanne Marie Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
I must say, I have lately been feeling that we must be in a time of powerful transition, or at least that’s what it feels like. The energy feels really good and flowing, but at the same time it offers much change, and change always brings its own challenges. In light of that, what message of guidance do you offer us today?

Change in itself is not the issue, for change happens constantly. What is the issue during times of transition—as you intuit this current phase to be, and correctly I might add—is whether or not the choice to flow with the energy will be allowed.

This is a time now of energetic shift, but it is up to each individual to grab onto the energy being offered and use it to personal advantage, irrespective of the needs of others. I do not mean to imply that one skirt duties or neglect that which must be attended to in every day life as concerns others, but I do suggest that each one of you has a personal agenda in life and it is important to pay attention to that personal journey.

During times of transition, opportunities to stay the course, to shift and gain momentum will be offered. Many choices will be offered. Awareness teaches that to be offered an opportunity is not rare, but to notice each opportunity may be quite challenging, as often opportunities come clothed in disguises.

You must each look at your self to determine how your personal opportunities for change are being presented. Often they are not as clearly stated or structured as one would like, but instead must be realized through the process of inner work. And that is today’s message of guidance, My Dear Ones: stay innerly focused on your personal energy no matter what calls from without. This is a time to stay innerly centered and calm, to indeed feel the energy of transition, but in order not to waste it one must take it inside and work it within the realm of personal energy, personal goals, and personal needs.

I have made many suggestions over the past few years regarding inner work. It is not too hard to begin the process again if some time has lapsed. Each time that you go outside of the self, departing from the inner self, the compunction of the inner self grows stronger, so that when you return you will be greeted like a long lost friend, made welcome again, and be invited to stay longer. This inner determination grows at each return. It is your anchoring place and once found it will be difficult to totally reject its call.

Quiet moments alone are a most necessary aspect of growth. I suggest that you accept this most important fact and allow your inner voice to meet you on common ground, where your ego self feels safe and relaxed and your inner self may be more clearly heard. Find time for such inner work and you will realize not only your challenges but also your inner goals, the spiritual ones.

I spoke earlier of disguises and by this I mean that your challenges may come in one form but actually mean quite the opposite. You may get invited to participate in life outside of you, but the real challenge may be to turn from it and say, no, I must remain alone and quiet today. I must become more familiar with my inner self and allow my ego self to go dormant for a while. I must also take off my ego disguise in order to meet my inner true self. I must allow my outer disguise to be left in the closet as I allow my innocence, my vulnerability, and my calmness to accompany me through this energetic time.

This is a very personally centered energy time and if you are ready to be personally focused and accountable, truthfully open and honest with the self, you may grow exponentially over the next few weeks. But, as I always say, it’s up to you! Are you ready to confront the truths of the self? If you are, have a most interesting journey. And if you aren’t, have a most interesting journey too! Either way, your experiences in life will give you what you need to grow.

Be sure to ask the self questions as you have your experiences. Find out what they mean to you personally. “Why am I having this experience at this moment?” you might ask. “What have I been thinking about, caught by or needing? Why did I receive this answer to my question? What is the real message? Where does this lead me? What is my challenge today?” These are all good questions to ask as you encounter what you must.

Good luck as you take your journeys, My Dears. And remember that is what you are supposed to be doing: taking a journey, growing, and evolving.

NOTE: As I was channeling this message at 7 a.m., and as I finish typing it up now, the air outside my windows is full of the happy sounds of baby robins. It almost appears as if a big transition is taking place in nature; all of the nesting birds seem to be leaving their nests simultaneously. I look at this synchronicity in light of the other feelings I have lately been experiencing regarding the energy and as regards Jeanne’s message today. Looking out onto the deck I saw what appeared to be a large flock of baby robins, chirping loudly, some of them being fought off by the bluebirds nesting in a box in a nearby tree. The bluebirds, not quite at the point of transition, still have a lot of work to do inside the nest, inner work to prepare for their day of transition. The robins are loud and cheery, extroverted and eager for their journeys in the world, singing the joys of transition. Both energies are equally vital and alive, equally necessary, when the time is right.-Jan

Feel free to share experiences or comment in the Post Comment section below.

Chuck's Blog

#705 Chuck’s Place: Necessary Encounters

July 31, 2010 Chuck 1 Comment

We are here for a reason. I base that statement not on a belief but on experience: my own and that of the many people who have shared their journeys with me. We discover our reason for being here in hindsight. We have to be here for quite a while before we awaken to the core drama we have been starring in. The resolution of that drama is why we are here.

The process of waking up to our reason for being here is what sets the stage for our necessary encounters, knocks at the door of our awareness. Necessary encounters are the cast of characters and life circumstances that make up our many groundhog days in this world. We are necessary prisoners to our dramas. This point is critical in suspending judgment about ourselves, for the quagmires we find ourselves in.

Of course, we find ourselves in, put ourselves in, create and author the repetitive, redundant, dysfunctional circumstances of our lives. It is necessary that we do so in order to accomplish, through resolution of our core drama, our reason for being in this world. There is no blame for being in the dysfunction we are in. We need to be there and repeat it as long as we need to, until we are ready to awaken to the drama we are in, take responsibility for it, and resolve it.

Solution may or may not come in this lifetime. From my experience with past life regressions, our present life circumstances are the necessary dramas recast from unresolved past life issues. This, if I understand it correctly from a Buddhist perspective, is the essence of why we reincarnate.

If, upon death, there is no drama left in this world that we are attached to, we will no longer reincarnate. To incarnate is to hold onto an issue or a need upon dying, which then becomes the nucleus of a restructured life in this world, as it encodes the instructions to recreate life circumstances that provide necessary encounters with the unfinished issue. Hence, reincarnation is the process of gathering the necessary materials, people, and circumstances to be born into, in order to relive the drama in another attempt at resolution and completion.

Though our individual dramas may vary from person to person, I’ve come to the conclusion that the overarching drama or reason for being in this world, is to reconcile total love with total detachment. I come to this conclusion from the following facts:

1. We are born into this world and must, in infancy, attach to another through a love connection or we will die through a failure to thrive. Granted, that “attachment” and “love” may be severely twisted and dysfunctional, but there must be some taste of it, however dysfunctional, to stake a claim to life in this world.

2. At the other end, we must die and relinquish everything we have attached to, physically and emotionally, in this world.

Of course, we have the right of refusal to detach from our physical and emotional attachments upon dying, though we cannot refuse death itself. Yet, in a sense, since we can refuse to detach, which triggers reincarnation, we could view reincarnation as its own form of eternal life upon this earth. This is so because refusal to detach results in repeating old dramas in new lives, a cosmic groundhog day where we refuse to die and change form; we refuse to evolve into energetic beings.

There is no judgment here, as once again we must stay in the lives we are in, with their necessary encounters, until we are ready to awaken, take responsibility, completely detach and move on. This can only happen if we have also achieved the place of ultimate love. For short of it, we are left with longing—the essence of a need to reincarnate to find fulfillment and completion.

In the end, love and detachment are the opposites, the cross we bear in this world that we must reconcile to find completion on this plane. With completion we continue our journey in infinity, as energetic beings graduated from this lovely world of special love and attachments.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Recapitulation & Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

July 28, 2010 Jan Leave a comment

In the introduction to The Wheel of Time Carlos Castaneda writes about don Juan teaching him how to perceive energy and that the recapitulation was an important aspect of learning this process. He states: “One of the most important units, he called the recapitulation, which consisted of a systematic scrutiny of one’s life, segment by segment, an examination made not in the light of criticism or finding flaw, but in the light of an effort to understand one’s life, and to change its course. Don Juan’s claim was that once any practitioner has viewed his life in the detached manner that the recapitulation requires, there’s no way to go back to the same life.” (p. 4)

As Chuck wrote about in his blog, The Power of Experience, the unconscious is a major player in the recapitulation process. Within a lifetime the unconscious offers us many opportunities to access its hidden treasures. It offers us protection when we need it the most. It offers us insight and guidance when we need it, and it also prods us to grow when the time is right for that too.

Many of us fear what the unconscious has kept stored for us, perhaps initially experiencing it as frightening impenetrable darkness. It is indeed the shadowy side of ourselves, often a part that we rarely allow to emerge, or a part of ourselves that we reject as not the real self. The unconscious is in fact present to help us grow, as don Juan teaches Carlos. If accessed, thoroughly explored, allowed to be present in our lives we discover that it is not a frightening alien entity after all, but the most fascinating side of ourselves.

As an artist and writer I have always had a certain relationship with my unconscious, at least the part of it that I used in my creative endeavors. There were other darker aspects of it that often emerged in the creative process, and otherwise, that scared me. Often I would wonder where certain things came from, how I, a shy and gentle soul, could produce such dark and disturbing images, and sometimes truly frightening ones as well. I knew there was a dark side to my personality, but I had no clue as to how it got that way. As much as I allowed myself to creatively explore my unconscious, I was not fully aware of what it held in store for me until I met Chuck and began a process of deeper exploration of it. In that process, which, as it began to unfold, became entitled a recapitulation, I, slowly at first and then quicker as I got the hang of it, explored the depths of that disturbing and frightening inner darkness.

In the beginning, I often felt as if I were falling into an abyss, much like the experience of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Many times I felt as if I would shatter as I took the plunge downward, fearing that the velocity of the fall itself would annihilate me, a brittle person made only of thin glass, as I rocketed into unknown territory. Other times I feared that I would crash and die upon impact, but these were mental imaginings that eventually gave way to curiosity and amazement as the plunge would invariably bring me to an experience of my past that I had no idea even existed.

The unconscious is both a mighty opponent and a mighty partner. When we fear it we see only the darkness, the possibility of death, the annihilation and the end of who we perceive ourselves to be. But when we engage it as a vital part of life, in dreams, in confronting it and asking it to show us something about ourselves, when we allow it to lead us into that darkness, we begin to understand that it is present not as an adversary but as a true companion who only wants us to grow. When we truly open up to the experience of recapitulation—greeting what the unconscious brings us to, points out to us or challenges us to investigate—we offer ourselves the opportunity to change the course of our lives, as Carlos suggests.

If, as I believe, we are each of us challenged to work through one core issue in a lifetime we will also, I believe, be presented with the means of working through that core issue as our life unfolds. We are invited to the process of confrontation in many ways, but it may not be until we are finally ready to tackle it that we will allow ourselves to take the plunge down the rabbit hole and find out what truly lurks in our inner darkness.

The choice to explore our unconscious is ours alone. Perhaps in the past we did not understand what we were being called to, but once we finally gain a clear understanding of our core issue, do we still refuse the call of the unconscious, as we have done so many times before? Do we elect to push it away, avoid it, die without resolving why we are here? In turning from the call of the unconscious we put ourselves in a position of having to grapple with it on many levels and in many forms, because once we acknowledge awareness of our core issue the unconscious, that wily opponent/partner, knows that we are awakening to the fact of its existence and beginning to understand the power it holds in our lives. During this period of grappling, our unconscious often becomes the leader, offering us what we need in order to get to that point of change that Carlos writes about.

Of course, there is so much more to the process, to the unconscious, and to the conscious self as well that I am not discussing today, but I wish to jump ahead to what Carlos states, that once we have reached a place of detachment “there’s no way to go back to the same life.” This might seem like a frightening prospect as well, but really it is what we are all here for, to keep going forward and eventually to evolve into new life. We won’t feel the need or the desire to go back if we truly allow ourselves to confront our darkness, to recapitulate, to free ourselves of the fear of falling down the rabbit hole. In fact, as the process unfolds we might find ourselves leaping down that rabbit hole, eager for the next experience, eager to see what is in store, because eventually we come out the other side and into a whole new world.