One day last week I sat down to meditate in front of a sliding glass door looking out over the deck and into the trees beyond. I focused my gaze on a spot at eye level in the leaves of the large catalpa tree and let it soften. In continually softening my gaze the leaves began to blur, my peripheral vision blurred as well and after a few minutes I was gazing at nothing more than a tiny pinprick of light. At first I did not attach any significance to this light, simply noted it, keeping my gaze on it.

As I concentrated on the point of light it began to float. It began to jiggle and shift in the blurred pattern of leaves. I became fascinated by this light, yet I also warned myself not to attach, to stop “looking” at it and simply let it be. “Achieving inner silence is much more intriguing and important than this pinprick of light,” I smugly told myself. Making a new attempt to banish all thoughts and soften my gaze I noticed that the light was moving again, this time coming towards me and that it now seemed to be something on the glass door.

“Oh,” I said to myself, “it’s just a raindrop!” But as soon as I noticed that, it retreated and was once again a point of light in the leaves. “Oh, perhaps it is just a speck of sky showing through the leaves,” I thought, now somewhat puzzled by what I was actually seeing. This shifting back and forth continued. As I watched in utter amazement the point of light was a tiny bit of sky one second and the next it was a raindrop catching the light on the door.

“Hey, wait a minute!” I said. “What’s going on here?” One minute I’m positive that I’m looking at a drop of water and the next I’m equally positive that I’m looking at a bit of sky. I watch this process with growing frustration and yet I resist the urge to get up off my pillow and investigate close up, aware somehow that this little show is for my benefit.

“STOP IT!” I finally yell out loud. “Calm down! Don’t you get it? It’s both. It is both a bit of sky showing through the leaves and a raindrop on the window and yet it is neither, so let it go!” With that I was able to detach from assigning a label, from creating a logical explanation, from affording it importance, from interpreting it in any way according to the foreign installation as the seers of ancient Mexico call the mind, of putting it into a context at all.

As Carlos Castaneda writes in The Wheel of Time:

“Human beings are perceivers, but the world they perceive is an illusion: an illusion created by the description that was told to them from the moment they were born.

So in essence, the world that their reason wants to sustain is the world created by a description and its dogmatic and inviolable rules, which their reason learns to accept and defend.”

I let go of all the rules. I let go of perceiving the point of light as anything in particular. I simply accepted its presence, without attaching any meaning or significance whatsoever. I allowed it to be part of my meditation practice.

As I let go, the light grew larger. I accepted it. I entered the light and held myself in its nothingness. In this place I was unaware of self, of light, of breath even. I was utter calm emptiness. I stayed for a moment, suspended, sustaining the nothingness of it, transported into a stillness that was so familiar, so known, so all encompassing that I almost resented leaving it.

As I returned to this reality I gave thanks for my experience, got up and walked away. It was only later that I realized I did truly get beyond the syntax of this world, for when I was done I did not, as I might have at an earlier stage in my life, investigate if there was indeed a raindrop on the window. It didn’t matter. It was the experience alone that mattered: letting go of this world in order to have an experience of another.

In The Art of Dreaming when Carlos is having difficulty understanding how he could possibly perceive what don Juan is telling him, they have the following conversation:

“The problem of validation always played a key role in my mind in those days,” says Carlos.

He goes on to say: “Forgive me, don Juan, but this business of the assemblage point is an idea so farfetched, so inadmissible that I don’t know how to deal with it or what to think of it.”

Don Juan retorted: “There is only one thing for you to do. See the assemblage point! It isn’t difficult to see. The difficulty is in breaking the retaining wall we all have in our minds that holds us in place. To break it we need energy. Once we have energy, seeing happens to us by itself. The trick is in abandoning our fort of self-complacency and false security.”

“It’s obvious to me, don Juan, says Carlos, that it takes a lot of knowledge to see. It isn’t just a matter of having energy.”

“It is just a matter of having energy, believe me. The hard part is convincing yourself that it can be done. For this, you need to trust the nagual. The marvel of sorcery is that every sorcerer has to prove everything with his own experiences. I am telling you about the principles of sorcery, not with the hope that you will memorize them but with the hope that you will practice them.”

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

Sending you all love and good wishes for good experiences,
Jan

NOTE: Excerpts from the books of Carlos Castaneda mentioned in this blog come from The Wheel of Time p. 137 and from The Art of Dreaming pp. 9-10. These and other books are available through our Store.

Maintaining balance may be the most important part of undertaking a recapitulation process. Entering into the unknown self or unknown realities is a very serious matter and should never be taken lightly. When I was very near the end of my recapitulation I had some frightening experiences that nearly freaked me out. Though I clearly understood that I had entered an alternate reality and that some evil entity was making a last ditch effort to recapture the energy that I had worked so hard to regain, it was not until I sat with Chuck at one of our regularly scheduled shamanic sessions that I was able to calm down and return to a sense of normality. Chuck calmly and softly said: “Don’t worry, Jan, the shamans have an explanation for everything you’ve been experiencing.” That alone was enough to calm me down and bring me back to reality, to tuck my fears away as we went on to explore in greater detail just what had happened and why.

In many of his books, Carlos Castaneda writes of don Juan being the sobering factor in many of his adventures into inner silence. Specifically, on pages 197-199 in The Active Side of Infinity he relates an experience he had with don Juan of going into inner silence and ending up walking in the Sonoran desert. He said that he could not speak during these adventures, that only don Juan, whose grave voice guided him when necessary, could talk. At the end of the experience, he writes the following:

Suddenly, I felt don Juan’s arm hooking my right arm and pulling me from the boulder. He said that it was time to go. The next moment, I was in his house again, in central Mexico, more bewildered than ever.

“Today, you found inorganic awareness, and then you saw it as it really is,” he said. “Energy is the irreducible residue of everything. As far as we are concerned, to see energy directly is the bottom line for a human being. Perhaps there are other things beyond that, but they are not available to us.”

Don Juan asserted all this over and over, and every time he said it, his words seemed to solidify me more and more, to help me return to my normal state. [End of quote.]

This captures many of my own experiences when working with Chuck during my recapitulation process. Over and over again he would bring me back to solidity, to balance in this reality with sharp calls to return to now, to the present moment, followed by sobering though at the time I thought rather “otherworldly” explanations of the experiences I was having.

Balance requires awareness. In the beginning of recapitulating it may be exceedingly productive and even crucial to have a seasoned guide, for it is very easy to get drawn into fear by foreign energy and get lost in the dramas of old memories, old situations, and old behaviors. It is also possible to get lost in other worlds, which it may take weeks to extricate oneself from. I had all of these kinds of experiences and many others during the three years when I did the bulk of my recapitulation. However, every time I had an experience and returned to balance in this reality, often grounded by Chuck’s pragmatic discussions of how the seers of ancient Mexico understood the universe, I gained and retained new awareness that I then utilized in further explorations.

Often I visualized balance as straddling a river, the river being this reality, the present, and either side of it, where my feet were planted, being my experiences. One foot was firmly planted in the past as I recapitulated and relived experiences from my entire life. The other foot was planted in a new world of awareness as I gained an understanding and perception that had previously been rejected and denied because of my need to control my world and be safe. Chuck seamlessly entered all three of those worlds with me, guiding me to truthfully observe my experiences in whatever reality I was in at the time, but then drawing me back into balance, sometimes quite forcefully as don Juan did Carlos, asking me to deeply study and bring into cohesion all three realities.

During my recapitulation I also learned that finding balance meant forging a connection to spirit, to the heart-centered inner guide. If I found myself in an unfamiliar world while recapitulating, in an alternate universe for instance, and could not figure out what I was supposed to do and was not able to talk to Chuck about it, I learned to rely on what my heart said was the right thing to do. This became a steady and reliable source of guidance during many uncomfortable and strange encounters. As I learned what my own energy felt like, absent of negative outside energy and old embedded energy planted in me by others and by life’s experiences, I was more quickly able to return to awareness and inner truth. The more I connected to my own inner spirit, the more anchored and aware I became, gaining not only increased self-confidence, but also a new sense of personal power.

It became increasingly easier to return to relying on the self with the more experiences I recapitulated. As old untruths gave way to previously hidden truths the reason for taking a recapitulation journey clearly revealed itself as the only way I was ever going to really change. I learned that my personal experiences belonged to me alone, for reasons that were meant for me to grow from, and even though others may have been involved it was up to me to take responsibility for dissecting from them my own life’s lessons.

Staying in balance is not only necessary during the process of recapitulation but is crucial to living a life of awareness. Without balance our lives may become scattered, stressed, unfocused, and we may even succumb to old habits and behaviors. In a dream last night I was shown how my personal energy is directly connected to remaining in balance. In this dream I had my hand on a square motherboard, slightly larger than my hand, of luminous energy connections. This motherboard was centered on a larger square, creating a mandala, held in place in the center of the back by a single metal spring soldered to the larger square, so that it was quite wobbly and shook when even lightly touched. When my hand was perfectly and lightly balanced in the center of the small board, the energy was fantastic, vibrating, glowing, and alive, but when I removed my hand the energy died immediately. If I shifted it slightly or removed a finger or two, the energy and the luminosity dimmed. It was clear to me that to be in perfect balance takes focus, attention, and awareness. It is not to be taken lightly. In understanding the precarious nature of being human, with little shifts here and there, I saw that my energy is really under my own control. I am responsible for remaining aware, each moment, of how I decide to use my energy or not. In the dream it was also clear to me that this motherboard was heart-centered and that this is where my connection to the energy of myself and the universe is to be found.

To remain in balance is to do so in reality, whatever that reality may be. As Carlos learned in working with don Juan, and as I learned in my shamanic work with Chuck, the more experiences I had in the seers’ world and in my own recapitulation the more I was able to navigate all realities with greater awareness and energy. Eventually, as Carlos, I became fully capable of taking journeys alone, able to see energy as it flows in the universe, and able to return to balance, without the guidance of another.

Perhaps the most rewarding part of doing a recapitulation is that one becomes open to life in a different way, perceiving and understanding the universe differently but also the self. I have certainly found that it has been far easier, and much more fun, to just be alive without the burdens of untruth that I carried for so many years. I humbly offer these blogs about recapitulation so that others may dare to journey into themselves and into other realities. Perhaps these experiences are helpful.

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

Sending you all love, good wishes, and balance.
Jan

NOTE: Books mentioned in this blog are available in our Store under the Shamanism category.