Shamanism for the Age of Science: Awakening the Energy Body - Kenneth Smith 2018

Stages of Awakening
Expanding the Boundaries

The change from a baseline state of consciousness through an altered state to a new baseline applies to the stages of awakening or what may also be regarded as levels of ontological development. As reflected by the different relationships of consciousness (i.e., ASC or d-ASC), each level represents new concepts and behaviors. Each new stage, for example, is an ASC until you can employ the skills associated within it with some degree of proficiency, whereupon it has become a d-ASC. When you have stabilized several related skills, such as various aspects of imagination, you experience a b-SoC shift, and have a new assemblage-point position. The main difference between specific skills and the broader cohesion of stages is the degree of expansion; put another way, differences among levels represent how much of your energy body has been actualized, how much of your unconscious has become conscious.

An ASC occurs principally due to the random influence of the second energy field. Some portion of imagination pops into consciousness, and then usually exits. A d-ASC and then a new b-SoC form when you have integrated this new knowledge into the first field, which means you have learned something about another part of your second field; you have learned to manage imagination a bit better. Again, the process is the same for handling a particular skill or enlarging your worldview, just on different scales. Ontological development, then, brings entire segments of your energy body into awareness and you experience quantitative leaps of consciousness.

Figure 5.2. Stages of Awakening

Each stage contains the others.

An ontological stage represents a major cohesion; it governs each and every feature of the reality you experience. Cohesion organizes your perceptions of the world and, in so doing, calls forth interpretations, values, ethics, habits, hopes, dreams, and states of health. With each shift in cohesion, these change. Intensity of daily experience magnifies at each new level.

Each stage is also a domain of self-actualization, of being. A self-actualization journey requires being oriented to core for each step. Only the degree of proficiency of stabilizing core awareness varies among levels. As you progress from orientation to training, and on to craftsmanship, artistry, and mastery, you can express more of your completeness. These levels are natural to humans in the same manner that moths have natural stages, growing from egg to larva to pupa to adult.

Cohesional or energy body intelligence—the ability to understand and manage your energy body—is a subset of ontological intelligence. Technically speaking, cohesion relates to the conditions within the energy body and ontological relates to the wider landscape of the human condition that also extends beyond the energy body. Both types of intelligence apply to skills of the energy body. Shifting awareness among cornerstones represents such skill as does the self-regulation of health. Applying this knowledge derives from ontological intelligence. For another nuanced understanding of energy body dynamics, cohesion and ontological may at times be considered synonymous as they both influence each other, depending on circumstance. Cosmology (the origins of the universe) is ontological, for instance, yet the considerations that are formed from such study stem from cohesion.

One way to begin expanding the boundaries of cohesion is to experience more. Engaging in things you are not fond of as well as those you enjoy builds connections within the energy body. Experience leads to learning and learning leads to knowledge, a condition where cohesion has been so well integrated that your relationship to the world—your ontological state of being—changes. The developmental stages represent leaps in expanding the conscious domain of the energy body. Each level also provides greater degrees of heightened consciousness as measured by the first and second fields blending. The more you have formed cohesional baselines for a range of distinct experiences and skills, the greater your overall cohesion. Practically, this means you are better able to see what you are up to and what effects your actions have. Put another way, seeing facilitates the experience of energy. Ontological levels instill meaning for this experience and this translates to more awareness. Each stage means you’re that much more conscious of being conscious.

Each stage represents an immense amount of reorganization of perception, characterized by new insights and abilities, and also reflects the type and quality of coherence between internal and external energies. Working with imagination directly stimulates and develops the energy body; learning integrates the experiences. The results are yours to discover. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any individuation to discuss. At the same time, humans share uniformity and therefore to some degree share cohesion, so each stage has common properties.

Orientation

If you are in the orientation stage, you have a highly conditional field. Cohesion is unyielding and there is minimal fluency of perception. You wouldn’t recognize an ASC if it bonked you on the head. Your reality is pretty much fixed in place like a window-store mannequin. Orientation, though, means that you have stepped onto a path such as one of the transpersonal psychologies. You might begin to meditate, practice yoga postures, or work to enter imagination. It means taking the first step toward learning about the world beyond ordinary constructs of reality. You now have some type of recognition that life is lacking and you are getting oriented to what other possibilities exist. Doing so carries the commitment to experience yourself as more conscious, more actualized. The dominant aspect of this stage is an orientation to learning a philosophy and set of skills; your formal training is about to begin.

Training

This stage reflects the beginning of movement, the remedy to stagnation. You begin to sense the intricacies of learning and growth. Whether you call it an apprenticeship or discipleship, this stage determines your relationship with your craft, be it Buddhist, Taoist, Sufi, Toltec, Christian, or whatever else that fits the bill. These all concern the development of awareness beyond the ordinary. While they may have different contexts, they often use similar methods such as meditation. It is a conscious decision to embark on this type of path, and whether or not you have a teacher you need to find entry by virtue of your own wits.

As an apprentice, you are fully yet clumsily engaged with your efforts to become more aware. Cohesion begins to be more malleable. During this adjustment you may feel like you lose touch with reality from time to time, which might be the case. Another way of saying this is that you are learning about the relativity of reality, and until you can find continuity in your means of constructing reality you may feel lost.

At first, seemingly mysterious events may randomly happen. You may have a spontaneous OBE or epiphany concerning a scientific discovery. As you grow, not only do you better understand how reality is an effect of cohesion, but you also begin to manage and use your experience at a more skillful level. You can begin to deliberately seek these types of experiences and begin learning in earnest how to transform altered states into new baseline states.

The training provided by your chosen system—including theory, context, and how-to exercises—is designed to further orient and stabilize perception. Your training offers the basics that not only lift you out of the orientation level but also provides the framework to advance to the other stages. In this manner, you will always be able to orient yourself, no matter the circumstance.

Craftsmanship

At a certain point, you gain a professional relationship with your endeavors. You now step away from training and learn through application as a practitioner of your craft. You have learned various elements of the craft to the point of being able to deliberately enact them. This process is characterized has having incorporated what once was unknown into something having meaning, or put another way as having traversed altered states to a new baseline state. You might therefore practice shamanism, science, or plumbing, for example.

From an ontological view, this means you’re now more adept at using the resources of your energy body. No matter the extent of your craft, the management of personal resources is a main feature of this stage. You can shift cohesion when desired and remain alert and balanced while doing so. You have firm understanding of conditional fields and what it takes to develop a natural field. You have also integrated the worldview and techniques of the craft with the pieces of your life. Formerly latent cornerstones of perception are activating.

The elements of one stage don’t become completely clear until you stabilize the next. And as you traverse the stages, you’ll see that what once was effective no longer works. You always have to bring new skills to bear and behave in different ways to accomplish your objectives, a requirement for a craftsperson of any profession. Discipline is the key to moving through the stages toward self-actualization, and part of discipline is not getting lost in the system. The labels and rituals associated with a given discipline are not the work; they represent ways to approach the true issue at hand. The real work resides in the being of it. A traditional shamanic exercise of orienting oneself to the four cardinal directions and the meaning each has for you, for instance, may help you feel more emotionally centered. The ritual helped bring about the actual sense of it. The higher skill, though, is being centered no matter where and when without any extraneous support. This is the knowledge—the being—learned from performing the exercises. Remaining oriented to core energy governs further growth.

Artistry

Superior craftsmanship leads to artistry, rousing the energy body to the level of a natural energy field. A hallmark of this field is that learning and imagination are on equal footing. The first and second energy fields have merged to a degree that differentiating them is meaningless, not because you’re disoriented but because you have lifted yourself outside their reference. This also means you have become individuated, to use Jung’s term albeit with shamanic meaning. At this point, you are no longer bound to your craft. You can stretch your perception in any direction without the need for channel markers and supportive exercises.

While a metaphysical system offers a practical approach to engaging this range of humanness, embedded within the training is the path to grow beyond the path. Training engenders a specialized conditional field, while craftsmanship represents a level of skill commensurate with achieving membership. Entering the artisan stage means you’ve left the system behind. You no longer need that structure to grow. In artistry you are participating in an entirely new manner with the world. You have become a conscious part of it, an integral part, rather than removed from it, truly living the time-honored adage, “in the world but not of it.” You are completely yourself and completely of the environment at the same time.

This is the domain of core, which contains all aspects of human intelligence. Conditional fields block access to this intelligence and interfere with the flow of information from it to conscious awareness. As a result, it remains in the realm of potential. Artisans rest easy at the core of their energy bodies, and life emanates from this vantage point.

As the energy body comes to life, the more you perceive the world from will rather than from reason. If you reach artistry via Toltec training, all of your cornerstones of perception will be awake. You will have moved away from the mental and into feeling as a principal means to navigate life. You will be using your complete anatomy. You adeptly manage your energetic resources. For modern Toltecs, this stage is the guiding light of what “shaman” means.

In general, whatever your craft, the potential you’ve labored to awaken is ready and available to be expressed. Logic constructed from personal and group considerations gives way to a natural order. This is another way of saying that you are more integrated with infinity. What happens next results as a statement of your artistry as you have learned to live in the thickness of imagination. You won’t know how this will be expressed until you’re in the midst of doing so.

Mastery

Whereas the artisan has arrived at his or her core, the master behaves from this center. Don Juan has indicated that this stage of development is that of the seer, involving the mastery of one’s totality, which includes the whole of the energy body. The prelude for this stage, he says, is that of the person of knowledge, or what I have referred to as the artisan.³ From this perspective, the principles put forth during orientation and training are the basics for learning mastery.

While seeing as a mode of perception is developed at each stage, a true seer completely engages a universe of energy as an integral, fully aware part of that universe. No matter how proficiently one sees, until a person enters mastery seeing may be relegated to part of the training needed to participate in a grander scheme of life. And therefore from a perspective of infinity, the master and apprentice are equal; however, from the perspective of these individuals, there are worlds upon worlds of difference in their awareness.