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

The Continuity of Reality
Stockroom of a Thousand Mirrors

The source as well as the result of projection is self-reflection. It is the glue that binds cohesion. The intellect interprets, defines, and arranges the world into a neat mental pattern, preserved by the stream of thought. The emotional aspect forms, reacts, and arranges the world in its own way. This type of self-reflection forms from considerations of feeling better than or worse than someone or something. Both mental and emotional states reflect conditions within cohesion.

The relationship between uniformity and cohesion also influences self-reflection. It is as though the inside of the energy body were lined with a thousand small mirrors, each representing one inventory item on the shelves in your stockroom of reality. The mirrors reflect raw data into what we perceive physically, emotionally, and mentally. In short, how we interpret the world results from our anatomy, and then our thoughts and feelings bounce back off the mirrors and influence consciousness. From a wider angle, reality is a collective reflection of this stockroom of mirrors. Using a computer metaphor, our perception of reality emanates from how our hardware (physical and energetic anatomy) and software (thoughts and feelings) work together.

In psycho-sociological terms, thinking influences awareness and reinforces social reality. From a shamanic reference, this means that thoughts fixate the assemblage point.⁴ If your assemblage point is at the position of “behavioral psychology,” when you see people acting like they own the world, you might say to yourself that those people have been conditioned by their upbringing and by society to behave like that. If your assemblage point is at “Toltec paradigm,” you might say that those people have too rigid a conditional energy field. If your assemblage point is at “mechanistic world,” then the world is comprised of material objects. If it is at “quantum physics,” the world is viewed as being comprised of energy.

Every time you label something—an event, a person’s behavior, a theory, anything—you are interpreting the world though reflection and projection. You are supplying energy to hold your cohesion in exactly the same pattern that gave rise to the interpretations in the first place. Collapsing infinity into a usable arrangement for mental continuity is the hallmark of reason. Although what is considered to be reasonable reflects but a piece of the vastness that surrounds you, it provides a measure of stability; at least you have a stockroom for reference. The magic of maintaining cohesion is that entire realities are built from sharing a similar assemblage point position with others.

Our internal dialogue aims and maintains perception and provides continuity. Hence, stopping your thoughts allows you to manage projection. A lull in your stream of thoughts permits a natural shift in cohesion as it entrains to new emanations, making it possible to have different perceptions and interpretations. Shift it a great deal and you will end up in a different reality. The same effect takes place for an individual, the collective, or the species. By understanding the neatly woven wall of mirrors, you begin to better understand cohesion, which helps you understand the force behind it all. Then you can begin deliberately transcending that force. Please refer to chapter ten for an exercise to stop your internal dialogue.

One remedy for projection put forth by Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki is to not believe in anything. This doesn’t mean to believe in emptiness, but to suspend belief in arbitrary rules embodied in transient formations of reality. Ninety-nine percent of thinking, he says, is self-centered. To step beyond this, he suggests believing in that which has no form or color, but that which is waiting to take form.⁵ He is advocating a stronger relationship with potential, with a creative force, instead of being limited solely to human contrivance.

However, mental agility and stability by themselves don’t solve the problem because our feelings also act as a binding glue of reality. Reality has an emotional continuity; it is held together by emotional links, emotional commitments. Valerie Hunt refers to emotions as the “mind field organizer.” Stemming from integrating a multitude of experiences over time, a person ends up with a well-defined energetic signature.⁶ This cohesion spins perception along the lines of the influences that determined the signature, and so how you think of the world is bound by how you feel about the world. This is why all heck breaks lose when you challenge the underpinnings of another’s reality.

In addition, consider physical continuity, or projection arising from the very physical world we inhabit. Our familiarity with trees, rocks, clouds, and all other physical-world elements exerts pressure to keep the assemblage point stable. Shifting cohesion to altered states of nonphysical dimensions—OBE, NDE, or mystical experience, for example—shatters this continuity.

The degree to which any worldview evolves hinges on projection. A more expansive model requires more elements of projection, which are then applied on a more expansive social scale. But you may end up just creating a more complex world without really getting anywhere. Growth through the ontological stages is geared toward realizing your core; personal projection evaporates because you are paying more attention to potential, to ever-increasing abstract relationships. Individual growth thereby influences group reality.