Shamanism for the Age of Science: Awakening the Energy Body - Kenneth Smith 2018
Learning and Imagination
Stockroom of a Thousand Mirrors
The stages of awakening—orientation, training, craftsmanship, artistry, and mastery—represent increasingly larger stockrooms, each containing more perspectives about life as well as greater capacities to be. Your inventory grows incrementally as you build a level, and then quickly expands as you stabilize the next. Each stage builds from projection, producing a conditional energy field consisting of those conditions (the inventory) that create the room. Each stage also acts as an echo chamber, providing both accurate and false readings about the nature of the room. The more self-reflection becomes self-centered, the more dysfunction you exhibit and experience. The echoes are phantoms rather than harmonics of reality; they don’t have a solid point of origin. With shelves loaded with inventory, mirrors reflecting this and that, and echoes bouncing off the walls, it is easy to get lost. But that is what maps—such as the outline of these stages and of human anatomy—are meant to help us avoid.
When you first enter a new stockroom, you may feel at a loss. The vastness of the new territory is too large to grasp and too big to feel. The first glimpses of the new room are altered states and may have no meaning to you whatsoever, other than signaling that you have experienced an altered state. As you become more comfortable inside the room, your expanded consciousness changes your relation to the mirrors and more meaning is developed. You have therefore elevated your awareness to having a discrete altered state. You learn in bits, then chunks. When you know your way about the room, you have developed a new baseline state of consciousness. You are literally living in a new world, a process reflecting the accurate, harmonic echoes of projection. It is then time to knock on the door of the next stockroom.
You don’t need to throw rocks at the mirrors and shatter them to become free or to learn. You can just stop what you are doing, release the effects of the mirrors, and let new information and experience enter. This is the essence of deautomatization, seen in the capacity of rivers to clean themselves after they cease being polluted. You need to let go and allow your intrinsic, core awareness to come forth. You then can arrange the new perceptions to reflect and project the new conditions, all the while knowing that at some point you will also need to let these go in order to reach yet another level of awakening. This dance of death and renewal, or release and regeneration, is at the heart of learning and imagination. It is the essence of the type of conditional field necessary to power you through the stages to a natural field.
Each level contains an energetic logic, with its own steps and measures, just as with intellectual logic. You can’t truly understand until you either have the experience or a sufficient amount of like-minded experience to make the connections. And just like intellectual intelligence, energetic logic is subject to use and misuse. You may distort what is said based on your conditional field and likewise distort your relation to the world due to the same thing: an improperly aligned cohesion. Put another way, each stage contains its own nuances, traps, and blessings. Consistency comes when you are focused on your core, as that energy resides beyond conditional fields.
Core and Projection
Core can be defined as the absence of personal projection as well as the quintessential, natural human condition. Traversing all the stages of awakening is possible as a result of aligning with your core energy. The activation of will is a by-product of this orientation, which brings the energy body fully to life. Correctly maneuvered, each stage brings you to a better sense of trusting your resources, decisions, and place in this world.
Self-reflection produces many conditions of imagination, some purposeful and some not so good. If you are lost in despair or dwelling in psychological disorder, then your imagination will reflect this type of energy, adding to your despair. On the other hand, if your mirrors are well integrated and polished for growth, then your imagination forms productive experiences. In each instance, projection influences the quality and content of perception. The degree of pathology associated with projection indicates the degree of denial that projection is taking place.
Arrogance and fundamentalism come from perceiving oneself as being right in absolute terms. A person with expertise in one field may also project that knowledge and speak with absolute authority on subjects outside his or her expertise. Being well versed in the logic of one subject can blind one to the logic of another discipline. Core energy, by contrast, is more amenable to different views of the world; it connects with infinity and infinity holds all possibilities.
Maintaining core alignment is what enables you to sift through all the potential that doesn’t apply to personal and social development, as well as to maintain a balance between relative and absolute. If you entertain the relativity of the universe too much, you won’t be able to sustain your own nature. If you focus on the absolute nature of the cosmos, fundamentalism takes over.
Only when you reach the artisan stage have you navigated your way out of this type of pathology. Until then, you’re in the throes of personal and group-associated projection and denial. A quest to reach core is a way to stay balanced and focused. From this posture comes the behavior that allows you to express and fulfill your innermost condition. Attaining this natural field reflects psychological health.
In the path of learning, closure and core need to be reconciled. Closure results from and produces projection. As a natural part of learning, it supports our capacity to focus. However, closure also closes off perception and limits imagination. Core awareness, on the other hand, opens the gates of imagination and accelerates learning. As a fully awakened energy body and core awareness are synonymous, a completely conscious connection with the world results. Anything off center and away from core is projection, and projection results from having a conditional field of one kind or another. At the same time, core is closed in the sense that it is the way you, and you alone, were created.
The more you align with your core, the more objectivity you have of yourself and the environment. This correlates with a movement of the assemblage point; the deeper you take your assemblage point into your energy body, the more you become aware of your environment. This is the same thing as simultaneously being at core and extended throughout your energy body. The effect is that you are aware that you are intimately connected with the environment and therefore are naturally more aware of the environment. Objectivity unfolds from this enhanced awareness. This is being-centered, not self-centered. The difference between the two makes all the difference in how you navigate life.
Another way of looking at this is to say that if you completely individuate, if you reach core, if you have developed a natural energy field, then you eliminate the effects of projection. Individuation first occurs at the artisan stage and is refined at the mastery level. At these levels, behavior emanates from core; it is not tied to a group consensus of reality or to what is known by structured teachings, metaphysical or otherwise. The person is knowledge and awareness, not the representation of them. The person is being.
When you reach the artisan stage, you possess an inner calm and quiet, almost a sense that nothing at all is going on while your world unfolds about you. Projection has ended and your connection with external emanations places you at infinity’s doorstep. At the mastery stage, you have taken this awareness to a highly skillful level of managing your innermost abilities, to the extent that you can step into those emanations, some of which may be literally out of this world.
Timing
Time lies at the heart of our earthly experience. Even in simple terms, it is the measure of life as provided by our Sun rising and setting. In turn, timing grants awareness of time; it provides the opportunity and ability to saturate consciousness in this requisite dimension. It should not be surprising, then, that a principle feature of the stages is timing, the speed of your relationship with self, others, and the world. Timing is rhythm, harmony. It is characterized by your movements through time, space, and other dimensions. Good timing is difficult to pull off. Just think of having to orchestrate the pushes and pulls of several chakra energies to arrange them so that you may act in a consistent manner. And in our modern culture, how often do you find yourself moving too fast in response to the demands of daily life?
Timing reflects your relationship with core; it can indicate a natural flow, as in the case of a strong and direct resonance, or it can indicate discord. It is also an indicator of the type of energetic field you have, the location of the assemblage point, and which stage of development you’re in. Within the energy body, timing reflects the degree of harmony between the first and second fields. It involves the opening and closing of awareness and the ebb and flow between learning and imagination. Projection, as it is not of core, reflects both poor timing as well as something that throws your timing off. On the flip side, reflecting on timing gives you something concrete to work toward.
Awareness of personal timing normally doesn’t find its way into standard educational curricula, let alone instruction on the means to engage it. To understand the importance of timing is itself remarkable. To be able to exhibit good timing at an ontological level is exceptional as it means you’re experiencing artistry, not just talking about it. Distinction between talk and doing makes all the difference in the world. For instance, one person might approach health from having extensive textbook training and a medical degree, while another person comes at it from the experience of it, the ontology or beingness of health. A physician may be quite adept in diagnosis and treatment of disease but have poor health-promoting habits, while another person is a shining statement of health but has no depth of medical science knowledge. Robust health signals at least some knowledge of timing as it demonstrates the harmony—the timing—of all systems within an individual.
Good timing requires the use of four-dimensional space, perceiving the whole of the environment, not just pieces of it. With self awareness, you can better adjust to the demands of the clock; you can navigate your job, relationships, hobbies, and other facets of your life that are governed by having to be somewhere at some time. Good timing by itself may not elevate your status in the world. It does, however, bring you more to life. A gesture given, a word spoken, or a laugh can all make or break any kind of interaction with others.
Timing is not something needing to be fixed or static. You don’t have to act the same way all the time. Timing is a measure of the alignment of internal and external emanations, and alignments produce perception. In the same manner, timing both reflects and governs heightened consciousness. Thoughts determine habits and both influence cohesion. The assemblage point holds in a certain position when a sufficient number of logically interrelated pieces come together. The ability to move the assemblage point to a new location requires forming a new set of habits.7 Timing is part of the puzzle of when to learn new habits, and how to enact them.
Habituation means you repeatedly experience something to the degree you become less sensitive to it.8 The maintenance of habit keeps you from feeling the original sensations. Your actions become automatic, rote. Timing falls by the wayside. You then become dull and lifeless, not even noticing what once held keen interest. Deautomatization helps prevent this calcification of perception; it helps you step outside of preconceived notions, rules, and behaviors. Using feeling, as a means to guide your steps, is an example of deautomatization, as is taking a different route to work everyday . . . as long as you don’t make doing so into another routine.
Deautomatization also offsets the effects of closure by refreshing, clearing, and opening perception. Each person—if not each and every organism—is in some way unique; each has a core signature, reflecting innate timing. This provides a distinctive relation to yourself and to myriad forms of the environment. Your core timing, then, yields an avenue of growth that can be used as a thread to navigate through levels of development.
You can use the stages of awakening to understand the relationship of timing to core.9 In the orientation stage, life is somewhat random. Often a person has no purpose, no sense with which to measure anything. During training, you gain a direction in life. The capacity to tap into an initially elusive concept of core starts as you begin to place your life in order.
By the time you develop craftsmanship, you have a fairly well-tempered energy body. You can let go of preconceptions and entertain new possibilities; purposeful direction is well in hand. As you have removed tired and worn-out behavior, life takes on a more novel flavor. Your life has been tuned in a way that you connect with life hour by hour. At the artistry stage, a natural field has taken over all aspects of your life. The journey has delivered you to the moment at hand, and traveling in the moment is the only way to sustain this level. Timing provides the means for maintaining your gains.