Shamanism for the Age of Science: Awakening the Energy Body - Kenneth Smith 2018
Barriers Within The Stages of Awakening
Stockroom of a Thousand Mirrors
Corresponding with advances in learning and imagination, barriers to unfolding perception are also found in each stage. Deemed “natural enemies,” by don Juan, they are immobility, insightfulness, control, and aging.10 These barriers may be found in anyone’s behavior at any time; they are not necessarily isolated to specific stages. For example, a person still needs to deal with the constrictive effects of an inflexible cohesion after attaining craftsmanship. The artisan, then, must remain vigilant to the ins and outs of insight as being projection in order to maintain a natural field. And the debilitating physical and mental effects associated with aging can strike at any age or any stage. However, these barriers do characterize the ingredients of ontological development; assigning them to specific categories aids our understanding of their operation.
Orientation
If you are in orientation, you are trying to do just that: get oriented. This means that you have no foundational direction in life, certainly none in relation to your core. Your conditional field is therefore static and characterized by a lack of movement and suppleness, an excessive degree of closure, and the inability to form new avenues of perception. The high-reflectively nature of perception often blocks awareness that it forms from projection. This augments the effects of closure. This general condition expresses itself as the feeling of fear; that is, when faced with a new prospect the inability of cohesion to shift translates through the physical body as fear.
One remedy for an immobile conditional field is to gain a wide range of experience. Each type of experience represents its own cohesion, so the more you are able to form a range of cohesions, the more fluid your energy body becomes. A guideline for this is to do exactly what you fear doing: in this way you face the rigidity head on. This doesn’t mean being stupid, as in breaking laws. It does mean directly facing your life with courage. Over time, you will have a sufficient amount of experience to be well oriented in life.
Training
At this point, you have a sense of the major ingredients of your life. You have a path. Now begins the training. This could take shape in the form of a college education, an apprenticeship, or other formal training. From an ontological perspective, it means you know what type of transpersonal psychology or metaphysical philosophy is most natural to you. No matter your path, you are developing a new set of habits, and new meaning.
You achieved this level by expanding your cohesion, yet it is like an in-between world. In practice, your hard-won knowledge grants better insight, more clarity about yourself and the world, and you can now suspend projection to some degree. You are clear about the world; you finally have it sorted out. You more easily sense the potential of events and your imagination bustles with excitement. It turns out that that is the problem. Your clarity and decisions stemming from it may not reflect a firm relationship with your life. It is too soon to apply your insight, as there is much more to be experienced and learned before you are ready, and so you act too quickly or don’t act when you should. You need more depth to your cohesion; otherwise you are reflecting and projecting from a training cohesion, not a professional one. It’s like living in an altered state where your steps may not match the needs of your life. By the time you’re ready to work with the next stage, you’ve learned not to let imagination get the better of you.
Insightfulness reflects the first significant step to heightened consciousness. But the fascination of experiencing heightened perception may throw you off the mark. Maintaining keen awareness requires an even better control and orientation to core to prevent you from thinking you know the definitive answer even when you are only flirting with a new cohesion. A way to groom balance is to remain a bit cautious, actively wondering about the depth of your insights, while still battling rigidity. After all, this stage is just another conditional field.
Attaining this stage also means you begin directly working with timing. To manage your insightfulness, you need to learn when to act and when not. Without timidity, carefully feel things out. Align your decisions with your core values. Allow yourself to learn. The rhythm for all this is found in discovering when to proceed or remain still, to be open or closed. Within the infinity of potential, you are now learning a high-wire balancing act of how, what, when, and where to engage your next steps. It is the beginning of managing your energy body.
To become individuated, everyone needs to find his or her own way. The skill is taking these concepts and applying them, then discovering what transpires, and then applying what you’ve learned. A path like this truly requires an independent drive to learn.
Craftsmanship
Craftsmanship indicates a high degree of learning and a sophisticated degree of managing the energy body. You can control that which is around you. By regulating cohesion, you determine the emanations you want to align with and thus determine circumstances. Now your energy acts as an external force to others.11 Your now-stabilized heightened consciousness and insightfulness enable you to better perceive and assess what lies before you, enhancing your ability to shape your world or, more to the point, bend it out of shape.
According to don Juan, the ability to overly influence events to your desire makes this the most difficult of all stages.12 It offers strong temptations that can lead you away from core. This is self-importance, not self-actualization. While you may have acquired knowledge well beyond the usual spheres of human activity, the cost is that of estranging you from the very quest that has thus far motivated you. For instance, as a person builds a career in business or politics, cohesion develops as the person learns and experiences more. A promotion or winning an election places the person in a position of power whereby it is part of the job to influence events. Ontological power is the same, yet more expansive as the person can manipulate the energy that determines the outward result. Each profession has its code of conduct, and abuse of any form of power estranges the person from core.
This ability of control opens the gate to the refined use of imagination, but remember that control also relates to closure. Resulting from having consolidated a large cohesion without orienting it to core, closure can easily turn into the abuse of power. This applies to all circumstances, large and small, where you hold sway over others. That kind of power is manipulation, not freedom. It suggests marginalizing life, not participating with infinity. The guideline to transcend it is simple: never use it. True power is derived from taking part in creation, not trying to determine it. A key to success is to focus on developing cohesion in order to enter the next stage rather than to stop and admire your abilities. While craftsmanship is the professional practice of what was learned during training, it is also training for the next stage. Awakening to infinity is a never-ending quest.
Until you’ve reached artistry, every perception—everything—is an effect of projection. As you progress, you clean the mirrors on your stockroom walls. The trick is to keep polishing until they become translucent, until your light passes through them to connect with the emanations. You then become light, not a reflection of it. Although you already are light, getting to the point of it being a conscious experience is full of deception. You automatically, and with an ironclad guarantee, limit your connections with potential by your thoughts and feelings of how you fit into the world. This remains firmly in place until you become the artisan and have removed yourself from the confines of conditional fields. At such time, you claim what has always been yours, but by now have removed the distortions of light’s shadows.
Artistry and Mastery
Artistry forms a direct relationship with knowledge and awareness, not with collective consciousness; the artisan is a force of nature rather than of the group. At this stage you have gained the freedom and ability to imagine your own inventories, to stock your own room. You have come to understand the wall of mirrors as reflection and have transcended their influence.
A natural field results from your alignment with your core: how you have been created, not how your personality has developed amidst social pressures. Individuation, according to Jung, is arriving at your “innermost and incomparable uniqueness.” This necessitates granting precedence to self-realization rather than to the considerations and obligations of the collective. At the same time, Jung was quick to point out that doing so is not selfish but the fulfillment of one’s nature. This requires “a living co-operation with all factors.”13
The mastery level becomes center stage when you’ve mastered your energy body to the degree that you step completely outside the stockroom. Everything that once was is now obsolete. Your experiences are yours alone. You may also step into the third energy field and attain a new sense of and enhanced objectivity about the human condition.14 Whatever your circumstances in life, you can orient yourself to mastery anytime, anywhere. The stepping-stones then reveal themselves while realization waits.
Understanding at least the concept of the energy body begins during the orientation stage. From there, you traverse the stages step by step, with the full use of your resources being the hallmark of the mastery level. Your insightfulness is refined and your drive for power is in check. You are able to maintain being and have a keen sense of flow in all areas of your life. Your energy body is sufficiently fluent that you can gently enter and leave any circumstance by shifting cohesion to match those events.
To do this takes many years, so many that most of those who reach mastery are old and their resources are waning. Even though they have mastered their energy body, the barrier of age is insurmountable; they will die due to old age, if by nothing else.
Don Juan holds that if one who has traveled a path of awareness gives in to the desire to rest, this new orientation causes an energetic warp, which leads to feebleness. However, he adds that if the person can shrug off this tension, the door is opened to having the most refined cosmological experiences imaginable, thereby making the pursuit worth the heavy toll.15 It is conceivable that such events supersede the current definition of mystical experience and may require a new category based on emerging psychological models.
It is the awareness gained by those who have developed their energy bodies to the artistry and mastery levels that has given rise to modern Toltec philosophy. This system has been forged over millennia from highly sophisticated individual and group reflection and projection, and aimed toward the goal of liberating perception beyond those very embankments.