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

Managing Fundamentalism
Closing in on Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism is a powerful force of entrainment. This force can be perceived and transcended as part of ontological development. There’s no doubt that the fundamentals—the essential basics—of a system serve to help liberate perception. They keep you heading toward your destination. It’s only when you lose yourself in the fundamentals that you go astray. Here are some suggestions that may help you navigate infinity:

1. Don’t use your knowledge as an excuse not to look at yourself.

2. Learn to see, as doing so suspends conditional fields and lets you directly examine energy fields. This provides the means to extend awareness beyond the known world. Seeing awakens the energy body. Chapter ten provides technique.

3. Shift your assemblage point regularly. Look at the world and act a little differently now and then. Stimulate your imagination. Fundamentalists try to maintain a certain perspective, and this means maintaining a particular assemblage point position.

4. Cultivate a bent for examination, for understanding. Toltecs have called this sobriety and hold that it automatically leads to a shift in the assemblage point.¹⁴

5. Challenge all of the assumptions that make up your worldview.

6. Don’t let your love for the fundamentals turn you into a fundamentalist.

7. Don’t confuse intellectual fluency with having the ability to do what it is you are talking about.

8. Realize that just because you have had an experience—like a NDE—doesn’t mean you know what it is or means in absolute terms.

9. Understand that groups go through the same process as individuals. Nothing is cast in stone and it takes time to weave perception from a baseline through altered states to another baseline. Individual consciousness and growth drives this process. Don’t give unwarranted allegiance to a group.

10. Get comfortable with not knowing anything. Then open yourself to knowing. Repeat as needed.

Millions of people are being exposed to, and influenced by, fundamentalist thinking, be they scientists, politicians, religious zealots, hardcore New Agers, or whatever. When many people adopt a new pattern of thought, it results in a revolution. The communist, socialist, industrial, evangelical, and green movements are all examples, as is the Inquisition. At its face value, a revolution is neither good nor bad. The measure of its value is its effect on the consciousness and development of individuals and groups.

Yet, for the revolutionary transformation of freedom, even this power must be transcended. Supplanting one template of thought with another is not a recipe for complete evolution. All too often when people have authority in one field, they assume their knowledge transfers to others. In addition, people construct many interpretations of what they think is occurring rather than examine what is occurring.

If there were a technology that could accurately indicate how much of the energy body had become conscious, we would have a way to predict any person’s level of fundamentalism or awakening. Seen from a behavioral psychological perspective, that would translate to hard data that could be used to predict behavior. From a transpersonal perspective, it would make the assessment of ontological development possible. We could then map practically any disorder and develop therapies, all based on the perspective that humans have objective, quantifiable energy bodies.