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

Deautomatization
Energy Management Skills

The following techniques apply to everyone regardless of your chosen path. They disrupt habitual behavior, rearrange how you look at the world, and liberate perception. They are part of the technological gears that enable the management of cohesion.

These skills destabilize conditional fields in a way as to enable the energy body to become more conscious. Many resources shedding light on these types of skills are readily available, including those referenced throughout this book. Further exploration depends solely on your motivation to seek answers using your own resources. Doing so is requisite for anyone aiming to claim the resources of their energy body.

Deautomatization

The essence of deautomatization is allowing dormant abilities to awaken by suspending the day-to-day consciousness of that which is known. This is accomplished by minimizing projection. The style of an exercise is subordinate to raw exertion coupled with the intent to fully engage the process, the learning. This is a nonpatterning process whereby you deliberately interfere with closure, with the tendency to create patterns of perception, a procedure don Juan calls not-doing.¹

While closure facilitates learning, deautomatization prevents the formation of rigid patterns. A key to managing the deleterious effects of fundamentalism, for instance, is to accept particular teachings while simultaneously letting them go in order to allow new relationships to emerge. For this, you need to add the ingredients of personal responsibility, independent thinking and feeling, nonattachment, fluidity, constantly challenging assumptions about reality, minimizing self-reflection, and utilizing everything else that a workable philosophy provides, including leaving the philosophy behind. This is how you allow the energy of infinity to feed your awareness.

The core of deautomatization requires remaining unbiased or unfettered by interpretations, including those arising from models of reality. You don’t assume the implicit facts of models, be they small or large, are unquestionable. Reality once espoused a flat world, and subsequently that all the pieces of the world are not connected. Copernicus and quantum physics, respectively, dissolved those views. It is a mistake to think that new worldviews won’t emerge.

A significant advantage of this concept-free state is granting you the ability to break the boundaries of your normal way of viewing and interacting with the world. You can also reconcile opposites to find balance in the midst of the pushes and pulls of differing values and standards. You then have new options, behaviors, and problem-solving capacities. Maslow’s B-cognition deals directly with this, including the inherent difficulties it presents as outlined in the previous chapter.

Practicing feeling and developing emotional intelligence, which go hand in hand, offer substantial means to reorient your stance in this world, a principal effect of deautomatization. One way to focus on feeling is to pay attention kinesthetically, to pay attention to the sensations in your muscles and physical body in general. The perspectives that follow are also in this category of managing awareness.

Self-Reflection

Self-reflection results from internal dialogue, the incessant verbiage about the world being one way or another. While it builds cohesion, it may also lock your assemblage point into place. And what you think about the world may, or may not, be true. Whatever the case, self-reflection creates a force that influences your energy body. Tart holds that our internal dialogue continually reinforces group consensus and that “it absorbs such a large amount of our attention/awareness energy that we have little of that energy available for other processes.”²

Stopping this internal chatter is a major way to step out of conditional fields. When you are taught to talk, says don Juan, you are taught to dull yourself. The day-in and day-out references to the same things reduce the flow of energy between you and the environment. At the same time, he states that the more fluid and varied your internal dialogue is, the more resilient you are.³ This is part of reasoning yourself out of reason and into a more expanded participation with the world. By the artisan stage, you are living within a more comprehensive order than is provided by reason.

Furthermore, an artisan doesn’t think, at least in ordinary terms.⁴ The stockroom mirrors have been well cleansed, minimizing projection. There’s only the immediacy of the moment to be lived, the being of it. It is by getting out of your self-reflection that you bring about body knowledge and heightened consciousness. Rather than ordinary mental or emotional considerations, the reflection needed for being consists of navigating intensity of experience.

All deautomatization skills help you step outside your thoughts. As an exercise, stopping self-reflection allows the environment—from the general conditions of your life to the greater cosmological expanse—to have greater influence. Don Juan prescribes a meditative walk for this.⁵

As an example of this procedure:

1. Walk with your hands in an unusual position that does not attract attention. The novelty directs energy away from the ordinary pattern of attention created by your usual way of walking. If you hold your hands in a dramatically unusual position, you have to contend with other people sending their energies toward you as they wonder what you’re doing.

2. Direct your vision toward the horizon. If you are in a hill or mountain environment, steadily look ten to forty feet in front of you. If you look twenty feet away, for instance, continue looking twenty feet away as you walk.

3. Unfocus your eyes, allowing your peripheral vision to absorb as much as possible.

4. Listen to and smell the environment. Feel your surroundings. You’re trying to get out of your thoughts and into your body.

5. Walk at a normal pace, or slower than your normal pace.

6. For safety, walk where you don’t have to contend with traffic or other obstacles. Otherwise, you’re thinking about navigating rather than interrupting your thinking.

7. Once you gain competency with turning off your flow of thoughts, you can do this by intending it.

Feeling

Feeling equates with deautomatization. It counters projection. You can talk about what you’re feeling, about the relation between thought and feeling, but overall doing so sheds little light on this cornerstone as experience delivers body knowledge. To begin getting a handle on feeling:

1. Don’t interpret events. Accept them at face value. This form of nonpatterning means you feel them out rather than think them through. Stopping your internal dialogue is an effective bridge for this.

2. What do you feel about specific issues: politics, relationships of one kind or another, the film you just saw?

3. Now ask yourself how you feel about these. “What” and “how” are two different functions.

4. Observe yourself responding emotionally to events throughout your daily life. Objectively assess these reactions.

5. Use feeling rather than thoughts for assessment. Listen with your heart when someone speaks rather than entrain to their words. Go behind the scenes to let yourself become aware of motivation, of complete experience.

Intent

Focusing energy toward something carries effects. From prayerful direction of healing energy to a woman lifting a car off a child to perceiving precise psychic information, intent changes circumstance. It is the primary means of managing cohesion. At the same time, intent may not be conscious. It may result from enculturation, training, or other entrainment influences, and so you have an intent exerting influence, and determining your life, without conscious recognition. To traverse the stages of awakening, you need to command intent, form it into a steady stream of energy, and thereby establish unbending intent. Unbending intent shifts the assemblage point; it forms cohesion.

Intent is also the fabric of silent knowledge as it carries the commands that sustain all aspects of creation.⁶ In relation to personal intent, you can intend something to happen in order to fulfill a wish or desire. However, artisans back away from the drive for control so they may participate fully with the emanation that sustains them. Within an emanation is intent, the hinge of silent knowledge. By latching onto cosmological intent, you enter that stream of energy. In other words, we usually regard professionals as giving their all to their chosen path, to the intent of their profession. From an ontological perspective, artisans give themselves to creation. Conscious participation with your emanation—your core intent—includes navigating this awareness as ongoing immersion in the natural order of your life, a process of “surfing” flow that automatically guides you to becoming-being.

To gain a sense of functional intent (the kind you need to direct your life in a positive manner), participate in the following process. As sports rely on physical-body intelligence, this activity helps establish a full-body relationship with intent, thereby increasing understanding. For this example, the end result is to accurately shoot a basketball. To realize beneficial results, establish the corresponding intent.

1. Gather all the characteristics of basketball into a bundle: imagine handling the ball, passing, dribbling, and shooting.

2. Imagine standing in front of a basket as though you are shooting free throws from the foul line. Place your awareness inside the hoop, gauge the distance and force required to project the ball to the basket, and then imagine and feel the ball drop through the net for a clean score. Take a few shots.

3. Gather the sense of all of this into a distinct focus. As you do, you will realize you’ve stepped away from thought into a more complete relationship with the action. Your thoughts, feelings, and behavior combine to form a single motion based on the intent of shooting hoops.

4. From your beginning perspective, you’re on automatic and your guidance for behavior comes from your focus of running or dribbling or shooting. Each behavior carries a specific intent. Combined, they produce “basketball” intent. From an energy body viewpoint, you are managing cohesion.

You can sense the intent of your personal emanation by rotating in a circle while standing in the same spot, then feeling the strongest direction. This is a natural intent, not a contrived version based on desire and self-reflection. This is also a good exercise to develop intuition and may be applied to problem solving. For instance, imagine various scenarios related to a specific problem and while doing so feel which one has the strongest resonance and strength as a path. Objective rendering requires keen discernment of desires, goals, orientation, and the like as you sift through your feelings.

Entrainment and Resistance

In order to be conscious of how cohesions form, you need to be aware of the basic maneuvers of opening to, and closing off, their determining influences. Depending on the situation, both processes yield benefits and drawbacks. By actively entraining your perception, such as forming a path with heart, you accept and move with particular energies. With resistance, you block a condition or circumstance from gaining sway. You may completely step away from a seductive influence or resist it in a way so as to study it. You might examine personal and professional peer pressures in this manner, for instance.

Blind refusal to acknowledge a circumstance is a negative form of entrainment rather than resistance, as this keeps a conditional field locked in place and therefore behavior associated with that field is automatic, habitual. Deautomatization suspends these types of behaviors. Faith in a divine order or being, on the other hand, entrains you to a higher level of participation with the world. Don Juan referred to this combination of being open and/or closed as being accessible or inaccessible and he encouraged inaccessibility to human-made order and accessibility to Spirit, meaning developing core awareness and a conscious connection with infinity.⁷

He also thought that worry entrained perception in an unproductive manner. When you lose your bearings and become too centered in what circumstances may portend or what others may think about you, you entrain to group consciousness rather than stay focused on self-actualization. In this light, worry is succumbing rather than creating. This neatly contrasts with constructive reflection where you contemplate and consider rather than develop hard-and-fast interpretations, an activity Goleman finds helpful to enhance emotional intelligence.⁸

The balance of these perspectives is found in maintaining your own sense of self and choosing that with which you wish to align. It requires personal responsibility and an orientation toward growth. It forms the center point of how you connect with the world.

Balance

The more your cohesion shifts, the more your world becomes fluid, and may even seem unstable from time to time, especially during transitions between cohesions. Altered states, including spontaneous psi, mystical experiences, and all sorts of nonsensical things might happen. To deal with this, you must continually adjust and adapt. This is where balance comes in, a combination of patience, awareness, perseverance, and fluidity—not to mention the timing involved of knowing where you want to go, what your priorities are, and what you intend to do along the way.

A core ingredient of balance is being grounded. This means you have your own life, your own solid sense of yourself. The path with heart offers this ability. But it also means you are experiencing a complete flow of energy. Charles Tart advocates balanced development of the body, intellect, and emotions.⁹ Each influences the others.

Release and Recharge

You cannot develop new cohesions when holding on to the old. James Oschman references energetic signatures of trauma, and maintains that they are resolvable. And Reiki teachings acknowledge habitual patterns that are unconsciously maintained and the need to resolve these emotional structures.¹⁰

In general, you need to refresh your energy body just as you would take a shower to cleanse your physical body. Moreover, assimilation and elimination of energy is required as much as with physical-body processes. In Toltec literature, a principal means to do this is through the recapitulation.¹¹ This consists of methodically reviewing, releasing, and recharging your energies. By providing a means to review everything that forms, and has formed, your cohesion, the overriding maneuver of this technique is allowing core energy to surface.

Recapitulation exercises allow you to let go of cohesion automatically, so you may then let go of worry, discomfort, and that argument you just had. It is a form of forgiveness, considering that you can’t change cohesion, and therefore your behavior, unless you let go of the old cohesion to make room for the new. Becoming-being is also a state of ongoing release in that it requires letting go of the good things in life as well. You don’t turn your back on them; you let go of the moment that contained them. A path with heart sets the stage to allow good moments to keep occurring.

Paying attention to the breath is often the initial reference point for the recapitulation no matter the method. In Zen, for instance, breath is the doorway that connects inner and outer and acts as a centering point for meditation. In addition, adherents of Tantric Yoga use their breath as a fulcrum to consciously move energy through the body as well as to release and remove blockages of energy in a similar manner as outlined here.¹²

Tart says that prayer is also recapitulation. As you remind yourself of your knowledge and intention, he indicates that its effectiveness hinges on the amount of consciousness brought to the exercise.¹³ These examples lend credence to the thought that a central feature of mysticisms is that they all focus on the universal human condition, but how they do so is stylistic.

A shamanic variation of the recapitulation utilizing breath follows:

1. Place your chin near your right shoulder. Now move it in a smooth, sweeping motion to your left shoulder. Then back to your right shoulder.

2. Adding another piece, as you repeat step 1 inhale through your nose as you sweep from right to left, and exhale through your mouth as you sweep from left to right, and then return your head to a relaxed position looking straight ahead as you exhale. That is the simple mechanics of it. Begin again with your chin near your right shoulder.

3. Now as you inhale, intend your breath to pull in the energy of the event, person, or feeling under examination. Feel yourself connect with your subject of study, and then use your breath as a bridge to bring that energy into your body. To get a sense of this, pick a minor event that is still somewhat troubling to you.

4. As you tap your memories, work from the items surrounding the event, to the people involved, to your feelings.

5. Let your body do the work. Your part is to engage the exercise and, above all, intend the recapitulation: the review, release, and recharge. If you feel your head wants to move in a different rhythm or direction, that’s fine. Let your body be in charge, not these directions.

6. Immerse yourself in your memories without indulging. Allow yourself to fully relive the event. If your images or thoughts move to a different subject, allow this to occur.

7. Now it’s time to yield to the energy. Let it work within you so you may enter all the crevices you have forgotten. Your body does this of its own accord; there’s no need to force the issue.

8. Allow the energy to dissipate of its own accord. This facilitates realigning your energy fields.

9. Get in the habit of reviewing and releasing anywhere, anytime. Even in the middle of a business conference, you can unobtrusively make one or two breathing sweeps and release energy that spontaneously surfaced. You also find that your intent sets the recapitulation process in motion whether or not you perform the breathing sweeps. What matters most is intending the recapitulation, not the specific manner of doing so. You may then feel energy moving and releasing anytime, anywhere. When proficiency in recapitulation has been developed, it is possible to gather the full sense of the process, eliminate the steps, and then just apply intent for the same results.

Relaxation

After dismissing the positive claims of meditators about meditation, physician Herbert Benson eventually decided to at least take a look. He then clinically observed “striking physiologic changes” in meditators that included lowered heart rate, metabolic rate, and breathing rate. The connections between meditative relaxation and good health were obvious and Benson went on to write his best-selling book, The Relaxation Response, which has remained an important work for over thirty years. In recent years, additional studies show that relaxation contributes to conditions for flow, and that this promotes health.¹⁴

Tart points out that relaxation promotes meditation and meditation enhances relaxation. He goes on to say that one set of psychological structures may prevent another from functioning. For instance, relaxation could help a person minimize physical pain but the pain might be too overwhelming to allow relaxation.¹⁵ In application, cohesion is a psychological structure. With a disorder such as pain, relaxation might interfere with how cohesion binds and the coherence producing the pain then dissipates. But if the pain is too overwhelming, then the combination of a recapitulation exercise and relaxation might prove helpful. The recapitulation could weaken the coherence of pain, and then relaxation could step in to allow the resolution of tension, thereby minimizing or removing the pain.

Energy psychologist Gallo backs up this general principle by indicating that when trying to remove trauma, relaxation lessens anxiety and encourages healing.¹⁶ Relaxation, then, allows energy to shift and new awareness to surface. It promotes natural timing and makes you generally more competent.

Decisions

Decisions can place you in relationship with a new emanation and modify your cohesion. They reorient your focus and therefore how you connect with the environment as they act to form new baselines of cohesion. A decision also reflects implementing cohesion. Not wavering from a decision strengthens cohesion. Unchangeable decisions, says don Juan, groom unbending intent. He advocates not changing a decision unless it is by another decision. He removes equivocation. He also advises us to make decisions free from fear or ambition. In short, he uses character to build the energy body’s resources. Whether decisions are based on deficit or growth needs, or whether or not free will exists, the basis for decision-making is awareness and responsibility. He also doesn’t look back, which promotes becoming.¹⁷

Nonattachment

Nonattachment brings to bear a different relationship with the world; it is not severance from anything. It offers a way to understand life, maintains Suzuki. It is when too much emphasis is placed on something that difficulties stemming from attachment become evident.¹⁸

Tart says that nonattachment is “learning to ’look neutrally’ on whatever happens, learning to pay full attention to stimuli and reactions but not to identify with them.” He adds that while nonattachment helps the machinery of the mind run better, there may be difficulties. One is that when a person seems unaffected he or she might really be uptight, reflecting a lack of neutrality. The other problem occurs when the person has had no practice with new situations and so acts inappropriately.¹⁹ The remedy for both of these is more experience with an eye toward growth and improvement.

Nonattachment augments becoming, as you feel and think freely. Don Juan says that a person who is nonattached has only one thing: the power of decisions. When this is added to awareness of death, he continues, it leads to a life of efficiency and gusto.²⁰ The thing to do when you act inappropriately is to not fret and to regain your nonattachment. This is another form of deautomatization. Suggestions to begin learning this skill include:

1. Recognize that you are fully connected with the world and are responsible for your actions.

2. Strive to remain calm and unfettered during any situation. Frequent meditations may help.

3. Participate in group activities without regard for how you are perceived by the group. This doesn’t mean to act foolish, but if you should behave contrary to the group’s protocols, let any criticism or accolade slide away from you. A goal is to become less reactive to condemnation or praise in order to stay in touch with your own resources. And when you do unwittingly react, don’t worry about it. Nonattachment helps you hold your center and to absorb experience with the least bias.

4. Remain aware that you are developing nonattachment and patiently let that awareness provide the lessons. You set into motion the lessons needed simply by intending them. Your awareness then carries the day.

Habituation

Self-reflection is often habituated thinking, in which awareness remains focused on the same options. The routine of habits forms and cements cohesion. This works positively as in performing all the habits to be professional at work, or instituting a new set of habits that enhance personal growth. At the same time, habits may lock perception in place.

Neurologist Donald Calne cites habituation as the oldest form of learning.²¹ Repetition is a primary education tool. But to add to the skill of learning and to form new cohesions, you must hold what is known in abeyance in order to determine its current value.

A way to do this is to alter your routines. This could be as simple as reversing the way you put on your belt, or what time you have lunch. What is needed is disrupting influences to shake up cohesion. Remember, new behaviors stimulate both coherence and neural pathways.

In general, deautomatization supplies the lubricant to rearrange habits, to drop some of the old ones and generate new ones. Letting go of expectations of results and practicing new modes of perception both facilitate and are facilitated by deautomatization. Dishabituation—altering the routines that bind cohesion and restrict neural pathway formation—disorients cohesion, loosening it in order to re-form. This also supplies an antidote to fundamentalism. Otherwise, your life becomes a stereotype rather than the vital force it should be.

The formation of reality is an effect of habituation; a result of extended cultural conditioning whereby we entrain our resources to social standards. Behaviorism, the first force of psychology and often considered to be the most scientific of the four major branches, reveals the power of conditioning in shaping individual and group perception and behavior. Our modern world has been shaped by constant reference to the findings and values of science, for example. Entering shamanic realms utilizes the same process of conditioning by removing some values and behaviors and instituting others. With sufficient behavior corresponding to these habits, a new world comes into view. Being able to observe this natural process is a significant step toward managing it, and there’s no better place to start than by self-examination.

Self-Observation

The mystic Gurdjieff thought that “seeing oneself ” was part of self-remembering, remembering all the things that are a part of you, even if not yet recognized. This sense of self is a catalyst for self-knowledge, and yet it doesn’t mean you really know yourself.²² Not knowing yourself can be a good thing in that you continually allow new facets of yourself to surface.

Context—anything that applies to a situation—supports self-observation. You have structure with which to gauge your actions. Even if it is just in reference to personal desire, context provides a sense of order for what you are observing. This might be as simple as examining your motivations.

Self-observation also fosters objectivity and is at the heart of meta-cognition. Tart holds that we often fail to make a clear distinction between observer, observation, and observing the observer, yet he points out that the latter is contained in many meditative disciplines. He also advises the development of discriminative awareness by consciously attending to mental processes in a manner so as to separate input from reaction.²³ By paying attention to your thoughts, for instance, you stand a better chance of not blindly following them. And by observing your actions, you can step away from rote, conditioned behavior.

The skill of self-observation is therefore that of being conscious of being conscious. The capacity to do this increases corresponding with a decrease in projection-reflection. The more you observe, the less you reflect, and vice versa. As Tart mentions, though, some type of self-referencing is necessary to observe these effects. Furthermore, an inability to self-observe ensures discord. As Professor B. Allan Wallace informs us in his book The Taboo of Subjectivity, self-monitoring is a fundamental element of human intelligence and well-being, and that a loss of this may lead to unproductive behavior.²⁴

In addition to self-understanding, self-observation allows for course corrections, to be able to assess how your behavior matches what is occurring. You need to see your behavior to change it. To facilitate this:

1. Imagine watching yourself from a vantage of a few feet away as though you were having an OBE and watching yourself.

2. Watch yourself without judging or censoring your behavior. Try not to identify with any roles. Just allow yourself to be.

3. Assess which behaviors provide energy and which don’t; which provide peace, strength, and joy and which don’t.

4. Study how you interpret events and what relation these have to the stages of awakening.

5. Observe events at face value. For instance, if you see someone walking on the other side of a brick wall, you don’t see a person walking. More likely, you just witness a head moving along the top of the wall. This is the “Fair Witness” skill as depicted in Robert Heinlein’s classic work of science fiction, Stranger in a Strange Land, where a class of trained professionals report only what is directly observable.²⁵ The idea is to circumvent excessive closure and not fill in the blanks even though they make sense. Don’t permit imagination to overly influence interpretation.