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

Learning Projects
The Heartbeat of Learning

Forging a path with heart offers one way to make sure that what you learn provides purpose and meaning. Hooking your path to stages of awakening promotes ontological intelligence. A way to augment your path with heart is through learning projects. They help you stimulate and manage your resources and accelerate your learning as you explore imagination. As a result, you’re constantly stepping into the unknown while grounding yourself in daily life. Repetitive behaviors aimed toward a goal gather unbending intent, increase awareness of your inventory, and consciously develop new cohesions. Learning tasks that are well integrated with your path with heart take you to core.

Learning projects help you dive into your energy body, to intellectually and energetically explore. A good learning project requires that you actively imagine an imagining while in imagination, to manufacture a specific situation or activity in your imagination that you may return to when you wish. For instance, you may enter imagination to explore the nature of perception, to write a book, to develop architectural blueprints, to use your heightened awareness to perceive the subtle energies of plants in order to gain knowledge of their healing properties, or anything modest or grand that takes you deeper into learning. The task also requires learning how to return time and again to the subject you are studying. You therefore stimulate and stabilize imagination. And then in a traditional shamanic maneuver, you apply your knowledge in your daily, waking world. You therefore engage the psychological process of heading from a baseline state of consciousness through altered and discrete altered states en route to a new baseline.

Learning projects are a way to use deautomatization, imagination, personal responsibility, intent, and all other techniques in a positive way. By constant focus on a goal, unbending intent allows you to enter new domains of consciousness, which in turn produce new imaginings. Once you complete a task, you will have learned the mechanics of cohesion. For a project to propel you to the next level, it has to be far-fetched, something beyond your current sense of what is practical or even doable, and it has to awaken imagination and solidify learning. It is your path forward because a learning task is not simply a matter of using the cornerstones; it requires using the entire craft for the overriding purpose of ontological development. This growth provides for a keener focus on the task.

To decide on a task, use your imagination to determine an ability that you have interest in acquiring, and one that is also well beyond your current abilities.

Meditate while holding your purpose at the center of your awareness, and then allow yourself to become even more aware. An unexpected idea may come to you, something that you had no interest in before. Your task may seem odd. At first, don’t worry about the task being right or wrong. The central consideration is to work with the resources of your extended anatomy. Over time, examine what the project requires for ethical balance within you and with the world. Like learning other skills, you’ll become more proficient the more you practice. Don’t consider what you’ll think about after the course of your project. Optimally, you will have developed your cohesion to another level and any thoughts about what that might entail are projection and only serve to keep you pinned to your current conditional field.

As with almost any endeavor, put your mind to the task and make it happen. Step-by-step exercises may provide guidance, but are only buffers; in themselves, they don’t provide the means for success. Once you get a feel for learning projects, they will take you to unforeseen places. By eventually giving your imagining practical application, you bridge imagination and learning. Then the expanse of energy found in potential takes shape in a workable, realizable format in your daily life. This expands the first energy field and reduces the second, rousing more of the energy body to consciousness.

In high school, my English teachers thought I was hopeless, and I passed my classes by the skin of my teeth. I was thoroughly disenchanted with writing because of this experience, but not because I necessarily lacked an innate drive to write. I was just not allowed to approach it other than via dogmatic rules. I accepted the writing task don Juan gave me out of respect for him, and I later considered it advantageous to earn a degree in journalism to help fulfill the task. The other part of the task required that I actually learn what I would write about. Guided by don Juan, during the many years of outlining and applying the techniques found in Castaneda’s books, I also worked on the wordsmith part of my nature; writing became something that now contributes to my livelihood. I eventually completed my project by publishing two books (under the name Ken Eagle Feather) that provide a shamanic orientation to the properties of the first and second energy fields, respectively.

For another example, as Castaneda didn’t consider himself a writer don Juan gave him the task of seeing his books already written while dreaming in the deeper levels of imagination. It thereby became an ontological development project rather than a literary exercise. Did he use dreaming to find an archetypical form of shamanic teachings? The question and all that it conveys point to another area for research.

Castaneda’s teammates had projects requiring them to gain proficiency with altered states of consciousness to learn healing, carpentry, and providing solutions to human predicaments and problems.²⁵ They discovered that, in performing these tasks, individual consciousness meets and exceeds the baseline state of consciousness for both individuals and groups. As with learning projects in general, this consisted of interplay between imagination and learning. In general, the next phase of a task is to give back to the group; perhaps a person becomes a healer rather than just studying about it. Professional skill then continues to develop the more one learns.

Such examples are not limited to those under don Juan’s wing. Norbert Classen, author of Das Wissen der Tolteken (The Knowledge of the Toltecs), uses energy body processes to hunt meteorites that have fallen to earth. He gazes at stones until he becomes saturated with their energy. The stones then appear in his dreaming. From that point, he learns new things as he sees other aspects of the stones. He then transports these qualities of perception to his “other side,” the consciousness characterized by waking life. Going back and forth, he eventually dreams of new stones and where to find them. While Classen uses this method to track meteorites, he advises the process is not limited to finding stones as it may be applied to finding pretty much anything.²⁶

A person with another bent of nature might hunt meteorites through diligent research and voraciously read about space, asteroids, classification systems, the locations of where they are found, and then after finding a meteorite provide all the reasons why it was at a certain location. Both people found the rock in different ways: one directly, the other indirectly. Any explanation for why the stone was at a location is based on the consensus of those who study such phenomena as well as the consensus of those who use a specific method. The deautomatization of it is that the meteorite was at a specific location. It was found using a particular process. And that’s that.

When you finish your task, another will claim your allegiance. As before, it will require that you enter arenas of consciousness that reside beyond your learning and imagination. From years of following a path with heart, though, the ability to proceed will fall into place. This doesn’t mean you’ve arrived on easy street. The ongoing necessity to rigorously study subjects that were once, and in large measure remain, beyond your grasp will remain abundantly apparent. The obstacles will be the same as before, although seemingly higher and wider. But to not give it a go is unthinkable. Outward success or failure is irrelevant, although success kindles more fun.

These projects greatly facilitate learning how to manage your energetic resources. When coupled with an objective like ontological development, they add to the overall inertia of managing cohesion. You are not using the task just to learn a particular subject; you are using it to grow as a complete person. A learning project moves you firmly toward the next level of growth: an apprentice-level project provides the means to step into craftsmanship, and a craftsmanship task ushers you to artistry.

The worse case scenario is that learning projects keep you from becoming dull, lackadaisical, bored, and resting too comfortably within your current cohesion. In short, they offer robust stimulation of your energy body and point you in a direction that renews your sense of life. This alone is worth the ride.