04/30/2024
Some thoughts:
Carlos Castaneda wrote a series of influential books back in the late-60s through the 90s, the first of which, "Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge" came to me when I was 14 years old. I have perused those books multiple times since, as the underlying premise appeals to my sense of the nature of reality.
The premise is a journey of revelation, in which the young Carlos is taught the ways of the Magicians - which has been described as being a version of the Toltec Wisdom Tradition - in which the world as it truly is, is slowly revealed to him. The first of his books was his doctoral thesis and, while many debunkers have arisen to state that Don Juan, his mentor and priest, was not a real person, the lessons imparted to Carlos across the span of his journey possess a shining core of essential Truth that has appealed to me and many others for decades.
Don Juan taught Carlos that, in order to become a Man or Woman of Power, one must do certain things, many of which do not comport with our modern, Western understanding of what it takes to be a "good" person. One example of this is the directive that a person of power must "take" back a form of essential energy that their children receive from both parents at birth. Another, and one that I am personally committed to as opposed to that first example, is that one must undergo the process of Recapitulation during a lifetime.
Recapitulation is the process of remembering your life. All of it. Or, at least, as much as you possibly can. By so doing, you are able to find and release all of the little pressure points that we each have that affect us in a variety of ways that we are generally unconscious of. This includes all of the good things as well as the bad things. It is not a process of seeking out the traumas of life, but instead the process of seeking out life itself, and how we have defined it and lived it for ourselves over the course of the years we've traversed this plane of existence.
Recapitulation as memory mining is designed to reclaim all of who you ever have been in this lifetime for the greater purpose of releasing it. For, how can you release what you cannot actively remember? The process can take years to complete, as memories arise suddenly, and takes an intense amount of purposefully directed energy in order to maintain over the length of the process. Once the Recapitulation process is complete, the unification of your Waking and Dreaming lives will also be complete.
In Castaneda's projection of the teachings of Don Juan, the Toltec Sorcerer, he is taught that life is best lived in its highest form when conceived of as an act of Dreaming, which, to the Toltec People of Power, was something far beyond what we know as dreaming. To them, Dreaming was a doorway into other worlds of potentiality, each just as real as the one that we inhabit daily during our waking lives. The process of of living itself, being fraught with memories that were accessible, called the 1st Attention, and those which were not, being hidden by what Don Juan called the 2nd Attention, a higher vibratory state of consciousness which cannot be recalled during the 1st Attention. Through the process of Dreaming, augmented by Recapitulation and a formal process of envisioning which awakens the 2nd Attention, one becomes, finally, a Person of Power and is able to escape the absolute finality of "The Eagle's Gaze", which befalls us all and leads invariably to what is a rather depressing spiritual outcome for pretty much everybody.
Excepting, of course, the Sorcerers, who are Men and Women of Power.
The following quote describes the practical process of Recapitulation:
"I think the basic lesson I've learned with recapitulation - something you could share with others - is that first you make a map of your life. Then you live with that for a while, you go back through that map and try and paste in the blank spots as best you can. Then at sometime maybe you relax a little bit. Then when it feels right you go back and fill in the map some more. You keep doing this until you can almost experience the moment just as you did the first time you experienced it. You keep going back over that map until you get all the little nuances, all the little feelings. What I mean by that is you have to re-experience everything that you've already experienced. You have to relive it as though you were living it right now. I think that's the way you start releasing energy from those moments and at this time that dreaming will appear. It's also the time that your reality and your dream life will begin to merge." Author Unknown
Taking alongside the recovering of memories lost to the 2nd Attention, which, generally, only People of Power can access, the Way to becoming a whole and complete person is revealed to the Seeker.
Whatever the case may be, in order to discover the value of a life lived, one must attempt as best as they can to access all influences which have determined the course of a lifetime, the evolution of a personality and the real parameters of a human, personal destiny. To the extent that we can, personally, access our memories do to physiological or psychological limitations, it is useful for us to attempt to do so in anticipation of that final Life Review that occurs upon the moment of death.
Doing so before death gives the Seeker the opportunity to uncover all of the self-hidden influences to the good and the bad, in advance of the Life Review, which would positively influence that final moment's encounter with whatever one's version of the Divine might be, whether that is the weighing of a soul against a feather, being present in the Book of Life, appearing before various Dieties of however it might be conceived of culturally among the disparate populations ot this planet and, perhaps, the Multiverse.
