Waking up at Burningman

During the 2002 Burning Man event I decided to be alone, rather than camp with a group of friends.  It wasn’t that I wanted to shun my friends; rather it was a desire to see what would happen if I didn’t have schedules or people to talk to.  Basically, I was exploring what would happen if I just let things happen on their own, without outside influences from friends.

I took my Jeep Cherokee and a small utility trailer that our family uses for camping.  The trailer made it easy to bring food, water, a stove and camping furniture.  I don’t like to sleep in tents, partly because I don’t like the process of setting them up and partly because I don’t like being hidden inside where I can’t see and feel what is going on around me. I like to watch the stars and like to see the morning light as dawn approaches.  For this reason I ended up sleeping in the back of the Jeep with the tailgate open (in order to let my long legs stick out of the back).  This kept most of the rain off, allowed me to close my stuff inside of the vehicle when the dust blew, and gave me a reasonable place to sleep.  Every morning I would heat a bucket of water to be used for a “shower,” dipping warm water over my head while standing next to my trailer.  This didn’t give much privacy, but privacy is not a big concern at the Burning Man.

I found my camping place to be just about perfect.  I had an open area within a circle of strangers.  However, it wasn’t very long before all of us knew each other because “my” open area was the common ground between the four or five encircling camps.  Everyone was very nice, and I very much enjoyed the freedom to come and go on my own schedule, while being able to stroll over to a neighboring camp for a visit at any time.  It was very relaxing.

One day early in the week I decided to take an extended bicycle tour around the camp, through the “residential” district.  It was one of those perfect days in the desert; no wind, a bit of chill in the air, and crystal clear blue skies.  My leisurely bicycle ride took me on a long dirt “road” between the tens of thousands of campsites set up by the attendees.  I was just sort of mindlessly riding along looking at the people and their ideas for the “perfect” camping experience, in awe of the creativity shown by the various campers. 

All of a sudden I felt like my attention shifted into a place that I had never experienced before.  It felt like I had woken up out of a dream.  It felt like I was directly seeing and experiencing what was there at that moment, rather than seeing it all through my filtering mind.  I don’t know how to describe this feeling, except to say that it felt good and clean and pure.  It was so strong that I stopped riding in order to just stand there and observe what was before me, taking it all in as an experience of the moment.

After a couple of minutes of this I realized that I was in a place of a disconnected observer, rather than as a participant. It was like I had dropped in from another planet and was observing the activities and characteristics of an alien community with little prior knowledge or expectations of who they were or what they were doing.  Having no filters meant that I had no expectations, which meant that it was all new and unknown.

What I saw made me laugh out loud, right there in the middle of the street.  I saw that everyone was preening to attract a partner.  The men were setting up their camps with lots of colored bobbles and interesting things to attract a partner. It struck me that it was very much like the mating activities of Bower birds. Bower bird males build a nest for their future, unknown, mate and then gather lots of colorful and interesting things that they place on the ground in front of the nest.  They like to get colored string, pieces of glittery things, colored fruit or flowers, seeds, or anything else that they can find that would catch the eye of the female.  If they are successful in creating an attractive nest, and have the right objects of attraction for the lady bird, she might stop in for a chat.  Of course this just gets the lady within speaking distance, what happens next is up to the two of them to figure out.  The actions at Burning Man are very much like that.  Each person is putting out (or on) interesting things to attract a potential mate (or maybe just a friend).  It was comical because I could see clearly that everyone thought they were acting as creative individuals, when in fact they were acting from an instinctual drive. 

This is just a small part of what saw that day.  As I spent the next couple of hours slowly riding through the camps among all of the people doing their various wonderful and wacky things, I just stayed in the position of an awakened observer not really interpreting what I saw and felt, just noticing.  That experience turned the entire week into a magical time for me because I stayed close to that point of view the entire time.  Not only that, but in many ways it has stayed with me.  I now find it much easier to just step back in my mind’s eye and observe, feel, and experience without always filtering everything through my past experiences and knowledge. I have learned to find a place of peace and calm in the midst of almost any amount of chaos.   I don’t mean that I am somehow reserved or distant, but rather it is the opposite – I am more often present in the moment, rather than dreaming of the past or the future.  This makes me more present and connected with the people I am with, rather than more distant.  That moment on the bicycle was a shift in perception that continues to resonate through my view of the world four years later. I suspect it will stay with me for the rest of my life (at least, I hope that it does because it is like a shroud has been lifted for me).

Birthday

The day was the day that my grandson, Hayden, was born in 2003.  I had been working in Santa Clara, so ended up at the hospital an hour or so after his birth.  I expected to find a bunch of giddy, happy people – but instead found quiet, concerned people because Hayden wasn’t doing so good.  He had a problem with his heart beat and respiration.  The biggest concern was a very uneven, and rapid, pulse plus whatever it was that was causing this.

 My family wanted me to see him, but that was kind of a scary thing because he was in a room by himself, in an incubator, hooked up to all sorts of monitors, tubes and wires.  Because he was “wired” it was easy to see and hear the problems with his heart on the monitor above his bed.

I watched him for a few minutes and then had an urge to hold him – holding him flat in my hands on his back, not like you normally hold a newborn baby snuggled in your arms.  For some reason it seemed right to me to hold him in my hands like an offering, rather than as a baby.  Once I held him, I could feel an odd sort of warmth that felt like love, moving through my arms and hands, into his body.  It was a very nice, warm, comfortable feeling of contentment and good will.  I really don’t know how to describe it other than to say that it felt warm, good, and as if  I was sending  energy and love though my hands to him.

As I did that I noticed his monitor changing.  His heart beat got more stable, slowed down and within a couple of minutes became “normal.”  After a short time (not more than three or four minutes), it felt like the energy flow was done and I could put him down.  I knew then that he was now ok, and that he would be fine.  This turned out to be the case.  They held him in intensive care for a couple more hours just to observe, but from that point on he was just a normal little kid doing everything just right.

My wife was in the room at the time that this happened. Afterward she said that it felt like the entire room had been filled with a powerful, loving energy.  She said it kind of pulsed or vibrated, and she knew that everything was going to be okay because of the power of that energy.

I had nothing to do with this event in the sense of intending it, or trying to make it happen.  I just felt an urge to do what I did, and then it just felt like it did.  Whatever was happening was happening through me, but not by me.  My wife and I were the only ones that seemed to know what was happening.  I didn’t feel that anyone else had to be in on it unless they already were.

Recapitulation

I first heard about the practice of recapitulation in Carlos Castanada’s books.  He briefly talks about the importance of using a practice of going back and re-experiencing life events as an important way to get access to our personal energy.  However, while he mentions it and alludes to its power, he doesn’t give enough details to really be able to do it.  Then a few of his fellow warriors (women) wrote books about don Juan and the path of the warrior.  They are much more specific about the importance of this practice, and give descriptions that are clear enough to actually do the practice.   When I met my leader/guide/teacher/mentor Ramin, he stressed the importance of this practice, and suggested a book by Victor Sanchez  (The Teachings of don Carlos) that describes how to do this practice.  Ramin highly recommended it as a necessary step toward getting access to our personal power.

Sometime around 1996 it became clear that if I was serious about learning what the Toltec path to wisdom I would have to do this practice of recapitulating my life, so I dedicated at least a year to it.  My original agreement with myself when I started talking classes from Ramin was to do what he suggested for a year to see if it was worthwhile.  I had completed this year and found it to be exactly what I was hoping for.  An additional year dedicated to taking the next step seemed reasonable to me.

Ramin was teaching the recapitulation practices to his students, and was leading us in the basics.  I followed him as best I could, but since he got the information from Mr. Sanchez’s book, and Sanchez got the information from Carlos’ books I decided to go directly to Carlos and Carlos’ fellow warrior’s books for direction.  This means that while I generally followed Ramin’s and Mr. Sanchez’s suggestions, I deviated in a few places to be closer to the source material instructions.  I believe the differences are not critically important.

The idea behind the practice is to re-experience (recapitulate) all of the important experiences in our lives in such a way as to be able to release the energy that we have invested in them.  The point is that a lot of our personal energy is bound up in these past experiences, and that through this practice it is possible to free up that energy for use.  We have a limited amount of total energy, the goal is not to make new energy, but merely to gain better access to the energy that we already have. The energy is almost always bound up with people that we have known, and the connections go both ways.  Sometimes we are holding them with our energy, and sometimes they are holding us with theirs.  In both cases, we are not free.  My goal is to be free.

The idea behind this process is pretty bizarre, it involves something that I can talk about, and know a little about, but mostly it is just weird.  Carlos talks about our “egg” of energy.  He says that people consist of a large egg shaped ball of energy fibers surrounding our body.  These fibers are our connection to the universe and allow us to perceive the world around us.  We interact using these fibers. Where the fibers come together they form what he calls the “assemblage point.”  (This point is located at about an arms length behind our right shoulder.  The exact location of the assemblage point on this ball of luminous fibers determines how we perceive the world.  Move it and our view of the world changes – actually, the world changes; it is more than just our view of it.  These fibers get “hooked” with other people’s fibers during our life, which means that we loose our ability to use those hooked fibers.  Recapitulation is a method for unhooking those bound up fibers and getting our egg back into shape, patching any holes and smoothing out any snarls that might have occurred during the tossing and tumbling of life. 

The first step in the process of recapitulation is to identify all of the important events/people in your life.  This would be a lot easier for a younger person.  For a fifty-year-old like me, it includes a LOT of important events.  Partly based upon directions from Ramin, but mostly from directions from Carlos and his cohorts, I made a chronological list of all of the people that I could recall in my life.  I did this by breaking my life into phases (houses where I lived, jobs that I had) and then working my way through the memories of these phases.  This part of the process took me about three months working a hour or two every day.  At first I tried to sort out the important people from the unimportant ones, but finally settled on the idea that if I could still remember them, they were important for some reason.  The ones that I couldn’t remember might not be so important.  I tried to identify them by name, but in some instances I couldn’t recall names, so instead I made short descriptions to remind me of them. The names weren’t important, but the memory of them and our experiences together were.  This list ended up including about 3,000 people.  I did it using the computer so I could sort them and print the list for future use.

The experience of doing this first step was amazing!  It connected my life into a single whole experience rather than a long series of experiences. I had tended to forget, or not pay attention to, past experiences and was just moving along in the bubble of the present.  This is not a bad thing, this focus on the present is what I am trying to achieve.  However, the experience of remembering all of this somehow broke the bounds of the present and made me realize that the past and the present are all here in the moment, we do not really leave the past behind.  It is hard to explain, but I ended up feeling like the past, present and future were illusions – the reality is that it is all one.  Just this part of the process turned out to be an amazing experience.

Then came the recapitulation part. I made a wooden box to sit in while recapitulating.  The box was just big enough so that I could sit cross-legged within it without touching the walls or top.  It was tied together with cotton string; I used no metal in its construction.  It was made from 1x6 boards, leaving cracks between the boards for ventilation.  The front came off to make a door and there were no windows or other openings.  I put the box in a shed out in our backyard within our forest of eucalyptus trees to protect it from the elements.  Every day for about a year I would take my list of names, and sit in the box going person by person down the list until I had revisited everyone on the list.

I had a candle in the box with me so I had enough light to read the list.  I would tear off the name of the next person on the list and recapitulate them.  In reality, I wasn’t exactly recapitulating them, I was recapitulating the events associated with them – but these two are so closely connected that I gave up trying to figure out the distinction.  When I finished with a person, I burned their name and added it to a can of ashes. 

I soon realized that there was a problem with dealing with the events associated with a person because people that I know well, and for a long time, have hundreds or thousands of events associated with them – many of them very important indeed.  I started to wonder if I should recapitulate each event or each person.  I had to decide how to deal with this.  Going back to don Juan’s instructions, it seemed like the idea was that we make connections to people in our lives. These connections are more or less permanent, and continue to influence our lives long after they were created.  In the process of recapitulation, we are trying to disconnect these connections.  Therefore, it is only necessary to go back to the last time that we encountered them – at that time all of the connections would exist and be available to us.  I followed his guidance and just concentrated on the last event that I had with each person.

I decided that the process is a purely magical one, meaning that it has little or no meaning to my logical mind – it just works.  I had to give up on making any sense out of it and do it with the assumption that something was happening.  The process is pretty simple.  (1) I imagined the person and the event surrounding the last time that I could recall seeing them. (2) I then watched that event from the prospective of being outside, kind of like watching a movie.  (3) Then I “jumped” into the event, recalling what it was like from the inside when it was happening.  At this step I tried to remember it as clearly as possible, including sights, smells, sounds, temperature, etc.  The more complete this was the better.  This step involved the realignment of the assemblage point with where it was at that previous time.  The realignment brings those connections that existed at that moment back in a way that allows them to be changed again. (4) I then jumped back out to see the view as in a movie, but this time including the smells and other things, and then finally (5) I breathed to release the energy. 

The breathing was done in a special way.  I turned my head toward the right shoulder and breathed in through my nose while slowly turning my head toward the left shoulder, retrieving energy that I used to connect and hold the other.  I then breathed out while turning my head from left to right, releasing energy that the other was holding me with.  I would focus on breathing in for awhile, then on breathing out for awhile.  I would breathe like this, imagining the energy being released from both directions, until it felt like there were no more connections.   At that point I was finished with that person, and would light the paper with their name and burn it up, placing the ashes in a can with ashes of all of the others.

Once in awhile I would come across an event that contained a special jewel for me.  These were times when I found the source of agreements that I had made about myself and who I am.  It turns out that our self image and our understanding of who we are come from a long series of agreements that we have made with ourselves, usually based upon things that others have told us while we were growing up, or just during life.  Things like, “you are not handsome.”  Oh, really?  Ok, I agree with that, I am not handsome.  “You are good at science.” Oh really?  I agree, I am science oriented and good at it.  “You are too stupid to do that.”  Sorry, I can’t do that, I am too stupid.  It goes on and on and on.  We slowly build up the story of who we are, what we can do, what we cannot do, what we like, etc. based on all of these little agreements.  This is not a bad thing; it is just the way it is. The problem is that we make the agreements without thinking about them, based upon assumptions of what was meant that are usually wrong, and we make a whole set of conflicting and confusing agreements because we get input from many people and experiences all jumbled together.  This helps to explain the mess that we are when we try to untangle who we “really are.”  We sometimes have a chance to revisit these agreements, and change them.

While recapitulating, now and then I came across events and people that seemed to be at the root of some agreement that I had about myself.  I then had the chance to re-visit that agreement and make a conscious decision about whether or not I wanted to keep it.  I could decide right then and there to discard it.  However, I couldn’t just throw it away; I had to replace it with something.  At about this same time I had read don Miguel’s little book “The Four Agreements”.  It turned out that in almost all cases I could replace my unwanted agreement with one or more of the four agreements.  I didn’t have to change from “I am stupid” to “I am smart,” all I had to do was change from “I am stupid” to “I will do the best that I can”.  With this simple change I dropped the judgments and baggage that came with the initial agreement.

This process was hugely liberating!  Day after day I found that I kept feeling more and more free.  I stopped worrying about problems with others, stopped trying to hold others with my energy, stopped letting them hold on to me.  I started being solid and strong by myself.  At first I was afraid that this process would ruin my feelings of love for my family and friends because I was confused about the difference of being attached, and being in love.  It is true, I lost my attachments – but that was a good thing.  I could finally just feel my love and allow myself to enjoy them and our relationship, no attachments and no controlling the other is needed. Love and friendship are not based upon holding onto and controlling the other.  In fact, it is just the opposite.  It is involved in allowing the other to be free, and enjoying them just as they are without trying to change or control that.  Instead of making me become isolated from my friends and loved ones, it brought me much closer but in a much warmer and comfortable way. 

Not only did this process help me to get closer to others, it helped me to let go of damaging agreements that were not useful to me.  It also allowed me to feel much more empowered to be able to use (or withhold) my energy to suite my needs.  I no longer feel compelled to use up all of my energy on things that don’t matter.  I feel like I am now much freer to be me, and much less compelled to be what I think others what me to be.

By the time I had spent a year sitting in my box, burned the last name from my list, and burned the box - I was floating in the clouds.  I feel peace and joy with life most of the time, even when it was not “fun” or peaceful.  I stand up tall and look life straight on with fearlessness and excitement to see what is coming next.  I find that I am much more relaxed and patient with my friends and loved ones because I just enjoy the time that I am having with them at the moment, there is nothing more important to do than what I am doing.  I find that what people do and say has not nearly the impact on me.  I can see clearly that what they say and do tells me a lot about them, but very little about me – so if they say something bad, or say something good, about me it is not about me – it is about them.  I don’t a need to let them “hook” me, and I don’t have to try to “hook” them. (In fact, when I do then I go back and unhook later in a mini-recapitulation exercise.  It just isn’t worth the extra work later on, so I avoid that in the first place.)  This doesn’t mean that I don’t let myself like or love them, or accept their good feelings; it just means that I don’t accept the controlling aspects of the relationship.

My year of sitting in my box was a true turning point in my life.  I no longer am able to return to be the person that I was before I met Ramin and started on the path of the warrior.  I am now on a path full of love, hope, joy, excitement and mystery.  I will never be able to go back, nor would I want to.

Bicycle Ride

The summers in Sonoma were times of high adventure for me as I was growing up.  I spent my time hiking in the hills (we called them “mountains”) between Sonoma and Boyes Hot Springs, swimming in one of the six public swimming pools within my “territory,” hanging out with friends, or riding my bicycle. 

One of my bicycle haunts was down by Sonoma Creek where there was a grove of oak trees in what must have been part of a park at one time.  The grove consisted of a couple of acres of flat land with trees that were either planted, or thinned out, to make nice shady picnic areas next to the creek.  The creek was normally almost dry during the summer months.  There were small ponds with warm water, green scum and giant bullfrog polliwogs in between the large, rounded boulders lining the bed of the creek. 

At the end of the grove of trees there was a dirt road leading down to the creek bed.  The road angled steeply down for thirty feet or so, and then bent to the right, going around an “island” of land that rose steeply on all sides – creating a peaked hill about 15 feet tall.  At the top of the hill was a single oak tree spreading its shady limbs over the hill and part of the creek below.  The side of the hill facing the creek had been eroded into a vertical cliff falling away from the tree to the boulder filled creek more than twenty feet below the peak of the hill.

I liked to visit this part of the creek because there were fish, frogs, pollywogs, crawdads and other creatures in the pools.  It was also a great access point for hikes up or down the creek.  During that summer, each time I visited on my bicycle I would ride down the first part of the dirt road and up the side of the island at the curve, hoping to ride all the way to the top.  I would get part way up, run out of speed and fall over – tumbling back down the hill.  I knew that if I went fast enough I could make it to the top, but since there was just barely enough room on the top to park the bike before going over the cliff I had to be careful to judge my speed to avoid that possibility. Every time I tried it I would go a little faster and get a little higher up the hill before falling over and tumbling back down the hill.

One day I decided that it was time to get to the top. I started way back in the grove of trees and pedaled as fast I could.  I was really going by the time I got to the road, bouncing around on the rough road.  I flew down the road, turned up the hill and didn’t slow down at all!  In a flash I was at the top of the hill, into the air, and still climbing.  As I flew up into the air,   I felt that time almost stopped.  It was like I was suspended in time and space. I had all the time in the world to check out my new predicament. I looked down and saw that I was well past the edge of the cliff, headed upward in a nice gentle curve that had a trajectory leading me to the middle of the creek below – right into the place with the biggest and nastiest looking boulders.  I thought about stopping, but since I had long since left the ground it was obvious that wasn’t an option.  I let go of my bike, feeling like I was hanging almost motionless, and bike-less, in the air. 

On my right side I noticed a big limb of the tree reaching out over the creek, the limb was right next to me, parallel to my flight path.  I reached over and grabbed onto that limb. The next thing I knew I was swinging from the branch, watching my bicycle continue through its arch and then falling front wheel first onto the rocks in the very place that I had predicted.  It bounced and crashed with a resounding smashing sound, ending up in a scum covered pond with broken spokes and a bent frame.  I swung there from the limb for a little bit imagining what it would have been like if that tree hadn’t reached out and caught me.  I think that might well have been the end of my adventures for that summer.

I finally reached up with my legs, encircling the limb - holding on upside down.  I inched my way back to the trunk of the tree onto firm ground and went to rescue my bicycle.  It was a little bent, but still usable.  It was covered in long, green, pond scum.  After cleaning it up a bit I was back on the saddle, no harm done – thankful to that grand old tree that was just waiting there to catch a stupid boy in its arms.

Cyclical Lives

This story isn’t really a “story” at all.  Rather it is about an epiphany that I had concerning some of the Buddhist teachings that I have been studying lately. 

Over the years that I have read about Buddhism I have been puzzled about the issue of cyclical life, and karma.  One of the reasons that I find Buddhism to be attractive is that is not a religion in the usual sense of the word.  It is based upon observations, rather than a belief in a divine creator.  I am attracted to the Toltec style of spirituality for the same reason.  Because they are both basically experiential in nature, they both have a lot of common themes, questions and answers.  However, Buddhism has the strange belief in cyclical lives that leaves me puzzled. 

I see no reason to believe in something that is totally unknowable (and not available to be experienced), such as a divine creator, or multiple lives.  These types of beliefs in myths don’t add anything to my spirituality, and in fact just seem to detract in many subtle, and not so subtle, ways.

I realize that at the same time as I say this I am willing to entertain beliefs in many other unknown things such as energy connecting living beings that can be used for communication and healing.  I am also more than willing to “call” for support from the “great spirit” or the “spirits of the four directions.”  Admittedly, this seems to require a belief in some unknowable things.  The difference is that I don’t think they are unknowable, only unknown.  I can test them and maybe even experience them.  I seem to be able to experience energy flowing, but not the spirits.  However, I am currently of the opinion that the idea behind things like that sprites of the directions isn’t that they are beings of some sort, but rather that they represent these invisible energies which may, or may not, exist.  I have come to the conclusion that everything that we experience is in our mind (it is all a kind of dream).  If I experience something, that has a lot of value to me – even if I know that it is “only in my head” – after all, that is all that we get, what is in our heads.  I’ll suppose that I will keep playing with these ideas until such time as I either know that they really do exist, that they don’t exist, or I finally die.

Then it hit me, it really doesn’t matter whether or not the myth of a cyclical series of lives is true in the strict sense, it is true in an even more fundamental sense that impacts all of us all of the time.  The idea is connected to the concepts of impermanence, karma and who we are (or more importantly, are not)

It has become clear to me that we are not who we think we are, we keep changing.  The “I” that was me twenty years ago is certainly not the “I” of today. I feel like there is a connection or continuity since childhood, but when I think back to those times it is as if I am looking back not only to a different time, but to a different person.  Some days seem to go from day to day and I stay the same (it seems like I stay the same because the changes are small, but I keep changing nevertheless).  Then something might happen to make a large change, all at once.  Perhaps meeting a new person, or losing an old friend.  The outcome is that we feel different, and ARE different – we are a new person.  The “I” is no longer the “I” of just a short time ago.  We have been reborn in a real way.  So that is the trick, we are reborn again and again, in a cyclical nature.  The idea of a cyclical rebirth makes sense, even if you don’t want to buy into the concept of a cycling beyond death.  It does indeed seem that we are in a recurring cycle of birth and death of “I”, which can be changed on any of the cycles.  This can be thought of as on the smaller time frame of our current lives, or on the time from of infinity.  From my point of view, the span of my life is effectively infinity.

I had already worked out in my mind the idea of karma can be thought of as within this life, or within the unknowable multiple lives beyond death and before birth.  It seems to me that karma clearly works within a lifetime.  Everything we do changes the world that we will experience next.  Not only that, but it moves out from us like the waves from a stone dropped into a pool, effecting others further and further away from us and that instant.  These then change others, which then send waves back toward us, impacting us once again.  The point is that we all impact each other, which impacts and changes our future lives (or future “I’s”).

We can indeed stop being caught in a life pattern that is just a continual cycle of pain and suffering, we can change who the next “I” is going to be if we truly desire to do so.  Not only that, but karma has something to do with how we can do that.  For example, if we decide to lead a “moral” life, it will change the karma that spreads from us, which will change the karma that comes back to us from others, which will change the things around us and interactions with others, which will change who we are.  We will then have been reborn into a new incarnation of “I” which is closer to what we desire – living in happiness and full of love.

Once it dawned on me that the messages of Buddhism can be applied to this life (the one between my birth and my impending death), I found that I didn’t have to worry about whether or not the myth of multiple lives is true or not.  It is clearly true from my vantage point, I can see and experience that it is true within this life.  That is good enough for me.