Footnotes to Crossroads Dispatches

When you hold some part of yourself in reserve you deny it exposure to life - Deepak Chopra

Excerpt from page 237 in The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your LIfe, by Deepak Chopra on giving your all, how passion brings up your shadow--dark and golden, and living without reservations:

"Being able to affect your whole reality at once is the essence of "simultaneous interdependent co-arising." There is no limit to how far your influence can reach but to find that out you must engage life with passion. When you do anything with passion, you express every aspect of who you are. Passion releases all the energy you possess.  At that moment you put yourself on the line, for if you throw everything you have into a pursuit, your defects and weaknesses are also exposed. Passion brings up everything.

This inescapable fact discourages many people, who dislike the negative parts of themselves so much, or are so intimidated by them, that they hold their passion in check in the belief that life will be made safer. Perhaps it will, but at the same time they are greatly limiting their understanding of what life can bring. In general terms, there are three levels of commitment you can express:

1. Going into a situation only far enough to meet the first real obstacle
2. Going into a situation far enough to conquer some obstacles
3. Going into a situation to conquer all obstacles

. . . . If you didn't know human nature, you might suppose that a single activity like painting, mountaineering, or writing could be treated separately, but the whole person is affected because the whole person is being expressed. (This is why it's said that you get to know yourself on the mountain or in front of the lank canvas.) Even if you pick a very narrow skill, like running a marathon or cooking, your whole sense of self shifts when you succeed with passion as opposed to failing or backing off.

The willingness to reach inside every part of yourself opens the door to total understanding. You place your entire identity on the line, not just an isolated part. This may sound daunting, but actually it's the most natural way to approach any situation. When you hold some part of yourself in reserve you deny it exposure to life; you repress its energy and keep it from understanding what it needs to know. Imagine a baby who wants to walk but has these reservations:

1. I don't want to look bad.
2. I don't want to fall down.
3. I don't want anyone else to watch me fail.
4. I don't want to live with the burden of failure.
5. I don't want to expend all my energy.
6. I don't want any pain.
7. I want to get things over with as fast as possible.

For a baby those reservations seem absurd. If any of them applied, learning to walk would never happen, or it would happen tentatively. The chance for mastery could never present itself. Yet as adults we resort to these reservations all the time. We deny ourselves mastery as a result. No one can can change the fact that all the negatives of a situation express themselves the minute the situation arises, along with all the positives. There is no escaping the internal decisions we've made.

Everything you've decided about yourself is in play at this moment.

Fortunately, these individual decisions can be reexamined and changed. Since all the negatives are right in front of you, you don't have to go searching for them. What people experience as obstacles in life are reflections of a decision to shut out understanding. If you shut out too much understanding, you become a victim, subject to forces that bewilder and overwhelm you. These forces aren't blind fate or misfortune; they are holes in your awareness, the places where you haven't been able to look.

Today, try to look at one of the decisions that has kept you from totally engaging in life, which may be included in the list just above."

They had no problems understanding light speed and teleportation except that they could have done it more discreetly. - Malidoma Some

One day after the dot-com bubble burst and I was no longer a CTO at an Internet start-up, I was at a wonderful bookstore and cafe in Salt Lake City, The Golden Braid. Instinctually, a particular book had a magnetic pull and I lifted out of the shelf. At that time, I very much defined myself as a left-brained, analytic, rational pseduo-intellectual that thought I knew how the whole world worked... until the rug had been pulled out from underneath me that previous year. Every part of my life went from idyllic (if you didn't look too far below the surface) to catastrophic, and I finally found myself in an unknown place where I had no pat answers.

This is a long-winded way of saying that this book I'm about to excerpt below made a huge impression on me. It changed my life. It was a voyage home, a true homecoming even if I didn't quite understand everything in it, it still rang true. It's the true tale of an African boy whisked from his village to a missionary school and his odyssey back to his own culture and shamanism. I don't really want to give too much away, but I recently checked the book out of the library to re-read my favorite passages.

In the world I reside today everything is based on left-brained intelligence (or, seeing as I'm in Vegas now, primal emotions run-amok) which culturally and systemically dismisses and buries any conversation by methods of mockery and/or fear all things not measurable and taught in schools or books. Thus, I tend to not speak of these agreed upon taboo subjects.

The passage below also explains why I'm moving more toward fiction writing to convey another view of reality.

This passage is in the Introduction by the author, he also mentions that Asian countries tend to also hold a non-Western view of reality that is foreign to Western education. Another reason that two of the main characters in a story I'm working are Asian-American.

"In the culture of my people, the Dagara, we have no word for the supernatural. The closest we come to this concept is Yielbongura, "the thing that knowledge can't eat." This word suggests that the life and power of certain things depend upon their resistance to the kind of categorizing knowledge that human being apply to everything. In Western reality, there is a clear split between the spiritual and the material, between religious life and secular life. This concept is alien to the Dagara. For us, as for many indigenous cultures, the supernatural is part of our everyday lives. To a Dagara man or woman, the material is just as the spiritual taking on form.

. . . .

The world of the Dagara also does not distinguish between reality and imagination. To us, there is a close connection between thought and reality. To imagine something, to closely focus one's thoughts upon it, has the potential to bring something into being. Thus, people who take a tragic view of life and are always expecting the worst usually manifest that reality. Those who expect that things will work together for the good usually experience just that. In the realm of the sacred, this concept is taken even further, for what is magic but the ability to focus thought and energy to get results on the human plane? The Dagara view of reality is large. If one can imagine something, then it has at least the potential to exist.

I decided to do a little experiment of my own with "reality" versus "imagination" when I was home visiting my village in 1986. I brought with me a little electronic generator, a television monitor, a VCR, and a "Star Trek" tape titled The Voyage Home. I wanted to know if the Dagara elders could tell the difference between fiction and reality. The events unfolding in a science fiction film, considered futuristic or fantastic in the West, were perceived by my elders as the current affairs in the day-to-day lives of some other group of people living in the world. The elders did not understand what a starship is. They did not understand what the fussy uniforms of its crew members had to do with making magic. They recognized in Spock a Kontomble of the seventh planet, the very one that I describe later in this story, and their only objection to him was that he was too tall. They had never seen a Kontomble that big. They had no problems understanding light speed and teleportation except that they could have done it more discreetly. I could not make them understand that all this was not real. Even though stories abound in my culture, we have no word for fiction. The only way I could get across to them the Western concept of fiction was to associate fiction with telling lies.

My elders were comfortable with "Star Trek," the West's vision of its own future. Because they believe in things like magical beings (Spock), traveling at the speed of light, and teleportation, the wonders that Westerners imagine being part of their future are very much a part of my elders' present. The irony is that the West sees the indigenous world as primitive or archaic. Wouldn't it be wonderful if the West could learn to be as "archaic" as my elders are?

As in the case of "Star Trek," Westerners look to the future as a place of hope, a better world where every person has dignity and value, where wealth is not unequally distributed, where the wonders of technology make miracles possible. If people in the West could embrace some of the more positive values of the indigenous world, perhaps that might even provide them with a "shortcut" to their own future." -- Malidoma Patrice Some, Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman

...when you have learned to synchronize your life with the universe itself, you are celebrating the cosmic dance. - Deepak Chopra

"We maximize the probability that something will happen by our actions. And many of our actions are determined by our karmic conditioning--those interpretations of past experiences and relationships that form and affect our life's memories and desires. If we have had past experiences of being lucky, the probability of buying a lottery ticket increases. But a person who has never won anything feels defeated even before the ticket is purchased, and may never buy the ticket at all.

In order to change your life, therefore, you must break free of your present karmic conditioning. You've got to change your interpretation of what happens in your life. You must transform yourself into the person for whom the probability of great things happening increases. And this transformation starts at the level of the soul. The soul gives meaning to events. The soul takes actions by influencing our minds. And for every action, there is a memory, an interpretation. Meaning, experience, interpretation, memory, desire--all of these are very closely connected through the karmic cycle.

We get used to a certain way of doing things and continue this pattern out of habit, simply because it is comfortable. In order to change your life, you have to find a way to break the pattern.This is not easy, but people do it every day. The best way is to watch for signs of new probabilities--and those signs come to us in the form of coincidences.

Coincidences are messages from the nonlocal domain, invitations to break our karmic bonds. Coincidences invite us to relinquish the known and embrace the unknown. A coincidence is a creative, quantum leap in the behavior of the universe itself. Since the known is itself a habit of past conditioning, creativity and freedom exist in the unknown--anything that breaks through the probability amplitude set by karma. That is why it is important to look for coincidences, to keep a record of them. When you notice coincidences, you can discover their hidden meanings for your life.

A coincidence is, by definition, a synchronistic experience. It comes from the nonlocal domain, and affects our world in unpredictable ways. The very fact that it's a coincidence means that it is a message from God. We must take heed, and then take action. This is our opportunity for a creative response. The goal of enlightenment is to go beyond the probability pattern and experience true freedom. This is why it is important to never ignore a coincidence. Never pass up a chance to see what the universe has planned for you. And if you pay attention to coincidences, you'll find that they accelerate, creating even more opportunities.

This is the secret of synchrodestiny. All the ideas presented here are the ruling principles of the universe. If you make them the guideposts of your own life, you live the life of your dreams. Understanding that these principles are not just abstractions, that actually they are operating in everything we do, is really more than just awareness: It's really a kind of celebration. When you have mastered sychrodestiny, when you have learned to synchronize your life with the universe itself, you are celebrating the cosmic dance." -- from page 244 in Deepak Chopra's book, "The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence":

Note: This is a companion blog to collect longer excerpts from books that are cited in my main blog, Crossroads Dispatches, by Evelyn Rodriguez.

...you are the artist and your life is your creation. - Miguel Ruiz

Excerpt from The Voice of Knowledge: A Practical Guide to Inner Peace, by don Miguel Ruiz (page 143). I've been in a workshop led by Ruiz in Teotihuacan, Mexico in 2003. As best I can tell from inner knowing, he walks his talk.

"You have seen how you create a virtual reality, the dream of your life, and you know that your life is a story. Now with that awareness, the question is: Are you happy with your story? Something important to understand is that you can be whatever you want to be because you are the artist and your life is your creation. It’s your story. It’s your comedy or your drama, and if the story is changing anyway, then why not direct the change with awareness?

Now that you are an artist with awareness, you can see if you like your art, and you can practice making it better. Practice makes the master. But it’s action that makes the difference. When I discovered this, my action was to take responsibility for my art and purify my program. As an artist I started exploring the possibilities—-every action and every reaction. And by the way, this is our real nature: to explore. Explore what? Life! What else can we explore?

To change the story of life is what the Toltec call the mastery of transformation. It’s about transforming you, the storyteller, the dreamer. Life is changing so fast, and you can see that you are always transforming, but you master transformation when you no longer resist change. Instead, you take advantage of change, and you enjoy change.

To master transformation is to live in the present moment, all the time. Life is an eternal now because the force of life is creating everything right now, and it is transforming everything right now.

How are you going to change your story? Well, now you know that you are creating your story according to what you believe about yourself. The way to transform what you believe about yourself is to unlearn what you have already learned. When you unlearn, your faith returns to you, your personal power increases, and you can invest your faith in new beliefs.

If you want to know the truth, if you are ready to take your faith out of the lies, then remember: Don’t believe yourself, and don’t believe anybody else. This will give you clarity about many things. But you may need a little support to stop believing the lies, and to start breaking all of the agreements that go against yourself.

The Four Agreements offer this support. They are just for you, the main character of your story. These four simple agreements can take you all the way to your integrity: Be impeccable with your word.Don’t take anything personally. Don’t make assumptions. Always do your best."

This is a companion blog for longer book excerpts that are cited from the main blog, Crossroads Dispatches, by Evelyn Rodriguez.

Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities. - Joseph Campbell

"Money is congealed energy and releasing it releases life possibilities.

. . . I got back from my student years in Europe three weeks before the Wall Street crash. . . I'd earned several thousand dollars--which was a lot in those days--and that was what I had until it disappeared. I didn't make another cent for five years. I found that, if you had no responsibilities, you could live wonderfully without any money. In fact, I thought anybody who worked for money was a fool. I took a vow never to do anything for money. Now, that does not mean that when I do something for somebody I don't ask for money. I want as much as I can get, but that's the secondary part of the game. My life course is absolutely indifferent to money. As a result, a lot of money has come in by my doing what I feel I want to do from the inside. If you do that, you are doing things that attract money, because you are giving life and life responds in the way of its counterpart in hard coin.

Being as I was, and given the field I was interested in, I had a certain disdain for people who gave their lives to making money. Now that I have made money, in dealing with it I've had to be in touch with people whose business is money, whose whole life has been in that field, and I've had an interesting and surprising experience: I've met some magnificent people.

Money experienced as life experience is indeed a meditation, and letting it flow out instead of hoarding it is a mode of participation in the lives of others. There's a beautiful thing that can grow out of a life devoted to money tha surprised me.

In the living of life today, money is a facilitating energy source. With money in the tank like gasoline, you can get places you other wise couldn't go.

. . . From what I have seen in the history of the arts in New York, when money is poured on something it flowers. With money there has to be a flow. I had a beautiful experience of a man with money when I was a trustee of the Bollinger Foundation, which was founded by Paul Mellon, an enormously wealthy man. He and his wife had been in analysis with Carl Jung when the war came and they had to leave Switzerland. They asked Jung what they could give him in the way of a gift to express their gratitude for what he had done. He suggested they establish a foundation for the interpretation and study of symbols. That's whay they did, and it is an example of a lot of money being put to the right use. The influence of that Bollinger Series on on the literature and science of America has been enormous.

. . . When you put the money in the wrong place, it can be devastating. Where is the money [and its associated intent to prioritize, value, attend to] going and where is it coming from in the economy of a nation, the economy of a city? You can turn a flowering culture into a desiccating culture just by wrong channeling. What factor in your own consciousness are you going to favor in the spending of the money? For instance, I have a seventy-five-dollar book coming out. Some people will say that is expensive, but those same people will spend one-hundred-and-fifty dollars to have dinner in a restaurant with another couple. So, is the money going up here in your mind or is it going down there in your stomach?"

- from Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion, edited by Diane K. Olson

This is a companion blog for longer excerpts to cite transcriptions from books. The main blog on inspiration, imagination, innovation, improvisation, creativity, and the Call is over at Crossroads Dispatches by Evelyn Rodriguez. Since, I mentioned Campbell in this one, you may also be interested in the art, myth and alchemy blog called Fertile Verge.

This is Burning Man, by Brian Doherty

Some notes taken from a book about that experiment in a self-organizing culture and ephemeral city-springing, This is Burning Man, by Brian Doherty. And the subtitle is:

page 272
What I'm picking up from Larry's new dispensation [more anti-consumerist and political activism... BM used to be apolitical event] struck me as antithetical to what I originally found interesting about Burning Man--that it offered a seeking and celebration of creative expression and liberated experience as a key to brain change and a means to search for what one might call the sacred. There are times, though, when Larry and I are feeling the same things. "We are beings, created things," Larry tells me. "We're the products of genetic mutation, and we're infinitely variable. The world presents itself to us as an artifact with slots to fill. But everyone's gifts are unique and not necessarily apparent to the [people themselves] unless some circumstance calls them forth. The whole story of my progress," he surmises, "might seem blind and hapless. But there was from the beginning a sense of something real in me and the idea that it had to have a home out there somewhere. Intuitively, blindly, as chance allowed, I moved in that direction even if it didn't make any sense by the world's standards. The human world is like a flowery meadow, and the individual is like a weed--each one different. A wed is simply an unwanted plant. It's a human category. There's no such plant as a weed. But the human world is more and more a monoculture. Farmer Jones wants corn and everything else is a weed, and if you can't get with the corn program, Buster, then get your thistle ass out of here! That's the problem everyone faces."

As he looks around at Burning Man, Larry sees lots of weeds essaying things with no apparent practical purpose. "It's weeds, but it's their weeds. Who knows what that leads to? Maybe nothing. But unless people are given that opportunity they will never find out. If their judgments are always governed by the world's standards, they might never find that one thing they are brilliant at, that they were born to do, and that's the greatest tragedy of all--the quiet desperation Thoreau wrote of. That just means that they never discovered what they were meant to do with the transcendent faith that they were meant to do that something. And that's been the moral of my life."

There's a lot I could argue with Larry about, but not that.

page 273
[What is it?] This book, I hope, provides some answers to that question. It's a place for human beings to live vividly free lives and have--as Larry used to recognize--experiences that are fundamental, unconditional, marvelous, and worth a thousand lectures on why one ought not to shop at Wal-Mart. [Kind of giving Larry a jab on that last bit.]

page 274
Interactive is the buzzword for Burning Man-style art, defined by BRAF's Jessica Bobier as "art that blurs the line between artists and audience, with collaboration in the creation or the experience of the piece. Art that requires the action of a participant to complete the piece. It represents the opportunity for people to come together and incites them to interact with one another, whether directly because they are needed to make something happen, or just something so exciting it makes people gather, brings them together." It fits in smoothly with the old Burning Man dispensation: art that creates community, art that gives you an opportunity to have an experience other than spectating.

page 282
It didn't start out as an art festival. It didn't really start as anything but an act and an excuse to gather. "What is art, you know?" muses Michael Michael on the meaning of this train he's riding. "Why art at Burning Man? What is this art thing? There's something much larger here. Art is a vehicle, a symptom of something bigger occurring. It's spreading beyond the desert, beyond the playa. It's a way of being, of thinking, to change a person: That's the real story, the real thing that's happening."

The change--that knowledge within that you no longer have to be and think and act as you previously been and thought and acted if you don't wish to--is a mystery, and Burning Man has no monopoly on the technology of generating it. It can come in an instant like a thief in the night, like Christ, or after years of difficult discipline, like those spent with a yogi master, but what's important is that it can happen and that the technologies of change exist and Burning Man is very, very good at reminding people of that.

page 280
Chris Radcliffe: "You don't need to go to Puerto Vallarta and lay on the beach and eat fish and drink frozen daiquiris and read Jacqueline Susann novels. You can have a primary experience of existence instead of something processed and fed back to you. Someone once said to me, if you're being entertained, you're not having any fun. And that's perfectly right. What we were doing was a very primary thing."

The main blog is at Crossroads Dispatches; this is accompaniment blog for longer excerpts cited there.

surrender to the universal domain, which is much grander than anything you could imagine - deepak chopra

"The realization that "I" am separate from "you" starts to happen at around age two or three. At this stage a baby starts to differentiate between "me" and "mine," and "not me" and "not mine." This separation creates anxiety. In reality the world is not separate from us, but part of the continuum of consciousness. Intent works by harnessing the creative forces inherent in the universe. Just as we have our personal creativity, the universe also displays creativity. The universe is alive and conscious, and it responses to our intent when we have our intimate relationship with the universe and see it not as separate but as our extended body.

We can restore the power of intent through a return to the true self, or self-actualization. People who attain self-actualization reestablish their connectedness to the nonlocal mind. They have no desire to manipulate and control others. [They no there is no "other."] They are independent of criticism and also of flattery. They feel beneath no one, but they also feel superior to no one. They are in touch with the internal reference point that is their soul, and not their ego. Anxiety is no longer an issue, because anxiety comes from the ego's need to protect itself. And that anxiety is what interferes with the spontaneity of intent. Intent is the mechanics through which spirit transforms itself into material reality.

Mature spirituality requires sobriety of awareness. If you are sober, you are responsive to feeback but at the same time immune to criticism and flattery. You learn to let go and you do not worry about the result. You have confidence in the outcome, and you start to see the synchronicity that is always organized around you. Intention provides opportunities that you have to be alert to. Good luck is opportunity and preparedness coming together. Intention will provide you opportunities, but you still need to act when the opportunity is provided.

Whenever you take action, have the attitude that you are not performing the action. Have the attitude that your actions are really the actions of nonlocal intelligence, the organizing universal spirit. You will begin to notice a great diminution of anxiety. You will also be less attached to the result.

Stress is a form of anxiety. If you're stressed, then you can't even begin to think about synchronicity. Synchronicity is a means of getting in touch with God. It's a path to meaning and purpose in your life. It's a means of having the experience of love and compassion. It's a means of connecting to the nonlocal intelligence of the universe. If my attention is on situations that generate stess, then it is difficult to access synchronicity. To do so effectively you have to have an attitude of surrender to the universal domain, which is much grander than anything you could imagine. Surrender requires a leap of faith, a jump into the unknown. Your inner dialogue can support this by saying, "Things are not going my way. I'm letting go of my idea of how they should. My sense of 'me and mine' has to expand." If you take this leap of faith, you will be richly rewarded. If you find yourself worrying about next month's bills, it would be appropriate to remind yourself that it is your intent not only to fulfill your needs but also to send your children to school, to contribute to your community. All people want to fulfill these needs in their lives. However, having articulated and expressed your intent to fulfill them takes them to the infinite mind, and in effect says, "I put all this at your disposal. I'm not going to worry about it because you, the nonlocal intelligence that resides within me, will take care of it."

Great artists, jazz musicians, writers, and scientists talk about having to transcend their individual identities when they create. I've worked with a lot of musicians and songwriters and I've never known any who are thinking about royalties when they are writing a song. A new song or a new piece of music involves letting go, and incubating in the nonlocal domain, then allowing the music or song to come to you. All creative processes depend on a phase of incubation and allowing. Synchronization is a creative process. In this case, however, the creative mind is the cosmos itself. When self-concern departs, nonlocal intelligence enters.

Remember, your thoughts must not conflict with the designs of the universe. Wishing to win the lottery can magnify your sense of separation from the universe. Frequently lottery winners report alienation from friends and family and no greater happiness. When money alone becomes the aim, it alienates you.

How do you know which of your intentions is likely to be fulfilled? The answer lies in paying attention to the clues provided by the nonlocal mind. Notice the coincidences in your life. Coincidences are messages. They are clues from God or spirit or nonlocal reality, urging you to break out of your karmic conditioning, your familiar patterns of thinking. They are offering you an opportunity to enter a domain of awareness where you feel loved and cared for by the infinite intelligence that is your source. Spiritual traditions call this the state of grace." -- pages 115-118, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire, by Deepak Chopra

I've come to the realization that we have to discover the shaman within. - Alberto Villoldo

Another excerpt from Alberto Villoldo's book imparting the knowledge he gained through Inka shamans and his own direct experiences in Shaman, Healer, Sage. This one about the transpersonal awakening (typically comes from a collapse of the conceptual separate identity, and can be facilitated through mental queries like, Who am I?, What am I?, Am I?, et all) and its potential "personal' consequences.

He explains a pretty common ego trick which has us worshippinng the exoticism of the Other as the self-realized--the whole "not me, I'm not worthy" routine--and plan elaborate excursions to South America or to drool over an African shaman dressed in his native garb in your local cellphone shop--and I cite two examples from folks I know, and totally be oblivious to the ordinariness of It, and its innate in-dwelling in yourself. Seeing it only out there (and in specific steoreotypical disguises) keeps you from knowing and being It yourself and seeing It everywhere anytime. Anyhow, without further ado, Alberto's words:

"I've come to the realization that we have to discover the shaman within. I teach my students that no amount of traveling with the Indians will bring you to your own wisdom and power. I've found that it frequently achieves exactly the opposite, distracting us from a true encounter with Spirit. The shaman is a self-realized person. She discovers the ways of Spirit through her inner awakening. Antonio would remind me that the Buddha was not a Buddhist, and that Christ was not a Christian. One sat under the banyan tree until he gained illumination. The other went to the desert for forty days. In the sixth chakra [pineal gland, third eye] we experience our own awakening. We shed the ponchos, the robes, the rattles and feathers, and all other exterior markings.

An awakened third eye allows the shaman to know who he is. It gives him knowledge of the past and the future and allows him to envision alternative destinies. Some legends report that those who awaken this chakra can even attain physical immortality. They no longer age or succumb to disease, but rather are able to maintain their youthful vitality and strength. All the desires of one with an awakened third eye come true, and if a number of healers hold the same vision, it comes true for the planet. Native religions have long practiced this tradition. Elders of the Hopi and a similar council of Inka medicine men and women sit in meditation envisioning the kind of world that hey want their great-grandchildren to inherit." - pages 98-99, Shaman, Healer, Sage by Alberto Villoldo, Ph.D.

Is there a difference between reality and imagination? - Doña Laura via Alberto Villoldo

I loved this excerpt about the fiery shamaness Doña Laura in Alberto Villoldo's book, Shaman, Healer, Sage. I know it seems a tad violent, yet its also a humbling lesson in being cautious when demanding tangible proof of a sage or the Universe itself. Go find out for yourself rather than cast aspersions of doubt on those with first-hand knowledge. The book details Villoldo's training with the highly-trained Inka healers whom work well beyond the physical plane at the level of Infinity and the luminous energy field.

"Whereas most shamans could travel in the shape of a spirit eagle or jaguar in dreams, Laura could do it while awake, in broad daylight. She could merge with a condor and fly the giant bird according to her will, diving into ravines and flying miles above the ground, contemplating the landscape below. Once, at the base of Mt. Ausangate, she was challenged by one of her students, a short, pudgy Indian fellow named Mariano who had a great sense of huor and a knack for gathering medicinal plants but who managed to do most everything else wrong. "How do I know you are really inside the body of the condor and not imagining it?"he asked. I was a dozen feet away, at our camp with Don Antonio. The air suddenly became electric, and I saw a faint smile cross Antonio's face. We all knew better than to challenge the old woman, and all of us were waiting intently for her response.

"Is there a difference between reality and imagination?" she answered in a gentle tone. We looked disappointedly at each other.

It was getting close to dusk, and a half dozen of us set out to collect brush and masto, the dried llama droppings that are used for fuel so high in the mountains. Half an hour later we were all back at camp except Mariano. Most of Laura's students were women, and they had given the two male apprentices women's names, which they used when they were not around. "Where is Maria?" they taunted playfully. "Maybe she has gotten lost," one snickered.

I could tell that Antonio was getting worried. It was wintertime on the second highest mountain in South America. In a half hour the temperature would fall below freezing. He motioned to me and another man to go search for him. As we were setting out we noticed Mariano staggering toward camp. His face was bloodied, and he was barely able to stand. I carried a first-aid kit, which I kept stowed at the bottom of my bag, for situations like these. My mentor [Don Antonio] did not life to use Western medicines, but at that altitude no medicinal plants grew. We were so far about the tree line that no plants of any kind were to be seen. We were surround by barren, icy landscape punctuated by patches of bare rock. We brought Mariano into our tent and saw that the back of his jacket had been slashed; the white filler was stained red with blood. The gash had gone through his clothing and torn his skin, leaving three deep gouges on his back, like those made by the talons of an animal. We asked Mariano to tell us what happened, but all he would do was shake his head and say that he had fallenn and cut his face on the ice. Later that night we overheard him apologizing to Doña Laura. It seemed a giant condor had swooped down from the sky and tried to carry him away. Condors have been know[n] to abduct a fully grown sheep, fly several hundred feet into the air with the animal in their clutches, and drop it to its death on the rocks.

Over the years Dona Laura and I became friends. One day she told me that the secret of shape-shifting was to realize that you were no different from anything else in the universe, no better and no worse. Once you understood in your cells that you were exactly the same as everything else, no more important than an insect, no less important than the Sun, you could change into any shape you wanted, whether a condor or a tree. You could even become invisible to others. She explained that the shaman had to master the art of invisibility in order not to call attention to herself. Antonio had mastered this. He was invisible to the Catholic Church [unbelievably still has an office of Inquisition in Peru]. No one knew who he was, so he was free to change the world. "You can accomplish anything," she once told me, "as long as you are willing to let others take credit for it." -- pages 36-37, Alberto Villoldo, Shaman, Healer, Sage

This blog is an accompaniment to the main blog at Crossroads Dispatches by Evelyn Rodriguez.

The real reality is behind the curtain. - Rumi

I adore this example of the unfolding nature of "destiny" and chance by Deepak Chopra taken from his own life story:

"When I was finishing my medical training, I knew that my interest was in neuro-endocrinology, the study of how brain chemicals work. Even then, I could see that this was a place where science and consciousness met, and I wanted to explore it. I applied for a fellowship to train with one of the world's most prominent endocrinologists. This highly respected scientist was doing Nobel Prize-worthy work, and I was eager for the opportunity to learn from him. Out of thousands of applicants, I was one of the six selected to work with him that year. Shortly after I started, I realized that his laboratory was more about ego gratification than about real science. We technicians were treated like machines, expected to mass-produce publishable research papers. It was tedious and unsatisfying. And it was terribly disillusioning to work with someone so famous, so respected and still mange to feel as unhappy as I did. I had taken the position with such idealism and I found myself doing nothing but injecting rats with chemicals all day long.

Every morning I scanned the Boston Globe newspaper want ads, aware of my disappointment, but thinking that this path I was on was the only way to go. I remember reading a little advertisement for a position in a local hospital emergency room. In fact, every day when I opened the newspaper, I would see that little ad. Even if I was only flipping through the paper quickly, it would fall open to that same page with that same ad. I would look at it and then push it out of my mind. Deep inside, I could imagine myself working in the emergency room and actually helping people, instead of injecting chemicals into rats, but my dream had been to land this fellowship with the renowned endocrinologist.

One day that endocrinologist addressed me in a cruel and demeaning manner. We argued, and I walked away to the lounge to calm myself down. On the table was the the Boston Globe newspaper opened to the page with the little want ad--that same ad that I had ignored for weeks. The coincidence was too powerful to ignore. Everything finally clicked into place. I knew I was in the wrong place doing the wrong thing. I was fed up with the routine, with the ego of that endocrinologist, with the rats, with the feeling that I was not doing what was in my heart to do. I walked back into his office and quit. He followed me out into the parking lot, screaming at the top of his lungs that my career was ruined, that he would see to it that no one would ever hire me.

With his voice still ringing in my ears,I drove directly to that little emergency room, applied for the position, and started work that very day. For the first time, I got to treat and help people who were really suffering. For the first time in a long time, I was happy. The Boston Globe ad had been beckoning me for weeks, but I had ignored it. Finally I noticed the coincidence and I was able to change my destiny. Even though the laboratory work seemed to be the very thing I had been striving for all my life, paying attention to this coincidence allowed me to break my habitual patterns. It was a message just for me, my life's personal road flare. Everything I had done up to that point was simply preparation for that change. Some people thought the endocrinology fellowship itself was a mistake. But if I hadn't gotten the fellowship, I might not have been in Boston. And if I wasn't working in the endocrinologist's lab, I might not have seen the ad and I might never have felt my heart's true calling. Endless details had to fall into place in order for this part of my life to play out the way it has.

According to a poem by Rumi, one of my favorite poets and philosophers, "This is not the real reality. The real reality is behind the curtain. In truth, we are not here. This is our shadow." What we experience as everyday reality is merely a shadow play. Behind the curtain there is a soul, living and dynamic and immortal, beyond the reach of space and time. By acting from that level, we can consciously influence our destiny. This happens through the synchronization of seemingly acausal relationships to mold a destiny--hence, synchrodestiny. In synchrodestiny, we consciously participate in the creation of our lives by understanding the world that is beyond our senses, the world of the soul." -- pages 126-129 Deepak Chopra, The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire

This blog is accompaniment (mostly excerpts from books) to the main blog, Crossroads Dispatches, by Evelyn Rodriguez.