Directing the Power of Conscious Feelings- Living Your Own Truth

by Clinton Callahan

  We are trained to consume, copy, conform, obey, adapt; be conventional, play the game, follow the program, give our authority away; distrust our own instinct, intuition, and innate talents; repress our feelings and ask no questions.

  We are trained to live as planets, absorbing.

  We are designed to live as stars, radiating.

  MAP OF TECHNOPENURIAPHOBIA (TPP)

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  While focused on trying to reach the good life, you live in subtle fear that modern technology will fail. The fear is called technopenuriaphobia (TPP), the fear of being without technology. You are born high up on a ladder of technology created mostly during the past one hundred years. The rungs beneath you are missing because you have forgotten how to live on the Earth without high tech. This gap in skills can be lethal.

  Stars emit more energy than they consume. The sun, for example, glows with internally generated heat and light. It sources its own liveliness. Human beings are designed as stars, to lead, discover, explore, create, generate, experiment, and to declare the way things are. We are designed to develop new social systems, solve impossible problems, communicate in new ways, create new forms of thinking and relating, and share all these with others.

  The process of changing from a planet to a star is called stellating. The idea is simple: light yourself energetically on fire from the inside. The heat of combustion comes from the conflict between your clarity about what you see is possible and your clarity about what you see is happening. The result is two clashing clarities occupying the same space at the same time. The friction produces a nearly intolerable impetus that moves you to create what you came here to create.

  MAP OF TECHNOPENURIAPHOBIA HEALING

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  Healing technopenuriaphobia (TPP) is a gradual process of learning low-tech skills. Each skill installs a new rung beneath you on the ladder of technology. Each skill erases a bit of TPP and reconnects you through a natural and sustainable relationship with Earth. Learning low-tech skills is edgework, but can be done with friends and children. In the process you gain a different idea of what the good life is.

  You came here with a plan. Your plans were approved, so you were born. Are you fulfilling your plans? For example, my plans are to empower facilitators of the shift to next culture. Writing this book is part of fulfilling my plans. Writing this book is excruciatingly intense for me. I want it done, and it is not yet done. There is a fire in me about this. This book comes out of that fire.

  MAP OF STELLATING ARCHETYPES

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  RITE OF PASSAGE

  Stellation is an essential element in a formal rite of passage from childhood into adulthood. A rite of passage is the activation process that empowers a person with the wisdom of responsibility and consequence.

  During childhood, the Box learns to defend itself. At age fifteen, the Box is designed to change its purpose, from childish defensiveness to adult expansiveness. Modern culture assumes that the shift happens automatically when we turn eighteen or twenty-one years of age. It does not.

  For 100,000 years human beings knew that a formidable rite of passage was required to initiate a man or woman into responsible adulthood. We seem to have forgotten. The result is that modern society lacks responsible adults. Parents do not know what being adult means. Our governments, militaries, businesses, educational institutions, and religions are being led by adolescents in older bodies. This explains why the annual international budget for promoting war in 2007 was over 1,339,000,000,000 (US dollars), and the annual international budget for promoting consciousness expansion in the same year was zero.

  Modern policies sponsored by modern leaders in modern countries underwrite starvation for the poor third of humanity while the rich third pays billions for liposuction to surgically remove extra globs of fat from their bellies, waists and thighs.

  Modern leaders are so committed to child level responsibility that they choose to fight each other over finite territory and resources instead of creatively collaborating to cultivate the beneficial potential of each human being on Earth.

  You do need to fight, but the true battles are internal. Fight to pay attention and stay unhypnotized. Fight to take back your authority. Fight to keep the promises you make to your children and your partner. Fight to build the matrix upon which your consciousness can grow. Fight to make unusual efforts of generosity and kindness.

  Fight through your prejudices to forge critical connections with other people so as to nurture the emergence of a world without war. Fight with fierce discipline and unquenchable commitment by your own authority, not at the whim of some politician or corporate executive! The noble fight is in you. This is where the archetypal warrior takes risky, inspired actions. Modern wars are little boys with guns. It is time to grow up.

  Adult responsibility is a new agreement between an individual and the universe, after which the adult’s life is about serving conscious Bright Principles greater than themselves.

  An adult takes responsibility for attention, center, presence, purpose, outcome, space, energy, time, costs, feelings, thoughts, possibility, consequences, the Box, communication, relationship, the greater community, and also responsibility for the level of responsibility that is being taken. If you do not know what some of this means, it is because modern society is not grounded in adulthood—you have not been taught. No one has shown you how to apply the technology of responsibility. Not knowing about a thing, however, does not protect you from that thing seriously affecting your life.

  Rite of passage may have been abandoned by modern culture due to a misunderstanding. We did not recognize that there is a difference of purpose between a traditional rite of passage as used by original cultures for 100,000 years, and the kind of rite of passage needed today. This difference can now be explained.

  RAGE HOLD The author is being held by four men in a classic rage hold—everybody’s first step towards stellating anger. A rage hold is so safe that feelings repressed since infancy can be experienced and expressed in such a way that they get completed. The rage hold is one element of a twenty-first century rite of passage.

  RAGE HOLD Through a sequence of steps you permit your rage to gradually increase in intensity and maturity of expression. A first attempt might reach 5 percent intensity of baby rage. Your next effort may get up to 15 percent child rage. Getting past 50 percent intensity involves using loud angry adolescent words. Anger past 80 percent is anger beyond understanding. You gain the capability to hold space for other people’s feelings up to the intensity of anger that you yourself have experienced. When you can freely experience and express 100 percent archetypal anger for no reason and can let it flow through you unrestricted until it stops by itself, your nervous system reorders and you have stellated the warrior or warrioress archetype. Then it is no longer your anger. It is a force of nature, anger coming directly from its own archetypal territory. For the rest of your life the energy and information of archetypal anger is turned on and available for your use in every instant.

  TRADITIONAL VS ARCHETYPAL RITE OF PASSAGE

  The traditional rite of passage used by original cultures differs from the archetypal rite of passage needed today by what is done with your assemblage points. Assemblage points are core reference frames around which you construct your Box. (I borrow the term from Carlos Castaneda’s reports about Don Juan Matus’s Yaqui Indian teachings in the book Journey to Ixtlan.) Each Box design orbits around a few foundational assertions about the world and life. If an assemblage point is shifted the entire Box reflexively reshapes itself.

  The human mind is capable of adapting to such a stunning diversity of cultures that it should be clear that the original placement of assemblage points is completely arbitrary. Rearranging the position of
an assemblage point can establish an entirely new framework of reality in which the Box can operate. In a traditional rite of passage the assemblage points are lifted out of their original (childhood) positions and repositioned so as to weld a person into complete identification with the tribe’s longstanding customs and worldview. This strategy constrains new adults to think, feel, and behave strictly within the norms established by that particular culture. They are bonded to their clan. The new adults have no option but to continue doing things in ways the old culture has already found to be sustainable for perhaps thousands of years, assuring the continued survival of the tribe.

  RAGE HOLD Be quiet, be a nice boy, be a good girl, be cool, stay in control, don’t be a problem—it takes great courage and stamina to break these long obeyed rules. This photo shows proper rage hold form. A person lies on top of each arm and leg placing one hand over and one hand under each knee and shoulder. Two additional people hold folded towels for the rage hold person to grab onto. Don’t pull too tightly, but give the person some resistance to fight with. There are two rules: don’t hurt yourself, and don’t hurt anybody else. Holding someone in archetypal rage is like riding a greased pig. Hang on!

  In cultures that need to change only gradually, if at all, traditional rites of passage make sense. For the twenty-first century’s hyper-evolving circumstances, something completely different is required: an archetypal rite of passage.

  An archetypal rite of passage does not weld your assemblage points into the local culture. An archetypal rite of passage instead anchors your assemblage points into your own personal set of Bright Principles, your archetypal lineage, and your high drama archetypes: (for men) King, Warrior, Magician, Lover or (for women) Queen, Warrioress, Sorceress, Lover. These archetypes are forces of nature that are more powerful than culture. The procedure for stellating these archetypes is well understood, although not by modern culture.

  The difficulty of explaining archetypal rite of passage to someone in modern culture is that modern culture is patriarchal. Patriarchy promotes the patriarchy, not the transformation of the patriarchy. Any rite of passage created within a patriarchy will avoid noticing that the patriarchy is itself irredeemably adolescent.

  No patriarchally ordained rite of passage can lead to greater responsibility. This means that an archetypal rite of passage to adulthood must be sourced from outside the realm of patriarchy, in archearchy. Archearchy is a new form of human society beyond matriarchy and patriarchy, where deep masculine and deep feminine archetypes reign in dynamic harmony. Archearchy is already being lived, for example, in Possibilica .

  It is deceptive to assume that you can design and manage a rite of passage for yourself by yourself. This would be like trying to midwife your own birth. The suggestion is to undertake a rite of passage in close association with guides.

  A guide is someone more experienced and further along in their rite of passage than you are. Since rites of passage are not sponsored by modern culture, your guide will be someone centered in a context that is greater than the context of modern culture. This does not mean, however, that you should commit to the first Tibetan Shaolin Kabalistic American-Indian Hindu Atlantean Tantra Priest Psychic Sufi Healer Shaman Kundalini Buddhist Drummer from Africa who comes along . . .

  RAGE HOLD Having so much safety and support from people feels wonderful. The rage work itself feels like a butterfly struggling to get out of a cocoon. The alternative is staying trapped in the cocoon forever, never to realize your life purpose. The outcome of breaking free of childhood patterns is becoming a Pirate Sorceress Warrioress Queen Goddess Woman (or a Pirate Magician King Spiritual Warrior Man). This result is astonishing, beautiful and attractive.

  Nonetheless, I can encourage you to begin your own archetypal rite of passage now, even if you have not found a guide, because of the Law of Precession. The Law of Precession says that as soon as you start making authentic efforts, the universe provides sideways coincidences to make your efforts more productive—including providing the appropriate guide when you are ready.

  FEELINGS AND ARCHETYPES

  Each of the four feelings ignites one of the four archetypes, as shown on the Map of Feelings and Archetypes. Anger ignites the doer / maker. Fear ignites the creator / designer. Sadness ignites the communicator. Joy ignites the leader / visionary.

  The procedure for igniting archetypes is to consciously choose to experience and express 100 percent maximum archetypal levels of feelings in their pure form (unmixed), in total safety, for no reason, letting it get bigger and bigger and letting it go and go until it stops all by itself.

  Stellating is neither a reaction to anything nor the release of emotions. Stellating is not catharsis—the discharge of accumulated energy. Archetypal feelings do not come from you. They already exist in the four territories of archetypal feelings. You intentionally choose and enter a specific territory—anger, sadness, fear or joy—and become the space through which the archetypal feeling is experienced and expressed into the world.

  PUNCHING Through physical metaphors such as punching a cushion safely and respectfully, your whole body learns to make use of the energy available in the adult ego state. You naturally replace victim behaviors with the ability to say, No! or Stop!, the ability to make effective decisions, the ability to change plans, make and keep agreements, take intelligent risks, and expand your capacity for passionate living and loving.

  LIFTING As an adult woman emerges and stands on her own two feet it is a time of celebration. Giving this woman a lifting welcomes her into the culture of adult women. The typical behavior of regarding other women as the enemy or as mistrusted competitors can slide into the past. A new partnership and camaraderie between women arises, full of support and wonder in the further exploration of adulthood and the unfolding of archetypal capacities. (The equivalent ritual of men lifting men recognizes successful rite of passage steps for men.)

  Stellating is authentic adventure.

  Stellating archetypes is one aspect of an underworld journey, the appropriate preparation for the Hidden Purpose Process, wherein a group of people in the company of a trained spaceholder (for example, a Possibility Trainer) consciously enters their own personal shadow world to retrieve the bright jewel of clarity. Specifically, the clarity retrieved from the underworld is the set of four, five or six Shadow Principles that your Gremlin serves.

  Once your hidden purpose is distilled (for example, in a Possibility Lab or Next Culture Lab training), you gain a choice as to which purpose you serve with each action: your hidden purpose or your true purpose (as shown on the Map of Possibility in Appendix C). Before gaining this clarity, you had no conscious choice. Choices were made unconsciously for you by your Gremlin. Having a conscious choice is worth working for. (This is my opinion.)

  After a sustained experience of 100 percent maximum fear (or rage, or sadness, or joy), your internal relationship to the feeling is changed. When asked the question, “Which is bigger, you or the fear?” (for example), the remarkable answer is, “I am bigger.” The answer is irrefutable because it comes from direct experience rather than theory or concept. Through the stellating process, you become bigger than your fear.

  MAP OF FEELINGS AND ARCHETYPES

  World Copyright © 2010 owner Clinton Callahan grants permission to use. www.nextculture.org

  Before learning how to feel consciously, maturely and on purpose, your feelings will be using you to serve your hidden purposes. By learning to consciously feel, your feelings become rocket fuel for serving your true purposes. Associated with each of the four feelings is an archetypal structure that is hardwired into your body and ready to turn on at about age fifteen. Each of the four archetypes is initialized individually through a guided process of intentionally experiencing and expressing 100 percent maximum of an archetypal feeling until your relationship to that feeling shifts. Archetypes arrive responsible, adult, clear, and bigger than your 100 percent big feelings. Once initiated, the four ar
chetypes are available for the rest of your life. Without stellating your archetypes during a formidable and authentic rite of passage, you remain functionally adolescent.

  It is now your fear. You own it. You never have to be afraid of fear again because through the stellating you have become bigger than 100 percent maximum archetypal fear.

  You contain the fear. It does not contain you. You own the fear. It no longer owns you. Nothing could ever be scarier than this fear, and even while experiencing it you are okay.

  PUNCHING Ordinarily you might not permit yourself to experience high intensity feelings due to the fear of hurting yourself or someone else. In conscious feelings work you are safe. You learn to start and stop feelings for no particular reason, only because you decide to start or stop. You detect what percentage big each feeling is, and you learn inner navigating so your feelings are pure and not mixed. Conscious feelings work changes your relationship to feelings. Feelings become a vast source of clarity, insight, intuitive intelligence, and focused energy for taking effective linear and nonlinear actions.

  LIFTING Lifters stand directly across from a partner, one grasping the wrists of the other under the body, supporting the shoulders, back and buttocks. The person holding the head does not touch the ears, holds the head and not the neck, and does not rest the head against their chest. The spaceholder of the lifting asks, “Is anything uncomfortable?,” and adjusts positions accordingly. Then the space-holder says, “Let yourself weigh ten thousand pounds. Let yourself be held in the arms of the women (men). Let your thoughts go. Welcome to women’s culture (men’s culture).” Then ask for silence. A lifting lasts two to five minutes. After placing the person gently back on the floor, all sit around them in a circle and give them a moment to assimilate this fabulous experience. Then ask them to slowly open their eyes, sit up, and connect with one or two of the lifters.