Radiant Joy Brilliant Love

by Clinton Callahan

  The second fallacy in thinking that you can transform the middleworld into the upperworld is discovered the moment after you actually exert some effort to do it! “Try” communicating. Try hard to be loving. Try just being kind. Try entering communion. Try resting in the peace that surpasseth all understanding. Try being joyous for more than two minutes straight. Try being harmonious. Try being happy. Try being in pure spiritual union with someone and seeing what happens.

  You already know what happens – as soon as you actually “try” to move from the middleworld into the upperworld problems arise. Conflicts boil up inside. You get offended over almost nothing, and react like a Geiger counter at Chernobyl. So does the other person. You are in the underworld! Deep and long-repressed feelings of rage, confusion, grief and terror raise their vicious heads and instantly transform you, the other person, or both of you into alien monsters hungry for fresh blood. Actually trying to go from the middleworld to the upperworld is how you discover that your underworld is located between them, and directly in the way!

  SECTION 13-C

  Underworld

  On first impulse you probably regard your underworld as bad, negative, and dangerous. You assume (and have been taught) that if you are in the underworld something is very wrong. On the other hand, you do not usually notice that you are in your underworld when you are in your underworld. You simply engage in your typical underworld activities – like flying into a rage, or feeling hopelessly depressed – until your Gremlin is fully satiated. After he falls asleep in an engorged stupor, you glance back from the middleworld and wonder, “Huh? What was that all about?” as if it were a freak accident instead of a recurring nightmare. But your wondering will not last long, as each world totally absorbs your attention and becomes your exclusive concern. In the next moment you may be totally preoccupied with your middleworld business, until such time as Gremlin wakes up hungry again, takes over the reigns and goes looking for an underworld lunch.

  The underworld referred to here is not somewhere else, deep under the earth’s surface, for example. The underworld is in you. You carry your own underworld with you, as a potential, wherever you go.

  The Underworld referred to here is not someplace you have a 50-50 chance of going to after you die. You go to your underworld in every moment when you generate an irresponsible action, unconsciously feed your Gremlin, or serve the Shadow Principles of your hidden purpose (see Glossary).

  The underworld referred to here is not based on fantasy or a belief, fairytale or religion. The underworld is a firsthand, real-time relationship to the level of your consciousness about your intention – that is, what purpose you are serving right now.

  Theoretically we locate the underworld somewhere far away from us, filled with devils, demons, monsters, and the hell realms. But, if you make any sincere efforts to take your relationship into the upperworld – for example, by being vulnerable and letting your partner see your fears in full force – you will often find yourself deep in your underworld instead. This is because of the geometry of worlds. You cannot get to the upperworld except through the underworld. You cannot have a stabilized upperworld until you take conscious possession of your underworld.

  The underworld referred to here is not a new concept. The underworld has been explored and mapped for epochs. Knowledge about the underworld is necessary for any human beings wishing to live together in peace and harmony with other human beings. Ignorance of underworld principles is no protection from them. Underworld maps have been passed on from generation to generation orally, through legend, song, dance, and epic poetry, since long before the written word was ever invented.

  Modern day Western culture has intentionally misinterpreted the encoded instructions about the underworld. We have been educated to regard any notion of underworld as nothing more than quaint allegorical nonsense. Because we no longer understand their true intent, underworld legends and tales no longer deliver their practical clarity. As a result, we fail to recognize what is going on and often have a shocking inability to take care of ourselves. Today’s financial, political, military and religious spheres are networked and activated in the service of underworld principles with such sophisticated ferocity that together they manifest a Shadow strength never before seen on Earth.

  MAP OF WORLDS

  Own Your Underworld

  Recognizing the existence of an underworld within you is one thing. Taking responsibility for actively sourcing the underworld within you is a completely different thing. Taking responsibility for actively sourcing the underworld within you makes you bigger than your underworld. You are not trying to get rid of your underworld. You are trying to get conscious of your underworld. Your underworld is full of riches and insights that you can usefully extract for the rest of your life.

  What riches? Authenticity, for example. Through owning your underworld you can no longer deceive yourself about not being Gremlin. Your friendly “nice person” mask no longer finds ears to hang on. When you inhabit your underworld you can have authentic compassion for others, each of whom has a vast underworld – regardless of whether they see it or not. Judging certain individuals as evil becomes a bad joke, not even funny. Your self-perception horizon expands to include previously invisible Shadowlands. Learning to navigate the Shadowlands consumes your naïveté, especially naïveté regarding people’s true motivations. Instead of being an easy mark, you become a dangerous ally for accompanying others through their rites of passage. Rage and terror shift from being overwhelming or repulsive to being simply underworld feelings, fuel for staying alert and creating clarity and possibility. Through integrating Archetypal dimensions, you become more whole and more real. Finally, you understand what it means to be growing up.

  Time to Seriously Collaborate

  It has never been more important that people in the service of expanding consciousness work together as one team. This means simply ignoring all the typical boundaries that we might imagine separate one lineage or style of consciousness-expanding work from another. It does not matter what kind of Buddhist you call yourself. It does not matter what level Aikido practitioner you are. It does not matter what therapeutic tradition you come from. We can no longer afford to bicker over such superficial differences. If you are involved in expanding the Box, we are all on one team. We are all serving the same Bright Principles. It is time to seriously collaborate.

  Creating a protected knowledge center that can serve as an “ark” certainly has value, but the fight has not yet been lost. It is not yet time to go underground and become invisible. Coordinated action is needed to experiment with alternative forms of culture, education, family, energy, government, city design, transportation, spirituality, society, financial exchange, management, entertainment, ritual, technology, meetings, and economic development. (See J. F. Rischard’s brilliant book High Noon: Twenty Global Problems, Twenty Years to Solve Them.) Experimentation depends on you experimenting. It only happens if you lead it to happen.

  The more reality that can be brought to implementing alternatives before they are desperately needed, the easier the transitions to using them will be. The need for experimenting is now. No, it is not easy to experiment now. Yes, you will be maximally challenged while implementing what you see is possible when others do not yet see similarly. Discovery always brings disorientation. But, if you do not try to bring what you know to be possible into existence now, who will? If you have clarity and the ability to take real actions and try things out, it is probably a job on your workbench. Change manifests one individual at a time, one day at a time, one small action at a time. Every little effort helps to cut new forms of consciousness that act as seed crystals and establish resonance for others who can tune in and follow. This is not a time for hesitation or hiding out. We have work to do, and this work needs to be done together.

  Owning your underworld does not mean that anything horrible must happen to you. By taking responsibility for your underworld you simply gain a freedom of choice that you d
id not have before. You get a choice about whether or not to enact behaviors which were previously automatic – like creating resentments, bearing grudges, or imagining revenge. You gain the choice of not underworld. You see the possibility of navigating to someplace else. Through discovering and integrating your underworld’s tricks, strategies and hidden purposes, your underworld stabilizes into a foundation that you can stand on. When the underworld no longer undermines you, the gates of heaven open. You have heard the legends.

  Owning your underworld can never be completed or perfected. Just like the upper-world and middleworld, the underworld is vast and complex. Neither is it wise to live in your underworld. The underworld is like a giant garbage dumpster. You have the dumpster. You use the dumpster. But life is not about living in the dumpster. This is how you own your underworld. You take possession of it and use it as necessary.

  You gain functionality in your underworld the same way that you would become adept in navigating and working in any other new land. You repeatedly enter the territory with caution and attention to learn as much as you can, and then you come back. You go in, get the treasure, and get out.

  What we are speaking about here is the classic hero’s journey. Enter the Shadowlands, capture the golden key, pick up the magic wand, collect the dragon’s tooth, snatch the bag of jewels, slide the power sword into your belt, memorize the book of secret knowledge, rescue the beautiful maiden and then get the hell out of there. This is how you come to know your underworld. You walk right into the unknown and try some things. Use what is useful. Learn as much as you can, and then return to the middleworld. The hero’s journey into the underworld is part of your Archetypal rite of passage into adult responsibility.

  In each voyage into your underworld you reclaim one of the treasures. Each treasure is actually a part of yourself that you long ago hid away, to disempower yourself, so that you could survive by not being a threat to your environment. You reclaim each treasure by taking it back from where you hid it from yourself. Going into the underworld is a search, a treasure hunt. You can enter the underworld with a prayer, as E. J. Gold puts it: “I do not know what I am looking for. I do know that I am looking for something. I only hope that I will recognize it when I find it.”

  Owning your underworld still lies ahead of you, until you have engaged it to the level that it becomes part of your daily life experience. Once you have consciously entered and exited your underworld a number of times, your relationship to it changes. You start to know where you are by the smell of the experience. You start filling in the underworld blanks in the Map of the Great Labyrinth of Spaces. You start detecting your own motives and the motivations of others, so you know where they come from and where they will lead you.

  You are less naïve because you have met your own King or Queen of the underworld face on – your Gremlin. You have seen him or her in action with full, horrifying, conscious clarity, and you know that in each action you take and each word that you speak, either you own Gremlin or Gremlin owns you. The Archetypal battle has begun within you, and you have learned by experience that there is no compromise with Gremlin. Changing your relationship to your underworld is big work, the utmost challenge, requiring every personal resource you can muster.

  What could you expect to find in the underworld? Lots of stored up feelings, to begin with. Unexpressed rage, grief, terror and ecstatic joy. The feelings are locked away in your body. When you enter the underworld your automatic mechanisms of denial and self-deceit come to a screeching halt. You stop pretending. You stop being nice. The game is up. You are suddenly and only exactly where you are.

  Being exactly where you are can be of great importance and practical use, if you know what to do with an almost unlimited supply of irresponsible rage, fear, sadness and joy… What rage? Consider this. Mostly without knowing it, women carry rage laced into their tissues and cells from 6000 years of torture, injustice, disrespect, abandonment, betrayal and intentional destruction of the dignity of Woman by the patriarchy. When a woman enters her underworld she begins to feel a white-hot rage in her like she never imagined could exist. She feels the rage of her mother, of her sisters, of her friends, of the unnamed women she sees on the street, the women sitting in back offices not yet feeling their own rage. She feels the rage of the millions of women who suffer at the hands of men, women who have died in the death camps of the men’s wars. The ancient rage of women runs deep. It is enormous.

  Men too have been minimized by the patriarchy. Men’s rage has an equivalent depth and size. The underworld is there inside of us even if we do not know it is there. The irresponsible rage, terror, grief, and joy of the underworld are to be consciously experienced and expressed. If we do not own our underworld, if we do not transform and use the energy of our feelings consciously to serve our Bright Principles, then our feelings will come out sideways, and we will keep unconsciously hurting the people closest to us.

  Not knowing what to do with so much uncivilized energy is what keeps most of us away from discovering our deep Masculine and Feminine Archetypal structures. The way that you avoid feeling your feelings is by evading the present. But evading the present has a severe side effect: it permanently blocks you from accessing the Adult ego state. Without direct immediate access to the Adult ego state, you haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of creating extraordinary human relationship, let alone anything Archetypal.

  From the civilized perspective, an underworld full of unexpressed feelings could only be a serious liability, one to be avoided in the extreme. Looking at the same scenario from a different perspective reveals that what at first appears to be the problem is, in fact, the solution. Having explosive resources hidden away in your underworld is not a design error from God. These resources contain the exact quality of intelligence and quantity of energy required to meet the challenges of bringing your destiny to fruition. The question is, how to change the lead into gold? The answer is stellating.

  Stellating Your Archetypes

  The word “stellating” means to change from a planet into a star (also see Section 5-E). The difference between planets and stars is that planets, like Earth, absorb more energy than they radiate. Stars, like the sun, radiate more energy than they absorb.

  The planet and star difference is analogous to human beings. Human beings are trained to live as planets. You are taught to consume as many resources as you can afford, absorb knowledge from what is already known, imitate styles, critically judge if things are good or bad or if they meet your preferences and match your expectations or not, complain if things do not make you comfortable, follow whoever is leading you, and pretend that you are satisfied.

  MAP OF STELLATING ARCHETYPES

  CHANGING FROM A PLANET INTO A STAR

  PLANET:

  Consuming Absorbing Copying Criticizing Judging Complaining Following Pretending

  STAR:

  Producing Creating Appreciating Leading Exploring Experimenting Declaring Generating Causing Discovering Planets absorb more energy than they radiate. Stars radiate more energy than they absorb. Human beings are trained to live as planets, but we are designed to live as stars.

  STELLATING:

  Stellating is the initiatory process of changing from a planet into a star. This process done safely and sustainably involves deep emotional work over a minimum of two years. Each of the four feelings stellates into one of the four Archetypal structures. The result of stellating is living in service of your destiny Principles.

  Although you have been trained to live as a planet, human beings are designed to live as stars. You are designed to produce more than enough resources for yourself and your game-worlds – your associations of two or more people gathered to enliven your Bright Principles. You are designed to generate more than enough intelligence, love, creativity, inspiration, money, energy, time and collaboration to bring your projects, your family, and your work abundantly to fruition. You are designed to create options whenever you run out of the options that you fi
nd, to appreciate the subtle details of four-body experiential reality – reality previous to words – so that you can lead anyone interested to join you in exploring new territory. You are designed to do Edgework experiments, draw new thought-maps, encounter new experiences and bring back whatever you find to share with your people.

  Stellating involves progressively expanding your Box through examining your Box’s present set of maps, while at the same time being exposed to upgraded maps that offer greater clarity and possibility. Taking on new maps changes the shape of your Box. Each change of shape requires your Box to go through the liquid state and involves deep emotional work – with anger, sadness, fear or joy. Stellating done safely and sustainably will mean taking a serious step, like being in a transformational training environment for several days in a row, once every three months or so, for a couple of years, at least. Such a program is already recognized as an effective method for sustainable professional development, for example, in the system of Continuing Education Units (CEUs). The result of stellating is not guaranteed happiness, wealth, health or enlightenment. The result of stellating is having the dignity of living your life in the service of your destiny Principles.

  That was the “stellating” part. What about the “Archetypes” part? For clarity’s sake it can be useful to remember that the context in this book is not a psychology context; it is a possibility context. Over the thirty years in which I have been doing empirical experimenting, I have helped teams of adventurous people to repeatedly come into direct contact with the Archetypal source of possibility. This contact is what has produced the language of Possibility Management. In the context of possibility, the question, “What is possible right now?” turns out to be of utmost interest. In the radical responsibility that characterizes Archetypal domains, the answers to this question come from your Archetypes, which surprisingly are not available automatically. Associated with each of your four basic feelings is an Archetypal character that is hardwired into your body and ready to “turn on” at about the age of fifteen years. You have access to your Archetypal resources only after you “initialize” them through a rite of passage that stellates your four feelings. Anger stellates the doer or maker, which is the Archetypal Warrior or Warrioress. Sadness stellates the communicator, which is the classical Lover Archetype. Fear stellates the creator, which is the Archetypal Magician or Sorceress. And joy stellates the Archetypal King as Man and the Archetypal Queen as Woman.