One central way next cultures achieve that objective is through centering the culture around ongoing adulthood-initiatory processes in which both women and men have their assemblage points detached from the mother and welded to their own center of being. This makes each individual unconditionally responsible for literally everything, giving them no chance to export authority to Senators or Representatives in Washington or even Mayors downtown.
Clearly, re-orienting to the condition of radical responsibility requires upgrading to new thoughtware. The thoughtware running in modern culture came from our parents before we went to school. This is because modern education provides information to think about. In comparison, next-culture education provides distinctions and thoughtmaps to think with. Running thoughtware from your parents, which they downloaded from their parents, etc., means you are running thoughtware that has been handed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. This, my friend, is very outdated thoughtware.
Next culture's ongoing initiatory processes involve carefully timed shocks of pressure and vacuum, plus connection to a wide range of energetic resources. Some initiations are designed to turn on internal capacities that have been lying dormant, as if still wrapped in their original cocoon, unhatched. Other initiations build out and stabilize one at a time your four bodies (physical, intellectual, emotional, and energetic) expanding your capacity for relationship, communication, healing, intimacy, creation, harmony with the world, serving your destiny, and your ability to safely journey in upper, middle, and under worlds.
At this point I invite you to make an edgework experiment. The experiment is this:
think about what it would be like to decide to place at the center of your life the path of ongoing adulthood-initiatory processes. What would it be like if you took your intentions
seriously and put what mattered most to you first?
There cannot be a standardized sequence for initiatory processes because each person is unique. Authenticity is not standardizeable. Each initiation unfolds and strengthens individual talents and knacks. The idea is to ignite each person's unquenchable inspiration for providing their beneficial contributions to humanity.
Your
journey is hindered before you even begin because modern culture does not contain
the thoughtware for understanding the necessity of being initiated. Therefore
part of your edgework is to gain that clarity by studying reports from other
edgeworkers. For starters try reading Robert Wolff's Original Wisdom, William Glasser's Choice Theory, Robert Fritz' Creating,
Joseph Chilton Pearce's From Magical
Child to Magical Teen, Malidoma Patrice Somà �'s Of Water and the Spirit, Martin Prechtel's Secrets of the Talking Jaguar and Long Life Honey In The Heart, James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games, Lyall Watson's Gifts of Unknown Things and Lightening Bird, Clinton Callahan's Radiant Joy Brilliant Love and Directing
The Power Of Conscious Feelings, Brad Blanton's Radical Honesty, and Red Hawk's Self
Observation. Put these books on your bedside table and watch the universe change before your eyes.
Because initiation
work involves upgrading ways that you think, feel, act, and are, it is deceptive
to think that you can navigate your initiatory processes for yourself by
yourself. What I just said goes against the ingrained Western attitude of "I can do it myself." But wouldn't some part of you doubt the validity of someone telling you they initiated themselves? That would be like trying to midwife your own birth.
The suggestion
is to establish connections with experienced facilitators. Start checking them out. But keep in mind that if you are not guided by
someone who comes from where you want to go then your perspectives come from
the place you are leaving and you might not get very far, or go along very safely, like driving your car by looking into the
rear-view mirror.
A guide is someone more experienced and further advanced in their rites of passage than you are, and, who is responsible enough, clear-heade d enough, and clear-hearted enough to serve as a guide.
Since initiation work is not sponsored by modern culture your guide will need to be someone with access to a context beyond modern culture's thought horizon. You will not necessarily be able to see what they see because appropriate actions may at first seem contradictory. However, this does not mean that you should commit to the first Tantric-Shaolin Kabalistic-American-Indian Tibetan-Buddhist Psychic-Sufi-Shaman-Drummer Hawaiian-Kundalini-Priest-Healer from Africa who comes along. But it does mean to consider taking what may seem like a risk. Both safety and comfort are illusions. Safety is an illusion because you will die. Comfort is an illusion because you are not dead yet.
The reason
I can encourage you to begin initiatory work now even if you are not currently collaborating
with a guide has to do with the law of
precession. This law says that as soon as you start making authentic
efforts towards a committed goal, the universe provides sideways coincidences
to make your efforts more productive in the big picture -- including providing
a suitable guide when one is truly needed. If you trust the universe, then if you are not presently working with a guide, you do not need one. On the other hand, your modern culture thoughtware may be blocking you from connecting with a guide whose flyer is already sitting on your desk.
In my
experience you can place radical reliance and lean heavily on the intelligence
behind the seeming random order of your ongoing initiatory processes. The
universe so often supports us in our efforts towards conscious evolution because it seems to appreciate the responsible adult men and women with whom it can creatively
engage. I think you've had the experience: when you get in the flow of things, the flow does most of the work connecting you with your next coincidence.
It is then you may recognize that your further steps could be somehow bound up with guiding initiatory processes for others.
If so, you have just entered a definitely interesting gameworld.
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