The Results of Recapitulation?! The Oncoming Leap
posted by Benjamin Bongstein | September 1, 2010
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IcerocketOne of the things I hate most about going home is running into people from high school. I'm still in college and I feel I've come a long way from where I had been back then. So when I run into people from that time, people who I haven't maintained touch with, I sometimes revert to this awful shadow of myself. In essence, it makes me feel nervous and uncomfortable.
Then I learned about recapitulation this summer. I studied the technique, read the books its came from, and then developed my own practice of doing it. I'd call it a knack one develops to see through the bullshit conditioning of our past experiences. And let them go.
I spent the summer doing that as best I could. I feel that I'm about to step onto a path--a path of mercurial waters that might rise in a tsunami to sweep me off to distant worlds.
So before I take that step, I need to be whole and ready. Recapitulation is me killing the learned parts of my personality. I'm learning how my behavior has come to be the way it is now, what molded it, and how to move beyond that. Or rather let it fall away and instead dwell spontaneously self-created in the moment.
Hindu natha yogis call it svecchachara, Castaneda called it 'erasing personal history' and 'losing self-importance'. The best descriptions also included the phrases 'controlled folly' and 'controlled abandonment'.
Only perfect mastery of this state prepares you for the jump into the abyss. I found the hole and I have to be ready to jump by friday. Wish me luck.
Comments
Wishing you...
— Sep 01, 2010
LUCK! :)
And re. "see through the bullshit conditioning of our past experiences. And let them go.", perhaps read:
http://spiritualadventures.blogspot.com/2010/08/allow-be-intend.html
http://spiritualadventures.blogspot.com/2010/09/dissolving.html
http://spiritualadventures.blogspot.com/2010/09/old-game-new-game-whatev...
BL!SS!NGS,
Seeds
— Sep 02, 2010
The best way to plant a seed is in the fresh soil of our own waste released and renewed by the earth. That which springs from it will be stronger and more resilliant. Recapitulation is also about finally being free to choose what you want to keep (refreshed now) as much as letting go of what no longer serves. Otherwise it can lead to obession and nihilism.... Oh the folly of it all! Good Luck.
Being in Freedom
Yeah I'm just discarding
— Sep 02, 2010
Yeah I'm just discarding what's unnecessary. Stalker style! :P
Recapitulation???
— Sep 02, 2010
I am not sure exactly what this is... but I am having a similar situation as I try to re-integrate with america. I did find a job washing dishes at a local vegan restarant though my friends of years ago seem so odd and distant to me. We meet, know each other, and some even flow with who I am now, but it often ends in a strange manner. Being away traveling and even more meditating as much as I do and did, I have almost no attachment to my earlier life. This country is like an unusual dream that I often wonder will I awaken to it again? Maybe my journey in the east was a recapitulation of here?
The dark is the only place to see the light.
Everyone has their own
— Sep 02, 2010
Everyone has their own fears, hopes, desires, etc. All of these things come from past experiences in their life that condition them to be a certain way. Teachers, parents, counterculturalist books, anything. Recapitulation is going over your life in minute detail, finding the moments where you absorbed these habits/imprints and letting them go to regain your own energy. If this idea scares you, then you need it desperately.
You come from an eastern practice background like me, so you've done something similar to this with your meditative practices and whatnot. But doing it directly, purposely, knowing what you are doing always helps.
Friday?
— Sep 02, 2010
What are you pushing the time-line for? And what book or books are you referring to?
Recapitulation
1: a concise summary
2: the hypothetical occurrence in an individual organism's development of successive stages resembling the series of ancestral types from which it has descended so that the ontogeny of the individual retraces the phylogeny of its group
3: the third section of a sonata form
I'm gonna go with 2, but now I have to look up phylogeny. lol
Phylogeny
1: the evolutionary history of a kind of organism
2: the evolution of a genetically related group of organisms as distinguished from the development of the individual organism
3: the history or course of the development of something (as a word or custom)
I suppose this comes down to me in the abstract form of entropy in dealing with my own habits.
Entropy
1. Symbol S For a closed thermodynamic system, a quantitative measure of the amount of thermal energy not available to do work.
2. A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.
3. A measure of the loss of information in a transmitted message.
4. The tendency for all matter and energy in the universe to evolve toward a state of inert uniformity.
5. Inevitable and steady deterioration of a system or society.
"Seek not abroad, turn back into thyself, for in the inner man dwells the truth..."
Recapitulation from
— Sep 02, 2010
Recapitulation from Castaneda's works.
I'm leaving friday from home to go back to college. The place I found for the jump out of this world is here at home. So I was given a natural timeline to work with.
Some of my previous blog entries talk about recapitulation, if you feel like browsing. :)
recapitulation does miracles
— Sep 03, 2010
I was even recapitulating in the middle of a situation in my home country Sweden when I was there on vacation. A meeting brought back weird memories which caused an awkward situation, so I went off by myself for a moment and recapitulated the old situation. When I came back, all the weirdness was gone and the person I met and I had a really good time =)
with Love!
S
on life and living
I accept that the answer to the question “who am I?” is eternal
