Stage 1: The ground shifts under you, you fall into the crack between worlds, shattering the mythology that grounds you. You strive for leverage in the fissures, but the Earth keeps stirring beneath you. In the midst of this physical crisis, an emotional bottom falls out from under you, forcing you to confront your fear of others breaching the emotional walls you've built around yourself. If you don't work through your fear, playing it safe could bury you. Your relationship to the world is irrevocably changed: you're aware of your vulnerability, wary of men, and no longer trust the universe. This event pulled the linchpin that held your story together and you cast your mind to find a symbol to represent this dislocation. Coyolxauhqui is your symbol for both the process of emotional physical dismemberment, splitting body/mind/spirit/soul, and the creative work of putting all the pieces together in a new form, a partially unconscious work done in the night by the light of the moon, a labor of re-visioning and re-membering. Find the scattered, missing parts of yourself and put them back together. Every arrebato rips you from your familiar "home" casting you out of your personal Eden, showing you something is lacking. Your world turns upside down and cracks the walls of your reality, resulting in a great sense of loss, grief and emptiness, leaving behind dreams, hopes, and goals. You are no longer who you used to be. As you move from past presuppositions and frames of reference, letting go of former positions, you feel like an orphan, abandoned by all that's familiar. Exposed, naked, disoriented, wounded, uncertain, confused, and conflicted, you're forced to live en la orilla--a razor sharp edge that fragments you. When two or more opposing accounts, perspectives, or belief systems appear side by side or intertwined, a kind of double or multiple "seeing" results, forcing you into continuous dialectical encounters with these different stories, situations, and poeple. Trying to understand these convergences compels you to critique your own perspective and assumptions. It leads to re-interpreting the story you imagined yourself living, bringing it to a dramatic end and initiating one of turmoil, being swallowed by your fears, and passing through a threshold. Seeing through your culture separates you from the herd, exiles you from the tribe, wounds you psychologically and spiritually. Cada arrebatamiento is an awakening that causes you to question who you are, what the world is about. The urgency to know what yoou're experiencing awakens la facultad, the ability to shift attention and see through the surface of things and situations. With each arrebatamiento you suffer un "susto" a shock that knocks one of your souls out of your body, causing estrangement. With the loss of the familiar and the unknown ahead, you struggle to regain your balance, reintegrate yourself (put Coyolxahqui together) and repair the damage. You must, like the shaman, find a way to call your spirit home. Every paroxysm has the potential of initiating you to something new, giving you a chance to reconstruct yourself, forcing you to rework your description of self, world and your plat in it (reality). Ask Spirit for increased awareness. Honor what has ended, say goodbye to the old way of being, commit yourself to look for the "something new" and picture yourself embracing this new life.
Stage 2 (Nepantla): You are catapulted into nepantla as you are jerked from your familiar and safe terrain. In this liminal, transitional space, suspended between shifts, you are two people, split between before and after. Nepantla, where the outer boundaries of the mind's inner life meet the outer world of reality, is a zone of possibility. you experience reality as fluid, expanding and contracting. In nepantla you are exposed, open to other perspectives, more readily able to access knowledge derived from inner feelings, imaginal states, and outer events, and to "see through" them with a mindful, holistic awareness. Seeing through human acts both individual and collective allows you to examine the ways you construct knowledge, identity, and reality, and explore how some of your/other's constructions violate other people's ways of knowing and living.
Stage 3: When overwhelmed by the chaos caused by living between stories, you break down, descend into the third space, the Coatlicue depths of despair, self-loathing, and hopelessness. Dysfunctional for weeks, the refusal to move paralyzes you.
Stage 4: A call to action pulls you out of your depression. You break free from your habitual coping strategies of escaping from realities you're reluctant to face, reconnect with spirit, and undergo a conversion.
Stage 5: Your desire for order and meaning prompts you to track the ongoing cirumstances of your life, to sift, sort, and symbolize your experiences and try to arrange them into a pattern and story that speak to your reality. You scan your inner landscape, books, movies, philosphies, mythologies, and the modern sciences for bits of lore you can patch together to create a new narrative articulating your personal reality. You scrutinize and question dominant and ethnic ideologies and the mind-sets your cultures induce in others. And putting all the pieces together, you reenvision the map of the known world, creating a new description of reality and scripting a new story.
Stage 6: You take your story out into the world, testing it. When you or the world fail to live up to your ideals, your edifice collapses, like a house of cards, casting you into conflict with self and others in a war between realities. Disappointed with self and others, angry and then terrified at the depth of your anger, you swallow your emotions, hold them in. Blocked from your own power, you're unable to activate the inner resources that could mobilize you.
Stage 7: The critical turning point of transformation, you shift realities, develop an ethical, compassionate strategy with which to negotiate conflict and difference within self and between others, and find common ground by forming holistic alliances. You include these practices in your daily life, act on your vision--enacting spiritual activism.
The first four stages of conocimiento illustrate the four directions (south, west, north, east), the next, below and above, and the seventh, the center. They symbolize the seven chakras of the energetic, dreambody, spirit body (counterpart of the physical body), the seven planes of reality the stages of alchemical process, and the four elements: air, fire, water, and earth. In all seven spaces you struggle with the shadow, the unwanted aspects of the self. Together, the seven stages open the senses and enlarge the breadth of depth of consciousness, causing internal shifts and external changes. All seven are present within each stage, and they occur concurrently, chronologically or not. Zizagging from ignorance (desconocimiento) to awareness (conocimiento) in a day's time you may go through all seven stages, though you may dwell in one for months. You're never only in one space, but partially in one, partially in another, with nepantla occuring most often--as its own space and as the transition between each of the others. Together, these stations constitude a mediation on the rites of passage, the transitions of life from birth to death, and all the daily births and deaths in between. Bits of your self die and are reborn in each step.
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