Ritual of Undoing
Ritual of Death-Rebirth Process (Ritual Suicide)
The purpose of the Ritual of Undoing is to drastically accelerate the process of eliminating obstacles preventing you from living your right and proper life thus expanding your capacity to live open as the love that you already are.
This... is your right and proper life.
Open, Stage 3, moment by moment living your life as an offering.
The Obstacle to a Right and Proper Life? Fear*.
Fear
I’m suggesting that enlightenment is but a swan dive into the abyss of no self.
“Fear of the hollow core. Fear of the black hole within. Fear of non-being. Fear of no-self. The fear of no-self is the mother of all fears, the one upon which all others are based. No fear is so small or petty that the fear of no-self isn't at it’s heart. All fear is ultimately fear of no-self.”
Fear, regardless of what face it wears is the engine that drives humans as individuals and humanity as a species.
“The one core disease from which all others radiate: Fear. Fear is the natural and certain state of one who lives with eyes closed in the segregated state of human childhood. Ignorance is the condition of thinking one’s closed eyes are open and that the world of one’s imagining is the world as it exists.”
The Ritual of Undoing is a swan dive into FEAR. The core fear being identified as NO SELF.
*A supporting document/book, inspired by the work in the Alpha Tribe, is being written as we speak. It is tentatively called the Fear Document.
Liberation Men
This offering, along with the Rings of Chaos, is designed to help us all increase our personal capacity to allow the universe to shine through us, and then to share that capacity with each other.
We simply seek liberation to give more fully what we are supposed to give.
The Prism of Self
Now no matter how much you work at gaining wisdom, knowledge, skills and power… You will find you have a limit to how much you can allow to flow through you. A good way to picture this is picture a prism. Light shines through the prism and diffracts into a rainbow of colors on the other side. Now imagine if your prism is dirty. Mucked up and grimy. And what I’m really talking about here are the grimes of self, primarily fears and ego, which is saying the same thing.
Enlightenment
What is enlightenment but having a perfectly clear prism through which the universal light flows and expands without flaw, distortion or confusion? I found someone who put it this way, and I think it’s pretty accurate:
“But ultimately, Enlightenment is understanding your true nature. It’s the realization that you are not a separate ego, you are the eternal, unbounded energy of the universe.”
Are we seeking full Enlightenment here? Maybe, but don’t get caught up on the terminology. You are simply entering into an advanced meltdown period of personal destruction to liberate yourself from yourself so that you can increase your capacity to serve.
How do we become ‘Enlightened?’
Below is a list of methods by which you can clear your prism of self:
· Meditation
· Prayer
· Chanting
· Yoga
· Martial Arts
· Fasting
· Sweat Lodges / Physical Distress / Ordeals
· Dancing / Quaking / Shaking
· Pilgrimages
· Sensory Deprivation
· Near Death Experience
· Depression / Despair
· Self Flagellation
· Psychedelics
· Spontaneous Enlightenment
These methods are but shadows of the real progress that can be made through the use of the Ritual of Undoing. The above methods can give you a piece here, a piece there, and take years and years. This process below is a pressure cooker high risk high reward dive into destruction, a true death and rebirth process.
Ritual for Undoing – Movement from Stage II living to Stage III Living – Human Adulthood Integrated State
The Ritual of Undoing will drastically clean the prism. It is a high colonic for the soul. A true purging, where you actually PURGE yourself.
Bhagavad Gita
At this time as you start to consider this process of purging layers of self, taking a knife and peeling your skin off layer by layer, you’ll want to get a little familiar with the Bhagavad Gita, an epic piece of Hindu scripture. In it our hero (who is YOU) Arjuna is asked to start a war. Arjuna falls down. He does not start the war.
And what you’ll want to do is focus a bit on why he falls down.
The process of cutting our fears away is fairly simple when we think of all the bad things fear represent. Fear of stepping up into our power as men, fear of losing the people we love, fear of being rejected etc. Fear of death! All crippling fears that serve nothing.
But the Ritual of Undoing will reveal a totally different side of fear.
The Ritual of Undoing will reveal that the connections we have with the things and people we value the most as good, (our loved ones, our families, our woman, our children) are mostly based on fear and get in the way of our greatness.
That’s a hard thing to swallow, and it’s the hardest part of this whole process.
Trace it all back far enough, and you’ll find that fear underlies everything in the human ego shell. The great horror is that even love (as primitively defined by Humans) is nothing more than an attempt by fear to hold onto something that can’t be he held onto.
We ARE fear. Fear IS us. Our doing as a separate entity is FEAR BASED.
Solo Journey
Any kind of suicidal process where you set aside all your teachers, all your learning, and draw a line in the sand and say this is it… no further until I get clear… is by nature a very solo journey.
And that’s where Arjuana’s story becomes useful to us. When faced with the war, he wasn’t afraid of fighting. What he saw that stopped him, that caused him to fall down, was his own kin and family on the other side. What he really saw… was his own heart. And his heart… was the enemy.
To truly clean this prism I’m talking about, you have to clear the heart as well.
And you’ll have to set aside everything. Your teachers, your gurus, your friends, your family. All of them have to go. You are alone. This is your journey. You can’t take them with you and if you try they will only trip you up and slow you down. They must be jettisoned as the distractions they are.
In the Bhagavad Gita the Lord comes to Arjuna and helps him, and in your rituals, you will have the Lord come to you as well. I’m not talking necessarily about Krishna, I’m talking about the universe, AS the LORD, in any guise necessary to help you stand up and launch YOUR war.
The Matrix
Now would be a good time to mention a profound and underrated scene in the movie The Matrix. Neo has previously left the Matrix, (waking up in the Goo Pod), but in this scene he has come back into it with Morpheus, Trinty, and the others. As he’s being driven along he sees a restaurant that he used to visit. He points to it and says, “I used to eat there. They had good noodles.”
This is profound because it illustrates everything that you should be aware of. He’s not just talking noodles. He’s saying his ENTIRE LIFE… was a dream. His parents, his job, his childhood… his friends, family, loved ones…all a dream. Even his daily habitual favorite foods. All meaningless. All a fiction.
This is tough stuff.
You’ve moved beyond everyone else in the world.
You’ve moved beyond all your teachers, gurus, you’ve moved beyond the Pope, the Dalai Lama, etc. You are completely on your own. You’ve left them all behind. You are about to undertake a journey few ever take. Like Moses or Jesus out in the wilderness, or Buddha leaving everything behind to figure it all out for himself.
It doesn’t matter how smart you are. The only thing that determines success is your purity of intent to stop living a lie. It doesn’t matter what you know, this is a process of unknowing. All the spiritual wisdom of all your favorite lineages and teachers and traditions is garbage in this process. It won’t help you at all. It will only weigh you down and put you back to sleep like Cypher in the Matrix.
You’ve entered the cauldron of your own ritual. You are utterly alone. And the world is just ONE. It’s all one. And everything in your life, including your loved ones and yourself, are revealed to be characters on a screen. Cartoons. Pixels.
So why take such a journey?
What does this Ritual of Undoing do for me??? Really? Why do it? See if the words below resonate with you:
Well… the situation is you don’t know shit and you are going to die and all this endless science and philosophy and religion and spiritually is the very muck in which you are drowning.
· You don’t care about the fucking future.
· You don’t want to be happy, radiant or blissful.
· You just want to stop being a fucking schmuck.
· You could be dead before you finish reading this, and you do NOT want to die as some baffled fucking cow.
· You want to stop sleepwalking and tear your eyes and your heart open. See what you REALLY ARE.
· You are stuck in a coma but you CAN wake up. You might not… but YOU know it’s possible.
So you have a decision: Do you want to do this Ritual of Undoing, and UNDO all of yourself, so you can DO as the universe… or just live out your days in a bovine stupor?
It’s time to draw a line and take the NEXT step.
And the painful journey of scraping yourself off the lens simply allows you to accept what really is true, and it allows the light of the universe to shine through you freely.
“This is an abominably difficult path to tread. It means stepping outside one’s own culture, society, relationships, family, personality, beliefs, prejudices, opinions, and ideas. It is just these comforting CHAINS which seem to give definition, meaning, character, and a sense of belonging to most people.”
-Peter J. Carroll
Turning Back
You might look at the deepest loves of your life and realize they are illusions, and that might be too much. You might say fuck that and turn back. Nothing wrong with that.
Pressing Onward
But you might accept nothing is real, and everything is meaningless, and you are just a void at your center, and… you might THEN choose to love anyway, and give them your gift as an actor on the screen gives a performance for art’s sake. Yes, you might lose your family, your children, your lover. It’s a real possibility. Your own loved ones might be nothing more to you than a candle in the wind.
You will die. But the Universe will be there.
Consider this quote from the Bible:
“I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
Drop the religious connotations and you get the spirit what this journey entails.
Preliminary Work
It goes without saying but I’ll say it anyway:
Water
Breath
Sleep
Walking
Drink more water than you ever thought you needed. One Gallon a day is about good for most people. Breathe. Do breathing if you don’t already, and all that goes with it. Openness of the body posture and muscles, openness of the heart, feeling out, openness of the spirit, feeling the oneness out and out and out. These are basic support works that will sustain you. Sleep as much as you can during the time you are engaged in this work. Sometimes this work will rob you of your sleep, or you will sleep odd hours. And walk. There is something powerful about walking in nature. You are moving your body, recharged by nature, and slaying demons in your head. It’s a great combination. Do it as often as possible.
Quit your Job – Leave your Family
If you can quit your job and leave your family for a while do it. Take a break from your men's groups, therapy sessions, growth work. You have no one to report to except yourself. I’m not joking. Get away as much as possible. It’s not often easy to do these things, but get as much space as you can. Obviously this isn't feasible for everyone.
Get a Notebook or a Journal
You’ll need it for the process after the ritual. Preferably get one where the paper can be pulled out easily.
Pray for Purity of Intent
In whatever way you pray, manifest, or express desires to the universe, ask for PURITY OF INTENT. That’s the secret. You can do ANYTHING with purity of intent. I know this. The process of Undoing is going to eliminate the IMPURITY inside you. So this prayer is the supporting the ritual and process. They work hand in hand. Put as much emotion as you can behind this prayer. The Prayed could be seen as the emotional component of your expression of desire.
Witnessing
Everyone on this list is well prepared in the concept of witnessing, setting aside and seeing yourself from the outside. This is a topic worth discussing in depth, but I’ll assume you have a good hand on it, and leave it at that. The bottom line is you’ll need to utilize the skill of stepping back from yourself and observing yourself in this process.
Severance
In the Men’s group we've discussed Severance: the need to cut away the distractions. We’ll, in our ritual we are going to demonstration to the universe, through a specific action, our intent. And this is how consciousness will be expressed here.
So… gather together all of your New Age prized possessions. Have a favorite author with a well worn book? Get that. Maybe a bible? Definitely. A beloved painting of peace and love? A poem? A special rock you found somewhere that has meaning. Pictures of loved one? A family heirloom?
Anything that represents your deep connection to life. Gather whatever you think is useful together.
Wood & Gas
This ritual is best done outside. You’ll want some wood for a big ass bonfire.
Clothing
You’ll want clothing you don’t mind destroying. You’ll want extra clothing to get home in if you happen to live through the ritual.
A Temple
You’ll want a specific place to do this Ritual in. The preferable place to do it is OUTSIDE… it really needs to be outside and at night. The trouble it takes to do this is totally worth it.
The key here is to create a consecrated space with which to work. Here are some ideas:
1. Choose your place ahead of time.
2. Spend some time in the place meditating FEELING what the space needs.
3. Clear the space, with smudge sticks, smoke, incense, kill a chicken for a symbol of ritual sacrifice, whatever you feel is necessary.
4. Prepare the space with your supplies.
Statement of Intent
Write out a one sentence statement of intent for the ritual. The statement should be short and to the point. You are already skilled in how to do this. It should capture your desire to ‘grow up’ and to ‘shed layers’ of yourself, and to ‘integrate’ with the universe. "My intent is to grow the fuck up no matter what."
Write this out on a piece of paper with as much effort as you can. Stylize it, put effort into making it look like a true offering. This will strengthen the power of the intent.
Memorize it.
Music and Incense
You might want to spend some time finding the right music for this ceremony. I use a lot of music in my rituals. This one calls for a deep rhythmic drumming type of music. Getting your music out into the wilderness might be difficult due to power needs, and silence is certainly acceptable. You can always bring your own drums.
If you have any scents you want that represent your desire, bring them. Bitter acrid scents would do well in a ritual where you are telling the universe you want to grow up NO MATTER WHAT. This is an act of destruction.
Ritual of Undoing
"He knows himself, and all that’s in him, who knows adversity. To scale great heights, we must come out of lowermost depths. The way to heaven is through hell. We need fiery baptisms in the fiercest flames of our own bosoms. We must feel our hearts hot- hissing in us. And ere their fire is revealed, it must burn its way out of us, though it consume us and itself.
-Herman Melville
Centering
Once you have arrived at the Temple in the Wilderness, sit or stand in a posture you feel serves the moment of undoing. Center yourself with breath, posture, and meditation. Take as long as want on this stage. Get quiet, calm, deep. Feel into the void of your center. Bring all you got to this quieting calming stage. You are attempting to achieve a perfect inner silence, touching the void.
After that, check in with your body. The Inner Smile Taoist technique is interesting, as are the Six Healing Sounds, where you simple check in with your entire body, bones, feet, kidneys, liver, eyes, tongue, etc.
Start the Fire
When you feel centered, start your fire. Throw in any incense if you are using it.
Draw a Circle
When the fire is going draw a circle around your fire in the dirt or sand. Use a burnt piece of wood if you can so there is some charcoal in the circle. You can also use chalk if you want, or just draw a line in the sand with your heel.
This is your line in the sand. This is you saying to the universe: I put it all on the line. I either die here, or I wake the fuck up.
Call in your Guardians: If you have any sacred animals, angels, totems, etc, and you want to call them, certainly do that now. They will help you achieve your aim.
This circle should be big enough to hold all your stuff. If you have sacred items, music, incense, all equipment needs to be inside the circle.
NOTE: Your extra clothes need to be OUTSIDE the circle.
Burn your Statement of Intent.
Place your well crafted parchment piece of paper with your Statement of Intent on it into the fire.
Chant the Intent
Start moving around the fire and begin to speak aloud your Statement of Intent (that you memorized). Keep saying it over and over again until it starts to sound weird. Let the sound change, and it will turn into a guttering chant or a high pitched chant, something foreign and different. Drive your body during this time, move move move, and chant chant chant, circling until the chant takes on a life of it’s own. It should turn into an unintelligible strong of repetitive words, a type of mantra. Get naked and howl at the fucking moon as you dance around the burning fire.
Rage is a great emotion here to use to give you energy here if you need it.
This is the time to turn on your music if you have it.
As you move, remember this is an act of destruction. You are showing the universe through this action that you are serious about waking the fuck up and living your right and proper life.
Keep driving. This could go on a LONG time. As you feel impressed, take off your clothes and throw them in the fire. One at a time (or all at once) throw your sacred items in the fire. Burn your favorite books, burn pictures of your loved ones, melt family heirlooms. Create the most sacrilegious thing you can consider here. Give it all up. Show the universe your desire to love so fully AS the universe that you will give up anything.
If you need any inspiration for the level of energy you need here, I HIGHLY encourage you to watch this clip:
THAT is the energy you need to break free. It’s a showdown… between you and the universe.
Ending
Go until you collapse or die. If you don’t feel like dying, you didn't go far enough. Period. You were just fucking around dancing with your dick out. Lay down the line, and do not stop until you either die for real, symbolical die, or God himself shows up and you have your showdown.
You HAVE to be angry to do this or you won’t have the energy to break through.
Grounding - Cleaning up
I think all of us have walked stumbling out of work, men’s work, holotropic breath work, contemplative embodiment, intensives, private ritual, etc, totally fucked up (in a good way). If you aren't walking out of this fucked up, you didn't do it right.
Once it’s all done and you've danced naked around the fire and howled at the moon and at God… and died inside… setting afire everything of value in your life… Get some rest. I would recommend a sleeping bag and sleep under the stars. I wouldn't go home or drive till at least morning. The usual recommendations: Water and rest.
Ground yourself, meditate, move, exercise, walk, etc.
The Process
Now… you have started. You've told the universe what you want, in no uncertain terms, and you have made it clear your desire in the only language the universe understands: ACTION.
Now you’ll get your wish, and the universe will begin to help liberate you of you:
“Examine everything you believe, every preference, every opinion, and cut it down. The most powerful minds cling to the fewest fixed principles. The only clear view is from atop the mountain of your dead selves.”
The following process utilizes the newest technologies of Quantum Mechanics and plain old human ingenuity to accelerate your progress. By bring up your fears and focusing your attention on them, looking and seeing, they quantumly stop their wave/particle appearance and reveal themselves as the illusion they are.
Daily Prayer
However you do it, pray every day something along the following lines: Grant me the courage and ability to see my fears.
The Book of Self Destruction
Keep a notebook with you and every day as any fear, opinion, or desire rises up… WRITE IT DOWN. And believe me, after the Ritual of Undoing: they will come up.
Do The MATH
You should be writing pages a day of bullshit fears and connections and opinions. If you don’t feel manic at times as you write, you aren't doing it correctly.
The key here is to DO THE MATH. What do I mean by that? Every FEAR, OPINION, BELIEF, or DESIRE can be traced back to the FEAR OF NO SELF.
This is the core piece of the process. So what you have to do as the fears come up, is connect the dots, do the math, and use your brain to figure out how the ‘current demon shadow fear’ you feel is connected to No-Self.
It won’t work if you just say: Yep, it’s connected to No-Self.
Seriously. All this is a waste if you don’t listen to this piece above all else: You have to do the math.
Your prayer will be answered. You will feel fear, and see how your attachments, beliefs, opinions, and loves are all fear based. In the writing process you will LOOK at it, and SEE it. Then connect it, see how it is interwoven through your mind and body until you can trace that fear (seeing, and writing down) all the way back to NO SELF VOID.
Doing that, will DESTROY that particular fear. For good. Then the next one will come up.
Ritual Burning
Believe me on this one. You need to BURN your written material. Daily, or every other day, depending on the speed with which you progress. The symbolism of burning up all your rantings and ravings along with all of your genius discoveries is so powerful it can’t be overstated. In fact, I don’t think the process works without it. I’ve gone a while between burnings and the material begins to weigh you down, you can feel it.
As you burn the pages say the following thing to the universe: “No matter what it takes, I want to grow up. I mean it. Death Rebirth. Whatever it takes, I want to grow up.”
NOTE: This statement will really SCARE you. The thing you just don’t want to give up… say it. Give it up. Go there. While the information you have written is burning: Say it and mean it. Saying these words is almost the hardest part of the entire project. If you can’t say them at first, no worries. Burn up your stuff anyway. But if you CAN say them… say them. It’s scary. But do it with all your training… breath… open open open bodily, feel your heart, feel out to the universe. And say: No matter what I want to grow up to be an integrated selfless human adult.
Some Help
If you want some help activating the process of fears in your writing, take some of the following ideas to heart. These come from Peter J. Carroll’s work: Liber Null.
“Chief among the techniques of liberation are those which weaken the hold of society, convention, and habit…”
Sacrilege: Destroying the Sacred: Energy is liberated when an individual breaks through rules of conditioning with some glorious act of disobedience or blasphemy.
Heresy: Seek out ideas which seem bizarre, crazy, extreme, arbitrary, contradictory and nonsensical and you’ll realize the belief’s you hold that you think are good are equally as silly.
Iconoclasm: Breaking Images: Contrast pornography and romance, cordon bleu gluttony and skeletal famine, dignity and masturbation. Consider violence as entertainment. Mass slaughter for idealism’s sake. Relish the cacophony of neurosis, fantasy, and psychosis on the planet. Pick through society’s dirty underwear.
Anathemism: Self Destruction: What is this process of undoing but a process of self-destruction? Eat all loathsome things till they no longer revolt you. Seek union with all that you normally reject. Scheme against your most sacred principles in thought word and deed. You will eventually have to witness the loss of everything you love.
Layers upon Layers - Fuel for your Prayer
We are built, literally constructed, by thin vaporous layers of fears. So keep going. The prayer will be answered, and the fears will come up. You should experience a certain amount of rage and anger at the fears and how many of them there are (and how insidious they are), and this should fuel your prayer. Rinse and repeat.
Mourning
The final piece of advice I give is to not forget to mourn. As pieces of yourself drop away, you have to MOURN them. If you don’t mourn these losses, it doesn’t work. Say goodbye to them. Shed tears. Write down a poem for those parts of yourself that are good and truly dead.
This is the final crowning piece. It’s the ‘funeral’ of your old self. A send off into the aether.
Gratitude and Honor
I thank you and honor you for coming along on this journey with me toward great gifting and selfless loving in the world. I leave you with the words of Shakespeare:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158.