A New Perspective

Rare is the book that comes along that is both a pleasure to read, as well as serves as a treasure trove of insightful knowledge into personal and spiritual growth. Lorraine Voss’s Becoming Awareness is one such book.

Early within Becoming Awareness, Lorraine mentions Carlos Castaneda and the books he has written. Some explanation is due to this mention.

Castaneda’s writings became a knowledge base for a discipline of awareness established by an ancient race called the Toltec. His seminal works started a movement (commonly known as the Toltec Path). While this movement is still very much alive and growing today, there are problems with Castaneda’s teachings today.

Old-World Perception

Castaneda first established his audience during the cold-war era of the 1960s and 70s. While he continued to publish until his death in 1998, he wrote for a world that was greatly unawakened to the problems that seekers face on the Toltec path today. Any discussion of spirituality was fiercely administered by religious and academic institutions. While the classic texts of ancient cultures (such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedas) were widely available, they are interpreted by readers of that time as allegorical stories, and were subject only to approved interpretation by established academic authorities. If any interpretation ventured too far out of what was commonly accepted by the controlling establishment, it was quickly and vehemently (even sometimes violently, as history shows) swatted down.

Trained in this traditional academic environment, Castaneda was challenged with authoring his writings in spite of the control mechanisms that most certainly did oppose him. While Castaneda no doubt was aware of many more problems (and their sources) within the world than he shed light on, as a matter of self-protection he was forced to write in similarly vague academic terms that hinted at the issues at hand. This especially applies to “the topic of topics” – the predatory nature of the world. In this passage, Castaneda defers to his mentor (Don Juan) to explain what he calls the predator:

“We have a predator that came from the depths of the cosmos and took over the rule of our lives. Human beings are its prisoners. The Predator is our lord and master. It has rendered us docile, helpless. If we want to protest, it suppresses our protest. If we want to act independently, it demands that we don’t do so… I have been beating around the bush all this time, insinuating to you that something is holding us prisoner. Indeed we are held prisoner!”
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– Don Juan, Castaneda’s mentor in The Active Side of Infinity>

While Don Juan speaks of the predator in plain terms, keep in mind that many of Castaneda’s early readers were programmed by the then-contemporary academic mindset. They were programmed to take certain things with a severely limited interpretation. These were the same people who grew up in the age of the nascent NASA space program, and who were taught that any “cosmic” entities that Don Juan may have referred to were merely cute little green martians one laughed at in cartoons on common “television programming”. Many of Castaneda’s readers mistook the outright proclamation of the predator’s existence as symbolic or allegorical – a well-meaning bit of drama to add spice to an otherwise fantastic story about a young anthropologist (Castaneda) and his seemingly eccentric Yaqui Indian mentor (Don Juan Matus).

Modern Affirmation of an Old Problem

Without going into how such entities exist or what they are comprised of, in her book Becoming Awareness Lorraine Voss lends credence to the existence of the predator by assuming her readers already know about their existence. She provides her own accounting of her confrontation with one such predator, and how she artfully rendered it harmless. To understand how this was done, read the book.

Through Lorraine’s example, the modern day warrior/seeker can benefit with the predator dilemma in several ways. By confirming the existence of the predator, “Becoming Awareness” provides some relief to those warriors who are currently struggling with the fantastic notion that the human race is indeed enslaved by a very real and intelligent collective entity – the acknowledgment of which is a fantastic leap in perception itself.

Indeed with the advent of the internet, there are countless testimonies that account for the many challenges seekers face while not only trying to grasp at the mere notion of the predator, but also while interacting directly with predator entities as living part of the seeker-warrior’s expanded reality.

No longer is this discussion taken as mere dramatic embellishment or allegory. The existence of the predator is a real deal: It is widely discussed in on radio, books, the internet and other public forums. The existence of the predator has even been scientifically explained by contemporary leaders of awareness such as world lecturer David Icke, with further evidence coming from the gnostic thinker John Lamb Lash, and the founder of the Quantum Healing Hypnosis Technique, Dolores Cannon. It has given rise to a global industry of holistic health practitioners who acknowledge the predator issue as a part of an accepted – and indeed expanded – reality.

Realistic Balance

While Becoming Awareness shows us that the journey of awareness may indeed be joyous, Lorraine’s story relates other challenges that lie in the warrior’s path – thus providing us with a healthy counterbalance to the prevalent misconception that spirituality leads only to a continuously positive state of intoxicated happiness.

Among these other issues that Lorraine covers in Becoming Awareness are: environmental destruction, cruel and unsustainable animal food production, and the ever-growing and obvious danger of humans literally destroying themselves and the Earth.

The Female / Male Dynamic

As a stark departure from other writers who recently tend to “single brand” themselves as the sole character within their work, we see the appearance of not only Lorraine’s friend Nayeli, but a cast of other rich characters.

These include El Cuervo, a visionary unto himself, whose seemingly soft-spoken behavior masks an intensely broad (and humorous) trove of knowledge, all shared from his artfully articulate perspective. As El Cuervo shares Lorraine’s trek across the beautiful American southwestern landscape, he offers his outlook on the warrior’s path and the many challenges at hand. With El Cuervo, we also see the energetic “flavor” of his words demonstrates an uncanny integration of both male and female energies – his contribution to an already amazing story indeed.

As a further refreshing outcome of their collaboration, the collective of stories that Lorraine and El Cuervo share with us doesn’t follow the typical (and utterly boring) adversarial “talk-show point and counterpoint” format – a paradigm of division and separation that likewise divides and separates the world. Instead, there is a naturally comfortable and respectful complementarity to their interaction. Refreshing indeed!

The Female Perspective

In a world filled with a new and burgeoning spirituality still dominated greatly by male figureheads, Lorraine Voss and her story steer clear of the bandwagon that spiritual “practitioners” hop onto in the onslaught of new age-ism and the host of spiritual materialism it brings.

Lorraine’s story is genuine, down-to-earth, and offers a clearly refreshing interpretation of the female (not feminist) energy and how it applies to the path of awareness. Her perspective again is in contrast with previous female writers of the 1960s-80s era, whose focus was sometimes pugnaciously aimed at the empowerment of women.

Here the narrative is indeed refreshing in that it completely bypasses the female perspective issue altogether, and brings us directly to issues at hand.
Unplugging from the Matrix

So, literally put aside all that is written above. This is appropriate now.

Put aside any further consideration of religious or spiritual figureheads, history, dogma, the male/female dynamic, and indeed any notion of Castaneda and the Toltec path. The main point of the trek is freedom, and perhaps this is the most important message that Becoming Awareness has to offer.

The story specifically warns us of the deleterious effects of fixating oneself to any one point of perception, for this leads to stagnation and the furtherance of the entrapment that humanity has fallen victim to. Here, Lorraine’s companion Nayeli answers the issue of being labeled:

“Are you a Toltec, Nayeli?”

“I am a warrior who is committed to aligning with the abstract, constantly striving to increase my energy in order to access knowledge and total freedom. Since this has been the life work of Toltec people, then I suppose I can be perceived as a Toltec.”

Nayeli later again cautions us from the fixation of labeling:

“It’s just a label though, a definition that can apply to so many people whether they have an understanding of Toltec culture or not.”

On the trek to freedom, Lorraine Voss also offers her further explanation of powerful concepts such as:

• the assemblage point and the lines of awareness
• the importance of acknowledging and reconnecting with the Earth as a living organism, of which we are a part
• the loss of personal energetic power through through traumatic life experiences, and the its reclamation through the process of personal recapitulation
• the importance not only of performing a personal recapitulation, but also a recapitulation of the earth itself
• the unique attributes of female energy (not in the feminist context mentioned above) with its energetic anchor in the womb
• how female energy works in contrast to male energy
• the history of the intentional disruption of humanity’s natural connection with the Earth
• the rise and fall of the “New Age” movement, and its currently growing and more genuine replacement movement
• modern issues such as GMO, fracking, and social conditioning
• much more…

Again, the main point of the trek is freedom, and unplugging from the matrix – any entrapment – is the most important message that “Becoming Awareness” has to offer.

One can also find joy through personal liberation, which Lorraine Voss gladly shares with us also. Read and utterly enjoy “Becoming Awareness: Earth. Energy. Evolution.”

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