Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences!
As the morning sun begins to rise, we are born into a new day or possibility. For a moment, our awareness is drawn to the wonder of it all, a deep spiritual pause, when suddenly and automatically our energy is stolen away, as we become fully engaged in the familiar habitual patterns that uphold our world and define our place in it.
In the broadening light of the rising sun, our consciousness grows, as we perceive the increasingly differentiated landscape. We define the world we see with increasing clarity. We define our familiar selves with similar precision. As contrast becomes more apparent, we separate our selves, and those around us, into distinctly separate, disconnected units. We reflect upon our selves as well, clearly differentiating our good and our bad traits. We review our faults, our sins. We establish our goals and intentions. We establish meaning and purpose. Our judgments become sharp. We move into our daily self, the acceptable presentation to the social order, the adaptive self. We push aside, refuse to acknowledge or allow expression to, the unacceptable, shameful parts of the self.
This is the price of the light of consciousness. The decision to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, to choose the light of consciousness over the paradise of unconscious wholeness, is what casts us from the garden. Our awareness is born, torn from wholeness into a fragmented world of objects. Knowledge requires the separation of energy into distinct objects to be known, classified, and differentiated. The truth of interconnectedness is compromised in the light of day. All things, as they become known, are alienated from each other. Light creates shadow as it shines upon an object. Each object has its own shadow. Consciousness creates shadow, as it pushes aside the unacceptable or unknown aspects of the self. But does the conscious self own the fullness of its being, its shadow? This is the evolutionary challenge, to own the fullness of the self in full awareness. The ability to return to the garden, a fully recapitulated self, in total awareness, is what Jung called, the process of individuation.
Our world requires that we acquiesce to darkness every day. As the midday sun wanes through the mid-afternoon hours, the stirrings of the shadow can be felt within. Perhaps there is fear, as secrets, safely concealed in the darkness, can no longer be restrained by the dominance of the light. Perhaps the drums of the deep, instinctive self begin to stir, as we ruminate about elixirs of release in the welcoming darkness to come, where we are freed of the harsh light of judgment and accountability. Perhaps we become Mr. Hyde, or the willing victim of the vampire, releasing our shadows to fulfillment in oblivion. Perhaps we leave it to our dreams alone to balance out our one sided daytime life, through adventures in fantasy or journeys in other worlds.
The bottom line is that we cannot escape the full living of our wholeness. Since we made the decision to enter this world led by our own consciousness, we are saddled with discovering our wholeness, fragment by fragment. In the meantime, all the fragments of our wholeness demand life, in some form, which manifests as our personal balance. Balance will happen with or without consciousness. Our challenge is to assume conscious responsibility for our personal balance.
If we can use our awareness to shine the light on truth, with total acceptance, through suspending judgment, we are well equipped to find the ideal balance of self, light and shadow, and return to the garden, restoring, with awareness, the full energetic interconnectedness of all things. This is the essence of love, the dissolution of separateness in full awareness.
Until we meet again,
Chuck
P.S. Please be sure to “tune in” tomorrow to a special audio channeling, recorded live at The Chocolate Factory!