Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Today, Chuck thanks Jeanne and Jan for help with this essay.

Several times last weekend my thoughts and feelings were energetically drawn to a dear woman I knew, though had not seen in some time. On Monday a voice mail from her husband, asking me to call, confirmed what I had already sensed: her passing; the reality of impermanence. I thank her for sharing her passing with me from her energetic form.

The Buddha, in deep meditation, discovered why we suffer: we cling to the false belief that things will never change. To be born in this dimension, on earth, we indeed reside in a physical form that will age and wither and we will die. Sorry folks, but that’s the truth! We will love, we will attach to those we love, we will decay, they will decay, they will die, we will die. Death, for the body, truthfully, is rarely a pleasant process. Morphine is, indeed, a godsend.

Personally, I have done that journey. My depth of love for Jeanne, in this world, knew no bounds. Her death, for me, truthfully, was utter joy. I was given the privilege of delivering her to the next step, at the right time, in alignment with her truth. For me, that was the ultimate fulfillment of our earthly love.

The gift I have been given by Jeanne leaving this world is the opportunity to experience the evolution of love beyond the body, beyond this world. This is not an instantaneous occurrence, but a long process, taking several years, perhaps a lifetime, as I make decisions and choices on my journey without her physical presence, learning to reconnect with her in infinity as a spiritual being. Part of this process entails learning to release myself from my old contracts that no longer work, such as upholding old ideas of the self, expectations of society, expectations of family, and mental constructs about love, about being a man, a father, and the nature of family, all illusions of permanence.

Furthermore, I am offered the opportunity to experience reincarnation without death. I have entered a new life, fully connected to and aware of my recent life with Jeanne. I have opened to new love, relationship, and marriage. I accept, from hard earned experience, that all love, attached to the physical form, is impermanent. Earthly love tempts us to grasp onto our physical form, to stay young, to keep things permanent. Like the young Siddhartha, we are barricaded behind the walls of our illusion that everything we see is permanent, especially our physical bodies and our loved ones. In fact, now, with the advent of Viagra, we are treated to the fountain of youth, offering eternal erections, undying physical love!

The denial of death abounds despite the overwhelming evidence of decay and death all around us. In spite of the underlying reality of our inevitable death, we live encased in the illusion of physical immortality. We are shocked when our dear friends and loved ones become ill and die. We cling to ignorance, it simply won’t happen to me! And so, we suffer. Not because of decay and death, but because we stubbornly live in the illusion of permanence. In order to complete the reincarnation cycle now, in this life, we must embrace impermanence. This requires releasing our illusions of physical immortality, which, in essence, is detachment from the illusion of permanence.

Most important is to remain fully open to life in a world of impermanence. This is the gift Jeanne has given me and presents to all of us. In practicality, this means entering a new life with no illusions. Fully opening to life without illusion is opening to infinite love, reconciling something that dies with something that doesn’t. Opening to new life, fully, requires a release from all prior contracts and grief, what Jeanne calls recapitulation. Through emptying our selves of the burdens of life lived, we are freed to enter new life, fully open, fully capable of loving, and fully aware and connected to the truth of our prior life. That is opening the door to infinity. There is no longer a need to reincarnate, as we have completed unfinished business, because, with truth, there is no need to remain attached to the illusion of permanence. We don’t have to hide from anything we have ever done and we are fully open to any experience. We are ready for the truth and full experience of energetic infinity.

From this stance, we can fully enjoy the impermanence of our life, in this world, as we reconcile the paradox of what we are, finite and infinite. What is finite is our body; it will end. What is infinite in us is that which attaches to nothing and continues to ride the eternal wave of energetic change, fully engaging, experiencing, loving, and releasing when it’s time to go, with full memory and love of where we have been.

Until we meet again, in one form or another,
Chuck

Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences!

Today, I am performing idea alchemy. In an effort to arrive at the “prima materia” of these two archetypes, mother and father, I have distilled these entities into their single essences. Perhaps this can be challenged on many grounds, but I invite you to suspend judgment and take this journey with me, to discover mother and father inside us all. Who are they; where are they; and how do they get along inside you?

I begin with mother. Mother is our body. We come from mother, having once been physically merged with her, as one, then delivered to the world in our own body, our mother. Our motherbody carries all the knowledge of where we came from, and where we may evolve to, in every cell. The wisdom accrued through countless eons of life in the flesh is stored within our motherbody, the ultimate motherboard. The structures, systems, balances, healings, gleaned through centuries of evolution, all the secrets of survival and material manifestation, are wholly contained and known within our motherbody. Our motherbody knows only truth, records and registers all facts of life, and our life in particular. Our motherbody deals in concrete physical fact, communicating truth through sensation and emotion. To know our mother is to experience our body, understand its communications, and attend to its needs and requirements.

Father is mind, total abstraction, devoid of any material substance. Father is thought, interpretation, and idea. For idea to manifest, mother and father must cooperate or join. Idea cannot manifest without matter (or mother). Idea can create a blueprint, but without matter there will be no creation. My ideas for this essay, from my father mind, will not manifest without my body’s participation, to give form and substance to abstract thought, as I physically write.

Every man and every woman is mother in body and father in mind. When we think, schedule, set goals, and make decisions, we operate from father, with our ability to abstract. Our mother self is always active, balancing and releasing energies and messages in the form of physical sensations, emotions, instincts, and direct knowing or intuition, which is instinctive knowing not mediated by thought. These functions can manifest as dream, image, automatic movement, or feelings. Mother presents impulse and image to father-thought, to be converted into plans of action. In these instances, abstraction is generated by body knowledge, where, in fact, the mind is not the architect of thought, but instead the converter, to thought and plan, of mother’s impulse. Of course, in many instances, pure abstract thinking dominates the body. For instance, a diet, an exercise regimen, a sleep schedule, clothing decisions, grooming behaviors, the use of drugs for medicinal or recreational purposes, are all at the behest of mind deciding what body will be subjected to. Western civilization, perhaps beginning with the Christian innovation, which decided that mind is more trustworthy than body, has increasingly supported mind over matter. This alienation of mind from body leaves many people disconnected from their physicality and all its accumulated wisdom, looking instead to science as the ultimate guide to decision making.

As with any family, the relationship between mother and father is fundamental to the health of the family. When we examine the health of our own being we must explore the relationship between our mother body and father mind. This can be a tricky assessment. For instance, a muscular, well-toned body may reflect a cooperative relationship between mind and body, or might equally represent a controlling father mind, completely dominant of, and alienated from, the true needs of motherbody. An overindulged motherbody might represent an alienation from body, both necessary and directed by mother. The body will often, when assaulted by trauma, register and absorb the experience in a body part, which it protectively numbs for the sake of survival. Motherbody has learned much about survival. Every living being is the product of billions of successful survival adaptations discovered over time, which is evolution. These are stored in the cells of the body, as archetypal strategies of automatic action to be released, as needed, to survive. Sometimes, some parts of the body are sacrificed for overall survival of the body, regardless of the resulting limitations. Sometimes, motherbody pushes awareness completely out of the body to survive. Ultimately this can result in an over-reliance on father mind, which only has abstract ideas of what body is, or may not even be aware of body at all. Realize, however that this extreme alienation of mind from body might be the necessary balance for survival. Often, motherbody waits until the appropriate moment to reunite mind with body, through the form of physical triggers that return awareness to the body and, in a successful recapitulation, restores optimal unity of mind and body.

Another consequence of the interaction of mind and body is that the artifacts of successful strategies for survival, that originate from mind, end up in the historical record of motherbody and become available as direct knowledge in the future, through motherbody/the home of the archetypes. An example might be where the world rests at this moment in time. By all objective accounts, we find ourselves on the brink of destruction. We have elected a new president, a new father. He now begins a redirection of energy and resources, as manifested through changed economic, social, and environmental policies, which may, in fact, lead to a successful adaptation to facilitate continued survival. The experiences of our time will be recorded in our motherbodies, becoming available to the future evolution of our planet. Here father becomes mother, as what originates as idea becomes manifest in body and is carried into the future through the body’s eternal registry, which becomes available, through mother, to future generations. Of course, it is likely that the impulse to act, leading to the current change of direction, came from motherbody herself. Certainly the breakdown of mother earth has generated images and emotions that have awoken consciousness, or father, to the need for change. Ultimately, mind and body are converging here and are, in fact, inseparable, and may be the ultimate energetic prima materia, as one.

I return you now to the exploration of your own inner family.

Until we meet again,
Chuck