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

Shamans maintain that the world of everyday life, what they call ordinary reality, is but one infinitesimally small possibility of human experience. They suggest that the relativity of our perception is determined energetically by where our assemblage point, a ball of brilliance, is stationed in our energetic essence. A metaphor might be a gear wheel with a vast number of slots or options to lock into. The most common slot that humans utilize among their many options is the slot of ordinary reality. The advantage of most humans fixating on the same slot is the creation of a uniform world, a consensus reality.

When we say good night to ordinary reality and fall asleep, we automatically disengage our gear and spin the wheel, opening the door to experiencing different worlds/slots in dreaming. Dreaming allows us to more fully experience our potential. Sleep disorders often reflect terror at relinquishing our hold on the familiar world of ordinary reality and visiting others. If we hold back sleep too long other worlds come to claim us, intruding upon the world of ordinary reality and causing what is known, in the psychiatric world, as a psychotic break. Shamans utilize the natural fluidity of the assemblage point in dreaming to volitionally, and with full awareness, enter other worlds. This potential is available to all of us, by simply intending awareness in our dreams.

Shamans would likely conclude that what we experience as our spiritual drive is actually an inner push to fully realize who we really are. Locking into one slot of who we are creates an identity that reflects but a fragment of our true potential. That fixation of our awareness on one slot generates an energetic dam that may result in depression, which is spiritual boredom, addictive endeavors, which are haphazard shifts of the assemblage point, or illness, which also serves to shift the assemblage point. The point is that our spirit insists that we shift the assemblage point and experience, more fully, the truth of who we are.

In effect, we all operate with an automatic transmission. The spirit involuntarily shifts our gears for us, to keep us in balance or force us to discover our wholeness. The greatest protagonist to the spirit’s intent is the ego, which generally strives to keep us in first gear, ordinary reality. I propose that we put our ego to work, instead, at learning to drive a manual transmission, where we safely and volitionally learn to shift the gears of our human potential and fully realize who we are.

As always, I am open to discussion or comment. Should anyone wish to write, I can be reached via email at: chuck@riverwalkerpress.com

Until we meet again,
Chuck