Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy website.
Yesterday, we sat in the waiting room, Cosi in Jan’s lap, both of us touching her, feeling her vibration, feeling our own sadness. In a few minutes the vet would see us, examine Cosi, and concur with what we already knew. Jan had faced the truth first: we were keeping her alive, she could not live without our intervention, she was in pain, it was time to let her go. Jan had previously fanned the pages of the I Ching in front of Cosi, asking her to show her what needed to happen. Her paw stopped on Hexagram #23 Po, splitting apart, the inevitable, unstoppable collapse of the house. There was no stopping Cosi’s body from splitting apart; it was time to release her energy. After that, Jan opened the book at random three times and each time it fell open on Po. There was no changing the inevitable.
Others came into the waiting room. They had no attachment to our cat. Though they occupied the same room they were in a different, disconnected world. That’s how it is with the human operating system; the archetypal substrate that governs our experience breaks us into units, a world of disconnected solid objects that we learn to differentiate. We are drawn to attach to certain objects to experience our emotional selves as we form bonds with other individuals. Our experience of connectedness beyond those we have attached to is quite limited. Haiti, for instance, is another world. Perhaps we might make a contribution on the cell phone. It is hard really to feel connected for very long beyond our immediate world and those we are emotionally attached to. That is the nature of fragmented, disconnected units. The advantage of fragmentation is the ability to obtain deeper knowledge of a part. In medicine this is called specialization. The challenge for medicine is to put Humpty-Dumpty back together again and see a person as a whole unit, holistic medicine.
This same challenge confronts our world now at a major evolutionary juncture. Our world has reached its limit in sustaining fragmentary beings with special interests. This fragmented world must allow itself to also be a holistic unit. This was don Juan’s conclusion: for this world to survive, it must be able to now be experienced as a world of interconnected energy, as well as a world of solid objects. This was Jeanne’s guidance yesterday. She gives us the image of liquid energy versus solid objects. She describes her experience as one of total detachment, that is, freedom from specialized attachments, which results in the experience of utter calm and pure love and compassion for all. This experience is our birthright, just as much as our experience of the world as one of solid objects is our birthright. For our world to survive, we must make the evolutionary leap to experience our liquid energy birthright and allow the experiences of interconnectedness, utter calm, and totally detached loving compassion for all to flow into our world of solid objects. This will transform how we act and react in a world of solid objects.
Cosi lay on the exam table, calmly awaiting her transformation; we laid our hands upon her and she received her injection. Both Jan and I then simultaneously experienced a subtle swoosh of light energy move from her body, through us, and then beyond. She is now in her pure energy state, the place we are all headed. The opportunity we are being offered now, while in our solid form, is to experience ourselves as liquid energy, all interconnected in a far greater reality. The experience of Cosi, as energy, was a reminder that ultimately we are all destined to return to our pure energetic state. However, we also have the opportunity to experience ourselves in our energetic state while we still reside in our solid human form. In fact, this is what is being required of us now, in order to allow our world of solid objects, itself on the verge of splitting apart, to continue to exist and evolve, to become an interconnected, holistic unit.
This evolutionary challenge is actually urging us to rediscover our energetic birthright because, once we enter the matrix of solid objects, we forget. As don Juan put it, “we are energy first.” As Jeanne put it yesterday, once we find our way to utterly calm and detached loving compassion we discover we are in a familiar, known place; we are home. This place is already in us, we just need to allow ourselves access to it. Can we stay in this place of familiar home, with all its truths, and reenter the world of solid objects, bridging the two and, in so doing, evolve this world into a sustainable world?
As always, should anyone wish to write or ask, I can be reached at: chuck@riverwalkerpress.com or feel free to post a comment.
Until we meet again,
Chuck