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Chuck’s Place: Transparent To The Transcendent

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Bowl made by David R. with earth from Abiquiu, New Mexico. -Photo by Jan Ketchel
Bowl made by David R. with earth from Abiquiu, New Mexico. -Photo by Jan Ketchel

We are a great interconnected whole. Collectively, at this moment in time however, we are all confronted with an antagonistic wave of energy that has us all scurrying for cover.

That wave of energy manifests as a fear and a belief that we are not enough, that we have not enough, and that the only defense to our not-enoughness is to batten down the hatches and accumulate as much of a store as we can and then guard it with vigilance.

Our storage warehouses may be filled with food, property, wares and wealth, or prayers, self-flagellant acts of deprivation, or good deeds. Underneath, however, they are all the same; nothing more than stockpiles of defenses to ward off the onslaught of not-enough.

The defenses of consumption and over-consumption have strained the world we are living in to its breaking point, and the question right now is: How do we hold it together?

In hexagram #8 of the I Ching, Pi/Holding Together, we are counseled in Six at the beginning to:

Hold to him in truth and loyalty;
This is without blame.
Truth, like a full earthen bowl:
Thus in the end
Good fortune comes from without.

Richard Wilhelm comments that sincerity is the true basis for forming relationships, both within ourselves and with each other. If we are to have sincere relationship within and without, we must be truthful with ourselves about where we grasp and guard in defense. Grasping and defending breaks the interconnected whole within ourselves as much as it breaks our connection to the greater world outside of ourselves. Wanting more and having to defend more causes a breakdown in relationship, within and without.

We must become like earthen bowls instead, filled with the strength of truth, if we are to hold ourselves and our earth together.

We must realize that although we are in a time of mass movements, necessary for massive change to happen, we are all part of the same mass. Every individual in that mass is affected by the same wave of energy. Jan wrote of being affected by such waves of energy in her blog last week as she attended a silent meditation retreat.

Every individual who tackles, with sincerity, the challenge of their own fears and consuming defenses, assumes a leadership role in creating energy that aids in unifying the whole by aligning with like energy. Every energetic advance by every individual synchronistically reverberates throughout the whole. This is the secret of holding together.

In energetic alignment, synchronicities will manifest as thoughts, feelings, and actual physical events that signal advances in holding together. On the other hand, over-consumption will manifest moods of defeat and powerlessness, as well as synchronistic physical events that violently signal annihilation.

The ruler of Pi/Holding Together, the Nine in the fifth place, speaks once again of cultivating purity and strength within the self as the basis for true fellowship vs attempting to woo favor, as currently dominates today’s mass market world. Here again, we are shown the path to not being consumed by our fear of not being enough.

Cultivating the transcendent! -Photo by Jan Ketchel
Cultivating the transcendent!
-Photo by Jan Ketchel

By cultivating purity within—what Joseph Campbell calls becoming transparent to the transcendent—we achieve the energetic influence that restores balance and attracts synchronistically what is truly needed in our individual lives, as well as what is needed collectively. Forget marketing, forget Facebook; become transparent to the transcendent instead!

From this place of transcendence, we become open to the influence of cosmic energy that exists outside the time we live in. We open to the infinite. In transcendence, we shift our assemblage points and resume our journeys along the interconnected route that holds us all together and, in so doing, we become part of the energetic mass that holds our world together.

Over-consumption is merely our world blanketed by an energy that constantly challenges us to find our union through realignment with the truth. Every time one of us realigns with the truth within the context of our personal lives, we send out energetic waves that offer all of us guidance to do the same. We cannot rescue each other, but the mass can’t help but advance by individual efforts.

We are all naguals now. The last nagual, Carlos Castaneda, showed us how to take personal responsibility for our own evolution. Many looked to Obama to be the savior. But we are beyond the time of saviors now; it’s up to each of us to save ourselves. Obama’s election simply mirrored the truth that anything is possible now, even a twice-elected black man to the presidency.

The real work now lies within each of us. We must each stare down the myth of not enough within ourselves and allow our truths and purity to become transparent to the transcendent, as we hold our world together in solid union and continue our journeys on the interconnected waves of infinity.

Riding the waves,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: It’s Not Personal—It’s Just A Sign

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Don't take it personally! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Don’t take it personally!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I’m reading Jan’s blog and call her regarding typos. She tells me of energetic oddities: faxes won’t go through, computer glitches and, finally, as we talk, a loud noise, a smell. She discovers the true culprit, a motor that has burnt out. And then, to boot, she opens the door to the motor to be met by a swarm of bees!

These might be typical reactions to these events: What am I doing wrong? Why is this happening to me? Why am I being punished? Notice how immediately the mind—the foreign installation, as the Shamans of Ancient Mexico call it—drops its veil over reality and introduces its self-absorbed interpretation.

For the Shamans of Ancient Mexico this reflexive tendency to insert the self in all interpretations of events is the greatest blockage to seeing things as they really are and to opening to our fullest potential. How can we hope to fulfill ourselves when our vital energy is mired in self-absorbed fixation? This fixation manifests as worry, fear, guilt, blame, and self-doubt. A typical response would likely be a plan to change the self in some way, to improve our, assumed, “negative karma.”

The ancient Chinese sages had a different take on the happenings of natural phenomena. From their perspective, things that occurred together—things that intersected at a particular moment in time—shared some meaning in common. Not that one caused the other, but that each reflected the other. Events that occur together are acausally related, what Jung termed synchronicities. From this perspective, rather than taking events personally, the ancient Chinese sages read the energy of the moment, which became a guide to decision making, cutting out self-absorbed judgment.

Thus, a fax not going through suggests it’s not the right time to communicate something, or that it requires a different method. Or that outside energy was blocking willful intent. Perhaps it signals a time of retreat and patient waiting, not time to force one’s way across the river. These reflections on energetic configurations are beautifully summarized and outlined in the Chinese I Ching or Book of Changes.

Sometimes occurrences are signs showing us that we are approaching things at a time not energetically suited to our intent. If, instead, we read such a sign as a proposal for corrective action—as an opportunity for energetic realignment, such as patient waiting—we spare ourselves the labyrinth of judgment. Remember, it’s not personal. Just read the signs.

Reading the signs,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Origin Of All Myth Lies Before You

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The great mythological Eye in the Sky... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
The great mythological Eye in the Sky…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

Home from the office, I sink into a chair on the deck. I’m drained, fatigued. My energy continues to plummet. I end up frozen, immobile. My depleted energy directs me to the sounds and smells of nature. I crave the open sky. The thought of entering the inside cooled space of sealed containment is unbearable. Sleep must happen out-of-doors, under the stars.

The sky darkens. The constellations brightly impress themselves upon my eyes. I drift into sleep. I am awoken with these words: “The origin of all myth lies before you.” And before me, at the moment of awakening, lies only sky.

My relationship with life and experiences such as this-with nature, with the heavens, and with the mysteries-is the basis of my personal myth. This is something I share with all who have ever lived in this world. All the shared encounters with the mysteries, with the awe of life, are accrued and recorded in the myths we inherit and contribute to. How foolish it would be to not partake of the nectar of such accumulated knowledge and wisdom encased in the great myths that have been handed down to us.

Myths are our natural history, recordings of the ancient psyche that resides within us all. Myths are the language of the soul that, in a myriad of forms, speaks to us in dream and projection. Cracking the code of the myth, collective and personal, means discovering the greatest guidebook for life. However, the journey is always, first and foremost, in direct experience, in the here and now. Study the artifacts of the ancient myths to discover the mysteries of life, but directly live now, this day, this night.

Sadly, I see nothing in the structures we build and value to encapsulate and make sense of our lives. Modern humans are too busy, too distracted, too consumed, too pre-occupied. In truth, with a little knowledge of the ancient myths, we need only a direct encounter with the Big Dipper, nothing more, to send us into the direct experience of discovering our own myth and the experience of being fully alive now. It’s that simple.

Every day we are beckoned to wake up, to open our eyes to the stars, to discover where we are in our own myth—to engage life fully in the tragedy and comedy of it all—to live the magical, the mystical, the awesome; to break the spell of the fixation of the assemblage point that Jan referenced in her recent blog. Beyond that fixation lies access to the greater mysteries, to the hidden truths of our journeys through infinity, to why we find ourselves where we are at the present moment. The rigid fixation of the assemblage point is life lived at the level of the mundane, screened from the broader journey we’ve all taken—and are taking right now—without our even realizing.

The Bite of the Ostrich... another myth, referenced in Jan's book, The Edge of the Abyss. - Photo by Jan Ketchel
The Bite of the Ostrich…another myth, referenced in Jan’s book, The Edge of the Abyss.
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In her blog, Jan writes of a dream she had when she was a young woman. In the dream, she buries her dead child en route across the American frontier, traveling by covered wagon, a recent Swedish immigrant. The dream foreshadows her return to Sweden in this life to ultimately rediscover an ancient strength that would allow her to lift the veils that hid a brutal life, already lived in this lifetime yet completely unknown. This is living the greater myth. This is cracking the code of the personal myth, daring to take the journey into the awesomeness of the personal myth, connecting lives lived with the here and now, but also bridging with life to come.

We are all living lives of greater myth, myths that are constantly seeking our attention, desiring to be lived and united with us, reconnected in a wholeness that transcends just this life and connects us with life in infinity. This is the journey that each and every one of us is on, charged with discovering our personal myth through direct experience with life, with nature, with the heavens, and with the mysteries. This is the meaning of the guidance I received. We all have access to it in our everyday lives, in the world we live in and the world we dream in.

As you dare yourself to wake up and live your own myth, I humbly pass on the guidance presented to me by the stars: “The origin of all myth lies before you!”

In the myth,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Hero & Hydra

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Hydra..guarding the gate... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Hydra..guarding the gate…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In Greek mythology the Hydra is a nine-headed serpent that guards the entrance to the Underworld beneath Lake Lerna. In modern terms, the Underworld is the deep unconscious psyche, home of the powerful energies that fund our lives with the “rapture of being alive in our bodies.” *

As the myth goes, it took the hero Hercules to slay the Hydra and gain access to the magical, mystical, and awesome energies of the Underworld. In our own lives, we too must access our Hero selves in order to slay the worthy opponent that ferociously guards the gateway to our own magical inner treasures.

Ironically, the Hero and the Hydra are fraternal twins, two sides of the same being, the being of our Ego self. The Ego self was birthed at the moment of decision to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, as another myth portrays it, which led to expulsion from the Garden, the garden of blissful wholeness with nature. Like all children, the Ego, with consciousness and autonomy, must leave the womb of unconscious wholeness and go out and establish itself in the world, separate and distinct from the wholeness of its unconscious origin. To accomplish this, the Ego must break ranks with its deep unconscious nature and become a rational, controlled being, while simultaneously installing the Hydra with all its deadly defenses—projection, denial, repression, resistance, etc.—to defend it from the energies and controls of nature’s instincts.

The Hydra is the greedy, sensually-driven part of the Ego self, the child in us who wants it all. The Hydra is also the power-driven competitor in us who thrives on attention. The Hydra is the frightened child in us who shuns life in self-hate and self-pity. The Hydra is the stoic in us who denies our needs. The Hydra is the defender in us, the repressor, suppressor, who guards the gate to the Underworld and shields us from the truths of our recapitulations, keeping them safely stored just beyond the door to the Underworld. The Hydra is neither good nor bad. It’s the house we’ve constructed to manage our lives. We all need defenses to stem the tidal waves of fear, abandonment, dissolution, and all manner of traumatic events.

Once the Ego has gained a foothold in the world, it desperately seeks its wholeness, that is, access to the deep energies that inspire and electrify life in human form. At this point, the Ego twins are pitted against each other. The Hero seeks to win individuation, that is, union with its alienated, deeper self, in fact, also with the Hydra. This is the moment when the Hero must go to battle, slaying through to everything that has been stored away beyond the entryway to the unconscious, safely protected from memory by the ferocious Hydra. The Hero must face and subdue the Hydra on its journey to adulthood, for its wholeness requires knowing and unification with all the truths of life, as well as the truths of the primal energies that flow just beyond the entryway to the Underworld, in the darkness of the mythological Lake Lerner.

Two-Headed Hydra in the clouds... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Two-Headed Hydra in the clouds…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The Hydra, in its stead, has the task of testing the worthiness of the Hero, proving the Hero’s readiness to undertake the journey into the Underworld and reunite with the powerful energies in the darkness below. The Hero may initiate the journey by undertaking therapy, recapitulation, or some form of initiation or night sea journey into the unknown.

The Hydra is a mighty opponent, a worthy guardian at the door of the deeper self, throwing all the sensual delights at the Hero—food, drink, diet, pleasure, denial of pleasure, etc.—to waylay the journey. If one head is cut off, two heads appear in its stead. In this manner, the Hydra presents distractions, projections, crises, and must dos to snarl and challenge the Hero’s intent—entitlements, resentments, sleepiness, and sloth—in cycles of groundhog days that deplete the Hero’s energy and defeat the Hero’s resolve to complete the journey.

Only if the Hero succeeds in defeating all the Hydra’s heads will the Hydra grant access through the gate, to a Hero proven worthy of feeling the full impact of stored traumas and the numinous reward of the energies of the deeper self. Only with the defeat of the Hydra is the Hero truly ready to join with its wholeness, truly ready to funnel the deepest of energies into rapturous life.

And so, ultimately, these fraternal ego twins—Hero and Hydra—must become necessary partners in our quest for wholeness. May we honor them both for the roles they play in serving to launch us into fulfillment.

On the battlefield,
Chuck

* Quote from Joseph Campbell.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Offense

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The magical in the ordinary... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
The magical in the ordinary…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

We are beings of offense, collectors of rights and wrongs. Judgment is our guiding voice: “Look, over there, how hideous, how bold, how disgusting, how risque, how inappropriate, how divine, how unfair, how rude, how insensitive, how mean, how narcissistic, how beautiful, how perfect.”

Then there’s the voice from the Land of Me. “I’m not getting what I need,” it says. “I deserve more. I got screwed. They took advantage of me. They treat me like I’m invisible. It’s never what I want. I don’t matter. I’m not attractive. I’m better than him. She’d never be interested in me. Nobody cares about me. Why am I never chosen? Why was I born like this? Why am I singled out? Why am I being punished? How come nothing good ever happens to me?”

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico contend that we spend the lion’s share of our vital force, our life’s energy, judging and being offended by the world and those who inhabit it. To counter offense we might develop and accumulate an identity of accomplishments. “I can take it,” our accomplishments enable us to say. “I’ll survive. Inwardly I know I’m worth more. Look how well I dress—I’m coordinated. I have lots of friends who keep in touch. I’m well-respected where I work. I’m always polite. I say my prayers. I donate. I care. I walk for causes. I read a lot. I have many “Likes.” People like my pictures. I’m funny.”

So constructed are we of rights, wrongs and likes that we know not who we really are beneath those mountains of offense. We perceive ourselves and the world around us through the narrowly burdensome lens of where we stand vis-à-vis our fellow human beings. We navigate our lives to constantly improve that position, with better homes, bodies, cars, jobs, friends, lovers, companions, environments. Our obsession with improvement puts blinders upon our real possibilities.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico claim that we are magical beings capable of stupendous actions and experiences. However, as long as we spend the capital of our human time in being offended we have no accrued savings, no energy for true self-actualization. The Shamans suggest that we can build our energy savings bank by thoroughly appreciating the petty tyrants who so offend us. Rather than spending energy capital on constantly being offended, Shamans bank their energy by stripping away the shackles of self-importance.

“This is the room they stuck me in, with that kid upstairs jumping on the bed for hours! I should complain!” we might say, taking offense at a situation we find ourselves in. Such complaining, the Shamans contend, will get us nowhere. “Thank you,” a Shaman would say, “for reminding me not to waste my energy on being offended. Let me instead be more fully present to the moment and all the magic that surrounds me.”

Eventually, we notice that the world is quite ready to open, expand and reveal its deeper truths, beauties, and mysteries as we drop the veil of offense and navigate instead with awe. As we follow the signs magically placed before us, by reinterpreting and reworking that which has offended us, we offer ourselves a new and different world in which to navigate. Without offense, life and the world we inhabit become a totally different and very inviting, magical place. We might even find ourselves suddenly offered something that we could previously only have dreamed of.

Navigating through the magic,
Chuck