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Chuck’s Place: Faith & Doubt

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Interwoven wholeness…
– Artwork © 2022 by Jan Ketchel

Sometimes we simply can’t believe, can’t accept something on faith alone; though spiritually driven we may need more than faith alone.

Jan has shared with me that the nuns of her grammar school called such spiritual candidates “doubters”, confused souls held tightly in Satan’s grasp of doubt. From their dogma, faith alone is the necessary bridge to spiritual ascent.

From my own earliest childhood inner experience, I qualified as a major-league doubter. In deep shame and horror, my truth was that I did not believe in God. I needed absolute proof, through experience, before I could believe. I challenged God to prove His existence to me.

That challenge was met with an experience that left no further room for doubt, for now I knew. Belief now rested upon the solid foundation of knowing, which has guided my life ever since. I thank doubt for setting the stage for the experiment and resulting numinous experience that has inspired my entire life.

Nonetheless, those Sisters at St. Mary’s knew of the perilous quicksand  that doubt becomes when it dominates one’s attitude toward life. Doubt can indeed cast a heavy shadow over the brightness of life. Excessive doubt breeds cynicism, where the interpretation of life events derives from an acute tunnel vision that sees only the negative side of everything. Doubt readily identifies the hidden, self-serving motive behind everything and everyone.

So convincing is the cynic’s perspective, as it casts its shadow of doubt  upon the supposed altruism of others, that its resulting negativity is quite infectious. In fact, one can easily lose faith that anyone is truly trustable, and firmly believe that any supposed loving action is really nothing other than a Trojan horse of self-serving narcissism.

Faith then, could be defined as remaining open to the hypothesis that anything is possible, at least until proven otherwise. Life, from this perspective, is sprinkled with optimism and positive thinking. Rather than dismiss a possibility outright, based upon a dogmatic or fixed perspective, we actually allow ourselves to remain open and see what happens.

In a relationship, a doubting attitude might easily judge the behavior of the other to be fraught with self-serving intent, despite their loving persona. This may then lead one to harbor resentment and distrust that precludes any possibility of a deepening intimacy.

If, on the other hand, one were able to suspend their doubting judgment and allow their faith to remain open and see what happens, they might be rewarded with the discovery that indeed, this flawed human being is actually reaching out to truly connect.

On the other hand, one might be led to the discovery that their doubt was actually well informed. They might be led to the fact that their companion is not ready to love another, as their gaze is solidly fixed upon love that is limited to their own reflection. Despite one’s disappointment at this, the outcome of this experimental relationship has proven its untenability, and so, it’s simply time to move on.

Faith allows us to suspend judgment and remain open to possibility. Doubt forces us to refine our relationship with the truth. Faith and doubt are thus a pair of opposites, which, when properly integrated, serve the deepening of our relationship with life, truth, and love.

If we are too one-sided in doubt, our relationships are sterile, calculated and fear based. If we have too much faith, we are easy targets for the con-artists, the prana suckers, and the devious.

The truth is that at different levels of our being we are all both devils and angels. We have good reason to doubt our own authenticity, at all times. We also have good reason to have faith in everyone’s capacity for deep altruistic love, including our own!

The fact that we are both devils and angels makes us human—beings who reflect a composition of both the left and right hands of God. Our challenge in this life is to weave both sides of ourselves into a functional unit that takes us deeper into the truth and love of this amazing journey: Life!

With Faith and Doubt,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Primal Love

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On the road to fulfillment…
– Artwork © 2022 Jan Ketchel

As infants, we are primed to be fallen in love with. The attention we receive fills us with the validation that we are, indeed, wanted, worthy beings. The glitter in the eye, the awe, the patient being caring for us, the play which engages us where we are, all fill us with the love, joy, and excitement needed to feel ourselves to be welcomed participants with a definite home in this world.

If you are in this world, you were once touched by that love, however fleetingly or scantily it was offered. For to be completely unmet turns off the ability to attach and survive, much less thrive. Nonetheless, in truth, the depth of this primal need for love is rarely fulfilled in childhood, with the result that some of the switches that would turn on the energy for a fully engaged life await turning on later in life.

Children often discover on their own what can bring them the loving attention they seek. I discovered that my mother loved a clean, shiny bathroom. I would spend a good deal of time polishing every surface, using a towel to shine the handles on the sink and tub to receive my mother’s glowing looks and soft, loving words of appreciation. Similarly, I would scrub my grandmother’s tiled kitchen floor on hands and knees, again polishing with a towel, just to receive her loving smile of appreciation.

Not feeling worthy because one simply exists, turns human beings into human doings. Codependency is a life of doing to receive love. Relationships often fall into this pattern of constantly needing to please the other in order to receive the coveted gold of attention. The compulsivity of this relational pattern is driven by the underlying fixed belief of unworthiness, where one remains unconvinced of one’s intrinsic worthiness, regardless of the amount of attention one receives. Hence, the constant need to fill one’s enduring sense of inner emptiness through service to sources outside of the self.

Consequently, love, however genuinely offered by another, will never convince one who feels inwardly unworthy, at their core, of their worthiness. Once the critical period of childhood has passed, turning on the switches to a fulfilling life becomes an inside job. This is the path of self love. The adult self you have become must assume responsibility for truly loving the neglected child you bear within.

Frequently, this involves addressing the resentment and entitlement that defensively shroud the vulnerable child within, protecting it from anticipated shameful and painful encounters with a failure to be loved. This creates enormous blockages of energy within the self that stagnate rather than engage in a love affair with life. These pooled energies can actually manifest as physical diseases, where the body draws attention to these energy blockages.

Often this dis-ease is the refusal to forgive. Forgiveness requires the action of giving. Giving is releasing something you hold onto. If someone hurt you and you hold resentment, your energy becomes blocked. In forgiving, you give away your attachment to being offended. In giving it away, you redeploy your energy reserves to flow toward life rather than stagnate in defense.

Nothing can erase the truth of neglect or abuse. However, once it has occurred it takes up residence within the self. It becomes the property of the self. All of my life experiences, good or bad, are part of who I am. The goal is to fully and harmoniously own all that I am, all I have experienced. To deny or remain stuck in blame alienates me from my wholeness.

It ultimately becomes one’s right and responsibility to address the fulness of one’s own life experiences. To do this, the adult self must become the ultimate parent, a parent that is charged with healing by forgiving the offenses of neglect and abuse accrued in one’s relationships through life.

Of course, we often forget, by suppressing or repressing, many unprocessed experiences of traumatic interactions. To initiate, as an adult, the intent to recapitulate one’s life, reverses the stagnant action of forgetting. Instead, we open to the action for getting to all the hidden experiences previously frozen in time in the storage container of the physical body.

In so doing, we are able to free ourselves of extraneous energy, i.e., the negative beliefs of others, that we have previously held within us. We also master the emotions and sensations pooled within, freeing that energy to be redeployed into a fulfilling life.

These are the actions of primal love that free the innocent child self to experience the joy and awe of life. From this place of openness, one is also ready to truly open to fulfilling relationships.

Beneath the surface is now a worthy child in partnership with a loving parent, ready to open to true connection in relationship, and in all of life as well.

Polishing my intent to love,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Get Excited!

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Cling to the loving spirit self…
– Artwork © 2022 Jan Ketchel

I threw the I Ching to get its take on the state of the world. I received the hexagram of Retreat, #33. It gave emphasis to a heightened energetic movement that has given me considerable pause for reflection. Specifically, the moving line in the second place states: “He holds him fast with yellow oxhide. No one can tear him loose.” (Wilhelm translation, p. 131).

The absolute necessity for retreat is the theme of this hexagram. All the moving lines highlight the various permutations of how that might be carried out. This moving line depicts an utter clinging to something that appears to contradict the necessity of letting go in order to retreat.

Wilhelm suggests that this line parallels Jacob’s biblical encounter with the angel Peniel (Gen. 32:26): “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.” Why would anyone need to cling to an angel of God, considered a representative for the face of God, and demand to be blessed?

If Jacob is ego, and angel/God is our High Spirit, than ego, in the face of necessary retreat, is absolutely insisting to maintain a living connection to High Spirit. I can’t help but see this attitude mirrored by the people of Ukraine, and particularly by their spirited leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. In him, I see the spirit of Martin Luther King, who, although knowing he wouldn’t be here in physical form to witness it, assured us all that the Spirit would manifest a fully integrated world, someday.

In this time of great disintegration, where the collective subconscious, with all its deeply suppressed energies, has found chaotic outlet on the world stage, this reading guides us to cling to the Spirit of love and truth, as our fragile civilization must retreat and preserve itself in the inner chamber of the heart. Many are called upon to offer the ultimate sacrifice, but their spirits are alive and unrelenting in their intent for freedom.

Amidst the deluge of disheartening words, accusations, and conspiracy theories, cling to love. Do not allow threats to dampen the spirit and send one into despair, nihilism, cynicism, and depression. Stay excited! Look to the greater truth of deep transformation happening right now upon this planet Earth.

Breakdown is a necessary prelude to reconstruction. And indeed, the world is contending with global carpetbaggers, totalitarians selling their narcissistic wares, seeking to entrance the populace with power schemes of shock and awe. Cling to the Spirit of love. Stay positive. Know that you are here, upon this Earth, amidst the tremendum of this moment to manifest the true Spirit of love, the foundation for our evolving planet.

On a personal level, continue to cling to the High Spirit of love to raise and radiate a higher vibration that attracts like Spirits and protects against intrusions of the lower negative vibrations seeking to undermine the all-encompassing power of love. In clinging to the power of love, ego remains charged with positive excitement, even as it must traverse through a loaded minefield of negativity in its retreat.

In a nutshell, I interpret the guidance of the I Ching as the necessity to retreat into the truth and love of the heart during this most activated of times. Cling with unrelenting perseverance to the High Spirit, we are advised, where love radiates at such a high vibration that nothing of a lower vibration can penetrate it. Ego must cling to its Spirit rather than fall prey to manipulation, inflation, or deflation.

Rest assured, with this alignment you truly will be blessed. That blessing is the excitement of High Spirit’s love vibration.

With love,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Befriend the Jackal

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Befriend the Jackal…
– Artwork © 2022 Jan Ketchel

In Egyptian mythology, Anubis, the guardian of souls and lord of the underworld, appears with a human body topped with a jackal’s head. The jackal, in physical reality, is an earthbound wild dog who, like a vulture in the sky, feeds off the flesh of the dead. This is the likely root of Anubis’ symbolic and solemn association with death.

The jackal, in the tripartite human being dimensions of mind, body and spirit, is the physical body, the mortal component of this human trinity.  The physical body is also the subconscious dimension of the human being. The subconscious houses the raw materials of all that we are, as well as all that we have ever been.

When the superconscious dimension of our Spirit decides to incarnate in human form for a particular mission of self-actualization in time and space, it must forget its immortal existence to accomplish its goal. If we were to be born with a distinct knowledge of our soulful existence beyond death, it would trump the experience of mortality, which is crucial to creating the necessary growth environment, or experimental/experiential conditions that our Spirit requires to advance its mission.

The jackal, as accomplice to Spirit’s intent, is the  guardian of Spirit knowledge housed in the shadowland of the subconscious and stored in the human body. The paradox of this contract is that the jackal becomes Spirit’s greatest opponent in life. While Spirit seeks the spiritualization of our sojourn as material, mortal beings, jackal seeks to consume all of our spiritual stirrings that threaten to bring into the light of consciousness the truth of our hidden potential and immortality. The psychological tool to keep things hidden is suppression.

The jackal accomplishes its mission through preoccupying us with concerns of physical survival. We become obsessed with our income and resources to assure food and shelter. Our preoccupation with creature comforts renders us inert, as we sink into the malaise of semi-conscious existence. Ultimately, these obsessions evoke anxiety and fear and breed selfishness.

The world is currently caught in such a survivalist drama, as fears of scarcity fuel war and hate of neighbor. These fixations lack the deeper spiritual knowing of interconnected life beyond mortal existence. The challenge for the world now is to ascend to this spiritualized position of love and care for all of life. This is indeed the Great Spirit’s intent for the entire human race in its current incarnation: to ascend to love amidst threat to mortality. But how to accomplish this?

The shamans of ancient Mexico reminded themselves each day that they were “a being who is going to die” to counter the jackal’s distracting efforts to mire their Spirits in materialism. With death as one’s adviser, one is mindfully present, with Spirit, to the opportunity for fulfillment in each mortal moment.

Between the superconscious domain of Spirit and the subconscious domain of the jackal—the body—is the mind. The mind is actually another orphaned dimension of Spirit, known as the ego. Like the body, the mind is a victim of brainwashing, that is, amnesia of its true origin: Spirit.

However, despite its ignorance, ego stumbled upon the tree of knowledge and free will. On the downside of this discovery is ego frequently colluding with the jackal, advancing its power aims and survivalist agendas. On the upside, ego has the potential to calm the jackal, whereby opening the channel to Spirit’s guidance and resource in its Earthly mission.

When ego chooses to meditate, it calms the body with positive suggestions, which in turn provide reassurance. This is where ego learns voluntary control over the jackal’s autonomic nervous system. When the jackal gets anxious, the ego can lead it to the calmness of its safe place. Once the jackal feels safe, and sees that its true physical needs are being met, it allows its hidden treasures to come into the light of consciousness.

This allows ego to recapitulate the repressed traumas of this life, or the issues of past lives, previously hidden and stored in the dark storage of the physical body. This allows access to one’s true karma, one’s mission in this life, allowing it to be revealed and fulfilled. Ultimately, this spiritualization process allows for the full merger of mind, body, and Spirit in love, the collective Spirit intent for the lifetime we are all in.

Interestingly, it is Anubis who presents the human heart to Ra at the time of human passing, as the actions of one’s just-lived life are weighed and future karma assigned.

We begin our journey of spiritual return through befriending the jackal, who in turn opens the door to the gems of our true heritage, presenting materials for advancement. And, ultimately, as our worthy opponent through life, the jackal returns us, upon passing, to our full-fledged Spirit in infinity.

Loving the jackal,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: What Do I Really Believe?

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Love in the silence of personal meditation…
– Artwork © 2022 Jan Ketchel

Matter follows thought. Thought issues from the mind. The mind is the soul’s seat of consciousness as it conforms to life in a physical body. The physical body is thus an expression of the soul, in a state of dense energy, as directed by the mind.

The mind has multiple influences upon it, the majority of which operate at a subconscious level. The core drivers of the mind are beliefs, those we consciously subscribe to, but more importantly, those we have internalized through socialization in this life, as well as those encoded in our genetics and archetypal inheritance.

Most of our beliefs operate in the shadow of the subconscious, unbeknownst to the conscious mind. We are a species that is highly susceptible to suggestion, which is merely a prepackaged thought presented to the subconscious mind, which in turn gives it material form through the body’s nervous and endocrine systems.

As the subconscious, by definition, is not a conscious thinking entity, its modus operandi is instinctive reactivity. This reactivity registers as physical sensations and emotions, which steer motor responses to actual physical circumstances or mental thoughts. The subconscious treats outer reality and the imagination identically, that is, as facts to be reacted to.

The influencers of modern social media are suggestion-producers, in the form of thoughts and images, that impact the collective subconscious and generate states of nervous activation, emotion and physical activity that then attempt to define and shape physical reality. For example, the suggestion that Ketanji Brown Jackson is soft on sexual predators becomes the internalized, felt to be, personal belief of many individuals.

Thus, many beliefs are actually not personally generated but are extrinsic mental installations that shape the conscious mind through subconscious influence. In such cases, the ego does not exercise its free will to apply consciousness in its ability to reflect and arrive at its own truth. To the contrary, it blindly accepts and follows the tenets of its internalized suggestions, where they are reacted to, as facts, by the personal subconscious.

Beliefs are also shaped by our educational systems that seek to instill a system of morality, along with tools for understanding and utility, that allow for successful navigation of life in a physical body. Thus, even our basic beliefs about the nature of reality are narrowed by the boundaries of what is considered valid exploration.

Medical treatment is largely confined to physical tests and medicines that correct the observable diseases in the physical body. The powerful effect of placebo, which completely reflects the power of a mental belief, is dismissed as irrelevant to objective reality.

Placebo actually gives evidence to the fundamental fact that, as a person thinketh, so do they becometh. Matter, the state of physical reality, is first and foremost shaped by our beliefs, shaped by inheritance, instinct, experience and karma. The royal road to discovering those beliefs is meditation.

To take true ownership of our physical reality we must illumine the beliefs that subconsciously operate within us, and determine their validity. In the still of meditation we observe how thoughts arise and impact our nervous and glandular activities. We discover the subtleties of beliefs upon the matter of our own physical bodies.

As we calm the subconscious reactivity of sensation and emotion, as well as the free flow of thought, in meditation, we move beyond the defining influence of the subconscious and are opened to the spiritual center of the higher self.

From the meditative position of detached observer we enter the subtle realm of energetic reality. We notice sensations arising spontaneously from the energy centers of the various chakras. We are treated to the experience of vibrational reality, where we can ascend into the quiet and calm of heightened spiritual awareness. We discover ourselves as energetic beings. We discover our higher selves.

At the heart chakra we are led to energetic truth and love, the one true energetic reality. Love is the binding glue of the oneness of all that is. All can experience this truth in the silence of their personal meditation.

As well, all that is untrue and negative will arise in meditation, where the opportunity arises to cleanse oneself of the the limiting beliefs, or habits, that have by default, defined one’s life.

Aligning one’s consciousness and free will with the truths of this spiritual, or energetic center, of the heart, sets the stage for manifesting the heart’s true content. Through the letting go of untruths, we clear the channel for pure love to flow through and into our physical reality.

Belief then becomes knowing. Knowing thoughts generate energetic and physical harmony. Harmony is the next stage of our human evolution.

Meditate, meditate, meditate, and all will be well, within and without.

Intent on Knowing,

Chuck