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Chuck’s Place: Beyond Self-Importance

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I am more than my physical body…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel taken at The Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia

For many years, we must grapple with our acquired inferiority and  journey to overcome it. All humans become inferior as they grow from a childhood of oneness of connection to everything to a firmly separated ego identity whose consciousness creates firm boundaries between self and other.

This loss of oneness happens gradually as we are socialized into rational thinking, the operational interpretation system of our world. Rationality, with its cause and effect focus, fragments our  wholeness in an effort to bring understanding, order, and control into our lives. Our inherent connection to our soul group and access to the  knowledge of our journeys through infinity, as recorded in the holographic Akashic record of all life, slips away as the challenges of navigating life on earth calls for greater adaptation to the physical world.

This loss of connection to our greater wholeness is the ultimate cause of the collective human condition of inferiority. The truth is that our poor ego is inferior. How could it be otherwise? To go from a condition of interconnected oneness, what many might characterize as the oneness of God, to the puny separateness of an ego disconnected from its source is a built-in experience of inferiority.

Ego has few options to improve its impoverished state of being. One option is to learn and master the rules of the interpretation system of this world that will allow it greater adaptation to the challenges of survival. This track—good schools, good mate, good job—though still powerful, is found wanting in our time of general disintegration. Our planet can no longer house unlimited growth.

Another option for our ego is to employ either deflation or inflation. In deflation the ego keeps itself down, as it sees all others in the world as superior to itself. The advantage to this strategy is to be more accepting of an inferior life by feeling unworthy of receiving more. The downside of this strategy is possible depression and resentment for not having been able to experience or actualize more of one’s inherent potential.

In contrast, inflation fills the ego with a high level of self-importance, as it puffs itself up with an identification with a higher spirit. Narcissism could be understood as the ultimate identification with God: I am all there is! The trap of self-importance is a false assessment of self that is off-putting and generally not up to the job.

So what is a more realistic option for the ego beyond the trappings of self-importance with its artificially low value with deflation or overvaluation with inflation? First, we must actually value the ego for what it truly is: a fragment of our soul that lives in a world of space-time. This unique opportunity has an advantage over infinity. That which is born, lives, and dies can experience a maturing and discovery process while separated from the oneness of infinity.

In fact, it is likely that our greater soul group chooses life in this world to discover and grow through questions and problems that will enhance our soul’s journey in infinity. A sojourn in space-time provides the opportunity for a full exposition and living out of a question in a lifetime that enhances our soul’s knowing of itself outside space-time.

Nonetheless, the cost to our ego in this earthly lifetime is a disconnect from the mothership of our greater soul in infinity. This is simply the necessary byproduct of a life in space-time. However, this ego/greater soul axis remains present throughout our lifetime as a latent potential to be more fully realized and developed. This is the evolutionary shift now happening in the world. This is the key to the ego shedding self-importance as a survival strategy to cover up its inadequacy.

Through its sensory systems the ego is quite capable of bringing to consciousness concrete data perceived in the world, as well as mentally orienting itself to that data. If the ego can suspend the judgements of its socialized operating system, to allow for decoding the world in a broader rather than strictly rational way, it becomes well positioned to collaborate with the wisdom of its greater soul while still in space-time.

An example of this is synchronicity. In every moment of every day the world around us echoes sounds, signs, and messages to guide and supplement our decisions, reflections, and understandings. Nearly every time I reach a conclusion I am treated to an affirmation or tweak in some form by the world around me that supplements my process.

This can take the form of a song in my head, a page in a book I randomly open to, a phone call, or the chirp of a bird. If my ego is humble it immediately considers the feedback the world delivers as it orients itself to decisions at hand. This is not about ego letting go of its rational facility but instead expanding it to include wisdom offered from beyond the rational for inclusion in its processing.

When ego reaches beyond self-importance to shore up its relationship with its greater wholeness the world is moved toward greater wholeness and integration as well. Decisions made by a clear headed ego, acting in consort with its greater soul, are sure to lead us to a real world of stable continuance.

As for our ego, its connection to its greater soul assures its confidence in being fully supported in its soul’s intent in this lifetime. Now that’s support beyond self-importance!

Humbly,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Attention

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Energy travels many paths…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

Energy is blood at the ethereal level. Blood is the carrier of the vital life source in the physical body. Energy is the active life force in the energy body. As sometimes we may require a blood transfusion to preserve life in the physical body so the energy body seeks energetic enhancement through exchanges of energy at the ethereal level.

Actually, we can notice this energetic transmission of energy on the physical plane through the exchanges of everyday life. Attention is a form of energy. When we give something our attention we transfer some of our vital energy to it, which then enlivens it in some form.

However subtle, we can often feel in some way that someone has their attention upon us. Often it might register as a sudden thought about the person who is thinking about us or actually looking at us, even from behind.

Human beings often interpret attention as a form of validation. Attention is currency. Like money, it fills us with value and worth.  This can result in attention seeking behavior. The greater the attention given, the greater the feeling of personal worth. This was the theorem Mark Zuckerberg exploited with the launching of Facebook: the more friends who like us, the better we feel about ourselves.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico were well aware of the energetic dynamic of attention seeking behavior. In fact, they determined that our human obsession with validation monopolizes the lion’s share of our vital energy through our entire lifetime.

The experience of being validated may deliver a temporary  energetic boost. In actuality it proves to be an energetic drain when factoring in the amount of mental and emotional energy spent each day seeking attention and validation from the outside world.

The shamans teach us to become energy misers. They employ techniques to free themselves of the energy drain of upholding self-importance through external validation. They relish opportunities to release themselves from being offended, a major source of energy drain in human interaction.

If we can release ourselves from being offended by others whose narcissism prevents them from seeing or valuing us, in fact even causes them to bully us, then we are actually storing tremendous caches of energy. Releasing ourselves from any attachment to victimhood is central to this practice.

This doesn’t mean we simply turn the other cheek. In fact, we might have to actually fight back, but our approach is not driven by rage or revenge or preserving self-importance but is simply a pragmatic response to the challenge presented, based on what is possible in a given situation.

The energy gained and stored through losing self-importance allows that energy to be redeployed toward exploration of one’s true purpose for coming into this world, as well as the ability to explore life in other dimensions of infinity while still in physical form.

Best use of attention is to observe the tendency to be offended by others. Identifying it enables a process of detachment that both saves and frees energy for spiritual deployment.

Attentively,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: All Roads Lead to the Energy Body

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In our energy bodies…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Is it a particle or is it a wave? Physicists have come to the conclusion that it is both. Sometimes it, (that is, our self) appears in solid form, sometimes in pure energy form.

Don Juan, Carlos Castaneda’s teacher added that we are always energy first. What we call physical is a specific configuration of energy that has materialized into a solid form. Nonetheless, our solid physical form regularly shifts into its energetic essence.

This happens to us automatically every night in dreaming. A part of our solid energy form dissolves into its energy body state where it is free to travel the universe in an instant with such lightness of being.

Dreaming allows the energy body to be bathed in pools of energy that release the stress accumulated in the physical body during its daytime encounters in the dense physical world. If we are denied our REM sleep, our energy body dreaming state, we lose our physical and mental ability to function coherently.

Our ultimate Self, what we might call our Soul, resides in our energy body. The basis for this conclusion is the fact that the energy body  does not die when the physical body dies. Our energy body consolidates all of our energy at the time of physical death and then flies off into infinity.

Our nightly energy body dreams are the gateway to explorations in infinity while we are still securely attached to our physical body that lies in deep, frozen, space-time rest while we journey. This attachment remains firm until the cord is cut when we undertake our definitive journey into infinity at the time of our death.

Consciousness is retained beyond the physical world of space-time. We experience this while in physical form in our nightly dreams with our energy body. We are fully capable of thinking and reasoning in our dreams, however, our physical capacities are actually thought imagery projections in dreaming as our physical body is held in a state of transitory paralysis while in REM sleep. Sleep walking is actually a failure of this suppression of the physical body in dreaming, which results in active physical accompaniment to a dream.

In ordinary dreaming the energy body releases the physical and emotional energies and entanglements from a day of waking life. Lucid, shamanic, and out-of-body explorations are more advanced forms of dreaming where consciousness is aware it is in a dreaming state and great control is exerted over staying present to the expanded opportunities for exploration in this altered energetic state.

The great energy of now is offering all of us a terrific boost of energy to discover and cultivate our latent potential to expanded awareness and exploration in our energy body’s nightly adventures. What was once the province of shamans and advanced yogis and monks is now available to all seekers who embrace the intent to retain awareness in dreaming.

All roads lead to the energy body, the carrier of our infinite soul. Enjoy it, explore with it, find the answers to the mystery of your soul’s intent with it. Dream on!

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Remote Viewing

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Reach out and see what happens…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel taken at The Monroe Institute in Faber, Virginia

Jan and I spent a week at the Monroe Institute doing their Gateway Program, which uses advanced sound technology to induce Alpha and Theta brainwave states, the frequencies for out-of-body states, lucid dreaming and manifestation.

We were treated to extended meetings with Joseph McMoneagle and Paul Elder, the former of whom is considered the most evolved remote viewer in the world. Both had affiliation with The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Stargate Project, a psychic remote viewing program dedicated to locating such targets as hidden nuclear sites or finding important missing people.

The Stargate Project operated as part of US intelligence from 1978 to 1995 when, after all those years, the CIA disbanded the program, claiming that the psychic phenomenon of remote viewing had not been very useful. Interesting how many years it took to figure out how ‘worthless’ psychic ability is. I’m sure the Russians came to the same conclusion!

Remote viewing is a psychic ability that involves the viewer getting completely centered in their right brain, the physical download of the deep spirit self, where all things are connected as one, the home of all knowledge. From this place of all knowing the viewer describes and/or draws the scene that comes to them, which ultimately provides the physical location of a chosen target.

I’ve come to realize that all of life is a remote viewing of our future self’s promptings to notice, in the resonances and compulsions of our present lives, reflections of our soul’s intent. Too often we get caught in the near-sightedness and tumult of our present circumstance, missing or misjudging the broader clues of the puzzle pieces of our destiny as they bubble up in current life.

Indeed the person or circumstance we are currently fixated on is significant. On some level they are the current representatives of our soul’s greater intent. However, they may only be a step, a necessary challenge that must be mastered before our soul can bring greater focus to where we really need to go.

Too often we get too attached and misjudge a significant task as the fulfillment of our purpose in life. We resist the obvious signs that it is not really ‘the one’ we are really seeking. The energy that covets this projected reflection of our soul snares us and thus we are destined to journey into the abyss of illusion.

Oh, how wonderful those illusions are! We really should enjoy all our illusions. But when Spirit calls we do well to listen. As Joseph Campbell pointed out, sometimes ‘the call’ comes but once.

Suspend judgment. From a broader perspective all journeys are relevant way stations as we traverse the labyrinth of our soul’s intent. Turn instead with awe to the magic remotely presented and viewed in the unfolding movie of the Everyday of our Lives. Figure it out, and journey on!

View from afar,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Spiritual Instinct

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Spent some time in the Deep South. Couldn’t help but be impressed by the preponderance of churches, congregations, assemblies, and conversations that ended in “bless you.”

Driving along, taking it all in, we were 30 miles from our next adventure, a week long immersion in out-of-body experience, for us the ultimate spiritual experience.

Something in the human being cries out for spiritual experience. On this one I’m quite certain Freud had it wrong. Spirituality is more than just a by-product, a sublimation of frustrated sexuality. We are spirit as well as animal beings. We are more than our physical bodies!

We are indeed beings whose animal self will die. Like some of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico accomplished, our species will find ways to extend our animal life for perhaps hundreds or even thousands of years, but eventually it will end.

Of course we covet life in the body. Why else would we find ourselves on this planet, land of opportunity? And that opportunity is the completion of a dream; beginning, middle, and end. Beyond that is more and more dreams, adventures without end. The great challenge is to complete the current dream and leap forward with awareness.

Were we but animals we would follow nature’s program as animals show us to do in their very orderly preparation for death. But our spirit self becomes so attached to the peoples and things of this world that it struggles mercilessly not to let go of this amazing life in time and space, to allow our dreams to unfold in new ways.

We are the active side of God, we are the seeds of possibility, living, feeling, failing, succeeding, developing and sensing in new ways the realization of infinite possibilities. All those possibilities are equal; success is as real a dream as failure, no judgment.

Our spiritual instinct gets caught in attachment to the physical. Our challenge in this life is to open up to our full spiritual nature. We are soul beings who travel endlessly in infinity, exploring love in all its possibilities. To reach this experience we must get beyond the veil of love existing only in the form of physical attachment in this life.

We are prompted by our spirit throughout our lives to awaken to this fuller truth, and this is the greatest challenge in this life. Pain and death are part of the loving path. They must be experienced, they must be mastered before the veil fully lifts.

Along the way are experiences of life and love beyond the body. It happens every night in dreaming. Hold the intent gently to explore that realm with consciousness as you go off to sleep. Repeat it every night. Eventually the door will open.

And then you won’t need to believe, you will know.

Sweet dreams,

Chuck