All posts by Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Answer To Ferguson

What is buried under all that whiteness? - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
What is buried under all that whiteness?
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

The snowfall was becoming heavy and sticking. I prepared to retreat to my home office, but, of all days, she insisted on seeing me in person.

She arrived, sank into the couch and cried. She had been there with King, and though she sat warmed by the zip-up sweater from Obama’s election campaign she was crushed by the outcome of Ferguson. “Nothing has changed,” she whispered despondently.

She went on to tell me she had to come, there was no one else alive to talk to, that is, those who were there, those who had marched with her alongside King. I have never felt so deeply honored, it was me she’d insisted on taking to, a white man, a little too young to have marched with King, now entrusted with helping her find meaning in the current tragedy. And the blinding white snow intensified outside the window as we talked.

The dialogue had started a few weeks earlier. She’d opened her computer to my website and up popped a blog. She came to see me afterwards, insisting that I explain what I had meant in a particular paragraph. I brought up on my computer the blog I’d written that week. “No, that’s not it,” she stated. It took about ten minutes to find it, but when she mentioned Dr. Kenneth Clarke having been referenced I put his name into the search engine and Eureka! “Yes, that’s it,” a blog I’d written when Obama first got elected, America Chooses the Black Doll. This blog had mysteriously popped up for her a few days earlier, a blog I’d written six years ago!

She immediately drew attention to a paragraph concerning the projection of evil onto blackness. “Explain what you mean,” she demanded. I told her that blackness, from an archetypal standpoint, is the unknown, whether it be rejected and disowned, or simply not yet encountered but lying somewhere in the unknown or dark area of the psyche. This projection falls upon race, but race is not the origin of this projection. She had told me that I needed to clarify that more and referenced a work by Toni Morrison.

On this snowy morning, she handed me a precious, personally autographed, copy of Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. “Read this and return it to me,” she said.

I have done my homework. Here’s my report. I can only answer to Ferguson in my own way, how I see and experience the world, where we are now, and what we must do to survive.

What Toni Morrison cogently captures in her incisive review of the black and white of American literature is that together they form an interdependent whole; one cannot exist without the other. The backdrop of the freedom of the American Dream is the utter control of the darkness that houses both its fears and deeply instinctual longings. In racial terms, that darkness—that resides in the depths of the psyche in the shadow of all people of all races—gets projected onto black people.

How is this not the dynamic played out in Ferguson? Had Michael Brown been white, would he be dead today? What terror gripped Darren Wilson, as he stared into the darkness he projected onto Michael Brown, that made him have to kill his assailant to feel safe and free?

Toni Morrison quotes the white author Marie Cardinal from her autobiographical work, The Words To Say It:

“My first anxiety attack occurred during a Louis Armstrong concert. I was nineteen or twenty. Armstrong was going to improvise with his trumpet, to build a whole composition in which each note would be important and would contain within itself the essence of the whole. I was not disappointed: the atmosphere warmed up very fast. The scaffolding and flying buttresses of the jazz instruments supported Armstrong’s trumpet, creating spaces which were adequate enough for it to climb higher, establish itself, and take off again. The sounds of the trumpet sometimes piled up together, fusing a new musical base, a sort of matrix which gave birth to one precise, unique note, tracing sound whose path was almost painful, so absolutely necessary had its equilibrium and duration become; it tore at the nerves of those who followed it.

“My heart began to accelerate, becoming more important than the music, shaking the bars of my rib cage, compressing my lungs so the air could no longer enter them. Gripped by panic at the idea of dying there in the middle of spasms, stomping feet, and the crowd howling, I ran into the street like someone possessed.”

Fortunately, for Ms. Cardinal, she landed in the hands of noted psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim where she squarely faced the source of her reaction to Louis Armstrong’s performance—the riffs from the darkness of her own soul, unleashed to shake her awake to the depths of her own nature.

As the I Ching states in Hexagram #48, The Well: “For any merely superficial ordering of life that leaves its deepest needs unsatisfied is as ineffectual as if no attempt at order had ever been made.”

But to achieve a new order of true balance, we must take responsibility for that which rattles in the depths of our own darkness and bring it into union with the white light of consciousness. This is true integration, the union of dark and light, each adjusting to the needs of its other half.

When the light seeks to rule, dissociated from the truths of its own inner darkness, only repression and dissociation can keep the darkness at bay. But life cannot exist only in the light of day; we need the dark of night as well. Without both, darkness disowned is projected, kept under control through racist dogma.

We can no longer afford a racist solution to house our psychic dissociation. Terrors from the depths of our psychic mayhem have slipped into full-fledged control of our planet. Madness in the form of greed is destroying our fragile ecosystem—all this in the white light of day.

Projecting our shadow onto people of color—African, Middle Eastern, Hispanic, etc.—is an old world survival strategy. Owning, facing and integrating what lives in the darkness of all of our souls is the only evolutionary option at this juncture. It’s about survival.

Only a new relation of balance between the light and the dark within human nature will reverberate outwardly and settle the squalls of Mother Nature who, like Louis Armstrong’s trumpet, is tearing at all our nerves to listen to the truth of nature. As within, so without.

This is my answer to Ferguson: Take your place in the history books of an old world order; the time of great advance has come. Now is the time when the human race must take ownership of its wholeness, squarely facing that which lies in the darkness of all of us.

Integrating,
Chuck

P. S.: Just as I finished writing this blog the verdict on the Staten Island chokehold death of Eric Garner was announced, highlighting the same dynamic I write about, keeping it fully alive and in the eyes of all of us, pointing out that this is one of the most important issues we must face in our time.

Notes for today

Look for a blog post from Jan later in the day! In the meantime today’s Soulbyte offers some helpful words of wisdom. And don’t forget to check in to Chuck’s blog published the other day and the great message from Jeanne earlier in the week. Have a great day!

Chuck’s Place: The New Dream Has Begun

“The dream is over
What can I say?”
*

The premise of the movie Interstellar, a wonderful and deeply meaningful movie on so many levels, is that the dream of Earth, as we have known it, is over.

This is no longer an issue for debate. Every human lives with the deep knowing that things are rapidly changing and devolving. If we can lift our eyes from our digital trance, the world reveals to us daily, rapid, unprecedented changes. This rate of accelerating change is paired with our insatiable hunger for new news. Even as we sleep our iPhones stay alert to change.

All the psychic messages that I’ve reviewed, including many from Jeanne, state clearly that planet Earth will continue to exist, though much changed, even taking a new orbital pattern.

This cannot be avoided now. It’s not a question of fate; it’s the inevitable outcome of humankind’s leadership and where it has led the planet.

Humankind is not a wise mother or father, but then, consciousness as the guiding factor is still in its infancy. The true parents of our earthly selves, nature itself, must step in to correct our blunders. Our lessons in stewardship will eventually accrue to an evolved consciousness where humankind can step up to the vision and responsibility of caring for the interconnected whole of this planet. Until then we are at nature’s mercy.

On an individual level, we are all challenged now to contribute to this evolving consciousness. If we are alive, in human form at this time, this is our overarching challenge, the imperative of our times. And although environmental decisions remain critical they no longer need be the main or only focus. Nature has already put in motion its own correctives, most of which cannot be stopped; we’ve already gone too far.

Our focus now needs to be the evolution of our consciousness with respect to the microcosm of our individual lives. We must face that all the forces we see acted out upon the world stage are present in the smallness of our daily lives. In fact, all those forces operate within each of us, pacifists and terrorists, activists and deniers, soothsayers and instigators alike; we are the world.

What is the truth I fail to see, refuse to see, allow to continue to control and dominate my personality, to the detriment of the interdependent whole of myself? This is where the buck stops, within each of us. Can we face and honestly answer this question? Can we take full responsibility for reconciling the powerful factions that operate within our own personalities?

This is our playing field now. Rather than in the escaping to new planets as in Interstellar, this is the one venue where we do have the ability to come into balance and reconcile with the truths of our own natures.

Every individual who takes up this challenge personally positions our species to assume real leadership as we reinvent the dream of humankind, driven forward now by nature itself. If we stay and change with nature, consciously accepting her prerogatives and the prerogatives of our own inner natures, we position ourselves to evolve with her.

As within, so without. Counter powerlessness with personal responsibility and feel the freedom and opportunity to fulfill the self in this life, simultaneously advancing all of human consciousness to responsibly take the dream forward, into new life and new possibilities, albeit in a vastly changed world.

Consciously dreaming it forward,
Chuck

* John Lennon quote from the song God on the album John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band 1970

Chuck’s Place: Real Security

Still dealing with computer issues, but here is a blog from Chuck, sans pictures again, but offered with our heartfelt wishes for good journeying through all the changes.

The human animal is acutely aware of great change on the horizon. Such impending change produces a collective fear that emanates from the deepest stratum of our instinctual selves, rising to the surface in our individual experiences as anxiety. We seek to dispel this anxiety by seeking refuge in our ego self, which responds by associating the anxiety with current events as it defensively reasons us to provisional security. This anxiety/fear, however, goes deeper than that, into the very nature of our human animal selves.

The question arises: How do we achieve real security? The truth is that although it is evident that we are in for great planetary change, life is and has always been about great change. All life ends; what greater change could there possibly be?

Real security is not to be found in a respite from change. A respite from change may temporarily be found in the ego’s bag of magical defenses, but such respite is an illusion. In reality change is constant and unrelenting. We might, nonetheless, discover a sense of real security on a warm day at the beach.

The ocean tide is the ultimate expression of unrelenting change. The heartbeat of the earth never ceases in the circulatory system of the ocean’s waves. If we lie calmly at the seashore, we might attune ourselves to the sounds of the true pulse of change. No wave is ever the same. Some waves are calm and smooth, others are crushingly powerful.

If we venture beyond our sandy bed into the ocean waves we experience more directly the energy of change. As the waves approach we might decide to learn to dance with them, timing our moves to leap at just the right moment, barely impacted by the passing waves. If our timing is slightly askew we might find ourselves mercilessly dragged down and under, into sand and swirls, frantically awaiting release that we might breathe again. Most times we are released back into life, returned to the control of our own bodies. Sometimes the ocean claims life, the catalyst to moving into new form.

Perhaps we might decide to align ourselves with the flow of the waves, with the energy of change, as we ride the cresting waves ashore. Sometimes we are fooled or miscalculate and again find ourselves pulled asunder, forced to face the crushing uncertainty of change head on.

Real security, however, is only to be found in facing the inevitability of change by allowing the ego self to learn about its energy, discovering how to ride it successfully by facing the truth of our own lives.

If we can allow ourselves to engage with consciousness in our dreams and bring them to waking life, we enter more deeply into the ocean of our deeper selves.

If we can allow ourselves to fully experience our feelings in the present, and in our deepest memories in recapitulation, we release the energy of stored inner tidal waves and learn to stay afloat through the inevitable storms of our lives.

And yes, if we can allow ourselves to fully reexperience our deepest encounters with terrors that once tore us asunder, we gain the knowledge of holding together through the greatest cataclysms of change.

Real security is to be found in the ability to flow with the changes that life presents us with. To fully become our wholeness we must allow for encounters with, and knowledge of, the parts of ourselves that rock the limited identity our ego has constructed to keep us safe. But let’s not sell the ego short; it is fully capable of the growth to fluidity that is necessary to accept life on its own terms without machinations to make it palatable.

Bring your ego to the beach of your dreams tonight. It’s fine to rest comfortably on the shore and attune to the rhythm of change. The time will come when you are ready, or not, for the deeper plunge into the ocean of pulsing life and constant unrelenting change. Real security is found in flowing with the changes, wherever they take you.

Resting comfortably on the beach, until the next wave comes along,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: The Three Vexations

[Here is Chuck’s blog for this week. We are dealing with some computer issues and thus no pictures accompany this post. Look for a blog from Jan later in the week. In the meantime, here is some good stuff to ponder as you take your own deepening journey. And don’t forget to check in each morning for our daily Soulbytes!]

In his 1477 poem, the Ordinal of Alchemy, Thomas Norton, the English alchemist, warns any seeker of this Sacred Art of three major trials: haste, despair, and deception. These three devils are the gargoyles that all would-be adepts must pass by if they are to find the path to achieve the Opus, the Grail Cup.

In modern terms, seekers of individuation through the path of psychotherapy and recapitulation will meet these same vexations cast upon their conscious intent.

Norton states: “He who is in a hurry will complete his work neither in a month, nor yet in a year, and in this Art it will always be true that the man [or woman] who is in a hurry will never be without matter of complaint…” (Anatomy of the Psyche, Edinger, p. 5)

We enter psychotherapy because life circumstances have mobilized our ego intent to find resolution to the conflicts that thwart our fulfillment. Our mobilized ego is frustrated or in great pain and is highly pressured to achieve freedom from these constraints. These are the conditions that set the stage for haste. We want to move on quickly, move deeper into life. We do not want to suffer a moment longer.

The rationalistic psychologies of the modern world promise just such results with well-laid out plans and programs promising great success. Would that the problems that befront us were all of the world of reason! Unfortunately, to solve our deepest issues we must sink into the depths of nature, far beyond the purview of reason. And for this healing adventure the ego’s demand for results in a timely fashion will only be met with disappointment and complaint. To enter the depths of the psyche we enter a world outside our familiar space and time where we must acquiesce to the healing tides of nature.

“If the enemy does not prevail against you with hurry, he will assualt you with despondency, and will be constantly putting into your minds discouraging thoughts, how those who seek this Art are many, while they are few who find it, and how those who fail are often wiser…than yourself.” (Ibid., p. 5)

Deflation of the ego, diminished self-worth and self-esteem, negative thinking, doubt that things will ever get better—these are the many faces of despair that seek to derail the concerted effort needed to prevail through the long, arduous, and often physically painful and emotionally terrifying journey into the inferno of recapitulation. A willingness to keep the candle of intent lit within the self, even though one feels utterly alone and abandoned as one takes the journey into the abyss, is critical if one is to prevail through this trial of despair.

“The third enemy whom you must guard against is deceit, and this is perhaps more dangerous than the other two…” (Ibid., p. 5)

By deceit, I believe Norton is referring to the helpers who come to serve the journey. Many of these so called “helpers” are the characters of the shadow self, entities that offer insights or respites in the form of inflations and addictions in exchange for allowing them to act out or take possession of our lives as we traverse our journey.

There are many tricksters within the self promising treasures in exchange for habits that subtlely drain our energy and resolve as we struggle to keep our course set on our goal of wholeness. Many an oasis offered can be a tricky resting place, claiming decades of our lives while we wait to awaken from our slumbers in a poppy field of a needed break.

Know that the vexations of haste, despair, and deception are the guardians of all paths of heart. They cannot be avoided. Better to see them as worthy opponents that forge us into the Grail Cup that can fully contain our wholeness, the goal of the opus.

We are all taking the journey in one form or another,
Chuck