Spirit comes down to earth… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
In addition to the petty tyrants that all people are impacted by—in their outer lives in the everyday world—is the tyrant within, the one that has us do what our more enlightened self would have us not do. Who is that mysterious other that upends our clearest, most grounded rational intentions, in a heartbeat?
That mysterious other is indeed a spirit, recognizable by its insatiable appetite for more. Rightly situated, that hunger for freedom is what propels the energy body to explore the universe, also in a heartbeat. Command of that spirit in dreaming is the goal of all spiritual seekers, as they prove for themselves the fuller capabilities of all that we are.
However, when that same spirit more projects itself upon the object world of everyday life it fixates on substances, objects, behaviors and people to quench its insatiable appetite for more. This is the obvious basis of all addictions: Our insatiable spiritual appetite entwined with the concrete objects of this world.
Being an insatiable spirit, it stands to reason that enough will never be enough. When spirit more attaches, obsession without end—its version of infinity—is its marching orders. Once spirit more takes up residence in ego spirit’s domain (the world of everyday life), ego is easily mesmerized by the promise of ecstatic fulfillment.
The problem with spirit more’s perspective of everyday life is that it acts there the way it acts in its pure energy body state. In that spiritual state anything is possible and time is largely nonexistent. Spirit more does not have to face the aging and dying of the human body, it lives in infinity.
The human body, in contrast, has its definite limits and fixed duration of life. When driven and controlled by spirit more, it is subject to illness and injury, as well as the distorted idea that it will live forever. It can cause many to delay their growth because they believe they have forever.
Of course, a touch of spirit more sprinkled lightly upon the affairs of everyday life is extremely helpful and energizing. Spirit more is a source of magic in everyday life. However, its proper domain is the energetic world of dreaming, where its true ambitions can be realized. When left to roam freely in the playing field of everyday life it wreaks havoc.
This is the heart of the opioid crisis. This is at the heart of the greed currently controlling the world. Spirit more can act as a tyrant when it infiltrates the psyche of a leader. We do well to view it as a misplaced spiritual drive, rather than our manifest destiny to entitlement.
In the world of everyday life, we are spirit beings in finite bodies. In the world of spirit, we are infinite beings, currently engaged in an enriching time-limited human form adventure. To integrate our spirit longings with our physical limitations is our deepest challenge in this life.
Honor spirit more by allowing its touch in everyday life, but be sure that ego spirit remains effectively in control at the heart center. In return, intend to journey with spirit more in its infinite playing field through the gateway of the dream.
Find fulfillment in both realms, but never confuse who should be in charge in their respective domains.
In Roman law, addiction was the term applied to restitution or punishment for a crime. The convicted criminal was addicted, or bound to servitude or slavery, to their master, the offended party in the criminal case.
Addiction to human (and self-importance too!) – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Spirit beings, who either choose or become trapped by a fascination with physical matter, become attracted to, attached to, and bound to, or, as Roman law dictates, addicted to, the constraints of such matter. In this case, that concentration of matter is a physical body, our animal form, what we define as a human being. Human beings are spirit beings addicted to being human. Addiction is the price for the “crime” of becoming human. Certainly, this notion has resonance with the plight of Adam and Eve, banished for their crime of human adventure.
Once the addiction sets in, what ensues is lifetimes of spirit (pure consciousness) living, in experiential detail, the full range of physical possibilities associated with inhabiting a material master (the body) or masters (many bodies), as one may reincarnate in a variety of lifetimes in earthly time/space.
Thus, life in the human form becomes one of various permutations of addiction, or compulsive servitude, to the wants and appetites of one’s physical host, the human body. Freedom from addiction would then ultimately require releasing one’s attachment to human form and returning to Oneself, to original spirit wholeness—what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico called a Magical Being or Energetic Being—freed from addiction, or fixation upon life in a physical body.
Energetic beings flow. Human beings fixate on all things human. Thus, even the most altruistic, giving, loving human can still be defined as an addict. That kind of addiction might take the form of luxuriating in the good feelings of giving. Perhaps the addiction might also belie an underlying attachment to the self-importance of being a selfless, giving being. Perhaps the addiction might simply be one’s final go-round in time/space, the attachment to saying goodbye and releasing from physical life in this dimension forever.
As with the high failure rate of all addiction rehabs, it’s hard to skip grades in Earth School. Each class generally lasts at least a lifetime, and it must be fully lived and fully completed to truly move on, to really be done with that particular addiction in the human form. In AA terms, one who skips over completion of an addiction becomes a dry drunk, not drinking but still equally addicted to the coveted substance in the form of nasty resentment.
The mastery of an addiction is the completion of one’s course with it. The final exam asks you to answer to your exploration of every facet of the addiction. Does it still hold you in its grip? Are you repressing knowledge of your continued attachment? Can you stare it in the face, smile, and say, “I know you! We had quite a journey together, but, truthfully, we are no longer traveling companions. I wish you the best. I love you, but I must move on now. Thanks for the fullness of our journey together.”
This level of completion advances one to the next class, the next level of fixation in the human form. The addiction might shift from substance to money, from victim to abuser, from moral heights to trickster depths, from straight to gay, or from man to woman, as one’s soul explores and gets to know and fully experience its addiction to all the possibilities in human form. The road to freedom may indeed require lifetimes of habitual patterns on a similar fixation until one becomes really bored, often a sign of true mastery and true doneness.
The process of advancement to Earth School graduation involves spirit’s deepening mastery of its addictions. Mastery ultimately leads to real detachment from the addictive fixation that was chosen as the experience in any given lifetime. Real detachment ultimately includes a complete release of emotional attachment to all things physical.
Thus, one bears, upon completion, no resentment, entitlement, anger, negative thoughts about, judgments toward, or obsession with anyone or anything they have been attached to in their lives. One can be thankful toward all the characters, both villains and lovers, for the full range of experiences shared with them, or acted upon them, in their various lives upon the Earth. In true detachment, the overriding feeling is one of love and compassion for all fellow travelers.
Love is indeed the Alchemist’s gold of Earth go-rounds, harnessed and purified in the addiction retort of a human lifetime. The experiment begins with tumultuous attachment, where love is first encountered in its most possessive animal form, with what we call being born. Non-attachment at this stage in human form results in death via failure to thrive, psychosis—where spirit can’t fully humanize—or psychopathy, where spirit serves shadow alone.
As Freud observed, this humanized primal animal energy slowly becomes sublimated throughout childhood, as spirit advances toward civilization. As recent Senate hearings suggest, the fallout for this is what Jung called the acting out of the shadow, where the imprisoned animal can overtake its civilized ego, and pounce.
For love to advance, and be enhanced, it must travel the path of the energy chakras throughout its various lifetimes, finally reaching the heart chakra, the tipping point toward spirit hegemony in human life. Reaching the heart center signifies the human emergence from the primary narcissism of the lower chakras. At the heart center, spirit is able to burn through the veils of illusion that have been generated by the ego’s journey through power, possession, and control in the lower chakras.
From the heart center, spirit is granted its unique opportunity for existence, and love is experienced in transparent sharing, seeing, and communicating. And, yes, the human sexual animal is fully incorporated at this level, entwined in the fullness of love.
From the level of the heart center, the human spirit is finally ready to lighten the heavy burden of its animal survival instinct. That survival instinct transitions from fixation on animal survival to preparation for finally returning to pure spirit form, the human sojourn in Earth time/space completed.
The chakras above the heart center further raise love to its highest human form, pure unattached love. This enhancement is the product of successfully mourning all the required losses of time/space existence, including family, friends, and all the loved ones and things of this world, most especially one’s animal self, the physical body, which must be freely surrendered to death for spirit to move on.
Completion of addiction to human is the shedding of all special attachment to all of the characters, in all of the lives lived in human form, all equally loved in unattached super love. Absorbing and surrendering this fullness lightens the spirit, advancing it to its true state as a Magical Being, ready to take with it enhanced super love, as it launches into its next journey in infinity, curious as to what comes next.
Now, that’s one worthy reason to suffer the human addiction! To put it succinctly: Curiosity is the spirit’s mother of exploration.
Addiction is the thorough exploration of new territory. Repetition is the technology of addiction. Boredom marks the first signs of completion; depression, the precipitant to actual completion. The technology to emerge from depression is recapitulation. During recapitulation, old attachments are released, and energy reclaimed from those attachments is accrued for the next spirit launch.
With the magic fully gathered, off we go, having enriched that which we explored, taking forward all the love, deeply enriched, deeply curious…
Sweetly suffering the human addiction, and curious,
We are animals who know that we are going to die. Our animal compatriots who share the planet with us have no thoughts about life beyond life. Life beyond death, or infinity, is a human obsession.
Infinity is what the word says: the absence of finiteness, life beyond the limits of space and time. Though in today’s world this kind of “spiritual focus” is often downplayed as simply wishful thinking, certainly beyond reason, experiences with infinity appear everywhere in everyday life.
Portal to infinity… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Take for instance the simple act of going to sleep at night. All animals that live in a body, and for whom night is the natural time of rest and rejuvenation, go to sleep at essentially the same hour every night. Human beings, however, often suspend time and live in consciousness into the wee hours of the night, whether it be in reading, interacting with screens, thinking, playing music, creating, or fearfully refusing the dread of dying to the day and facing the darkness of the night. As the night progresses and one remains awake, one enters the altered state of timelessness, impervious to the needs of the finite body that must somehow function the next day.
Others make their forays into infinity through massive accumulations. This can take the form of hoarding where the limits of space are suspended and one lives with unlimited stuff. This can take the form of vast accumulations of wealth, wealth way beyond the realistic needs of many lifetimes. Such insatiability, an active pursuit to continuously possess more, touches the limitlessness of infinity.
Falling or being in love is a powerful suspension of space where lovers meet in the experience of oneness, a timeless union that touches the wholeness of infinity. So powerful is the nectar of this infinite experience that many simply cannot commit to a finite relationship because once limitation sets in, the sparkle of infinity dulls and one is prompted to go in search of it elsewhere.
The myriad of addictions of our time are actually spiritual attempts to reach infinity in material form. Take food. The pleasure of food intake without restriction, without boundary, gives entree into the limitless joy of infinity. To drink without limit, to suspend time, drinking through the night without limit, is to enter countless worlds of dreaming possibilities within the confines of a world that is still limited by the 24 hour cycle of day and night.
The preponderance of drug addictions in our time is directly proportional to the hegemony of reason over our lives, which so shuts down an active connection to explorative spirituality. Drugs in their many forms offer experiences beyond the limits of the body, in forms that range from euphoric stupor to access to superhuman abilities of physical prowess, from transcendent communication and creativity to energetic travel and experience unrestricted by bodily inhabitation.
Obviously, these many attempts to experience infinity in human form stress and can kill the human animal that contains the consciousness that seeks to experience MORE. They do demonstrate, however, the human spirit’s quest to experience its infinite potential no matter how spiritually impoverished our lives may be.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, appreciating this instinctual human need to realize spiritual potential while in human form, squarely call out to and embrace their intent to experience their full potential. That spiritual intent naturally appears in dreaming and in magical experiences in everyday life.
If we can merely suspend judgment and open to what happens to us everyday, as synchronistically magical, we will indeed find our way to human infinity, safely, soberly, and fully.
Rites of initiation are painful transformations… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Initiation is instinct. Instinct is nature. Nature is the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is the greater part of all that we are that we don’t know about.
We are born of egg and seed, the program of who we are set at conception. Nature provides initiation to reshape us at our necessary transitions in life, those important moments that are necessary to completely fulfill who we are.
Jung pointed out that our conscious attitude has the choice to submit to fulfilling who we are. On the other hand, if we choose incorrectly the collective unconscious will confront us, first in dream, next in neurosis and, ultimately, if we miss those calls, in the events we encounter in our lives, which will be fashioned to enforce our initiation.
Ancient tribes were closest to nature’s imperative. The great transition from childhood to adulthood was required by all through participation in initiations of severe torture and deep mystery to enact a shedding of the immature child self and the solid formation of a mature adult self capable of taking proper care of self and other.
Our modern world has long lost its connection to and respect for “primitive” initiation rites. On a global scale the results of this lost connection are evident in the puer aeternus leaders caught in the immaturity of their preadolescent sex and power games.
As a world, we are increasingly engulfed in a world of addiction. Ultimately, addiction is preadolescent fixation on dependency and power and, at the same time, an attempt to challenge the self to transform by going too far. Sometimes that leap is fatal. Sometimes it leads to consequences that awaken spiritual transformation and transition into adulthood.
One thing is certain, though we may refuse the call to initiation it will find us in some form in this modern world of ours. Our leaders are definitely creating the conditions for worldwide transformation right now, though they have no idea what nature has in store for them.
As individuals, if we search the truth that resides within us we will identify the initiations we are ourselves in the midst of. If we can join our intent with nature’s intent to become who we truly our, we free ourselves from the victim mentality that rages against the harshness of our initiation and solidify into the mature adult beings we truly are meant to become, marching toward fulfillment at last.
In the mystery play of our time, Donald Trump is emerging as Helios, the sun god, a golden redeemer. The stronghold of reason is crumbling and the hunger for divine renewal appears to be landing upon his golden locks.
A religious fervor is stirring in the masses, in all of us. The renewal we really crave is transcendent ecstatic experience. The problem with Donald’s solution is his complete identification with ego as divine Self. In other words, total exaltation of the ego with divine imperative. “Make America Great Again,” as catchy as it is, is complete ego coronation, as it solves the destruction of the world through a restoration of the myth that America is God’s chosen one whose grand imperative is purification and masculine power domination.
The mystery play denies the necessity to take the journey into the depths of the earth to face the truth of the destruction and neglect of the feminine, of its divinity and source of healing and renewal.
How high can we go before we suffer the fate of Icarus? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Trump reflects the ego in all its might—Helios the sun god obliterating all the darkness in its one-sided enlightenment. This is a very personal story for all earth inhabitants. We all have ego selves, that which governs our decisions and actions in life. Ego of our time is dominated by reason. But reason, for all its order, is deplete of body experience. Reason is localized in the head; it is abstract, dissociated from our true animal aliveness.
Our modern religions are dominated by reason, they don’t link us to the living substance within ourself. This is why the modern world is addicted; addiction is our hidden pagan compensation to partake of the divine substance so critical to sustain life. Of course, addiction is equally as one-sided as reason—it knows no limits, like Icarus, who imagined himself as Helios and melted from getting too close to the heat of the sun, falling to his death upon the earth.
Trump is the ultimate symbol of the addict: we can have it all, he says, there are no limits! This is the collective masculine ego’s last stand and it is empowered by ego identification with divine energy, with God, but like Icarus it is really just ego unleashed and if I am reading it correctly, it can only go so high before it is doomed to go down.
This hunger for divine experience has been burgeoning beneath the rule of reason for too long, and the charismatic Trump advantage lies in its fervor. This truly is what happened in Nazi Germany. The irrational fervor latent in the German Volk was galvanized by a charismatic leader who extolled purification and masculine domination, overtaking their cultured humanity and sending them, and the rest of the world, into the darkest time in recent modern history.
To learn from history would be to not repeat it. Collective energy, including all that fervor, is made up of the energy of individuals. To separate the individual self from the collective is Step One, while at the same time accepting the truth that as individuals we are still a microcosm of the collective. The advantage of individuality, however, is one of manageability. For however vast the challenge, it is possible for the individual to take the plunge into the full truth of the many-sided self, where all the ancient mysteries and transformations are possible, without harm to the collective.
Individuals can assume responsibility for themselves, and must, as historical fact shows that collectives are largely impossible to control. Unfortunately, there is now a curious total absence of individual responsibility, in fact, things are devolving into something of a mass blood thirst. The time is ripe for the individual to take responsibility, one person at a time. Let’s hope we are not too late!
Squaring with the divine within the fires of the self… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
To begin immediate and active participation in becoming responsible, each individual can square with the divine masculine and the divine feminine within the self, each finding their own unique and individual way to the Middle Way, the ultimate goal within and without. It is impossible to define that Middle Way on a collective level, for all must find legitimate balance and reconciliation within all that one is made up of, within the self.
If enough people can make the effort to find their way to this Tao within, the world will find its way to the healing ticket too!
