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Messages from Jeanne

Readers of Infinity: Matters of Choice

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Choosing to become like a flowing river…

Choice matters. Making the right choice, knowing the right choice to make, may at times appear impossible, as in certain circumstances the right choice may remain unclear no matter how much the mind attempts to make a decision. However, once a choice is made it becomes the right choice, for no choice is ever wrong as it leads one along the path of life.

The issues you must confront in life will appear in front of you not matter what choice you make; no matter what path you are on your core issues will arise again and again. So, rather than focusing so much on the choice to be made, on choosing what is right, focus instead on discovering your life’s core issues and work instead on resolving those.

In so doing, your choices will become clearer, for once you know what your core issues are, and once you begin the process of changing the self by addressing those issues, your choices will appear with great clarity. The choices that now cause such distress will appear as distinctly different choices, one as absolutely right and others as old and unappealing. Once your inner work is in progress you will find, almost immediately, that as core dilemmas are revealed they will direct you to what you must do next to really grow and change your life. And growing and changing, facing fears and resolving the deepest pain, woundings, and struggles, is how life evolves for everyone.

As one faces the inner self and resolves the cores issues, life begins to flow more easily, like a meandering river naturally taking the journey it is meant to take, en route to connecting with all other sources of water, meeting and joining, flowing around the world. So is life, a continual flow of energy constantly seeking connection will all other sources of like energy.

So you see, as regards choice, the ultimate choice may seem selfish in comparison to choices regarding the needs of others in your world, but in resolving ones core issues one resolves far more than just the problems of the self. One becomes part of a healing energy that is so badly lacking and needed upon that earth at this time.

So, in the end, what choice do you really have?

Most humbly channeled, with love.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Choice

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A strange da Vinci flying machine…

The other day, as Chuck and I walked in the early morning, a strange sight greeted us. We had just arrived at a “T” intersection when to our left a commotion arose.

Out of the treetops a strange creature appeared. Squawking and flapping, it came towards us, a phoenix or some other mythical beast. On second glance it appeared to be some manmade object, whirring and clunking along in the sky, much like a Leonardo da Vinci flying machine. As it drew nearer it changed again, into a hawk with two small birds clutched in its claws, the birds flapping and shrieking wildly in an attempt to free themselves from the clutches of this, indeed, mythical beast.

As we watched, one of the birds did free itself. Somehow able to wriggle out of the grip of the sharp claws, it quickly flew off into the woods with nary a backward glance. The hawk flew over us, and though its tasty meal still struggled frantically, it seemed that its fate was sealed.

Much startled by this sight, we turned to the right and continued our walk, our thoughts and discussion turning too. We had been talking about our deepening practice as spiritual beings on a journey in this world, of constantly having to balance the magic of other worlds with the duties and needs of this world. And thus, we could not help but wonder what this sighting could possibly mean.

Our kind hearts immediately projected onto the poor little birds. And two of them! We thought in terms of loved ones. Who was at risk; who would be confronted with some terrible trauma today or in the near future? What did it signify for us, the first thing to catch our attention on this day, and so early in the morning? What did it portend in our own lives?

As we watched the hawk fly off down the road ahead of us, the siren cries of blue jays—the birds I interpret as the police force of the skies—alerted other creatures to be aware that a predator was in their midst. But there was really nothing to be concerned about, for the hawk had gotten what it wanted; its only intent now was to consume it.

Who’s the predator?

My thoughts turned away from my projections and fears, for self and others, and instead began to look at the reality of what had occurred. The hawk began to lose its predatory role and take on the role of life itself, doing what it needed to survive in this world, much as we all do in our own lives, consuming and taking what we need. The two birds lost their roles as poor creatures of circumstance and instead became the choices we all make each day: the choice to live one way or another, the choice to do one thing or another, the choice to come into this world at all.

“You know,” I said to Chuck, “one bird is going to live and it looks like the other will die, but who’s to judge which one got the better deal. Do I feel sorry for the one that’s facing death? Perhaps it’s being given the opportunity to go deeper into its evolutionary experience? The very thing we seek all the time.”

As I pondered the significance of the event, I realized that we all get carried away by predators in our own lives, by our compulsions, addictions, attachments, our fears, our psychological makeup, by our very nature, and by the very energy of life that is as unstoppable as the predatory hawk simply searching for sustenance to survive. We are all both the hawk and the two birds. Often enough, we are caught unaware, taken from our perch and thrown into turmoil, forced to fight for our lives, to make a choice that will take us on a new journey. Even in the most mundane of circumstances our choices matter. As we plod along in our daily lives it becomes increasingly necessary to train our awareness to stay upon the path of growth, intent upon a life of meaning and evolution, no matter what our circumstances.

I could not judge the outcome of the event, for I saw the potential for growth in both life and death. I see the potential for growth, for going deeper into the life we are in, no matter where we end up. I cannot judge another for where they are in their life, just as I do not wish to be judged for the choices I’ve made in my own.

We all have the same choice to make: How are we going to deal with where we are now? Are we going to be the evolutionary beings we are meant to be, conserve our energy for our journey and go deeper into our experience, no matter what it is? Or are we going to succumb to the predator, our energy consumed by another, by everything from worry and fear to mental illness and disease?

As the shamans of Ancient Mexico point out, we are beings who are going to die. I see death as offering as much choice as life. As I saw what was happening to the two birds, I knew that one chose life and the other chose death, but also that both were worthy choices, both presenting evolutionary opportunities. The opportunity—and this is what we are training ourselves for as we recapitulate, and as we seek connection with our deeper spiritual selves—is to remain aware of our evolutionary potential at all times.

The journey matters…

Recapitulation offers us the opportunity to practice the skills necessary to maintain our awareness. Each time we recapitulate we experience a little death, a loss of our perceived self, while we simultaneously regain a part of our lost energetic self. This involves remaining aware that we are in two worlds at once, both in the energy of the predator and simultaneously the victim of our circumstances, like the two birds in the claws of the hawk that flew over Chuck and I the other morning. Recapitulation is as much practice for how to live this life as it is practice for facing the moment of death from this life, two evolutionary paths of equal value and potential.

We all stand at a “T” intersection every day of our lives—we have choices to make, and those choices matter. No matter what our fate, whether we are the little bird that gets away or the little bird that goes to its death, we always have the opportunity to go deeper, or not.

Love,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: From Destiny To Choice In A Concubine World

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Zeus over the lake...

The lake rests in calm repose. Suddenly and shockingly, thunder blindsides the stillness. Zeus ravages once again; the lake is disturbed and shown its destiny. The marrying maiden is delivered to the threshold of her husband’s door.

In the case of Kuei Mei, the I Ching’s hexagram #54—The Marrying Maiden—this is not an auspicious event. This is the marriage of woman as concubine, indeed a destiny of suffering.

Buddha discovered that LIFE itself is suffering. As beings born into this world we are all stamped as concubines, and we only fully grasp this notion as we understand that the circumstances of our births, the stamps of our destinies, require us to fully suffer those destinies. We cannot escape them. Even if we refuse them through denial, delusion or death, we cannot escape the controlling hands of our destinies. We cannot change the reality of what or who we are. Our challenge is to fully discover, become, and accept that which we are. And then we are free to truly dream it forward, that is, to choose.

Once we embrace our destiny we are free to dream it into new worlds of possibility and fulfillment, untethered to the destiny of our origins. But, until then we must suffer.

It was my stamp, my destiny, to repeatedly suffer the ravages of rape and alcoholic violence foisted upon my mother as I lay in frozen stillness, incubating in the embryonic pool of her womb. Like the calm lake in hexagram #54, I had to withstand the sudden thunder and lightning that came from outside, in the form of my abusive father. My destiny was PTSD, PTSD in oneness with my pregnant mother.

My choice, after decades of discovering my destiny—who I am—has been to dream that destiny forward, as a therapist discovering an evolutionary advance for PTSD, dreaming it forward as a gateway to infinity. Arrival at that gateway—being released from the confines of destiny—through deep inner work, leads to choice and real freedom.

All worlds are multifaceted...

The journey from destiny to choice is multifaceted. Most prominent is the facet of recapitulation. Every day we are triggered by our spirit to recapture the deepest truths of our destiny. We are asked by our own fears and stumblings in everyday life to wake up to where we’ve been and who we are, right down to the elemental essence of our conception. That joining of genes is the stamp of our individuality, the formative journey of our material beings, sending us off on our destinies. Just as I was stamped in my mother’s womb, so are we all.

Until we can feel and know all that we are, all that we’ve been through, we suffer the limitations of beings not ready to fully know ourselves. Of necessity we are held back from the full truth of our heritage and personal history and remain caught in revisionist lives. We remain blinded by false beliefs of who we are, struck by the glare of the thunder and lightning of our lives. We remain stuck in a concubine world.

In recapitulation, we gather up and recondition our parts, the fragments of our destined selves. We reclaim and rejoin with our true selves, experiencing revitalized energy as we recapitulate. Along the path we are challenged to face our victim status, i.e.: None of it was fair. None of it was okay. We didn’t deserve it. It’s not supposed to be this way. They shouldn’t have been allowed to do that. All of this, and much more, is true. It must be acknowledged; yet, beyond that, the truth is that destiny is not fair. The world of the concubine is not fair. Destiny, however, is an experience seeker, a unique combination of energy—a “probe of awareness,” as the shamans would say—sent out in search of new experience.

Who are we? Victim or Fox?

Destiny has no morality. It just is. We awaken to our destiny and seek to make it pleasurable, meaningful, and fulfilling. That is our predilection, the stamp of our humanness. And so, as humans we naturally challenge ourselves to evolve our destinies beyond their victim, concubine, origins. To remain in the victim range is to limit ourselves to the concubine world, far from dreaming our destinies forward. But, the truth is, it’s a formidable task to release our destinies from the human judgment of victim. And, yes, “victim” is a human judgment, for destiny carries no such judgment. It simply is. It simply seeks to evolve, asking us to work with what we got in order to break away from the victim, concubine, world we find ourselves in everyday.

All judgments—though so humanly necessary, as we scrutinize and come to know ourselves and our world—are, ultimately, obstacles to full self-acceptance, as much of what we are, what we’ve done, and what we’ve been exposed to, is often truly unacceptable. To arrive at truth, we must release the human judgments of acceptability and unacceptability. We must fully open up to what is, and, most especially, to what was. Suspend judgment, Carlos Castaneda recommended, as the fundamental resource to discovering who we are and who we might fully become.

Destiny and choice, seeming opposites, are actually a pair of inseparable twins, though in this concubine world destiny births first, followed by choice. Allow the full birth of your own destiny, through recapitulation of the concubine world you now live in, and birth your choice.

Still choosing to dream it forward,
Chuck

Messages from Jeanne

#692 Choice Matters

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Jan Ketchel channeling Jeanne Marie Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Personally, I have noticed an increase in experiences of energy. About a week ago I had a profound out of body experience (OBE). I have also noticed that energetically speaking, in the outer world, there has been a lot of activity. There have been days when everyone seems to be angry. Other days everyone we meet seems caught in an old place, and other days everyone seems flowing and full of awareness. It feels as if this particular time in our lives, and in the history of the world, is offering us such power to change, to do things differently, and yet we hesitate. I am speaking of personal issues that arise to remind me to keep changing, but also of the issues of our own country and the signs of change that all of us are constantly facing. The main realization that I experience, energetically speaking and otherwise, is that we are not in charge, that a far greater force is asking us to acquiesce and flow with the true awareness that we are all energy beings. I believe this force is inside each one of us. When we slow down and experience it, as I did in my OBE, we feel enlightened, but then we go back to our daily lives, seeking to join that world of energy with the state of our crumbling world and we come up against so many impenetrable walls, walls of self-doubt, of judgment, of the need to be human, as well as the visceral memory of the experience and wonder of it all, of the magic.

I understand that acquiescence to energetic reality takes time. But I also wonder, are people really understanding that our energy experiences, such as an OBE, are the true reality that we seek and must turn to now? I don’t think I am making an uninformed assumption. I fully feel that not enough people are getting what it means to be energy beings, that which you speak of so often, what don Juan, Carlos and the women seers teach about, what quantum physics is about, and what the religions of the world sprang from: the fact that we are all energy beings caught in a fixed reality and that it is up to us to dismantle that fixation, whether by fault or on purpose, in order to “see” better. I believe we are now in the midst of that process of dismantling and it does not matter to God, or Mother Earth, or the energy of intent how we go about that. Our awareness must now shift so that we do not lose this opportunity to evolve, to flow with the earth itself, as change is more fully brought upon us. It is now imperative that we all make some drastic changes in our personal lives.

Can you comment on my feelings that, each day, we are being confronted with powerful energy alerts? Some days, we are asked to fight through them, to express our anger and discontent. Other days we are asked to gently flow, but, at all times, we are being asked to be aware of the energy around us and how it affects and guides us to evolve. We are, I believe, being shown, each day, what we must change about ourselves, whether those things are inner aspects such as judgments, prejudices, fears or denials, or whether they are how we choose to live in the world. I feel that it is time for all of us to face what we have created, both inside us and outside us. Can you offer your comments and guidance as to what we have become and where we should go now?

My Dear One, the world you inhabit, the world of everyday life, is but one reality, yet it is the playing field for your evolving self. I do not like to speculate because, as you know, choice matters and that is really the crux of everything that you speak of today.

Each one of you must choose how you will live. Is this lifetime dedicated to building a nice ego, to engaging in self-important behaviors of inflation, bullying, self-aggrandizing—all necessary aspects of learning what it means to be human? Is this lifetime dedicated to victimhood, to eternal big-babyhood, to sucking off the lives and energies of others? Is this lifetime a predatory life or a simple life of deflation and self-loss, or are those aspects simply building blocks to an evolving self in this lifetime? Have you presented your self with challenges that require you to take abrupt and mighty steps out of an old world and into a new one?

You see, you must first address your personal challenge. What is your personal challenge? Where are you caught? Then the next challenge is to discover the means of taking that giant step to a new level of self and awareness. You see, your assumption, My Dear Jan, that you and the world are one, on a similar journey, is correct. You would not be living at this time if the world did not reflect the challenges that you each, as individuals, face. Your world outside of you is your inner world vividly reflected, staunchly produced and accessible. It can be so easy to see how to solve the issues of that world and how everything is being done wrong, going too slowly or quickly, in the opposite direction from what you know is right, and, yet, can you turn your frustrations with that world innerly and accept the energetic consequences of the decisions you personally make each day?

Energy is energy. You are, each one of you, energy. What flows outside of you has the ability to flow inside of you and affect you greatly. You are in control of your own energy and everything about you is set up for you to learn this fact. You may not feel or admit that you are, though you so easily may see that the world outside of you is all set for change, and perhaps for total collapse. Energetically speaking, whatever happens to your outer world is good for it. Energetically speaking, the flow of life is being directed by the choices that have been made in that world. Your own life is flowing according to the choices you make.

I do not judge or hold attachment to that world or the choices of individuals, except to point out your teaching tools and your learning process. Abide by the laws of energy and you will learn about awareness, awareness as clear-seeing. Perhaps this may come to you in intuitive knowing so that your choices may be clearly shown to you. Perhaps your awareness may come in the form of puzzling experiences that you must need in order to better understand what you need in life. Perhaps you will only have full understanding by incremental learning, rather than bursts of knowledge too big to hold onto and fathom. Most humans need to learn in this incremental manner, for true energetic reality is too much to take in.

In answer to your queries about the energy around you in your world and the intensities you now feel, I suggest that you attempt a new measure of attention to what is happening around you, because it is indeed a significant time to be alive. But in your personal world, what are you supposed to be learning? What is your personal growth challenge at this moment? How can you change with the changing world?

Change is inevitable. Are you going to flow with it, or are you going to perish in the vast sea of darkness? Really, the choice is simple. You must ask yourself: What do I fear most, the energetic unknown or the old familiar darkness? In order to change, one must enter the darkness, but you must elect to take the journey. Oh, and by the way, no matter how you answer that question, the journey will be the same. You must face your fears and learn that they too are but energetic realities to be confronted and passed through on the way to the next level of awareness.

You must confront everything you need to confront, whether you elect to go willingly or kicking and screaming. Don’t you know that you are all going anyway? What else is there? You are all beings who are going to die. How do you elect to experience death? That is the next question to ponder. And don’t wait too long to decide. Get right on it; there is no time to waste!