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Chuck’s Place: Life Is Crucifixion

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Easter blooms…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The most challenging problem of my youth was my doubt in the Catholic doctrine to which I was exposed. My lineage and early socialization no doubt confounded my smooth sailing into Christian soldier hood. My maternal grandmother was Lutheran, and I recall some experience in the toned-down secular milieu of those Protestant services.

I was introduced to Catholicism, my true birthright, rather late for communion age, out of sync with the rhythm of no question, memorize, and repeat the hermetically sealed catechism. My mind was too influenced by the powerfully rational mind of my secular Jewish step-father: I asked questions, faith alone couldn’t work for me.

I soon realized it best to keep my questions inside myself where they only intensified in urgency. One Good Friday evening, I had it out with God, insisting on an experience, not a belief, that could give some legitimacy to a core premise of Christianity, Christ’s crucifixion. I was met with an overwhelming experience that baptized my spiritual life.

My birth father, whom I never knew, hailed from a very Catholic Irish family where he was designated by his mother to become a priest. His refusal to her call sent him into alcoholism and violence against women. Clearly, his unrequited call to the priesthood was passed along to his biological son, me.

I have never found comfort in the Christian story and cast of characters; I simply never felt a personal connection. Communion never performed any magic for me. However, I was introduced to my spirit self, and God, experientially, and that truth could never be erased. I took my vows as a priest by becoming a psychotherapist. I have spent my career helping people to heal through connecting with their Spirit.

Lately, I’ve come to more deeply appreciate the Christian story, though my interpretation would likely be branded heretical, or at the very least, too muddled in New Agism. Nonetheless, I offer my understanding as part of my obligation, or folly.

Christ knowingly agreed to his fate in incarnating as a human being. The suggestion here is for all to contemplate their own agreement, as spirit beings, to enter a physical life, with a choice of their human fate. The suggestion that we choose the life we will encounter assigns us ultimate responsibility for the fate that befalls us.

Christ does not blame anyone on his cross; he is not a victim, for he knows he chose to be crucified. So, “forgive them father, for they know not what they do.” And what they did, was to help him fulfill his destiny. All must figure out their mission for the life they are in, and how all that they encounter is part of helping themselves achieve this goal, however obscured it might be from consciousness.

Christ was crucified. Christ reveals that life in human form is a crucifixion. Uniting an eternal soul with a temporal body is a death warrant; human life, by design, is a crucifixion. One part of the human being will die, the other will live on. All that we attach to in human form will perish, and we will be crucified by those losses.

Christ resurrected in spirit form. Christ models the fact that physical death results in the consolidation of continued life in the astral body, or in Christian terms, the soul body. Christ’s example validates the current science of out-of-body exploration. Indeed, we are more than our physical bodies.

Christ’s central message was unconditional love, even in the face of crucifixion. This perhaps is the most helpful message. Human life offers the opportunity to refine love to a very high degree of clarity. And that purity of love is the fuel to reenter infinity with the fortitude for deep exploration.

The veils of attachment that define, and are critical for human sustenance, are all challenged and lifted by the temporary nature of human existence. We must attach to live and truly detach to leave. And the detachment factory truly is the assembly line of love’s evolution.

To open to love in the flesh, to remain open to love beyond physical life, to open to new love in human life without cancelling old love of human life, to love neighbor as self, to love enemy as self, to love all with equanimity, to possess not—these are the stations of the cross of human existence. To achieve these stations is to open to truth and love at the most refined levels. Perhaps that is the essence of why we came here, and chose the life we are in.

Jan’s final book of The Recapitulation Diary series, Dreaming All The Time, ends with a shocking finale, a very deep challenge. Can we love and be thankful to everyone we have encountered in our human sojourn, no matter what? That, I believe was Christ’s most profound message. Love knows no limits and is only strengthened by our mastery of our greatest challenge, our very human condition of crucifixion.

Happy Spring, Happy Easter, Happy Incarnation!

With unconditional love,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#667 Chuck’s Place: The Foreign Installation

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There is a preponderance of energy this week, pushing upward through the hardness, the murkiness, the silt, the nigredo of the earth, traveling its path to new life, to flowering in the brightness and warmth of the sun. This energy that bursts forth is nature itself, our deepest roots, and our conscious challenge is to harness and channel it safely into life. For this we need the sacred containment of our awareness and our physical bodies peacefully brooding, like the hen upon the egg, awaiting maturation and readiness for life. The major protagonist to this containment is the mind, what the shamans call the foreign installation.

When shamans view the human body in energetic terms they see swirling energy at different centers within the body, with one exception. In the head they see an energy that moves horizontally, in a rapid back and forth motion. For shamans, this energetic pattern is alien to the body; hence, they have named it the foreign installation. Many people recognize and experience this foreign energetic presence in the form of obsessive thinking, which bounces back and forth in the brain or gets stuck in a thinking loop with no exit, often experienced at 3 AM, initiating hours of senseless perseverative activity, allowing for no further sleep.

The goal of all meditative practices is to eliminate this obsessive quality of the mind, to free it up for concentrated thought or emptiness, and to be able to clearly channel the intent of the higher self. Shamans call this coveted state inner silence. In inner silence the internal dialogue is eliminated and the channel is opened to direct knowledge.

Buddha, as he sat beneath the bodhi tree, discovered that direct knowledge or enlightenment was achieved through the practice of remaining still while the conjuring mind presented intense scenarios that beckoned emotional attachment. This is the 3 AM scenario. Buddha was able to not fall for these enticements to engage his energy in illusory concerns. He was able to not grasp at these scenes; grasping, in the Buddhist sense is attachment, which engages and drains the energy and life force in empty imaginings, in illusory reality.

Like Buddha, we are all confronted with countless concerns through the incessant sales pitches of the foreign installation, the ultimate salesman vying for our energetic attachment through worry and obsessive thinking, gateways to illusory living at every moment of the day. How can we resist such a pervasive onslaught! Christ, like Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, instructs us in this dilemma in his own encounter with the tree, the cross, where he achieves his own stillness and ultimate enlightenment. If we understand dying for “the sins of mankind” as a metaphor for achieving non-attachment to the conjurings of the internal dialogue, Christ demonstrates how challenging it is to not attach, literally being nailed to a cross to maintain stillness amidst the pulls of this world. In Greek mythology, Odysseus binds himself to the mast of his ship, his own sturdy tree, to avoid the fateful lure of the conjuring Sirens. And who are these modern Sirens? They are Worry about those we love. They are Fears of illness, of ruin, of death, an endless sea of possibilities; empty imaginings, sensuous enticements, presented in living color upon the inner screen of the foreign installation, beckoning attachment.

The lessons we glean from heroes such as Buddha, Christ, and Odysseus are:

1. to remain aware that the conjurings of the foreign installation are all illusions seeking to trap our awareness, drain our energy, and engage us in false reality;

2. to remain still, like the tree; don’t budge; don’t attach; don’t worry or fear. Though you cannot control the incessant presentation of illusory sales pitches, you can choose not to give them your attention;

3. to exercise great restraint, as the conjurer is masterful, the offerings are plentiful, enticing, and terrifying.

I suggest the practice of shifting awareness back to the body, our own sturdy tree in this life, and placing our intent upon softening, going deeper and deeper into energetic calmness and stillness, regardless of how loud the band of the conjurer plays its songs. Keep bringing awareness back to the body, going deeper and deeper into the stillness.

The shamans do say that, eventually, the foreign installation leaves, if it is persistently provided no energetic sustenance through our attachment to its enticements. The key though, is perseverance without attachment to the outcome. Sometimes the foreign installation goes dormant for a while, producing a true sense of accomplishment. Beware though of attaching to this. This is one of its traps, as it awaits that moment of success to return with a vengeance, entrapping us in defeatism and a return to the dominance of the incessant illusory world conjured by the internal dialogue. Do the practice with no attachment to the outcome!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck