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Chuck’s Place: The Quickening Is Now

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The opening is coming…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Quickening is active labor—rapid, thundering contractions with fetus squeezed in a sealed womb, cervix undilated. This is the current birthing stage of our world, reflected in the climatic, environmental, political and social dimensions of life in Gaia’s womb. This is planet Earth now. No exit, no escape.

The survival instinct defense of the human psyche normalizes these traumatic conditions to maintain stability, the way the body regulates its temperature to the ideal of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, regardless of external temperature. This defense automatically distracts us from the truth of our emotional reactions to the tensions of now, enabling us to carry on with a false sense of normalcy.

However, the law of compensation insists that the emotional energy we are spared must be converted and experienced somewhere else. One possibility is in an intense obsession, like a cause that consumes our attention with the energy equivalent to our unfelt feelings.

A variation would be a projection, where we might hate someone; again, with the same quantity of energy we avoid in our projected emotions. Perhaps the most common defense is repression, where the disavowed feeling takes up residence in the body and manifests as a somatic issue, like severe back pain. This is the root of psychosomatic illness.

For a time, Jan’s childhood doctor was Dr. John Sarno. Her grandmother revered him. He was a neighbor and Jan has memories of him making house calls. She still has warm feelings about this humble man to this day.

If you google the question: Who is America’s most famous back doctor, the answer you will receive is, Dr. John Sarno. This gentle, soft spoken, 5’3″ man healed Senator John Harkin, John Stossel, Anne Bancroft and Howard Stern of severe back issues by simply educating them about how the psyche distracts us from repressed feelings by creating physical symptoms.

Dr. Sarno’s main treatment was to have his patients read his book Healing Back Pain: The Mind-Body Connection. For 95% of Dr. Sarno’s patients the knowledge alone of this automatic defensive operation led to a cure.  The remaining 5% he referred to a psychotherapist to address repressed trauma. I would strongly recommend the documentary, All the Rage: Saved by Sarno for an in-depth exposition of his method.*

I emphasize Dr. Sarno’s work here to suggest that we, the people of the world, are most likely being spared the full impact of our emotional reactions to the hair-trigger, eve-of-destruction, state of the world we live in, through converted somatic distractions. This knowledge alone, as Dr. Sarno discovered, may be enough to relieve psychosomatic symptoms in many cases.

To enhance the effectiveness of this knowledge we can make the suggestion to the subconscious to not displace our emotions, but, to the contrary, to deliver us directly our feelings. To acknowledge the truth, and allow ourselves to feel, relieves the body of the tensions that generate the tightness and constriction in our muscles, tendons and nerves, giving rise to many medical diagnoses.

The deeper truth that we might consider is the condition I opened this post with, what Stan Grof has labeled Basic Perinatal Matrix II. BPM II is the no-exit stage of active labor, prior to cervix dilation. Gaia is birthing a new world and we are all part of it, cells of that fetus, currently feeling the terror of extreme contraction, constriction and annihilation. These contractions are real, but they are just that, contractions promising new life.

The impact of our extreme containment is actually facilitating the gradual opening that will birth forth a new world in harmony with the truth.

Best advice for this time is to be aligned inwardly with the truth of the heart and, as they teach in birthing classes: Just Breathe!

Breathing in truth,
Chuck

Please Note: As Dr. Sarno always advised, anyone dealing with physical symptoms should avail themselves of conventional medical consultation.

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Chuck’s Place: The Birth Of Humans Plus

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Birthing…
– Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

The consummate, uniquely American shaman, Robert Monroe, launched his Hemi-Sync Human Plus series to give humanity the tools to actualize their latent, but rarely accessed, highest human potential.

His dear friend Elmer Green actually removed himself from the Monroe Institute’s Board of Advisors in reaction to Bob’s indiscriminate granting of access to advanced powers that he believed should not be available to those who might abuse them.

Carlos Castaneda, whom Elmer Green deeply appreciated, did exactly what Bob Monroe did: he unveiled all the knowledge he had gained from the shamanic world of don Juan Matus, teaching it to anyone who was interested.

For Carlos, the time of sequestering knowledge for a limited few initiates had passed. Like Bob Monroe, Carlos saw that human evolution required a critical mass of seekers with the necessary tools to advance consciousness to the energetic, or soul, level of our being.

As Elisabeth Kübler-Ross stated in a workshop, “… if all of you would put a curse on me with your psychic energy, which is very powerful, all your psychic energy in this room could not touch me as long as I have no fear of voodoo. Negativity can only feed on negativity.” (The Tunnel And The Light, p.75)

Bob Monroe, as did Carlos Castaneda, taught the tool of affirming one’s intent to be protected from the unwanted intrusions of negative thoughts and negative energies, from within and without, at the beginning of every spiritual exploration.

That those advanced powers of human potential could be exploited is a fact of human life, evident in the narcissistic ego’s use of hypnotic suggestion to assume control in this current time of great transformation.

Stanislav Grof, a contemporary of  Bob and Elmer’s, and an equally advanced traveler in non-ordinary states as Carlos Castaneda, has  delineated the most explicit cartography of the human psyche to date, shining the brightest of lights on its transpersonal dimensions, illuminating our evolutionary trajectory.

Grof has demonstrated, for over sixty years, his discovery of the perinatal gateway to the transpersonal dimension, which includes the collective unconscious, the phylogenetic history of our world, as well as our past lives. The perinatal gateway is nothing other than the death/rebirth path that every human being has traversed in being born into this world. This paradigm is extremely helpful to understand the happenings on planet Earth now, as she has entered her active labor in delivering us our own rebirth into human plus beings.

The death required for this rebirth is a spiritual process that parallels the dissolution of the symbiotic unit of fetus, umbilical cord, placenta and mother in human birth. At the spiritual level the fetus is the human ego, currently in its last stand of narcissistic fixation. The placenta and umbilical cord have been the ego’s attachment to material exploitation of Mother Earth’s bountiful body.

What needs to die is ego’s greed and self-serving decision making. What is in the process of being born is ego’s rebirth into heightened awareness and assumption of responsibility for its energetic interdependent connection to all that is.

The idyllic state of unconscious union with the resplendent material world, identical with the tranquillity of fulfilled life in the womb, has advanced now to the chaos of active labor, with its insistence upon death of the old, birth of the new. The cervix has yet to dilate, but the contractions have begun.  Like migrants seeking to escape unbearable conditions, the borders are closed. No exit, no escape. Humanity arms itself, steals the property and lands of others, as fears of apocalypse stir the surface of the collective consciousness.

The existential depression of meaninglessness currently abounds, as the future appears hopeless. Remember, every fetus  was confronted with this same right of passage during the labor pains of the mother, forced to be completely alone, in utter darkness, under intense pressure, as walls caved in and outcome was uncertain.

We are already experiencing the first hints of the volcanic contractions to come in this joint rebirthing process now underway. Our undergoing of the joint labor needed to stretch the cervix so we can arrive into the light of a new world is evident in the extremes of climate change and the great advances in spiritual movements, which are pressing us to break beyond the narrow borders of ego narcissism.

Our spiritual rebirth is bringing us to a new life of expanded consciousness that holds divine the interconnectedness and equanimous value of everything.

At this higher level of consciousness, the powers available at the energetic, transpersonal dimension of life will be exercised responsibly. The creative power of thought will generate harmonious physical coexistence. This is the light at the end of the tunnel.

May we all use this intuitive knowing as we ride Mother Earth’s rocky rollercoaster of contractions, eventuating in the spiritual rebirth of humans plus.

All aboard,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: May Suggestion Embrace The Current of Truth

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The current of heart centered truth…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Suggestion is the connection to the imagination of the human soul. The mere hint of a possibility seeds the foundation of a story that bursts forth, in all its particulars, from the raw materials of the subconscious mind, in concert with the logic of consciousness.

Perhaps the greatest works of art and literature, as well as scientific discoveries, have their roots in the power of suggestion, as it conjures and takes shape in the interplay between the subconscious and conscious minds.

The subconscious has access to every detail of all we have ever experienced, since conception, and even before. The subconscious, as a piece of the hologram of infinity, also stores the collective history of humankind, with all its accrued knowledge.

When Edgar Cayce, with his simple 8th grade education, gave an intuitive health reading, he had access to in-depth medical treatments from all historical times. At the same time, Cayce required, in trance, to be asked questions to give needed answers, as the subconscious requires suggestion; it is not a freethinking mind. For this, the directed thinking of consciousness is required.

The subconscious, with its unlimited ability to generate information, is the automatic mind that guided our evolutionary ancestors. The birth of ego consciousness—the hallmark of a sense of personal identity, and the ability to reason and override subconscious instinct—is a very recent human acquisition. In fact, the automatic mind of the subconscious dominates both the running of the physical body and most mental processes as well.

The shamans point out that the incessant repetition of the internal dialogue that we all experience is nothing other than the drone of the subconscious, as it generates the preprogrammed suggestions that contour our habitual sense of self. Whatever core beliefs we have about ourselves are constantly reinforced by suggestions fed to us by programs embedded in our subconscious, which we unwittingly reinforce daily at a conscious level.

Much of the cognitive and emotional distress we encounter in our lives is actually generated by suggestions we automatically give ourselves from the moment we awaken to each new day. Those suggestions generate the familiar stories we live by. If consciousness made a concerted and persevering effort to suggest a different storyline to our subconscious, we could open up to an entirely different sense of self. The key is to have faith and belief in the suggestion we embrace.

Suggestion is at the heart of marketing psychology, that which controls much of our economic behavior. Suggestion has run rampant on social media as well, as people unconsciously absorb fake news, and as they subsequently take on the polarized attitudes and stories encoded in those viral suggestions.

Once the subconscious takes in a new suggestion, that suggestion becomes its truth and it rallies all its resources around its imperative. It remains for consciousness to judge the validity of the storyline. If consciousness does not engage its reason to objectively evaluate the story, it automatically becomes the story we adopt and live by.

The current of truth is the one story that actually aligns with the truth in the world. The many currents of nature—be they the tides, the fires, the earthquakes or winds—reveal the truth of climate change. Despite this objective truth, many people still believe in subjective stories that don’t acknowledge the actual truth.

The current of truth is actually the Tao, the harmonious law of nature that validates the simple truth of cause and effect. Humans are free to embrace whatever story they wish, however, nature’s currents of truth will continue to react to human miscalculation.

Eventually, humans will embrace the suggestion to live in the current of truth, as it is the only combination that will ensure the necessary balance and harmony for survival.

The truth is, all are empowered to embrace this intent now, simply by offering new suggestions to the self to flow with the current of truth.

When consciousness embraces the truth, the subconscious will rally its potentiality around this directive, and the world will be remade in a truthful story. Now that’s a story worth embracing!

Suggesting the current of truth,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Law of Compensation

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In flight in life, grounded in death, beautiful nonetheless…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Carl Jung recognized the psyche’s insistence upon balancing itself out in some way. Thus, if we consciously live a one-sided attitude in waking life, our dreams will balance it out with characters and dramas that engage us in the exact opposite attitude. Freud captured this principle in describing sexually promiscuous dreams as balancing an individual’s sexually repressive waking life attitude.

Psychic researcher, both in human life and in his soul’s afterlife, Frederic Myers, teaches from infinity how this law of compensation extends into the life of the soul after its completion of physical life. Myers channels, through Geraldine Cummins, his observation of the soul’s residence in the Plane of Illusion, the immediate world we encounter after a brief adjustment phase subsequent to physical death. (See both The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality by Geraldine Cummins.)

Similar to the Buddhist description of a personalized bardo, Myers describes how the soul’s imagination creates a world uniquely suited to fulfilling its unlived earthly dreams, or to feel fully the pain it caused others, as it compensates for the cruelty it delivered during its earthly sojourn.

Souls live and reside in these personal environments until they achieve the completed balance to further their soul’s journey at higher, more subtle and objective levels of infinity. Thus, the Plane of Illusion enacts the life necessary to compensate for and balance out the life just completed in human form.

On Earth, presently, we have two distinguished nonagenarians, Noam Chomsky and Sir David Attenborough, reflecting to us how this law of compensation is exacting its present toll upon our planet’s survival. In a recent podcast with Ezra Klein*, Chomsky states, without hesitation or reserve, that humankind has twenty years left to radically change its environmental behaviors before it faces definite extinction.

This deeply reflective 92-year-old scholar is bluntly pointing out how significant this time on Earth is for humanity. Within our current lifetime, decisions and actions now taken will determine the near immediate fate of our human race and planet Earth.

How much greater a wakeup call could there be? How awesome to be a participant in life, on this planet, at this moment in time! Such the opportunity to awaken to a world unfiltered by blurry narcissism!

Attenborough is gentler in his challenge to a humankind that has doubled its world population in the last fifty years, seriously squeezing out other life on the planet. In his Netflix series, A Life on Our Planet**, Attenborough invites us, in graphic detail, into the beautiful yet tenuous balance of all of nature, deeply interdependent and perilously impacted by human habit. He remains optimistic, appealing to our love and awe for our home planet to curb our attitude of entitled excess.

Much of the human population is reacting aberrantly to this intuitive knowing of the precarious state of the planet that both these distinguished sages affirm. Addictions of many kinds reflect a mass of humanity seeking to remain comfortably numb in the oblivion of a soothing, fanciful, materialistic womb. Staggering gun sales reflect the fantasy of survival in a post-apocalyptic world of diminished resource.

The objective truth is that humankind is emotionally and cognitively at a narcissistic stage of development. Narcissism represents an early developmental stage of the imagination, filtered and constrained by the needs of self. From the vantage point of narcissism, the purpose of other beings and resources is limited to serving the self, the boundary of the known world.

Decisions and actions stemming from this narrow view are often to grow and hoard as much as materially possible, to be able to move about as desired, and to continue to survive and thrive upon a dying planet. Migrants are often seen as aliens, trying to take what is not rightfully theirs, rather than as people seeking refuge from an increasingly uninhabitable planet.

The issue is not ultimately about caring for the less fortunate, however noble such a cause. The deeper issue is about facing and taking right action to save the planet. And right action is the willingness to sacrifice, to set limits upon the supposed sacrosanct right to more, more, more.

Very early in my college days, I ventured into an economics course, which insisted, as its sacred dogma, that humankind’s need for more was innate, and that the world must be irrevocably organized to meet this human demand. Who ever questions the given that the economy, jobs, the human population and the stock market must continually grow?

The world emerges now from its yearlong pandemic retreat. Already, CO2 emissions are climbing back to “normal”. All envision expansion as recovery. And yet, as Attenborough’s graphic display of the melting of Antarctica portends, the compensation for expansion will be the continued unleashing of endless viruses upon the world stage.

Chomsky points to atomic fusion as the likely safe antidote to our ever-growing world energy demand, but states that such a solution is decades beyond our twenty-year survival limit. But I ask, why do we accept, without question, this supposed absolute imperative that we accommodate our energy appetite?

Beyond this materialist fixation upon energy expansion lies the final frontier of energetic expansion into the province of our soul. The energy body, our subtle soul that innervates our physical body during the physical phase of our immortal life, is ripe for discovery and exploration now, while we reside in human form.

This is literally the stuff that dreams are made of. To open to this dimension of spiritual life is to direct the human felt manifest destiny for more into sustainable evolution. To awaken to this spiritual unfolding is to stretch the imagination beyond its narcissistic constraints, to take in the deeper reality in which the self is a participant but not everything.

The current initiatives to address climate change, at the highest levels of world governance, are laudable but likely to suffer the sad fate of most New Year’s resolutions. More likely, are continued attacks from nature herself—from viruses to earthquakes—to assist humankind, via compensation, to learn to curb and redirect its insatiable appetite for more.

Nature can take down our energy infrastructure in a heartbeat, teaching us how to live small and interdependently. The law of compensation insists that we will find our way to balance. All individuals are empowered to address this inevitable fate by squaring with the imbalances in their own lives.

Taking an honest accounting of one’s habits, and willingly sacrificing excess, in whatever form, is both the individual and the planetary imperative. All excess, voluntarily sacrificed, results in the accrual of energy for spiritual advancement and planetary survival. All individual sacrifice of excess additionally accrues to humankind’s growing account of energy for necessary attitudinal shift: from narcissism to right action.

The law of compensation is the truly sacrosanct law that governs this world, and the beyond. It will help us to grow and find fulfillment through mastering the art of sacrifice. We can aid this natural and spiritual law by voluntarily taking a personal inventory of habits and aligning with right action and true interdependent need.

Start small; all donations, of whatever size, are equally appreciated. Choose one small act of sacrifice today and notice its subtle appreciation by physical body and energetic spirit. Ask for help from the unseen and experience the synchronistic material response.

Put the law of compensation to best use: let material sacrifice be compensated by spiritual advance.

Appreciating sacrifice,

Chuck

*Ezra Klein interviewing Noam Chomsky
**David Attenborough’s film trailer

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Chuck’s Place: A Shift of the World’s Assemblage Point

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Being Intent, no matter what…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Carlos Castaneda faced the most ego-crushing fact. His role, as dictated by Spirit itself, was to end rather than continue his shamanic lineage, a lineage that had spanned twenty-seven generations.

Carlos’ dilemma mirrors the energetic configuration of our time, a time of endings.

Earth herself is in a time of major reshaping as she violently shakes free of the shackles of inertia that have bound her in place. Shamans would call the place of her frozen fixation, the world’s assemblage point, the place where the Earth’s energy is assembled into a consensus reality, the everyday world as we have known it.

The Earth abounds now with dismantling events, be they earthquakes, Senate trials, or viruses. Reality, as we have known it, is being rocked at its core. Institutions are falling like dominoes. Many dreams are vying to become the new consensus reality, the world’s new position of the assemblage point.

As I see it, the destructive phase of now will not be of short duration. The dream currently dominating is the ultimate completion of a one-sided American dream. That dream demands full expression. Perhaps that is the true contribution of our time, to not suppress and pass along that unfulfilled dream for future generations to have to complete. I believe this current dream has been long in the making. That dream spares not even a brush with apocalypse to fulfill its hunger for power and domination.

More comprehensively put, America is completing the ultimate ego over everything dream. This is actually a universal dream, not just America’s. The universality of that dream reflects a world developmental process that tests the viability of fixation at the level of total narcissism.

The current strain of the coronavirus has presented a most interesting challenge to the most populated country on Earth, China, the ancient home of the Book of Changes, the I Ching. Could an alternative dream be unfolding where China shakes off its materialistic dew and gets down to its Taoist roots, action in accordance with Inner Truth (hexagram #61)?

A totalitarian regime has chosen to lose face. No hiding its blemish; it is currently the home of a deadly virus. Superhuman efforts are being made to construct necessary hospitals, isolate large masses of people, and provide accurate safety precaution to all. Economic considerations pale next to the cooperative needs of survival.

Who knows what will happen, but at present this unfolding dream appears to attempt to stalk a position beyond the narcissism of damage control to face the actual danger, with rationality untempered by narcissism. Planet Earth is steadily insisting on a movement that assembles such a reality.

More dreams will  fill the world stage in the coming months; these are the trials of transformation. When Carlos Castaneda was confronted with deciding what to do with the hidden knowledge of his shamanic lineage, as he closed its door, he dreamed forward Tensegrity, offering anyone who wanted it the practical knowledge of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico.

Carlos, while still in this world, would marvel at Tensegrity workshops, that he was able to observe perhaps a thousand people practicing in unison the Magical Passes of his lineage. This was a sight no other Nagual—the shamanic leader of a group of no greater than 16 apprentices in each generation—had ever witnessed: the power of the mass impact of these Magical Passes performed in unison.

Carlos Castaneda believed that the time had arrived where a new power of the mass, spirit warriors from all nations and traditions, would energetically combine their forces of intent  to shift the world’s assemblage point to a new, more comprehensive position to ensure a solid foundation for survival.

The ending of Carlos’ line marked the end of the self-importance of any one tradition holding the exclusive keys to the kingdom. The mass movement of this growing collective intent is fueled by truth, love, and pragmatism. It includes movements such as minimalism, clean energy, small cooperative organic farming communities, respect for the Earth as a living planetary being, as well as the all-inclusive values and practices of all spiritual traditions, none excluded.

The traumas upon the face of the Earth now, though tragic, reflect a shaking loose of the current heavy inert fixation of the assemblage point that has long been preparing for a necessary move. Carlos demonstrated the necessity of letting go of old ways, particularly the dominance of the narcissism of self-importance, to make room for a new position grounded in the greater common good.

We are lured to give over our attention, our hopes and fears, to quick fixes or idealistic dreams that could stem the tide of this destruction. Best to do this with what shamans call controlled folly: detached passion; rather than deplete one’s energy through futility and defeat. Much more important is to place one’s intent upon joining with the Earth’s intent, as she aggressively shifts her own body to a new and necessary position of the assemblage point.

May all beings join in the intent of this new position of the assemblage point, where reason is stripped of its narcissistic veils and applies itself wholeheartedly to the pragmatism of world survival.

being INTENT,

Chuck