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Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Dream Home

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Spirit entering a room…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

Our home, as the personal repository of the remnants of our earthly existence, is the perfect metaphor for our human personality, our soul. Closets house moments of the past, some joyful, some deeply sad. Bedrooms house our intimate lives and our nightly journeys of rejuvenation and ventures into infinity.

Bathrooms meet our animal needs and ego primping; kitchens our desires and physical sustenance. Living rooms support our relaxation and social gatherings. Basements are home to the powerhouse of heat and the central electrical nervous system. Upstairs are rooms of spirit, hobby, and fanciful dreams.

Dreams utilize this powerful metaphor of home to reflect the status of our soul’s journey in this life. When we leave this physical life the home we leave is the home we arrive to, replete with the sensations, emotions and thoughts of our earthly experiences and attachments. Some rooms of our familiar soul are polished, some a mess, some avoided, others the home of creative possibility.

Our work beyond this life is no different than our work in this life, that is, until we have perfected the home of our human personality we won’t be ready to continue the great adventure of new life beyond the human personality.

In spiritual terms this would mean our readiness, beyond physical life,  to shed the astral soul body, called the double, as it completely resembles the physical body it entwined with while in physical life. Once we have perfected the completion of our earthly challenges beyond physical life, our spirit moves on to a new body of experience. While in physical life, however, our dream homes remain an active playing field to enhance our soul’s refinement.

When we dream of childhood homes we are brought back to our entry into this world, with our primal attachments and core feelings and beliefs about ourselves. Such dreams invite us to recapitulate and free ourselves from formative habits and hurts. Such dreams also suggest that our current waking life is a milieu for reliving the past. Meeting deep challenge in waking life can free one of past limitations.

Dreams of explosions of the furnace, or electrical fires in the home, speak to unruly passions of desire, fear or rage. Often they correspond with physical symptoms in the solar plexus and heart. Dreams of this genre beg for acknowledgement of suppressed and repressed emotions, seeking safe release and practices, such as meditation to gain mastery of the energy of emotion.

Dirty bathrooms and compromised toilets correspond to the digestive and elimination systems, where certain experiences of life refuse to be cleansed or flushed away. These dreams generally point to the need for deep self-reflection and honesty, where we acknowledge the truths we have denied or projected away onto the lives of others.

Attic dreams may reflect promptings from our high Spirit to build a new room for creative endeavor by opening, in our waking lives, to new projects, relationships, and innate unfolding of potential. These promptings might also appear in visitations to homes never inhabited, or in the discovery of a room never before known about in one’s current abode.

Kitchen dreams might harken back to a spotlight on early nurturance and how those patterns overshadow the present. Cooking dreams focus on self-care, the quality of what one is taking in to nourish physical body and soul. Kitchen adventures also reveal one’s relation to the desire body, often the one hidden away in waking life.

Houses in the mountains are the abodes of spiritual life. Houses by the ocean depict one’s relation with one’s inner nature. Is there threat of tidal wave? Here, nature warns of a coming major life transition or a compensation for too much repressed life. Dreams of this type call for a broader view of the balance of the energies within the self.

Homes under construction portray the soul work you are currently engaged in. Is the foundation secure? If not, the dream asks you to slow down, have patience with the basics. Are the building materials inferior or insufficient? Perhaps one is asked to be more generous at devoting one’s resources to true needs.

The dream house is a guide to soul work in this life. Perfecting that home leads to fulfillment in this life and advances the soul when it lands at the next stop on its infinite adventure, beyond this physical life.

Build with confidence,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Snow — the Truth Congealed

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Congealed truth…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Water, in its highest aspect is a symbol of our high Soul, the ultimate source of who we really are. Water symbolizes ultimate unity. Lacking in differentiated parts, the river flows in its wholeness: the Tao.

At the level of everyday consciousness, the world is perceived in a highly differentiated way that separates, classifies, and organizes energy into distinct objects that enable an individual to navigate life in a material world.

This perspective has the side effect of obscuring or downright blinding us to our underlying interdependence and oneness and also sends us into deep opposition within ourselves and with our many neighbors.

When snow appears in a dream, it represents the Truth from the high Soul being transmitted to the plane of everyday consciousness in the form of water, congealed. This intervention from the high Soul freezes water into snow, as we are not ready to grasp its full message at our current level of consciousness; we need to first melt the snow.

Melting the snow begins with the recognition that its appearance in the dream is significant. To contemplate its meaning initiates the melting process. It is likely that the message will not be revealed in an immediate eureka moment, though indeed that is possible.

Contemplation has its own limits, as it issues from the mental plane, which tends to think in terms of opposites and differentiated parts. However, reliving vs merely thinking about a dream can give rise to spontaneous associations that begin to decipher the message from the high Soul. In this way, contemplation makes space for direct communication, as well as intuition.

To fully melt the snow, one must enter into communion with the greater unity of the high Soul. From one perspective this means fully owning every aspect of the dream as part of one’s wholeness. Regardless of who the characters are in the dream, their drama, at a certain level, is one’s own drama.

What distinguishes this perspective from narcissism is its willingness to permit a fuller knowing of self, particularly aspects that function autonomously in the darkness of the shadow. Rather than dismiss the existence of other, this approach promotes solidarity with other in a greater acceptance of the universality of all human experience. In contrast, in narcissism, one is the only one who exists; there simply is no other.

Taking a walk in the snow in last night’s dream, I unknowingly found myself nearly falling off a precipice. Time became elongated. I had full clarity that my balance had shifted beyond the tipping point; indeed it seemed I was about to fall. In deep slow motion, I next experienced a counter energy that gently reversed my body movement like a rubber Gumby, as my feet remained planted on the ground. Balance was restored.

This dream speaks to many dimensions of my being, but at the most universal—that of the high Soul—it follows up the message of last week’s blog, The Turning Point. Here the turning point becomes the tipping point, the point of apparent no return. And yet, despite the inevitability of deep crash, balance was restored.

The message from the highest center of unity suggests that though the current Earth drama may go so far as to throw it out of its normal elliptical revolution, a return to balance is possible. Regardless of the deeply exaggerated precipitous ledge we find our world currently in we will swing back.

With this knowing, seek refuge in the heart center, the Truth center that melts all the congealed snow.

Warmly,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Google & the dream

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Daphne
– Art by Jan Ketchel © 2003

Carl Jung discovered the Collective Unconscious, a layer of the mind all beings share in common, what the ancient Hindus identified as Universal Mind. Edgar Cayce validated its existence through accessing, in trance, the Akashic Record to provide spot-on medical diagnosis and treatment recommendations. Joe McMoneagle equally accessed this dimension of all-knowing through Remote Viewing, proving its utility for military intelligence and solving ancient mysteries.

What Edgar Cayce and Joe McMoneagle teach is the use of deep relaxation of left brain focused ego dominance as a pathway to direct experience and access to all knowledge, the deepest level of the collective unconscious that we all share. These methods can be trained to waking consciousness.

Dreaming, where ego relaxes its focused left brain dominance in order to fall asleep, also takes place in the realm of the collective unconscious. Thus, it is possible to encounter deceased relatives or living archetypes, such as gods and goddesses, or virtual treasure maps, in one’s nightly journeys in the all-knowing Universal Mind of being.

Dreaming provides opportunities for the Universal Mind of the collective unconscious, or SOUL, to communicate profound knowledge to waking ego consciousness. This linkage of Universal Mind to personal ego requires dream interpretation.

The first stage in dream interpretation, and perhaps the most challenging, is to remember the dream.

Everyone dreams. It was scientifically demonstrated in sleep labs long ago that anyone who is deprived of dreaming for three days will become psychotic. Restitution of dreaming quickly reverses this condition. Remembering dreams, however, is a matter of intent. State, in advance of sleep, “I intend to remember my dream tonight.”

Stage two is to value whatever dream fragments one wakes up with and write them down. Like a hooked fish quickly slipping back into the ocean, a vivid dream not recorded is gone after even a quick visit to the bathroom. In particular, watch out for King Ego, master of the waking world: “Oh, that’s stupid, irrelevant, nonsense, etc., …” Follow Carlos Castaneda’s number one rule: Suspend Judgment. Write it down!

Stage three is to track immediate associations as you recall and write the dream. Last night I had a tin can of bluefin tuna in a dream. As I remembered the dream next morning, I immediately flashed to an article I’d read of a Japanese restaurant owner paying $3.1 million dollars for a large bluefin tuna at auction. Suffice it to say that this “prized fish,” contained in its leaden mandala tin, perfectly mirrors the current stage of my own opus of individuation.

Stage four. Once personal associations are exhausted, take it to the next level: Google. Google is humankind’s collective conscious effort to mirror the all-knowing collective unconscious. It is a great aid in deciphering the universal symbolic language of the vast collective unconscious.

I offer an example from a recent dream of Jan’s. Jennifer Lawrence and Lawrence Osborne show up as characters in the dream. Jan knew of and had associations to actress Jennifer Lawrence but had never heard of Lawrence Osborne. Quick google research produced a nomadic author of some repute. Jan has here to face her own nomadic author self, who has written deeply valuable books about her own shamanic recapitulation, combined with facing a latent extraverted Jennifer Lawrence self!

Jan next looked up the name Lawrence. Ultimate derivation of the name Lawrence is laurel, symbolically referring to Daphne, who ran from rape by transforming into a laurel tree. (Side note: many of Jan’s paintings include a tree). Daphne is both a symbol of perseverance and frozen avoidance of life. These associations help Jan explore the current balance of her hermitic introverted and confident extraverted selves.

These associations, both personal and collective, string together a profound communication from SOUL to ego Soul, essentially gifting a willing ego Soul with a direction for the playing field of waking life.

Google doesn’t always get it right, though. Ego Soul must decide upon what personally resonates and then take action—that is the completion of the dream. It is a grand opportunity to bridge the SOUL/ego Soul relationship and communication in the completion of one’s life karma, or mission on Earth, this time around.

Thank you, Jan, for sharing this gem.

Dream on,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Ego & Synchronicity

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In a dream I am in a packed country bus, descending down a windy dirt mountain road, in a third world country. A boy holds onto a door at the back of the bus. All of a sudden the door swings open as we round a wide curve in the road, and the boy, gripping tightly, swings in and out. The bus’s momentum is too great and we swerve off the ledge and go airborne, a huge chasm below leading to certain death. I close my eyes as I feel myself float out into the air. I am already vibrating and intent upon raising my vibratory level as we descend, awaiting impact.

Buddha awaiting the great transition... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Buddha awaiting the great transition…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I wake up. I had already awoken earlier in the night with the intent to raise my vibratory level, to connect with Jeanne out-of-body. This dream ended my sleep for the night and soon Jan awoke too.

I hopped out of bed. “You’re very peppy today!” Jan said. As she said the word “peppy,” in my mind I said, “Pepe Le Pew, Jeanne’s affectionate nickname for her childhood dog, Pepe.” Jan spontaneously said, “Pepe Le Pew!”

We decipher my dream as my intent’s method of raising my vibration. It’s raining outside. I head out to feed the birds and discover that the rain is freezing over as I slip and slide to the bird feeders.

Later, as I head out to the office, I put the truck in four-wheel drive to climb the steep driveway. Regardless, I nearly slide back down. Suddenly I remember my dream. I get it! Be extremely careful driving, especially as the steep hills of my dream provide me with the necessary warning. I am more cautious than I’ve ever been as, without thinking at all, I turn to head down our road in the more gentle direction, away from the steep hill in front of our house. Jan informs me later that even the town salt truck would not go down the hill!

I arrive at work. Suddenly it flashes, “Oh, it’s December ninth! This is the day Jeanne left this world!” I’d completely forgotten. But Jeanne didn’t forget. As I had attempted to raise my vibrational level to visit with her in the night, I was left suspended in the air in my dream, in this world. That was the necessary association I got as I drove to work: Drive slowly on the hills and curves. Indeed, the message was exactly right. It sent me into heightened driving awareness as I slowly edged toward work over the icy roads, with little traction in spite of my four-wheel drive vehicle. And to boot, I got the greeting from Pepe Le Pew, an unmistakeable association Jan knew nothing about!

This is how ego and synchronicity differ. Ego has such a focused cause and effect filter that it misses the signs and symbols that appear to communicate vital information. I am quite certain that this morning’s Eureka moment in the driveway prevented a serious accident.

Typically, the ego quickly shifts into judgment mode when analyzing a dream. Must be some kind of psychic inflation, set to take a tumble, if you’re about to crash in a dream. And what about the recklessness of the vehicle you’re being transported in? Aren’t you responsible for that? These questions narrow the view to a judgment of fault and badness. We know how the ego is always on the lookout to avoid exposure of its inadequacies!

And then there is the case of Pepe Le Pew, that cute skunk of long ago cartoons. The ego has to admit to this amazing “coincidence,” but in suspending that judgment I knew it was Jeanne humorously assuring me that we were meeting after all!

Once again, though the ego narrowed the field, saying, “Don’t feel bad, but you are too inadequate to raise your vibrational level to meet as intended,” I know for certain that I was delivered a message, a synchronicity between dimensions, that completely shifted my behavior and perhaps saved my life. All this, before I even realized that, thirteen years ago, this was the magical day of transition!

Love never ends,
Chuck