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Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Midas Touch of Intent

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I intend a change. Midway through the night, I am suddenly awoken. Outside sounds abound around me. I am captive; they will not let me return to sleep. For hours they exhaust me. All I can do is breathe, breathe into deep relaxation.

The next day, I am present, but a step behind the action. My intuition, ordinarily my guiding light, is shut down. The world moves at its normal pace, but all I can do is watch it unfold as I fumble for words and meaning. I meet extraordinary challenges in the day. I notice an exhausted, detached calm.

The next night, I dream I am at the Grammys. I sit next to Bob Dylan. From his seat he delivers an acceptance speech for the Lifetime Achievement Award. He rambles on, monotone, almost incoherent, like he’s talking to himself. Someone from behind, with a long wooden pole, tries to poke Bob, to make him shut up. I protect him by deflecting the pole. He deserves respect.

In another dream, I’m in a large lake at night. I’m swimming. A huge oceanlike wave is approaching. I dive through it, only it doesn’t pass, it engulfs. I realize it’s a tidal wave. I’m now well beneath the surface. I do seem to be able to breathe. I’m not overwhelmed by fear, but it does feel like death is imminent.

More and different challenges appear the next day in waking life. Encounters coalesce around the theme central to my intent. It’s clear I am being softened, made malleable, as intent pulls me forward, pushing me to experience a much deeper level of groundedness and detachment.

The next night, in a dream, a Chinese man translates the soup choices on the menu at a restaurant. I choose the soup called: “A Light Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” Something has shifted; light can now pass through where once I was caught, between a rock and a hard place.

This series of events, which occurred in different states of my multidimensional self—dream body, physical body, social body—were all different ripples of the same intent, synchronistically related. This is the Midas Touch of Intent. Once the universe engages our intent, like Midas with his golden touch, intent turns everything in our path into gold; everything becomes the substance of our intent. You simply can’t get away from it. Everything, indeed, becomes meaningful and is tied to the intent of our intent.

On the first night, after I set my intent, intent awoke me and refused to allow me to sleep. It was as if the Sirens had me under their spell, all I could do was relax my body. This physical experience shut down my intuitive function and rendered me a therapist without vision. In the dream with Bob Dylan, I sought to protect the icon that deserved respect, but the truth is, it was time for new life: change. This is the time of revolution. The old kings must now die to usher in a new era. Jan informed me the next day that an Indie band from Canada called Arcade Fire, had won the Album of the Year Award at the Grammys. Like Bob Dylan, I too had to let go of the old self to make room for the new.

In the next dream, a tidal wave, like Noah’s flood, swept away the old and ushered in the new. There was nothing I could do but breathe and go with the flow, into the unknown. Finally, I experienced a new self, my intent realized, a new life, where once life was frozen between a rock and a hard place.

Jeanne cautions us to be careful of what we ask for when we set an intent. She suggests we be specific, but also be prepared, as the path intent chooses to realize our intent may not be as we expect. Midas might have been wise to choose a more careful intent so that he would have been able to eat his food, rather than have it all turn to gold when he touched it!

Intent will ripple through all the dimensions of the self. At first, the meaning of events may elude us; sometimes we are simply in the grip of the experience and need to allow ourselves to be led along. What choice do we really have, once we are in it?

Suspend judgment. Go with the flow. At some point you will arrive at the shore of a new self, intent realized, and marvel at the magical journey that brought you there.

Bon Voyage!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Dreaming Intent

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To follow up on Jeanne’s message of the other day, Navigating the Mystical, I decided to practice intent last night. Right before falling asleep, when I was already drowsy, I set this intent: I intend to know the moment I am falling asleep and remain aware of dropping into a dream. I want to know the moment this is happening and retain the experience. Immediately, I closed my eyes and was aware of literally feeling like I was dropping into a dream.

This is what I experienced: I felt as if I were more than one being or awareness. I was the dreamer in the dream and a dreaming observer as well. I saw my own hand reach out from the left, palm open and facing upward. “Oh look, there’s my hand,” my dreaming self thought. Then almost immediately another hand appeared on the right holding a red flower in its palm, as if showing it to me or offering it to me. I felt I should look at it closely. My dream observer, aware of also being the owner of the hand said, “Oh, look at that, two hands, and look at that beautiful flower.” At the same time, my awareness as the dreamer in the dream concentrated on looking closely at the flower. It was as if I were looking through a microscope at this close up scene of the two hands, and I was both inside the scene with awareness and I was also the outer observer looking through the microscope. I woke up immediately and thought: “It worked! My intent worked!”

Enthused by this experience I decided to try again. This time, I set a new intent, which was: I intend to see everything in my dream with crystal clarity. Again I felt myself dropping into dreamland. This time I landed in a small rowboat. I appeared to be on an arctic lake formed by a melting glacier. It reminded me of hiking up Svart Isen, a huge glacier in Norway that I once tramped up and had a most amazing experience on, as I watched and heard the rumblings and shiftings of this massive ice flow, its colors almost Caribbean blues, a contrast that, at the time, I found remarkable. There on top of the northern world were the same intense blues of the waters of the Caribbean Sea; fascinating.

Anyway, in my dream, I am in this tiny boat floating without oars into the center of this huge glacier. Everything is crystal clear! The word “Crystalline” was repeating throughout the dream experience, in a sort of voiceover, though I knew it was my own voice. I floated further into the glacier and was soon surrounded on all sides by this crystalline world of ice. It was not blue as in my experience in real life, but absolutely “crystal clear,” just as I had set in my intent.

Again, I woke up out of this experience quite fascinated by the literal quality of my dreaming self and the response of the universe, as it so nicely allowed me to have these experiences. This reminded me of what Jeanne had said in the message on Monday, that you must remain aware of how your intentions or requests are answered, that they may not be as clear or straightforward as you desire. However, I thought my dream experience was humorously playing right into my intent to have an experience of crystal clarity. It literally gave me an experience of just that!

I find this process fascinating, the way the psyche and the universe, the dreaming body and awareness, do work hand in hand. I got what I asked for! In this case, I received several gifts: proof that intent does indeed work because I fell into a dream, I retained the dream experience, and I got crystal clarity, all the things I desired. And, in addition, my intent from the first experience “to remember” carried over into the second experience, thus showing that intent, once set, is planted for future use.

Perhaps my recitations on these experiences may add to your own personal incentive to try dreaming intent or any other intent. As subtle as these experiences may seem, they were in fact just what I asked for and I felt quite satisfied with the night’s work. The rest of the dream night proceeded from there. As I fell back to sleep the third time, I simply set my intent to keep going along the same lines. As I went deeper into sleep and dreaming, the word “crystalline” kept popping up, my awareness reminding me to look closely, very clearly at my dream world, which I was aware of doing.

See if this conversation that Carlos Castaneda had with don Juan, from pages 22 and 23 in The Art of Dreaming makes any sense in how dreaming intent works:

Don Juan explained that there are entrances and exits in the energy flow of the universe and that, in the specific case of dreaming, there are seven entrances, experienced as obstacles, which sorcerers call the seven gates of dreaming.

“The first gate is a threshold we must cross by becoming aware of a particular sensation before deep sleep,” he said. “A sensation which is like a pleasant heaviness that doesn’t let us open our eyes. We reach that gate the instant we become aware that we’re falling asleep, suspended in darkness and heaviness.”

“How do I become aware that I am falling asleep? Are there any steps to follow?”

“No. There are no steps to follow. One just intends to become aware of falling asleep.”

“But how does one intend to become aware of it?”

“Intent or intending is something very difficult to talk about. I or anyone else would sound idiotic trying to explain it. Bear that in mind when you hear what I have to say next: sorcerers intend anything they set themselves to intend, simply by intending it.”

“That doesn’t mean anything, don Juan.”

“Pay close attention. Someday it’ll be your turn to explain. The statement seems nonsensical because you are not putting it in the proper context. Like any rational man, you think that understanding is exclusively the realm of our reason, of our mind.”

“For sorcerers, because the statement I made pertains to intent and intending, understanding it pertains to the realm of energy. Sorcerers believe that if one would intend that statement for the energy body, the energy body would understand it in terms entirely different from those of the mind. The trick is to reach the energy body. For that you need energy.”

Intend by intending? Find the energy body? Does it all sound too idiotic, as don Juan suggests? So what, just try it, set your dreaming intent and see what happens. These are the means to beginning a process of navigating the mystical, as Jeanne suggested. It works. Good luck and good dreaming!

If you wish, feel free to share or comment in the Post Comment section below.

Thanks for reading! Sending you all love and good wishes,
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Beyond Belief

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“Do you believe in God?” asks John Freeman of Carl Jung in a 1959 BBC interview.

“Now?” asks Jung. “Difficult to answer… I know… I don’t need to believe… I know.”

“What is the practical importance of the out-of-body experience?” asks an Italian interviewer of William Buhlman, prominent out-of-body explorer, researcher, and author, in April 2008.

“The most important thing about an out-of-body experience is the ability to obtain answers… the ability to go beyond beliefs… the out-of-body experience gives people the opportunity to verify their own immortality,” replies William Buhlman.

The out-of-body experience (OBE) is the experience of consciousness separate and apart from the physical body. This experience is most frequently first encountered in a dream state when awareness is suddenly awoken by a sensation of intense vibration that leads to the separation of consciousness from the physical body. Frequently, people report floating up from or rolling out of their physical bodies, which remain asleep and frozen, in a state of paralysis. This emergence from the body is experienced as still being contained in the body, however its movements are dictated by thought versus physical action. The shamans call this the energy body and others call it the astral or ethereal body.

This awakening to one’s energy body is experienced spontaneously by most people at some point in their dreaming life. Don Juan suggested that the experience of the self as energy, the dormant energy body, is a potential available to all, simply waiting to be called into action.

The initial reaction to an OBE can range from terror to exhilaration. My own reaction to my youthful OBE was very similar to Robert Monroe’s, a pioneer in OBE exploration in America. I feared death, as did he, and I feared a brain tumor, as did he. Like Monroe, I was cleared of tumors after neurological brain scans, and also discovered that I wasn’t going to die, however, in the absence of more knowledge I remained terrified. In contrast, as Monroe states, in a 1992 interview at his institute in Virginia, he had the benefit of a discussion with a psychologist friend who informed him that his experience would be quite normal in India. He suggested that Monroe move to India and study under a guru in an ashram for ten to twenty years to hone his skills in OBE. Though Monroe was not prepared to leave his wife, child and business for a decade or two, he obtained the knowledge that his experience was not abnormal and began his own Western exploration of OBE.

In fact, the knowledge and experience of life beyond the body is highly refined in Eastern systems of yoga and Buddhism, as well as in shamanic cultures both East and West. This has been Carlos Castaneda’s greatest contribution to our time: awakening all of us to the equal opportunity to find our energy bodies and answer for ourselves questions of immortality and life beyond the body.

There are many roads to awakening the energy body and beginning a personal exploration of infinity: trauma, sleep deprivation, drug use, yoga, meditation, holotropic breathing, Tensegrity, hypnosis, channeling, prayer, fasting, creative dreaming, near death experience—in fact, the list may be endless.

In my experience, intent is all you really need. Intend to find your energy body. Intend often; it will happen. What stands in the way for most people is the rational mind. “I don’t believe in an energy body,” the mind will say. My response, “Good! Beliefs are useless.”

Be a scientist, find out through your own personal experiment. Suspend judgment, like any true scientist. Set up your experiment. Intend your energy body, gently, persistently, every day, for weeks. Then, see what happens!

See what questions you might begin to answer through your own personal experiences and knowing.

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

NOTE: All cited interviews are available on YouTube. Click on the links: Carl Jung, William Buhlman, Robert Monroe. You can also read about Chuck’s experience in The Book of Us, p. 5 or in this Chuck’s Place Blog.

Messages from Jeanne

#733 Become Eagles Today

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Jan Ketchel channeling Jeanne Marie Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
I awoke in the middle of the night and as I drifted back to sleep I asked you to teach me a shamanic lesson in a dream. I then fell into a dream about transforming energy from the dominant right side of this reality to the magical left side and back again. In the dream I was taking awareness from “The Eagle.” I had huge eagle wings myself, and I was sweeping energy toward my body, pulling it in from the right side, then from the left side, and then inward toward my chest and shoulders. I seemed to be learning a magical pass.

Can you please elaborate on this dream? What did it mean and why did you feel it was important to teach me that lesson?

My Dear Jan, when you ask, you receive. As you know, this has always been true, but, as you also know, specifically how you receive is up to the giver. This is true in all realities. On the other hand, if you ask for something specific, as you did in asking for a shamanic lesson, you will receive that specific request, however, the delivery is up to the giver as well. You see, in your request for knowledge I felt it was most meaningful to offer you something practical: a magical pass.

There are millions of magical passes, though not even a fifth of those millions of passes are known or utilized. Many of them you do without even knowing they are magical passes, though you may include them in your daily lives. So many and so frequent are these movements, filled with intent, that it is hard to be concerned with calling them one thing or another.

Be contented with the fact that in your very lives every action holds buried intent, and this is the crux of all magical passes, the intent that lies behind them. When you walk or skip or run you stir up ancient intent. Though you may not be aware of just what that intent is, you may be aware that something in you shifts, your energy, your mind, your senses. You stir up intent with practically every movement in that world, with the potential to offer you insight into infinity.

Now, in your dream sequence, I did indeed send you, upon your request, into a state of awareness where you knew how to shift your awareness from your right-sided self to your left-sided self and back again. This is an energetic process related to the energy body of course, but your physical body is what you must work with in that world. So, suffice it to say, your right side is your awareness in one world, the world you reside in most often, and your left side is your awareness in other worlds, including dreaming. Neither awareness is keenly aware of the other. Most of the time they are separate entities, only fully utilized one at a time. However, in dreaming a shift takes place whereby you may indeed maintain awareness of both sides of the energy body simultaneously. That was what you were learning last night.

The eagle’s wings pass is indeed an option for gathering your personal energy to greater awareness at all times. By sweeping the intent of awareness from the right side and then from the left side, as if you did indeed have broad feathered eagle’s wings, and pulling it into your heart center you begin to stir up these two awarenesses, mixing them together inside your energy body. But I also hazard that they will be most noticeable in your physical body as well. The eagle’s wings pass is quite accurately a good energy builder if you feel somewhat depressed, have low energy, or need a mental and physical boost. Simply sweep in energy from the right with your right wing, then from the left with your left wing, and then both together ending by wrapping your wings around your shoulders in an embrace of sealing in that energy.

This will invigorate your spirit, clear your mind, stir your heart and present you with inner calm all at once. Do not hesitate to do this pass whenever you feel the need. It is my gift to you.

Thank you, Jeanne. I am passing this message on to others. Is that okay? And may they also use this eagle’s wings pass?

Of course! That is a fine idea. It is not meant for you alone but for you to pass along, as are all the messages you encounter, if it feels appropriate. I encourage all of you to pass on what you learn in whatever way feels most right. For only in so doing will your lives evolve and your world too.

In the past you have mentioned that you thought the disciplines of the seers of ancient Mexico might be too archaic for modern man, yet here you have given us a magical pass. Have you changed your thoughts about Tensegrity as a practice? Should it be taken up more seriously by myself, as well as by others? I have never found it especially suitable to my personality, as I prefer yoga and meditation, though there are certain magical passes that I do regularly.

I do not advise anything along the lines of practice, except to advise that you find ways to stir up intent within your body, in both your physical body and your energy body. In order to evolve one must become aware, and to become aware one must wake up out of the slumber of that one world. One must open the eyes and be ready and alert to the experiences that abound, that in fact are being missed every day due to a lack of awareness. So however you choose to stir up your awareness works fine. In my book, your personal preferences must be appreciated and acceptable to you over anyone else, for it is your journey and your life. However, that being said, I do advise that in order to promote healing and evolutionary growth, awareness of the self as energy must be part of the process and this is why some sort of energy work is most beneficial.

This can be as simple a process as walking, as I mentioned earlier. This can be as easy as sitting quietly and learning what your personal energy feels like, as I have spoken of before in other messages. This can be a practice of yoga and meditation, as I know you are so fond of Jan, for it does indeed fit your personality and your quiet temperament. This may also be a more vigorous activity if that is what one needs to stir up the personal energy. It may depend on how long it has lain dormant and how far from its calling you really are.

Have you not heard your personal energy calling you? If not then it might be a good idea to begin stirring it up with the eagle’s wings pass as laid out thus:

1. Stand up and face the direction that feels most personally right and spread your eagle’s wings.

2. Breathe into your heart center and awaken your self. From the heart center invite your tender self—who may be afraid or simply dozing and unaware—to join you now, a little at a time, on your journey through that life, as you begin a new trip, so to speak, into the world of energy.

3. Sweep in energy from the right with your right wing and press it to your body and then release your wing back out to the side.

4. Then sweep in energy from the left with your left wing and press that into your body as well, releasing your wing back out to the side.

5. Then sweep in both wings of energy together, ending by wrapping your wings around your shoulders in an embrace of sealing in that energy.

6. When you are done release your wings and discover, My Dear Readers, that you do indeed have a vast storehouse of energy at your disposal, in fact an endless amount.

Invite yourself into the dream of awakening with your energy body fully present and participating in life. It is not so frightening as you may fear, for in reality it is who you are, in the reality of the true meaning of life.

Lift your wings, stir up your heart-centered energy and become eagles today, My Loved Ones. You cannot harm yourself or anyone else by doing so. You can only grow, heal, awaken, become alert, aware, and more fully present. Enjoy the experience!

Thank you Jeanne! As I was channeling and putting this up on the website today the winds were whipping and howling, as if the eagle were outside flying back and forth stirring up the energy!

Please feel free to post comments or respond to this message from Jeanne in the post/read comments section below.

Fondly and most humbly offered.

Chuck's Blog

#732 Chuck’s Place: Repetition

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The seers of ancient Mexico state that the only barrier between this world and infinity is the internal dialogue. The internal dialogue is the incessant conversation that plays in our heads from the moment of waking to the moment of sleeping. These inner conversations continuously tell us who we are and interpret, non-stop, the events and people around us. With our attention so fixated and monopolized by these inner conversations, we are hardly available to perceive or experience anything outside the world this internal dialogue generates.

The seers of ancient Mexico describe dreaming as a time when we are naturally freed of the internal dialogue and, as a result, journey into other worlds or other potential realms of experience. Those seers cultivate this natural phenomenon into a conscious art of dreaming where they volitionally journey into infinity.

Other traditions such as Yoga and Buddhism have discovered similar pathways to exploring infinity by achieving inner silence in meditation. Though deeply attracted to the value of these esoteric traditions, most Westerners experience considerable difficulty engaging in these practices. Perhaps it is the added burden we Westerners encounter at every nook and cranny of our existence—the external dialogue constantly telling and selling us on who we are, what we need, what’s new, what’s best and, most recently, the addition of all the latest news from our friends on Facebook. Is there any Western practice that can lead us to inner silence? I propose: Repetition.

When I was a preteen I was abruptly torn out of public junior high school, mid-year, and placed in Sister John Michael’s seventh-grade class at Saint Ignatius Loyola grammar school. Sister John Michael was horrified that I was left-handed but, even worse, that the quality of my handwriting was a dead give-away of demonic influence. For Sister John Michael the most important things in life were presentation and uniformity. I failed at proper lowercase loops on L’s, which I was taught must be clearly differentiated from loopless T’s. Lowercase F’s and P’s must sink below the line at the proper depth and angle, never interfering with subsequent letters on the next line. And of course, all letters must be consistently drawn, clones of each other. Sister John Michael taught me, through shame and fear, but most importantly through repetition: endless pages of letters until I got them right, consistently.

Repetition is a pathway to inner silence. If I mindlessly wrote a page of letters I was sure to receive a scolding, a sentence to blackboard writing after school under the watchful eyes of Sister John Michael, and the insistence that my mother sign my heavily marked up homework filled with red corrections. Hence, repetition must include mindfulness, being fully present versus falling asleep at the wheel of habit as the internal dialogue resumes its incessant chatter.

Don Juan made it clear that setting an intent and the repetition of it is key to harnessing intent. My suggestion to reach inner silence, the gateway to infinity, is to set the intent for inner silence, repeat it incessantly, with mindfulness, whenever it comes to mind: in the shower, walking, going off to sleep, waiting, etc. As with all meditation, attach to no outcome, yet know with certainty that silence will come. Expect nothing, wait with patience; simply repeat: “Inner silence, inner silence, inner silence…”

I send my gratitude to Sister John Michael, wherever she may be, for teaching me this deep shamanic practice of repetition. Unfortunately, I’m not so sure that she’d be proud of my handwriting, which I’m sure she’d still judge to be possessed!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck