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Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Reign Of The Imp King

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So, what is an imp? The imp is a little devil from the woods who lives and acts in a most impulsive way! The imp is a spoiler, rarely tells the truth, reverses himself on a dime and can never be held to any agreement. The imp defies all reason and simply cannot be nailed down to anything. The imp is impishly spontaneous, outrageously fiendish, and at times malevolently rageful.

The imp king.
– Collage by Jan Ketchel

Let’s stop blaming the Russians! This Friday the imp becomes King through democracy’s divine ritual of inauguration. The collective unconscious, Mother Nature herself, has delivered her imp son, Donald Trump, to take over world leadership. Gaia has taken the imp from the woods and installed him to lead the world. Why?

Gaia long ago gave birth to human consciousness. When she bid us eat the apple from the tree of knowledge she bid us take her forward in new and more efficient ways. Since leaving the Garden, human consciousness has mastered technology and increasingly distanced itself from its animal, instinctual roots, from Gaia herself.

Today a majority of humans live online. Facebook gives us the news and organizes our memories. We text, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. We romance on Match. Soon cars will drive themselves, as drones deliver our goods. We have become beings of mind, of reason, of the rational, logical, technical with nary a spiritual thought or experience. Our god is Google. Our ego consciousness, Gaia’s hopeful gift to us, has so dissociated itself from the Garden and enthroned itself as creator that the planet that births and feeds us has become a rapidly metastasizing cancerous tumor.

Gaia has pulled the imp from the woods to level our God of Mind and bring us back down to true mindfulness that incorporates all that we all are, nature in all its forms. Our mind has become too high and mighty, our dissociation from and disregard for nature without and nature within has constellated the impish destroyer. He simply defies all reason. He typifies the world’s most exaggerated ego. Here Gaia is presenting us with the homeopathic cure. In homeopathy like cures like by intensifying the symptoms of a disease to activate its necessary cure. Trump is both the homeopathic agent of exaggerated ego and at the same time the imp from the woods who defies all reason. He comes in the archetypal line of the savior.

Dionysus was such a savior in antiquity, a spring god who broke through all the dams of civilized order to fertilize the earth with orgiastic fervor. Christ was another such savior who came to tone down the instinctual bloodlust and orgy of that same Dionysian fervor through a ritual of communion, accenting instead the ascension of spirit, which in human terms facilitates the dominance of mental control. Unfortunately, the mental plane of humanity has grown to deify itself today, with mind our god, completely overpowering and dissociating itself from its instinctive nature. We are disembodied humans who live in our heads.

Donald, the “new savior,” is indeed a primitive, dangerous nature spirit that threatens world survival. His installation is bound to unleash the pent up instinctual energies of the collective unconscious in an orgiastic outbreak of unbridled lusts for all kinds of power and grab. Then there’s the danger of the autocrat, a la the Hitler variety. We must learn from history. A charismatic king can unleash a collective fervor that infects the populace at the expense of individual reflection and integrity. That was how Hitler mesmerized a nation to follow his will.

Mother Nature has gone to such a drastic measure to level the deified ego of reason, which has disregarded its irrational core, nature itself. That’s how dangerous our dissociated ego has become to the survival of the planet. Mother Nature has brought in a bombastic, dangerous imp to check the overgrown God of Mind at all costs. The question is, how much destruction will be necessary before a new guiding principle emerges?

Mind is critical, but it becomes irrelevant and useless if it deifies itself and does not include nature in its identity and care. Until that happens we will be at the mercy of nature’s impish destroyer, who seems quite content to bring down the God of Mind along with civilization itself!

Realize, with the installation of the imp outwardly, we are subject inwardly as well to the imp’s control, within the Self. We are all living cells of Gaia, all in this together, and therein lies our opportunity. If we can bring our mind down to embrace our earthy substance, and move toward necessary balance in our bodily home, we remove the imp from power within because we voluntarily humble ourselves to our true needs. If enough individuals, as conscious cells of Gaia, take up this challenge we offer the healing potion so badly needed, and the imp might all the more quickly be returned to the woods.

Begin to unplug the self from virtual life and plug into what’s really all around you. Bring life out of the head and back into the body at the rhythm of the heartbeat. Sleep well and listen to nature’s guidance in your dreams. Be in solitude. Be in real human interaction and communion. Embrace your inner imp by paying heed to your spontaneous impulses and find a way to live them in right balance. Allow your mind to be challenged by your disavowed needs, embrace the fullness of your nature. Nature abhors too much order, it’s simply unnatural. So, allow for some form of chaos to bring renewal to too ordered a life.

For better or worse, we enter now the time of the Reign of the Imp King. Trust that, as in all things, nature will only let things go so far, but be empowered within yourself. Nature once gave us the gift of consciousness. If we learn to use it in her service now, we are sure to be restored all the sooner.

Embracing my inner imp,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Trickster King In Us All

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I recommend a viewing of Netflix’s The Crown. This modern exposition of the sacred transformation of the human being, anointed and born again as the divine queen in the cathedral, portrays the rich and basic archetypal substrate of the human psyche; the same archetypal substrate that has us project onto our president the ordering of the life of our nation, believing the presidency to be the design, for us, of the divine.

Who should wear the crown? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Who should wear the crown?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

America, of course, long shed itself of the silliness of the monarchy, but we could not erase our psychic predisposition to find sacred order and balance in our president. Our coronation at the cathedral is the ballot box, our king is our president, in whose presence we are equally predisposed to encounter the awe and the awful.

With President Obama, the earthy black shadow rose to kingship and he glowed with progressive intelligence. America, having apparently valued its shadow, appeared to be on the cusp of anointing the feminine to her goddess rank, just in time to rescue the ailing Earth. But alas, America was unexpectedly charmed by the Trickster King, Donald Trump.

What becomes evident is that America did not resolve its shadow by electing Obama. The shadow was stored beneath the surface and the trickster took full advantage of exposing it and tapping into its energy. We were not ready for the goddess. We hadn’t truly reckoned with the shadow.

The Trickster King is the full embodiment now of that shadow, and we must reconcile with it. In a nutshell, that shadow is the ultimate ego self who exalts itself in godly towers. This is the ego that truly only cares about itself, its needs, its wants, its security, its power. This is the ultimate individualistic ego that feels no responsibility for the safety and needs of the world, only insofar as it impacts its own interests. It’s alway only about “me and mine,” it says. In fact, “me” has become extremely narrow by definition, as the impetus now is on a “pure” America, where only those truly entitled to the Kingdom may reside.

As a psychotherapist, I have experienced marriages, families, friendships, business relationships, and relationships within the medical caregivers community experiencing major earthquakes as the fault lines of greater connection have been shattered and threatened by the divisiveness of this election. The grassroots impact of this election has indeed infiltrated even the sanctuary of the bedroom.

America is forced to face and reconcile with its huge shadow in all relationships in daily life in order to find its way to genuine connection where the ground will be properly prepared for the election of the feminine. We have a lot of work ahead of us.

We must face the truth, that though we have long espoused in our faiths and politics heart-centered compassion, the truth is, we mostly live at the level of self-centered survival. Apparently, it is necessary for this to be acted out and lived under our current kingship. Let us not make the mistake of an earlier generation that projected as a nation their divine center onto their divine king: “Adolf Hitler is Deutschland, Deutschland is Adolf Hitler.” *

It is not my intention to identify Trump as Hitler but to draw attention to the human tendency to invest leaders with the divine and follow them blindly.

We must thank and respect our trickster president-elect for mirroring our truth to us, but must individually, as true Americans, secede from the monarch, withdraw the projection from the Trickster King and face the truth of our own inner kingdoms. We must face our own ego king self, and ask: Who will rule the personality? The ego, or the  the divine Self within us?

Time to go into the tower and restore balance... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Time to go into the tower and restore balance…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The Self is the divine spark within us all who rests in the truth of our heart center. Our ego’s task is to realign and truly embrace the rule of this heart center and in so doing release us from its own egocentric worldview.

As we succeed in this individual effort we become like the ancient Taoist rainmaker who in restoring balance within triggers the restoration of balance without. As the rains return, the crops are nourished and life thrives anew. Sometimes those rains must provide great floods for life to truly be renewed. Never lose sight of the ark of the heart. It’s near, dear, and a definite lifesaver.

Remaining heart centered,

Chuck

* Quote from C. G. Jung’s Visions Seminars Volume 2, p. 1332

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Inflated Tire

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Got enough air? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Got enough air?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

If the tires are inflated, filled with air, the vehicle is free to move. Without air there is no movement, without air there is no human life. Air fills our lungs in the region of the heart. With this influx of air the heart is filled with the spirit of the heavens, that which comes from above. This is in contrast to the fiery, watery, earthy region below the diaphragm, in the abdominal cavity, the region of digestion and earthy excretion.

The region of the heart is where the rising sun is lifted into the heavenly sphere, as true light is shown upon all that is. In its heavenly rise the sun reveals the truth and invites us to live in its purity. With this we are lifted beyond our earthy murkiness and introduced to our spirit self. Our spirit self is ethereal. Though it operates within the body, it participates with the gods in infinity. Each breath of air is the commingling of body and spirit.

This communion of ethereal knowing and bodily existence lifts one beyond the bodily constraints with its rootedness in space, time, and gravity. Identification with the spirit self, dissociated from the physical, is the psychological condition of overinflation.

In a state of overinflation one is likely to forget to eat, or to eat so rapidly that digestion is compromised. Instead, one turns to the nourishment of a spirited idea, which now fuels life. A creative project might seize one, as sleep and food are completely suspended, as the spirit relentlessly commandeers the body with its cause. This ungrounded mania, though it may produce a spiritual masterpiece, might eventuate in physical collapse, as the depleted body eventually claims its needed rest.

The key with our spirit self is for it to remain associated and in balance with its bodily partner, rather than dissociated and manic. An automobile is like the body proper. With its properly inflated spirit tires it flows smoothly as it navigates life. The I Ching depicts this as the condition of peace, Hexagram #11, where earth rests upon heaven, their influences in harmonious union.

In energetic terms, this is the body self assuming its position as subordinate to its spirit self. In psychological terms, this is the ego self aligning itself with the intent of its spirit self. To be sure, the ego, for its part, is charged with determining the legitimacy of its own spirit’s intent. Too often the ego is vulnerable to “false gods” catering to its own ambitions, where it gets duped into flying in hot air balloons or taking wax-winged flights of fancy.

Gotta watch those flights of fancy! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Gotta watch those flights of fancy!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

When the true self speaks from the heart center there is clarity and calmed emotion. This is ego and spirit in alignment. To be sure, a highly emotional spirit is not speaking from the heart, and is one that should be carefully explored before it is allowed to drive the automobile of self.

The voice of the true self simply speaks the truth. Its spirit is lifted above the compulsions of the wheel of life that constantly reconstruct “Groundhog Day” and instead calmly points out the true way forward.

Breathing,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Healing Ticket

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In the mystery play of our time, Donald Trump is emerging as Helios, the sun god, a golden redeemer. The stronghold of reason is crumbling and the hunger for divine renewal appears to be landing upon his golden locks.

A religious fervor is stirring in the masses, in all of us. The renewal we really crave is transcendent ecstatic experience. The problem with Donald’s solution is his complete identification with ego as divine Self. In other words, total exaltation of the ego with divine imperative. “Make America Great Again,” as catchy as it is, is complete ego coronation, as it solves the destruction of the world through a restoration of the myth that America is God’s chosen one whose grand imperative is purification and masculine power domination.

The mystery play denies the necessity to take the journey into the depths of the earth to face the truth of the destruction and neglect of the feminine, of its divinity and source of healing and renewal.

How high can we go before we suffer the fate of Icarus? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
How high can we go before we suffer the fate of Icarus?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Trump reflects the ego in all its might—Helios the sun god obliterating all the darkness in its one-sided enlightenment. This is a very personal story for all earth inhabitants. We all have ego selves, that which governs our decisions and actions in life. Ego of our time is dominated by reason. But reason, for all its order, is deplete of body experience. Reason is localized in the head; it is abstract, dissociated from our true animal aliveness.

Our modern religions are dominated by reason, they don’t link us to the living substance within ourself. This is why the modern world is addicted; addiction is our hidden pagan compensation to partake of the divine substance so critical to sustain life. Of course, addiction is equally as one-sided as reason—it knows no limits, like Icarus, who imagined himself as Helios and melted from getting too close to the heat of the sun, falling to his death upon the earth.

Trump is the ultimate symbol of the addict: we can have it all, he says, there are no limits! This is the collective masculine ego’s last stand and it is empowered by ego identification with divine energy, with God, but like Icarus it is really just ego unleashed and if I am reading it correctly, it can only go so high before it is doomed to go down.

This hunger for divine experience has been burgeoning beneath the rule of reason for too long, and the charismatic Trump advantage lies in its fervor. This truly is what happened in Nazi Germany. The irrational fervor latent in the German Volk was galvanized by a charismatic leader who extolled purification and masculine domination, overtaking their cultured humanity and sending them, and the rest of the world, into the darkest time in recent modern history.

To learn from history would be to not repeat it. Collective energy, including all that fervor, is made up of the energy of individuals. To separate the individual self from the collective is Step One, while at the same time accepting the truth that as individuals we are still a microcosm of the collective. The advantage of individuality, however, is one of manageability. For however vast the challenge, it is possible for the individual to take the plunge into the full truth of the many-sided self, where all the ancient mysteries and transformations are possible, without harm to the collective.

Individuals can assume responsibility for themselves, and must, as historical fact shows that collectives are largely impossible to control. Unfortunately, there is now a curious total absence of individual responsibility, in fact, things are devolving into something of a mass blood thirst. The time is ripe for the individual to take responsibility, one person at a time. Let’s hope we are not too late!

Squaring with the divine within the fires of the self... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Squaring with the divine within the fires of the self…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

To begin immediate and active participation in becoming responsible, each individual can square with the divine masculine and the divine feminine within the self, each finding their own unique and individual way to the Middle Way, the ultimate goal within and without. It is impossible to define that Middle Way on a collective level, for all must find legitimate balance and reconciliation within all that one is made up of, within the self.

If enough people can make the effort to find their way to this Tao within, the world will find its way to the healing ticket too!

Squaring with the divine,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Ego & Entity**

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We are more than we think we are... like this double shadowed being! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We are more than we think we are…
like this double shadowed being!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

If you break it down, the term “un-conscious” is just that—all that we are that we are simply not aware of.

Ego is that part of us that we are aware or “conscious” of. Hence, ego and unconscious comprise the sum of all that we are, the known and the unknown.

Freud was able to prove that disturbing parts of who we are can be pushed out of awareness into the unconscious through a defense mechanism he called repression. Jung subsequently discovered that other parts of who we are, that go deep into our ancestry and phylogenetic heritage, reside in what he called the collective unconscious. These parts appear in dreams, visions, and fantasy and may powerfully influence the quality and behavior of our lives. Jung further discovered that the collective unconscious eventuates in infinity and houses the spirit side of who we are.

Entity can be defined as an autonomous character that is active in the unconscious part of who we are. For a variety of reasons it comes to the surface of our conscious minds and challenges the ego to contend with its will and message.

An example of this might be a conscious personality that sees itself as peaceful and loving suddenly seized by a powerful emotion of rage and unpleasant thoughts as regards a friend or family member. Perhaps in a dream that night an acquaintance they haven’t heard from in decades is encountered. When they amplify the dream by recalling the personality of the dream character, the image of an aggressive bully comes to light, someone they never felt comfortable being around in their youth.

In this example the ego is confronted with a challenge. This exaggerated bully character is certainly a hard one to “own” as a part of one’s own self. This character hardly fits the definition of one’s conscious values and how one knows oneself. However, the problem that has arisen is that one’s own ego is struggling to accept that something has irritated it and that it has an aggressive reaction to someone close to them. This is simply incompatible with how one sees oneself!

The tendency might be to see the appearance of that childhood bully in the dream as a reminder of an evil entity that tried to take possession of the ego and force it into hateful, rageful feelings and thoughts. The strategy may then call for disowning the anger and turning instead to loving thoughts for one’s close friend or family member.

However, a more astute and honest reflection might reveal that the ego has had too narrow a definition of itself, seeing itself only as positive and softly loving, disavowing the stronger and more assertive side of itself. As a consequence, the dream image of the bully may have arisen from the unconscious as a character who could balance out the extreme one-sidedness of the conscious attitude of lovingness with an equally one-sided attitude of aggressive behavior. In this scenario, the unconscious entity compensates for the ego’s imbalance, demonstrating to it the results of its narrow definition of itself, presenting it with the far greater depths of who it really is.

Taken this way, the ego is offered the opportunity to drop its false pretenses of an all-loving being and make peace with its, at times, aggressive reactions. The ego, upon further reflection, might discover that its aggressive reaction to a loved one might in fact be the most appropriate reaction to have, as that person might be taking excessive advantage of one’s loving and giving attitude and require a boundary!

Somewhere in all that darkness and confusion there is a centered and calm being... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Somewhere in all that darkness and confusion there is a centered and calm being…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Of course, if the ego is fully honest with itself it might have to admit that the outer problem probably arose in the first place because the ego felt too uncomfortable with confrontation and sought refuge in its one-sided definition of a loving self, a definition way too narrow to encompass the fuller definition of one’s true Self.

Thus, when ego encounters an entity within, it first does well to question what might have given rise to this entity at this particular time. Before casting out the devil, make sure the devil isn’t the Self in disguise!

Reflecting,

Chuck

** Please note that last week’s blog is now also available for viewing: Orgasm As Divine Encounter