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Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: To The Deeper Within

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One day we must all take off and head into the great unknown... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
One day we must all take off and head into the great unknown…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

We must all take the hero’s journey. At some point in our lives it becomes imperative. When we stand on the threshold, about to take the first step into the unknown, we feel totally alone. No one has ever done what we are about to do. Our journey is our own to have, to experience, and to return from.

Perhaps our first journey is to leave our parents at the age of five and go off to school, to get on the school bus and return at the end of the day having had an experience that no one else has ever had. We must all do this at some point in our lives if we are to become mature, independent beings.

“Your real duty is to go away from the community to find your bliss,” writes Joseph Campbell. And it’s true, we all have to leave the known, the easy comforts of a provided life and experience the discomforts of life on our own.

There are many stages of the hero’s journey. There is that first stage of leaving home, of going off to college or moving far from where we grew up, to begin anew, as youth chomping at the bit for our own experiences beyond the world of our parents. Many never take another hero’s journey after that. We settle into our lives, become complacent, disillusioned, perhaps angry at the world for not meeting us in the way we expected. Our spirit, however, never gives up. It comes knocking, constantly asking us to please get up and do something to change ourselves!

Sometimes the call of the spirit is finally answered later in life. The journey is taken up again, when other duties have been met, when our maturity allows us to shed some of what has held us back in the past, when we are finally ready. Others continue the hero’s journey unabated, letting something else besides the dictates of society and family tradition guide them on their way, those free-spirited ones who never seem to settle in one place for very long. Others constantly refuse the call, even late into life; even upon their death beds they do not heed the proddings of their spirit to experience the bliss of life.

There is another journey... to the Deeper Within... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
There is another journey…
to the Deeper Within…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Besides the hero’s journey in the world, there is another kind of hero’s journey, the inner journey, the call of the spirit to encounter and experience the Deeper Within, as I like to call it. The journey into the Deeper Within is as frightening as taking that first step on the young hero’s journey, when leaving home for the first time and finding out what it means to be a fully responsible adult.

The Deeper Within calls to us throughout our lives. Calling and calling, it asks us to come closer, to hear what it has to tell us of the treasures and mysteries of the deeper self, like a deep well, the bottom of which is endless. The Deeper Within is where our true bliss lies, where our real transformation awaits. Once we heed this call, we are offered the opportunity to go on a journey that never ends.

To be ready to encounter and experience this Deeper Within we must allow ourselves to take the first part of the hero’s journey in the real world. We must leave home, grow up, create a life for ourselves on our own terms, as fully independent beings. We must gather experiences, learn what it means to face our fears and test our merits, to have gains and losses, to have love and to lose love, to build our egos and strengthen our spirits in a world that is often ignorant, disharmonious, and could care less.

Once we have had experiences in the real world, we might be ready to have experiences in the Deeper Within, where everything that we have learned from being in the outer world will be utilized and tested, proven to be useful or useless in our inner world. In the Deeper Within we will finally meet our spirit face to face, all that it encompasses, our light side and our dark side. We must be prepared for such encounters.

Our ego, strengthened by our life experiences, will prove its worth, showing us what we are really made of as we dive into the Deeper Within. The shamanic process of recapitulation is taking the hero’s journey into the Deeper Within. It entails facing what has controlled us and what has guided us, what has supplied us with our energy and what has drained us of our energy. Recapitulation is the hero’s journey to reconnecting with the spirit self. During recapitulation we surrender our ego to this spirit self, so that it may guide us to full transformation.

As we return to the real world from our hero’s journey through the Deeper Within, we must ease slowly back into society, quietly and humbly take our place again, transformed yet fully present. We return to life like a newborn, full of a new kind of knowledge that others cannot totally grasp. We return from taking the journey into the Deeper Within speaking a strange new language, having had visions and mystical encounters. We return with a new way of perceiving the world, with a new kind of awareness.

Complexities of the deeper self blissfully revealed upon taking the hero's journey... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Complexities of the deeper self blissfully revealed upon taking the hero’s journey…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Everything is now so clear to us, life explained on so many levels, death faced and found to be nothing more than this life extended, experienced in another state. We return with a new kind of sober fearlessness, with a new kind of detachment, and yet we feel and experience life with far greater love and compassion than previously possible. We emerge fully aware of our universal interconnectedness and our energetic connection to all living beings. Yes, we return with blissfulness coursing through us, having experienced bliss, having fully known what bliss really is.

Our new self wants everyone else to experience the bliss of life in this manner, to take the hero’s journey to the Deeper Within and transform too! But we learn soon enough that not everyone is ready. “I can’t read all that spiritual crap!” someone said to me the other day. I was not offended, nor did I feel sorry for the person. I simply acknowledged the journey that was being taken.

There are millions of kinds of journeys being taken simultaneously. Some people are here, others there. But the thing to remember is that we all had to start somewhere. We all had to take that first step into the unknown at some point, whether in a past life or in this life. At one time we all had to, and have to, take the first step on the hero’s journey to the Deeper Within too.

Wishing you all well, wherever you are on your hero’s journey. Keep going!
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Bearing The Tension

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Like the hot flame emotions flare up... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Like the hot flame emotions flare up…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Intense emotional encounters with rage, desire, joy or love are encounters with powers greater than our ego selves. Whether we seek out or seek to avoid these encounters, they require tremendous ego-forging to successfully receive or withstand the energetic intensity of their impact.

The ancient Greeks were well aware of the otherworldly origin of these higher power emotions, assigning many to the gods and goddesses on Mt. Olympus. Many Greek myths capture the intensity of human seizure by such higher power emotions in romances between the gods and mortals.

This ancient respect for the non-ordinary human origin of intense emotion, with its volatile, ecstatic, and overwhelming impact upon our human selves, is largely lost to the modern world. Now the lone ego self, or rational self, is given the daunting task of owning and managing emotions of great intensity.

Following ancient tradition, Jung’s psychology assigns the numinous energy of intense emotion to the ego’s encounters with the spirit self in the realm of the archetypes of the collective unconscious. This dimension of the psyche exists outside of the parameters of everyday space and time, in the timelessness of eternity. The ego, in contrast, was born in the world of ordinary space and time. Encounters between these two worlds are highly charged energetic exchanges.

For example, to be seized by love is, for the ego, an inner encounter with the archetype or Greek god of love—Eros—who pierces the ego with a numinous arrow of otherworldly spirit energy that then flows into the ordinary confines of human interaction. Some egos, under such seizure, are unable to approach the ‘object of their desire,’ collapsing in frozen awe or feelings of unworthiness. In instances where contact is made, rarely can an individual or couple withstand the energetic impact of the encounter for too long, as the relationship inevitably slips into the stasis of the ungodly boredom of the mundane, into the ordinariness of everyday life. As the light of the divine spark dims, a couple is challenged to search inwardly for divine connection and human partnership.

Bearing the tensions of ordinary reality... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Bearing the tensions of ordinary reality…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Sexuality, as Freud and William Reich researched, is itself an interaction between ego and spirit energy. The ability to channel the highly charged spirit energy of orgasm requires the ego to relax its controls and constructions of ordinary reality to physically receive and commune with the divine energy of orgasm. Alexander Lowen spent his professional life developing Bioenergetics, physical movements to forge the ego’s ability to channel and receive spirit in ecstatic release.

The act of simply going to sleep similarly challenges the ego self to release control and receive spirit contact with its energy body in dreaming. In dreaming, the body self is completely immobilized to allow for this encounter.

In native American vison quests, the ego/body self is contained within a circle, bearing the tension of limitation, as it forges a vessel to receive a visitation from spirit self.

Christianity and Buddhism likewise engage physical stillness and limitation as the means of achieving divine encounters. Christ bound to a cross, bearing the tension of human suffering, is the context for divine connection. Buddha similarly bears the tension of the onslaught of human illusion as he sits in utter stillness, preparing to receive divine enlightenment beneath the bodhi tree.

At the culmination of the Jewish wedding ceremony, as divine energy pours into a couple, they forge a vessel of deeper commitment in human relationship by shattering a glass, in remembrance of the bearing of tension at the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. In marriage, the ego self must bear the tension of suffering, as it makes contact with the divine, in joyful energy of union. The ego must be tempered to receive successfully the divine energy of joy.

Even the most modern of psychotherapeutic approaches boil down to forging the ego’s ability to suffer the influx of divine energy. In DBT therapy and Neuroplasticity, where the brain develops new channels to handle higher power emotional energies, treatment requires the ego self to learn to practice mindfulness. In mindfulness, we develop the ability to stay still and present—to manage and channel appropriately—encounters with highly charged spirit emotions.

The struggle to achieve full conscious awareness in spite of the veils of illusion is universal... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
The struggle to achieve full conscious awareness in spite of the veils of illusion is universal…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Vedantic science developed yogic practices to enable the ego and body self the ability to become still and successfully receive contact with the deepest spirit self, the Atman that lives beneath the bliss sheath. In other words, this translates as union with the infinite self in the space and time of ordinary human reality.

The ultimate goal of all spiritual and shamanic practice is: to enter infinity with consciousness, to be able to bear the tension of divine contact without dissolution, to continue the infinite journey beyond human life in full awareness. For this purpose, we are afforded a life in this world.

Everyday life in this world offers us many opportunities to forge the ability to enter infinity with consciousness. As we bear the tension of the reality in this world, we also practice bearing the tension of forging contact with infinity. We practice how to receive it, withstand it, flow with it and, ultimately, to become it, with awareness.

Bearing the tension,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Twice Born—From Beliefs To Conscious Discrimination & The Atman

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Beliefs.

Some beliefs, like a catechism, are handed down as a prescribed description of reality to be memorized, recited, and believed. Other beliefs assemble inside our minds as we strive to understand why things happen as they do. Beliefs are descriptions that create order and ascribe meaning to our world. Once a belief sets in, whether through the internalization process of socialization, or through some introverted process devoid of outside messaging, beliefs themselves become hardcore “facts” in our minds. And these believed facts are highly impervious to change.

Beliefs constructed in childhood, at such an impressionable time of our young ego’s development, can take up residence in our minds for a lifetime. Our beliefs, positive or negative, become our security blanket; they keep us safe and familiar as repetitive thoughts that comfort and guide us through the maze of life.

Ironically, the belief “I am ugly” can be as equally comforting as the belief “I am beautiful,” from the point of view of inner security. Security rests upon a known, familiar, redundant, predictable interpretation of reality. Consistent beliefs, positive or negative, build stability.

If one has held a lifelong belief that “It was my fault,” the liberating realization that “It wasn’t my fault” can feel more destabilizing than liberating, as it sends us into a deconstructed free fall of feeling that there is nothing safe to hold onto. This free fall, however, is a free fall of the ego alone. Ego is not Self. Ego is a part of a greater self, a Self to which it must awaken.

Twice born Self—beautiful Atman…

In Hindu philosophy the Atman is the true Self, the inner Buddha or Overself of Buddhism, the inner Christ of Christianity, the inner Nagual of the shamans of Ancient Mexico, the inner spirit in all of us. The ego is a functional tool of Atman, the tool of conscious discrimination, the decision maker that aligns action with right action. Right action is action in alignment with truth, with Atman. When ego uses conscious discrimination to deconstruct a false belief, ego goes into free fall, because the world it clings to is outed as a world of false beliefs, which must be surrendered.

Ego must allow the truth of Atman to manifest. To do this means relaxing defenses once dearly needed to construct a “safe world.” This construction is now identified as an anachronous artifact, a young ego’s construction of an illusion needed to create safety. The ego must allow itself to be reborn with Atman in the true nature of reality. This is the real meaning of being twice born—first time as an infant that grows an ego identity through accumulated beliefs, but more importantly grows an ego capable of conscious discrimination.

This exercise of conscious discrimination by ego leads to the collapse of its false beliefs and the birth, however traumatic—and all births are traumatic—into the Self, into the truth of the Atman. This is consciousness and Self reborn in second birth. This is the ultimate goal, to be twice born, with the opportunity for growth in this world, as enlightened Self.

In the canal,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: On Thin Ice

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Beware…thin ice!

The eyes of Capital peer hungrily at the melting Arctic caps, pondering what fossil treasures might lie beneath. I hear Jung’s cautionary note: Beware the slumbering gods of the deep. Never forget the awakening of Wotan, the ancient pagan god that broke through the cracking ice of Christendom and swept through the German psyche in the firestorm of Nazism, erasing centuries of civilization. Beware the thin ice that Reason rests upon at this moment in the progression of 2012.

We are reminded daily now of the hair-trigger balance of world order as an amateur internet film ignites the ire of the Middle East, as Newsweek throws brush on the fire with a provocative cover, as Netanyahu sees fit to overtly threaten Iran. Romney openly stokes the rage of the other seemingly emasculated 47%, pointing a finger at all the non-white male scapegoats. And thus, the slumbering energies of some wrathful, vindictive, punitive, licentious, greedy male god is gathering momentum and being openly invited to take full control of the American psyche.

The notion that REASON is enough to forestall a Romney coup is naive. We are dealing with a highly unstable collective psyche, a highly unstable collective race at war with itself. Romney’s frankness has merely laid completely bare the civil war within ourselves, within our world.

Is “survival of the fittest,” “best man wins,” “winner takes all,” to be our evolutionary path? Or are we an interdependent world that must take responsibility for all of its parts in order to survive and evolve?

Actually, both sides of this argument have truths to offer. Within the psyche, the ego must establish itself, must be fit and in control. Without a fit ego there is no survival; without a fit ego there is psychosis. However, an ego that cares only for its own needs and wants and interests evokes the rage and revolt of the rest of all that we are. We are also mind-body-spirit; that is, we are ego-animal-spirit. And if ego ignores or neglects the animal self, the body and all its instincts will revolt through disease, psychosomatic symptoms, rampant instinctual disorders like mass sexual abuse, etc. If ego ignores its spirit self, spirit self and spirit world will cast life into addictions, compulsions, and depression. Ego must take its rightful place in balancing the interdependent parts of the self.

Recapitulation is the ego’s willingness to reconcile with spirit and body self. In recapitulation we free our body selves, our instinctual selves, and open to the fullness of our energy spirit selves. Through recapitulation, ego evolves the fullest potential of the self, as an interdependent whole.

We must take responsibility for our individual lives as separate egos, fit and willing to take the journey into self, a self much greater than the sum of its parts, particularly that of its ego part. This is the formula for resolution, both on an individual and on a world level.

Our world rests on thin ice due to an alienated collective ego that has neglected both nature and spirit. Rebalance will happen one way or another, but if we take up the challenge and seek personal wholeness and balance, we strengthen the whole world.

The real truth that we must face is that we are all victims. Life in this world is a socialization of fragmentation that repeatedly victimizes the truth. In recapitulation, we take responsibility; we are not victims of our circumstances but our own liberators.

Only through assuming responsibility for the full truth—that of all our interdependent parts—can we advance ourselves, our species, our world, and skate off the thin ice and get back onto solid ground.

Beware! Thin ice!
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: An Awesome Experiment

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Some containers...

We are beings in the process of becoming. Our families, through socialization, help us to mold our first containers to hold and manage the prima materia, the innocence from which we are all created. This human mold becomes our identity, our sense of self—a being with continuity—a being we can wake up to in the morning who resembles the being we were when we went to sleep, what psychology calls an ego self.

The truth is, however, that what we are molded into says very little about who we really are, or who we will become. In truth, it’s just a working model, quite universal actually, a mold used and reused billions of times in forming the human race. That mold is the birthplace of our consciousness, our first bicycle, precious for a time but hardly a tool of navigation for an entire lifetime. In truth, consciousness must grow and become increasingly aware of its full nature to remain an effective navigational tool.

It was nature that decided to become conscious in the first place and we human beings are just that: nature that decided to become conscious. Our container, or ego self, is nature’s organ of consciousness. Our fledgling ego self, though, knows nothing of its true nature; it knows nothing of its true parents, nature itself. Our young ego self is an orphan child, separated at birth from its true parents and thrust into a mold that is supposed to know everything about navigating life, yet is so lacking in nature’s true knowledge.

Face it, consciousness enters life seriously stuck behind the eight ball, so different from its natural parents—the deep unconscious of nature—yet expected to have all the answers. The ego self, separated from its roots, has no answers and so little experience, yet is supposed to figure it all out for itself. All it has to work with are the rules, the laws, handed down through its socialized container’s book of rules. Those rules might be helpful in the beginning, but they are not the products of conscious experience and, underneath it all, we, as conscious beings, are deeply insecure beings; all of us nature’s orphans.

Nature's Opus...

And yet, at the same time, we are nature itself, nature’s most evolved experiment! Nature intended to take life in a new direction when it created the human, to not remain bound to its old, redundant patterns. Consciousness was born, conceived to herald in this change that evolved into the human being. What nature didn’t bargain for was that consciousness in the human ego container would become a renegade ship, a child overwhelmed by its power and ability to create, hoard, dominate and destroy. It’s the renegade stewardship of ego consciousness that’s brought us to where we now find ourselves: perched on the brink of destruction, with our true parents, nature, attempting to reign in this runaway ship before it’s too late.

What nature really seeks of us is that we take its prima materia, all the stuff of what we truly are, of what is, and find new expression for all of it in the living out of our lives.

In order to do this we must, of necessity, encounter, in consciousness, all the forces or essences of true nature inherent within all of us. These are the compulsions that come to grip us in fascination, in love, and in terror. These forces rock our containers, beckoning us to face them, own them, and find life for them. How will we fit them into our containers? Do they really belong in our containers, or must we simply acknowledge them and make peace with them? Are we ready to expand our containers, perhaps like the hermit crab that parts ways with its old shell and looks for a new one? Is it time to trade up to a new, expanded, conscious ego self?

The forces of nature within us are varied. Some are radiant and nurturing, others are greedy, vengeful, and deadly. All insist upon some place in our lives. It is the fundamental charge of consciousness to discover these forces of nature, acknowledge the truth of their existence, experience them fully and figure out what to do with them—how to live, balance, express, and evolve them forward.

Is it time to look for a new shell?

Consciousness is nature’s evolving organ, it is nature’s grand experiment and its decision making organ, and we are its container. To date, consciousness has largely mismanaged its nature. Collectively and individually we walk the razor’s edge of psychosis, which is nothing other than nature’s way of reasserting its control over a renegade ship and a failed experiment.

On the other hand, nature is completely supportive of its offspring, if that offspring is willing to squarely face the full truth of all that it is. This requires recapitulation—the process of learning to release ourselves from the containment of old, those limited containers of self, as we discover and integrate the fullness of our true natures. This also requires a willingness, on our parts, to take our full natures into the adventures of uncharted waters, within ourselves and in the world without. This is nature’s imperative at this moment in time—to keep evolving into new possibilities, but now responsibly, in full consciousness!

An awesome experiment indeed!

Part of the experiment,

Chuck