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Chuck’s Place: Befriend the Jackal

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Befriend the Jackal…
– Artwork © 2022 Jan Ketchel

In Egyptian mythology, Anubis, the guardian of souls and lord of the underworld, appears with a human body topped with a jackal’s head. The jackal, in physical reality, is an earthbound wild dog who, like a vulture in the sky, feeds off the flesh of the dead. This is the likely root of Anubis’ symbolic and solemn association with death.

The jackal, in the tripartite human being dimensions of mind, body and spirit, is the physical body, the mortal component of this human trinity.  The physical body is also the subconscious dimension of the human being. The subconscious houses the raw materials of all that we are, as well as all that we have ever been.

When the superconscious dimension of our Spirit decides to incarnate in human form for a particular mission of self-actualization in time and space, it must forget its immortal existence to accomplish its goal. If we were to be born with a distinct knowledge of our soulful existence beyond death, it would trump the experience of mortality, which is crucial to creating the necessary growth environment, or experimental/experiential conditions that our Spirit requires to advance its mission.

The jackal, as accomplice to Spirit’s intent, is the  guardian of Spirit knowledge housed in the shadowland of the subconscious and stored in the human body. The paradox of this contract is that the jackal becomes Spirit’s greatest opponent in life. While Spirit seeks the spiritualization of our sojourn as material, mortal beings, jackal seeks to consume all of our spiritual stirrings that threaten to bring into the light of consciousness the truth of our hidden potential and immortality. The psychological tool to keep things hidden is suppression.

The jackal accomplishes its mission through preoccupying us with concerns of physical survival. We become obsessed with our income and resources to assure food and shelter. Our preoccupation with creature comforts renders us inert, as we sink into the malaise of semi-conscious existence. Ultimately, these obsessions evoke anxiety and fear and breed selfishness.

The world is currently caught in such a survivalist drama, as fears of scarcity fuel war and hate of neighbor. These fixations lack the deeper spiritual knowing of interconnected life beyond mortal existence. The challenge for the world now is to ascend to this spiritualized position of love and care for all of life. This is indeed the Great Spirit’s intent for the entire human race in its current incarnation: to ascend to love amidst threat to mortality. But how to accomplish this?

The shamans of ancient Mexico reminded themselves each day that they were “a being who is going to die” to counter the jackal’s distracting efforts to mire their Spirits in materialism. With death as one’s adviser, one is mindfully present, with Spirit, to the opportunity for fulfillment in each mortal moment.

Between the superconscious domain of Spirit and the subconscious domain of the jackal—the body—is the mind. The mind is actually another orphaned dimension of Spirit, known as the ego. Like the body, the mind is a victim of brainwashing, that is, amnesia of its true origin: Spirit.

However, despite its ignorance, ego stumbled upon the tree of knowledge and free will. On the downside of this discovery is ego frequently colluding with the jackal, advancing its power aims and survivalist agendas. On the upside, ego has the potential to calm the jackal, whereby opening the channel to Spirit’s guidance and resource in its Earthly mission.

When ego chooses to meditate, it calms the body with positive suggestions, which in turn provide reassurance. This is where ego learns voluntary control over the jackal’s autonomic nervous system. When the jackal gets anxious, the ego can lead it to the calmness of its safe place. Once the jackal feels safe, and sees that its true physical needs are being met, it allows its hidden treasures to come into the light of consciousness.

This allows ego to recapitulate the repressed traumas of this life, or the issues of past lives, previously hidden and stored in the dark storage of the physical body. This allows access to one’s true karma, one’s mission in this life, allowing it to be revealed and fulfilled. Ultimately, this spiritualization process allows for the full merger of mind, body, and Spirit in love, the collective Spirit intent for the lifetime we are all in.

Interestingly, it is Anubis who presents the human heart to Ra at the time of human passing, as the actions of one’s just-lived life are weighed and future karma assigned.

We begin our journey of spiritual return through befriending the jackal, who in turn opens the door to the gems of our true heritage, presenting materials for advancement. And, ultimately, as our worthy opponent through life, the jackal returns us, upon passing, to our full-fledged Spirit in infinity.

Loving the jackal,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Tell Your Body What To Do

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Image by Jan Ketchel

I would like to say that, yes, it is that simple. By telling your heart to beat slower, it will beat slower. By telling your blood pressure to flow more calmly, it will flow more calmly. By telling your breathing to calm down, it will calm down. By telling your body to relax, it will relax.

And though I know from personal experience that these things are true, I  also know that our internal programming, largely molded by our social conditioning and education, tells us that such things are not possible.

The rational mind either rejects such a simplistic possibility and refuses to do it or makes half-hearted attempts a couple of times and proves its absurdity.

If we allow our accepted beliefs to control our actions without honestly testing out possibilities beyond those beliefs, we will be slow to evolve. Evolution requires that we allow life to progress through its changes. If we grasp too tightly to old beliefs without testing new possibilities we create roadblocks to our own growth and evolution.

The true scientist is not offended when the outcome of an experiment disproves the stated hypothesis. To the contrary, there is the thrill of the discovery of a new truth. Science, at its purest, is a lover of truth. Beliefs that refuse to yield to an unprejudiced experiment are no lovers of true science.

It is true that many of our cognitive, emotional and behavioral actions happen outside the control of consciousness. Our subconscious minds are the home of the programs that automatically operate our physical and mental systems.

We should be quite thankful that the subconscious automatically shoulders the directing of these systems. Imagine if we had to tell ourselves to breathe every breath we inhale throughout the day! We’d have little energy and focus to do any other activity. Yet, it is a fact that at times, when we do assume conscious control of our breathing, it can have a deeply calming effect upon our body and state of mind.

The science behind the efficacy of conscious self-regulation can be traced to the pioneering research of German psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz in what he called autogenic training. The marvels of hypnosis were in deep display in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. No one could deny that the subconscious mind could be influenced to vastly change the condition of the body.

What Schultz advanced was the possibility of a direct relationship between the conscious mind and the state of the body. Rather than put the conscious mind to sleep in a state of trance and then have the subconscious controlled by the suggestions of the hypnotist, in autogenic training the conscious mind is fully awake, talking with conviction to the body and the underlying subconscious, consciously directing physical changes.

The mind, at the level of the ego, the chief navigator of daily life, can decide at any time to direct thinking and behavior. This means volitionally, with conscious intent, interrupting and overriding the currently active program operating from the center of the subconscious mind.

With calm, unbiased perseverance, one can discover, for themselves, the power they have to directly influence the state of their central nervous system. Of course there are many other ways to influence this relationship, such as through the use of medications, whose chemicals exert direct influence over the automatic programs running the body.

Energy therapies such as acupuncture also directly impact the energy channels in the body, by overriding subconscious programs causing energy blockages. Massage therapy deals with the relaxing and redistributing of energy at the level of the densest concentrations of energy, the physical body.

All these methods have their benefits and may be helpful to creating harmony within the CNS. Statements made directly to the body empower an individual to directly impact their state of being. Of course, one should always investigate the reason behind an uncomfortable body condition, as there may be a message behind it to the psyche from the body, asking it to change a dysfunctional behavior or to investigate some deeper issue.

Nonetheless, even that kind of investigation requires a calm state of being to allow for clear mental processing. For this, the simple directive from the conscious mind, telling the heart to beat slower, may prove extremely useful.

Try it. See what happens. Be a true scientist.

My heart beats slower,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Thrust of the Spirit

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Calcinatio in the retort of the body…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

My Spirit sees everything from an evolutionary perspective. Thus, even the sobering truth of Maureen Dowd’s editorial, Apocalypse Right Now,  is not a dealbreaker for my optimism.

All are encouraged to examine the truth, to the extent that that is possible, but then to exercise Carlos Castaneda’s number one dictum, Suspend Judgment, in order to reach the deeper truth of the soul’s fantastic voyage.

Sir Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos sought to actualize achieving such a high level perspective in their respective launches into space these past couple of weeks. I see their journeys as transcendent attempts to free their spirits from the  gravity of the mess on the ground of planet Earth. 

Indeed, the thrust of the Spirit now is for the human race to up its Olympian game. This does not require that all go in search of transcendent out-of-body experiences. In fact, though I am impressed with the recent space adventures, they appear a bit compensatory to the truth on the ground. Good to be reminded of the potential of the human ego spirit to rise above the mess, but can it apply itself to the needed changes below?

We are all in this world on missions of growth. Most are born with a blank slate to protect those intended missions from confusion and interference from their Spirit’s prior journeys in infinity. Though the soul brings with it the fruits of its prior adventures in the form of its innate intelligence, it temporarily releases the memory of those experiences to be fully available to the life at hand.

Thus, the purity of Spirit’s intent imbues one’s life with purpose yet becomes clouded over by one’s material DNA and physical life circumstance. Nonetheless, one’s physical life remains the playing field for the Spirit’s intended growth.

We could say that the purity of Spirit becomes muddied and weighed down by the imperfections of material physical life. The journey then, in this earthly life, is one of working through the impurities of our physical trials to further add to our Spirit’s clarity, knowledge, and growth.

Carl Jung spent much of his adult life unearthing and studying ancient alchemical texts. Most modern psychological researchers question his sanity for having wasted so much time on such obscure nonsensical pre-chemistry texts. Jung, however, discovered that the alchemists were deeply engaged in a series of operations seeking to release the Spirit from its material impurities.

Psychotherapy, for Jung, was the application of a series of alchemical operations upon the psyche, seeking to free one’s Spirit from the bindings of illusion that overshadow one’s life and block fulfillment—the refinement of one’s Spirit.

The alchemists began their operations by choosing a substance to work on. In psychotherapy, one chooses a core stumbling block in one’s life to work on.

Alchemists used a retort, a vessel that the substance was placed in and then sealed, while they performed their operations upon it. In psychotherapy, the retort becomes the introspective ego that is asked to stay in body and be with the thoughts, beliefs, feelings, memories, sensations and dreams that arise as one works with an issue.

In psychotherapy, the sealed retort is equivalent to the body and psyche containing the intense energies of a conflict that has arisen, which is so tempting to release through blame, rationalization, a new illusion, or an emotional catharsis. Like the pot of water that never boils if we keep lifting the lid, we will never achieve the desired transformation if our retort is prematurely opened.

Planet Earth is clearly in the midst of its own alchemical processes of solutio, via flooding, and calcinatio, with fire. The retort of Earth is performing the necessary operations to reshape itself, and the lives of its inhabitants, and to cleanse itself of the illusions that have encumbered its Spirit.

Humans are simultaneously being asked to stay grounded and face the truths of their own lives, without opening the retort to the inflation of Icarus or the deflation of morbid depression. Containment of volatile emotion is a necessary precursor to transformative change. Acquiescence to necessary behaviors that reflect the truth is the ego’s greatest challenge.

These are the earthbound tasks for all humans now, as we individually and collectively seal the retort and are driven, by the thrust of the Spirit, to advance deeper into truth, survival, and evolution.

In solidarity,

Chuck 

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Being In Presence

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Being in presence…
– Photo by Chuck

Our truest parent is our Spirit, which has provided us with a reflection of itself as an ego entity, and charged us to lead this human life of material being with consciousness, on  a mission of progress, the underlying intent of all nature.

Spirit’s material clothing for its fledgling offspring is the prefrontal neocortex of the brain, that houses the functions and states of ego that make conscious decision making possible. Spirit, in its intent for progress, equipped little ego spirit with the ability to alter the accrued binding laws of life, known as archetypes, which, without interference, directed life actions until the dawn of ego consciousness.

Ego, with its ability to quickly override the rules of its conservative evolutionary inheritance, is nonetheless still but a child quaking in its boots, as it assumes its assigned task to responsibly lead both its individual life and the life of the planet. The world stage today reflects ego’s developmental struggle to emerge from its insecure narcissistic adolescence into assuming true adult responsibility, for the greater good of all.

Spirit never abandoned its ego progeny; its eyes rest peacefully and lovingly—but not interferingly—behind the ego’s eyes that, of necessity, remain fixated upon the outer material view of the world. What Kahlil Gibran counsels all parents, as regards their children, applies to Spirit as well:

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. 

Nonetheless, Spirit’s seeing is not encumbered by the shadows that veil  ego’s perception and interpretation of its limited worldview. Spirit sees ego’s projections upon its fellow humans that mirror its own unknown or disavowed self. Spirit sees the power drives of the archetypes, powerful spirits in their own right, competing and vying for life through the ego’s decisions on life’s earthly stage.

Ego, in its humbleness, might at any moment turn inward and ask its Spirit what it sees. Spirit never judges; all roads lead to evolution and must be trodden. Spirit only tells the truth if ego seeks its guidance. If ego is hiding from the truth, Spirit will show it this truth by way of a compensating dream.

Spirit will suggest ego get calm and notice all the events that are happening within its purview, from a blinking light to a cardinal’s song to an open book that falls to the floor. This is the language of truth that greets all of us every day, in every which way we turn.

Spirit also offers ego the communion of being in presence. In the quiet calm of meditation, as the sensory world is put to rest, ego and Spirit come home to each other in the deepest of calmness and oneness of being. Ego can walk any road in life with the knowing of this most intimate relationship ever present, within and without.

Walk with confidence and tread lovingly,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: I Want

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Spirit wants matter…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In the beginning was  Intent, and Intent attracted to it a material world and all life in it. Intent, as represented in thought and image, is the magnetic blueprint that draws to it the material life we are in. One “I” of “I want” is the intent of our spirit  that has drawn to us the physical body we don during our human journey in this world.

Our spirit body, the home of intent, is composed of our high self, ego self, and subconscious self.

From the high self is delivered the blueprint for the life we will enter. This encapsulates our spirit’s intent, our mission for the life we are in.

The ego is the seat of our individual consciousness that allows us choice, our personal connection to intent, within the life of our spirit’s design.

The subconscious is the home of the desire body that, through the law of attraction, transforms suggestion (spirit) into physical existence (matter). When the subconscious is given the suggestion, “I want,” it automatically prepares the body to receive and act to produce the desired outcome.

The subconscious is a highly sophisticated manufacturing and maintenance facility. The subconscious is nature’s brain. The subconscious automatically operates all physical systems and cycles of life, without consciousness, in the human body.

The subconscious does not think, it follows orders. Its inborn orders are the genetics, instincts and archetypes that govern a specific species. The subconscious also has access to the akashic library, the reservoir of all human experience and knowledge, past and present.

When life presents us with any circumstance, the subconscious scans its resources and activates the program it associates most specifically to the situation presented. This action is called habit; no conscious thinking involved. When we drive and someone runs in front of us, the subconscious automatically reads the danger and directs the foot to brake.

The subconscious can be influenced by suggestions beyond the dominant programs of nature. The ego can choose actions that override nature’s laws. Though we may be dead tired, we can force ourselves to stay awake. Though we are attracted to somebody, we can choose not to approach them. Though we may not be truly hungry, we can force ourselves to eat.

The ego, with its constant internal dialogue, writes programs that the subconscious obeys. Thus, if my ego tells itself that it is inferior, the subconscious activates neurotransmitters that provide it with a depressed mood.

The subconscious also receives the suggestions that spirit forces seek to deliver to us. The universal law to progress, in this life and beyond, is to be helpful to those whom one can truly help. Spirits beyond human life, who have evolved and have guidance to offer, known as spirit guides and guardian angels, constantly offer helpful suggestions to our subconscious minds, the medium that receives their subtle energetic impressions.

These suggestions suddenly burst forth upon our ego consciousness in the form of images, thoughts, intuitions, inspirations and wants that the subconscious presents to the ego as it awaits orders. Often the ego is unaware of the origin of these offerings ushered upon consciousness by the subconscious acting as medium to spirit.

Frequently, the ego takes credit for these creations in an inflated state of grandiosity. Nonetheless, consciousness is given the opportunity to examine the suggestion and choose a course of action. However, the ego must choose wisely, as not all suggestions are the offerings of benevolent spirits!

Just as the living human race is challenged by greed and self interest, so is the spirit world populated by souls at different levels of development. Many a departed soul clings to life in this material world through association with the physically living. Though their suggestions might appear desirable, their human impact might prove detrimental. Choose wisely.

To return to the phrase ‘I want’, we do well to question who the ‘I’ is within us. Suggestions abound from the spirit world, and the material world, in the form of subtle marketing suggestions. These suggestions are impressed upon the subconscious, with many rising to the level of consciousness, for review.

To really claim ownership of ‘I’, consciousness must own and agree to the suggestion. This is called acting responsibly. Acting without conscious reflection is ego signing up for a temporary state of possession. Though the ego remains responsible for its actions in this case, those actions are likely irresponsible.

When ‘I want’ chooses with consciousness, for the greater good of self and other, we can be certain that the ‘want’ is the desire body acting to manifest the intent of the higher self in the flow of our human life. And that is what I want!

I Want the greater good,

Chuck