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Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Path to Heart

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Wherever your path to heart may lead…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Often, what is experienced as traumatic in the moment becomes the seed of great growth and liberation when viewed from a deeper perspective at a future time.

Maya, a central concept in Hindu cosmology, is considered illusion at the level of everyday life, as events in the moment veil the fuller picture beyond the container of space and time. Yet, at the fully transparent level of the highest spiritual plane, Maya radiates as ultimate truth. The key to accessing ultimate truth is to revisit experience from the fullest and deepest perspective.

Thus, everything that challenges us, no matter how terrifying or painful, ultimately has the potential to lead us into deeper truth as we trod upon our path to heart. However, to benefit from this gift we must allow ourselves to review what we have already lived, by viewing it with a ruthlessly open and conscious mind and heart.

In viewing from a different perspective, we can release the emotions that have protectively shielded us and view the deeper truth that lies beyond our limiting beliefs. With this, the protective chaff falls away, as we now have direct access to the seed of our fuller knowing and future possibility.

One great antagonist in 2020 is Covid-19. At the level of everyday human life, its impact upon the world has been devastating. As a world, we hope to neutralize its impact upon us, even as I write. Many lives have been lost at the physical level, and many livelihoods and life plans have been radically changed through the lethal invasion of this virus.

Beyond personal impact, however, is the interruption it is causing to the energetic flow of the planet. Travel is severely limited. Gatherings of humanity, even the smallest of nuclear families, are suspended in physical space and consigned to connection only at the vibrational level of virtual reality.

The next higher vibrational dimension of humanity, the soul level, operates via thought and feeling, in its energy body, independent of the physical body. Though the virtual reality experience during the pandemic has largely been dependent upon human technology, it has also challenged the physical human being to find mental and emotional connection in non-physical contact. This has been a tremendous crash course on spiritual contact beyond the human body.

Of course, we all crave physical contact, as we also exist in human form. However, we are being ushered, via virtual reality, into another dimension of our human potential. When this potential is more inwardly developed, via the discovery and practice of innate psychic powers—such as intuition, conscious dreaming, and telepathy—the door is opened to unlimited possibility for travel and connection beyond physical reality.

Within the physical dimension, the quality of connection is spiritually enhanced to include greater movement to the heart, in a deeper experience of abstract love; that is, love beyond strictly physical attachment. The legacy of Covid-19 has launched us forever into a greater world of energetic possibility to satisfy our deeper mental, emotional, and spiritual needs.

Donald Trump has certainly presented as both central protagonist or antagonist, depending upon your perspective, in 2020. In fact, as I write this blog, it remains unclear what is actually going to happen at the completion of his current term.

Regardless of one’s perspective, Donald Trump has championed the fact that reality is truly relative. He has shown us that it is consensus of agreement that actually generates a reality. What we believe is true is more powerful than objective reality.

This is most powerfully demonstrated via the placebo effect in scientific medical trials. Many a person has actually been cured of a disease because they wholeheartedly believed they were being administered the curing agent, even if it was actually a placebo sugar pill. Though medicine may dismiss the change as mere placebo, cure is cure! The power of belief can concretely transfigure physical reality.

The power of the subconscious to change our mental and physical conditions is the essence of hypnosis. What we tell ourselves, often via forgotten or unknown subconscious programs, is what we manifest.

Donald Trump, as master hypnotist, has demonstrated the power of repetitive speech to determine one’s belief system. The use of affirmations, mantra, prayer, and suggestion to shift belief and behavior is extremely powerful. The collective massing of such efforts, when attuned to the common good, can spiritually advance the planet.

Donald Trump has also embodied the ego at its me-first zenith, which is a reflection of the collective planetary ego of our time. Every individual human must face that the dominance of the ego within their own personality is their greatest resistance to desired spiritual growth.

On a planetary level, it is the collective human ego that puts the wants and desires of itself above the true needs of the whole planet, presenting the greatest blockade to needed planetary change. Donald Trump has impeccably embodied this attitude of resistance, reflecting humanity’s struggle with its own massive ego entrenchment.

For the planet to arrive at the heart center, the needed perspective for planetary survival, the ego must acquiesce to the needs of the greater planetary whole. It is inevitable that we will get there, but we don’t know how far planetary disruption will go before we arrive at the heart center consensus.

To arrive at the position of unconditional love for all that is, is where we are headed. Begin to practice it now in full unconditional love for self. To love every aspect of self, from lowest to highest, will end the need for projection of one’s personal evil upon other.

To love other as self is indeed the path to heart. May we all take giant steps upon it this coming year.

Love to all,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Just To Love With A Blank Check

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Just to love…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I was present when Carlos Castaneda stated:  “If you truly want to love, love with a blank check.” For many years I struggled to fully understand what he meant. My assumption was, don’t hold back in your giving; be of complete service, of unlimited support.

He often spoke of the merchant mentality as dominating what humans called love. Love, as a commodity, is traded, with the expectation that one is entitled to a higher, or at least equal yield, for one’s loving investment in another. 

Thus, giving a gift is traded for appreciation. To give of oneself comes with the expectation that one be equally given to now, or certainly at some future date. After all, it’s only fair. Why should I do for you if I get nothing in return? It simply isn’t worth the investment!

Carlos made reference to eden ahbez’s songwriting hit Nature Boy as a journey with love. eden refused to capitalize his assumed name, as to him the only words worth capitalizing were God and Infinity. While living outdoors with his family, under the “L” in Los Angeles, he gave Nat King Cole’s manager the song he had written, Nature Boy, which Cole subsequently recorded with overarching success.

The song ends with these lyrics: “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn,
is just to love and be loved in return.” Carlos pointed out that eden later stated that the song should have ended after ‘just to love’ rather than ‘and be loved in return.’ This captures Carlos’ criteria for love clarified to its purest.

Who, of course, could deny the exhilaration of a true meeting in the mutuality of love, where love simply flows, no walls. That kind of meeting is a genuine experience of love, as it harbors no contract of entitlements. Nonetheless, it is often a fleeting experience, as need and expectation soon enter the playing field, muddying the waters.

Jan reminds me of a time when we were walking in the dark and I stated, “If you’re going to do a good deed, do it in the dark.” When I thought of this the other day, I wondered if perhaps that was what Carlos meant by a blank check—a check filled out to be cashed, but with no reference to the sender.

The merchant of love is the ego. The ego demands recognition, validation, and attention. With these filters, true love can hardly show through. Thus, the technology of the blank check, and the invitation ‘just to love,’ are valuable steps on one’s personal path of heart.

With a blank check,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Day of Transition

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The unrenovated shadow self…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I spent last night in dreams of renovation. I awoke several times in the night, my body feeling the physical download of great effort. The house is an older home, with good bones, purchased from people of positive intent, who never got to the renovation of the back half of the house. Under their care it remained a potentiality, dark and unexplored.

The project is huge, the materials are modest and the effort is great. There is no sense of inflated expansion, but the expansion is solid and will serve the needs of all who will inhabit it.

Awakening to the headlines of today, legitimacy is being granted, despite reservation. The momentum of change is fully apparent. The country has spoken and chosen a new dream. The dream we have been living challenged us to take responsibility for our future dream. It truly became necessary to consent to the reality we would live in.

Consciousness, as expressed through the collective ego, has risen beyond the stage of pure narcissism to address the true needs of the whole. This has been a developmental process of necessity.

First, the purely self-serving ego needed to be lived and given full rein, so that the impact upon world survival could be felt and consciously assessed. All of the ego’s manipulative machinations had to be fully lived and experienced before it could acquiesce to a higher cause, the welfare of the greater whole. Though leaders mirror this ego, they merely reflect the internal process of us all.

We have all encountered the impact of allowing the desire body to rule the ego. The thrill of that ride, the bliss of excess, is a legitimate dream, but it burns out quickly through its unbridled appetite, leaving us all exhausted. We have now chosen continuance and evolution over the fascination of Armageddon. We know now that we can indeed go out in a blaze of glory that we have caused, but we have chosen not to exercise that option.

We have learned, as well, that the repressed in all of us can emerge with a self-destructive vengeance. We’ve all witnessed it acting out. To regain balance, we must responsibly find a life for all that we desire.

The Earth teaches us to move away from exploiting her bounty. We must follow her example. The future of desire is to turn this human spirit of manifest destiny to exploration of the energy body, away from rampant ego desires to the world of spirit and out-of-body travel and all that it offers. At this subtle level of the Soul, thought alone is the fuel. How’s that for clean energy!

As my dream portends, the dark unknown half of the house is ready for discovery and renovation. Despite the labor involved, it promises to solidly house all that we are. We must all begin with the self.

Take up the challenge of the repressed and the desired within the self. Bring light into the darkness. Be conservative yet daring. The time of transition has arrived.

In gratitude, and with love to all,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Be Like the Flame of A Single Candle

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But a single flame…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

“To seek freedom… be like the flame of a candle, which, in spite of being up against the light of a billion stars, remains intact, because it never pretended to be more than what it is: a mere candle.”  – Don Juan Matus, from The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

It’s a mighty challenge to be born into this life as an ego, a limited point of consciousness, separated from its greater wholeness. This limitation is  the price we pay to exclusively explore one facet of the fuller diamond we are, in a life that begins and ends in space/time.

Ego has risen beyond the control of its own instinctual nature into a being capable of making its own decisions. This evolution beyond the strict control of its subconscious programming has given rise to civilization and human domination of the Earth.

This moment we are now living in is the ultimate exploration of ego’s freedom to consider only itself —its wants and needs— as the basis of its governing decisions. The sky is the limit for the ego of now,  much like Icarus, whose intoxication with flying on his wax wings drew him higher and closer to the sun.

It’s inevitable that ego test the limits of its power. Simply observe the toddler testing its newfound powers of locomotion. Caution is thrown to the wind in the thrill of discovery and autonomous movement. This same excitement of power and mastery accompanies ego at all stages of life.

Truthfully, however, underneath it all, ego knows it is inherently inadequate. How could it be otherwise? Ego is but a fragment of its greater wholeness. Ego’s underlying instinctual programming has heralded evolution, devoid of consciousness. Ego’s now conscious ability to negate that programming is a tremendous feat, but ego also lacks the wisdom packed into those archetypal programs. Managing the survival of the planet requires more wisdom than ego can possibly amass in its limited time on Earth.

The evolutionary challenge now posed to ego is to rise above its egoism and discover a higher authority within itself that can teach it the path of right action. Ego must silence its own internal dialogue that incessantly attempts to keep it secure in its knowing of everything. In the silence beyond that chatter is the voice of wisdom that resides in the mature heart.

Ego needn’t feel ashamed of its objective inadequacy. Ego has the unparalleled gift of consciousness, but it must discover how to exercise its powers in the service of the greater whole that it is but a fragment of. Ego is not yet convinced it can’t simply go it alone, hence, it is currently testing the hypothesis that it is all that there is.

After the fall of this experiment, ego, like Icarus will come down to Earth with the humility proper to its status. This is the ego that will accept that it is indeed but a solitary candle amidst the light of a billion stars. However, this acceptance of its smallness, lacking any illusory inflation, is the attitude that will protect that flame from perhaps ever blowing out.

May we all find our way to the smallness of a single candle flame. With such humility, we connect to the wisdom awaiting us all in our mature hearts.

From the heart of the flame,
Chuck
Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Holding Space for Trickster

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Shining the light upon Trickster’s stupendous web…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Holding space means being with someone without judgment. Holding space means being fully present without seeking anything in return. Holding space means bearing the tension of opposition. Holding space means unconditional acceptance of all that is. 

Trickster is the child in all of us who simply refuses to conform to civilized expectations. That child will undermine our ego’s best intentions, as we find ourselves breaking our deeply fought for resolutions at trickster’s instigation. In a heartbeat, trickster will concoct a reason to open the refrigerator or peek at Facebook. Later, defeated and guilty, ego contritely starts anew on its road to self-improvement.

Before we completely demonize trickster, let us ponder a koan from Jesus. In Matthew 18: 2-4, Jesus is quoted as stating, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  Clearly, the suggestion, on some level, is that, holding space for trickster is fundamental to spiritual evolution.

Trickster is a character that appears in the mythology of all cultures. Phil Jackson, of immortal basketball coaching acclaim, bestowed upon one of his star Chicago Bulls, Dennis Rodman, so called “best friend” of Kim Jong-un, the role of a Heyoka, a Lakota Indian trickster spirit, who both crossdresses and does things backwards to challenge the prevailing order of the tribe.

Phil Jackson recognized the necessity of holding space for this most unruly of characters, who would at times cost his team games and at other times help teammates to get over their self-importance and just have fun playing basketball. Like noted physicist David Bohm, Jackson knew the value of bearing the tension of full wholeness, over merely expecting goodness, in elevating a team to a higher level of play.

Jackson stressed the practice of patience in allowing another person to be who they were going to be, and while not protecting them from the natural consequences of their actions, not excluding them from the team either. In fact, he stressed the critical necessity of all-inclusiveness, including even the most vile trickster, in the building of a whole team.

David Bohm insisted that the way to advance civilization’s survival was to bring together all disparate characters at a roundtable of dialogue. All would commit to suspend judgment and merely express themselves and get to know their neighbors. The objective is not to advance one’s view over another’s, but simply to be part of this living wholeness.

Bohm predicted that this full presence alone, devoid of any attempt at convincing, would in itself give rise to the necessary resolution of difference. Perhaps his vision is similar to a Quaker service where, in the presence of the wholeness of the group, guidance spontaneously emerges in a channeled message. This was his social equation for human resolution, as he realized that at the most quantum subatomic level, only through the removal of subjective prejudice could science arrive at the fullest truth of energetic reality.

The trickster in all of us is our inner hero in the rough. Trickster is the ultimate Freudian slip, where the truth is most uncomfortably revealed. Perhaps that truth has laid bare one’s pretentious host at a party, or exposed one’s own most sensitive sore spots.

Trickster is daring, indignant, irreverent, ruthless, charming, hilarious, playful, spontaneous, sensitive, insensitive, attention-seeking, and highly self-centered. Trickster disdains reason and is far more driven by impulsive opportunity to shock and disrupt. Don’t expect trickster to be good at the party. Trickster is already eyeing the desert when you first walk through the door.

Don’t shut out trickster’s truth. Be patient and suspend judgment upon  the full truth of the self. See what might emerge as you bear this tension. If trickster appears outside the self, in the person of another, recognize its value as petty tyrant. In Carlos Castaneda’s shamanic lineage, trickster as petty tyrant is the person who most deeply offends us.

Typically, these are the characters one would prefer most to not have in one’s life. But, from a spiritual advancement opportunity, petty tyrants require one to completely relinquish the ego’s self-importance by not engaging in a defeatist argument in a futile attempt to defend oneself. Trickster also lays bare any proclivity to self pity, which in itself depresses the ego into immobilization.

Alternatively, if one can contain one’s anger and hurt within the cauldron of self, and travel down the rabbit hole of holding space beyond one’s hurt ego, one may be led on a journey of enlightenment to hidden memories and attitudes, which reveal previously veiled truths about the self.

Trickster may never mature, but trickster will challenge one to get beyond the limitation of self-importance that burdens all egos.  It may very well be that trickster’s irreverence persists only until ego truly grows up to the truth of right action, and assumes appropriate leadership. From that accomplishment trickster moves on, in its own mercurial way, to force attention upon another of ego’s many blindspots.

Most importantly, trickster offers us the opportunity to recover our lost innocence, the awe that leads to spiritual advancement.

Holding space for trickster,

Chuck