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Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Tripartite Soul of Now

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I am writing to the future, the day this will be published, the morning after the midterm elections. For the record, my final edit for this blog was on the morning of November 6, 2018, well in advance of outcomes in time and space. My intent is that the electorate free its mind from manipulation and vote from the heart for the greater good of all. I will accept the outcome of the election as a true reading of the status of our collective soul now.

Tripartite: heaven and earth with the light of the intellect in between…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I define mind as soul, the subtle body companion of our physical body for the duration of our lives in this world. The soul is a tripartite structure consisting of the inherent collective unconscious with its instinctive knowing, the ego with its intellect and capacity for reason, and the high self that is guided by infinity through intuition and love.

Recently, we have seen the rapid emergence of instinct, with its passionate emotions, take charge of world governance. This is an archetypal response, from the collective unconscious dimension of the soul, to the Earth’s current major reshaping and the primal dread it awakens at our animal core. Survival is its battle cry.

Our reasoning mind has either been convinced of instinct’s call to arms, and leant it support, or opposed its radical approach, embodying, instead, calls for greater unity and compassion.

The question for this midterm was whether the escalating instinctive approach would continue to grow, or a movement toward more inclusive values would begin to assert itself.

Regardless of outcome, the Earth will continue its radical changes, and the human animal will continue to experience fear and anxiety in response. The problem for humans, as well as all species on Earth, is that the environment is shifting into unknown territory, where old tried and true instinctive responses cannot effectively assimilate the current dangers.

The intellect that has the capacity to analyze a problem and oppose even its own nature to effect a solution may be equally disadvantaged if it cannot detach from personal interest or the thrill of unbridled emotion. Furthermore, the real solution to survival in this changing world might require opening to the guidance of an intuition that transcends pure reason.

Clearly, cooperation by all parts of the tripartite soul would best prepare us to ride the tide of our evolutionary challenge. From our instinct emerges the alarm of real threat to survival. From our intellect emerges the ability to analyze and act in our best interest. From our high self comes the experience of pure love, which binds the world together in common interest. Thus, the combination of instinct, intellect, and love are the winning ticket.

Regardless of the outcome of this election, our evolutionary path requires us to access the fullness of our tripartite soul to find our way. Regardless of the outcome of the election, every individual is free to travel this evolutionary path within the confines of their own physical body and tripartite soul.

In fact, the greatest of leaders throughout history were masters of their tripartite souls, to such a degree that they inspired humanity to higher spiritual directions, merely through the presence of their evolved personalities.

Focus now on evolving the personality through acknowledging the anxiety from below, through thinking objectively and initiating right action, and by finding inspiration and intuitive solution from the love and wisdom that comes from above. This is the tripartite ticket to facing one’s deepest issues within, as well as managing one’s reactions to the volatility expressed without.

Never feel powerless; you are the agent of change. Change the self, change the world.

In gratitude,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: God’s Chosen One: The Human Ego

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When I reflect upon the momentous decision Jeanne and I made in 1979, to abruptly leave America and move to the Promised Land of Jamaica, I cannot help but see the parallel to now, to Jan and my very abrupt move to the New Land at The Monroe Institute.

The veil is lifting…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Back in 1979, it was the reggae sirens whose call we could not refuse, their song echoing the themes of bondage and deliverance, and God’s support for his chosen people. It was as if the Old Testament had shown up in a time capsule bottle on the shores of that island paradise with a message to explain the African diaspora and provide a spiritual depth and context in which to move forward as Africans forced to assimilate in foreign lands.

“Black man it’s time to know your history.” “King David, he was a black man. King Solomon, he was a black man. King Moses, he was a black man. From Africa, yeah!” This was the Rastafarian identification with the Old Testament heroes as made popular by Rod Taylor. This music echoes the universal themes of life and struggle in the human form, with an accompanying heartbeat that connects the suffering time/space human with their immortal soul.

Flash ahead to 2018. The siren that drew Jan and I to The Monroe Institute was the Hemi-sync beat, with its abilities to facilitate expanded states of consciousness and awareness, where left brain ego serves right brain spirit; the formula for ego liberation from its state of alienation from spirit, facilitating a return to wholeness.

Human consciousness, centered in the human ego, is God’s chosen one. The ego is a separated part of the infinite soul, a spark of divine light living in the time/space illusion of its current life. This is a life that will end—death is at the crux of its suffering—but it all began with its higher soul in infinity sending it on the sojourn of its current life, truly a mission from God. Thus, the part (the ego) became separated from the whole (the Spirit), with its necessary blank-slate-forgetting at birth.

That mission is as individual and varied as there are people upon the planet. Yet, there is an underlying collective similarity to all individual missions, and that is what Robert Monroe discovered and wrote about in his book Far Journeys. The mission is to refine love energy, he wrote. For love to be refined it must encounter the various stages Elizabeth Kubler Ross delineated for the dying process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

All of these stages are emotional stages that love must go through to reach the pinnacle of emotion, a Super Love that, with compassion, accepts and loves everyone and everything. These are the missions and varied lives we have lived through, or must live through, in order to fully master all the permutations of humanness, from the most horrific to the most fully loving.

Can I love the abuser I may have been in one lifetime, as much as the victim of abuse I might have been in another lifetime? This is the great challenge and opportunity Earth School offers us, to refine love to its greatest potential, at least in this cosmos. Once the Soul decides its specific goal for its time/space life on earth, it sends off its ego seed to be planted in a human body.

The next step of this unfolding mission is to be adopted into and successfully attached to an earthly family. Without attachment the mission and the ego spark of life would not survive. With attachment comes the inevitable misery of loss, truly a unique byproduct of time/space life.

The ego, in its birth, was indeed cast from Eden, its home of wholeness, to fend for itself in a predatory world. The predatory world is necessary to encounter conditions that offer refinement of emotion leading to Super Love. Yes, the ego can use its spark of consciousness to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, but it cannot escape the underlying truth: it is an orphan of its own wholeness, chosen to navigate and master its destiny in this life. Its true status is one of a wanderer with no real roots in this earth. Ego is equipped to enjoy and accumulate the riches of the earth, but it can never truly be at home here.

The dawning of the Age of Aquarius—the time we are living in—offers the human ego an enlightenment as to its true status, as an intelligent part of a far greater interdependent whole. The mission now for God’s chosen one is to free itself of the veil of separateness that has handicapped its effectiveness to fully love and effectively manage the earth. The ego must relinquish its self-importance, its grandiosity, as well as its inferiority, if it is to find its way back to the wholeness it has always sought, both on an individual as well as a collective level.

The ego must fully assimilate all peoples into one united chosen one. The chosen one is our collective human consciousness, not our local affiliations nor our individual egos alone. Clearly, such disruptive rumblings beneath the surface of current world events reflect our deeper separation and fear and rejection of our collective wholeness.

Defensively, separateness is being highlighted as imperative, as countries seek to expel others from what they perceive as theirs alone and reclaim what they perceive is their manifest destiny, to personally possess all they believe they are entitled to.

The current world leader mirrors so fully the ultimate inflated ego, a soon-to-be relic of an earlier stage of human evolution. Mother nature and the rising feminine will ensure the leveling of human inflation and facilitate the reign of the next level of human evolution, a union of all human groups, both physically and spiritually, into a united whole while in human form. From this will spring a new consciousness emanating from the heart, Super Love, capable of decisions of right action to the benefit of the whole chosen world.

One love, one destiny,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Atomic Self

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A gathering of all the parts that make up the whole…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

So, this tiniest of units, the atom, what the ancients named the most basic building block of the universe, houses an incredible amount of contained energy. Once the integrity of that unit is split, it is capable of unleashing a surge of vast destructive energy, as the world witnessed in the closing days of WWII at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We are currently living through the unleashing of such powerful destructive energies on a social scale, as the integrity of our unity as a nation has been split by a leader well aware of the latent energy potential contained in such a unit as a United State. His modus operandi has been to tap those violent and ecstatic energy reserves through splitting rhetoric that halves the whole and unleashes lethal force.

On the individual level, that of a human personality, this social phenomenon mirrors the plurality of forces contained within a person. When the unity of personality is split open powerful energies are unleashed from the various factions of self, formerly cooperatively linked, now luxuriating in stretching their powers and vying for control of the self. This is the basis of the term I am employing in this blog, The Atomic Self.

How many times do we begin the day with a specific intent, only to find ourselves fully distracted and engaged in a less desirable activity? Less desirable to whom? I think we would have to say less desirable to one’s conscious ego state; less desirable to the leader of the personality and the working definition of self. But clearly, there is another faction of personality that exists somewhere within the shadows of self that has opposing wants and needs, a will and an energy of its own that supplants the ego’s intent by ‘wasting time’ in ‘unnecessary’ activities.

In fact, the Self is comprised of many factions beyond ego that each possess their own storehouse of energy. Freud identified a few characters: ego, id and superego. Jung expanded the population to include persona, shadow, anima/animus, Self, as well as an ancient inherent dimension to the psyche that includes the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Spiritualists broaden the field even further to include the soul, that which has had countless lives that coexist within the underpinnings of self in the current life.

In fact, the Spiritualist tradition would go so far as to point out that all who are alive in this moment are composed of the cosmic dust and ashes of countless prior generations of life. The notion of a pure bloodline of identity takes a quantum leap if we consider the sins and wisdom of generations past as the building materials of what we all really are, all deeply connected at the atomic level, all siblings sharing the same cosmic dust.

The unity of this oneness is often stretched to the max, as Miranon, a non-physical entity of high intelligence, explained in channeling explorations conducted in the early researches at The Monroe Institute. Miranon suggested we imagine a world of truly interconnected wholeness but all parts in opposition to each other, envisioned as a rubber band stretched in many opposing directions, it’s constituent parts vying for differentiation and supremacy. No matter how far they contort that rubber band it remains the same wholeness, albeit severely contorted and out of balance at times.

Thus, what we call personality is a plurality of characters and lives bound together in a cohesive way to form a consistent identity we call ‘me’. However, beneath this surface cohesion are very powerful energies that may not be well-integrated at all. Jung used the term individuation to define these energies as they actively seek integration and, ultimately, fulfillment in the maturation of an individual life.

People approach counseling when their factions of personality subvert individuation, preferring to assert their personal agendas at the expense of the overall integration of the personality. This results in failure to achieve goals, at minimum, and psychic atomic war at maximum!

The ego’s challenge of leadership with such divisive energetic personality factions is great. If the ego chooses a dictatorial approach to gain control, the rejected factions are likely to withdraw their energy reserves from the personality, whereby causing  a depression of energy resource that the ego requires to take action.

Despite this energetic stalemate the ego is charged with restoring balance to the personality. Sometimes this requires surrendering to the archetypal underpinnings of self and allowing, for instance, a flood of tears to release a tide of grief. Sometimes it requires the ego to refuse this archetypal call and hold on in a deeply alienated state until a reconciling thought, feeling, image, or outer happening provides the ticket to a newly resolved balance.

Sometimes the ego must recapitulate the experience of an archaic part of its atomic self that it had no idea existed. This may be presented to the ego in the form a powerful mood or emotional reaction to some environmental trigger. This encounter might require the  recapitulation of a repressed memory, a past life, or even a coexistent life at another level of its multidimensional self, lived exclusively at a dream level.

The name of the game is individuation, which integrates the separate components of the atomic self, with all their powerful energies, into a cohesively balanced self, on very deep levels. This is the journey and responsibility of now, inwardly and outwardly. As our earth continues her great transformation, may we, her children, shepherd her changes peacefully, lending our powerful energies to her newly rebalanced configuration.

Never doubt the value of turning inward and taking on the atomic self. Reconciliation at this level is what the world needs now: reconciling vs splitting the atom.

Atomically,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Becoming More Fully One’s Self

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Becoming more of who we are…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

A seed is what it is. Once it takes root it unfolds according to its innate code of development, greatly influenced by the environment it is born into. Humans are seeds of the soul planted upon the earth, each of us with our own unique innate program for development, which acquires further influence from the unique family we are born into.

The soul is the higher self, whose program steers the greater unfolding of our life. This unfolding is additionally impacted by environmental nuances and a budding ego self, a point of consciousness that gradually becomes one’s central identity. The ego is part of the higher self, as the higher self is comprised of all that we are. In effect, the ego is the General on the ground, charged by the higher self with making  decisions in everyday life that best fit the needs of the unfolding of the greater self in life. This is how we become who we truly are.

Ego inflation is a state of alienation from the higher self, where the ego installs and acts upon its own programs for life that fail to consider the true needs of the greater unfolding of the true self. In effect the ego crowns itself the higher self and exercises its freedom of choice to direct life to further its own ambitions. The political climate we find ourselves in now starkly reflects the plight and consequences of a runaway ego pursuing its own ambitions at the expense of the true needs of the greater whole.

The Tao of the inflated ego is deflation, a natural correction, as the energies that fuel the inflation eventually dry up, as they are not connected to and will not be supported by the higher self. The higher self contains the wellspring of energy for unfolding development. If true needs are not properly funded by the ego the higher self withdraws its energy from the ego, a state experienced psychologically as depression.

On an individual basis decisions made by an alienated ego will lead to complications of mind and body that reflect the split within the self. These complications serve as guides to the ego to adjust its attitude and decision making to better serve the true needs of the unfolding self.  A depression then is a precursor to needed realignment with the unfolding of the true self. A humbled ego can once again become empowered by the self as it embarks upon its corrected path. This is experienced as a lifting of depression, accompanied by a new outlook on life.

Although the ego can greatly obstruct addressing the greater needs of the whole self for a long time, its decisions will naturally be overridden in some form eventually. We see this now in the consequences of global warming upon the Earth. Essentially, we are being confronted with nature’s reaction to our environmental decision making, which has not been in true alignment with the needs of the planet. Thus we are being challenged with the consequences of our decisions by a rapidly changing climate. Our attitudes are being humbled; we are living with the consequences of the error of our ways.

The truth is that the unfolding of who we truly are, the reason we are here, continues to manifest, regardless of our mistaken attitudes. In fact, it may be that our karmic seed led us to be born in this time of great realignment to be part of an evolutionary ego shift. Thus, our unfolding selves are actually reflecting the great polarization we see abundantly reflected around us. We are all charged with reconciling the split between ego needs and the needs of the true self.

Ego has always had to grapple with life in the physical world, thus its focus tends to be materialistic. Thus it focuses on accumulation of wealth as a path to status and security. The ego also puts high regard on mastery in one’s chosen profession as a reflection of its worth and status. The ego also concerns itself with its ranking and desirability in its relations with fellow human beings. The ego’s goals of perfection and possession drive it to compete with or eliminate its neighbors. On the positive side, the ego has the capacity to suspend judgment and see the greater truth.

The greater unfolding of now is teasing us away from this one-sided obsession with material manipulation into a far greater exploration of our spiritual potential in human form. Bringing consciousness to our energy body’s energetic abilities was the hallmark of the U. S. Army’s Stargate program, where psychic abilities were employed for purposes of national defense.

The opportunity for the ego to shift its material focus to a greater exploration of energetic reality beyond space and time is the new frontier. This does not abandon material life. In fact, balance in material life is essential to balance in energy body exploration, where we are simply waking up to a greater awareness of the fullness of who we are. Many who have journeyed in infinity rest in the knowing that, as Robert Monroe’s core mantra states: “We are more than our physical bodies.” They no longer fear death.

We awaken to our energetic potential when we listen to the guidance of the self within and follow the synchronicities that manifest daily in our lives. We awaken to our energetic potential when we grant equal value to our nightly dreams as to the waking dream we begin anew every morning. We most align with our energetic potential when we align our ego intent with that of the higher self, to become who we truly are.

Aligning,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Fixation

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In contemplative silence we build our well…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

What does it mean when you simply can’t get it out of your head? It might be a thought, a desire, a hunger, a person, an object, or an incident.

The energetic charge of our fixations is experienced as strong emotion and mental perseveration. This is the fire of an activated archetype outwardly projected and inwardly fixated. Some deep need is stirring and we are drawn involuntarily to its projection, the flame of our fixation.

Projection is automatic, that is, unconscious. We don’t choose to project, it happens to us. We are not at fault, for instance, if we are attracted to the wrong person. Attraction happens. Nature is ruthless in pursuit of its aims, in this case, blindly bringing a couple together for union.

Caught in the flame of desire the ego is overwhelmed. The intensity of the energetic charge may at once be both threatening and exciting. After all, archetypes transcend our civilized exterior; they reach down to the primordial core of our being and flood us with bursts of living energy. How do we keep ourselves afloat in such a precarious state?

In the hexagram of The Well, the I Ching makes clear that we all need to partake of the living water that lies beneath the surface of the Earth. The well is the human connection to that living energy below. Humans must build the well. Psychically, the ego is the well. As humans we are charged with building and managing our relationship with our archetypal core, what Jung called the collective unconscious.

In the case of fixation, the ego builds its well through its response to archetypal activation. A hasty reaction may be equivalent to jumping in the well and drowning! An overly suppressive reaction may refuse the bucket that brings up the living water from below.

Often the ego lends its mental manipulative powers, such as through rationalization, to further the aim of the archetype while naively assuming it is doing ‘the right thing’. Only deeply contemplative inner truth will reveal the right action called for.

Often the ego protects itself from rejection and defeat through rationalization turned against the self in some cognitive permutation of unworthiness. Perhaps this is a necessary defense, as the ego hones its ability to regulate the impact of archetypal energy.

We too easily forget that the ego, with its consciousness, is a very recent acquisition for humankind. Before its arrival we shared, with all other animals, life completely directed by archetypes, with no conscious choice available. No wonder we are so flustered when an archetype is activated. How fragile our conscious footing amidst such intensively charged directives!

The ego can choose to bear the tension of the archetype. In recovery programs guidance is given to examine people, places, and things. In early recovery, particularly, the archetypal energetic power of the desired object is respected by avoiding known associations to it. Further, one turns to a trusted sponsor, the program, or a higher power to strengthen one’s resolve to bear the tension vs succumb to habitual addiction.

Spiritual traditions all stress restraint, sacrifice, and detachment as the technology to manage archetypal fixation. Unfortunately, this technology, valuable as it is, does not address the need to fully partake in our humanness while in human form. Yes, we are spirit beings, but we are spirit beings in human bodies with deep archetypal roots in this Earth. We must build our wells to draw our nurturance from that underground river of living energy.

If we can’t bear the tension and either jump into the well or refuse the call we needn’t judge ourselves negatively. All experience accrues, adding to eventual ego enlightenment. When we are ready, when the ego has been sufficiently moulded to be in the truth, we can align our intent with that of the heart, our personal conduit to our higher spirit.

From this place of heart centeredness we know the truth and allow ourselves to be in the Tao. Being in the Tao means knowing that our lives are unfolding to express and fulfill all that we are and that projections are stirrings to find outlets for that fulfillment. However, often projections are simply reflections, not what is actually needed. The heart, in its quiet calm, will tell us the truth.

Aligning with this truth we have the certainty that life will bring to us the real deal. And with that we will be led to draw the water from our living well, our fixations realized in their highest form.

Constructing the well,

Chuck