Tag Archives: evolution

Soulbyte for Wednesday November 1, 2017

Get grounded and stay grounded no matter how bad the world gets, no matter how sad the world gets, no matter how absurd the world gets. Bring spirit fully into body and live grounded in knowing the self as fully spirit-in-body, as fully whole and alive, as fully sane and capable of right decision making and right action, for the world needs grounded people now to keep an even keel, to clear away the fog of illusion, to steady the course and sail in a new direction with goodness of heart, kindness of hand, and compassion of word and deed. Even if you only do this in your own little world you are doing what is needed, and that is good. Take care of yourself. Stay grounded in yourself and keep your spirit alive. Know who you are and why you are there: to accomplish even the smallest of good. That is a fine life indeed!

-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Soulbyte for Thursday September 21, 2017

Mother Earth and Mother Nature, body and spirit, two parts of a whole, have their ways of communicating. They have their moods, their temperaments, their means by which to speak their wisdom. Listen carefully to what they say and take action to persevere and flourish even in the worst of times. For though Mother Earth shifts and changes she cares for all of her creatures and in consort with Mother Nature, her eternal spirit, she seeks new evolution within and without. It is time now for great change and advancement, she says. Know this and abide in her beauty and her fury, under her fine sun by day and her calm moon by night. Bask in her growth and her destruction, knowing that she has things under control. Be her earthly companions and treat her well. Be her spirit companions as well and find her spirit in you and she will support you all of your days. Matter and spirit, body and soul, are everywhere and in everything, within and without, even in your eternal Mothers.

-From the Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Chuck’s Place: Spirit Matters

Spirit & Matter in one…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Spirit and Matter are the building blocks of humanity. Spirit is invisible, matter is substantial and therefore observable. We infer the existence of spirit by the effects it has on matter. If I decide to stand up and walk to the door, my invisible mind, the spirit dimension of my being, moves my body, the matter or material part of my being.

Thus, spirit begins with the mental plane, which, granted, uses the physical brain but is not identical with it. Consciousness functions outside the human body as an energy body capable of defying the laws of time and space. This dimension of spirit experience, though a latent potential for everyone, usually remains dormant except under extraordinary circumstances like a physical trauma, which shakes the energy body out of the physical body in an OBE. In a generally less uncomfortable way our spirit or energy body separates from the physical body in dreaming every night.

Matter is all of nature. Nature is governed by instincts and inherited programs, which at the human level are called archetypes. Archetypes are nature’s inherited programs that can assume control of human behavior from a deeply unconscious level. For example, many people who were sexually abused in childhood lose conscious memory of their experiences almost immediately after they occur. Certainly this is not a conscious decision. This amnesic reaction is governed by an archetypal program deeply embedded in nature’s program for survival at such a traumatic moment. That program reactivates—generally in midlife, to facilitate the achievement of wholeness at a mature stage of life—as memory in the form of flashbacks, beckoning reconciliation with consciousness.

Consciousness is fixated on rationality as the governing spirit of our time: spirit intellectis. Juan Enriquez, a scientific visionary, has basically stated what most people really believe: that we are God now, that our intellect is God, and that we are completely in charge of our own and the world’s evolution. Certainly the words bellowed from the United Nations General Assembly yesterday reflect such an attitude.

This kind of inflated spirit erupted with Naziism, which had as its god the creation of the perfect superior human. Interestingly, C. G. Jung stated that Naziism was the eruption of the pagan god Wotan, long suppressed in the human psyche through the impact of Christianity, which had served to help humanity advance spirit over the dominance of its nature roots.

When spirit dissociates itself from matter, matter seeks revenge. That’s where we are now: matter is at war with spirit. Matter, as nature, is deemed irrational. Spirit, as mind, is deemed rational. Thus the war is played out as the irrational versus the rational, matter versus spirit.

Nature is dealing deadly blows to humanity at present. Simply view the state of our islands of paradise in the Caribbean. My heart goes out to all my friends there in the front line of nature’s forward march. The Caribbean is at the vanguard of our changing world. This has archetypal underpinnings as a paradise lost, representing a major shift in human consciousness. We can only return to the garden now with a wholly new adaptive attitude, which is already emerging from this precious part of the world as it braces for nature’s next round of energetic impact.

In human form, nature, as the irrational, has seized control of major world leaders, particularly here in America. These untethered spirits are governed by their own whims, which change dramatically, like the wind, day by day, with no rhyme or reason, as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

The deeper issue that all these world happenings reflect is the relationship between the irrational and rational within ourselves. Our ego spirit intellectis simply devalues and dismisses all that is matter, and the laws that govern it. Our bodies and our physical world are filled with food stuffs and objects alien to the true needs of the body and the planet. Our ego spirit cares largely about me and mine; let the world community fend for itself. Our ego spirit identifies with reason and so dissociates from or tries to control, for its own gain, the basic instincts.

The war we are in must be fought within individuals, each of us striving to reconcile our own spirit and matter selves. The ego must ground itself in the body and in deeply unconscious nature. This  means facing the truths of body ailments that are expressing nature’s resentments and needs. This means facing, feeling, expressing, regulating and integrating nature’s powerful emotions, which express important needs and send archetypal messages that have the potential, if paid attention to, to steer the spirit in consort with material reality and need, that is, the true needs of the body and the planet.

We are all empowered here and now to make the changes in our own lives that are necessary to reconcile with nature. This is not the time to luxuriate in OBEs, dissociated from our body and our nature. The playing field is spirit-in-body now,  doing our best to bring this yin and yang of ourselves into working harmony.

Let’s calm nature by listening to her, within and without, acquiescing to the true needs of self and planet. This is the true spirit of the matter. Have love, compassion, and care without, but seek the needed transformation within.

The truth is that our world leadership does not grasp the heart of the matter. Our greatest playing field is restoring the Tao within the self. As within, so without. This is the spirit that really matters now.

In spirit in matter,

Chuck

*See Juan Enriquez on NPR’s Ted Hour here.

Chuck’s Place: Aquarius Meets Lucifer

Every 2,150 years the Earth tilts toward a different constellation. This repeats itself twelve times before it completes a full revolution on it axis for a total of 26,000 years.

Never too late for some flower power!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Astrologers assign to each of these epochs a different zodiacal sign. Earth is just completing its 2,000 year plus stay in the sign of Pisces. We are currently indeed at the dawn of the Age of Aquarius, the beginning of a new 2,000 year era.

“And now we are moving into Aquarius,” wrote Carl Jung in a letter in 1955, “of which the Sibylline books say, …Aquarius inflames the savage forces of Lucifer.”*

As with the ending of any epoch, new life is preceded by great destruction. Put another way, we are in the early contractions of a cosmic birth. Jung’s final vision on his deathbed in 1961 was a vastly changed Earth, some 50 years in the future. This vision is shared by many psychics. In fact, Jan channeled a similar prediction in which Jeanne suggested that the re-formation of earth mass may create a whole new orbit of the planet.

Whether these predicted changes will occur through nuclear engagement, currently threatening the world, or through the melting of the ice caps and the rising oceans, or some combination of both, it’s pretty clear that major change is already in motion. The saving grace is that all predictions suggest that, though deeply challenged, the Earth and life will endure.

Aquarius is the water bearer, and it is associated with all things water, from nurturance to flood. Aquarius is also forward looking, idealistic, bent on freedom and humanitarianism. These are the higher chakras in the human energy system, from the heart to the third eye, the mental and spiritual planes.

The period we are exiting, Pisces, was characterized by hierarchy and power, the chakra of the ego or solar plexus and its dominance of the lower chakras, particularly sexuality.

The religions of the Piscean era offered their guidance and garnered their power through insistence on belief and forced adherence to dogma. The Aquarian age, though highly intuitive, insists on proof, genuine experience as its spiritual path, to “know” rather than to simply believe.

With its insistence on fairness, Aquarius is in direct opposition to the  wily ego of power and control, a vestige of the Piscean age. This is the clash with Lucifer that Jung references from the Sibylline Oracle. We are currently witnessing such opposition on the world stage as narcissistic power motives clash with the true needs of the planet. It will be the challenge of the Aquarian age to reconcile narcissism with true freedom and equality.

Interestingly, Jung believed that even more fundamental to world survival was the issue of overpopulation. Even Tesla, the rising star of the electric car industry, though producing an intelligent energy solution to gas guzzling cars still aims to produce 10,000 vehicles per week, modest by auto industry standards but absurd in terms of the burden on the planet. The truth is that an ever-expanding human population will destroy the planet regardless of its attempts at energy conservation measures.

From the perspective of overpopulation, the humans of the Aquarian age will have to arrive at a new relationship to the sexual instinct if the planet and life on it are to survive.

Interestingly, don Juan Matus, Carlos Castaneda’s teacher, concluded that the only way for the world to survive and evolve was for human beings to access the energetic side of life, the energy body. Reaching the energy body and interacting on an energetic level require a refined use of sexual energy. Honing sexual energy for higher purposes has long been known and utilized in kundalini yoga, as well as Buddhist and shamanic practices.

Life at an energetic level offers completely transparent union. And connection at that level involves direct knowing and complete merging with another being; a more completely satisfying union than the physical copulation of our current permutation, where large parts of our beings remain hidden from our partners. At an energetic level all is revealed, all is known, all is accepted.

I am reminded of a young Jane Fonda as Barbarella, a 1968 movie about a futuristic woman who encounters a man from our time who wants to have sex with her. She is amused and grants him his wish, but sees it as an antiquated, limited approach to intimacy from a once physical, lower-chakra dominated time in human history.

Deeply satisfying union that transcends mere physical need opens a whole new possibility for achieving balance upon the planet in this coming age of Aquarius.

Though there are established practices to reach the energy body, such as Tensegrity, dreaming, and meditation, in my clinical work I have discovered that trauma often precipitates an immediate out-of-body jolt, introducing a person to the energy body, where they witness their physical body from a vantage point outside of the physical body.

Obviously, I am not advocating that people go out and engage in activities that will trigger traumatic jolts out-of-body. But I am suggesting that perhaps what we are going to be facing in this Aquarian age, in our clash with Lucifer and whatever earthly calamities result, may offer jolts that will collectively catapult our species out-of-body and into energy body states with all its evolutionary possibilities for harmony and understanding. Stripped of our current collective ego consciousness, the possibilities for a new collective consciousness, dissolved of ego dominated by narcissism, is truly a new age dream.

The true clash of the Aquarian with Lucifer is the clash between spirit (mental plane) and  body. This translates into the opposition and split between the lower chakras of the physical body and the higher chakras of the energy body. In the Piscean age regulation of this opposition was handled through romantic ideals such as courtly love, celibacy, or downright repression. This form of control burst apart with the freedom and ideals of the dawning of the age of Aquarius in the experimentation and free love of the 1960s.

Those new age ideals have transmuted into a cool detachment, deep intelligentsia,  and avoidance of human commitment in favor of abstract connection via technology in a multitude of forms of social media. That incredible new opportunities for connection and communication have opened via this channel, as they present new means of connection and mass efforts to effect change, is obvious. However, the shadow of this medium is a dissociation from real human contact and genuine feeling, which the liberated Aquarian may neglect in its idealism. This can activate the ire of Lucifer, the earthbound body.

On an individual level the reconciliation of spirit and body endures in new forms in this Aquarian age. As we allow ourselves to discover our new found energetic freedoms let us not neglect the true needs of our physical, animal, instinctual selves, which must be included fairly in our new selves, or meet them as inflamed savage forces as the Sibylline book warns.

To address the needs of the whole self, with full transparent honesty, is an Aquarian ideal. As this transparency extends beyond the self to others the door opens to greater energetic connection. As the wave of Aquarian energy more fully enters the world, a greater mass of human beings bent on evolution will embrace compassion, truth, and loving kindness, manifesting a newly balanced world.

Making it real,

Chuck

*From Letters Volume 2, p. 229

 

Chuck’s Place: The Transparent, Responsible Dream

When we enter infinity…
-Art by Jan Ketchel

By many accounts, when we permanently leave our physical body to embark upon our definitive journey into infinity at death, we enter an energetic state of pure transparency, no hidden compartments, the exact opposite of the most salient feature of life in the human form, the ability to keep secrets from self and others. Thus, the next rung of our evolutionary trajectory challenges us all to be and interact with all “others” as we and they truly are, a distinct advance from the vagaries of human interaction and relationship.

Human relationship, lived  within the self or interpersonally with others, happens mainly in the dark. Truthfully, we know little of who we are and little of the true nature of those with whom we interact. Such is the curse and challenge of life in this dimension.

Technological advances of our time have however greatly restricted the ability to have a hidden compartment. Chances are, there’s a camera or recording device of some sort that is creating a record of all forms of observable human behavior, no matter how discreetly life is lived.

The hidden identities of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, right down to Carlos Castaneda, could never be maintained in today’s world. We don’t know for certain Castaneda’s real name, where he was born, his real date of birth, nor the place and date of his death. This would not happen in today’s world.

Carl Jung managed to conceal that he was sexually abused as a youth for his entire life, save one brief reference to it in a personal letter to Freud published years after his death. The fullness of that story would never be allowed to go to the grave in today’s world.

Donald Trump, though he still tries to conceal his tax returns, is perhaps the most transparent of all political figures of our day. We know he’s behaved like a lech, it’s recorded. He makes no effort to present himself as presidential. Whether we like him or not, with Trump we are treated to a very transparent leader, he simply can’t help himself.

The truth is, you can’t reconcile with yourself or with another person if you can’t reveal to yourself or another the fullness of who you are, however sordid. The absence of transparency gives rise to intrigue, deception, and hidden subplots in life, all the ingredients of fake relationship.

It appears that full transparency is our current evolutionary imperative. Of course, revelation of the shadow self, the hidden compartments, does not automatically lead to evolutionary advance. Trump’s current transparent behavior simply means that he’s acting out power-drives in the open versus acting them out covertly, as was typical of politics in the past. With transparency comes responsibility for what to do with one’s “outed” shadow.

Though we are moving quickly, driven by unstoppable technological advances toward greater and greater transparency, what has become abundantly clear is that we must reconcile all the formerly hidden parts that become transparently exposed. Full exposure is not reconciled wholeness. This is abundantly clear with the sexual abuse issue in the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church tried to repress sexuality in its clergy. Transparency revealed the results of that decision in perhaps the greatest institutional case of sexual abuse in history. Simply outing the perpetrators does not reconcile the opposition of spirit and matter/animal/sex. Transparency merely alerts us to the truth of all that we are. Any attempt at reconciliation that merely represses one side in favor of another merely creates a new shadow. Reconciliation means creating a stable personality that doesn’t require new prison compartments.

But how does one achieve responsible wholeness? Here are some suggestions:

1) Appoint your adult self to mediate the process. The child self or the shadow self must be included in the negotiation but only the mature adult has the stamina and objectivity to work with all the points of view and emotional states of the different factions of the self. An immature child self has neither the patience nor objectivity to see beyond its own needs. Maturity is critical. Maturity must be in charge.

2) Suspend judgement. We all have parts of ourselves that have powerful “unacceptable” emotions as well as “immoral” impulses. Regardless of our reaction to these challenging parts we must accept them as part of who we are. All parts of the whole must have a place in that whole. It is the challenge for the adult self to recognize its parts, listen to their needs and points of view, and find the best place within the whole self for each part to live. For example, perhaps there is a part of the personality that truly hates to deal with people and the outside world. Perhaps that part can be assigned to securing uninterrupted meditation time, both from outside influences and inside thoughts that would dare to intrude upon inner silence. Be creative.

Our challenge, with the imperative of transparency being handed down to us from the next rung of life beyond human life, is to reconcile with our wholeness. We must find a place for all that we are, light and dark, in the full light of day. I would call this responsible, transparent wholeness.

Transparency is coming into its own now anyway. I dream that we may find our way to responsibility too. Together, let’s dream that dream, the transparent, responsible dream.

Dreaming,

Chuck