Tag Archives: foreign installation

Chuck’s Place: Barking Meditation

It’s 10:30 p.m. A dog barks incessantly. “What dog is it?” I wonder. “Whose dog is it? Who would allow their dog to carry on for so long?” I return my awareness to my tiredness and the dog’s barking fades into the sounds of the night.

It’s 1:00 a.m. The dog is still barking. Someone must have gone away, left their dog outside. The dog is frightened, helpless, terrified of the night, terrified in abandonment. Perhaps I should go and find the dog, find out its situation, reassure it. Perhaps I need to rescue this poor dog in need. I’m sad. The image of the shivering victim dog is haunting.

I breathe. Thoughts tell me I have an obligation to care for, to take responsibility for, this trapped, scared, frightened animal. I notice my thoughts and my feelings. I return my awareness to my tiredness. The barking is absorbed into the sounds of the night.

Now it’s 3:00 a.m. The dog barks on, without pause, an incessant, monotonous bark. Someone must be hurt. Its owners. Perhaps they’ve died. This is a loyal dog. This is Lassie calling for, demanding, help. Those barks may be a deep cry for needed attention, for someone in need. How can I possibly not respond?

I’m anxious, worried, sad. What kind of person would close their eyes to such need, such tragedy? What kind of person puts their own needs and comforts above the suffering around them? Shouldn’t I do something?

I breathe, releasing the mobilizing energy that accompanies my thoughts. The sounds of the night, deafening, once again absorb the barking.

It’s 4:00 a.m. Same rhythm, same intensity of barking. I isolate the barking cry of what must be a dog being punished by being left outside. It must be an owner that has an idea about training his dog. It’s necessary to give a dog firm consequences. Perhaps it soiled in the house or chewed the couch. A righteous owner is teaching the dog a lesson, I surmise. It will never forget this lesson for disobedience. This owner has cut off any feeling for this frightened dog in pain. This owner is proud of its ability to be firm and consistent. I’m angry at this owner. But then I find compassion, reminded of my own ignorance, once having humiliated a dog, feeling it necessary in training. I remember my father training a dog of my youth in the same manner. It’s what men do, cut off feeling, do the necessary deed.

My body is tense. I breathe. I release the tension. My awareness melts once again into the sounds of the night.

It’s 5:00 a.m. We sit and drink our coffee. We ponder the barking dog, still active as we sip. Jan suggests that it’s the sheep dog at the sheep farm down the road, protecting its flock from the coyotes that roam at night. I hadn’t considered that possibility.

I ponder my journey through the night, the sleep I lost and found. I notice my heart. Calm, unstirred. I turn to my spirit. No impetus to act. It’s my mind that has conjured the horrors of the night. The mind, with its thoughts, seeking to stir agitated feelings, draining my energy, commanding my awareness.

The shamans call the mind the foreign installation, an entity that feeds on worry and agitation, an entity that conjures and projects without substance. In the night, I noticed its wonderings, but never fully took the bait. The feelings stirred were never true messages from the heart. They were feelings triggered by projections of the mind, not feelings triggered by my real perceiving self.

The shamans teach that we are perceivers, that is our true nature. We perceive—we know—with our whole being. Then we know what’s truly there and we can act with certainty. The mind, on the other hand, has become a symbiotic appendage that has gained ascendancy over our perceiving being, draining us of our energy, of our perceptual certainty.

Last night, as I drove up the hill to my home, I encountered the young female fox that roams the neighborhood. I stopped. She stopped. Head moving side to side, sniffing, perceiving, she showed no interest in spending energy on connecting with me. She knew immediately that I wasn’t a threat. She perceived rightly, her energy being spent only on what was real and necessary. My own perceiving self, I’ve learned—like the fox—will alert me when it’s truly time to act, when there is a real danger at hand, a real concern.

My Barking Meditation Teacher

After the night of the barking dog, I left for work early. I drove slowly past the homes of the suspects of the night. I doubted that I’d see anything, but asked the universe to please reveal the source of the mystery. My last pause was in front of the farmhouse of the sheep farm. I sat. Nothing. Then suddenly, the large white sheep dog appeared by the side of the house. Staring at me, it barked the now familiar bark. I continued to sit and stare. It started to advance toward me, ready to chase me off, perceiving me as a threat. It was time to leave.

Jan was right. It was a guardian dog, with unrelenting persistence, protecting its flock from predators. As I drove off, I thanked it for my nightlong training in mindful meditation.

Perceiving more, thinking less,
Chuck

#741 A Conversation With Jeanne

Written by Jan Ketchel and including channeled guidance from Jeanne Ketchel.

Last week I wrote about restlessness as being a catalyst for change and it often served me well, for I believe that we are here to change, that to evolve we must confront our restlessness and use it wisely to keep growing. I use the terms growing and evolving in the sense of allowing ourselves to have experiences in life that lead us to a higher awareness of ourselves as beings on a mission.

What is my purpose for being alive? What is my mission? At pivotal points in my life these are the questions that have spurred me to keep going. I could never imagine life as anything but extremely meaningful, but I also always knew it to be a very personal journey. Awareness of myself as a separate being on a singular journey arrived early, but it has taken many years to sift through the rhetoric of interference, what the seers of ancient Mexico call the foreign installation, the conjuring, rational mind.

The rational mind seeks concrete answers and explanations, wants everything lined up, quantified, labeled. The seeker side of the self may have experiences that cannot be so neatly tied up and explained in acceptable terms. If I tell someone I have experienced myself as pure energy, I may be met with disbelief and dismissal by a rationalist, or I may be met with excitement by a fellow explorer of energy. Both reactions are right, for we do live in a world of rational concreteness, but we also live in a world of wonderful energy. Once I allowed myself to really explore the world of energy that I had indeed always known and experienced, I learned how to detach from the foreign installation, personal importance, and being offended when someone dismissed me as just another kook.

In reality, I am a very pragmatic person, not lent to over-exaggeration or fanaticism. Basically, I have learned to live in two worlds and am quite excited to be in both of them.

Ten years ago, I began a shamanic journey with Chuck and Jeanne Ketchel. It was right about this time of year when the last great restlessness struck me and I knew, with a certainty I had never quite acquiesced to before, that I was about to embark on a journey of total change.

It was a year of shattering, of breaking through personal blockages. It was the year of September 11th and the year Jeanne died. It was a year of beginning a journey to new life, for out of the rubble of shattered lives rises the phoenix, transformed energy burning brightly, as it rises above the flames of destruction, carrying only the energy of truths revealed, reincarnated in new life.

What have we all learned in the past ten years? What have we done with ourselves and our lives that is worthy of speaking about? What have we done as a nation to promote healing and compassion both at home and in the world? What have we done on a personal level for ourselves and others?

Once again I feel restless because I feel that we are on the verge of another catalyst that will force us to change, for perhaps we did not truly pay attention to the true meaning of the events of ten years ago. Even though I have experienced incredible personal change, and even though there are so many more people spreading the message of the importance of personal transformation—not in a religious sense but in a perceptive sense—the Deepak Chopras, the Eckhart Tolles; the many people who have dared to become open channels, who have shed self-importance in order to bring forth the news of the dire necessity for change.

Something else is going to come along to shake us out of our boots again. It has to, for we have not done our homework on a national and global level. Yes, we have done a lot of work, but the true messages of change have not spread as they should.

People, Jeanne says, have become more isolated, more protective, more selfish, more inferior in their thinking. Isolationism breeds contempt for fellow human beings. Isolationism leads eventually to destructive energy. Isolationism breeds fear and that is the energy that now permeates the earth. Fear abides so strongly upon that earth that it cannot contain itself.

It will now begin a pounding at the doors of reality as you know it, seeking expression and release. There are two options:

1. to recognize it for what it is, fear of the unknown, and confront it, or

2. to allow it to rule, to dominate further, creating more destruction.

Fear is the only enemy upon that earth. This is true on an individual level, a national level, and a global level. Fear, once induced, like labor, will deliver what it holds within. Allowing it to release will have one kind of outcome. Allowing it to dissipate by close examination of what it truly is will have a strikingly different outcome.

Fear breeds fanaticism, which breeds destruction. Claim fear as a catalyst to personal change by wrestling it down inside the self. Face it head on, on a personal level, each one of you, and see what it really is that causes your personal restlessness, your personal discomforts, your personal anxiety, and your personal stagnation. I guarantee that it is not really anything outside of you that is so bothersome, but only something inside you.

If everyone voluntarily turned inward and confronted and cross-examined the fears inside them, the world would set a course correction for peaceful resolution and change. However, at this time, there is too much reliance on outer sources of energy, electricity of the manmade sort, rather than reliance on the inner sort of electrical energy.

Mankind is on the verge once again of choosing a new way of life, of freeing himself from destructive behaviors and old fears. If you knew everyone else had the same fears and the same desires, would you be less afraid? If you knew that everyone sought peace, happiness, love, and earth-oriented living, would you be less judgmental? If you knew that the sadness you truly feel inside you is felt equally deeply by everyone else, would you allow yourself to feel for others as you do for yourself? If you knew that today was your last day on earth, would you change your reliance on fear? Would you acquiesce to the fact that your energetic self truly exists? Would you let go of all that you hold so important and realize that none of it truly matters? Would you let yourself go free?

Jeanne, you are really quite confrontational today!

Yes, I am, for it is indeed time to shake things up on an energetic level. Take note: Your world is about to change. What are you going to do about it?

I suggest that each one of you find your inner self. Get to know it extremely well. Find out how it reacts to life and why. Don’t accept everything the mind tells you. Don’t dismiss so easily what your body tells you. And don’t dismiss your energetic resonance. Please learn what it means to be an energetic being. It will serve you well in the year to come.

Are you suggesting a big change? On a global level?

I am suggesting that the potential for disaster created by man’s fear of man is imminent. However, disasters have a way of being averted by those who choose to feel rather than judge. Become a feeling being and you will understand what I am talking about.

This message is for all of humanity. Look to nature to guide you in this energetic endeavor, for nature carries the answers. And you may need to turn to nature for your very survival, if all does not go well.

Instinct, feeling, heart-centered awareness of the self and all human beings as journeyers to enlightenment, to God-energy, will aid in the release of deep-seated fears. You must learn to look always within if you are to save the planet and learn to dispense with fear as the energetic driver of change. Allow something much more profound to enter your being and take over the course of humanity. A new direction is being revealed. Do you see?

Yes, Jeanne, I believe that many people upon the earth truly want change that is good, pure, and sensitive, that humanity as a whole wishes to be unafraid, to be freed of fear and judgment. But I also believe, as you say and through my work with other journeyers, that the biggest blockage is within each of us. We must learn to free ourselves first. Thank you for this message.

Dear Readers: Pass it on and help create the new energetic network of transformation and change that Jeanne suggests is so personally necessary for each of us to partake in, for all our sakes, and the planet too. And then set a personal intent and let it go to the energy of all good intent, to the Universe, who has a way of returning it to us in just the right way, at the right time, and in just the right amount.

Please feel free to post comments or respond to this message in the post/read comments section below.

Most fondly and humbly offered.

#718 Chuck’s Place: Po

Jeanne once called me “Parallel Man.” She referred to a certain knack I have to see the same idea presented in many different forms. In fact, under the influence of a certain idea I am likely to see it reflected everywhere for days. I suspect that this is how synchronicity works—like a wave of energy that moves and has a ripple effect on everything, at a moment in time.

This week I had a deep concern about a pending danger, a pending collapse. I consulted The I Ching, which produced hexagram #23, Po. This hexagram is constructed by five yin lines supporting a weighty yang line at the top. The image used to depict this state of energy is a house about to split apart due to a shattered roof. The English translation for the character Po is splitting apart, a most ominous condition.

The Flyer’s mind, what the seers of ancient Mexico called the foreign installation, that influences all human thinking, attempted to hook me on a doom and gloom scenario. This conjuring mind generates many negative scenarios, threats to survival; bait to capture awareness and energy in a state of agitation and fear. I breathed calmly, recalling Buddha beneath the bodhi tree as he refused to attach to earth-shattering illusions that were rapidly firing before him. It helped as well to recall the many “groundhog days” of going for the bait, investing so much energy in potential dramas that never materialized. Don’t attach; let life unfold; see what happens; suspend judgment; find out what it means—these mantras have proven far more emotionally and energetically efficient in approaching ongoing time than chasing down the red herrings of the conjuring mind.

The I Ching goes on to state that the imminent collapse presented in the time of Po is not due to personal behavior, but is, in fact, an impersonal reality, part of a death and resurrection theme inherent in nature. The time of Po is October/November, the time of the harvest. The I Ching also chooses the image of a rotting fruit on a tree to depict Po. Of necessity, the fruit will fall to the earth and die. However, that yang line, the seed, will be buried in the earth with the promise of new life.

Synchronistically, we are in the time of Po now, harvest time. Personally, illusions we cling to may be exposed, die, that change and new life might unfold. This is a natural and evolutionary process. Nonetheless, the process of letting go, of dying to old ways or untruths, may indeed be painful and threatening, as they present themselves.

I prefer the image of the rotting apple falling from the tree to that of the collapsing house. Though I see the parallel, an image taken directly from nature, undisturbed by human intervention, seems to remove the judgments we quickly place upon ourselves in trying to decipher the meaning of an oracle. Understanding what naturally does and must occur in nature first can help in suspending judgment of that same scenario as it manifests in human nature.

Incidentally, as I completed my contemplation of Po, I pulled a card from my Tarot deck (Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot Deck)—the Knight of Disks—the harvester, who with his threshing tool in hand is preparing to harvest what he has cultivated. This card is a perfect synchronistic ripple of Po, splitting apart in the time of harvest. Time for all to bravely separate the wheat from the chaff!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

A Day in a Life: Recapitulation & The Mind

I have always kept a stack of books beside my bed, sometimes neatly arranged on a bookcase or table, other times piled on the floor next to a mattress. As a very young child these books were a thick volume of Mother Goose rhymes and the poetry of A.A. Milne, both of which I knew by heart, every word in every rhyme memorized and treasured. As I lay under the covers at night reciting the words of these dear works the soothing rhythm of their lines enabled me to break through the fears of the day and enter another world. They became the mantras that enabled me to enter a new world of dreams and forgetting.

Coming from a family of readers, observing my mother, with her legs tucked up under her, deeply absorbed in reading, I intuited that books were important, containing something compellingly irresistible. At the same time I saw that they had the power to remove a person from this world, to envelop them and take them away to another world where they could not be reached. Growing up in a family of such readers, the escapist kind, produced a hoard of bubble beings, each of us floating through life safely sequestered inside our own little bubble, with little interaction or spoken word, the draw of the written word always more enticing than actual personal contact.

As I grew older the books advanced with me, the nursery rhymes giving way to Little House on The Prairie and Black Beauty, both of which I secretly cried over, safe in my bubble where I was free to compassionately and empathically absorb and embrace the trials and tribulations of the characters. Fiction and non-fiction, mysteries, classics, historical novels, fantasies; you name it, I read it. By the time I was in my late teens and early twenties the stack of books on the floor of my room in the apartment I shared with two other young women in New York City ranged from some battered and yellowed paperbacks by and about Edgar Cayce that I had found in my grandparent’s attic, to the early works of Carlos Castaneda, and some books on the power of prayer that my grandmother had shyly presented me with one day. My two roommates, gaily flitted off to yoga and meditation classes, lapping up the energy of the times while I sat in my room and read these books, trying to figure out what they meant for me, taking my time to absorb them, studying them and eventually finding my own way to what I needed out in the world.

Now as I look at the books I have on my bedside shelf I recognize the seeker in me, having stayed connected to that which would both catapult and accompany me on my inner journeys as well as my journeys in the world. I have taken my time, the time I have needed, recognizing and finding in the works and adventures of others just the words to send me in the right direction so I could break through the barriers that stood so seemingly solidly in place, as I had once done as a small child lying in bed incessantly repeating the rhymes of comfort and transformation. I have learned that when the time is right, when everything is aligned, I will be shown where I must go next. Of course, it is not just in books and words that we are guided, but in the challenges and synchronicities in life. Even if one is not a reader, but totally absorbed by the outer world the same alignments, signs, and guidance will be present when the time is right for us to take a plunge in a new direction and break through the barriers that seem so solidly constructed.

For me, those barriers have most often appeared in the form of words, just as the key to breakthrough has also most often appeared in words, both my own words and those of others. The words we grow up with, the commands and demands of our parents, our teachers, our bibles and catechisms, become the mantras that replay and hold us captive, until one day we decide, by fate or choice, that it’s time to resist them, to reject them, to turn them off and to look in a new direction for new words of guidance. This day may come slowly and methodically or it may come over us all of a sudden with a big whack over the head. But when this day arrives, when we begin to question the repetitive, incessant dialogue inside our heads, wondering who said that to us, or how we could ever have held such a belief, we are choosing to break through the barriers that have kept us confined in a limiting and unsatisfying world.

When this moment comes, whether because the right words have been read or spoken, or because life has just delivered another blow, or because there is just no other choice to make, this is the moment when, as don Juan suggests, infinity calls. This is the moment that Pema Chödrön in her book When Things Fall Apart recognizes as the catalyst. “Instinctively I knew that annihilation of my old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go,” she says on page 14. This is the moment when Carl Jung asked his unconscious for a sign and he received the vision that would eventually send him on his deepest explorations as recounted in The Red Book. And this is the moment of invitation into recapitulation.

Carlos Castaneda recounts his own adventures into recapitulation with don Juan in The Active Side of Infinity, which I have been using as a resource for the past few weeks in my essays on the recapitulation process. On page 168, don Juan introduces Carlos to the idea of the mind as a foreign installation, and suggests that Carlos note how, in undertaking recapitulation, his true mind is emerging. Don Juan says to Carlos:

“The haunting memory of your recollections could come only from your true mind. The other mind that we all have and share is, I would say, a cheap model: economy strength, one size fits all. But this is a subject that we will discuss later. What is at stake now is the advent of a disintegrating force. But not a force that is disintegrating you—I don’t mean it that way. It is disintegrating what the sorcerers call the foreign installation, which exists in you and in every other human being. The effect of the force that is descending on you, which is disintegrating the foreign installation, is that it pulls sorcerers out of their syntax.”

The mind as foreign installation is what I am referring to when I write of the incessant dialogue, the mantras of old that feed us and, yes, even nurture us through most of our life, until the moment arrives when we question their advice and even their very presence. This is the moment that our syntax, the world as we have always known it, no longer fits who we are or how we perceive or experience ourselves. This is the moment when the mind, old conjurer that it is, confronts us with its old mantras, seeking to draw us back into its comforts, but we know, with utter certainty, that we cannot go back. When Pema Chödrön is confronted by her husband asking for a divorce, her syntax shatters. She writes:

“I tried hard—very, very hard—to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place. Fortunately for me, I could never pull it off.”

When we are confronted with the shattering of the foreign installation, the mind as it has been constructed throughout our lives, when we are thrown into free fall, into a place where nothing is familiar, and we feel like we are being annihilated or disintegrating, we want desperately to reach back to something that will anchor us. But as we grasp for the old syntax we find that the world that once served us so well is gone, that it no longer holds what we need. This is when we enter into a new phase of our recapitulation. This is when we enter the moment of choosing to change not only ourselves but our entire outlook on life, accepting that we will allow our entire perception of the world, as we know it, to disintegrate before our eyes and allow our mind, that foreign installation, to go with it. This is the moment when we experience our true mind. When we allow the old mantras to cease comforting us and look for what the next moment offers, fully aware that we are electing to take a journey of disintegrating change, we have finally gotten to the place that don Juan refers to as thus, on page 182 in The Active Side Of Infinity:

“He explained to me the intricacies of choice,” writes Carlos. “He said that choice, for warrior-travelers, was not really the act of choosing, but rather the act of acquiescing elegantly to the solicitations of infinity.”

Infinity chooses,” he said. “The art of the warrior-traveler is to have the ability to move with the slightest insinuation, the art of acquiescing to every command of infinity. For this, a warrior-traveler needs prowess, strength, and above everything else, sobriety. All those three put together give, as a result, elegance!”

When Carlos struggles to make sense of his experiences in infinity don Juan suggests the following:

“It is unbelievable, but it’s not unlivable,” he said. “The universe has no limits, and the possibilities at play in the universe at large are indeed incommensurable. So don’t fall prey to the axiom, ‘I believe only what I see,’ because it is the dumbest stand one can possibly take.”

So, if we ponder that axiom for a moment, ‘I believe only what I see,’ and ask where it comes from, who planted it in our mind, who first spoke those words to us, or where did we read them, we might, if we are being true to ourselves, realize that those are words of the foreign installation. Because if we are indeed warrior-travelers in infinity, we know that our experiences supersede every idea that our mind has ever had or put in place.

Our true mind knows that anything can happen, that everything is possible and that once we acquiesce to the solicitations of infinity that old mind cannot hold up, under any circumstances. It will no longer give us what we need or want. It is then that we begin to look beyond the old mantras and the old comforts for something else to lead us. As don Juan, Carl Jung, Pema Chödrön, and Carlos Castaneda recognize, this is the moment of disintegration leading to new awareness. This is when we know that the only way to live is in the moment, soberly acquiescing to and learning from what infinity offers us.

On a final note, as I discussed today’s blog with Chuck this morning at breakfast, I found that I could not find the words to describe to him what I was going to write about. Spoken words have always been so inaccurate and fleeting to me, sent out on a puff of air, unclear and often jumbled, not yet fallen into just the right alignment. “It will all come together as I write,” I said to him. As I have honed how I use words, over a lifetime of career and personal writings, I know that the moment when it all comes together is largely directed by a force outside of me; creative energy perhaps. As Pema Chödrön’s teacher, Chögyam Tungpa Rinpoche, said to her once: “Relax and write,” so do I know that, once I acquiesce to the process, the process has a way of taking me where I need to go.

And so now here we are already past noon and I am looking over what I have written. I humbly offer these words that have fallen into just this essay today, coming together outside of the conjuring foreign installation of the mind that attempted to explain to Chuck earlier in the day what I would be writing about. Here it is now, come, in the end, from somewhere else; infinity perhaps?

If you wish, feel free to share or comment in the Post Comment section below.

Sending you all love and good wishes,
Jan

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