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Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Relationship Between Black Magic, Karma And Evil

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Black Magic, Karma and Evil integrated…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Black Magic is the ego’s use of its power of suggestion to manipulate the subconscious mind to produce subtle and material effects for its own self-serving purposes. This contrasts with the exercise of suggestions intended for the greater good of the overall Self, as well as the greater good of the world. These kinds of suggestions are the ego’s use of White Magic.

Both Black and White Magic employ spells and incantations in the form of repetitive words—like prayers, intents or affirmations—that the receptive subconscious, the true mother of creation, brings to life. Words are the seeds that fertilize new life in the womb of the subconscious mind.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh,” opens John’s Gospel, describing the origin of creation. Words can produce works of evil, as well as works of high spiritual value. The subconscious does not differentiate between the two; the subconscious is a dutiful servant that does what it is told.

Words issue from the mental body, the ego part of the personality, with its thinking, reasoning and decision making capabilities. The ego has the supreme ability to exercise free will, to be its own creator of reality. Through its influence upon the subconscious, the ego has free access to the elemental forces of good and evil, the divine building blocks of our human self and our world.

The mission for ego in its life in human form is to bring harmonious balance to its innate state of polarity. Each of us are born with our own myth, a riddle to be discovered and resolved in the high art of a human life. For this, the ego must venture into the underworld of its shadow self, as well as enter into the outer world of relationship. The choices it makes are necessary engagements of both Black and White Magic. Wholeness precludes one-sidedness; wholeness is integration.

The subconscious mind is reflected in the body’s gut. The gut, at a physical level, is all about the balance of bacteria needed for proper digestion. The gut follows Nature’s Law: karma. Karma is the law of cause and effect. The gut will take the necessary actions to bring to balance the effects we have caused by the actions we have chosen.

These gut healing efforts might include great pain in the intestinal tract, or actual disease to an organ, as the gut spurs the ego to right action in its choices and suggestions to the subconscious mind.

Thus, the subconscious mind, though it does not argue with the ego about its dominant commands, and in fact carries out those commands, is fundamentally bound to Nature’s Law of karmic balance. While materializing the ego’s wishes, the subconscious is simultaneously bound to materialize its karmic consequences.

Nature makes use of the destructive elementals to enact change. Evil can be defined as the destructive action necessary to evoke change through the breakdown of rigidities. Love can be defined as the receptive energy of change, driven by the heart opening to greater inclusiveness. Love and evil are a most necessary polarity in wholeness. The challenge is to harmonize their influences in the service of refined growth.

Black Magic is part of the ego’s necessary repertoire. Sometimes the ego must oppose nature’s law of balance. Of course, those decisions will evoke a karmic consequence that may seriously sideline the ego. Watch out what you ask for!

Nonetheless, as creators, we are scientists destined to experiment. We are truly on a mission from God to know and refine who we are—in our wholeness, both good and evil.

Evil is a necessary tool for both the ego and the subconscious. Evil is the mental body’s free-will teacher and refiner. The mind will reflect upon the consequences of its decisions, which may modify subsequent actions.

Evil is also Nature’s karmic tool of balance, the primary controlling  suggestion to the subconscious mind. The challenge is to bring free will and karma into good balance.

Perhaps the best guidance was offered by don Juan Matus, Carlos Castaneda’s teacher: Have a romance with knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. Explore everything, but don’t get overly attached to anything.

Or, as Julia Child recommended, have but a small taste of everything.

In conclusion, choose the best balance for where you are now!

Harmonizing,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog, Jan's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Now is the Time of Testing

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Being love…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

What is the spiritual purpose of the coronavirus? We ask this question as a new variant, given the name of the Greek letter, Omicron, descends upon us.

Spirit is the purest, most rarified subtle energy intent behind physical reality. Spirit intent is encoded in DNA and in the subconscious programs that attract and solidify energy into the physical forms that we are and know ourselves to be.

Nothing exists that is not, at its most subtle core, spirit. Spirit is housed in the subtle body called the soul, just as the soul inhabits the physical body during its earthly sojourn. As one spiritually progresses, one’s consciousness lives in evermore subtle bodies of spirit.

Spiritual evolution is accomplished through the successful passing of tests at various soul body stages. While in human form the soul body is symbiotically attached to the physical body, thus much of the spiritual tests in human form occur in relation to the physical plane. Someone may have to deal with a debilitating illness; someone else may have to overcome extreme shyness; someone else may have to confront rejection, abandonment, or deep loss.

The greatest test in human form, however, is to bridge spirit truth with physical life. Spirit truth, first and foremost, knows that everything that exists is part of an indivisible whole. At a physical level, we appear as distinct separate objects; at a spiritual level we are all one.

The spiritual challenge of our time is to raise our consciousness to a higher level of truth and embrace actions that bring our interdependent physical whole into harmony and balance. To accomplish this we must overcome our separatist illusions that deny our deeper spiritual truth of oneness.

While in human form we are all holograms of Gaia, Mother Earth. Our separatist behaviors, which have thrown Gaia into disarray, have been our own process of coming to know ourselves, enacted through a system of differentiation from each other, a necessary developmental step.

However, differentiation is but the prelude to union. That which has been distinguished must find its way back to its wholeness, filled with new knowledge of self, gained through self-exploration. Greater consciousness is then rejoined with its greater wholeness.

The appearance of Omicron is rocking our very fragile sense of freedom and mobility. Something greater is being asked of us than simply a return to normalcy. Yes, we so want our freedoms of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but we must raise these values to physical expression according to higher spiritual truth.

The freedom to travel and interact with the entire physical world is being transmuted to the spiritual level of truly caring for and loving everyone, and everything, in this world. Accepting physical limitation elevates spiritual connectedness.

Our collective spirit has landed in this physical world to bring the Earth into greater spiritual harmony. Symbiotically, our individual spirits are themselves being raised to higher soul body states, as we pass the tests presented in this physical world.

Progression is the ultimate law of spirit. Astrologically, both Pisces and Aquarius have Omicron stars in their constellations. For Pisces, it’s a big yellow star, for Aquarius a blue one. We have moved now from 2100 years of Pisces domination into the Age of Aquarius.

Pisces represents the goddess and god of love, Aphrodite and Eros, bound together as two fish in the sea, hiding out from the destructive shadow of Typhon, the personification of violent volcanic forces. Love has been safely protected in the time of Pisces but now is being challenged to rise out of the protective sea into the air of greater spiritual realization, into the water jug of Aquarius, the water bearer.

With such exposure, love cannot help but encounter its shadow in Typhon, cruel and power hungry. This is the collective test of our time, to overcome and absorb Typhon through the purest of rarified love.

Fear not this time of testing. Take full advantage of opening to loving all that you hate. Join with the water bearer in raising the spiritual level of self and world. It’s not about seeking love but all about being love. That’s the transformation that our times call for.

When you open your heart to loving, you become a loving being. And when you are love, you become fully available to love as well.

Let there be love,

Chuck and Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: On Splitting and Uniting

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Uniting the split self…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Infants scream, toddlers tantrum, and adults sulk when they don’t get what they want. Disappointment at a frustrated need or desire can result in an intolerable emotional state in humans of all ages. Often the resulting mood reflects a bipolar state of either happiness, if there is a change of fortune, or rage and depression at continued frustration. The ability to regulate and tolerate emotional extremes is a true sign of maturity.

This inner state of emotional challenge is often reflected in distorted, all-or-nothing reactions to other people. If an individual’s thinking reflects one’s own, that person might be liked. However, if that same person says something disagreeable to one’s own sensibility, they made be suddenly viewed as all bad, not a good person. The ability to tolerate the tension of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ qualities in the same person is often lacking. The result is a literal splitting apart of the other person, as either all good or all bad.

Often, intimate relationships suffer the brunt of splitting perceptions. If a couple are in sync with a desired activity, things flow smoothly. However, if they individually seek opposing activities this can result in an abrupt mood change and withdrawal from the now ‘bad’ other. Should the other give in to one’s want, there can be an instant positive mood shift, as the partner is restored to ‘goodness’.

Often, the partner who acquiesces to the other’s need creates a split within themselves. Though they smile and proceed outwardly, inwardly they carry a pocket of resentment that doesn’t allow full connection with their partner. This inner emotional stalemate can result in anxiety and depression, though outwardly all appears well.

We live in a time that has encouraged splitting on a grand scale. The political polarization of our time has resulted in roughly half the population viewing the other half as all bad. Either one agrees with the other or they are seen as all bad by the other. There is no tolerance for mixed feelings or beliefs. This is further exacerbated by the lifting of the social norm to suppress one’s angry or disappointed feelings.

This release of suppressed rage is cathartic and a relief from the constraints of political correctness, much like psychoanalysis freed the repressed sexuality of the Victorian era. Nonetheless, in both cases, primal release of repressed emotion does not result in emotional maturity and, in fact, often fuels an endless addiction to emotional excess.

The results of splitting are a divided self, a divided relationship, and a divided country. Though compromise might be a valued step in the resolution of conflict, it does not necessarily reflect true unity. True unity can only be achieved if there is full acceptance of other, perhaps as captured in the suggestion to ‘turn the other cheek’.

Jesus’s suggestion to turn the other cheek is fundamental to the shamanic practice of freeing oneself from the burden of self-importance. To not be offended by another’s behavior, however outrageous, allows one to tolerate the existence of the other. True, one may need to defend oneself from the behavior of the other if there is physical threat, but this is not driven by personal offense at the behavior and values of the other.

Beyond offense are the split, polarized attitudes of a world fatigued by Covid. One side clings protectively to the safety of retreat. The other lurches boldly into the right to live freely, even if it means death. Can we all not find both attitudes active within ourselves? Are we all not challenged with the conundrum of safety vs adventure, as we navigate the most basic decisions of daily life? Does it serve us to resolve that tension by becoming one-sided, projecting the rejected ‘evil’ opposite onto others?

Buddha proposed loving compassion for all. All includes evil. Rather than split off evil as something to be repressed, evil is granted its place in the flow of all that is. The ability to tolerate both the good and evil within the self sets the stage for unity of self. This, of course, requires a high degree of maturity and responsibility for managing and balancing the opposite tendencies within the self.

Tolerating the evil within the self can allow for acceptance of one’s partner as a being who sometimes pleases and sometimes disappoints. Accepting the evil within the self lessens a reactive emotional charge to  others who act upon their own evil impulses. Loving compassion does not preclude necessary boundaries, but with loving compassion those boundaries are not driven by divisive hatred.

Buddha arrived at the unity of enlightenment through the meditative practice of stillness and not grasping at any offering that presented, ranging from the most seductive to the most horrific. To achieve this, one must find deep calm, regardless of what thought presents from within or what scene is presented from without. The equanimity of this kind of detachment actually reflects total acceptance of everything, the key to unity.

To practice this meditation in our current world environment is to bring oneself to calm, within and without. Whatever appears, go to the breath: loving compassion on the inhalation, release of tension and judgment on the exhalation.

Intend unity; heal the split. As within so without.

Intending unity,

Chuck

Soulbytes

Soulbyte for Thursday February 6, 2020

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Maintain your own good values, your own true reality, even as the world around you loses its fixation on what is right and prosperous, and for the greater good of all. Do not let the actions of a few undermine the hearts of the many. Remain on the path of light and love, no matter what prevails, for light and love will always be the right answer.

Sending you light and love,

The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Thanks

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We’re all heading down the same human highway together…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Thank you, human animal, for housing our tumultuous spirits. In this time of The Battle of the Titans, i.e., the clashing and thrashing of major belief systems, as reflected all around us every day it seems, the human animal continues, loyally, to bear the dictates and consequences of our wild spirits.

Often the animal in us, with its powerful instincts, is blamed for the excesses and extremes of human nature. But what animal engages in pornography, creates and gorges sugary concoctions, or cheats? The human spirit, with its desire and mental body, is the genesis of our material obsessions and excessive behaviors. The human spirit alone is responsible for the highest and lowest of our creations. The hands of the animal body merely obey the promptings of the dominant spirit, the human mind.

Thanks, as well, to the human spirit that has chosen this embodied life in time and space. With its consciousness it knows its days are numbered. This is the engine behind its boundless invention and exploration. Still a child, compared to its instinctive animal host, the human spirit, in its innocence, is driven by curiosity into infinite discovery.

The major discovery of now is the relativity of our world, how uniform belief systems are the building blocks that congeal our material world. And belief systems are the province of the spirit. We are forced now to discover and explore our spirit realm, as in our unconsciousness we have generated chaos. The key to material survival is responsibility at the spirit level now.

Fortunately, we are multidimensional beings. Indeed, we are watched over and guided by our spirit families beyond human form. Let us give thanks to those who continue to care for and guide us, though they be far removed from the ignorance and sentimentality of us in human form. May we do our best to contribute to our soul group’s greater exploration of infinity and beyond.

Thanks to Gaia, for inviting us, for tolerating us. The great changes of now reflect her transformation, though certainly we bear marked responsibility for her changed course. Nonetheless, her changes are driving, symbiotically, our own spirit maturity, as we are compelled now to face the truth of our own desires and mental illusions if we are to survive the mess we have created.

Thanks to the wholeness behind it all that decided to discover itself in the multitude of forms and possibilities we partake in. Indeed, we are all endowed with the active energy of infinity, no possibilities excluded. Thus, we must embrace evil as a fundamental permutation that must be explored. Of course, love remains the overarching all-inclusive truth. Love is greater than evil because it accepts it. Evil always requires an enemy.

Though we must limit and destroy it, we ought to give thanks to evil itself. Evil is the change agent, the destroyer of forms. Where would we be without the change of seasons? How long could we be in paradise before boredom would set in? Our curiosity, the hallmark of our spirit, must journey on, or be dammed in the inferno of changelessness. Evil’s excesses must be checked, but the truth is that evil forces us into new life.

Thanks to reason, that which allows us all to be the scientists performing the experiments of our lives. May reason humbly accompany us, as we wake up to our greater interconnected spiritual essence. And may our reasoned conclusions chart our future course, once our obsession with armageddon has burned itself out.

Thanks to love, which grows and refines, and allows us to know and be one with us all, no exclusions.

With thanks and gratitude, and love to all, no exclusions,

Chuck