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Chuck’s Place: The Human Animal Body Is The Soul

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Soul within Body within High Spirit…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

The soul is our everyday sense of self, a subtle energy body that fits snugly inside the contours of our physical body. The glow, or aura, around our physical human animal body is the radiant energy of the soul within.

The soul houses both our mind and our emotional self. Our emotional self includes our desire body. It is the magnetic draw of the desire body, in conjunction with the subconscious portion of our mind, that initially attracts to it the physical body that the soul will extend itself into to participate in a life in human form.

The soul completely controls the physical body, particularly through suggestions delivered to the subconscious portion of its mind. The soul often drifts out of the physical body, particularly in times of physical sleep. Though it remains connected to the physical body, and can return instantly if needed, the soul is free to travel out of body, where it interacts with its subtle home territory of the astral world. When its cord is severed from the body, at physical death, the soul returns to life in the astral realm.

The soul itself is a vehicle of our High Spirit, that portion of ourselves that lives in infinity and sends the soul on missions in finite time space. Thus, as our soul moves into a physical human life it acquires experience and knowledge that it ultimately brings home to its High Spirit in its afterlife existence. Both the soul and the High Spirit learn, grow and evolve with each lifetime lived.

Karma is generally the leitmotif of one’s next mission in human form, as it reflects the need to further explore and master the consequences of  decisions and actions taken in one’s just-completed life.

Upon preparation for new life, the subconscious is preprogrammed by our High Spirit’s blueprint for our soul’s next earthly existence. In preparation for incarnate life, the soul attracts to it the best earthly family, physical body and life circumstance to achieve its assigned mission in its new life.

Of course, genetics do play their role. However, the choice of a specific genetic history and potential is already preset in the desire body’s attractive force, for example in the family we are drawn to be born into. Thus, the human animal body that we are is actually the product of pure High Spirit intent. As above, so below.

The physical body and the soul are not opposites. In fact, they are really extensions of the same thing. Our earthly body is the clothes our soul wears to have its earthly existence. Physical death is merely a shedding of old clothes that once fit so well. At death our soul ascends, taking with it the experiences of our physical lifetime, into a soulful period of reflection and rejuvenation, as well as a reconciliation with our High Spirit.

The human animal body that we inhabit is largely governed by the archetypes that shape our species. These include the core instincts of survival and reproduction. The body is maintained by the subconscious mind, which follows the laws of nature to ensure its survival.

Essentially, we are unconsciously being governed by archetypes and genetics until our blank slate ego matures into consciousness. Ego is actually a part of the soul’s mental body, fashioned to identify with its physical body and social context in what we call our personality. The ego has an imposed amnesia of its true royal heritage—that is, its immortal High Spirit—to enable it to attach to the earthly circumstance it needs to fulfill its mission.

As the ego matures in life it begins to have greater access to its broader identity and divine lineage. These developing realizations offer opportunity for clarity, through greater detachment from personality, as the ego fulfills the goals of its soul’s true mission. As the ego moves beyond its narcissistic wrappings it is better positioned to serve its soul’s and, ultimately, its High Spirit’s intent. Free will eventually is exercised as acquiescence to true need.

The process of ego maturity consumes most of our earthly life. Much of our existence is spent trying to realize our earthly personality’s ambitions. Self-importance, victimhood and entitlement dominate our lives. The resolution and refinement of these attitudes and emotions ultimately accrue to our High Spirit’s enhancement, allowing it to advance as well.

Ego, in the early stages of maturation, exercises its free will from the bondage of archetypes to prove its worth through wealth, accomplishment and fulfillment of desire. Too often does the body, with its animal instincts, get scapegoated as the source of excess and evil. No, the human animal body is the product of the soul’s creation, as well as the soul’s choices. The animal body reflects the true curiosity and necessity of High Spirit.

What High Spirit asks of soul, with its extended physical body, is to master its challenges in time space so that High Spirit can launch further into infinite possibility.

The archetypes are our babysitters until we are ready to assume responsibility for life in full maturity. Foolishly transgressing the laws of nature are a necessary stage of development. Heart-centered transcendence, or refinement of archetypes, is the propulsion for High Spirit advancement.

The chaos of now reflects attempts to restore archaic archetypal laws, or to indulge in the total freedom of narcissistic free will. These are reflections of the collective soul’s current healing crisis, a time of great turmoil and transformation.

Remember: The karma of now will provide great advancement of soul.

But don’t ever blame the human animal body. The animal body is High Spirit’s honest material reflection of its own soul’s journey. As above, so below.

Spirited Animal,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: The Power of Belief

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“There is nothing that is not divine.” – Aurobindo
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

From a shamanic perspective, the cosmic dance of now lays bare the power of belief in generating the reality we live in. Our belief system is largely shaped by the messages we internalize from the outside world that become the internal dialogue that interprets our reality. The belief system we sign up for becomes our reality.

At present, the mass of humanity is engaged in a civil war of conflicting belief systems. The consequence of such disagreement is an instability of worldview that threatens basic security, both within the individual and in the world at large. Without a collective boundary of belief, the world is subject to a barrage of all that has been suppressed and repressed in the individual and in the collective human psyche as well.

Civilization has, at its root, civility, defined as a politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech. Clearly we are in a time that has overturned politeness and courtesy in behavior and speech. What’s been unleashed is the repressed energy that lies beneath the surface ripple of civilization, what Freud called the Id and what Jung called the shadow. Civilization is currently overrun by the power of these discontented parts of its psyche.

Our fragile civilization is charged with addressing the truth of its discontents. A new balance is called for. This balance must consider the animal within the human being. That animal has long been the sequestered Minotaur, lost in the labyrinth of the unconscious.

That shameful human, with animal head and tail, is filled with rage toward the civilized human it blames for its rejection. Meanwhile, its human counterpart is both terrified by its power and hungry for its passion. Clearly these two spheres of existence have a place in human reconciliation. Domination of the unconscious as a defense strategy to protect civilization is unstable and cuts off a wellspring of vital energy needed for a fulfilling life.

The opportunity of now is to construct a belief system that values and reconciles all parts of being human. Thus the human animal and human spirit are recognized as valid parts of a human being that both contribute to and enhance human life. Both centers of being are valued for their inherent knowledge and creative potential.

Alexander Lowen, Wilhelm Reich’s protege, pointed out that human beings rarely experience full orgasm in their sexual contact because they have lost their connection to their animal core that truly knows how to physically move. Thus, human sexuality is rarely fulfilling, dominated as it is by the ego’s mental control and expectations.

A belief system that incorporates both our inherited nature and our ability to elevate it to the spiritual heights of love, offers a reconciliation of the human condition that may better serve our evolving civilization.

As always, be empowered to begin within. All the forces without that both attract and repel us are also our own projections from within. All that we hate and fear are as much a part of us as all that we love and long for. A belief system that accepts this equation is poised to find true stability and wholeness within. Wholeness within, wholeness without.

Optimistically,

Chuck

NOTE: Taking a week off, so no writings from either Jan or I next week, including Soulbytes. We look forward to reconnecting starting the week of September 14, 2020.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Addiction to Human

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In Roman law, addiction was the term applied to restitution or punishment for a crime. The convicted criminal was addicted, or bound to servitude or slavery, to their master, the offended party in the criminal case.

Addiction to human (and self-importance too!)
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Spirit beings, who either choose or become trapped by a fascination with physical matter, become attracted to, attached to, and bound to, or, as Roman law dictates, addicted to, the constraints of such matter. In this case, that concentration of matter is a physical body, our animal form, what we define as a human being. Human beings are spirit beings addicted to being human. Addiction is the price for the “crime” of becoming human. Certainly, this notion has resonance with the plight of Adam and Eve, banished for their crime of human adventure.

Once the addiction sets in, what ensues is lifetimes of spirit (pure consciousness) living, in experiential detail, the full range of physical possibilities associated with inhabiting a material master (the body) or masters (many bodies), as one may reincarnate in a variety of lifetimes in earthly time/space.

Thus, life in the human form becomes one of various permutations of addiction, or compulsive servitude, to the wants and appetites of one’s physical host, the human body. Freedom from addiction would then ultimately require releasing one’s attachment to human form and returning to Oneself, to original spirit wholeness—what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico called a Magical Being or Energetic Being—freed from addiction, or fixation upon life in a physical body.

Energetic beings flow. Human beings fixate on all things human. Thus, even the most altruistic, giving, loving human can still be defined as an addict. That kind of addiction might take the form of luxuriating in the good feelings of giving. Perhaps the addiction might also belie an underlying attachment to the self-importance of being a selfless, giving being. Perhaps the addiction might simply be one’s final go-round in time/space, the attachment to saying goodbye and releasing from physical life in this dimension forever.

As with the  high failure rate of all addiction rehabs, it’s hard to skip grades in Earth School. Each class generally lasts at least a lifetime, and it must be fully lived and fully completed to truly move on, to really be done with that particular addiction in the human form. In AA terms, one who skips over completion of an addiction becomes a dry drunk, not drinking but still equally addicted to the coveted substance in the form of nasty resentment.

The mastery of an addiction is the completion of one’s course with it. The final exam asks you to answer to your exploration of every facet of the addiction. Does it still hold you in its grip? Are you repressing knowledge of your continued attachment? Can you stare it in the face, smile, and say, “I know you! We had quite a journey together, but, truthfully, we are no longer traveling companions. I wish you the  best. I love you, but I must move on now. Thanks for the fullness of our journey together.”

This level of completion advances one to the next class, the next level of fixation in the human form. The addiction might shift from substance to money, from victim to abuser, from moral heights to trickster depths, from straight to gay, or from man to woman, as one’s soul explores and gets to know and fully experience its addiction to all the possibilities in human form. The road to freedom may indeed require lifetimes of habitual patterns on a similar fixation until one becomes really bored, often a sign of true mastery and true doneness.

The process of advancement to Earth School graduation involves spirit’s deepening mastery of its addictions. Mastery ultimately leads to real detachment from the addictive fixation that was chosen as the experience in any given lifetime. Real detachment ultimately includes a complete release of emotional attachment to all things physical.

Thus, one bears, upon completion, no resentment, entitlement, anger, negative thoughts about, judgments toward, or obsession with anyone or anything they have been attached to in their lives. One can be thankful toward all the characters, both villains and lovers, for the full range of experiences shared with them, or acted upon them, in their various lives upon the Earth. In true detachment, the overriding feeling is one of love and compassion for all fellow travelers.

Love is indeed the Alchemist’s gold of Earth go-rounds, harnessed and purified in the addiction retort of a human lifetime. The experiment begins with tumultuous attachment, where love is first encountered in its most possessive animal form, with what we call being born. Non-attachment at this stage in human form results in death via failure to thrive, psychosis—where spirit can’t fully humanize—or psychopathy, where spirit serves shadow alone.

As Freud observed, this humanized primal animal energy slowly becomes sublimated throughout childhood, as spirit advances toward civilization. As recent Senate hearings suggest, the fallout for this is what Jung called the acting out of the shadow, where the  imprisoned animal can overtake its civilized ego, and pounce.

For love to advance, and be enhanced, it must travel the path of the energy chakras throughout its various lifetimes, finally reaching the heart chakra, the tipping point toward spirit hegemony in human life. Reaching the heart center signifies the human emergence from the primary narcissism of the lower chakras. At the heart center, spirit is able to burn through the veils of illusion that have been generated by the ego’s journey through power, possession, and control in the lower chakras.

From the heart center, spirit is granted its unique opportunity for existence, and love is experienced in transparent sharing, seeing, and communicating. And, yes, the human sexual animal is fully incorporated at this level, entwined in the fullness of love.

From the level of the heart center, the human spirit is finally ready to lighten the heavy burden of its animal survival instinct. That survival instinct transitions from fixation on animal survival to preparation for finally returning to pure spirit form, the human sojourn in Earth time/space completed.

The chakras above the heart center further raise love to its highest human form, pure unattached love. This enhancement is the product of successfully mourning all the required losses of time/space existence, including family, friends, and all the loved ones and things of this world, most especially one’s animal self, the physical body, which must be freely surrendered to death for spirit to move on.

Completion of addiction to human is the shedding of all special attachment to all of the characters, in all of the lives lived in human form, all equally loved in unattached super love. Absorbing and surrendering this fullness lightens the spirit, advancing it to its true state as a Magical Being, ready to take with it enhanced super love, as it launches into its next journey in infinity, curious as to what comes next.

Now, that’s one worthy reason to suffer the human addiction! To put it succinctly: Curiosity is the spirit’s mother of exploration.

Addiction is the thorough exploration of new territory. Repetition is the technology of addiction. Boredom marks the first signs of completion; depression, the precipitant to actual completion. The technology to emerge from depression is recapitulation. During recapitulation, old attachments are released, and energy reclaimed from those attachments is accrued for the next spirit launch.

With the magic fully gathered, off we go, having enriched that which we explored, taking forward all the love, deeply enriched, deeply curious…

Sweetly suffering the human addiction, and curious,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Trial by Fire

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By fire…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Trial is ordeal. Fire is passion! Trial by Fire is enduring the ordeal of passion, a deeply challenging encounter, the encounter of now.

Human passion emanates from the root of our instinctual animal being. When activated our faces redden, our voices growl and howl, our bodies thrash and react involuntarily, seized by the heat of passion. Like flames in a fire, passion flails recklessly.

One step above this hot core of our fiery roots are emotions, which, though flushed with the fire of passion, are somewhat tamed by our ego as they churn in the furnace of our solar plexus. These are the more manageable emotions of anger, frustration, desire, craving, competitiveness, and narcissism.

Finally, at the mental region of the civilized self, are feelings, which have rationally transformed the fire at the root into energetic units of valuation. Here we have our feeling judgments: I like, want, need, am attracted to, am saddened by, repulsed by, made happy by, etc. These rational feelings bear little resemblance or relationship to their passionate roots.

Jung observed that the Christian era, which correlated with the Piscean Age of the past 2000 years, contributed greatly to the advancement of this mental plane in humanity, however, this at the expense of its connection with its earthly passions, which became the province of the rejected devil. Though this internal civil war was won at the spirit mental plane its resulting hegemony is wearing thin upon its devils below.

That brings us to today, the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, where those rejected devils have risen up in uncontrollable flames of passion as they sweep the Earth in actual fires, political uprisings, wars on social media, conflict in human relationships, and warring splits within the human psyche. From the outermost perspective the Earth itself has become an alchemical retort with fire its catalyzing agent, as all warring opposites are pitted against each other in a Trial by Fire indeed.

This appears to be the first spiritual challenge of the Aquarian Age: to take on the reconciliation of its formerly disowned passions, at its human animal core, with its high reaching values generated from its abstract mental plane. Apparently, the main technology of the Christian era, keeping separate the animal and mental selves, with the mental plane maintaining superiority, can no longer contain the needs of the self, or the world, as both push for a more comprehensive wholeness.

The unleashing of previously contained fiery passions upon the world stage, with wild abandon and without regret, is the approach stoked by those most in charge of world policy today. Many in the world populace now model this unleashing of fiery passion without restraint upon any who would oppose their positions. This Trial by Fire is producing many casualties. Justified or not, the fact is that these flames are  rapidly burning down the foundation of modern civilization.

All must be where they are in the trial. For many participating in the fiery war of words, the outside world becomes the furnace of their transformative process. No one can be convinced to give up what they are attached to. When we argue and fight, our passions embody us, often at great cost to our energy reserves and inner balance. These battles are renewed in seemingly inexhaustible intensity as the world fights itself on social media.

Nonetheless, detachment is not a choice, it must be achieved. One method is through sheer exhaustion where passion exhausts the body and psyche and survival forces us to ultimately let go. Though  a costly energetic approach, many are convinced that outer protest and confrontation are critical to change.

For those more innerly inclined, the furnace of transformation is the hologram of the self, which makes its worldly contribution through the axiom, as within so without.

To contain within the self all the warring passions of animal and spirit in a heated process—that looks not outside the self for the relief of blame—is a formidable furnace of transformation. Therapy is one such vessel for this process as we confront and own all that we are—passion and spirit—in a journey whose destination is greater wholeness vs. greater domination. As with the outer playing field, the inner playing field must itself arrive at a true place of detachment where truth prevails, special interests burned through.

Trial by Fire is where we are. Know that there is always sanctuary in the human heart. All must have their safe place to release and rejuvenate. Love is the  most inclusive respite, as love can even love the part of the self that hates, but we must burn through much before we can truly inhabit it.

Nonetheless, heart-centered breathing heals the wounds and calms the nerves. Take advantage of it.

From the heart,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Guilt

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Guilt is the emotional consequence of knowing, on some level, that we are not the mask we portray ourselves to be in the world. We are guilty because we know we fail to meet the standard of perfection. We are aware of our inferiority and our darkness hidden within.

Who is that animal lurking within? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Who is that animal lurking within?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Actually, this knowing is a saving grace, because despite having to suffer the torture of guilt, we are owning the existence of our dark side. We encounter and suffer inwardly the dilemma that in a less conscious individual is only known through the disowned projection of one’s dark side onto a scapegoat that reflects the hidden darkness within. In projection, guilt is avoided because the real problem is projected “out there.” It can be eliminated and controlled by imprisoning or killing off the bad guy “out there.”

Our time is rife with mass projections of evil onto Muslims, Mexicans, African Americans, women, Democrats, Republicans, Jews, Palestinians; the list is endless. The world is currently completely divided into separatist camps that see themselves as morally superior to all others. They completely project their inferior dark side onto some other camp “out there.”

The preponderance of these polarized camps in our time is the surface repercussion of a more deeply brewing clash between the collective unconscious that contains all our darkness with the idealized moral superior values that our egos identify with in our religions and modernistic lifestyles. Would that the collective consciousness of the world could feel guilty, that is, own more fully and grapple with the true depth of its nature versus continually locating it outside where it destroys its neighbor and the world in order to be delivered from its own evil.

Unfortunately, though the world must arrive at this deeper truth to survive now, it is the individual that must lead the world in this task. The individual who faces their own shadow is the advance guard of a transformed world. On the other hand, how fortunate that every individual who faces the true depth of their own shadow advances the world on its path of survival. How empowering!

How do we own our shadow? How do we resolve our guilt? To begin with, as long as we only identify ourselves as light beings, or as beings who must be purified of or relieved of our own darkness, we will always suffer guilt. As Erich Neumann states:

“Just as light cannot be extinguished by the superior power of darkness, so too there is no evidence to show that darkness can ever be abolished by any superior power on the part of light.” *

We are all light and shadow... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We are all light and shadow…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Light requires the contrast of shadow to be defined; dark requires the contrast of light to be known. One cannot be separated from the other and be whole. The two are inextricably opposite sides of the same wholeness.

Human beings are beings of light in their spirit, as reflected in mental processes and consciousness. Human beings are beings of darkness in the depths of their instinctual, animal natures. Spirit beings could not be in this world without their animal bodies. Animal and spirit are inextricably linked in a partnership in this world, saddled with the challenge of developing a relationship which acknowledges and finds life for both animal and spirit.

If we identify with an ethic that says passion and pleasure are evil, we will suffer guilt. Our wounded animal self will torture, ad nauseum, our morally superior controlling ego with depression and “bad” fantasy. We must abandon this old ethic. Our new ethic must grant the human animal its basic human right: The right to pursue happiness. With this gesture, our spirit consciousness acknowledges its animal partner, though the challenge of true integration and reconciliation with the fullness of who we are is indeed the greatest human challenge.

Guilt can be relieved when we accept that the animal hungers, lusts, and rages. The fact that the animal has these experiences does not make it bad; it simply makes it a human animal.

Of course, it is equally appropriate for its spirit counterpart to require of the animal a bit of refinement and restraint. Once the animal energies can find satisfaction and expression, with conscious consent and collaboration that allows for a fuller expression of all that we are, we advance.

What ultimately will relieve us of our guilt, is to embrace a new human ethic: Integrated wholeness versus perfection based on suppression or repression of the animal—that which has led us to our current status: a crumbling civilization with its discontents!

Reconciliation, when all is known and accepted... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Reconciliation, when all is known and accepted…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

May we all herald in this new ethic, beyond guilt, as brave pioneers taking full responsibility for our individual wholeness in our interdependent one world.

Going beyond,
Chuck

* Reference: Erich Neumann, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, p. 46.

Note: I am grateful to Erich Neumann and his book, Depth Psychology and a New Ethic, which has inspired much of this blog.