Tag Archives: integration

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Positively Negative

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Sometimes life is defined, balanced, black and white... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Sometimes life is defined, balanced, black and white…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

We live in a world of polarities. We come into life; we die. You can’t have one without the other; they are opposite sides of the same coin. To obtain the full value of that two-sided coin we must integrate both of its sides, positive and negative. By merging this seeming opposition into its true wholeness we allow fulfillment in this life and at death, as we seek to continue resolved of this life.

If we consider being positive as seeing the good qualities, the brighter side of life, we can see how a positive attitude invites openness, joining and expansion in our life decisions. Conversely, if we see being negative as a focus on the bad qualities of someone or something, we can see how a negative attitude helps us to create sharp boundaries and separateness, conservatively generating protection from the potential ill-effects of contact beyond the self.

In effect, positive moves us toward greater union, negative maintains protective boundaries. From this perspective we can appreciate both positive and negative as necessary attitudes to regulate and navigate life.

If I am to remain open to new life, be it through a relationship, experience or opportunity, I must be able to see the potential good in all of these situations. On the other hand, if I am to properly protect myself I must be open to seeing the predatory and dangerous potential in all encounters with living beings and life’s offerings.

Successful navigation of life necessitates the ability to integrate both negative and positive perspectives. We are all bipolar beings who must find the right balance of positive and negative perspectives. Bipolar disorder is actually a failure to find a constructive integration of these bipolar attitudes.

In deep inner work we seek to integrate the opposites... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
In deep inner work we seek to integrate the opposites…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In extreme cases we see a lack of corrective balance between poles where an individual clings too rigidly to one pole or another. For example, an extreme attachment to the positive pole can lead to such expansiveness that one gives up sleeping, hits the casinos and exhausts a life’s savings on a whim, seeing no need for limitation.

At the other extreme, over-attachment to the negative pole can lead to such a deep sense of futility in engaging in life that one might sink into a suicidal depression. In actuality, bipolar disorder leads to powerful mood swings. Eventually, the clinging to one pole exhausts into the opposite side, be it from negative to positive or visa-versa.

We live in a time where negativity and cynicism dominate. On one level this is an honest reaction to the expansive one-sided attitude of wealth and capital that sees no need for limitation, sharing, or protection of the environment.

However, when negativity is overly dominant it tends to generate a feeling of powerlessness, with little energy left to make any effort toward positive change. While we need to respect the truths that the negative perspective reveals, we must also be mindful of becoming too polarized to this extreme, which can lead to inertia and indifference.

On the other hand, sometimes depression is necessary, as life as it has been lived must be halted while we go inward to find the seeds of new positive life. Seedlings require care and attention, as does bringing new parts of the self into life. This is not the time of rapid expansion indicative of a dominantly positive attitude.

In our wholeness we become centered, light and dark in balance... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
In our wholeness we become centered, light and dark in balance…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Even in the midst of a depression, however, I generally suggest remaining positively negative. That is, to hold onto the positive knowing that even a depression is but a stage in the birth of new life with its eventual return to expansiveness that in due time will recede and acquiesce to even newer life, as we take our ever-evolving journey.

On that infinite journey,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Multiple Personality In Order

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In the dreaminess of the dream, what do you see? -Photo by Jan Ketchel
In the dreaminess of the dream, what do you see? -Photo by Jan Ketchel

Carl Jung brought our attention to nature’s use of the mandala as a symbol of our wholeness. Whenever some configuration of a circle and a square appears in a dream, follow that trail. Pick up that lowly copper penny inside a box, something of your valuable wholeness lies there. Follow that bouncing ball as it hits the square pavement stones. It may lead you to the next piece of the puzzle of self.

Typically, the mandala is divided into four sections, symbolic of our divided selves. Wholeness requires that we discover, develop, relate to, and bring into an integrated life, our very divided and separated inner selves.

Perhaps at the deepest level our divided selves reflect our lives lived through infinity, our incarnations in different worlds at different times. Sometimes in my consulting room clients are compelled to visit and integrate the challenges and lessons of past lives. More often than not, however, this deeper integration awaits as a final task to completion of our present life, as we prepare for transition into new life.

Division within the self is often a function of trauma. In childhood trauma especially, our developing selves are confronted with challenges beyond our ability to emotionally and cognitively master. Such experiences are split off, frozen in time, stored in the body for future reconciliation when our evolving self has greater mastery and an ability to meet the challenges of its lost self or selves.

All individuals experience splintering of self through the normal socialization process known as education. During schooling we are sharply molded into more uniform beings, despite personality differences. Unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are relegated to what Carl Jung called the shadow personality that takes up life in the darkly impersonal unconscious mind and body.

That shadow personality seeks life in our fantasy, in our less than conscious states where it can seize control in psychic projections and obsessions that dominate our attention, regardless of conscious rational intent. Even predatory behaviors may be viewed as compensatory states of shadow possession, reactive to the dominating power of socialization. It’s no wonder we have a society up in arms about limitation of its arms, so aware are we of the destructive power of the shadow. Would that we were equally aware of the nature of projection; where the shadow is so easily disowned within the self, only to be feared and projected, placed out there, in the dangerous other.

The truth is, we are a multiplicity of beings, in fact a multiplicity of energetic beings. As Jan hints in her blog, we may indeed all be the same being. Wow, the integration of that realization is indeed of the highest order!

Our challenge, as Jung’s discovery of the archetypal mandala suggests, is to find all our missing parts and fit them into a unified whole. These parts all come with their challenges, ranging from facing a past life to facing down the tyrants of trauma and freeing the lost children of the self, to finding one’s voice in song or finding one’s rhythm in body movement.

The shamanic tool of recapitulation, like following the bouncing ball of the mandala in dreaming, is a time worn tool to putting in order the multiple personalities we call Self. That task is a journey of a lifetime. It’s why we’re here.

I end with a quote from The Book Of Us, Jeanne speaking of taking the road to life’s completion, channeled by Jan on May 30, 2008:

The ultimate purpose and reason for living in that realm is to complete your evolution at that level of learning, and to prepare the self to move on to the next level. Completion entails taking into consideration every bit of who you are, and putting together the puzzle of the self, holding the self responsible for finding what you need to make this completion happen …To achieve completion must you be prepared to leave your recapitulated self upon the shores of that world and advance to a new level where only completed souls may go..

Following that bouncing ball and dreaming on,
Chuck

Excerpt from page 207 in The Book Of Us.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Parallel Lives, the Maze, and the Ego Self

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The Big Bang

In the beginning, so say the scientists, was the Big Bang, and the universe was born. In his seminal piece, The Trauma of Birth (1924), Otto Rank describes the Big Bang experience of human birth and its psychological impact throughout the life cycle.

On a soul level, many have retrieved their journeys through infinity; their lives lived before the big bang birth into their current lives in this world. These soul retrievals point to a parallel life, a soul of many lives that gives birth to the Self of this life.

The decision as to what life to be born into is made at that soul level, as part of that soul’s evolving journey and needs in infinity. Some have called this process Karma.

For most of us, the big bang experience of our birth trauma into the life we are in is a shock that severs us from the knowing of our soul and our many lives previously lived. We are born into a maze with huge walls that seal off the memory of prior life and our connection to our greater soul that continues to live in tandem with the self we become in this world.

A hint of previous lives

We are here on a mission, and that mission requires a blank slate maze-of-unknowing. A maze is a definite, constrained life: a family, a culture, a set of circumstances, a world within which to encounter specific challenges, and a world within which to develop an identity, a sense of self, an Ego—a point of consciousness.

That ego will become our working definition of who we are and also our engine to accomplish our mission in this world, that is: the reason we came here, the reason we were born into the circumstances we arrived into.

Had we the full awareness of our greater soul coming into this life, our mission would be compromised. We’d be unable to fully inhabit the role we need to experience in taking on the challenge of this life. However, the ego does, in its separated state from its greater soul, experience a deep underlying sense of insecurity and separation anxiety. The ego retains an awareness of its orphan state and part of its mission in this world is to reunite with its true birth parent, its greater soul.

The circumstances we are born into

Life for the ego is a fragmented self in a fragmented world—life in a maze—a neatly constructed world, but only a fragment of life at large.

Traumas beyond birth continue the fragmentation of ego self into Ego States. Ego states are separate senses of self that coexist and live in tandem—parallel lives in tandem, parallel lives within the ego’s life in this world.

Ego states may be hidden from or known to each other. Some ego states remain largely in the closet, holding frightening traumatic memories. Some ego states suffer arrested development, child states necessarily pushed aside or denied for adaptive reasons. We discover and live the parallel lives of our ego states in our symptoms—i.e.: ailments, diseases—hinting at and suggesting the truths of our parallel lives. We discover and live the parallel lives of our ego states in our mood states—i.e.: depression, elation, hope, hopelessness, fear, etc. We also discover our ego states in obsessive projections—those we are drawn to in admiration or those we abhor. Somewhere in those projections are the mirrors to our unknown, unloved, or forgotten ego states. We also discover our ego states and our connection to our greater soul in dreams, active imagination, and synchronistic phenomena.

Parallel lives

If we can suspend our rational judgments and explore the characters and messages of dreams, synchronicities, and other psychic phenomena, we begin to step outside the maze of our narrow selves and access the fullness and resource of all that we truly are.

This is the process of integration that unites the fragments of this life and potentially the fragments of all lives lived—our greater soul—within this life. This is a mighty task though, as it asks us to truly take in the Big Bang realization of all that we are: We are much more than our orphan ego clings to in its neatly defined maze.

Though the knocking down of the walls of our mazes may shatter our “known” selves, it is not without its rewards. We discover a-maze-ing resources and a life of magic now freed for fulfillment beyond the maze, a once needed but now much too small home.

Out of the many become one: Parallel lives united, beyond the maze, continue the soul’s journey in infinity.

Chuck

Messages from Jeanne

#656 Responsibility

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Jeanne Marie Ketchel
Channeled by Jan Ketchel

Dear Jeanne,
Last night, I dreamed this question: Who is really in charge? In my dream I felt that it referred to integrating all the parts of the self, by first identifying those parts and how they operate. Is this the next step in our inner work?

My Dear One, inner work requires taking full responsibility for the self and, yes, that includes all aspects of the self. One must fully understand how one operates under many circumstances and in many different roles, taking full responsibility for each of these separate aspects of self, those who are known and those who are unknown. In order to more fully explore this process one must understand that this is very deep inner work. It is a process that is mostly played out innerly. As each part of the self emerges it plays its role, most assuredly innerly, having its way there before it ever emerges in the outer world, before it shows itself in an outer way.

The inner process is most intriguing in this manner. Your inner self may shift and a new self emerge long before you are aware of it. And, yes, it may be triggered by what is happening outside of you, but more often than not it is triggered by your own inner workings and this is where your task must focus: on determining who is really in charge inside you. This requires taking full responsibility for the inner self, for all the parts of the self, those who are most often present, those who slumber, and those who attempt to emerge and live in your worlds, both inner and outer.

Who is in control? Who is making you do what you do? Who is creating the havoc and the dilemmas that you face? Who is responsible for your attitudes, moods, feelings, emotional states, and your choices and challenges? Well, who do you think? You are, of course!

Being able to accept full responsibility for the self requires taking responsibility for the inner self as well as the outer self. It requires identifying and studying who you are and how you operate in the world, but more thoroughly how you operate inside of you. And you are really the only one who can do this because you are the only one who is present inside of you.

You may think that you are infected with energy of another, and for all intents and purposes you may be, but that does not relieve you of the fact that your own inner energy, of one sort or another, has been awoken by such an invasion. Do not dismiss any coincidences as merely that, as merely passing things of insignificance, for if you do that you will lose an important point that must be noted. Inner work requires just that, inner work. And who better to do such work than you, the inner you.

I suggest, in order to get to the bottom of the inner process, that you make note of all the parts of the self that emerge. Note how they appear, how they seep into your inner world, how they act once there, and how you feel as a result of their presence. Then you must find a means of acceptance, because this person you may suddenly find yourself to be is in fact you, as odd as that may seem.

You can have many parts without being crazy. You can have many parts and, unless you pay attention to them, you may not know they are there. But once you turn inward and investigate how they operate inside you, you will recognize them and know they are indeed part of you. This process is a process of taking full responsibility for all aspects of self. In so doing you are learning the first steps in integration of self.

I do not ask you to love all these parts of your self, for I do not find that possible until you really get to know them and allow then to speak up as to why they are there and what message they have for you. Only in fully understanding their role in your life will you one day be able to love them, but until then you might as well accept that you may not even like them, so loving then is not an option either.

Find out who you are inside the self. Take full responsibility for all aspects of the inner self by acknowledging the fact that you are really quite mysterious, especially to your self. Allow your self to investigate the true meaning of each one of your inner parts, their roles and their processes, how they work inside of you and what they are showing you about your self. Treat each part with reverence and wonder, for they have found ways to present themselves to you through all your defenses and pretensions, through your oblivion and your denial.

Be amazed at the process that you confront each day, for each day is different. You are different each day too, but you must find out just what that means and take full responsibility for being that new inner being and fully explore the possibilities and potential being offered as you do your inner work.