We must all prepare for our own vision quest… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
After four sweat lodges and several days on a vision quest, Jonas Elrod—the seeker who made the documentary Wake Up that Jan references in her blog earlier this week—reaches out to God, as throughout his quest his concept of God has constantly changed and now he is befuddled. He begs for clarity on the meaning of God, of religion, the correct path, etc., and is met with a vision of fingers pointing at a bigtop tent. He sees that the tent is empty, the posts fall down and the tent collapses. This vision is accompanied by the words: “All pointers point in the same direction.” He understands that what he seeks has nothing to do with religion or church, that there is no life, or only the illusion of life, inside the tent, inside the church. Inside the tent there is nothing.
Jung unmasked the same truth about modern religion: dogma and ritual are dressed in archetypal wrappings with no life inside them, no pathways to spirit. In his youth, Jung had a powerful dream where the heavens opened up and dropped excrement upon the church steeple. He was to spend the rest of his life carving a pathway to spirit for modern humanity.
Jung journeyed through the ancient religions, East and West, in search of valid pathways to the soul. He, like Joseph Campbell, discovered that religious symbolism and practice were relative to the time and place of their emergence. The gods and saviors of one era were merely local masks or pathways to spirit that fit the style and custom of those times. Evolution, however, requires that new pathways emerge, relevant to changing times. All religions that cling to the images of another time cannot support or transport the modern soul to its destiny and fulfillment.
Jung’s greatest discovery was that connection to spirit lies not in attachment to some mask of God, but in direct contact with spirit in numinous experience. Jung’s process of psychotherapy opens the door to direct encounter, direct experience, direct communication between consciousness and the greater self—Spirit—to arrive at healing and fulfillment. The challenge for all seekers and initiates, of all times, is to take the journey into the unknown—like Jonas Elrod did—to become heroes in search of their souls. Such a journey means encountering, confronting, and slaying all the energies that lie in the unknown, in the form of sensations, intense emotions, and powerful beliefs and images.
Do we need to be inside the tent? -Photo by Chuck Ketchel
In our time, the quest for wholeness with spirit has been largely projected outwardly onto materialism, romanticism, and consumption. As a consequence, spirit has lodged itself inside the empty circus tent of consumerism on a grand scale, in the empty search for romantic love, in the desire for more, and in the addiction to substance. Modern humanity is compelled to seek its wholeness in the tent of emptiness. Spirit is behind this, but as a trickster now, ravaging us with knocks of the spirit as we relentlessly grasp for our wholeness in that which shines with promise.
Spirit comes in the form of the trickster because it needs to meet us where our projections are caught. It’s the only way we can engage it, so it meets us where we are. If we are bent on romantic love that’s where spirit will meet us. It has to have us wake up to our fixation—that’s not a judgment. God comes in the form that God comes in, to wake us up. Hence, the emptiness of the tent, because that’s where we all are. It’s only through fully grasping and crushing in the emptiness, in collapsing that empty tent, that we will be forged for the next step of the journey—direct experience within.
Bill W., ultimately through a connection with Jung, had his direct experience in a vision that lifted his thirst for spirit without—from “spirits”—to spirit within, to inner union and wholeness. AA was founded on direct contact with spirit, with the mask of spirit unmasked. As spirit is freed of its empty substance container, it is brought home, inwardly to self. Thus, AA works as a valid religion when its adherents find their way to direct experience and union with spirit within. Short of that, AA leads only to control of dry spirits.
Jung warned against the seduction of adopting the garbs of exotic practices and ritual as a replacement for empty local religions. He frowned upon yoga and Buddhism replacing religion in the West. Though I think his warning is valid, he himself used yoga to withstand the energies of the collective unconscious as he went deeper into his own night sea journey. The message being: take what works, but go inward and do the work there rather than wearing it outwardly.
We’re all just searching for the same thing… what really lies deeper within… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The key to direct experience lies in the methodologies, not the wrappings of many ancient traditions. Witness the sweat lodge and the vision quest in Wake Up.
So do engage in the practices of yoga or the meditation techniques of Buddhism, the prayers of many traditions, and the many worlds of dreaming, or whatever works for you.
When Carlos Castaneda would discuss the Magical Passes of Tensegrity, he’d exclaim: “Suspend judgment! Just do it and see what happens!” In other words, avoid the trappings of faith, belief and deity. Just do the techniques, and see what happens: Communion, or not?
Furthermore, if your spirit lands somewhere in the circus tent just accept it. You must pursue it until you unmask its emptiness—the direct experience of emptiness. This is what Jonas Elrod finally achieved during his own spiritual quest, the emptiness that led to his own direct experience.
From the emptiness of the circus tent, you may be ready to encounter spirit directly, in direct experience at home, in the depths of the self.
What is the significance of a burnt out compressor? – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
In 1916, the period that came to be known as Jung’s Confrontation with the Unconscious, as recorded in his now publicly available Red Book, Jung’s household and family were seized by a haunting. As he relates in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
“There was an ominous atmosphere all around me. I had the strange feeling that the air was filled with ghostly entities… My eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through her room. My second daughter, independently of her elder sister, related that twice in the night her blanket had been snatched away… (T)he front doorbell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. Then I knew that something had to happen.” (From pp 190-191.)
What ultimately did happen was Jung’s interaction with a group of ancient spirits. Once he engaged in the dialogue the hauntings stopped. These dialogues were documented in the Red Book, and prompted Jung to embark on his lifetime career of mapping the deeper structure and dynamics of the psyche.
Among his major discoveries was the principle of synchronicity. As evidenced from his personal haunting, spiritual forces from within the psyche can effect physical reality. In Jung’s case, he had not been paying attention to the deeper layers of what he came to call the collective unconscious and so the collective unconscious came to encounter him in a physical haunting. Physical events in one’s personal life may represent the true energetic picture of reality at a moment in time. This is the synchronistic value of an oracle like the I Ching as well, who’s reading is built by the image generated through the physical throwing of coins.
In Vedantic science we are beings comprised of five layers. Our outermost sheath is our physical body within which lies a series of energy bodies, housing our emotional, mental, wisdom, and blissful selves. Beneath all the sheaths lies the Atman, the Buddha, or simply God, beyond all the many Masks of God, as Joseph Campbell would say. We become enlightened when we fully realize—become—our deepest nature, shedding our attachment to all our sheaths.
In the meantime, we are complex beings who synchronistically interact with our deeper spirit in a myriad of ways. We are constantly being pushed by our spirit to discover and become who we really are. Life events can be viewed as our conscious or unconscious relationship with our knocks from spirit. This happens individually in the events of our lives and collectively in the events of our time. We are now in a time of great knocks from spirit, asking us to awaken to our truths and make great changes in how we care for ourselves and our planet.
I share today a most personal story, as spirit has drawn the events in my family into a public forum. I must answer this call, this request from spirit for transparency. We are all requested now to become, as Joseph Campbell put it, transparent to the transcendent. In this manner, we release our attachment to the self-centered demands of our individual sheaths and open to the energy and truths of our deepest spiritual selves in new balance. And so, here is how spirit, the impersonal, came to interact with the personal in the recent life of my family.
It was a Friday afternoon, around 3 PM. I decided to mow the lawn. A tire was flat on the mower. I turned on the small air compressor to fill it when suddenly the motor died and sparks started shooting out of it. It was finished.
I gathered Jan to drive to Kingston with me to purchase a new compressor. We took our time studying what was available at Lowe’s and finally made our selection. As we approached the tollbooth to the Kingston bridge on our return journey, something compelled me to notice a black Mercedes in front of me. I noted the word Kompressor above the back bumper. I said nothing.
After crossing the bridge, we drove a ways and came to a light. Jan’s attention was drawn to the same black Mercedes. “Look,” she said, “Kompressor! Funny that we see that just after we’ve bought a new compressor. I wonder what it means.”
After returning home, I mowed the lawn and in the early evening the phone rang. It was my younger son, a Georgia resident, who informed me that he was in town for a surprise visit. He was ten minutes from the house and would like to come over. Excitedly, we awaited his arrival. A car pulled up—it was the black Mercedes with the word Kompressor on the back. Unbeknownst to me, my son had bought a new car.
The bell tolls for all of us… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Over the next two days we had brief visits that ended abruptly due to energetic/emotional turmoil. Saturday evening, Jan and I slept outside beneath the stars. At about 5 AM Sunday morning, Jan awoke me to share a very powerful dream she had just experienced. Here is her dream as she related it:
“In my dream, as in reality, I am sleeping outside with Chuck on the deck—lying beside the bench where the stone Buddha sits. I have my back turned to the Buddha both in reality and in my dream. I am startled by the sudden PING of a tiny bell that sounds like it is made of glass. This PING wakes me up in my dream and is immediately followed by a shattering sound, as the bell breaks and the shards of glass fall to the ground. I am aware that if I roll over to look at the bell, which I had envisioned over the head of the Buddha, I will see nothing, for in the moment of ringing the glass bell has shattered. I lie awake in my dream, aware that something has happened regarding a life, but that the message is for all of us, that it’s a universal message: there is only one opportunity to wake up. I understand that although we have many small wake up calls throughout our lives there is only one big wake-up call from our spirit, because at the moment it calls out, the opportunity is gone, never to come again. In its ringing, the bell breaks, thus there is no longer a bell that will toll for us. The sound of the bell, so light and ethereal, yet so profoundly startling and penetrating, stayed with me as I woke up and told Chuck of my dream. “Your son is in serious trouble,” I said, for Chuck’s second son came clearly to mind.” (Here ends Jan’s dream.)
We went back to sleep for about an hour, arising by 6:30 as I was determined to finish stacking several cords of wood. Shortly after 7AM the phone rang. It was my son’s fiancé calling from Georgia. She had just received a call from a State Trooper. My son had been in a serious car accident at 5 AM and had been taken to St. Francis Hospital. The Kompressor had crashed.
I called the ER to discover that he was alive, somewhat conscious, but bleeding internally. We arrived at the hospital emergency room. The doctor told us that he needed to be airlifted by helicopter to Westchester Medical Center as he has severe internal injuries and numerous shattered bones. A helicopter was on the way. They also awaited a heart surgeon who might be able to find and stop the internal bleeding. In the meantime, he was being given blood transfusions to compensate for lost blood.
The helicopter was arriving, but so did Dr. Kobak, the heart surgeon. With competence and compassion, he assured us that he’d do his best, and he did, as he found and cauterized a severed artery on one side of my son’s pelvis. “Don’t worry,” he assured us, “the artery on the other side will supply more than enough blood to the entire region.” Dr. Kobak held my heart in his hands. I feel nothing but gratitude for this man. Within ten minutes of this surgery, my son was strapped to a gurney and loaded outside onto a helicopter and off he went, with us following, to another hospital and another surgery.
The Kompressor had crashed… -Photo by Jan Ketchel
Two surgeries later, my son was put back together with screws and a tension bar with an excellent prognosis to fully recover over the next several months. He himself views the accident as a rebirth, having crawled from the compressed and mangled car on his elbows, having received new blood, and having to be contained until he can learn to walk again. His containment is the creation of the impersonal, his opportunity to meet his inner truth and change the direction of his life.
Within ten days of his surgeries my son was discharged from the hospital to begin a driving pilgrimage back to Georgia with his fiance. Just ten minutes from the house, on this past Wednesday evening, he called me from the car to tell me that he’d be stopping by to say goodbye. I hung up the phone and it immediately rang again. Suddenly, the sound of a large helicopter hovered over the house, and the synchronicity did not go unnoticed. On the other end of the phone was the sullen voice of my older son. “Dad, it’s bad, I’m in the Ulster County Jail.” It turns out that he was involved in some kind of illicit drug transaction, involving heroin. He faces three felony charges.
My younger son pulled up within minutes and I had to deliver the news about his brother. He became hysterical, but himself recognized the knock of the spirit. Everyone had been given the events they needed to face their lives, their inner truths, at the deepest level. As Jung discovered a century ago, and as my family experienced in this series of events, if we don’t voluntarily go to meet spirit and take the journey of recapitulation, then spirit will come to claim us in the daily physical events of our lives.
We can refuse that call, but as Jan’s dream warns, we only get one chance, at least in this life. Then it’s all about karma, not as punishment, but as the necessary picking up of the thread of where we are stuck, perhaps to be addressed in a new life, in a new time.
Personally, I love deeply, and I am deeply affected by the journeys of my sons, but I am not attached at the level of anger, pity, or victim to the events that have transpired, for I am more fully aware of their significance and the greater interconnectedness of present day life with lives lived, and lives still to come—with the urgent call of our spirits to wake us up. In fact, these events have pushed me to further stalk the sheath of bliss, bliss in the form of deep compassion but nonintervention in the fate of others, even those closest to my heart.
Beyond the sheaths lies the opportunity for new life… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The bliss sheath reveals what lies beyond the veil of personal emotion and sees, without judgment, the workings of spirit through the events of our lives, traumatic and awesome alike. My love is expressed compassionately, in my guidance, when sought, and in the respect I have for all to heroically face their deepest truths in full transparency. We cannot rescue anyone. If we do, we make them victims and cloud their access to their own deeper truths.
We live in a world now that must transcend blind allegiance to family, tribe or nation and acquiesce to the truths and needs of our greater interconnected whole. To do less is to stay steeped in the greed of “me and mine” that has brought us to our current brink of destruction.
May we heed now all our knocks, the signs and synchronicities from spirit, and go to meet our truths directly, as Jung guided, and stop the hauntings—the extreme compression spirit resorts to in physical catastrophes—though sometimes that’s the only way to prompt us to wake up.
I woke up this morning and turned to Jan: “I just had a nightmare!”
“So did I,” said she.
I was struck by the classification nightmare, not one I really identify with. However, it was the word that came out of my mouth.
As we compared notes, I realized we were in the same dream, though with different props. For Jan, it was the phantasmagorical winged serpent devouring the innocent or foolish. For me, it was the world of people and the devouring power of greed.
In my early waking moments I was being seduced by the mind to attach to intrigues in the world. I watched it happen, but didn’t attach; I held onto my energy. The phantasmagoric imagery of Jan’s dream tempered my interpretation of my own dream. We were being shown an energetic challenge before us and offered the opportunity either to grasp the metaphor and face the challenge within or allow it to project outward onto the world of everyday life.
Jung’s axiom came to the fore: face the shadow within or encounter it without. How quickly, when we attach to the without, is our energy completely engaged and drained. Can we strip away the nightmarish energy, see the challenge directly, and address the needed change? Or must we engage a new drama in an old world?
INTENTO!!!
As we talked about our dreams and came to understand the message, I found myself recapitulating walking out of a Tensegrity workshop that Jeanne and I had attended in 1999 having completed the magical pass of the Sabretooth Tiger of Intent. I provide a link to that pass here. I encourage those who view it to notice the transition back into the human form at the end of the pass. This is how to change: turn around 180 degrees and walk calmly away in a new direction, into a new life.
As Jan and I continued to talk this morning, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t written my blog! In fact, I hadn’t even thought about what day it was or what I might write about! It became quite evident that the spirit had its own intent that this be my blog message today. And so, I have delivered it!
Carlos Castaneda writes, in The Wheel of Time: “We hardly ever realize that we can cut anything out of our lives, anytime, in the blink of an eye.”
I’ve been doing inner child work for years. I’ve learned so much from long encounters, from hours of what Jung termed active imagination, from weeks of inner focus, as I’ve attended to my spirit. I sometimes feel that it’s like driving a car; sometimes I’m aware that I’m doing it, alert and conscious of everything I pass along the way, at other times I arrive at my destination wondering just how I got there.
I do inner child work especially when confronted with a dilemma or when conflicts arise. I know that it’s imperative that I constantly check in with my inner child and see how she’s doing. Although my personal challenges are, for the most part, clearly defined now, I also know that sometimes they are not the issues that need attention but that something else is calling to me, some deeper more profound need is making itself known.
Self-reflection?
I have a dilemma. How do I solve it? I ask for guidance. I wait for an answer. Meanwhile I have my own agenda. For the time being my personal agenda rules. It takes over. It’s all I can think about: how to set it in motion, how to contrive to make it happen, how to make it meaningful. I can’t get away from it. As I allow it to assert itself, it begins to dominate not only my thinking but my actions as well. This feels like part of the process I must go through, but deep inside I feel restless. Something else is stirring in me, raising a protest, asking me if this is really what I intend to do. I push it away.
“No,” I say, “I want it to happen my way. I want to be in control. I want to set up my life in such a manner that I can determine not only the process but the outcome as well.”
“Sorry,” I hear. “You are not going to be granted that wish today. Today you are going to have to struggle and eventually you are going to have to let go.”
“No, I don’t want to. I want things to work out my way!”
As this tug-of-war goes on, I know, deep inside, that I must stop playing this game. From experience, I know that the sooner I acquiesce to a process that is already in progress, already laid out for me, the better things will unfold. This is how I resolve my dilemma: I acquiesce to the process, but it takes deep work to get to this place of acquiescence.
I know I must dissect my personal agenda and discover why I am so attached to it. I must face the fact that I may be trying to hold onto old ideas, old agendas, and old comforts that no longer serve me. I must face that even though I may want those things, they are not good for me; they no longer serve who I am becoming, who I have the potential to become, and whom I need to become to evolve.
Once I’ve studied my personal agenda, the next step is to turn inward. I must get quiet in order to do this. I must let myself have a few moments of meditation or simply sit quietly and comfortably. I must ask myself: What is really going on here? What am I missing? Am I just reluctant, avoidant, affronted? Am I being shown something I must embrace; or the opposite, that this is something I must refuse?
Sitting in calmness allows the voice of our inner child to be heard. If we listen carefully we will hear truths spoken that we may not have wanted to hear before, that we may not have been ready to hear until now. If we allow ourselves to become a frightened child again, knowing that we are facing changes that we don’t want to happen while we also remain our adult selves, we may reach a new level of understanding about how we tend to function on a normal basis.
We all have a needy, wounded child inside us. No matter how much inner work we do that child will always be present, suggesting deeper issues that need attention. Its needs are endless, ancient needs. Eventually we learn that they stretch far back, into eons, into past lives full of similar needs left unresolved.
Ready to get off the well worn path and enter the abyss?
As we do inner child work, our spirit will repeatedly guide us in how to sit alongside our child self, perhaps in discomfort at first, but later in full acceptance as we face the ancient knowing child self and ask it to tell us what comes next. What must I face this time? Where are you taking me?
We must be prepared to face our fears. We must accept that our inner child self of this lifetime is frightened of change. We must accept that our adult self of this lifetime is afraid of change too. Both parts of us must constantly face the truth that change is challenging us to face our fears and conquer them with awareness.
Whenever I sit in calmness with my adult self and my frightened child self, I know that there is something else beneath the fears that I must also face. I must go even deeper. I must reach down to that far more evolved ancient child self, the one who has already lived these life challenges before. This is the knowing self that constantly challenges me to go beyond my present self. This is the place where I will gain clarity on what to do to resolve my dilemma.
Clarity often comes in calmness, delivering a direct blow. Much like getting hit over the head, it strikes quickly and with utter clarity. When we are ready we are able to accept it and immediately act upon it. If we are not ready it will remain churning inside us until we are ready.
When our world is challenging us, even collapsing on us, our deepest dilemma is often in learning how to acquiesce, to let go, to not fight as we have been taught, but to let the process guide us. Often we may find the deeper meaning inside, rather than in constantly looking for reason and answer outside. Sometimes we just can’t have things our way.
There is so much more to doing inner child work. As we work with what our inner child presents, going deeper and deeper, we get to know just who that child is, and just who we are and why. Eventually, we all arrive at that place where the ancient child self speaks. Often the sound of that ancient child’s voice may be distant and difficult to decipher, but if we let our personal agenda go, for even a second, we may be able to accept the truth it brings us. Sometimes just a hint of something different, a deep inner knowing, may waft up and offer us just enough to help us along, to make a decision that will indeed set us on a new path.
What lies in the vastness of the inner world?
The inner world is vast, bigger than the outer world. Jung once noted that once we do inner work we will no longer be able to ready novels, because nothing can compare to what we have already encountered inside the vastness of the self. I have found this to be true. I personally can no longer read a novel. I am quickly bored, knowing that inside the self reside all the mysteries and horror stories that I once enjoyed reading, the adventures and relationships I loved to tap into, other people’s lives I’d turn to. All of those things, and more, reside inside us, in the vastness of our inner world, just waiting to be tapped into.
As we let ourselves be guided through the terrors inside us, we arrive at precipice after precipice. And each time we stand on the brink of change we know that we must take the leap into the abyss that yawns before us, if we are to keep evolving. That is where our riches lie, where our thrills await us, where our adversaries lurk, where our beauties hide, and where our spirits will greet us.
Going ever more deeply inward, we soon discover that our outer world is less threatening, less frightening, less terrifying, for we discover that it cannot present us with anything as frightening as we have already faced within. This is what Jung learned and this is what we also may learn as we continue our inner child work.
Thank you for reading, and may you all enjoy the adventure of a lifetime, inside the self.
We are challenged every day by forces that want our time, money, attention, and emotion. Jung focused on the inner culprit—the shadow, or unknown self—as the force that consumes a great deal of our daily energy and actions. The shamans of Carlos Castaneda’s lineage focused outwardly on the flyer, an entity that preys upon the tumult of human excess for its own sustenance and survival.
These are two descriptions of reality that coin metaphors to capture the predatory dimension of life. If we can acknowledge, that is, suspend judgment about this dimension of life, both within the self and in the world at large, we are freed to benefit from this relationship. The function of the shadow/flyer is to show us all of who we are. With this knowledge we can choose who we might become.
As we exit the season of excessive consumption we are shown our proclivity for sensual delight, whether we indulge or refuse it. Encounters with shadow/flyer may result in nausea, guilt, depression, insatiability, out-of-controlledness, and defeat.
Make no mistake about it; these are powerful entities with completely self-serving agendas. They can wreak havoc on our physical and emotional selves. However, their power lies solely in our ignorance or refusal to know the full truth about ourselves. If we can accept that we are sensual, emotional beings that need to find fulfillment in all that we are, we can begin to make room for all that we potentially are, in new balance.
Sometimes, we engage in excess to numb ourselves from parts of the self too painful or frightening to know. This is a defensive strategy that has its temporary value, however, it cannot hold back the deepest need to know and realize the full self. This activity points the way to recapitulation.
When we find ourselves caught in the daily round of repetitive Jekyll/Hyde behavior—fully convicted and repentant with the rising sun, only to be swept away again and again with the rising moon—we are awakened to the power of the shadow/flyer to control our lives in the absence of self-knowledge. As we awaken, we are freed to find new balance in our lives, perhaps a middle way; and with this awareness we are able to release the predatory entity of excess.
Mosquitoes are predatory flyers. However, they will move on to other prey when the stagnant pool that breeds them dries up. If we remain in stagnancy, we invite the shadow/flyer into our lives. It will feast upon us in our stagnancy, however, with the discomfort it creates we are invited to change.
Such is the nature of this symbiotic relationship between predator and prey. The predator becomes the beacon or instigator of change. Nonetheless, we must use this provocation to our advantage. That is, we must wake up, face the fullness of the self and move toward balance and fulfillment in life. Once we begin this process of change we release the predator because it no longer serves us. And we no longer serve it!
Moving on, into a new space. We have literally moved our office to the end of the hall, beyond our former location. See you there!
Chuck
