Where did I come from? Where am I going? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Many are challenged to reconcile the memory and experiences of past lives as they intrude upon life in this life. Many others go in search of the karmic origin of current life struggles through past life regression.
Emphasis on karma alone narrows the focus of the full challenge of integrating a past life, which includes allowing the self to feel deep love and attachment in all the critical relationships of that life. The challenge lies as well in releasing the self, and all the loved ones of that past life, to be free to fully open to new love in new lives in completely different roles.
The enormity of growth required to achieve such openness to new beginnings and endings, to truly live what it means to “go with the flow,” may be the deepest purpose of the concensus reality of this dimension we call Earth. Most humans born in this dimension experience a blank slate of origin. Our parents are experienced as our first and only parents of our infinite journey. Everything that might have come before, in lifetimes of transpersonal living, is checked at the memory gate before we enter this life. We are thereby freed to limit our attachments to this life without the complexity and confusion of prior lives.
This arrangement offers us a training ground to deal with attachment, love, and loss on a manageable scale. Rudimentary attachment is critical to passing the starting gate of this dimension. Failure to thrive and death are the consequences of primary non-attachment.
However, beyond this starting gate are many gates of deepening attachment that will determine how welcome we truly feel in this world and how able we are to come to full flowering. It is very possible to survive yet constrict our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves to survive in what is experienced as unwelcome, exploitative, rejecting territory. Much of the first half of life may be taken up by the challenge of finding a secure anchor in this world so that we may eventually begin a process of unburdening recapitulation to free ourselves to begin to truly thrive in this life. That anchor is the adult self I wrote about in last week’s blog.
Time to grow beyond the family tree… – Art by Jan Ketchel
The ability to fully know and accept this life we were cast into, and to then shed its encasement in recapitulation, is a deep spiritual practice that teaches us to fully live and release the life we have lived, in this lifetime, so we can move on into new life now without constraints. Accomplishing this stupendous task prepares us to more fully encounter all the many past selves and past lives we have lived throughout our journey in infinity. In recapitulating this lifetime, we are freed of the need to constrict our cognitive and emotional knowledge and the need to have to hold ourselves together within some definite container.
To release one’s parents, siblings, spouses, and children to new lives and new roles within this lifetime frees them as well to experience endless possibilities within their own lives. All journeys have beginnings and endings.
In addition, all journeys—past and present—need to be equally honored with love and compassion for the self and all the intimate traveling companions of each journey. Such deep love and compassion open the gate to new and deeper journeys in infinity, unshielded by the illusion of limitation and unending attachment.
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.
Sobriety is a state of calm and balance that belies an underlying state of tension. This tension is the holding together of opposite tendencies in a cohesive functional way, to allow for a full actualization of self and an ability to flow with and navigate change. Chiefly, these bipolar opposites reflect some interplay of Yin and Yang or finite and infinite or mater and spirit.
We are spirit/material beings. When spirit stirs, we seek to transcend our human/mater limits. We might deaden the body with numbing “spirits” to release our spirit and end up falling down drunk—the opposite of sobriety. On the other hand, we might exert such material restraint upon the self that we shadow over desire completely, becoming a “dry drunk,” equally non-sober. Sobriety demands a reconciliation and inclusion of each of these very opposite needs into an integrity of self.
In Vedic philosophy, Sattva is the fundamental principle of BALANCE that constructs our world. In this cosmology there are two other fundamental building blocks, Rajas and Tamas, that entwine with Sattva to construct our reality.
Rajas, like Yang, is active movement: spice, desire. Tamas, like Yin, lies dormant in deep inertia. For life to happen both Rajas and Tamas must participate. Life dominated by Rajas is life consumed by desire, knowing no restraint. From a bipolar perspective this is life on one big manic trip. Life dominated by Tamas is a life frozen in potential, completely restrained. From a bipolar perspective this is a major depression.
Tamas, Sattva, Rajas…
Sattva, like sobriety, is the principle of balance that reigns in these opposite tendencies to work harmoniously to promote change and growth. If Yin and Yang don’t join in a complementary relationship, there is no new life. Sattva bears the tension of finding the right place for these opposites to promote life and balance.
The Middle Way is the path that the Buddha discovered that leads to liberation from suffering the failure to reconcile the opposites of self-indulgence and self-denial. Buddha pointed out that addiction to sense pleasure was equivalent to extreme denial of pleasure. His own life began in the kingdom of his father where he was exposed only to pleasure. Eventually he forsook his father’s kingdom for the ascetic life of complete renunciation of worldly pleasures. Ultimately he accepted a bowl of rice milk from a young girl, realizing that the nourishment of Mater was essential for the realization of Spiritual enlightenment.
The Middle Way is a path that neither denies pleasure nor denies restraint, but instead finds the necessary balance between these needs in order to achieve the calm necessary for enlightenment. To deny pleasure or to deny restraint sows a Karmic seed of continued suffering until we can achieve a balance of liberation. Thus, the Middle Way is the path of sobriety and Sattva, a state of balanced tension that reconciles the opposing tendencies within all of our selves.
In Magical Passes Don Juan states, “To navigate, in a genuine way in the unknown…a sorcerer has to be extremely sober.” The unknown is all around us, it is now. To part the veils and fully live in the unknown we must achieve sobriety, Sattva, and the Middle Way—a balanced whole of opposing tendencies and needs that flow with the changes, versus clinging to the extremes.
The Middle Way
P.S. Jan gives permission for me to reveal that she did eat a piece of carrot cake and she says it was yummy!
“There is a state of mind which does not change, despite anything that happens in life. With that state of mind you can live with all the conditions of life. You can live with a good partner or a bad partner, prosperity or poverty, disease or death, in a discotheque, on a beach, a hotel, everywhere, because nothing affects you. You are where you are, firmly rooted in your own self, but at the same time you can interact with everyone. You can even fight, but still not be affected.”
“Nothing being more important than anything else, a warrior chooses any act, and acts it out as if it mattered to him. His controlled folly makes him say that what he does matters and makes him act as if it did, and yet he knows that it doesn’t; so when he fulfills his acts, he retreats in peace, and whether his acts were good or bad, or worked or didn’t, is in no way part of his concern.”
The first quote is from The Five Koshas, a talk given by Swami Satyananda Saraswati on June 9, 1984, and the second quote is from The Wheel of Time by Carlos Castaneda. These two quotes that flow seamlessly together, reflect the consistency of the knowledge of ancient India, as revealed in the Upanishads, and that of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico as articulated by don Juan Matus. Both traditions pierce the illusional nature of reality and cut to the heart of enlightenment: detachment.
Detachment knows that all things are equal, all things are part of the same interdependent whole. To grasp or attach to anything is to enter maya—fragmented reality—or the world of ordinary reality.
In everyday pragmatic terms, the guidance suggests being mindfully present, mindfully engaged in every situation with equal presence. Nothing is greater, better, or more important than anything else. The banal and the profane are as significant as the saint. Being locked away in a prison or lounging on a beach in the Caribbean are equal opportunity employers for the soul seeking liberation. Engage in life, treat each moment, each being, with equal appreciation. Choose with whom you journey, but know that this is but your predilection, as no life is better or more significant than any other.
Choice matters. Yogic science teaches that choice is the seed of manifestation, or what is known as karma. The secret of liberation from karma, however, lies in detachment. It’s not about being good, or moral, because choices that grasp at life in any form fixate and attach life to that form. Shamans, like true Yogis, free their energy from attachment to the world of ordinary reality, from fixation on the maya of this dimension, through this same process of non-attachment. Though they engage in life impeccably, they are ready to leave in an instant without looking back.
Flowing with the changes…
To leave without looking back is to have achieved complete love and compassion for all whom we are leaving behind. This detachment is the acceptance that life is complete and it’s okay to truly flow with the changes that death invites. Unless we have arrived at the completion of compassion, we will resist the changes and stay where we are in some form, until we are ready to flow with the deeper nature of reality.
When enlightenment and total freedom are the intents, only unconditional, all-encompassing compassion will be the path. Compassion requires absolute detachment. Anything excluded from our compassion actually generates attachment and becomes the seed to bondage in another life, where we are challenged to continue working it out. This was the wisdom of Christ’s guidance to “love thine enemy.”
All-encompassing compassion is the vehicle that releases all karma attached to this world and frees the soul to journey onward, into the finer energetic dimensions of its infinite journey.
The great value an exhaustively repeated negative behavior pattern offers is the irrefutable evidence it provides for learning the law of cause and effect. At a certain point, after finding ourselves in the same place, after repeating the same set of behaviors, we can say to ourselves with confidence and certainty: “If I say, do or think such and such, I will feel frustrated, disappointed, angry, hopeless and depressed.”
Of course, as St. Paul humbly admitted, knowing the law of cause and effect is no guarantee that the same demon compulsion won’t steal the show again and again and again!
Nonetheless, realizing the law of cause and effect with respect to a behavioral pattern is the first step in overcoming ignorance, what the Buddists call avidya. Overcoming ignorance is the only way to change our karma, if we understand karma to be the inevitable outcome of repetitive behavior. It might feel like punishment, but in truth karma rests completely in our own hands as the law of cause and effect demonstrates: repeat the same behavior, cause the same outcome.
If we remain ignorant of the outcomes of our behaviors we stay glued to them. Each day we wake up to our revitalized, reincarnated selves, still bound to the karma of the ignorance of the self we went to sleep with. This endless round of repetition is, however, essential, as each revolution of the wheel accrues irrefutable evidence of the karmic law of cause and effect.
Some day, in some life, it will serve to awaken us from our sleepy repetitive selves with knowledge and a readiness to change. We will simply know too much to be fooled once again. We know where it definitely leads and we don’t need to go there one more time. We have too much experience to take the bait. The tasty morsel or seductive promise of the entity—the devil behind the compulsion—is no longer interesting. The entity is dismissed, freed to move on to new life, mission accomplished, and so are we. Ironically, the entity is a slave to our own awakening and remains bound to us until we can honestly tell it to leave.
These devils, or petty tyrants as the shamans of Ancient Mexico called them, are actually our liberators. Those shamans sought to come under the influence of such devilish petty tyrants so that they might shed any vestige of self-importance, a critical component of achieving total freedom and fully awakening to our true selves and fullest potential.
Our petty tyrants…
Petty tyrants come in many forms, visible and invisible. Visible tyrants are those in our lives—family members, bosses, politicians, abusers, etc. Invisible petty tyrants show up as compulsions, overwhelming moods and emotions, limiting beliefs, and spellbinding projections that land on people and objects in the world.
What all tyrants have in common is their ability to force us into repetitive negative behavior patterns—they bind our lives; they control our karma. They attack our most vulnerable selves, the core of our self worth, without mercy!
We feel stuck, worthless, hopeless, out of control, overly in control, helpless, frozen, fatalistic, or even suicidal/homicidal in reaction to our tyrants. How can we possibly evolve in such a circumstance? How can we ever be free? So begins the cycle of repetitive negative behavior in thought, word, and deed that begins our training in the law of cause and effect. These negative patterns of self-hate and hate of others, of self-imprisonment and imprisonment of others, might last a lifetime or perhaps many lifetimes, however, our wheel of repetition is ultimately our wheel of liberation.
Once we learn the law of cause and effect, we are freed to detach from our devilish tyrant that has lost its power over us. Detachment means that our power is withdrawn from the tyrant; it can no longer hold us in check. We are then freed to fully move on to greater fulfillment, karma erased.
If we don’t feel compassion for our disempowered tyrant/devil that has held our power for us until we were ready to claim it through choice and change, we are caught in another permutation of the same karma, negative pattern revisited. Anger at the tyrant binds our energy to it, and so we are still not free.
True freedom means no attachment whatsoever to the energy of the tyrant, only gratitude for a job well done. Ultimate freedom lies in sympathy for the devil, as we both part ways and move away into new life.
Sympathizing,
Chuck
Here is a rendition of The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy for the Devil by Rickie Lee Jones.
