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Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Unconditional Love

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The highest form of love is love without condition, the total embracing acceptance of all that we are.

This is the welcome that we all seek as our birthright into life in this world, loving acceptance of all that we are, simply because we are. This is the love the child longs to see mirrored in its parent’s eyes to help fortify a deep sense of worthiness, confidence, and lovability that encourages the journey to individuation, to becoming all that we truly are in this life. This is the love we seek in partnership, a loving embrace of all of our body self, all of our virtues as well as all of our sins.

Shadow partners... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Shadow partners…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

In our time, the longing for unconditional love has come to be felt as an inalienable right, an entitlement. If one does not experience unconditional love immediately one feels empowered and righteous to end a relationship or marriage rather quickly. However, relationships are cauldrons where confronting the unacceptable, in both self and other, is part of the process of growing. If one exits a relationship due to unmet acceptance too prematurely the opportunity to experience the coveted “unconditional love” may be missed.

The first challenge in achieving unconditional love is to unconditionally love the self. The process of socialization we all encounter growing up leaves us with a huge shadow self, a rejected part of the self that we are taught must be forsaken due to its unacceptability.

Do we know that shadow self? Do we hate it as it has been hated? Do we expect a partner to remedy our disdain for a part of ourselves that even we do not love, expecting another to lovingly accept all of us?

Can we actually turn over that unwanted shadow self to another to make it wanted? We can try, but we’ll never fully believe the outcome. Even if a partner claims love for that which we hate in ourselves, it will not be redeemed. We will either need constant reassurance to silence our inner doubt or we simply won’t believe our “naive” partner. We will retain the “true knowledge” of our unacceptability.

In other ways, it might just be that parts of ourselves deemed unlovable might indeed be immature, with a limited capacity for relationship. Young children are far more concerned with themselves—primary narcissism, it’s called—than the needs of others. This may be quite appropriate at an infantile stage of development, but it is hardly adaptive to adult relatedness, which requires a fuller knowing and appreciation of another, as well as of self.

Our challenge might be to love that very infantile part of ourselves but realize that it is also anachronistic, non-adaptive to adult life, and unacceptable when acted out in adult relationship. This may be a case where we need to access the loving but firm adult/parent within ourselves that sets boundaries upon the demands of an infantile part of ourselves. This may allow for adult connection with another where we can share the fullness of ourselves but don’t burden the relationship with expectations that need to be grappled with within the self.

When Buddha speaks of loving compassion he speaks equally of detachment. Unconditional love—acceptance of all—does not mean attachment to all. (Attachment in this sense meaning having to engage in the acted-out entitlements of another.) In detachment, we can fully love and accept another yet insist that they manage their own infantilism.

Unconditional love is not unconditional license. Unconditional love is full acceptance of what is, while assuming full responsibility for integrating it into the self and into life at a level where life can receive it and help it to grow. Ironically, the key to unconditional love is complete loving acceptance of self while facing the conditional reality that we must grow up!

If we have been failed by those entrusted to connect us with unconditional love we must pick up the mantle of finding our way there on our own, beyond blame and bitterness. Our truest parent, Mother Earth, entrusts us with this journey as she evokes a healing process that requires deeper connectedness and love for that which has been rejected. If we are here we have been invited to partake in this great healing crisis, our own and that of the world now. It all begins with the journey of unconditional acceptance of the self.

Lovingly,

Chuck

 

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Furor & Führer

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Labor deepens. The world anxiously awaits the birth of a redeemer. The era of Obama has seen great expansion and inclusion. However, the speed of change has caused a swing to the opposite pole, that of boundary and protection, guns not roses. What’s at play beneath it all is the tango of two opposite, yet intimately related, instincts: sex and self-preservation.

What is being constellated, devil or angel? - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
What is being constellated, devil or angel?
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

When sex dominates, we open our hearts, our borders; everyone matters, basic needs are met. When self-preservation dominates, our hearts are closed and steeled; we sacrifice life, we protect our own.

When sex dominates, the spirit of earth-based marijuana becomes legal. When self-preservation dominates, the distilled spirit of alcohol, an artifact of science, reigns.

When sex dominates, African-Americans, gays, transsexuals, Syrians, Muslims are welcomed. When self-preservation dominates, freedom shrinks as old order conservatives restrain the lower chakras. The head rules, the body politic is divided and controlled.

At a higher level these opposites are the interplay of love and power. When power rules, sex is rape. When love rules power is flaccid. When love and power vie for dominance, destruction and rebirth are the consequences. The goal we seek is to reconcile these opposites in a balanced union, and that brings us to the question of where we are now: What truly is the state of our Union?

America seeks renewal. Trump has risen as a potential redeemer. He presents as a freakish Dionysus with his golden locky mop. He embodies the spirit of a spontaneous orgy. He shoots from the hip with total unapologetic humor, sarcasm, and fury. He at once expresses youthful spontaneity and ruthless power. He is at once inclusive and divisive. He is uncontainable. Even the most powerful conservative Republican monied lobby cannot control his chameleon spirit. He’s alive and America is bored.

His appeal touches a latent excitement in Republican and Democratic citizens alike. His enthusiasm trumps reason, and this excites the volk of the American spirit. It’s a layer of the psyche below the ruling ego with all its boring limits and controls.

Under Trump our madness comes alive. We can all play with the Joker as he takes control of Gotham City. Who needs the movies? We can all become lustful, power-driven billionaires who can act out our wildest fantasies. We can simply, impulsively and completely, wipe out a country that threatens our security and our playtime.

Trump is dangerous because in the midst of all this furor we are missing a latent Führer. Hitler came to power because he, like Trump, tapped a latent Dionysian spirit of change that burgeoned beneath the beleaguered spirit of the German people. What broke forth under Hitler’s reign was a mass psychosis and an orgy of death.

Trump is not a redeemer. He is a false prophet, falsely presenting a balanced union of opposites. And yet we cannot ignore the need he excites: a reconciliation of sex and self-preservation, love and power.

True conjunctio, the opposites united by spirit...
True conjunctio, the opposites united by spirit…

However, if we study Trump closely, we see that though he embodies the energy of Dionysus there is no love in his person. This is America’s problem too: the Goddess is completely missing. Mature feminine wisdom is the bridge to reconcile these two opposing instincts of love and power, and wisdom is severely lacking in the youthful mess we find ourselves now steeped in. This is America’s true blind spot.

Youthful furor never stops to reflect and reconcile. And now it has truly upped the ante as it seems we might be swept into electing a Führer. Hopefully, a higher wisdom will prevail as we face this possibility. Or perhaps there will be another step needed before we can find our way to wisdom and advance beyond this dangerous dance of opposites into true conjunctio.

As always, we as individuals are microcosms of the collective consciousness as well as the collective unconscious. Roughly speaking, the instinct of self-preservation finds its home in the power drive of the ego. Sexuality, in contrast, remains largely in the body and the instinctual unconscious. If we approach the relationship between the ego and the unconscious from the place of higher feminine wisdom, that of relatedness, we are offered an opportunity to align these very powerful instinctual forces toward a united, balanced effort of survival, for both the individual and the planet.

However, we better still vote with Wisdom!!!!

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Death Of A Cardinal

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Cardinals derive their name from the red garments worn by Catholic priests. Ironically, cardinals are birds that mate for life, who celebrate the equality of the male and the female, one of the few bird species that sing together. The Christian world, on the other hand, has no such model in its pantheon of God to honor the feminine so equally and fully as the cardinal pair who so deeply honor each other.

She was dead... - Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Suddenly, she was gone…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

Early one recent morning I was reading to Jan the sentence: “We kill while we live, …” At that exact moment we heard a loud SMACK upon our window. Stunned, we looked up to see a burst of feathers floating in the air. We approached and saw a female cardinal lying stunned upon the ground, slowly and laboriously arching her wings, trying to catch her breath.

I was immediately reminded of the grackle that had similarly crashed into our deck door a couple of years ago, and after a few hours of rest sat up and flew off. Confident of the cardinal’s recovery too, I went for the camera and took a few pictures.

Jan said that she was dying. Then the cardinal pulled in her wings and gave one last violent shudder. The last thing we saw was a fluttering of the crest at her crown. She was dead.

Deeply saddened, I touched her soft feathers, thinking to bury her. Jan suggested that I instead put her out front atop a rotting pumpkin that the crows and squirrels peck at. I moved her there and within a minute a crow came and cautiously circled around the pumpkin. It made its way closer and closer and finally grabbed the still warm carcass and took off, a rich, fresh feast to feed upon, nourishment for the day.

We were both deeply emotionally affected by this death, especially as we watched the male cardinal perched upon a branch searching listlessly for his lost bride. I was compelled to write this blog, as the synchronistic sacrifice of the cardinal’s life, coupled with the words I’d read, carried a message I felt obligated to deliver.

We had been reading from a book by Marie-Louise von Franz, The Puer Aeternus. She’d been quoting from a novel by a German writer whose main character suffered from a severe inner split. He refused a true relationship with life and love in this world, honoring instead his rational mind, with its order and principles that obstructed a life truly embodied and lived. Such an attitude avoids the true crucifixion that engagement in life requires: emotional attachment with all its ecstasies and deep disappointments that are the hallmark of a life truly lived.

The line I had been reading as Mrs. Cardinal crashed to her death reflected a very rational truth, to live is to kill. For life to be sustained, as the crow amply demonstrated, it must feed upon the vitality of life. And though this is indeed a rational truth that must be accepted, it must also not be allowed to be a license to kill feeling and love.

To love, to feel, to attach, to connect, these are the hallmarks of the feminine. If we allow ourselves only the cool detachment of the rational we refuse to suffer the emotional reality of life, in fact, we cut ourselves off from life itself, as we remain frozen and sterile, focused instead on our own power, gain, and advantage.

What the world needs now is love, sweet love. This is the feminine, resident not just in women but equally in men, that is so neglected, disregarded, and disdained that we find ourselves steeped in bloodbaths of mass proportion, rationally iced in numbers and strategies for killing, neglecting not only our emotional attachment to fellow humans but to all of nature as well.

Our dear cardinal assumed her place on the cross, the little Goddess who sacrificed herself to deliver the message: Yes, life is consumed to support life in this world, a cruel but true paradox. But this is no excuse to refuse to engage in life with deep emotion, which for us in that moment was love for Mrs. Cardinal and her powerful gift, and sadness for Mr. Cardinal as he mourned her passing.

The only thing that matters now is the ascension of the Goddess in all our lives, in all our actions. Only love can redeem the world now. The feminine principle of love is the redeemer. Let the death of the female cardinal not be in vain.

Love,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Time Of Collapse

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From a palpable and intuitive level, Colorado, Chicago, and Paris are all part of the same ocean of molten lava that’s erupting, in various levels of intensity, around the globe.

Chuck found these bricks washed up on the shore of the Hudson River... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Chuck found these bricks washed up on the shore of the Hudson River…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The I Ching confirms for me that we are in the time of Splitting Apart, hexagram #23. Here the image is of a top-heavy mountain collapsing upon the earth. The I Ching brings it very personally home in the moving line I threw, six in the fourth place: “…the disaster affects not only the resting place but even the occupant.”

Who in the world is not impacted by the daily outbreaks of violence that now infect the world? How are we to position ourselves in this time of collapse?

The I Ching is clear that what is happening is objective. When a structure becomes too top heavy it must, of necessity, collapse. The ruling attitudes of our world are too top heavy. Greed has amassed the bulk of the wealth in the hands of the few at the top. The masses, the foundation of the world, are unsupported. Greed has decimated the environment of the world too, to the point where it can no longer sustain life as it has done in the past.

If we understand that our current state of collapse is inevitable, and though the destruction surfaces in what appears to be a growing mass psychosis, the truth is that at the deepest level we are in the midst of a major world transition. Would that it could happen more orderly and calmly, but that is not the way of nature!

However, beyond the destruction is the building of a new foundation, a broad foundation that can support all of life on a planet in healthy balance. In fact, the future reading I received, derived from the changes in the hexagram of Splitting Apart, is the hexagram of Progress, #35. In this hexagram, the sun moves over the earth providing the clarity to build anew with wisdom.

Beyond the collapse of now we have all the stones to properly build a new foundation for life, and the guidance on how to proceed. If we study the hexagram of Splitting Apart, it is apparent that greed is a weak foundation. Balance, on the other hand, offers the proper cornerstone for our coming world.

On an individual level, we are free now to fashion our own personal foundation blocks. These blocks must include love. Love does not scapegoat or marginalize. Love is all-inclusive. Love provides a massive foundation for our coming mountain to build upon.

Balance within ourselves, within our bodies and our psyches, provides a sturdy base as well for our growing mountain.

Our new world must be built on love... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Our new world must be built on love…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

We are all empowered to contribute stability to our evolving world by accepting the inevitability of change by staying calm, embracing love, and establishing balance. From this place we are assured rapid progress.

All is not lost, though we all must suffer through this painful time of transition.

Hang in there, we’re all in it together,

Chuck