– Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Today’s channeled audio message asks us to ponder what love means.
Contemplation may lead to enlightenment.
Tag Archives: love
Chuck’s Place: Furor & Führer
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.
– 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.
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 Place: Death Of A Cardinal
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.
– 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 Place: Time Of Collapse
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.
– 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.
– 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
