Tag Archives: love

A Day in a Life: Give Peace A Chance

Peace

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” So said Pierre de Chardin the French Jesuit priest and philosopher. The first time I read this quote, I knew that he was right. It explained everything to me; my very existence suddenly made sense. I was here on earth to have a human experience, but I really was that spiritual being that I always sensed I was. I felt I no longer had to apologize for being gentle and loving, for wanting peace and love in the world, for my so called naiveté or simplistic views of how to solve the world’s problems. I knew that only such idealistic views embodied the real nature of reality and that only they would work to resolve conflict and achieve worldwide peace.

De Chardin also said these words when the Nazis were fast advancing in Europe during World War II: “Peace cannot mean anything but a HIGHER PROCESS OF CONQUEST…The world is bound to belong to its most active elements…But no spiritual aims or energy will ever succeed, or even deserve to succeed, unless it is able to spread and keep spreading a fifth column.” In essence, he was letting the world know that the Nazis were the “most active element” at the time, the kind of energy that had the potential to spread like a wildfire, and it was imperative that the spiritual rise to the occasion and conquer it. It was a dire warning that we too, in our time, must pay heed to.

John Lennon once noted that Gandhi and Martin Luther King, both proponents of peace and nonviolence, had been assassinated for their efforts. He didn’t understand why people wouldn’t “just give peace a chance,” and then he too was assassinated.

Yeah…

We are at a point in our lives, in the life of our planet, when the imperative to give peace a chance is at its most crucial, and for spiritual consciousness to dominate and spread like wildfire. For that is the only way that real change will happen, by good once again becoming the dominant force, the HIGHER PROCESS, as de Chardin suggests. De Chardin also spoke elegantly about love being the most powerful of all forces that we as human beings could employ for ourselves and our planet, the same love that John Lennon, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King embraced.

When you are in a room of peaceful people you notice how peaceful and calm the atmosphere is. When you are in a room of happy people, you notice happiness. When you are in a room of angry people you notice anger, you feel anger, it takes over. When you are in the midst of evil you can smell it. Which kind of room would you like to be in?

As simple as it sounds, the only way to make change happen for the better, is to change the way we think, act, and react, the way we treat each other, the way we treat the planet. To become a peaceful Self is the first step in enacting change outside of the self, to learn to take responsibility in the world and inside the self, to really be the spiritual beings we are, to stop blaming and judging each other, to realize we are all the same.

Flower power…

If I set an even greater intent than usual to be peaceful, gentle, loving and kind for the rest of my life, toward myself and others, I will be part of a new spiritual consciousness. The more who are engaged in this new peaceful and loving consciousness, the more powerful grows a movement of real change, soon a spreading wildfire. Many of us are children of the 60s, still idealists at heart, gentle souls still hopeful of peace in our life.

I support the movements started by Gandhi, King, and Lennon—among the many others I have not named, men and women of peace and real caring—who knew that we are all indeed spiritual beings having a human experience. A new peaceful and loving existence requires taking both a personal journey and a badly needed universal journey, each day being different as we go out into the world and interact with others, as well as in our innermost thoughts. If we all decided that love of each other and love of the planet was the most important aspect of our human existence, how quickly change could happen and perhaps a new national mood would prevail and spread like wildfires around the world.

Spread the word: Give peace and love a chance.

Change begins with me,
Jan

Readers of Infinity: Carry Love In Your Heart

Anchor in love...

Keep love in your hearts for all beings. Do not carry resentment or regret for lives lived, but seek release and redemption from all that now holds you captive by releasing the self from inner turmoil so that peace may reign, within and without.

Though you live so fully in that world of outer reality, it is the inner journey that must be taken in order to reach a new level of consciousness, both within the self and in relation to the world outside of you. Constant attention to the inner workings of your mind, body, and spirit is necessary in order to achieve calm love in your heart for all beings, including the self.

Facing your inner turmoil will lead to finding love in your heart, first for the self and then for others. Find the reasons for your sorrows and you will find joy. Find the reasons for your pain and you will find release. Find the reasons for the constant worries of the mind and you will find peace of mind.

All in all, it is only in constantly attending to the self as a spiritual being on a journey to wholeness that change will occur. Let the self be taken forward on that journey each day. With patience, learn to acquiesce to the flow of life, for it will take you where you need to go, show you what you must confront, and guide you to resolution.

Trust all that comes your way as guidance and you will have traversed the first hurdle in taking that journey of change. Challenging though your journey may be, keep always in mind that of all life’s journeys it is the one that matters. At your core you already know this.

Acquiesce a little bit more to that truth, trusting that this day and the events that arise from outside of you and the corresponding reaction that arises inside you are crucial partners as you take your journey. Pay attention to all that arises or comes to greet you as being significant and deeply meaningful, today and all days.

Find release in learning what it truly means to carry love in your heart through deep work on the self. It is truly a loving journey worth every second of your life.

Your daily journey is showing you all that you need in order to evolve. Accept what comes and flow with it, in trust that you are indeed well guided and truly loved in return.

Deeply trusting this journey, channeled with love for all,
Jan

Readers of Infinity: Love Comes From The Earth

Jan's morning dream image: We each hold love in our own hands...

Smell sweet scents of nature. Listen for sounds of beauty. Walk upon the earth and own its beauty. With humility and deep compassion be its mentor and its guide, for you human beings are responsible now for all that you behold. Do you care to lose it? Or do you care to truly love it?

In love there is only caring: for self and other, for that which is right, within and without.

Find peace in your days upon that earth by reckoning with your troubles as an individual and as part of the whole.

Find peace on earth by giving rather than taking.

Find peace within by loving in the midst of both your joys and your sorrows.

Find peace in right action, in balance with nature’s generosity, but do not be greedy, for then will peace be destroyed.

Be solid citizens of earth, of the self, of each other, for you are all worthy of peace on earth.

Dream told Jan to put index fingers over heart, creating a roof, making love available for both giving to others while still containing for self...

Find yourself more than worthy of the earth’s calm energy as you soak up its love for you. Can you accept that loving energy from the earth itself and return it with equal love? This is what man is now charged with upon that earth: balancing energies of love by achieving balance between nature and self. This is how to change the self and how to also change the world.

Love exists all around you. Let it in.

Channeled, with love, by Jan Ketchel.

Chuck’s Place: Thoughts about Shame

The gift of the movie Shame is the clear and brutal exposition of a path deeply hidden yet commonly taken, the path of sexual addiction.

At its heart, sexual addiction shares with all addictions the expropriation of an instinct, in this case the sexual instinct. Other addictions, such as food and chemical dependency, are more associated with the hunger instinct. Addiction numbs, soothes and keeps at bay the underlying challenges of self-knowledge, self-acceptance, integration, and true intimacy.

The sexual instinct, fully wrestled with and realized in maturity, brings in its wake bonding, union, love and new life. In addiction the sexual instinct is choked into compulsive release, offering little more than deepening alienation under the ever-present shadow of death.

Choked in shame!

The storyline of the movie gives us little history, but enough to know that life lived must be kept at bay, frozen and unprocessed. Human contact—seemingly at its most intimate in the sexual act—must be completely devoid of connection and feeling. Sex is completely severed from even a hint of love. The slightest hint of feeling renders the phallus flaccid, plunged into yet deeper shame.

And with shame comes the opportunity to be with the pain, to find the tearful circuits to emotional release, to begin to melt the frozen islands of fragmented self. But, as with all paths, sometimes the shock and pain of knowing the truth, and feeling it fully, sends us back into addictive behaviors and release, the wheel of groundhog days. Though this repetitive cycle appears to offer little resolution, in actuality, it allows us to engage in a truly instinctual/spiritual process, as we return to accrue more energy in the form of frustration and discontent, energy that one day will help us awaken and realize that we no longer need to stay on that wheel. We are fully prepared then to step beyond the path of shame into deeper connection and fulfillment.

The movie leaves us hanging, in an unresolved land with some painful truths revealed and many still deeply hidden. It leaves us uncomfortable, confronted with accepting the fact that we all face addiction of some sort in our lives, as well as some sort of shame.

Though addiction comes in many guises, at its core it nonetheless asks us to face the same things within ourselves as the protagonist in Shame is asked to face within himself: the uncomfortable truth.

Can we enter that land of truth? What do we stay addicted to that keeps us from not only facing our deepest pain but from going deeper into where it is instinctually guiding us? Can we allow ourselves to accept that in facing our truths we really will step onto a path of change? Can we bear the tension of that journey of change that seeks to lead us to true union?

Jan: Self-portrait at age 18—still asked by spirit to face truths in the light of day

Lift the veil of shame and see what’s beneath it. The ultimate realization is that we’re all on the same path; we’re all beings on our way to dying. Choosing addictions equals choosing attachments. How long do we really need to hold onto them? How long do we need to keep at bay the real truths of who we are, the truths of our lives lived and the truth of our lives yet to be lived? Can we stay open to our fullest potential—fulfillment in a life we can’t hold onto anyway? Because we do have to die.

The real question is: How do we want to live?

And the real crux of sex and love is: Can we allow ourselves to fully open to love in a life that will one day end? Can we join the spirit of love and fully merge with another human being? Can we love someone who may leave us and someone who surely is going to die? If love is spirit and sex is matter—which is transitory—can we allow ourselves to drop all addictions and attachments, and all our shame too, and truly merge the two?

Full union of spirit and matter is letting love in. There is no shame in that.

Chuck, with love and thanks for some expert editing by Jan.

#759 Right Direction of Change

Written by Jan Ketchel with a channeled message from Jeanne Ketchel.

As I observe nature in spring unfolding, I feel the urgency to keep up, to keep changing and growing too, to not waste a second, but to continually evolve. This is not an urgency to go beyond nature, but to go more deeply into it, to learn from it, both how to live in better alignment with it, part of it, as well as how to better understand life and the meaning of human existence.

Today, I ask Jeanne: What guidance can you offer as I struggle to evolve in right alignment with nature?

Jeanne responds:

Do not look too far beyond your own intimate world for the signs and guidance you need in order to learn about the meaning of life. Each one of you have, within your home environment, the seeds of nurturance and evolution. Whether those are seeds of sustenance or seeds of decay, so are they seeds of change. Whether your tendency is to attach to a positive outlook or a negative outlook on life, so are you fully equipped with the tools you need to change.

Begin where you are, with what you have. State your intent to change, grow, learn, and then allow nature within the self to guide you on your journey.

Are you stuck in inertia? In complacency? Are you not sure? Or are you simply unaware of your true state?

It does not matter what your mind knows or does not know, so much as what the stirrings of your spirit know. True spirit knowing is often fear inducing, for your spirit is your greatest challenger, confronting you always with the truth of your situation.

You may wish to blame others or the outer world for your predicaments and circumstances, but, in truth, only you are to blame for your life, your situation in life, your health, your awareness, your clarity, your abilities to dare yourself to move on and truly live a full life.

Do not turn to others to resolve or solve your most urgent matters, but constantly turn inward and ask the self to show you the way. It may help to SLOW DOWN, even though you may feel the urgency of nature unfolding all around you. Slow down and OBSERVE how nature reacts to situations it finds itself in. Observe the SPIRIT of nature itself as unbending, unbreakable, unthwarted by what comes from the outside. Spirit leads to understanding LIFE itself, and this is where your most necessary lesson is—in learning to grasp what the energy of LIFE, that which you all hold within your personal world, really means to you as an individual and as a member of the society you live in.

The world is large and diverse, and populations are at different stages of life, yet each population and each individual within those populations around the world are living a life of meaning, potential, and purpose. It is up to you to find the true meaning for your life and act upon it with energy, daring, and in right alignment with the truth of all nature.

When Jeanne says this it reminds me of what the Buddhists say, that everyone has within them the true potential to be a Buddha.

Jeanne continues:

Within your personal permaculture must you each find your rhythm, your sustenance, your signs of growth. Within yourself must you seek your guidance.

When Jeanne said the word “permaculture” I immediately understand this to mean the physical body, that our bodies themselves are our total and complete world—that everything we need is embodied within the permaculture of our human, physical form. This is what she refers to when she speaks of our true natural world. We must keep it in balance, richly tended, attended to like a good organic farmer.

Jeanne goes on to say:

Look to nature at your feet, not at someone else’s, for your personal direction. Look for guidance in your own heart, not someone’s else’s, for your knowing. Look for the answers to your questions in calmness of self, knowing full well that your outer world is showing you that it is only within the self that truth and spirit lie.

The events outside of your inner world, even the events around the greater world, as they erupt daily, effecting everything about your life, are really only pushing you to confront your own inner events and conflicts, for that is where your life energy resides, caught in conflict.

Even as you work your soil, take in the sunlight, the moonlight, and connect to your natural world, dig deeper within, for that is your fertile ground where all the answers lie, seeds waiting for your mind to release them. They hold enough energy to burst open without your controlling mind attaching importance based on old, outer knowledge. That is done now. It is the inner knowledge of the ancient self that must come forth and guide each one of you now.

If you want to change your world—your personal world as well as your greater world—you must change the self, otherwise there will be no success. Lift your heavy mantles of intellect now, the mantles of rational thought, as great and powerful as they are. There is nothing so great and knowledgeable as the true knowing heart of each one of you.

The Ancient Circulating in Nature

Join in heart-centered energy and find the answers you seek. You will recognize them immediately, for they have always resided inside you. You have used them many times to guide you in the past. In all lifetimes, these are the answers you seek. Your ancient answers, your ancient knowledge—which has been circulating for eons—has always spoken, always been present in some form. You just have to hear it, recognize it, feel your true heart’s response, and get in alignment.

Watch out for the false words and the false heart’s response. Watch out for the ego’s alignment. Danger lies in this alignment. You know what I’m talking about: FEAR!

Yes, I must interject here, because I do know exactly what she means. Jeanne warns us earlier in this message that: True spirit knowing is often fear inducing. This is where we must face our greatest challenges because, indeed, fear shows us where we have to go to really change and grow. Normally fear makes us want to run back into our old comforts, but the true challenge is to confront the fear, go through it, and find out what it has been blocking us from. This is the challenge of recapitulation, to keep facing the fear rather than retreat into our old world, our old behaviors, and our old ideas of self. If we don’t face our fears we will never change our world.

Jeanne offers this final advice today:

Turn now toward LOVE, universally present inside all of you.

That’s enough for today. Find the difference between LOVE and FEAR, between the heart’s true alignment and the ego’s false alignment. This is where you will distinguish between right direction of change and old direction of complacency and no real change at all.

It takes daring to change. Watch Nature. It shows you all that you need to learn how to face the daring self who truly desires change, as the daring self challenges the fearful self.

Most humbly offered,
Jan