Tag Archives: matter

Chuck’s Place: Meet the Animal—A Twist

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I was six years old. Powerful rhythmic music filled the room. A young woman, Rita was her name, and my older sister broke into a violent hip swaying pelvic dance—the Twist! I was overcome with dizziness and fear. I hid in the closet.

Rolling force of nature…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Today I understand that experience as my first conscious encounter with what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico called the Rolling Force, the primary vibrational energy behind life that shapes the reality we live in. In this instance that vibration manifested in the Kali-like physical body movements of Rita and my sister.

What I was to learn from this encounter was how overwhelming this  expression of the rolling force of animal rhythmic abandon was for my tender child spirit. In effect, my human spirit, or growing sense of ego identity and consciousness, was extremely fragile and needed to ward off the disintegrating effect of this rolling energy of nature. The key was to be able to maintain control over this flow at all costs.

My retreat to the closet allowed me to stop my exposure to the flow of energy, to separate my consciousness from the raging, twisting river of dance energy that threatened to drown me. This was spirit triumphing over matter. And so it begins.

Our evolving species has fixated its awareness upon a consensual reality of mind over matter, or spirit over nature. Within ourselves we prize the rational goal-oriented mind over the instinctual animal we are encased within. We joke about the animal we are, like the comedians among us who are proving to have taken it too far.

The consequence of this disidentification with the animal is a complete miscalculation of, and unrelatedness to, the power of its instinctual energies that flow within the human body and are essential to human life.

Sexual desire, for instance, is an essential component of the human animal. The human spirit, as ego, must deal with its instinctive hormonal promptings yet has no clue as to how or what to do with it. To truly relate to this instinctive energy is to encounter the Twist!

How does mind get comfortable being taken on a ride by an impersonal force of the body? How does consciousness hold on, channel, remain responsible and related with its instinctual, rhythmic self? Tall order for a spirit that just wants to exploit this instinctual energy without a real relationship with the body.

The present outing of the sexual behavior of powerful men clearly evidences the abusive use of control to obtain some measure of twisted sexual release by exploiting the bodies of both women and men. Outings of these behaviors must continue, yes, to bring justice to crime, but even more fundamentally to give credence to the dire state of immature relatedness to the sexual instinct in modern culture. The consequence of this dissociation and hubris is quite apparent: aberrant sexual behavior.

The powerful raging rivers of opinion and outrage that flood the gates of social media run the same risk of miscalculating the power of thought (spirit) over instinct. Nature always prevails.

The young boy in the closet has spent his life building a relationship with his rhythmic animal partner. Shortly after his encounter with the Twist he was to experience the same vibrational shattering in a pure spirit meeting while his body lay frozen in deep sleep. Rhythmic vibrational contractions permeate life in the body as well as life in the spirit.

In physical life our opportunity is to partner our spirit consciousness with the sensual rhythm of our animal nature. This is the key to the mastery of intent and manifestation. The abuses of control and power are really maladaptive attempts to solve the riddle of who we really are and form some form of relationship with our mysterious other.

What the abuses currently reveal is the underlying terror of powerful men to connect with their mysterious other in a genuine meeting of respect and love. This is indeed the greatest challenge of life in the body.

That little boy continues to learn how to meet his partner in love and the Twist. Perhaps a partnership with our younger other is the place to start.

Twist and shout,

Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Spirit Matters

Spirit & Matter in one…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Spirit and Matter are the building blocks of humanity. Spirit is invisible, matter is substantial and therefore observable. We infer the existence of spirit by the effects it has on matter. If I decide to stand up and walk to the door, my invisible mind, the spirit dimension of my being, moves my body, the matter or material part of my being.

Thus, spirit begins with the mental plane, which, granted, uses the physical brain but is not identical with it. Consciousness functions outside the human body as an energy body capable of defying the laws of time and space. This dimension of spirit experience, though a latent potential for everyone, usually remains dormant except under extraordinary circumstances like a physical trauma, which shakes the energy body out of the physical body in an OBE. In a generally less uncomfortable way our spirit or energy body separates from the physical body in dreaming every night.

Matter is all of nature. Nature is governed by instincts and inherited programs, which at the human level are called archetypes. Archetypes are nature’s inherited programs that can assume control of human behavior from a deeply unconscious level. For example, many people who were sexually abused in childhood lose conscious memory of their experiences almost immediately after they occur. Certainly this is not a conscious decision. This amnesic reaction is governed by an archetypal program deeply embedded in nature’s program for survival at such a traumatic moment. That program reactivates—generally in midlife, to facilitate the achievement of wholeness at a mature stage of life—as memory in the form of flashbacks, beckoning reconciliation with consciousness.

Consciousness is fixated on rationality as the governing spirit of our time: spirit intellectis. Juan Enriquez, a scientific visionary, has basically stated what most people really believe: that we are God now, that our intellect is God, and that we are completely in charge of our own and the world’s evolution. Certainly the words bellowed from the United Nations General Assembly yesterday reflect such an attitude.

This kind of inflated spirit erupted with Naziism, which had as its god the creation of the perfect superior human. Interestingly, C. G. Jung stated that Naziism was the eruption of the pagan god Wotan, long suppressed in the human psyche through the impact of Christianity, which had served to help humanity advance spirit over the dominance of its nature roots.

When spirit dissociates itself from matter, matter seeks revenge. That’s where we are now: matter is at war with spirit. Matter, as nature, is deemed irrational. Spirit, as mind, is deemed rational. Thus the war is played out as the irrational versus the rational, matter versus spirit.

Nature is dealing deadly blows to humanity at present. Simply view the state of our islands of paradise in the Caribbean. My heart goes out to all my friends there in the front line of nature’s forward march. The Caribbean is at the vanguard of our changing world. This has archetypal underpinnings as a paradise lost, representing a major shift in human consciousness. We can only return to the garden now with a wholly new adaptive attitude, which is already emerging from this precious part of the world as it braces for nature’s next round of energetic impact.

In human form, nature, as the irrational, has seized control of major world leaders, particularly here in America. These untethered spirits are governed by their own whims, which change dramatically, like the wind, day by day, with no rhyme or reason, as the fate of the world hangs in the balance.

The deeper issue that all these world happenings reflect is the relationship between the irrational and rational within ourselves. Our ego spirit intellectis simply devalues and dismisses all that is matter, and the laws that govern it. Our bodies and our physical world are filled with food stuffs and objects alien to the true needs of the body and the planet. Our ego spirit cares largely about me and mine; let the world community fend for itself. Our ego spirit identifies with reason and so dissociates from or tries to control, for its own gain, the basic instincts.

The war we are in must be fought within individuals, each of us striving to reconcile our own spirit and matter selves. The ego must ground itself in the body and in deeply unconscious nature. This  means facing the truths of body ailments that are expressing nature’s resentments and needs. This means facing, feeling, expressing, regulating and integrating nature’s powerful emotions, which express important needs and send archetypal messages that have the potential, if paid attention to, to steer the spirit in consort with material reality and need, that is, the true needs of the body and the planet.

We are all empowered here and now to make the changes in our own lives that are necessary to reconcile with nature. This is not the time to luxuriate in OBEs, dissociated from our body and our nature. The playing field is spirit-in-body now,  doing our best to bring this yin and yang of ourselves into working harmony.

Let’s calm nature by listening to her, within and without, acquiescing to the true needs of self and planet. This is the true spirit of the matter. Have love, compassion, and care without, but seek the needed transformation within.

The truth is that our world leadership does not grasp the heart of the matter. Our greatest playing field is restoring the Tao within the self. As within, so without. This is the spirit that really matters now.

In spirit in matter,

Chuck

*See Juan Enriquez on NPR’s Ted Hour here.

Chuck’s Place: Accumulation in Excess

We are in a time of extreme imbalance. Imbalance is the result of accumulation in excess. Accumulating in excess is the precursor of change. When a river swells to excess with accumulated rains, it must, of necessity, overwhelm its banks and flood the lands—a time of great change indeed!

The accumulation of angst through decades of stagnant repression has broken through to revolution in the Middle East Arab Spring. The accumulation of excessive wealth in the hands of the few has sprung another spring of protest upon the “wall” of Wall street.

The excessive stranglehold upon the economy—from whatever tainted, purist, or natural source—presses now upon the spirit to relinquish its attachment to materialism in excess as a source of meaning in life. The flood of deprivation drowning the planet is pressing human life into a new, sustainable balance.

There is no restraining the floods of change currently unleashed upon us. No corrective action can shore us up or return us to an old world balance.

We are in a different world now. The environment is rapidly shifting, the masses are wiser, more interconnected than ever, and the ruling platitude of unlimited growth and expansion has proven unsustainable.

We find ourselves truly at a major evolutionary juncture: Accumulation in excess as a way of life, as a planetary economy, is unsustainable. What will come next?

What is called for is a new paradigm that separates true needs from want, hunger from appetite. Accumulation in excess derives not from true need and hunger but from want and appetite. Want and appetite are abstractions, projections of value attached to things. From this projection derives the equation: more things = greater value. This is the equation of addiction. Addiction is accumulation in excess. Addiction is the human condition at this current evolutionary juncture.

The ethereal impulse behind addiction is spirit. Spirit seeks greater life, greater possibility. Spirit projected onto matter always seeks more for completion: more love, more alcohol, more numbness, more freedom, more adventure, more sex, more intensity, more money, more food, more, more, more.

Material balance

If we are to find safe passage through this time of great change we must satisfy spirit in spirit terms. We must lift our spirit’s longings off our material world and allow our beleaguered planet to restore its balance.

We are energetic beings. Energy is the home of spirit and spirit longing. The ultimate adventure that awaits us is our energy body, the body that lives on beyond the material world, the body that journeys in infinity. We all have access to it in this life, but only if we shift. The more we cycle in excessive accumulation of material things, the longer we remain in avidya—ignorance—yet to discover that all that glitters is not gold.

Fulfillment in this life requires us to explore and meet our deepest needs: material and spiritual. But if we refuse to recapitulate—where we free our spirit from our material experiences—we remain frozen, unable to find fulfillment in spirit or body. One cannot substitute for the other. A spirit being who shuns the body—a spirit in excess—results in a being in need of reincarnation. Likewise, a physical being who shuns the spirit will find itself steeped in addiction, bound to the spirit, projected onto matter.

With spirit soaring

Such is the condition of now. Accumulation in excess—unsustainable and uncontainable. The walls are coming down in floods of revolution. May we find safe passage as spirits soaring in material balance.

In dedication to the soaring spirit of Steve Jobs,
Chuck