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Chuck’s Place: On Narcissism

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Jan stalking Narcissus…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The diagnostic tool of the American Psychiatric Association, DSM-5, classifies pervasive narcissism as a personality disorder, a mental illness. I would argue that narcissism is a stage of cognitive and emotional and moral development. Fixation can occur at this egocentric stage of development. In fact, collectively, humankind is currently fixated at this stage. However, this is not as a result of mental illness but simply because of a lack of evolutionary maturity.

Narcissus, the namesake of narcissism, fell in love with his own reflection as he gazed into a clear pool of water. Narcissus’ utter fascination and love for his own image absorbed his total being, much the same as any thunderstruck lover is utterly absorbed with their soulmate.

At its most basic, narcissism is the inability to see and experience the world holistically. The absorption with self narrows every sensory interpretation of the world. People, events, and things are seen through the lens of self-need and self-gratification.

Cognitively speaking, although one knows of the existence of others beyond the self, one is solely focused on their utility to satisfy the needs of the self. Thus, self-interest can be characterized as the overarching focus of a narcissistic worldview.

Since love is fixated upon the self, the narcissist simply cannot sustain interest in a story void of itself. It literally zones out or falls asleep as it attempts to listen. This, however, is not volitional; the narcissist’s total preoccupation with the aggrandizement of self is truly all-pervasive. For the narcissist there simply is no energy or interest in anything that does not bring exclusive consideration and attention to the self.

Narcissism has its roots in the incarnation of spirit in a physical body. The body of a human is animal. Like all animal species, the human animal is governed by archetypal programs nuanced to the idiosyncrasies of its species. These programs govern the instincts of feeding, self-preservation and reproduction.

Emphasis upon survival of self is the overarching intent of the instinctual core of humankind. Food, sex, and power are procured for the survival of self. Even though sex generally involves another person, the instinct offers satisfaction to insure its own intent of reproduction of its self in a new birth.

Clearly, narcissism is a normal developmental theme of childhood. Much of the social challenge in schooling revolves around learning to share and be considerate of the needs of others. Although most children learn ultimately to behave with a certain level of altruism for adaptive purposes, the truth is that their narcissistic underpinnings merely slip into the shadow of their personality where they continue to dominate emotionally and cognitively.

Nonetheless, childhood education does help to refine the ego self, which is the spirit’s workhorse challenged to master the trials it assigned itself for its current human life. Ego develops consciousness to exercise freedom of choice through exercise of the will.

With free will the ego can choose to oppose the urges of instinct with which it contends. Conversely, ego has the capability to collude with instinct and tweak it to its own designs, behaving in ways instinct would never venture on its own. This is frequently the combination that underlies the acting out of horrific abuse.

The ego also has the ability to nearly completely shun grounded life in a physical body and identify itself instead with a high spirit self. Frequently this invites spirit contact with entities that will feed this inflation for their own nefarious purposes. Narcissism, in this case, manifests as a belief that one is a high Self, greater than most other humans. This narcissistic lens remains focused on the greatness of self.

In the course of human evolution, rites of passage were aggressively employed to broaden one’s narcissistic identity. Thus, personal and familial loyalty were broadened to include identification with the greater community. The failure of modern civilization to preserve and deepen these initiation rites is reflected in our current world crisis, with its ultimate roots in pervasive narcissism.

The central tool of initiation is sacrifice. Sacrifice accrues to the ego the ability to both wrestle from the instinct its primal power and dominance and spiritually align itself with the needs of the greater good. Our willingness as individuals to sacrifice our narcissistic fixation upon self, as it reflects in family, ethnic and national partiality, to find equanimous love for all, is the key to reaching the next stage of developmental growth.

As Gaia ups her climate change game, humankind is being placed in her retort, as we must suffer her alchemical operations to assist us in rising to the next level of evolutionary progress, heart centeredness. Heart centeredness is love beyond the self, love that includes the welfare of the entire world. This is love that knows and acts upon what is truly right, beyond the polarized centers of greed and self-interest.

Gaia is returning us to the initiation rites of yesteryear where suffering, not education, served to emancipate one from total fixation upon the self. Beyond that fixation is entry into an interdependent world of unlimited possibility. True transformation, real growth, shall be the outcome of this time of great suffering and change.

Such a privilege to be in this world at such a milestone transition. We’ve all been called here to facilitate and be part of this great transformation, despite, and because of, the suffering.

Carry on,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: The Law of Compensation

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In flight in life, grounded in death, beautiful nonetheless…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Carl Jung recognized the psyche’s insistence upon balancing itself out in some way. Thus, if we consciously live a one-sided attitude in waking life, our dreams will balance it out with characters and dramas that engage us in the exact opposite attitude. Freud captured this principle in describing sexually promiscuous dreams as balancing an individual’s sexually repressive waking life attitude.

Psychic researcher, both in human life and in his soul’s afterlife, Frederic Myers, teaches from infinity how this law of compensation extends into the life of the soul after its completion of physical life. Myers channels, through Geraldine Cummins, his observation of the soul’s residence in the Plane of Illusion, the immediate world we encounter after a brief adjustment phase subsequent to physical death. (See both The Road to Immortality and Beyond Human Personality by Geraldine Cummins.)

Similar to the Buddhist description of a personalized bardo, Myers describes how the soul’s imagination creates a world uniquely suited to fulfilling its unlived earthly dreams, or to feel fully the pain it caused others, as it compensates for the cruelty it delivered during its earthly sojourn.

Souls live and reside in these personal environments until they achieve the completed balance to further their soul’s journey at higher, more subtle and objective levels of infinity. Thus, the Plane of Illusion enacts the life necessary to compensate for and balance out the life just completed in human form.

On Earth, presently, we have two distinguished nonagenarians, Noam Chomsky and Sir David Attenborough, reflecting to us how this law of compensation is exacting its present toll upon our planet’s survival. In a recent podcast with Ezra Klein*, Chomsky states, without hesitation or reserve, that humankind has twenty years left to radically change its environmental behaviors before it faces definite extinction.

This deeply reflective 92-year-old scholar is bluntly pointing out how significant this time on Earth is for humanity. Within our current lifetime, decisions and actions now taken will determine the near immediate fate of our human race and planet Earth.

How much greater a wakeup call could there be? How awesome to be a participant in life, on this planet, at this moment in time! Such the opportunity to awaken to a world unfiltered by blurry narcissism!

Attenborough is gentler in his challenge to a humankind that has doubled its world population in the last fifty years, seriously squeezing out other life on the planet. In his Netflix series, A Life on Our Planet**, Attenborough invites us, in graphic detail, into the beautiful yet tenuous balance of all of nature, deeply interdependent and perilously impacted by human habit. He remains optimistic, appealing to our love and awe for our home planet to curb our attitude of entitled excess.

Much of the human population is reacting aberrantly to this intuitive knowing of the precarious state of the planet that both these distinguished sages affirm. Addictions of many kinds reflect a mass of humanity seeking to remain comfortably numb in the oblivion of a soothing, fanciful, materialistic womb. Staggering gun sales reflect the fantasy of survival in a post-apocalyptic world of diminished resource.

The objective truth is that humankind is emotionally and cognitively at a narcissistic stage of development. Narcissism represents an early developmental stage of the imagination, filtered and constrained by the needs of self. From the vantage point of narcissism, the purpose of other beings and resources is limited to serving the self, the boundary of the known world.

Decisions and actions stemming from this narrow view are often to grow and hoard as much as materially possible, to be able to move about as desired, and to continue to survive and thrive upon a dying planet. Migrants are often seen as aliens, trying to take what is not rightfully theirs, rather than as people seeking refuge from an increasingly uninhabitable planet.

The issue is not ultimately about caring for the less fortunate, however noble such a cause. The deeper issue is about facing and taking right action to save the planet. And right action is the willingness to sacrifice, to set limits upon the supposed sacrosanct right to more, more, more.

Very early in my college days, I ventured into an economics course, which insisted, as its sacred dogma, that humankind’s need for more was innate, and that the world must be irrevocably organized to meet this human demand. Who ever questions the given that the economy, jobs, the human population and the stock market must continually grow?

The world emerges now from its yearlong pandemic retreat. Already, CO2 emissions are climbing back to “normal”. All envision expansion as recovery. And yet, as Attenborough’s graphic display of the melting of Antarctica portends, the compensation for expansion will be the continued unleashing of endless viruses upon the world stage.

Chomsky points to atomic fusion as the likely safe antidote to our ever-growing world energy demand, but states that such a solution is decades beyond our twenty-year survival limit. But I ask, why do we accept, without question, this supposed absolute imperative that we accommodate our energy appetite?

Beyond this materialist fixation upon energy expansion lies the final frontier of energetic expansion into the province of our soul. The energy body, our subtle soul that innervates our physical body during the physical phase of our immortal life, is ripe for discovery and exploration now, while we reside in human form.

This is literally the stuff that dreams are made of. To open to this dimension of spiritual life is to direct the human felt manifest destiny for more into sustainable evolution. To awaken to this spiritual unfolding is to stretch the imagination beyond its narcissistic constraints, to take in the deeper reality in which the self is a participant but not everything.

The current initiatives to address climate change, at the highest levels of world governance, are laudable but likely to suffer the sad fate of most New Year’s resolutions. More likely, are continued attacks from nature herself—from viruses to earthquakes—to assist humankind, via compensation, to learn to curb and redirect its insatiable appetite for more.

Nature can take down our energy infrastructure in a heartbeat, teaching us how to live small and interdependently. The law of compensation insists that we will find our way to balance. All individuals are empowered to address this inevitable fate by squaring with the imbalances in their own lives.

Taking an honest accounting of one’s habits, and willingly sacrificing excess, in whatever form, is both the individual and the planetary imperative. All excess, voluntarily sacrificed, results in the accrual of energy for spiritual advancement and planetary survival. All individual sacrifice of excess additionally accrues to humankind’s growing account of energy for necessary attitudinal shift: from narcissism to right action.

The law of compensation is the truly sacrosanct law that governs this world, and the beyond. It will help us to grow and find fulfillment through mastering the art of sacrifice. We can aid this natural and spiritual law by voluntarily taking a personal inventory of habits and aligning with right action and true interdependent need.

Start small; all donations, of whatever size, are equally appreciated. Choose one small act of sacrifice today and notice its subtle appreciation by physical body and energetic spirit. Ask for help from the unseen and experience the synchronistic material response.

Put the law of compensation to best use: let material sacrifice be compensated by spiritual advance.

Appreciating sacrifice,

Chuck

*Ezra Klein interviewing Noam Chomsky
**David Attenborough’s film trailer

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Assume Responsibility for Being Here in this Marvelous Time

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Let your ego-Soul rise to its heart’s SOUL!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

It’s not often, in the modern world, that the Divine Right of royalty can actually have an impact on our present world drama. Once upon a time, God’s royal blood poured through the arteries of kings and queens who ruled the Earth by divine right. Today, though royal doings and marriages fascinate the imagination, the rule of nations has largely given way to those elected democratically by the proletariat, the common citizen.

Last week, however, the Queen of England, was asked by her prime minister to suspend Parliament. Her decision would have a significant impact on the momentous Brexit process, a major transition point for the future of England. The Queen elected to oblige her prime minister. And with that the Gods have spoken: “let human nature play itself out now, without divine interference.”

Why have the gods taken this stance, particularly the Mother God embodied by the Queen? Could it be that Mother Nature has chosen to decree that it’s time for human nature to solve the riddles of its own storms?

The implication for our current Earth Crisis is that we will not be rescued through some deus ex machina, some godly savior from beyond. It is left instead in the hands of humanity to forge a sustainable path for the survival of its species upon the planet. It is indeed time to assume responsibility for being here in this marvelous time.

In the structure of the human psyche, royalty equates with the High SOUL spirit center, far removed from the doings of everyday life. Like the Queen of England, it does not take responsibility for human decision making. This, for better or for worse, is the province of the human ego-Soul.

We see before us now great examples of the mind of ego-Soul changing the substance, in structure and action, of the outside world. What lies behind all manifest creation is idea. Mind shapes substance. The consumer awaits a changed world of prices, as tariffs takes effect. Whole industries will change course, as an idea from a president becomes manifest in solid reality.

What ideas, what beliefs—all spirits in the mind—shape our bodies and our world. We are being given great examples, in this momentous time, of how quickly and formidably the world can be reshaped. If we assume full responsibility for our thoughts and our intent, great changes in our lives await.

The question emerges as to where we will place our intent. We do well to study the preponderance of our realized culture of narcissism, that Christopher Lasch so aptly captured in his 1979 bestseller, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. If we truly lean into the narcissism that surrounds us, we will discover its grip upon us all.

Survival and self-interest are the dominant ideas of our time. Our political leaders mirror this for us. Let us not project all responsibility upon the foolhardy and miss the gift they offer us. We are at an evolutionary turning point, and even the Queen insists that we, the common people, assume responsibility for the fate of our lives.

If we continue to fixate our intent at the rudimentary level of satisfying our narcissistic needs at the expense of the greater needs of the body, the Soul, and the world, the outcome is obvious.

If our intent can rise to the level of the heart, where the SOUL tells us the truth, our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs will be blessed with pure love. From that spirit state, our lives will manifest, in substance, all that is needed, all that is wanted for our deepest fulfillment.

And that fulfillment will extend to all living beings, as love in its highest form includes everything. That is the key to love at the heart center. Since love adheres to the truth that, energetically, we are all connected, nothing is left untouched by its care.

Narcissism is indeed its own form of love; it simply hasn’t grown beyond its own reflection. Accept that we are all narcissists at some level, but to grow one’s reflection to include the whole world is to rise to the heart of the matter.

The opportunity of this marvelous time we live in, is to assume personal responsibility through divine right to raise our beings to the heart center. The Queen herself has passed on this insinuation. Truly become your royal self.

With love,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: On The Edge of Narcissism

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What does it mean to be living in this time of The Trump Show? This thinly veiled reference to the movie The Truman Show casts no aspersions upon Trump but intends instead to present an incisive understanding of the momentous time we are living in.

There’s a whole new reality out there!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In The Truman Show, Jim Carrey’s character, Truman, lived his complete life on a TV set, totally unaware that he was the only real character in a fabricated story that the rest of the world vicariously watched on their screens. He naively lived this personal illusion, which was completely supported by consumer interest. The climax of the movie was the moment he discovered the boundary of his illusion, a fake ocean in a flat room, and a three dimensional world beyond it that he had never known existed.

Jim Carrey’s moment of revelation is symbolic of the time when human consciousness was confronted with the reality that the world was not flat, that explorers did not fall off the edge of it on their ocean voyages. At that moment, world consciousness realized that it had been locked into a belief system, like Jim Carrey, that kept it insulated from true reality, largely due to its isolated, confined, narrow-minded view of the world. Once that revelation came, everything changed.

That moment of revelation can be characterized as standing on the edge of narcissism and glimpsing the true nature of someone or something other than the mirror of one’s personal belief system, the lens through which one ordinarily perceives the world. It’s that moment on a date, when the one who has talked about him or herself, non-stop for an hour, suddenly looks up and notices the other person at the opposite side of the table, and asks, “And what about you?” The implication: Something beyond me exists, a startling revelation!

Human consciousness is currently nearing such a moment of revelation. Donald Trump is our Truman, bringing us to the edge of narcissism, to the boundaries of our belief systems that veil a more comprehensive view of reality. In one form or another, we are all players on the set of the Trump Show. The main technology of his show is sheer impulse and unpredictability, and we are all gripped and contained in the fiery energy of the drama.

No longer do we have a comprehensive collective belief system about how people should behave, what news is fit to print, how natural disasters or assassinations should be handled. Instead, we’ve  splintered into clusters of opposing views, where even the Commander-in-chief might impulsively, completely reverse himself, at any moment, on any given day.

This plethora of opposing beliefs keeps us locked into warring differences that vie for supremacy, an attempt by each side to install their belief system as the overarching truth. However, the more sublime impact of the Trump Show is the revelation that belief systems are just that, bulwarks of narcissism that veil other truths and realities, and prevent deeper exploration and knowing of those truths and realities.

And now, as we begin to see through the relativity of our limiting belief systems, what is the broader reality that approaches us?

Energetic reality is the new frontier. The Trump Show has laid bare the dominance of the survival drive, at the animal level, as the basis of current decision making. Energetic reality lays bare the existence of spirit as a dominant guiding force for life, in and beyond the physical body.

What all religious traditions have always held space for, is the existence of a soul, an etheric body that separates from the physical body at death to participate in continued life on new terms, without a physical body. Energetic reality offers the means to experience and explore this realm while still in possession of a physical body.

Robert Monroe was a leader in providing a technology of brain hemispheric synchronization that facilitates such exploration. Carlos Castaneda shared a simpler technology toward the same end, that of intent. The potential that each technology offers is direct experience of one’s soul, on an energetic plane beyond the physical body.

This energetic exploration is a means to knowing, versus simply hoping, that life continues beyond physical life. With this knowing, life on the physical plane is no longer encumbered by the fear of death, that which has led to the dominance of the survival drive at the animal level of our human selves.

Opening to energetic reality also exposes us to the true nature of our interconnectedness with all of life, on and beyond the planet, as we encounter the subtler energetic dimensions of being. With this broader view we realize that our thoughts influence others, spoken or unspoken. We discover that we too are deeply influenced by the silent thoughts of others, as well as the collective world thought patterns and beliefs, that on any given day large numbers of people may feel depressed and hopeless, or invigorated and hopeful, as the collective energy is felt on an energetic level.

Energetic reality is transparent and largely nonverbal. In energetic reality, we easily read the intentions of others, as well as ourselves. In energetic reality, the instincts of the human animal are seen, known, and accepted. In energetic reality, with a more honest awareness in place, the human animal is granted life with embodied consciousness. Certainly, in energetic reality, the negotiation of intimacy in relationship has the potential to become one of deeply profound union.

The ability to heal and be healed in energetic reality is exponentially advanced, as the subtler dimensions of thought and intention, as energetic change agents, are incorporated more fully and fundamentally into treatment protocols. The understanding of disease, as indicative of the status of the soul—perhaps being blocked in its intent, or forging its intent through the creation of physical symptoms—will deepen diagnostic and treatment approaches.

In energetic reality, inter- and intra-dimensional travel and communication, with souls no longer in human form, will vastly conserve the dense energetic reserves of the planet, currently being exploited for dense body, physical travel. Obsession with materialistic accumulation will give way to energetic creativity, with its boundless right-brain potential properly attuned with a left-brained attitude freed of egotistic fixation.

Though it may be difficult to imagine these profound changes, as we near the edge of the narcissistic platform that has embodied our beliefs, the possibilities I present are already being experienced by many. One need only decide, in earnest, to experience the soul directly, in an out-of-body experience in dreaming. As the body goes to sleep, the natural time for the soul’s dominant activity in our lives awakens. With but a little perseverance, one will have experiences beyond belief.

And so, with the Trump Show shattering our beliefs, the ground is clearing, as we reach the edge of narcissism and venture into a whole new world of energetic possibility.

Bon Voyage,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: My Inner Trump

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Our baldheaded cardinal going at it again!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

A doggedly persistent male cardinal smacks into our living room window throughout the day. The top of his head is bald and blue, like that of a turkey vulture, from his incessant headfirst crashes. We have noticed that this cardinal has a mate and we surmise he must be trying to fend off his perceived enemy reflected in the window, but the truth is that his enemy, unbeknownst to himself, is himself!

Our Soulbyte of Tuesday July 17, 2018 begins: “Pay attention. Become more fully aware of nature assisting you on your unfolding journey.” What is the guidance of this display of nature, of this seemingly crazy cardinal?

A bird is a spirit being. It flies like angels. The cardinal is named after the Cardinals of the Catholic Church in early Rome, adorned in their bright red robes and pointy red hats. Thus the cardinal is an earthly representative of a spirit being. Closer to home, the ego is the earthly representative of a spirit being. Consciousness, the hallmark of spirit, is born as the ego at the chakra center located at the solar plexus.

The solar plexus is the fire in the belly chakra, the home of personal power, where the ego discovers its ability to rise above the absolute control of nature’s primordial energies that command the lower chakras and choose its behavioral responses to the world. Nonetheless, choices are inevitably constricted by the narcissistic, self-referential cognitive and emotional limitations of the ego at this newly awakened youthful state of emergence.

Our cardinal reflects this narcissistic fixation. He cannot differentiate his enemy from himself. This results in a repetitive pattern of self-destructive behavior based on a distortedly applied archetypal instinct of defense. That distortion is a narcissistic reflection that won’t allow him a perspective beyond himself.

When Donald Trump asserts that American intelligence is the enemy, not Russia, he reflects the cardinal who sees his own reflection as the enemy. Trump unwittingly sees his own country as the enemy, which he subsequently incessantly verbally attacks, just as the cardinal incessantly attacks his own image reflected in our living room window. This is likely a developmental issue where ego is fixated on a narcissistic worldview.

The question is why this developmental stage is being so graphically mirrored upon the world stage at this point? What does it mean for all of us, as holographically we all share an inner Trump?

If we bring attention back to our friar, the baldheaded cardinal, attention is drawn to the redness of its firery spirituality. The cardinals of Catholicism, as well as the leaders of all spiritual traditions, have stood for a morality that rises above instinctual dominance. This is the equivalent of transcending the solar plexus and rising to the heart chakra with its more inclusive consideration of others.

The heart center can recognize and value life beyond itself. It can see truth and make decisions based on the overarching needs of the interdependent whole world. Our spiritual traditions stalk a higher chakra than we have actually developmentally reached. Obama stalked the heart center, which resulted in major inclusiveness of groups long rejected and cast out by society.

The truth is, however, that developmentally we truly have not reached the heart center perspective, and the Trump election avalanche was fueled by the collective narcissistic shadow which now unabashedly asks: “What about me, why do we have to care about everyone else?”

We are guided to take up this issue on an individual level. As our cardinal reflects, we must incessantly ask ourselves: “What repetitive self-destructive behaviors am I engaged in based on illusion? Who within me is in charge of my decision making? Am I properly including my deepest instinctual self in my decisions, or do I avoid the fire in the belly of emotion by blindly adhering to moral platitudes that defend me from the tensions within and without?”

The greatest individual contribution we can make in this time of fierce splitting apart is to face squarely our own inner Trumps. Clearly the planet beckons us to take up the challenge to reconcile our deepest instinctual selves with our highest spiritual values.

Suspend judgment. Take responsibility to know the self beyond illusion. Bear the burden of instinct and spirit. Find wholeness in the self. Let love join body and spirit, as well as neighbor to neighbor.

Facing my inner Trump,

Chuck