Tag Archives: ocean

Lessons in a Life: The Great Unknown Known

Before sleep I call upon Robert Monroe, great out-of-body explorer and author of several books as well as guided meditations on the subject. “Will you take me on as your apprentice?” I ask. Before long I am asleep and dreaming.

Girl on beach, drawn as we all are... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Girl on beach, drawn as we all are…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I stroll along a boardwalk. On my left side is an endless row of doorways to video arcades, to adventures and games, places to learn and test skills. On my right is the ocean, dark and brooding.

I pop into one arcade after another, through wide doorways into big rooms, through narrow doorways, no wider than a sheet of paper, into rooms equally narrow. All doorways are accessible; no matter how thin, I simply slip in. I have many adventures in these various rooms, partaking in games of skill, learning how to manipulate and master everything that comes at me.

Every now and then I step back out onto the boardwalk and walk out onto the beach and step into the waves of the ocean. As opposed to the busyness of the arcade scene, all is calm and quiet here. I am calm and at ease here too.

All night long, while I dream, I partake in life along the boardwalk and in the arcade rooms. I play all the games. I am enticed, challenged, gain insights, skills, and a sense of power and prowess, and yet it all soon becomes repetitive and boring. At the end of the night, just before I wake up, I walk one more time out to the ocean’s edge and realize that this is what matters, this is what’s meaningful, this is the whole point of everything. I wake up in utter calmness.

The boardwalk is the path through life. We make many trips along that boardwalk, through many lifetimes, selecting how we want to live, being drawn here and there, walking the narrow planks over and over again.

The arcade rooms represent the many adventures we have, the choices we make to play one game or another, the things we are challenged with and the things we learn. Here all the desires, the wantings, the needs, the things of this world that we find so enticing are supplied, encountered, and experienced.

The ocean is the Great Unknown Known. I call it this because although it is dark and brooding and hard to see what lies in its depths, we sense such affinity with it. There is familiarity in its mystery and we are constantly drawn to it. We are drawn there by the High Self, our spirit urging us to discover what it offers, just as I was drawn in my dream. We go to it throughout our lifetimes, perhaps not as often as we go to the arcade rooms, but often enough that we all have a sense of its presence and significance in our lives.

Life's repetitions keep us going in circles... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Life’s repetitions keep us going in circles…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Our sense of familiarity with it, hard to pinpoint at first, becomes more realized as we get to know it better. For some, the unconscious, that Great Unknown Known, is frightening. To others it is calming though still mysterious. It will remain a mystery until we dive deeper into its depths and discover what it holds for us. Once we have gone into its depths enough times we gain a certain prowess and ease, equal to that which we gain in the reality of this world, as we engage in it, walking the boardwalks of our many lifetimes.

The more we explore the ocean, the more we feel its resonance, its energy so like the energy of our spirit. The more we enter it the more we gain a certain prowess in its waters. We might even experience the great depths of calm that came over me at the end of my dream as we dive deeper into the mysteries of the inner self. Even as we become calm in its waters, we are also aware that we have still much to learn, as its mysteries are endless. It is the vastness of infinity, and just that, infinite.

Each time I took a break from the arcade rooms and stepped into the ocean in my dream calmness came over me, and yet I always went back to the boardwalk and the arcades. By the end of the night, however, I got the message. It’s not the boardwalk and the endless supply of games, one more bedazzling, enticing and challenging than the next, but the deep and broody ocean that is important. It is where our spirit takes us over and over again. Our spirit knows it’s what we are really seeking, and that it offers all the adventure we really need.

The ocean, the Great Unknown Known, is the big draw. It offers the wonder and mystery of what lies beyond the boardwalk, beyond this world, enticing us to discover it for ourselves, asking us to test its waters as eagerly as we jump into another arcade game.

In the end it’s the balance between the two that we seek. We must let ourselves fully experience what the boardwalk offers, on both sides. We must fully live in this world, the arcade rooms, but also fully avail ourselves of the world of the Great Unknown Known. And that really means that we soon discover that it is not so unknown at all, but just another part of who we really are.

Where our heart knows we must go... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Where our heart knows we must go…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

There are many ways to go to the ocean every day, in sitting calmly, in simply breathing, in meditation, in just being, in refusing to do what we might normally feel we must do, in what the shamans call “not doing.” In “not doing” we refuse to go into the arcade rooms. Instead, we go to the other side of the boardwalk, slip into the ocean for a moment or two and wait for it to show us something. You too might ask for Robert Monroe’s help. I think he’s out there waiting.

For now, we must return to the boardwalk because that’s where we live, but the ocean is always right there.

Not doing,
Jan

Chuck’s Place: Real Security

Still dealing with computer issues, but here is a blog from Chuck, sans pictures again, but offered with our heartfelt wishes for good journeying through all the changes.

The human animal is acutely aware of great change on the horizon. Such impending change produces a collective fear that emanates from the deepest stratum of our instinctual selves, rising to the surface in our individual experiences as anxiety. We seek to dispel this anxiety by seeking refuge in our ego self, which responds by associating the anxiety with current events as it defensively reasons us to provisional security. This anxiety/fear, however, goes deeper than that, into the very nature of our human animal selves.

The question arises: How do we achieve real security? The truth is that although it is evident that we are in for great planetary change, life is and has always been about great change. All life ends; what greater change could there possibly be?

Real security is not to be found in a respite from change. A respite from change may temporarily be found in the ego’s bag of magical defenses, but such respite is an illusion. In reality change is constant and unrelenting. We might, nonetheless, discover a sense of real security on a warm day at the beach.

The ocean tide is the ultimate expression of unrelenting change. The heartbeat of the earth never ceases in the circulatory system of the ocean’s waves. If we lie calmly at the seashore, we might attune ourselves to the sounds of the true pulse of change. No wave is ever the same. Some waves are calm and smooth, others are crushingly powerful.

If we venture beyond our sandy bed into the ocean waves we experience more directly the energy of change. As the waves approach we might decide to learn to dance with them, timing our moves to leap at just the right moment, barely impacted by the passing waves. If our timing is slightly askew we might find ourselves mercilessly dragged down and under, into sand and swirls, frantically awaiting release that we might breathe again. Most times we are released back into life, returned to the control of our own bodies. Sometimes the ocean claims life, the catalyst to moving into new form.

Perhaps we might decide to align ourselves with the flow of the waves, with the energy of change, as we ride the cresting waves ashore. Sometimes we are fooled or miscalculate and again find ourselves pulled asunder, forced to face the crushing uncertainty of change head on.

Real security, however, is only to be found in facing the inevitability of change by allowing the ego self to learn about its energy, discovering how to ride it successfully by facing the truth of our own lives.

If we can allow ourselves to engage with consciousness in our dreams and bring them to waking life, we enter more deeply into the ocean of our deeper selves.

If we can allow ourselves to fully experience our feelings in the present, and in our deepest memories in recapitulation, we release the energy of stored inner tidal waves and learn to stay afloat through the inevitable storms of our lives.

And yes, if we can allow ourselves to fully reexperience our deepest encounters with terrors that once tore us asunder, we gain the knowledge of holding together through the greatest cataclysms of change.

Real security is to be found in the ability to flow with the changes that life presents us with. To fully become our wholeness we must allow for encounters with, and knowledge of, the parts of ourselves that rock the limited identity our ego has constructed to keep us safe. But let’s not sell the ego short; it is fully capable of the growth to fluidity that is necessary to accept life on its own terms without machinations to make it palatable.

Bring your ego to the beach of your dreams tonight. It’s fine to rest comfortably on the shore and attune to the rhythm of change. The time will come when you are ready, or not, for the deeper plunge into the ocean of pulsing life and constant unrelenting change. Real security is found in flowing with the changes, wherever they take you.

Resting comfortably on the beach, until the next wave comes along,
Chuck

Readers of Infinity: As Ocean

Here is a channeled message from Jeanne and Jan to start off a new week!

Study what lies on your shore… - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Study what lies on your shore…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

As the waves of the ocean wash upon the shores so may you live your lives. Envision first gentle waves, the waves of childhood and youth, the waves of learning how to be in the world, the waves of knowledge and potential emerging out of the greater potential of nature from which you all come.

Sometimes the waves of the ocean are fierce and forceful, and sometimes it is appropriate for human beings to also be as forceful as nature. At times, it is necessary to barrel ahead, to push forward into life with liberty and freedom.

All must find their way through life, letting the energy of nature full expression and release. In order to progress in life one must allow nature to play its part—nature inside of you in relation to nature outside of you—if one is to evolve. Eventually new energy comes, the waves of moderation and progress, the waves of maturity.

Look upon the self as like the ocean. Study what that might mean for the self individually. Look at what lies in your deep. Look at what rides your surface. Look at what churns in your foam. Look at what crashes upon your shores. Look at what brings you to your true self.

As ocean, so are you like a force of nature, boundless yet contained, free yet controlled by other forces of nature, allowed expression and release yet also within the self complete with no need to expand too far. As ocean you are powerful, yet you are also gentle and calm. As ocean you are fruitful and bountiful, yet you must also preserve and care for that which you are.

As ocean, you are one with all of the energies of nature. You are nature itself. Remember this always: You are nature itself.

Allow the natural flow of you, as ocean and as nature itself, to guide you more fully through this phase of your life. What stage are you at now? And why must you be here? Learn from the self every day, so that you may achieve a new phase. That is what life is all about, constantly changing like the ocean. That is you!