Tag Archives: parts of self

Chuck’s Place: Getting To Know Our Parts As Probable Selves

Wholeness is accepting all the parts…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

I spent a training weekend with a virtual Susan Brown, LCSW and EMDR psychotherapist. This event coincided with my reading the book Seth, Dreams And Projections Of Consciousness, published posthumously in 1986, two years after the death of its author, Jane Roberts.

Susan Brown addresses the integration of sub-personality parts work with classic EMDR therapy as applied to treating addictions. For her, the multiplicity of fragmented parts that we become when separated from our wholeness of Self, through traumatic encounter, continue to serve our healing quest for connection with, and restoration of, our lost wholeness of Self.

Susan counsels that we value, accept and respect all parts of Self with equanimity, regardless of their apparent dysfunctionality. Wholeness, once again, requires acceptance of everything that we are. Her intent could be characterized as a modern day shamanic soul retrieval, where the adult self is brought into living connection with its lost parts, as the overall personality is restored to healthy balance and cooperative oneness.

Carlos Castaneda highlighted this shift in modern shamanism by insisting that we are now all our own redeemers. We must all become our own Naguals, or High Selves, as Susan Brown might characterize them, and assume central responsibility for the healing and individuation journey to our true wholeness of Self.

The therapist or shaman is a facilitator but does not assume responsibility for retrieval of a lost part in the underworld of the unconscious. The evolving relationship between adult self and High Self, and its variety of part personalities, is the magic and centerpiece of healing in this empowered journey of recovery.

Seth, the entity whom Jane Roberts channelled, explained that probable selves represent living permutations of the life we are currently in. These sub-personalities, or parts, are intimately connected and interactive with the life we are currently living, though they are completely autonomous and may be functioning largely outside of our conscious awareness.

For instance, Jane Roberts, and her husband Rob, had once travelled to Maine for a vacation. One night while there, they went to a night club and were drawn to sit opposite a couple whom they experienced as bitter, disgruntled versions of their future selves, miserably shut down and disconnected from their creative cores.

Seth explained to them that their present selves had created, or birthed, these versions of themselves from the shadows of their fears. As opposed to mere psychological projections, these beings were actual entities, with lives of their own, seeking their own resolutions.

This synchronistic encounter with their probable future selves served all four beings well, as their connection spawned many possibilities and reflected knowledge extremely useful to the making of decisions that would go on to change their future lives.

We all have our personal astral network of probable selves that we interact with, largely in dreaming and through the practice of, what Jung called, active imagination. These connections are real, living connections that exist as parts of our greater wholeness, regardless of our awareness of them. Just as we have neural plasticity networks in the brain, we also have, what I would term, the astral-plasticity to grow through greater awareness and connectivity with our probable selves.

Astral-plasticity utilizes lucid dreaming, where present selves volitionally encounter their probable other selves, meeting with the intent of respect and offering the opportunity to share and gain knowledge gleaned from their separate lives lived.

Astral-plasticity also generates the merging of healing intentions, wherein separate lives move beyond being unconsciously, compensatorily related, to being joined in similar healing intentions at different dimensions of Self.

I have suggested, in previous blog posts, that our current world crisis is reflecting a chaotic macro-encounter between the presently embodied World Self and the probable shadow self of past generational decisions, still alive and well on the astral plane, all demanding a physical replaying to reach a higher level of global Self-realization. We have at present slipped into a probable World Self that resembles Gotham City of Batman ilk. The advanced prefrontal cortex of current world civilization is becoming increasingly entranced by its limbic ancestors, all seeking a new world order.

Rather than pass the buck, through solidarity with the repression of prior generations, we are being called upon to live with the misery and lament of what appears to be irreconcilable differences. Accepting the role of taking the hit for the greater whole, by embodying these epic challenges, offers us the very real option of once and for all healing the deep splits that have perennially haunted human history. It also requires that we fully experience and reckon with the genuine threats to our current world’s survival.

Our best opportunity for healing rests in our capacity to summon our adult Self, with its ability to exercise its free will in the service of the greater good. Furthermore, we have the resource of our probable part selves, alternate selves who appreciate our efforts and contributions toward their own evolution and whom support us in ours. How critical it is that we get to know and make peace with all our parts. Ultimately, as Susan Brown points out, all parts matter!

Where to start? Set boundaries, but treat all parts with compassion and respect. Every part has a story to share that weaves together the mystery and wonder of Self.

Weaving,
Chuck

Soulbyte for Thursday January 11, 2024

-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Besides your physical body, what else needs nurturing? What calls to you to be lived? What part of you has yet to be expressed? Notice your wants and desires. Perhaps you have not attended to your physical self and it needs you the most. Perhaps your spirit, your creative self, calls out to you and desires expression. Perhaps you have not been very receptive and the feminine needs some attention. Perhaps your masculine side is asking for you to take notice. Everyone is made up of multiple aspects, all vying for attention throughout life. Get to know who is in charge, who is ruling, and allow balance into your life by acknowledging all of who you are and giving all of who you are areas of expression. In this manner balance, contentment and happiness will ensue. Operate from a place of love for self and that will make it all go so much better as well!

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Chuck’s Place: The Atomic Self

A gathering of all the parts that make up the whole…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

So, this tiniest of units, the atom, what the ancients named the most basic building block of the universe, houses an incredible amount of contained energy. Once the integrity of that unit is split, it is capable of unleashing a surge of vast destructive energy, as the world witnessed in the closing days of WWII at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We are currently living through the unleashing of such powerful destructive energies on a social scale, as the integrity of our unity as a nation has been split by a leader well aware of the latent energy potential contained in such a unit as a United State. His modus operandi has been to tap those violent and ecstatic energy reserves through splitting rhetoric that halves the whole and unleashes lethal force.

On the individual level, that of a human personality, this social phenomenon mirrors the plurality of forces contained within a person. When the unity of personality is split open powerful energies are unleashed from the various factions of self, formerly cooperatively linked, now luxuriating in stretching their powers and vying for control of the self. This is the basis of the term I am employing in this blog, The Atomic Self.

How many times do we begin the day with a specific intent, only to find ourselves fully distracted and engaged in a less desirable activity? Less desirable to whom? I think we would have to say less desirable to one’s conscious ego state; less desirable to the leader of the personality and the working definition of self. But clearly, there is another faction of personality that exists somewhere within the shadows of self that has opposing wants and needs, a will and an energy of its own that supplants the ego’s intent by ‘wasting time’ in ‘unnecessary’ activities.

In fact, the Self is comprised of many factions beyond ego that each possess their own storehouse of energy. Freud identified a few characters: ego, id and superego. Jung expanded the population to include persona, shadow, anima/animus, Self, as well as an ancient inherent dimension to the psyche that includes the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Spiritualists broaden the field even further to include the soul, that which has had countless lives that coexist within the underpinnings of self in the current life.

In fact, the Spiritualist tradition would go so far as to point out that all who are alive in this moment are composed of the cosmic dust and ashes of countless prior generations of life. The notion of a pure bloodline of identity takes a quantum leap if we consider the sins and wisdom of generations past as the building materials of what we all really are, all deeply connected at the atomic level, all siblings sharing the same cosmic dust.

The unity of this oneness is often stretched to the max, as Miranon, a non-physical entity of high intelligence, explained in channeling explorations conducted in the early researches at The Monroe Institute. Miranon suggested we imagine a world of truly interconnected wholeness but all parts in opposition to each other, envisioned as a rubber band stretched in many opposing directions, it’s constituent parts vying for differentiation and supremacy. No matter how far they contort that rubber band it remains the same wholeness, albeit severely contorted and out of balance at times.

Thus, what we call personality is a plurality of characters and lives bound together in a cohesive way to form a consistent identity we call ‘me’. However, beneath this surface cohesion are very powerful energies that may not be well-integrated at all. Jung used the term individuation to define these energies as they actively seek integration and, ultimately, fulfillment in the maturation of an individual life.

People approach counseling when their factions of personality subvert individuation, preferring to assert their personal agendas at the expense of the overall integration of the personality. This results in failure to achieve goals, at minimum, and psychic atomic war at maximum!

The ego’s challenge of leadership with such divisive energetic personality factions is great. If the ego chooses a dictatorial approach to gain control, the rejected factions are likely to withdraw their energy reserves from the personality, whereby causing  a depression of energy resource that the ego requires to take action.

Despite this energetic stalemate the ego is charged with restoring balance to the personality. Sometimes this requires surrendering to the archetypal underpinnings of self and allowing, for instance, a flood of tears to release a tide of grief. Sometimes it requires the ego to refuse this archetypal call and hold on in a deeply alienated state until a reconciling thought, feeling, image, or outer happening provides the ticket to a newly resolved balance.

Sometimes the ego must recapitulate the experience of an archaic part of its atomic self that it had no idea existed. This may be presented to the ego in the form a powerful mood or emotional reaction to some environmental trigger. This encounter might require the  recapitulation of a repressed memory, a past life, or even a coexistent life at another level of its multidimensional self, lived exclusively at a dream level.

The name of the game is individuation, which integrates the separate components of the atomic self, with all their powerful energies, into a cohesively balanced self, on very deep levels. This is the journey and responsibility of now, inwardly and outwardly. As our earth continues her great transformation, may we, her children, shepherd her changes peacefully, lending our powerful energies to her newly rebalanced configuration.

Never doubt the value of turning inward and taking on the atomic self. Reconciliation at this level is what the world needs now: reconciling vs splitting the atom.

Atomically,

Chuck