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Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Being In The Abundance Of Total Love

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The Abundance of Loving it All…
-Artwork © 2026 Jan Ketchel

The term scapegoat had its literal origin in instructions outlined in the Old Testament for a practice on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16:8-10). An actual goat was chosen for practitioners to, literally, project their sins upon that would then carry those sins away from the community as it was sent off into the wilderness.

The relief afforded by this ancient ritual, of assigning the weight of one’s committed sins to another to carry, was defined in modern times by Sigmund Freud, as the ego’s defense of projection.

The action of this defense is the ego protecting itself from the negative judgment of its conscience (superego), for wrongful thoughts and actions, that would otherwise result in the consequences of shame and punishment. Thus, in scapegoating or projection, an innocent person is blamed for the very actions and thoughts one seeks to disown.

Both Freud and Jung emphasized that projection was not a conscious choice, it happened unconsciously and automatically. Jung went on to broaden the function of projection beyond a psychological defense only. He identified that the unconscious mind reveals its fuller self to the conscious mind by projecting its contents, or complexes, like through a movie projector, upon the outer screen of our daily lives, replete with all its characters and dramas.

Through its projections upon other people in daily life, that snare us in emotional reactions and entanglements, the unconscious mind communicates with us by drawing our attention to people who mirror our own hidden selves.

Our conscious ego is then offered the opportunity to individuate, that is, to welcome home its unknown and disowned parts. This requires extreme moral courage while we face and reconcile with our shadow, or unknown self.

A more advanced technology than scapegoating, to redeem our sinful selves, has been attributed to Moses in Leviticus (9:18), via the commandment, to “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This exact guidance was reaffirmed and highlighted centuries later by Jesus Christ, to “Love your neighbor as yourself”, as a core ethic of his teachings.  (Matthew 22:36-40).

The wisdom of this biblical injunction, to love your neighbor as yourself, is in its practicality and scope of healing potential. This is a technology of true love.

In order to love our neighbor we must retrieve and love our disowned, or unknown selves, completely, particularly the parts of our projected shadow that we loathe and have scapegoated in our projections onto our neighbors. No scriptural exceptions are made to this commandment. All neighbors, and consequently all parts of the self, must be loved.

The refusal to love and assume responsibility for the true self, with all its flaws and prejudices, results in the living of a false self, which creates illusion and dysfunction, both within and without. As psychosomatic medicine reveals, very often our physical ailments reflect the soul mirroring to ego consciousness the error of its judgments.

A physical ailment may reflect the unconscious mind using the physical body as its projective screen. For instance, digestive problems might be the unconscious mind symbolically communicating to the ego the ego’s refusal to accept a truth, as mirrored in the physical body being unable to properly digest food. In this case, acquiescing to the truth at the mental level might resolve the physical symptoms. Love of truth promotes physical vitality.

The shamans of ancient Mexico discovered that the wear and tear of living our illusions causes our vital energy to be dispersed to the periphery of our physical beings, compromising the efficiency of our vital energy centers, or what the Hindus call chakras.

Some of these illusions are traumas, stored in the body, whose life experiences have yet to be individuated into our wholeness. To access the abundance of our fullest potential, we must fully accept and love every aspect of our selves, including our entire lived life experiences.

If we scapegoat any life experience, or anyone in that life experience, we are a fragmented, divided wholeness. We must love it all, unconditionally, no exceptions.

Gay Hendricks, in his classic book, Learning To Love Yourself, taught the practice of declaring love for every challenging or disagreeable part of the self, as it emerges. For example: “I love the part of me that feels hate. I love the part of me that objects to me admitting it feels hate. I love the part of me that hates that I hate. I love the part that judges me harshly…” With love comes acceptance. With acceptance comes abundance.

Out of sheer love, Carlos Castaneda gifted the world the fruits of his shamanic lineage before he closed the door and ended that lineage. One of those gifts was the magical pass of recapitulation, where one fully restores one’s energetic wholeness through reliving, and ultimately fully loving, every aspect of oneself and one’s life. This is being in the abundance of total love.

Love is the energetic vibration that opens us to the experience of our oneness with everything, the ultimate abundance. From this place of wholeness we are best positioned to suggest to our subconscious mind to manifest outwardly our heart’s desire.  As within, so without.

All is one,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Harmonizing The Group Soul Of Now

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Loving harmony in the group soul…
-Artwork © 2025 Jan Ketchel

I define the group soul of now to be the collective soul of all individual souls currently extant in human form on planet Earth. We are the brain center of the Earth, afforded the free will to impact greatly the fate of this planet.

Of course, Mother Nature, the subconscious powerhouse of our group soul, also has us experience the true karma of our decisions. Optimally, our collective will would harmonize with the greater good for all.

Currently, the group soul of our world is in a process of extreme  polarization. Conventional wisdom would have these opposing forces come together to reconcile differences in a process of communication, understanding and compromise.

However, such desired union is not yet prepared for, as the warring elements are convinced that success can only be obtained through the total conquest of opposition. For a harmonious union of opposites to occur at the level of the group soul, we must first discover and reconcile with the opposites within ourselves.

If we don’t know ourselves at the depths of our own inner opposites, we are sure to fall prey to the power of projection, where the problem of opposites is resolved through rejecting our neighbor, our projected, forsaken inner opposite.

Nonetheless, we can take advantage of discovering ourselves through the projections that so powerfully, emotionally seize us. For instance, I might notice myself angered at what I see as a highly manipulative, passive-aggressive move by another person. My anger, if I am paying attention, tells me immediately to look within.

As I do my mental inventory, I might discover my own ego power drive that does not like to lose. And with this insight, I shine a light upon the hologram of self, which reveals to me that in the as without of my projections is also the so within of my own psyche.

My ability to identify the true source of my anger, my own power drive, brings me into greater acceptance of my apparent opponent, as I can now see myself in the other. This does not resolve this inner opposition, but it does truly bring it home to roost.

Self acceptance of the unacceptable within makes it more acceptable to acknowledge that everything we are is the same in everyone else. Wisdom comes in knowing how to live those opposites, as in when and where it is best for them to be lived in our lives.

The more we are able to see ourselves in every attitude that comes at us the more we no longer need to be personally offended by the behaviors of others that we ourselves are quite capable of committing, if only in our fantasies. Fantasizing hating our neighbor is quite a potent form of polarization, within and without.

Anger and hatred issue from the solar plexus chakra, the home of our personal power. Inevitably, from this center we find ourselves in a competitive mode with others. The ability to reach the heart center chakra, the place of compassion, allows us to raise our vibration to the higher level of love, truth and wisdom, which lifts us out of the throes of competition.

The heart center also connects us to the wisdom and guidance of the High Self, that which assures us that there are benevolent forces beyond the ego that are in alignment with the greater good, letting us know that we can let go of the need to control, and be in harmony with the greater good of the group soul.

If we are to truly harmonize with the group soul for the greater good of all, we must innerly disarm from overt or covert hostility. When truly detached we are able to shift our energetic posture from yang to yin.

Yin is a magnetic state that attracts people in a positive way because they can feel that they are energetically being accepted, regardless of their views. A yang state, which is assertive, is, of course, equally appropriate at times. This set of opposites, yin and yang, represent a supreme example of opposites, able to express their individuality when appropriate and join in union—the essence of creation—when appropriate.

All efforts to harmonize the opposites within one’s individual soul are powerful contributions to the group soul of now, as it finds its way to the harmony of the greater good of all.

Harmonizing,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Learn To Love The Dweller On The Threshold

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Time to Love The Dweller…
-Artwork © 2025 Jan Ketchel

Mystical traditions appropriated from fiction the term, Dweller on the Threshold, to describe an inner psychological character who serves the role of initiator to deeper spiritual realization.

The Dweller is a psychological complex that is an amalgam of all of one’s fears and unresolved inner darkness at a personal level of present life, as well as the spiritual debts, or karma, one has accumulated from the soul’s journey through infinity.

The Dweller is a universal character that might appear as a powerful archetypal demon in a dream encounter. However, the Dweller is also quite uniquely fashioned to reflect that which is suppressed, repressed or unknown within the darkness of one’s personal unconscious, what Jung termed The Shadow. Nonetheless, the human race, as a single organism, bears its collective Shadow with its own guardian Dweller on the Threshold.

In order to grow, we must know thyself. In order to know thyself we must ultimately subdue the Dweller who tempts, taunts and exposes us to our darkest deeds, desires, habits, thoughts and primal impulses. To subdue the Dweller we must shine the light upon and accept the full truth of all we have hidden from, or all that has been hidden from us, behind the  door to the Shadow.

The Dweller might appear to be an evil entity, and in our encounters with it we might be tempted to act out our hidden compulsions, but full responsibility for all one’s actions resides within one’s conscious personality, named the ego. The Dweller is not responsible for the ego’s failure to grow. The Dweller indeed leads one into temptation, but one no longer faces temptation who has reconciled with the wholeness of who they are through inner shadow work.

Ultimately, the Dweller is entitled to deep gratitude and love for the service it performs in helping one to reach the maturity needed to open the door to higher spiritual enlightenment. Failure to love the Dweller is an attachment to hatred that bars entry to higher consciousness.

Though the Dweller often appears in dreams, it is most often met in the projections that unknowingly issue forth from our Shadow and take on mental and emotional life, as reflected in our daily interactions and relationships. Anyone or anything in waking life that gets us emotionally charged, for better or for worse, is a strong candidate for a potential showing of a character within ourselves.

Those we admire might reflect our unknown innate potential. To own that potential and develop it, rather than living it vicariously through another, is the shadow work of broadening one’s personality. To shine the light on one’s inner darkness rather than blame and hate its outer reflection, in the person of another, is the shadow work of accepting the unacceptable within the self. We are challenged to love, with equanimity, the best and worst of ourselves.

Self-knowledge, self-acceptance and self-love are the key technologies required to effectively open the door to higher consciousness. As regards our projections, we are equally charged to love thy enemy as thyself. My enemy is indeed acting from the same venomous impulses buried in my own heart. I must own and love these impulses, and accept that the law of karma applies to all actions. With awareness, I can pay my dues and make my amends as I become able to somewhat look through the window of higher consciousness.

Behind the door of initiation to higher consciousness is our access to psychic powers, and the astral world with its greater access to the divine powers of the subconscious mind. As we, as individuals, must pass the tests of the Dweller to realize our soul’s potential, so the human race too is facing its own developmental challenge.

There are several Dwellers on the Threshold in positions of power throughout the world, currently, who are challenging the organism of humanity as a Whole Being to face the truth about itself. We are on the threshold of a major leap in human evolution, however, we are too weighed down by the burdens of our disowned Shadow to advance.

Our greatest challenge at present is to accept that we are in an accelerated period of major transition. The antics of the Dwellers mark this speed of transition.

Face the truth and have gratitude for all the Dwellers. They insist that we do our preparation by truly admitting the depths of our narcissism and by learning to love all beings, as necessary parts of our one human family. To love the Dweller is to love the self in its entirety, the ticket to higher consciousness.

Loving,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Be At Peace With It All

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At peace in reconciled wholeness…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Interconnectedness and oneness are the underlying truths of our spirit being. However, incarnation as a physical person is a journey of separateness, as we are born into a world of self and other. This world of distinctly separate objects offers a journey of evolution, where consciousness and knowledge grow, and creativity flourishes.

Nonetheless, evolution ultimately devolves into involution, where all that has been separated rejoins in the enhanced wholeness of ultimate oneness. At present, our journey of separateness is peaking, as expressed in the incessant clashes of nature’s storms and in polarized human interaction.

It is obvious that the solution to the warring elements of now is a movement toward oneness, where the true needs of the greater whole become the working intent of the world. How long this process will take, how much more destruction will be required, remains an open question, but be at peace in knowing that we move toward oneness.

The Age of Aquarius is upon us, a time of great spiritual advancement. The prelude to WW1 was the birth of Spiritualist and Theosophical movements, where the spirit world made physical contact with human awareness. WW1 brought forth a wave of channeling, with souls recently departed from human form sharing their experiences.

Current times are replete with Near-Death Experiences (NDE’s) and Out-of-Body Experiences (OBE’s), further advancing human awareness to experiencing its foundational spiritual essence, with life in human form understood as simply a season of its soul’s continued life. Great calamities appear to be the necessary balance for advanced spiritual realization. Be at peace with it all.

Knowledge of self as a spiritual being completely shifts one’s relationship with the physical world. With it comes the ability to manifest one’s intent  through spiritual practice. The ability to heal and communicate at a distance, the ability to travel through mere thought, and the ability to transcend DNA programming through mastery of the subconscious mind are all human potentials coming on line. Be at peace with it all.

Knowledge of the underlying oneness of everything—which includes the bully who outrages us the most—equips us with a tool to hasten our evolution. Knowing that everything is a part of you, ask yourself: “Who is that being I can’t stand, or am so afraid of, inside of me?” Find the enemy within yourself. Value it and find loving compassion for it.

Reconciling a polarization within the self advances relationships outside of the self, as projection of the unwanted shadow ceases. This does not mean that the bully without may not need to be confronted, but when the shadow is reconciled within the self then the confrontation with the bully becomes only what is necessary, with an absence of malice. Be at peace with it all.

The title of this blog is from guidance attributed to Cochise, a powerful Apache leader, who battled with a changing world as Mexico and America encroached upon indigenous lands. May we all be such impeccable warriors, and, “be at peace with it all.”

In Peace,
Chuck