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Chuck’s Place: Beyond The Competitive Solution

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Digesting one’s life is the source of new life …
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Every person alive in this extraordinary time is part of a major world transition. The question is whether this is a nightmare that must be completed or whether it’s time to choose a new dream.

The gods have unequivocally made certain that world events reveal the truths for all to see. And so it appears that what’s being asked is for humankind to assume full responsibility for deciding what comes next. Nightmare or regenerative dream?

Behind it all is the very real clash of opposites, inherent both in wholeness and in all of us.

Jane Roberts, who delivered to the world the epochal teachings of Seth, spent the last year and a half of her life confined to a hospital, her body completely locked in a fetal position, incapable of independent movement.

Jane’s mother had suffered and died from rheumatoid arthritis. Jane never saw her mother walk and spent her childhood and early adulthood at the beck and call of her mother’s bedpan. In her very early childhood, Jane spent two years in a repressive Catholic orphanage due to her mother’s inability to care for her. Her mother largely blamed Jane’s existence for her own medical woes.

Similar to many other extraordinary psychic adventurers, Jane’s traumatic childhood dissociated her into the largess of subtle energy exploration. She published short stories, science fiction novels and poetry before she ultimately met, and channeled, the wise, evolved human being, no longer in human form, who called himself Seth.

The opposites that riddled Jane’s existence were the part of herself that she designated the sinful girl of her childhood, who needed to be punished, and the adult channel she became, with access to the wisdom, critical in our time, to keep the human dream alive and evolving into deeper balance.

Jane had compensated for her neglected and abused beginnings with a spiritual drive that was intent upon discovering the deeper truths beyond everyday existence. It was not until later in life, fully frozen in her hospital bed, that she was forced to recapitulate the experiences of her neglected younger selves, with their limiting negative beliefs that had driven her discomfort with being a woman in this life.

Her total dependence upon nurses, and her husband Rob, allowed her to experience maternal care at a near infantile level, challenging the deep-seated unworthiness of her childhood. In addition, by embodying her mother’s limiting disease she was able to experience deep love and empathy for her mother’s frozen self, freeing herself of the burden of resentment. 

Jane’s heroic journey of ego compensation for traumatic beginnings is the heroic journey of most human egos. It represents the competitive solution to the problem of the opposites. In this scenario, heroic compensation defeats the legacy of trauma, at least temporarily.

Many a successful adult can trace their current good fortune to the one-sided discipline they brought down upon themselves to escape the fate of their origins. As successful as one-sided solutions may be, eventually, often by midlife, the knock of the spirit insists we retrieve the opposites we have left behind.

The extremes of Jane’s life required that she literally experience her mother’s full body paralysis in order to relive her childhood and face the depths of her own self-hatred and the negative beliefs she carried about herself.

Throughout Jane’s hospital stay, as she encountered the fullness of her night sea journey, Seth guided and supported her healing. Her devoted husband, Rob, would often massage her arms and legs, and at times Jane experienced her steeled muscles softening, permitting significant movement.

Generally, however, the physical and emotional pain resulting from such  release of defensive tightness would rebound into redoubled resistance to movement by the next day.

This scenario is a reversion to a competitive solution to the problem of reconciling the opposites inherent in our wholeness. Given an opening, the habitual solution to go to defense to ward off the pain and fear of true freedom reasserts itself with abandon.

On a practical level, the use of self-hypnosis to introduce to the subconscious new suggestions to old habits was freely employed by Jane and Rob, often with great success. However, the resource of new beliefs cannot override the necessity of recapitulation. We can never fully progress beyond where we are if we are not ready to bring all of ourselves with us: the good, the bad and the ugly.

As Jane discovered, and as her story reveals, no one else can heal us. No one else has lived our life and no one else knows the depths of our most painful experiences. Only we know what truly needs to be reconciled. Thus, only through our own exploration of our opposites, through the process of recapitulation, by taking a deep and thorough dive into our darkness, can we succeed in bringing ourselves into the light of full regenerative healing.

Of the many gifts that Jane Roberts left behind, I appreciate the full transparency of her offering of the complete annals of her life to the Yale University Library. What they, and Rob’s uncensored notes of the last year of her life reveal, to all of us, is how tenacious the problem of reconciliation of opposites truly is. Even a direct confrontation with potential death itself can fail to avert the well worn habit of a one-sided defensive solution that precludes reconciliation with one’s whole self.

Beyond this competitive solution of opposites is the full acceptance of all of one’s life experiences. This advances one to full self love, as well as love for everything and everyone else.

Everything and everyone is part of our own wholeness. With that level of truthful acceptance we are freed from the bindings of competitive solution, freed to choose the regenerative dream. It’s the obvious right choice, and it includes the welfare of all.

Thank you, Jane, for pointing out the true depths of the challenge of recapitulation. Thank you, also, to all of you scouts, who have done the work and are stalking the regenerative dream beyond the eclipse.

Recapitulating,
Chuck

Suggested reading:
The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel van der Kolk
The Recapitulation Diaries, J. E. Ketchel
The Way Toward Health, A Seth Book, Jane Roberts  

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Chuck’s Place: Erasing Personal History

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Erasing personal history…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

At one point, Don Juan Matus abruptly threatened the continuation of Carlos Castaneda’s shamanic apprenticeship by challenging him to immediately disengage from all his attachments and habits of daily life, thus erasing personal history, a prime tenet of a shaman’s advancement. For instance, Carlos was encouraged to immediately dissolve a lucrative tie dye tee shirt business partnership, which he did within a few hours.

Erasing personal history means ending the control of an identity, rooted in past associations, that continues to define one’s present life activities and sense of self. When I was in Castaneda’s world, I experienced people taking this insinuation to change to the extreme, completely leaving their daily lives, even changing their names, to free their energy to be employed in a totally new way.

This radical form of dissociation from the past is more a metaphor than a practical and effective form of achieving desired change. As a therapist, or spiritual guide, I approach such an intent for new life through the experience of changing one’s past self, and thereby, altering one’s present and future selves. Changing one’s past self is indeed erasing the hold of one’s personal history.

To change the past self we must fully revisit it. The power of suggestion is extremely powerful and can indeed change the present self, at least temporarily, through the power of dissociation. However, our wholeness requires us to fully associate with ourselves, which requires full acceptance, not dissociation, from our past self, and all it has experienced.

When we encounter our past self we must be willing to feel the fullness of everything it has experienced. This includes its feelings, bodily sensations, and beliefs, particularly around powerful experiences that overwhelmed its capacities and froze its further development.

The presence of the past self’s frozen state is experienced in what is called a trigger. When we are triggered our past self eclipses present self adaptation, as we become locked in our frozen past. Often, we expect others to respect our triggers, controlling their speech and behavior so as to protect us from experiencing the sting of our triggered, unsettled younger self.

Relationships are often tasked to avoid each other’s minefield of triggers. Sometimes this is considered an act of true love. How ironic. For triggers, once resolved, are the gateway to new and fuller love of self and other.

When the present self is fully able to be present to the experience of its past self, we begin to change the past. For one thing, this very act of showing up establishes a new fact of the past: Whatever was experienced in the past no longer has the power to shut one down.

When the present self is fully present for the past self it is also no longer alone. This alters its isolated experience of the past, as the present self becomes a true traveling companion to the past self’s journey.

When the past self relives its frozen moments, it is encouraged to  express its innate reactions that were previously suppressed. Words and agency come on line and metabolize a prior silent scream. The body breaths deeply as it expands beyond its habitual, frozen in time, stance.

In a dream, I am back in an old neighborhood under great siege of winter storm. I am confronted by an intimidating, rageful acquaintance. His threatening silent glare intensifies as his eyes bulge. I force myself to speak, refusing to accept this frozen encounter. A portion of my past self is changed in that moment.

Dreams often present us with dramas that are permutations of our frozen moments. With consciousness we can send our present ego self into dreaming with the intent to act where we were once previously frozen. Ego advance in dreaming generalizes to ego advance in waking life.

Often, the cognitive understanding of frozen moments in time is highly distorted for defensive reasons, or developmentally hampered by the age at which the traumatizing event occurred. The developmentally matured and advanced present self can be extremely helpful in broadening the scope of the past self’s experience by exploring factors unavailable to the younger self. This can considerably alter the past self’s identity, which then contributes a changed foundational stone to the present self’s state of being.

A fully transformed younger self no longer lives in the prison cell of its frozen past. While this in no way erases the facts of its prior experience, the younger self is no longer emotionally or cognitively conditioned by it. Its freed energy is liberated to rejoin its wholeness of being.

Thus, the past becomes fully recovered, resolved and revitalized for new life. The fully matured past self delivers its evolved gift to the present and future of self. This is how to truly erase personal history.

Erasing,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: The Refined Love Of Total Acceptance

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Refining love…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

In his journeys in infinity, Robert Monroe experienced a perspective of our world as a colony that refined the commodity of love, which he called loosh. This, he discovered, is why we are here, that the real reason for our sojourn through life in this world is to refine love. But how do we do that?

The notion of refining love suggests a developmental process for love, spanning its first coming alive in gross matter, at physical birth, to its subtly refined pure, spirit-energy state at physical death. Refined love is the one thing you really can take with you! Furthermore, the energy of refined love is the fuel for total acceptance, the key to wholeness. Everything that is, is part of the whole. If you cannot accept something, you cannot be whole.

Our world provides the ideal framework for this refinement process. Psychology teaches us about the absolute necessity for an infant to attach to a secure love object to move forward into life in this world. Rene Spitz, an early pioneer in attachment theory, discovered that institutionalized babies, separated from their mothers beyond three months, sank into what he identified as a progressive anaclitic depression, which often resulted in failure to thrive and death.

To survive and thrive in this world we must attach. Our emotional attachments in this world are the playing field for the refinement of love. Ironically, to achieve the maximum refinement of love required for it to transcend physical death ultimately requires us to completely detach from the physical dimension and all the objects we have loved. Many departed souls struggle with this challenge on the astral plane, especially if they haven’t reached that level of physically letting go during the dying process.

The primal necessity for attachment to a secure object can be transferred to a host of objects, including one’s physical body. For example, rhythmic rocking behavior in children enables a self-soothing behavior that somewhat autonomously satisfies the need for comfort from a secure other person. Freud illumined fixation upon particular erogenous zones of the body as serving similar self-soothing functions. 

Attachment to screens, even in very young children, can provide a sense of primal connection with an energetically vibrant and stimulating other. The pleasure derived from food and substance can serve as a displaced soothing interaction with a secure love object.

As Gabor Mate suggests, addiction is persistence of attachment to any object or habit that offers soothing connection, in spite of its destructive consequences. From this perspective, the task of recovery is a refinement of love that withdraws the outer projection of maladaptive connection into the ability to truly love the self.  

Psychiatrist and pediatrician, Margret Mahler described the achievement of object constancy as the internalization of the outer primary love object into a stable inner sub-personality that can soothe the child from within. Thus, if mother is not in the vicinity, the internalized mother image can bring calm and reassurance that she will return. Emotional object constancy refines love into an inner ability to love and accept both the good and the bad of self and other.

Emotional object constancy is also the foundation for the adult self, as the parenting functions of emotional regulation are now in the inner hands of the growing personality. The greatest challenge for the adult is to refine its critical judgment of itself, and others, into total acceptance of everything and everyone. Love is all-embracing.

To accept and love all, does not mean that boundaries are not necessary. We can love people who must be stopped. We can abandon people physically who must assume responsibility for themselves, yet we can still love and accept them with equanimity. Total acceptance is wholeness, even when some parts of the whole may need to occupy different places for the overall balance and welfare of the whole.

Perhaps the most challenging arena of acceptance is self-acceptance. When we recapitulate our lives, we are asked to completely accept everything we have done and that was done to us. This is not about seeing someone’s potential bright side to find greater acceptance of their dark side. This is full-on acceptance of the total truth, in its full ruthlessness, of what we have done and what has been done to us. This is acceptance completely devoid of shame and blame.

The shamans of ancient Mexico imagined the force behind our loosh/love colony to be a great Eagle that consumes the experience of our refined love journey to enhance its own evolution. The Eagle grants souls continued love journeys in infinity, once they arrive at total acceptance of their complete love journey while in the sojourn of human form.

The journey always continues and love lives on.

Refining love and acceptance,
Chuck 

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: True Healing Of The Child

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Healing the child self…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Alice Miller’s books, on the impact of child abuse and neglect, evoke deep compassion for the wounded inner child. Healing from childhood trauma requires deep sensitivity and respect for dissociated child parts, along with their experiences of abuse and neglect.

Ultimately, complete healing requires full acceptance of everything one has experienced in life. With trauma, this includes releasing the full sensory and emotional discharge of stored reactions to the traumatic experience. With healing, those memories are no longer traumatic; they trigger no emotion or sensation. They are completely neutral.

Mentally, one is challenged to dispel beliefs that one was responsible for causing the traumatic encounter. Here one truly needs to accept that indeed they were a victim in an experience that was not of their making.

Healing also includes a vastly enlarged perspective of the experience, which includes the motives and circumstances of others involved in the traumatic experience. Ultimate healing also requires complete emotional neutrality toward one’s perpetrator.

To acknowledge one’s victim status is critical to healing and, yet, one cannot heal if one holds onto the victim status as an enduring identity. An enduring identity as victim reflects a personality construction with the wounded child in control of, what Winnicott called, the false self. This self is seen as false because rather than mature through the normal developmental stages of childhood, it mimicks adulthood while secretly dedicating itself to adaptive behaviors that protect the child from anxiety.

The false self is a commandeered adult ego state whose charge is to defend the child from any discomfort. The false self employs its resources to bury, in the physical body, the memory and impact of trauma, as well as to develop a rigid body armor to stave off the challenge of the outside world.

The false self often develops competency in a profession, which provides security for the child, but behind this seeming successful adaptation to life is a sense of self as a phony, threatened to be discovered at any moment.

I refer to this child state that controls the false self as the uninitiated child because it has failed to complete its rite of passage to advance beyond its victim status. Rites of passage are purposeful traumatic practices that societies once used to help children successfully advance into real adulthood. All trauma requires full recapitulation to complete passage into real adulthood.

Failure to advance can fixate the child in a narcissistic worldview of entitlement, protection and revenge. In her book, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child Rearing and the Roots of Violence, Alice Miller describes Hitler’s horrifically abusive childhood, that, left unprocessed, was projected outward in a ruthless quest for revenge.

These same dynamics are blatant in the cult of the child that serves the power drives of uninitiated charismatic leaders, who promise revenge upon the reigning adult authority figures in the present world. These extreme childish expectations of entitlement and protection have opened the floodgates of legitimization for the uninitiated, who blindly support these irreverent child heroes.

These extreme examples simply underscore how this developmental challenge of achieving true adulthood is the salient issue for the human race today. The hallmark of true adulthood is the acceptance of full responsibility for one’s entire life, including all experiences of victimization.

This in no way takes responsibility away from those who have victimized others. They must and will be held accountable for their actions. They will never be able to advance spiritually unless they fully feel the pain they caused and recapitulate all the pain of their own lives. These are the prerequisite rites of passage.

Ultimately, like Job, we are faced with accepting the fact that life is not fair, despite the echoes of our childhood socialization.

Ultimately, we are challenged to accept Buddha’s assessment that life is suffering. Earth School is a playing field for the suffering of attachment and loss.

The full mastery of Earth School is to arrive at the place of love, most especially for all those who had roles in our traumatic rites of passage.

Become the child acorn that advances beyond its protective shell, delivering its vitality to the mighty adult oak it was always destined to become.

Ultimately, the child’s destiny is to grow up and into its adult self, who awaits beyond its rites of passage. To that adult, bring a matured innocence, willing to journey freely in and, perhaps someday, beyond this predatory universe.

Mature the self, mature the world,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

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While fears inhabit Spirit waits…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

The word habit derives from the Latin word habitus, which means clothing or outer attire. In fact, the clerical attire of monks and nuns are actually called habits. Habit is thus a persona, which actually covers the real person. We are not our habits.

And yet, the word inhabit insists that to live in, or occupy a space, one must inhabit it. When a Spirit takes on life in human form, it must conform to the habits of that form.

At a core level, habits are instincts and archetypes that govern life in human form. These limitations control the expression of the life essence of Spirit while it resides in human form, but does not reflect the fullness of Spirit.

The shamans of ancient Mexico discovered that humans were not limited to one habitual form. Their version of shapeshifting involves the embodiment of a set of habits unique to another species. They utilize the practice of specific physical movements, called magical passes, and dreaming to accomplish these shifts. Some shamanic groups use power plants or psychedelics to facilitate these alternative perceptual experiences.

The shamans of ancient Mexico also emphasize the practice of recapitulation, or life review, to free oneself of habits that have crusted over one’s core identity and embedded it in a negative belief system. When we face our most feared issues, our energy is liberated from the constriction of defensive behaviors, allowing us to explore new possibilities of being.

The channel, Monitor, has suggested that the original intention was for the human body to live healthily until the human Spirit, that took up residence in it, had fulfilled its purpose in coming into human form. When, however, fears are suppressed and locked into body armor, the  vitality of the physical body is overtaxed, shortening its duration and ability to serve Spirit’s intent.

Humankind has currently inhabited many fears that result in belief systems that expect illness. It doesn’t have to be this way. If we truly neutralize our fears, our life essence is freed to exercise its creative potential and create the life we intended when we first inhabited human form.

The shamans of ancient Mexico fully accepted that they were beings who would ultimately die. They also discovered that they could fulfill their intention for life in human form and simply burn from within when it was time for Spirit to move on. The implication, beyond this metaphor, is that, freed of our fears, we can exercise tremendous control over the course of our living and dying.

The best preventive for illness is to create the life that aligns with our Soul’s intent. Of course, sometimes illness is integral to our Earth School tour, to advance the growth of our Soul. However, very often, illness is the byproduct of stuck fear.

Release of habits of fear redefine the human body and unleash the creative human Spirit. That’s the way it truly can be.

Rejuvenated,
Chuck