Tag Archives: reconciliation of opposites

Soulbyte for Wednesday May 15, 2024

-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Reconciliation requires trust, trust that anything is possible, trust that can be shared between adversaries, between parts of the self or between two issues or situations that need resolution. Reconciliation may require boundaries, limitations, strict rules, but reconciliation may lead to new respect, nonjudgmental attitudes and a loving relationship never before imagined. For reconciliation all parties must show up, be fully present, of sound mind and heart, and willing to do the work necessary to come to a peaceful resolution. With hard work, trust, respect and truth, reconciliation is truly possible. Sometimes reconciliation may mean a parting rather that a coming together, but either way the same methods apply, hard work, trust, respect, truth.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Chuck’s Place: Beyond The Competitive Solution

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  

Chuck’s Place: How Are You Living Your Wholeness?

What’s the balance in your wholeness?
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

We are always whole. The question is not whether or not we are whole, but rather, how are we currently living our wholeness? Our lives might currently reflect balance or chaos. Each alternative generates its own configuration of our same inherent ingredients of wholeness. Whether in balance or chaos, we are always whole.

If I long for something that I don’t currently have, the suffering I feel, whether as sadness or anxiety, holds the emotional place for the wholeness I seek.  A depression might hold the place for a missing or lost relationship.

The law of compensation is nature’s law of wholeness. Elsewhere known as karma, compensation insists that we fulfill our wholeness by living the natural consequences of our actions. If, for instance, we attempt to keep a trauma at bay through repression or willful suppression, the compensation may express itself in physical symptoms or triggers, which now serve the function of holding space for the unprocessed experience.

Many communication issues in relationships reflect this imperative for wholeness. If one partner presents their interpretation of reality the other partner might automatically see and feel compelled to express the other side of the argument. Wholeness insists upon both sides being represented.

Of course, often couples, or friends who share one’s point of view, will need to project the opposite point of view upon a person or group, outside their personal circle, whom they fervently dislike. In some form, wholeness insists that a one-sided point of view be compensated for by its opposite, which is then lived and owned inwardly, through emotional attachment to one’s projected antagonist.

Hate is a powerful expression of emotional attachment. It’s often very hard to not be obsessed with thinking about someone one hates. Once we can accept that these projections actually reflect aspects of our own wholeness, we can take the first step in shifting the volatile state of balance that our wholeness is in.

Wholeness includes everything. We are riddled with pairs of opposites that comprise our wholeness. Once we outwardly withdraw and take ownership for a hated projection, we can begin the process of reconciling the oppositions that comprise that opposition within our wholeness.

First we must bear the tension of holding this opposition within. Once contained, we can appreciate the value of our formerly hated other. Perhaps, for instance, this hated other reflects our own disdain for the limitations authority figures have imposed upon our lives.

By acknowledging this part of our wholeness, our heavily rational prefrontal cortex can come to appreciate its aggressive limbic  counterpart, and those two parts might come to accept their complementary roles and find acceptance and room for each other. This is how we shift the balance in our wholeness.

Accepting and finding room for all that we are allows for a more fulfilling wholeness. When the Rainmaker went into his hut to restore the Tao in the village riddled with drought (see last week’s blogpost), his effort reflected a rebalancing of the oppositions within himself, which then triggered greater balance in the outer world.

Wholeness is the same wholeness, whether it be in drought or rainstorm; the difference is in how we do our wholeness. Finding a compatible relationship between the opposites within ourselves is the key to balance.

The difference in personalities among us is simply that which is emphasized within our wholeness that then results in the state of balance we live with. That which is not emphasized is still part of our wholeness and must still be lived in some form.

If I am a true introvert my wholeness requires that I include extraversion  somewhere in my life, even if it is only fulfilled by obsessively hating what I judge to be shallow extraversion in others.

Our journey in infinity, beyond this life, may comprise many lives, where different aspects of wholeness are emphasized. This allows for an ever-deepening knowing of wholeness by exploration of it from many different perspectives. In fact, this is how we truly change the past, which completely shifts the balance of our present and future selves.

Trauma freezes our perspective in the past. Beyond the release of previously frozen emotions in processing trauma is the greater perspective of the present self that frees long-held limiting beliefs and definitions of self. Our wholeness then has the opportunity to come into new balance, which allows for greater exploration and expression of our innate potential in the present.

Ultimately we are all part of the same wholeness. The separateness we experience in this life is all a journey to truly know the self and advance our personal and collective evolution through the achievement of a broader perspective, which can’t help but result in the attainment of refined love, for all.

In wholeness,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: In And Out Of Changing Times

Who is dreaming whom?
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Why do we gain so much benefit from a brief moment of rest? When we close our eyes to the outside world and drop into daydream we enter what Seth, whom Jane Roberts channelled, called, psychological time.

Psychological time demonstrates Einstein’s theory of relativity par excellence, as, in but a moment of measured physical time, a whole lifetime can be lived, in dream time.

At one time in my life I practiced extreme dream recall. I would awaken after a few minutes of sleep and record my dreams, which could take an hour or more to record. After a few nights I had to abandon this practice, as I’d experience little restorative sleep while I produced volumes of dreams from such brief blocks of physical sleep time.

What I did discover from this experiment was, indeed, the relativity of time. Our favored construct of living life according to outer time is actually a very slow playing field for our ego’s waking existence. When located on the fuller spectrum of our inner energetic life, waking life moves at the speed of molasses as contrasted with the rapid river-speed of the dream plane of psychological time.

Have you ever noticed upon drifting into daydream that you are casually engaged in conversation with unknown people, in unfamiliar life dramas? Who are you and who are those beings? Actually, you have opened the door to your fuller self, who lives life in many time zones or on other planes of existence.

The closest plane of existence to the solid physical plane of waking life has been called the astral plane, where souls, both still living in physical bodies, as well as what we call departed souls, commingle and interact, either consciously or in deeply entranced states.

The astral plane has many levels. Initially it serves as a greeting station for souls who have completed life in a physical body. During this initial adjustment period, souls recapitulate their just-completed lives.

Some souls remain in a state of purgatory as they reckon with desires, regrets, resentments, losses and unfulfilled needs. Some souls enter bardo states of deeply creative dreaming where they seek resolution and completion of unresolved issues from human life. Some souls remain so deeply attached to their prior life in physical form that they spend extensive time fixated upon life on Earth.

When souls are fulfilled, having evolved emotion and attachment into the purity of refined love, they may then advance to the higher rungs of the astral plane. At its most advanced levels, the astral plane is the launching pad for life beyond illusion.

Souls, like us, who have not yet left life in physical form are visitors in the astral plane during dreaming. Much of waking life is actually the physical reliving of life already lived in dreams on other planes of our existence. Often, what we recall as dreams, reflect interactions on the astral plane, though most of these encounters are lost to waking consciousness.

When we experience a deja vu moment, or a synchronicity, in waking life, it’s actually an awakening moment to an interaction already lived in dreaming that is now crossing over to be lived in waking life.

Our subconscious mind for our present life in human form has a full-time job operating the systems of the physical body while our consciousness is mentally engaged in its pursuits for waking life. In sleep, that subconscious mind, or energy body, is freed to rejuvenate itself and journey into the astral realm, which is more akin to its faster energetic speed of existence.

In these journeys in infinity, the energy body might encounter departed souls struggling to accept their changed energetic condition and living circumstance. Sometimes we are able to help them move on from their confused state into their new energetic life. Sometimes we encounter loved ones who have departed human form and are able to share intimate moments of connection and communication with them.

Sometimes we may encounter souls with whom we have travelled in prior incarnations, discovering lives and themes which lend clarity to   our circumstances and goals for our present life. Sometimes these astral encounters reveal to us unborn potentials, ready for birth in our daily lives. These might be new careers, relationships, and hidden talents seeking fulfillment.

It is my hypothesis that human evolution is moving toward greater integration with the astral realm. When I see the rapidly unfolding dramas on the Earth plane, I see collective movements, problems, and political structures from prior times in human history that gravitated into the astral realm and have now returned.

Have not the holocaust, the current status of Israel, leanings toward a dissolution of democracy in America, and in much of the world, and stirrings toward the restoration of monarchy in Russia—all issues from prior generations—reappeared and quickened at a frenetic pace on the current world playing field? Hard to not conclude that there is an infiltration of old unresolved astral issues seeking resolution in current human life.

Human life is at a monumental crossroads in terms of how it chooses to reconcile these pervasive states of polarization. We are being asked to relive and resolve ancient struggles in the light of a new day. The solution of repression is no longer available to us. We must reconcile with our wholeness, which is both rational and irrational.

And so, in these changing times, we must all bring integrity into the daytime and into the night sea journeys of our dreams. We must be receptive to guidance that resonates the truth. We must provide guidance to, and set limitation upon, that which would seek to overrun our conscience, our balance, and our health.

Human responsibility and choice are critical to celestial solution. Changing times call for greater consciousness, greater conscience and greater love for ALL.

And remember that love leads, but is not dismissive of, hate.

In and outside of time,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Love And Hate

Reconciliation of Opposites…
-Artwork © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Don Juan Matus explained to Carlos Castaneda that, yes, our world is a world of separate objects. However, beneath that world of separateness, we are all in a state of one interconnected energy. In that state of oneness, love is the energy of cohesion, that which holds together and welcomes all of its neighbors.

Don Juan also explained that we live in a predatory universe. Indeed, all life feeds upon life, and yet, at a soul level, energetic life is never lost, it merely changes form.

Survival, in our separate human form state, requires an instant ability to judge safety and danger. That which we judge to be dangerous we come to hate. Hate is the emotion that allows us to dehumanize and destroy that which we judge to be different and threatening to our survival.

Oneness and separateness are a pair of opposites that constitute a core challenge to life in human form. It all begins with the symbiotic oneness of mother and embryonic fetus, in pregnancy, that ends in the separation of the one into two distinct beings at birth. The challenge to become a fully realized separate being, who can open to the oneness of love, is the art of human life.

We are drawn to relationship in a quest to reunite with our lost oneness. Union is driven by the natural attraction of opposites for each other. This is love in energetic motion. When these opposites unite there is frequently a honeymoon phase, where opposites relish the relief and ecstasy of restored oneness.

However, as relationships progress, one’s separate, differentiated self reemerges and finds itself in opposition with its soulmate. This reemergence frequently leads to competition and opposition of viewpoints in the relationship. The couple is then challenged to make room for their differences in the wholeness of their relationship. Far too often, bearing the tension of these unreconciled opposites results in the solution to hate one’s partner and end the relationship.

The solution of hate, devaluation, and demonization of the other is the frequent outcome of attempting to bear the extraordinary tension of differences necessary to reach a reconciling of opposites. This is evident in the wars that plague our world. The underlying energetic imperative to embrace all parts and peoples of the world in the oneness that we truly are is the evolutionary and karmic challenge of our time.

Beneath the opposites of love and hate is the oneness and separation phases of human and cosmic evolution. The separatist, hateful stage of human interaction must ultimately acquiesce to the greater harmony and love of energetic reality, which, like day turning into night, will naturally reassert itself.

As we live through this stage of human evolution, which emphasizes separateness and hate in human relations, may we bear its tension and find the path that will lead us to our underlying wholeness, with renewed balance. This is the path where love and hate meet in a union that makes room for all.

Bearing the tension of love and hate,
Chuck