Tag Archives: reincarnation

Chuck’s Place: Change

To reincarnate or not?

I intend not to reincarnate into this world. The Buddhists recommend that those who hold this intent not wait until they find themselves in the Bardos as a departing soul to prepare for this challenge. They recommend that the intent not to reincarnate be the central focus of life while in this world. The Seers of Ancient Mexico similarly recommend that those who are intent upon taking their definitive journey into infinity, with awareness after death, make that intent the central focus of life in this world. How does this intent manifest in everyday life in this world? Through intimations to change.

Every time we refuse the call to change in this life we opt for reincarnation. Reincarnation, simply put, is the consequence of non-readiness to let go, to move on when it’s clearly time to do so.

Is this the road to change?

If a relationship has run its course, can we face that truth and end it? Can we give ourselves permission to release our grasp on a deeply familiar way of life, send our former traveling companion off with love, and move into new life?

When the call to recapitulate tugs at our bodies and psyches, beckoning us to awaken to deep truths we’ve pushed away for a lifetime, can we heed that call and acquiesce to the journey of the dark night of the soul? What we discover and experience on that journey will lead us into a different self as we put down the burdens we’ve carried that have kept us from entering life more deeply, more soulfully.

Can we allow for the changed world that appears when one we love departs this life? Can we release our hold on the physical presence of that being who once was the center of our lives? Can we open to the magic of a changed relationship, life and connection on new terms, and enter into a new world?

Is this the way?

Can we release ourselves from the obligations and expectations of roles that have long outlived their usefulness? Once we reach adulthood we are all equal beings responsible for discovering and meeting the challenges of our core reason for being in this world. The old roles of parent and child must be released to allow all to gather their full energy and take charge of their journeys. Can we release our parents, our children, ourselves?

Can we allow ourselves to fill our cups to the brim with experiences in this world, challenging ourselves to free our wounded innocence to love deeply without illusion? Can we live our illusions and release them when it’s time to move on?

Moving on?

Can we suspend judgment and feel compassion for even those possessed of brutality? Can we suspend judgment of ourselves and allow the awesomeness of this magical journey to course through our veins? Can we allow ourselves to be the magical beings we truly are?

These are some of the many faces of change that present themselves to us through the course of everyday life. These are the manifestations of the intent to evolve versus reincarnate.

What’s it gonna be, the red pill or the blue pill?

Taking the Red Eye,
Chuck

P.S. After I had read the early draft of this blog on Thursday morning to Jan, she happened to read the daily astrology reading for the day on PlanetWaves.net and sent me this link. Pretty cool synchronicity!

Chuck’s Place: Reincarnation in a Pear Tree

The inspiration for the title and theme of this blog began with a story Jan told me as we talked about reincarnation this past week. Here, in her own words, is what she said:

My grandfather was a builder and developer. When he retired from major construction projects such as building skyscrapers, churches and apartment buildings in New York City he put his creative energy into building houses in the hills of the Hudson Valley where he had purchased an old farm in the nineteen-forties and where he maintained a second home. As I remember him telling the story, he was getting ready to bulldoze a new road through an old orchard of gnarly apple, pear and plum trees. Always sensitive to nature—indeed the homes he built were more than likely to be nestled among tall trees—his choice of where to build was always planned so as to do as little damage to the natural environment as possible. On that day, he attempted to push his way through a row of old fruit trees, but one small, dead looking pear tree would not fall before the powerful machine upon which he rode. He described it as standing as solidly as if made of steel, and although he had knocked off quite a few large branches, almost halving the tree, he felt that it deserved to live as long as it desired, so he moved his road slightly to the left in order to accommodate this most auspicious pear tree.

As he worked on his housing development he watched with delight as the little pear tree blossomed, grew leaves and bore fruit. Later he stood on the back of his truck and picked the ripened pears, marveling at the mystery of this half dead tree, as year after year it continued to produce the biggest, juiciest and sweetest pears he had ever tasted. Years later he would still drive by, stop and stand on the back of his truck and reach up into the branches, filling his hat with golden pears.

I too picked pears from this magical tree. When waiting for the school bus or walking past it I never failed to recall my Grandfather’s story of how it had survived the bulldozer. It was a story I heard him tell many times and always with the same bright sense of wonder in his voice as the first time I’d heard him speak of the sturdy little pear tree that refused death and always produced such succulent life.

Years later, my youngest brother, when he was about eleven or twelve, asked me if I believed in reincarnation and immediately an image of that same little pear tree came to mind. When this same brother died a few years after that the little pear tree again instantly appeared before me. In fact, whenever I hear or think the word “reincarnation” an image of that little pear tree immediately floats before me. I see it now, a little golden pear tree, its trunk, leaves and fruit bathed in glistening golden light, and I am reminded of my grandfather and my brother, and the energy of all life, never ending.

The old gnarly pear tree is our old soul that continues its journey through infinity, manifesting new lives, new adventures, in the fresh fruit of our current life, our current incarnation. Though this life, this incarnation, will end as all fresh fruit ultimately breaks down, the life of our soul endures, accruing all the experiences of our current incarnation, constantly evolving onward to new adventure.

On the evening of December 9th, Jan and I sat calmly watching the flames in our wood stove, drinking a glass of wine. This was a special wine we had ordered, having to wait weeks for its arrival. I had just picked it up before coming home. This wine is a fair trade red organic wine without sulfites from South Africa called “Live-a-Little” Really Ravishing Red. On the label is an illustration of a woman dancing freely among the stars and a man in the background hanging from a crescent moon.

The phone rang. It was my daughter, Erica. She shared how well she’d done on her finals, then asked: “Are you guys doing anything special?” I paused, thinking: Well, it’s a Thursday night, why would we be doing anything special? I replied: “No, not really, why?”

“It’s December 9th, Dad…”

Suddenly, I was transported back into another life, a prior incarnation. Nine years ago, Jeanne died on December 9th. And, for the first time in nine years, I had not relived our personal passion play, amazing as it was. So fully interwoven now is Jeanne in the fabric of my current incarnation as we face oncoming time, that I was totally living outside the caboose, which represents looking backward and living in a life we have already lived. (Refer to last week’s blog.)

Deeply sensitive to my daughter, and all my children, seeds planted from the fruits of my journey with Jeanne in this world, I journeyed back a bit into that life as I spoke with Erica. How tender and vulnerable the transition between lives after the death of a beloved parent. How necessary to visit and revisit the caboose of anniversaries, to never forget a past, precious life.

For myself, I am in awe at the seamlessness of my flow through December 9th, fully available to oncoming time. Someone had even recently mentioned a woman dying of cancer at age 47, such a young age. I thought, when I heard it: Yes, that’s how old Jeanne was when she died of cancer. Even this “trigger” had not the power to awaken me to the cusp of December 9th. Earlier in the day of December 9th, a client had asked me about Jeanne’s life and death. I shared in detail her deepest issue and how her death had led to its resolution. Even this had not the energy to awaken me to a past life of December 9th!

Jeanne flows through me and many others as I enjoy the fruits of my current life. My attachment to memory and the specialness of that past life recedes as new days—oncoming time—are freed of old associations and obligations. The only real obligation to be fully present to life is to merge all lives into a living whole that partakes in life NOW. This is life in the pear tree; life that can handle the full impact and integration of all lives lived, venturing forth to new adventure, next year’s crop.

The ultimate irony and humor of the universe is that the celebration of December 9th was well prepared for and pictorially presented on our bottle of “Live-a-Little,” with Jeanne still dancing in infinity!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: From the Archives Again

While Chuck continues a break from routine we offer another look at a post from the archive. Here is Impermanence, originally posted on February 21, 2009:

Several times last weekend my thoughts and feelings were energetically drawn to a dear woman I knew, though had not seen in some time. On Monday a voice mail from her husband, asking me to call, confirmed what I had already sensed: her passing; the reality of impermanence. I thank her for sharing her passing with me from her energetic form.

The Buddha, in deep meditation, discovered why we suffer: we cling to the false belief that things will never change. To be born in this dimension, on earth, we indeed reside in a physical form that will age and wither and we will die. Sorry folks, but that’s the truth! We will love, we will attach to those we love, we will decay, they will decay, they will die, we will die. Death, for the body, truthfully, is rarely a pleasant process. Morphine is, indeed, a godsend.

Personally, I have done that journey. My depth of love for Jeanne, in this world, knew no bounds. Her death, for me, truthfully, was utter joy. I was given the privilege of delivering her to the next step, at the right time, in alignment with her truth. For me, that was the ultimate fulfillment of our earthly love.

The gift I have been given by Jeanne leaving this world is the opportunity to experience the evolution of love beyond the body, beyond this world. This is not an instantaneous occurrence, but a long process, taking several years, perhaps a lifetime, as I make decisions and choices on my journey without her physical presence, learning to reconnect with her in infinity as a spiritual being. Part of this process entails learning to release myself from my old contracts that no longer work, such as upholding old ideas of the self, expectations of society, expectations of family, and mental constructs about love, about being a man, a father, and the nature of family, all illusions of permanence.

Furthermore, I am offered the opportunity to experience reincarnation without death. I have entered a new life, fully connected to and aware of my recent life with Jeanne. I have opened to new love, relationship, and marriage. I accept, from hard earned experience, that all love, attached to the physical form, is impermanent. Earthly love tempts us to grasp onto our physical form, to stay young, to keep things permanent. Like the young Siddhartha, we are barricaded behind the walls of our illusion that everything we see is permanent, especially our physical bodies and our loved ones. In fact, now, with the advent of Viagra, we are treated to the fountain of youth, offering eternal erections, undying physical love!

The denial of death abounds despite the overwhelming evidence of decay and death all around us. In spite of the underlying reality of our inevitable death, we live encased in the illusion of physical immortality. We are shocked when our dear friends and loved ones become ill and die. We cling to ignorance, it simply won’t happen to me! And so, we suffer. Not because of decay and death, but because we stubbornly live in the illusion of permanence. In order to complete the reincarnation cycle now, in this life, we must embrace impermanence. This requires releasing our illusions of physical immortality, which, in essence, is detachment from the illusion of permanence.

Most important is to remain fully open to life in a world of impermanence. This is the gift Jeanne has given me and presents to all of us. In practicality, this means entering a new life with no illusions. Fully opening to life without illusion is opening to infinite love, reconciling something that dies with something that doesn’t. Opening to new life, fully, requires a release from all prior contracts and grief, what Jeanne calls recapitulation. Through emptying our selves of the burdens of life lived, we are freed to enter new life, fully open, fully capable of loving, and fully aware and connected to the truth of our prior life. That is opening the door to infinity. There is no longer a need to reincarnate, as we have completed unfinished business, because, with truth, there is no need to remain attached to the illusion of permanence. We don’t have to hide from anything we have ever done and we are fully open to any experience. We are ready for the truth and full experience of energetic infinity.

From this stance, we can fully enjoy the impermanence of our life, in this world, as we reconcile the paradox of what we are, finite and infinite. What is finite is our body; it will end. What is infinite in us is that which attaches to nothing and continues to ride the eternal wave of energetic change, fully engaging, experiencing, loving, and releasing when it’s time to go, with full memory and love of where we have been.

Until we meet again, in one form or another,
Chuck

#705 Chuck’s Place: Necessary Encounters

We are here for a reason. I base that statement not on a belief but on experience: my own and that of the many people who have shared their journeys with me. We discover our reason for being here in hindsight. We have to be here for quite a while before we awaken to the core drama we have been starring in. The resolution of that drama is why we are here.

The process of waking up to our reason for being here is what sets the stage for our necessary encounters, knocks at the door of our awareness. Necessary encounters are the cast of characters and life circumstances that make up our many groundhog days in this world. We are necessary prisoners to our dramas. This point is critical in suspending judgment about ourselves, for the quagmires we find ourselves in.

Of course, we find ourselves in, put ourselves in, create and author the repetitive, redundant, dysfunctional circumstances of our lives. It is necessary that we do so in order to accomplish, through resolution of our core drama, our reason for being in this world. There is no blame for being in the dysfunction we are in. We need to be there and repeat it as long as we need to, until we are ready to awaken to the drama we are in, take responsibility for it, and resolve it.

Solution may or may not come in this lifetime. From my experience with past life regressions, our present life circumstances are the necessary dramas recast from unresolved past life issues. This, if I understand it correctly from a Buddhist perspective, is the essence of why we reincarnate.

If, upon death, there is no drama left in this world that we are attached to, we will no longer reincarnate. To incarnate is to hold onto an issue or a need upon dying, which then becomes the nucleus of a restructured life in this world, as it encodes the instructions to recreate life circumstances that provide necessary encounters with the unfinished issue. Hence, reincarnation is the process of gathering the necessary materials, people, and circumstances to be born into, in order to relive the drama in another attempt at resolution and completion.

Though our individual dramas may vary from person to person, I’ve come to the conclusion that the overarching drama or reason for being in this world, is to reconcile total love with total detachment. I come to this conclusion from the following facts:

1. We are born into this world and must, in infancy, attach to another through a love connection or we will die through a failure to thrive. Granted, that “attachment” and “love” may be severely twisted and dysfunctional, but there must be some taste of it, however dysfunctional, to stake a claim to life in this world.

2. At the other end, we must die and relinquish everything we have attached to, physically and emotionally, in this world.

Of course, we have the right of refusal to detach from our physical and emotional attachments upon dying, though we cannot refuse death itself. Yet, in a sense, since we can refuse to detach, which triggers reincarnation, we could view reincarnation as its own form of eternal life upon this earth. This is so because refusal to detach results in repeating old dramas in new lives, a cosmic groundhog day where we refuse to die and change form; we refuse to evolve into energetic beings.

There is no judgment here, as once again we must stay in the lives we are in, with their necessary encounters, until we are ready to awaken, take responsibility, completely detach and move on. This can only happen if we have also achieved the place of ultimate love. For short of it, we are left with longing—the essence of a need to reincarnate to find fulfillment and completion.

In the end, love and detachment are the opposites, the cross we bear in this world that we must reconcile to find completion on this plane. With completion we continue our journey in infinity, as energetic beings graduated from this lovely world of special love and attachments.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

A Day in a Life: The Stubborn & The Curious

Today, I switch from the subject of nature outside of us, which I have been writing about for the past few weeks, to nature inside, as it exists in its many forms inside our physical bodies. I define nature as that which is simply present, that which we are born with, and that which we cannot stop.

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, while watching a doe and her fawn in my backyard, I see nature as unstoppable. It lives and it dies and it lives again. I also feel that we humans have this same unstoppable force of nature inside us. Much as the seasons recur, we are positioned, over and over again, to encounter things about ourselves. Often these are things we do not like about ourselves but know we must confront in order to change. They may be well known issues, perhaps already acknowledged but conveniently ignored until we are ready to go more deeply into them, or they may only exist in our subconscious, blocked, suppressed, and left to smolder. In either case, nature has a way of revealing them to us, in ways that are really quite personally relevant.

First I must state that I believe we are all born with a core issue, one core issue, and although there may be many surrounding and resounding issues, each of us is challenged in our lifetime to resolve this one issue. It may even be an issue or challenge that we have carried over many life times. I feel that nature, our inner nature, in collusion with the forces of nature outside of us, is bound and determined to challenge us to confront this issue, teach us how and why it belongs to us, and ask us to evolve beyond it. This is the basic tenet of recapitulation, to recognize the core issue that is holding us back in life, to confront it, to leave it behind without regret or attachment after being fully relived and resolved, and to move on to new life.

At this point, I must make note of Chuck’s recent blog regarding the contention of the seers of ancient Mexico that everything resides within the human body. This is what I write about today, how our bodies tell us, over and over again, just what our core issue is. We can find out everything we need to know about ourselves by contemplating, studying, and paying attention to our own natural state, our physical body. Our bodies contain all the answers, in our physical, in our psyche, in our energy. Our bodies can tell us where we are blocked, why we are afraid, what our spirit asks of us, and why we are here. Of course, it is much easier to see where others are blocked, to guess at their core issues, and wonder why they so stubbornly refuse to change. I will give some personal examples.

In my family, I am dealing with two very old women, one in her eighties and the other in her nineties, who are nearing the ends of their lives. One of them is in denial, stubbornly pretending that everything is fine; this has always been her way. The other is curious, eagerly attentive to anything she can find that may help her understand where she is going; this has always been her way. When I look at them I have to admit that I see myself in both of them. In the stubborn one, I see my own potential to dig in my heels and kick and scream that I don’t want to go; essentially I see my own fear. In the curious one, I see my enlightened self, eager for the adventure ahead, because this side of me has always known that there is something exciting beyond the veils of this world. In these two women, I see the duality of nature, two very powerful forces in a grand tug-of-war, and they are inside all of us.

It’s natural to be afraid, to fear the unknown, but it’s equally natural to be curious. As I watch these two women struggling through old age, maintaining their dignity while confronting their natural and inevitable physical deterioration in their own ways, I know that nature will win out, but I also know that nature is both sides of this process. In spite of the strong desire to remain in control, nature does not allow us to hold onto anything, it forces us out of the physical body. However, nature also gives us the option of capitulating to our energy body, to finally evolving beyond our need to continue reincarnating in the physical human form with our core issues. It offers our curious selves the option to remain alive, vibrant, and engaged in learning about the possibilities that lie ahead. Energy too is the natural way of things, if we care to engage it.

So who wins the tug-of-war? Well, that is up to each of us; it is an individual choice. Do we allow the tug-of-war to hold our energy in eternal conflict, or do we reconcile the opposing forces, confront our core issues this time around, and evolve? Once we recognize what our bodies are trying to tell us, in all our aches, pains, and tensions, and what our psyches are trying to tell us, in our fears, and embrace the experiences that these two opposing natural forces offer us on a daily basis, we come into alignment with nature, with the opportunity for the stubborn and the curious to finally be reconciled.

If you wish, feel free to share or comment in the Post Comment section below.

Sending you all love and good wishes as you take your journeys to reconciliation,
Jan