Tag Archives: self-reflection

Chuck’s Place: Look Into The Mirror Of Self-Importance

Who is looking back at you in the mirror?
-Artwork © 2026 Jan Ketchel

What rules the outer world, at this moment in time, is the most fantastic display of self-importance the world has ever known. Of course, it’s the most fantastic display, ever! It wields the Midas Touch, as everything it touches turns to gold, real or imagined!

Let us face this outer reflection of insatiable self-importance as we discover its hidden presence within the workings of our own inner Soul. We are all subject to the Hermetic Law, as without so within. May we all truly find the gold within in this golden moment of our planetary progression.

Self-importance has its roots in the developmental needs of the human ego. The mention of ego often provokes a pejorative reaction, as it is frequently associated with negative self-importance, one of its trappings so offensive to the virtue of humility. However, in its functional form, ego is the part of the personality that forms an identity that navigates the life we were born into, and the entire journey of our lifetime in human form.

In fact, ego is a part of our Soul that generally suffers amnesia at birth—what is called a blank slate—where it is separated from its royal ancestry of infinite Soul, to be born into a human family, as a mere mortal who will live and die in human form. This royal scheme is the greater Soul’s intent to explore vistas of being that only life and death in finite form can provide.

Ego, born into this state of alienation, is obsessively driven to bond to parents who will ensure its survival. It grows through helplessness and dependence to secure independence, when it can more fully undertake its hero’s journey to complete the mission it unknowingly signed up for prior to birth.

Ego has an insatiable desire for attention, particularly from its parents, which is largely met by parents through mirroring glances of acknowledgement, joy, and welcomeness to young ego, who experiences validation and the definitive right to take up space and thrive in this world. Failures in early mirroring can lead to depression and obsessive attention seeking behaviors, as such an ego lacks secure attachment and inner worth.

Ego may revert to strategies such as ego inflation, where it puffs up its self-importance to more securely navigate life. Equally, ego may choose to hide, seeking no attention. Attention entails performance, which can lead to failure, shame, and rejection. In this adaptive hideout, one may live a fantasy life of importance and fulfillment, though secretly feel entitled, superior, and resentful.

Another ego strategy for navigation is the pursuit of perfection to avoid the judgments inherent in being seen. The problem with perfection is that it leaves no space for the acceptance of being a mortal human with flaws and inadequacies. Avoidance of rejection and shame can monopolize all of one’s energy for life.

Blatantly mirrored, in current world rule, is an ego strategy that exercises its full might to consume all world attention and stamp out all possible criticism and limitation. This strategy is a concretized attempt to achieve wholeness and oneness by literally having, and becoming, all that is.

Ultimately, we are all being challenged to address our fixations with self-importance as the collective planetary ego prepares to evolve in this Age of Aquarius, which we have recently entered. The ego of the Aquarian Age is opening up to telepathy, where thoughts and feelings are transmitted without verbal communication. This mind-reading function does not require another to be locally present for thought-sharing to occur.

Ego cannot hide out during telepathic communication. The ego becomes the emperor with no clothes in this scenario, for all is known. Ego can no longer hide behind words and persona; it is simply seen as it truly is. This progression in evolution requires that ego be in acceptance of the truth of what it is, with all its flaws and limitations. This alignment with truth opens the door to love of self, as well as love of equally flawed neighbor.

P. P. Quimby discovered that most of what becomes disease in our lives is  erroneous ego beliefs, which condense and are reflected in the external conditions of our body. His method of cure was to have his patients see the blatant truths of these errors and open to the love and truth of their divine beingness. This orientation also opens us to the truths and intentions for the greater good for all rather than the cloistered, self-serving ego of deception.

This attitude of love and reverence for everyone prepares us to take full conscious possession of our divine ability to manifest, via suggestion to our divine subconscious mind, sincere fulfillment for self and all others.

Until recently, we have all projected these divine abilities to create and manifest onto godly beings beyond ourselves, or concretely upon money and physical objects. The Age of Aquarius is reflecting to us our royal potential, as we retrieve our projections and advance our innate energetic abilities.

In effect, the more truthfully we face and accept the full truths of our lives, the more ego discovers its true royal heritage, which it can then align with for the greater good of self, and all others. Ego then serves the needs of its greater Soul, in truth and wisdom, rather than its own self-aggrandizement.

The shamans of ancient Mexico, who recognized the utter necessity to become free of self-importance, stressed that laughter was the best medicine in accepting our flawed selves and the wily ways we adopt to cover ourselves up.

Every one of us has the capacity now to advance the world from within, by facing the giant of self-importance, so boldly mirrored to us from without. May we follow the true guidance reflected by this utterly glaring projection!

With affection for all,
Chuck

Soulbyte for Wednesday May 10, 2023

-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Stay attached to how far you have already come and not to how far is still to go. Your accomplishments deserve credit, as does your strong will to change and evolve the self. There is great dignity in paying attention to what has made you and what potential still lies unawakened within you. Let fear stand aside now. Take it off like an old winter coat, no longer needed in the warm sunshine, and allow yourself to launch now into the great and fantastic unknown. It is your destiny.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Soulbyte for Wednesday April 26, 2023

-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Suspend judgment about yourself and the things you have done. Shift your awareness to the bigger picture and your life in its wholeness, in the context of a journey of learning and growth. When you suspend judgment you let go of the inner critic, the constant judging voice in your ear, and allow something else to enter, perhaps the knowledge that you have done nothing wrong but only lived an aspect of life worth living to the fullest. Everything is part of the journey you are on. Can you accept that? Integrate that? And move on from that? That is how to suspend judgment.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Soulbyte for Wednesday February 15, 2023

-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Forget about yourself for a moment and tune into someone else, even someone you don’t know who is having a bad day, a bad week, a bad year. There’s always someone worse off than you.  Notice how fortunate you are in comparison, how much you have and how much you don’t need. Turn your frown into a smile and see how that feels. Sometimes a bad mood is just that, a mood not related to anything real except your false self-perception that something is wrong when obviously it isn’t. The more you smile the better you’ll feel.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Chuck’s Place: Just A Boy And A Little Girl*

That inner partner might pop up at any time…
-Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

Just like the roots of our computer programs, that boil down to zeroes and ones, human beings are all, at their core, a combination of male and female, (+) and (-) energy. Psychologically, this means that our wholeness includes the existence of an inner contrasexual partner.

Jung called the inner feminine character in a male personality the anima and the inner male character in a woman the animus. These characters are living entities that interact with our ego, and various other characters within our psyche, where they impact our attitudes, beliefs and moods. Often these characters project themselves onto actual people in the world, which greatly impacts how we judge and feel toward the recipient of their projection.

We are, psychologically, hermaphroditic beings, conjoined together for life. Our individuation challenge, regardless of our sexual orientation, is to achieve union with our inner contrasexual partner. This requires getting to know our opposite side, respecting and accepting its existence, and achieving inner harmony with what is often experienced as a highly conflicted self.

Failure to achieve union with one’s inner other-half often results in suppression of one’s inner partner’s perspectives and feelings, a total denial of its existence, and countless conflicts with one’s outer intimate partner, who may be confused with one’s inner unknown partner.

How often do we feel judged and offended by what we assume another person thinks and feels? Little do we know that our ‘intimate knowledge’ of our outer partner is actually a reflection of our own unknown, or rejected, inner self.

Qualities of masculine energy include the mental function of thinking, most dominantly within the constraints of logic. Masculine energy tends to be active and solitary.

The dominant feature of feminine energy is relatedness, which seeks emotional connection. Feminine energy tends to be receptive, seeking to receive and compliment the energy of another. All of human experience involves some combination of masculine and feminine qualities and energies.

Writing this blog has required my feminine energy to become pregnant with masculine ideas needing containment and maturation to bear fruit. My patience with this congealing process is reflected in the words and thoughts pouring forth as I write.

Sometimes my anima insists upon a colorful word because she likes an idea dressed in her style. Sometimes my masculine ego is too abstract, refusing to give a down-to-Earth example that would facilitate ease of understanding.

In dialogue with my anima, I concede my abstract bias and agree to use this example of my personal process to help readers connect to my idea. My anima agrees to let go of her attachment to attractive but unnecessary words.

Often one’s contrasexual partner defends the ego by using its ability to reason to argue a point, regardless of the absurdity of its argument. Sometimes the defense comes in the form of powerful moods, where one’s inner other tells it how undeserving it is of the treatment it has received.

Through genuine interaction with our inner other, we achieve a collaborative relationship that facilitates progress in our individuation and also clears the way outwardly for positive relationships with others.

If we find ourselves in conflict outwardly, we do well to first check in with our inner contrasexual partner, who we might be avoiding and meeting instead in projected form in our current impasse. Most relational problems originate in one’s lack of relatedness within. As is often said: as within, so without.

Go within; work it out. Become that boy and a little girl, actually changing that whole wide world.

Working it out,
Chuck

*Words from John Lennon’s Isolation.