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Chuck’s Place: Belief Is Destiny

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Owning beliefs from all quarters…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Belief is a mental, not physical, process. We could say that belief, in its insubstantial state, is a spirit, comparable to thought. In fact, we could define belief as a fixed, determined thought whose spirit energy arranges perception and physical matter to conform to its expectations.

Spirit is our active Mars/Yang energy, the energy of intent that engages our Yin/Venus energy, the energy of attraction, to manifest our spirit beliefs. Beliefs become the seedlings of the events of our lives via intent and the law of attraction. All beliefs become true in their ability to attract the very gross matter circumstances that substantiate their validity.

Our subconscious mind is the home of our Yin energy. All of our spirit beliefs are endowed with our Yin energy in our subconscious minds to attract and manifest most of the events of our lives. Indeed, some untoward events passively happen to us, independent of our intent, yet even these apparently random happenings might reflect a deeper intent being housed at an unconscious level.

For example, a conscious intent for change and new life might be thwarted by a blocking belief at an unconscious level that far prefers the security of the status quo. In this case, blocking beliefs override, or, at the very least, weaken, the spirit of desired change.

Karma could be defined as our inherited belief state. Our astrological birth chart is the blueprint for the manifestation of the core beliefs we have accumulated from the various milestones of our infinite journey.

The moment and circumstances of our birth reflect the intent of our high Spirit, in concert with the cosmic Yin energy of the universe, to reflect our previously accumulated level of karmic development in a life on Earth, which offers us the opportunity to deepen our knowledge and advance ourselves to a new level of karmic clarity, challenge, and release.

Individuation can be defined as discovering and squaring with all the opposing beliefs we house in our unconscious karmic warehouse. Typically, we define ourselves at the level of ego consciousness. For the sake of consistency, the ego defends against knowing or owning alien thoughts and feelings dystonic to its working definition of self. It likes to stay in its comfort zone.

As a consequence, much of who we are is suppressed in the shadow dimension of our unconscious, or is simply kept from ever emerging from the deepest transpersonal levels of the collective unconscious. The current renaissance of psychedelic therapy reflects the impetus to force open the knowing and experience of these hidden levels of being.

Although transpersonal exploration is the wave of our evolutionary times, we must be careful to realize that we are here, in the gross matter form we inhabit, to fully live and solve the karmic riddle of the personal sphinx we came here to advance. To be overly seduced by spirit encounters and communion with mythical beings and archetypes can be the ultimate distraction from our core, grounded Earthly mission.

If we can suspend judgment toward our own beliefs, as well as the beliefs of others, we are freed to more deeply enter their vortex and discover their etiology. For instance, an adult’s inner child’s belief that it is responsible for the abusive treatment it received can be understood as issuing both from its young narcissistic, cognitive developmental level, as well as the defensive action of its instinct for self-preservation.

If we can blame ourselves for the shattering behavior of others, we can protect those who harm us, for we may need them in order to survive. As well, if we are to blame, we can maintain control over the world, believing we are the cause of everything that happens to us. However, if we respect our inner child’s belief by confronting it, feeling it, and interacting with it, the child might crack the nut of its fixated belief, freeing itself to experience new life with its adult self.

Therefore, what we believe is indeed our destiny. Destiny means we MUST live it, at least in some form. If we refuse to know about it, it will need to continually reappear in gross matter, or physical life circumstances, to give us new opportunities to crack the nut. This is our true karma, to crack the nut of what we are truly up against now, in this life.

However, if we are willing to suffer the fullness of our beliefs by owning and getting to know them on a deeply inner level, without having to act them out to get to know them, we can truly free ourselves from their limitations and journey into new life in our infinite journey.

Refining destiny,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Divine Bi-Spirituality

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Divine connection…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

The typical splitting of body and spirit into a pair of opposites, though useful in contrasting gross and subtle expressions of energy, reinforces a spiritual prejudice against the body, encumbered with its instinctual life. Most spiritual traditions, while tolerant of life in a physical body, place a premium on sacrificing carnal life for the betterment of spiritual evolution.

Furthermore, the physical world is typically associated with feminine energy, which is equally devalued or seen as subservient to the superior masculine spirit. The body, with its instinctual inclinations, is associated with evil and passions, that which must be sacrificed to achieve spiritual advance.

This stripping of the physical body and instinctive mind of divine association has been the prerogative of ego consciousness, which has the ability to exercise its will over instinct and the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Most profoundly has been the explosive growth of the rational mind, with its associated prefrontal cortex, which claims absolute power over the belief systems of modern humans.

It can certainly be argued that the one-sidedness of modern ego consciousness matches the one-sidedness of our early ancestor’s absolute dependence on instinctual guidance. However, this modern one-sidedness has clearly reached the tipping point, as the world is currently being reshaped by the breakthrough of repressed instinctual forces of destruction.

Marie Louise von Franz, Jung’s most valued associate, reflected on a Romanian fairy tale about a 17-year-old princess who was turned into a cat via a curse from the Virgin Mother, Mary. The curse required that both her cat tail and cat head be cut off by a prince for her to be restored to her human self.

This association of witchy behavior with the Virgin Mother is highly unusual. Von Franz believed it represented the repressed state of the feminine by the Catholic Church. Mary’s shadow delivered a curse intended to fully redeem the feminine.

Von Franz associates the cat’s tail with its dominant animal instinct. Symbolically, the cutting off of the tail represents a humanizing ability to successfully handle the threat of being overpowered by one’s instinctual feelings and sensations. Feelings and sensations are a divine gift, but to be received in a fully human way they must be refined from their overpoweringly compulsive control and integrated as part of a balanced self.

Men who struggle with premature ejaculation learn to breathe and get calm to be able to tolerate and savor the feelings and sensations associated with sexual activity. Divine union must include the wholeness of feelings and sensations. 

Cutting off the head addresses the one-sidedness of mental control by ego or the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Most times, the experience of anxiety is the consequence of the projection of an archetype onto a person or situation one is confronting. Thus, if one’s boss evokes anxiety, it is likely that one is dealing with the image of the destructive side of the Great Mother, or wrathful Yahweh, which must be cut off before one can have a human interaction.

Shamanic journeys, active imagination, and dreaming all offer venues to heroically confront and ‘cut off’ the influence of these archetypes that overshadow human interaction. Breath work, yoga, and meditation provide pathways to gain control over the central nervous system to again cut off the power of the archetypes to possess human life.

Similarly, romantic relationships can’t progress to true connection if one can’t cut off the control of an Adonis or Aphrodite mental projection onto one’s human partner. One will always feel less than when their partner is experienced as divine. Mythology is very instructive in pointing out the pitfalls of human and godly union.

While fully appreciating the attraction and beauty of each other, a couple can truly communicate in a real, down-to-earth human way. Thus, the intensified experience of a divine connection with another human being is truly possible if one communicates directly with the actual person they are with.

Mental presence, unencumbered by divine projection, in combination with matured feelings and sensations is the key to divine bi-spirituality. Our spiritual essence is both body and spirit equally engaged, equally valued, equally matured.

Our collective world shamanic journey of now beckons us to retrieve the lost and captured parts of our wholeness, in particular, our feminine and  animal selves.

The body is as much spirit as the spirit itself. It must be granted its true value and raised to its highest spiritual potential. This is the essence of divine bi-spirituality: as above, so below.

Love all,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Perfection Is Wholeness

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Find wholeness in all things…
-Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

Perfection is wholeness. Wholeness is the four-sided mandala: 4 directions, 4 seasons, 4 stages of life, etc. Winter is pregnancy. Spring is birth. Summer is fulfillment. Fall is death.

The decay of Fall provides the seeds and nourishment for new life, as the life cycle completes itself and begins anew. Nature teaches, in this most basic way, that life feeds upon life. The shamans of ancient Mexico called our world a predatory universe, not as a judgment but as nature’s destructive truth.

Evil is branded the demon, and it may present as such, but it is a necessary part of the life cycle, a fundamental part of our wholeness. Archetypes are the primal patterns that generate the life cycle. Archetypes populate the deepest level of the human unconscious, what Jung called the collective unconscious.

Joseph Campbell realized that in world mythology, which personifies the  organizing influence of the archetypes upon human behavior, the hero archetype has a thousand faces. Local cultures thus dress the core archetypes in local clothing and masks, but beneath the surface all the different variations can be reduced to the same universal archetypes.

Despite the culture or religion, the hero is always sacrificed, changes form, and is born again into new life. Once again, nature’s fallen resurrects in the new life of Spring.

Archetypes insist on being propitiated. We must appease their energetic imperatives or suffer the agonizing consequences of their wrath.  For example, depression is often the withdrawal of life energy by a neglected archetype. If we refuse a rite of Spring, like Daphne our life might harden into a frozen tree.

Modern humanity has forgotten its natural roots. The animal has been confined to the darkness of the basement, in the area of the psyche Jung called the shadow. While humanity luxuriates in its advanced technology, the animal in the shadow plans its escape into life. Here’s how Jung described the ravaged animal’s escape in Nazi Germany:

“Like the rest of the world, [the Germans] did not understand wherein Hitler‘s significance lay, that he symbolized something in every individual. He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody‘s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.” *

Projection of one’s disowned self onto a political leader renders one the sacrificial victim of a wrathful archetype. Victimhood is experienced as both the ecstasy of the entranced and the rage and hate of the rationally disenchanted. In both cases one is drawn into emotional bondage by the archetype.

In either case, the truly disenfranchised is both the personal and collective shadow, the neglected animal and the natural world, the Earth. This is a universal collective problem for humankind, not simply an issue of polarization.

The archetype of the shadow is just that, that which lives in the darkness.  This is both the truth of our disowned lives, as well as the archetype of our unlived wholeness. To propitiate the shadow, we must bring the light of our consciousness into the darkness and discover the fullness of who we are.

In waking life, our journeys into darkness require us to own and release the intensity of our emotions in a safe place. Beyond release is the full knowing and acceptance of all we have done, light and dark. Finally, the darkness will reveal the changes we must make to align ourselves with our wholeness.

If we can suffer the Fall, reveling in its final colorful act, and have the patience of a pregnant Winter, new life will surely arrive, to be nourished in the Spring and brought to fulfillment in Summer, as the life cycle perfects its wholeness.

Seeking perfection,
Chuck

*Jung, C. G. (1946). Fight with the Shadow. In The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 10). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Close Your Eyes To Projection

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Discovering royalty within…
– Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

Our attention and emotional excitement are drawn outwardly to events that show us our very personal drama within. Our inner director is so stupendous, we hardly realize that our outer fascination is directed from  the depths of our own psyche, as it seeks to captivate the attention of our consciousness.

So held in the grip are we by certain events upon the world stage that it seems impossible to believe that they are actually reflecting something quite personal within our own selves. The movie we are drawn to see might be our own personal shadow play, or it may reflect the seismic stirrings at the deeper, unconscious level of our collective Soul life.

To discover the source, close your eyes and ask your Soul to reveal the source of your attraction, fascination, repulsion, and passion for the story it has directed you to. Allow your spontaneous thoughts and images to interact with your reflective consciousness. Prepare to take deeper ownership for the fuller picture of the many selves of your self. 

The Queen’s funeral might find one unexpectedly overcome by a depth of emotion completely enigmatic to one’s conscious attitude toward the monarch and sense of self. Closing one’s eyes to the world, an image of personal mother may appear. A series of vignettes might ensue, expressing her life of self-sacrifice and service, as she provided  nurturance and security to all. A wave of old grief might invite one to emotional release.

Perhaps one might be drawn instead to images of mother repressing emotion in all, stressing rules and limitations in her reign over one’s childhood. Perhaps one is then drawn into the emotion of guilt that one actually felt joy at liberation upon her passing.

At another level, one might encounter the numinous energy of royalty, the Great Mother Queen, whose coffin concealing her lifeless body draws thousands to wait countless hours to walk by and to personally commune with her Goddess energy. Welcome to the the domain of the archetypes.

Archetypes are nature’s images that direct human behavior from behind the mind’s eye. In archetypal reality, royalty is the Queen Bee, whom the drones of humanity are organized to serve. Queen and King are the ultimate mother and father in all benevolent or cruel authority figures that we encounter throughout life. We react to their projection with anxiety, awe, fear, and anger.

Inwardly, these archetypes are the ego’s parents, to which it owes its life. When ego inflates, it identifies with their power. When it deflates, it abandons all its power, as it returns to the womb in total surrender.

In Queen Elizabeth, ego highlighted the value of service—service to the established rules. Queen Elizabeth represented ego sacrifice to a higher value. Human predilection must conform to royal expectation, without exception.

Inwardly, human guilt and longing may be the consequence of our relationship to these powerful archetypes. Has my life gone wrong because I refused to sacrifice to service, that is, to what was expected of me? Is my fulfillment denied because my needs have offended the royals within? Is it time to break free of royal bondage? Am I prepared to go it alone, to honor my right to choose? And if I do, am I prepared to bear the wrath of the royal parents?

At the deepest collective level the boots of the activated Gods are making the Earth shudder. The Queen is dead, long live the King. Inwardly, this transition of power marks the emergence of a new rule, perhaps dictated by transition to a new stage of the life cycle. Clearly, the world is floundering as it seeks a new value to live by.

The Queen’s adherence to ancient precedent cannot lead us to salvation. What is needed is not adherence and sacrifice to tradition but service and acquiescence to what is truly needed for the Earth, and all her inhabitants. Can ego serve such a King?

These are the many worlds within that play for attention in our changing world without. Though we might laugh at the silliness of monarchy, perhaps if we close our eyes and discover the powers that be within, we’ll understand the reason for a tear as we listen to the bagpipes sending this Queen on her definitive journey.

With closed eyes opened,
Chuck

Soulbytes

Soulbyte for Monday September 19, 2022

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                                                       -Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

Stay grounded by refusing the call to go outside the self in too many ways. There is much outside of you that draws engagement, that wants your energy. Far better to limit outside interference so you can focus on what is going on inside and causing issues within. Inner work is as important as outer work. How you attend to yourself is as important as how you attend to others. What’s really going on with you? Only you know for sure.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne