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Chuck’s Place: The Karma Of Resentment Is Ultimately Love

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Self Importance Kills!
-Photo by Chuck Ketchel

Resentment means, literally, to feel, with intensity, over and over again; resending to the self feelings that have affected it deeply. The actual feeling experienced in resentment is one of passionate anger and bitterness, held tightly, and felt enduringly, for perceived wrongs committed against the self.

Such emotional fixation and repetitive emotional experience rigidifies the heart, inhibiting the free flow of loving and compassionate energy.

The mind often replays incidents associated with its resentments, whereby refreshing their smoldering energy with renewed vigor that then seeks outlet in actual or imagined revenge.

As is evident from the current state of the world, resentments from centuries ago have led to fervent beliefs of entitlements, which are being played out in wars and conflicts throughout the globe. The family of nations and the oneness of the human race is overshadowed by a stage of separateness that is focused on individualistic needs, entitlements and resentments.

Behind all the material veils of physical life is the ultimate truth that all is One, that everyone is part of everything. This truth can only be lived when we emerge from our narcissistic shells and are able to be in love with, and of service to, the Greater One. The karma of separateness, as embodied in resentment, is love. Love is the acceptance of everything, which removes all barriers to Oneness.

The journey from resentment to love is a developmental process. The shamans of ancient Mexico discovered that the key to freeing the stuck energy of resentment lies with overcoming one’s self-importance. Self-importance must first be differentiated from self-esteem.

The essence of self-esteem is a measure of one’s self-confidence in the ability and capacity to face life’s challenges. Equally important is one’s ability to be in full acceptance of self, of all one’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as all that one has done, good or bad.

In contrast, self-importance is an egoic strategy of defense, which protects the ego self from feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. The self-important ego clings to its archetypal entitlements, as, for instance, in the expected love and support of parents, or in the right to have its needs met and not to be abused.

These are, of course, healthy archetypal expectations, however, they hardly address the fullness of reality conditions in Earth School, beginning with the universal experience of violent separation and trauma at birth. Regardless of our ultimate mission in an earthly incarnation, we have all chosen a milieu where the ego is always behind the eight ball. To graduate from Earth School we must arrive at total acceptance of everything, even the most unfair experiences.

To defend against the enormity of this challenge the ego employs self-importance, demanding to be compensated in some form for all the basic entitlements it has been denied. The ego’s resentments for violations to its self-importance might result in aggression expressed outwardly, or buried inwardly in a silent, bitter depression.

The ultimate goal for shamans is the total elimination of self-importance and maintenance of a healthy self-esteem that provides the confidence and clarity to face life’s challenges without attachment to the outcome. Success and failure are equal for shamans. There is no diminishment of self for failure, there’s simply acceptance of the truth without judgment. Healthy self-esteem has no need for self-importance; it acts from its own self-assuredness.

Shamans suggest using the  petty tyrants in one’s life to get over self-importance. Petty tyrants are those people or circumstances in our lives that offend us and drive us to resentment. The goal is to arrive at not being offended by the most offensive behaviors inflicted upon us. If we are not offended we gain utter clarity in how best to navigate a difficult person or situation.

Of course, we may need to safely release genuine primal screams of reaction for what we have endured. However, once released, rather than shift into resentment, we are strengthened in our confidence to come to full acceptance of the truth of our experience and fluidly take action to best address the circumstance we are in. Only the ego caught in self-importance suffers woundings and resentments, the High Self never does.

We don’t indulge in hate, but ultimately feel genuine love for our petty tyrant, a necessary teacher from the dark side, who has offered us such opportunity to shed the weight of resentment and hone our skills of navigation as we deepen our ability to further journey into infinity.

We might also employ the power of autosuggestion to gain release from the habit of resentment. The subconscious mind transforms resentments into habits as the conscious mind incessantly dwells upon them. If we raise our consciousness and freely choose to suggest love for all of our neighbors, we exercise the Divine spark at our disposal in the subconscious mind to transform resentment into love.

Shamans have also provided the recapitulation breath, the side to side bilateral breath that accompanies the reliving of encounters with petty tyrants and both neutralizes resentments and frees stuck energy for the ultimate journey of love, for every One.

And yes, we can set extremely firm boundaries with petty tyrants and still love them. These boundaries are not boundaries fueled by resentment. To the contrary, they are firm boundaries that reflect the truth of the heart.

In this infinite journey that we all traverse, the ultimate karma for all resentment is love. For how are we ever to advance without the total acceptance of everything that is all-inclusively an expression of the One?

Choose love, the ultimate free choice,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Royal Spheres Of The One Mind

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The Royal Couple…
-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

The mind is a subtle body that creates, runs, and maintains the physical body. A cord, similar to an umbilical cord, connects these two bodies while we are physically alive. When that cord eventually breaks, the physical body dies, while the mind, in its soul body, moves off to life in a  subtle dimension of reality.

The mind is a singular organ with two significant spheres, one conscious and the other subconscious. The conscious sphere is the King who chooses the blueprint for life in this world. The King is a ruling dominant of the mind, as reflected in the attitudes, beliefs, and thoughts one imbues one’s attention with and that determine the course of one’s life.

The subconscious sphere is the Queen, who creates life through her access to divine substance and intelligence, in accordance with the dictates of heredity and consciousness, which constantly provide her with guiding suggestions. The Queen is the ruling dominant of the mind that manifests new life.

The conscious sphere works with the subconscious sphere when it is awake. The subconscious never sleeps. When the conscious sphere  sleeps, the subconscious continues to monitor and address the needs of the physical body. These two spheres of the mind, though distinct, are deeply intertwined royal partners.

The physical brain, with its nervous system, provides the conscious sphere with the sensory data gathered through its five physical senses, allowing it  to choose behaviors that address its physical needs. Thus, if one senses cold through the sense of touch, they may decide to put on a sweater.

The subconscious sphere of mind also receives sensory data from the brain, which it automatically responds to via the association of sensory experience with reactive suggestions from innate instincts of survival and growth. Instincts are powerful programs of habitual response to address sensory activation and mental thought. If, for example, one hears a noise and imagines an intruder, a fear response and mobilization for physical action and survival will result.

The conscious sphere of mind constantly presents its own suggestions to the subconscious, who then manifests them through its total control of the physical body. Thus, if one tells the heart to reduce its rate of heartbeat, the subconscious slows it down.

Suggestions from both the conscious sphere of mind and the instincts, stored in the subconscious, influence the actions of the subconscious in accordance with the law of attraction. That law operates via like attracting like. The subconscious attracts divine substance to it as it fashions, in physical form, the energetic intent of consciousness.

The shamans of ancient Mexico called this divine substance and intelligence the energy of intent. This independent magical energy permeates the universe and is the energy behind all of creation. The subconscious mind has access to this divine energy of intent, which it calls upon to both run the body and manifest, in physical form, the suggestions it accepts.

The conscious mind has its own relationship with intent through its ability to intend its intentions to the subconscious mind via suggestion.  Like the subconscious mind, the energy of intent neither reasons nor moralizes, it creates what it intends to create.

The subconscious, with its access to the energy of intent, can thus create a reality that serves the whims of narcissism as equally as intentions presented for the greater good. A heartfelt conscious master of intent would thus choose to exercise their divine freedom of will for the intent of the greater good of self and other.

Consciousness also has the Knightly duty to protect its Queen, the subconscious sphere of the mind. Concretely, this can mean choosing to not expose itself to the content of the negativity influencers on social media, who seek to implant their suggestions into the subconscious minds of listeners and readers.

The subconscious does not rationally reflect upon the rightness of the suggestions presented to it, it is solely the irrational center of creation. The subconscious depends completely upon the conscious sphere to discern right action.

The conscious sphere of mind is also charged to face its own fears and negative beliefs which might be secretly undermining its own intentions for change in accordance with the greater good. For example, a hidden fear of scarcity might result in the subconscious being attracted to purchase less healthy but cheaper food to save money, whereby compromising its intent for perfect health.

Consciousness must monitor its use of words, as it is words that become the flesh. I’ll never be able to have that, is a powerful suggestion to the subconscious that will be manifested as scarcity and poverty. The antidote: immediately change all negatives into positives. In this instance, never have that becomes a definite, I have that!

The declarative, I have that, rests upon the conviction of the conscious sphere that it has successfully planted the seed of its intent into the fertile soil of subconscious substance. The law of growth insists that that seed will physically manifest through the energy of intent in the subconscious sphere of the mind. The conscious sphere waters its seed through its certainty that the full maturation of its seed of intent is a physical fact, in definite progress.

During the watering of the seed of intent, the affirmation, I have that, is repeated often in the conscious mind, together with a powerful exercise of the imagination that visualizes that in one’s possession, as one passionately feels one’s desire and joy at its realization. The conscious sphere must choose to engage in this practice frequently, to both impress the subconscious with its intent, as well as to become a habit of mind and, eventually, a new reality.

Consciousness, with its royal prerogative to choose, must also acquiesce to the divine prerogative of the subconscious to attract the necessary events to realize the given intent, in accordance with its own methods, and in its own time.

The mind is ultimately a royal partnership, of interdependence and deep love and respect, between the conscious and subconscious spheres of the mind. Without the conscious mind’s reasoning powers and discernment of right action, the subconscious mind is prey to create all manner of unsavory suggestions. Likewise, without a positive working relationship with the subconscious, the conscious sphere cannot realize the fulfillment of its true desires, and potential, while in physical form.

As with all intimate relationships, the relationship between the conscious and subconscious spheres of mind requires focused attention, appreciation, and mutual respect, to grow and become all that one unified mind can be while attached to life in physical form.

Mindfully,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: A Life Of No Self-Importance

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Secret Service…

Soon after my wife, Jeanne, left this world she communicated a cosmic perspective on our Earth’s crises. Essentially, she described a tremendous backlog of souls, clamoring to reenter earthly existence to further their experience of physicality and the sensuality of being in a human body.

Her new mission in infinity is to hasten the spiritual evolution of those still in human form that they might be ready, upon departure from Earth, to venture further into the greater mystery of evolved life, beyond attachment to the human body. Her guidance, channelled through Jan’s daily Soulbytes, reflects this intent.

Carl Jung, from the perch of a wise, fully lived life, saw that the greatest problem for humanity was overpopulation, as it alone is fatally straining the Earth’s resources. Our current Earth crises all reflect land disputes driven by sprawling populations, or diminished resources resulting from climate change and failures in human management.

The issue of overpopulation strains our world at both a soul level and a physical level. At an individual level, we are all now, in this life, granted the opportunity to address this Earth and this cosmic crisis through our commitment to a spiritual fulfillment in this life, which will eventuate in a readiness for new levels of life beyond Earth’s riches.

The shamans of ancient Mexico saw clearly that the greatest opportunity for spiritual evolution in human life was through the defeat of the ego’s obsession with its own self-importance. Self-importance is not self-esteem. Self-esteem is the ability to approach life with innocence, unsullied by the judgments of others.

Self-importance is rooted in self-doubt. The ego tries to resolve its doubts about its worthiness through the quantity and quality of attention it receives from others. It tends to either inflate itself with superiority or deflate itself with inferiority. This obsession leads to struggles with entitlement, fairness, and victimhood.

The shamans of ancient Mexico discovered the value of interactions with petty tyrants in our lives in overcoming our trials with self-importance. Petty tyrants are people or circumstances that offend us.

However inappropriate the behavior of another is, to be offended triggers issues of unfairness and victimhood. Mastery of one’s actual presented challenge then gets waylaid by feelings of resentment and entitlement. Though it may be necessary to set boundaries, the burden of negative thinking and feeling compromises one’s ability to respond effectively.

At the deepest level, nature itself has a hostile side. Petty tyrants are part of nature. Consider the devastations in Maui, Afghanistan and, most recently, Acapulco. Of what value would it be to be offended by an earthquake, a hurricane, or a fire? Their occurrence, however devastating, is simply objective, requiring focused rescue efforts. At the deepest level, is not nature showing us that we must all come together and master the real problem of human overpopulation?

Instead, self-importance allows us to be offended and to engage our vital energy and resources on wars. Boundaries must be set, respected and defended, but being offended leads to excesses that perpetuate conflict and miss the true mark of needed change.

To not be offended by those who hurt us is to accept and learn from the hostile side of nature, in whatever form it is expressed. By not being offended, we refine our ability to respond with actions in alignment with the truth of Spirit versus the resentment of ego. This is the spiritual evolution that graduates us from Earth School, as we move into a life of no self-importance.

Buddha emphasized the role of service in facilitating spiritual advancement. In service, we reach beyond the ego’s narcissistic worldview and value our neighbors as part of our ultimate soul group. The most refined practice of service is anonymous. To live a life of anonymous service is the ultimate life of no self-importance.

Anonymous service is good deeds performed in the dark, where there is no possibility of the kudos of another’s attention. To send one’s healing intent to another in silent prayer, no energetic strings attached, is anonymous service. To send that healing intent anonymously to one’s most hated enemies is practicing transcendent love, the currency of higher planes of existence.

Of course, when we send healing intent to another, we are really sending suggestions telepathically to their subconscious minds. It is always up to the receiver to take responsibility for the suggestions they choose to live by. Nonetheless, it is of great service to anonymously send suggestions from the truth of the heart.

With the refinement of no self-importance, we are irresistibly drawn to the challenge and growth potential of the life that is available beyond the human form.

May we take full advantage of the petty tyrants currently active and soon to come upon the Earth. To arrive at a non-offended life of secret  service is the ticket to spiritual evolution, reachable through the loss of self-importance. Nature herself is leading us to that necessary advancement.

May we all advance,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog, News and Notes

Toltec Wisdom

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Don Jose Ruiz really touches on the interconnectedness of Toltec Wisdom, and all wisdom traditions, to the world dream of now. We highly recommend taking some time to listen to Mark Certo’s Interview with him on the Expanding on Consciousness Podcast.

Listen on Apple Podcasts at the link below, or wherever you get your podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/expanding-on-consciousness/id1628153495?i=1000609469850

Don Jose Ruiz, Author of the Fifth Agreement and Teacher of Toltec Traditions— A Mystical Connection to the Infinite Source

“Toltec wisdom is about healing with spirit, and Toltec practitioners serve as an extension of the divine Mother Earth. The fire within is there to protect us from ourselves. Follow that fire. The Toltec of today has evolved as the world has evolved—kept alive not with blind faith repeating traditional beliefs, but by how the world is dreaming right now. There are many challenges to unlearn. Toltec is an ancient common sense where you know the truth. It’s an autopsy on the illusion of today. Don Jose speaks of two types of consciousness: personal consciousness—a personal dream—and impersonal consciousness. A field of interaction includes all life on Earth and all life in the cosmos. “We have the ultimate respect for the ultimate dance of detachment, which dances with the angel of death in the music of life. And from this point, we live with gratitude, not with a fear to hold on and miss everything that is around us.” ” -Expanding on Consciousness

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Take Charge Of The Internal Dialogue

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A new internal dialogue…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

The shamans of ancient Mexico coined the term internal dialogue to identify the incessant self-talk that we all engage in that generates our personality.

The content of the internal dialogue is the socialized messages we all receive from the moment we are born, which come to shape our perception and interpretation of ourselves, and the world around us.

What’s key is how the internal dialogue, which is largely internalized verbal and nonverbal messages from significant others, becomes the deeply felt personal definition of self that we accept as our unique personality. Thus, our sense of self is mostly simply a product of external forces of socialization. What we come to covet as our unique self is largely an arbitrary creation of external suggestion.

Psychologically this is what forms and upholds our ego identity. The ego adopts this external messaging as its internal dialogue, which instructs the subconscious mind to manifest the mental and physical being we then become in this world. The subconscious mind is capable of creating anything we say to it—its powers are that extraordinary.

This magic, however, is lost to us, as our magical possibilities are molded externally, and maintained internally, by the incessant unconscious repetition of the same internal dialogue.

Shamans call this fixation of identity, via suggestion, the assemblage point, where unlimited possibility becomes sharply bound by a definite sense of self. Carlos Castaneda called it the place where the wings of our magical selves become clipped.

To further complicate the potential awakening to our innate creative potential is the emotional security we derive from a consistent knowing of ourselves. Thus, for instance, if we are generally somewhat depressed and not hopeful about success in our lives, we may nonetheless cling to and defend this unhappy personality because it provides us with the security of a familiar, trustworthy sense of self.

The rational function of the ego will also likely generate persuasive arguments to dismiss the irrational notion of an unlimited magical potential within the self.

For instance, the subconscious mind is capable of nonlocal perception, such as through remote viewing, channeling or telepathy. The ego, on rational grounds, may dismiss these potential abilities with blocking beliefs that preclude ego even suggesting such a possibility to the subconscious mind.

The shaman proposes that one suspend judgment, and, like a true scientist, approach the subconscious with an unbiased experiment that presents suggestions to it and observes behavioral outcomes.

Too often we try first to reason with the internal dialogue to overcome its objections. This will almost always fail due to the power of the ego’s defenses, which it employs to securely maintain its familiar self.

Rather than battle with reason, accept the product of its internal dialogue, the current ego identity. Instead of an argument, create a new internal dialogue that you volitionally and incessantly repeat, as often as you remember.

For example, state the phrase, “I am calm,” thousands of times a day. It matters little if you believe it or not. In fact, your working definition of self—your standard operating self definition—might be, “I am an anxious person.” Do not challenge this definition, simply repeat, “I am calm,” as often as you can.

Suggestions given to the subconscious just before sleep are the most powerful. In retiring to sleep, both the physical body and the conscious mind are turning down and tuning out, thus the availability of the subconscious to receive new instructions is paramount.

In addition, the subconscious naturally comes alive to creativity and suggestion at night. Why waste it on ordinary dreaming? Give it some direction!

As one works the magic at night, one may soon discover that one is more calm in waking life as well. The more established ego state, which loves rationality, will likely take in this new fact and be willing to incorporate it into its old sense of self with little resistance. What ego would deny the facts of its own experience? That’s reality testing at its most basic level.

The possibility of molding a new sense of self, with consciousness that assumes personal responsibility for the suggestions presented to the subconscious, is the true key to the magical kingdom.

Firstly, it allows one to shed the propositions of early internalized beliefs that don’t truly reflect one’s innate potential. The ego instead becomes the beacon of the true Spirit of the Self.

Secondly, it puts the two minds within the self in an optimal relationship for growth. If the ego suggests, to the subconscious, actions of health, healing and the greater good, the physical body and the manifested world will reflect the instinct of self-preservation taken to the highest level of evolutionary refinement.

Thirdly, we, as human beings, are thus restored to the free exploration of our magical beingness and our greater creative potential. We unclip our wings with the free exercise of our will and become the true artists of our lives.

It’s that simple! Take charge of the internal dialogue and become all that you can be!

I am a being of unlimited potential,
Chuck