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Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Beyond Archetypal Slavery

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Just because we look alike does not mean we are like each other... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Just because we look alike does not mean we are like each other…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

If your mother were not your mother, would she be a person you’d find resonance with, that you’d seek to spend time with? This is not a knock on mother. The same could be asked of mother. If you were not her child, would she find your company companionable? In many cases the answer to both questions is no. What then is the energy that binds non-companionable people together?

The answer is the binding archetypal impact—in this case, of the archetype of Mother—on people who objectively may have very little in common.

Archetypes are the inborn programs that organize the lives of a given species. They exert a magnetic draw on relationships that supersedes actual compatibility or consciousness. People who might under ordinary circumstances have no interest in each other are suddenly bound together by an energy that pays little heed to compatibility or choice.

Archetypes overlay most human relationships. If one finds resonance with another on a dating site, the soul mate archetype is activated and suddenly this mysterious other is imbued with the archetypal energy of radiant promise. In the actual human encounter during the ensuing date, the archetypal balloon may quickly puncture, as she/he, who moments before shined with such promise, may be the last person you’d want to spend the evening with!

Archetypal energy is the binding energy of our world. Like bees who organize as a collective, building their hives and collecting their pollen, our own archetypal patterns ensure the continuation of our species along definite lines.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico call this act of generating a world, a magical act. Generating patterns that magnetically organize our lives into a human form is sheer magic! It’s magical to have intense relationships with people whom we may share no compatibility with, simply to ensure the continuance of our world. The soul mate archetype brings many children into the world who might never have been born. Nature wants children; it’s not concerned with compatibility of partners. Children need powerful adults to socialize them into the patterns of this world. Nature doesn’t care if there’s true compatibility between parent and child. It simply creates a power differential, through the archetype, that creates optimal conditions for socialization.

It all depends on how you choose to view the world... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
It all depends on how you choose to view the world…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico call this specific use of archetypal energy INTENT. Humans unconsciously use their ability to intend to mold archetypal energy into a cohesive world. And that is magic! It’s a magical act of illusion to “fall in love,” or to be bound to someone we have no real interest in. These are the spells of the magician that so frequently lead to strife, as true connection rarely matches up with the blinding forces of archetypal attraction.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico point out that it is humanly possible to journey and live in worlds beyond the archetypal trappings of this world. While acknowledging the magnetic draw of archetypal energy, it is also possible to not automatically or compulsively act upon it. If we step outside the field of our archetypal pulls and examine objectively whether the needs, expectations and obligations we experience in a relationship align with a genuine connection or need, we might discover that most of the relationship is being defined by the illusory magic of the magician.

Carlos Castaneda said, “individual relationships are based in emotional investments, and the moment the practitioner (a shamanic practitioner) really practices what she or he learns, the relationship crumbles. In the everyday world, emotional investments are not normally examined, and we live an entire lifetime waiting to be reciprocated.” *

Through examination we can then choose to stop participating in the obligations of the archetype and instead store the energy that would have been spent there for other use. We are then freed to discover whole new worlds—if we so choose—that are accessible within what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico call “the band of man.” These are other possible worlds for us to live in that are rarely explored. They include a world of relationship outside the draw of capitalistic emotional investment that is caught in the trappings of profit and loss.

Archetypal energy is the energy of emotional investment, i.e.: “What’s in it for me? What am I getting out of this? I deserve more. My needs aren’t being met.” Perhaps these are all valid reflections, but they still remain caught in the narrowly defined world of me and need. Of course unmet developmental needs of early childhood must be addressed within the parameters of our archetypal heritage but, once addressed, needn’t overshadow our greater evolutionary potential.

Just another perspective! - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Just another perspective!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

We might step beyond that world and discover a whole new world of compassion and genuine affection outside of the old archetypal bindings and investments. We might discover a world of deeper discovery and fulfillment, even within the world we are born into. We might intend a whole new world of truth and affection outside an old world of archetypal slavery. We might discover that we are soul mates with everyone! This is indeed our evolutionary challenge now; to transition into a cohesive world of truth and genuine affection for all, outside the old blind compulsory bindings of archetypally-routed relationship that has so far controlled our destinies.

Let’s intend a new world together,
Chuck

* From Navigating Into the Unknown: An interview with Carlos Castaneda found HERE.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Human Change

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Are you ready to enter the portal of change... To consciously take the necessary steps? - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Are you ready to enter the portal of change…
To consciously take the necessary steps?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

All life is subject to definite laws of change. The I Ching or Book of Changes, is a collection of significant archetypal scenarios that highlight those points of inevitable change. However, the I Ching also points out that though change is inevitable, we are free to make choices that set in motion their own flow of changes.

Freestanding water in an uncovered pot will eventually evaporate into the atmosphere. Such is the inevitable flow of change for this substance. I, in turn, could ignite a fire beneath that pot of water and thereby hasten an inevitable change by my intervention.

We are all beings who are going to die, this is inevitable. However, the choices we make in life may serve to shorten or lengthen the duration of our life, as well as determine the quality and fulfillment we will experience in human form.

Our animal contemporaries utilize the deep roots of accumulated archetypal wisdom to survive life on this planet. Animal decisions are rapid and automatic, involving little if any conscious deliberation. The human animal, with its latest development, the neocortex or rational brain, has, at least on the surface, parted ways with its internal instinctual animal knowledge. Google has become the warehouse of and vehicle to archetypal knowledge—one click away for conscious consideration and choice.

The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, warn that this neocortex is not to be trusted as a worthy arbiter of decision making, going so far as to suggest its functioning has been commandeered by a foreign installation. We’d be hard pressed to argue that the decision making of the modern brain isn’t under the influence of some aberration, as it has so quickly put us on the brink of destruction!

Perhaps we are at a stage of evolution where our new cog, the neocortex, needs to run its course before it finds its rightful, modest place next to the archetypal wisdom and instinct we inherit largely from our animal selves.

We must also appreciate that life itself spawned this new possibility of effecting change more creatively by growing a neocortex to begin with. Life wants consciousness to participate alongside archetypal wisdom and instinct. We are at the stage now of discovering how to do that responsibly, hopefully before we destroy ourselves.

On an individual level, we are all charged with taking control of our lives with consciousness. We are change agents who must learn about and respect the ancient wisdom we inherit in our bodies—wisdom that guides decision making through image and emotion. To be responsible, we must, with consciousness, discover why our animal selves might react with fear, anxiety, attraction, or aggression. We must face, as well, habits we have fallen into that mollify but don’t truly satisfy our deepest needs.

We are often confronted in dreams by the images of powerful or weakened animals that reflect and communicate the reactions of our instinctual selves to daily neocortex decision making. If we take seriously these reactions from our deepest human nature, and apply them to the decisions and habits of our waking lives, we are free to introduce changes that could realign us, placing us in good balance to hasten boiling the water of our own spirit/body selves and facilitate our own transformation.

Such are the possibilities of human change!
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Shamanic Tools Of Freedom

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Freedom is the unmasking of the petty tyrant and seeing it for what it really is… - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Freedom is the unmasking of the petty tyrant and seeing it for what it really is…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

As a seeker and a therapist, I search for tools of freedom. Freedom is the ability to flow with life as it is. Life is flux—change—and with change always comes a wounding to that which once was. Woundings create fixations, protective shells of holding on, to that which was. Such fixations interrupt our ability to flow with life as it has become.

The shaman’s world accepts the inevitability of woundings and tracks the human tendency to fixate on judgment of the self for its woundings. These judgments take the form of self-blame or self-rage. Either judgment further infects the wound and alienates the self from the flow of life energy. The shamans are empathic to woundings but ruthless in their goal of freedom. Hence, they go to extraordinary lengths to uncouple from attachment to their woundings.

To break the fixation with wounds to self-worth, self-importance, or self-esteem, the Shamans of Ancient Mexico encouraged their apprentices to saturate themselves with the doings of tyrants who made their lives miserable. In order to free themselves from the effects of these tyrants, these shaman initiates needed to astutely study the tactics and behaviors of these petty tyrants to precisely plan and execute their defeat. If they allowed themselves to indulge in blame, shame, rage, pity, or self-defeat, they would lose focus, often to fatal outcome. Those shaman initiates learned to waste no energy on taking anything personally, but focused instead on staying present in objective reality. This was the path of freedom from their woundings.

Traumatic encounters are uninvited encounters with life’s harshest petty tyrants. Shaman initiates seek out the encounter with the tyrant, but innocent recipients aren’t given that choice. Whereas the shaman initiate is in an active playing field with the tyrant, in real time, the trauma recipient’s playing field is the field of recapitulation, the reliving of the trauma once lived.

The means of achieving freedom from traumatic fixation, however, is identical to the means of achieving freedom from all woundings. To complete the process, we must arrive at what the shamans call the “place of no pity,” for self and other. From this position, there is total clarity and total release, as the ability to be present for the full truth of what happened, and the full release of energies previously fixated by life interrupted, is achieved. This is the ultimate defeat of the tyrant: complete release from its grip and complete release from the protective shell of fixation. From this place of no pity we retrieve the journeying self. We shift and reengage in life, as it is. Freedom achieved!

Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Seeing

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This is how I see Jeanne's energy... - Art by Jan Ketchel
This is how I see Jeanne’s energy…
– Art by Jan Ketchel

I lie awake. It’s 2 AM and I can’t sleep. It’s the energy of now, I think, the restlessness of this time of transformation. My mind races. Thoughts swirl. An hour goes by. I still can’t sleep. I should get up, I think, go sit by the wood stove and meditate or read, but it’s too cold. I snuggle down in bed, pulling the covers up higher.

I say my mantra: “Look into your darkness until you see the eye of God.” I repeat it, looking into the darkness behind my eyes. As usual I see all kinds of eyes. Faces loom, strange and wonderful, eerily looking right back at me. I know that they are all eyes of God. God is in everyone and everything, whatever God may be. To me, God is the energy of all of us and of everything, not a being but simply who we all are. But I cannot still my humming mind.

I should be able to handle this, I think, I’m a hypnotist after all! I do self-hypnosis. I go to a calm place, a safe place, a beautiful place. I go deeper into my body, relaxing each muscle, calming my thoughts one at a time, dismissing them as soon as they arise. Without attachment, I let them go, knowing they will reappear again in the morning. Another hour passes. I still cannot fall back to sleep.

Now I open my eyes. Instead of looking into my inner darkness I peer into the night. This has always been a fascination of mine, another kind of mediative practice that I’ve always done. As I stare into the darkness of the bedroom I see energy, swirling, twirling, flipping and soaring energy that immediately comforts me. Yes, this is good, I think. And I wonder if Jeanne will come to me, for this is often how she appears, in her energy body, as a fluttering globe of white light, a white moth surrounded by an ethereal glow in the dark of night.

Once, when I told Chuck that this was how I saw her, we lay on our bed in the darkness one night and looked for her together. I am a visual person. I see things, actually see. I believe everyone can see the same way, see the same things, but I also know that we are all constructed differently and some parts of us are more dominant and more exercised than others. I’ve always been like this. I have a kind of synesthesia where I see numbers in designs; the days of the week, the hours of the day, the months of the year each with their own specific layout. When I do math, I see the numbers in their places on the spiraling pattern that always appears when I think of numbers. I calculate by visualizing. If I think of the days of the week, Wednesday for instance, there it is, right where it always is in the weekly design layout. I see words in shapes and colors. I thought everyone saw the same way, but now I know differently, that we all perceive the world in our own unique way.

I know that Chuck does not see the way I do. Where I am visual, he’s intuitive. So it stands to reason that his way of perceiving things is different. He was always a good hypnosis subject when I was doing my training because I could never ask him to visualize something, to see it in his mind’s eye. He challenged me to go beyond my own perception, to accept and allow for other possibilities. Everything is abstract to him, he feels things, while to me everything has shape and form, so I knew that when I asked him to look into the darkness with me on that night, I was asking him to come into my world, a very different world from the one he normally inhabits.

How I see the world... -Art by Jan Ketchel
How I see the world…
-Art by Jan Ketchel

“Don’t look too hard,” I said, “gaze the way the Shamans say to gaze. Notice that the darkness is not just one color. Notice that it’s not solid, that it’s in constant flux. Do you see that reddish light over there to the left?” I wondered if he could indeed see what I was perceiving. After a while, he said yes, and he described exactly what I saw.

“See how it moves?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “that’s energy moving in the universe. That’s what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico talk about. We are all that.”

The other night, when I looked into the darkness, I called Jeanne to me, as I often do. “Are you there?” Out of the darkness she came.

“I can’t sleep,” I said. “Help me to sleep.” Her white fluttering globe came closer and closer until I blacked out.

In the morning, I was grateful that I had gotten a few more hours of sleep, but I clearly saw the power of the conscious mind, how it fights for precedence and how insidious our thoughts are, never willing to release us. The conscious mind feeds off us all day long and if we wake up at night it’s there waiting to suck our energy again. I went through a few more nights like that before, finally worn out perhaps, I slept deeply and solidly. I’d wake briefly but, without attachment, fall easily back to sleep after staring into the energy of the darkness. This activity, as well as being in my usual world, has also provided me with inspiration, the basis of many of my abstract paintings, the seeing of energy, day or night. Anyone can do it. Try it, whether sleepless of not, it’s quite an exhilarating experience. Allow the solid world to slowly dissolve into energy— vibratory strings, lines, dots—not unlike the pixilation of a digital image.

Perhaps the energy outside of us will calm down soon, perhaps we’ll all ride it to a new level. Perhaps, as Jeanne suggested in her message the other day, you’ll “Learn to flow with what comes and your fulfillment will loom large before you.” That’s what it’s like when I stare into the darkness, my fulfillment looms large before me. It comes to meet me, to speak to me in a different way, in image and abstraction, in the clarity of intuition that has no basis in visual seeing, but only exists in seeing the energy that we all are.

May you all be well and keep flowing!
Jan

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Mindfulness & Journeying in Healing

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We publish Chuck’s blog today. Look for Jan’s later in the week!

Like the inevitability of the season's change so too are there things we do not control... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Like the inevitability of the season’s change so too are there things we do not control…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The deepest truth of the human psyche is that we are only partially rational beings. There are forces within and around us that act upon and through us without our conscious awareness. Reckoning and reconciling with these forces lies at the heart of achieving balance, happiness and fulfillment in this life.

Modern sensibility seeks to reduce our struggle with these outside forces to chemical imbalance and structural flaw in our brains, largely correctable through psychopharmacological input. As valuable and supporting as these interventions might be, they cannot, by any means, address the intense emotionally charged feelings and thoughts that daily barrage our conscious foothold in this world.

Psychotherapy has been charged with treating the “mental illness” we see violently acted out in mass shootings that we witness almost daily. Thankfully, the tools of psychotherapy have been greatly enhanced over the past several decades by the influx of mindfulness practices introduced to the world as a result of the Tibetan diaspora. DBT, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, owes its structure and methodology directly to mindfulness practice.

Mindfulness practice empowers us to gain control over our central nervous system and to generate neuroplasticity—a remapping of neural pathways—in the brain. The contribution of mindfulness and meditation practices, to our ability to stay focused and develop detachment from the destructive impulses and moods we experience, cannot be overestimated. Through the exercise of these tools we become grounded, able to function, and able to explore the deeper reality of who we are and who we are not. Without grounding, we are woefully ill-equipped to handle that deeper journey into our unknown selves.

Much more recent than the Tibetan diaspora has been the Shamanic diaspora of the teachings of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico through the published works of Carlos Castaneda and his cohorts and the public release of Tensegrity. Pragmatic tools have been introduced from these Shamans to enable seekers to journey into the deeper layers of self and reality.

In a recent Amazon book review of J.E. Ketchel’s The Man in the Woods, Gary Siegel, LCSWR states, “We have seen in recent times the integration of many concepts and approaches from Buddhist traditions into the mainstream of clinical work and psychotherapy. It seems to me that if techniques and awareness of Buddhism are especially well suited for things like acceptance, letting go, being in the moment, compassion and forgiveness, then the techniques and awareness of Shamanism – with their concourse with altered states of awareness, and dissociation would be perfectly suited for work with those very states that are the hallmark of trauma victims.”

Sometimes the crow of recapitulation rests among the tangled web of memory... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Sometimes the crow of recapitulation rests among the tangled web of memory…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In facing trauma, specifically, a seeker is challenged to reconcile with a highly emotionally charged event, or series of events, that has been stored in an altered state within the psyche. Consciously, the seeker may have little or no awareness of the contents of that altered state and may only feel the conscious tremblings or intrusions of this material through associatively triggered encounters in the flow of everyday life. From a Shamanic perspective, for healing to take place, a journey must be taken to retrieve and reintegrate the lost parts of the self encapsulated in that altered state. In addition, the journey entails the release of extraneous energy—outside energy, perhaps in the form of ideas and beliefs—that has held one’s personal energy captive in that altered state.

The Shamanic tool of Intent empowers the conscious self to engage the supports, dreams and synchronicities that initiate and lead the journey. Although stating one’s intent initiates the journey, the path will unfold outside of the control of reason.

Recapitulation is the very conscious reliving of past events. From a Shamanic perspective, reliving a past event means entering another world, a world one was once in but has subsequently left. The Shamanic practice of recapitulation enables the seeker to consciously—in the world of now—reenter an old world and take from it whatever part of the self splintered off while caught in an experience in that prior world. That energy is then brought forward and reintroduced into the self of now, where it belongs, freed of its prior entanglements. From a Shamanic perspective, this is total healing.

Shamanic journeying requires groundedness. As don Juan Matus put it, we need “nerves of steel,” if we are to journey into the unknown. Hence, the contribution of Buddhism, with its mindfulness practices, offers the perfect complement to the contributions of Shamanism with its journeying practices in healing. In fact, groundedness is a prerequisite to successful journeying. We must be able to stay present with that which once splintered us if we are to truly retrieve the lost parts of ourselves.

Meditation hones the mind, like the light seeking the flower... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
Meditation hones the mind, like the light seeking the flower…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The Shamanic journey of intent, however, is unpredictable. Sometimes it pushes us into journeys we feel ill-prepared for. At other times, it gives us long stretches of respite to shore up our groundedness. In reality, Buddhist mindfulness and Shamanic journeying are perfect complements, the yin and yang of wholeness and healing.

On the mindfulness journey of intent,
Chuck