Tag Archives: soul retrieval

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Life Is Our Appointment With Knowledge

Leave a comment
Persist beyond the barriers…
-Artwork © 2025 Jan Ketchel

Thoughts of Carlos Castaneda recently came into my mind. Back in 1998, Deepak Chopra wrote of Carlos, on the jacket of his new book, The Active Side of Infinity: “Carlos Castaneda was one of the most profound and influential thinkers of this century. His insights paved the way for the future evolution of human consciousness. We are all deeply indebted to him.”

But with the publishing, in 2003, of Amy Wallace’s Sorcerer’s Apprentice: My Life With Carlos Castaneda, which revealed her experiences within his inner circle, the final nail was put into the coffin of Carlos ever again being considered a true man of knowledge, or worthy of any legitimate consideration. Instead he became categorized as a typical New Age guru who abused his disciples. I suspect that Carlos made sure that Amy Wallace wrote that book, which ensured he’d be all but forgotten. It shocked not only his followers but the world at large.

Comparable to Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, founder of Naropa University, who also fell from grace, Carlos has been, at best, deemed a teacher who employed the cognitive dissonance of crazy wisdom. At worst, he’s been categorized as the greatest fictional trickster of the century, whose shenanigans  fooled an entire generation of spiritual seekers. Once branded the Godfather of the New Age, today Carlos Castaneda is essentially a forgotten, discredited man.

Having spent a significant part of my life immersed in his world, I view his current status and exit from this world as a masterful shamanic move, a stroke of genius. I say that because shaman’s recognize self-importance as the number one scourge of humankind, the most negative human characteristic that significantly waylays our ability to spiritually advance. Could the self-importance of world leadership, and the pursuit of likes on social media, which dominate the world at present, not be more validating of this truth?

Carlos wrote 12 books, leaving behind the fullness of his shamanic knowledge, should one be called to it. Yet, should anyone be so called, it would be for the knowledge alone, with no attachment to Castaneda himself. That was his great shamanic maneuver, to ensure that the knowledge be separated from him personally. His reputation aside, he succeeded in delivering his messages, and with no self-importance following him, he sealed the door behind him as he exited human form. How many of us can do our good deeds in the dark, never sharing the knowledge of them with anyone?

When we shed self-importance from our identity, we disconnect from needing to be fortified by the attention of outside energy. Untethered, at death, from the thoughts and feelings of those left behind in human form, our Spirit is completely freed to move deeper into the exploration of infinity. Becoming untethered to the need for outside validation, while still in this world, frees us to follow, impeccably, the intent of our own Spirit, NOW!

Such was the lesson I was taught when my first wife, Jeanne, left this world and I sought our reconnection between worlds, as per our pre-agreement. Ultimately, she informed me to take my attention off her so that she could fully focus her attention upon learning the parameters of her new body and her new world.

Of course, the ultimate irony is that she has talked to my wife, Jan, every day for well over 20 years, in her soul sister messages. Her channelings, however, are not burdened with personal attachment to me. What is delivered is what she deems relevant now, for everyone, from her perspective in infinity. The opportunity for me has been to step up to the refinement of impersonal love.

Both Carlos and Jeanne teach the value of completely losing self-importance through non-attachment; no need for the validation of likes and attention from others. Freed of this imprisonment, we can focus all our energy on the greater good of self, and all others as well, uncompromised by the need for personal recognition. Validation of facts by others is a helpful and a necessary compass as we navigate our spiritual journey, but validation for the sake of self-recognition alone is a path of ego, not a path of heart.

When infinity recently sent me the suggestion to write about Castaneda’s teachings, I pondered which of his books to choose. Ten minutes later someone told me they found a giveaway copy of Carlos’s 1974 book, Tales of Power. Following this synchronistic prompting, I reread the first chapter to see what spoke to me now.

When still in this world, Carlos cautioned us to not attach to the shamanic practices employed upon him during his apprenticeship, which he documented in his three earliest books. Yours is a different time and your journeys are colored by the circumstances of your new age, he said. His suggestion was for us to be guided by the intent of ancient knowledge but to assume full responsibility for formatting its essence into addressing the needs of our time.

The essence of the first chapter of Tales of Power is that we are all double beings, both rational beings, with a solid physical body, as well as lighter energetic beings, with a soul body. Life presents us daily with appointments to obtain knowledge of this true wholeness so that we might more fully realize our fullest potential, while still in human form.

Carlos quotes the Nagual, don Juan Matus: “The only thing we all have in common is that we play tricks in order to force ourselves to abandon the quest. The countermeasure is to persist in spite of all the barriers and disappointments.” (Tales of Power, p. 20.)

Those tricks issue from the rational ego mind, terrified of ego death as it encounters the immensity of, and the powers of, its greater Soul. How quickly ego judges and dismisses its encounters with its soul in the mysterious and often puzzling synchronicities and triggers of daily life.

Synchronicities are creations of the soul of the subconscious mind, offering the ego encounters with the greater knowledge of infinity. In such encounters the subconscious mind is truly manifesting the ego’s intent to evolve, yet the ego often misses its appointments with such knowledge by its counter-intent, which is to survive unscathed the sometimes ruinous demands of greater truth.

The challenge for the ego is to suspend its judgments and refine its reason, to include the parameters of the greater truths of the soul. Reason is essential to navigating infinity, but it must get beyond the stumbling blocks of a solid world that clings tightly to its materialist prejudice.

Triggers are guides from infinity that summon the ego to retrieve its soul through honest recapitulation of its personal history. Typically, the ego gets drawn into self-pity, as it wallows in the offenses committed upon it by others. It holds tightly to the entitlement of retribution before it can forgive. This is a fixation of energy on self-importance, a sidetracking of attention from true knowledge.

Alternatively, the ego can accept all its experiences in life as reflections of all that is. The task is not about forgiveness; there is nothing to forgive. There is only the full retrieval of all of one’s energy, in the full acceptance of one’s life. With this equanimous acceptance of all the acts of one’s life, one is elevated to the highest level of love for all that is.

The barriers that don Juan references, in the above quote, are largely the habitual patterns we live by, as housed in our subconscious mind. Whether they issue from personal history, genetic history, the soul’s intent for this life, or from our ego’s defenses, new habits can manifest, through the persistence of intent and the positive suggestions we consciously and persistently impress upon the subconscious mind.

Persist, persist, persist in lightness and utter calm, and keep those daily appointments with knowledge.

With calm persistence,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Remembering Is Everything

Leave a comment
Time to take a stroll down memory lane?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

In a separate reality, I was in a new school, small and simple. It was the first day of school. Another student and I were called to stand in the front of the class. We were being recognized for the papers we had written from a summer assignment. I was amazed, as the topic was science or engineering, something I hardly felt knowledgeable in.

I remembered to remember that my task was to remember. Remember people’s names, remember the layout of the school, how to get to the lunchroom, where to sit, the protocols around being served and eating. I was painfully shy, not wanting to stand out by making mistakes. The imperative was clear—remember everything so that you can smoothly fit in and navigate the school.

The evening before this dream journey I was back at The Training for Living Institute, remembering being hired as a promising prospect, though still a teenager. The layout began to materialize, the large pop art rendition of the TFL logo painted on the wall, encircled in bright colors. The spacious outer reception area with modern, comfortable chairs.

Amazingly, the names of my colleagues began to materialize as my focus opened the Akashic record of this earlier lifescape. My school dream was validating the importance of remembering, the key to retrieving all of what we are. What really is the challenge of remembering? And why do we ‘forget’ to begin with?

Children often remember their families from a prior life. Parents must quickly talk them out of it, lest they be identified for medication assessment. The truth is, however, that children do go on to forget because the main attraction is the life they are currently in, not past lives lived.

Remembering a past life is as valuable as an astrological chart. It explains  the influence of indelible prior experiences and predicts future possibilities, but ultimately the action is in the free will choices of the current life.

We do not continue a prior life; we take up the issue of a prior life in a totally new context. We will meet incomplete challenges, which we might complete in this life. Future life will pick it up from there. Perhaps a life is an opportunity to pay forward the evolution of a greater life. And so, we forget past lives so that they don’t interfere with our current opportunities.

Of course, from the perspective of our greater wholeness in infinity, indeed, we must ultimately claim all of our lives. We must be able to handle the emotion of that integration as we bring together all of our varied adventures in infinity. This level of Enlightenment is generally the challenge upon leaving this life.

When the challenge is at this level of consolidation of our wholeness, we must be capable of radical acceptance of everything. This can only be accomplished with the most refined level of love for everyone and everything—with total equanimity. Until we are ready to love at this level, many memories must be anesthetized.

In trauma, the contents of an experience are separated from consciousness to protect the stability of the personality. These ‘forgotten’ experiences nonetheless include a portion of our vital energy. Thus, loss of memory, in this case, is loss of self.

Reliving a forgotten memory through recapitulation is a soul retrieval process that restores one’s lost vital energy. Key to this restoration is the ability to experience, release, and neutralize the emotions bound to the memory. The complete acceptance of self and other, as well as the circumstances of the memory, requires achieving the refined love of equanimity. If we can’t love every experience we have ever had, we are rejecting a part of our truth.

Morality has no value in acceptance. All that happened is valid because it happened. If we remain judgmental, we are not fully accepting of a part of ourselves and a part of our history. Our future lives will continue to reflect future attempts to reach total acceptance, as we relive new permutations of our unaccepted themes.

Thus, in the context of a current life, remembering the fullness of this life is essential to fully achieving the goal of the life one is in—to resolve the major theme and core issue of this life.

From the context of our greater Soul, in infinity, wholeness requires the remembering of all the lives, all the characters, all the partners and parents, all the loves, all the losses, all the supposed sins—all with total radical acceptance and total loving equanimity.

At the greater Soul level of acceptance, we must be ready for the big bang encounter with our fuller operating system, our multi-lived selves, at the time of transition into infinity. This might require extended time in purgatory bardos, as we slowly complete our cosmic recapitulation, resolving all of our lives and all of our issues. Remembering is the ticket to consolidation of our greater wholeness.

The order of challenge is to first remember and accept everything from the life we are in. With the wholeness of our current life achieved, it’s far easier, in infinity, to remember and accept every life lived. With this consolidation of cosmic Self, perhaps we approach the ultimate memory of oneness, with Source, the single being of everything and from which we all come.

Remembering to remember,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: It’s All In Body

Leave a comment
We must go down into the murky depths of our own reservoir if we are to experience wholeness... - Photo by Jan Ketchel
We must go down into the murky depths of our own reservoir if we are to experience wholeness…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The clinical wisdom of our time highlights the role of the body in psychological healing. To resolve our deepest issues, we must go down into the depths of the body to discover our hidden truths and restore a fluid connection to the wellsprings of our life energy.

For many years, I have spoken about out-of-body experiences and energetic life beyond the physical. Soul retrieval journeys, such as the kind taken in recapitulation, are in fact intimately connected to our in-body reservoir.

When we reenter the scene of an earlier experience in life, we utilize the sensations in our bodies to lead us to the actual event. The body stores all experiences and once we arrive at their gate, in recapitulation for example, we are thrust full-body into what happened to us in the prior experience. In traumatic recapitulation, we may have a full in-body sensation and complete reliving of a long-forgotten experience.

Many visits to hospital emergency rooms actually result from unknown, unsupported, tripping into stored bodily memories of trauma, inadvertently triggered by some associatively related current life experience. Often, after exhaustive testing, physicians are clueless in diagnosing the disturbance, often assuming panic attack. For the patient, the physical experience has been so real and in-body that this explanation seems highly dubious. Nonetheless, what ensues is perhaps a trail of treatments to control panic, which misses the true nature of the symptom: the triggering of a dissociated life experience stored in the body seeking re-association through reliving and resolving the turbulence it holds.

Modern clinical wisdom and ancient shamanic wisdom point the way to the innate, archetypal bridge of bilateral body movement to enable the grounding needed to experience and integrate dissociated parts of the soul that lie in wait in the body reservoir.

In dreaming, we naturally experience bilateral rapid eye movement, commonly called REM, that clears and processes the remnants of the day just lived. In nightmares, we experience failed attempts to naturally resolve traumatic moments. When no resolution occurs, these traumas end up stored in energetically volatile and incomplete states in the body—often a cause of physically distressing symptoms. Chronic pain and debilitating symptoms, even anger and fear of intimacy or conflict, may in fact be trauma related.

Francine Shapiro advanced the instinctive bilateral physical movement that we all use when we dream, incorporating it as a direct method to facilitate the integration of traumatic experience, in a waking state, through the protocol of EMDR. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico discovered the bilateral recapitulation breathing Magical Pass millennia ago, as a means to enable reintegration of lost parts of the self. These inherent and consciously facilitated practices provide the bridge to safely encountering and putting to rest the stored energies of unresolved traumas.

The body stores that which is incomplete, awaiting resolution when the time is right. The body equally holds the key to safely resolving that which it holds, through bilateral movement, whether exercised consciously with recapitulation or in EMDR, or unconsciously in dreaming. Only through fully accessing and resolving all that the body holds will we acquire the energetic wholeness to launch, with completion, out-of-body when it’s time to pass on into new life.

In body,
Chuck