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Chuck’s Place: The Odd Couple

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Suggestions in alignment with spirit…
-Artwork © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Suggestions can be likened to sperm, whose intent is to impregnate the egg of the subconscious mind, the mother of manifestation.

Suggestions abound from many sources, such as habits, instincts, and the thoughts and beliefs of others. However, the optimal source of suggestion for the growth of the personality is the conscious ego presenting suggestions to the subconscious in alignment with its soul’s mission in this life.

The oddity of this necessary relationship is that the ego has a long developmental process to arrive at the necessary maturity to optimally lead the personality. This challenge is blatantly illustrated in the power struggles currently riddling the Earth. Rather than address the true needs of the planet, the world ego is stuck in greed, or essentially a narcissistic worldview, which obscures the execution of suggestions of right action to resolve crises.

This same limitation applies to the individual personality, whose narcissistic needs and desires can monopolize habits that impact the health of the physical body, as well as the quality of connection possible in relationships with others.

Many of the suggestions from ego to subconscious result in poor health and failed relationships. It often requires the learning curve of a lifetime for the ego to arrive at the optimal spiritual alignment to truly lead the personality.

At the receptive end is the subconscious mind, whose powers are truly supernatural, yet it lacks the reasoning power of consciousness to select the best suggestions to fulfill. Of course, it has the suggestive influence of the whole of human evolutionary history that expresses itself powerfully in the emotions of instincts, yet even these reactions may not fit with the true needs of life in the modern word.

For example, the instinct of self-preservation might insist upon a prolonged war as the necessary reaction to an attack. As appropriate a reaction to this survival threat as this reaction might be, the more conscious human potential to arrive at resolution through negotiation might prove more effective at finding lasting resolution.

In this case, the ego, with its higher capacities for reason and right action might be the better center for decision making, offering better suggestions to the subconscious mind than the deeply engrained instinctive suggestions that were more necessary at a purely instinctive age of human history.

In contrast to the ego, the subconscious mind does not need to undergo a developmental process. It is fully formed in childhood where its power is quite evident in play. A slight suggestion of a peer as monster, in a game of tag for instance, can preoccupy a group of kids for hours, as they are filled with intense emotional reactions to the easily imagined chasing monster.

The subjective mind in childhood and adulthood can equally take charge of one’s perceptions, thoughts, beliefs, and physical actions when a suggestion successfully impregnates it. The subconscious acts as a creative manifester, fully believing and becoming the suggestion it takes in. It remains for the ego alone to reality-test the validity of this activated, or we could even say, possessed, state.

It becomes evident how this odd couple needs each other’s capacities to fully succeed in life. Ego must carefully guard against underhanded suggestions, which abound, from taking root in the subconscious. Energy practices, including stated intentions, can create boundaries against unwanted influences.

The subconscious, in response to ego suggestion, can provide information to the ego similar to the capability of artificial intelligence (AI), which can advance the ego’s problem-solving or knowledge of lived events with its perfect memory. Like AI, however, the subconscious must be monitored and led to exert its influence for the greater good of all. For this, as in all things, one needs a mature adult ego that submits to right action as its guiding principle.

A healthy, intimate relationship between each mind of this odd couple suggests the ultimate evolutionary track for mind during its sojourn in human form. In human terms, it represents the optimal relationship to find fulfillment and individuation in this magical life.

Suggesting wellness,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Finding Stability in the Destruction of Now

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Bringing chaos into order…
-Artwork © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Ancient Hindu mystics predicted, with precision, the dire circumstances of the epoch in which we now live; they named it Kali Yuga. As the final stage of a repetitive cycle of four cosmic seasons, Kali Yuga is the moral rockbottom for humanity. It is currently expressed in the atrocities we are now living through, replete with loss of life, and lack of compassion and virtue.

The impersonal energetic imperative of this cosmic era is nature’s insistence that our collective shadow, with its destructive energy from all that has been repressed, erupt upon the terrestrial surface of the Earth, deeply wounding and splitting apart life as we have known it.

The intent of this energetic lightning bolt is to break apart our consensus reality—an agreed upon union of opposites of now tenuous solidity—to ultimately facilitate the creation of a more perfect union of opposites with which to nurture and support new life.

At present, our wholeness is being shattered into its constituent parts, which are opposites. The polarization we see and experience everywhere is the emotional state of these opposites. They are vying for dominance, warring to generate a new world order that is controlled by their polarized points of view.

The repressed emotional hot lava, that has metaphorically reached the terrestrial surface from the earth’s core, are beliefs and actions from prior eras of human history. The dynamic of a final solution to the challenge of opposites that gave rise to the Holocaust has reemerged today, with its emphasis on complete elimination of one’s opposite as the only solution to achieve stability.

This dynamic is active in the Middle East and Ukraine, and is certainly at the heart of the great American divide. The heightened tension between polarized extremes has given rise to a self-protectiveness and a self-righteousness that justifies violence and eschews the possibility of peaceful coexistence. At present, eliminating and punishing the opposition is the dominating strategy to resolve the clash of opposites throughout the world.

Social media is a war zone of opposites seeking to vex and destroy each other. Politicians pander to polarized issues and groups, seeking victory and rule through dominance versus a reconciliation that includes a rightful home for all the opposites.

Humans did not create Kali Yuga, but they do have their personal stamp upon the issues it has brought to the surface. How we reckon with what we must reckon with is of human decision making and responsibility. Finding stability rests in the hands of free will. Though one might feel instinctual rage from lethal attack, consciousness allows for  the possibility of higher levels of human response and reconciliation.

Stability begins with the knowing that this time of Kali Yuga issues from nature itself. The goddess Kali brings about a time of change that must go through destruction and death en route to renewal and new life. Even the Death card, in the Tarot deck, represents this inevitable stage in the cycle of life; a necessity for transformative change.

The death and resurrection motif in Christianity is central to spiritual evolution. Though concretely symbolized in the form of a crucifix, death symbolizes the letting go of a prior consensus reality in order to allow for life in a new and more stable union of opposites. The process of getting there is indeed a painful process.

No one can escape Kali’s energy. Within all of us is a personal consensus reality that has ruled our greater personality. The destructive energy of Kali is rattling our own ruling belief systems, as the ego is inundated with the energy of the complexes it has suppressed.

Complexes range from primal desires and needs to repressed personal traumas; from unsolved ancestral dramas to one’s soul’s mission for coming into this life.

Often our personal consensus belief system is ruled by an illusion or delusion that favors one pole at the expense of its opposite. Perhaps we are so dominated by rationality that we reject the irrational and emotional. In the time of Kali Yuga, we will not escape fits of passion or depression.

Ruthless honesty, within the self, offers the equanimity necessary to know the truth of one’s fuller self. Self-acceptance, and reconciliation with all that one is, is the prerequisite to individuation, a reconciliation with one’s whole self that gives rise to a more fully inclusive consensus reality to live by. This is how one achieves stability in this time of destruction.

The most powerful spiritual tool now available to all of us is being blatantly showcased in this time of Kali Yuga: The power of suggestion. Politicians boastfully chuckle at their power to exercise the power of suggestion to impact masses of people to bend toward their stated suggestions.

The power of the subconscious mind to heal is unparalleled. The power of the subconscious mind to destroy is equally unparalleled. All rests in the integrity of the one who suggests. Autosuggestion in alignment with the true needs of healing is the key to a more perfect union.

Suggestion is what the shamans call intent. Intent is the creator. Shamans maintain that humanity is asleep at the wheel of their power, unavailable to take command of their intent. When asleep at the wheel, we allow old programs, or the suggestions of others, to rule our personal creative force. That creative force molds our consensus reality.

When we wake up to this power, as the shocks of Kali rock our world, we are offered the opportunity to take back our own power, to mould and create our world, through conscious autosuggestion.

Stability rests in our faith in, and exercise of, our birthright to self-determination in the intent we hold for our lives. Turn your own intent in the direction of a more perfect union, within and without.

State, with authority and conviction, what your rational mind might even doubt is possible. Expand your rationality to include the possibility of a healing solution. Employ your rational mind often to express this intent to the subconscious mind.

Once the subconscious adopts the suggestion, it will become its truth. Fueled by its faith, the subconscious will employ its creator ability to manifest the stated intent.

Intending stability,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Golden Opportunity Of Now

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The Golden Opportunity to use intent for the greater good is now…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Life in a physical body upon the Earth, at this phase of eternity, is largely governed by autosuggestions emanating from our instinctive nature. Though consciousness is awakening to its power to intend and create its physical reality, it remains largely controlled by hidden, limiting autosuggestions. 

Autosuggestions can originate from both conscious and subconscious intent. The ego, employing its thinking mind, can decide upon an innovative change that it then perseveringly suggests to its workhorse subconscious mind to manufacture in material reality. This is an example of a conscious intent derived from inductive, or creative, thinking and presented to the subconscious mind for materialization.

The subconscious mind does not employ the inductive reasoning of ego consciousness. With inductive reasoning the ego can think and create outside the box. Though I have stated repeatedly that the subconscious does not think, this is in fact not completely accurate. The subconscious thinks deductively.

Essentially, the subconscious treats the suggestion it embraces as absolute fact and engages all of its energy to manufacture and prove this commanding suggestion via associations generated from its access to the vast storehouse of human evolutionary history. Thus, the subconscious makes a suggested truth become a physical truth.

Although the conscious mind, particularly through perseverance, can attract the subconscious mind to embrace and manufacture its suggestions, the subconscious mind is mostly drawn to suggestions presented to it by our genetic code, our evolutionary history and, most prominently, our instincts, which have insured the survival of the human race.

If the conscious mind imagines it will be attacked in some way, fear might overtake one’s mental, emotional, and physical state. Confronted with actual danger, the subconscious mind will likely embrace and act upon instructions suggested to it by one’s self-preservation instinct, which can result in the calm clarity and superhuman strength needed to defend one’s self. In this case, the subconscious abandons the suggestion of consciousness, to remain fearful, in favor of the empowered instinctual suggestion to survive.

This overtaking of the ego by autosuggestion from the instinct for self-preservation is favorable in this instance, as it can save a life. However, a family history of a particular disease, rooted in one’s genetic code, might pose the suggestion to the subconscious to automatically activate this latent possibility of disease. This situation may be further complicated by a reigning blocking belief in science, which states that consciousness alone cannot alter physical reality.  Consequently, the ego is sheepishly lulled to concur with the disease suggestion of its genetic code, thereby forfeiting its potential ability to create another reality.

To be sure, not all physical conditions can be altered by conscious suggestion. Some programs, such as the inevitable death of the human body, derive from programs that may be delayed but ultimately cannot be overcome.

But clearly, evolution advanced us from the total domination of our animal instinctual mind, to allow for free will and change, because of the creative power of consciousness to alter physical reality and thereby enhance its potential for survival. This is evolutionary innovation via intent versus via natural selection. The golden opportunity of now is to fully embrace and exercise this creative power of mind for the greater good of all.

Advanced disembodied souls, whom have turned their attention to informing and guiding those of us still physically embodied, have shared consistently that life beyond the human body is primarily controlled by the soul’s mental capacity to imagine. Imagination is the currency of nonphysical reality, where one is freed to live in a reality of one’s own mental construction.

This creative activity allows a soul to generate familiar environments, populated with kindred souls, enabling the completion of incomplete residual dreams from one’s prior sojourn in physical life. Completion, at this phase of eternity, enables one to progress ultimately into the more expanded dream of one’s soul group.

This refinement of creative imaginative power, beyond physical life, though largely dormant while living in a physical body, is nonetheless a latent power capable of being activated while in physical life. The shamans of ancient Mexico instruct us to suspend the prejudice of materialism and unrelentingly intend the change we seek. With intent we can awaken the spirit from its slumber in materialist malaise.

To support this awakening, the shamans also recommend that we throw out a line and hook to our future  disembodied soul state, and to the prolific potential of this creative facility, stalking it now. By stalking, the shamans mean embodying the full knowing and exercise of intent as the prime creative power in life. To consciously master it in this life is the ultimate intent.

Trust the power of the Spirit. Trust the power of consciousness to change the self and to change the world.

As we live through the destruction of this Fall season of Earth’s life and face the inevitable changes ahead, let us, without fear or doubt, imagine and create, with intent, a new world that reflects the greater good for all.

Without attachment to the outcome, know it will be done. This is the golden opportunity of now.

Imagine,
Chuck 

Soulbytes

Soulbyte for Tuesday October 10, 2023

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-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Don’t let negative thoughts get in the way of progress. Just as when you put a positive intent out to the universe and ask for help so does a negative thought go out as well. Replace negativity with an attitude that is grateful for every day and every experience, that is thankful for the opportunity to change. A negative thought offers just that, an opportunity to change, to turn in a new direction and do something different. Don’t offer the universe your negativity, for surely it will take it and run with it, and that won’t help you or anyone else. Give it something better and more enriching to work with!

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Always Find The Positive In The Negative

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Finding the positive in the negative…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Most of what we are is either inherited or molded by our formative social experience, essentially, what we brought in with us into this life and how we were greeted when we arrived. The force of these influences can make a strong argument that the course of a human life is predetermined or mechanistically determined.

Nonetheless, as noted existential thinkers and authors Victor Frankl and Edith Eger have demonstrated: Regardless of circumstances beyond our control, we always retain the free will to choose the attitude we will take toward our reality. And attitudes, it turns out, are powerful suggestions that we, as creators, present to our subconscious minds that can completely shift the reality that we live in.

Some of those inherent programs, however, are so powerful that they simply cannot be overridden, like the one the shamans of Ancient Mexico emphasize: We are beings who are going to die. Ironically, this is the one inherent program that human beings refuse to acknowledge and, in fact, spend most of their lives living as though it will never come true!

Of course, the argument immediately arises that to focus on the inevitability of death is morbidly negative and casts too depressive a shadow over opening up to the fullness of life. So what could possibly be the positive side of death?

Death advises us that our time in human form is limited. This impact of limitation allows for a legitimate scientific experiment in the living of a human life. Science insists upon a beginning and an ending to assess the truth and full knowing of something. The awareness of inevitable death keeps us positively on track to discover and test the core hypothesis of our lives. But what is our core hypothesis?

Carl Jung would identify that hypothesis as one of individuation, which entails successfully bringing into realized wholeness the unique combination of opposing parts that we are. Frederick Myers, from his advanced perspective in infinity, would identify that hypothesis as an incarnating soul’s mission, assigned by its Spirit, to answer a question through the trajectory of a human life, which ultimately allows one’s soul group to further refine and thus to advance on its ever-unfolding journey in infinity.

Wholeness must include light and shadow. Individuation is the ability to accept, with equanimity, all parts of self and all parts of the world. Buddha, during his enlightenment, remained utterly calm, as he saw the illusory and transitory nature of all forms. Carlos Castaneda suggested that, as one discovers the specific role one has been assigned in this life, one suspend judgment and live and appreciate it to the fullest, whether it emphasizes the light or the dark side.

The power players on the current world stage are truly playing their parts to perfection, both those who reflect the light and those who blatantly reflect evil. The collective individuation challenge  of our time is well represented, with worthy opponents whose interplay is critical to advancement of the soul group of planet Earth’s dream.

Closer to home, we all struggle with these opposing forces within ourselves. We all contend with genetic consequences, which both limit and promote our physical structure, health, and attractiveness. If we can see these effects, no matter how undesirable, as critical factors to our individual and soul group’s need to master, we can embrace the positive side of the negative.

At the level of the psyche, we all deal with forces that can be extremely critical, deprecating and incessantly negative, generating depressed mood states and compulsive behaviors. If we can understand the necessity of these negative forces in our journey of mastery, we can see the positive value of these petty tyrants to help us emerge from the captivity of self pity.

Self pity shapes our vital flowing energy into a rigid negative form that completely clouds the positive potential latent in the present challenge. It’s a dream where many of the stone steps of a narrow circular stairway are missing, as we feel hopelessly barred from ascent to higher ground. Our energy is fully spent on body armor, condemning our innocence and unlived self to the isolation of solitary confinement.

The shamans of ancient Mexico always included powerful petty tyrants in their lives to help them stare down the imprisoning bars of self pity. Being challenged by ruthless petty tyrants frees our energy from the confinement of defending our hurt selves, allowing it to be deployed in focused action in full conformity to what is needed to master the tyrant’s labyrinth.

To achieve this mastery we cannot afford to spend an ounce of energy on being offended. Here, the petty tyrants of this world offer us the greatest opportunity to break through the narcissistic shell of self pity and entitlement.

The success of individuation in the limits of a human life is the achievement of acceptance; complete acceptance for every experience and character one has ever encountered, as well as complete acceptance of one’s self.

The fruit of this acceptance is an even more refined purity of love. And that refined love is what fulfills our lives and advances our soul group another rung on the infinite ladder of love.

Always find the positive in the negative; it’s the truly soulful thing to do,
Chuck