A message from Jeanne, normally posted on Monday, will be posted on Tuesday this week, so look for it then!
A Day in a Life: What Is The Meaning Of Life?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
When asked, “What is the meaning of life?” Joseph Campbell responded thus: “There is no meaning. We bring the meaning to it.”
Our very lives provide us with everything we need to discover who we are and why we are here, offering us everything we need to find meaning. We are all heroes on meaningful journeys.
Chuck and I have revealed intimate details of our lives over the past several weeks in our blogs, having had to face moments of deep anguish and wrenching sadness. Yet interwoven within those moments of turmoil were many moments of awe, moments of breakthrough and insight, moments of transparency leading to transcendence, for all involved. Meaning is being discovered and lived each day as the members of our family take their journeys, as they face their deepest issues and broken selves, as we all face where the devastating and the magical have landed us.
All of us live magical lives. If we accept ourselves as magical beings, as magical pursuers of meaning, we find that the very lives we live are more than fulfilling. There is great power and energy in turning what on the one hand may appear as devastating and hopeless—those knocks on the head, those wake up calls—into meaningful encounters with what we need to progress and grow. “To refuse the call means stagnation,” says Joseph Campbell.
We are all offered supremely necessary encounters with our inner darkness as we live our lives and face the reality of where we are. Our real duty in life is to take what is offered as a new opportunity to face our fears and challenges with a shift in awareness. That shift in awareness must be that we are being asked to evolve, that we are being asked to wake up and take the hero’s journey. Suddenly, our journeys take on new meaning. Suddenly we are no longer victims but warriors of our own destiny. “Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging,” says Joseph Campbell.
And so, as the energy of change that has rolled through our family reverberates throughout the world—for none of us are alone in our moments of darkness or our moments of awe—as we look for the higher meaning in all of our lives, we share the energy of change with all of you. For we are aware that there is a greater interconnected web of energy that courses through us all.
As we acquiesce to that greater interconnectedness, we discover that we are all the same, that we are all nothing and that we are all everything; we are darkness and transcendence alike. We discover that we all must suffer personally for the greater good, for if we are to change the world we must suffer the changing self.
We are all capable of experiencing the transcendent. As we reach up out of our stuckness and seek meaning for all that befalls us, we offer ourselves the answers that we seek. Why did this have to happen to me? Well, it happened so you could grow. This is what we personally have had stressed to us over the past several weeks. We are all in the process of growing every day of our lives. Let that be the guidance that moves you along on your own journey.
In the deepest of challenges, and in the most radiant experiences of awe, we discover the meaning of who we are and why we are here. Joseph Campbell, whose words of wisdom have helped us weather through the flood of recent events, says: “Breaking out is following your bliss pattern, quitting the old place, starting your hero journey, following your bliss.”
Keep breaking out and bliss will meet you.
-Jan
Joseph Campbell quotes are from: Reflections on the Art of Living, A Joseph Campbell Companion, Selected and Edited by Diane K. Osbon
Readers of Infinity: I Cannot Do More Than Guide You To Compassionate Loving Detachment
Today we offer a powerful message of guidance from Jeanne in response to a question that Chuck asks. No matter what journey we are on, whether we are parents or solo journeyers, whether we are young or old, stuck or flowing, what she says is profoundly important. First Chuck’s question is posed, related to the blog he wrote the other day regarding some personal events, which you can read here, but really it’s a question for all of us who struggle, and then comes Jeanne’s response. Asked and offered most humbly, from all of us, Chuck, Jan, and Jeanne.
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Dearest Jeanne,
As you are well aware, the sons we bore, in your life as Jeanne Marie Ketchel, are deeply challenged by their choices in this life. Most recently this resulted in near death for one of them and criminal confinement for the other. Given the public nature of their recent actions, I offered a commentary on their journeys in my blog, believing that their processes may be relevant to the greater journey of our time.
You live now beyond the sheaths of the human form, yet continue to watch over and guide seekers in this life. What message might you offer—from your perspective beyond the loyalty and emotion of human attachment—for all who struggle to discern their responsibility for the lives of others, particularly those closest to them?
Jeanne responds: In all humbleness, and with great appreciation for the journeys that must be taken, I reply. Here follows my answer to your question:
There is great pressure now upon that earth for all to conform to a new idea of growth. This growth is not concerned with need or desire but only with an awakening to the greater meaning of life, as well as to the state of the world, a state largely brought about by the naiveté of the human population. Something has gone awry, and that something is a deep disconnect, a severing of ties with the spiritual self. Far more important has become the rational and the physical self, the desire body and the impassionate self-serving needs of the human body.
I do not blame or fault, but, in my assessment, this is a dire situation. In reality, however, it is in such times of dire circumstance that change happens. As specifically regards the sons we bore, their time has not yet come to advance, though they struggle at the very door of change. In my detachment I am offered the greater picture, the iconic image of the struggles of the human being to accept its place in the physical world, while simultaneously struggling to embrace its spiritual nature, its truth that it does not really belong there. In other words, the spirit self knows that life upon that earth is not the only thing, yet the human self adheres to it like glue, as if nothing else matters.
In truth, all must face the struggles of these two selves, and so as you, My Dearest Chuck, face the struggles of our two sons, so must you allow them to have their experiences, just as you have had your own. You know from your own life that your struggles have advanced you. This is what all must take into consideration as they face the judgments that arise regarding the decisions of others, for surely judgments arise.
Is it right to judge another, to decide that they are doing life wrong? According to whom are they doing life wrong? No one lives wrongly. No one is really making mistakes. No one should be judged for decisions they make and the situations they find themselves in. Yet, to step back and be compassionately nonjudgmental is one of the most terrifying and necessary moments in life. Especially, when looking into the faces of one’s children, one must look with openness, with open heart and open mind, and say: “Look at you, taking your journey, as I once took mine! Look at you!”
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Outside of the physical pain lies another pain, the pain of emotional detachment, the most necessary detachment, the most necessary suffering of mature beings. For yes, even as those of you who have children must stand by and watch and suffer, so must you challenge yourselves to do as you request of others. You must evolve to a new level of freedom for the self and others by releasing judgments and emotional attachments, for the idea that you can control, or really even guide another, is quite absurd. I say that with all love and compassion, for I understand the role of parents and others who must stand by while seeing so clearly the futility of such struggles. But the truth is that no one can teach another, for lessons in life come only through experience.
Remember always that everyone learns in their own personal manner and an awakening, a knock over the head for one person, may be nothing more than an annoyance for another.
Value your own process now even as you look upon the processes of others. Know, all of you, My Dear Readers, that in the struggles of others reside your own struggles. Know that the compassion and concern and worry that you direct outwardly should be turned inwardly. Know that even as you intuit devastation and decline for others, so must you take that knowing inwardly. You must face what lies in your own future if you do not face your own struggles, both as they manifest outwardly and as they manifest inwardly in the physical and psychological pain that you suffer as a result of your life, mirrored by the lives of those closest to you.
No one can live another’s life. No one can learn the lessons that another must learn. No one can make the decisions that another must make. To aid too much is to inhibit growth, and so I advise compassionate detachment in the face of outer turmoil. Will you heed my advice? I know, as I have said, that no one can really help another, yet I remain committed to my assignment as guide and helper, just as you each do upon that earth, as adults, parents, and teachers. And so, from my perspective as a being no longer in human form, I advise that you seek this perspective of compassionate detachment as well. For all of you, though you exist in human form, are fully capable of accessing a higher state of being.
Within the body self lies all you need. Your core self awaits your recognition. No one is a superior being, yet in the reality of a spiritual self, all are superior beings. At the same time, no one is a lesser being, no one is a damaged being, no one deserves pity or fear, no one deserves more or less compassion than another.
Allow, My Dearest Chuck, and All of My Readers, life to unfold as it must, for the key to all of this struggling that you carry within your heart is the greater awareness that struggle is necessary for change to happen. If the seed did not have to struggle through the darkness of the earth to break open there would be no flower reaching for the sunlight.
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Let the seeds lie upon the ground where they have fallen. Let them become the men and women they struggle to become on their own. Let their decisions take them to their next challenge. Let their circumstances crack their outer shells, so that roots and sprouts may occur, for it is only in the cracking that this will occur.
Life, even in the form of solid rock, evolves as it wears down and changes shape, as it rolls and rattles about in water and wind, being sculpted by the turmoil of nature’s energy. Realize that the human being is only but another object in the turmoil of life’s energies. Tossed and jostled about, in meeting life head on, all that is offered will turn each one of you into new beings.
Even as a stone may one day stand as the cornerstone to a new structure, so must you carry in your hearts the knowledge that each human being will one day evolve into their own cornerstone. But this, for the most part, will only happen through discovering that the cornerstone one seeks is within, not without.
I ask, as you struggle with those closest to you, as you struggle to understand them and their choices, to drop all notion of helping. Take the small stones you carry in your pockets, the memories and knowledge of them as tender children full of potential, and lay them at the alter of life. They are showing you that they are, in fact, ready to more fully engage life now, for in their very struggles does life exist, pushing them now like you never could. They will certainly pay attention to life, though they may still resist you and your advice! Let life become their mother and father now. Let life, full force, carry them where they need to go.
I cannot do more than guide you to detachment. The struggles to achieve a place of compassionate loving detachment are your own. But I do wish to impart that life is not just what you observe and experience in your human form, but a most vital energy shared by all beings. Remember that even as you feel your own powerful life force, so does everyone else.
Awakenings come in many forms and to each person their awakening is appropriate. Even the awakening of death is not to be despaired or attached to beyond loving appreciation for life lived, because the one who has died has evolved to a new level, awakened to new life.
Hold your loved ones tenderly, and tenderly let them go when the time for their own maturity arrives. They let you know in their turning away from you, in their decision making, that they are ready to take on life on their own terms. You cannot outline or plan the life of another, so please step back from attempting to do so. Stand back in awe instead and watch them go into life, fully loaded with all that you once gave them, energized by your continued support in the form of powerfully positive intent that they go live their lives to the fullest.
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Detach from worry about others and you release them. Detach from fear for others and you release them of your fears, as well as release them to discover, face, and conquer their own fears. Detach from controlling others and let them discover the seeds of their own intent.
Life wants to live. Let life have its intent realized to the fullest by standing aside. Let the seed sprout, let the stone roll, let the winds blow, let the waters flow. Do not stand in the way of life, and notice—as you step back and out of the lives of others, as you let them seek maturity and responsibility for themselves—how your own life begins to evolve at a quicker pace. In releasing comes release of new energy.
You are not responsible for the lives of others. Once your parenting is done, once the early years are over, the child must grow up. That can only happen by that child becoming fully responsible for its own life. One day you, and it, will realize it is an adult and fully responsible for itself. Then it will discover not only its power, but its passion as well.
The role of the parent is a difficult one, but it is no more challenging than the role of each individual to separate from the past and move on unencumbered by life to a new level of existence, energetically freed and energetically alive in a new way. It is the goal of each one of you, to evolve on your own terms. Good Luck!
A Change in the Posting Schedule
Once again, Dear Readers, we switch things around. Today, Chuck writes a very personal blog regarding some intense events that recently occurred in his life. In the spirit of transparency, he writes to you all today. Find his blog below this posting.
We will, most likely, have a message from Jeanne on Wednesday, but that may change as well, as we follow the signs and await guidance from the universe and spirit in alignment.
Have a great week, and stay alert to the signs that come into your own lives, leading you to discover your truths and your bliss.
Most humbly and with affection,
Jan and Chuck
Chuck’s Place: Synchronicities & A Tale Of Two Siblings
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel
In 1916, the period that came to be known as Jung’s Confrontation with the Unconscious, as recorded in his now publicly available Red Book, Jung’s household and family were seized by a haunting. As he relates in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections:
“There was an ominous atmosphere all around me. I had the strange feeling that the air was filled with ghostly entities… My eldest daughter saw a white figure passing through her room. My second daughter, independently of her elder sister, related that twice in the night her blanket had been snatched away… (T)he front doorbell began ringing frantically. It was a bright summer day; the two maids were in the kitchen, from which the open square outside the front door could be seen. Everyone immediately looked to see who was there, but there was no one in sight. I was sitting near the doorbell, and not only heard it but saw it moving. Then I knew that something had to happen.” (From pp 190-191.)
What ultimately did happen was Jung’s interaction with a group of ancient spirits. Once he engaged in the dialogue the hauntings stopped. These dialogues were documented in the Red Book, and prompted Jung to embark on his lifetime career of mapping the deeper structure and dynamics of the psyche.
Among his major discoveries was the principle of synchronicity. As evidenced from his personal haunting, spiritual forces from within the psyche can effect physical reality. In Jung’s case, he had not been paying attention to the deeper layers of what he came to call the collective unconscious and so the collective unconscious came to encounter him in a physical haunting. Physical events in one’s personal life may represent the true energetic picture of reality at a moment in time. This is the synchronistic value of an oracle like the I Ching as well, who’s reading is built by the image generated through the physical throwing of coins.
In Vedantic science we are beings comprised of five layers. Our outermost sheath is our physical body within which lies a series of energy bodies, housing our emotional, mental, wisdom, and blissful selves. Beneath all the sheaths lies the Atman, the Buddha, or simply God, beyond all the many Masks of God, as Joseph Campbell would say. We become enlightened when we fully realize—become—our deepest nature, shedding our attachment to all our sheaths.
In the meantime, we are complex beings who synchronistically interact with our deeper spirit in a myriad of ways. We are constantly being pushed by our spirit to discover and become who we really are. Life events can be viewed as our conscious or unconscious relationship with our knocks from spirit. This happens individually in the events of our lives and collectively in the events of our time. We are now in a time of great knocks from spirit, asking us to awaken to our truths and make great changes in how we care for ourselves and our planet.
I share today a most personal story, as spirit has drawn the events in my family into a public forum. I must answer this call, this request from spirit for transparency. We are all requested now to become, as Joseph Campbell put it, transparent to the transcendent. In this manner, we release our attachment to the self-centered demands of our individual sheaths and open to the energy and truths of our deepest spiritual selves in new balance. And so, here is how spirit, the impersonal, came to interact with the personal in the recent life of my family.
It was a Friday afternoon, around 3 PM. I decided to mow the lawn. A tire was flat on the mower. I turned on the small air compressor to fill it when suddenly the motor died and sparks started shooting out of it. It was finished.
I gathered Jan to drive to Kingston with me to purchase a new compressor. We took our time studying what was available at Lowe’s and finally made our selection. As we approached the tollbooth to the Kingston bridge on our return journey, something compelled me to notice a black Mercedes in front of me. I noted the word Kompressor above the back bumper. I said nothing.
After crossing the bridge, we drove a ways and came to a light. Jan’s attention was drawn to the same black Mercedes. “Look,” she said, “Kompressor! Funny that we see that just after we’ve bought a new compressor. I wonder what it means.”
After returning home, I mowed the lawn and in the early evening the phone rang. It was my younger son, a Georgia resident, who informed me that he was in town for a surprise visit. He was ten minutes from the house and would like to come over. Excitedly, we awaited his arrival. A car pulled up—it was the black Mercedes with the word Kompressor on the back. Unbeknownst to me, my son had bought a new car.
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
Over the next two days we had brief visits that ended abruptly due to energetic/emotional turmoil. Saturday evening, Jan and I slept outside beneath the stars. At about 5 AM Sunday morning, Jan awoke me to share a very powerful dream she had just experienced. Here is her dream as she related it:
“In my dream, as in reality, I am sleeping outside with Chuck on the deck—lying beside the bench where the stone Buddha sits. I have my back turned to the Buddha both in reality and in my dream. I am startled by the sudden PING of a tiny bell that sounds like it is made of glass. This PING wakes me up in my dream and is immediately followed by a shattering sound, as the bell breaks and the shards of glass fall to the ground. I am aware that if I roll over to look at the bell, which I had envisioned over the head of the Buddha, I will see nothing, for in the moment of ringing the glass bell has shattered. I lie awake in my dream, aware that something has happened regarding a life, but that the message is for all of us, that it’s a universal message: there is only one opportunity to wake up. I understand that although we have many small wake up calls throughout our lives there is only one big wake-up call from our spirit, because at the moment it calls out, the opportunity is gone, never to come again. In its ringing, the bell breaks, thus there is no longer a bell that will toll for us. The sound of the bell, so light and ethereal, yet so profoundly startling and penetrating, stayed with me as I woke up and told Chuck of my dream. “Your son is in serious trouble,” I said, for Chuck’s second son came clearly to mind.” (Here ends Jan’s dream.)
We went back to sleep for about an hour, arising by 6:30 as I was determined to finish stacking several cords of wood. Shortly after 7AM the phone rang. It was my son’s fiancé calling from Georgia. She had just received a call from a State Trooper. My son had been in a serious car accident at 5 AM and had been taken to St. Francis Hospital. The Kompressor had crashed.
I called the ER to discover that he was alive, somewhat conscious, but bleeding internally. We arrived at the hospital emergency room. The doctor told us that he needed to be airlifted by helicopter to Westchester Medical Center as he has severe internal injuries and numerous shattered bones. A helicopter was on the way. They also awaited a heart surgeon who might be able to find and stop the internal bleeding. In the meantime, he was being given blood transfusions to compensate for lost blood.
The helicopter was arriving, but so did Dr. Kobak, the heart surgeon. With competence and compassion, he assured us that he’d do his best, and he did, as he found and cauterized a severed artery on one side of my son’s pelvis. “Don’t worry,” he assured us, “the artery on the other side will supply more than enough blood to the entire region.” Dr. Kobak held my heart in his hands. I feel nothing but gratitude for this man. Within ten minutes of this surgery, my son was strapped to a gurney and loaded outside onto a helicopter and off he went, with us following, to another hospital and another surgery.
-Photo by Jan Ketchel
Two surgeries later, my son was put back together with screws and a tension bar with an excellent prognosis to fully recover over the next several months. He himself views the accident as a rebirth, having crawled from the compressed and mangled car on his elbows, having received new blood, and having to be contained until he can learn to walk again. His containment is the creation of the impersonal, his opportunity to meet his inner truth and change the direction of his life.
Within ten days of his surgeries my son was discharged from the hospital to begin a driving pilgrimage back to Georgia with his fiance. Just ten minutes from the house, on this past Wednesday evening, he called me from the car to tell me that he’d be stopping by to say goodbye. I hung up the phone and it immediately rang again. Suddenly, the sound of a large helicopter hovered over the house, and the synchronicity did not go unnoticed. On the other end of the phone was the sullen voice of my older son. “Dad, it’s bad, I’m in the Ulster County Jail.” It turns out that he was involved in some kind of illicit drug transaction, involving heroin. He faces three felony charges.
My younger son pulled up within minutes and I had to deliver the news about his brother. He became hysterical, but himself recognized the knock of the spirit. Everyone had been given the events they needed to face their lives, their inner truths, at the deepest level. As Jung discovered a century ago, and as my family experienced in this series of events, if we don’t voluntarily go to meet spirit and take the journey of recapitulation, then spirit will come to claim us in the daily physical events of our lives.
We can refuse that call, but as Jan’s dream warns, we only get one chance, at least in this life. Then it’s all about karma, not as punishment, but as the necessary picking up of the thread of where we are stuck, perhaps to be addressed in a new life, in a new time.
Personally, I love deeply, and I am deeply affected by the journeys of my sons, but I am not attached at the level of anger, pity, or victim to the events that have transpired, for I am more fully aware of their significance and the greater interconnectedness of present day life with lives lived, and lives still to come—with the urgent call of our spirits to wake us up. In fact, these events have pushed me to further stalk the sheath of bliss, bliss in the form of deep compassion but nonintervention in the fate of others, even those closest to my heart.
– Photo by Jan Ketchel
The bliss sheath reveals what lies beyond the veil of personal emotion and sees, without judgment, the workings of spirit through the events of our lives, traumatic and awesome alike. My love is expressed compassionately, in my guidance, when sought, and in the respect I have for all to heroically face their deepest truths in full transparency. We cannot rescue anyone. If we do, we make them victims and cloud their access to their own deeper truths.
We live in a world now that must transcend blind allegiance to family, tribe or nation and acquiesce to the truths and needs of our greater interconnected whole. To do less is to stay steeped in the greed of “me and mine” that has brought us to our current brink of destruction.
May we heed now all our knocks, the signs and synchronicities from spirit, and go to meet our truths directly, as Jung guided, and stop the hauntings—the extreme compression spirit resorts to in physical catastrophes—though sometimes that’s the only way to prompt us to wake up.
In transparency,
Chuck