What are you keeping from yourself in the shadows of your mind? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Examine the self. Find out who you are, who you have become, and who you want to be. Follow no protocols but your own. Discover what you need as you journey through life, trying out what might work for you, dismissing that which is not amenable, acceptable, practical, or fulfilling to your spirit. In order to know what is fulfilling to your spirit you must know yourself very well. This is what is most important in life—to know the self fully.
Use all the tools of awareness and inner work that you have at your fingertips and go to work on deeper examination of the needs and wants of the self. I do not speak of the needs of the child self, though they must be taken into consideration and seen for what they are. No, I mean the needs of the evolving human self, inhabited by an evolving spiritual self. These two parts of you must come to some agreement that is fluid and accepting of each other, not compromise but cooperation, with evolutionary growth in mind.
After all, what do you really want to accomplish during your time in this life, in this body? Think about it in the context of the self as an energetic being full of life and vitality yet stuck in human form. The body must get in alignment with the energetic self so that these two parts may fluidly navigate through life, learning about each other in the context of everyday life.
What do you want out of life? Ask your two selves. They already know, but perhaps they haven’t told you yet. The answer lies within, in the context of you as a spiritual human. It’s a great way to be! The answer to your question must begin with accepting this self as a most amazing being! You are a most amazing being!
Look for ways to shift your present outlook and your present perspective on yourself and your life. It’s not that hard to do. Find one thing that you consider a negative and turn it into a positive. Go ahead, I dare you! Then do the same with another aspect of self. Notice how your two parts learn to speak and communicate on a new and different level as you dare yourself to practice this exercise. A most amazing being indeed!
As I finish channeling, I hear the raven that lives in the woods nearby calling loudly in its crackly voice. “Heh-Heh!” it says, “laugh at yourself a little too!” And so, I end this channeling on a happy, laughing note to you all. Sending love, Jan
Let your intent shine through the burdens of unconscious intent… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
“Saying something aloud is mysterious and magical… The loud and clear voicing of your intent is the secret of secrets. Do it… Assume responsibility to stand in front of the boundless. It isn’t weak; it doesn’t respond to supplication…” -Carlos Castaneda, December 1993, from a lecture at The Phoenix Bookstore in Los Angeles, California.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico contend that we are magical beings. Our magic is to manifest ourselves through stating our intent. It is true that we feel stuck and weighed down in our lives by burdens outside of our control. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico acknowledge this fixation but explain that we find ourselves so burdened because we’ve yet to consciously assume responsibility for our true intent.
We enter this world with a powerful set of inherited programs, what Carl Jung identified as the collective unconscious. The social systems—family and culture—heavily influence which programs become activated, whereby shaping the intent we have manifested in the creation of ourselves.
We internalize the tactical commands of our socialization and repeat them through our internal dialogue, dialogue that daily reconstructs the familiar burdened self that we feel so encrusted in. This is our intent unconsciously manifested.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico recommend that we carefully examine the repetitious patterns of our lives as a first step towards assuming responsibility for our link to our true intent. Unless we can begin to disrupt the commands we give our intent unconsciously, through our internal dialogue, we will not be in a position to state a clear unambiguous, non-contradictory intent.
Finally, Carlos advises that the greater intent of the universe does not respond to supplication, that is, to begging. We must be firm and definite, stating our intent out loud, with true conviction. Do this daily to continuously renew the link to intent, stating it loudly and boldly, while simultaneously observing and discarding the old intents of the molting self. Then we should go on with our lives, knowing that our intent will be realized, in its own time, in its own way.
I have had to remind myself lately to not forget the experiences of awe that I have had in the past and constantly have in life. I get so caught up in the mundane, in this world, that I often lose track of where I’ve been and all of the amazing things that have transpired in my life. Jeanne suggests some useful guidance around this issue in her latest message.
Life in this world can drag us down. We become so fixated on things that are wrong, things that offend us, things that make us angry, resentful, hurt; feelings that leave us shamed, blamed, helpless and lost. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico would call all of those things issues of the ego, issues of self-importance. Lose your self-importance, they constantly suggested.
I try to be impeccable, but I am not. I try to be balanced and in perfect alignment with my spirit’s intent, but I am not. I try to be selfless, kind, and compassionate at all times, but I am not. I like to think of myself as on top of things when in reality I just am not. I’m often lazy. I had to face my imperfect, lazy self over the weekend when the hard drive on my computer crashed. I also had to face my psychic self, who kept warning me to do things that I ignored. “Make a copy of this, back this up, notice this sign and this sign that things are just not working right,” she warned me. But did I pay attention? No. And so I had to suffer.
We took my computer to the Apple Store and when they ran the diagnostics on it, a large red banner appeared that read: FAILED! Immediately, I felt like a bad person, because I knew I had not backed up at the end of the work week as I normally do and I wondered how much stuff I had lost. I did attempt a backup as soon as I noticed something was seriously wrong, but did it take? Only time would tell.
My MacMini is happy again… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Back home again with a new hard drive, I had to face the truth. Not only that, but I had to face it with other people looking over my shoulder, my techie guy and Chuck. “Seriously,” my techie guy said, “you didn’t back up like I told you to do?” “Once a week,” I said, meekly, “but I didn’t do it last week.” “ARRGH!” This is something like what the conversation went like and boy did I feel bad, and really really stupid. “So much for impeccability,” I thought. “Jan, you suck!”
As time wore on it became clear just how much stuff I had lost. The hard drive was so corroded that my last ditch backup effort had failed. I got more depressed, felt more stupid, admitted I was a real jerk and got depressed. By the time Monday morning rolled around I wondered what I would find when I looked at the last revisions I had made on my book, had I saved them? Uh-uh. Nope. More depression. Then along came a different me, the fighter/warrior, cut-your-losses and move-on person that I can be and she said: “Get over it! This is meaningful. It’s not so bad. It’s teaching you things you need to learn about yourself.” How could I argue with that?
I have my backup machine plugged in all the time now. I backup to DropBox as well now. I found that once I let go of trying to recall the changes I had made to my book, the editing of Volume Two of The Edge of the Abyss ran smoothly, with a new precision and conciseness that had been lacking for the past month. I had gotten so bogged down in trying to finish that I was forgetting to enjoy the process. I got so caught up in the mundane that I forgot about the awe that comes along even in the most trying of times. I forgot to really savor the people in my life, and life itself.
In awe… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
“I want to laugh more,” I said to Chuck the other day, and then someone showed us a funny video and we laughed so hard! I forgot that you just have to ask and you receive. I forgot to lighten up and enjoy where I am. I forgot that there is awe in life every single day, you just have to see it that way. I forgot to lose my self-importance and just enjoy every moment.
There is awe in my computer crash, there is awe in my depression, there is awe in my stupidity, if I so choose to see it that way. And yes, I do choose to see it that way, thank you very much!
Find your intent and stick with it… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Hold to the fine line of intent, the intent for your life, the intent which you personally have set in your conscious state of being, as well as the bigger intent of your spirit in alignment with universal intent. What this means is: Do not lose connection to yourself as a being who is seeking greater purpose in life, with the far greater intent to evolve as a spiritual being comprised of energy.
Shift focus away from the mundane tasks of life throughout the day. Even as you must deal with mundane tasks, constantly return to that fine line of spirit intent. Reconnect with it and then go back to your daily life. In this manner will your unconscious awaken further, and your awareness will gather to you the strings of your intent that have been flustered and frayed by life and reweave them back into that finely honed sense of self as an interconnected, whole being on a journey of the utmost importance. Keep that always in mind too, that you are on a journey of the utmost importance. Let it unfold as it will.
Your job is to maintain awareness so that your travels through life may be synchronized with your spirit’s intent. You will get there, to that place of easy alignment, by acquiescence to the truth that you really have no control. Once you arrive at that insight it’s pretty easy to take the journey along that finely honed line that I speak of. I do understand that that is the hard part, acquiescing to your journey, especially if it’s been a pretty rough one. Keep in mind that all beings have rough journeys. It’s the nature of life; it’s how you learn the lessons you need to learn. You are not alone, nor are you special, you simply are. There are plenty of things to do to get you to that place of acquiescence.
Begin by forging a new self constantly. Make the decision to change and then do it daily. Each time you visualize your fine line of intent—whatever that line may look like to you—see yourself shifting into position, equally honed, alert, impeccably pointed in the direction you know you need to go in. It’s not that hard to do once your begin the process. You just have to keep reminding yourself that you are on a journey of change and evolution; you have to say: Yes, I’m ready. Let’s go!
And then you have to act on your own behalf by taking full responsibility for yourself, for your actions and decisions, for your internal dialogue, for the journeys you have thus far taken, and for the things that keep you stuck. Constantly shift body and mind throughout your day, and begin to notice the changes you yourself enact simply by being fully aware of yourself as an impeccable being on a journey of fulfillment.
Travel onward with your own intent as your guide now. Let it lead the way.
For the past several months I have enjoyed a major infatuation with a delicious variety of chocolate from The Grenada Chocolate Company. It’s simply the best chocolate I’ve ever eaten. It’s organic and it’s affordable! This past week, I discovered its true energetic origin and now know why it has resonated so deeply with me, for its creator was a man of integrity, energetically aligned with what’s right, with the same spirit of intent that I fully embrace in my own life and work.
Unfortunately, I am sad to say, Jan sent me the obituary for Mott Green the other day, founder of the Grenada Chocolate Company, who recently died a tragic death at the age of 47. This man lived and actualized the values of our world to come, a master stalker of needed change. I encourage all to open to his journey—it’s an inspiration.
Here is the New York Times obituary for Mr. Green:
Mott Green, a Free-Spirited Chocolatier, Dies at 47
By WILLIAM YARDLEY
Published: June 9, 2013
Mott Green, who emerged from a hermitlike existence in a bamboo hut in the jungle of Grenada to produce a coveted Caribbean delicacy — rich, dark chocolate bars that he exported around the world with the help of sailboats, bicycles and solar-powered refrigeration — died on June 1 in Grenada. He was 47.
He was electrocuted while working on solar-powered machinery for cooling chocolate during overseas transport, said his mother, Dr. Judith Friedman.
Mr. Green was born David Friedman, and grew up on Staten Island. He became Mott over the course of many years of visiting and eventually living in Grenada, where residents had a distinctive way of pronouncing his nickname, Moth. He later took Green as his surname to reflect his environmental interests.
Mr. Green tended to flit about as a child, but with focus: he built go-karts using lawn mower engines; he ran the New York City Marathon when he was 16; he dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania just months before graduation — accepting a degree, he felt, would be capitulating to a corrupt social structure — and he spent much of his 20s squatting with a community of anarchists in abandoned homes in west Philadelphia, where he “rescued” food that restaurants had planned to throw away and distributed it to homeless people.
He was eventually drawn permanently to Grenada. When Mr. Green was a boy, his father, Dr. Sandor Friedman, the director of medical services at Coney Island Hospital, taught there each winter, often bringing his family along.
Mr. Green founded the Grenada Chocolate Company in 1999. Its slogan was “tree to bar,” but that did not capture the breadth of the endeavor. Working with small cocoa farmers in Grenada and as many as 50 factory employees during peak operations, all of whom earned the same salary — and probably more than he did — Mr. Green dried cocoa beans in the sun; built, maintained and powered the machinery to make chocolate; packaged the finished product; and cobbled together an international network of distributors, including volunteer cargo cyclists in the Netherlands.
In 2011, the company received recognition the State Department for its “contribution to the sustainable growth of rural economies by establishing Grenadian products in international markets; pioneering agrotourism; outstanding environmental conservation efforts; and promotion of organic farming.”
In 2008, 2011 and 2013, the Academy of Chocolate in London awarded silver medals to Grenada’s dark chocolate bars. A documentary film about the company, “Nothing Like Chocolate,” directed by Kum-Kum Bhavnani, was released last year and has been shown at film festivals.
Human rights advocates have long criticized the treatment of small cocoa farmers, and, particularly in Africa, the exploitation of child workers by buyers and exporters who sell cocoa to big chocolate companies. Despite international protections put in place in 2001, a 2009 survey by Tulane University found that nearly a fourth of all children ages 5 and 17 in cocoa-growing regions of Ivory Coast had worked on a cocoa farm in the previous year.
Mr. Green set out to address such issues by dealing directly with small growers and by keeping the processing and packaging of chocolate within Grenada. In the process, he appears to have created the only chocolate-making company in a cocoa-producing country.
“My progression,” he told D magazine in Dallas for a 2012 blog post, “was activist, love Grenada, love cocoa, love machines and tinkering, making chocolate, and doing it all without hurting the land.”
David Lawrence Friedman was born on April 15, 1966, in Washington. His family moved to Staten Island shortly before he turned 2.
He was the valedictorian of his class at Curtis High School. He was accepted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but chose Pennsylvania instead. He dropped out in the spring of 1988, his senior year.
“He was repulsed by the prison of privilege,” Tim Dunn, a friend, said in an interview. “He was looking for real life. And he found it.”
Mr. Green spent several years after college as a kind of master tinkerer, forager and activist among homeless anarchists in Philadelphia. He helped route electricity into abandoned houses for squatters, and he converted a Volkswagen bus to run on electricity. He helped develop a free lunch program that is still in place. He later moved to the East Village in Manhattan and made solar-powered hot-water showers for a group of squatters there.
By the mid-1990s he had moved to Grenada, where he initially lived in a remote hut he had built himself. It, too, relied on solar energy, in part to power Mr. Green’s passion for music.
“You’d hear Ella Fitzgerald coming out of this bamboo house in the rain forest,” his mother recalled.
Mr. Green developed a taste for cocoa tea, a local favorite, and that helped draw him out of the jungle and into the concerns of cocoa farmers and workers. Joining with a friend from Eugene, Ore., Doug Brown, he studied chocolate production in San Francisco. Working in Eugene, the men restored old machines from Europe and built new ones themselves. By the late ’90s they had shipped everything to Grenada. Mr. Brown died of cancer several years ago.
The company struggled for many years even as it won recognition. Mr. Green lived at the factory the whole time, sleeping in a workroom.
It moved into profitability just a few months ago, thanks in part to its recent opening of a shop in Grenada that sells treats made from its chocolate. Grenada’s chocolate bars are also sold online and at stores in various countries. In the United States, they are sold at Whole Foods stores in Manhattan and other retailers scattered across several states.
Last year the company delivered tens of thousands of chocolate bars to Europe on a sail-powered Dutch ship, the Brigantine Tres Hombres, operated by a company called Fairtransport. A team of volunteer cyclists in Amsterdam helped handle distribution on the ground.
Mr. Green called it “the first carbon-neutral trans-Atlantic mass chocolate delivery.”
In addition to his mother, a clinical psychologist in New York, Mr. Green is survived by a brother, Peter. Sandor Friedman died in 2004.
Dr. Friedman said she and several other people involved with the company were meeting this month in Grenada to develop a plan for keeping it operating.
“A lot of people now talk about paying for the actual cost of food or fair food and stuff like that,” said Alexis Buss, a friend from Mr. Green’s days as a squatter. “He wasn’t doing it to be trendy. He’s always been that way. He was just doing it because it made sense.”
So ends the obituary. As I pondered Mr. Green’s death, I found myself caught in a moment of crisis of meaning, a glitch, which granted me access to a deeper truth: We are all beings who are going to die. Our life’s work, no matter how good and valuable, is but a castle on the sea shore, soon to be washed away by the waves of infinity.
The Shamans of Ancient Mexico encourage us to indeed choose a path of heart, and to live it to the fullest, to live it impeccably, but not for a moment to be fooled by the self-importance of permanence. No structures can withstand the impermanence of change. Our structures or casings are vehicles to dip into life and gather experience and lessons, but in the end, the real trick is to learn to ride the ever-changing waves of infinity, and that requires learning how to let go when the gig is up and be ready to catch the next wave.
What we carry with us is the experience and love of all life lived, but beyond that we take nothing. And what we leave behind will blend forward into new life, perhaps an even better blend of chocolate, done right, impeccably, with care for all involved, energetically resonant with what’s right. Thanks for your gift Mott!
Sincerely,
Chuck Ketchel, LCSW
If interested in knowing more about Mott Green, here is a detailed article published in SideDish.
