Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Dreamer Behind The Dream

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Gathering and deciphering the jewels…

I am deeply thankful to the dreamer behind the dream who leaves me with my last dream, closest to waking consciousness, that will guide me to clarity in making a most painful but necessary decision. In the movie Lincoln, Daniel Day Lewis’s physical representation of Lincoln leaves no doubt that he was crucified by the weight of his decisions. However right, we must all bear the pain of our decisions. Lincoln’s only solace, as a visionary acquiescing to his role in correcting the course of human affairs, was in knowing, at the deepest level, that his decisions were really not his at all, but were his own surrender to the dreamer behind the dream.

This morning, I pondered Einstein’s theory of relativity and the dreaming body, wondering if it was worthy of a blog. I opened William Buhlman’s book, Adventures Beyond the Body, at random. The dreamer behind the dream winked at me as the page I opened to had the heading: Einstein’s Dream! So, here it is. Now that was an easy decision!

Einstein proposed that time simply is relative. If we traveled in a spaceship at the speed of light for 40 earth years, we would actually only physically age several hours of earth time. Nonetheless, we will have had experiences of the equivalent of 40 earth years in those few hours. We will return young and refreshed, while earth and those upon it would have aged 40 years. This is what happens in our dreams every night.

As our physical body enters sleep, our dreaming body takes flight through universes of experiences—we are indeed multidimensional beings. In but a few minutes of earth time we will have traveled through years of dream experience. Years ago, I realized that if I tried to remember all my dreams in the night there was no time left in the day for anything else. My current intent in dreaming is to journey with awareness and bring back only the most important key elements. Every night presents new opportunities for journeys and discoveries.

Dreaming with awareness is the science of the 21st Century, though actually it’s just a rediscovery of ancient knowledge and practice. For instance, the ancient Hindus knew more about relativity than Einstein. The dreaming body, what the Hindus call the astral body, is actually capable of traveling beyond the speed of light, breaking Einstein’s cardinal rule that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. In an instant the dreaming body can project itself to the moon.

Often in dreaming, the dreamer behind the dream takes charge and sends us to waking consciousness with strange experiences and symbols, challenging us to crack the nut open for our answers to dense reality problems—that is, the problems of waking life. These strange jewels are the gifts accumulated through a night’s dreaming, as we travel through our life in other dimensions. They are meant to guide our decisions, which in turn will effect our greater interconnected whole being. In my dream, the dreamer behind the dream presented me with just the jewels I needed to make both my most challenging decision and the decision about what to write for this blog.

We discover through these journeys in dreaming that we are never alone, and some day, I’m quite certain, we will all meet face to face with the dreamer behind the dream of this infinite adventure. Until then, we are free to enjoy, discover, and explore infinity with abandon, every night, relatively free!

Intend to dream with awareness,
Chuck

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Dreaming All The Time

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What it says…

I dream each night, long and winding dreams that string me along, taking me through many structures, along roads and pathways, through intimate and public settings alike. I encounter people I know and people I’ve never met. Sometimes I’m an observer, sometimes I participate, sometimes I’m all parts of the dreaming self, the dream and dreamer alike.

I dream with the intent of training my awareness, my greater intention to be alert at the moment of death so that my time in the bardos may be limited, so that I may swiftly make my way through that state of dreaming and onto what comes next without getting caught. I’m also interested in learning as much as I can now, about the human potential beyond the mind and body. And so each night I set my intent to remain alert, to wake up in my dreams and remind myself that I’m dreaming, and to be proactive in my dreams.

This process of dream intent and training really began during my recapitulation, as I found myself able to tackle issues and do things that I could not ordinarily do in real life, everything from simply saying no to defending myself with masterful moves and extraordinary powers. I learned how to hone such skills, gradually daring myself to go beyond my normally passive and asleep self in real life too, being as fully awake and as powerful as I was in my dreams. As this powerful dream self eventually spilled over into real life, I grew into a new person as a result of the work I was doing in dreaming, complementing my recapitulation work so nicely

I began to understand that everything I was dreaming was part of the bigger picture of my recapitulation process and my life as a whole, and that my transformation was directly linked to all that I was doing in both waking and dreaming life, and so I took dreaming very seriously. As I found myself doing things in dreaming that I could not ordinarily do as a human being, I began to value the work, more eager to hone a supple energy body, for I saw that it offered a deeper understanding of the meaning of life itself.

Training our awareness is a gradual process, but a good first step is to begin each night as we are on the verge of going off to sleep by simply stating: “I intend to remain aware during dreaming.” Since we all dream anyway, this may be all it takes to begin honing the skills of awareness that will lead us to transformation, now, and later at our time of transition from this life.

Just as the signs and synchronicities in life may not at first be clear, so are dreams sometimes unclear, their meaning unapparent for days. At other times, they are immediately significant and helpful. Part of training to be a good dreamer is to sit with what we return from dreaming with long enough for its truth to be revealed. If we gloss over or forget—allow a dream to be too complicated or confusing to interpret or know on a deeper level—we limit ourselves. So part of the training involves doing inner work around the messages we receive in our dreams, to keep them in our awareness. As we work on this during waking hours, keeping our dream messages alive, our dreaming self gains strength as well. As we hone our energy body in dreaming, we begin taking back our personal energy too, making it available for use in this world as well.

We all go to sleep each night. We all dream each night. We all wake up each morning and reenter the life we live in reality. We see these two worlds—night and day, dreaming and sleeping—as so separate, but really they aren’t. They’re two sides of the same coin. We are the coin and both sides are us. The challenge is to meld them, to make them one flowing life. That’s how to become aware.

Dreaming all the time,
Jan

Messages from Jeanne

Readers of Infinity: Consider This

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Here is today’s channeled message from Jeanne, offering us guidance for the changing times that we experience every day.

Seek always the Higher Self…

Consider the possibility of real change. What would it mean to let go of long-held ideas of the self, of old habits and old desires? To hold the self fully accountable and responsible for changing the self is all that is required.

Consider the evolution of the self as your main goal in life. Consider the necessity of change in order to evolve. What must you do today to honor your desire for change?

Make one decision today that promotes change and healing, that evolves the self one step further on your journey. Be mindful of your life as an ever-evolving and ever-changing process. Yet, also keep in mind that as a human being you are also equipped with far greater meaning and purpose than simply that. There is much more to take into consideration when working with the human situation, for there is the energy of the spirit to take into account, as well as the journey of the eternal soul.

Deepen your journey by accepting that there is a greater meaning and purpose to your existence than you have yet to experience. Take into consideration that your trials are leading you somewhere as of yet unknown, for a higher purpose. With that in mind at all times, reach beyond your daily lives, striving always for connection with that Higher Self. Seek always this other adventure, the unknown life of change that asks you to take one more step in its direction each day.

Each one of you who reside upon that earth is charged with the same mission: to seek to know the Higher Self at all times.

You will be shown what direction to take each day as you set your intent to grow. Be alert to the signs that come to you, and discover their meaning. Choose always growth. Though it may dare you and challenge you beyond measure, in your heart you will know what is right. Can you accept your heart’s knowing and leave something behind in order to move one step closer to its fulfillment? That is the ultimate challenge.

What are you being asked to leave behind today? Whatever it is, if you let it go you will move more swiftly forward on your journey and your path will widen, your vision clear, and your spirit enlighten. Good Luck!

Thank you to Jeanne and all of our guides. Most humbly channeled, with love for all of you as you take your individual journeys.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Resentment

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A pragmatic guide…

“Resentment is an emotionally debilitating condition that, when unresolved, can have a variety of negative results on the person experiencing it…” –Wikipedia

“It is plain that a life which includes deep resentment leads only to futility and unhappiness. To the precise extent that we permit these, do we squander the hours that might have been worth while.” –The Big Book/Alcoholics Anonymous p.66

Resentment is an intense stored anger that is re-experienced every time the person or circumstance that is causally linked to the offending event is triggered or remembered. Resentment binds our essential energy as it tyrannizes the central nervous system with a frustrated unrelenting cry of anguish. Resentment victimizes the felt victim in an avalanche of self pity. This fixation on self and self pity, for the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, was the number one reason human beings do not realize their full spiritual or, as they would say, energetic potential.

Like the Hindus, who hold that the Atman (The Eternal One—The Source—God) lies deeply embedded in the center of the physical body inside the hard-crusted shell of the ego, those shamans realize that the obsession with ego self as the only self, as the almighty self, must be broken open to truly discover and release our spirit potential. Those shamans purposefully put themselves under the thumb of horrific tyrants to learn to break open their attachment to ego self, manifested in self pity and its resentments, or perish defending it. For them, a ruthless obliteration of obsession with the ego self, with feelings of entitlement or resentment, was the only hope of releasing spirit energy and reaching total freedom, or enlightenment.

What lies at the center?

The Big Book, “the bible” of AA, asks its practitioners, in step 4 of this modern shamanic healing art, to make a searching and fearless moral inventory of themselves in a process that parallels the shamanic practice of recapitulation:

“We took stock honestly… Being convinced that self, manifested in various ways, was what had defeated us, we considered its common manifestations.

Resentment is the “number one” offender… From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally and physically ill, we have been spiritually sick. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically. In dealing with resentments, we set them on paper. We listed people, institutions or principles with whom we were angry. We asked ourselves why we were angry. In most cases it was found that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions, our personal relationships (including sex) were hurt or threatened. So we were sore. We were burned up.” –The Big Book pp. 64-65

The founders of AA realized that alcohol was the ultimate petty tyrant for alcoholics that freely fed the delusion of ego self as the all-important almighty one, displacing the true spirit self. Under the brutal tutelage of this petty tyrant, alcoholics are led to a systematic destruction of the ego self, as the meaningful accomplishments and relationships of a lifetime are burned up as the almighty ego self maintains its hegemony. The alcoholic must break its attachment to ego self and self pity to be released from its superior lethal delusions evoked by spirit alcohol. In recovery, the ego self is broken open and humbled to surrender to the leadership of true spirit self, the higher power, and is thus saved from its delusional demise. The pathway to ego surrender is the dismantling of its attachments to self importance.

What do we find in the dismantling?

The Big Book pragmatically instructs in the dismantling of self pity: “We turned back to the list, for it held the key to the future. We were prepared to look at it from an entirely different angle. We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrong-doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually kill. How could we escape? We saw that these resentments must be mastered, but how?

This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps spiritually sick. Though we did not like their symptoms and the way these disturbed us, they, like ourselves, were sick too. We asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, and patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend. When a person offended we said to ourselves: “This is a sick man. How can I be helpful to him?” –The Big Book pp. 66-67

This technique takes us to the teachings of the Buddha of Compassion that all human beings are struggling beings—like ourselves. Rather than be offended, release the self and “offender” alike with compassionate energy. This doesn’t mean we have to be friends, for truly we can only really be connected to those traveling at similar speeds as ourselves, but we needn’t disdain the journeys of others that have disrupted or intersected with our own. This is the shaman’s appreciation of tyrants: No, they are not our friends, but they teach us to shed our complacency with self pity so that we may resume, full force, our egoless spirit journeys through infinity.

The Big Book goes on to instruct: “Referring to our list again. Putting out of our minds the wrongs others had done, we resolutely looked for our own mistakes. Where had we been selfish, dishonest, self-seeking and frightened? Though a situation had not been entirely our fault, we tried to disregard the other person involved entirely. Where were we to blame? The inventory was ours, not the other man’s. When we saw our faults we listed them. We placed them before us in black and white. We admitted our wrongs honestly and were willing to set these matters straight.” -p. 67

The fire is within…

In this example, taking responsibility of our faults is fully owned, releasing the self from the burden of projected self truths. Once fully acknowledged, resentment is burned up and fully released in humble self-acceptance. Released resentment is the fuel that launches spiritual evolution, the stuff of recovery in AA and the stuff of infinite journeys in the shaman’s world.

Let us approach the stored energies of resentments to set us free, in a thorough 4th step in AA or in a thorough recapitulation, completing our shamanic journey in this world or in the shamanic world—or both!

Chuck

NOTE: I find AA and The Big Book—its lineage stemming back to the nagual psychiatrist Carl Jung—to be a most valuable, pragmatic guide to healing and spiritual evolution, in the same class as Magical Passes, the pragmatic guide to healing and spiritual evolution from the Shamans of Ancient Mexico.

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Turning

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Worry like heavy stones comes…

Between us, Chuck and I have five children, his three and my two. All in their twenties, all on their own journeys, we worry about them nonetheless. Some days we hear from them as they express deeply painful challenges. On other days they call with good news, glowing in their accomplishments, bubbling with happiness and self-confidence. At other times we hear nothing at all for weeks on end. One of our greatest challenges as parents is to let them all go into the world and have their experiences, whatever they may be, knowing that they are learning how life works, deciding how they want to live their own lives, just as we’ve done.

During my intense recapitulation period, which spanned three years, I received hundreds of messages of guidance. They came from many sources—from dreams, from the signs and synchronicities I’d encounter in everyday life, from otherworldly sources, from the ever-deepening recapitulation process itself—as I dove deeper and deeper into my past and discovered what I harbored in body, mind, and spirit as a result of that past. Last night, as I was drifting off to sleep, a familiar voice came to visit and delivered a message from my days of recapitulation.

“Just turn away from that which comes to occupy your mind, turn away from worry, for worry is nothing more than a cogitation of the mind,” the voice said. “Turn away and you will see that it is nothing; it only exists if you let it.”

And so I turned. Each time I woke during the night, I’d automatically turn, and in so doing I left whatever was seeking entry behind. Without thought, I’d turn away, instinctively knowing that it was the right thing to do. But I did notice that each time I turned something seeped away from my awareness; I could feel it fall away from my head and land on the pillow behind me. A thought that was just about to anchor, easily flowed out of me, for I would not allow it to get a grip. And I realized the truth of worry, that it’s like air, flowing through the universe looking for a crack to seep into, looking for an opening. In turning, I refused it. “Nope,” I said, “you can’t land here.”

Eventually the void clears…

For some reason lately, worry has been seeking me out. I feel it coming to me, asking me to engage it. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico, from the lineage of Carlos Castaneda, talk of worry as an entity, seeking to attach and siphon our energy, and that is exactly the way I feel it, as a foreign entity looking for a way in, seeking sustenance. I feel it tickling me, asking me to please let it in.

As a clairvoyant, I’ve made a concerted effort to not let certain “knowings” in, to refuse to accept some of the things that I intuit. There are things that it just isn’t right to know and so I turn away from them as soon as I sense them trying to occupy my psyche, for they too will siphon my energy. In the past, I’d get clear messages of knowing, seeing the unfolding of events, seeing deaths. Such insights aided me in trusting my psychic abilities, but now I don’t need such things, for I accept where I am and who I am. I understand that this “knowing” is natural, part of being human, and yet it must be carefully considered and utilized in the right way.

In addition, I’ve learned that it doesn’t matter what I know, that the most compassionate thing is to just be present for people as they go through their lives, to be available when sought out. The Buddhists say that it isn’t right to interfere with another person’s life, and I understand that, that we may be interrupting a process many lifetimes have been spent perfecting and is perhaps on the verge of being resolved. I’ve learned that you can’t tell anyone anything either, no matter how clearly you see. I believe that people will get what they need when they are ready, and only when they are ready. And they will get it in their own way.

And so, last night, as worry about others came to tease me, asking me to attach and give it life, I paid attention to my message of guidance and turned away. For I also believe that in attaching to worry my energy would feed it, grow it, and perhaps even manifest it, when in reality I know that in the lives of others there are so many possibilities, so many outcomes, so many paths to unfold.

And so I refuse to influence another’s choice, another’s life in that way, even energetically. By attaching my worry to another, to their decisions, I believe that my energy will interfere. Instead, I choose to send positive energy out into the world, loving energy that says, “Take your journey!” At the same time I continue to train myself in compassionate detachment.

And so, I practice compassion…

I learn compassion as I step back and let others live their own lives, learning as I once learned, by living my own life. As a teenager and young adult, the only thing I wanted was to be freed of others, of my parents and the life I’d had with them. And yet my father was a supreme worrier and so—clairvoyant that I was—I sensed his worry and his fears, and they burdened me. With all that I carried inside me, his burdens were the last things I wanted, and so I was forced to reject him, turning from him so many times because I could not bear his thoughts. I told myself I would never do that to my own kids. I would never burden them with my fears and worries. And so each day, I energetically send them off on their own journeys, freed of my worries.

I know that we all have to live out our lives as we must. I cannot change another’s path, make their choices for them, or direct the outcomes of their lives. I can only work on my own. And so I continue to turn.

Compassion enfolds me at every turn. Love embraces me at every turn. Life fully expressed asks me to come into its arms, receive it, and keep going with it to a new level of understanding and growth. And so I turn and turn, night and day, finding my way to energetic freedom and compassion for myself and others. No matter how much I love the others in my life, I must let them go so that they may fully live, as I too wish to fully live.

Turning,
Jan

And yes, it was the voice of Jeanne that came to me last night, in a deeply loving and compassionate way, so reminiscent of my days of recapitulation.

Chuck Ketchel, LCSWR