Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Invitation to a Dream

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When we say good night to the world and drift into sleep, the golden person, the immortal one, the energy body, the soul, gently moves away from the nest of the physical body, though still safely attached by a thin silver ethereal cord, to begin its night journey in the daybreak of a dream.

Those journeys beyond the body, beyond the dense energy of the physical world, are our natural opportunity to dip into and explore the world of pure energy, infinity itself. This is why the Hindus and the Tibetan Buddhists call the bardo of the dream the bardo of death.

In dying, our incarnate essence leaves its nest for the final time, this time with its umbilical cord severed, as it is born into the greater world of energy. To the Buddhists and Hindus the ability to smoothly make that transition, that is, to be able to sustain a sense of cohesion and awareness beyond the body, to be ready to continue life beyond the physical world, determines what comes next. Will we choose to reincarnate in this world, in another carnate round of preparation, or, from an enlightened place, continue the journey beyond the carnate, beyond the body, in infinity?

Buddhists, Hindus and the Seers of Ancient Mexico spend much of their energy in this life becoming familiar and comfortable with life in the bardo of the dream to prepare for their definitive journey at the time of their death in this world.

Every night we do die to this world when we enter sleep and life beyond the body. I recall, as a child, when I first became aware of this truth. I realized that when I closed my eyes to sleep I could not be certain I’d return, the terror of which interrupted my going to sleep for weeks. Every person must pass this gate of challenge in this life. Many get waylaid at this gate, starting in childhood as we cling to parents, lights, and rituals to assure safe passage through the night and rebirth the next morning.

Children are not fully socialized, that is, they have yet to be talked out of their knowing perceptions of energetic life that they encounter beyond the physical world. They are challenged to reconcile with these ‘imaginary friends’ or stand up to scary projections. Seniors, as they prepare to die, often have clear visitations with evolved energetic beings—people they once knew, though long gone from this world—who come to prepare them for safe transition into the next life. Dying people may experience the lifting of the socialized rational veil that once blocked these perceptions and find themselves in a condition professionals often call dementia.

In between childhood and the dusk of life we are all challenged every night to let our physical bodies go to rest and open to a world of energy. So awesome is this task that it’s no wonder we remember so little of where we’ve been and what we’ve done during our nighttime adventures.

When I prepare to sleep at this stage of my life, I simply note when I need to return to this world, with the total confidence that I will be dropped off—that is, awoken—at the exact moment I’ve asked to arrive. What happens in between leaving and arriving is sheer magic, mystery, and adventure. Time and space are nonexistent in that world. I can awaken from but a moment of dreaming and recall endless dream journeys in what was only a minute or two of actual time. The only question is how aware I will be in the dream, or really, how much I will allow myself to remember.

It’s all about remembering. That is the essence of recapitulation in waking life. The more we remember the more we recover of ourselves. It’s not really about the skill of memory. It’s more about our readiness to expand our knowing of ourselves. Can we accept aspects of ourselves that seem foreign and uncomfortable and unfamiliar to our working sense of self? Are we ready to allow ourselves to experience the energetic world that is generally checked by the filter of rationality, keeping us fixated on the dense world of solid objects?

We owe to psychoanalysis the resuscitation of the dream, a modern attempt to reclaim the value of the night. There is indeed much to be gained by the analysis of dreams, much to be discovered about the shadow dimension of ourselves in the unrestricted playground of the dream. Again though, the challenge: how prepared are we to accept the unacceptable or unknown aspects of ourselves? Despite the analytical value of the dream, this approach does lend itself to domination by the ego with its monkey mind that quickly and associatively springs away from the dream itself.

Native American approaches to dreaming and the night became popularized and made accessible to the masses by Patricia Garfield with the publication of her book Creative Dreaming in 1974. She researched how the dream in the Native American world functioned as an active playing field that was valued as much as that of waking life. A father instructs his son, awoken by a nightmare, to return to the dream and actively confront the bear who chased him.

Carlos Castaneda’s publication of The Art of Dreaming in 1993 opened the gate to the active side of infinity through the step by step development of conscious dreaming. Don Juan made it clear that our dreaming attention was a dormant ability simply awaiting our attention. If we merely call to it, it will awaken, and with it our growing ability to venture into the bardo of the dream with awareness.

For myself, I am well aware that most of what I know comes to me in my nightly journeys. Though I don’t always remember the experiences, I clearly retain the lessons. Deja vu is really just a moment of remembering. I know that my dreaming partners, Jan and Jeanne, are amused at my reluctant remembering.

I offer these rudimentary steps to those who wish to accept the invitation to a dream:

1. Know that you are already a dreamer.

2. Put a pen and dream notebook next to your pillow with a handy light. Better yet, as Jan suggests, learn to write in the dark, in your sleep!

3. State your intent to remember your dream. Say it out loud—I intend to remember my dream!

4. When you awaken, no matter how tired and certain you are that you can’t possibly forget your dream, write it down!

5. Dismiss not the tiniest fragment of a dream. Every morsel is a golden nugget.

6. Know that you are safe and protected; you can always wake up if you need to.

7. If you don’t want to be in the dream you are in, change it! State your intent, change the dream, or wake up.

8. Treat your dream as a lesson of some sort. When you review the dream keep it simple. Imagine your dream was a movie you had just seen. Say to yourself: What do I feel, what do I take from it? What possible relevance might this have for my life? If nothing comes, let it sit, take another look later. Watch what happens in the day. Perhaps the dream will suddenly make sense in an encounter you might have.

I conclude with a story and a song. Carlos Castaneda and don Juan Matus enjoyed going to the movies together. One movie struck don Juan’s fancy: You Only Live Twice. I’m not certain it was the Bond girls don Juan liked. I think it was the song of the same title, sung by Nancy Sinatra. Here’s the link.

Sweet dreams,
Chuck

Jan's Blog, Quote for the Day

Busy Nights

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Here are some excerpts from Out-of-Body Exploring by Preston Dennett.

Dreaming with awareness

“Most advanced astral travelers believe that everyone goes out-of-body every night. At first this seemed absurd to me, but as I began to remember more and more of what happened to me at night, I realized it was true. We may think we are asleep, we may not remember, but the reality is, all of us are very busy every night.”

“If you examine your dreams, you will see that most of them represent your fears and desires. By going out-of-body, you are forced to face these issues head-on.”

“Most out-of-body explorers report that they have spirit guides who assist them on their journeys. Others meet advanced spiritual beings who impart sage advice.”

Jan's Blog

A Day in a Life: Take a Ride on the Wings of the Eagle

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Here are some thoughts from M. Scott Peck, M.D. in his book In Search of Stones:

“One age does not turn into another overnight. Between the Age of Faith and the Age of Reason there lay at least three hundred years of confusion. An old Age does not die easily. Today, firmly ensconced in the Age of Reason, we look back upon its pioneers—men like Galileo—with admiration and respect. For the Inquisition that persecuted him, we have only disrespect and find it hard to imagine how the authorities of the church could have been so narrow-minded, stupid, and downright cruel. Yet were we able to look through the eyes of those authorities at the dawning of the Age of Reason, we would not only have seen a crumbling of faith, we would also have been filled with terror at the impending disintegration of civilization and loss of all that gave meaning and coherency to life. Perhaps the greatest sins of religion are not those of faith per se but of faith threatened.” –page 6.

Here are some quotes from Carlos Castaneda in his book The Wheel of Time:

“To change our ideas of the world is the crux of shamanism. And stopping the internal dialogue is the only way to accomplish it… When a warrior learns to stop the internal dialogue, everything becomes possible; the most far-fetched schemes become attainable.” –pages 118-119.

“Whenever the internal dialogue stops, the world collapses, and the extraordinary facets of ourselves surface, as though they had been heavily guarded by our words.” –page 128.

“Human beings are not objects; they have no solidity. They are round, luminous beings; they are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is only a description that was created to help them, to make their passage on earth convenient.” –page 135.

“Human beings are perceivers, but the world that they perceive is an illusion: an illusion created by the description that was told to them from the moment they were born…” –page 137.

Here are some interesting quotes from The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche:

“To see through the eyes of the mountain eagle, the view of realization, is to look down on a landscape in which the boundaries that we imagined existed between life and death shade into each other and dissolve. The physicist David Bohm has described reality as being “unbroken wholeness in flowing movement.” What is seen by the masters, then, seen directly and with total understanding, is that flowing movement and that unbroken wholeness. What we, in our ignorance, call “life,” and what we, in our ignorance, call “death,” are merely different aspects of that wholeness and that movement. This is the vast and transforming vision opened up to us by the bardo teachings, and embodied in the lives of the supreme masters.” –page 341.

“To see death, then, through realized eyes, is to see death in the context of this wholeness, and as part, and only part, of this beginningless and endless movement. The uniqueness and power of the bardo teachings is that they reveal to us, by showing with total clarity the actual process of death, the actual process of life as well.” –page 342.

Here are some thoughts from me:

I believe that we are always in the middle of a tornado, our world collapsing, in the process of death while in the throes of life, but that we do not perceive our world in such a manner until something shakes us out of our complacency, out of our narrow-mindedness, out of our internal dialogue, and out of our ignorance. I believe that we are being gifted with one of those times of shake-up right now.

Look around; look at what is happening. Take a ride on the wings of the eagle and realize that this is the time of confusion before the dawning of a new Age. But, as the shamans, the Buddhists, and deep spiritual thinkers suggest: this collapse is constantly presented to us—we are just not aware of it. And this is where Harold Camping, the end of the world predictor, gets it wrong. The end of the world is an every day occurrence and we all have the opportunity to grab onto the freedom of that clarity every day.

If we can learn how to let go of our reason—our internal dialogue, our conjuring mind, and our description of the world as we have been taught—and open up to the realization that everything is an illusion, we can enter a new reality. We can do this volitionally, learning how to shift our perceptions and how to experience the endless movement of energy, our own included, as it flows in the universe.

Through the process of recapitulation we learn to shed our old selves, our old perceptions and ideas of the self and the world, our self-importance, our attachments to the illusions of this world that we so solidly stand upon. In so doing we relieve ourselves of adherence to beliefs that do not truly serve us if we are ready to evolve into a new understanding of life and death.

We can experience our energetic wholeness in total freedom by constantly challenging ourselves to shatter our world as we have always perceived it, by refusing to attach to the illusions of this world. Those illusions are placed upon us from the moment we are born. If we can break our fixation with reality as we have been taught to perceive it, we might just discover that what is happening in the world, every day, is nicely set up to help us shatter those illusions. Even a momentary glimpse of a different idea of ourselves offers us the opportunity to gain in awareness, to aid us in letting go—just a little bit more—of all that holds us so attached to what we believe is so important and so dear.

Today, across America, many people are waking to a shattered world, everything gone. The tornadoes that have been touching down bringing the end of the world to so many lives remind us that we cannot hold onto anything. In such a moment we are offered the experience of impermanence. So what do we do when we stand there with nothing, when our dreams and our lives are shattered, totally gone?

This is the moment of enlightenment, the moment of freedom in collapse, the experience of death in life. The big challenge is to retain the experience of this moment of death; of ourselves without attachments, without belongings, totally released from the familiar. The is the gap moment that allows us a glimpse of our eternal selves while we still stand firmly in this world.

So, can we accept the convenience of our solidity long enough to embrace the fact that it is offered as a means from which to launch our awareness, as the shamans would pose? Can we allow ourselves to embrace this moment of impermanence, as the Buddhists would call it, as our big moment of evolutionary enlightenment? Can we hold onto our experience and use it to truly shift us away from our old ideas, needs, and desires? Can we use it to enter a new Age, an Age of true Enlightenment as the deep spiritual seekers understand it?

These are the challenges that the shamans, Buddhists, and deep spiritual seekers know are the moments that teach us how to face our deaths, but also offer us the opportunity to face our lives in the same manner. These are the moments of shattering the illusions we hold onto, though what we are really being shown is that we cannot hold onto anything and we don’t need to either.

We are beings who are going to die, as the shamans say. Yes, it’s a very scary thought, but can we live each day with that foremost in our thoughts, basing our lives on that idea? Can we live beyond the illusions of this world, and enter the flowing movement of unbroken wholeness? It’s not really that hard to do, we’re already doing it, every day!

Perhaps we just haven’t fully perceived it that way yet, but we have so many daily opportunities to do so. Every day is the end of the world.

Just trying to remain aware,
Jan

Jan's Blog, Quote for the Day

Grandmothers in the Tao

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This year's lettuce crop

“The time will come when mankind will understand. The most important scientists will come and pay a visit to the grandmother on her plot of land. Famished, they will ask her to give them a tomato for something to eat. The scientists and their illusory creations are not needed by that grandmother today. She knows nothing of them herself, nor does she want to know. She lives a quiet life without the scientists’ help, while they cannot live without her. They inhabit a world of fruitless illusions, leading nowhere. She is with the natural earth and the whole Universe. The Universe needs her, it does not need them.” —From The Space of Love, Book 3 in The Ringing Cedars of Russia Series.

Messages from Jeanne

#760 Angel & Devil

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Written by Jan Ketchel with a channeled message from Jeanne Ketchel.

There is such energy now, energy of change, disruption, and transformation, asking us all to go to higher levels of conscious awareness, as I interpret it. A lot of people are feeling it in their personal lives as well as in the world outside of them. Nature continues to show us just what it means to really change as well, as she erupts from deep within and creates whirlwinds of destruction from without. Nature is showing us that this is really a time of cataclysmic change, meaning, as I interpret it, that we must all really change now too.

In order to do what we’ve all been talking about, in order to fully embrace a new world order, we must all face our challenges head on, allowing ourselves to break with the old world order, in whatever way it takes, and start anew from totally different precepts, or no precepts at all.

This is my question for Jeanne today: I see so many people fearful, almost paranoid in the face of the truth of how things now stand on earth—with radiation embedding itself into the food chain as only one example. Our health and the world we live in are evermore compromised and what we have always trusted in is no really longer trustworthy or viable. How do we arrive, Jeanne, at a new understanding of ourselves so that we can face a totally new future without fear and paranoia?

This is how Jeanne responds:

My Dear Ones: I ask that you all begin anew from a place of calmness, that you start within your own body by listening more closely to the dire truths that you hear being spoken within the self. In order to do this, you must shut off the outside world in every sense. You must refuse to open the doors to paranoid fear and to the rabble from outside that is not truly in balance.

Take a minute to contemplate who you have been getting your information from. Question the truth behind the news organizations, the pundits, the truthsayers, the naysayers, and the soothsayers. Question, question, question EVERYTHING and then push it all aside. Know what is really being spread around the world as the truth of reality. Accept the bitterness of it, but do not attach to its taste in your mouth.

Accept that, indeed, the world is crumbling on many levels. From the highest peaks to the lowest valleys of the ocean floor you are being shown some rare truths. But do not attach to those truths as the only truths available because there are far greater truths, always accessible, that must be adhered to.

The far greater truths have we spoken of many times. They are the energetic truths of the power of all of mankind to effect change associated with the balance of nature.

Get in balance with Nature.

This means: get in balance with the forces of nature that are both calmly proceeding as normal, as well as the forces of nature that are shaking things up, coming with such powerful energy of change that you cannot help but take note.

This is what it means to get in balance: to accept both the good and the bad, the calm and the storm, the pure and the putrid, the beautiful and the ugly, the angel and the devil inside all of you—in your world, in all of energy, and in all of nature.

Can you accept that all of you are part of the world you live in, right down to the grittiest truth? Why do you turn away when I call you on this? Why do you turn from the hard facts of life that you are both angel and devil, that you are of the highest and the lowest, both enlightened being and ugly beast?

Not one of you will change, nor will your world, until you accept these truths. And you will not access such truths until you take the time to confront yourself with them. Take your lessons from outside, but do not attach to them on the outside before you attach to the same lessons on the inside. In order to get in balance with nature you must understand what nature is, both inside and outside. You must accept the disasters along with the enlightened potential in all of you.

You are all capable of rising up to a new level, but first you must go down into the depths of your soul and confront who you are.

You will not lose your fear of the world until you lose your fear of yourself. And once you sink your hands and teeth into your own fears and taste their bitter bite you will realize their significance in your personal life. Everyone must do this in order to change.

What are you afraid of? What do you run from every day? What do you turn from with such disgust and discomfort? What do you find most disagreeable and disturbing in others and in how the world operates? These are the things to face within. These are the guides to your unconscious self, to your secrets. Your fears, your sicknesses, your most painful thoughts and ideas of the self and others, your frustrations and despairs, are your most precious teachers.

The world is showing you that in order to really go to a new level—as Jan asks about today—in order to change the very foundations of life, you must face your most inner foundations and question what they have been built on. Do they truly hold up, or are you supporting an old world inside you? How can you expect the outer world to change if you do not change yourself?

This is the hard task at hand: Slowly and methodically dismantle the self. Pick through the ruins, take only that which is viable and real, and move on to new life basically foundationless, on the wings of your own cleared energy. You don’t really need more than that. Begin anew by becoming a new you. That is where you need to go…into a new you.

Keep your eyes open, your mind open, your heart open. Be ready at all times to observe and interpret with that openness, no longer attaching to your old rules, ideas, teachings, but fully open to new concepts, ideas, and views.

You never know where you will go as you do this inner-world work, and that is the beauty of it and the true beauty of life…that you just never know anything. That is how you learn to truly flow with the energy of nature, never knowing anything, except the truth of your place in that great unknown.

You do belong exactly where you are now, but everything else is completely untrue, non-existent, a great illusion. All that truly exists is the unknown, and that is what you must prepare yourself for every day: to enter the great unknown.

You know how to get there. It’s what we talk about all the time. Do it! What are you waiting for?

Nothing is as it seems— begin there.

Thanks Jeanne!

Most humbly offered from out of the great unknown where I am nothing.
—Jan

Chuck Ketchel, LCSWR