Category Archives: Chuck’s Blog

Welcome to Chuck’s Place! This is where Chuck Ketchel, LCSW-R, expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Currently, Chuck posts an essay once a week, currently on Tuesdays, along the lines of inner work, psychotherapy, Jungian thought and analysis, shamanism, alchemy, politics, or any theme that makes itself known to him as the most important topic of the week. Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy page.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Highest Level Of Spirit Influence

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Sculpt a life of love and positivity…
-Artwork © 2025 Jan Ketchel

Many years ago, my sister, while working as a nurse in a hospital, had an encounter with a man, who may be described as the current, most powerful person in the world. She described him, in that encounter, as both gentle and gracious. This description is quite at variance with his current emphasis, one seemingly dominated with hatred and rage.

The experience of the full range of positive and negative emotions and thoughts is central to the human journey. When our spirit chose to enter a life in Earth School, the intent was to address a specific issue via a human life that would allow for the full enactment and resolution of that core issue.

Naturally, we begin that human journey with our core issue in the crudest of form, like the sculptor who begins their opus with a pile of clay or a solid hunk of marble. We master that core issue, from its crudest of form, into the most refined delicacy of love, toward self and all others, through the working art of a human lifetime. This is the mastery our spirit requires to further its journey in the ever-deepening mystery of infinity.

Spirit, then, is capable of acting both from the higher emotions of love to the crudest emotion of hatred. Thus both good and evil exist in spirit form. Our thoughts and feelings are emissaries of our spirit. When we think positive thoughts and feelings about someone, they experience, on some level, the energetic intention of our positive spirit toward them.

The feeling and behavior of kindness brings people together, regardless of their differences. Expressions of hate and rage generate fear and more rage, as well as divide people in accordance with their differences. Many people today are deeply concerned with the fate of the world under the strain of this polarization, which is rapidly impacting life at all levels.

Many feel compelled to protest, in a variety of ways, the exercise of power as it is currently being deployed on the world stage. I approach the challenge through the suggestion of positive influence, emitted from the highest level of spirit.

This may take the form of a telepathic message for the greater good that we send off, in thought and feeling, to someone we know. That person may experience an unexpected thought about us as the message is delivered. However, the force of the message may not reach the level of their conscious awareness, and act instead as a hidden suggestion to their subconscious mind.

The relationship between the conscious and subconscious minds is the most powerful force we have access to in human form. Thoughts and feelings that issue from the mind, or spirit, act as suggestions to the subconscious mind that then engages its ability to manifest on the physical plane, the intents and desires that issue from the mental plane.

We impact the lives of others by the thoughts and feelings we have about them. If we feel hatred towards someone, their subconscious mind will be influenced by this suggestion to generate more hatred. Our own preoccupation with hatred also directly impacts our own subconscious mind, which will then draw experiences toward us which further those dark feelings and thoughts.

The most effective way to influence another person at the highest level of spirit is to encourage, in thought, that they reach a highly refined resolution of their own core issues. This suggestion is imbued with love and compassion and encourages the same feelings in the recipient.

Every time I think of the powerful man I opened this blog with, I imagine the experience my sister once had with him. I appeal to the kindness I know he has inside him. I suggest that he open to that side of himself and take full advantage of his ability to advance the greater good of the world on a grand scale. I know, with certainty, that this possibility exists within him, as well as within all others.

I suggest that many people, in their thoughts and intentions, send off the same message. This collective intent for the greater good generates a high level of spirit influence, the true motor behind our expressions of physical life.

Whatever form of protest or influence one might choose to engage in, always be sure to refine both thoughts and feelings beyond hatred and rage so as to deliver a current of energy that awakens love and a focus on the greater good of all.

Anything is possible,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Awaken To The Stupendous Spiritual Opportunity Of Now

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Stupendous Spirit emerging into new life…
-Artwork © 2025 Jan Ketchel

Please indulge me in the sharing of this succinct AI summary of Kali Yuga, the Hindu cosmological season that we are now pervasively living through:

“In Hindu cosmology, Kali Yuga is the final age in the Yuga cycle, representing a period of decline in morality, righteousness, and spiritual awareness. It is characterized by increased materialism, greed, and a weakening of traditional values. While often seen as a “dark age,” Kali Yuga is also believed to be a time of opportunity for spiritual growth…”

If we can suspend judgment, and grasp that we are living through a season that cannot be stopped, any more than we can decide not to have winter, spring, summer or fall, we are freed to detach from negativity, helplessness and blame, and awaken to the stupendous spiritual opportunity of now.

 At its essence, profound change is the birth of whole new life. Spiritual birth is the discovery and gaining of access to the knowledge and capabilities of our greater Self, or Spirit, that is connected to us in this life, yet resides at subtler levels of our being, beyond the coarser daily drama we are so deeply attached to.

Our current sojourn, on this planet earth, is deeply immersed in a physical life monopolized by material concerns. This daily focus on physical survival and fulfillment consumes nearly all of our mental and emotional energy. Our Spirits are so dominated by material concerns that Spirit is often only experienced through its projections of itself upon those we admire and desire, or objects of beauty, taste and comfort.

To advance to Spirit connection, beyond mere attachment to its material reflections, we must bring home the essence of these outer projections of Self. The hardest part of this process is acquiescing to the inevitability  of detachment. We recognize a simple detachment in the letting go to trash or thrift store of an article that once shined with promise and lit up our lives.

For the child it is the stuffed animal or material article that was once imbued with mother’s magic, now tossed aside, as its basic spirit of security has taken up residence within the growing personality. This internalization of the magic does not require loss of love for the outer object, but it does grant it its own existence, beyond the burden and illusion of carrying our Spirit for us.

Kali Yuga is the time of grand detachment. The climate of the planet is extraordinarily volatile, unpredictable and ruthless. Basic rights to land, property and life itself are not guaranteed. Beliefs that have ruled civilization are being torn down, seriously doubted, and flippantly revised. Morality is now governed by self-interest alone.

I stress here the need to suspend judgment. There is plenty to judge, but the greater reality is the all-pervasive breakdown of the ability to rely on anything we have previously held sacred and secure, things we could definitely count on. All the magic once projected onto the outer world, to keep us secure, is gone. The world we knew and trusted in is rapidly unraveling. In this time of utter uncertainty of attachment, room is made for new possibility.

It’s time to awaken to the stupendous spiritual opportunity of now. Many who are severely traumatized now are discovering their Spirit life beyond the physical body, as they are thrown out-of-body by impact of traumatic agent. This is a rude and unexpected awakening, hard to wake up to, but it opens the door to greater Spirit discovery and experience.

Scientifically validated approaches to health and healing are all being challenged and made scarcely accessible. This forced detachment has opened for many the spiritual discovery of the power of the relationship between the conscious and subconscious minds.

The subconscious mind has access to all knowledge and powers of manifestation. Under the influence of proper suggestion from the conscious mind the subconscious can miraculously heal the body, what was once brandished as mere placebo. These powers do not invalidate the truths and practices of medical science, but they do empower access to the healing power of Spirit within.

Kali Yuga is a passing season that will morph into new life with new understanding and power. But we have no choice but to bear the brunt of its fierce storms, as it tears down all the prior givens of civilization. Let mourning be brief, as the flood of change is exponential and has yet to reach its climax. We cannot stop it; no one is to blame, it’s just the spiritual weather of this cosmic season.

Buddha experienced a brief deep sorrow as he opened the door to his enlightenment. This was the accompanying sorrow of loss of a narrow view, the personal dramas we are so deeply attached to, to the greater view of the relativity of all views, as well as the seeds of all possibilities in the cosmic oneness of enlightenment. This is the bittersweet moment of pause we experience as we cross from adolescence to adulthood of Spirit.

Use the impact of this time to shake free of all old attachments, no matter how worthy they are, and awaken to the stupendous spiritual opportunity of now. This expansion will usher in a world of unfolding spiritual potential, from telepathy as our native language to effortless travel and material manifestation via confident intent alone.

Turn attention inward, away from the outer suggestions to give over your spiritual independence. Ask from the subconscious for all that furthers your individual good and the greater good of all. Claim and manifest the best from your own divinity. Become the next chapter of who you really are.

Simply Stupendous,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Love With Wisdom

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Let love with wisdom radiate…
-Artwork © 2025 Jan Ketchel

We are in a time of short-lived truce. Threat of violence has favored conformity over the challenge of liberty. The I Ching, in hexagram 37, depicts our time as one of the Darkening of the Light or Wounding of the Bright. Energetically, the dark forces predominate and movement is ill-advised.

In such times, we are counseled to maintain the brightness of our candle in the hidden sanctuary of our hearts, with the resolute conviction that the sun will indeed rise again, and that sanity and morality will prevail. Though outwardly yielding, inwardly we act through love with wisdom.

More powerful than an armory of weaponry is the substance of our thoughts and feelings. When we consistently state to ourselves an intention, with the gusto of true desire, our subconscious mind will be drawn to this charged suggestion and ultimately bring it to fruition. Our confidence increases as we experience the truth of this divine conscious/subconscious relationship and as we receive the gifts of all that we have requested.

This is not about wishing, pining, envying or empty imagining for that which we desire, but truly living, in the mind, the knowing and tempered excitement that our seed of desire has been planted, and whose growth is well-attended. Love with wisdom grants to all, without discrimination, the full materialization of their own desires, with the stated caveat that it be for the greater good of all.

Love with wisdom also recognizes the need to prune last year’s deadened remains to allow for new growth. If we hoard old habits that no longer serve us, there is insufficient space for new life. Detachment is pruning that frees the energy for latent and desired new growth to come to life.

Love with wisdom knows that good and evil are equal members of all that is. Love with wisdom knows that the interplay of these forces in the times we are in is essential to the higher refinement of love, the greatest opportunity for life in human form. I quote, in depth, from a book entitled Your Forces And How To Use Them, written by Prentice Mulford in 1887:

“Force by the same law may now be acting on you, but force bringing mainly unhappy results; for being so surrounded by evil or immature thought, we unconsciously open our minds to it, and send back more or less of gloomy, despondent, peevish, or other unhealthy thought. It is almost impossible to avoid this, since we live in a cloud of such thought-element, and our minds may be trained by life-long habit to give way to it. We are unconsciously daily co-operating with this order of thought. We now seek to turn this thought into a higher, better channel; and it is turned into such channel when we, if but for a moment, desire the welfare of all people, and exclude not from such blessing the person to us most repulsive, hateful, and disgusting; for every thought of ours, as sent out, is a force in nature; and the more freighted it is with good to all, the greater is that force; and the more of good it sends to others, the more good through its re-actionary effort comes back to us. A thought is not an “idle breath,” here one moment, gone into oblivion the next: and if but once a day we say in all sincerity, “May the Infinite Spirit of Good bless all men and women!” we shall find, when the grand sum-total of all our life is footed up, that the moment so occupied was of all the most profitable; for the force we sent out in thinking this may have been the only one which penetrated the murky thought atmosphere so prevalent all about us, and, reaching upward, brought down to us its corresponding ray of higher, purer, life-giving and constructive force; for every thought of real good brings to us its like in return.”

Love, expressed with the wisdom here so eloquently described, is how we advance ourselves to higher love rather than be consumed by the flames of hatred, revenge and blame. Thoughts of ruin are indeed all about us, but we have the power to exercise love with wisdom as we train our thoughts upon the greater good for all.

May the efforts of all who feel such in their hearts collectively restore the light to our world.

Love with wisdom,
Chuck
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Chuck’s Place: Taking Responsible Command Of The Dual Mind

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The dual mind is inseparable…
-Artwork © 2025 Jan Ketchel

The mind, though dual in function, is but one, inseparable mind. Half of it, known as the conscious mind, exists in the light of consciousness. The other half, known as the subconscious mind, lives in the darkness of unconsciousness. And in that darkness it is connected to everything beyond our conscious awareness, including infinity itself.

These different locations of mind perform complementary, yet vastly different, mental functions. Understanding their differences, yet most vital and intimate relationship, is key to the realization of one’s full potential.

With the bright light of consciousness the conscious mind is afforded the awareness to observe, study, reason, judge, decide and take action in life. Such exercises of its will allows it to override both common sense or instinctual impulse as it charts its own course.

This freedom to exercise one’s intent is akin to divine prerogative and comes with enormous responsibility. Conscious decisions are causes which become the effects of manifest reality. Consciousness is free to act both in its own self interest alone, or for the greater good of all. It is the responsibility of consciousness to choose wisely.

This responsibility is extremely crucial because it is the subconscious mind that, without reflection, produces the outcomes to the suggestions it receives from the conscious mind. The divinity of the subconscious is its supernatural ability to indeed make manifest the many whims of its intimate partner, the conscious mind.

The subconscious mind has access to both the personal unconscious of individuals as well as the collective unconscious of humankind. It remembers everything beyond the scope of conscious memory. If we are trying to solve a problem, it reaches, via association, into the annals of human history and brings forth images and knowledge to memory, dream, or intuition, that often provide consciousness with the missing piece of the puzzle of its current struggle.

Notice, however, that this process has nothing to do with logical thinking. The subconscious mind associates; it doesn’t think. Thinking is purely the process of the conscious mind. Furthermore, the subconscious mind, once it is impressed by a suggestion, manifests that suggestion via a pathway of events that often completely defies logic. This is the reason for the caveat to all autosuggestion: don’t attach to the outcome.

I conjecture that the subconscious taps, via association, the pool of collective wisdom available to it that best fits the accomplishment of its mission to fulfill its working orders, the suggestion from the conscious mind. It charts, via feeling, its course.

This might involve many preparatory events that clear the way for the expected manifestation of its goal. It is often only in hindsight that we can appreciate the role of seemingly unrelated or counterintuitive events that actually provided the foundation for the desired result.

This ability to often miraculously create is applied to any suggestion the subconscious attaches to. It trusts implicitly the vetting process of the conscious mind to decide upon a suggestion. Its role is to create, not judge whether a suggestion it is given is good or evil. It will not argue with the morality of a suggestion; it spends all its energy on manifesting what it is told is needed.

If we don’t have leadership within the conscious personality that suggests to the subconscious outcomes for the greater good, we become burdened with bearing the outcome of poor decisions. This is the law of cause and effect, the karma of all thought and action. We certainly can see this mirrored in the outer world now, where the creative forces of manifestation are being directed by tenuous leadership, creating tremendous instability all throughout the globe.

The conscious and subconscious minds are indeed a royal couple who are responsible for the full course of our human life. The royalty of consciousness is its ability to direct. For maximum, sustainable success, this requires great humility and the ability to think for one’s self by suspending judgment and determining what is truly right for self and all.

The subconscious mind, our inner miracle maker, can do anything. This is its gift.  When the conscious mind provides its intimate partner, the subconscious mind, with the gift of suggestions grounded in love and the greater good, we take best command of our dual mind for the betterment of all.

For the betterment of all,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Attack In Your Mind Whatever You Fear

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Compassionate detachment is the key…
-Artwork © 2025 Jan Ketchel

“…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance,” stated Franklin Roosevelt in his first inaugural address.

Fearful thoughts literally have substance. The substance of our thoughts is the energetic play of our imagination, the building blocks of what will become substantial physical reality. Fearful thoughts manifest as earthquakes and solar flares in the physical body.

When we imagine, we engage the subtle energy of the astral world, the next stop on our infinite journey beyond life in this physical world. The currency and subtle building materials of that world are thought and imagination.

When we imagine, while in physical form, our mind shifts to the astral plane as we channel its creative capacity to give substance and form to our desires in this world. This is how the subconscious mind manifests our suggestions. What we imagine, with feeling, the subconscious mind brings to life.

At present, our world is teeming with warring thoughts. These outer thought munitions infiltrate the mind with images and emotions that suggest terror to the subconscious mind. This results in paralytic panic in the physical body, which charges the imagination to create even more fearful outcomes, a vicious cycle continuously escalating and spinning out of control.

The real battlefield for this unrelenting attack is the mind itself. At the quantum dimension of our being we are a fully interconnected ocean of thoughts, telepathically exposed to all thoughts. Exposure to thought is one thing, absorption of thought is something else.

Absorbing thought means attaching to a thought, as we doggedly think about it. This incessant attention allows the substance of the thought to subtlety take control of the mind. Even if we disagree with a thought, by mentally and emotionally fighting with it, we increase its power over us because it becomes the central focus of our attention, usurping our vital energy.

To attack in your mind whatever you fear is to become lucid. In a dream state, lucidity allows us to wake up and take charge of the progression of a dream. To become lucid in waking reality is to become aware of the thoughts we have unconsciously become enslaved by, and then to exercise our innate ability to choose where we spend our attention.

Detachment is freedom of attention. With detachment we become emotionally neutral and objective. We are afforded views of current events that clarify the cosmic cycles behind the current dance of humanity. Our narcissistic worldview, that ordinarily has us take things so personally, becomes neutral and objective, despite the horrors of the present. Though not robbed of our compassion, we absorb no grievance.

This freedom of refined attention is aided by guides and intuitions issued from the higher planes of the astral world, from helpful souls who have reached total acceptance of all that is, and seek only the truth. We open to these positive channels of truth as we exercise our lucidity and attack in the mind whatever we fear.

Wake up to the state of your mind and reclaim all of its power by releasing, with love, the thoughts that once bound you to fear. Think only of the greater good for all.

The Greater Good for All,
Chuck

Inspiration for this blog: Your Forces And How To Use Them by Prentice Mulford