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.
Love comes in many shapes and forms… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
To be a being in love is the ultimate journey. To embody love in all perceptions, in all judgments, in all reflections, and in all actions is the goal. Behind all fear love awaits. Love is full acceptance of all that was and all that is. Love rests upon the truth; it’s all that matters.
Love is not a merchant. It seeks nothing in return; it simply loves. Love is not a pushover. If the truth is that it must kill, it does so with love. This is the lesson of the Gita, a battle guided by Krishna.
Life is hardly the absence of struggle and battle. The challenge is to be a being who comes from the place of love in every role, good or bad. Love has no attachments; love simply is. Can you find it in everything and everyone?
Love seeks not, especially to change another. Love simply accepts the full truth of the other. In full acceptance may lie the truth that it’s not time to meet, that you both need other things. You are in love if you allow for the full acceptance of this truth, as you quietly grant each other the necessary journeys you each must take.
Love with another asks for nothing but the full truth of another, without expectation. This is the place of highest meeting. When two truths align there is meeting. One must give oneself fully to the truth and see what’s there. Meetings can be brief, extended, or not at all, not in this life. But a being in love is always in love. In the fullness of truth one is never alone.
Love is the deepest connection to all that is. One is never alone in love; love encompasses all. Nothing is rejected in love, especially the self, the greatest love of all. This is not narcissism, for a being in love knows the necessity of complete self acceptance, the greatest challenge of all.
Love lets the other go… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Love smiles at the phrase, “getting my needs met.” Love admits there is much to be discovered and much to be experienced. But love also knows the folly of asking another to meet a need. True love may need to venture into the vulnerability of such a request, as the journey of love insists we drop all defenses. But love also knows that only true meetings are real. Role playing is play, but true meeting requires no rehearsal, it simply aligns. This is the substance of true meetings, and precious is that substance.
Yet all meetings are meetings of love. To always be in love and ask for nothing is the challenge. To radiate the fullness of love without expectation, in all situations, is the path of heart. Meetings and mergers in love create growing consciousness of the oneness of all “things.” In the patience and steadiness of this growing awareness we consolidate being in love, gently diving deeper into the unfolding adventures of oneness in love.
To be a being in love is to be a warrior of the highest rank!
The active side of infinity is always seeking… – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
If indeed we are the “active side of infinity,” as don Juan asserts, then our mission is to live and thoroughly bring consciousness into the myriad of possibilities of infinity that we embody.
We are probes of awareness bringing light and life into the darkness of wholeness. Through our experiences of exploring a possibility, what we call a lifetime, the universe becomes aware of itself. Infinity lights up and grows through all of our “individual” journeys.
All our individual journeys are fragments of a greater whole, with specific missions to enhance consciousness through the lives we each live. These fragments that we are create the illusion of separateness that is necessary to explore a specific part of the wholeness we are here to enliven and enlighten. Of course, behind our illusion of separateness is the real truth of our oneness with infinity.
The primary driver of the separate self, our soul we’ve come to identify with, is a longing for unity with its lost wholeness in infinity—that is, the complete union of consciousness with its wholeness—the complete union of light with its darkness.
The truth is, we are souls seeking union with our one true mate—infinity itself. The driver of that union is love.
Love is full merger with all that we are and all that is. Nothing is rejected in infinity. On the other hand, love seeks the fullness of union, and for this to happen we must release attachment to all the illusions we attach to in our fragmented journeys, all the masks of God, beings we merge with, beings that awaken our lost forgotten wholeness, who offer us temporary refuge in the lives we live.
If we cling too highly to a golden being who wears the mask of God for us in this life, we are caught in the dilemma of clinging to false gods, the essence of karma. Karma, in this context, is our journey to the completion of the true wholeness that we really are.
Where have you projected your Soul? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
There are many worlds we enter on this infinite journey where the golden Soul Mate of wholeness projects itself upon another being. We are drawn to unite and ignite with this being in our quest for fulfillment.
Jung identified some archetypal programs that govern such projections. The shadow is a projection of a side of our wholeness that we refuse, experienced in people we are compulsively drawn to fear, hate and reject. The shadow hides in the darkness, but our journey to unmask it will bring us closer to our golden light, as we come to accept the unaccepted within ourselves.
The anima/animus archetype draws us to seek completion through merging with our unifying Soul Mate. The romantic and transpersonal experiences of this archetype, outwardly projected and joined with, bring us deeper into the fullness of infinity. However, we are challenged to unmask these golden companions as well.
I spent thirty years with my golden “Soul Mate” Jeanne, only to discover, as she entered the astral realm, the deepening reality that though we had experienced Soul in this life together, I was but one “soul mate” in life. There were many soul mates in many lives, both in hers and in mine. This expanded knowing blew wide open for me the idea of the specialness we all feel as we encounter the golden mask of she/he that reflects ultimate union in this life. Sorry, I learned, the buck just doesn’t stop there.
Our growing consciousness demands that we continuously stay only within the truth. The illusions open the door to the truth, but we cannot attach to them. Ever-deepening love allows us to broaden our connection to our ultimate Soul Mate—infinity—by welcoming all the truths, as we gracefully and with love retire all our illusions of separateness and specialness.
We must leave our little soul mates and find our true golden Soul Mate… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
All our golden encounters with our golden masks of God are truths, but relative truths—stepping stones to the ultimate wedding—union with infinity, in full consciousness.
The shadow of death is always right behind us… – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
I most humbly and with deep gratitude borrow the title for this blog post—The End of an Era—from a section heading in Carlos Castaneda’s final work, The Active Side of Infinity. As I look about me and see the signs of endings everywhere the phrase “end of the story” comes to mind, but I refuse it. It’s not the end of our story; it’s the end of an era.
I have just finished reading to Jan the chapter entitled Death as an Advisor in Castaneda’s early work Journey to Ixtlan. As I look over my left shoulder—where death, our faithful companion sits perched about an arm’s length away—I don’t feel the chill up my spine, the sign death delivers to show us our time is up. The sign is neither there for myself nor the world, and so our story continues.
Nonetheless, death delivers many signs on the world stage, countless atrocities, beheadings and the like. With these signs death advises us to awaken from the daily trance we live in, generated by our complacent minds—the foreign installation the Shamans of Ancient Mexico taught us about—our true antagonist in this chapter of our world’s story.
The storyline of that foreign installation—our mind—is to focus on the pettiness of self-importance and greed, the matrix that keeps us distracted from the real precipice we are perched upon, our survival dangling in delicate balance.
Death broadcasts its message in dramatic voice. Yes, we are in the throes of transformation, one era melding into another. Death advises that we cut through to the bone of the illusions we have clung to, the cornerstone of the era we are leaving. That era has been dominated by the mind’s attachment to greed in all its myriad forms. Greed is a virus unsustainable in the New Era. Our next chapter is immune to the virus of greed.
I do not fault greed, the product of what don Juan called the Flyer’s mind, another term for the foreign installation that challenges us and has held us so tightly in its grasp. Don Juan states:
“We are energetic probes created by the universe…and it’s because we are possessors of energy that has awareness that we are the means by which the universe becomes aware of itself. The flyers are the implacable challengers…They are the means by which the universe tests us.” *
Here don Juan identifies our ultimate reason for being in this world. Through our journeys in this life we become the apparatuses of consciousness that enlighten our World Soul. We are the active side of infinity. The flyers, or foreign installation, that have taken root in our minds are the agents of greed. The dominance of greed has let us sit back in the Matrix** and pretend all is well. Death, our faithful advisor, shows us that the gig is up; wake up!
Like the snow squalls, a New Era too will blow in… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The flyers, monstrous as they may be, are the necessary antagonists that force us to shine a brighter and brighter light on the truth. This is how the universe challenges us to become aware of itself: The light of consciousness shines through all the veils of illusion to arrive at what really is. Evil—those flyers, the foreign installation that controls our mind—is actually challenging us to wake up, to burn through the illusions and deepen our alignment with the truth.
This is the basis of our New Era, a world that aligns itself with right action, a world that corrects its course and allows Earth’s story to continue in new balance. Of course, this New Era will have its own new antagonists to contend with. And someday this New Era will also end. But the truth is that this Earth story is such a good one that it’s just not allowed to end yet, though someday it will.
All things have their era and then they eventually end because that is the imperative of consciousness, to grow and adventure in this, the ever-deepening, active side of infinity.
World without end, Amen, Chuck
*Quote from:The Active Side of Infinity, p. 229
** Reference is made to the movie, The Matrix.
We also note the synchronicity of this day: today is Ash Wednesday, a New Moon phase, and the eve of the Chinese New Year, all endings, and beginnings of new eras.
Accessing the divine cosmic… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Human sexuality is the physical manifestation of a far subtler yet powerful cosmic energy whose guiding intent is union. At the highest level that union is oneness with God, or the cosmos. At the most basic level, in the human form, it is unconscious instinctive union that results in procreation. One of the greatest challenges for human beings is to reconcile this divine energy with its physical, emotional, and mental energies in the human body.
I opened the Huffington Post the other day to an article entitled: Saudi Historian: U.S. Women Drive Because They Don’t Care If They’re Raped. This somewhat bizarre argument, to justify the Saudi law that forbids Saudi women from driving, does shine a light, however, upon a worldview that acknowledges the power and dangers of sexual energy. The Saudi solution is to overly protect women from the dangers of male sexual energy that loses control in situations of rape. Their solution is an affront to modern sensibility and progress, yet it nonetheless openly confronts the power and potential dangers of sexual energy.
In the West, the assumption that rationality, maturity, love, and respect insure safety in sexuality is blatantly on trial in our age of internet revelation. Abuse of sexual power is evident in our most sacred religious institutions, our schools and universities, and in our homes. It is quite arguable that for all our technological advances we are extremely naive and underdeveloped in our handling of sex.
In old Tibet, children entered monastic life long before the adult manifestation of sexual energy. Celibacy and the refusal to engage in sexual pleasure, even in masturbation, are fundamental to nuns and monks seeking enlightenment. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico discouraged sexual activity, as the energy it exhausted is seen as critical to dream advancement. In these practices we see a respect for the power and vitality of sexual energy, and while it is sublimated it is still utilized, channeled into spiritual advancement. Freud went so far as to suggest that civilization itself was a by-product of sublimated sexual energy.
This scant survey of sexual management throughout the world highlights the power of and the challenge that the carnal and the spiritual dimensions of sexual energy pose. If we can allow the hypothesis that sexuality is of cosmic origin, a blind yet divine energy, sent from “God” to empower union in human form, then it is our greatest human challenge to reconcile this blind, divine energy with full human consciousness. Thus, we can ill afford to lock it away in protectionism, divert it for spiritual aims, or naively assume anything goes simply because we all have rational control.
Trashy Barbie… – Trash Art by Jan Ketchel
As humans, we are charged with discovering the full depth and power of our sexual instinct, this divine energy from God, in all its manifestations—physical, emotional, and mental. We are all charged with actively uniting this side of our nature with our consciousness, that which, in our human form, is our ephemeral spiritual center.
This weekend we celebrate Valentine’s Day, a day appropriated to pay homage to love in relationship. The intent of this celebration is to merge love—union based on consciousness, driven by what is right—with sexuality, in its most instinctive form, in a harmony that symbolizes wholeness and oneness, as cupid depicts, in divine rapture.
Valentine’s Day is, not coincidentally, the opening day for the movie Fifty Shades of Grey. This movie is based on a highly erotic novel that develops the theme of dominance/submission, sadism/masochism in sexual practices. The novel, with all of its steamy sex scenes, has had unprecedented worldwide success. I suggest this success is due to its liberating effects on the exploration of female desire and sexual fantasy, which have been largely undervalued or “protectively” ignored. However, I don’t feel that this fantasy of female sexuality is fully accurate or comprehensive. It may serve for the release and exploration of a largely hidden topic—woman’s sexuality—but I think it actually mirrors the collective frozen states of women’s sexual pleasures and the relationships that reinforce them.
The storyline of the novel allows women pleasure in bondage. Bondage may indeed be a pleasurable experience, but it hardly touches the depths of real pleasure that a woman is capable of experiencing in a truly conscious, loving relationship. The true union of the primal sexual power with consciousness requires the containment of a safe, loving relationship where these primal energies can play and merge in full consciousness.
Bondage, by design, is the antithesis of true freedom. Nonetheless, bondage might be viewed as a more primitive form of commitment. In true commitment, however, a couple freely bonds themselves to each other in a love that allows the full meeting of two beings on all levels. This deep and freeing union, I suggest, is one realization of the divine intent of sexuality. Issued from the highest spiritual plane, it culminates in full realization of the divine in sublime human form.
Rape, in all its manifestations, is the consequence of an aberrant decision to not take up the challenge of humanness and instead to surrender control to the proclivities of the dark side. It’s inhuman. Bondage, in all its manifestations, is a rudimentary experience of trapping and controlling the divine energy. Conscious relationship is the exact opposite, as it seeks to responsibly unite animal and divine.
Will we go through the bardos into the light this time? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
The ultimate challenge awaits us in death itself, where we, as individuals, must completely merge our human energy with divine oneness. Notice, this is not union with another person. This is ourselves, as individuals, uniting with the divine.
Our ultimate, full realization of divine sexuality is in the inner union of self, in the wholeness of all energies merged, physical and divine, transfigured into the oneness of all. Will we resist releasing our body and land in the bardos to continue to work through our attachments to physicality? Or are we ready to fully join with the divine light?
Incredible lightness of being… waiting to be freed… – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
If we understand karma to be unfinished business, that which grounds our flight, then we can understand detachment as the necessary tool to free our incredible lightness of being to find fulfillment in this life and beyond. Detachment unhitches us from the energetic drains that keep us tied to people and situations that impede our freedom. Energetic drains take the form of intense emotional attachments, be they fear and hate or, quite the opposite, unrequited love. Either way, attachments keep us tethered, and, until released, we cannot journey deeper into life.
But what are the nuts and bolts of detachment? Often enough, Jan and I write about the formal process of recapitulation to free and reclaim all the entangled energy knotted in the lives we’ve lived. Love and laughter are tools at the heart of the recapitulation journey.
Prior to his assassination, Gandhi had expressed, “Even if I am killed, I will not give up repeating the names Ram and Rahim, which mean to me the same God. With these names on my lips, I will die cheerfully.” He also said, “If I am to die by the bullet of a madman, I must do so smiling. There must be no anger within me. God must be in my heart and on my lips.”
Rahim also means compassion. When Gandhi was actually assassinated, he raised his hands in front of him, in a common gesture of greeting to his assassin. And he did call out to God, according to some accounts, speaking the words “Ram, Ram.” In speaking these words, and with this final gesture, Gandhi forgave his assassin, leaving this world completely untethered to what his assassin had done to him, but also thanking the man for delivering him to the next stop on his journey.
Jesus similarly cried out to God while on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” He also left this world completely untethered to his accusers, who delivered him to his future.
From wherever we come, we land; we move into life on this earth. It’s where we are now. If we turn around we turn to stone and can move no further, according to a common concept. Recapitulation, however, requires us to turn around, but with the intent of removing all the energetic strings that keep us bound in regret, anger, sadness, longing, and hate. In retrieving these energetic strings of self, we can turn to the unfolding awesomeness of continuing our journey untethered.
Buddhist wisdom guides all who leave this world to glance only briefly at the bardos of their discontent and stay focused on the light. To remain attached to the emotional ties of our life, loving or traumatic, forms the seeds of our karma and interrupts our journey to spiritual wholeness and enlightenment. Gandhi was well aware of this, as he faced his assassin in the common greeting of respect, namaste, meaning “I bow to you; I bow to the God within you.”
We all travel in and out of the light and the dark all the time… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
To release emotional attachment to those who harm us frees our karmic load. We are then freed to proceed into new life unburdened by emotional heaviness. Karmic attachment requires us to stay put, until we can free our spirits to move into new life.
The love or compassion that Gandhi and Jesus portrayed transcends the attachments we have to our lives, interrupted as they are by our assassins. Instead, it accepts the reality of our unexpected launching into a different journey. Those that launch us must then grapple with their own karma—for the choice made to act from the dark side. We can extend the love of compassion to them, as they continue their journeys into that karma, and appreciate our own opportunity to free ourselves, at their hand, from attachment to the dark side that would have us stew in powerful emotions. If we look instead to the dark side and send it love—the last thing it wants—it releases its talons from our light being.
Laughter, like love, is equally freeing of energetic bindings. The Shamans of Ancient Mexico discovered that the greatest hook to our energetic selves from the dark side is self-importance. When we are offended by another, or by life circumstances, we are drawn to the seriousness of anger, pain, and resentment. These emotions, though transiently valid and necessary to encounter during recapitulation, are equally capable of keeping us attached to the dark side, for the dark side looks for ways to hook us, to entrap us indefinitely by feeding on the energy of our fixated, negative emotions. We can completely break the chains of these offenses by learning to laugh at ourselves.
We can laugh at our attachment to seriousness. We can laugh at our own human frailty. We can laugh at our tendency to judge the self and other. And we can laugh at the frailty and foolishness of others. If we can find our way to the divine comedy of self and other, we are freed of all karma associated with the injustices we have engaged in and those that have been foist upon us—however serious!
Can we learn to laugh at our predicaments? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Love and laugher are powerful tools that, when genuinely engaged in, free us from the binding attachments that tether our fulfillment to our karmic lives. As we exercise these powerful tools, we offer ourselves the opportunity for new and different outcomes. Love and laugh! Try it, and see what happens!
