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

#697 Chuck’s Place: Independent Action

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In the last year of his life, Carl Jung took on the project of expressing his core ideas and discoveries at a level comprehensible by the general public in his final book Man and his symbols. Ten days before his fatal illness, he completed his chapter to this work, which includes chapters written by his closest associates. In what were perhaps some of Jung’s final written words, he states:

“As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be anyone of us. Nobody can afford to look around and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loath to do himself. But since nobody seems to know what to do, it might be worthwhile for each of us to ask himself whether by any chance his or her unconscious may know something that will help us. Certainly the conscious mind seems unable to do anything useful in this respect. Man today is painfully aware of the fact that neither his great religions nor his various philosophies seem to provide him with those powerful animating ideas that would give him the security he needs in face of the present condition of the world.” (p. 101)

Last week in my blog, Why BP?, I suggested that the core conflict expressed by the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico is the battle between two primary instincts: hunger and self-preservation. Reason, the hallmark of consciousness, is colluding with and actually possessed by the unchecked, insatiable greed of the out-of-control hunger instinct in all of mankind. Esther Harding states, reflecting upon the hunger instinct, in her book Psychic Energy:

Modern man has sought to compass the whole of life with his conscious intellect, only to find that the power of the irrational life force has not been overcome, but has retreated to the unconscious and from that hidden stronghold exerts a powerful and often baneful influence on his life. The power of his primitive greed bursts forth in wars of aggression and manifests itself in asocial business practices, while the exclusive concern with outer satisfactions leaves his soul hungry and starving. For man cannot live satisfactorily, cannot be whole, unless he is living in harmony with the unconscious roots of his being. Yet, how can he be at one with himself while the barbaric impulses of unredeemed instinct continue to hold sway in the unconscious? It is just because the ideals we hold up before us do not represent the truth about mankind that the hopes of peace and progress they embody so constantly elude us. Yet we fear to admit this obvious fact and to relax our efforts at self-improvement, lest we fall again into chaos and barbarism.” (p. 84)

Bringing Jung’s challenge to the “single individual” to change and solve the problem of greed, requires that each and every one of us identify our own relation to greed within our psyches and in daily functioning. If we understand hunger broadly, as the instinct to consume, especially in great quantity, we might automatically associate it with the addictions: food, drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, shopping, etc. I suggest that we extend this energetically and ask ourselves, how do we spend the bulk of our energy? From this vantage point, we might ironically look at an obsessional disorder, such as anorexia, as an out of control hunger instinct, considering how much life energy is consumed by not eating.

We might view a fixation on reading as an insatiable hunger to consume words, facts, or fantasies to the exclusion of all other needs in life. Similarly, the insatiable attachment to constantly checking facebook, email, text messages, etc, is an addiction to consuming electronic connection, a barbaric dominance of the hunger instinct. We might view preoccupation with our physical appearance as a greedy monopoly on our daily energy for life. We could view dominating habits of complaining, being cynical, or judging, as acts of avarice feasting upon our energetic storehouse.

The possibilities for greed in our daily functioning are endless, and it requires conscious reflection on our part to take an honest energy inventory and face the truth of how we allow greed to dominate and control our lives. If we can reel in our attention from the greedy mirrors around us and tackle the shadow of our own greed, we can energetically change the world. This is the essence of Jung’s final guidance to us in how to change the world, which he acknowledged was in a very dangerous place. From the same chapter in Man and his symbols, he writes:

“Our intellect has created a new world that dominates nature, and has populated it with monstrous machines. The latter are so indubitably useful that we cannot see even a possibility of getting rid of them or our subservience to them. Man is bound to follow the adventurous promptings of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, his genius shows the uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide.” (p. 101)

As I stated last week, Mother Nature has taken the lead to restore balance now, and there is inevitable and obvious destruction in this healing process. If we can cap the greed in our own lives, we put ourselves in alignment with nature’s cure, and change the world!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#695 Chuck’s Place: WHY BP?

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Mother Earth, that mighty sentient being, has resorted to that ancient healing practice of leeching, or blood letting, to cure her wounds. Her BP, her blood pressure, has risen and blown a gasket, as her blood spews forth, poisoning the seas. With all our advanced technological know-how, we cannot cauterize or clot this flow. Bleeding, as all women experience, is nature’s way of cleansing.

The Earth poisons now our food supply. Why? And why won’t she stop? Why is she destroying herself? Frankly, I see no other way for Mother Earth to save herself, other than to create unprecedented destruction.

Mankind has been unable to evolve beyond greed, the true culprit of the wounding of the Earth. Mankind’s most prized possession, his reason, is but a puppet in the hands of his greed. Even in the midst of this unprecedented environmental disaster a judge has lifted the ban on offshore drilling. Our Mother realizes that the destruction must be vast and must impact us at a level we cannot ignore, at a level that forces us to change, to cap our greed, in order to survive.

Mother is providing us with a cure now, a flow, to move us forward. Mother is correcting the imbalance in mankind. This is no longer a problem solvable by reason; reason is no match for greed. Mother is forcing our instinct of self-preservation to confront our out-of-control hunger instinct, which has been allowed to consume and destroy, in the form of hoarding, accumulating, and exploiting the Earth. As this quote from a Wintu woman, in T. C. McLuhan’s Touch the Earth suggests, modern man has lost his connection to balance as reflected in his practices toward the Earth:

“When we Indians dig roots, we make little holes. When we build houses, we make little holes. When we burn grass for grasshoppers, we don’t ruin things. We shake down acorns and pinenuts. We don’t chop down the trees. We only use dead wood. But the White people plow up the ground, pull down the trees, kill everything. The tree says, ‘Don’t. I am sore. Don’t hurt me.’ But they chop it down and cut it up… They blast rocks and scatter them on the ground… How can the spirit of the earth like the White man? Everywhere the White man has touched it, it is sore.”

This is now a battle of instincts, instigated by the Great Mother Earth. Man, with his reason, is being put in his proper place, as Mother instinct takes over, with her menstrual flow, to clean things up and reassert natural balance. It’s not in our hands anymore. Mother Earth has taken over her own body. All we can do now is acquiesce to the facts of the destruction and what we need to do to survive. If we choose to continue to manipulate and spin reality, allowing reason to continue to feed our greed, Mother Earth will continue to spew toxins, her own chemotherapy, to bring us to truth. It’s an illusion for us to really believe that we are in control now.

That’s why BP. Mother has sent us a sign, using an acronym we can recognize: BP. Her blood pressure will no longer tolerate our greed. It’s pointless to blame BP; Mother has chosen BP for her own cleansing purposes, offering our consciousness the acronym BP to contemplate. Despite the destruction, Mother does have a sense of humor!

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#693 Chuck’s Place: FATHER

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THE CONCERT

At Carnegie Hall, on a Tuesday night, a full day of work awaits, starting early the next morning. I make the sacrifice, my stepson is singing in Eric Whitacre’s Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings. Paradise Lost is the story of a lost generation of angel children left behind by their dying parents, walled off, without their wings, in a deeply protective structure. Logos is the leader of the now grown up lost children. The Gospel according to John begins: In the beginning was logos (the word), and the word was with God. Logos is the word, the law, the blueprint, the archetype of God, the ultimate father. In Eric Whitacre’s story, Logos frequently imbibes “amber,” some kind of hallucinogen that opens, for him, the channel to his deceased father, who communicates the message that he must protect all the children, at all costs. The decree of the father is to protect, maintain the status quo, keep things unchanging within the highly guarded and protected walled-in structure.

The love of Logos’ life is Exstasis. Exstasis is the Greek root for ecstasy, which literally translates to going outside of the stationary or static walls. Their names, Logos and Exstasis, foreshadow the ultimate conflict between conservative protection and freedom. Exstasis, in her own amber journeys, discovers from her own ethereal mother that her wings are hidden and retrievable, but she must take up the journey and go beyond the walls to visit the Oracle in the sacred temple. The Oracle insists that she face the truth, only the truth, to be guided to her wings. She passes this test and ultimately discovers her wings. However, in her final confrontation with Logos in which he burns her wings, she is killed, as the secure and protective father principle cannot tolerate her flight beyond the known, into potential danger.

A DREAM: The Great Train Robbery

I am at a train station on Long Island, right next to the ocean. In the first half of the dream, dimly recalled, I am part of a well-planned and executed plot to rob a train/railroad station. I recall a knapsack full of bundles of money. The robbery is successful, and involves the use of packs of dynamite, placed in several places around the station, set off just at the moment of getaway.

The consequence of this robbery is the end of this railroad station being included along this train line. A nostalgia sets in, particularly from my father. I join him in a campaign to restore the destroyed station. My father becomes involved in the beautification effort, the landscaping. I, in turn, distinctly recall where the planks and stones from the explosion had landed, which I easily begin to retrieve and restore. The dream ends as a smart detective, who has been tracking my activity, confronts me on the boardwalk about the crime.

I immediately awakened from this dream charged with the energy to record it, as well as contemplate it, with my consciousness still between worlds. I suspended my ego’s judgment about being a criminal and instead asked myself: what was the true nature or meaning of the crime? Not all crimes are criminal. When Prometheus stole fire from the Gods, mankind gained in consciousness. When Adam, at Eve’s urging, bit from the apple of the tree of knowledge, the world advanced in consciousness. In both cases, God’s, the father’s, rules were broken and there were punishments, paradise lost.

To go out alone, without the protection and security of father’s walls is both a reward and a punishment. In my dream, the destruction of the train station was a boon for me, a backpack full of money, a tremendous pick-up of energy. The seers on ancient Mexico devised the practice of recapitulation as a means of freeing oneself of static behaviors, returning that energy to the self for new possibilities. The train line, with its familiar stops and fixed rails, which cannot be deviated from, is the security of known habits and routines in life, the protective walls of the father. After I had committed the crime of breaking the routine, freeing myself from a familiar, well-trodden stop (the train station), I was drawn back to the old familiar place, by father, in the form of nostalgia for the old, known, unchanging stasis; the old way.

Regardless of our formative experiences with our actual fathers, real or imagined, present or absent, supportive or threatening, we are all our own fathers now! Formative experiences with our actual fathers are merely awakenings to this father within, the true father, who will guide and protect us through life. The father within us guards and protects the status quo of our lives: our habits, whether good or bad; our rules for ourselves, however limited or open they may be. The guiding principle of the father is the protection of the family. Inwardly we execute this father function by upholding the familiar safe-place train stops of our daily lives. Familiarity breeds safety and security, a bulwark against the changing sands of time. Zeus’s father, Kronos, Father Time, consumed all his children at birth to ensure the longevity, the unchangingness of his rule, that is, until his clever wife wittingly exchanged a stone for baby Zeus, which ushered in a new era.

Sometimes, of course, the conservativism of the father within us is wise to clip our wings. Daedalus, father of Icarus, constructed for his son wings to fly, made of feathers and wax. He tried desperately to warn his son not to fly too close to the sun. Icarus, so enthralled with his freedom, refused his father’s warning and suffered the inevitable consequence of his inflation, a perilous fall. Obviously there is a need for this protective father function, at times, but more often than not the supportive protective arms of our inner father attitude is just as likely to keep us entombed, limited within the safe walls of our familiar selves, however dysfunctional that might be.

Father is the guardian of the familiar: our inner family of known habits, behaviors and attitudes. The true challenge of my dream was to let go of a tried and true habit, to eliminate it from the repertoire of the self, to take back the energy spent on it and take up my wings, untethered to the tracks leading to an old station in life. But alas, I succumbed to the reconstruction of the walls of Logos, the protective rule of the father, enticed by the safety of the old familiar way, resulting in paradise lost. Thank God I woke up!

P.S.: As I conceived of this blog today, moving through the experiences of this past week, it never dawned on me that tomorrow is Father’s Day. There was no conscious intent to write on this topic, to highlight Father’s Day. I take that to mean that I was moved in this direction by the collective energy that marks the celebration of that day. In keeping with the intent of what I wrote, I wish you all a Happy Father’s Day! Whether we are male or female, our true father is the powerful father within us all, who exerts a tremendous influence upon the blueprint of our lives. To become fully conscious of the operation of this father principle within us is a worthy exercise for Father’s Day.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#691 Chuck’s Place: The Call to a New Era

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Refusal of the Call

“OFTEN in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or “culture,” the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless—even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire of renown. Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from his Minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration.” (From The Hero With a Thousand Faces; Joseph Campbell, p. 59.)

Walled in by the widening nigredo of oil blackening shores, America faces the consequences of its own refusal of the call. The earth, that mighty sentient being, releases its own curative now. Change is no longer an option; it is upon us. We have simply, run out of time.

Carlos asks: “What’s happening to me, don Juan?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question on my part.

“It is the workings of infinity,” he replied. “Something happened to your way of perceiving the day you met me. Your sensation of nervousness is due to the subliminal realization that your time is up. You are aware of it, but not deliberately conscious of it. You feel the absence of time, and that makes you impatient. I know this, for it happened to me and to all the sorcerers of my lineage. At a given time, a whole era in my life, or their lives, ended. Now it’s your turn. You have simply run out of time.” ( From The Active Side of Infinity; Carlos Castaneda, p. 77.)

As Jeanne and I sat in our van at the Omega Institute parking lot after our first round of Tensegrity, we knew, an era of our lives had ended, forever. The distant call that we had heard for decades had arrived, loud and clear. We sat in calm silence. In the background was the definite knock of death; cancer had been diagnosed. No more illusions of infinite time in this world. The path of heart had fully materialized before us. We were in it, no turning back. Everything was different. Suddenly, the definition of our relationship totally shifted. Sexual energy was to be accrued, to be used in new ways. The only thing that mattered was the truth, lifting the veils, finding the energy body, and ultimately, meeting, energetically, in infinity. That knowing, that new era, continues to unfold to this day.

The world as we know it has, indeed, run out of time. We are all afforded, now, the gift to acquiesce and evolve this dream into a new era of unparalleled possibility.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#689 Chuck’s Place: The Ego Ideal & The Veil of Self-importance

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Over one hundred years ago, Sigmund Freud introduced the concept of the superego, an internalized component of the human personality, the product of socialization, which both judges and tells us what we ought to be. This what-we-ought-to-be component has become known as the ego ideal, the ideal image of the self that we expect ourselves to become. Our ego ideal dictates our notion of success: what our bodies should look like, what our skills and abilities should be, how others should view us, what level of education we should have, what kinds of relationships we should be in, how many worldly goods we should accumulate, how well we should be able to meditate, etc.

How well we do at actualizing our ego ideal becomes the basis of our sense of self-worth. Our judgment of personal success or failure rides upon how well our actual life “measures up” to our idealized expectation. If we are “on course” we “feel good.” If we don’t “measure up” we may judge ourselves to be “failures,” sentencing ourselves to an emotional state of deflation, experienced as depression. Alternatively, we might inflate our ego, assuming the persona, or mask, of our ego ideal. In fact, our ego might be capable of truly convincing itself and others that this is, indeed, its true identity. This might result in grandiosity, or attempting deeds way beyond one’s true ability. This is when we can expect dreams warning us of falling off a steep precipice or being in a plane crash, etc., all signs of the dangers of inflation.

In the psychiatric diagnostic world this dilemma of ego inflation and deflation, with its possible swings, is described in variations of bipolar disorder. Psychoanalytic resolution of the ego/ego ideal relationship ultimately rests upon an acceptance of ourselves as we truly are, for what we are truly capable of, which may only in part, or not at all, reflect the internalized ego ideal. Successful treatment would result in a more realistic modification of the ego ideal to fit the ego’s true capacities. Nonetheless, even with this modified self-judgment we continue to live in an internalized paradigm fixated on self.

The seers of ancient Mexico would definitely concur with Freud about the profound impact of socialization upon our perception and interpretation of ourselves and our world. For these seers, our awareness is staunchly fixated upon the self, causing all our available energy to be monopolized by self-importance, whether it be in the form of self-worth, self-esteem, or self-pity. For these seers this fixation of awareness on the self creates veils, which narrow our ability to perceive and experience all there is to see, for instance, a world of energy, the true nature of reality. For these seers, most human beings live and die in a world of self-obsession that shuts us out from reaching our true potential. That potential is not measured as some form of a socialized ego ideal. That potential is simply the freedom to perceive, unencumbered by the self, which spends all its energy worrying about how well it is doing, or what it is entitled to.

These seers discovered that the number one key to unlocking the true potential of the self, to discover total freedom, is to embrace an enduring practice of suspending judgment. This orientation asks that we seek always to know the truth, without any consideration of the value of the self for its performance. For instance, if I made a decision, took an action, that resulted in an undesired outcome, my goal would be to examine the full truth of that process with a detached curiosity and quest for understanding. I might discover that I had forgotten some important detail or acted hastily, causing the “failure.” However, the “failure” would not extend to myself as some kind of measure of my worth or as something for me to feel bad about. This does not negate the absolute examination of my level of competence and how that might inform me in future actions, but it, in no way, is attached to my value or level of self-importance.

For these seers this is the critical point: to avoid constructing a definition of self based on competence and performance. These seers indeed seek to be impeccable in all of their actions; however, they attach no significance in terms of self-worth to the outcome of those actions other than knowing the truth of them. They seek to totally eradicate the self; the self too is a veil blocking total freedom. To eradicate the self, from the seers’ point of view, means freeing the self of the encumbrance of self-importance, becoming a being free to perceive what is. In this manner they accrue valuable energy for expanded perception, rather than spend it on the construction of the self, with its all-consuming self-importance. In the process of constantly shooing away self-importance, we are in fact working on the ego, which becomes a tool to actualize our true potential. This is one reason why the seers place so much value on the petty tyrants in our lives. Petty tyrants are beings who challenge our attachment to our self-importance to the max, and offer us the opportunity to arrive at the ability to laugh at ourselves, rather than get caught in the clutches of victimhood or the fixation of self-pity.

For the seers of ancient Mexico, if we never “achieve” anything in this world other than the ability to suspend judgment, we have indeed achieved the most important thing there is to achieve in this world. Suspending judgement allows us to break the fixation of self-importance, dismantling Freud’s ego ideal, which opens the gateway to expanded knowing and infinite possibility.

If you wish to correspond, please feel free to post a comment below.

Until we meet again,
Chuck