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

#677 Chuck’s Place: Losing the Human Form

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This past week I found myself contemplating evil. Two weeks ago I explored the role of evil in the shaman’s world as a necessary encounter that advances seekers on their evolutionary journeys. Last week I delved into evil from a strictly human perspective, exploring the role of evil in the collective psyche of the human race. I am continually drawn back to the shaman’s world where I find the tools and pragmatism of their discoveries most helpful in dealing with the affairs of this world in preparation for journeys in all worlds. I decided to be guided by synchronicity for this blog today and opened The Wheel of Time to the following quote taken from Carlos Castaneda’s The Second Ring of Power.

“A warrior knows that he cannot change, and yet he makes it his business to try to change, nevertheless. The warrior is never disappointed when he fails to change. That’s the only advantage a warrior has over the average man.” (p. 166)

It’s not really that a warrior knows he cannot change; it’s more that a warrior does not attach to the outcome of his actions. In psychological terms, this represents the egoless ego. A warrior’s ego is neither willful nor inflated, but focused and pragmatic. The ego is a functional unit, not an identity. A warrior intends an outcome and acts impeccably in accordance with that intent. That is all that matters. The outcomes of actions merely present the circumstances for the next decision, the next action. Disappointment is a direct function of identification of ego, with accumulated deeds, such as merit badges or detention slips. I succeeded, I’m a success; I failed, I’m a failure: Me, Me, Me. A warrior suspends judgment. Judgment casts value upon the ego. The warrior seeks freedom from an ego identity, from judgment, from the human form.

I turn now to the opposite page in the same book for the following quote:

“Warriors must be impeccable in their effort to change, in order to scare the human form and shake it away. After years of impeccability, a moment will come when the human form cannot stand it any longer and leaves. That is to say, a moment will come when the energy fields contorted by a lifetime of habit are straightened out. A warrior gets deeply affected, and can even die as a result of this straightening out of energy fields, but an impeccable warrior always survives.” (p. 167)

The human form is the unique configuration that our inherent energy is funneled into by what C. G. Jung called the archetypal patterns of the collective unconscious. The human form, from a shamanic perspective, refers to a specific interpretation of energy, not to be confused with our physical bodies. Actually, shamans have discovered that the human body, or solid reality, is an interpretation of energy. This is not all that radical, as even mainstream physics can demonstrate that, at its core, everything is energy. The shamans highlight the role of socialization to create the interpretation of energy they call the human form. The repetitive behavioral patterns we are taught from infancy by older, socialized members of the human community shape our energy into a uniform set of habitual behaviors recognizable to all humans, creating a uniform consensus reality we call Our world.

Shamans have determined that the lion’s share of our inherent energy, in the human form, is spent on habitual behaviors focused on self-importance and self-pity. In our human form we can spend a lifetime in either self-doubt or self-pity over our failures to meet expectations. We can become obsessed with self-motivation, trying to conquer the world or our own inertia to prove ourselves: to make something of our lives, to produce something to leave behind or to bask in during our golden years. We can become obsessed with becoming good, becoming great, becoming selfless, etc. All of these strivings, from a shamanic perspective, are variations of self-importance. In a nutshell, the shamans see the human form as an energetic entity completely consumed in a narcissistic bubble of self-involvement, totally incapable of fighting its way out of this self-absorption. If you stay in the human form mold you live and die in it, closed to the possibility of evolution. In Buddhist terms, your destiny is reincarnation, another opportunity to awaken to energetic reality.

The human form, in this socialized and narcissistic state, cannot be sustained without a high degree of energy being dedicated to upholding this ego-self identity. Warriors strive to store the energy usually expended on upholding this ego-self identity by interrupting the habitual behavioral patterns of self-absorption, i.e., by not attaching or becoming identified with the outcomes of their actions. The human form, denied this energetic sustenance, eventually leaves, with the result that energy is now freed for other possibilities, which naturally transcend the human form.

This shift, this abandonment by the human form is shattering. Picture the scene in The Matrix where Neo is unplugged from his habitual illusory programs, i.e., his hard drive is wiped clean and he nearly goes into shock under the impact. An impeccable warrior is well prepared for this blow, having spent a lifetime interrupting the flow of habitual patterns, using petty tyrants to free awareness from a self that requires judgment to exist, using recapitulation to free energy formerly attached to interpretations feeding self-absorption.

Energy, freed from the human form? Then what! Picture Neo, as the bullets merely bounce off him and he flows, as he no longer participates in that interpretation of reality; he has lost his human form. Let’s see what happens!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#675 Chuck’s Place: The Spirit & The Flesh

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In recent weeks I have explored, from the shamanic perspective, the role of the petty tyrant in preparation for the definitive journey at death. As reactions to these blogs demonstrate, it is extremely challenging to fathom anything positive emerging from such horrific encounters with pure evil as the Holocaust or a personal holocaust of childhood sexual abuse. As a clinician, I have spent much of my professional career questioning how an adult could sexually violate a helpless child. The very idea of such an interaction is so devastating, repulsive, abhorrent, and painful that we quickly turn away from even allowing such an image to present itself in our mind’s eye. Is it no wonder that the world’s conscience has remained dormant, as denial has prevailed well into our modern age, refusing to acknowledge the reality of a worldwide epidemic of childhood sexual abuse?

In my personal quest for understanding, and as I have accompanied many clients through their journeys of recovery, I have learned much about the underlying psychology contributing to the psychopathic behaviors of perpetrators. This understanding, however valid, is still limited to a focus on the individual perpetrator, his or her individual life and individual history. This focus does not allow for the broader view, the fact that we are all part of an interconnected whole. How could it be that a massive worldwide phenomenon of childhood sexual abuse could have such a prominent role in the life of the interconnected unit we call the human race? Every individual who commits an act of sexual abuse is responsible for his or her behavior, end of story. No excuses. However, is it not time for the human race to examine itself and question how such an aberration could be part of our interconnected whole? Is it not the responsibility of the human race to address its own shadow?

This collective issue appears ripe for discussion as the reality of sexual abuse has now stained the hands of, for Catholics, God’s #1 representative on earth: The Pope. The Catholic Church, like most institutions, has denied, minimized, or turned a blind eye, for centuries, to the large-scale sexual exploitation of children by its priests. It has taken our modern age, with its unrelenting waves of information, to finally topple the Vatican’s solidly built wall of denial. As significant as this process of acknowledging the truth is, I wish to focus instead on the aberrant solution of the dilemma of the spirit and the flesh in these abusing priests: the ultimate “spiritual” representatives on the one hand now revealed as the ultimate “physical” violators.

The Catholic religion has been the major religion to insist upon celibacy for its priests. This absolute separation of spirit from flesh presupposes some kind of tenable reconciliation of spirit and matter; meaning, in effect, that the completely repressed sexual side of a human being could be transformed and brought into balance with the spiritual side. I don’t doubt that this transformation can take place; in fact, celibacy is a central feature of the shaman’s world. However, it is obvious that for the Catholic Church it has failed miserably for many of its ordained priests, resulting in a backlash of ravenous, blind, instinctual exploitation of innocent children.

In a book entitled, The Myth of Meaning, Aniela Jaffe, analyst, editor and Jung’s personal secretary writes:

“Because the primitive is so close to nature, the meaning of his myths gives him a sense of security. Everything he does, everything he experiences, is intimately connected with the cosmos, with the stars and the wind, with sacred animals and gods. Modern man, with his incomparably more differentiated consciousness, has lost touch with nature both without and within, with his psychic images and therefore with meaning. He is one-sided, and he goes on developing one-sidedly along the path of intellectual differentiation. The primitive child of nature, who yet dwells within him, was repressed, consequently it degenerated and from time to time goes berserk and turns him into a pitiless barbarian. Contact with the unconscious, which heals and makes whole, restores the connection with his origin, with the source of psychic images. This is not a reversion to barbarism, but regeneration through a renewed and conscious relationship with a living spirit buried in the unconscious. Every step forward on the way to individuation is at the same time a step backwards into the past, into the mysteries of one’s own nature.” (p. 148-9)

Herein lies the crux of the problem, I believe, for our interconnected human race, which the Catholic dilemma serves so well to illustrate. We are all children of nature; animalistic, primitive and deeply instinctual, whether we acknowledge or experience it consciously. But, we have become so one-sided, as Jaffe states, in our intellectual, rational, scientific, mental, technological, interneted-friended-texted-facebooked selves, that we have divorced ourselves from our own true human nature, which is non-rational, instinctual, physical and yes, primitive and animalistic. This worldwide dissociation from our instinctual selves, this lack of integration and reconciliation with our mental/spiritual selves, has created a ravaging, feelingless ferocious beast in our human race, which strikes back as the predator who preys upon the innocent. Even animals in their predatory behaviors do not come near the cruelty of the rabid human animal in its predatory revenge for its exclusion from the true human equation.

I am proposing that, from a human-racial perspective, the psychopathic manifestation of sexual abuse is a ruthless compensation by our inner nature to level our spiritual one-sidedness with instinctual devastation, so aptly illustrated by the abuser priest. This type of compensatory balance is unacceptable and is finally being made available to the world’s conscience. Perpetrators must be exposed and held fully accountable. However, as a race, we humans are responsible for taking back the night, not just in an outer sense of physical safety, but in an inner claiming and reconciliation with our own irrational, instinctual shadow natures. As Jaffe points out, reconciling with our instinctual nature is not a reversion to barbarism, but a “regeneration through a renewed and conscious relationship with a living spirit buried in the unconscious.” We must make contact with our instinctual natures and take up the challenge of integrating our instinctual selves into our modern lives in a healthy balance. Furthermore, we must have the moral courage to face the feelings and images of our animalistic selves. We have consciousness and the ability to choose how these impulses are understood and lived. The fact that we have feelings, impulses, and desires, which run counter to our moral and ethical code, does not make us pathological. Too often we are so disturbed by the occurrence of an unacceptable thought or impulse that we immediately repress it or see ourselves as somehow deviant. If we can suspend judgment and look upon the products of our inner nature with a curiosity and quest for understanding we will discover what nature is truly trying to show us. If we deny our natural, primitive side, we create the conditions of impoverishment that can force nature to violent extremes.

Nature, from this viewpoint, will not be denied without serious consequences. To sleep, to dream, to face our deepest unconscious selves, embracing our wholeness, is the individual and human challenge in order to achieve ultimate balance and reconciliation of the spirit and the flesh.

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

# 673 Chuck’s Place: Thank You Petty Tyrants!

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Why are we here? One thing is certain: our time is limited. Our life here is only a visit. In the end, we must leave on what the shamans of ancient Mexico call, our definitive journey.

Unlike other journeys we may take in this world, in preparation for our definitive journey there are no bags to pack and only one appointment to keep, our appointment with death. At that appointment we are required to relinquish our bodies and our attachment to all things material as we enter the unknown in pure energetic form.

Throughout their physical lives shamans enter their energy bodies and take journeys into infinity. Upon returning they report that, though they discover amazing things on these journeys, the true preparation for facing the unknown is in this world, in the form of our encounters with petty tyrants. One major reason for our being in this world is, as I see it, to encounter and master our petty tyrants, the true proving ground for our definitive journey in infinity upon dying.

Petty tyrants can be defined as anything in this world that interrupts or shatters our expectations. Examples may include a crying baby that won’t allow us to sleep, a defiant teenager, an unloving parent, an exploitive boss, a ruthless ex-spouse, a rejecting lover, a condescending partner, a prejudiced teacher, a violent psychopath who physically or sexually abuses, etc. Petty tyrants can also come in the form of natural or unnatural disasters such as earthquakes and wars. In fact, the examples are endless and range from annoying everyday interactions to traumatic experiences. Petty tyrants are not fair, they don’t play by the rules; they devastate us, they use and abuse us, they take what they want, they destroy what they want. Our experiences of petty tyrants force us to relinquish our expectations of common decency, respect, love, or basic entitlements. Although these expectations may be our preferences in this world, they are, by far, not the true nature of reality, which is unpredictable. When faced with a petty tyrant we are thrust into a completely unpredictable, uncontrollable reality where anything can happen, anything goes.

Shamans say that our encounters with petty tyrants provide us with the necessary training to face the true nature of energetic reality; this is our destiny, this is why we are here. Energetic reality is fluid, ever changing. To maintain cohesion in energetic reality we must be able to flow without requirements, that is, preconceived expectations. Petty tyrants force us out of our world into the unknown. If we refuse to accept the unknown and choose instead to cling to our expectations of reality then we are not prepared for our definitive journey. If we insist upon a world that conforms to our expectations, we are not ready to enter the unknown. The Buddhists point out that if we cannot detach from our expectations upon dying, we must re-materialize; that is, reincarnate in the material world for more classes on detachment, with our petty tyrants as teachers. In fact, petty tyrants are our greatest teachers in this world.

The process of mastering our petty tyrants requires that we recapitulate. In recapitulation we face, squarely, all our experiences in life, releasing any attachment to them in the form of anger, resentment, fear, regret, hatred, sadness, self-pity, etc. Staying attached to unfairness, for example, would keep us attached to a predictable world that follows the rules. As long as we hold to the position that we are undeserving of the petty tyrants in our lives we remain deeply attached to creating our own world, a world of illusions, what the Buddhists call maya. Through recapitulation we arrive at a place of complete neutrality toward all our petty tyrants. We let go of any sense of being special or deserving of anything, we simply accept all the experiences in our lives as part of the journey, without judgment. Experiences are simply facts, they happened. With recapitulation we are released to completely let them go, with appreciation for lessons learned. We arrive at a place of readiness to enter an unpredictable world, our tyrants having prepared us well!

When we arrive at the place of utter neutrality, what the shamans call the place of no pity, we are offered the opportunity to thank our petty tyrants for journeying with us and preparing us for our final appointment with death, as we embark upon our definitive journey in infinity.

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#671 Chuck’s Place: The Warrior’s Affirmation

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I opened The Wheel of Time, that book of knowledge from the shamans of ancient Mexico, written by Carlos Castaneda, to the following quote on page 139, taken from Tales of Power:

Only as a warrior can one withstand
the path of knowledge. A warrior cannot
complain or regret anything. His life is an
endless challenge, and challenges cannot
possibly be good or bad. Challenges are
simply challenges.

A warrior greets the new day affirming his knowledge: I am a being on my way to dying. This affirmation sets the orientation for the day. These might be my final moments in this world, let me soak it up fully. Each encounter might be my last, let me be fully present. What challenges will greet me this day? Where might I shed more of my human form? Who will offend me today, offering me the opportunity to lose my self-importance?

Self-importance is that human demon that supports our notion of being special, of deserving special treatment. It leads to a life of conditions: good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable. It creates a structure to live and die in.

The warrior strives to peel away any attachment to this structure. For the warrior, the intent is to learn to flow, to be able to meet the unknowable without conditions. This world, this life, offers infinite opportunity to learn to flow without conditions.

The warrior welcomes all challenges as opportunities to break down any vestige of specialness. For the warrior, abuse, trauma, regret, hatred, meanness, loss, offense, etc., are the golden tyrants this world offers to hone and prepare our awareness to leap into infinity and journey forward into new worlds and new challenges. The warrior uses these challenges to release all attachment to these experiences, through recapitulation, and embraces the advances in detachment such recapitulated tyrants have afforded. A warrior knows only love, for the transitory and the infinite.

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#669 Chuck’s Place: Ecstasy

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First, a Chuck-ku:

Wind blows, seeds disperse.
Earth softens, flowers emerge.
Divine Ecstasy!

We work very hard each day to stay on top of our responsibilities, to sleep well, to get up on time, perhaps to exercise, to stay abreast of world events, or keep them at safe bay so as not to infiltrate the calm, to be prepared for the day, to show up on time, or quietly sneak away. At the end of the day we want to feel good about our accomplishments, our challenges met, as we plan for tomorrow’s activities or weekend’s repose. These are all efforts of consciousness: decision making, planning, will power, efforts to create structure in our lives. But where’s the juice?!

Where is the joy, the electricity, the experiences that transport us beyond our hard earned structures to a deeper communion with life, a true experience of rapture, wholeness and union with the divine? We all crave this experience, this melding of consciousness with the divine instinctual energy that lies at the depths of our being. This experience we seek, to complete our day in wholeness, is the experience of ecstasy.

The Greek roots of the word ecstasy are ex meaning out of or to stand apart from, and stasis meaning stationary or stagnant. Thus, ecstasy is the experience outside the box of our hard earned ego structures. To get there we must loosen or dissolve the rigid static structures of our egos, stand outside our rules, our strict rationality, our thinking processes, to encounter the energetic fluidity and unpredictability of our deeper emotional divine selves. The challenge is to step outside the box and yet remain fully conscious and present, flowing with this intense ecstatic energy.

The tendency of the ego is to either repress the divine impulse due to its intensity and fear of loss of control or for the ego to volitionally check out, as for example in a drunken binge where ecstatic energy overtakes consciousness in a frenzied reverie. In either case, there is no union, and no true experience of wholeness and divine rapture.

How can we build a solid bridge capable of safely channeling such powerful energy? To construct this bridge, we must engage all the powers of ego and consciousness. Without consciousness the experience of the divine energy is a tsunami that overtakes all structures or simply passes over without notice. How do we build a solid foundation for our bridge? One stone at a time.

One stone is to recognize the stirrings of emotion within as we move through our daily lives. Perhaps we might experience an impulse, a feeling of warmth, of appreciation, of love, of excruciating tenderness in an interaction with another. Can we allow ourselves to stretch and feel the full energy of this emotion? Perhaps we feel quite vulnerable, overly sensitive, seeking to automatically shut down, cut off, and move away from feeling the energy of our experience. Beyond the self, might we stretch ourselves, allowing our egos to lay down a stone by actually expressing out loud our feeling to another? To allow the self to withstand and be reshaped by the energetic aftermath of this wave of emotion is bridge building.

In another instance, we might find ourselves moved by a divine impulse to dance, to sing, to be playful, or silly. Can we lay another welcome stone to this divine energy by stretching our rigid egos to be moved to action by this impulse?

Perhaps we partake of a sip of wine. Dionysus, the personification of divine ecstasy, is also the Greek god of wine. Even the Christian mass includes a sip of wine as a channel to divine communion with God. That sip of wine immediately invites the experience of another world. Boundaries disappear and the experience of everything as energetically interconnected emerges. However, can we stop at one sip, at one glass? Can we retain our consciousness and experience interconnectedness in a modest way? This challenge is certainly another brick in the foundation of our bridge to ecstasy. Too often the craving for more divine contact, so deeply desired, results in inviting too much energy to travel on an incomplete structure ending in oblivion or divine madness.

Ecstasy is its own crucible, its own alchemical oven, its own cross. Pushing the confines of the structure, which can ultimately increase one’s joy, is a painful and lengthy process. Take, for example, love and sex, a very challenging combination, a cornerstone of our bridge to ecstasy. In the beginning of relationship, when nature provides us with an unearned “in love” experience, we are afforded the divine rapture of ecstasy as the boundaries of our individual egos are stretched to merge with our “soul mate.” In this time, love and sexual energy flow freely. If this divine spark acquires duration and becomes a true relationship we are ultimately expelled from the garden. The gift of ecstasy must now be earned through the building of a bridge of conscious relationship. The more we get to know our partner, the more familiar they become, often, the more difficult sex becomes.

Love is a product of consciousness. Love takes work, hard work. Encountering and accepting the truth of our “human” soul mate, as well as revealing our own most vulnerable selves, is an extremely challenging process. Meanwhile, familiarity often drives sexual energy underground. Love and familiarity bring a lot of bright light to a relationship. The spontaneous, unpredictable flow of primal sexual energy seeks the darkness, where play, connection, and abandon are spared watchful, judgmental eyes and a thinking mind. To be conscious and present in abandon, without thought, is the crucible of love and sex. To merge the familiar and the spontaneous, the divine and the earthy, the spirit and the flesh, is a powerful, ecstatic moment. This is definitely possible if there is commitment, but it is often a painful, vulnerable, and frustrating process where the energies seek to escape the containment required for ultimate transformation and ecstatic union.

Stretching and softening the boundaries of the ego to accommodate and join with the divine spontaneous impulse is the essence of ecstasy. Yes, to be able to stand, which is to hold onto consciousness, outside the static structure of the ego, is to open to the flow of divine energy, true ex-stasis. In this piece, I selected the metaphor of a sturdy bridge built stone by stone to represent the place of standing amidst divine energy. The opportunities to lay these stones offer themselves daily in a myriad of ordinary life circumstances where the spark of divine impulse is felt subtly or profoundly within the heart.

Jung chose a different metaphor, that of a cork floating on the ocean. The cork being the place of standing, or consciousness floating upon the boundless, infinite flux. Despite the disparity in size of cork to ocean, Jung would argue that without consciousness there is no wholeness, there is no divine ecstasy. Rumor has it that Jung’s final words, spoken to Marie-Louise von Franz, were: “Let’s have a really good red wine tonight!” Wine or no wine, I suggest that you make your experience di-vine!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck