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

#685 Chuck’s Place: Boroughs & Bridges to the Truth

2 Comments

America eagerly awaits its new Idol: Will it be Crystal; will it be Lee? The Tea Partyers eagerly await the opportunity to “throw the bums out” in the midterm elections. We breathe easier because the solid Admiral of the Coast Guard is overseeing BP. Natural gas companies are seizing the moment; offering the “safe” alternative to oil. After all, they blast 7,000 feet beneath the earth’s surface; how could that possibly effect the drinking water, or the cows pasturing on the farms above? Meanwhile, somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, one mile (5280 feet) beneath the earth, the oil continues to flow, unabated. Fortunately, we are “right on schedule” for a final capping off of the pipe, some time in August. There is evidence now that the oil has caught the current and is showing up on the coast of Florida, the same current that flows up the eastern seaboard. Naturally, specimens are being “properly analyzed” to verify their point of origin. Thank God for science!

From a different perspective, I view this broadening, enveloping nigredo, as black gold, perhaps the real next American Idol; the one we will learn to appreciate the most. The tragedy to the seas, to the habitats of many, including our own, is now threatened at an unstoppable pace. Nature itself has taken over now, demanding that we embrace the truth. It is downright heartbreaking to see the amount of destruction to innocent sea life. The entire food chain will be poisoned as a result of this catastrophe and the impact will be felt by all living things. It is evident that the human race, left to its own devices, refuses to face the truth of its destructive behavior to the planet. I call the nigredo “black gold” because it represents, through the magnitude of its destruction, our path to redemption. It is not just a “good” thing that we check our greed, become humble, and assume responsibility for maintaining balance in this world; it is the only means of survival. It is not about convincing anyone or overpowering resistance. Nature has lost her patience; if we don’t capitulate, we perish.

The water, from which we are all born, which sustains all life, will now poison life, until we face the error of our ways and change our gluttonous attitudes toward the planet. But do not despair! Change is on the horizon. No longer must we sit idly by in powerlessness as the forces of greed dominate the show. Nature is on board now, in a big way. Stay aligned with the truth, your inner truth, and join your intent with this evolutionary process, facing and embracing all our planetary truths, which are, from an energetic perspective, “right on schedule.”

Keeping with the themes of water and nature, I turn now more personal, to dreams from my life around the Isle of Manhattan.

In countless dreams, I am lost in the Bronx searching for the bridge to Manhattan. Eventually, I find the bridge. However, it is generally at various stages of disrepair, or under construction, or being dangerously flooded with enormous waves crashing over it as it sways in the wind. Sometimes, I am lost in Brooklyn, unsure of the direction to Manhattan or which subway to take. Occasionally, the current is calm and I can swim across the river.

My psyche, the self, the spinner of dreams, has chosen New York City, with all of its boroughs and bridges, to show me both the fragmentation within my psyche, the location of untapped resources or possibilities, and the status of my ability to both tap into and integrate them.

Psychic fragmentation is often caused by traumatic experiences where parts of the self are cut off from the mainstream conscious self and forced to exist in unknown isolated islands, like, let’s say, Staten Island. Who even knows anything about Staten Island, or conceives of it as being part of New York City? So forgotten are they, complain Staten Islanders, that they have even considered secession from the union of New York City.

Psychic fragmentation can also be the result of socialization, where unacceptable parts of the self are repressed, never allowed access to conscious life; in the place Jung called the shadow. Perhaps these parts are stored in another borough of New York City, such as in Brooklyn or the Bronx.

Finally, there are parts of the self that have simply yet to emerge, yet to be activated, yet to be discovered in life. These resources may also be stored in the outlying boroughs, perhaps in Queens, a royal borough.

The process of individuation is the challenge to gain access to, to claim and integrate, all the boroughs of the self into a conscious unified whole. Integration requires a network of connections that allow easy access to all the boroughs, hence the significance of the condition of the bridges in my dreams. Psychotherapy is the process of building solid bridges to all parts of the self.

The seers of don Juan’s line introduced the process of recapitulation, of reliving one’s life, in order to reclaim all vital energy lost to prior experiences, or that which is lodged in the outlying boroughs. Furthermore, they introduced learning to shift the assemblage point, what they call our major point of awareness, to different positions within our energetic selves to access the fuller possibilities of our innate potential. Their techniques to create this shift are:

1. recapitulation, where we volitionally shift the assemblage point to a different place of awareness, that of forgotten or repressed aspects of life experiences;

2. dreaming, where the assemblage point loosens as the conscious ego relaxes its hold on our point of awareness;

3. stalking, where we shift the assemblage point through volitionally interrupting our habitual patterns by acting-as-if, or by practicing not-doings; and

4. intent, where we access the power of intent to shift our point of awareness simply through intending it.

Both psychotherapy and the practices of the seers offer tools to individuate and actualize the full potential of the self. But remember, union requires open bridges to all boroughs, access to all parts of the self. It requires truthfulness and clarity, without deception or hidden agendas; no cover-ups or idolizations, no capping off of any parts of the self that are spewing black gold until you get the message and take appropriate action. In order to stand in the fullness of self, we must allow nature itself to take over, inner and outer, integrating it with what we already know about the self. The natural flow of events and consequences in our lives, even the nigredo, are integral to this evolutionary process.

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#683 Chuck’s Place: Lions & Tigers & Bears, Oh Yes! Sorcerers & Witches & Shamans & Seers!

1 Comment

Words have power. Terms like sorcerers and witches conjure shady if not evil purpose. It was not until his final works that Carlos Castaneda decided to use the term “shaman” to describe his teacher, don Juan. Don Juan himself referred to his lineage as Seers. Seers are men and women of knowledge, who, through their unbending intent and ability to achieve inner silence, are capable of seeing energy as it flows in the universe.

The intent of don Juan and the seers of his lineage is total freedom, freedom to perceive, explore and live in infinity as energetic beings. These seers have no interest in malevolence or power over others. They view those kinds of practices as a fateful waste of energy, energy fixated on self-importance. These seers contend that total freedom requires impeccability and the purest of intent. To claim our full power as energetic beings requires utter sobriety, humility, and balance.

As a young boy, I inadvertently experienced myself as an energetic being when I used intent, through prayer, to have a direct experience of God. This experience was so shattering that I barely escaped total disintegration. There were no religious guidelines for this experience. Once I opened that door to experiencing myself as energy I could not control it, and I was terrified for years by its unexpected visits. I gradually devised ways to survive the onslaughts, but never felt comfortable.

I know, today, that I was led to Carlos Castaneda’s world as a teenager because the seers of don Juan’s lineage had amassed a comprehensive set of practices, through thousands of years of experience, to comfortably manage living as energetic beings, the possible but mostly unexplored essence of our beings, and this was what I needed.

Exploring our energetic essence is, for me, our true evolutionary potential. The world we live in, of solid objects, is in peril because of human being’s fixation upon self-importance with the resulting dominance of greed. Opening to our energetic potential requires a total revamping of our energy, first and foremost a total release of self-importance. The use of petty tyrants in the practice of detachment is a method the seers developed to aid in this process. In the practice of recapitulation we are led to energetic wholeness as we lift the veils and face our inner truth in its entirety, recapturing our dispersed energy. This practice does not allow us to hold on to illusions that result in a life of self-importance and greed.

What I see happening in the world of finance, politics, and religion, under the guise of solution, is actually malevolent sorcery practices, new permutations of greed; new trickery to exploit and gain power over others. Centuries ago, the seers of don Juan’s lineage exposed the limitations of those practices. Their practices have the true intent of total liberation from self-importance and the conjuring illusions, the current fixations, of our world. The survival of our fragile world is wholly dependent upon our evolutionary advance into a world of energy.

To avoid any confusion, to allay any fears, in my future writing I will refer to Carlos Castaneda and the teachers of don Juan’s lineage as seers, whose intent is total freedom, whose gift is knowledge on how to achieve it. But, all must discover this for themselves. Freedom is not an entitlement; it must be earned. It is not about faith. It is not about belief. It is about experience!

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

NOTE: Words in italics refer to terms coined by the seers of don Juan’s lineage.

Chuck's Blog

#681 Chuck’s Place: Must be the Season of the Witch

Leave a comment

This week, I was drawn to pick up my least favorite of Carlos Castaneda’s works, The Second Ring of Power. In retrospect, I now know why. I had had the audacity to write about the knowing of the womb last week and the witches came to repay the favor.

When I first read that book, thirty plus years ago, I hated it. I was horrified and confused by Carlos’s lethal encounters with the witches. These were encounters with women who had lost, or were losing, their human form and were capable of anything. When one loses the human form one becomes an energetic being untethered by human roles or conditioning.

The condition of my copy of The Second Ring of Power is decrepit, an old hard cover, still with its original jacket, but with a broken binding, whole chapters falling out, brittle pages that peel off as they are turned. I thought: Well, this is a perfect not-doing. As opposed to the normal pattern of reading a book by turning its pages and holding it together, as I read each page, I peeled it off and placed it in a separate pile.

At some point in the week, I was pulled to put on another of my wedding rings. I stared into a small dish of jewelry on the dresser and selected a ring. In keeping with the practice of not-doing, I placed the ring on the wrong finger on the wrong hand; my wedding ring with Jan snuggling up with my wedding ring with Jeanne. It never dawned on me that I was inviting in the energy of the second ring of power!

In The Second Ring of Power Carlos describes the winds of the four directions and how all female sorcerers draw power from the winds of one of these directions. The winds were wicked this week. Several times they blew open the consulting room door at the office. Sudden wild winds of tornado like intensity appeared out of nowhere, knocking out power lines and just as suddenly shifting back to utter calm.

As abrupt as a sudden wind, Jan and I had a forceful exchange. In an instant, the human form of our relationship dissolved. Reactions shot forth out of both of us like lightning bolts, completely unexpected and totally out of character. Our discussion was around our children. In The Second Ring of Power, the witches speak of completeness, for a sorcerer, as requiring the retrieval of their edge, their energy lost to the children they had borne. In fact, on an energetic level, these sorcerers see those children as their mortal enemies.

For years, I have known and written about the need for all to detach, to break the energetic bindings of the archetypal roles of the human form with its holy days of family obligation, specifically in Your Family is Not Your Family. I notice that I write today’s essay on the eve of the holiest of holies, Mother’s Day. This was completely unintentional. It’s either a synchronicity or the witch’s sense of humor. Ultimately, mothers, fathers, and children need to be freed of the energetic bindings of these human form roles, if they are ever to gather in their energy to individuate or become energetically complete.

Jan and I exchanged verbal blows, confronting each other around these energetic entanglements with our children. The power of these archetypal roles runs deep. As we each held our ground something else took over. Neither of us was prepared for what came through us; it was the energy of the witches, carried on the winds, blowing us out of the human form. This was a decisive shift. We became beings unrecognizable to each other. At the same time we each landed in a very personally familiar place of energetic calm and clarity, utterly detached. We shifted into a formless state without definition or attachment to any roles. For a good twenty-four hours we shifted out of the human form of our marriage with its own set of deep energetic entrapments. We became two warriors, solitary beings, well aware of each other’s power and utter willingness to deliver a lethal blow to the other’s desperate clinging to the human form. Synchronistically, this happened on the day Jan wrote her blog about guidance she had received from the witches of don Juan’s line in her dreaming.

The winds have subsided now. We have “safely processed” our experience. Rationality is restored. Our energy has receded back into the forms of contented husband and wife. We joke about it; we enjoy it, our experience of the human form and our shift beyond it. Neither of us has any illusions about our true formlessness and our ruthless intent upon energetic completion. Archetypal roles provide structure for human completion, but if we cling too tightly we invite the wicked winds of the season of the witch.

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

NOTE: We have nervously added The Second Ring of Power to our STORE under Shamanism. Watch out when you open this book! The witches will come to get you too! Also, listen to Vanilla Fudge sing Season of the Witch, my favorite version.

Chuck's Blog

#679 Chuck’s Place: The Womb in the Age of Reason

Leave a comment

The primary function of the womb is reproduction: the production and continuation of the life of our species. Shamans maintain that the womb has a secondary function, rarely accessed, as the epicenter of evolution. For shamans, evolution is a function of intent and the ability to perceive and interpret energy in new ways.

Shamans call the womb a “perceiving box,” capable of perceiving and interpreting energy as direct knowledge, completely independent of the cogitations of the mind. This is not a rational process, but a living, irrational process, like life and nature itself.

Shamans claim that women’s access to direct knowledge is unparalleled. In fact, it happens so easily that women take it for granted or simply dismiss it. In contrast, men, lacking a womb, must work very hard to gain access to direct knowledge and highly prize that achievement. For shamans, this is the advantage men have over women; since they work so hard for it, they don’t dismiss it. When this topic was touched upon at a Tensegrity workshop I had attended, the question arose as to the fate of women who no longer had their wombs due to hysterectomies. We were assured that the womb center was fully present in the energy body, regardless of changes in the physical body. Perhaps the major reason women dismiss their access to direct knowledge is reason itself, the reigning fixation of awareness in the modern world.

Women, like men, are socialized to cultivate the mind by mastering rationality. The ability to understand and explain life in rational terms is deemed a measure of intelligence and is a core component of self-esteem. Simply knowing, without knowing why one knows what one knows, without being able to establish a systematic rational building block of facts, in modern terms is deemed both laughable and primitive.

As we watch the nigredo of oil sweep across the Gulf of Mexico, what is it that we know? How much oil dumps into the Gulf each day; how the oil will be encircled and contained; how the leak will be capped; what the effects will be on the shrimp industry; how government and industry will work together to solve this regrettable miscalculation? What does the womb perceive? What does the womb know about life and where it is headed under the dominance of rationality in our modern world? Who will value what the womb knows?

In my clinical work as a psychotherapist I have often been struck by the knowing of the womb, as reported by women clients at different times in their monthly cycles. Of course, the regimentation and orderliness of the modern world has socialized women to devalue and override the stirrings and moods of the womb, though the knowing womb frequently overrides such repressive efforts by outbursts of irrationality. In my experience, the knowledge that can burst forth at these times, though exaggerated by the energetic process needed to overcome repressive efforts, frequently reveals truths that ultimately become major life changes, though they may take decades to realize.

For shamans, the future of our evolution rests in our ability to break the fixation of our awareness on a world of solid objects and a mind of reason. The ability to perceive energy in new ways frees our evolutionary potential. Yet, even in this world of solid objects, might we free ourselves of the dominance of the rational? As we observe now the destruction of life on our planet, as it is reasonably rationalized away in quantifiable, descriptive terms, masquerading as control and order, might it not be time to listen to the knowing of the womb, the bearer of life, the seat of evolution?

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

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

#677 Chuck’s Place: Losing the Human Form

2 Comments

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