Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences!

The shamans tell us we are born with all the energy we will have for this life. They claim that the quality of the energetic charge at our conception determines our energetic allotment. Laughingly, they claim that most of us were the product of a “bored fuck,” hence, our energy stores are quite limited. For these shamans, energy is everything: awareness, parting the veils, dreaming, journeying in infinity – all require energy. Those bent on achieving these feats in this life must become energy misers.

As energy misers we examine our habitual patterns, what Jeanne calls rituals this week, and determine which habits compromise our evolutionary imperative. This process is reflected in the chorus of Michael Jackson’s song, Man in the Mirror:

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change, yey
Na na na, na na na, na na na na oh ho

As we peer into the mirror we will discover, for instance, what relationships we engage in that spend our energy by upholding a familiar life, such as repetitive conversations, redundant stories which reaffirm who we are, who we have always been, and who we will always be. These comforts of familiarity disperse and bind our energy and squash new possibilities. The shamans go so far as to suggest that we erase our personal history in order to remove the energetic bind of expectations from familiar sources, which keeps us imprisoned in a known world. In a modern sense, this might mean breaking the mold of our own self definition by doing something new, alone, rather than repeat the known rituals of the self. On the other hand, we might discover a pattern of staunch independence where energy is spent refusing a practice or making a commitment. Beware of this compromise of energy as well. Look carefully in that mirror, as you might discover a hidden puer or puella who refuses to engage in the adult world.

Taking an honest inventory of habits and behaviors of everyday life is another means of identifying energy drains. These can include items of worry, incessant judgements of self and others, or unnecessary doings, i.e.: staying busy or always being available to others. We may discover that many of our habitual patterns or choices are not necessary and are, in fact, a means to keep us distracted from deeper truths. This leads into recapitulation where we have the opportunity to recondition old energy, dispersed and attached to fragments of our past. As we relive our past we reclaim energy that has remained frozen there, a part of the self that is unresolved. The ability to relive the past allows its dilemmas to be put to rest, whereby freeing the energy that was caught. This then gets added to our energetic stash, available for use in a new way.

As we retrieve our energy, both through recapitulation and retiring energy draining rituals, our energy revitalizes and becomes available for true adventure.

I welcome your comments. Should anyone wish to write, I can be reached at: chuck@riverwalkerpress.com

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences!

They left together this week, Charlie’s Angel, Farrah Fawcett and the musical icon, Michael Jackson, embarking upon the next phase of their definitive journeys. Farrah fought so diligently with determination and focus to hold onto life in her body. Michael, the boy/man, the archetype of eternal youth, himself sought rebirth in this world as he, just as diligently, prepared to launch his own comeback. Death chose to take them on the same day. So, Death, what is the meaning of this synchronicity? What is it you want us to see?

With Farrah, we see the best of ego-intent to preserve life in this world. With Michael, we see the best of drinking from the fountain of youth, refusing all agreements with aging. In the end, death teaches that, however noble the strategy of transcendence, we must relinquish our grasp upon our solid form and transform into sheer energy.

The shamans, like the Buddhists, keep this moment of inevitable transformation central to their everyday lives. Each day they state: I am a being who is going to die. They live their lives impeccably, with the awareness that each act in this world may be their last. Hence, they engage each moment, fully present and unattached. They practice their journeys in infinity while in this world, honing their awareness for their definitive transformation into energy at the moment of their death.

These journeys in infinity are available to us all. All they require is that we continually break our leases with the myths that house us. The core myth, of course, is that we will live forever in our solid form. That was death’s gift this past Thursday when it snatched Farrah and Michael from our midst. For a moment the entire world stopped, even AOL. We were treated to a moment of truth. The ultimate myth buster, death, does indeed take all.

In that moment, when the myth was shattered, we glimpsed our own mortality, as beings on our way to dying. We were all Michael underneath a white sheet, being delivered into a simple ambulance, on our way to the morgue. Death offered us a moment of clarity, detachment, love, and excitement at the possibility of being with true angels and eternal youth, as energy bodies, in the playground of infinity.

I welcome your comments. Should anyone wish to write, I can be reached at: chuck@riverwalkerpress.com

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Today, Chuck’s Place is graced by a guest improviser, Jan Ketchel, who will take us out of the familiar cognitive system we use to discuss and share knowledge and ideas, into the world of inner silence and direct knowledge.

Inner silence, according to don Juan, is an evolutionary possibility available to us all through which we can access direct knowledge. Direct knowledge is a unique form of knowing, which arises from a faculty completely independent of the brain and its cerebral processes. In order to reach inner silence, with its companion, direct knowledge, we must arrive at a place where we can shut down our incessant internal dialogue, which is the constant companion of our cerebral construction of the world.

The shamans of ancient Mexico maintained that every individual has a unique threshold of accrued moments of silence that must be reached before they automatically and unexpectedly stop the world of ordinary perception and cognitive functioning and, instead, see energy directly, as it flows in the universe, from their energy body state. This is achieved in full waking awareness, and from this perceptive position direct knowledge becomes accessible.

This notion of accruing moments of silence is very important. This means, literally, that every time we are able to stop the internal dialogue, even if but for a few seconds, these seconds are in the bank; they count toward reaching our individual threshold, whatever it might be, twenty seconds or two minutes. This notion of accruing time relieves us of the construct of failure based on, for instance, not achieving a successful meditation practice. Being able to shut down the internal dialogue for four seconds while walking down the street automatically accrues toward our individual threshold, regardless of the success or failure of our ongoing meditation effort. Break the attachment to that cognitive structure of success and failure. Hold, instead, the persistent intent of silencing the internal dialogue, through whatever practice or non-practice resonates or is presented in the moment; any opportunity to silence the mind.

Know that, at an unexpected moment, you will have reached your threshold and, suddenly, the world as you knew it will stop, and you will enter the world of energy and direct knowledge. Here is Jan’s example of entering inner silence and receiving direct knowledge, an energetic improvisation on reality:

I am at a family gathering, my mother’s eightieth birthday party. My sister has, for several years, taken on the tradition of writing a poem and reading it to celebrate the parents at their annual birthday events. I am in the living room, having been called there by my sister as she prepares to read. I am reluctant. I would rather stay in the other room than have to listen to another poem and experience yet another family event, a boring ritual, known and predictable. I am in the middle of my three-year recapitulation and I have been sorting through a whole host of personal issues and feelings, so this feels especially restrictive to me. I have been in the process of detaching and releasing the debris of many things. I want to refuse the repetition of a known world; I feel that I am being forced into a lifeless place that is no longer energetically engaging to me.

I pay attention to the first few lines as my sister begins to read her poem, but I refuse the familiar and resist being caught up in the communal reaction. I don’t want to be here. I stop my participation in that world. I am aware that the accolades are only half true, that underneath another meaning is true, when all of a sudden a shift occurs.

The floor at my feet suddenly becomes a river of energy, perhaps a foot or two deep of swirling, vibrant, flowing energy. My sister’s voice recedes; the laughter becomes muffled. I am so stunned I have to sit down. I sit on the step leading down into the sunken living room, my feet in the river, and watch the floor of energy. I become aware of my sister’s underlying thoughts and motives as she reads. I perceive my mother’s thoughts as she hears what is being presented to her. I see her hand pushing away the accolades, refusing them, and at the same time keeping the swirling river of energy down and away from her. I wonder: Can I hear what others are thinking? I slowly pan the room, going from one person to another, connecting to and receiving their thoughts. They just flow to me and I understand where everyone has gotten to, all these adult siblings, and how detached or attached to my mother they are at this point in their lives. I return my gaze to the river of energy at my feet, curious about it, perceiving everyone’s pain and sorrow pouring into it, flowing through the room, and my own dreamlike sense that we are all just energy and here it is lying at my feet, a thick river of it, a river of energetic perception. I want to stay here, remain open to it and hold onto it, aware. Suddenly, the reading is complete. I reluctantly let the energy go and come back to a familiar place. My brothers continue the festivities, singing songs for my mother, while I retreat to the kitchen to wash some dishes before I leave, wanting to retain as much of the experience as possible by detaching myself from the old recognizable process a little longer.

Jan and I welcome your comments. Should anyone wish to write, we can be reached via Chuck’s email at: chuck@riverwalkerpress.com

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences!

Shamans maintain that the world of everyday life, what they call ordinary reality, is but one infinitesimally small possibility of human experience. They suggest that the relativity of our perception is determined energetically by where our assemblage point, a ball of brilliance, is stationed in our energetic essence. A metaphor might be a gear wheel with a vast number of slots or options to lock into. The most common slot that humans utilize among their many options is the slot of ordinary reality. The advantage of most humans fixating on the same slot is the creation of a uniform world, a consensus reality.

When we say good night to ordinary reality and fall asleep, we automatically disengage our gear and spin the wheel, opening the door to experiencing different worlds/slots in dreaming. Dreaming allows us to more fully experience our potential. Sleep disorders often reflect terror at relinquishing our hold on the familiar world of ordinary reality and visiting others. If we hold back sleep too long other worlds come to claim us, intruding upon the world of ordinary reality and causing what is known, in the psychiatric world, as a psychotic break. Shamans utilize the natural fluidity of the assemblage point in dreaming to volitionally, and with full awareness, enter other worlds. This potential is available to all of us, by simply intending awareness in our dreams.

Shamans would likely conclude that what we experience as our spiritual drive is actually an inner push to fully realize who we really are. Locking into one slot of who we are creates an identity that reflects but a fragment of our true potential. That fixation of our awareness on one slot generates an energetic dam that may result in depression, which is spiritual boredom, addictive endeavors, which are haphazard shifts of the assemblage point, or illness, which also serves to shift the assemblage point. The point is that our spirit insists that we shift the assemblage point and experience, more fully, the truth of who we are.

In effect, we all operate with an automatic transmission. The spirit involuntarily shifts our gears for us, to keep us in balance or force us to discover our wholeness. The greatest protagonist to the spirit’s intent is the ego, which generally strives to keep us in first gear, ordinary reality. I propose that we put our ego to work, instead, at learning to drive a manual transmission, where we safely and volitionally learn to shift the gears of our human potential and fully realize who we are.

As always, I am open to discussion or comment. Should anyone wish to write, I can be reached via email at: chuck@riverwalkerpress.com

Until we meet again,
Chuck

Welcome to Chuck’s Place, where Chuck Ketchel expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences!

Carlos Castaneda opened the weeklong workshop series known as the Westwood Series, at UCLA in 1996, with the instruction, SUSPEND JUDGEMENT. He intended to introduce us to some core sorcery knowledge, but knew that the dominance of our minds needed to first soften to allow it in. His method to achieve this was to have us learn and perform sorcery movements called MAGICAL PASSES, which enabled us to gather the energy needed to receive his knowledge. Judgement, he contended, was the guardian of our worldview, however limiting or illusory. In order to see and experience more we must first suspend judgement.

Jeanne has suggested, many times, that we be careful to never be harsh with the self. Harshness is the action of a judgement, which views the self, in some way, as a failure. She suggests that we view, instead, all our decisions and actions as necessary and as part of our path of gaining knowledge. Rather than berate the self for the repetition of an ancient “negative” behavior, ask the self what it means. Why have I journeyed here again? What is it that I need to learn? Am I ready to retire these actions or thoughts, or must I remain a while longer? This line of questioning is gentle and objective; it allows the self to be fluid. It allows the self to discover its secrets. It allows the self to gather in old energy, tucked away in old experiences, waiting to be liberated and returned to the self to allow for a new direction.

When we look outward into the world, our judgements categorize every one and every thing. These categories generate clarity and determine how we navigate. The value of such an interpretation system cannot be overestimated, as it generates a cohesive world for us to solidly live and die in. However, our judgements are hardly objective. Much of what we “see” is, in fact, the projection of archetypal determinants, or reflections of our own psychic economy. If I haven’t discovered the depth of my own shadow, I am surely subject to dark paranoid projections upon the people of the world around me. How can I ever discover the true nature of the world if I remain encased in my own subjective bubble? Suspending judgement outwardly requires the same curiosity as the inward view. Why do I feel this way toward him/her? What happens if I suspend the automatic categorization; if I continue to observe; if I allow myself further investigation? Perhaps I will discover something very different than I initially assumed.

Buddha’s emphasis on compassion can be helpful here. Compassion erases the category of otherness. True compassion requires the ability to own the fullness of the self, no discarded parts projected outwardly. Removing the veil of separateness in our experience of the world opens the door to deeper exploration and connection. We may choose not to go deeper with another, but we can do it from a place of energetic objectivity, i.e.: this relationship doesn’t serve my energetic evolution or, I no longer need this energetic encounter because I have discovered all I need to learn. This kind of decision making is a far cry from any judgement of superiority or difference, which subjectively keeps us entrenched in the veil of our illusion of who we really are.

Learning to suspend judgement is, by far, the most powerful tool to pry apart the old veils, advancing us into deeper truth, and worlds beyond the known.

As always, I am open to discussion or comment. Should anyone wish to write, I can be reached via email at: chuck@riverwalkerpress.com

Until we meet again,
Chuck