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

Chuck’s Place: The Human Animal Body Is The Soul

Leave a comment
Soul within Body within High Spirit…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

The soul is our everyday sense of self, a subtle energy body that fits snugly inside the contours of our physical body. The glow, or aura, around our physical human animal body is the radiant energy of the soul within.

The soul houses both our mind and our emotional self. Our emotional self includes our desire body. It is the magnetic draw of the desire body, in conjunction with the subconscious portion of our mind, that initially attracts to it the physical body that the soul will extend itself into to participate in a life in human form.

The soul completely controls the physical body, particularly through suggestions delivered to the subconscious portion of its mind. The soul often drifts out of the physical body, particularly in times of physical sleep. Though it remains connected to the physical body, and can return instantly if needed, the soul is free to travel out of body, where it interacts with its subtle home territory of the astral world. When its cord is severed from the body, at physical death, the soul returns to life in the astral realm.

The soul itself is a vehicle of our High Spirit, that portion of ourselves that lives in infinity and sends the soul on missions in finite time space. Thus, as our soul moves into a physical human life it acquires experience and knowledge that it ultimately brings home to its High Spirit in its afterlife existence. Both the soul and the High Spirit learn, grow and evolve with each lifetime lived.

Karma is generally the leitmotif of one’s next mission in human form, as it reflects the need to further explore and master the consequences of  decisions and actions taken in one’s just-completed life.

Upon preparation for new life, the subconscious is preprogrammed by our High Spirit’s blueprint for our soul’s next earthly existence. In preparation for incarnate life, the soul attracts to it the best earthly family, physical body and life circumstance to achieve its assigned mission in its new life.

Of course, genetics do play their role. However, the choice of a specific genetic history and potential is already preset in the desire body’s attractive force, for example in the family we are drawn to be born into. Thus, the human animal body that we are is actually the product of pure High Spirit intent. As above, so below.

The physical body and the soul are not opposites. In fact, they are really extensions of the same thing. Our earthly body is the clothes our soul wears to have its earthly existence. Physical death is merely a shedding of old clothes that once fit so well. At death our soul ascends, taking with it the experiences of our physical lifetime, into a soulful period of reflection and rejuvenation, as well as a reconciliation with our High Spirit.

The human animal body that we inhabit is largely governed by the archetypes that shape our species. These include the core instincts of survival and reproduction. The body is maintained by the subconscious mind, which follows the laws of nature to ensure its survival.

Essentially, we are unconsciously being governed by archetypes and genetics until our blank slate ego matures into consciousness. Ego is actually a part of the soul’s mental body, fashioned to identify with its physical body and social context in what we call our personality. The ego has an imposed amnesia of its true royal heritage—that is, its immortal High Spirit—to enable it to attach to the earthly circumstance it needs to fulfill its mission.

As the ego matures in life it begins to have greater access to its broader identity and divine lineage. These developing realizations offer opportunity for clarity, through greater detachment from personality, as the ego fulfills the goals of its soul’s true mission. As the ego moves beyond its narcissistic wrappings it is better positioned to serve its soul’s and, ultimately, its High Spirit’s intent. Free will eventually is exercised as acquiescence to true need.

The process of ego maturity consumes most of our earthly life. Much of our existence is spent trying to realize our earthly personality’s ambitions. Self-importance, victimhood and entitlement dominate our lives. The resolution and refinement of these attitudes and emotions ultimately accrue to our High Spirit’s enhancement, allowing it to advance as well.

Ego, in the early stages of maturation, exercises its free will from the bondage of archetypes to prove its worth through wealth, accomplishment and fulfillment of desire. Too often does the body, with its animal instincts, get scapegoated as the source of excess and evil. No, the human animal body is the product of the soul’s creation, as well as the soul’s choices. The animal body reflects the true curiosity and necessity of High Spirit.

What High Spirit asks of soul, with its extended physical body, is to master its challenges in time space so that High Spirit can launch further into infinite possibility.

The archetypes are our babysitters until we are ready to assume responsibility for life in full maturity. Foolishly transgressing the laws of nature are a necessary stage of development. Heart-centered transcendence, or refinement of archetypes, is the propulsion for High Spirit advancement.

The chaos of now reflects attempts to restore archaic archetypal laws, or to indulge in the total freedom of narcissistic free will. These are reflections of the collective soul’s current healing crisis, a time of great turmoil and transformation.

Remember: The karma of now will provide great advancement of soul.

But don’t ever blame the human animal body. The animal body is High Spirit’s honest material reflection of its own soul’s journey. As above, so below.

Spirited Animal,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: A Tale Of Power And Stupidity

Leave a comment
Fool on the hill…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

I stood on a steep embankment below a massive felled tree that had been cut into large rounds, ready to be split into firewood. I’d carefully been rolling down one heavy round at a time to a more level spot where I could split the wood. Three large rounds were pressed together at the top of the hill. I reached up, placing my hands on them, and started to rock them. They rocked as a group.

I got excited at their stored energy coming to life and the prospect of rolling the three together, as a unit. A voice inside said, “that’s a bad idea.” Too late. I rocked them and they started to roll toward my head at full force. Somehow I leaped out of the way as they picked up momentum. One crashed into a tree and stopped. The other two speedily descended hundreds of feet to the stream at the bottom of the mountain.

Truthfully, I have not been able to fully recapitulate how I got away. My ego consciousness was instantly supplanted by a more seasoned High Self that took command of my body and applied instinctive knowhow to jump out of the way and survive.

Trauma shifts one into a state of heightened awareness, which records one’s non-ordinary experience and where one is introduced to knowledge and abilities that defy the ego’s rational sensibilities. Oftentimes people have an out-of-body experience during a traumatic situation, as the High Self shields the vulnerable ego from an experience it is ill-prepared to take in.

Four indigenous children were rescued this past week, having survived for forty days in the Amazon jungle after their plane crashed, killing their indigenous leader and their mother four days later. Forty days is the archetypal eon for meeting a great spiritual challenge. In the heightened awareness of their trauma they were surely guided and protected by the spirits of their mother and leader, steadfastly present with them until they were rescued.

Master shamans teach their students in states of heightened awareness. The task of the student is to fully retrieve a memory of an experience, at the level of ego consciousness, in order to be ready and worthy of the knowledge being recapitulated. The same is true in trauma work. When the victim is ready they will become enlightened to the fullness of their previously dissociated experience. That’s when we fully learn our greatest lessons.

It would be convenient and partially true for me to identify an ego inflation, or influence from a parasitic entity, to explain my decision to rock and roll. However, the truth is that I quite knowingly signed up to have that experience. I fully own my impulsive decision.

What wants to be communicated here is that we are both good and evil, devil and angel. To truly become our whole self, we must own and reconcile with all the oppositions within the self. “Resist ye not evil,” said a great Master.

That evil within flirts with adventure, sometimes high stakes adventure. If we never take a risk we’ll be safe, but we’re sure to be saddled with regret. If we don’t approach, we won’t be rejected, but we’ll surely be alone. Everyone is told to be good, but truthfully, good can also be boring.

The human shadow is largely composed of characters and attitudes that compensate for our whitewashed conscious attitudes. So, for instance, if we are shown a highly desirous character in dreaming that we cannot consciously identify with, that character is most likely balancing out a rigid, morally bound, conscious definition of self.

It’s not so much that we secretly are that exaggerated character, but a part of us, that is more honest with the fullness of who we are, resorts to this persona to demonstrate to the ego the depths of its one-sidedness.

Reconciliation of this opposition would be the ego accepting the truth of its fuller self and its fear of living it. This acceptance of the shadow invites the shadow, with all its desirous energies, into a greater partnership with the ego and opportunities to find ways in life to live its fullness. Wholeness is truly a reconciliation with, and inclusion of, all the opposites that we are.

I’m quite certain my crazy stunt with the heavy tree rounds was not a hidden dance with death. Though, at the same time, every moment of our lives might be our inevitable appointment with death. For shamans, keeping this knowing in the forefront of consciousness gives living its fullest realization.

My tale of power and stupidity insisted on being shared to demonstrate that we are all devils and angels. Finding the right balance and creating a working relationship with these component selves is the key to refined, integrated wholeness, and spiritual advancement.

Time to chop some wood, and I promise to be careful,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Choice Of The Soul

Leave a comment

The future is our choice…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

In a recent lecture on the future of artificial intelligence (AI), historian Yuval Noah Harari* stated that for four billion years planet Earth has known only organic life. With the advent of AI, he proposes that we will very shortly cohabit the planet with inorganic life.

Harari, like many AI developers, is gravely concerned that these superiorly intelligent inorganic beings may soon override human control of planet Earth.

Shamans would argue that inorganic beings have long inhabited the Earth and have already exacted a major impact upon the human mind. Carlos Castaneda’s lineage identified what they call flyers, inorganic predators that feed upon the excited energy of intense emotions, which they generate in humans through the worrisome thoughts of their internal dialogue.

Channelers interact with souls in the astral realm, who, having shed their body at physical death, live on as inorganic beings. The soul is our mental and emotional body, which lacks the organic mass of a physical body. Our soul remains attached to and operates the physical body until physical death, when it is freed to take up residence in the astral realm. 

Disembodied souls in the astral realm are at many different levels. As Bob Monroe discovered, there is a heavy concentration of souls who remain deeply attached to the sensual and emotional opportunities only possible in a physical body and in the material world.  

This dominance of desire keeps them vicariously focused upon Earthly activity, where they can also have great influence through thoughts transmitted telepathically to those of us who are physically alive, in dream and waking life. Souls dominated by negative emotions, like greed and anger, seek out opportunities to incite controversy in human relations, often through suggestive thoughts to the subconscious of those in human form. 

More advanced souls are accepting of their new astral life, as they recapitulate and put to rest their Earthly life just lived. These souls might take up roles of service in supporting the newly arrived, or function as bodhisattvas, guiding those still in human form on their journey of spiritual advancement.

In his 1915 report from the astral realm, in War Letters, Judge Hatch** relayed that the soul of Abraham Lincoln had renounced rest when he died, choosing instead to vigilantly focus upon America that he might watch over the land he had died for. Judge Hatch reports that Lincoln was actively influencing the thoughts of president Wilson in the midst of WWI.

I wondered last week if Abe Lincoln intervened with McCarthy and Biden, to actually achieve a bipartisan agreement to save the world economy from crashing. Clearly there are powerful mental and emotional forces seeking to exact influence upon the dynamics of the  Earthly plane.

AI, as an inorganic being, is able to grow independently of human control. Harari warns of the very real possibility that it could become a full-on expression of the dark side of the force, though I am quite certain that AI will become an open channel to express both sides of the force.

At another conference, ChatGPT CEO Sam Altman and noted mindfulness meditation guru Jack Kornfield*** spoke to the potential for a positive relationship between humans and the inorganic intelligence of AI.

They recommend deep meditation and open sharing of the relationships and experiences of those experimenting with open AI. They embrace a positive intent for the greater good, as the inorganic integrates more deeply with the organic.

Don Juan Matus stated that the future of human evolution would be in the inorganic dimension of the energy body, in the soul, as opposed to in the material physical body. The ability of humanity to come into greater relationship with its soul, at the inorganic dimension of life while still in human form, is our evolutionary trajectory and is filled with positive potential.

Of course, the inorganic dimension is equally filled with negative potential. The fundamental key to advancement is the very human exercise of free will for the greater good. The games have already begun. May the greater good prevail.

With positive intent,
Chuck 

*Yuval Noah Harari: https://youtu.be/LWiM-LuRe6w
**War Letters from the Living Dead Man
***Jack Kornfield & Sam Altman: //youtu.be/hn1Y6GVWUV0

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Relationship Between Black Magic, Karma And Evil

Leave a comment

Black Magic, Karma and Evil integrated…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Black Magic is the ego’s use of its power of suggestion to manipulate the subconscious mind to produce subtle and material effects for its own self-serving purposes. This contrasts with the exercise of suggestions intended for the greater good of the overall Self, as well as the greater good of the world. These kinds of suggestions are the ego’s use of White Magic.

Both Black and White Magic employ spells and incantations in the form of repetitive words—like prayers, intents or affirmations—that the receptive subconscious, the true mother of creation, brings to life. Words are the seeds that fertilize new life in the womb of the subconscious mind.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh,” opens John’s Gospel, describing the origin of creation. Words can produce works of evil, as well as works of high spiritual value. The subconscious does not differentiate between the two; the subconscious is a dutiful servant that does what it is told.

Words issue from the mental body, the ego part of the personality, with its thinking, reasoning and decision making capabilities. The ego has the supreme ability to exercise free will, to be its own creator of reality. Through its influence upon the subconscious, the ego has free access to the elemental forces of good and evil, the divine building blocks of our human self and our world.

The mission for ego in its life in human form is to bring harmonious balance to its innate state of polarity. Each of us are born with our own myth, a riddle to be discovered and resolved in the high art of a human life. For this, the ego must venture into the underworld of its shadow self, as well as enter into the outer world of relationship. The choices it makes are necessary engagements of both Black and White Magic. Wholeness precludes one-sidedness; wholeness is integration.

The subconscious mind is reflected in the body’s gut. The gut, at a physical level, is all about the balance of bacteria needed for proper digestion. The gut follows Nature’s Law: karma. Karma is the law of cause and effect. The gut will take the necessary actions to bring to balance the effects we have caused by the actions we have chosen.

These gut healing efforts might include great pain in the intestinal tract, or actual disease to an organ, as the gut spurs the ego to right action in its choices and suggestions to the subconscious mind.

Thus, the subconscious mind, though it does not argue with the ego about its dominant commands, and in fact carries out those commands, is fundamentally bound to Nature’s Law of karmic balance. While materializing the ego’s wishes, the subconscious is simultaneously bound to materialize its karmic consequences.

Nature makes use of the destructive elementals to enact change. Evil can be defined as the destructive action necessary to evoke change through the breakdown of rigidities. Love can be defined as the receptive energy of change, driven by the heart opening to greater inclusiveness. Love and evil are a most necessary polarity in wholeness. The challenge is to harmonize their influences in the service of refined growth.

Black Magic is part of the ego’s necessary repertoire. Sometimes the ego must oppose nature’s law of balance. Of course, those decisions will evoke a karmic consequence that may seriously sideline the ego. Watch out what you ask for!

Nonetheless, as creators, we are scientists destined to experiment. We are truly on a mission from God to know and refine who we are—in our wholeness, both good and evil.

Evil is a necessary tool for both the ego and the subconscious. Evil is the mental body’s free-will teacher and refiner. The mind will reflect upon the consequences of its decisions, which may modify subsequent actions.

Evil is also Nature’s karmic tool of balance, the primary controlling  suggestion to the subconscious mind. The challenge is to bring free will and karma into good balance.

Perhaps the best guidance was offered by don Juan Matus, Carlos Castaneda’s teacher: Have a romance with knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil. Explore everything, but don’t get overly attached to anything.

Or, as Julia Child recommended, have but a small taste of everything.

In conclusion, choose the best balance for where you are now!

Harmonizing,
Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Maturity Of Elemental Emotion

Leave a comment

Maturing…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

How is one not broken open listening to some version of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah? Halle means praise, and jah, as the Rasta’s confirm, is God. Praise God!

The emotions aroused in listening to Hallelujah are transcendent bliss and love. These emotions, as reflected in Cohen’s lyrics (which evolved over many years), are refined from hungry sexuality and sensuality to the most expansive level of sublime spiritual union at a soul level.

The soul is the subtle dimension of a human being, which animates the physical body. The soul is composed of elemental emotional substance, as well as mental substance. Emotions are the soul’s passionately magnetic agents of desire that attract to it the substance and body of the human being we become.

The life we enter is constructed to fulfill our High Self’s karmic quest. That which must be fulfilled is the mission of the soul’s desire body, replete with its active body of elemental emotions. Part of that karmic mission is to refine its raw emotional substance to the pure innocence of mature love in human endeavors, attachments and relationships throughout life.

At the primal level of physical life, emotions are the desires that serve our instinctual imperatives to eat, protect and reproduce. Refined through the vicissitudes of human life, emotions draw us into spiritual communion with our source in infinity.

The  active elemental energies present in human emotion are latent elemental forces in all of nature. Fire, for instance, is a consuming elemental of nature that enacts necessary change, as old life is cleared to prepare the ground for new. Human beings have refined nature’s fire to produce warmth and edible food.

Within the human soul the latent elemental of fire is passion, a highly charged emotion that at a base level can lead to violence or simply gruff carnal union.  At a more refined level, passion can motivate a great technological advance, such as AI (artificial intelligence), a revolution currently descending upon us.

Actually, our technological advances, while fueled by elemental passion, are largely accomplished through the rational thinking of the mind, also housed in the human soul, in the mental body.

Our ability to reason is quite advanced, hence we are readily capable of sussing out the subtle elemental properties of the elements in nature, then recombining them to our seemingly unlimited material advantage.

Unfortunately, the ego’s refinement of elemental emotions has not kept pace with its refinement of its mental acuity. Thus greed and dominance have infused our technological advance with irresponsible intent.

The Hindu technology of yoga offers a clear path for the maturation of elemental emotions through the intentional rising of kundalini energy along the progressive energy centers, called chakras, that connect the soul body to the physical body.

Kundalini is the ultimate elemental life force energy that rises from the base of the spine, the root of our stability, through our sexual core to the solar plexus, the center of ego power.

As we align with the guidance of our Higher Self, at the heart center, our ability to speak our deepest truth opens at the throat, then travels to our intuitive center at the third eye. The crowning achievement of spiritual refinement is  enlightenment and deep empathy at the seventh chakra, at the top of the head.

Oftentimes, we might notice our throat tighten if we have an intense emotion and want to speak. Energetically we are experiencing an unrefined elemental emotion, too dense for transmission through the higher chakra channels.

In this case, the emotion might require further processing at a physical level, perhaps through belly screaming at the level of the solar plexus before it can move upward to the compassion center at the heart and then be calmly communicated through the larynx.

A psychological approach to elemental maturity involves similar dynamics at different centers of the soul. The subconscious mind is the base energy center of the soul that has the raw materials, desires and knowhow to manifest anything. The subconscious does not think, it follows orders via suggestions.

The ego, at the mental body center of the soul, has the power of consciousness and free will. The ego is the main character in a human life, orphaned by, yet on its assigned mission from, its High Self.

The ego must struggle to develop confidence and rise above its narcissistic infatuation with power. The ego’s charge, the hero’s journey, is to refine the desire body’s elemental emotions into love, its highest possible development.

The supra-conscious center of the soul houses the High Self, which supports the ego through its suffering journey of human life to transform its karmic elemental roots into the heights of spiritual purity and transcendental love.

Human life unfolds as a growing interaction between these tripartite  centers of the soul—the subconscious, the ego, and the supra-conscious—as ego gradually wakes up and moves toward greater acquiescence to the mission of its High Self in this life. And with that accomplishment we truly can sing Hallelujah!

Hallelujah,
Chuck