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: Our Promethean Debt

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The power of One…
-Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

Prometheus stole fire from the gods, delivering to humanity the gift of consciousness and the ability to chart its own course. For his transgression, Zeus condemned Prometheus to eternal torment. Human beings must also suffer nature’s torments, as she evens the score for transgressions to nature, within and without.

At the deepest transpersonal dimension of our psyche we all share the same roots and laws that govern our being. These are the instincts and archetypes of the collective unconscious. When the decisions we make deviate too widely from those archetypal roots, our Promethean debt must be paid and, as Jung put it, “from time to time with hideous consequences.”*

This is the usual course of human history with its eternal torment of wars. Outwardly, the conservative laws of the instincts are diametrically opposed to the decisions and directions of detached consciousness. Instinct and reason are fighting for supremacy. The lines are drawn, with no interest in reconciliation.

Inwardly, the consequences of one-sided attitudes are the torments of restlessness, anxiety, terror, and depression. Resolution of these painful states is to be found on the path of individuation, where we reconcile and live the fullness of our wholeness. To travel this path brings benefit, both within and without. It takes but one rainmaker to bring rain to an entire village. As within, so without.

Every one of us is a fragment of the same hologram. Though outwardly we appear unique, at the transpersonal, quantum level of our being we are all all that is. Look no further than yourself to confront the same dynamics being played out, at this very moment, upon the world stage.

Individuation requires that we suffer the opposites of our wholeness. All beings are actually bipolar beings. Wholeness cannot be found in one-sided dissociation. We must suffer full ownership of our shadow, all the parts of us that we reject or simply don’t know about.

It is not enough for consciousness to shine its light into the darkness, it must accept and bring into life all of itself. Sometimes, for example, you must speak the truth, however painful the consequences. As a result, a rejected part of the psyche that had turned aggressive might feel reconciled with consciousness for its willingness to take such heartfelt action.

Those deep truths, though they may appear transactional, and require outer action, actually originate within the interplay of dynamics within the self. Outer truths merely mirror inner facts. Be sure to always bring it home, not leaving a projected part of the self in the person and behavior of an other. Take full responsibility for owning, suffering the torments of, and living your wholeness.

We, each individual, are the world. Every character upon the world stage is within us. The energetics without are the energetics within.

The playing field for our Promethean debt is the structure and dynamics of our inner world. Find the balance within; advance the world without.

In so doing, perhaps the usual course of history might be averted. Grab the opportunity to truly make a difference.

Going for it,
Chuck

*Essays On A Science Of Mythology, C. G. Jung and C. Kerenyi, p. 82.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Squeezed In The Time Of No Exit

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Eventually we exit, we birth…
-Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

Earth is birthing. Humanity is birthing. The human psyche is birthing.

At the current stage of the birthing process contractions have begun; we are in active labor. The fetus is tightly encased in the birth canal, with no possibility of exit, as the cervix has yet to dilate enough to enable the birthing journey into the light of this world. Stan Grof has named this stage of the birth process Basic Perinatal Matrix II (BPM II).

Nature’s hurricanes, massive flooding, erupting volcanoes and earthquakes, and worldwide conflagrations are all part of Earth’s contractions, closing in upon all life on the planet. Gaia is rebirthing herself into a new configuration of life, which is currently sealed in, like a fetus, in her alchemical pressure cooker of a womb, planet Earth itself.

Humanity finds itself squeezed by drought, tidal wave and famine, as it migrates, seeking safety and new life. Borders are closing. Nationalistic impulses are squeezing in upon sovereign nations, as greed and violence expand, seeking to stave off the stage of no exit.

Political heroes have emerged who promise to restore a former paradisal time of Shangri-La in the midst of this time of no exit. These so-called saviors intend to ignore, defy, or totally control the feminine. The entire world awaits the outcome of the American Election Day to determine how humanity will choose to position itself in the midst of this active labor.

Within the psyche, the ego finds itself squeezed by anxiety, terror, hopelessness and helplessness, as totalitarian archetypes threaten possession from within. Conversely, many people experience religious ecstasy and fervor, as they bathe in numinous identification with the masculine gods of war, certain to fully rein in and control the feminine birth process, within and without.

The fragility of ego muscle, no matter how well armed and defiant, is no match for nature’s current squeeze upon human emotion. The random violence of our time is ego’s impotent attempt to forestall the birth of a radically new world. What then is the correct attitude for ego to assume in this time of no exit?

Ego must face its pending death and rebirth, the story of all new life in this world. Our first breath in this world is also the death of our former life as aquatic beings, who were passively fed oxygen and nutrients in our symbiotic life as one with mother. The end of life in paradisal union with another requires letting go of hoarding our former material security, as we must meet the demands of changed conditions.

In the time of no exit it is possible to get calm. If we can’t escape the claustrophobic squeezing of ego by tumultuous emotions, ego still retains its existential ability to choose the attitude it will take toward the inevitable. Ego can breathe, however constrictedly, and instruct every cell of the body to go calm.

Just as ego knows that the numinous experience of body orgasm will result, if it can calmly let go of resistance to the higher power of instinct, ego can cognitively know that there is light at the end of the tunnel, as it lets go to the inevitable birthing of new life. And what does that new life look like?

Glimpses of new life are evident in the current psychedelic trials that activate the healing forces of the transpersonal dimension of the psyche. During psychedelic experiences, many individual’s hearts are opened by their recapitulation journeys through old traumas, with the resulting inner experience of total love and acceptance.

Others encounter past lives, ancestral trauma, and spirit encounters that break down old ideas and neutralize emotional intensities, while they simultaneously experience their death and rebirth into a broader, interconnected knowing of life.

I am neutral with regard to the coming renaissance of psychedelics as facilitators of healing and rebirth. Carlos Castaneda, mistakingly identified as the father of psychedelics and the New Age, was adamantly averse to their use.

Personally, I know that the mere invoking of intent is all that is needed to reach the holotropic powers of the transpersonal psyche that both break down and refurbish the ego with broadened and truthfully driven agency.

Know that the time of no exit is transitory. No matter how tight the squeeze, the opening will eventually appear.

Be patient, be calm, beware the false prophets and redeemers. Trust your innate ability to find the true light.

Taking the journey,
Chuck 

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Chuck’s Place: The Way Of The Mandala

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The Way…
-Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

The appearance of a penny on the street in a dream is a healing trail marker. Follow that coin! A four-sided rectangle, a box, or simply the number four showing up in waking life, or dream, may be another communication from our High Soul that we are involved with something that furthers our intrinsic unfolding of Self.

The circle and the square, separate or in combination, form a mandala,  the archetype of wholeness. Our individual mandala blueprint, at the core of our Soul, attracts to us the raw material circumstances and relationships needed to fully realize our wholeness in this life. The mandala archetype is the central organizing archetype for all life.

Jung pointed out that the primary atom for all organic life is carbon, whose outermost ring has a valence of four electrons that form the chemical bonds to create the basic building materials of life. Thus, at the material level of existence, the mandala is the central organizing blue print for physical life.

Our inner mandala, operating at the spiritual dimension of our life, accentuates activities we are engaged in, with synchronicities or images of mandalas, as suggested in the dream images mentioned above, when we are heading in the right direction or when we need a course correction in our decisions and behaviors.

Sometimes a broken, messy, round public toilet of a mandala appears in a dream. In this case, we are shown that our path to wholeness requires that we face that which we seek to flush away and be rid of. Our mandala of wholeness forces us to face that which humiliates us, as it refuses to allow us the release of repression. The mandala will insist that we claim and own all of our wholeness, regardless of how bad it smells!

The precursor to the number four, on the number line, is three, which, as a geometric image, forms a triangle. A triangle has integrity but is a volatile energetic force of change, like the Bermuda Triangle.

In the shamanic lineage of Carlos Castaneda, the leader, or Nagual, was always a human being with four energetic compartments, until Carlos came along. Though he was pointed out as the next Nagual, he had only three energetic compartments, foreshadowing the coming of great change for his shamanic line.

In fact, Carlos ended his shamanic line’s traditional transmission of knowledge to simply a new generation of selected leaders and apprentices. Instead, he unwrapped the secret, sacred technologies of his lineage and freely offered them to anyone interested in learning them. In Carlos’ new world, everyone needs to become their own personal shaman, taking the soul retrieval journey of their lifetime.

Carlos correctly read the energy of the need for total transparency as our evolutionary destiny. The days of the witch hunt and the need to hide shamanic knowledge from the Conquistadores has ended. The modern era needs all the sacred knowledge of yesteryear to correctly navigate the profound changes of our time.

Carlos’ decision allowed me access to the practice of recapitulation, with its ancient shamanic roots, as a complement to the use of EMDR in modern psychotherapy in the treatment of PTSD. Carlos, with his energetic configuration of three, freed ancient shamanic wisdom, allowing it to find new manifestations in the healing of our world.

The number three seeks its mandalic completion. The Christian male God triangle of Father, Son and Holy Spirit points to the need for Mary, as Goddess, to square its mandala. The struggle to achieve this configuration, in many spheres, is the story of our time.

The Catholic Feast of the Assumption never granted Mary true Godly status. The best it could do was offer Mary continued existence in physical form in heaven. The masculine gods of our time continue to devalue, control and exploit the feminine.

The feminine, in the energetic manifestation of the energies of Kali and Isis, are agents of change, using nature and climate change to point humanity toward squaring the mandala, with the inclusion of the feminine principles of relatedness and interconnectedness, to restore order and balance to the world.

Masculine and feminine energies are present in all life. Jung called the feminine energetic compartment in men the anima and the masculine energetic compartment in women, the animus . As individuals, we are all tasked with squaring the mandalas within ourselves by integrating these primal masculine and feminine energies within our own psyches into fruitful evolution.

Women can be animus dominated and as devaluing of the feminine as abusive, controlling men. Men can be anima dominated, overwhelmed by moods and resentments that dominate impulsive decisions.

All people are charged to follow the way of the mandala now, as it seeks resolution, inwardly and outwardly, in true integrated wholeness.

Tracking the Mandala,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Earth’s Holotropic Emergence

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Emergence is healing…
-Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

The term holotropic was coined by Stan Grof to depict the energetic movement toward wholeness, which is active at the transpersonal dimension of the human psyche.

Stan and Christina Grof chose the term Spiritual Emergency to describe the impact of  those holotropic energies upon our lives when we are in deep personal crisis. Emergence and emergency share the same Latin root, emergere, meaning bring to light, the cornerstone of healing.

Planet Earth’s present crises are, at their core, manifestations of holotropic emergence. Confusing are the primordial mother goddess Kali’s destructive winds and fits of irrational tantrums as agents of healing, but the illusions that have governed us inwardly and outwardly must be brought to light before the seeds of truth and needed change can be planted and bear fruit.

Inwardly, we must contend with the governance of ego soul, which is shaped by the values of materialistic achievement, dominance, and world view. Reason and powerful defense are its primary preoccupations.

The truths of ego soul’s disavowed wholeness, housed in the depths of the transpersonal unconscious and physical body, generate disease and chaos to shatter the repressive grip of misaligned ego soul. This is Spiritual Emergency breaking down ego soul’s delusions.

How often our dominating materialistic perspective finds us in the emergency room or under the psychiatrist’s medicating wand, as we misread the symptoms of true emergence, asking to bring truths into the light. Of course, we must always address impacts made upon the physical body and material reality, but all crises should also be considered to be the action of holotropic emergence, replete with its healing intent.

Outwardly we are dancing with apocalypse, truly playing Russian Roulette. The thrill of this vicarious brush with absolute power is both addictive and fated to be lived out. Ego soul must test its limits. Inflatedly delusional leaders, who entrance us with their dares, are the actors chosen for this ultimate showdown.

However, we must all assume responsibility as energetic players in this collective drama. We must own the authoritarian dominance of the ego soul, to the detriment of discovering and living our wholeness, as well as our materialistic bias that justifies and maintains the mismanagement of our bodies and the Earth. Through owning and reconciling with our blind spots and disavowed shadows, we are freed to open up to real love.

Reaching the place of real love is the true intent of Earth’s current spiritual emergence. However, to arrive at love, we must experience its fatal blows, as it prepares us to receive it. Mother Nature is rapidly destroying the bounty of her food and shelter. She triggers our reaction of denial and greed, which she meets with even greater conflagration.

Her true motive is to provide us the sobering experience we need to humble our inflated ego souls and align with the greater truth of our interdependent oneness. We must freely choose to come together, and not destroy ourselves. Guides, helpers and saviors cannot rescue us; ego must truly grow up to the truth. Love is a verb that requires maturity to become active.

From the true home of our holographic oneness every individual impacts and is a voting member of our world drama. Every decision and action in our individual lives, particularly the owning and reckoning with our personal shadow selves, is a vote for real love, the next stage of Earth’s spiritual emergence.

May we reach the critical mass needed to advance to love, as we  journey through nature’s pitiless onslaughts, plowing the fields for love’s planting and bearing of fruit.

Remain positive in the knowing that meeting one’s own spiritual emergence with open arms advances our continued collective dream of life on Mother Earth.

Emerging,
Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Perfection Is Wholeness

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Find wholeness in all things…
-Illustration © 2022 Jan Ketchel

Perfection is wholeness. Wholeness is the four-sided mandala: 4 directions, 4 seasons, 4 stages of life, etc. Winter is pregnancy. Spring is birth. Summer is fulfillment. Fall is death.

The decay of Fall provides the seeds and nourishment for new life, as the life cycle completes itself and begins anew. Nature teaches, in this most basic way, that life feeds upon life. The shamans of ancient Mexico called our world a predatory universe, not as a judgment but as nature’s destructive truth.

Evil is branded the demon, and it may present as such, but it is a necessary part of the life cycle, a fundamental part of our wholeness. Archetypes are the primal patterns that generate the life cycle. Archetypes populate the deepest level of the human unconscious, what Jung called the collective unconscious.

Joseph Campbell realized that in world mythology, which personifies the  organizing influence of the archetypes upon human behavior, the hero archetype has a thousand faces. Local cultures thus dress the core archetypes in local clothing and masks, but beneath the surface all the different variations can be reduced to the same universal archetypes.

Despite the culture or religion, the hero is always sacrificed, changes form, and is born again into new life. Once again, nature’s fallen resurrects in the new life of Spring.

Archetypes insist on being propitiated. We must appease their energetic imperatives or suffer the agonizing consequences of their wrath.  For example, depression is often the withdrawal of life energy by a neglected archetype. If we refuse a rite of Spring, like Daphne our life might harden into a frozen tree.

Modern humanity has forgotten its natural roots. The animal has been confined to the darkness of the basement, in the area of the psyche Jung called the shadow. While humanity luxuriates in its advanced technology, the animal in the shadow plans its escape into life. Here’s how Jung described the ravaged animal’s escape in Nazi Germany:

“Like the rest of the world, [the Germans] did not understand wherein Hitler‘s significance lay, that he symbolized something in every individual. He was the most prodigious personification of all human inferiorities. He was an utterly incapable, unadapted, irresponsible, psychopathic personality, full of empty, infantile fantasies, but cursed with the keen intuition of a rat or a guttersnipe. He represented the shadow, the inferior part of everybody‘s personality, in an overwhelming degree, and this was another reason why they fell for him.” *

Projection of one’s disowned self onto a political leader renders one the sacrificial victim of a wrathful archetype. Victimhood is experienced as both the ecstasy of the entranced and the rage and hate of the rationally disenchanted. In both cases one is drawn into emotional bondage by the archetype.

In either case, the truly disenfranchised is both the personal and collective shadow, the neglected animal and the natural world, the Earth. This is a universal collective problem for humankind, not simply an issue of polarization.

The archetype of the shadow is just that, that which lives in the darkness.  This is both the truth of our disowned lives, as well as the archetype of our unlived wholeness. To propitiate the shadow, we must bring the light of our consciousness into the darkness and discover the fullness of who we are.

In waking life, our journeys into darkness require us to own and release the intensity of our emotions in a safe place. Beyond release is the full knowing and acceptance of all we have done, light and dark. Finally, the darkness will reveal the changes we must make to align ourselves with our wholeness.

If we can suffer the Fall, reveling in its final colorful act, and have the patience of a pregnant Winter, new life will surely arrive, to be nourished in the Spring and brought to fulfillment in Summer, as the life cycle perfects its wholeness.

Seeking perfection,
Chuck

*Jung, C. G. (1946). Fight with the Shadow. In The Collected Works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 10). Princeton: Princeton University Press.