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: Addiction to Human

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In Roman law, addiction was the term applied to restitution or punishment for a crime. The convicted criminal was addicted, or bound to servitude or slavery, to their master, the offended party in the criminal case.

Addiction to human (and self-importance too!)
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Spirit beings, who either choose or become trapped by a fascination with physical matter, become attracted to, attached to, and bound to, or, as Roman law dictates, addicted to, the constraints of such matter. In this case, that concentration of matter is a physical body, our animal form, what we define as a human being. Human beings are spirit beings addicted to being human. Addiction is the price for the “crime” of becoming human. Certainly, this notion has resonance with the plight of Adam and Eve, banished for their crime of human adventure.

Once the addiction sets in, what ensues is lifetimes of spirit (pure consciousness) living, in experiential detail, the full range of physical possibilities associated with inhabiting a material master (the body) or masters (many bodies), as one may reincarnate in a variety of lifetimes in earthly time/space.

Thus, life in the human form becomes one of various permutations of addiction, or compulsive servitude, to the wants and appetites of one’s physical host, the human body. Freedom from addiction would then ultimately require releasing one’s attachment to human form and returning to Oneself, to original spirit wholeness—what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico called a Magical Being or Energetic Being—freed from addiction, or fixation upon life in a physical body.

Energetic beings flow. Human beings fixate on all things human. Thus, even the most altruistic, giving, loving human can still be defined as an addict. That kind of addiction might take the form of luxuriating in the good feelings of giving. Perhaps the addiction might also belie an underlying attachment to the self-importance of being a selfless, giving being. Perhaps the addiction might simply be one’s final go-round in time/space, the attachment to saying goodbye and releasing from physical life in this dimension forever.

As with the  high failure rate of all addiction rehabs, it’s hard to skip grades in Earth School. Each class generally lasts at least a lifetime, and it must be fully lived and fully completed to truly move on, to really be done with that particular addiction in the human form. In AA terms, one who skips over completion of an addiction becomes a dry drunk, not drinking but still equally addicted to the coveted substance in the form of nasty resentment.

The mastery of an addiction is the completion of one’s course with it. The final exam asks you to answer to your exploration of every facet of the addiction. Does it still hold you in its grip? Are you repressing knowledge of your continued attachment? Can you stare it in the face, smile, and say, “I know you! We had quite a journey together, but, truthfully, we are no longer traveling companions. I wish you the  best. I love you, but I must move on now. Thanks for the fullness of our journey together.”

This level of completion advances one to the next class, the next level of fixation in the human form. The addiction might shift from substance to money, from victim to abuser, from moral heights to trickster depths, from straight to gay, or from man to woman, as one’s soul explores and gets to know and fully experience its addiction to all the possibilities in human form. The road to freedom may indeed require lifetimes of habitual patterns on a similar fixation until one becomes really bored, often a sign of true mastery and true doneness.

The process of advancement to Earth School graduation involves spirit’s deepening mastery of its addictions. Mastery ultimately leads to real detachment from the addictive fixation that was chosen as the experience in any given lifetime. Real detachment ultimately includes a complete release of emotional attachment to all things physical.

Thus, one bears, upon completion, no resentment, entitlement, anger, negative thoughts about, judgments toward, or obsession with anyone or anything they have been attached to in their lives. One can be thankful toward all the characters, both villains and lovers, for the full range of experiences shared with them, or acted upon them, in their various lives upon the Earth. In true detachment, the overriding feeling is one of love and compassion for all fellow travelers.

Love is indeed the Alchemist’s gold of Earth go-rounds, harnessed and purified in the addiction retort of a human lifetime. The experiment begins with tumultuous attachment, where love is first encountered in its most possessive animal form, with what we call being born. Non-attachment at this stage in human form results in death via failure to thrive, psychosis—where spirit can’t fully humanize—or psychopathy, where spirit serves shadow alone.

As Freud observed, this humanized primal animal energy slowly becomes sublimated throughout childhood, as spirit advances toward civilization. As recent Senate hearings suggest, the fallout for this is what Jung called the acting out of the shadow, where the  imprisoned animal can overtake its civilized ego, and pounce.

For love to advance, and be enhanced, it must travel the path of the energy chakras throughout its various lifetimes, finally reaching the heart chakra, the tipping point toward spirit hegemony in human life. Reaching the heart center signifies the human emergence from the primary narcissism of the lower chakras. At the heart center, spirit is able to burn through the veils of illusion that have been generated by the ego’s journey through power, possession, and control in the lower chakras.

From the heart center, spirit is granted its unique opportunity for existence, and love is experienced in transparent sharing, seeing, and communicating. And, yes, the human sexual animal is fully incorporated at this level, entwined in the fullness of love.

From the level of the heart center, the human spirit is finally ready to lighten the heavy burden of its animal survival instinct. That survival instinct transitions from fixation on animal survival to preparation for finally returning to pure spirit form, the human sojourn in Earth time/space completed.

The chakras above the heart center further raise love to its highest human form, pure unattached love. This enhancement is the product of successfully mourning all the required losses of time/space existence, including family, friends, and all the loved ones and things of this world, most especially one’s animal self, the physical body, which must be freely surrendered to death for spirit to move on.

Completion of addiction to human is the shedding of all special attachment to all of the characters, in all of the lives lived in human form, all equally loved in unattached super love. Absorbing and surrendering this fullness lightens the spirit, advancing it to its true state as a Magical Being, ready to take with it enhanced super love, as it launches into its next journey in infinity, curious as to what comes next.

Now, that’s one worthy reason to suffer the human addiction! To put it succinctly: Curiosity is the spirit’s mother of exploration.

Addiction is the thorough exploration of new territory. Repetition is the technology of addiction. Boredom marks the first signs of completion; depression, the precipitant to actual completion. The technology to emerge from depression is recapitulation. During recapitulation, old attachments are released, and energy reclaimed from those attachments is accrued for the next spirit launch.

With the magic fully gathered, off we go, having enriched that which we explored, taking forward all the love, deeply enriched, deeply curious…

Sweetly suffering the human addiction, and curious,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Animal, Ego & Heart

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From trunk to heart…
– Photo by Chuck Ketchel

Modern civilization values highly its rational ability to be in control of its animal self. But what happens if a seventeen-year-old teenager drinks too much and the desire body of his human animal self takes charge of his decision making ego and aggressively tries to rape a girl? Should he be held accountable for his behavior?

Most people would say yes. Some would blame alcohol excess, hormones, or the seductive impact of the girl. Few would simply dismiss the encounter.

Our civilization’s approach to reckoning with its animal self, with its powerful instinctual energies, is to expect its mental body, the ego, to keep its animal self in line. This is particularly emphasized at a level of society that values perfection as a major qualification to  become, say, a Supreme Court Judge.

Civilization, as is now clearly being revealed in such highly regarded moral institutions as the United States presidency and the Catholic Church, has quite overinflatedly judged its prowess at containing the impulsive instinctual side of its animal self. Repression or suppression does not transform or raise an instinct to mental obedience, in fact, quite the contrary. The animal, tucked away in the shadows behind a squeaky clean persona, gains in energy and waits for its opportunity to pounce, a frequent occurrence at a college frat party.

As Robert Monroe, in energetic form, recently explained to Jan: “Always the sexual drive is dominant in men, and when present needs to be dealt with.”* Dealing with it in a blackout state is often highly traumatic to the recipient of its fury and can haunt a woman for a lifetime. Is there an alternative way for men to elevate their animal drive to human consideration?

Jung discovered mental programs that attempt to govern our animal impulses and contribute to our humanness, allowing us to rise beyond the nature of our primate relatives. Perhaps the most primary is the incest taboo, which is essentially universal, spanning all peoples on our globe. Though in many cases this innate taboo fails to control men’s sexual drive, it nonetheless has allowed for the stabilization of the family unit as a relatively safe building block for civilization.

Other innate archetypal programs that address the instinctual energies of adolescent males are the initiation/puberty rites of many ancient civilizations that, when properly enacted, result in a real transformation of the irresponsible/dependent child into a respectful mature adult. Modern civilization has either watered down these rituals to the point of meaninglessness or abandoned them altogether, with the result being a preponderance of uninitiated men, inadequate to safely channel their sexual drive.

Effective initiation in our time is largely a solo journey, as our civilization has largely locked the minotaur of its sexual self away in the labyrinth of the repressed unconscious, preferring to project its darkness on the evil other, who should be removed from our borders. This of course allows the real shadow to act out with impunity at the highest levels.

Perhaps the reinstitution of group puberty initiation rites will someday happen in some modern but meaningful form, but for this to happen society will first have to face the true status of men’s beleaguered sexual instinct and be willing to seriously address its  need for transformation and integration into humanness. There are signs of this today in the consciousness raising effect generated by the Me Too movement with its takedown of exploitative men. But it cannot solve the transformative/maturity issue at the crux of the problem, to say nothing of the grey area of human sexual exploration that can hardly be deemed abusive.

Nonetheless, the transparency of Me Too is shining a needed light on the sexual shadow that leads to a more honest reckoning with the massive hidden acting out of men’s inadequately matured sexual instinct. Punishment, however appropriate, will not result in transformation.

Real human maturity requires the heart. Maturity below the heart stops at power and control; truthfully, right where we are now. To rise to the heart, we must advance beyond the compulsive entitlement of our narcissistic instinctual desires. In a country that now sets the standard for the world as me first, instinctual drives are unlikely to rise to the level of combining sexual drive with true human love and consideration for another. We just aren’t there yet.

Nonetheless, the rising feminine, be it in the Me Too movement or in political activism, is being mostly promulgated by the ultimate feminine herself, Gaia, Mother Earth, who is absolutely insisting that mankind take respectful care of her body and come together as an interdependent whole to face the real deficits in human maturity by rising to the true heart of the matter.

Let’s see what happens,

Chuck

*Jan wrote a blog about this encounter on The Recapitulation Diaries Facebook page.

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Chuck’s Place: God’s Chosen One: The Human Ego

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When I reflect upon the momentous decision Jeanne and I made in 1979, to abruptly leave America and move to the Promised Land of Jamaica, I cannot help but see the parallel to now, to Jan and my very abrupt move to the New Land at The Monroe Institute.

The veil is lifting…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Back in 1979, it was the reggae sirens whose call we could not refuse, their song echoing the themes of bondage and deliverance, and God’s support for his chosen people. It was as if the Old Testament had shown up in a time capsule bottle on the shores of that island paradise with a message to explain the African diaspora and provide a spiritual depth and context in which to move forward as Africans forced to assimilate in foreign lands.

“Black man it’s time to know your history.” “King David, he was a black man. King Solomon, he was a black man. King Moses, he was a black man. From Africa, yeah!” This was the Rastafarian identification with the Old Testament heroes as made popular by Rod Taylor. This music echoes the universal themes of life and struggle in the human form, with an accompanying heartbeat that connects the suffering time/space human with their immortal soul.

Flash ahead to 2018. The siren that drew Jan and I to The Monroe Institute was the Hemi-sync beat, with its abilities to facilitate expanded states of consciousness and awareness, where left brain ego serves right brain spirit; the formula for ego liberation from its state of alienation from spirit, facilitating a return to wholeness.

Human consciousness, centered in the human ego, is God’s chosen one. The ego is a separated part of the infinite soul, a spark of divine light living in the time/space illusion of its current life. This is a life that will end—death is at the crux of its suffering—but it all began with its higher soul in infinity sending it on the sojourn of its current life, truly a mission from God. Thus, the part (the ego) became separated from the whole (the Spirit), with its necessary blank-slate-forgetting at birth.

That mission is as individual and varied as there are people upon the planet. Yet, there is an underlying collective similarity to all individual missions, and that is what Robert Monroe discovered and wrote about in his book Far Journeys. The mission is to refine love energy, he wrote. For love to be refined it must encounter the various stages Elizabeth Kubler Ross delineated for the dying process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

All of these stages are emotional stages that love must go through to reach the pinnacle of emotion, a Super Love that, with compassion, accepts and loves everyone and everything. These are the missions and varied lives we have lived through, or must live through, in order to fully master all the permutations of humanness, from the most horrific to the most fully loving.

Can I love the abuser I may have been in one lifetime, as much as the victim of abuse I might have been in another lifetime? This is the great challenge and opportunity Earth School offers us, to refine love to its greatest potential, at least in this cosmos. Once the Soul decides its specific goal for its time/space life on earth, it sends off its ego seed to be planted in a human body.

The next step of this unfolding mission is to be adopted into and successfully attached to an earthly family. Without attachment the mission and the ego spark of life would not survive. With attachment comes the inevitable misery of loss, truly a unique byproduct of time/space life.

The ego, in its birth, was indeed cast from Eden, its home of wholeness, to fend for itself in a predatory world. The predatory world is necessary to encounter conditions that offer refinement of emotion leading to Super Love. Yes, the ego can use its spark of consciousness to eat from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, but it cannot escape the underlying truth: it is an orphan of its own wholeness, chosen to navigate and master its destiny in this life. Its true status is one of a wanderer with no real roots in this earth. Ego is equipped to enjoy and accumulate the riches of the earth, but it can never truly be at home here.

The dawning of the Age of Aquarius—the time we are living in—offers the human ego an enlightenment as to its true status, as an intelligent part of a far greater interdependent whole. The mission now for God’s chosen one is to free itself of the veil of separateness that has handicapped its effectiveness to fully love and effectively manage the earth. The ego must relinquish its self-importance, its grandiosity, as well as its inferiority, if it is to find its way back to the wholeness it has always sought, both on an individual as well as a collective level.

The ego must fully assimilate all peoples into one united chosen one. The chosen one is our collective human consciousness, not our local affiliations nor our individual egos alone. Clearly, such disruptive rumblings beneath the surface of current world events reflect our deeper separation and fear and rejection of our collective wholeness.

Defensively, separateness is being highlighted as imperative, as countries seek to expel others from what they perceive as theirs alone and reclaim what they perceive is their manifest destiny, to personally possess all they believe they are entitled to.

The current world leader mirrors so fully the ultimate inflated ego, a soon-to-be relic of an earlier stage of human evolution. Mother nature and the rising feminine will ensure the leveling of human inflation and facilitate the reign of the next level of human evolution, a union of all human groups, both physically and spiritually, into a united whole while in human form. From this will spring a new consciousness emanating from the heart, Super Love, capable of decisions of right action to the benefit of the whole chosen world.

One love, one destiny,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: The Atomic Self

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A gathering of all the parts that make up the whole…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

So, this tiniest of units, the atom, what the ancients named the most basic building block of the universe, houses an incredible amount of contained energy. Once the integrity of that unit is split, it is capable of unleashing a surge of vast destructive energy, as the world witnessed in the closing days of WWII at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

We are currently living through the unleashing of such powerful destructive energies on a social scale, as the integrity of our unity as a nation has been split by a leader well aware of the latent energy potential contained in such a unit as a United State. His modus operandi has been to tap those violent and ecstatic energy reserves through splitting rhetoric that halves the whole and unleashes lethal force.

On the individual level, that of a human personality, this social phenomenon mirrors the plurality of forces contained within a person. When the unity of personality is split open powerful energies are unleashed from the various factions of self, formerly cooperatively linked, now luxuriating in stretching their powers and vying for control of the self. This is the basis of the term I am employing in this blog, The Atomic Self.

How many times do we begin the day with a specific intent, only to find ourselves fully distracted and engaged in a less desirable activity? Less desirable to whom? I think we would have to say less desirable to one’s conscious ego state; less desirable to the leader of the personality and the working definition of self. But clearly, there is another faction of personality that exists somewhere within the shadows of self that has opposing wants and needs, a will and an energy of its own that supplants the ego’s intent by ‘wasting time’ in ‘unnecessary’ activities.

In fact, the Self is comprised of many factions beyond ego that each possess their own storehouse of energy. Freud identified a few characters: ego, id and superego. Jung expanded the population to include persona, shadow, anima/animus, Self, as well as an ancient inherent dimension to the psyche that includes the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Spiritualists broaden the field even further to include the soul, that which has had countless lives that coexist within the underpinnings of self in the current life.

In fact, the Spiritualist tradition would go so far as to point out that all who are alive in this moment are composed of the cosmic dust and ashes of countless prior generations of life. The notion of a pure bloodline of identity takes a quantum leap if we consider the sins and wisdom of generations past as the building materials of what we all really are, all deeply connected at the atomic level, all siblings sharing the same cosmic dust.

The unity of this oneness is often stretched to the max, as Miranon, a non-physical entity of high intelligence, explained in channeling explorations conducted in the early researches at The Monroe Institute. Miranon suggested we imagine a world of truly interconnected wholeness but all parts in opposition to each other, envisioned as a rubber band stretched in many opposing directions, it’s constituent parts vying for differentiation and supremacy. No matter how far they contort that rubber band it remains the same wholeness, albeit severely contorted and out of balance at times.

Thus, what we call personality is a plurality of characters and lives bound together in a cohesive way to form a consistent identity we call ‘me’. However, beneath this surface cohesion are very powerful energies that may not be well-integrated at all. Jung used the term individuation to define these energies as they actively seek integration and, ultimately, fulfillment in the maturation of an individual life.

People approach counseling when their factions of personality subvert individuation, preferring to assert their personal agendas at the expense of the overall integration of the personality. This results in failure to achieve goals, at minimum, and psychic atomic war at maximum!

The ego’s challenge of leadership with such divisive energetic personality factions is great. If the ego chooses a dictatorial approach to gain control, the rejected factions are likely to withdraw their energy reserves from the personality, whereby causing  a depression of energy resource that the ego requires to take action.

Despite this energetic stalemate the ego is charged with restoring balance to the personality. Sometimes this requires surrendering to the archetypal underpinnings of self and allowing, for instance, a flood of tears to release a tide of grief. Sometimes it requires the ego to refuse this archetypal call and hold on in a deeply alienated state until a reconciling thought, feeling, image, or outer happening provides the ticket to a newly resolved balance.

Sometimes the ego must recapitulate the experience of an archaic part of its atomic self that it had no idea existed. This may be presented to the ego in the form a powerful mood or emotional reaction to some environmental trigger. This encounter might require the  recapitulation of a repressed memory, a past life, or even a coexistent life at another level of its multidimensional self, lived exclusively at a dream level.

The name of the game is individuation, which integrates the separate components of the atomic self, with all their powerful energies, into a cohesively balanced self, on very deep levels. This is the journey and responsibility of now, inwardly and outwardly. As our earth continues her great transformation, may we, her children, shepherd her changes peacefully, lending our powerful energies to her newly rebalanced configuration.

Never doubt the value of turning inward and taking on the atomic self. Reconciliation at this level is what the world needs now: reconciling vs splitting the atom.

Atomically,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Build That Wall

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I recall, as a young boy, the delight of constructing Lincoln Log forts, safe places on the outposts of the American frontier. I could play alone for hours, fully engaged in the interplay of battle and retreat to safety.

Walls to an open path…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Perhaps the number one obsession of the current world leader is the construction of the Great Wall of America. His supporters often break into a deafening chorus at his rallies, exclaiming: “Build that Wall!” My intent in this blog is to find the place in our current state of evolution where that battle cry might indeed find its rightful home. We all need to find the safety behind the walls we call home.

Perhaps the number one focus of any psychotherapist is to enable clients to ground themselves and withstand being overtaken by powerful forces, both within and outside the psyche. Plainly speaking, that is, to shore up the ego; to build a strong wall to withstand a psychotic coup, which could swallow up or permanently fragment identity, consciousness, and a consistent reality-based sense of self.

Biology teaches us that we are constantly under assault by predatory viruses and bacteria that seek our energy for their own sustenance. Thus, our immune systems are programmed to build walls around these invaders, blocking their access to our vital energy.

Structurally, this self protection is also reflected in the two separate hemispheres of the brain. Roughly speaking, the left hemisphere provides the physical operating system for the intrapsychic ego, the etheric executive in charge of decision making in time/space. By carving out a rationally based interpretation system, the left brain creates walls around energy and transforms its interpretation of it into a predictable world of discreet solid objects. The ego grounds itself, categorizes the world it lives in, identifies its operations in terms of cause and effect, and defends itself against thoughts and perceptions that threaten its control.

In contrast, the right hemisphere of the brain remains open to the far more inclusive, free flowing, interconnected energy that exists outside of the left brain’s categorization system. This is the home of creativity, psychic knowing, and the Soul that lives beyond space and time, that is interconnected with and communicates with everything. Although both hemispheres of the brain interrelate and contribute to a balance in life, the left brain dominates in ordering how we interpret reality.

The right brain is the physical operating system of the energy body, or the Soul, that assumes dominance of our being when we sleep. During dreaming the energy body separates from the physical body and ventures into infinity, the true home base of our energetic existence. Though the energy body appears largely dormant in waking life, access to it can be cultivated or spontaneously reached under extraordinary circumstances, such as through blunt trauma or ecstatic experience.

When psychics or remote viewers utilize their parapsychic abilities, they relax the typically dominant left brain and enter into the timelessness of the right brain, while still maintaining left brain awareness. From there they can delve into the Akashic record of all life lived, or to be lived, as they have access to the oneness of everything.

Interestingly, to navigate this sojourn in infinity it is necessary to have access to left brain consciousness, with its wall of identity and its ability to interpret the energy it encounters in these expansive journeys. Short of this, our right brained nightly dreams in infinity are lost to integrative consciousness. Though the mood of a dream may follow us or determine the quality of our response to encounters in waking life the next day, without left brain participation we remain completely unaware of our prior dreamland guidance, lessons, and experiences that prepared us for the day.

This amnesic effect of crossing the bridge from infinity to waking consciousness serves the great wall of ego that authoritatively directs waking life. This creates a veil over the infinite underpinnings of Self/Soul that the ego has no time for. The ego must get up and direct real, solid life in time/space. Until the ego is ready to discover its true lineage in infinity it must maintain its blank slate wall. For the ego there is nothing beyond its concrete interpretation of reality in time/space.

Of course, this kind of ego stance must rely upon a good variety of defenses. Ultimately, however, for growth to proceed, ego must willingly walk back across the bridge to infinity via a journey into right brain interconnectedness. This generally involves first squarely encountering the experiences ego has pushed into deep storage rather than assimilate their threatening truths. A major pathway for this clearing is the practice of recapitulation, which requires ego intent and participation if it is to be fully accomplished.

Once ego no longer finds it necessary to hide from the fullness of Self—which includes its energy body in infinity—it can bring its boundaried identity and left brain capabilities into practice, to observe, interact, act, and reflect upon its right brained journeys in both dreaming and waking life. Over time, and with practice, this wall of ego actually becomes more permeable, more elastic, more open to new truths being discovered, as life is enriched and enhanced by greater access to one’s fuller potential, left and right brain in full cooperation.

So, yes, we do need walls of identity, but let them reflect the fullness of who we really are: infinite spirits inhabiting finite human bodies. Let the two hemispheres of the brain more consciously get to know each other and work collaboratively in the dream of waking life, as well as in those nightly journeys in infinity. No need to be fearful of the unknown with the integrated support of that dynamic duo!

Hemi-synching,

Chuck