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.
I said to Jan on Sunday that it felt like the first day of spring—yes, January 31st! Temperatures in the low 50s, people out walking, time elongated to the point where by 8 PM it felt like 11PM, certainly time for bed!
The world is changing rapidly now. There is no going back. Though we ground ourselves in the familiarity and constant contact of social media, pervasive and lasting change is swooping in all around us.
I was delighted, on our timeless Sunday, to find and watch a documentary on Marion Woodman, renowned Jungian analyst, whose personal life and transformation speak eloquently to the coming death and rebirth of the world we live in as we undergo deep transformation. Her sharing of the rise of the feminine as the missing healing factor in our growth process is positive and quite hopeful. I couldn’t have said it better.
Labor deepens. The world anxiously awaits the birth of a redeemer. The era of Obama has seen great expansion and inclusion. However, the speed of change has caused a swing to the opposite pole, that of boundary and protection, guns not roses. What’s at play beneath it all is the tango of two opposite, yet intimately related, instincts: sex and self-preservation.
What is being constellated, devil or angel? – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
When sex dominates, we open our hearts, our borders; everyone matters, basic needs are met. When self-preservation dominates, our hearts are closed and steeled; we sacrifice life, we protect our own.
When sex dominates, the spirit of earth-based marijuana becomes legal. When self-preservation dominates, the distilled spirit of alcohol, an artifact of science, reigns.
When sex dominates, African-Americans, gays, transsexuals, Syrians, Muslims are welcomed. When self-preservation dominates, freedom shrinks as old order conservatives restrain the lower chakras. The head rules, the body politic is divided and controlled.
At a higher level these opposites are the interplay of love and power. When power rules, sex is rape. When love rules power is flaccid. When love and power vie for dominance, destruction and rebirth are the consequences. The goal we seek is to reconcile these opposites in a balanced union, and that brings us to the question of where we are now: What truly is the state of our Union?
America seeks renewal. Trump has risen as a potential redeemer. He presents as a freakish Dionysus with his golden locky mop. He embodies the spirit of a spontaneous orgy. He shoots from the hip with total unapologetic humor, sarcasm, and fury. He at once expresses youthful spontaneity and ruthless power. He is at once inclusive and divisive. He is uncontainable. Even the most powerful conservative Republican monied lobby cannot control his chameleon spirit. He’s alive and America is bored.
His appeal touches a latent excitement in Republican and Democratic citizens alike. His enthusiasm trumps reason, and this excites the volk of the American spirit. It’s a layer of the psyche below the ruling ego with all its boring limits and controls.
Under Trump our madness comes alive. We can all play with the Joker as he takes control of Gotham City. Who needs the movies? We can all become lustful, power-driven billionaires who can act out our wildest fantasies. We can simply, impulsively and completely, wipe out a country that threatens our security and our playtime.
Trump is dangerous because in the midst of all this furor we are missing a latent Führer. Hitler came to power because he, like Trump, tapped a latent Dionysian spirit of change that burgeoned beneath the beleaguered spirit of the German people. What broke forth under Hitler’s reign was a mass psychosis and an orgy of death.
Trump is not a redeemer. He is a false prophet, falsely presenting a balanced union of opposites. And yet we cannot ignore the need he excites: a reconciliation of sex and self-preservation, love and power.
True conjunctio, the opposites united by spirit…
However, if we study Trump closely, we see that though he embodies the energy of Dionysus there is no love in his person. This is America’s problem too: the Goddess is completely missing. Mature feminine wisdom is the bridge to reconcile these two opposing instincts of love and power, and wisdom is severely lacking in the youthful mess we find ourselves now steeped in. This is America’s true blind spot.
Youthful furor never stops to reflect and reconcile. And now it has truly upped the ante as it seems we might be swept into electing a Führer. Hopefully, a higher wisdom will prevail as we face this possibility. Or perhaps there will be another step needed before we can find our way to wisdom and advance beyond this dangerous dance of opposites into true conjunctio.
As always, we as individuals are microcosms of the collective consciousness as well as the collective unconscious. Roughly speaking, the instinct of self-preservation finds its home in the power drive of the ego. Sexuality, in contrast, remains largely in the body and the instinctual unconscious. If we approach the relationship between the ego and the unconscious from the place of higher feminine wisdom, that of relatedness, we are offered an opportunity to align these very powerful instinctual forces toward a united, balanced effort of survival, for both the individual and the planet.
Cardinals derive their name from the red garments worn by Catholic priests. Ironically, cardinals are birds that mate for life, who celebrate the equality of the male and the female, one of the few bird species that sing together. The Christian world, on the other hand, has no such model in its pantheon of God to honor the feminine so equally and fully as the cardinal pair who so deeply honor each other.
Suddenly, she was gone… – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Early one recent morning I was reading to Jan the sentence: “We kill while we live, …” At that exact moment we heard a loud SMACK upon our window. Stunned, we looked up to see a burst of feathers floating in the air. We approached and saw a female cardinal lying stunned upon the ground, slowly and laboriously arching her wings, trying to catch her breath.
I was immediately reminded of the grackle that had similarly crashed into our deck door a couple of years ago, and after a few hours of rest sat up and flew off. Confident of the cardinal’s recovery too, I went for the camera and took a few pictures.
Jan said that she was dying. Then the cardinal pulled in her wings and gave one last violent shudder. The last thing we saw was a fluttering of the crest at her crown. She was dead.
Deeply saddened, I touched her soft feathers, thinking to bury her. Jan suggested that I instead put her out front atop a rotting pumpkin that the crows and squirrels peck at. I moved her there and within a minute a crow came and cautiously circled around the pumpkin. It made its way closer and closer and finally grabbed the still warm carcass and took off, a rich, fresh feast to feed upon, nourishment for the day.
We were both deeply emotionally affected by this death, especially as we watched the male cardinal perched upon a branch searching listlessly for his lost bride. I was compelled to write this blog, as the synchronistic sacrifice of the cardinal’s life, coupled with the words I’d read, carried a message I felt obligated to deliver.
We had been reading from a book by Marie-Louise von Franz, The Puer Aeternus. She’d been quoting from a novel by a German writer whose main character suffered from a severe inner split. He refused a true relationship with life and love in this world, honoring instead his rational mind, with its order and principles that obstructed a life truly embodied and lived. Such an attitude avoids the true crucifixion that engagement in life requires: emotional attachment with all its ecstasies and deep disappointments that are the hallmark of a life truly lived.
The line I had been reading as Mrs. Cardinal crashed to her death reflected a very rational truth, to live is to kill. For life to be sustained, as the crow amply demonstrated, it must feed upon the vitality of life. And though this is indeed a rational truth that must be accepted, it must also not be allowed to be a license to kill feeling and love.
To love, to feel, to attach, to connect, these are the hallmarks of the feminine. If we allow ourselves only the cool detachment of the rational we refuse to suffer the emotional reality of life, in fact, we cut ourselves off from life itself, as we remain frozen and sterile, focused instead on our own power, gain, and advantage.
What the world needs now is love, sweet love. This is the feminine, resident not just in women but equally in men, that is so neglected, disregarded, and disdained that we find ourselves steeped in bloodbaths of mass proportion, rationally iced in numbers and strategies for killing, neglecting not only our emotional attachment to fellow humans but to all of nature as well.
Our dear cardinal assumed her place on the cross, the little Goddess who sacrificed herself to deliver the message: Yes, life is consumed to support life in this world, a cruel but true paradox. But this is no excuse to refuse to engage in life with deep emotion, which for us in that moment was love for Mrs. Cardinal and her powerful gift, and sadness for Mr. Cardinal as he mourned her passing.
The only thing that matters now is the ascension of the Goddess in all our lives, in all our actions. Only love can redeem the world now. The feminine principle of love is the redeemer. Let the death of the female cardinal not be in vain.
I honor the earthly life of David Bowie who creatively expressed and lived the innate androgyny of all human beings to the benefit of human evolution. Well done, David. May your journey continue to new energetic heights!
Marie-Louise von Franz quite bluntly identified the physical manifestation of a woman in a man’s body in his nipples, and the physical manifestation of a male in a woman’s body in her clitoris. Although one’s sex is genetically determined, she points out, biologically it is obvious that there is a real contrasexual component to both sexes, present in the sex they are born into.
Psychologically, C. G. Jung coined the term syzygy to depict the inherent pairing of contrasexual opposites within the human being. Syzygy literally means yoked together, like a pair of horses bound together, drawing a carriage. The male/female parts of each human being are yoked together for life in every human being and it remains for all to creatively get to know, accept, and integrate those part selves into a wholeness that gains deeper entrée into the magic and mystery of infinity.
We find ourselves now in an energetic fervor similar to that of 1933 Nazi Germany when the solution to wholeness went the way of the scapegoat, of annihilating the shadow self, projected, in a xenophobic assignment of the rejected self, onto the wandering Jew. As history has shown, this psychotic one-sided attempt at purification to achieve wholeness allowed pure evil to dominate the world and nearly destroy it. Extinguishing an unwanted part will never bring about wholeness.
On another front, the movie The Danish Girl depicts another fatal attempt to achieve wholeness through a concretized physical attempt to surgically transform the body. Unfortunately, the psychiatry of that time, the 1920s, had not been sufficiently infused with Jung’s wisdom about syzygy to support a deeper process of reconciliation with one’s inner opposites.
David Bowie shines as a modern creative being who fully allowed for the unfolding, integration, and manifestation of a multifaceted being. He continued to evolve and died as an integrated warrior, leaving behind a plethora of insinuations for creative transformation and wholeness.
Your ego is only one facet of your wholeness… – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
Envision the Self as a multifaceted diamond, the jewel of all that you are. See one facet of the diamond—the sun beaming directly upon it—as the seat of consciousness, the ego, the child of the Self. In this respect, we are all, while in this life, a child of our Self.
It is the task of our ego in this life to ignite and bring life and light to as many facets of the diamond of our greater Self as possible; full realization of the diamond is true enlightenment.
The first challenge for the ego is to become a mature adult child. We are born in innocence, strangers to ourselves, strangers to the world. As mere fragments, facets of the Self, we are orphaned from our wholeness and seek solace in our early attachments. Though our greater Self never leaves us it can only support us in mystical ways, as the outside world truly becomes our adoptive home.
Our ego has an important mission in this life, that is, to bring to the material world the drama and challenge of each facet of our unrealized Self—to know it, live it, resolve it, and then release it as we move on to new life and the next facet of the Self.
The ego, in its orphaned state, constantly feels the pull to its lost wholeness. This lost Self does come to meet the ego, in numinous dreams, ecstatic experiences, visions, and in outer reflections in the material world, both in the people and the objects we are powerfully drawn to.
The greatest challenge for the ego is to partake in these renewing visitations but then walk away without regret or insistence that the meetings continue or repeat in the same way. To fixate on an experience of Self is like trying to force a romance to remain the same when it has obviously changed. Romance is one type of encounter with the coveted lost Self as reflected in the world. If we demand it to stay out there, in the same way, we remain the child who clings and refuses to grow.
The Self is pure life, and pure life—like a river—never repeats itself. It simply continues to flow in new and ever-changing constellations. It is alive, all-present, yet ever fresh and new. It never reveals itself twice in the same way.
We are ever-changing, flowing into the river of life… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
As a mature child of the Self, we learn to meet the Self in innocence yet are also able to release it from its current manifestation and allow it to move on into new form without loss or regret. And if we can continue to flow with it we are led to realize increasing facets of our wholeness as we continue our journey of Self Realization.
This is the essence of the Buddha’s guidance on non-attachment. Indeed, attach fully to the facet of life you are now realizing, but know that it is not the whole of life, and know that there will come a time to let go and discover more of the wholeness that you truly are. That’s where the adventure lies, in the endless discovery of new and evolving life.
Happy for the gifts of this journey,
Chuck
NOTE: Thank you to Marie-Louise von Franz, my muse for this blog.
