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.

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Chuck’s Place: The Transparent, Responsible Dream

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When we enter infinity…
-Art by Jan Ketchel

By many accounts, when we permanently leave our physical body to embark upon our definitive journey into infinity at death, we enter an energetic state of pure transparency, no hidden compartments, the exact opposite of the most salient feature of life in the human form, the ability to keep secrets from self and others. Thus, the next rung of our evolutionary trajectory challenges us all to be and interact with all “others” as we and they truly are, a distinct advance from the vagaries of human interaction and relationship.

Human relationship, lived  within the self or interpersonally with others, happens mainly in the dark. Truthfully, we know little of who we are and little of the true nature of those with whom we interact. Such is the curse and challenge of life in this dimension.

Technological advances of our time have however greatly restricted the ability to have a hidden compartment. Chances are, there’s a camera or recording device of some sort that is creating a record of all forms of observable human behavior, no matter how discreetly life is lived.

The hidden identities of the Shamans of Ancient Mexico, right down to Carlos Castaneda, could never be maintained in today’s world. We don’t know for certain Castaneda’s real name, where he was born, his real date of birth, nor the place and date of his death. This would not happen in today’s world.

Carl Jung managed to conceal that he was sexually abused as a youth for his entire life, save one brief reference to it in a personal letter to Freud published years after his death. The fullness of that story would never be allowed to go to the grave in today’s world.

Donald Trump, though he still tries to conceal his tax returns, is perhaps the most transparent of all political figures of our day. We know he’s behaved like a lech, it’s recorded. He makes no effort to present himself as presidential. Whether we like him or not, with Trump we are treated to a very transparent leader, he simply can’t help himself.

The truth is, you can’t reconcile with yourself or with another person if you can’t reveal to yourself or another the fullness of who you are, however sordid. The absence of transparency gives rise to intrigue, deception, and hidden subplots in life, all the ingredients of fake relationship.

It appears that full transparency is our current evolutionary imperative. Of course, revelation of the shadow self, the hidden compartments, does not automatically lead to evolutionary advance. Trump’s current transparent behavior simply means that he’s acting out power-drives in the open versus acting them out covertly, as was typical of politics in the past. With transparency comes responsibility for what to do with one’s “outed” shadow.

Though we are moving quickly, driven by unstoppable technological advances toward greater and greater transparency, what has become abundantly clear is that we must reconcile all the formerly hidden parts that become transparently exposed. Full exposure is not reconciled wholeness. This is abundantly clear with the sexual abuse issue in the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church tried to repress sexuality in its clergy. Transparency revealed the results of that decision in perhaps the greatest institutional case of sexual abuse in history. Simply outing the perpetrators does not reconcile the opposition of spirit and matter/animal/sex. Transparency merely alerts us to the truth of all that we are. Any attempt at reconciliation that merely represses one side in favor of another merely creates a new shadow. Reconciliation means creating a stable personality that doesn’t require new prison compartments.

But how does one achieve responsible wholeness? Here are some suggestions:

1) Appoint your adult self to mediate the process. The child self or the shadow self must be included in the negotiation but only the mature adult has the stamina and objectivity to work with all the points of view and emotional states of the different factions of the self. An immature child self has neither the patience nor objectivity to see beyond its own needs. Maturity is critical. Maturity must be in charge.

2) Suspend judgement. We all have parts of ourselves that have powerful “unacceptable” emotions as well as “immoral” impulses. Regardless of our reaction to these challenging parts we must accept them as part of who we are. All parts of the whole must have a place in that whole. It is the challenge for the adult self to recognize its parts, listen to their needs and points of view, and find the best place within the whole self for each part to live. For example, perhaps there is a part of the personality that truly hates to deal with people and the outside world. Perhaps that part can be assigned to securing uninterrupted meditation time, both from outside influences and inside thoughts that would dare to intrude upon inner silence. Be creative.

Our challenge, with the imperative of transparency being handed down to us from the next rung of life beyond human life, is to reconcile with our wholeness. We must find a place for all that we are, light and dark, in the full light of day. I would call this responsible, transparent wholeness.

Transparency is coming into its own now anyway. I dream that we may find our way to responsibility too. Together, let’s dream that dream, the transparent, responsible dream.

Dreaming,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: The Economics of Changing Dreams

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We must begin by assuming personal responsibility for the world’s current dream. Last week, I proposed that we are in the Time of the Usher, the dream changer. That lead role mysteriously fell upon Donald Trump.

Our very own Petty Tyrant!
– Art by Jan Ketchel

If we face the deeper truth that our world is spinning out of balance and requires a radical shift to survive, perhaps we can appreciate why we have called upon such a ruthless sorcerer from the dark side to usher in change. This sorcerer fits the bill of what the Shamans of Ancient Mexico call the petty tyrant.

Petty tyrants rank as extreme narcissists and psychopaths who wield the power of life and death over others. For shamans, encounters with petty tyrants are fundamental to their training. Most importantly, since tyrants lack any capacity for empathy for the cruelty they perpetrate upon their victims, shamans are offered a golden opportunity to lose their self-importance when dealing with them. Those indulging in self-pity under the reign of the petty tyrant exhaust their energy quickly and unwisely, as the petty tyrant has absolutely no concern for their needs.

Instead, shamans learn how to hone and revamp their energy, wasting none in seeking sympathy or validation for the hardships and cruelty directed at them by their petty tyrants. This energy saving training has the secondary benefit of preparing them to face future onslaughts from the unknown.

In this time of changing dreams that we are now experiencing, we are all at a distinct advantage, as it is very clear who the petty tyrant is. We can choose to stand up to him, by deciding to have all our energy available to meet the unexpected challenges and shifts that are occurring daily, with a minimum of energy expense.

Shamans ultimately seek the defeat of the petty tyrant but realize that getting caught in the traps of indignance and being offended both exhaust energy and cloud the ability to observe and plan strategically. The bigger the tyrant the greater the challenge to preserve  one’s energy and stay centered on the task. This is the position of the assemblage point that the shamans call the place of no pity. This position requires extreme mindful presence without ego attachment. The only question to ask oneself is, what is the appropriate action now, all personal attachment removed from view.

Since January 21st of this year I have limited myself to one minute per day of taking in the news. I came to this practice after observing the energetic impact that one hour of news was having on my energy as I went through the day.

Donald Trump, our news tyrant, seduces with outrageous antics and threats, which literally suck the energetic life out of a person. The emotional volatility evoked, and the attention given, literally feed the tyrant entity, who clearly has an insatiable hunger for attention.

I observe a tremendous energy savings with my one minute per day limitation. Each morning, I quickly receive the bullet points of necessary information, intentionally avoiding the trappings of emotional reactivity and seduction to track, think about, react to , and talk about the stories that are circulating in the news throughout the day—all energy-zapping practices. As a result I am free to decide if I need to do something or if I can just move on.

I don’t spend my energy on worry, fear, or rage. It simply depletes too much energy. Being offended by Trump is a waste of energy! Refusing to give him the attention he feeds off of, starves him of my energy and I get to keep it for myself. Having detachment from his outrageousness allows me to see clearly and to strategically navigate now.

Thus, I see Trump’s role as the usher, who has disrupted the familiarity and security of our world, as the role of the petty tyrant as well. He offers himself as the one to help us hone our energy and prepare for the real changes that we will invariably face as the world changes dreams again.

It’s a dangerous situation!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Please don’t misconstrue my perspective as a benevolent casting of Donald Trump. He is a tyrant and he is dangerous. Many people will be and have been crushed by his ruthlessness. However, the world must evolve now into a new dream in order to survive, and the silver lining in Trump is that, though he appears the antithesis of survival, he has had the ability to interrupt the status quo of the world. This interruption of energy flow is a move of a sorcerer and it allows us all an opportunity to hone our own energy and prepare for the challenges on the horizon. These challenges may be hastened by Trump, but they hardly originate with him.

The deeper dream we are leaving is the self-centered dream where it’s all about “me” and “us” (U. S.)! Trump’s embodiment of that dream is the catalyst for the new dream, the one centered at the heart level: the real truth, transparency, and all-inclusiveness.

For us to prepare for this new dream, we must learn the economics of saving our energy resources by losing the self-importance of being offended and raising our consciousness to the truth of the heart.

The heart stays in alignment with the soul/energy body—spirit—call it what you will, but it is that divine center within us all that tells us the truth, the real truth, and whose guidance will lead us forward into a truly sustainable dream, the dream we are really preparing for, a heart-centered world dream.

From an energy miser,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: The Time of the Usher

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The usher at a concert escorts us to our preselected seats. In the shaman’s world, the usher is the spirit that selects what we will encounter next. Those who are deeply engaged in traumatic recapitulation are quite familiar with the autonomy of the usher. One never knows what memory is to be ushered in next. It appears, of its own accord in the body, psyche, and events of everyday life.

Our neighbors stirring up some energy…
-Photo by Chuck Ketchel

In tribal times it was the medicine man, or woman, who went into trance and was ushered into spiritual realms that determined the fate of the individual or the tribe. The medicine man had access to unseen spiritual forces, some benevolent, some destructive. The medicine man had no friends. He exerted such a powerful hypnotic effect on tribal members that people avoided contact with him for fear of losing their sanity or becoming possessed by spirits. Nonetheless, the medicine man had his role as mediator to forces that would fundamentally shape the future direction of the tribe, for better or for worse.

In our times, there can be no doubt that Donald Trump is a medicine man. His rise to power indeed defied all reason, his hypnotic tirades channeling a spiritual wave of energy that swept him into the presidency. His intent is that money solve everything. He is a change agent who has opened the tunnel to powerful forces determined to reshape our world. He was selected, he was ushered in, and he in turn ushers the world into where we know not.

In shamanic terms, the usher causes a shift in the assemblage point. The shamans describe the assemblage point as a perceptive center that assembles how we interpret the world. As they see it, our world is held together by a massive uniformity of interpretive agreement. This perceptual agreement is upheld by all members of the human race, generating the world we call reality.

A shift in the world assemblage point shakes the very cohesiveness of the world of everyday life. The reality we’ve come to depend upon crumbles as new building blocks factor into the mix. Like an earthquake, everyone feels the shift, as it shakes the very ground of our beings.

Forces are now rapidly vying to assemble a whole new world, a reality based on a whole new formula. How that will congeal and whether the uniformity necessary to uphold it will be agreed upon remains to be seen. In the meantime, we are all subject to veritable onslaughts of the unknown in the course of everyday life.

This collective instability impacts our personal reality as well. On an individual level, one’s personal usher may be forcing encounters with very deep issues that rattle the familiar security of everyday life. This can take the material form of relationship issues or family crises. Inwardly, this might be a time to face firmly engrained habits that no longer fit the changes the usher demands of us. Inwardly, as well, we may be forced to encounter deeply buried truths and experiences that completely reshape how we know ourselves and the world.

What is clear in this time of the usher is that the world as we have known it cannot be held onto. The consensus of our consensus reality is under too much bombardment to remain in its customary position. The danger of this destabilization should not be taken lightly, but the fact that this time also offers an opportunity for great change is equally significant.  As we grapple with our deep personal challenges we are led outside our familiar selves, into a deeper universe of possibilities that we may have never known about.

Frankly, though Donald Trump has been selected to usher in universal change, I rest assured that the female shamans are behind this maneuver. Radical changes are needed to save this world and he is being used by them to break down the familiar. What comes beyond that, however, goes way beyond him.

I suggest that we all do our part to meet squarely all that comes to meet us, and agree to create a new mass consensus reality based upon love, truth, equality, and sustainability. Let that be the intent we ask of the usher, to land us on the world assemblage point of love!!

Let’s see what happens,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: What We Need Now

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Too soon!
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

I observe the spring birds and daffodils arriving too soon, simply following nature’s cues, their inner programs indelible, natural laws that must be obeyed.

In contrast, most conscious humans would delay flight plans if alerted to an as yet unseen arctic nor’easter. How is consciousness not superior to nature’s old ways? This is the argument that elevated reason to chiefdom, to stardom. But reason, in its mental abstractness, has lost contact with its deep chthonic roots, with the power and wisdom of nature itself. Reason can harness the energy of nature, but if it abuses this decision-making ability nature will exact its corrective.

We find ourselves living in a comic book world now. Super villains or, from another perspective, super heroes have taken charge of Gotham City. Like many of Hollywood’s current epics the forces of good and evil are in dire conflict, either pre- or post-apocalypse. Reason has clearly lost its command, but why?

Why have the deep chthonic powers arisen so ardently to topple reason and reinstate an angry god? Was our choice of Obama that one-sided, as we presumed that the world was ready for full inclusion? Wasn’t Hillary reason’s obvious no-brainer for the next step? Why are we where we are now, back in Gotham City?

Perhaps the mistake was presuming that the light and right of consciousness was all that was necessary for wholeness to finally come about, that good will always triumph over evil. In fact, this one-sided hubris constellated the enantiodromia of the blitzkrieg of this dark side we now face. Light and dark, the two sides of God, are the two sides of all of us, and they must each be included lest the jealous, disowned God exact its revenge.

Take the sexual instinct, for example. Consciousness can prescribe the appropriate channels for this instinct, a very logical and ordered program. But beware the ravages of a powerful neglected instinct not properly lived in consciousness. The result, sexual abuse, in every culture, class, and institution around the globe.

What has assumed power is civilization’s disowned shadow, blind instinct wanting and taking. Responsibility for why we are here lies with the people of light, who truly underestimate the power and relevance of the people of the dark, as well as with the people of the dark who have no use for the reason of the people of the light.

With sex you cannot consciously force attraction. You must engage the power of deep instinct to join with conscious love for there to be fulfillment. Conscious love without the juice of attraction is at best a rational partnership, the shadow of which supports the pornography industry.

Equality…

So how do we arrive at conscious and fulfilling sacred sex? Clearly such a merger must include the heights of spirit light and the depths of dark chthonic instinct. Only an inclusive yin/yang configuration can lead to a balanced whole. If a tree’s branches are to reach heaven, its roots truly must sink into hell.

Consciousness must be restored to its leadership position in our world, but it must become a realistic versus idealistic leader. Nature did advance itself by evolving human consciousness after all. Yes, it is better to be able to delay a flight versus arrive early to sudden death.

On the other hand, consciousness must fully know and embrace its darkness, its deep chthonic roots, and slow its evolution to a reasonable pace that its integrated wholeness can bear.

In consciousness with chthonic roots,

Chuck

PS: Today is International Women’s Day, a day that many have called for women to give the world the experience of no women in it. That wave of energy may be experienced as what it is like to be in a world of light lacking its deep chthonic roots. Let’s see what happens!!

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Chuck’s Place: I Want

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In the beginning was the child…
-Photo by Jan Ketchel

Yes, there really is a part of the self that simply is all about me. Born in childhood, this spark of me-ness is our earliest ego state that simply needs, wants, and expects to be given to. And at that stage of life this narcissism is healthy and necessary; it’s all about survival.

Fairly quickly the needs and expectations of powerful others require us to suppress our needs, delay gratification, and give as well as take—all technologies to form a mature adult ego. This socialization of the child ego state greatly curtails its self-centeredness, which slips into the shadows of the unconscious, hidden but hardly dormant. Polite as we might appear to be outwardly, inwardly or covertly the child still wants and gets, in some form.

In our time, new apps appear daily to rapidly cater to all our wants. In America our new president has become the poster child for entitlement. The child ego state has been freed from the shadows, its narcissism given full legitimacy as a national policy.

The wanting child has truly come of age. We are all being asked to grapple with our own wanting child ego state. However, in approaching this inner child ego state, we must be careful to distinguish between it and the many parts of the self that appear in the form of the child and are in fact not the child ego state, what I refer to instead as the child image. The child ego state itself is a universal non-personal inherited psychic structure much like a limb or any other part of the body which serves a necessary function in life. The function of the child ego state in young childhood is simply to procure, as it is too immature to give or care for itself. In contrast, the child image reflects the personal history of the personality’s unfolding in this life.

Often, an inner child image, not the child ego state, may represent a split off part of the self that was abused or neglected in childhood and had to be packaged up and stored away, often somewhere in the body, forgotten to the conscious mind. This part of the personality holds a memory that  may be triggered into awareness by a current event, seeking some kind of recognition and reconciliation with the rest of the personality. This is not the wanting child, this is the traumatized child’s experience seeking peace through integration.

A symbolic child image is also frequently encountered in dreams of  pregnancy, or simply having a child, which might represent the development of a new potential in the personality. Hence, one might decide to start a new career, enterprise, or relationship, all starting in an embryonic state, needing the conscious care of a parent/adult ego state to support and bring to fruition.

A dream variation on this theme might be finding oneself back in grammar school, high school, or college, having to learn something. Here, information or skills we missed in our formative years might need attention, asking our current adult ego state to humbly attend to an underdeveloped part of the self.

Having considered these other permutations of the child image self, we need to consider how best to deal with our structural child ego state. First, we should acknowledge that the child is the true home of innocence in the personality. This innocence has been extolled as the only state worthy of entering heaven.

Innocence approaches the world with curiosity and awe, unencumbered by preconceptions and rules. Of course, this innocence will be wounded by Buddha’s greatest discovery: life is suffering. No-one can escape the ultimate reality of old age, sickness and death. Nonetheless, under the tutelage of the adult ego state, “mature” innocence, that can remain open despite the vulnerabilities and inevitabilities of these truths, may find full expression in adult life.

As to the wants of the child ego state, these may be largely under the compulsive dominance of instincts, be it for food, power, stimulation, or attention. The challenge for the adult ego is to help its child ego state become free from the instinctive dominance of its basic needs so that they may be incorporated into adult life in a fulfilling way. Keep in mind that free will can only exist within the limits of consciousness, which is a function of the adult ego state. Beyond those limits there is the mere compulsion of the child ego state. For instance, a sexual impulse, delayed, might ultimately become the foundation of a real loving relationship versus a narcissistic release with a casual hookup. The adult ego state can reconcile and integrate the energy and power of human animal instinct with true relatedness and spiritual love.

The essential challenge with the demanding “I want” child self is to transform it to coexist with the legitimate needs of others. The child ego state dominating in adulthood is largely anachronistic, non-adaptive to a reality beyond “me.” To achieve fulfillment of wants, those wants must be channeled and transformed through the adult ego state that can navigate the world as it really is and find a home for all its deepest needs, within the greater self as well as in the world. That is recognition and reconciliation in maturity!

I want maturity,

Chuck