Category Archives: Chuck’s Blog

Welcome to Chuck’s Place! This is where Chuck Ketchel, LCSW-R, expresses his thoughts, insights, and experiences! Currently, Chuck posts an essay once a week, currently on Tuesdays, along the lines of inner work, psychotherapy, Jungian thought and analysis, shamanism, alchemy, politics, or any theme that makes itself known to him as the most important topic of the week. Many of the shamanic and psychological terms used in Chuck’s essays are defined in Tools & Definitions on our Psychotherapy page.

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: The Reign Of The Imp King

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So, what is an imp? The imp is a little devil from the woods who lives and acts in a most impulsive way! The imp is a spoiler, rarely tells the truth, reverses himself on a dime and can never be held to any agreement. The imp defies all reason and simply cannot be nailed down to anything. The imp is impishly spontaneous, outrageously fiendish, and at times malevolently rageful.

Let’s stop blaming the Russians! This Friday the imp becomes King through democracy’s divine ritual of inauguration. The collective unconscious, Mother Nature herself, has delivered her imp son, Donald Trump, to take over world leadership. Gaia has taken the imp from the woods and installed him to lead the world. Why?

Gaia long ago gave birth to human consciousness. When she bid us eat the apple from the tree of knowledge she bid us take her forward in new and more efficient ways. Since leaving the Garden, human consciousness has mastered technology and increasingly distanced itself from its animal, instinctual roots, from Gaia herself.

Today a majority of humans live online. Facebook gives us the news and organizes our memories. We text, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat. We romance on Match. Soon cars will drive themselves, as drones deliver our goods. We have become beings of mind, of reason, of the rational, logical, technical with nary a spiritual thought or experience. Our god is Google. Our ego consciousness, Gaia’s hopeful gift to us, has so dissociated itself from the Garden and enthroned itself as creator that the planet that births and feeds us has become a rapidly metastasizing cancerous tumor.

Gaia has pulled the imp from the woods to level our God of Mind and bring us back down to true mindfulness that incorporates all that we all are, nature in all its forms. Our mind has become too high and mighty, our dissociation from and disregard for nature without and nature within has constellated the impish destroyer. He simply defies all reason. He typifies the world’s most exaggerated ego. Here Gaia is presenting us with the homeopathic cure. In homeopathy like cures like by intensifying the symptoms of a disease to activate its necessary cure. Trump is both the homeopathic agent of exaggerated ego and at the same time the imp from the woods who defies all reason. He comes in the archetypal line of the savior.

Dionysus was such a savior in antiquity, a spring god who broke through all the dams of civilized order to fertilize the earth with orgiastic fervor. Christ was another such savior who came to tone down the instinctual bloodlust and orgy of that same Dionysian fervor through a ritual of communion, accenting instead the ascension of spirit, which in human terms facilitates the dominance of mental control. Unfortunately, the mental plane of humanity has grown to deify itself today, with mind our god, completely overpowering and dissociating itself from its instinctive nature. We are disembodied humans who live in our heads.

Donald, the “new savior,” is indeed a primitive, dangerous nature spirit that threatens world survival. His installation is bound to unleash the pent up instinctual energies of the collective unconscious in an orgiastic outbreak of unbridled lusts for all kinds of power and grab. Then there’s the danger of the autocrat, a la the Hitler variety. We must learn from history. A charismatic king can unleash a collective fervor that infects the populace at the expense of individual reflection and integrity. That was how Hitler mesmerized a nation to follow his will.

Mother Nature has gone to such a drastic measure to level the deified ego of reason, which has disregarded its irrational core, nature itself. That’s how dangerous our dissociated ego has become to the survival of the planet. Mother Nature has brought in a bombastic, dangerous imp to check the overgrown God of Mind at all costs. The question is, how much destruction will be necessary before a new guiding principle emerges?

Mind is critical, but it becomes irrelevant and useless if it deifies itself and does not include nature in its identity and care. Until that happens we will be at the mercy of nature’s impish destroyer, who seems quite content to bring down the God of Mind along with civilization itself!

Realize, with the installation of the imp outwardly, we are subject inwardly as well to the imp’s control, within the Self. We are all living cells of Gaia, all in this together, and therein lies our opportunity. If we can bring our mind down to embrace our earthy substance, and move toward necessary balance in our bodily home, we remove the imp from power within because we voluntarily humble ourselves to our true needs. If enough individuals, as conscious cells of Gaia, take up this challenge we offer the healing potion so badly needed, and the imp might all the more quickly be returned to the woods.

Begin to unplug the self from virtual life and plug into what’s really all around you. Bring life out of the head and back into the body at the rhythm of the heartbeat. Sleep well and listen to nature’s guidance in your dreams. Be in solitude. Be in real human interaction and communion. Embrace your inner imp by paying heed to your spontaneous impulses and find a way to live them in right balance. Allow your mind to be challenged by your disavowed needs, embrace the fullness of your nature. Nature abhors too much order, it’s simply unnatural. So, allow for some form of chaos to bring renewal to too ordered a life.

For better or worse, we enter now the time of the Reign of the Imp King. Trust that, as in all things, nature will only let things go so far, but be empowered within yourself. Nature once gave us the gift of consciousness. If we learn to use it in her service now, we are sure to be restored all the sooner.

Embracing my inner imp,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Eros Is Not Sex

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What and who is Eros?
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

By one account, Eros is the son of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Eros is frequently represented as the young, devilish Cupid who pierces his target with the arrow of desire. When Eros strikes, his victim is overcome with attraction and longing for a specific person.

This longing is frequently portrayed in images of blissful sexual union and ecstasy, a supreme state of wholeness and fulfillment. However, real union far transcends sexual intercourse. In fact, for sexual intercourse itself to result in complete union a meeting of spiritual nakedness must also take place, and this requires relatedness. Eros is really relatedness.

Relatedness means connection at a feeling level. To meet another at that level we must be willing to reveal who we really are behind the mask of our attractive persona. As well, we must be able to meet, accept, and value who our partner really  is.

If we impose our needs, expectations, and appetites upon our partner we are not related, we are entitled, and our partner generally feels burdened, pressured, and not met. Entitlement breeds alienation, the opposite of Eros, which seeks deep connection.

When we share our fears, vulnerabilities, and weaknesses with our partner, as well as the pain and humor of our human cluelessness, Eros is activated. When we tune in with attention and sensitivity to our partner’s revelations of their felt flaws and guarded secrets, Eros draws us closer, deepening our connection.

When we acknowledge our carnal lust and desire but temper it to meet where it is truly possible to meet at this time, Eros rewards our restraint and sensitivity with deepening soul contact. This is the pathway to relatedness and genuine love.

It’s always been possible to overpower and take what one wants. This kind of exchange will never result in love. Love requires respect. Without respect the soul retreats, Eros flies out the window, and love dies.

Important in these times—when the ruling leaders of the world are of the entitled, grabbing what you want ilk—that the true tenets of love be reinforced. Eros is not sex. Eros is relatedness. Relatedness is the pathway to love, and that love might indeed open to blissful sexual communion. But blissful sexual union can never happen without Eros, the god of true relationship.

Relating,

Chuck

 

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: News For The New Year

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Keeping the light alive…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Our blogs will venture into new arenas in 2017. My usual blog, Chuck’s Place, will continue to explore psychological, physical, and social interplays and synchronicities at individual and world levels. Jan and I will occasionally publish a blog on relationships, which we are affectionately naming The Monogamy Dialogues. Finally, I will be adding a new blog entitled Guidance From The Shamanic Line, which will address suggestions to those of our readers who are shamanically inclined and looking for guidance on an energetic dimension.

On that note, I offer this New Year’s suggestion: watch the new Netflix series, The OA. This series is like the shamanic Theater of Infinity, filled to the brim with jolts to the socialization system that keeps us in bondage. Outwardly, the world is rapidly moving into an extraordinary time of bondage with the forces of truth and light held in check. Powerlessness, however, opens up portals of extraordinary discovery. This is what the shamans call shifts of the assemblage point and discovering of the energy body.

In The OA the insinuation of the magical passes of Carlos Castaneda’s Tensegrity is blatant. The extraordinary sense of physical and emotional wellbeing achieved through rigorous practice, as well as a means to accessing the energy body, is beautifully captured. The value of the Petty Tyrant, the victimizer, as the one who forces the captives to lose their self-importance and become impeccable warriors in their intent is clearly outlined. Finally, the collective energy accessed through the magical passes to heal and overpower the dark side is strongly hinted at. These are evolutionary tools in a time of great planetary shift.

Of course, The OA is fiction, but what is fiction anyway but truth reimagined. If it grabs you, it may hold some truths to be discovered. The OA captures truths that are inherent in the human body, simply waiting to be accessed. These are not cognitive truths; these are experiential, energetic truths. And everyone must discover all truth for themselves.

The OA is intense, only go there is you are shamanically inclined. There are many roads to freedom. This is one of powerful adventure, no different from the most shattering of recapitulation journeys. In fact, it’s what the show clearly demonstrates, a recapitulation journey of outstanding impact.

Finally, we all look forward to the publication of Jan’s fourth book in the Recapitulation Diaries series, Place of No Pity, due in late February.

A Happy and Peaceful New Year to all,

Chuck

Chuck's Blog

Chuck’s Place: Initiation

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Rites of initiation are painful transformations…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

Initiation is instinct. Instinct is nature. Nature is the collective unconscious. The collective unconscious is the greater part of all that we are that we don’t know about.

We are born of egg and seed, the program of who we are set at conception. Nature provides initiation to reshape us at our necessary transitions in life, those important moments that are necessary to completely fulfill who we are.

Jung pointed out that our conscious attitude has the choice to submit to fulfilling who we are. On the other hand, if we choose incorrectly the collective unconscious will confront us, first in dream, next in neurosis and, ultimately, if we miss those calls, in the events we encounter in our lives, which will be fashioned to enforce our initiation.

Ancient tribes were closest to nature’s imperative. The great transition from childhood to adulthood was required by all through participation in initiations of severe torture and deep mystery to enact a shedding of the immature child self and the solid formation of a mature adult self capable of taking proper care of self and other.

Our modern world has long lost its connection to and respect for “primitive” initiation rites. On a global scale the results of this lost connection are evident in the puer aeternus leaders caught in the immaturity of their preadolescent sex and power games.

As a world, we are increasingly engulfed in a world of addiction. Ultimately, addiction is preadolescent fixation on dependency and power and, at the same time, an attempt to challenge the self to transform by going too far. Sometimes that leap is fatal. Sometimes it leads to consequences that awaken spiritual transformation and transition into adulthood.

One thing is certain, though we may refuse the call to initiation it will find us in some form in this modern world of ours. Our leaders are definitely creating the conditions for worldwide transformation right now, though they have no idea what nature has in store for them.

As individuals, if we search the truth that resides within us we will identify the initiations we are ourselves in the midst of. If we can join our intent with nature’s intent to become who we truly our, we free ourselves from the victim mentality that rages against the harshness of our initiation and solidify into the mature adult beings we truly are meant to become, marching toward fulfillment at last.

No easy road to freedom,

Chuck

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Chuck’s Place: Heading For The Morass

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“Man still hopes, in a primitive way, that not knowing, not naming, not seeing a danger would remove it.” (C. G. Jung in a letter to Cary Baynes in 1959)

Would that I could ignore all that threatens about us as we prepare to celebrate the ancient archetypal imperative to bring light and hope to the tree at the time of the Winter Solstice. Ignoring, however, does not remove the threat of the light going out. How then can we name the truth and preserve our little candle of hope? We must begin by knowing and naming what really is.

The great morass…
– Photo by Jan Ketchel

The drums of war are pounding. The tribes are choosing sides. Power is about to transfer. The period of stability and stalemate with all its matriarchal inclusiveness is about to be torn asunder. The burgeoning patriarchal energies of the collective unconscious, seeking advance domination and plunder, like an active volcano, are about to erupt.

Though at first glance it all appears to be in the hands of the patriarch, I would propose  it is actually but an unconscious male couvade (sympathetic male labor pains) mimicking the action and intent of the dark side of the Great Mother as she reshapes her creation, planet Earth.

This, I believe, is the light of our salvation. Mother Nature, who reigns supreme, is both using and depotentiating her wayward son, the male patriarch. Violation of nature’s law can only be met with its natural corrective. Ultimately, Mother Nature has all the power, even over the consciouness she created but which has abused its privilege.

The destructive energies of the collective unconscious all ultimately issue from Mother Nature herself. Man deludes himself when thinking he owns these powers. Mother Nature delights in the delusions of this drunken frenzy of ego inflation unfolding before us. Destruction is painful and dangerous, yet all birth is dangerous and unkind to the mother’s body. That new and better life is the result is the light and hope frequently associated with a savior being born at this time of year.

That the savior is always the son of a virgin reveals that what issues forth is indeed of Mother Nature alone, parthenogenetically brought forth from her body, her appendage, without male fertilization. The “new man” will be of her determination alone, her concoction, better fashioned to serve her ultimate goal of new life, better suited to manage her creation.

And so, from the great morass of the coming time will emerge new life to lead us onward. We lend ourselves to this cause by staying connected to the truth and not exhausting ourselves in premature labor. As they say, let the games begin! Save your energy for when it will be truly needed for genuine transformation.

In the meantime, stay present and in awe of the majesty of life that continuously fills us with love and compassion.

Intent on keeping the flame lit,

Chuck