Currently, I put most of my energy into the weekly channeled messages, the daily Soulbytes, and the completion of The Recapitulation Diaries. An occasional blog does still get written when the creative urge strikes. Archived here are the blogs I wrote for many years about inner life and outer life, inner nature and outer nature. Perhaps my writings on life, as I see it and experience it, may offer you some small insight or different perspective as you take your own journey.
With gratitude for all that life teaches me, I share my experiences.
I am beautiful, loving vibration.
You are beautiful, loving vibration.
All beings are beautiful, loving vibration.
May I experience myself as beautiful, loving vibration.
May you experience yourself as beautiful, loving vibration.
May all beings experience themselves as beautiful, loving vibration.
May I experience you as beautiful, loving vibration.
May you experience me as beautiful, loving vibration.
May we experience all beings as beautiful, loving vibration.
May all beings experience me as beautiful, loving vibration.
May all beings experience you as beautiful, loving vibration.
May all beings experience all other beings as beautiful, loving vibration.
I am beautiful, loving vibration.
You are beautiful, loving vibration.
All beings are beautiful, loving vibration.
August 11, 2015
J. E. Ketchel
All of life is beautiful, loving vibration! – Photo by Jan Ketchel
In meditation it is common for thoughts to impose, for ideas to form, for stories to spin. The antidote is to bring attention back to the breath, to a mantra, a chant, any predetermined anchor will do the trick… until thoughts reappear. Then it’s back to the breath, to the mantra, to the chant or the anchor.
Life, I have found, is much like the process of meditation. We can so easily be overwhelmed by life, by forgetting why we are here, our purpose often impossible to locate and often harder to actualize, as our daily intentions go flying out the window as soon as something enticing comes along. The desires and demands that come during the unfolding of a day are like the thoughts that impose during meditation. In fact the thoughts that come during meditation are all about life—the figuring and planning, the conniving, reminding, and determining of what we want and how to get it—as the two intermingle, quite naturally.
Over time, as we learn to sit quietly, in meditation or otherwise, we enjoy a peacefulness that may only exist because we are removed, for a few moments, from life, from its plans, needs and wants. We discover that we are simple beings, just sitting still, part of it all. The more we achieve such moments of sitting still the more we experience ourselves as simple energy, needing nothing. No matter how we came into this world, what our experiences have been, and who we think we are, we can all achieve the same simple pleasure of quietude in sitting still.
It is in such quiet moments that deeper realizations come to us. It is in such quiet moments, when we are no more than a breath of air, that we might discover our deepest and truest needs. They might not be what we think. The quiet truth, learned in this manner, might shake us as violently as the truth learned in a harsh or abrupt and painful manner. The quiet truth is often the catalyst to real change, just as tragedy or trauma is.
And then there are times when nothing seems to change us. Nothing that we do, nothing that happens to us has any effect. We might be truly shaken or we might enter a state of bliss, but such moments of opportunity pass us by. Perhaps we are just not ready. Perhaps we are afraid. Perhaps this is not the lifetime that such things will be accomplished. Perhaps we really do want to come back and do it again. Perhaps that is our deepest truth after all.
Perhaps we haven’t achieved quiet sitting very often. Perhaps we haven’t given ourselves the opportunity to hear our deepest truth. Perhaps we feel we’ve been shorted, that life just isn’t very exciting and we just don’t have any hope that it will change. But in taking a different look at who we really are, we offer ourselves a truth that is hard to ignore. For, in truth, the being we are in the world, as we go about our lives, is only one part of us, a different being from our sitting quiet self.
It’s not hard to determine that the worldly self experiences life one way, but our sitting still self experiences it another way. It’s also not hard to determine that both of these selves exist simultaneously. We might notice how we present one self to the world and another only to ourselves; though both exist in our physical body they are two different beings.
It is our quiet self that asks us to sit still and it is our worldly self that interrupts with those thoughts, ideas, and stories. It’s our quiet self that reminds us to breath, to say our mantra, our chant, to anchor ourselves in some way when we meditate. Or we might be sitting outside, quietly listening to the sounds of nature when thoughts interfere. It is our quiet self that shuts them down, intent upon having a moment of peace. Once we realize that we are these two selves all the time, we realize they each have an important role to play. They are the knowing selves, our closest guides through life.
Sitting quietly… – Photo by Chuck Ketchel
As we shift our awareness away from finding one or the other as problematic, and connect to both of them, we are more aware of how they work, and how we can work with them to stay focused, sometimes quiet and sometimes active, for it is only in a balance of the two that we can really live in this world. And then the challenge becomes giving them equal time, listening to both of them, and acting appropriately.
And that is the true work of this lifetime, to know who we really are—all parts of ourselves, fully—to work with what we came into this world with, striving always to make this life be the one where we solve and resolve all that has haunted and challenged us, perhaps for many lives. Our ultimate goal is to fully transform and actualize our fullest potential, in this world and the next. Now that is something to sit quietly and meditate on!
Before sleep I call upon Robert Monroe, great out-of-body explorer and author of several books as well as guided meditations on the subject. “Will you take me on as your apprentice?” I ask. Before long I am asleep and dreaming.
Girl on beach, drawn as we all are… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
I stroll along a boardwalk. On my left side is an endless row of doorways to video arcades, to adventures and games, places to learn and test skills. On my right is the ocean, dark and brooding.
I pop into one arcade after another, through wide doorways into big rooms, through narrow doorways, no wider than a sheet of paper, into rooms equally narrow. All doorways are accessible; no matter how thin, I simply slip in. I have many adventures in these various rooms, partaking in games of skill, learning how to manipulate and master everything that comes at me.
Every now and then I step back out onto the boardwalk and walk out onto the beach and step into the waves of the ocean. As opposed to the busyness of the arcade scene, all is calm and quiet here. I am calm and at ease here too.
All night long, while I dream, I partake in life along the boardwalk and in the arcade rooms. I play all the games. I am enticed, challenged, gain insights, skills, and a sense of power and prowess, and yet it all soon becomes repetitive and boring. At the end of the night, just before I wake up, I walk one more time out to the ocean’s edge and realize that this is what matters, this is what’s meaningful, this is the whole point of everything. I wake up in utter calmness.
The boardwalk is the path through life. We make many trips along that boardwalk, through many lifetimes, selecting how we want to live, being drawn here and there, walking the narrow planks over and over again.
The arcade rooms represent the many adventures we have, the choices we make to play one game or another, the things we are challenged with and the things we learn. Here all the desires, the wantings, the needs, the things of this world that we find so enticing are supplied, encountered, and experienced.
The ocean is the Great Unknown Known. I call it this because although it is dark and brooding and hard to see what lies in its depths, we sense such affinity with it. There is familiarity in its mystery and we are constantly drawn to it. We are drawn there by the High Self, our spirit urging us to discover what it offers, just as I was drawn in my dream. We go to it throughout our lifetimes, perhaps not as often as we go to the arcade rooms, but often enough that we all have a sense of its presence and significance in our lives.
Life’s repetitions keep us going in circles… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Our sense of familiarity with it, hard to pinpoint at first, becomes more realized as we get to know it better. For some, the unconscious, that Great Unknown Known, is frightening. To others it is calming though still mysterious. It will remain a mystery until we dive deeper into its depths and discover what it holds for us. Once we have gone into its depths enough times we gain a certain prowess and ease, equal to that which we gain in the reality of this world, as we engage in it, walking the boardwalks of our many lifetimes.
The more we explore the ocean, the more we feel its resonance, its energy so like the energy of our spirit. The more we enter it the more we gain a certain prowess in its waters. We might even experience the great depths of calm that came over me at the end of my dream as we dive deeper into the mysteries of the inner self. Even as we become calm in its waters, we are also aware that we have still much to learn, as its mysteries are endless. It is the vastness of infinity, and just that, infinite.
Each time I took a break from the arcade rooms and stepped into the ocean in my dream calmness came over me, and yet I always went back to the boardwalk and the arcades. By the end of the night, however, I got the message. It’s not the boardwalk and the endless supply of games, one more bedazzling, enticing and challenging than the next, but the deep and broody ocean that is important. It is where our spirit takes us over and over again. Our spirit knows it’s what we are really seeking, and that it offers all the adventure we really need.
The ocean, the Great Unknown Known, is the big draw. It offers the wonder and mystery of what lies beyond the boardwalk, beyond this world, enticing us to discover it for ourselves, asking us to test its waters as eagerly as we jump into another arcade game.
In the end it’s the balance between the two that we seek. We must let ourselves fully experience what the boardwalk offers, on both sides. We must fully live in this world, the arcade rooms, but also fully avail ourselves of the world of the Great Unknown Known. And that really means that we soon discover that it is not so unknown at all, but just another part of who we really are.
Where our heart knows we must go… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
There are many ways to go to the ocean every day, in sitting calmly, in simply breathing, in meditation, in just being, in refusing to do what we might normally feel we must do, in what the shamans call “not doing.” In “not doing” we refuse to go into the arcade rooms. Instead, we go to the other side of the boardwalk, slip into the ocean for a moment or two and wait for it to show us something. You too might ask for Robert Monroe’s help. I think he’s out there waiting.
For now, we must return to the boardwalk because that’s where we live, but the ocean is always right there.
Who am I? Why am I really here, for what purpose? Where am I going?
Such questions plagued me during childhood and well into early adulthood. Turmoil within and without kept me going, focused on getting on with life, getting away and out into the world. I couldn’t wait to be on my own, taking responsibility for myself, and yet at the same time another part of me was viscerally frightened. That fear manifested in my physical body.
Most of the time I felt so dissociated from what was going on outside me, so singularly solitary, not really part of life. It wasn’t until I began exploring the deeper issues that lived inside me, like alive beings just waiting for me to find them, that some broader answers and new perspectives began to appear. As I relaxed my physical body, letting go of my fears, I gained access to so much more of the world, and beyond this world. My whole viewpoint expanded as a result. I discovered that I was so much more than my physical self.
As renowned out-of-body explorer Robert Monroe contends: You are more than your physical body. Remember this always, he says: You are more than your physical body.
Life is not all that it seems, as it appears or as we think of it. There IS so much more. We are ancient beings, living in the present, searching our pasts for clues to those questions. Who am I? Why am I really here, for what purpose? Where am I going?
To truly become a full-fledged student of Earth School we must take on characteristics of a student warrior, becoming strong in mind and body while simultaneously becoming kind and gentle beings. We learn what it means to become a warrior as we study ourselves in our lives, the past, the present, and as we face what we want our future to look like. That part is totally up to us, to carve out what we will. We have the power to do that right now. The power lies in the decisions we make every day.
A warrior takes full responsibility for the self, recognizing the self as being more than a physical body, as being a participant in life on earth to learn something. We each have something to learn during our lifetime, a singularly personal issue to figure out and resolve. Our time in Earth School, if we are to see it that way and meet the challenge of our issue, requires that we become good students, eager to learn all that we can while we are here.
At some point in our lives we are given the opportunity to wake up. In fact, wake-up calls come all the time. We will answer when we are ready. When we do, we begin to discover that, indeed, we ARE so much more than just our physical bodies. And then the real adventures in Earth School begin.
I propose that Monroe’s directive become a personal mantra. Keep saying it until it makes sense. “I am more than my physical body.” You are more than you think you are. Your thoughts may have shaped who you are now, but you have the power to reshape yourself.
Something is waiting to blossom… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Earth School isn’t such a bad place to be if you take a Warrior class, if you decide that you want to find deeper meaning and purpose, if you decide you really do want to evolve. You can be your own teacher. All you need is your determination and intent to change, and your new mantra: I am more than my physical body!
Start with that and see where it leads. You never know what you might discover about yourself as you begin to experience life outside of the physical. The door is always open to Earth School. It must be experienced to have true impact. Full participation required! You just have to decide to walk through, open up, and enjoy the lessons!
We all get caught in systems of belief, sticky as a spider’s web… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Chuck, Jeanne and I write often of warrior skills, of learning to hone the skills and mindset of a warrior. We like to say that we are all warriors on our personal journeys. It might be difficult to grasp what we mean by this or to feel an attachment to the term, but be assured it’s not really that foreign.
The first step of acceptance of the self as a warrior comes in acknowledging that we are all spiritual beings seeking to graduate from Earth School, to find the means to connect with our High Self and move on from repeated lives here and to advance into other realities. Earth school is the preparation for doing just that.
A warrior does not seek to promote or aggrandize the self, but uses the term only as an anchor, as a focus. Much as a practitioner of meditation, yoga, tai chi, karate, etc., might practice the skills of those disciplines, in deep inner silence, so does a warrior practice the skills of the warrior in private. It is not something one talks about. It is something one does, all the time and to the best of one’s abilities, seeking always to advance to new levels of accomplishment, like learning to improve at playing a musical instrument or to perfect an athletic skill.
To bring attention to the self, to believe or state that one is better or more advanced that another being is not in the warrior’s best interest. The only thing that matters is the personal journey toward awareness, and so a warrior remains innerly focused on that intent. Awareness is whatever it is for the life one is in and the journey one is presently on. One person’s awareness might be another person’s confusion, or already assimilated into another person’s life, but all will discover what they need over time, when they are ready, and so awareness is very personal too.
And so, the only thing that really matters is the personal journey, and thus we use the term “warrior” in a very specific way, to describe a being who is privately intent on figuring life out on ever-deepening levels, intent on taking the inner journey to understanding and completion, in whatever way that is meaningful for the current lifetime.
Curiosity might be the catalyst to advancement… – Photo by Jan Ketchel
Thus, references to the skills of the warrior and the processes of the warrior’s journey are always made with a far bigger picture in mind, the ultimate goal being that of the eternal spirit’s connection and union with its energetic self, with the Earth School being finding out that it is something else entirely. Experiences in life provide us with the direct means and the tangible products to take the journey to understanding what that might mean for us individually, utilizing what is personally relevant.
If you have any doubt about being a warrior yourself, stop right now. Instead, accept that because you are here, living in Earth School, you are already taking the warrior’s journey. You are curious, a seeker of something beyond that which is normally perceived, or you have been thrust into experiences and perceptions that you did not ask for but have had to contend with nonetheless. So the truth is, we are all warriors seeking meaning, understanding, and connection. If you are reading this—and I write this without any self-aggrandizement but simply as fact—you are already well on your way.
There comes a point during your time in Earth School when it becomes clear that “warrior” is indeed an appropriate term of description for what you are doing, for what you are attempting to achieve, to figure out, to sort through. In seeking deeper explanation, in the search for self-knowledge, for spirit connection, in the deep work of recapitulation, you are learning and honing the skills of a warrior. You might even discover that you have always been a warrior; you just didn’t know it!
So, when we speak or write of warriors and their doings, do not dismiss yourself from the mix, but more fully embrace your own journey as a warrior’s journey. Perhaps finding a context for what you are attempting to do and giving it a label, such as “I am a warrior taking a warrior’s journey,” will be just what you need to lock-in the practice and the deepening search for meaning that you have embarked on, even without your knowing, giving it a most fitting name. Do not doubt that you are worthy of the name, for in truth we are all warrior’s taking the warrior’s journey, just as we are spiritual beings taking the spiritual journey. They are one and the same.
At some point along the way we discover what it means to be in Earth School. We wake up to the fact that we are here to learn something. We become intensely aware that there is something else beyond this learning ground. That awakening offers us the opportunity to seek advancement beyond Earth School. It’s always our choice, of course.
What’s out there waiting for us? – Photo by Jan Ketchel
With our warriorhood practices firmly rooted, with our skills honed, our doubts melt away more easily and we move on more easily too. For now, however, we do the work we are challenged with in this life, both that which comes from within and that which comes from without.
The lessons of this lifetime, whether we are aware of them as lessons or not, whether we see a bigger picture or not, offer us the opportunity to connect with our future self. Making the decision to find out what that might mean is another step on the spiritual warrior’s journey.
