Tag Archives: transformation

Soulbyte for Tuesday January 30, 2024

-Artwork © 2024 Jan Ketchel

Stability comes from within and is manifested without when that strongly centered stability is allowed to form a life structure that is conducive to growth and evolution. Imagine the world without the structure of nature. In that case, Earth would be a planet devoid of life. Life is what brings structure. The art of living presents possibilities, choices and decisions that in turn produce the structures of a life. That which contains also allows for transformation. Look to constructing containers within your own life that will provide the perfect mix of tension and flexibility to allow you to continually transform. It’s what life is really all about, after all.

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Soulbyte for Monday November 13, 2023

-Artwork © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Keep a compassionate heart, for self and others, and without denial of truth remain steadfast upon your path of grow and change. It’s so easy to slip back into old habits, even when it’s clear that those old habits are harmful. With the truth known, continually challenge the self to move on now, into the change that is necessary. With forward movement comes greater clarity and greater lessons in how to best proceed, how best to embrace the changes that are being shown to be not only beneficial but absolutely necessary. Life opens new doors each day and each new door is a new gift urging you onward. Embrace all the changes with a compassionate heart, and keep going!

Sending you love,
The Soul Sisters, Jan & Jeanne

Chuck’s Place: The Collective Energy Burning Through Us All

Trial by fire…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

An angry God once flooded the Earth in retaliation for broken laws. Afterwards, that God humbly promised to never destroy the Earth again in that way. That power was turned over to humans, which gave rise to  Oppenheimer’s world, the world we now inhabit.

Oppenheimer’s world is the reign of the human ego, with its power to both create and destroy. That great God in the sky transmuted into the High Self, the Spirit in everyone. The challenge today rests in the relationship between ego and its High Self. That relationship is in the midst of trial by fire.

Fire was originally the sole property of the gods. It took the hero, Prometheus, to steal it from the gods and deliver it to the human psyche. That deliverance was the birth of the human ego, in the form of the fire’s light of consciousness, with its ability to see and act beyond the dark control of instinctual unconsciousness.

With knowledge came independence and the ability to choose, create, destroy, dominate and be greedy. Ego has so dismissed its Spirit’s guidance that the Spirit of nature has been called in to adjust and refine the hubris.

The collective unconscious is creating fires in the passionate verbiage of pundits, who in turn are stirring the masses with similar aggressive passions. At the physical level, fires are raging around the globe.

The fiery energy of the collective unconscious is simultaneously burning through physical nature and human nature. This dual expression of fire, within and without, is what Jung called synchronicity, an expression of the psychoid level of reality, where psyche and nature similarly reflect a moment in time, as it reverberates through all of creation.

This is the same action that gives rise to an I Ching reading, where the physical action of throwing of coins creates an image that reflects one’s spiritual predicament, at that very moment in time. The oracle reflects the oneness of Matter and Spirit at a specific moment in time.

The collective energy of nature expresses this oneness, within and without, as it burns through the hubris of ego, which has abused its royal privilege, to restore the rule of the wisdom of the High Self. This is the refining action of the trial by fire we are all now living through.

On an individual level, it is important to notice that this current of collective energy is running through all of us. Be mindful to not get ensnared by this fiery energy, or take it personally, acting it out in your social interactions. Nonetheless, we must apply the fiery light of consciousness to burn through our own defenses and illusions.

All fires require fuel to continue burning. When we don’t throw more fuel on it, it won’t keep burning. When we don’t attach to an illusory story or feeling, we will not be consumed by it.

The fire is burning off all that stands in the way of Spirit truth. To attempt to defensively reason with fire merely fans its flames. Seek refuge in the truth; let others burn their way to it. Some just have to go deeper through the trial-by-burning to get to the truth.

Bring one’s ego into alignment with High Self. Understand that the trial by fire is really the proving ground to mature the ego by burning off its excesses and illusions, and shifting its attention to address the true needs of our Great Collective Spirit Self.

Transfiguring through trial by fire,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Regeneration, Renewal & New Life

It’s all about New Life…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Two very common dream scenarios, related to new life, are encounters with snakes and with children, which I will explore separately.

Snakes molt. They regenerate by letting go of their old skin, literally. To be bitten by a snake or chased by a snake in a dream, or to house a snake beneath the floorboards of one’s dream home all herald the message that it’s time to let go of an attitude, belief, or habit that has been dominating one’s life.

Snakes seek a remote, hidden locale that allows for total exposure to the heat of the sun to facilitate the release of old encasement. Our world is now heating to record levels, forcing humankind to let go of old ways of living.

The sun, our ultimate source of light on Earth, symbolizes the penetrating light of consciousness we apply to discern truth. The truth is the stuff of the new skin that will contain us as we shift into new life.

Arriving at truth is like lying in the sun, relaxing in a fixed posture, allowing the rays of the sun to penetrate our rigidity, as we soften and receive its transformative impetus.

The release of old attitudes and attachments allows the crusted-over energy of our old skin to be revamped and redeployed for new life. Letting go is a breakdown phase that does require the destruction of beliefs that have served in the past but no longer promote new life.

The universal symbol for new life is the child. Whenever children appear in our dreams, some part of our unborn self is seeking to come to life.

Carl Jung was careful to point out that the shadow in the human psyche is both a place of repressed experience but, more fundamentally, is also the home of our unfolding inherent self. There are parts of our core seed self that may not be ready to be born in our human life until we are well into the second half of life.

If your actual child appears in a dream, the dream might refer to your child but more likely it refers to a quality of that child seeking to evolve within your own self. Pregnancy in a dream, however unrealistic to waking life, strongly hints at the coming birth of new life and new potential.

Too often, we are apt to interpret the appearance of our child self in our dreams to mean our actual inner child. This then associates to childhood, with its focus on trauma and unmet needs, that beckons ego, or someone else, to take better care of its neglected inner child. Though of course this might be true, more likely the child might represent a vital potential within one’s core seeking to find its way into life.

The Greek god Kronos was the father of Zeus. Kronos had the habit of eating his newly born children to ensure his safety and continued rule. Kronos operates in all of us through our judgments and attitudes that refuse the change into new life. Eating the children can take the form of entrenched habit that disregards any new possibilities that contradict one’s ruling beliefs.

“The King is dead, long live the King!” This cry expresses the necessity for the ruling, anachronistic attitudes in the psyche to die for the new King to emerge and bring new life to the personality. This is the true fountain of youth.

When we heed the call of the snake to allow for the breakdown and letting go of Kronos, we open the way for the innocence of the child to be born, as we regenerate, renew and become new life.

Molting,
Chuck

Chuck’s Place: Karma For Better

We all must face the highs and lows of karmic destiny…
-Illustration © 2023 Jan Ketchel

Karma is destiny, the inevitable effect of a previous cause. That which goes up must come down. And, according to Newton’s Third Law, the force with which it lands will cause a reaction of equal force. This repetitive back-and-forth volleying generates a groundhog day habit of karmic stuckness.

We must circumambulate our habitual beingness until we accrue the consciousness to clearly see our individual core karmic leitmotif. Once filled with awareness of our karmic duty we are then freed to exercise our will to address our oppositions and eventually shift our lives in an equal and reconciled new direction. This is using karma for better.

Esther Harding states:
“The marvel is that there is not a perpetual state of war within the psyche, for each of these elements is endowed with energy and so cannot die. Fortunately for our sanity, many of these irreconcilable elements lie deep within the unconscious, locked in primordial sleep; those which may have stirred are shut away in separate compartments. But as life progresses and an increase of consciousness is achieved, the inner conflicts awaken, and the problem of reconciling the oppositions they reveal has to be undertaken as a serious and urgent task.”
–M.E. Harding, Psychic Energy

Cherokee guide Joyce Sequichie Hifler, in A Cherokee Feast of Days, speaks to the karma of a pond turning over. It’s nature’s way of cleaning house. The stagnant energy settled at the bottom of the pond activates, mixes with other strata of water, and rises to the surface. And yes, the whole pond of human affairs needs to turn over at times. This is the cosmic karma of now.

Judge Hatch, a Master teacher in the astral realm, hovered over the battlefields of Earth throughout WW1, channeling his observations and guidance for humanity to his scribe Elsa Barker, in War Letters. His intent was to empower humanity to advance beyond the perennial karma of war. His empowering technology is available to every human being to reconcile with both the warring factions within the self, as well as in the world. Here’s a method to transform hate, the mother of all wars:

“…Has anyone injured you in the struggle of life?—for life is a kind of war. Go out in thought to those whose desires have clashed with your desires, those who have hurt you or hated you. Go to them one by one—not several at a time in this exercise, and one by one try to understand them. See yourself with their eyes, feel toward yourself with their hearts. If they still hate you, you may hate yourself at first in sympathy with them. But remaining there in sympathy with them, you will gradually feel their hard thoughts of you change, gradually begin to be friends with yourself through them.”  –Elsa Barker, War Letters From The Living Dead Man.

Judge Hatch emphasizes that this exercise is not a subconscious abuse of black magic to control another because its objective is consonant with the intent of the High Self, one of unselfish union and positive evolution. Carolyn Elliot describes similar exercises of appreciation for the warring factions within the self in her book, Existential Kink.

From the perspective of every individual human as a single cell in the wholeness of everything, every effort—even that of a single person—will impact the state of balance in the overall whole. Furthermore, every individual, however disagreeable, is a permanent member of the whole, for energy cannot die.

What is changeable is the balance between the parts within the whole. We all, as individuals, are subject to the karma of our attitudes, decisions, and actions. The human race, as a whole, is subject to its karma as well. The artistry of being human is our ability to sculpt our beingness with attitudes, decisions, and behaviors that advance our karma for better.

As Judge Hatch describes, the practice of deeply appreciating the perspective of one’s enemy, especially feeling their hatred toward oneself, mitigates the intensity of one’s own anger, harmonizing an opposition within the self and impacting positively one’s outer relationship with the hated other.

Perhaps this technology can be simply summarized in the words of an earlier Master, “love thy enemy.” That’s how to advance the self and use one’s karma for better.

For the better,
Chuck