Category: major arcana

The Hidden Difference: How Empathic Readers and Psychics Use Tarot Differently

A comparison between psychic and empathic tarot readers, explaining how psychics use tarot as a focus for intuitive insights, while empaths interpret emotional and energetic patterns for guidance.

If you’ve had more than a few Tarot readings, you’ve probably encountered a reader who, “pulls,” the cards for you.  They may mix or shuffle the deck a few times and then they pick some cards which are supposed to represent you and your situation.  They lay those cards out and then interpret them for you.

There’s a real question in my mind whether we can even properly call that technique a Tarot reading.  Still, it illustrates the difference between two highly different styles of reading cards:  the psychic approach and the empathic approach.

PSYCHIC TAROT READERS:  USING THE CARDS AS A FOCUS TOOL

Psychic Tarot readers tend to use the cards as a tool to focus their extrasensory abilities.  Think of the classic movie scene where a  gypsy woman is huddled over a crystal ball and utters a pronouncement like, “You are going to meet a tall dark stranger and have incredible sex in a variety of nearly impossible positions.”  There’s no suggestion that the crystal ball is talking to her or texts are appearing inside of it.  Rather, she’s using it to focus her attention on receiving messages from spirit guides or opening herself to intuitive flashes.

In the same way, a psychic reader might pull The Tower card out of the deck and say something like, “Towers are tall buildings and that’s what I’m picking up on.  I’m seeing a tall building in your future and there’s something wrong with it.  I’m getting that you’re thinking of buying a house and I’d caution you about any two story house you look at it.”

Now, that interpretation HAS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE DEFINITION OF THE CARD.  Not even close.  That doesn’t mean that the reader is wrong, though.  If you’re dealing with a genuine psychic, she may be totally right on.  

But it’s not a Tarot reading.  It’s a psychic reading using Tarot cards as prompts.

Put another way, the knowledge is coming from the reader and not from the cards.  That’s a major clue that you’re dealing with a psychic reader – they deemphasize the actual definitions of the cards and substitute their own.  The images on the cards are actually much more important to them than the definitions because the images are what trigger their psychic flashes.

EMPATHIC TAROT READERS:  READING EMOTIONAL AND ENERGETIC PATTERNS

Empathic readers tend to take a much more traditional approach.  

First of all, they want YOU to handle the cards as much as possible, rather than simply picking out the cards for you.  This is a recognition that there is some sort of a synchronistic link between the cards and the person who’s receiving the reading.  It’s almost like the cards have to get to know the person – they need to pick up your unique vibrations and then the cards will match those vibrations and give you a reading.

An empathic reader will also rely much more heavily on structure and definitions.  He’ll use readings with predetermined positions such as past, present and future.  He’ll have a set of definitions that won’t change simply because he’s getting a different, “impression,” of what the card should mean.  In the example of drawing The Tower card, he’d tell you that some cataclysmic event is about to occur in your personal life, but he won’t mention two story houses.

In one sense, an empath’s Tarot reading might seem to be a little psychic because she will connect deeply with the emotional and energetic state of the the person receiving the reading. Rather than receiving psychic downloads, an empathic reader will sense the feelings, fears, and desires of the client and interpret the cards in a way that reflects these energies.

Because empaths absorb emotions, their interpretations of the cards mirror what the client is going through.  For instance, they might sense the client’s anxiety over drawing The Tower card and interpret it as need for an emotional breakthrough, rather than pure destruction.  In that sense, an empath’s Tarot reading might feel more like a therapy session than a psychic prediction because they’re much more heart focussed.

WHICH TAROT READER IS RIGHT FOR YOU?

Both types of readings are perfectly valid, but one or the other might be preferable for us.  It depends on what we’re looking for.

If we’re looking for guidance about what may happen in the future, then a psychic reader may be the better choice.  That’s assuming, of course, that we’re convinced that the person we’re dealing with is a genuine psychic.

We’d approach that type of a reading in precisely the same way that we’d approach a psychic reading without the Tarot cards.  After all, the cards are just there to focus the psychic’s abilities.  We might go to a psychic to try to establish communication with a loved one who’s passed over.  Or perhaps we feel a need for direction from a spirit guide or angel and can’t communicate directly with them ourselves.  The psychic is the channel and the cards are secondary, so we’re not really looking for the wisdom of the Tarot itself.

A reading with an empath, on the other hand, would be much more oriented toward trying to make sense of our daily lives using the cards and their actual definitions.  Empaths process information in patterns and so they’d be looking at all of the factors in our lives and trying to stitch them into a coherent whole.

A reading with an empath is also much more about how we feel about what’s happening to us, rather than just predicting events.  After all, that sensitivity to other people’s emotions and energy is what empaths do best.

In either case, we always need to remember that a Tarot reading is just a snap shot in time.  It’s about what MAY happen if the current circumstances continue.  Nothing in a Tarot reading is written in stone and we have the ability to change the outcome by changing our behavior.

The Hermit, Introverted Intuitives, and Letting Our Lights Shine

How intuitives emerge from a Hermit Phase.

As an INFJ personality type, I’ve always felt a particular affinity for The Hermit card.    After all, going into Hermit mode is one of the primary defense mechanisms of intuitives and introverts.   When we feel overwhelmed or hurt, we pull up the drawbridge, slam the gate shut, and self-isolate until we heal.  Sometimes that takes a few weeks and sometimes it can turn into years.

I’ve recently begun focusing on another part of The Hermit card, though, which is the lamp that he’s holding aloft.  He isn’t just hiding out anymore – he’s illuminating a path for others to follow.

 INTUITIVES DON’T LEAD

Doing that is NOT something that highly intuitive or empathetic people are inclined to do, for a couple of reasons.  First – and most obvious – is the fact that most intuitives are also introverts.  We’re not the sort of people who want to have a great deal to do with other people, much less try to lead them anywhere. 

In a very real sense, that’s more of the path of the extrovert.  Extroverts love, love, LOVE to charge out into society, organize everything, and tell other people what they should be doing and when they should be doing it. Which is fine, because someone has to put together the Christmas parties, right?  Better them than us.

INTUITIVES AND SELF-IMAGE

Another reason that intuitives seldom assert themselves as, “leaders,” is that many of us have really rotten self-images.  We feel as if we don’t fit in, as if we’re the original square peg in a round hole.  

Some of that flows out of the fact that society is, once again, pretty much designed by extroverts.  Starting in elementary school, we’re told that daydreaming and wanting to be by ourselves is, “bad.”  How many of us received the dreaded report card that said, “Doesn’t play well with other children?”  Yikes.  

That continues into adult life, of course.  Just look at the modern work spaces, with cubicles piled on top of each other and no sense of privacy or personal space.  They’re extrovert heaven and introvert hell and if we don’t like them there must be something wrong with us.  It turns out we don’t play well with other adults, either.

INTUITIVES AND DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES

There’s a further reason for intuitive introverts having terrible self-images, which is – guess what? – our families.  When I first started digging into intuitive personality types I was astounded at the number of people who reported that they had come from dysfunctional families.  And by, “dysfunctional,” I mean families where one or both parents had serious mental issues, addiction issues, or abuse issues.  

Frequently, a part and parcel of being a terrible parent is blaming the child for your bad parenting skills.  A classic example is a parent who gets drunk, beats the hell out of the kid, and then says, “You made me do that.  If you were a better child, I wouldn’t have to beat you.”  The end result is that the kid is convinced that he or she isn’t a, “good,” person and that they’re somehow to blame for the abuse.  We go into life with the basic premise that we’re flawed and unloveable.

INTUITIVES AND COGNITIVE INTELLIGENCE

So, all of these factors (and more) lead the introverted intuitive to feel that she’s in no position to lead anyone, anywhere.  After all, we’re odd balls and we’re just not quite good enough.  But is that borne out by facts?  Consider these statistics from Susan Storm’s article in PsychologyJunkie:

Of all of the personality types, INFJs have the second highest grades in high school.

INFJs have the highest first semester grades in college and some of the highest undergraduate grades.

INFJs are among the most persistent personality types in actually finishing college.

INFJs tend to score well above average in standardized IQ tests.

INFPs and INFJs read more than any other personality types.  While the average American reads 12 books per year, INFJs average 67 books per year.

INTUITIVES AND EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

While some introverted intuitives are full blown empaths, ALL of them are highly empathetic.  And by empathetic, I mean that they can, “read,” another person’s emotions so deeply and so quickly that they may appear to be psychic.  

When you meet an introverted intuitive, they are instantly scanning your body language, your eyes, your facial expressions, the tone of your voice and even the clothes that you chose to wear that day.  All of this happens so rapidly that the intuitive may not even be aware that he’s doing it.  What’s more, intuitives frequently feel that everyone else must have that same level of perception, simply because it feels so natural to them.  But, no, most people don’t do that.

As Eileen McKusick, author of Tuning the Human Biofield put it, “It’s like having an antenna that goes a little higher than everyone else’s.  We pick up information that normal people don’t.”

COMING OUT OF THE HERMIT PHASE

What usually pulls introverted intuitives out of their Hermit phase is a desire to help other people.  That can manifest as personally as wanting to help a friend who’s gone through a divorce or as broadly as wanting to make some contribution to humanity as whole.  Intuitives are, after all, highly empathetic, which means that we really DO feel other people’s pain, almost as if it were our own.  

In order to help, though, we have to get rid of that old, “I’m not good enough,” self-image.  When we combine our intellectual intelligence with our emotional intelligence, we are actually extraordinarily capable of helping others heal.

It’s estimated that up to 52% of the population may fall into the introvert section of the personality types.  BUT . . . introverted intuitives are a very tiny slice of that.  Only 1 to 2% of the world population are INFJs and only 4.4% are INFPs.  We have unique gifts and unique perspectives.  We just need the self confidence to go along with those gifts. To let our lights shine on other people’s darkened paths.

The Most Powerful Card in the Tarot – Getting Downright Foolish

An explanation of why The Fool is the most powerful card in the Tarot.

There’s an ongoing debate among Tarot aficionados about which card is THE strongest card in the deck.  The most prominent candidates are usually the first two cards of the Major Arcanum:  The Fool and The Magician.  I tend to lean toward The Fool, for reasons which I’ll explain, but the truth is that we need both of their energies in our personal and spiritual growth.  The Fool is pure potential, whereas The Magician is pure mastery.  Growth occurs when those two energies intersect.

LOOKING AT THE SYMBOLISM

In The Fool, we see a young, ambisexual person dancing along at the edge of a cliff.  He lightly holds a rose in one hand, and his meager possessions are contained in a satchel hanging from a pole that he carries over his shoulder.  A small dog joyously cavorts at his feet, despite the fact that The Fool appears to be about to walk straight off of the cliff.

If we had to select a couple of words to describe the image, they would probably be, “happy,” and, “unfocused.”  The person in the card seems to not have a care in the world.  He’s to telling us to stop and smell the roses, to trust in the present moment. The message is that if he walks off of the cliff, he’ll just keep strolling along on thin air.

The Magician card, on the other hand, is an image of total concentration and focus.  He’s dressed in the formal robes of a ceremonial magician and looking very serious.  One hand, holding a wand with two points, is pointed toward the sky and the other is pointed at the ground.  His robe is belted with the ouroboros symbol of eternity, a snake eating it’s own tail, and that message is reinforced by the eternity symbol floating over his head.  The four symbols of earthly existence, the wand, pentacle, cup, and sword, lie on his altar.

“Just the Tarot” by Dan Adair – A complete set of definitions, layouts and instructions for reading Tarot cards.

The Magician is channeling the divine energy into the Earth Plane.  He’s using it to control the four elements and manifest his desires through the use of his will power.  If we had to select a couple of words to describe this image, they would be, “control,” and, “focus.”

THE MAGICIAN AS THE WESTERN PARADIGM OF POWER

The Magician is very much the Western paradigm of power.  We use phrases like, “He’s a take-charge sort of a guy,” or, “She’s always in control,” to describe this kind of power, and we tend to admire it.

The Magician is the type of a person who is very conscious of what she wants to accomplish, has a detailed plan for doing it, has the necessary skills to make it happen, and works the plan until she reaches her goals.

This is the type of linear, step-by-step thinking that Westerners have traditionally employed, and it can be very effective.  

It’s also very much an ego-based sort of a power.  It’s saying, “This is what I want and I’m going to use all of my abilities and will to make it manifest.”

THE FOOL AS THE EASTERN PARADIGM OF POWER

The Fool’s energy is much more in keeping with the Eastern paradigm of power.  It has more to do with aligning ourselves with a deeper, universal  power, rather than trying to run the whole show with our egos.

There’s a basic trust implicit in The Fool.  It’s a trust that, as the Desiderata put it, “whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”  The idea is that there IS an underlying force in the Universe and that it’s a loving, compassionate force.  When we’re in alignment with that force, then we’re in The Flow, or the Tao, and our lives are much easier and happier because of it.  And, paradoxically, the more that we try to control that Flow, as the Magician does, the less in alignment we are and the harder life becomes.

VISUALIZING AND MANIFESTATION

We can see this sort of tension between The Magician energy and The Fool energy when we begin to delve into visualization and manifestation.  

Most of the books and seminars on the subject run pretty close to The Magician model of power. (A) We figure out what we want (the usual example being a million dollars.)  (B) We concentrate all of our will power on that goal by visualizing it, writing affirmations, and making vision boards.  (C) We cause that goal to manifest in our lives through repetition and the sheer power of our wills.  The Magician model is also very one-pointed and specific, as in, “I want a million bucks by September the first and I want it to be in unmarked hundred dollar bills.”

Of course, that frequently doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that most of us aren’t millionaires.  This is the point where many teachers will bring in the concept of The Fool energy.  The idea here is to relax, stay in the present moment, and quit telling the Universe how it’s supposed to behave.  Instead of setting a specific goal, right down to every detail, we set a general goal, but let the Universe work out the details.

Mike Dooley, in particular, works with this concept in many of his books like, “Manifesting Change.”  He refers to our trying to control all of the details (Magician energy) as, “the cursed hows.”  In other words, “I want a million bucks, Universe, and this is exactly HOW I want you to manifest it.”  The point that he’s making is that we may think we’re opening one door to financial abundance, but in reality we’re slamming shut a thousand other doors.  The Universe is infinite and it has an infinite number of ways of delivering what we want to manifest, unless we get too specific about how we want it done.

So, we bring in Fool energy.  We use a general statement like, “I’d like to manifest happiness and abundance in my life, Universe, and I’m sure you can work out the details.  After all, you make stars and solar systems, so this shouldn’t be much of a challenge for you.” And then we butt out and let it happen, while we stay happy and in the present moment.

CONSCIOUS AND SUBCONSCIOUS MINDS

The Kybalion – a discussion of Hermetic magic – talks about this dance between Magician energy and Fool energy in terms of the conscious and subconscious minds.

Our conscious mind is our everyday mind, which is the mind that we mostly identify with.  It’s ego based, logical, and linear and it’s very clever at performing mundane tasks.  It’s the mind that balances our budgets, pays the rent, buys groceries, and gets the kids to school on time.  We could call it Magician energy but it’s really just a tiny part of our larger mind.

The subconscious mind, on the other hand, comprises the majority of our minds.  Unlike the conscious mind, it never needs to sleep and it’s working 24/7, processing information, calculating what the future may look like and telling us when something’s wrong.

The most important thing about the subconscious mind, though, is that it’s our connection to the super-conscious mind, AKA the Universe.  Though that connection, it has almost infinite power to manifest anything that we truly desire.  That’s Fool energy.

Those two minds – conscious and subconscious – need to work together.  Although the subconscious mind is infinitely powerful, it just drifts without direction from the conscious mind.  Even worse, it can construct our reality based on the crap that flows through the internet, our televisions, our cultures and our religions, which may have very little to do with what we really want to manifest.

So we need to use that Magician energy – the conscious mind – to sort through our options and figure out where we want to actually go with our lives.  Do I want to be rich?  Do I want to be an artist?  Do I want more love in my life?  Once we determine what our overall goals and desires are, then we say, “Hey, subconscious mind/Universe – this is what I’d like to see happen.  Please get to work on that.”

THE FOOL DOES THE HEAVY LIFTING

Here’s the most important thing about all of that:  The Fool does the heavy lifting.  The SOLE PURPOSE of the conscious mind is to figure out where we want to go and turn it over to the subconscious mind/Universe.  

The conscious mind has a terrible time accepting that notion, because it’s ego based.  It wants to control every little detail of the manifestation process, and so it keeps snatching it back from the Universe and imposing more and more cursed hows on the process.  Every single time that we do that, we’re slamming doors shut instead of letting the subconscious mind open more doors.

And so, yes, in my opinion there can be no doubt that the most powerful card in the Tarot deck is The Fool.  It’s the primal energy that makes good things manifest in our lives.  The Magician can guide that energy but, by itself, it’s nothing but a control freak in a red robe.

Blasted Towers, Bad Ju-Ju, and the Unluckiest Card in the Tarot

A look at the five unluckiest cards in the Tarot deck.

I recently received an email from a reader who asked, “What’s the unluckiest Tarot card?”  I had to scratch my head about that one because the whole concept of good luck versus bad luck can get pretty complex.  Nonetheless, there are some Tarot cards that can always be considered harbingers of bad luck

THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE, REVERSED

The Wheel of Fortune, Reversed, is the most obvious choice for a, “bad luck,” card.  We actually talk about luck in terms of good fortune and bad fortune and that’s what this card is all about.  It depicts life as a wheel, where sometimes our luck is ascending and expanding and sometimes it’s descending and decreasing.  When The Wheel of Fortune, Reversed, shows up in a reading it indicates that we’re in for a patch of bad luck.

The Kybalion, which is a book about Hermetic Magic, compared it to the pendulum of a clock.  The pendulum swings first in one direction and then back in the other.  Life can be seen in much the same way:  sometimes we’re swinging into really good luck and then we swing back into a period of bad luck.

The obvious underlying message is to just hang on, because things will inevitably change.  When we can stand back and look at good luck/bad luck as a rhythmic cycle, then periods of ill fortune will affect us much less severely.  We just need to stay centered and calm and wait for the cycle to reverse itself.

THE TOWER

Also known as, “the lightning struck tower,” and, “the blasted tower,” The Tower would probably be my pick as THE unluckiest card in the deck.  

“Just the Tarot,” by Dan Adair – complete definitions, layouts, and instructions for reading Tarot cards, available on Amazon.

At it’s most severe level, it can indicate that everything that you’ve loved and invested in is about to be blasted right down to the ground.  The last time that I had it showing up in my personal readings, my life partner died, I lost my house, and I was involved in a horrible law suit over the probate of the estate.  It can be that bad, depending on the other cards in the reading, but it usually isn’t.

On a mundane level, The Tower is usually just a powerful warning that we’ve gone down the wrong path and the Universe is about to provide a course correction.  Perhaps we’ve been treating our fellow employees badly and – Shazam – we’re suddenly fired or demoted.  Or perhaps we’ve been emotionally abusive or neglectful of our lover and they leave us for someone else.

In my experience, there’s always a level of hubris involved with this card.  We’re not only taking things for granted, but we’re also being arrogant.  We’re assuming that everything is under our control and the Universe is going to show us that we’re not.

The most positive message in this card – which we usually fail to appreciate at the time – is that we get to completely start over.  It’s like that line from, Me and Bobby McGee:  “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.”  When our lives (or our projects or relationships, etc.) have been blasted right down to the foundations, we have the freedom to consciously design something new and better.

DEATH

Even if it isn’t the unluckiest card in the deck, Death definitely wins the award for the creepiest card in the Tarot.  In her wonderful book, “Fortune Telling by Tarot Cards,” Sasha Fenton puts it in this perfectly understated, British way:  “This card usually puts the wind up people when it appears . . .”

Yes.

Now, first of all, I have never seen the Death card appear before someone’s death.  It will pop up after someone has died, but it’s usually just a comment on what’s happened.  It’s more like, “Well, you’ve lost someone you loved, so you’re dealing with death and grief.”

What it can indicate, though, is that there’s going to be a radical, life changing turn in events in a person’s life.  The querent is suddenly going to find herself going in a completely different direction than she has in the past.  In an emotional and spiritual sense, it really is as if their previous life has died and they’re off in a completely new direction.

I knew a woman who had been happily married for 15 years, had a home, a loving husband, and 2 kids.  She woke up one morning with this thought ringing in her head:  “Shit, I’m not in love with him anymore and I hate my life.”  Within six months she’d obtained a divorce, turned custody of her children over to her ex-husband and was working as a river guide in West Texas.  That’s the kind of radical change that we’re talking about here.

Whether that kind of change is good luck or bad luck is just a matter of interpretation.  If it’s something that we consciously plan, we usually view it as good fortune.  If it was something that was forced on us by circumstance, we may think it was bad fortune.

JUSTICE, REVERSED

I’m a little hesitant to include the Justice card in this list because it has more to do with people and circumstances than luck per se.  Nonetheless, it’s frequently seen as bad luck so I’ll stick it in here.

Classically, as you might guess from the image, Justice has to do with the legal system.  If we’re involved in some sort of litigation and Justice is upright, it can mean that we’ll prevail.  If it’s reversed, it can mean that we’ll lose.

On a personal level, it can mean that the people around you – your family, co-workers, boss, etc. – are making judgements about you and they’re not good if the card is reversed.  

Losing a court case can obviously be seen as bad luck.  Or it can be seen as a sign that we have a bad case, a bad lawyer, or a bad judge.  In the same way, having people we care about judging us harshly can be seen as being treated unfairly.  Or it might be that we’re being jerks and we need to clean up our acts.

Justice, Reversed, can be a sign of a bad luck to come, but it also serves as a warning.  It’s saying, “You’re about to have some bad luck, so you need to take a careful look at your own actions before that happens.”

TEN OF SWORDS

It doesn’t take but a glance at the Ten of Swords to realize that there’s some serious bad ju-ju happening here.  If we’re lying face down stuck full of swords like a human pin cushion, something’s a little wrong. This card can indicate treachery, deceit or a very, very bad ending to a relationship or a job.

The suit of Swords symbolizes our personal power.  That’s the way that we project ourselves out into the world.  There’s nothing innately wrong with that.  Whether it’s standing up to a school yard bully when we were kids or pushing hard for a project we really believe in at work, there are always times when we have to be a bit aggressive.

But . . . when we’re overly and chronically aggressive, that puts us into a power cycle. We’re trying to dominate other people and run over their emotions and desires.  We become the school yard bully instead of the person standing up to the bully.  We see this mentality frequently with primitive men who brag about being the, “alpha dog.”  It’s dominance for the sake of dominance, rather than for the sake of getting anything done.

The message of this card is the old cliche’: live by the sword, die by the sword.  If we’ve been treating other people harshly, if we’ve been abusive in our love relationships, or domineering in work relationships, we’ve got some bad karma heading our way.

So those are the top five, “bad luck,” cards in the Tarot deck.  There are, of course, other cards that may indicate bad fortune in one aspect or another of our lives, but these are the red flags.  And, of course, we should always remember that a Tarot reading is just a snap shot in time.  It tells us what’s likely to happen, but we have the free will to change it.

Animal Companions, Heart Chakras, and Learning to Love

Our pets abilities to heal our Souls.

“I’ve known several Zen Masters and they were all cats.” – Eckhart Tolle

The image in The Fool tarot card shows a person dancing with joy at the edge of a cliff.  It’s meant to portray a Soul that’s so fully in the Flow that, even if she were to dance off of the cliff into thin air, she wouldn’t fall.  It’s a beautiful card, but we seldom take much note of the little dog that dances right along with The Fool.

In her book, “Animal Soul Contracts: Sacred Agreements for Shared Evolution”, Tammy Billups addresses the idea that animals come into our lives for specific reasons and they’re often instrumental in helping us to recover and evolve.  As she puts it, we have a Soul Contract with our animals.  We heal them and they heal us.

She tells the story of a man who was living alone when a stray dog suddenly showed up on his doorstep.  He took the dog in and they formed a strong, loving bond. The one problem was that the dog developed terrible separation anxiety and suffered greatly whenever his new owner had to leave the house.

He finally contacted Ms. Billups in the hope that she could work with the dog and help it to feel more secure.  In the course of treating the dog, though, the man had a sudden epiphany:  every relationship he’d ever had ended up with his lover walking away from him.  He had severe abandonment issues of his own and so he’d attracted an abandoned dog.  He started therapy and, as he learned to deal with his own fears of abandonment, the dog healed from its separation anxieties.

She posits that animals – and particularly that class of animals that we refer to as our, “pets,” – have a very deep and ancient Soul connection with human beings.  They not only mirror who we are, as the dog did with the young man, but they also point us toward a better way of existing in the world.

One thing that they provide to us abundantly is pure, unconditional love.  Getting that kind of love as an infant is vital to the development of a healthy, well adjusted human being.  Sadly, though, we have a lot of people in our world who were beaten more than they were hugged as children.  We emerge as adults who are convinced that (a) we can’t be loved; (b) somehow it’s our fault, rather than the fault of our crazy parents; and (c) it’s never safe to reach out to other people for love.

And then a puppy or a kitten shows up in our lives and loves us unconditionally.  The dog or the cat doesn’t give a flip about how smart we are or how we dress or how much money we have or any of the other parameters we may find in human relationships.  They just love us, totally and unconditionally, for who we are.  And, yeah, we learn that lesson on a deep Soul level:  it’s safe to love and to receive love.  They fill that hole in our hearts that’s been there since we were babies.

Another example that Ms. Billups gives is that highly empathetic people (and particularly empaths) will tend to attract highly empathetic animals.  We run into that sometimes with an animal that literally seems to be peering straight into our Souls when it looks at us.  There’s a sort of a tickle in our energy systems and a voice that says, “This dog somehow understands exactly who I am and what I’m feeling.”

The common bond is that both animals and empathetic people are primarily, “feelers,” rather than just thinkers.  We exist on that energy level of emotions and almost instantly perceive the hidden vibrations in another being.  And the, “training,” that we receive from that kind of an animal is to learn to keep our own vibrations as loving and kind as possible because they’re feeling them just as much as we are.

Which brings me to the part of Ms. Billups discussion that really blew me away, which is emotional support animals.

We’ve seen a fairly substantial increase in the presence of emotional support animals as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Many of the troops were returning home with severe PTSD and social anxiety.  Psychologists found that pairing them with animals – usually dogs – helped to soothe their nervous systems and allowed them to interact more peacefully in social settings.

It makes sense, even on a superficial level.  If we’re feeling extreme anxiety, the presence of a calm, loving animal would obviously settle us down.  Ms. Billups takes that a step further, though.

She says that some animals, especially emotional support animals, are able to hold what she calls a, “transformational healing presence.”  In other words, it isn’t just their presence as a trusted companion that’s calming down the person’s nervous system.  Rather, these are animals that are SO evolved that they’re able radiate calmness, serenity and love out of their very core.

We can actually see that with our own eyes.  The next time that you encounter someone with a support dog in a store, stop and look at the people around you.  Most of them will suddenly slow down, smile, and begin to radiate calmness of their own.  It isn’t just because they think the dog is cute, either.  Rather, they’re walking into that energy field of a healing presence that the dog is holding and it transforms them.

There’s a lesson in there for humans, as well.  It takes work – sometimes a lot of work – but we can become that same sort of a transformational healing presence in the world.  Through therapy, affirmations, meditation, and working with our heart chakras, we can nurture a core energy that’s calm, loving, and compassionate.

We don’t need to develop a philosophy or a method around that.  We don’t need to become gurus or convince anyone that they should behave in this way or that way.  All that we need to do is to build the love in our hearts and radiate it out into the world.

One of the neat things about that is, like the support dog in the store, we can step out of all of that judgment about who’s going to receive the love.  The dog isn’t standing there thinking, “Oh, that one’s a Republican – no love for him.”  Or, “Uh, oh, it’s a liberal, shut down the love.”  It’s there for anyone who wants to receive it, no questions asked.  And if someone doesn’t want to receive it, the dog doesn’t get upset or neurotic about it – she just keeps shining that light.

So I’m going to start paying a lot more attention to the animals in my life and begin actively looking for the messages that they’re bringing me.  Perhaps I’ll put my cat in my lap the next time I meditate and see if she has anything she’d like to add.  I’m guessing she does.

Karma, Having Sex with Republicans, and Being Kind to Yaks

Seeing karma as a way to change our past.

One of my favorite internet memes says, “Karma – It’s spelled K-A-R-M-A and it’s pronounced, ‘Ha, ha, fuck you.’”  

That’s a perfect explanation of our usual understanding of karma which is basically, “If you do some shit, you get some shit.”  If we do something terrible to another person, something terrible is going to happen to us. If we do something nice, something nice is going to happen to us.

OH, WELL, IT’S KARMA

Counter-intuitively, karma is also used an explanation for why bad things happen to good people.  We may have a friend who’s a wonderful person and goes through his life supporting and nurturing others, who’s full of love and gentleness and kindness.  And then something horrendous happens to him, like he falls of a cliff or discovers his wife is having sex with a Republican.

We simply can’t understand why such a good person would have such bad luck.  Certainly, he did nothing to deserve it and, according to the Law of Karma, all of his good behavior should have been rewarded with good things happening to him.

But . . . we’re told . . . perhaps he did something really, really terrible in a previous incarnation.  Maybe he pushed someone off of a cliff or maybe he had sex with a Republican.  Maybe he actually – shudder – enjoyed having sex with a Republican.

That allows us to restore some sense of cosmic balance and we say, “Oh, well, it’s just karma.”

IT AIN’T ME, BABE

We can certainly understand that concept when something bad happens to someone else, but it’s difficult to swallow when it happens to us.

Let’s face it, most of us are NOT the Dalai Lama and we have very little memory of our past lives.  We may accept the general idea that we’ve lived other lives, but we don’t actually remember being a Yak herder in Mongolia in 40 A.D. or a courtesan in Paris during World War I. 

From our current point of view, those people who we were in our past lives were literally someone else and not us.  

The idea that I broke my wrist today because some other guy kicked a Yak 2000 years ago seems entirely capricious and cruel and unjust.  It feels like . . . how shall I put this? . . . bullshit.

KARMA AND DETERMINISM

From that perspective, karma feels very much like determinism.  Determinism is the view that every single thing that happens to us is pre-determined from the moment of birth.  There really isn’t any free will or choice in life because our lives are a result of our genetics, our cultures, the families we’re born into, and the times we live in.

We can actually make a strong case for that.  Even in the United States, where we worship the idea of free will and choosing our own destinies, the statistics say it ain’t so.  If we’re born into a dirt poor family, we’ll probably die dirt poor.  If we’re born into great wealth, we’ll probably die rich.   If our parents were conservative Catholics, we’ll probably be conservative Catholics.  If our grandfather hated socialists for no particular reason, we’ll probably hate socialists for no particular reason.

We tell ourselves that we’re making choices about those issues, but for the most part we aren’t.  It was all programmed into us before we came down the birth canal.  Life is something that happens to us, not something that we create.

Karma can feel a lot the same way.  I, me, the person who I am right now, did NOT kick that Yak 2000 years ago, so why am I being punished for it?  It’s something that’s just happening to me, not something I can control or make any choices about.

BUT KARMA’S A CHOICE

Paradoxically, being the people who we are, right here, right now, is the good news about karma.  

Determinism basically says, “You’re fucked or you’re not fucked and there’s not one damned thing you can do about it.  You have NO choice in the matter.”  It’s all predetermined.

The Law of Karma, on the other hand, says that what we do right now is what really counts.  Far from saying that we have NO choice in the matter, karma is saying that we always have a choice.  And our choices are what determine our karma.

As David Michie said in, “Buddhism for Busy People,” 

“A lot of Western people wrongly think that karma equals fate or predestination.  They think it’s something you don’t have any power to change.  This is a misunderstanding.  It is we who create our own karma and we can change it in a powerful, dynamic way. We are creating hundreds, even thousands of such causes every day of our lives.”

Put another way, we are creating our own karma ALL THE TIME.  It’s not something from the past that just pops up to bite us in the ass every once in a while.  It’s not like The Wheel of Fortune, where we have good luck for a while and then bad luck, for no apparent reason.  It’s something we personally create by either being good people or being bad people.

THE PRESENT AS PROLOGUE TO THE PAST

Now, there’s a particularly fascinating doctrine in some schools of Buddhism that says that we can actually change our past karma by how we behave in our present lives.  

Suppose, for instance, that I was a really notorious Yak kicker in Mongolia in 40 A.D.  I didn’t just kick Yaks occasionally.  No, I was a mean, nasty, evil spirited son of a bitch who got up every single morning and kicked the hell out of as many Yaks as I could reach.

Fast forward 1985 years to my current life.  Suppose I start an, “adopt a Yak program,” and spend years rescuing and feeding homeless Yaks.  I learn to love Yaks and have great compassion for them.  Perhaps I even dress them in Yak finery for special occasions.

Under this particular doctrine, I wouldn’t JUST be creating good karma for my present self.  My good karma would go backwards through time and actually change the character and behavior of my previous self, the notorious Yak kicker. He might learn to love Yaks just as much as I do and my bad Yak karma would be erased.

IT’S NOT THAT WILD

If that sort of time traveling karma sounds a little too wild, just consider what most of us already believe about karma.

We believe that we have one Soul with many different historical identities and that what a previous identity does can travel through time to affect the life of our current identity.  So if all of these past identities are somehow in touch with our current identity, why wouldn’t our current identity be in touch with our past identities?  If they can affect us, it stands to reason that we can affect them.

KARMA AS AN ONGOING PROJECT

When we shift our perspective in that way, then karma becomes an on-going project.  We’re no longer victims of our past.  We’re actually re-creating our past through our current actions.

And if that isn’t free will and choice, I don’t know what is.

Being compassionate, decent people every day and right now is good for us and it’s good for the people around us.  And, ultimately, it’s good for the Yaks.  

Do it for the Yaks.

Just a reminder that my ebook, “Just the Tarot,” is available on Amazon for much less than a bag of Yak feed.

Doing Justice to Our Beliefs With Byron Katie’s The Work

A look at how to change our core beliefs using the methods from Byron Katie’s, “The Work.”

The Justice card in the Tarot is, at its most basic level, about society judging us, but there are few harsher judgements than those which we make about ourselves.  And most of them are horribly unjust.

As Cynthia Kane points out in, “Talk to Yourself Like a Buddhist,”  we say things to ourselves that we would never, ever, in a million years, say to our friends and family.  When we really start listening to our inner dialogue, we may find little poisoned pellets like:

You’re so stupid.

I can’t believe that you fucked that up . . . again.

What in the hell is wrong with you?

Why can’t you ever get anything right?

Your problem is that you’re just lazy.

And on and on and on.  The more dysfunctional that our family of origin was, the more likely we are to have that harsh inner critic constantly deriding us.  Constantly telling us that we don’t measure up and we’re never quite good enough, no matter how hard we try.

Now, there’s a basic formula in New Age Thought that goes like this:

Our thoughts create our emotions.

Our emotions create our vibrations.

Our vibrations create our lives.

When we break that down, it just means that every single thought we have has an emotion attached to it, either positive or negative.  When we think of puppies or cookies, we feel good.  When we think of dentists and written tests, we feel bad.  Our feelings about those thoughts add up to create our overall vibration.  If we’re constantly thinking of things that make us sad or scared, we end up with negative vibrations.  If we’re constantly thinking of things that make us happy, we end up with positive vibrations.  And, eventually, our overall vibrations will draw similar vibrations into our lives.  If we have really negative vibrations, we’ll draw in negative people and failures.  If we have really positive vibrations, we’ll draw in positive people and abundance.

It’s really cool when we figure that out because it empowers us to make changes.  We can jump in at any one of those three points and start to transform our lives. Most of the self-help guides advocate one approach or another.  If we change our thoughts, we’ll change our emotions.  Or if we work on feeling happier about life, that will change our thoughts.  Or if we meditate on raising our vibrations, that will change what we attract.  Pull on any one of those three strings and our lives will start to change.

There’s one element that’s frequently left out of that equation, though, and that element is beliefs.  We can change our thoughts, our emotions, and our vibrations but if we don’t change our underlying beliefs, we’re not going to get anywhere.

The classic example of that is the person who wins the lottery and two years later he’s bankrupt.  Maybe he spent hundreds of hours visualizing getting that winning ticket and wrote out a kazillion affirmations and did vision boards and all of that helped him to win.  But he didn’t change that underlying belief, which was, “I’m poor,” so the money floated away.  It wasn’t a vibrational match for his basic beliefs about himself.

To put it in a nutshell, our beliefs create our thoughts which create our emotions which create our vibrations which create our lives.

Which begs the question, “What IS a belief?”  

A belief is nothing more than a thought that we repeat over and over until we think it’s true.  Sometime they ARE true, but frequently they aren’t.  If we want to know what our real beliefs are, all we have to do is to listen to that inner dialogue.  If we’re constantly degrading and belittling ourselves, then those are beliefs that we need to change before we can effect permanent changes in our lives.

So how do we change our basic, underlying beliefs?  We actually pull them out and look at them.

One of the most powerful tools for doing that is Byron Katie’s, “The Work.”  

To use The Work method, we take a, “work sheet,” (download one here) and focus on four areas:

1- What’s the belief that I need to change?

2- Is it true?

3 – What kind of a person would I be without that belief?

4 – What are some opposite turn arounds that I can substitute for that belief?

Here’s an example of a negative belief that a lot of us carry around:  “I’ll never have enough money.”

IS IT TRUE?  For most of us, it’s not true at all, at least for most of our lives. There are very few of us who have been homeless or starving.  That doesn’t mean that we haven’t gone through some bitchy, bad times.  There may very well have been times when paying our bills or even just buying groceries was a struggle.  Still, if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us, most of the time, manage to pull it together even through the occasional hard times.

Of course, one of the questions that we need to look at there is, “What do I mean by, ‘enough money.’ “  If we put together a vision board that’s covered with pictures of sports cars, McMansions, and private jets, we’ll probably feel like we don’t have, “enough.”  If we think in terms of food, clothing, shelter, a car that runs, and a job, though, we realize that we’ve usually had plenty.

WHO WOULD I BE WITHOUT THAT BELIEF?  Well, for one thing, we’d probably be a lot more grateful.  When we actually focus on the fact that we have always had enough money to eat, enough money for a warm place to live in the winter, enough money to pay our bills, then we can start to see how very lucky we’ve actually been.  

For another thing, we can start feeling a lot less anxious about the future.  If we’re able to look at our past and see that there’s always, somehow, been enough, then we can see that there’s absolutely no empirical evidence for the idea that we won’t have enough in the future.  It’s just a movie playing in our heads that’s based on a bad fantasy.

WHAT ARE SOME OPPOSITE TURN AROUNDS TO THIS BELIEF?  The obvious one, of course, is, “I always have enough money.”  Some others might be, “I manifest what I need as I go along,”  or “The Universe always provides for my needs.”

Once we’re able to flip that basic belief, then some miracles start to happen.  Our thoughts begin to be more positive (“I always have enough money.”). Since our thoughts have changed, our emotions start to change (“I really don’t have anything to worry about financially and I’m happy about that.”). Since our emotions have changed, our vibrations start to change (“I feel really secure, relaxed and positive about life.”).  And when our vibrations change, then we start to create the life that we always wanted.

It’s a really good and relatively simple method for changing our basic beliefs.  Of course, Byron Katie probably named it, “The Work,” for a reason, because it does take some work.  It’s not just a matter of sitting down and filling out a sheet of paper.  It’s actually taking the time to listen to our own thought stream, write down those negative beliefs, and then meditate on them as we fill out the sheets.

And changing negative beliefs is work on a whole different level, as well.  We tend to cling to beliefs about ourselves and the world around us simply because they’re comfortable and they’re what we’re used to.  When we adopt the very opposite of those beliefs, it can initially feel very strange and foreign.  The negatives will keep popping up in our thought streams for a while, but we now have the consciousness to stop and say, “Nope.  It’s not true, it doesn’t make me feel good, and it’s not who I am.”

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The Hierophant, the Tangerine Blob, and the Moral Collapse of American Christianity

A look at the role of cognitive dissonance in American Christian voters.

One of the larger puzzles of the recent elections in the U.S. is the huge number of people who are self-professed Christians but voted for Trump.  Not to belabor the point, but Jesus was pretty much of a peace, love, and forgiveness dude and the Tangerine Blob is all about hatred, anger, and vengeance.

So how could they possibly reconcile being followers of Jesus with voting for the Malevolent Cheeto?  Hmmm . . .

It’s important to note that American Christianity (and Christianity in general) has always sort of run on two different tracks at the same time. As Dee Brown delineated in his classic book, “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,”  Christianity was a driving force behind the genocide that White settlers committed against Native Americans.  The peculiar notion of, “the White man’s burden,” dictated that all people of color MUST be forced to adopt Christianity or be exterminated.

And, of course, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s had massive support among the White Protestant churches of the South.  There’s a reason that the Kluxers burn crosses at their rallies.

We’ve regularly had this strange dissonance between the Christianity that purports to be a creed of peace and humility and the Christianity that feels more like a violent Spiritual Imperialism.  It’s like someone saying, “You have to believe in our God of love or we’ll kill you.”

It may be that, “dissonance,” is precisely the word to describe what happened with American Christians and this election.  In psychology, “cognitive dissonance,” is the term that’s used to describe the state where an individual holds two different sets of beliefs that contradict each other, or where their behavior is completely at odds with their values.  

Think of it like a good, family man who professes to love his wife and children but is constantly sneaking off to have liaisons with hookers.  Or a feminist woman who’s strongly attracted to primitive, abusive males.  What happens is that the differences between their self images and their behaviors cause a huge amount of psychic tension and eventually something’s got to give.  Either they change their behaviors or they change their beliefs and that eliminates the dissonance and relieves the tension.

If we start to think of American Christianity in terms of that same sort of a moral and behavioral dissonance, then all of this begins to make sense. The Hierophant card represents the formal teachings of a religion or creed, as opposed to actual spirituality.  It’s what the church tells us that we ought to believe and how we ought to behave.  It’s not necessarily who we truly are.

Jesus, of course, taught that we ought to love each other, we ought to forgive each other, we should help the powerless and the ill, that violence is wrong, and that rich people can’t get into heaven.  Americans, on the other hand, have always been at war more than we’ve been at peace, we love violence in our movies and our sports, we sell more weapons of destruction than any other country in the world, and we worship money and the people who have money.

If you’re a Christian, that’s cognitive dissonance.

Now, it would be inaccurate and melodramatic to describe Trump as, “the Anti-Christ.”  At the end of the day, he’s just one more puffed up wanna-be dictator strutting his stuff on the world stage.  It would be highly accurate, though, to describe him as, “the Anti-Jesus.”  Nearly all of his behaviors and beliefs – the anger, the hatred, the vanity, the vengeance, the gross materialism – are in direct opposition to everything that Jesus taught.

If we stick with our model of cognitive dissonance, Christians voting for Trump would be like the good family man leaving his wife and running off with a hooker.  Or the feminist woman getting married to a man who’s a sexist pig.  Rather than changing their behaviors, they changed their beliefs.

Put another way, the election of Donald Trump can be seen as a substantial shift away from what American Christians claimed to be and toward who they really are.  In fully embracing their Shadow of anger, xenophobia, sexism, and violence, they’ve relieved the psychic tension of that cognitive dissonance.  They feel a whole lot better, even if the rest of us are freaking out.

So it’s really not shocking at all.  That very dark side of Christianity has always been there, operating in the background.  What’s interesting, from a purely sociological point of view, is what American Christianity will become now that they’ve thoroughly expunged Jesus from the equation.  Without the doctrines of peace, love, and brotherhood, what’s left?

In her brilliant book, “The Power Worshippers – Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” Katherine Stewart argues that what’s left is essentially a political movement rather than a church.  She traces a nationwide network of religious fundamentalists, ultra-conservative oligarchs, and autocratic preachers who are determined to undermine democracy and impose their world view on the rest of us.  Their world view is that White males should be the ruling class in our society, that women should be subservient breeding stock, and that our constitutional democracy should be replaced with an Old Testament religious theocracy.

Will that movement be able to sustain itself in the long run?  Perhaps.  What’s clear at this moment, though, is that if it’s going to be defeated there will have to be a transformation of the basic values of many Americans.  Unfortunately, the normal vehicle for ethical change in America has always been the Christian church, which apparently isn’t very Christian anymore.  We shall see . . .

“Just the Tarot,” available dirt cheap on Amazon. As a member of the Amazon affiliate program I may receive a very small, itty bitty, tiny remuneration when you click through one of my links and make a purchase.

The Moon, Processing the Election, and Summoning a New Reality

Processing the craziness of the U.S. election and waiting for a new world to manifest.

MORE THAN JUST THE BLUES

So how are you doing out there after this crazy election?  If you’re a liberal, an empath, or an intuitive, you’re probably feeling puzzled, sad, angry, depressed, and – to a certain extent – scared.

And, unless you’ve just sworn off rationality (like the other half of the country) you’re probably trying to figure this out.  What in the HELL just happened?  It’s more than just a normal case of post-election blues.  It’s a need to restore some sense of sanity to our daily lives.

YES, THEY REALLY ARE CRAZY

The first thing to acknowledge is that, yes, the Trumpsters really ARE crazy.  There’s an old argument that says, “A million people can’t be wrong.”  But they can be and frequently are.  Millions of people supported Hitler and Stalin.  Millions of people supported the Catholic church raping and burning and murdering it’s way across several centuries.  Not only is there not truth in numbers, there’s frequently collective insanity.

DEFINING CRAZY

If you joyously embrace something that’s going to fuck you up, you’re crazy.  We recognize that fact with addicts who stick the needle in their arms one more time or alcoholics who pick up a bottle again.  Bi-polars who quit taking their meds.  Abused spouses who go back to their abusers.  If we choose self-destruction, we’ve left the realm of sanity.

In my lifetime, there has never been an election where more people voted against their own self-interest.  Women voted for a man who wants to end their control over their own bodies.  Latinos voted for a candidate who calls them murderers and rapists.  So-called Christians voted for a serial adulterer who’s violated nearly everything that Jesus ever taught.  And on and on.  They’ve chosen someone who is going to destroy their lives, therefore they’re crazy.

TRYING TO RESTORE BALANCE

One of the first things that we do when we’re confronted with a whole lot of crazy is to try to restore a sense of balance and sanity.  There must be some reason why they acted so crazy, right?

That’s our rational, left-brain, linear thinking trying to understand why they acted as they did.  A sense of sanity is very important to human beings.  It makes our environments predictable, it makes our lives orderly and meaningful.  More than anything else, it gives us a sense of safety and we need a sense of safety to function.

This is why we’re seeing all of the post-election analysis.  “What is it that women really wanted?  What issues are really important to minorities?  What message was rural America really trying to send?”

PROCESSING CRAZY

The sad truth, though, is that if we try to process non-rational behavior from a rational perspective, it just makes us crazy.  There are million reasons out there for why different people voted for Trump.

I couldn’t bring myself to vote for a woman.

I didn’t like her laugh.

I’m paying too much for groceries.

I’m worried about immigrants.

I’ve always voted for Republicans.

I hate liberals.

He didn’t REALLY mean all of those things he said.

Any and all of those reasons pale in comparison to the reality of voting for a senile, hateful, con artist who announced that he intends to be a dictator and end democracy as we know it.  When we put the reasons next to the results, they’re all crazy.

THE MOON CARD AND CRAZY

The Tarot card, The Moon, is all about crazy.  It shows a dog and a wolf baying at the Moon, while a crustacean crawls out of a dark pool.  It illustrates that even our domesticated dogs still contain the genes of the wild wolf and our brains still contain the primitive, crocodile brain that motivates hatred and fear.  The light of the Moon illuminates but doesn’t delineate.  We see a shape on the ground and we don’t know if it’s a snake or a rope.

What happened in our last election was all about illusions, delusions, and trickery.  It was the wolf snapping it’s ravenous jaws at our doors and the crocodile gnashing it’s teeth.  It was a cultural and spiritual disaster.  It was crazy to the max.

CREATING ALTERNATIVE REALITIES

So if we can’t use our rational minds to really understand what just happened, what do we do?  Well, we ask for answers and wait for alternative realities to emerge.

We need to give our subconscious minds – which are also our links to our higher selves – time to process all of this craziness.  What we just got was the equivalent of a massive data dump.  We just now found out that over half the country supports a very evil (yep, I’m going to use that word) agenda.  It contains racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and fascism.  We simply can’t assimilate all of that data at once.

What we CAN do is to actively engage with our subconscious minds (and thus our higher selves), ask for answers, and wait for them to emerge.  That means doubling down on meditating, prayer, lucid dreaming, reading Tarot cards – whatever our particular means is of creating a dialogue with our subconscious and higher selves.  That means actively asking for answers.

IT TAKES A LITTLE WHILE

As we know, the subconscious mind doesn’t have a drive-through window.  We can’t just cruise up and order an answer to all of this with a side of onion rings or fries.

We also know, though, that our subconscious minds, our higher selves, and our guides and helpers are infinitely creative.  Right now, at this very moment, they are weaving together a tapestry that will contain the answers we need.  As spiritual seekers we don’t drive out the darkness – we bring in the light.  The light will start to emerge over the next couple of months and it will emerge through us.

The Emperor, The Empress, and Kamala Harris as Feminine Archetype

The re-emergence of the Divine Feminine Archetype in American society.

Carl Jung was always a bit vague about exactly what an archetype is.  The basic definition is, “universal symbols or patterns that exist in the collective unconscious of all humans.”

Okey dokey.  That’s one of those phrases that sounds like it must mean something really important and leaves us feeling a little dumb because we can’t figure out what it is.

One way of cognizing archetypes is to think of them as sort of Super Energy Forms.  They are the essence of a particular idea or feeling, writ large.  In Tarot cards, for instance, the card Justice might stand for all legal matters, court proceedings, judges, and lawyers.  The Lovers might symbolize all forms of human bonding between couples.  The Moon could be seen as all forms of craziness, delusions, and projection.

Now, one of the fascinating things about archetypes is that we can invoke them, which is to say that we can draw their energy into our lives.  For instance, if it’s been a very, very long time since we had a romantic relationship, we might meditate on The Lovers and that will serve to create that romantic energy in our existence.  Or, if we’re feeling scattered and restless, we can meditate on a statue of the Buddha and that will pull in peacefulness and serenity.  If it feels like our lives are full of obstructions, we can invoke the energy of Ganesh to dissolve them.

It’s very much like there are all of these specific energy sources that we can tap into when we need them.  Pretty neat, huh?

Although he only hinted at it Jung seemed to warn us that there is also a dark side to archetypes.  He seemed to feel that they can actually possess us and take over our lives.

By way of an example, he was doing psychotherapy in Vienna when many of his male clients began having the same dreams.  They involved white, Germanic males riding horses in a nighttime parade and carrying torches.  This, of course, became a standard practice in Nazi Germany, but their dreams occurred several years before Hitler came to power.  He theorized that the collective German unconscious was being slowly possessed by the archetype which would manifest as the Nazi movement.

In another example, Bill Wilson, who was one of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous, once asked Jung what caused alcoholism.  Jung replied that alcoholics were, “possessed by the Devil.”  Jung was NOT, of course, a fundamentalist christian, and he meant that in a very specific way.  He meant that their unconscious minds were being taken over by the archetype of addiction which, in its essence, is evil.

It is perhaps illuminating to view current American politics as a demonstration of the power of archetypes.  In that scenario, Trump might be seen as a sort of a dark magician (The Magician reversed) who has been invoking an archetype in the unconscious minds of his followers.  It has a huge amount of negative energy in it – hatred, anger, xenophobia, misogyny, racism, fear.

Many of us have been puzzled by it for several years.  We have friends, relatives, neighbors, even lovers, who appear to be normal, rational humans in all of the other areas of their lives.  Still, they support a politician whose, “values,” are the antithesis of everything they claim to believe in.  How is that possible?

In Jungian terms, we might say that Trump has managed to summon their Shadow selves and form them into a collective archetype.  And, at a certain point, that archetype has possessed them and they’re no longer in command of their own faculties.  They are no longer individuals, they’re parts of a collective energy form.

One of the most intriguing aspects is that this dark, shadow archetype seems to be summoning yet another archetype in the minds of the people who aren’t Trumpsters.

The Trump movement has become increasingly focused on a particularly malevolent form of misogyny.  Under their model, females, even children, will be forced to carry and deliver the babies of the men who raped them.  Project 25 documents reveal that there are even plans to eliminate free access to birth control.  J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate has stated that women who don’t procreate are essentially wasting their lives and should be treated as second class citizens.

In a phrase, women are to be reduced to breeding stock.

Obviously, this is one of the most anti-feminist, anti-female political movements we’ve ever seen in the United States.  The good news, though, is that it seems to be giving birth to a new wave of feminism.  Suddenly, as if by magic, the male Democratic nominee has been whisked off of center stage and replaced by a very energetic, very feisty female candidate.  There is a palpable, almost electrifying energy in our electoral process that hasn’t been there for years.

If we were to cast it in archetypal terms, Trump might be seen as The Emperor Tarot card, the embodiment of toxic male energy.  Harris, on the other hand, could be seen as The Empress, the archetype of sensual, relaxed but very, very strong feminine energy.  Toxic masculinity versus the divine feminine.

A Battle of the Archetypes.  Wow!

It’s going to be a very interesting election.