Category: Tarot Cards

The Five of Wands, Louise Hay, and Becoming the Grown Up Who Lives in Our Heads.

A look at childhood programming and using affirmations.

If I were to say, “Your thoughts are total bullshit,” you’d probably feel highly insulted.  On the other hand, if I were to say, “My thoughts are total bullshit,”  you might agree with me or you might tell me that’s not true and wonder where I got such a terrible self-image.

But if I were to say, “A lot of OUR thoughts, as human beings, are total bullshit,” that’s a more fertile ground for discussion simply because it depersonalizes it and takes us out of a fight-or-flight reaction.  We don’t have to defend anything or run away from being criticized.

In, “You Can Heal Your Life,” Louise Hay made the point that, at their base, our thoughts really mean nothing at all.  They’re just words that we string together and they don’t take on any meaning by themselves.  We have to ASSIGN meaning to them.  We have to say, “I believe these thoughts are true.”

And, oddly, our beliefs are nothing more than thoughts that we’ve repeated over and over and over until we believe that they’re true.  When we take a little closer look at those thoughts we can understand exactly why so many of them really are bullshit.

First of all, a lot of our thoughts were, “installed,” in our little brains when we were far, far too young to make any rational judgements about their validity.  By the time that we reach late adolescence most of us have been thoroughly programmed with unexamined thoughts that we believe to be true.  The richest source of the programming is our families, of course, but we get a hefty dose of it from our teachers and peers, as well.  Some of those thoughts might be things like:

I’m no good at math.

I can’t dance.

I’m a terrible athlete.

I’m not very good looking.

I’m too fat or too skinny or too tall or too short.

I don’t fit in.

Nobody likes me.

Or the thoughts might be something like:

Democrats are communists.

Republicans are fascists.

Rich people are heartless.

People who don’t practice my religion are evil.

Black people are scary or white people are arrogant honkies.

Immigrants are too lazy to work AND they’re going to steal my job.

These are all just words, strung together to make thoughts, which were repeated over and over when we were young until we came to believe that they must be true.

The truth of these beliefs were totally unexamined when we were kids because we didn’t have the mental capacity to evaluate them.  If our parents or teachers told us they were true, well then – hey –  they must be true because that’s what the grownups said. For the most part, though, they remain unexamined when we’re adults, which is the second reason that many or our thoughts are total bullshit.

Most of our thoughts are subliminal, which literally means, “below the light.”  In this case, we mean, “below the light of consciousness.”  We just think them, without even being aware of the fact that we’re thinking them.  That’s the infamous, “stream of consciousness,” or, “monkey mind,” that engages about 20 seconds after we wake up in the morning.  It’s just a ceaseless chatter that runs along by itself and contains – buried in its content – all of that programming that we got as kids.  It sounds like this:

Gotta get the coffee going, godamn it’s cold, I wonder if I have enough gas in the car, should have balanced the checkbook but I’m no good at math, gotta get the kids up and make breakfast, can’t believe the price of eggs, it’s the rich Republicans driving the prices up, nobody cares about working people, if only I had a better job but I’m not smart enough to get a better job, where are my socks . . .”

The unexamined thoughts that were programmed into us when we were kids are running over and over again, all the time, and remain unexamined.  And, yes, thoughts that are repeated over and over become beliefs and, like the people in the Five of Wands, we’ll fight to the death to defend our beliefs.

Which is the third reason that most of our thoughts are bullshit.  We’re totally ego involved with them.  Most of us, most of the time, completely identify with that subliminal thought stream.  We experience it as, “These are MY thoughts in MY mind, therefore, they’re a part of me.”  It never occurs to us that they’re not really our thoughts.  They’re our parent’s thoughts and our teacher’s thoughts and maybe even the thoughts of that bully who tortured us at recess in the third grade.

Affirmations, as Louise Hay points out, are a simple way to step out of that thought stream and start changing our beliefs by changing our thoughts.  Let’s face it:  most of don’t have the time to just sit there all day and watch our thoughts.  “Ah HA!  There’s another negative thought from my childhood programming!  Take THAT, negative thought!”

What we can do, though, is to become a little more conscious of our thought streams.  Even when we’re working or driving to the store or taking a shower, we can watch the mind chattering away and consciously think, “Okay, that’s a pretty negative thought,  And it’s probably not MY thought; it’s just something my mind was taught when I was a kid.”

When we begin to dis-identify with that constant stream of thoughts, we immediately lose the need to defend them.  After all, they’re not really my thoughts, so why should I care about them?  And then we can begin to replace all of that subliminal programming with programming that we consciously choose.

Just pick a positive thought – any positive thought – and repeat it 3 or 400 times a day.  Does that seem like a lot?  Well, how many times a day do we say something negative to ourselves with that childhood programming?  Hundreds of times, right?

If that sounds like a sort of a forced, Pollyanna Positivity it’s because it is. We are quite literally pushing our thoughts in a new direction and it can feel completely unnatural to begin with.  But that’s the whole point:  there’s nothing, “natural,” about our unhappy beliefs, either.  They were just thoughts that were repeated again and again, often by the miserably unhappy adults who raised us.  That’s all that happy beliefs are, too – thoughts that are repeated again and again until they become beliefs.  And we get to be the adults who are repeating them, which is pretty cool.

Small Town America, the Chat ‘N’ Chew Cafe’, and the Five of Wands.

A look at why small town Americans overwhelmingly support Donald Trump.

When we look at the electoral map of the United States, we can’t help but notice that there is a veritable sea of Red States that stretches from one coast to the other.  When we look a little closer at that sea, we notice that it’s actually composed of millions of tiny, little towns in thousands of tiny, little counties.  This is rock solid Trump country and – since Trump is a Master Salesman – it might behoove us to look at exactly what it is that he’s selling to these folks.

In a word, it’s, “nostalgia.”  Nostalgia for a simpler, cleaner, more understandable way of life.  You know . . . like we all had in the 1950s.

Now, I passed through a fair number of those little towns as I was growing up and, in many ways, they were all remarkably similar.

1 – They all had a local cafe’/hamburger joint with a cute name like, “The Chat ’N’ Chew,” where folks gathered for Sunday brunch or morning coffee.

2 -They all had one barber shop and one beauty salon.

3 -They all had a local high school and the Friday night football game at that high school was the most important event of the week.

4 -The high school football team was always called, “The Fightin’ ___________, “ (fill in the blank according to the local animal mascot, although I never encountered, “The Fighting’ Oysters.”)

5 -They all had some version of a local swimming hole where the younger kids frolicked and the older kids might go skinny dipping on a dare.

6 -They all had a, “lovers lane,” which was usually a small road on a hill or bluff where the high school kids went to explore their sexualities and lose their virginities.

7 – Except in the South, they all had one or two, “Negro,” families whose children might be allowed to attend the local schools, but were de facto segregated in every other way.

8 – They all had one token, “queer,” who was usually a single, older male who owned the local antique shop, cared for his aging mother, and was known to be, “a little light in the loafers, if ya know what I mean.”

9 – They were all convinced that their little town was somehow unique, different, and better than all of the other little towns and they usually had a billboard right outside of the town to tell you just exactly that.

I mention all of this, not to make fun of or denigrate those towns, but to point out that THEY WERE REALLY REAL.  Millions of Americans were born in and grew up those places and lived extremely happy lives in them.  

And then they left.

A big factor in their leaving is that Small Town America doesn’t have many ways to make a living.  Unless your Daddy owned a farm or your Mama owned The Chat ’N’ Chew, you were pretty well screwed in finding a job.  Another reason, of course, is that young people naturally want to get out and explore the world, to see what lies beyond that billboard on the edge of town.

There are many other millions of us who never had those small town experiences.  We can legitimately point out that while they were living their Ozzie and Harriet/white picket fences/1950s lives, Black people were still being lynched in the South.  Latinos were walled into barrios.  Gay folks were routinely beaten and sometimes killed.  Middle class women were quietly losing their minds and becoming addicted to Valium in record numbers.

That’s not to say that those small towns were hot beds of racism and homophobia.  For most of the people who lived there, those simply weren’t issues that they dealt with.  Except for that local antique dealer, there weren’t any queers and the few Black folks who lived there weren’t a problem because they kept their heads down and kept to themselves.

The end result is that we have millions of Americans who look back on their lives in Small Town, USA, as a golden, magical time.  These are the folks who spend thousands of dollars to travel back to high school reunions and reminisce over, “that year when the football team was the district champion.”

You also see these folks on the local community pages on FaceBook.   They chime in with comments like, “Hey, I lived in Thimble Town in the 1960s.  Does anybody else remember the milk shakes at Stegner’s 5 and dime?”  Or, “Whatever happened to Mrs. Peachtree?  She was my favorite teacher.”

That’s exactly what Trump is selling to that sea of Red Counties and Towns: nostalgia for a time that they viewed as simpler and easier, where everything, “made sense.”  It isn’t just the people who are still living there, it’s also the millions of people who USED to live there.

And so we’ve ended up with an America that’s essentially divided into two different cultures:  the rural folks, who remember a time when their lives were so much better; and the urban and coastal dwellers who view that life as largely incomprehensible, if not a down right lie.  Much like the Five of Wands, we’ve got a whole bunch of people swinging sticks at each other but never quite connecting.

The ironic thing, of course, is that the man who’s selling that nostalgic vision to the rural folks has never gone camping or hiking, never gone fishing or hunting, never owned a dog, lived most of his life in a penthouse in New York City, and wouldn’t be caught dead in a pair of blue jeans.

All of which doesn’t matter to his supporters in the least. A good salesman doesn’t just sell a product.  He sells an illusion.  And there is no better illusionist in the world than Donald J. Trump.

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.

The Emperor, Psilocybin, and Butterfly Warriors

A look at the role of psilocybin in erasing toxic masculinity.

And then there’s the amazing case of Mark Matzeldelaflor.

Mark was a Navy Seal.  In case you’re not familiar with that, the Seals and the Green Berets are the ultimate warriors.  Incredible athletes, highly disciplined and impeccably trained, they are considered the finest combat soldiers in the world.  

Mark was also a professional sniper in the Seals.  His job was to kill other human beings by shooting them with high powered rifles, as rapidly and effectively as possible, and he was very good at it.

After serving two tours in Iraq, he left the military and returned to the West Coast, where he became an emotional and spiritual shipwreck.  He drifted from one meaningless job to another, drank too much, suffered from horrible PTSD and sank into depression and suicidal ideation.

Then one day a buddy of his said, “Hey, man, why don’t you take some Magic Mushrooms with me”. And it all went away.  All of the trauma, all of the depression, the alcoholism, the PTSD – it vanished from his heart and brain like . . . well . . . magic.

Mark immediately started trying to use his new world view to help other veterans and started an organization called Guardian Grange.  The idea is to use the discipline and talents that they’ve acquired in the military but channel that into helping to save the earth.  And their first project is . . . a refuge for monarch butterflies.

Now, I’ve written quite a bit here about toxic male role models and I find this story so amazing from that perspective.  When we think of the classic toxic male, we tend to envision a guy who’s taken a few too many steroids, muscular, swaggering, fairly devoid of emotions, unable to admit any vulnerabilities, and a bully.

That kind of a guy becomes a sort of a silly cartoon when you put him up against the reality of a Navy Seal.  These are men who can run or swim for hours with no rest, survive in a jungle or desert with no food, and kill with no mercy or compunction.

So how does someone who is literally a stone cold killer suddenly become a Butterfly Warrior?  It’s fascinating to think about, isn’t it?

The normal cultural model for male/female behavior is based on hormones.  To put it in a nutshell, men are chock full of testosterone and that makes us aggressive, dominant, and violent.  Women are flooded with estrogen, and that makes them passive, nurturing, and weak.  That model was given a huge boost by Sigmund Freud, a man who wanted to fuck his own mother and thought the clitoris was utterly unimportant in female sexuality.

Despite it’s rather shaky logic and dubious proponents, that remains the model that most people operate out of:  we’re simply predetermined products of our hormones.  But what if we’re not?

Scientists are just now beginning to really dig into what psilocybin does to the human brain.  They know, for instance, that it has some sort of a strong interaction with serotonin and pleasure receptors, meaning that it makes us happier.  They know that it vastly increases the connectivity between different parts of the brain, so that parts of our brain that don’t usually, “talk to each other,” are suddenly communicating.  They know that it suppresses activity in other parts of the brain, such as the portion that maintains our sense of self and ego.

Still, there’s much more that we DON’T know about how Magic Mushrooms affect our brains than what we DO know.  Somehow it erases depression, anxiety, PTSD, and suicidal ideation.  And – I suspect – it may also erase toxic male role modeling.

My symbol for the Male Archetype in our culture is The Emperor.  He’s strong, he’s heavily armored, he’s living in a barren environment, and he’s very much alone.  He rules, but he’s paid a heavy price for his crown.  He is, above all else, disconnected.

One of the best descriptions I’ve read of what psilocybin does to the human brain is that it’s just like a snow globe.  It picks up our brains, gives them a good shake, and a lot of our normal neural pathways are disrupted and fly off in totally new directions.  If you’re more into mechanistic models, it seems to instantly rewire our brain patterns.

Dig what Mark said in that interview:  “I just reconnected to nature and my past, where I was like a kid in the woods.”  That description is what we hear from many other people who have taken psilocybin:  an instant sense of reconnection with the earth and with meaning.

Now, there’s no suggestion that psilocybin caused a huge drop in Mark’s testosterone levels or that he suddenly became a eunuch and that’s what took away his aggression or his toxic male role modeling.  He simply instantly learned how to be a male in an entirely different way than what WE ARE TAUGHT that it means to be a male.

All of this is strongly indicative that, “manhood,” is much more in our heads than it is in our testicles.  Toxic masculinity may very well consist of a series of enculturated neural pathways that are so deeply burned into our brain tissue that they’re nearly impossible to overcome.  Unless someone picks up that snow globe and gives it a good shake.

We can’t expect that taking psilocybin will turn our culture around anytime soon.  For one thing, we’re taught from the cradle that some form or another of toxic masculinity is good, that this is the way that a real man behaves.  For another, there’s no money to be made by the pharma industries where psilocybin in concerned.  It’s out there and it’s relatively cheap, so why manufacture it?

Still, it’s a start.  If a man who was the most efficient killing machine the military can manufacture can suddenly turn into a warrior for butterflies that’s . . . a miracle.  

There’s hope.

Another way to almost instantly expand your consciousness is to buy my ebook, Just the Tarot, available dirt cheap on Amazon.

The Empress, Fucking a Trumpster, and White Feminism

A look at sleeping with the enemy and the politics of sex.

I have an online friend who’s fucking a MAGA Trumpster.

Now, I lived in Texas for many years so I actually have quite a few friends who are fucking Trumpsters, but this one feels different to me.  This is a woman who claims to be a liberal and a feminist.

I read recently that we now have 15 different states in our Grand Old Union where, if a 12 year old girl is raped and impregnated, she’ll be forced to bear that baby to term.  In some states, the rapist is even allowed to sue anyone who assists the little girl in getting an abortion.  

We can draw a direct line from that barbaric state of affairs to the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.  And we can draw a direct line from the court doing that to Donald Trump’s appointments to that court.

So how, I asked my friend, can you – as a feminist – be on intimate terms with someone who supports the politician who has caused so much harm to the women’s movement and so much pain to individual women?  Her answers were telling.

You don’t understand.

We keep politics out of our relationship.

He’s really a decent, nice guy.

He comes from a different background.

We don’t talk about that stuff.

Put another way, she chooses to not discuss the issues that she claims are important to her because they might be inconvenient to her romantic relationship.  Put another way, those issues really aren’t very important to her, after all.

There’s been an interesting development in the feminist movement in the last few years, which is the rejection of, “white feminism,” by women of color.  Among a myriad of disagreements, one that stands out is the accusation that white feminists tend to be more concerned with, “board room feminism,” than with the grittier women’s issues.  

For instance, a white, middle class feminist might be much more concerned about equality in the workplace and getting that promotion to CEO than she would be about issues like rape, domestic abuse and abortion rights.  And, of course, the reality is that women of color are far more likely to be raped, abused, and need reproductive choices than white, middle class women and much less likely to get that promotion.

Unfortunately, that view is born out rather powerfully by the voting records in the United States.  In the 2016 election, 42% of female voters cast their ballots for Trump.  That’s well, well past the time that every single adult in the country was aware of the pussy-grabbing tape and aware of the fact that Trump is a misogynistic swine who views women as mere life-support systems for vaginas.

As shocking as that is, here’s the more interesting breakdown on that:  55% of white women voted for Trump.  70% of Hispanic women voted for Biden.  And 91% of black women voted for Biden.

You really can’t get much more definitive evidence of the racial differences in today’s women’s movements and how this is impacting some women much more powerfully than others.

Under that scenario, white, middle class feminists have gotten . . . comfortable.  Like The Empress, they’re securely ensconced on their luxurious couches, wearing their prom queen tiaras and languidly waving their scepters at the women who are still down in the trenches getting raped.  And it may be true.

I still care about my friend and respect her in many other ways, but I recognize that on this topic she’s talking the talk and not walking the walk.

You can’t share a bed with a Nazi and claim that you’re concerned about anti-semitism.  If your boyfriend has a KKK robe hanging in his closet, you can’t claim that you’re upset about racism.  And if you’re fucking a Trumpster, you can’t claim you’re a feminist.

The Fool, Flowing into Fun, and Making Wu Wei Our Woo Hoo

A look at Flow State as a spiritual practice.

Most people know about being, “in the Flow,” also known as being, “in the Zone.”  It’s that feeling of engaging in an activity with such concentration and perfection that it’s as if we somehow become the activity and the activity becomes us.

Dancers and athletes talk about being in the Flow when they turn in a performance that’s absolutely flawless and they somehow go far beyond what they’ve ever been able to do before.  Artists and writers have the same sort of an experience when they plunge so deeply into their work that it’s almost as if the painting is painting itself, or the page is filling itself with beautiful images.

One of the fascinating things about Flow state is that the world seems to disappear for a while.  There’s nothing in our consciousness except the activity that we’re engaging in.  It’s like a trance. Painters will frequently start a painting and then, “wake up,” six hours later, having lost all track of time, their environment, and anything else but the surface of the canvas.

Oddly, we see very much the same phenomenon with people who are plagued by ADHD.  They may spend most of their lives jumping from one activity to another, unable to focus or stay on task for more than a few minutes.  When we take those same people, though, and sit them down in front of a video game, it’s a very different story.  They go into a state of hyper-focus and will frequently become so immersed in the game, so ultra-concentrated, that they may not leave it for hours.  They’re in a trance and the world has disappeared.  They’re in the Flow.

Hungarian psychologist Mihal Csikszentmihalyi first noted the Flow state in 1975, but Taoism pegged it centuries ago and calls it, “Wu Wei.”  Wu Wei can be translated as, “inaction,” or, “doing nothing,”  but a closer definition is, “effortless action.” Which is exactly how we feel when we’re in the Flow.  We feel that we’re completely in synch, in the groove, in harmony with whatever activity we’re engaged in and it becomes totally effortless.

Now, a lot of Westerners have had trouble with the idea of Wu Wei, because they glom onto the idea of just doing nothing, rather than doing something effortlessly. As lovely as it can be, sitting on a beach dangling our toes in the water is NOT Wu Wei.  

We are in the Flow state when we are involved in an activity for which we have some skill.  When we’re doing something completely. Somehow in that process our ego disappears, our environment disappears, and our sense of time disappears, which is pretty much the definition of a transcendent spiritual experience.

To put it another way, we’re co-creating with the Universe.

Mike Dooley hints at that process when he’s talking about the art of visualizing and manifestation.  He says that the Universe acts as a sort of a GPS system that guides us to our goals, constantly popping up directions and resources to get us where we want to go.  BUT . . . we have to actually start the car before the GPS system starts to work.  We have to get our asses in gear and move before the Flow state happens.

The closest that the Tarot gets to portraying that state is The Fool.  The Fool is dancing along at the edge of a cliff, so absorbed in his joy that he really doesn’t even see the precipice.  The message of the card is that even if he dances off of the edge he’ll just go on dancing on air.  He’s in the Flow.

The neat thing about all of this is that, when we look at being in the Flow AS an act of co-creating with the Universe, then it becomes a spiritual practice.  It becomes a way of communing with our higher powers or spirit guides or angels or whatever we want to call them.

All we have to do is to figure out what gets us into that state of Flow and DO IT.  It can be almost anything.  It can be painting or writing or dancing or gardening or cooking or having incredible, mind-blowing sex.  It’s just a matter of thinking about what activities come the closest to putting us into that trance state.  What is it that, when we do it, the world disappears for a while, time stops, and we completely forget our egos?

Once we identify the activity – and we all have at least one – then we build it into our lives more and more.  Every time that we engage in our particular Flow activity, we form a stronger and stronger bond with our higher powers and our higher selves.

And it’s fun.  It’s lots and lots of fun.

The Fool, Double Dorjes, and Saying Yippee to the Universe

A look at the underlying, happy energy of the Universe.

I’ve been playing around with making altar cards to sell on my Etsy shop (synergyfolkart.etsy.com) and trying to put together a line of them for Buddhists.   The other day I was looking at a picture of a double dorje – a very powerful symbol in Vajrayana Buddhism –  and I thought, “I wonder if I could make that gold, instead of bronze?”

Lo and behold, after several hours of research, clicking, layering, re-layering, and praying to the mighty goddess of Adobe Photoshop, I went from this:

to this:

Now, it hasn’t been that long since I had sex with someone – probably not more than 5 or 6 hundred years – but completing this transformation was very much like that feeling.  When I saw the final image there was a huge, internal, “YIPPEE!,” from my Inner Child and I got up and danced around my studio.  (And, yes, when I used to Get Lucky I would frequently shout, “YIPPEE!” and dance around the bedroom.)

There are probably about 30 million 10 year olds who are far more adept at Adobe Photoshop than I’ll ever be,  and I only get a few bucks for each card, so there was nothing earthshaking about this. But that’s not the point.

The point is that the Universe is doing something . . . somehow . . . for some reason. 

I don’t think I can put it any more clearly than that.

Scientists tell us that about 13 billion years ago there was a tiny dot of super-concentrated energy in the center of the Universe.  Well . . . it wasn’t the center of the Universe because there wasn’t any Universe, yet, but just for the sake of argument, pretend there was a Universe and there was this dot in the middle of it.  And then – KABLAMMM!!!!!!!!! – the tiny dot of energy suddenly exploded for no particular reason and started expanding outwards into . . . you know . . . nothing. 

The energy carried with it all of the . . . um . . . stuff . . . that would later form into solar systems and suns and planets and moons and Donald Trump’s hair.

That’s what they call the Big Bang Theory.

AND . . . according to the scientists, the Universe is STILL expanding.

I’ve always had a little trouble with that part because I’ve never been able to figure out exactly what it’s expanding INTO.   I mean, if the Universe is everything and it’s expanding, then there must be a whole lot of nothing out there somewhere for it to expand into and I wonder if there’s some sort of a fence between the Universe and the Nothing.

But I digress.

Modern science has pronounced that the Big Bang was sort of an incredibly powerful firecracker that blew up and scattered detritus all across the Universe.  And they’re very proud of that pronouncement because they feel it gets rid of all of the superstitious nonsense like gods and goddesses and creation myths and fables.  But just saying that there was a giant cherry bomb in the middle of the Universe before there was a Universe and it somehow blew up and somehow made the Universe, doesn’t really explain anything.  There are still those questions like, “Who made the cherry bomb?” And, “Who lit the fuse?”  And, “What’s the point?”

For centuries, Sages, Mystics, Philosophers and other people with far too much spare time on their hands have tried to figure out exactly what that primal energy that exploded outward from the Big Bang is composed of.  Is it alive?  Is it conscious?  Is it thinking?  Is it feeling?  Is it in a bad mood or does it have a sense of humor?

There are a few religions and philosophies out there – like Taoism and Vedanta – that assert that the primal energy is very much alive and conscious.  And, although our egos tend to make us forget it, we ARE that energy.  In many ways, we may actually be the spear tip of that energy because we’re one of the few species we know of who have evolved into thinking, self-reflective, beings.

It makes sense, then, that we feel at our best when we’re in alignment with that energy.  And we feel at our best when we’re loving, creative, and playful, much like the energy of The Fool, dancing along with his little doggie.

It’s not a HUGE leap, then, to extrapolate that the basic, primal energy of the Universe is loving, creative, and playful.  When we’re laughing, having great sex, or making Golden Double Dorjes. To me, at least, that’s a lot more logical than thinking that we’re the left over wrappings of some giant firecracker.

Yippee!!!!

My ebook, “Just the Tarot,” is now available for free for anyone who has a Kindle Unlimited membership. For those of you who don’t, it’s still DIRT CHEAP!

The Emperor, Robotic Cats, and Suicide Among Elderly Men

Examining the reasons for the high suicide rate among elderly males.

I was just reading an article about suicide in the elderly and the author – a certified therapist with a PhD, mind you – suggested that a good preventative might be a robotic cat or dog that we could talk to and sleep with.  That way, we wouldn’t be lonely and, if we weren’t lonely, we wouldn’t be offing ourselves at record numbers.

Now, if you weren’t already suicidal, the idea of having to get a little cat robot to be your best friend would surely drive you over the edge.  It’s such a radiant example of NOT understanding suicide in the elderly that it’s almost breathtaking.

Here, kitty kitty!  Oh, shit, her batteries are dead.  Might as well just kill myself.

The, “reasons,” for elder suicide are all over the place.  According to the experts, it’s because we’re lonely, or we’re socially isolated, or we’re sick, or we don’t have jobs anymore, or our spouses died, or we’re invisible in a youth-culture, or we never get touched by anyone.

My very favorite is that elderly people commit suicide because they’re . . . drumroll, please . . . depressed.  

You think?

After spending several days combing through articles and studies about why elderly people kill themselves, I came to two conclusions.  One – nobody really knows why.  Two – nobody is very motivated to find out.  From a purely dollars and cents perspective, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to social scientists to study elderly suicide because – hey! – old people are, you know, old.  Why spend a ton of money studying how to keep them alive when they’re supposed to die soon anyway?

They have pretty much pinned down the people at the highest risk. The person who is most likely to commit suicide in the United States is an elderly, white, male, introvert with a family history of suicide.

Males kill themselves four times more than females.  Apparently it’s one of our special skills, though it’s probably best to not note it on our resume’s.  No surprise, then, that those statistics would go across all of the age groups and extend into old age.

I can also understand the factor of the family history of suicide.  Perhaps that’s just a genetic predisposition to depression, but once you’ve seen suicide modeled in your own family, it’s hard to unsee it.

Introversion is a little harder to grasp, because it exists across such a broad spectrum and means so many different things to different people.  About 52% of the general population are introverts but most of them are obviously not suicidal.

Researchers have been quick to make the leap from introversion to loneliness and social isolation, though.  Under that model, introversion = social isolation, which = loneliness, which = depression which causes suicide.

Leaving aside the fact that those us with robotic cats are hardly lonely, other statistics would seem to refute this approach.  Elderly women actually report much higher levels of feeling socially isolated and much higher levels of feeling lonely than elderly men.  If there was causation from those factors, we’d expect to see the gender statistics reversed, with women killing themselves at four times the rate of men.

There’s another interesting difference we can discern when we look at a recent study from UCLA.  Dig this:

“What’s striking about our study is the conspicuous absence of standard psychiatric markers of suicidality across all age groups among a large number of males who die by suicide,” said Kaplan, a professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs. They found that 60% of victims had no documented mental health conditions.

In other words, the standard perception of suicide as being caused by long term mental illness simply isn’t born out.  Suicidal men aren’t crazy, they’re just suicidal.

So, if elderly men aren’t killing themselves because they’re more lonely, more isolated, crazier, or more introverted than everyone else, what’s causing it?

I suspect that a large part of it may lie in another part of the description, which is, “white male.”

Of all of the many groups in the United States, there is no group that is more likely to fully participate in the toxic masculine paradigm than the Caucasian male.  We have, simply by being born with white skin, more access to the education and financial resources that enable us to become completely enmeshed in the insane pursuit of money, power, and position.  We abandon our own authenticity in that lifelong pursuit.

When we look at the Tarot card, The Emperor, we see the ultimate outcome of that paradigm.  Yes, he’s sitting on a throne and he’s powerful.  He’s also completely and totally alone, covered from head to toe in his armor.  Everything around him is a blasted, sterile wasteland. No friends.  No lovers.  No family.

He doesn’t even have a fucking robotic cat to sit on his lap.

When we talk about toxic masculinity, we mainly frame it in terms of the negative effects that it has on women who come into contact with it.  We tend to forget that it’s the men who are carrying all of those toxins around with us.  And it’s killing us.

Is it likely that white American males will begin to look at the female paradigm or perhaps people of color and try to figure out why we’re killing ourselves and they’re not?  Probably not.  On the other hand, artificial intelligence is improving by leaps and bounds.  It’s only a matter of time – hopefully a very short time – until we’ll all have robotic cats and dogs who can actually talk to us and help us deal with our emotional problems more realistically.

Here kitty kitty!  I have some brand new batteries for you, sweetheart.

I am very pleased to announce that my ebook, “Just the Tarot,” is now available FOR FREE on Amazon for anyone who has a Kindle Unlimited membership. The cheapest robotic cat that they offer is $113.00 so this is just one hell of a deal.

How to Lighten the Fuck Up by Fooling Around with Magic

A Quick Look at the Playful Nature of Magic.

Magic.  

What is it, anyway?  We talk about magic a fair amount.  We say that something, “felt really magical,”  or we, “feel a lot of magic,” when we’re with another person,”  or a solution to a problem appeared, “just like magic.”  But what, exactly, is it?  Is it just a feeling, or is it a real thing that exists in the world independent of our feelings?

In The Magician card, we see a person channeling magical energy from, “above,” into the material plane.  He’s using his concentration, his will power, and his skills to pull that energy into what he wants to manifest.

Which, of course, is a major clue.  Magic is an energy, just like light, sound, radio waves, or solar flares.  What’s more, it is it’s own energy, meaning that it’s distinct from other energies.

We tend to get it mixed up with other energies, because it appears coincident with them.  When we’re madly in love with someone, it feels magical, and so we tend to mix magical energy up with being in love.  When we’re joyous, it feels magical, and so we tend to mix magic up with great happiness.  But magic is it’s own energy that appears with joy and love, but isn’t just joy and love.

We can see an analog of this with emotions and brain chemicals.  When we have a lot of serotonin in our bodies, we feel happier.  When we have a lot of cortisol and adrenaline in our bodies, we feel more stressed and anxious.  But . . . happiness causes serotonin to appear and serotonin causes happiness to appear, so it’s a definite, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” situation.  They’re not equivalent – they just appear at the same time.

Reductionists would have us believe that serotonin = happiness, but it’s not true.  Antidepressants, which increase serotonin levels, can be a very effective band aid for depression, but they pretty much have to go along with good therapy to deal with the underlying problems.  If we don’t build in the therapy, the happiness goes away when we stop taking the antidepressants because – guess what? – the things that were making us unhappy are still there.

In very much the same way, magic appears in our lives coincident with love and and joy, but the love and joy don’t cause the magic.  Nor does the magic cause the love and joy.  They just appear at the same time.

There are some other clues we can find that point to what magic actually is.  Two major markers that appear in our lives when we’ve got magical energy flowing through us are synchronicity and serendipity.  Synchronicity and serendipity are really just short hand for, “life is easy.”  Solutions to our problems appear out of nowhere.  People, places and things that feel like gifts from the universe manifest with no effort at all.  

And, “life is easy,” is really just short hand for, “life is light.  Life is playful. Life is fun.”

Which are some more major clues about what magical energy really is.  In the same way that magic tends to appear when we’re joyous or in love, magic tends to appear when we’re happy and playful.  It’s almost as if the universe is saying, “You know, you really need to lighten the fuck up if you want me to play with you.  I get that you’re all sad and dour, but it’s a drag and I can find someone else to hang out with.”

So magic is an energy that tends to appear in our lives when we’re loving, joyous, happy and playful.  It doesn’t cause them and they don’t cause magic, but they definitely appear at the same time.

Which brings us to another card, The Fool.

The Fool is FULL of magic.  He’s dancing along at the edge of a cliff and he really doesn’t give a fuck about the danger because he’ll just float right off into the air and keep dancing.  His little dog is picking up on his joy and dancing right along with him, in just the way that dogs always will.

Now, the interesting thing about The Fool is that he’s the Zero card in the Tarot deck.  Every other card has a number, but The Fool is Zero.  Which means that he doesn’t belong anywhere and he belongs everywhere.  We can literally take any card in the Tarot deck, drop The Fool on top of it and things will start to get better.  Even extremely bad cards like Death and The Tower start to improve the second that we bring in magical energy.  

There are people in the world who will tell us that life is insane, tragic, and brutal and that there’s very little to be optimistic about.  And, when we look at the daily news, it can be hard to argue with that view.  Believing in love, joy, playfulness, happiness and lightness can seem downright . . . Foolish.   

But that’s the point.  No matter how bad the situation may be, if we start to drop The Fool on it, if we start to increase the magic in our lives, it will get better.  

Magic brings love, joy, happiness, playfulness, easiness, and lightness with it.

Yes, please.  I’ll have some of that.

My e-book, Just the Tarot, is still available on Amazon at a price that’s SO reasonable that it would be downright Foolish not to buy a copy.

Toxic Masculinity, The Inner Marriage, and Percolating Testicles

On the exterior level, the Two of Cups obviously represents two people who are falling in love.  On a deeper level, though, it represents the Inner Marriage, the harmonious joining of the Divine Feminine and the Sacred Masculine in one person’s Soul.  In a sense, it represents learning to fall in love with yourself.  Or maybe your Self.

I was watching an interview about that the other day and I got plumb confused.  The speaker was discussing the way that her Tantric Tradition deals with the Yin/Feminine and Yang/Masculine energies that we all contain.  I followed the beginning of it with no great problem.  Obviously, every human being incorporates both Yin and Yang and we give greater or lesser expressions to those energies at different times in our lives.

Then she got off into some territory where I felt like I needed to make a chart to keep track of it all.  She said that every person has a Yin and a Yang, but women’s Yin have a Yang within the Yin and men’s Yang have a Yin within the Yang.   The Yang in women’s Yin is apparently centered at  the birth canal, because that’s where they project their being into the world.  The Yin in men’s Yang is located in their testicles because that’s where they hold life and sort of . . . . um . . . percolate it.

It all just seemed really complicated.

Now, I want to be clear that I’m not in any way making fun of that tradition or denigrating it.  In fact, I was really impressed that someone had invested that much time and effort thinking about testicles because most of us are perfectly happy to let them just hang around without analyzing them too much.  Men, in particular, consider their testicles as really good buddies, despite the fact that they seem to cause a lot of problems in the world.

What came through to me, though, is how much more women have advanced than men in thinking about all of this.  Despite the recent legal set-backs in reproductive rights, the women’s movement remains relatively robust.  Women continue to question and examine their roles in society and try to sort out their emotional energies.  The men’s movement on the other hand . . . um . . . oh, that’s right . . . there IS no men’s movement.

Well, there IS a sort of a men’s movement, but it’s pretty horrifying.  It seems to be based on the idea that men have a divine right to be belching, farting, weight lifting, muscle car driving, gun toting swine and that anyone who questions that is a bitch or a fairy.  If you type, “Toxic Masculinity,” into the YouTube search bar, here are a few of the videos that come up:

THE WAR ON MEN

START INCREASING TOXIC MASCULINITY LIKE A REAL MAN

THE RISE OF WEAK MEN: BREAKING DOWN TOXIC MASCULINITY IN AMERICA TODAY

THE INSIDIOUS TOXIC MASCULINITY MYTH IS HARMING HUMANITY

Here’s a screen shot from one of them that kind of says it all:

Ironically, there’s a female side to that story, as well.   Under the same topic we find vids (by women) with titles like:

DON’T BE A SIMP:  WOMEN LIKE BAD BOYS

WOMEN HATE MEN WHO ARE IN TOUCH WITH THEIR, “FEMININE

SIDE”

WHY WOMEN CRAVE DOMINANCE

and my personal favorite:  MEN TRY TO GUILT US BY BEING, 

“NICE.”

So there seem to be a fair number of women who don’t want any Yin in their Yangs.  Men, of course, take note of that and process it as, “Yeah, I know they SAY they want sensitive men but I’ll never get laid by being evolved.”  And, really, we even see quite a few, “feminists,” who are still dating knuckle draggers because it, “just feels right.”

Despite all of that, I still see a fair amount of hope on the sexual horizon.  For one thing, we virtually never see a debate over what it means to be a REAL woman.  Women seem to be pretty accepting of each other’s life choices now days and career women and lesbians are just as welcome in the tribe as homemakers and mommies. 

Kansas City Chiefs football player Harrison Butker recently got into some serious trouble by suggesting that women are much more fulfilled by having babies than they are by having careers.  A lot of Yins suggested cutting his Yang off, but it really hasn’t been that long since that would have been considered normal speech.

Up until the late 1960s, it was commonly accepted that the only, “natural,” role for women was producing babies until their uteruses fell out.  A corollary to that was the widely held stereotype that only women who had large breasts were truly sexy, a belief that must have made most women feel fairly uncomfortable. 

Thankfully, a huge amount of the sexual stereotyping around women has fallen away.  Unfortunately, men seem to still be stuck at first base, he said, using a very masculine, butch sports metaphor.  So what is it going to take for men to dribble their balls down the court and kick one over the goal posts for a home run?

Well, first and foremost, it’s going to involve men actually claiming that Yin side of their nature and saying, “Yes, REAL men have sensitivities and emotions and needs and men who don’t have them aren’t real in any human sense of the word.”

And, second, it going to involve more women letting go of that toxic stereotype, as well.  As long as women continue to have sex with emotionally primitive men, men will continue to be emotionally primitive.

I mean, why wouldn’t they?