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The Three of Cups, Leela, and Playing in the Flow

A look at the Hindu concept of Leela and learning to be a part of a playful Universe.

We wouldn’t put water into the gas tank of our car and expect that it would somehow work alright, would we? Of course not.

Putting sadness, anxiety, depression and fear into our minds is exactly like that. In order for human beings to, “run,” we need to put the right fuel into our energy systems, and that fuel is happiness.

WE ALL KNOW THAT

That proposition isn’t really something that we have to prove, because we already know that it’s true.

We’ve all had the experience of having to go to work when we were sick. Perhaps we had the flu or a bad cold, but we still had to drag our asses into work and somehow slog through the day. No one – ourselves included – expected that we were going to be operating at peak efficiency or do a super duper job when we were ill. We just had to show up and keep our bodies going through the motions until we could get back home to bed.

Getting through life when we’re extremely depressed, fearful, or anxious is just like that. All of those states of mind are literally like a poison, like a bacteria or virus that seriously interferes with our abilities to function. Our bodies are in place, doing what we have to do, but we’re far from being at our best.

HAPPINESS IS THE RIGHT FUEL

In contrast to that, we’ve all had the experience of living when we were extremely happy. Perhaps we were in love. Or we just got a promotion. Or maybe it’s just Springtime and we feel completely zippety doo dah.

When we’re happy, life is easy. We seem to sail right through difficult projects, our relationships with other people are much easier and more positive, and we attract even more happiness into our existence.

In a very real sense, choosing happiness instead of depression is like putting gasoline into our car instead of water. It’s the right fuel to optimize human life.

HAPPINESS IS BEING IN THE FLOW

People talk a lot about being, “in the Flow.” That’s also known as being in the zone, or, as Taoists put it, being in the Tao.

When we’re in the Flow, life is smooth and effortless. We start to experience a lot of synchronicity and serendipity. We have an unusual amount of focus and concentration and the task at hand is easy.

Exactly the same things happen when we’re in a state of happiness. Some people might think that being in the Flow triggers the feeling of happiness, but it’s quite the opposite. Being happy triggers being in the Flow.

BUT CAN WE REALLY CHOOSE HAPPINESS?

To a large extent, yes, we can.

There are, of course, a few glaring exceptions. If we’re living in a war zone or someone we dearly love has just died or our house has just been destroyed by a disaster, it can be very difficult for those of us who aren’t spiritual masters to keep a smile on our faces.

The truth of the matter, though, is that for 90% of us, 90% of the time, NOTHING IS WRONG. Yes, we may have very unhappy memories or we may be very anxious about the future, but right here, right now, in the present moment, nothing is wrong.

The past and the future are just movies that we’re running our own minds. They literally have no existence outside of our mental images. We can, in the present moment, choose to be happy or choose to be sad. As Thich Nhat Hahn said in Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life, “Learn to love, enjoy and embrace what you have in the here and now. That’s all you really need to be happy.”

HOW DO WE DO THAT?

Oddly, the answer to that seems to be simple: play.

That can be difficult for us to grasp as Westerners, because our culture and our religions tell us that LIFE IS VERY SERIOUS!!! We’re supposed to get up in the morning and work hard and sacrifice. We’re supposed to put off all of the things that give us pleasure. That’s what it means to be a responsible adult, right?

The Hindu philosophy, on the other hand, has a delightful concept called, “Leela.” Leela literally means, “divine play.” The idea is that when the Goddess made the universe, she didn’t do it as a job, or with a purpose, or even for anything very serious. She did it because she was playing. Because it was fun!

“Hey, I think I’ll make the Universe. Ooh, that’s a nice color! Maybe I’ll throw a galaxy in over there. Why not put some rings around that planet? Oh, pretty . . .”

Like the people in the Three of Cups, she was having a ball.

PLAYING IS BEING IN THE FLOW

The real idea behind being in the Flow is that there’s some underlying energy that flows through the entire Universe. When we’re in alignment with that energy, everything goes smoothly because we’re moving with the natural flow of the Universe. When we’re out of alignment with that energy, then life is difficult because we’re swimming against the current.

It’s easy to see, then, that if Leela is true – if playfulness is the energy that underlies the entire Universe – then the happier and more playful that we are, the more that we’ll be in alignment with that energy, and the easier life will be.

WHAT ABOUT WHEN LIFE IS HARD?

Life here on the Earth Plane is cyclical. We see evidence of that everywhere we look. The moon waxes and wanes, the tides come in and then go out, animals and humans are born, flourish, and then grow old and eventually die. Even nations rise and then fall.

The Hermetic book, “The Kybalion,” refers to that as the Principle of Rhythm and likens it to the pendulum of a clock. The Pendulum swings to the left and then it swings an equal amount to the right.

Our emotions and our personal fortunes seem to operate according to that same principle. We may have a period of our lives when everything is going perfectly and then that’s followed by a period when everything is difficult. We may be incredibly happy for a while and then experience deep sorrow. It’s just the pendulum swinging back and forth.

When we consciously realize that, when we know that any difficulties and sadness that we’re having will change back into happiness eventually, then we cease to take it all so seriously. We can rise above it, and continue to play.

THE PLAY IS A PLAY

There’s another meaning to the word, “play,” that’s used in the concept of Leela. That’s the idea of life AS a play. As something that we might watch playing out on a stage at a theater.

Like the Principle of Rhythm, that points to the notion that none of this is real or permanent. These are just parts that we’re playing in this incarnation. All of our, “sound and fury,” all of the ups and downs, all of the victories and defeats, are just temporary roles that we’re playing and we’ll shed them like old costumes when we move on to our next incarnation.

All we have to do is learn to play at playing in the play. We can do that!

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.”

Note: as a member of Amazon Associates, I may receive a tiny remuneration if you buy a product listed on this page. I am in no way associated with the authors of the books quoted.

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 . . .

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How to Choose an Oracle Deck

Factors to consider in choosing an Oracle deck.

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with Colette Baron-Reid’s Wisdom of the Oracle deck lately. They seem to be highly accurate and the illustrations are really magical.

There are, of course, about 80 kazillion different decks out there by now, so it can be difficult to decide which one to get. On average, they’re about 20 bucks a pop, so it’s not like most people can order a dozen of them and figure it out later. If you’re in the market for a new deck, here are a few things to consider.

ARE THEY REALLY ORACLE DECKS?

That’s not as silly as it sounds. There are quite a few decks that really have nothing to do with, “fortune telling.” For instance, Louise Hay has several decks like, “Heart Thoughts Cards: A Deck of 64 Affirmations,” which are collections of affirmations printed on separate cards. They’re lovely, inspiring thoughts, but they have nothing to do with predicting the future or understanding the past.

“Healing the Inner Child Oracle: A Transformative Quest,” is another example. It’s a charming deck that offers words of solace for anyone with a wounded Inner Child, but it isn’t in any sense, “oracular.” Basically, what we’re looking for in an oracle deck is one that’s capable of saying, “You are here. This is how you got here. This is what’s going to happen if you keep on your present course.” If it can’t fulfill those simple parameters, it’s not an oracle deck.

DO YOU TRUST THE AUTHOR?

A little bit of research can tell us a lot about the author of a deck. Some basic questions we can ask are: is the author experienced? Does the author have some sort of psychic ability that would lend her credence in designing a deck of cards? Is the author in a positive flow of energy?

Colette Baron Reid, for instance, is a psychic and has been reading cards professionally for 25 years. (Check out her web site here: https://www.colettebaronreid.com/)\]. For me, personally, the fact that she’s gone through some serious shit in her life and emerged with a positive message and positive energy adds greatly to her credibility.

We can contrast that with Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot deck. It’s a well designed deck and Crowley had a deep knowledge of occultism. He was also deeply involved with black magic, sacrificed animals in his rituals, and was a heroin addict. I wouldn’t want his deck or his energy anywhere near my house.

IS THE DECK MAGICAL?

This is obviously highly subjective. The question here is, “Does the deck call out to your Deep Mind?” Does it stir something inside of you that resonates and feels magical?

I would answer, “absolutely,” with Baron-Reid’s deck. The illustrations are by Jenna DellaGrottaglia and her art is like something channeled from another world. The second I picked up the deck I could almost feel it vibrating in my hands.

They’re whimsical, thought provoking, and perfect illustrations of the situations we find ourselves in on a daily basis. You can see more of her art here.

On the other hand, we can look at cards like those from Doreen Virtue’s original angel decks and feel a resounding, “Blechhh.” They’re really just Hallmark greeting cards compiled into a deck. Despite the fact that they sold in the hundreds of thousands, they’re flat and low vibration.

ARE THEY ACCURATE?

Although this is, of course, the most important question, it’s hard to ascertain without actually buying one of the decks and trying them. We can try to get a, “feel,” for them by reading the reviews on sites like Amazon, but even those can be highly suspect.

If you’re just starting out on your card reading adventure, one indicator you might use is how long the deck has been around. Decks that don’t work tend to disappear fairly quickly. The Waite Tarot deck, for instance, is pretty much the gold standard for accuracy and was first published in 1909. The much, much older Marseilles deck has been used for centuries, but is a little more difficult for beginners to work with.

In the limited period of time that I’ve been using Baron-Reid’s deck, I’ve found it to be highly accurate. I inquired, for instance, about the outcome of the presidential election here in the U.S. and drew a card titled Conflict and Chaos. Perfect.

WHAT ARE YOU USING THEM FOR?

Finally, it’s good to consider how we’ll actually be using the cards. If we’re deeply into metaphysical inquiries and are looking for the underlying currents in life, we might want to go for a deck that relies heavily on archetypes. One example is Baron-Reid’s Goddess deck. Or we might want to go straight to the source and use an archetype deck like this one from Caroline Myss.

I tend to use my cards much more for mundane inquiries than for metaphysical explorations. In other words, my questions are more like, “What in the hell am I supposed to be doing this week?” And less like, “What is the meaning of life?”

Which is another reason why I particularly like this deck. The cards are mainly flat out, practical, day to day advice, like, “You need to get more rest.” Or, “this venture isn’t going to work so make a u-turn.” Or, “use your imagination, not your logic.”

We can achieve much the same result by taking a classic Tarot deck like the Waite deck and simply removing all of the Major Arcana (archetype) cards. When we use only the Minor Arcana, we’re only looking at the mundane, practical factors in life. That’s kind of a hassle but it works.

Ultimately, the deck you choose will be all about you. If it calls out to you, if it resonates with your vibrations, if you trust it, that’s your deck.

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.

Donald Trump Voodoo Dolls, Recovering from the Election, and the Burning Times

Developing a strategy for dealing with Christian Nationalism and recovering from the trauma of the election.

Well, it’s been a few days since the United States election and many of us are still trying to get over the shock, sadness, and anger of what happened. Still, it’s important to focus on how we’re going to survive for the next couple of years. That’s especially true for people who are empaths and intuitives.

IT’S A GRIEF PROCESS

First of all, it’s important to realize that this is a genuine grief process. Millions of us are experiencing this just as if something we’ve loved deeply has died. There’s a sense that the America we believed in, the America that we thought we knew and could depend upon, is gone.

If you’ve experienced the death of someone you treasured, you know this feeling. It’s as if the entire world has tilted off of it’s axis and nothing will ever be the same. There is deep sadness, anger, and fear.

So the first step is to be as gentle with ourselves as we can be. Acknowledge and honor our emotions. Try to do all of the things that a therapist might recommend in the midst of grief. Stay in the present moment. Take care of ourselves physically. Deal with the sadness without descending into depression. Deal with with the fear without descending into anxiety. Deal with the anger without losing our compassion.

We have a little over two months to move through the grief and heal our energy. We need to use that time wisely.

RECOGNIZING REALITY

Healing our energy and staying positive does NOT mean being foolishly optimistic. We can and we must contribute as much light and love to the collective energy as we can. That doesn’t mean that we can visualize this election out of existence or immediately change things here on Earth School. There are some harsh realities ahead and we need to be prepared for them.

IT ISN’T DONALD TRUMP

Donald Trump is a gibbering idiot. He’s always had serious personality disorders and they’ve gotten much worse. This is a 78 year male who is morbidly obese, in a constant state of narcissistic rage, and is suffering from dementia. It’s obvious to any objective observer that he is not going to last for four years in the White House and will either die or be replaced because of mental incompetence.

In a word, Trump is nothing more than a figurehead. He was used by a political group to seize power in the United States, but he is not in charge of them. They are extremely intelligent and have planned this meticulously, so there can be no doubt that they know Trump is a paper tiger.

THE CHRISTIAN TALIBAN

The people who are really in charge of this political coup d’état are Christian nationalist extremists. Many people refer to them as, “the Christian Taliban” because they share so many views with that group. They are misogynistic to a point where they’re determined to turn women into breeding livestock and take away all of their basic rights. They are racist, they are xenophobic, and they are fascists. They have already taken over our Supreme Court and at least one branch of our legislature and now they’ve claimed the prize of the Presidency.

These are the people who are now running our country and Donald Trump and his supporters mean nothing to them.

THE BURNING TIMES

Wiccans and Witches refer to the Inquisition as, “the burning times,” in obvious reference to the thousands of people who were burned at the stake. It’s important to remember that it wasn’t, “only,” witches who were massacred in that period of madness. It was also Jews, Gypsies, Wise Women, Heretics, and anyone else who didn’t fit in to the mold of, “good Christians.”

We saw a reiteration of that in Hitler’s reign of terror. The, “norm,” is defined very narrowly as a certain entitled class of people and anyone who is outside of the norm is, “the enemy within.” Any time that a fascistic movement takes over the rule of a population, they will immediately start weeding out anyone who disagrees with them and they don’t care how brutal they have to be to do that.

IT’S OUR FIGHT, TOO

Am I suggesting that the Christian fascists who have taken over our country are going to start burning people in the public square? No. I’m simply saying that – left unchecked – they’re fully capable of it.

If you’re a Tarot reader, or you like to toss the I Ching or play with Oracle cards, you’re on their list. It may not happen immediately, but they WILL get around to it. It’s in their book:

“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” – Exodus, 22-18

They will first go after the marginalized minorities and the people who are powerless, but they will eventually go after us, as well.

SPIRITUAL WARFARE

I have no doubt that a certain number of my brothers and sisters here have already unpacked their black candles and voodoo dolls and are busily sticking pins into Donald Trump effigies. That’s certainly one way to approach the coming threat and I totally understand it if that’s where you’re at.

The problem, though, is that you can’t be an empathic person or an intuitive and carry hatred in your heart at the same time. Not for long. It’s not our energy. It’s not our essence at our core. It will eventually destroy who we are rather than change who they are.

A STRATEGY FOR RIGHT NOW

At this moment, there are only 4 things that we can do:

1 – Heal – Give ourselves time to heal psychologically and spiritually. If our basic energy is fucked up, we’ll be much less effective when we need to be.

2 – Think and Ask for Guidance – We are much more creative than they are. We need to come up with new solutions for dealing with this new reality and I have every confidence that we will.

3 – Stand Up and Speak Out – We can’t let this temporary loss silence us. They are planning to start setting up concentration camps in our country in about two months and that’s just the beginning. We have to speak out against every single injustice and atrocity that they have planned.

4 – Love – Yes, I understand that getting our heads and hearts into a place of love right now is extremely difficult. Think of it as energy, though. The collective unconscious has been filled with a flood of hatred and the ONLY spiritual antidote to hatred is love. That doesn’t mean we need to go out and hug a Trumpster or even try to send healing to them. It does mean that we need to generate as much love in our hearts, our auras and our environments as we possibly can as a counter force to their energy. If they’re the disease, we’re the cure.

And finally, I would just like to say, “Namaste’” to all of you who are reading this. That translates as, “I bow to the sacred within you.” Let’s keep that sacred light burning bright.

PEACE AND LOVE – DAN

Thought-Forms, Astral Pornography, and The Ace of Wands

Are our thoughts actually energy forms?

A few years ago I was reading a fascinating book called, “You Are Not Your Brain,” and the authors made a statement that was positively shocking to me: “To this day, scientists and psychologists cannot agree on exactly what a thought is.”

At first blush, that sounds completely ridiculous because we all know what thoughts are. They’re . . . um . . . they’re like . . . these little things that jump up in our heads and live in our brains, right?

There . . . I solved that one. You’re welcome.

Seriously, though, there really isn’t a good working definition of what a thought actually is. There’s a sort of reductionist explanation of how our nervous systems and brains produce thoughts. We can hook someone up to a brain monitor and see which parts of their brains light up with activity when they’re thinking about a particular subject. Perhaps their fear center – the amygdala – lights up because they’re thinking of something really scary. Or their prefrontal cortex – the thinking brain – lights up because they’re doing some heavy problem solving.

That doesn’t really do anything but describe the process of making the idea, though. It doesn’t tell us what the finished product is. That theory – that the brain makes ideas – exists cheek by jowl with the stimulus/response model where something in our environment makes us think certain things. Perhaps we see a picture of Donald Trump and we think, “Ohhh, scary clown,” which makes us think of circuses which makes us think of Stephen King horror novels about murderous clowns which makes us think about our overdue library book.

That concept seems to be counter-intuitive when we think about . . . well . . . intuition. When we have intuitions or flashes of insight, it feels as if they’ve popped right up in our brains without anything else making them happen. When someone asked Einstein how he invented the theory of relativity he said, “Oh, it just dropped in while I was playing the piano.”

For centuries, human beings viewed some types of ideas in just that way: as something that came into our minds from an outside source. That’s why the word, “inspire,” means to have something breathed into you. The notion was that something out there – perhaps the Universe or the Gods or the fairies – inserted the idea into your mind.

That’s what’s portrayed in the Tarot card, The Ace of Wands. Wands represent ideas and this is an idea or thought coming into the world in its purest form of mental energy. It’s, “divinely inspired.”

That STILL doesn’t tell us exactly what an idea IS, though. It’s just talking about it’s source, rather than it’s contents.

Now, the Theosophists and Victorian occultists had very specific ideas of exactly what an idea is. They viewed ideas as thought-forms, which is to say, individual little packets of energy produced by our brains and emotions and auric fields. And – important point – they felt that they were independent of the human being once they were produced.

We’ve all seen those cartoons where there’s a person having a thought that appears as a bubble with text in it, hovering over the character’s head. That’s a convenient way to visualize what the Theosophists were talking about. Every time that we have a thought, it’s like our bio-field – our brains, emotional energies, energy bodies – are extruding a little, tiny thought-form bubbles that exists outside of us.

Most of the bubbles don’t last very long because they don’t contain much energy. Let’s face it, many of us are NOT thinking about the theory of relativity while we play the piano. Instead, we’re having really profound thoughts like, “Where’d I put my car keys? Need a cup of coffee. Gotta walk the dog. Did I do the laundry?” So these are little bubbles that appear for a moment, pop, and disappear.

When the thought forms are really heavily charged with energy, though, they stick around. How do they get charged? Well, through emotions and through repetition.

Suppose you just went to bed with someone and you had a super-duper, unbelievable, I-think-my-ears-just-fell-off orgasm at the exact moment that you thought, “I love you.” That, “I love you,” thought is super-charged with energy and it will last. Ditto, if you’ve been badly shocked or frightened by something. The more intense the emotion, the more of an energetic charge the thought-form has and the longer it will exist.

We can also charge the thought-forms with energy by thinking of them over and over and over. On a positive note, we can see that happen when someone thinks of their lover constantly, as we tend to do in the early stages of falling in love. The obsessive thinking keeps adding energy to that same, “I love you,” thought-form and makes it’s last. On a negative note, we can see the same pattern with chronic anxiety and depression. Constantly thinking of things that frighten us or make us sad just increases the charge in the thought-forms and so the depression will linger long after the original cause.

Two of the early Theosophists, Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater, published a book called, “Thought Forms.” It had illustrations of the forms as they emerged from people’s auras, as seen by psychic mediums. Here’s one of a peaceful thought:

And here’s one of an angry thought.

I would have liked to have seen one of a horny thought – sort of astral pornography, I guess – but the Victorians didn’t roll that way.

So is all of this true? Maybe. It certainly forms the basis for much of what we call visualization and manifestation, as well as the concepts of either cursing or blessing someone. I’ll be writing more about that in the immediate future but for the time being it’s a fun concept to play with. What if our thoughts are actual things that exist in our personal energy space and exert an influence on us and those around us? How can we change the negative thought-forms and increase the positive-forms? Can we pick up someone else’s thought-forms, much like a virus?

Before you dismiss the idea out of hand, remember what we started off with here: the most preeminent psychologists and scientists in the world have absolutely no idea what a thought is. The theory of thought-forms is just as good – and maybe better – than most of their theories.

Remember that my e-book, “Just the Tarot,” is still available – dirt cheap! – on Amazon. In fact, I’m sending thought-forms at you right now. You should buy this book . . . you should buy this book . . . you should buy this book . . .

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.