wands – Just the Tarot

The Nine of Wands, Buddhist Emotions, and Having Sex While We’re Water Skiing

On the emotional nature of ideas.

In the Tarot, each suit of the minor arcana represents a different realm of the human experience. Cups represent emotions, pentacles are physical possessions, swords are energy, and wands are the intellectual realm of ideas.

At first glance, we’d hardly associate the Nine of Wands with ideas at all. A man stands there clutching a wand, a fearful, almost paranoid look on his face, and a bandage tied around his forehead. He looks like he came out on the losing end of a bar fight much more than he looks like he’s swarming with ideas.

When we stop for a moment and ponder just exactly what ideas really are, though, the card starts to make sense. We all have thoughts – a LOT of them – from the moment that we wake up in the morning until the moment that we fall asleep. Some meditators call our thoughts, “the mind stream,” because they feel like an endless stream constantly rushing along from one point to the next to the next.

And, let’s face it – many, if not most of them, really aren’t worth much. The Buddhists talk about, “monkey mind,” which basically means that our minds are like monkeys jumping randomly from one branch to another, with no particular order or meaning. Rather than having truly great thoughts, our thoughts are more like:

-did I turn off the coffee pot?

-why is the cat crying?

-remember to buy more cat food.

-what am I making for dinner tonight?

– should I wear brown socks?

-who invented toast?

-I think I’m a little hung over.

-where’s the alka seltzer?

-remember to buy alka seltzer when you get the cat food.

All of those thoughts occur in mere seconds and they go on like that all day, every day. Most of our thoughts, then, are just immediate, fleeting responses to whatever’s happening in our environments at any given moment.

There are, of course, more organized thoughts that we generate with problem solving activities. That’s where we sit down and really concentrate on how we’re going to get from point A to point B, how we’re going to get through work activities or budget enough money to pay the rent. How to organize our shopping lists and plan meals before we go to the grocery store. What we’re going to say at a business presentation and how to prioritize the points that we want to make.

Yet another type of thought is what we could call intuition, where an idea or a notion just seems to pop up out of nowhere. We may be shocked or surprised or delighted by an intuition because it frequently has little in common with our usual thinking patterns and provides us with a whole new way of looking at a problem or even life in general. When someone asked Einstein how he’d come up with the theory of relativity, he said that it, “just dropped in,” while he was playing the piano. Intuition may occur as a thought but there’s no feeling that we somehow generated it. It really is as if someone or something else dropped it into our mindstreams.

Now, one thing that all three of these ways of thinking – rapid responses to our environments, organized problem solving, and intuition – have in common is that they all appear to be relatively innocuous, relatively harmless. It’s hard to figure out how you could go from them to the character in the Nine of Wands who looks like he got the snot beaten out of him. What the hell happened? Did he beat himself with his own ideas? Did someone else dislike his ideas so much that they beat him up?

We find a clue to that process in Eckhart Tolle’s book, “A New Earth, Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.” In his discussion of the, “pain body,” (the accumulation of subconscious emotional pain that we all carry) he states: “. . . emotion is the body’s reaction to your mind . . . An emotion is the body’s response to a thought.”

In other words, thoughts never occur in isolation. There are always emotions attached to them. With many of them, the emotions, like the thoughts themselves, may arise and fall away so rapidly that we’re not even aware of them, but they’re there.

To use the example from above, we might think, “Remember to buy more cat food,” and not even realize we’re feeling anything. Just below the surface though, there may be a fair number of emotional reactions, like, “I love my cat, I hate the smell of that fish flavored cat food, I miss my other cat who died, it all costs so much and I’m so worried about money . . .” Love, hate, sadness, worry, all flashing through us over a damned can of cat food.

We might think that thoughts obviously can’t hurt us. We can think of a purple polka dotted hippopotamus or the theory of relativity and neither of those thoughts is going to hurt us or anyone else. They’re just ideas. But – again – they’re ideas with emotions attached to them, and, yes, emotions can hurt us or help us.

If we obsessively ruminate over unhappy thoughts all day, that will hurt us. It causes our blood pressure to shoot up, our bodies are flooded with cortisol and adrenaline, our serotonin levels drop and we become much more susceptible to depression and disease.

If we interrupt those obsessively unhappy thoughts with the memories of something that made us happy – a vacation, great sex, a good friend, water skiing, a vacation where we had great sex with a good friend while we were water skiing – that will help us. Our blood pressure drops, serotonin levels increase, stress hormones drop, our immune systems get a boost.

So a good first step in not getting beaten up by our ideas is to consciously realize that every thought has some emotional component to it. Every time we think something, we feel something. The more aware we are of that, the more aware we become of what we’re actually feeling and we can gradually start to eliminate the thoughts that make us have bad feelings. Like fish flavored cat food.

Another thing that can help us is to meditate a bit on the Buddhist notion that NOTHING HAS ANY VALUE. At first blush, that may sound like a radically nihilistic notion. “What the hell do you mean, nothing has any value? I’ll tell you what has some value, Bubba – my new IPhone. THAT’S what has some value. Exactly $799.98, plus shipping, that’s how much value it’s got. Don’t tell ME nothing has any value.”

To express the idea a little more clearly, nothing has any INTRINSIC value. It only has the value that we assign to it, the value that we project into it. An IPhone is just a piece of plastic and electronic components. There’s nothing in it that’s intrinsically, “happy making,” until we decide that IPhones make us happy. Or unhappy.

Buddhists put a little finer edge on it by saying that we assign one of two feelings to virtually everything we encounter in life: attraction or aversion. Either we like it, in which case we want it, or we don’t like it, in which case we want to avoid it.

The tricky part is in realizing that there is NOTHING that’s either likable or unlikable until we decide it’s likable or unlikable. It’s wonderful to realize that because it gets rid of a whole host of unconscious motivations like greed, prejudice, possessiveness, materialism. Literally, nothing has any value unless we want to think it has some value. Nothing’s good unless we think it, nothing’s bad unless we think it.

It also makes us deliciously responsible for our own lives because we’re no longer victims of circumstance. How many times have we all said, “I’ll be happy when I get a new car, or a new computer, or a new job, or a better lover, or a nicer house?” We chronically think that there is something or someone OUT THERE that will magically make us happy. And if it’s OUT THERE, then we don’t have any control over it. It’s something that happens to us or it doesn’t, either something outside of us makes us happy, or we’re just doomed to be miserable.

Once we realize that it’s our own thoughts that are assigning happy or miserable feelings to the things out there, that we are unconsciously deciding that some things are attractive and some things are aversive, then we control our own happiness. Or we can be just as miserable as we want to be.

Happy, sad, mean, joyful, miserable. They all start with thoughts and we, and we alone, make our thoughts.

Bundles of Sticks, Ajahn Brahm, and the Ten of Wands

Finding closure on experiences that don’t make any sense.

Should we carry our past with us or just throw it away?

The Ten of Wands shows a person plodding along, carrying a large bundle of sticks. The, “sticks,” are wands, the suit of the Tarot that represents ideas, so he’s actually carrying a massive number of ideas.

If we take a little closer look at the card we notice a few odd things about it. First, he’s not at all carrying the sticks the way that we’d expect. If we pick up a big old honker of a load of sticks, we’d throw them over our shoulder, right? Instead, he’s carrying them in front of himself, with his head pressed into the bundle.

Second, the sticks are all crossed up at the bottom and going in different directions at the top. If someone asked us to lug a large pile of sticks across the yard, we’d probably throw a rope around them and tie them together, not carry them in a loose, unwieldy mess.

Third, he’s definitely not watching where he’s going. His head is tilted down, as if he’s watching each step he’s taking, rather than keeping his eyes on his destination.

So just by looking at the face of the card, we can deduce quite a few things about it. This guy is probably an intellectual, or at least someone who thinks a great deal, because he has many, many ideas that he’s carrying around. His ideas don’t really, “fit,” together, and they’ve become quite a burden for him. In fact, he’s so involved with carrying his ideas that he really has no idea where he’s going. He’s so lost in his ideas that he has no perspective on his life.

The Australian Buddhist monk, Ajahn Brahm, tells a funny story about sticks. When he was a novice monk he was strolling through the forest with his teacher, the head monk at the monastery where he was studying. The master suddenly picked up a stick from the forest floor and asked, “How heavy is this stick, Ajahn Brahm?” And then he threw it away and asked, “How heavy is it now?”

The point, of course, is that something is, “heavy,” only when we hold on to it. It’s the act of PICKING IT UP AND CARRYING IT that makes it heavy. We don’t look at a stick on the ground and say, “Oh, crap, that’s heavy.” We only say it when we try to pick it up. It’s our act of grasping something that makes it seem heavy, not the thing itself.

Human beings are natural storytellers. We all reflexively try to make sense out of our lives and weave the events we experience into a coherent, sensible narrative. We have an innate drive to try to make sense out of what happens to us and so we’re constantly reviewing our pasts and rearranging the puzzle pieces of our lives into some sort of a rational structure.

We don’t just say, “Well, I lost my fucking mind and decided to quit my job, leave my husband, and move to Montana to grow dental floss. Just for no particular reason.” Instead, we say, “After several years of marriage I felt a yearning for solitude and spiritual growth that could only be satisfied by disconnecting from social obligations that had become increasingly mundane.”

That feels ever so much better.

We need to feel that it all makes sense, somehow.

From a Buddhist perspective, constantly trying to make sense out of our pasts is tantamount to picking up that stick. It only becomes heavy, it only becomes a burden, when we grasp it and carry it around with us. In fact, Ajahn Brahm actually recommends writing, “this is my past,” on a stick and throwing it as far away as we can. Just let it go. When we’re not carrying it, it’s not heavy.

Now, modern psychology has a different take on it. Therapists tell us that it IS important to try to make sense out of what’s happened to us and to strive for a sense of meaningfulness in our lives. Bottom lining it, that’s why we go to therapists: because our lives aren’t making any sense and we need someone to help us sort it all out.

I suspect that for most of us, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If we wake up one morning and have no past, we may have suffered a psychotic break. Or, in the case of people like Eckhart Tolle, perhaps we’ve had a massive revelation, a huge psychic shift that made us realize how absurd our previous thinking was.

For those of us who are neither psychotics nor enlightened spiritual masters, though, just tossing our pasts out the window isn’t an option. It seems we can’t just NOT think about it.

Which brings us to that tired, but still valid, word: closure.

We think of closure as having worked through a problem or a process in life until we’ve made sense of it, until it fits logically into our coherent narrative of what our lives mean. If we go through a divorce, for instance, we may go to a therapist and try to figure out why it happened. What was our role in the relationship breaking apart? What was our spouses role? What did we do wrong? What did we do right? What can we learn from it to make our future relationships better? Eventually, when we’ve talked through all of those issues, we start to achieve closure and we’re ready to move on from it. We haven’t necessarily thrown the stick away, but we’ve made it a hell of a lot lighter to carry.

There are other issues, though, that we can never seem to make any sense out of.

– If you were badly abused as a child, that doesn’t make any sense. You didn’t do anything to deserve it and there’s no logical or emotional reason it should have happened to you.

-If you’re an open and loving person and you got chewed up and spit out by a malignant narcissist, that doesn’t make any sense. You didn’t ask for it, you didn’t deserve it, and it shouldn’t have happened.

-If the new boss from hell fires you from your dream job because he’s a sexist or a sadist, that doesn’t make any sense. You were a great employee, there’s no justice in it, and it shouldn’t have happened.

So there’s a kind of a subclass of experiences that we all have that we could call, “doesn’t make any sense,” experiences. Those are the experiences that get really, “sticky.” Those are the experiences that we pick up and carry with us. We go over and over and over them, trying to figure them out, trying to make them somehow fit into our narratives, our story. But they never do.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” experiences are the ones that are most likely to wound us spiritually and emotionally. They keep us stuck. They keep us wounded. They keep us living in pain.

Oddly, though, they’re also the experiences that are easiest to let go of, if we think of them in the right way. If we’ve honestly, sincerely, conscientiously tried to figure them out and we can’t do it, we can just say, “Well, fuck it. This doesn’t make any sense.” And then we can put that experience in a nice, “doesn’t make any sense,” box, tie a brightly colored, “doesn’t make any sense,” ribbon around it, and toss it in the nearest river.

Maybe we’re not enlightened or smart enough to throw all of our, “sticks,” away, but we can throw some of them away. We can consciously choose which parts are valuable and which parts are worthless. We can drop some of the burden and make it a little easier to move forward in our lives.

And that’s a good start.

Ahimsa, Love, and John Wayne’s Therapist

I ran across an interesting quotation from Gay Hendricks, author of The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level : “If you have any sort of a problem, send love at it. If you’re dealing with a bully, send love at him. If your life is stuck, send love at it.”

It’s fascinating because it makes love into an active proposition, rather than a passive state of being. He’s not talking about just sitting in a meditative state of love, he’s talking about consciously generating it and using it to solve problems.

There is a principle that’s called, “ahimsa,” which is one of the five Yamas, or ethical rules of behavior, in yoga philosophy. It’s widely translated as non-violence or doing no harm to any living thing. I know a lot of Buddhists and Wiccans who have incorporated that idea into their lives. If they find a spider in their house, they carry it outside and let it live rather than squashing it against the wall. It’s a basic measure of respect for life and not taking it or harming it.

If we dig a little further into the idea, though, we find Patanjali, the author of the Yoga Sutras saying, “once ahimsa is mastered, even wild animals and ferocious criminals will become tame and harmless in our presence. … Ahimsa, rightly understood, is the ultimate weapon; it turns one’s enemy into a friend, thereby banishing the possibility of further conflict.”

In other words, send love at them. Use love as an active force to dissolve other people’s aggression.

One of the problems with sending love at people and things that threaten us is the limbic system in our brains. That’s that very ancient part of our brains – sometimes called the crocodile brain – which is responsible for the fight or flight reaction. If it detects a threat, it immediately dumps massive amounts of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline into our systems. Our heart rates go up, our blood pressure goes up, we become hyper focused on the threat, and our thinking brain, the prefrontal cortex, pretty much stops functioning. We’re ready to fight like hell or run like hell, whichever action is most likely to help us survive.

The thing is, it’s very easy for other people to reach right past our conscious minds and our spiritual beliefs and tap into that fight or flight reaction. If someone at a business meeting makes fun of us, or a coworker is nasty to us, or a friend puts us down, we reflexively, unconsciously go into fight or flight. We can see that happening in the Five of Wands: everyone is madly swinging their clubs at everyone else and no one is stepping outside of the conflict and thinking things through.

The problem with fight or flight – aside from being a really unhappy, miserable way to go through life – is that aggression breeds aggression. If you get up in my face, I’m going to get right back up in yours. Which will make you even more aggressive, which will make me even more aggressive and on and on until someone gets hurt or someone flees. It’s a self-feeding cycle that inevitably leads to someone being wounded, either emotionally or physically.

And that’s the genius behind Ahimsa: it short circuits the fight or flight reaction by changing the energy field.

To put it in New Agey terms, incompatible energies cannot exist in the same energy field. If we’re actively generating love and nurturance and caring from our heart centers, then hatred and anger and aggression can’t enter into that field. One of two things will happen with the people around us who are generating anger: (1) they’ll go away because their anger isn’t compatible with our love; or, (2) they’ll change into more loving, mellow people in order to be compatible with the energy we’re putting out.

All of that starts, though, with our actively, consciously generating love and applying it to our problems. It’s not just a state of being that we sometimes live in and sometimes lose sight of. It’s beginning to see love as a very powerful force for change and not just some wimpy phrases on a Valentine’s card.

It makes perfect sense when we think about it. The Buddhists have an old aphorism that we don’t take darkness OUT, we bring light IN. We don’t just sit in a dark cave and imagine that there’s light – we actually light a candle.

It’s not an easy place to get to, certainly not in our society. We’re constantly programmed that violence and anger are solutions, rather than problems. Our heroes carry guns and know karate and drop bombs on other people. Love, on the other hand, is seen as something that’s weak and wussy, appropriate, perhaps, for mothers who are nursing babies but not very useful in the, “real world.” Love, when our tough guy heroes encounter it, is something that happens TO them, something that they have no control over and have to put up with, despite their best instincts to the contrary.

Changing that paradigm is going to involve embracing the idea of love as being much, much stronger than hatred and rage. As being an irresistible energy that’s an undercurrent in the universe. It’s going to involve realizing that people who are living in constant anger are the ones who are really afraid and the people who are living in love are the ones who have the courage to embrace life to the fullest.

It’s sort of like imagining John Wayne or Clint Eastwood in a bar, face to face with the BAD HOMBRE’. They’re glaring back and forth at each other, their hands are resting on their pistols, and everyone else in the bar is hiding under the tables. The music slowly builds to a crescendo and at that exact moment of the highest tensions in the scene, John Wayne reaches over, hugs the bad hombre’, and says, “I love you, man. I’m sorry that you’re having to live in such a terrible, negative space, and I know a good therapist I could recommend. Here, let me buy you a drink and we’ll talk about it.”

It works. Try it.

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Spring Equinox, the Four of Wands, and the Spiritual Joy of Chocolate Covered Bunnies

Exploring the lost – and found – joy of spirituality.

I haven’t celebrated easter in a very long time. I’m not a christian, so I don’t feel any particular connection there. I was also reared as a catholic, so there may actually still be a little subconscious hostility left over as a result of recovering from that heritage.

This year, though, I decided that I was really going to celebrate the Spring Equinox. I won’t belabor the fact that the christian churches never met a pagan holiday that they didn’t steal or co-opt, and that easter is obviously a take-over of the celebration of Spring. We all know that. What I hadn’t really consciously flashed on, though, was that I was letting the christian holiday interfere with MY holiday in more ways than one.

It’s been a bitch of a year and a bitch of a winter, not just for me but for the entire world. There’s been a lot of death, a lot of depression, a lot of darkness and craziness and it’s gone on for a very long time. So when the first golden daffodil started popping open this year, I could feel in my very bones that I wanted to celebrate. I wanted to embrace that light with everything I had.

I decided to build a Spring Equinox altar. That, along with incense and candles, is one of the few positive things about growing up catholic. I’ll build an altar anywhere, anytime, at the drop of a freaking hat. And then I’ll stick candles on it and get some incense burning, by Goddess.

I spent hours cruising through our local stores, purchasing the, “ingredients,” for my little shrine to Spring. As usual, Dollar General was a treasure trove for low priced holiday decorations. I bought glittery eggs and plaster bunny rabbits for fertility symbols. Candles and chrysanthemums and sea shells. Virgin of Guadalupe’ votives to represent the Goddess. And more bunnies. I went home and dug out my crystals and my pentagrams and my chalice and athame’, and began assembling the altar.

About half way through the process I realized that I was having a hell of a good time. I actually found myself laughing out loud as I arranged the items on an old coffee table and rearranged them and rearranged them again. I put my statues of Tara and Quan Yin in the center of the table, strung white christmas lights around the shrine, lit incense, and laughed some more.

It was fun!

And it really hit me like a hammer: organized religions didn’t just steal our holidays, they stole our fun. They took every single pagan holiday, turned it something dark and solemn and serious, and systematically tried to wring every bit of joy and laughter out of it.

Easter is a prime example of that. The pagan celebrations of Spring had a HUGE amount of fun attached to them. Much like the Four of Wands, there was dancing, drinking, revelry and the people who were doing the celebrating didn’t just eat chocolate bunnies, they fucked like bunnies. A LOT.

And then along came organized religion. Suddenly the celebration of Spring was all about death. All about a very kind – and perhaps fictional – man being tortured, crucified and killed. And, yes, I know that christians like to say that easter is all about re-birth, all about christ rising from the tomb, but it’s really not. It’s about death.

It’s like they took my beautiful, golden daffodil and threw a bucket of blood on it.

There’s been that same strange dance between pagan joy and organized religion for centuries and I’d have to say that – all in all – we pagans are winning. Organized religion took over the mid-winter festival and declared that it was the birthday of Jesus, a very solemn occasion, doncha know? We countered with christmas trees and presents and twinkling lights. Organized religion took over our festival celebrating the end of the season of light and declared that it was, “All Souls Day.” We came right back and said, “Nope, it’s Halloween – break out the masks and candy!”

They said, “Easter,” and we replied, “Chocolate Bunnies!”

The point is that you can’t repress the joy of true spirituality. William James pointed that out in The Varieties of Religious Experience a long time ago. The hallmarks of someone who has had a true spiritual experience are joy, compassion and love.

To put it another way, if we’re not having some FUN with our religions, we’re not connecting with any sort of spirituality AT ALL. If we’re afraid to laugh in church, we’re in the wrong church.

So this year I’m starting again. Like my little Spring Equinox altar, I’m assembling the, “ingredients,” of my spirituality. They will include feathers and crystals and bells and, yes, some chocolate bunnies. And I may rearrange them and then rearrange them again, but I’ll be laughing while I do it.

Wishing you a joy-FULL Spring Equinox and BIG smiles.

The Five of Wands, Compassion, and the Invasion of The Trumpster Amygdaloids

Developing compassion for Trump supporters based on their inflamed amygdalas.

I’ve been trying to reach a space of compassion in my heart for rabid Trump supporters and it hasn’t been easy. Any time that we see pictures of them, they seem to exist in a sea of snarling, angry, hate-filled faces. Their social media posts are contemptuous, bigoted, ill-informed diatribes that frequently feature images of people with guns, swastikas, and confederate flags.

They, “feel,” very much like the Five of Wands. A group of people swinging clubs as fast and as hard as they possibly can and rarely connecting with anything useful.

There’s not much there to love or empathize with. It became much, much harder to feel a sense of common humanity with them after they stormed the Capitol Building on January the Sixth. They exhibited all of the rage, fury, and mindlessness of a lynch mob and it’s plain that people would have been seriously injured or killed if the Trumpsters had been able to reach them.

I DO have a need and a perceived duty to feel compassion for my fellow humans. If we believe, as I do, that we are ALL Souls at our core – small sparks from the Sacred Fire of the universe – then we need to treat one another with the same respect that we would show for the origin of the Sacred and the Divine. The rabid Trumpsters, then, could be perceived as wandering, confused, temporarily misguided human Souls.

But they’re such assholes.

I mean, they’re really, really REALLY hard to like. I don’t like their politics, I don’t like their snotty, condescending attitudes, I don’t like their hatred or their guns or their racism. So I was having an extremely hard time trying to come up with one thing, just one thing, where I could find some common ground and tell myself, “Yeah . . . THERE’S something we have in common! There’s a basis for some empathy and compassion.”

And I finally settled on their amygdalas.

The amygdala, in case you’re not familiar with it, is a walnut shaped organ at the base of our brains. It’s probably the most ancient part of our brains which is why it’s referred to as, “the crocodile brain,” meaning that it’s on about the same primitive evolutionary level as a crocodile.

It’s also in charge of the fight, flight, or freeze reaction. If we’re confronted with danger, the amygdala fires off and our brains and bodies are flooded with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. We’re on full alert and we’re instantly ready to fight like hell, run like hell, or freeze in place.

Also – and this is VERY important with understanding the Trumpsters – when the amygdala is fully activated the prefrontal cortex, which is the THINKING part of the brain, the RATIONAL part of the brain, shuts down. Turns off. Quits working.

One other curious fact about the amygdala is that the more it’s activated, the more dominant it becomes. When we’re constantly frightened or angry, the amygdala actually GROWS in size and our bodies become like a sea of stress hormones.

Even to a rational, normal person, the last four years have been extremely irritating. Until they took Trump’s Twitter account away from him, there was a constant, never-ending barrage of Twisted Trump Tweets. Many times a day there were messages that basically said, “Be afraid! Be very, very afraid!”

The Socialists are coming for you!

The Communists are coming for you!

The Chinese are coming for you!

The Mexican rapists are coming for you!

The Anitifas are coming for you!

The Democrats are coming for you!

The liberals are coming for you!

Toilets that you have to flush twice are coming for you!

Be afraid! And – also – be very, very, very ANGRY!

For most of us the tweets went from being stupid to being annoying to, “Doesn’t that guy EVER shut the fuck up?”

But now imagine what those tweets must have been doing to the rabid Trumpsters. These were people whose amygdalas must have already been pretty active since they voted for Trump and his fear and his anger to begin with. Then add a four year stream of poisonous messages from the Tangerine Troll and they had to have gone totally into Tilt.

If the amygdala actually grows every time we get angry or become frightened, they must have amygdalas the size of freaking watermelons. And if the prefrontal cortex shuts down every time the amygdala fires off, well shit, they haven’t had a rational thought in years.

Bless their little hearts.

So I’m using that as my basis for compassion. These people aren’t just assholes. They’re actually suffering from extremely inflamed amygdalas, aggravated by shrivelled prefrontal cortexes. I’m even beginning to think of them less as rabid Trump supporters and more as Amygdaloids.

“Yes, it was tragic. When he was born he seemed perfectly normal, but sometime in his later development turned into an Amygdaloid. No known treatment for it, you know. Just . . . tragic.”

There now. I feel better already.

The Nine of Wands, Spiritual Post-It-Notes, and Being Okay With Not Being Okay

I was recently watching an interview with Brad Yates, author of A Garden of Emotions: Cultivating Peace through EFT Tapping, and he made the point that social media can have the inadvertent effect of making us feel pretty inadequate. It can slide us right into the, “comparison trap,” and we start to think that there must be something really wrong with us and our way of thinking. I sat right up and took notice when he said that, because it rang a major, huge, giant brass bell in my head.

What he was talking about was FaceBook, “positivity.” If we’re involved with the New Age or New Thought movements at all, we run into a LOT of positivity with our on-line friends. We get up in the morning, crank up our Internet Machines, and there’s a virtual blizzard of Spiritual Post-It-Notes. Things like, “I am SO grateful for this beautiful morning!”

Or, “I count my blessings with every breath!”

Or, “Healthy boundaries make for healthy relationships!”

Or, “Always live in an attitude of gratitude!”

And – as actual human beings – sometimes we feel like shit. In fact, sometimes we feel like shit a lot of the time. But we’re looking at all of these bright, shiny thoughts from all of these bright, shiny people and THEY don’t seem to feel like shit all of the time, or even some of the time, or even, for god’s sake, EVER.

Almost inevitably we slide into comparing ourselves to them and start thinking that there must be something really wrong with US. How come I don’t feel like a million dollars every single goddamned day the way that they do? I must be a really low-vibes, depressing/depressed human being because a lot of the time I hurt and I don’t feel very freaking grateful.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that if someone says that they’re grateful, happy, joyous and free EVERY SINGLE DAY, they’re either shallow or they’re a saint or they’re in denial or they’ve got some really, really good weed.

All right, granted, there are some people out there who really are happy most of the time and more power to them. Some of them were born with a basically happy disposition. Some of them have worked very, very hard to get into a place of grace and joy. I’m not denigrating or diminishing that at all.

Most of us, though, don’t wake up grinning every single freaking morning. For some of us life feels very much like the Nine of Wands tarot card: we’re still standing, we’re still upright and strong, but we’ve had the crap beaten out of us by life and we’re pretty wounded.

And that’s okay.

That’s where we’re at. That’s our starting point on the map for the rest of our journey.

Mike Dooley, who has done such wonderful teaching about manifesting and visualizations, often compares reaching our goals to setting a GPS in our cars. We feed in the information about where we want to go and then the gizmo just takes it from there. We don’t argue with it or second guess it – we just follow the directions. In the same sense, he says, we can just set our goals and then let the Universe take it from there. We don’t need to constantly obsess about the details (what he calls, “the poisoned hows,”) because the Universe will keep popping up new road signs and different paths to get us there.

Implicit in that, though, is the idea that we KNOW where we’re located at the beginning of the journey and we’re HONEST about it. If I’m in San Jose and I want to get to Phoenix, but I tell my GPS that I’m in Dallas, it ain’t gonna work out too well.

And, in just the same way, if I’m beat up, knocked down, drug around, and life has beaten the stuffing right out of my meditation pillow, putting up Spiritual Post-It-Notes about how grateful I am ain’t gonna work out too well.

Unfortunately, social media sites are generally piss-poor places to be honest about what we’re really feeling. It’s difficult to admit publicly that we’re NOT the Great and Mighty Wizard of Oz and there may be a lonely, sometimes sad, sometimes frightened person behind the curtain who’s just pulling levers. It’s especially difficult when so many other people seem to be doing so well. At least, all of their posts say they’re doing so well.

In a way – and perhaps a healthy way – this impossibly cheerful positivity has intensified since the start of the pandemic. People really ARE struggling with depression and fear and loneliness and we’re trying to encourage each other to stay in healthy, positive frames of mind as much as we can.

So it may be a good, temporary coping mechanism. Maybe we DO need to be as optimistic and up-beat as we can be, until we find our way out of this weird, scary virus maze. It’s what we used to call, “whistling past the graveyard,” and in this case the graveyard is very real and it’s got a half a million Americans in it.

Long term, though, simply pretending that everything is alright when it’s not, doesn’t really work. It doesn’t get us to our destinations because we’re not being honest about where we’re starting from.

Brad Yates went on to say that there are no such things as negative emotions. WOW! But . . . but . . . but . . . I thought I was supposed to be happy all of the time!

Not.

Repeat – there are no such things as negative emotions. There are no BAD emotions.

There are emotions that are uncomfortable. There are emotions that feel sad or that arise out of situations that are depressing or painful. But they are all our emotions, they are all part of our story, and they serve to tell us where we are before we take the next step in our journeys.

In 1967, Thomas Harris published a wonderfully cheery book entitled, “I’m Okay, You’re Okay.” In a nutshell, it promulgated the idea that we’re all just fine, we just misunderstand one another sometimes, and we should always remember that you and I and – gee whiz! – pretty much everyone is . . . well . . . okay.

To which Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, that amazing wizardess who spent a lifetime studying death and dying, replied:

“I’m Not Okay.

You’re Not Okay.

And That’s Okay.”

And it really IS okay. It’s right where we’re supposed to be when we take our next step on the journey.

The Ten of Wands, Mike Dooley, and Becoming a Topless Cellist

This is a post about Mike Dooley’s concepts of choosing our goals, visualizing them, and manifesting them. It discusses the Ten of Wands tarot card as a representation of someone who has too many goals and needs to narrow her focus while remaining open to all possibilities.

If you’re a Great Thinker – and most of us at least believe that we are – you probably have a lot of Great Ideas. In fact, you may have too many. Way too many. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Mike Dooley has a wonderful book called Choose Them Wisely: Thoughts Become Things! As the title implies, what we think will inevitably manifest in our physical lives, sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly, but what we think will become our physical realities.

Now, the Tarot slices our everyday lives into four quarters represented by the Minor Arcana. The suit of Cups represent our emotions, Pentacles represent our relationship with physical possessions, Swords represent our physical drives and aggressions, and Wands represent our ideas, our thoughts.

The Ten of Wands is a wonderful representation of someone who has way too many Great Ideas. Each wand represents a thought and this poor son of a bitch has SO many thoughts going on in his head that he can barely stagger along his path. He’s literally weighted down with all of his wonderful, fabulous, potentially AMAZING thoughts. So much so that he can’t even lift up his head and look at the world around him. All he can do is carry the burden of his thoughts and stare at the path that he’s on, hoping he doesn’t stumble and fall and – goddess forbid – lose his stupefying collection of Great Ideas.

The bad thing about having too many Great Ideas is that it can be just as discouraging as having too few Great Ideas. It can paralyze us. We have so many options swimming around in our heads that we just really can’t decide which direction to go in – so we go nowhere. It’s like we’re saying to ourselves, “Well, I could be a Great Artist, but if I put all of that time and energy into being a Great Artist then I won’t have any time and energy to put into being a Great Writer.”

So we sit around on our asses and worry about that and – in the meantime – we don’t write and we don’t paint. We’re stuck.

We can actually see a pretty good representation of this with The Chariot card. You can take one look at this guy and tell that he has some Great Ideas. I mean, look at those shoulder pads! Who wouldn’t want a jacket with Moon shoulders? He’s glorious! But if you take a little closer look, you see that the Sphinxes aren’t harnessed to anything and he doesn’t have any reins in his hands. He looks fabulous, but he’s not going anywhere because he doesn’t have any direction, he doesn’t have any focus. He just can’t decide which way to go.

One of Dooley’s ideas about getting out of the trap of having too few options can also be useful in dealing with having too many options. Make up a list of your options, of all of the things that you could possibly do to move forward in your life, and then choose the three LEAST SUCKY options and move forward with those.

If you have too many Great Ideas, that may sound like a daunting task, but it really isn’t. My experience is that a lot of my Great Ideas can be slotted under the category of, “Probably Ain’t Gonna Happen.” For instance, when I was in Junior High School, I got it into my head that I wanted to jump hurdles on the track team. And I would have been absolutely amazing at it except for the fact that everyone in my family has short legs and I kept jumping into the hurdles instead of over them.

In the same sense, if you’ve always dreamed of being a porn star and you have a small penis, that, “Probably Ain’t Gonna Happen.” It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with my short legs or your small penis, it’s just not a good fit. So to speak.

So we can winnow out a lot of our Great Ideas from the get-go. And, as we do that, we find that a lot of them are actually pretty Sucky Ideas. Eventually, as we continue to work on our lists of Great and Sucky Ideas, we’ll come down to the three that are the least Sucky and we can move forward with those.

This is the point where a lot of us get paralyzed again. Should I really give up on my life-long dream of being a world famous Juggler on the Ed Sullivan Show, just because Ed Sullivan is dead? Am I making a dreadful mistake in abandoning my idea of being a Topless Cellist at Carnegie Hall?

This is also where Mike Dooley came up with a genius concept: IT DOESN’T MATTER.

No matter what we choose, it doesn’t matter. The main thing is to choose something and then start moving forward with it. That’s probably the single most important thing that we can do: get off of our asses and start moving. And, as we begin to move forward – with ANYTHING – the Universe will provide the next step and then the next step and then the next step and eventually we end up exactly where we want to be.

That takes a tremendous load off of our shoulders, especially if we’re Great Thinkers with lots of Great Ideas. We really don’t have to decide too much. We don’t have to spend endless hours analyzing our options, playing scenario tapes in our heads, and fretting over possible disasters. All we have to do is figure out a couple of our least sucky options and start moving toward them. We provide the moving feet and the Universe provides the path to walk on.

As Dooley put it, “Do WHAT you can, with WHAT you’ve got, from WHERE you are, and it will ALWAYS be enough.”

And we can overcome any hurdles. Or, if we’ve got short legs, we can learn to run sprints. It’s all good. It’s all just right.

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The Seven of Wands, Donald Trump, and Conservative Brains

Pssst . . . there’s a psychotic in the White House . . .

Pssst . . . Donald Trump has been sent by god himself to save our country.

Depending on which news channel you watch you can hear either message any day of the week. No matter where you fall in the spectrum between those two opinions, there can’t be any doubt that we’re experiencing a major conflict in values in the United States right now. Call it a war between the haves and the have-nots, between the Left and the Right, between the Democrats and the Republicans – call it whatever – there’s no doubt that a LOT of people are pissed off and willing to talk (or shout) about the differences in their values.

A more productive way to examine it might be to take a look at the ground of those values. What are people’s basic beliefs about the world and their place in it? How do they experience life itself? Do they view the Earth as a beautiful cradle that holds sacred life or as a never-ending battle field where only the tough survive?

In the Seven of Wands we see a figure who is literally under siege. He has the high ground but combatants are coming at him from every angle. He’s perched right in the middle of a battle and he has to fight or perish. The world he inhabits is NOT a safe place, to say the least.

That stuff happens and we’ve all been there at one time or another. Sometimes you do have to stand up and fight for your ideas or your ideals, for your positions or your principles. The question, though, is whether that’s a temporary situation in our lives or the way that we view life in general.

We’re certainly hearing a lot of rhetoric that indicates a very, very fearful world-view. Be afraid of Mexicans. Be afraid of Black folks. Be afraid of the Chinese. Be afraid of Muslims, and immigrants, and foreigners, and liberals, and socialists, and gay people and even be afraid of toilets that you have to flush too many times.

Be afraid. Be very, very, very AFRAID!!!

And, of course, there’s the corollary proposition that flows out of that fear, which is that anyone who isn’t afraid is an idiot, a chump, a fool, a snowflake.

But what if we look at all of that fear from a different perspective? What if some people are just hard-wired to view the world as a hostile, scary place? Is it possible that they just can’t NOT view life that way?

It’s an intriguing question, because – if true – those people are probably more deserving of our pity than our anger. They’re suddenly transformed from angry trolls into rabbits quivering in terror in their self-imposed cages.

Consider this: the amygdala is the part of the brain that contains our fight or flight reactions. In other words, that’s where anger and fear hang out in our brains. Brain scans performed at the University College of London actually showed that conservatives have LARGER amygdalas than liberals and are more reactive to fear.

A 2008 study found that conservatives are MUCH more sensitive to stimuli which they view as threatening, such as sudden loud noises or scary images.

A 2012 study found that conservatives tend to have what psychologists call a “negativity bias.” In other words, they view their environment in largely negative terms and tend to see it as threatening. Liberals see butterflies and conservatives see spiders.

Now, if all of that fear and anger really is hardwired into their nervous systems, if their brains really are predisposed to fighting or fleeing, we can’t do much about that. We can’t expect someone who is color blind to suddenly appreciate the different shades of blue.

But what we CAN do is to have a shift in our own perspectives. What we can do is to try to have more compassion for these people who are trapped in a rather hellish world of anger, fear, and contempt. They can’t NOT be that way and that’s very sad, in addition to being very dangerous.

H.L. Mencken once observed that the average anglo saxon goes to bed at night terrified that someone is hiding under his bed and wakes up in the morning convinced that someone has stolen his socks.

That’s a humorous way of putting it but it’s a way of life – and experiencing life – for a lot of people. Some people don’t just get the Seven of Wands in a reading – they ARE the Seven of Wands.

And we have to find a way to live with them.

Donald Trump, Pharaohs, and the Peculiar Royalty Cards of the Tarot

\If you’ve ever studied the Tarot you know that the definitions for the royalty cards in the Minor Arcana pretty much suck. For every suit of cards – wands, cups, swords, and pentacles – there are corresponding royal figures: the Page, Knight, Queen, and King. The definitions for these come about as close as any of the cards to the stereotypes of Gypsy fortune tellers muttering that you’re about to meet a tall, dark stranger.

Unlike the definitions for all of the rest of the cards, these tend to be very gender and age specific. As in, “An older, dark haired man with a hatchet face will play an important role in your life.” Or, “A troubled young person with red hair may cause mischief.” Or, “A very strong, dark haired, materialistic woman will be difficult to defeat in legal problems.”

Perhaps the definitions are so awful because the very concept of royalty is so NOT the Tarot. The Tarot is not about, “exceptionalism,” or people who are removed from the normal human experience by virtue of their wealth or power.

The Minor Arcana cards describe common human experiences and states of being that we all go through. Poverty, disappointment, broken hearts, celebrations, love, hate, passion. The Major Arcana describe archetypes that blow through all of our lives. Illumination, spiritual quests, death, lovers, evil, power, sudden turns of fortune.

In a word, the Tarot is, “egalitarian.” Egalitarianism is, in its original meaning, the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities. We see that built into the Declaration of Independence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Of course, we know that the people who signed that document were, for the most part, rich white dudes who owned slaves and would have been horrified at the possibility of women voting. Nonetheless, let’s look at the truth that underlies the statements that they didn’t live up to.

We are ALL of us much more alike than we are different. If you take it right down to the core, right down to the bedrock of existence, we are ALL Souls on the earth plane trying to do our best and figure out why in the hell we’re here and what we’re supposed to do next. Just forget for a moment all of the strange earth plane illusions of skin color, gender, countries, languages, creeds and religions, wealth, poverty, genius and stupidity. Underneath the whole, bizarre, flashy, Mardi Gras parade of colorful costumes and masks, we’re Souls on a common journey. On the Soul level, we are all equals.

Which is why the Tarot works for everyone. It’s about that bedrock of human experiences that every person on the planet shares in common. It’s about what we – ALL OF US – encounter in our lives.

Being a King or a Queen, a Knight or a Page . . . except metaphorically and momentarily, those are NOT experiences which most of us will share. And so those cards seem like rather odd appendages to the Tarot as a whole.

Karl Popper, who was one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century, once wrote an essay called, “Is There Meaning in History?” And the first sentence in his essay was, “No.”

His point was that history is mainly about the egomaniacs, killers, misfits, and psychotics who seized power, created thrones, and caused endless misery for their fellow Souls, and NOT about the majority of people who were living during their periods of time. The French, for instance, are fond of remembering the, “military genius,” of Napolean while ignoring the millions of deaths that the little over-compensated dictator caused.

Americans love to talk about their cowboys but not so much about the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Native Americans to make room for the cowboys.

The real story of the pyramids should be about the slaves and artisans who built them. Instead, we remember them by the tricked out, inbred Pharaohs whose bodies they contained.

On the current scene, Donald Trump is an extremely wealthy man who has taken over control of the world’s most powerful office. He, not us, will be remembered in the history books. But on a Soul level, he’s a rather pathetic old man who’s stuck in his first and second chakras, whose own mother didn’t like to touch him, who’s had a series of mail order wives he’s cheated on, who never had a pet and who, as near as we can tell, has never been loved by another human being. Pretty sad.

In all probability, decent definitions for the royalty cards in the Tarot won’t emerge until we give up our fascination with and admiration for royalty and the ultra-wealthy.

At that point the definition for the King of Pentacles may be, “A totally materialistic, shallow soul who is obsessed with money to a point of crushing anyone in his path.”

And the Queen of Cups might be, “A pathologically jealous bitch who will destroy anyone she views as a potential rival.”

And the Knight of Wands might be, “An intellectual zealot who will ride right over anyone who disagrees with his elitist, fanatical point of view.”

It’s just a matter of looking at the real Kings, Queens, Knights, and Pages in, “history,” and seeing how they really behaved. What human qualities do the royalty cards really represent? What kind of a person was Henry the Eighth? Was the Sun King all that sunny? How horrible were most of these people?

We may have to create a special card to represent Trump, though. Maybe the King of Putz? I’m open to suggestions . . .

The Five of Wands and a Committee of Egos

The Five of Wands is almost painful to look at. All of that conflict! All of that fighting! All of those guys whacking each other with their staves!

Except, they’re not.

If you look a little more closely at the Five of Wands you see that NO ONE is getting hit. Not one single staff has landed on one single head. Look a little closer and you see that they’re all holding their staves with one hand, which is a little awkward for close quarter combat, right?

So what the hell’s going on here?

When you stand back and get a little perspective on the painting you can see that the staves are actually starting to form a pattern as they’re being waved around in the air. One side of a pentacle is forming and we can assume the other side is coming eventually.

Wands, of course, represent ideas or ambitions and pentacles are possessions or earth based manifestations. The short hand on this card is that a variety of ideas are coming together and will manifest into a single, material form.

We might call this, “co-creation by committee.” Or more accurately, co-creation by ego.

Ego gets a bad rap a certain extent of the time. Aside from being that distracting voice that won’t shut the hell up when we’re trying to meditate, there are some things that ego is very good at doing. Ego is great for making out grocery lists, or remembering to change the oil in the car, or paying the bills on time. Ego is not only good at planning for the future, ego can plan six or seven possible futures simultaneously AND be obsessed with the past while it’s doing that.

One thing that ego is NOT good at, though, is co-creation. It’s almost as if acknowledging that someone else might have a better idea is a threat to ego’s very existence.

As Eckhart Tolle said in “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose,”

“There is nothing that strengthens the ego more than being right. . . For you to be right, of course, you need someone else to be wrong, and so the ego loves to make wrong in order to be right. . . Being right places you in a position of imagined moral superiority in relation to the person or situation that is being judged and found wanting. It is that sense of superiority the ego craves and through which it enhances itself.”

And when you put a group of people in a room together, all of whom are convinced that they’re right and everyone else is wrong, you end up with the Five of Wands. They’re not just waving their wands around, they’re waving their egos around. They’re not TOUCHING each other, not synthesizing each others creativity into a real group effort and so it’s very difficult to bring a coherent, complete vision out of the gathering.

Real co-creation requires that we step out of our egos for awhile and actually listen to other people’s ideas and inspirations. That we operate as equals and acknowledge that each person brings valuable gifts to the table.

There was a very popular book written by Thomas Anthony Harris in the 1960s called, “I’m Okay, You’re Okay.” The premise of the book was that we’re all on equal footing spiritually, no one is a superior or an inferior. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross flipped it a little and said, “I’m not okay, you’re not okay, and that’s okay.”

Either way you look at it, THAT’S the point where we start to have real co-creation with other people. When we leave the ego by the door to guard the umbrellas and actually listen to each other.