Just the Tarot

The Empress, Fucking a Trumpster, and White Feminism

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

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

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

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

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

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

You don’t understand.

We keep politics out of our relationship.

He’s really a decent, nice guy.

He comes from a different background.

We don’t talk about that stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A look at Flow State as a spiritual practice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

to this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what they call the Big Bang Theory.

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

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

But I digress.

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

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

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

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

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

Yippee!!!!

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The Emperor, Robotic Cats, and Suicide Among Elderly Men

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

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

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

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

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

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

You think?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to Lighten the Fuck Up by Fooling Around with Magic

A Quick Look at the Playful Nature of Magic.

Magic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings us to another card, The Fool.

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, please. I’ll have some of that.

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

Toxic Masculinity, The Inner Marriage, and Percolating Testicles

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

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

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

It all just seemed really complicated.

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

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

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

THE WAR ON MEN

START INCREASING TOXIC MASCULINITY LIKE A REAL MAN

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

THE INSIDIOUS TOXIC MASCULINITY MYTH IS HARMING HUMANITY

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

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

DON’T BE A SIMP: WOMEN LIKE BAD BOYS

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

SIDE”

WHY WOMEN CRAVE DOMINANCE

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

“NICE.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mean, why wouldn’t they?

The Ten of Wands, Energy Healing, and Over-Thinking Enchiladas

Using energy healing to overcome overthinking.

I find myself understanding the poor dude in the 10 of Wands more and more as time goes by.

In the Tarot, the four suits of cards represent different realms of the human experience. Swords = personal power. Cups = emotions. Pentacles = material possessions. And wands = ideas.

So we see this guy in the 10 of Wands who has SO MANY ideas that he can barely stagger along under the weight of them. His head is pressed firmly into the bundle of wands and he can’t even see what’s going on around him. He’s just trudging toward a distant destination, hoping he’s going in the right direction and trying to put one foot in front of the other. His ideas own him, not the other way around.

I was watching an interview with Eileen McKusick, author of, “Electric Body, Electric Health,” and she flat out said, “Overthinking is a cultural brain virus. Overthinking never, ever solves anything.” Naturally, my reaction was, “I’ll need to overthink that statement.”

She’s right, though. What we refer to as, “thinking,” usually means shuffling around a lot of different concepts, trying to make them fit some sort of a coherent pattern. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube that we keep flipping and flipping and flipping, hoping that all of the squares will line up.

But conceptualizing is just one part of a much larger process and when we get stuck in that one part, it doesn’t work. We can never, ever solve anything by just thinking at it.

Somewhere along the line in human evolution -probably about the time we began to develop alphabets and writing – we started to pull out of our bodies and into our heads. Which is to say that we started to think of our heads, our brains and thoughts, as being somehow separate from our bodies. Philosopher Gilbert Ryle referred to that as, “the ghost in the machine.”

That name is so apt because most of us suffer from this incredible, mass hallucination that there’s some separate, non-material, “self,” much like a ghost, that sort of rides around in our bodies, as if they were machines that we’re driving. The ghost, of course, lives in our heads and we peer out at the world through our eyes, just as if they were windshields.

We call the ghost in our heads our, “selves,” or our, “personalities,” or even our, “souls.” So there’s a ghost that’s our REAL self and then there’s the body, which we’re sort of temporarily driving around in. That scene is very much like our real self landed at the Earth Airport and went straight to the Hertz Rent a Body so that we’d have a cool ride to tool around in. “Hey, I’ll take something with fins and a lot of chrome. Bucket seats.”

We even see that dualism in New Age philosophy, right? How often have we heard that expression, “You’re not a body that has a Soul; you’re a Soul that has a body?” Which is a nice shift toward the spiritual, but it still maintains that strange hallucination that our bodies are somehow NOT our real selves.

Which is exactly what McKusick was getting at: we’re not just our brains and we’re not just our bodies – we’re our body/brains/nervous systems/emotions/thoughts/memories, Soul – the whole enchilada.

Or perhaps I should say, “the Soul Enchilada.”

She’s an energy worker who uses the energy of sound to heal us. Like most energy workers, she heals from the outside in, which is contrary to some New Age thinking. The basic New Age formula for life runs like this:

Our beliefs create our thoughts.

Our thoughts create our emotions.

Our emotions create our vibrations.

Our vibrations create what we draw into our lives.

New Agers have tended to jump in at the level of thought and say, “Well, if we change our thoughts, we change our emotions, which changes our vibrations, which changes our lives.” Also known as the power of positive thinking and it’s true.

Energy healers like McKusick, though, are flipping the script on that. They’re saying, “If we change our vibrations, we change our emotions, which changes our thoughts.” She’s taking the same holistic approach – we’re all one great big electromagnetic vibration and if you change one thing, you change all of it – but she’s working from the vibration inward to the thoughts.

Her idea is that sound is a form of energy and so are we. When we listen to certain sound frequencies that are coherent, solid frequencies, it reorganizes the energy in our bioelectric field into a solid, coherent vibration. As our vibrations become more coherent, so do our emotions and our thoughts.

Does it work? I don’t know, yet. I’m spending a significant part of my day banging away on my Tibetan meditation bowl and grooving on the rising and falling of the sounds. It does seem to be very soothing and it does take me out of my head and into my body.

And now that I’ve over-thought it, I like it. I really do.

Please remember that my amazing e-book, Just the Tarot, is still available on Amazon for MUCH less than an order of enchiladas. Hell, it’s less than a side of refried beans. What an incredible bargain!

The Four of Pentacles, New Age Capitalists, and Buddha in an F-150 Pickup Truck

A look at the New Age fascination with money.

“I wanted to be able to help people financially. If you have enough money, you can buy health. A rich man can always find a woman. If you have enough money, you can buy almost anything.” – Jerry Hicks

There is a very peculiar – and very strong – connection between the New Age/New Thought movement and good old American capitalism.

The Four of Pentacles shows a guy with his feet on money, holding money, and money on his mind, and that’s a LOT of the New Age movement and its leaders.

Mike Dooley, who is best known for his credo, “Thoughts become things,” was an international tax specialist for Price Waterhouse and his primary client was Saudi Freaking Arabia.

Prior to channeling Abraham, Esther Hicks was a business accountant and Jerry Hicks was THE leading Amway salesman in the United States.

Stuart Wilde made a fortune selling Mod clothing on Carnaby Street before he took up Taoism and made another fortune selling books about how spiritual it is to make a fortune.

Even the much beloved Ram Dass was born into a very wealthy family, never experienced a day of poverty or want, franchised his spirituality very successfully and died on his massive estate in Hawaii.

I have to admit that I was somewhat puzzled by the extreme emphasis on money and material possessions when I first stumbled into the New Age movement. I started my spiritual journey as a young kid in a midwestern state, taking LARGE amounts of LSD, reading Tarot cards, and convinced that it really was the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Racism, war and poverty would be eliminated. We’d all live in peace and harmony and people would really and truly realize that love is all that matters. Those were my dreams when I was a young man.

Duh. I know. It didn’t exactly turn out that way, did it? Still, there was a nobility and a grandeur to the dreams that I think all young people should have.

And so, when Mike Dooley talked about his dreams as a young man, I was a bit mystified. “I wanted to make a million bucks, own my own private plane and travel internationally with a beautiful woman by my side.”

Or Stuart Wilde’s statement that, “Money doesn’t imply that rich people are spiritual but it does infer that poor people probably are not.”

Or the (I’m sure inadvertent but telling) juxtaposition in Jerry Hicks statement, “A rich man can always find a woman. If you have enough money, you can buy almost anything.”

Esther and Jerry Hicks probably took the wedding of capitalism to spirituality further than anyone else. Their basic position is that our desire for material goods – for the goodies in life – is what drives us into greater and greater spiritual growth. In their view, we have a sort of an internal wish list that’s composed of things like boats, cars, money, houses. As we tell the Universe what we want, the Universe provides all of those things on the wish list.

BUT . . . as we fulfill one wish list, another list spontaneously arises and we want even more, which the Universe provides and then we want even more, and so on.

Oddly, that very process is exactly what the Buddha described as the source of all suffering. It’s the constant desire for more and more and more, without the realization that more is never enough to make us happy. One wish list will always be replaced by another.

What I eventually realized is that these people – despite being rampant, unapologetic capitalists – ARE spreading a lot of spirituality through the world, no matter how paradoxical that might sound.

Here’s the thing: American capitalism is the dominant force in the world right now. And the lingua franca of capitalism is M-O-N-E-Y.

Who are the people who are going to all of the seminars and retreats of the New Age gurus and buying all of the millions of books they produce every year? They sure as hell aren’t Buddhist monks or old hippies.

They’re business people. Amway salesmen. Used car dealers. Advertising guys. Executive secretaries and career women. Their dreams aren’t about world peace or brotherhood; their dreams are composed of F-150 pick up trucks, big houses, ski boats, and, yes, all the women they can buy with their fabulous wealth.

The ironic thing about it is that as they’re attending the Let’s-All-Get-Rich rallies, they’re also getting a HUGE dose of spirituality. What’s really behind the idea of visualization and manifestation is that the physical world is not at ALL what it looks like. We really CAN manifest whatever we want, seemingly out of nothing. Magic really DOES exist. There IS huge abundance in the world and we can tap into it with the power of attraction.

These are exactly the same people who love to mock California woo-woos and think that psychics and sensitives are crack pots. But there they are, hunkered down in their split level homes in Nebraska, Utah, and Kentucky, pasting together vision boards and writing out affirmations.

LOL – which is doing magic. Plain and simple. If you’re trying to make something appear out of nothing using the power of your mind, you’re casting a magic spell. Surprise!

It’s all very bizarre and puzzling, but it’s an improvement. It’s a definite improvement.

EMPATHS, EARTHING, AND MEDITATING CODEPENDENTS

Staying grounded as an empath.

So I just received my Amazing Hooga Earthing Mat from the very nice UPS driver and I should be incredibly spiritual after just a few days of using it.

The basic theory behind them is that our energy systems get in a kerfuffle because we’re exposed to negative people, places, and things and, when we walk barefoot on the Earth, it restores our systems to their natural, harmonious balance. Earthing Mats simulate that very same energy and get our auras all fluffy and pretty again.

I decided to get one because I’ve recently become aware of the fact that it is of tantamount importance for empaths to stay thoroughly grounded. If we don’t, we start to dissolve like a piece of salt in the rain. Earthing is a dandy way to avoid that.

EMPATHS AND EMPATHY

Being an empath is sort of hard to describe to a, “normal,” person. First of all, of course, being an empath is not equivalent to being empathetic, although most empaths are highly empathetic. An empathetic person might sympathize with another individual to a point where they can imagine what the other person is feeling and thinking. Empaths actually experience what the other person is feeling in real time.

Empaths are also not psychics, although most psychics are empaths. A psychic will focus on another person, “read,” their energy, their emotions and their thoughts, and then weave all of that into a coherent meaning, much like telling a story. Empaths, on the other hand, are simply bombarded with information about the other person without really knowing what it all means. We automatically glean far more details about the other person’s energetic and emotional state than what’s on the surface, but we don’t necessarily know how to put it all together.

To make it even more confusing, there isn’t just one type of empath. There are empaths who actually hear what other people are thinking. Other empaths feel other people’s emotions as they occur. Some are telemetric empaths who, “get a reading,” merely by touching a piece of clothing or jewelry that someone else has owned. A few empaths are highly attuned to the feelings of animals, but won’t pick up anything from other human beings. Precognitive empaths may get very strong insights about what’s going to happen to a person in the future.

EMPATHS AND EGO STRUCTURE

One thing that all empaths have in common is a relatively weak ego structure. It makes perfect sense, when we think about it. Our ego is our sense of who we are, and the first part of knowing who we are is knowing that you’re over there and I’m over here. Your, “you,” starts with your skin and all of your emotions, energy, and thoughts reside inside of your skin and all of mine reside in mine. The only way that another human could possibly know what we’re thinking is if we tell them.

Which is very much not true for empaths. For an empath, what’s going on in the other person’s mind is also going on in our minds, simultaneously with what WE’RE thinking.

All of which can make for a very confusing state of affairs, because we’re never quite sure which part of the conversation is ours and which part is yours. For an un-grounded empath, there really ARE no significant boundaries or borders.

There’s an old Spanish expression which goes, “Mi casa, su casa,” or, “My house is your house.” Now change that to, “My brain is your brain,” and you get an idea of how truly weird it can be for an empath to hold a simple conversation. Most empaths have to sit quietly after a meaningful exchange and decode exactly what thoughts came from which person.

EMPATHS AND CODEPENDENCY

One of the ways that the weak ego structure of empaths shows up is in codependent behavior. Codependents tend to revolve around other people, much like the moon revolves around the earth. Sometimes that’s a result of having been raised in an alcoholic or abusive family. Sometimes it’s because we have a particular personality type. And sometimes it’s because we’re empaths who haven’t learned to separate ourselves from other people.

What happens with empaths is that we become enmeshed in the other person’s energy, in their thoughts, emotions, and their life patterns. Since empaths already have a weakened sense of boundaries, they can easily dissolve into a more dominant person’s energy system. In essence, they become overwhelmed and end up as bit players in someone else’s movie, instead of starring in their own. They not only feel the other person’s emotions, they become the other person’s emotions.

EMPATHS AND MEDITATION

Empaths also need to be very careful about the type of meditation they practice.

Many types of meditation are geared toward weakening the ego structure. We’re basically trying to get past that chattering mind stream that prevents us from truly relaxing into deep meditation. Those techniques involve what’s referred to as a, “bare awareness,” method, where we might focus on our breath or a mantra, or a candle flame, until the chattering mind calms down and recedes into the background.

BUT . . . studies have increasingly shown that meditation is highly correlated with PSI or psychic abilities. If we tritty trot off to a meditation center for a two week retreat, we’re probably going to be more psychic coming out of it than we were going in. For a normal person, that involves a significant decrease in ego control and, “becoming one,” with the universe and our fellow humans.

An empath, though, is already wide open and our challenge lies in shutting down some of that in-flow of information. Deep meditation can destroy whatever barriers we’ve managed to erect and leave us completely adrift in other people’s energies.

Mindfulness meditation seems to be the, “go to,” method for empaths. It’s a constant reminder to stay in our own bodies in the present moment and to separate from all of the drama out there.

THE EIGHT OF WANDS

Being an empath can feel very much like the Eight of Wands looks. Wands represent ideas and this card shows inspired ideas raining down from heaven. For an empath, though, the ideas may be far from inspired and not at all our own.

If everyone we met was in a perfect, loving place, being an empath could be pure heaven. We’d just walk around grinning while all of those good vibes poured straight into us. Unfortunately, that’s far from the current state of affairs and a tremendous amount of what we absorb is toxic.

The answers for empaths seem to be strengthening ego structure, not weakening it. Building boundaries and borders, not letting them down. And, above all, staying grounded. Which we can begin to do by planting our tootsies firmly on the Amazing Hooga Earthing Mat.

Love, Therapy, Ram Dass, and God in Drag

A look at the sources of love.

I’ve been reading a book called, “Getting the Love You Want,” by a psychotherapist named Harville Hendrix. The theme of the book is basically, “We all fall in love, a lot of us fall out of love, and here’s how to fix that.” He’s a smart guy, did some excellent analysis, and I’d probably recommend the book.

But he never did get into that basic question of, “What IS love?”

Now, there’s been an awful lot of brain and biochemistry research over the last 20 years. What the scientists have determined is that when we magically meet, “the right person,” giant sparks fly out of both our genitals and our subconscious minds, then our brains start pumping huge amounts of endorphins, and – SHAZAM! – we’re in love.

That’s what we could call the, “reductionist,” approach to love. What we call love is ultimately reduced to brain and body chemicals that cause us to feel wonderful. From that point of view, love is nothing more than a biochemical reaction – probably based on the need for the species to procreate – that we dress up with a lot of romantic notions, boxes of candy, and Hallmark cards.

It’s a classic case of the whole being more than the sum of the parts, though. Love isn’t just hormones.

Love is an energy. When we have it in our lives, we don’t just feel better, our lives actually work better. Its presence seems to trigger huge amounts of synchronicity and serendipity, we suddenly have solutions to most of the problems that we encounter, and we’re harmonious with the Tao, the Universal Flow. When we don’t have it, life can feel like a meaningless slog through knee deep mud.

So the obvious course of action seems to be that we should all run right out, throw a net over someone, and fall in love with them. Unfortunately, as Hendrix pointed out, right around 50% of us fall out of love, which is extremely painful, and we’re right back where we started, only we hurt a little more than we did before and we’re a lot more cynical. Then we go back out, find another person to fall in love with, and rinse and repeat.

As much as Americans revere the idea of finding our Soul Mates, most of us are actually serial monogamists, who find one Soul Mate after another after another until one of them finally sticks.

I got a BIG clue on all of this a few years ago when I was listening to a Ram Dass talk after my partner had died. He said that the reason that we feel so devastated after a death, a divorce, or a break up is that we mistake the person for the love. The person is the vehicle that gets us to the love, not the love itself. Since we have so totally identified the love with the person, though, when they go away it feels as if all of the love has gone away.

As near as I’ve been able to figure out, there are basically three sources of love. There’s the love we derive from our relationships with other people. There’s self-love, which so many of us struggle to achieve. And then there’s the love that flows out of our spiritual connection with Source Energy, the god-head, the Tao, the Flow.

The trick is to understand that all three of the different forms are actually the same energy, the Source Energy, dressed up in different costumes.

Human beings are hardwired to receive love from other human beings. And that’s a very good thing, indeed. It’s like a built in on-ramp to Source Energy and it should be an effortless, natural process. Unfortunately, the second that we enter the world, a lot of other ingredients get added to that process. We start out with pure love and then we throw in crazy parents, cultural expectations, dysfunctional partners, etc., etc., etc, until the love becomes a shit show.

Then we find ourselves sitting in a therapist’s office, asking, “What happened? All I wanted was for someone to love me. What happened?” If we’re blessed with a really good therapist, we can start to untangle those knots and sort it all out. “Okay, this part of the shit show came from your depressed mother and this part of the shit show came from high school and this part of the shit came from your ex-husband.” As we identify and subtract more and more of the added ingredients that doomed our relationships, we move closer to that model of pure love that we were born with.

Where our culture lets us down, though, is in not identifying the actual origin of that energy that we call, “love.” When we finally realize that the love is flowing OUT of Source and THROUGH our partners, then we can wake up and realize, “Huh . . .the love is always there and it’s abundant. I can find it through my partners, but I can find it in a lot of other ways, too. I can actually love myself. I can meditate on Source. I can connect with that energy in a zillion different ways.”

That’s not to put down romantic love in any way. Romantic love is a grand sort of a feeling and it’s probably the fastest way for us, as a species, to reach that love energy. BUT . . . it’s not the origin of the energy.

Perhaps the best solution is something else that Ram Dass suggested: “Treat everyone you meet as if they were God in drag.” When we start looking at the people we love as little bits of that God/Goddess/Love energy shining out at us through their human forms, then we can honor them, honor the process, and honor the love.