Alcoholics Anonymous – Just the Tarot

The Five of Cups and the Dark and Magical Path to Happiness.

Happiness as a choice, rather than just a state of being.

The Five of Cups shows a person who is in deep grief. He’s lost something vital in his life and he’s mourning it on the deepest, most profound level. In the system of the Tarot, Cups represent emotions and he sees three of his cups lying on the ground, tipped over, and spilling out their emotions. He’s literally hypnotized and immobilized by his sadness.

A sub-theme of this card is that he is also NOT focusing on the two remaining cups, which are upright and full. He is so concentrated on what he’s lost that he’s not perceiving that he still has something left to be grateful for.

Happiness is one of those things in life that we seldom contemplate until we lose it. Most humans are born happy. Sure, there are the inevitable times when babies get, “fussy,” or decide to stay awake screaming their little heads off all night, but most young critters are happy, playful and content. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about human babies, puppies, kittens, or deer, the young are pretty much happy, pretty much most of the time.

So in many ways, happiness is a birthright of most living beings. It’s also frequently a matter of inertia – objects in motion tend to stay in motion and happy people tend to stay happy. We don’t even think about it until it disappears – we’re just pretty much happy, pretty much most of the time. In the words of the old blues song, “You don’t miss your water ‘til your well runs dry.”

We’re told that into each life a little shit must fall, and, sure enough, we all suffer a certain amount of loss and grief. We all have loved ones who die or become very ill, we get fired from jobs, we go through separations and divorces, and we occasionally get into car wrecks or fall down and break something that we’d rather not have broken.

Thankfully, for most of us, those losses come in fairly measured doses and we have enough support built into our lives to recover and return to our natural state of happiness. But there are also those of us who get absolutely hammered by loss and grief. Who don’t just experience the death of loved ones, but the tragic death of loved ones. Who don’t just go through a divorce but go through a devastating divorce, lose their homes, lose their jobs, and find themselves out on the street with nothing but the lint in the pockets of their overcoats. Who not only lose their happiness, but lose it for a LONG time.

Oddly, those are the people who probably appreciate happiness the most, because they’re the people who were forced to live without it. They’re the people who had to fight to regain it, often alone, frightened, and hopeless. To my mind, they’re some of the real heroes in life, the spiritual warriors who made it back from the dark side, from the brink of madness and suicide.

If you’ve ever gone through that kind of a loss, you’ll know what I mean. If you’ve suffered a major nervous breakdown, or battled with alcoholism and addiction, or lived with crippling depression, you know what it’s like to be so down that you can’t even see up anymore. Life becomes a meaningless, seemingly endless, series of days and nights filled with darkness, sadness, and extreme anxiety. You don’t really know why you go on living, but you do, putting one foot in front of the other and slogging along toward nothing.

Now, some of us don’t make it back from that journey into darkness. Some of us get swept over the precipice into oblivion. Suicide is the 12th leading cause of death in the United States. In 2020 there were 1.2 million suicide attempts in the country and nearly 46,000 successful suicides. Those are, of course, only the suicides we know about because many of them are concealed.

For those of us who do make it back, happiness becomes a desperate quest and a practice. We realize at some point that if we’re going to stay alive we somehow have to find a way to recapture happiness and build it back into our lives. For some of us, that means finding a really good therapist to help us unravel all of the emotional knots and heal the psychic wounds. For others, the gateway to happiness is the doorway to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting hall. Perhaps happiness arrives in the form of a prescription for Prozac or a spiritual reawakening or even a psilocybin mushroom.

Happiness doesn’t arrive all at once, neatly bound in wrapping paper and ribbons. It’s something that we carefully build back into our lives, one trembling step at a time. We may need to learn how to control our thoughts that obsessively lead us back to melancholy view points. We may need to learn how to control our emotions and just do some deep belly breathing and meditation when we feel overwhelmed with sadness. We may need to sit down with a therapist and do some serious exploration of why our paths crumbled under our feet.

Happiness at that point is transformed from a natural occurrence into a set of skills that we practice in our daily lives.

For me, one of the major breakthroughs was my therapist teaching me that we can be happy whenever we want to be. We can sit down, meditate on something that makes us happy, and we will feel happy, even if just for a few moments. If we string together enough of those meditations, we have a happy day. If we string together enough of those days, we have a happy life. It’s a skill. It’s a practice.

The other day I was listening to this delightful video from author Mary Pipher about her book, “Women Rowing North.”

The book is primarily about women and about aging, but it also has a lot of good information on happiness. One of the things she said that really jumped out at me is that happiness is an existential choice.

There’s a deeply profound lesson in there because happiness can’t be a choice until we’ve lost it and then we’ve finally learned how to regain it.

When happiness is just our natural state of being, we’re on spiritual cruise control. When we’re pretty much happy, pretty much most of the time, like puppies and kittens and babies, we’re not choosing happiness – we just ARE happy. And happiness is frequently perceived as something that’s outside of us, that happens to us, rather than something we create. We meet the right partner, we stumble into a good job, we have a nice summer, we get laid, we see a funny movie. It’s all a sort of a pleasant parade of sweet events that we have absolutely no control over.

When we lose our happiness – really and truly lose it for an extended period of time – and we learn how to recreate it in our lives, then it becomes something that we can control. It becomes a product of practicing certain skill sets like meditating, staying in positive thinking, avoiding negative situations and people, and performing all of the little mental and emotional hygiene tasks that are required to stay in a state of happiness. We’re trying to stay in a state of happiness because we KNOW that we’ll die if we don’t.

There’s a step beyond that, though, which is what Mary Pipher is talking about. When we practice happiness long enough, there comes a wonderful day when we realize that we CHOOSE to be happy. At that point, happiness isn’t just a survival mechanism, it isn’t just a way to avoid the darkness. It’s an active, conscious embrace of the Light. Happiness isn’t just a way to get along, it becomes our primary value and our choice and we know that we’ll never live without it again.

It’s a huge gift in life. We only find it at the end of some very dark paths, but when we reach that point we realize that the journey has been a magical quest that led us to our own inner light.

The Hanged Man, Eckhart Tolle, Byron Katie, and Getting Shazammed

Exploring rapid versus gradual spirit growth and how we have to be our own miracles.

Have you ever been really, really, REALLY unhappy for a REALLY long period of time? One of those stretches in life where you feel like nothing’s going right, nobody loves you, and the future looks like a whole lot of storm clouds and very few rainbows?

In the South, they’d say, “By god, I’m so down I’d have to look up to see a snake’s belly.”

The Hanged Man shows someone who’s been through that experience. He’s suffered so deeply that he’s barely survived and now he’s about to travel down a road of spiritual rebirth. In the meantime, he’s just hanging there in space and time trying to figure out what it all meant and why it happened.

Willam James, the founder of American Pragmatism, wrote a lot about what The Hanged Man goes through in his book, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Penguin American Library) He called it a conversion experience. In simple terms, that just means that a miserable, unhappy, deeply depressed, highly dysfunctional human being is somehow converted into a person who is happy, joyous and free.

The most fascinating examples of it are when the conversions appear to happen very rapidly. A person is full of despair and totally heart sick on Tuesday, but they wake up on Wednesday full of joy and love.

Shazam! Brand new person!

The classic example of that, of course, is Ebeneezer Scrooge. I’ve often wondered if Dickens hadn’t read Varieties of Religious Experience. “Hmmm . . . miserable son-of-a-bitch turns into a happy, compassionate person over-night . . . what an interesting plot . . .”

We can find modern day examples of that experience in a couple of the New Thought leaders: Eckhart Tolle and Byron Katie. Tolle was, by his own account, an overly sensitive, deeply depressed, frequently suicidal person. Katie was an alcoholic drug addict who found herself locked in the attic of a woman’s rehab facility because the other women in the house were afraid of her. In both cases, they suddenly, “woke up,” one day, finally understanding what life is all about and totally joy-full.

Shazam And A Half!!!!

Of course, the thing they don’t much talk about is that it wasn’t an overnight miracle. In fact, both of them had been stewing in their own misery for years and years and years before something popped, before that shift in consciousness occurred. The shift in consciousness took on the qualities of a, “miracle,” simply because the shift appeared to happen so rapidly, but it had been processing in their subconscious minds for a very long time.

Now, I’m not meaning to denigrate either of them or diminish the help that they’ve provided to other people. I’m actually a huge fan of Eckhart Tolle, but the fact remains that both he and Katie have done a very good job of marketing their, “miracles,” to other people. Tolle is currently offering a virtual spiritual retreat for ONLY $997.00 (that’s a $300 discount by the way, and DON’T WORRY, you can put it on your Visa, Mastercard, or American Express.) Katie offers a 9 day workshop for ONLY $3,500 dollars or, alternatively, you can stay at her, “Turn Around House,” for 28 days at ONLY $20,000.

There’s another saying in the South, which is, “Never trust a fat preacher.” Since I’ve gotten old and fat, I’m going to modify that to, “Never trust a preacher who wears a Rolex.”

In other words, if someone is selling you spirituality, if they’ve decided that you can put a price on miracles – and it’s exactly $997.00 – it’s appropriate to approach with caution.

Tolle has a deep background in philosophy and psychology and he IS a very profound thinker. Katie, not so much. In both cases, though, they aren’t just selling their philosophies or their ideas – they’re selling their miracles. They’re saying, “HEY! I was a miserable, unhappy bastard and I got Shazammed. If you sit real close to me, it might happen to you, too.” And there’s a definite messianic flavor to their gatherings and their followers.

The unfortunate thing, though, is that you can’t borrow someone else’s miracle. You can’t even buy it. Not even for $20,000. You kind of have to make your own.

Another person who had what appeared to be a, “rapid,” conversion experience was Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. After decades of hopeless alcoholism, dozens of jobs lost, and hundreds of relationships destroyed, he had a sudden spiritual revelation while lying in a hospital bed waiting to die. In a phrase, “he got struck sober,” and he never had another drink.

Wilson realized that by far and away, most people will never have a sudden, dramatic conversion experience like he had. Using Varieties of Religious Experience as a sort of a manual, though, he set out to create a method to consciously create slow, gradual conversion experiences in other alcoholics. The result of that effort was the now famous 12 Step Program.

And the price of it is . . . nothing. It’s absolutely free. Well, they do appreciate it if you drop a dollar in the basket when they pass it, but you don’t have to.

I’m not suggesting that everyone should go out and adopt the 12 Step Program for their lives, and neither would Bill Wilson. In fact, he designed it specifically for people who were serious alcoholics, and by serious he meant, “almost dead.”

Where I think we can get some helpful insight, though, is that Wilson designed a program for spiritual change that involves a sort of a miracle in slow motion. He was wise enough to realize that his, “sudden,” conversion was the result of many years of deep suffering and affliction. He tried to set up a program that would shorten that period of suffering, but he never denied that the suffering was a necessary part of the whole package for alcoholics.

And isn’t that a drag?

I would LOVE to get Shazammed. I’d love it if an angel would suddenly appear to me at night and say, “Danny, boy, you’re cured.” Or maybe Glenda, the Good Witch of the North, could whack me with her wand and tell me to just click my goddamned heels together.

I mean, damn, why can’t I have one of those really FAST miracles?

Because – for most people – they never happen. Most of us have to take the slow, sometimes intensely painful, sometimes tedious – occasionally joyous – route of creating our own miracles. We have to take the time to sit down with our therapists and do our own emotional work, we have to actually sit our butts down on the meditation pillows and do our own spiritual work. We have to create the miracle that is us.

In a very real sense, we have to design our own programs. Maybe they’ll involve 12 Steps. Maybe they’ll involve 36 Steps. Or 210 Steps. But they’ll never involve 1 Step. And they sure as hell shouldn’t involve $20,000.

The bad news is that miracles can take a lot of work. You can’t catch one by sitting next to someone else who had one. The good news is that they’re free.

Well . . . maybe a dollar.

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