Donald Trump – Just the Tarot

Empaths, Elections, and Staying True to Our Own Energy

Building effective boundaries for empaths.

If you’re an empath and you’ve been feeling kind of sick to your stomach lately, believe me – you’re not alone. Many of us have experienced the recent election in the United States as something that makes us want to curl up in a ball under a blanket for the next four years.

It’s important for us to explore how this is affecting us from a bioenergetic perspective, though, and not just from a political or emotional perspective. What is all of this DOING to our energy and our energy fields?

What’s one of the first words that come to mind when we contemplate being an empath? Boundaries, right? Boundaries, boundaries, BOUNDARIES!

Empaths have extremely porous personal boundaries and very leaky energetic boundaries. In a way, that’s what makes us empaths. “Normal,” people have fairly strong boundaries and a strong sense of, “I’m over here and you’re over there and we’re two separate beings.” For a normie, what another person is feeling stays inside of the other person, unless the other person decides to share it. For an empath, other people’s feelings are constantly flooding into us. It’s very easy for us to merge with those feelings and mistake them for our own.

That’s one of the reasons that many empaths become codependent. We merge so totally (and so easily) with other people’s emotions that we mistake them for our own. If someone we’re close to is having emotional or mental problems, we think that we have to manage their drama because it feels like it’s our own. We end up taking care of their lives instead of our own.

So one of the first steps to becoming a healthy empath is to learn to identify our own energy and separate it out from other people’s energies. We learn this at an early age and many of us become socially avoidant as a result. We realize that if we’re around people who are angry, depressed, or violent, that we just soak all of that in and it fucks us up. One strategy we use to deal with that is to just avoid people in general: many empaths become radical introverts. Which works, but it’s not the BEST strategy, right? We really can’t cover our heads with the blankets for the next four years.

Can we? Um . . . no. I guess not.

We have to learn to separate our energy fields in better ways.

The human energy system is really quite simple to visualize. As Alla Svirinskaya says in her book, “Own Your Energy – Develop Immunity to Toxic Energy and Preserve Your Authentic Life Force,” we can think of it as the physical body or core, which is surrounded by a couple of other energetic layers or bodies which are the emotional body and the mental body. Those other bodies are usually seen as egg shaped, so we end up with a picture of it that looks like this:

For a normie, those extra layers act as a wall to keep out other people’s energy. They filter out negative energies so that they never reach the core of the physical body. For an empath, though, they act as a bridge. Instead of blocking us off from the emotional identity of people who aren’t us, they allow it to flow right into our personal energy fields which frequently overwhelms us, leaving us confused and injured.

Most empaths are dealing with those dynamics on a daily basis. What we forget, though, is that our personal energy fields exist inside of larger energy fields. Any time that you put a group of people together, their personal energy fields are going to merge to some extent and generate a group energy field that’s composed of the collective emotions of all of those people. And we live within those other energy fields.

In a very real sense, we could talk about the vibrations of a particular town or a county or a state. Those vibrations are the collective energies of the people who live in those places. Texas, for instance, has a very different vibration than California. And, yes, countries have a collective energy field, too, which is brings us back to the topic at hand: dealing with this election.

About 72 million Americans got together and voted for a candidate who oozes hatred and anger out of every pore of his orange skin. THAT is the collective energy that we’re dealing with right now and THAT is what’s making us feel sick. Put simply, there’s a whole lot of hatred and anger out there in the collective energy field and it’s seeping in to our personal energy fields. As empaths, we are especially vulnerable to this.

So what can we do about it? Well, we need to remember that the key to being a healthy empath is to be able to distinguish OUR energy from OTHER’S energy. We need strong boundaries and we need that sense of, “this energy belongs to me and that energy doesn’t.”

Empaths are (for the most part) kind, loving, compassionate people. That just goes with the territory. When you really and truly understand another human being on the deepest level, it’s very difficult to stay angry with them. Or to hate them. Or to judge them too harshly.

Hatred, anger and judgements are NOT our energies and that’s why they make us sick.

A good strategy for us, then, is to be very conscious of those energies existing inside our personal fields. If we start to feel really, really, REALLY pissed off at the Trumpsters, we can stop and say, “This is NOT my energy. This is their energy. I won’t own it.”

Another strategy is to do what Chagdud Tulku called, “antidoting.” The antidote for hatred is love and the antidote for anger is compassion. I’m not suggesting that we turn ourselves into human doormats for the Trumpsters. Rather, we’re just embracing our own nature. By embracing our own nature, by being as compassionate, kind, and caring as we can, we automatically separate OUR energy from THEIR energy and – surprise, surprise! – we’ve got boundaries. Suddenly, they’re over there and we’re over here and we don’t have to live in their hatred or let it blend into our energy.

Shazam!

The Hierophant, the Tangerine Blob, and the Moral Collapse of American Christianity

A look at the role of cognitive dissonance in American Christian voters.

One of the larger puzzles of the recent elections in the U.S. is the huge number of people who are self-professed Christians but voted for Trump. Not to belabor the point, but Jesus was pretty much of a peace, love, and forgiveness dude and the Tangerine Blob is all about hatred, anger, and vengeance.

So how could they possibly reconcile being followers of Jesus with voting for the Malevolent Cheeto? Hmmm . . .

It’s important to note that American Christianity (and Christianity in general) has always sort of run on two different tracks at the same time. As Dee Brown delineated in his classic book, “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” Christianity was a driving force behind the genocide that White settlers committed against Native Americans. The peculiar notion of, “the White man’s burden,” dictated that all people of color MUST be forced to adopt Christianity or be exterminated.

And, of course, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s had massive support among the White Protestant churches of the South. There’s a reason that the Kluxers burn crosses at their rallies.

We’ve regularly had this strange dissonance between the Christianity that purports to be a creed of peace and humility and the Christianity that feels more like a violent Spiritual Imperialism. It’s like someone saying, “You have to believe in our God of love or we’ll kill you.”

It may be that, “dissonance,” is precisely the word to describe what happened with American Christians and this election. In psychology, “cognitive dissonance,” is the term that’s used to describe the state where an individual holds two different sets of beliefs that contradict each other, or where their behavior is completely at odds with their values.

Think of it like a good, family man who professes to love his wife and children but is constantly sneaking off to have liaisons with hookers. Or a feminist woman who’s strongly attracted to primitive, abusive males. What happens is that the differences between their self images and their behaviors cause a huge amount of psychic tension and eventually something’s got to give. Either they change their behaviors or they change their beliefs and that eliminates the dissonance and relieves the tension.

If we start to think of American Christianity in terms of that same sort of a moral and behavioral dissonance, then all of this begins to make sense. The Hierophant card represents the formal teachings of a religion or creed, as opposed to actual spirituality. It’s what the church tells us that we ought to believe and how we ought to behave. It’s not necessarily who we truly are.

Jesus, of course, taught that we ought to love each other, we ought to forgive each other, we should help the powerless and the ill, that violence is wrong, and that rich people can’t get into heaven. Americans, on the other hand, have always been at war more than we’ve been at peace, we love violence in our movies and our sports, we sell more weapons of destruction than any other country in the world, and we worship money and the people who have money.

If you’re a Christian, that’s cognitive dissonance.

Now, it would be inaccurate and melodramatic to describe Trump as, “the Anti-Christ.” At the end of the day, he’s just one more puffed up wanna-be dictator strutting his stuff on the world stage. It would be highly accurate, though, to describe him as, “the Anti-Jesus.” Nearly all of his behaviors and beliefs – the anger, the hatred, the vanity, the vengeance, the gross materialism – are in direct opposition to everything that Jesus taught.

If we stick with our model of cognitive dissonance, Christians voting for Trump would be like the good family man leaving his wife and running off with a hooker. Or the feminist woman getting married to a man who’s a sexist pig. Rather than changing their behaviors, they changed their beliefs.

Put another way, the election of Donald Trump can be seen as a substantial shift away from what American Christians claimed to be and toward who they really are. In fully embracing their Shadow of anger, xenophobia, sexism, and violence, they’ve relieved the psychic tension of that cognitive dissonance. They feel a whole lot better, even if the rest of us are freaking out.

So it’s really not shocking at all. That very dark side of Christianity has always been there, operating in the background. What’s interesting, from a purely sociological point of view, is what American Christianity will become now that they’ve thoroughly expunged Jesus from the equation. Without the doctrines of peace, love, and brotherhood, what’s left?

In her brilliant book, “The Power Worshippers – Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism,” Katherine Stewart argues that what’s left is essentially a political movement rather than a church. She traces a nationwide network of religious fundamentalists, ultra-conservative oligarchs, and autocratic preachers who are determined to undermine democracy and impose their world view on the rest of us. Their world view is that White males should be the ruling class in our society, that women should be subservient breeding stock, and that our constitutional democracy should be replaced with an Old Testament religious theocracy.

Will that movement be able to sustain itself in the long run? Perhaps. What’s clear at this moment, though, is that if it’s going to be defeated there will have to be a transformation of the basic values of many Americans. Unfortunately, the normal vehicle for ethical change in America has always been the Christian church, which apparently isn’t very Christian anymore. We shall see . . .

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

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

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

IT’S A GRIEF PROCESS

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

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

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

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

RECOGNIZING REALITY

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

IT ISN’T DONALD TRUMP

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

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

THE CHRISTIAN TALIBAN

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

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

THE BURNING TIMES

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

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

IT’S OUR FIGHT, TOO

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

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

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

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

SPIRITUAL WARFARE

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

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

A STRATEGY FOR RIGHT NOW

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

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

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

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

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

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

PEACE AND LOVE – DAN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then they left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Putin, Ukraine, Toxic Males, and The Emperor Card

Toxic-Male psychopathology in the invasion of Ukraine.

We’re at about the three week mark in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Anyone who’s a decent person has been shocked, appalled, and nauseated by what we’ve seen. A quiet, peaceful country primarily known for its wheat and decorated Easter eggs is being bombed into dust.

For no apparent reason.

The horror of what we’re seeing on the news everyday is hard to grasp, but equally hard to grasp in the, “why,” of it. Why would Russia suddenly launch a brutal military campaign – the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Nazis – against a neighbor who was absolutely no threat to its security?

I saw a talking head on one of the news shows tonight who asked, “Just how much of a psychopath is Vladimir Putin?” It’s a revealing question because it points to the fact that we already knew Putin was a psychopath, we just didn’t know (and still don’t) how truly crazy he may be.

That truth points to another truth, which is that we’ve developed a remarkably high tolerance for psychopathology. We put up with it. We accept it. It isn’t as if Putin hasn’t been doing dreadful things for decades. He almost single handedly destroyed whatever small hope the Russian people had for freedom and democracy. His political opponents end up poisoned, dead, or in prison. He employed chemical warfare in Syria.

He’s a bad guy. A crook. A thug. A criminal. And he has been all of those things all of the time that he’s been in power. Still, the world leaders kept inviting him to the dinner table. Kept trading with Russia, inviting their teams to the Olympics, welcoming their tourists and investors, just as if Putin was somehow a normal, civilized leader. It wasn’t until he decided to obliterate a modern society for no particular reason that we began to treat him like the psychopath that he is.

Just to define our terms before we go any further, what exactly do we mean when we say that someone is a psychopath? According to Wikipedia, psychopathology is:

“characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited and egotistical traits.”

Put another way, a psychopath is a cold blooded, egotistical prick who causes a lot of suffering and really doesn’t give a shit about how many people he hurts.

I have argued previously in this blog that psychopathology is an inherent part of the Toxic-Male paradigm which our society too often embraces. We see some of that exemplified in the Tarot card, The Emperor. We can tell from his throne, scepter and title that he’s a powerful leader, a king of kings. When we look a little more closely at the card, though, we see that he’s completely alone, armored, rigid, and surrounded by a blighted, sterile landscape. His power is so toxic that not a tree or a flower can grow in his poisonous energy field. Still, we focus on the power and not the devastation.

Power that destroys everything around it for the sake of power is psychopathic.

Many of us actually admire and reward psychopathic behavior. Consider this article from Forbes magazine in which they estimate that up to 12% of corporate CEOs may be psychopaths. They are in those positions precisely because they are ruthless, have a total lack of empathy and will place corporate profit above the human suffering of their employees every time.

Remember when the CEO of the mortgage company Better.com fired over 900 employees at a goddamned Zoom meeting just before Christmas? People across the country were shocked at the totally heartless, callous way that he’d behaved, but he wasn’t fired. He took a month-long hiatus (translate: he took Christmas vacation) and was back at work within a month. He issued a tepid apology which was much more of an, “I’m sorry I got caught,” than it was an, “I’m sorry.” He kept his job because the board of directors at Better.com wanted someone with psychopathic traits running their company.

We may shake our heads at the horrible behavior of Vladimir Putin but while we’re doing that we should take a very careful look at the behavior of Donald Trump. Persistent antisocial behavior? Check. Impaired empathy? Check. Total lack of remorse? Check. Bold, disinhibited and egotistical traits? Check. Can we really doubt that the primary difference between Putin and Trump is one of power? Can we really doubt that Trump would have happily shut down a free press and had his opponents imprisoned if he could have gotten away with it? Trump is a classic CEO psychopath.

And just about half of the population of the United States voted for him. If you need any evidence that we have an increasing tolerance for psychopathic behavior, there it is.

When we look at written history, legends, and myths, it’s a safe bet that psychopaths have always been scattered throughout the human race. Wherever we find suffering, cruelty, torture, war and rape, there we find psychopaths. Is it fair, though, to tag this trait as a part of Toxic-Males? After all, there are female psychopaths, too.

The answer to that question is a resounding, “yes.” Psychopathology is toxic and it is very much a male behavior. The ratio of male to female psychopaths may be as high as 20:1. Virtually all serial killers have been males. Mass shootings are overwhelmingly committed by males. The prison population of violent offenders is heavily weighted toward males.

We can see the same evidence in human history. Leonard Shlain, author of “The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image,” hypothesizes that most of the earliest human cultures were matriarchal, goddess based and peaceful. It wasn’t until the emergence of patriarchal society that we began to see psychopath kings and leaders. There is no historical record of females leading hordes of barbarians to murder, rape, and pillage. Virtually all of the monsters in human form – Ghengis Khan, Hitler, Napolean, Pol Pot, to name just a few – have been males.

It might be tempting for us to simply shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh, well . . . they’ve always been a part of the human race. What can we do about that?” Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – the human race is at a crossroads and, as Eckhart Tolle has pointed out, we are in imminent danger of extinction if we don’t begin to evolve out of our current ways of thinking. We now have weapons capable of destroying life on earth. Millions – not thousands – of people were killed in wars and other armed conflicts during the 20th century and it’s not looking a hell of a lot better in this century.

To put it mildly, “Houston, we have a problem.” A major component in that problem is Toxic-Male psychopathology. By far and away, the majority of human beings – male and female – are NOT out there killing people and spreading terror. It’s this tiny, tiny minority that’s threatening our very existence.

So we must be rid of them. One way or another, we MUST be rid of them. We start that process with our own minds. We start that process by recognizing that they are sick, depraved, deeply flawed human beings. We stop, “admiring,” their so-called toughness and ruthlessness and realize that it’s really nothing more than a thin veneer over a sadistic personality. We stop describing them as, “geniuses,” when they put their brutality on full display. We stop voting for them when they run for office. We stop promoting them to positions of leadership in businesses. We stop acting as if it’s somehow okay or inevitable that mass shootings continue in our society or that our leaders are braggadocious bullies.

Above all else, we need to start holding up and supporting the model of emotionally healthy, nurturing, caring males. Most men are not like these psychopaths – we know that. Most men love their partners and their families and just want to live their lives in peace and harmony. At the same time, though, as males we are constantly confronted with the stereotypes of what, “real,” men are like. And those stereotypes look an awful lot like the psychopaths: ruthless, emotionless, physically dominant, violent, and lacking in empathy. That ideation of the, “alpha male,” is buried WAY deep down inside the collective psyches of both males and females. We have to start digging it out, holding it up to the light of day, and rejecting it.

It really is a matter of our survival.

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 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 . . .

Donald Trump, The Empress, and The Emperor

A juxtaposition of male and female energy patterns as exemplified in the Emperor and Empress Tarot cards.

I have to admit that I’m always a little puzzled when I run across one of those news columns discussing, “Donald Trump’s Toxic Brand of Masculinity.” To me, a guy who gets daily manicures, has his dyed hair styled every morning, and bakes under a sun lamp until he turns orange isn’t masculine ANYTHING, toxic or otherwise.

But maybe I’m just being defensive on behalf of all of the sane men in the world.

Today IS the International Day of the Woman, though, so perhaps it’s a good time to talk about all of this.

The Emperor and The Empress, sharing the same exalted positions and residing side by side in the Tarot deck, are often – in fact usually – held up as examples of male and female energy in the world. But let’s a take a step back from that. Let’s just consider them as examples of energy in the world. Different ways of being.

Ram Dass has a rap in Grist for the Mill: Awakening to Oneness that says you can consider people on a number of different levels. You can look at their skins and see black and white and brown. Or you can look at their signs of the zodiac and see Aries and Scorpios and Capricorns. Or you can approach it like a psychologist and see obsessive compulsives and narcissists and dependent personalities.

Or you can take it right down to the bedrock and see Souls. Fellow travelers on this very strange journey through this beautiful world who just happen to be incarnate as a Taurus or a Leo in black or brown or pink skin and seem to have developed a little problem with OCD.

Or to put that another way, we are all multiple patterns of energy existing in the Earth Plane.

And two of those patterns of energy are male and female.

There are, obviously, very valid and real differences between the two patterns. The human body responds quite differently to testosterone and estrogen. Males tend to have more muscle mass and extra cones in their eyes. Women tend to have more fat cells and to visualize more in patterns than lines.

We can take those differences and we can celebrate them as we do when we recognize both the God and the Goddess. The problems start to arise when we view those differences as being absolute and we turn them into stereotypes. “Real,” men are always muscular and silently strong. “Real,” women are always soft and fluttery and vulnerable.

I’ve known women who were so physically powerful that they could have bounced me down the driveway like a basketball. And I’ve known men who were nervous nellies residing in very frail bodies. You can take any stereotype of masculinity or femininity and find examples of it in both men and women.

Likewise, we know that we all have both testosterone and estrogen in our bodies. We all have both, “male,” and, “female,” hemispheres in our brains. Some men retain massive amounts of fluids when the moon is full. Some women are natural born weight lifters.

So masculinity and femininity are much more of a continuum than a dichotomy. It’s a lot more gray than it is black and white.

From that perspective it’s much easier to drop the idea of looking at The Emperor and The Empress as masculine and feminine energy and just look at them as ways that energy can exist on the Earth Plane.

The Empress is relaxed. Comfortable. At ease in her world. She reclines on a velvet throne, legs slightly spread, wearing an unfettered, flowing robe and she is crowned with stars. She holds a sceptre – her symbol of power – but she holds it loosely, almost as if she’s forgotten she has it. A lovely waterfall flows out of a verdant forest behind her and wheat – the symbol of nourishment – grows in front of her. And . . . is that a box of chocolate leaning up against her throne?

The Empress is very, very powerful. She is the power of life and fertility but it’s a gentle, unassuming power. Most of all, she BELONGS in her world and she blesses it and it blesses her.

And now look at The Emperor.

Kind of a nasty faced old man who looks like he’s suffering from a severe case of hemorrhoids. He sits on a hard, stone throne (ouch) and tightly grasps a vaguely Egyptian looking sceptre. His garments are tight, as well, and reveal that he is fully armored beneath them. Mountains rise behind him, barren of any vegetation, and far, far below him a river flows at the base of the cliffs.

The Emperor is also very powerful, but he’s very different from the energy of The Empress. It’s tempting to view him as the alpha-dog but he’s so obviously, painfully alone that you know he doesn’t even have a pack to run with. The Empress exists IN her world, as a part of her world. The Emperor has, “conquered,” his world, destroying anyone and anything that got in his way. He’s at the top of the heap but his heap is a pile of ashes.

Sadly, there are still many people in the world (and, yes, they’re mostly men) who choose to adopt the energy patterns of The Emperor rather than The Empress. And we all pay a price for their choice.

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