Eckhart Tolle – Just the Tarot

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

On the emotional nature of ideas.

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

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

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

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

-did I turn off the coffee pot?

-why is the cat crying?

-remember to buy more cat food.

-what am I making for dinner tonight?

– should I wear brown socks?

-who invented toast?

-I think I’m a little hung over.

-where’s the alka seltzer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Wheel of Fortune – Good Luck, Bad Luck, Flying Monkeys and Eckhart Tolle

A closer look at good luck and bad luck in The Wheel of Fortune

Luck. It seems to be a universal concept, found in every human culture. There are blues songs bemoaning the fact that, “if it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” People talk about how their luck’s been so bad they’d have to look up to see the belly of a snake. Then there are other people who seem to live enchanted lives, lives where one good thing after another happens to them for no apparent reason other than they’ve got really good luck.

The Wheel of Fortune Tarot card is obviously about luck, but the modern, Waite Deck depiction of it is really just about good luck. It shows a wheel bedecked with Egyptian deities and surrounded by symbols of the four elements or, perhaps, the four apostles. There’s nothing threatening or scary about this version of the card.

When we look at the old, Marseilles deck version of the card, though, we see a different story. Instead of Egyptian deities, we see . . . um . . . monkey critters. Wizard of Oz flying monkeys, one perched atop the wheel, wearing a crown and wielding a sword, one being carried upward on the wheel and one being cast down by the wheel. This is really much more in keeping with that very primal perception of luck that we humans have always had about luck. It’s something kind of creepy, magical, and outside of us, outside of our control. We can never tell when a flying monkey might swoop down out of nowhere and carry us away in its nasty little talons

Humans are always trying to find a way to harness luck, to somehow bring it under our control. There are dozens of gods of good luck that we’ve worshiped through history – Hotei, Fortuna, Lakshmi, etc. – hoping that they’ll bless us with strong luck. Many people carry a rabbit’s foot or a lucky penny or have, “lucky socks,” or jeans that they favor. A lot of obsessive compulsive behavior flows out of a ritualistic quest for luck. OCDs may feel an urgent need to wipe the counter exactly seven times or wash their hands three times in order to avoid something catastrophic happening. Most of us were taught the basics of avoiding bad luck as children. Don’t step on a crack or you’ll break your mother’s back. Don’t walk under a ladder. Don’t break a mirror. Oh, shit, it’s a black cat!

The older Tarot card shows both good luck and back luck – one monkey is rising on the Wheel of Fortune and one is descending. The two phenomena seem to go together, to be attached, one rising from the other. The second verse of the Tao Te Ching alludes to this when it says:

Once we know beauty, we know ugliness.

Once we know good, we know evil.

High and low, long and short—all these opposites support each other and can’t exist without one another.

That duality, that sense of opposites always going together, seems to apply to everything on the material plane, including luck. Good luck seems to give way to bad luck and bad luck gives way to good luck, or that’s the way that we conceptualize it.

Eckhart Tolle suggests that, at least to some extent, it really is just about the way that we conceptualize it. Many times, what we view as bad luck is just the end of a cycle. Everything grows and then it diminishes and then it grows again. We don’t view plants dying at the onset of winter as a tragedy, but we do view humans dying at the end of their incarnations as tragic.

Louise Hay has much the same view of the ends of relationships. When we break up with someone or we get a divorce or our partners die, it feels like a horrible, painful tragedy. It feels like bad luck. She suggests viewing it instead as a sort of a graduation. At the point the relationship ends, it means that we’ve learned everything we were supposed to learn from the dynamic of that relationship and it’s time to say, “thank you for the wisdom,” and move on.

The Law of Attraction people tell us that good luck and bad luck can actually be learned behaviors, patterns that we get into that, “attract,” more of the same. If we can learn how to maintain a positive, healthy outlook on life, we tend to attract positive, healthy people and things into our lives. In the same sense, if we see life as a terrible, crappy experience where we’ve got nothing but bad luck happening, that’s what we attract. Even worse, we attract people with the same negative vibes and then we get to deal with their shit in addition to our own. That can go a long way toward explaining why some people always seem to be lucky and some people seem to have a curse on them.

Pema Chodron said that life is all about being constantly thrown out of our nest. Constantly forced to give up our security and adapt to new experiences. Quite a bit of what we call, “bad luck,” is that simple, elemental human experience of not wanting things to change. We envision an idyllic, static existence where nothing new or challenging ever happens to us because change is scary. Getting fired from our jobs, losing our partners, having to move out of our houses – these are all bad luck because they’re changes that we don’t want.

There are a couple of things worthy of noting about that, though. The more that we resist change – the more that we say, “no,” to the end of a cycle – the more dramatic that change is eventually going to be. It’s almost like an explosive force that just keeps getting more and more powerful the longer we sit on it, until it eventually blows our existence into tiny, smoldering pieces. A small change that we resist can easily grow into a catastrophe that we could have avoided.

The other thing to note is that good luck so often grows out of bad luck. After we’ve had a period of seriously rotten luck, we frequently find our lives being showered with blessings of all sorts. It could be that, as the Taoists assert, good luck is attached to bad luck and one inevitably gives rise to the other. Or, as Tolle said, perhaps we’re just ending one cycle and plowing the dead weeds under the ground to make room for the new growth.

That can make a huge difference in how we experience those periods of, “bad luck.” We can realize that The Wheel of Fortune is a wheel that’s constantly turning and that we’re never stuck in one place. It just feels like it. Being thrown out of the nest may feel incredibly uncomfortable emotionally. It may be terrifying. It may feel like horrible luck. But it’s the only way we learn how to fly.

Dan Adair is the author of, “Just the Tarot,” available on Amazon.com at a very reasonable price.

Happiness, Capitalists, Yellow Rocks, and Radical Meditators

Most people who are on a Spiritual Path eventually come to hold beliefs which conservatives consider, “politically radical.” It’s ironic, because most people who are on a Spiritual Path have very little interest in politics, except to casually observe it as another form of human insanity.

When I use the term, “radical,” I mean it in its original use from the latin word, “radix,” or root, as in, “the root of a plant.” To get radical is to get at the very root of something, to get to the place that it all grows out of, so to speak.

Let’s take the example of the Six of Pentacles. It shows a richly dressed man, scattering coins to beggars, and holding a scale so that he can measure exactly what he’s giving away.

You couldn’t ask for a better representation of the, “scarcity,” view of life that’s at the root of our society. There simply isn’t enough wealth to go around and some people have it and some people don’t. Those who DO have it, should share it with those who don’t have it, but they need to be very, very careful about not giving too much away, because there’s never really enough.

In real time, we see that happening with the gazillionaires who live in penthouses, fly around in private jets, take vacations on yachts, and are DESPERATELY WORRIED that poor people might be getting too many food stamps. Having enough to eat without working for it at minimum wage jobs is bad for their character, doncha know? Makes them lazy and dependent. Pass the champagne, darling . . .

As we move into a deeper level of spirituality, though, we begin to understand that there’s another model for looking at life, which is the, “abundance,” view. The Universe and Mother Earth seem to be richly, almost insanely, abundant. There are enough seeds in one tomato to plant an entire farm. There are enough sperm cells in one tablespoon of semen to repopulate the world. Women’s bodies produce far more eggs than they could ever bear as babies. And, yes, we could produce enough food to feed every hungry person in the world.

And we begin to realize that the problem isn’t that there isn’t enough, the problem is that some people are spiritually sick and want far more than their share of the abundance. Even worse, they want to be sure that other people have less than THEIR share, because they believe in their hearts that wealth is scarce and if they have more wealth, they’re better than other people.

Eckhart Tolle talks about this quite a bit in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61) In a nutshell, the Ego always wants more STUFF, because the Ego believes that the more STUFF it has, the more important it is. And, as a part of that contrast, if you’ve got less stuff than I have, then I’m just that much more important! If I drive a BMW and you drive a Honda, I’m better than you. If you have a two hundred dollar computer and mine cost five thousand, then I’m better than you. If I live in a McMansion and you live in a trailer, then I’m better than you.

And so we get hypnotized into this weird dance of thinking that our STUFF makes us, “better people.” But, as Tolle points out, it’s just a sugar rush, not real nutrition. Yes, the new computer (or car or house or jewelry) makes us happy for a while, but then it doesn’t anymore. So we have to buy more and more and more stuff to keep getting that rush, but somehow happiness keeps slipping away from us every time.

If we keep walking down the Spiritual Path we realize that the STUFF doesn’t really make us happy, not for long. As we continue to evolve, we start to get a glimpse of happiness WITHOUT the stuff. Maybe that revelation comes to us in our meditations or our dreams or journals, but we begin to get just a glimmer that the material stuff really has very little to do with happiness. We can actually BE HAPPY anytime that we want to and we don’t need a new computer to get there.

And that, my friends, is a RADICAL idea! That goes right to the root of our whole economic system and way of life. It short circuits the entire capitalist system which is based on consumers being convinced that they need to keep consuming STUFF in order to be happy. If we quit buying all of that crap that doesn’t really make us happy, then the gazillionaires who are selling us all of that crap that doesn’t really make us happy are going to lose a lot of money.

Dangerous, dangerous thinking! LOL – it really is. It’s why they killed Jesus. “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven.” WHAT???? Kill that guy! Quickly!

The point is that as we explore and grow spiritually, our values change and we become less and less in synch with society as whole. We realize that, ultimately, what all of us want is love and happiness. And we realize that love and happiness flow out of our hearts, not our possessions. Possessions and materialism itself start to feel like a form of insanity, which it can easily become.

Consider the example of the genocide committed against Native Tribes in the United States. We killed hundreds of thousands of Tribal Peoples in the Dakotas and Northern California because they were sitting on land that contained gold.

From their point of view, we were totally out of our minds because NO ONE HAD TOLD THEM THAT GOLD ISN’T JUST A ROCK. Why kill someone over a rock? Which, by the way, it IS just a rock. You can’t eat it. You can’t fertilize your fields with it. You can’t make clothing out of it. Other than being pretty, gold is totally useless.

Except that somewhere, thousands of years ago, some asshole said, “I have this pretty yellow rock and you don’t, so I’m better than you.” Since that original asshole, wars have been fought, untold numbers of people have been tortured and killed, and whole civilizations have been decimated, all because some people wanted to have ALL of the pretty, yellow rocks.

It really is monumentally nuts, when you think about it.

It’s my fervent hope that, as we move out of the ego-based scarcity model and into the new spiritual paradigm, we’ll see materialism begin to wither on the vine. Contrary to their paranoia, that doesn’t mean we need to have a revolution and take all of the rich people’s stuff away from them. There’s plenty to go around and if their yellow rocks make them feel better, so be it.

That’s abundance.

That’s radical.

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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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Panic Attacks, Gas Lighting and The Moon Card

Have you ever had a panic attack?

They’re absolutely, 100%, no doubt about it, HORRIBLE. You can’t catch your breath, your pulse rate goes through the ceiling, your heart is like a jack hammer in the middle of your chest, and you feel like you’re going to die.

And it’s all an illusion. There’s really NOTHING wrong with you, at all, but it FEELS like the world is ending and vultures are sitting on your shoulders.

I had a series of them about ten years ago when my life partner was becoming seriously ill. One of the lovely things about them is that they seem to come totally out of the blue. With the first one, I was driving merrily along The Great Highway of Life in my little Honda and WHAM!!! “Danger, Will Robinson, danger, danger! Be afraid! Be very, very afraid.” I somehow managed to get myself to the local emergency room where they examined me and gave me an extremely professional shrug of the shoulders.

“Nothing’s wrong with you, man. Blood pressure’s normal, EEG’s normal, you’re incredibly sexy and good looking.”

Well, they didn’t really say the part about being sexy and good looking but I’m sure it was on their minds.

I couldn’t believe it. I was dying and it was just . . . in my head. Hmmmm . . .

Once I figured out what was going on I did a lot of research on panic attacks. There are some interesting theories out there about what causes them, but nothing definitive. Breathing into a paper bag can help. Benadryl can help. My favorite piece of advice was, “Think of something else. Sing something happy.” Oddly it works.

But I want to go back to the part about them being illusions. The Moon card is all about psychological illusions. As I said in my original definition:

Think of seeing the world under the light of the moon rather than the sun. Shadows and light blend into one another and our eyes and mind see things that aren’t really there. Or maybe they are.

There is a tendency for the unconscious, unexamined contents of our minds to come forth when The Moon is present.

What I eventually figured out about my panic attacks is that I was living in an illusion and my subconscious didn’t like it. Not at all. My partner was becoming increasingly, seriously ill and I was trying to stay very upbeat about it and reassure her – and myself and her children – that it was nothing to be concerned about, that if we just kept a positive attitude we’d get through it and she’d be just fine. My subconscious, on the other hand, was looking at it and saying, “Holy shit! Carol is really, really sick. You need to pay attention to this, Dan!”

And, when I didn’t pay attention to it, my subconscious said, “Okay . . . well how about this? How about if I throw an absolute screaming fit and make you FEEL like you’re dying? How about a nice big fat panic attack or three? Will you pay attention now?”

I paid attention. The panic attacks stopped.

The point is that there is something in our psyches that is always watching over us and warning us if we go too far off track, if we get too disconnected from reality. Eckhart Tolle calls it, “the Watcher.” Jeffrey Schwartz calls it, “The Wise Advocate.” I’m referring to it here as, “the subconscious.” It’s reality based, it’s dispassionate, and it will always blow a very loud whistle if we get too delusional about what’s really going on in our lives. Some of us may have panic attacks, some of us may start having inexplicable accidents or become very anxious and distracted or angry. It’s our inner guidance system saying, “Pay attention. This is serious.”

It’s also a great defense against narcissistic gaslighting. The term gaslighting is derived from the 1944 film Gaslight, where a husband tries to convince his wife that she’s insane by causing her to question herself and her reality. Gaslighting is standard operating procedure for narcissists at a certain point in their destructive relationships.

As Doctor Ramani explains in this video, narcissists will eventually begin to treat you like shit and betray your trust in every imaginable way. It’s what they do. BUT . . . just to make it a little bit worse, they will always tell you that you’re just imagining it.

They put you down in front of your friends – you’re just imagining it!

They devalue or ignore your opinions – you’re just being delusional!

They screw around on you – you’re just being paranoid!

There’s actually an old joke in Texas where a woman walks in on her husband while he’s in bed with another woman and he says, “Now, darlin’, who are you going to believe – me or your lying eyes?”

It’s a funny joke but that’s precisely the level that narcissists operate on. And it makes their partners crazy, just like in the movie.

But that’s a good thing. That’s our subconscious, our Watcher, our Wise Advocate, saying, “Something here is very, very, wrong. Pay attention.”

And, if we can manage that shift in perspective, if we can say, “Wait a minute . . . maybe I’m NOT crazy, maybe this really IS happening,” then our so-called symptoms are suddenly transformed into very healthy warning signs. If I’m depressed, if I’m angry, if I’m anxious – and, yes, if I’m having panic attacks – something is out of whack in my life. Something in my conscious life is out of synch with my Watcher and my Watcher is ALWAYS right.

When we do that course correction and bring our conscious perceptions back into alignment with our subconscious Watcher, the symptoms disappear. It’s not necessarily because anything in our environment has changed or gotten better, it’s simply that we’re being honest about what’s going on and there’s no longer a split in our consciousness.

We’ve achieved integrity as defined by the dictionary: the quality or state of being complete or undivided. Which is way better than feeling like you have an elephant sitting on your chest and you’re about to die. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t panic and carry a towel.”

And you’ll be alright.

The Sun Card and The Uncarved Block

Seeing the human Soul in the Taoist concept of The Uncarved Block.

One of the core tenets of Taoism is an idea called, “The Uncarved Block,” or, as it’s written in Chinese, “Pu,” (not to be confused with The Tao of Pooh although it IS the Tao of Pu.)

It refers, quite simply, to a piece of wood that’s never been touched, never been carved into a statue or an ornament or a utensil. It’s just the wood, as it came into and grew into this world. It’s in its’ primal, original state of being.

When the term is used to refer to the human experience, it means the primal state in which WE came into this world, untouched by experiences, prejudices, or dualistic thinking. And, of course, it implies that there was a SOMETHING that arrived when we were born, other than just a tiny little human body. There was a primal NATURE that came into the human body. Some people call it a Soul.

This has actually been a pretty hot topic for philosophers and psychologists for hundreds of years. Are we just reducible to the sum total of our bodies and brains, or is there something else that’s greater and somehow inhabits our bodies and brains? Another way of putting it is, “nature versus nurture:” are we born with a certain nature, an essence that existed before our birth, or are we simply whatever we learn as we go along in life, whatever we learn by being nurtured by our culture?

Aristotle came down firmly on the nurture side of the equation, saying that we are born as a, “tabula rasa,” a blank slate that life and culture writes upon. There is no soul, no pre-existing essence. The idea was later picked up by the English philosopher John Locke and thus made its way into modern psychology.

New Thought writers, of course, are advocates of nature, of the idea of our having a Soul that, “arrives,” in this world using the vehicle of our bodies. What’s more, they see the Soul as being pretty cool when it dances into the physical world. To quote Esther Hicks/ Abraham in Ask and It Is Given: Learning to Manifest Your Desires:

“You are eternal beings who have chosen to participate in this specific physical life experience for many wonderful reasons . . . You are eternal Consciousness, currently in this wonderful physical body for the thrill and exhilaration of specific focus and creation.”

In other words, when we first get here we are beautiful, spiritual beings, full of joy, who have come here on a mission that INCLUDES having a lot of fun. To use a phrase from AA, we are happy, joyous, and free. We would feel a lot like The Sun Tarot card looks.

We arrive as beautiful, innocent, children, full of elation and radiating the euphoria of being alive in this enchanted garden that we call the Earth. We are naked and unadorned, and our original nature, our essence, our, “uncarved block,” is love. Pure love.

But then something happens. Perhaps we forget our original nature in the process of transitioning from being Spirits to existing in physical bodies. Perhaps, as some children do, we remember our original nature and still see the angels and the fairies, but our families and society soon beat that magic out of us. As Don Miguel Ruiz put it in The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book),

“We are born with the capacity to learn how to dream, and the humans who live before us teach how to dream the way society dreams . . . we learned a whole new reality, a whole new dream. We never had the opportunity to choose what to believe or what not to believe.”

And we find ourselves wandering in Paradise, lost in the collective dream of our existence, with no memory that we are something far, far greater than our mere physical bodies. As the bible expressed it – in a phrase that christians never, never, never EVER quote – because then we wouldn’t need preachers: “You are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you.”

Or to use Joni Mitchel’s riff on it, “We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

That’s the rub, that’s the rough part for most of us: just remembering that we ARE spiritual beings and getting back to that garden. It’s not as if society exactly encourages us to act like we’ve all got Souls. If we really believed that we’re all part of the Divine, we’d treat each other with a shade more respect, wouldn’t we? If we actually looked at killing as killing a part of the Divine, we’d have a lot fewer wars, doncha think?

It’s actually become quite fashionable to laugh at the idea of a Soul. Many people view it as an anachronistic belief on a par with the idea that god is an old man sitting on a golden throne. Just silly crap that’s left over from our primitive religious views.

Can we PROVE that there’s a Soul? Of course not. Can materialists or atheists prove that there ISN’T a Soul? Of course not. What we CAN do is to intuit that there is a something that lies beyond and beneath our ordinary consciousness and reality.

In discussing the difference between the ego and what we really are in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61) Eckhart Tolle says:

“What a liberation to realize that the ‘voice in my head’ is not who I am. Who am I then? The one who sees that. The awareness that is prior to thought, the space in which the thought happens.”

In a similar vein, Jeffrey Schwartz, who is a neuropsychiatrist and uses very strict scientific standards of proof, argues in You Are Not Your Brain: The 4-Step Solution for Changing Bad Habits, Ending Unhealthy Thinking, and Taking Control of Your Life that there is something beyond the mere thoughts that our physical brains generate, something that directs our focus and can override our thoughts. He calls it, “The Wise Advocate,” and it sounds very much like the description of a Soul.

“The Wise Advocate knows what is best for you, it loves and cares for you, so it encourages you to make decisions in a rational way based on what’s in your overall best interest in the long term.”

That Wise Advocate, that space that exists between our thoughts, is where our Soul lives. It’s where our Soul is still naked, beautiful, innocent, and playing. It’s our original nature, our uncarved block.

All we have to do is find it again. Or at least try to be a chip off the old block.

The Chariot Card, Setting Intentions, and Magical Stepping Stones

As I’ve said in previous posts, the most astounding thing about the Chariot card is something that we usually don’t even notice. The Charioteer has no reins and the Sphinxes have no harnesses. In fact, the Sphinxes are sitting on their asses, pointed in different directions.

And it IS astounding that we don’t notice that . . . but not really. The Charioteer is, after all, one hell of an impressive looking guy. Tall, handsome, big shoulders, noble face. I hate him. (Whoops, who said that?) Seriously, if you just encountered the Charioteer casually you’d assume that this is someone who has it all together. He has incredible, beautiful armor, moons on his shoulders, a magical crown, a glowing square over his heart chakra, and a hell of a ride.

But, ultimately, he has no direction and, therefore, he has no real power.
And that may be why he’s dressed up in his finest duds: so that we don’t notice that there’s really nothing there.

Eckhart Tolle talks about this a lot. The ego loves things. New I Phones, new cars, designer clothes, new houses. The reason is that the ego identifies itself with things. The more things it’s got and the more expensive they are, the bigger and more powerful the ego feels. That isn’t just a new computer – that new computer is a part of and an extension of ME. And the more things I’ve got, the more ME there is, right?

Of course, it’s all a shell game, a little illusion that we sell to ourselves and others to distract from the fact that most of us tend to be pretty hollow shells. Drop us in the middle of a forest with nothing but the clothes on our backs and what do we have? Drop death or disaster on us, something that truly takes away all of our things, all of our ego extensions, and what do we have?

That’s the question. That’s what the Charioteer has to begin to find out. How to become something more than a flashy appearance. And the beginning of finding out is called, “Intention.”

Buddhists have a lot to say about intention, and particularly Right Intention. The intention to practice harmlessness, to at least do no harm if you can’t actually do some good. The intention to practice loving/kindness, to remember that all sentient beings deserve our compassion and empathy. But those are steps on the path, and first we need to see the path itself. Where does Intention come into our lives?

It can be as simple as a realization like, “Oh, I am SO fucked up.”
Or feeling sad and alone and miserable and being tired of feeling that way.
Or being an alcoholic or an addict and being sick and tired of being sick and tired.

It’s whatever makes you stop and think, “I don’t want to be here anymore.” I don’t want to live like this anymore. And, of course, “I don’t want to be here anymore,” leads to, “So, where DO I want to be?” And that leads to, “I want to be over THERE.” I want to be happy. Or I want to be more spiritual. Or I want to feel more evolved. Or I want to be more helpful and loving to the people around me.

Once we’ve got that, once we understand that we don’t want to live in that painful space anymore and we’ve got a vision of a better space that we’d like to be in, then we have a goal. And once we have a goal, then we’ve got a direction to move in, and then we’ve got steps that we can take.

“I want to be a more spiritual person. What can I do about that? (1) Pick up a copy of that book on angels I’ve been wanting to read. (2) Actually sit my ass down and meditate in the morning. (3) Promise myself that I am NOT going to get pissed off at that ditz who sits next to me at work and I’m going to try to respond with loving kindness, instead. (4) Try to post something on FaceBook that’s a little inspiring instead of bitching about the quarantine . . .”

The second that we actually set an intention, that we actually say, “I want to go from Point A to Point B because Point A pretty much sucks,” then the stepping stones along that path magically appear. Then the Charioteer has some reins and the Sphinxes are harnessed and we’re MOVING somewhere.

Stay home. Stay safe. Be blessed.

The Five of Wands and a Committee of Egos

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

Except, they’re not.

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

So what the hell’s going on here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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