fear – Just the Tarot

The Empress, Conservative Cavemen, and Getting Back to Our Magical Garden

Recovering a sense of physical safety in the world.

I’ve posted in before about the importance of recovering a sense of spiritual safety and of recovering a sense of safety about our own subconscious minds. Today I’d like to share a little about recovering a sense of physical safety.

What if I were to tell you that 99% of people are perfectly safe 99% of the time?

Does that sound a little weird and uncomfortable to you? It certainly did to me, when I first stumbled over the idea. After all, we KNOW that the world is a terribly dangerous place. Just look at all of the earthquakes and floods and tsunamis and GIGANTIC FUCKING ICEBERGS that are dropping off of the polar caps like fleas! Not to mention the wars and famine and terrorists and horrible car accidents and planes full of terrorists flying into towers full of innocent people.

Yikes!

In fact, double yikes or even yikes to the fourth power, which is a pretty big YIKES!

But . . . stop and think about it for a few minutes. How long has it been since you were smack in the middle of a 7.5 earthquake? Or a massive flood? Or you got swept away by a tsunami? Or had an iceberg collide with the ocean liner you were on?

The astounding truth of the matter is that – by far and away – MOST of us get up in the morning, drive to work or take care of our homes, raise our children, plan for our retirements, take vacations, go about our lives and . . . NOTHING BAD HAPPENS. Nothing. We’re perfectly safe 99% of the time.

So why do we all have this creepy feeling of impending doom, of something horrible that’s going to happen to us right around the corner? And why does it matter?

The Empress card in the Tarot shows someone who is absolutely, perfectly at ease in her world. She reclines gracefully on her beautiful couch, surrounded by natural abundance. Her head is crowned with stars and she grasps a scepter of power, but holds it very casually. Her legs are slightly parted, as if she might welcome a little company on her couch, and her face radiates a quiet, peace. She is the Goddess in Paradise.

That is EXACTLY the vibration that we should have in our world, here on the beautiful Earth Mother. We have evolved here over hundreds of thousands of years and this is our home. In the words of the Desiderata:

“You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.”

We might find a clue as to why so many of us don’t feel safe in our Magical Earth Home hiding in our brain structure. The limbic system of our brain is set up to trigger massive amounts of stress hormones when our fight or flight reaction is activated. Nick Ortner,in his book The Tapping Solution: A Revolutionary System for Stress-Free Living, posits what he calls a, “negative brain bias.” His thinking is that our ancestors who were the most frightened were also the ones who were most likely to survive. To use his example, the caveman who thought the rustling in the bushes might be a tiger was more likely to live than the one who assumed it was a harmless squirrel. And so, the more frightened, constantly freaked-out cavemen and cavewomen would have been the most likely to pass on their genes and – shazam! – we all have, “Holy crap is that a tiger in the bushes?” reactions built into our brains, even if we’re actually surrounded by harmless squirrels.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Psychological studies suggest that conservatives have a negative brain bias, but liberals do not. In a nutshell, if you show a bunch of pictures of gardens to both conservatives and liberals, conservatives will pick out the creepy spiders and snakes in the pictures and liberals will pick out the pretty butterflies and flowers. In other words, conservative cavemen were the ones who heard tigers in the bushes and liberal cavemen were the ones who heard squirrels.

And, if Ortner’s hypothesis were true, all of the liberals should have been eaten by tigers, but there are still a bunch of us around watching the butterflies and smelling the flowers.

Which suggests that a negativity bias really isn’t built into our brains. It was acquired. Where did it come from, then?

A lot of it comes from social programming, of course. It has long been a part of Judeo-Christian philosophy that the Earth was, “given to man,” by God and we’re supposed to control it and everything in it. We have to, “conquer mother-nature,” in order to survive and build more hamburger stands and condos and parking lots and Walmart Super Stores. God wants us to. When you view nature as something to be conquered, then nature – earth itself – becomes an enemy, rather than our Mother and home.

Then there’s politics. Think of what we’ve been hearing from our politicians for the last four years. BE AFRAID! Be very, very, very, very afraid of Mexicans and Knee-Grows, and Arabs and Jews and Chinese and lesbians and socialists and feminists and communists and . . . well . . . pretty much anyone who looks or sounds or thinks differently than we do. Every single one of them wants to Destroy Our Way of Life, rape our daughter, and steal our dog.

A certain amount of the fear comes from the globalization of information. We see things on the internet and our televisions that we would have been totally unaware of a short evolutionary time ago. If there are riots in Portland, train crashes in Pakistan, or bombings in Yemen, we are aware of that now. It’s all become a part of our daily lives. The work that’s being done with mirror neurons suggests that human beings are highly empathetic. If we see other people in pain or distress, we internalize that pain as our own, and we are being exposed to a LOT more people in pain than has ever been normal for the human race.

All of these factors – plus a lot more than could be covered in a blog post – have combined to create a massive illusion, a sort of a group hypnosis, where the world is perceived as a horribly dangerous place that could kill us at any moment. And, really, it’s not.

99% of the time, it’s perfectly safe for 99% of us.

Hopefully we can begin to stop the insanity and start EXPANDING that safety and peace to as many other humans as we can. Stop the wars, feed the hungry, eliminate corruption and greed, declare AS A SPECIES that racism and religious fanaticism will no longer be tolerated.

But first we need to recover that sense of safety in our own hearts and heads. We need to return to our home in the magical garden and become The Empress again.

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Tarot Readings, Archetypes, and God-Fearing Southern Women

I recently heard a very nice woman describe herself as, “a good, God-fearing Christian.” And it really gave me a bad case of the creepy-crawlies because it’s such a death blow to any true spirituality.

I spent a substantial portion of my life in the Southern United States, so expressions like that aren’t anything particularly new to me. Many people in the South are not only God-fearing but they also have a lot of things, “put the fear of God,” in them. God, for them, is a pretty scary dude.

I didn’t really think much about those sayings until recently, when my life took a drastic turn toward the worst and I had to reassemble the jigsaw puzzle that my incarnation had become. When confronted with the death of a loved one and the financial disaster that ensued, I began a spiritual quest of sorts, trying to put some meaning back into a life that had become dangerously Meaning-Less.

The Tarot was a big part of that quest. In reading after reading it provided a basic framework for understanding where I was in life and where I wanted to go. It was my touchstone through the darkest times l’ve lived through.

One of the most profound lessons it taught me was, “don’t be afraid.” The readings were . . . well . . . readings. It was like, “Okay, THIS is happening in your life and THAT’S happening in your life, and in order to move forward you need to do THIS and then THAT.” Or, to put it in more concrete terms, “Okay, the Death Card is in your life right now and so is The Tower, so you need to channel The Hermit and retreat and heal and then you’ll get the spiritual lessons of The Hanged Man.”

It was a road map, really. Or, perhaps more accurately, a sort of a spiritual GPS system that kept telling me, “Okay, now turn right and go 12 miles more . . .” And I learned to see that everything that was happening to me was a necessary step on the road.

I learned to trust. To trust in the process of life and in the Universe as a loving, benevolent energy that was always there and always supporting me.

That’s a necessary pre-condition for any serious spiritual quest. You have to believe, deep in your heart and mind, that you are ultimately safe and that you are moving toward something or someone that loves you. Otherwise, why would you do it? Why would you deliberately seek out something that could harm you? Something that’s scary?

Let’s look at the way that we, as Westerners, usually view the whole God thing, whether consciously or not. We see the universe as a sort of a triangle or pyramid. God sits at the very top of the pyramid and everything – all the energy and forms in the universe – flow downward from him/her to us, who live very close to the bottom of the pyramid.

In most mystical traditions and many non-western religions, God is seen as a sort of pure, loving energy that flows down to us, but becomes more diffused and faint as it enters the physical realm where we exist. The quest for the holy grail, then, becomes a quest to bring ourselves more in alignment with that pure, loving energy and to expand its presence in our lives.

We may use a variety of means to get there – meditation, psychedelics, yoga, loving/kindness, etc. – but there is a basic belief that the underlying energy in the universe is love. That it nourishes us and completes us and comforts and guides us through the dark times in our lives. Conscious contact with that energy heals us.

But . . . then we have the Judeo/Christian/Islamic model of the universe. It’s still a pyramid with God sitting at the top, but God is a sort of a psychotic, abusive, completely unpredictable father. And not only does love flow down, but a LOT of punishing, sadistic shit also flows down. This God is, a “jealous God,” a, “fearful God,” a God who claims to love you but is perfectly willing to pitch you into eternally burning flames if you even question what he tells you to do.

This is a God who blows up cities because there are gay people living in them. Who tells Abraham to tie his son down to a stone altar and thrust a dagger into the child’s heart. Who destroys Job’s family and his bnlife over a casual bet with the Devil.

This is one sick puppy.

There is no, “God Card,” in the Tarot. We don’t think about it but it really is a curious omission. The Major Arcana contains nearly all of the archetypes that blow through our lives: death, love, luck, rebirth, judgement. But no God. And God IS kind of a major archetype, right?

Historians tell us that the first Tarot decks emerged in the 15th century, a time when Europe was absolutely obsessed with and dominated by the Christian God-Model. The scary, crazy dude who you kind of hoped wouldn’t notice you and do something awful to you. That may be the very simple reason that the creators of the Tarot decided to just leave the God-Model out of the deck: because a malevolent, harmful God is a complete short circuit to the spiritual quest.

If there’s no belief that you’re moving toward love and healing, why would you go there? And if your God is a foul tempered narcissist who is off of his medications, why would you think there’s any genuine love flowing out of that?

The model of God emerging out of the Middle Eastern religions – the angry, hateful, capricious, male god of war – has been an absolute spiritual disaster for the Western world. We have been deeply wounded by it and we need to KNOW that and begin to consciously heal our hearts and minds. And the way to do that is to move toward love.

Always.

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.