Tag: five of wands

The Pragmatism of Happiness, Colliding with Bubbles and The Five of Wands

The pragmatism of choosing to be happy.

Maybe we’re just meant to be happy.

That may sound a bit simplistic and silly on the face of it.  “Duh . . . who doesn’t want to be happy?”  Still, when we consider all of the hoops we jump through in order to NOT be happy, it’s kind of amazing.  Happiness, for many of us, always seems to be a future event rather than something we enjoy in the present moment.

  • I’ll be happy when I finally get out of high school.
  • I’ll be happy when I finally get laid.
  • I’ll be happy when I get a good job.
  • I’ll be happy when I get that new computer.
  • I’ll be happy when I get a new car.
  • I’ll be happy when I fall in love.
  • I’ll be happy when I get married.
  • I’ll be happy when I get divorced.
  • I’ll be happy when the kids are grown up and I have some time for myself.

And on and on and on.  That approach is valid, to a certain extent.  We do get some measure of happiness from all of these things and events, but it never seems to last.  It never seems like real happiness.  It’s like we’re microdosing instead of getting the whole pill.

One of the problems is that we always look at happiness as something that happens to us, rather than something we generate on our own.  We see this reflected in the way that we talk about the process.  “You make me happy.”  Or, “this made me sad.”  Or, “I couldn’t believe how happy that made me feel.”  

The way we verbalize it sounds like there are these bubbles floating around the universe that we occasionally have collisions with and it changes the way that we feel.  “Uh, oh, I just ran into a sad bubble, so I’m sad now.”  Or, “Oh, man, that happy bubble felt good.  Yay!”

Since we don’t control those sources of happiness, since they’re things that happen to us rather than by us, we never feel as if we control our own happiness.  Yes, we can try to maximize our lives so that we run into more happy bubbles than sad bubbles.  We can get rid of the negative people in our lives.  We can find jobs that don’t totally suck.  We can intentionally pick out books or videos that are uplifting, rather than depressing.  But that’s still giving that power of happiness away to exterior sources.  We’re still just trying to control the exterior sources rather than realize our own ability to be happy just because we want to be.

So a good first step in being happy is to just claim our own emotional states.  That means realizing that our happiness, sadness, joy, depression, anger, love, etc. are all things that we are generating ourselves.  They don’t come from outside of us – we’re making them up as we go along.  

Put another way, it’s not a simple stimulus/response interaction.  We don’t have to automatically respond to our life’s events in certain pre-programmed ways.  We can – and do – interpret them.  We just usually interpret them in a very unconscious way.  We’ve been taught that some events are supposed to make us sad and some events are supposed to make us happy and we never stop to question why.

For instance, marriage = happiness and divorce = sadness.  We accept that equation instantly, despite the fact that about half the marriages in our country are miserable experiences and divorce often feels like being let out of a prison.  As the bumper sticker says, “It is better to have loved and lost than to go on living with a psychopath.” 

Now, once we’ve gotten there, when we’re willing to accept that WE are making our own emotions happen rather than colliding with random happy or sad bubbles, then the next step is to actually ask ourselves why we’re choosing those emotions.  A good yardstick to use in that process is evaluating whether they’re actually doing anything for us.  Are they making our lives better?  Are they moving things forward?  Are they improving the quality of our lives?

By way of an example, I used to love, love, LOVE my self-righteous anger.  If I really, genuinely felt that I was right and someone else was wrong, I was willing to argue all night and fight to the death to defend my position and change the other person’s opinion.  I was angry because I had every right to be angry.  

In my defense, I don’t think I’m exactly alone in that process.  Social media groups often feel like the Five of Wands, where everyone is madly swinging their opinions at everyone else, all of us sure that we’ve got the real skinny on what’s true and what’s not.  Our current politics are even worse.

A peculiar thing happened to me, though, where I reached a point of realization that anger just didn’t work very well.  It was this sudden revelation that every single time I got angry, it made things worse instead of better.  Every single time.  Without fail, if I lost my temper I ended up with shit on my shoes and feeling like hell.  Far from changing anyone’s mind about the issue we were arguing over, it just convinced them that I was an angry asshole and there was no reason to listen to me.

And so I just gave it up.  Sure, I get irritated or impatient, just like any other human being, but I haven’t been angry in several years.  Not because I’m some kind of Mahatma Gandhi, but simply because it doesn’t work.  It’s like trying to use the wrong key to start your car.  If you know it’s not going to work, why would you do it?

In the same sense, sadness and depression are emotions that just don’t work very well for human beings.  They make life a lot harder, instead of a lot easier.  They freeze us in place and keep us from attaining our goals and feeling connections with life and joy.  

They are basically an unnatural act, in the true sense of that term.  When we look at young critters, what’s their primary activity?  Play.  Puppies, kittens, young humans, young apes, any young being gets up in the morning and plays until they’re so exhausted that they fall over.  And then they get up and do it again.  We’re born happy and we have to learn how to be unhappy.

Now, it’s true that into every life a little shit must fall.  We aren’t going to feel happy and positive when someone we love has just died or we’ve just gotten run over by a truck.  About 90% of the time, though, NOTHING IS WRONG.  That means that in about 90% of our lives, we can make that simple choice of how we’re going to feel:  happy or sad?  Can you imagine having a life that was 90% happy?  Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t have to be some bold, existential statement, either.  It doesn’t have to be some phony Pollyanna stance that everything in life is sweetness and light.  It can be a simple act of pragmatism.  Happiness makes us feel connected with life and our fellow beings.  We move forward toward our goals and opportunities for growth seem to appear out of nowhere.  Depression makes us miserable and we feel that we have no choices and no growth in life.

In a nutshell, depression doesn’t work very well.  Sadness doesn’t work very well.  We can give them up, just like a bad habit, because ultimately that’s all they are.  

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 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.