Tag: lakshmi

Atheist Tarot Readers, Defective Jesus, and Finding a New God-Person

The pragmatism of polytheism.

I have a friend who is an atheist Tarot card reader and it tickles me no end.  I like to rag on her a bit and ask her, “Who do you think is answering your questions when you do a reading?  Maybe atheist angels or agnostic spirit guides?”  

Which generally earns me a dirty look or a shrug.  She reads Tarot cards.  She’s an atheist.  It’s not up for discussion.

Now, she’s kind of caught between a rock and a hard place.  The rock is that she was reading Tarot cards for many years before she became an atheist, so she knows that they actually work.  When you sit down with a deck of cards and do a reading, you get answers and the answers are generally (not always) right on.

The hard place is that she went through a series of very painful life experiences that led her to conclude that there’s no God and that religion is nothing more than superstitious nonsense.  That conclusion wasn’t arrived at in a frivolous manner because she was genuinely suffering in her life, she prayed for help, and nothing much happened.

It’s a pretty simple equation, right?  We’re told that there’s some sort of a God-person out there, that he loves us, and that if we’re in trouble he’ll come zooming in and rescue us.  So, if we do our part by (a) getting in trouble and (b) praying for help and the God-person doesn’t do his part by (c) zooming in and rescuing us, then it’s logical to conclude that the God-person either doesn’t exist or else he’s pretty useless.

I’m actually very sympathetic with my friend, the atheist Tarot reader, because I had a similar experience when I was in my mid-forties.  My father had just killed himself, I lost my job and had to declare bankruptcy, my house was repossessed, and my mother developed Alzheimer’s Disease.

All of this happened within a one year span of time.  My life went from being perfectly normal to being a total shit-burger in the wink of an eye.  I was so chewed up by life that I had to look up to see the bottom and if it weren’t for bad luck, “I wouldn’t have had no luck at all.”  Life had chewed me up, spit me out, and then stomped on me with hob-nail boots to be sure I’d stay on the ground.

I was living in Texas at the time and there’s a fundamentalist christian under every rock and behind every cactus in Texas.  It was probably inevitable, then, that one of them said, “Dan, you just need to get down on your knees and pray to Jesus for help.”  And I did.  I was raised up in the catholic church, so the concept of praying to Jesus wasn’t exactly foreign to me and I thought, “Well, shit . . . what do I have to lose?”  Nothing.

So I commenced praying and I prayed and prayed and prayed and asked Jesus to help me in my misery and travails and – SHAZAM! – nothing happened.  No heavenly hosts of angels appeared, Jesus didn’t invite me for a walk in the garden and no one anointed my fevered brow with soothing oils.  I continued to be royally fucked.

But, unlike my friend, the atheist Tarot reader, I didn’t throw my hands in the air and declare that God is dead and it’s just a cold, hard universe.  Instead, I analyzed my situation and thought, “Well, I’m in trouble, I prayed to the God-person to come zooming in and help me, and nothing happened.  Obviously, I have a defective God-person.  He’s not working, so I’ll just send him back.  I need to find a God-person who can get the job done.”

I did a lot of research on Gods and Goddesses and finally settled on Hecate’, the Goddess of the Cross Roads.  She seemed like a good fit because I was definitely at a cross roads in my life and I needed to know which way to turn.  I prayed and prayed and prayed and asked Hecate’ to help me in my misery and travails and – SHAZAM! – something happened.

In fact, quite a bit happened, just like magic.  I met a woman on line, fell in love with her, moved to California and we lived together for 19 years.  My life went from being an absolute shit-burger to being wonder-full in the wink of an eye.

Now, I’m not writing all of this as some sort of an anti-Jesus screed or to praise the wonders of Hecate’.  I know a few christians who swear up and down that Jesus answers their prayers and they seem like nice, honest people.  Maybe they got a Jesus model that wasn’t defective and he sort of works if they don’t take too close a look at him.  Maybe Jesus was just a bad fit for me – could be that he doesn’t like my haircut or tie dyed shirts.  I don’t know.  I just know he didn’t work.

Which leads me back to my friend, the atheist Tarot reader.  Like me, she tried praying to her God-person and nothing happened, nothing got better.  She quite logically realized he was a defective model and sent him back.  Fortunately, she was still able to hang on to her Tarot cards and say, “These DO work, so I’m not sending them back.”

The point being that we have a sort of a pragmatic, mostly unspoken, contract with our God-persons.  It’s something along the lines of, “Okay, God-person, we’ll pray to you and we’ll build all of these very grandiose temple-houses for you to live in and we’ll pay the salaries of your priest-persons.  You, on the other hand, will help us, console us, give us guidance, and zoom in to help us when we’re in trouble.”

Unfortunately, humans have a long history of making excuses for their God-persons.  In many instances, it’s as if the God-person is on vacation when we’re in trouble, or perhaps he has Attention Deficit Disorder and it just slips his mind that we’re hanging off the edge of a cliff holding on to a single branch.  In the worst instances, the God-person seems to behave like some sort of a deranged sadist who LIKES wrecking people’s lives and we just pray that maybe he won’t notice us while he’s in a bad mood.

In those instances, it’s perfectly acceptable to just say, “Okay, God-person – I held up my end of the bargain and you didn’t hold up yours.  It’s been sweet, but I think we both know this isn’t working out.”

And it’s also perfectly acceptable to find another God-person.  Just because this relationship is ending, it doesn’t mean that we can’t have another relationship.  There’s no reason to accept the christian line that there’s only ONE God-person and that we mustn’t ever be unfaithful to him, even when he’s being unfaithful to us.  What a narcissist!

It’s actually a great big universe out there and there are plenty of God-persons to choose from.  If we’re stone-cold poor, for instance, we might want to talk to Lakshmi, the Goddess of Abundance.  If we’re facing insurmountable obstacles, Ganesh specializes in removing them.  If we’re in need of healing, talk to Tara.  If we have no love in your lives, pray to Quan Yin.

I think that you’ll find that most God-persons are actually quite nice entities.  For the most part, they seem to have healthy boundaries.  They don’t follow you around and spy on what you’re doing.  They don’t have temper fits and throw you out of the garden just because you ate an apple.  They seem to have a lot of unconditional love and won’t ask you to sacrifice your first born son.  And they actually work.

My e-book, “Just the Tarot,” a practical guide to reading Tarot cards, is still available on Amazon for less than you’d pay for a small order of jalapeño poppers and will last a lot longer.

Faeries and Angels and the Something Out There That Wants to Have a Chat

A closer look at synchronicity and the concept of a responsive universe.

There’s Something Out There.

 . . . And it’s watching you.

Cue in creepy horror story music.

LOL!  Not really.  More like cue in joyous, happy music.  But there IS Something Out There.  Something mysterious that we can occasionally feel but can’t quite focus on.  It flits by at the corner of our eyes but when we turn to look at it, it’s gone.

Here’s a fun experiment that anyone can try.  Think of a problem that you’ve got or a question that you need an answer to.  Really concentrate on it and then send it out into the universe and ask for an answer.

Then over the next week, watch for the answer.  You don’t have to get all serious about it (in fact, that may be the worst thing to do) but just remind yourself to look for the answer every time that you go out the door.  And it will appear.  It will probably be in symbolic form rather than a post-it note dropping out of the sky, but it will be there.  Perhaps a book will fall out of a shelf opened to a page that has the answer.  Maybe it will be a highway sign flashing a message on your way to work.  Maybe it will be a particular song that comes on the radio every time that you turn it on.  Perhaps a total stranger will walk up to you and say something that fits perfectly.  However it appears, if you ask the question and then diligently look for the answer, the answer will appear.

And that’s strange and wonderful and magical and marvelous and has some really interesting implications.

Now, our current term for that is, “synchronicity,” which was coined by Carl Jung.  Jung was one of the few honest scientists of his time and he noticed that weird shit happens and he actually wrote about it.  He noted weird things that  we’ve all experienced, like thinking of someone we haven’t seen in years when the telephone suddenly rings and it’s that very person calling.  One of his own examples was that he was treating a patient who was describing a dream she’d had about a scarab beetle when – shazam – a scarab beetle appeared on the outside of the window.

He looked at those occurrences, analyzed them thoroughly, and then concluded, “That’s weird. Really, really . . . weird.”

Unfortunately, when Jung talked to his fellow scientists about it and asked, “Have you noticed that weird shit happens?” they all said, “No.  We try very hard to not notice that.”  In other words, if they couldn’t explain it, they preferred to ignore it.

Jung’s very careful definition of synchronicity was, “a meaningful convergence of inner and outer events.”  Which is just another way of saying, “When you ask the universe a question, Something Out There answers you.”

There’s Something Out There.

A large part of the history of the human race has been trying to figure out just exactly WHAT or who the Something Out There is.  There have been a lot of interesting answers, too.  Human cultures have had hundreds and hundreds of gods and goddesses whom we have posited as, “the Something Out There,” that answers our questions and solves our problems.

We’ve gotten a bit lazy and unimaginative in modern times and we only seem to be able to come up with one god, but for most of our evolution we actually had specialized gods who answered specific questions.  If we were having problems with a lack of abundance in our lives, we might ask Lakshmi to give us answers for those questions.  Or if we were suffering through a drought, we might appeal to Oshun for rain.  Or if we were faced with insurmountable obstacles, we could turn to Ganesh and ask him to remove them.

All of the gods and goddesses are a recognition of the fact that there’s Something Out There that seems to listen to us and provide the answers that we need.  Some of the more spiritually, “evolved,” religions like Taoism posit that there’s a Something Out There but it’s not too terribly interested in our personal problems.  Rather, the Something Out There is a sort of an impersonal current that runs through the universe and we solve our problems by becoming more aligned with its energy.  The more we’re in harmony with that energy, the more likely we are to be happy and not have any problems that need answers.  We just have to get in the flow, but the flow doesn’t particularly care if we do that or not.

That’s never really been terribly satisfactory to the human spirit, though.  We seem to need to feel a personal connection, to know that the Something Out There actually sees us, hears us, and cares about us.  Despite the fact that Taoism as a philosophy may posit an impersonal universe, Taoism as a religion has plenty of gods and goddesses to talk with, not to mention swarms of ancestors we can consult on a daily basis.  Buddhism as a philosophy may be perfectly acceptable to atheists, but most Buddhists pray to Tara and have altars in their homes.

I love the approach that Brian Froud and Jessica MacBeth took in the Faeries’ Oracle Cards.  Not only is there a Something Out There, there are a LOT of somethings out there, in the form of Faeries, Gnomes, and Elementals who are perfectly willing to give us a wink and tell us when we’re going down the wrong paths.

In a very similar way, I have several friends who see and talk with angels and spirit guides on a regular basis.  To them, those are the Something Out There that answers when they ask a question.  Sonia Choquette has actually mapped out dozens of different types of angels and guides and elementals, each with different functions and different answers.

For as long as humans have existed, we’ve known that there was a Something Out There that is conscious, caring, and interacts with us to make our lives better.  And for just as long, we’ve been trying to fill in the blank about exactly who or what that Something Out There is.  

We don’t really need to do that, though.  We don’t have to be Spiritual Masters or be able to see the angels sitting on our couches.  If we have faeries living in our gardens and they want to appear to us and tell us their names, that’s great, but it’s not necessary.  We can just start with the knowledge that there’s Something Out There, which is magical enough for most of us, and go from there.

“Hey, Something Out There, I really like the person I’ve been dating and I’m wondering if we should move in together?”

“Hi, Something Out There, I’ve been offered a better job, but it means moving away from my family and I’m just not sure if I want to do that.  What do you think?”

“You know, Something Out There, I was wondering if I could really make a living as an artist, or am I just bullshitting myself?”

And the Something Out There will give us the answer and the answer will be right.

All we have to do is . . . Believe . . . Ask . . . and Listen.

Easy peasy.

Remember that my e-book, Just the Tarot, is available on Amazon and is less expensive than a bag of Doritos. If you buy one of those little jars of spinach dip to go along with the Doritos, my book is actually THREE TIMES LESS EXPENSIVE!!! Jesus, what a bargain!

The Wheel of Fortune Reversed and Turning it Over

I recently made a decision to start turning some of my problems over to my Higher Powers.  And I found that for me – as a Wiccan who tries to be emotionally and intellectually honest – that was a surprisingly easy decision.

Sometimes life turns into a shit sandwich.  It happens to everyone sooner and later and this was my turn.  Within a period of just a few months I’d lost my beloved life partner to cancer, I was embroiled in a nasty probate process to settle her estate, and the unpaid bills just kept piling up like malevolent imps that had taken up residence on my desk.

In other words, The Wheel of Fortune Reversed.  A prolonged period of bad luck.

I was beat up, beat down, and hung out to dry.  Emotionally and spiritually exhausted, I knew I needed some help from the higher realms to keep walking down my path, and getting to that help turned out to be more of a revelation than I could have anticipated.

The first realization was that I actually trusted my Higher Powers.  I had drifted a long way from the little boy kneeling in a catholic church, being taught that god loved us so much that he let his only son be murdered just to prove it.  My view of the universe no longer included some scary, bipolar, vengeful, patriarchal god who might be equally inclined to toss you into eternal flames or welcome you to heaven, depending on how much you’d prayed and how little you’d masturbated.

Somewhere through the many years I’d lived, my view of Higher Powers had morphed into angels and spirit guides, fairies, elves, and gods and goddesses (with a lower case, “g,”)  who actually loved and cared about us. The face of Jesus, writhing in pain and covered with blood, had been replaced with the smiling, tender faces of Lakshmi and Tara.

It was kind of a shock to me, to tell you the truth.  Despite all of the poison that had been planted in my subconscious mind when I was a child, despite the fact that I was going through a terrible, terrible time in my life, I found that I had unquestionable faith in a loving and nurturing universe.

And that brought along a second, equally powerful revelation:  I can live – for the most part – without the need for a constant cause-and-effect spirituality.  The universe doesn’t always have to be a comfortable place for me to trust it.

Cause-and-effect spirituality is the basis of all organized religions and has a large part in New Age spirituality.   The idea is that if you’re a really, really good person then really good things will happen to you. And if you’re a really, really bad person then really, really bad things will happen to you.  And there’s a lot of truth in that.

But then you look at someone like Donald Trump and you think, “Huh . . . what happened there?  Why has this tangerine colored, demon infested, piece of human excrement who’s never caused anything but misery been blessed with all of this material wealth?”

Or you have a friend who is a kind, loving, wonderful person who lives in poverty and dies an agonizing death and you think, “Huh . . . what happened there?”

As I said, cause-and-effect spirituality appears to be true a lot of the time.  But not always. People have been trying to come up with explanations for why good things happen to rotten people and vice verse since the beginning of human existence.  Maybe it’s karma from past lives. Maybe they forgot to say their prayers or slaughter an ox and two sheep and offer them to god. Maybe they masturbated too much. Who knows?

That’s what The Wheel of Fortune Reversed is really all about.  Shit happens. It doesn’t put any value judgements on it, it doesn’t say shit happened because you were a bad person or you brought it on yourself.  It just quietly observes that shit happens, sooner or later, to all of us.

And that’s a Spiritual Law, just as surely as the Law of Attraction.  It can be scary if you need to view the Universe as a neat and tidy place where everything happens for a reason, the good are rewarded, and the evil are punished.  Or it can be a strong motivator to deepen your spiritual resources and to cultivate your inner strength and resilience BEFORE it happens. As The Desiderata says, “Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.”