manifesting – Just the Tarot

The Most Powerful Card in the Tarot – Getting Downright Foolish

An explanation of why The Fool is the most powerful card in the Tarot.

There’s an ongoing debate among Tarot aficionados about which card is THE strongest card in the deck. The most prominent candidates are usually the first two cards of the Major Arcanum: The Fool and The Magician. I tend to lean toward The Fool, for reasons which I’ll explain, but the truth is that we need both of their energies in our personal and spiritual growth. The Fool is pure potential, whereas The Magician is pure mastery. Growth occurs when those two energies intersect.

LOOKING AT THE SYMBOLISM

In The Fool, we see a young, ambisexual person dancing along at the edge of a cliff. He lightly holds a rose in one hand, and his meager possessions are contained in a satchel hanging from a pole that he carries over his shoulder. A small dog joyously cavorts at his feet, despite the fact that The Fool appears to be about to walk straight off of the cliff.

If we had to select a couple of words to describe the image, they would probably be, “happy,” and, “unfocused.” The person in the card seems to not have a care in the world. He’s to telling us to stop and smell the roses, to trust in the present moment. The message is that if he walks off of the cliff, he’ll just keep strolling along on thin air.

The Magician card, on the other hand, is an image of total concentration and focus. He’s dressed in the formal robes of a ceremonial magician and looking very serious. One hand, holding a wand with two points, is pointed toward the sky and the other is pointed at the ground. His robe is belted with the ouroboros symbol of eternity, a snake eating it’s own tail, and that message is reinforced by the eternity symbol floating over his head. The four symbols of earthly existence, the wand, pentacle, cup, and sword, lie on his altar.

“Just the Tarot” by Dan Adair – A complete set of definitions, layouts and instructions for reading Tarot cards.

The Magician is channeling the divine energy into the Earth Plane. He’s using it to control the four elements and manifest his desires through the use of his will power. If we had to select a couple of words to describe this image, they would be, “control,” and, “focus.”

THE MAGICIAN AS THE WESTERN PARADIGM OF POWER

The Magician is very much the Western paradigm of power. We use phrases like, “He’s a take-charge sort of a guy,” or, “She’s always in control,” to describe this kind of power, and we tend to admire it.

The Magician is the type of a person who is very conscious of what she wants to accomplish, has a detailed plan for doing it, has the necessary skills to make it happen, and works the plan until she reaches her goals.

This is the type of linear, step-by-step thinking that Westerners have traditionally employed, and it can be very effective.

It’s also very much an ego-based sort of a power. It’s saying, “This is what I want and I’m going to use all of my abilities and will to make it manifest.”

THE FOOL AS THE EASTERN PARADIGM OF POWER

The Fool’s energy is much more in keeping with the Eastern paradigm of power. It has more to do with aligning ourselves with a deeper, universal power, rather than trying to run the whole show with our egos.

There’s a basic trust implicit in The Fool. It’s a trust that, as the Desiderata put it, “whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.” The idea is that there IS an underlying force in the Universe and that it’s a loving, compassionate force. When we’re in alignment with that force, then we’re in The Flow, or the Tao, and our lives are much easier and happier because of it. And, paradoxically, the more that we try to control that Flow, as the Magician does, the less in alignment we are and the harder life becomes.

VISUALIZING AND MANIFESTATION

We can see this sort of tension between The Magician energy and The Fool energy when we begin to delve into visualization and manifestation.

Most of the books and seminars on the subject run pretty close to The Magician model of power. (A) We figure out what we want (the usual example being a million dollars.) (B) We concentrate all of our will power on that goal by visualizing it, writing affirmations, and making vision boards. (C) We cause that goal to manifest in our lives through repetition and the sheer power of our wills. The Magician model is also very one-pointed and specific, as in, “I want a million bucks by September the first and I want it to be in unmarked hundred dollar bills.”

Of course, that frequently doesn’t work, as evidenced by the fact that most of us aren’t millionaires. This is the point where many teachers will bring in the concept of The Fool energy. The idea here is to relax, stay in the present moment, and quit telling the Universe how it’s supposed to behave. Instead of setting a specific goal, right down to every detail, we set a general goal, but let the Universe work out the details.

Mike Dooley, in particular, works with this concept in many of his books like, “Manifesting Change.” He refers to our trying to control all of the details (Magician energy) as, “the cursed hows.” In other words, “I want a million bucks, Universe, and this is exactly HOW I want you to manifest it.” The point that he’s making is that we may think we’re opening one door to financial abundance, but in reality we’re slamming shut a thousand other doors. The Universe is infinite and it has an infinite number of ways of delivering what we want to manifest, unless we get too specific about how we want it done.

So, we bring in Fool energy. We use a general statement like, “I’d like to manifest happiness and abundance in my life, Universe, and I’m sure you can work out the details. After all, you make stars and solar systems, so this shouldn’t be much of a challenge for you.” And then we butt out and let it happen, while we stay happy and in the present moment.

CONSCIOUS AND SUBCONSCIOUS MINDS

The Kybalion – a discussion of Hermetic magic – talks about this dance between Magician energy and Fool energy in terms of the conscious and subconscious minds.

Our conscious mind is our everyday mind, which is the mind that we mostly identify with. It’s ego based, logical, and linear and it’s very clever at performing mundane tasks. It’s the mind that balances our budgets, pays the rent, buys groceries, and gets the kids to school on time. We could call it Magician energy but it’s really just a tiny part of our larger mind.

The subconscious mind, on the other hand, comprises the majority of our minds. Unlike the conscious mind, it never needs to sleep and it’s working 24/7, processing information, calculating what the future may look like and telling us when something’s wrong.

The most important thing about the subconscious mind, though, is that it’s our connection to the super-conscious mind, AKA the Universe. Though that connection, it has almost infinite power to manifest anything that we truly desire. That’s Fool energy.

Those two minds – conscious and subconscious – need to work together. Although the subconscious mind is infinitely powerful, it just drifts without direction from the conscious mind. Even worse, it can construct our reality based on the crap that flows through the internet, our televisions, our cultures and our religions, which may have very little to do with what we really want to manifest.

So we need to use that Magician energy – the conscious mind – to sort through our options and figure out where we want to actually go with our lives. Do I want to be rich? Do I want to be an artist? Do I want more love in my life? Once we determine what our overall goals and desires are, then we say, “Hey, subconscious mind/Universe – this is what I’d like to see happen. Please get to work on that.”

THE FOOL DOES THE HEAVY LIFTING

Here’s the most important thing about all of that: The Fool does the heavy lifting. The SOLE PURPOSE of the conscious mind is to figure out where we want to go and turn it over to the subconscious mind/Universe.

The conscious mind has a terrible time accepting that notion, because it’s ego based. It wants to control every little detail of the manifestation process, and so it keeps snatching it back from the Universe and imposing more and more cursed hows on the process. Every single time that we do that, we’re slamming doors shut instead of letting the subconscious mind open more doors.

And so, yes, in my opinion there can be no doubt that the most powerful card in the Tarot deck is The Fool. It’s the primal energy that makes good things manifest in our lives. The Magician can guide that energy but, by itself, it’s nothing but a control freak in a red robe.

Doing Justice to Our Beliefs With Byron Katie’s The Work

A look at how to change our core beliefs using the methods from Byron Katie’s, “The Work.”

The Justice card in the Tarot is, at its most basic level, about society judging us, but there are few harsher judgements than those which we make about ourselves. And most of them are horribly unjust.

As Cynthia Kane points out in, “Talk to Yourself Like a Buddhist,” we say things to ourselves that we would never, ever, in a million years, say to our friends and family. When we really start listening to our inner dialogue, we may find little poisoned pellets like:

You’re so stupid.

I can’t believe that you fucked that up . . . again.

What in the hell is wrong with you?

Why can’t you ever get anything right?

Your problem is that you’re just lazy.

And on and on and on. The more dysfunctional that our family of origin was, the more likely we are to have that harsh inner critic constantly deriding us. Constantly telling us that we don’t measure up and we’re never quite good enough, no matter how hard we try.

Now, there’s a basic formula in New Age Thought that goes like this:

Our thoughts create our emotions.

Our emotions create our vibrations.

Our vibrations create our lives.

When we break that down, it just means that every single thought we have has an emotion attached to it, either positive or negative. When we think of puppies or cookies, we feel good. When we think of dentists and written tests, we feel bad. Our feelings about those thoughts add up to create our overall vibration. If we’re constantly thinking of things that make us sad or scared, we end up with negative vibrations. If we’re constantly thinking of things that make us happy, we end up with positive vibrations. And, eventually, our overall vibrations will draw similar vibrations into our lives. If we have really negative vibrations, we’ll draw in negative people and failures. If we have really positive vibrations, we’ll draw in positive people and abundance.

It’s really cool when we figure that out because it empowers us to make changes. We can jump in at any one of those three points and start to transform our lives. Most of the self-help guides advocate one approach or another. If we change our thoughts, we’ll change our emotions. Or if we work on feeling happier about life, that will change our thoughts. Or if we meditate on raising our vibrations, that will change what we attract. Pull on any one of those three strings and our lives will start to change.

There’s one element that’s frequently left out of that equation, though, and that element is beliefs. We can change our thoughts, our emotions, and our vibrations but if we don’t change our underlying beliefs, we’re not going to get anywhere.

The classic example of that is the person who wins the lottery and two years later he’s bankrupt. Maybe he spent hundreds of hours visualizing getting that winning ticket and wrote out a kazillion affirmations and did vision boards and all of that helped him to win. But he didn’t change that underlying belief, which was, “I’m poor,” so the money floated away. It wasn’t a vibrational match for his basic beliefs about himself.

To put it in a nutshell, our beliefs create our thoughts which create our emotions which create our vibrations which create our lives.

Which begs the question, “What IS a belief?”

A belief is nothing more than a thought that we repeat over and over until we think it’s true. Sometime they ARE true, but frequently they aren’t. If we want to know what our real beliefs are, all we have to do is to listen to that inner dialogue. If we’re constantly degrading and belittling ourselves, then those are beliefs that we need to change before we can effect permanent changes in our lives.

So how do we change our basic, underlying beliefs? We actually pull them out and look at them.

One of the most powerful tools for doing that is Byron Katie’s, “The Work.”

To use The Work method, we take a, “work sheet,” (download one here) and focus on four areas:

1- What’s the belief that I need to change?

2- Is it true?

3 – What kind of a person would I be without that belief?

4 – What are some opposite turn arounds that I can substitute for that belief?

Here’s an example of a negative belief that a lot of us carry around: “I’ll never have enough money.”

IS IT TRUE? For most of us, it’s not true at all, at least for most of our lives. There are very few of us who have been homeless or starving. That doesn’t mean that we haven’t gone through some bitchy, bad times. There may very well have been times when paying our bills or even just buying groceries was a struggle. Still, if we’re honest with ourselves, most of us, most of the time, manage to pull it together even through the occasional hard times.

Of course, one of the questions that we need to look at there is, “What do I mean by, ‘enough money.’ “ If we put together a vision board that’s covered with pictures of sports cars, McMansions, and private jets, we’ll probably feel like we don’t have, “enough.” If we think in terms of food, clothing, shelter, a car that runs, and a job, though, we realize that we’ve usually had plenty.

WHO WOULD I BE WITHOUT THAT BELIEF? Well, for one thing, we’d probably be a lot more grateful. When we actually focus on the fact that we have always had enough money to eat, enough money for a warm place to live in the winter, enough money to pay our bills, then we can start to see how very lucky we’ve actually been.

For another thing, we can start feeling a lot less anxious about the future. If we’re able to look at our past and see that there’s always, somehow, been enough, then we can see that there’s absolutely no empirical evidence for the idea that we won’t have enough in the future. It’s just a movie playing in our heads that’s based on a bad fantasy.

WHAT ARE SOME OPPOSITE TURN AROUNDS TO THIS BELIEF? The obvious one, of course, is, “I always have enough money.” Some others might be, “I manifest what I need as I go along,” or “The Universe always provides for my needs.”

Once we’re able to flip that basic belief, then some miracles start to happen. Our thoughts begin to be more positive (“I always have enough money.”). Since our thoughts have changed, our emotions start to change (“I really don’t have anything to worry about financially and I’m happy about that.”). Since our emotions have changed, our vibrations start to change (“I feel really secure, relaxed and positive about life.”). And when our vibrations change, then we start to create the life that we always wanted.

It’s a really good and relatively simple method for changing our basic beliefs. Of course, Byron Katie probably named it, “The Work,” for a reason, because it does take some work. It’s not just a matter of sitting down and filling out a sheet of paper. It’s actually taking the time to listen to our own thought stream, write down those negative beliefs, and then meditate on them as we fill out the sheets.

And changing negative beliefs is work on a whole different level, as well. We tend to cling to beliefs about ourselves and the world around us simply because they’re comfortable and they’re what we’re used to. When we adopt the very opposite of those beliefs, it can initially feel very strange and foreign. The negatives will keep popping up in our thought streams for a while, but we now have the consciousness to stop and say, “Nope. It’s not true, it doesn’t make me feel good, and it’s not who I am.”

Note: as a member of Amazon Associates, I may receive a tiny remuneration if you buy a product listed on this page. I am in no way associated with the authors of the books quoted.

The Secret, The Law of Attraction, and Game Show Gods

A look at manifesting what we think we want when the Universe has different ideas.

Once upon a time, when I was in my mid-forties, I found myself standing beside a wild, rushing stream in Northern California. It was a chilly Autumn day and the forest was a wonderful mix of giant redwoods, twisting madrones, and towering, ancient oaks.

I was alone that day and the feeling of magic seemed to positively vibrate through the air. I came to a rocky promontory where the stream poured over a limestone outcropping and dropped twenty feet into a crystal clear pool. I thought that if there was any place in the world where the Fairie Folk would be likely to hide their enchanted treasures, it would be in that mystical glade. And so I asked them, “Fairies, show me your gold!”

Seemingly out of nowhere, there was a powerful blast of wind in the tree tops and thousands and thousands of golden leaves fluttered to the forest floor.

I learned two valuable lessons that day. First of all, don’t get uppity with the Fairies, particularly on their home turf. Secondly, Fairies may have an entirely different idea of what’s really valuable than humans do. I suspect that they may find a shower of golden leaves far more precious than a lump of yellow rock.

I was cogitating about all of that today because I just discovered that the movie, “The Secret,” is now available for free on YouTube. If you haven’t seen it, it’s all about how we can have absolutely anything that we want in life, if we really, really understand the Law of Attraction. It has a sort of a breathless, Dan Brown meets Norman Vincent Peale feeling to it, but it was a groundbreaking film at the time of its release and it’s been a positive force in many people’s lives.

The thing about the Law of Attraction is that it definitely works. Sometimes. And sometimes it doesn’t. For most of us, it works just enough for us to scratch our heads and think, “There’s something going on here and I want to know what it is.”

There is a general principle that if we think positive thoughts, more positive events and people will enter into our lives. If we become more loving, then we’ll start to encounter more loving people. If we’re grateful for the abundance that we have right now, then more abundance will flow into our lives. On the other hand, if we’re constantly depressed and anxious, then the Universe will flow things into our lives to get anxious and depressed about. If we’re constantly cynical and negative, we’ll attract cynical and negative people.

So, yes, “like attracts like,” and the energy we’re putting out will attract energy just like it. The problem seems to be that the Universe may have very different ideas than we do about what we’re looking for.

I have a friend who was completely jazzed when, “The Secret,” came out. She literally watched it several dozen times and took reams of notes so that she could get The Method of Manifesting down perfectly. She made vision boards and spent many hours visualizing and writing out affirmations and she was so relentlessly positive that it was irritating to be around her.

Shortly after that, her husband lost his job, their house was repossessed and they had to live in a travel trailer parked at a camping site in the forest.

Quite understandably, she threw up her hands, pronounced it all, “New Age bullshit,” and even went so far as to become a dedicated atheist. So what went wrong there?

Most Americans approach spirituality and religion as if it were a television game show. For most of us, those are issues we don’t much think about right up until we get our asses caught in a crack. We float right along through life, mostly happy, mostly decent to other people, mostly content with our new cars, new computers, new lovers.

And then – KABLAM!!! – something awful happens. We learn that we have some terrible illness or our life partners leave us or we get fired from our jobs and our houses get repossessed. That’s the point where a lot of us get POWERFULLY religious and we suddenly remember that there’s a God-person who’s supposed to fix everything that’s bad.

We might call that particular God-person the, “Let’s Make a Deal God.” As in, “Let’s make a deal, God. If you’ll just get me out of this mess, I PROMISE I’ll never be bad again. I’ll be a lot better person, God, and . . . and . . . I’ll start going to church and I’ll adopt a puppy and . . . I’ll be good, God. Just PLEASE get me out of this!”

Now, here’s the thing: the God-person (or the Fairies or the Angels or the Universe or Jesus or whatever our particular religious configuration is) does answer our prayers, just not necessarily in a way that makes any sense to us at the time it happens. Like the Fairies on that Autumn day, the Higher Powers out there may have a very different idea about what constitutes gold in our lives than we do. And so, we don’t get exactly what we wanted.

When that happens, we tend to carry the Let’s Make a Deal scenario even further and get really pissed off at the God-person for not holding up his end of the deal. “Look, I wanted the shiny new Jeep that was behind Door Number Three and you gave me the crappy toaster oven that was behind Door Number Two. Well, just forget that part about me adopting a puppy, God. In fact, I just won’t believe in you anymore. Neener, neener, neener!”

Many people approach visualization, manifestation, and the law of attraction in exactly the same way. They think that if they can just find THE method that will make it all work right, they’ll suddenly own a mansion, a sports car, a private jet and they’ll get laid every single night and perhaps every morning, too.

Let’s face it, though: if there was ONE method that worked EVERY SINGLE TIME for EVERY SINGLE PERSON, we’d all be millionaires and we’d be so tired from having great sex that we could barely crawl out of bed. Hell, our butlers would have to serve us our meals in bed, only there wouldn’t BE any butlers because they’d all be millionaires, too.

What a conundrum!

It’s very possible that there’s a guardian angel standing at our shoulders saying, “Yes, dear, I know that you wanted the shiny new Jeep but you really can’t afford the payments or the insurance and you don’t know how to drive a stick shift. On the other hand, we could put some bread in the toaster oven and, look: I brought butter and raspberry jam and Red Zinger tea.”

Or perhaps my friend’s guardian angel was saying, “Yes, dear, I know that you wanted a pot full of Krugerands to appear in your living room, but maybe what you really need is to stop sitting in front of a t.v. watching a movie 30 times in a row and have a little adventure. Life is short. Here’s a nice travel trailer and there’s a beautiful forest. Go.”

Einstein said, “Either everything is a miracle or nothing is a miracle.” It can be really hard to wrap our heads around the idea that we’re getting precisely what we need, when we need it, even if it’s not exactly what we wanted. The key seems to be to realize that miracles are constantly unfolding in our lives, but they tend to unfold slowly and in their own peculiar ways.

Just be patient, wait for the magic to work it out, don’t try to make toast with a Jeep, and don’t get uppity with the Fairies.

Remember that my ebook, “Just the Tarot,” is available on Amazon for less than a jar of raspberry jam.

The Nine of Wands, Spiritual Post-It-Notes, and Being Okay With Not Being Okay

I was recently watching an interview with Brad Yates, author of A Garden of Emotions: Cultivating Peace through EFT Tapping, and he made the point that social media can have the inadvertent effect of making us feel pretty inadequate. It can slide us right into the, “comparison trap,” and we start to think that there must be something really wrong with us and our way of thinking. I sat right up and took notice when he said that, because it rang a major, huge, giant brass bell in my head.

What he was talking about was FaceBook, “positivity.” If we’re involved with the New Age or New Thought movements at all, we run into a LOT of positivity with our on-line friends. We get up in the morning, crank up our Internet Machines, and there’s a virtual blizzard of Spiritual Post-It-Notes. Things like, “I am SO grateful for this beautiful morning!”

Or, “I count my blessings with every breath!”

Or, “Healthy boundaries make for healthy relationships!”

Or, “Always live in an attitude of gratitude!”

And – as actual human beings – sometimes we feel like shit. In fact, sometimes we feel like shit a lot of the time. But we’re looking at all of these bright, shiny thoughts from all of these bright, shiny people and THEY don’t seem to feel like shit all of the time, or even some of the time, or even, for god’s sake, EVER.

Almost inevitably we slide into comparing ourselves to them and start thinking that there must be something really wrong with US. How come I don’t feel like a million dollars every single goddamned day the way that they do? I must be a really low-vibes, depressing/depressed human being because a lot of the time I hurt and I don’t feel very freaking grateful.

Of course, the truth of the matter is that if someone says that they’re grateful, happy, joyous and free EVERY SINGLE DAY, they’re either shallow or they’re a saint or they’re in denial or they’ve got some really, really good weed.

All right, granted, there are some people out there who really are happy most of the time and more power to them. Some of them were born with a basically happy disposition. Some of them have worked very, very hard to get into a place of grace and joy. I’m not denigrating or diminishing that at all.

Most of us, though, don’t wake up grinning every single freaking morning. For some of us life feels very much like the Nine of Wands tarot card: we’re still standing, we’re still upright and strong, but we’ve had the crap beaten out of us by life and we’re pretty wounded.

And that’s okay.

That’s where we’re at. That’s our starting point on the map for the rest of our journey.

Mike Dooley, who has done such wonderful teaching about manifesting and visualizations, often compares reaching our goals to setting a GPS in our cars. We feed in the information about where we want to go and then the gizmo just takes it from there. We don’t argue with it or second guess it – we just follow the directions. In the same sense, he says, we can just set our goals and then let the Universe take it from there. We don’t need to constantly obsess about the details (what he calls, “the poisoned hows,”) because the Universe will keep popping up new road signs and different paths to get us there.

Implicit in that, though, is the idea that we KNOW where we’re located at the beginning of the journey and we’re HONEST about it. If I’m in San Jose and I want to get to Phoenix, but I tell my GPS that I’m in Dallas, it ain’t gonna work out too well.

And, in just the same way, if I’m beat up, knocked down, drug around, and life has beaten the stuffing right out of my meditation pillow, putting up Spiritual Post-It-Notes about how grateful I am ain’t gonna work out too well.

Unfortunately, social media sites are generally piss-poor places to be honest about what we’re really feeling. It’s difficult to admit publicly that we’re NOT the Great and Mighty Wizard of Oz and there may be a lonely, sometimes sad, sometimes frightened person behind the curtain who’s just pulling levers. It’s especially difficult when so many other people seem to be doing so well. At least, all of their posts say they’re doing so well.

In a way – and perhaps a healthy way – this impossibly cheerful positivity has intensified since the start of the pandemic. People really ARE struggling with depression and fear and loneliness and we’re trying to encourage each other to stay in healthy, positive frames of mind as much as we can.

So it may be a good, temporary coping mechanism. Maybe we DO need to be as optimistic and up-beat as we can be, until we find our way out of this weird, scary virus maze. It’s what we used to call, “whistling past the graveyard,” and in this case the graveyard is very real and it’s got a half a million Americans in it.

Long term, though, simply pretending that everything is alright when it’s not, doesn’t really work. It doesn’t get us to our destinations because we’re not being honest about where we’re starting from.

Brad Yates went on to say that there are no such things as negative emotions. WOW! But . . . but . . . but . . . I thought I was supposed to be happy all of the time!

Not.

Repeat – there are no such things as negative emotions. There are no BAD emotions.

There are emotions that are uncomfortable. There are emotions that feel sad or that arise out of situations that are depressing or painful. But they are all our emotions, they are all part of our story, and they serve to tell us where we are before we take the next step in our journeys.

In 1967, Thomas Harris published a wonderfully cheery book entitled, “I’m Okay, You’re Okay.” In a nutshell, it promulgated the idea that we’re all just fine, we just misunderstand one another sometimes, and we should always remember that you and I and – gee whiz! – pretty much everyone is . . . well . . . okay.

To which Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, that amazing wizardess who spent a lifetime studying death and dying, replied:

“I’m Not Okay.

You’re Not Okay.

And That’s Okay.”

And it really IS okay. It’s right where we’re supposed to be when we take our next step on the journey.

The Ten of Wands, Mike Dooley, and Becoming a Topless Cellist

This is a post about Mike Dooley’s concepts of choosing our goals, visualizing them, and manifesting them. It discusses the Ten of Wands tarot card as a representation of someone who has too many goals and needs to narrow her focus while remaining open to all possibilities.

If you’re a Great Thinker – and most of us at least believe that we are – you probably have a lot of Great Ideas. In fact, you may have too many. Way too many. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

Mike Dooley has a wonderful book called Choose Them Wisely: Thoughts Become Things! As the title implies, what we think will inevitably manifest in our physical lives, sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly, but what we think will become our physical realities.

Now, the Tarot slices our everyday lives into four quarters represented by the Minor Arcana. The suit of Cups represent our emotions, Pentacles represent our relationship with physical possessions, Swords represent our physical drives and aggressions, and Wands represent our ideas, our thoughts.

The Ten of Wands is a wonderful representation of someone who has way too many Great Ideas. Each wand represents a thought and this poor son of a bitch has SO many thoughts going on in his head that he can barely stagger along his path. He’s literally weighted down with all of his wonderful, fabulous, potentially AMAZING thoughts. So much so that he can’t even lift up his head and look at the world around him. All he can do is carry the burden of his thoughts and stare at the path that he’s on, hoping he doesn’t stumble and fall and – goddess forbid – lose his stupefying collection of Great Ideas.

The bad thing about having too many Great Ideas is that it can be just as discouraging as having too few Great Ideas. It can paralyze us. We have so many options swimming around in our heads that we just really can’t decide which direction to go in – so we go nowhere. It’s like we’re saying to ourselves, “Well, I could be a Great Artist, but if I put all of that time and energy into being a Great Artist then I won’t have any time and energy to put into being a Great Writer.”

So we sit around on our asses and worry about that and – in the meantime – we don’t write and we don’t paint. We’re stuck.

We can actually see a pretty good representation of this with The Chariot card. You can take one look at this guy and tell that he has some Great Ideas. I mean, look at those shoulder pads! Who wouldn’t want a jacket with Moon shoulders? He’s glorious! But if you take a little closer look, you see that the Sphinxes aren’t harnessed to anything and he doesn’t have any reins in his hands. He looks fabulous, but he’s not going anywhere because he doesn’t have any direction, he doesn’t have any focus. He just can’t decide which way to go.

One of Dooley’s ideas about getting out of the trap of having too few options can also be useful in dealing with having too many options. Make up a list of your options, of all of the things that you could possibly do to move forward in your life, and then choose the three LEAST SUCKY options and move forward with those.

If you have too many Great Ideas, that may sound like a daunting task, but it really isn’t. My experience is that a lot of my Great Ideas can be slotted under the category of, “Probably Ain’t Gonna Happen.” For instance, when I was in Junior High School, I got it into my head that I wanted to jump hurdles on the track team. And I would have been absolutely amazing at it except for the fact that everyone in my family has short legs and I kept jumping into the hurdles instead of over them.

In the same sense, if you’ve always dreamed of being a porn star and you have a small penis, that, “Probably Ain’t Gonna Happen.” It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with my short legs or your small penis, it’s just not a good fit. So to speak.

So we can winnow out a lot of our Great Ideas from the get-go. And, as we do that, we find that a lot of them are actually pretty Sucky Ideas. Eventually, as we continue to work on our lists of Great and Sucky Ideas, we’ll come down to the three that are the least Sucky and we can move forward with those.

This is the point where a lot of us get paralyzed again. Should I really give up on my life-long dream of being a world famous Juggler on the Ed Sullivan Show, just because Ed Sullivan is dead? Am I making a dreadful mistake in abandoning my idea of being a Topless Cellist at Carnegie Hall?

This is also where Mike Dooley came up with a genius concept: IT DOESN’T MATTER.

No matter what we choose, it doesn’t matter. The main thing is to choose something and then start moving forward with it. That’s probably the single most important thing that we can do: get off of our asses and start moving. And, as we begin to move forward – with ANYTHING – the Universe will provide the next step and then the next step and then the next step and eventually we end up exactly where we want to be.

That takes a tremendous load off of our shoulders, especially if we’re Great Thinkers with lots of Great Ideas. We really don’t have to decide too much. We don’t have to spend endless hours analyzing our options, playing scenario tapes in our heads, and fretting over possible disasters. All we have to do is figure out a couple of our least sucky options and start moving toward them. We provide the moving feet and the Universe provides the path to walk on.

As Dooley put it, “Do WHAT you can, with WHAT you’ve got, from WHERE you are, and it will ALWAYS be enough.”

And we can overcome any hurdles. Or, if we’ve got short legs, we can learn to run sprints. It’s all good. It’s all just right.

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Karmic Re-Set with the Nine of Swords

I remember the last time I pulled the Nine of Swords in one of my personal readings. I had a very spiritual reaction, which was, “Well . . . shit.” Swiftly followed by another, which was, “Why me?”

It probably wasn’t one of my better days.

The Nine of Swords absolutely screams, “karma.” The individual is lying in bed with his head in his hands, a perfect image of someone who has just awakened from a screaming nightmare. The quilt on the bed is covered with astrological symbols showing past incarnations in different signs of the zodiac. The swords behind him seem locked together like the bars in a prison cell.

Just the Tarot by Dan Adair – a kindle ebook available on Amazon

There can be no doubt that this is someone who has just realized that he’s accumulated some terrible, terrible karma and is going to have to pay a serious price for it.

There’s another way of looking at it, though.

If you’ve spent any substantial time in spiritual exploration then you’ve had that, “Ah HA!” moment when you realize that you are a co-creator of your life. It goes something like this:

I control my thoughts. My thoughts cause my emotions. My emotions cause my energy vibrations. My energy vibrations, through the Law of Attraction, determine what’s going to manifest in my life. Therefore, I control (or create) what’s manifesting in my life.

To put it more succinctly, if I’m broadcasting a lot of negative vibrations I’m going to attract a lot of negative crap into my life. If my vibrations are positive, positive things will flow into my life.

There’s a real rush that goes along with that revelation. We feel very liberated from random circumstances and from people victimizing us. We realize that all of this isn’t being done TO us, we’re making it happen to ourselves, which means that we can change it.

But there are a couple of, “Well . . . shit,” moments that go along with that.

The first one is, “Well . . . shit . . . I made this. This is MY karma. I’m totally responsible for this mess.”

It wasn’t our abusive fathers, or our crazy ex-wife or husband, or the country or culture we grew up in, or the opportunities we did or didn’t have, or anything OUT THERE. We manifested all of it into our lives or we chose to NOT manifest something better. We made it.

Well . . . shit . . .

The second appallingly scary moment happens when we realize that it means that we’re also creating what happens next.

Alcoholics Anonymous and the other 12 Step Programs have a saying: “You can start your day over whenever you want to.” In other words, if you’re having a terrible day you can always take a deep breath, reconnect with your serenity, and change how your day is going.

Tibetan Buddhism embraces the concept that we can start our karma over whenever we want to. No, we can’t escape the unfolding of consequences from our previous actions but we can make those consequences a lot better by starting to live our lives with love and compassion and the creation of good karma.

And when we realize – truly realize – that we are creating our lives right now, right here, with the choices that we’re making, that we’re starting over, that’s a pretty heavy responsibility.

For one thing we have to get really clear on just what we DO want. What are my values? What do I want in my life? Peace? Serenity? Happiness? Family? Sex? Money? What do I want to create in my life? If all of this isn’t just stuff that’s happening to me, if it isn’t just things that people are doing to me, if I’m MAKING my life . . . what do I want it to look like?

And if we’re going to choose to consciously create our own lives – and we don’t have to, we can stay unconscious – then we have to consciously choose, every day, every hour, to control our emotions, our vibrations, and our manifestations.

And that’s not easy.

Well . . . shit . . .