Tag: middle eastern religions

Time Travelers, Blackberry Salmons, and Babies in Sunbeams

Religious concepts of time and the destruction of mindfulness.

I love Eckhart Tolle’s statement that, “it’s never not now.”  

It’s totally true, but we really have to bend our minds a lot to get into that space.  It’s not too difficult intellectually, because we can look at it rationally and realize that there really is no past (except in our heads) and there really is no future (except in our heads.)  I mean, it’s not like there’s some Past Land, like a Disney adventure ride, that we can go visit.  IT DOESN’T EXIST. Ditto with the Future, because all that it really consists of is our projections of what we think will probably happen.  Maybe.  Could be.

Despite that, we humans spend a MASSIVE amount of our lives Time Traveling to the future or the past and very little time in the Now.  Put another way, we use a lot of our mental space living in something that doesn’t even exist and, as a result of that, we spend very little time existing in the space that actually does exist.  We’re so bad at living in the Now that we actually have to take mindfulness classes to learn how to do it.

So how in the hell did this sorry state of affairs come to be?  We should find the person responsible for this and give him a good thrashing.

Oddly, the answer seems to be that it was our old buddy, Organized Religion, that did it.  In the Tarot, organized religion is represented by The Hierophant and The Hierophant has rules and regulations that we’re all supposed to bend our knees to.  One of his Big Rules is about time and it says, “There isn’t enough of it.”

Now, probably the original way that humans experienced time was sort of like this: 

There was just a big NOW, with no concept of the past or the future.  We just sat there in the bliss of the present moment soaking it all in.  Or it might have been a little bit more like this, where one NOW moment just led into the next NOW moment. No concept of past or future, just NOW.

That’s much the way that babies seem to experience time.  They can lie there for hours staring at a sunbeam and not get worked up at all about what the sunbeams are going to look like tomorrow or worry about what the sunbeams were like yesterday.

At a certain point in our evolution, our experience of time probably shifted more into the model we see with the Wiccan Wheel of Time.  

We started to notice the cycles of the Moon and the passing of the seasons.  There would have been some recognition of certain times of the year but not a great deal of worry about it.  The Native Americans of the Northwest expressed it in terms of activities.  “This is the time when we gather berries.  This is the time we catch salmon.  This is the time when we plant seeds.”  And so on.

Still, there was none of the huge anxiety that we seem to feel about time today.  Tribal people didn’t sit around their camp fires filling in dates on a calendar or trying to figure out how to, “use their time more productively.”  They just did what they needed to do when it was the right time of the year to do it.  “Hey, I’ll bet some fried salmon would go great with these blackberries!  We should probably stack up a little fire wood while we’re at it because it’s going to get cold sometime soon.”

Unfortunately, while the Native Americans were sitting around having fish fries and enjoying their blackberry cobblers, humans in the Middle East were coming up with an entirely different concept of time, which historians refer to as the, “inclined plane,” model.  The reasoning behind this model of time ran very much like this:

  1. – If time exists, then there must have been a BEGINNING of time, because . . . you know . . . there just must have been.
  2. – And if someone, “started,” time, then it must have been someone who was OUTSIDE of time and that would be someone who was eternal and that would be God.
  1.  -And if there was a start to time, then there must also be a stop to time, which is when the world ends and God will do that, too, so I think we should call it The End Times.

Okay, so it wasn’t the best piece of human thinking that we’ve ever seen, but they didn’t have Google in those days so they couldn’t really look things up.  It also represents a HUGE shift in human perception and one that we’re still suffering from today.  All of a sudden, time looks like this:

So time has suddenly become a quantity, rather than a quality. It begins and it ends.  We can measure it, we can put it on calendars, we can plan it, we can carry it around on the daily planners of our phones. Shazam! – we have the concepts of the past and the future, of yesterdays and tomorrows.  We see this notion of time-as-a-quantity deeply ingrained in our languages.

I need to SPEND some time on that.

I’m not sure I want to INVEST that much time in it.

Time’s a WASTING.

This should be a real time SAVER.

I need to ORGANIZE my time.

We’re RUNNING OUT of time.

I’ll PAY you for your time.

When we look at all of those statements, the basic message is that THERE ISN’T ENOUGH TIME, goddamnit!  Which, of course, is ridiculous, because there’s all the time in the world.  Literally.

We’ve been so totally hypnotized by the religious concept of time that we  can’t imagine a world without it.  We’ve devolved from that perfect bliss of a baby tripping out on the sunbeams into beings who are missing our own lives because we’re constantly living in the past or in the future.  The only cure for it seems to be to re-train our brains back into living in the NOW through mindfulness meditations and living mindfully.

I mean, you know, if we can schedule the time for that.  I’ll have to look at my calendar . . .

Just a reminder that there is ALWAYS time to read my ebook, Just the Tarot, and it’s still available, dirt cheap, on Amazon

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.