narcissists – Just the Tarot

Bundles of Sticks, Ajahn Brahm, and the Ten of Wands

Finding closure on experiences that don’t make any sense.

Should we carry our past with us or just throw it away?

The Ten of Wands shows a person plodding along, carrying a large bundle of sticks. The, “sticks,” are wands, the suit of the Tarot that represents ideas, so he’s actually carrying a massive number of ideas.

If we take a little closer look at the card we notice a few odd things about it. First, he’s not at all carrying the sticks the way that we’d expect. If we pick up a big old honker of a load of sticks, we’d throw them over our shoulder, right? Instead, he’s carrying them in front of himself, with his head pressed into the bundle.

Second, the sticks are all crossed up at the bottom and going in different directions at the top. If someone asked us to lug a large pile of sticks across the yard, we’d probably throw a rope around them and tie them together, not carry them in a loose, unwieldy mess.

Third, he’s definitely not watching where he’s going. His head is tilted down, as if he’s watching each step he’s taking, rather than keeping his eyes on his destination.

So just by looking at the face of the card, we can deduce quite a few things about it. This guy is probably an intellectual, or at least someone who thinks a great deal, because he has many, many ideas that he’s carrying around. His ideas don’t really, “fit,” together, and they’ve become quite a burden for him. In fact, he’s so involved with carrying his ideas that he really has no idea where he’s going. He’s so lost in his ideas that he has no perspective on his life.

The Australian Buddhist monk, Ajahn Brahm, tells a funny story about sticks. When he was a novice monk he was strolling through the forest with his teacher, the head monk at the monastery where he was studying. The master suddenly picked up a stick from the forest floor and asked, “How heavy is this stick, Ajahn Brahm?” And then he threw it away and asked, “How heavy is it now?”

The point, of course, is that something is, “heavy,” only when we hold on to it. It’s the act of PICKING IT UP AND CARRYING IT that makes it heavy. We don’t look at a stick on the ground and say, “Oh, crap, that’s heavy.” We only say it when we try to pick it up. It’s our act of grasping something that makes it seem heavy, not the thing itself.

Human beings are natural storytellers. We all reflexively try to make sense out of our lives and weave the events we experience into a coherent, sensible narrative. We have an innate drive to try to make sense out of what happens to us and so we’re constantly reviewing our pasts and rearranging the puzzle pieces of our lives into some sort of a rational structure.

We don’t just say, “Well, I lost my fucking mind and decided to quit my job, leave my husband, and move to Montana to grow dental floss. Just for no particular reason.” Instead, we say, “After several years of marriage I felt a yearning for solitude and spiritual growth that could only be satisfied by disconnecting from social obligations that had become increasingly mundane.”

That feels ever so much better.

We need to feel that it all makes sense, somehow.

From a Buddhist perspective, constantly trying to make sense out of our pasts is tantamount to picking up that stick. It only becomes heavy, it only becomes a burden, when we grasp it and carry it around with us. In fact, Ajahn Brahm actually recommends writing, “this is my past,” on a stick and throwing it as far away as we can. Just let it go. When we’re not carrying it, it’s not heavy.

Now, modern psychology has a different take on it. Therapists tell us that it IS important to try to make sense out of what’s happened to us and to strive for a sense of meaningfulness in our lives. Bottom lining it, that’s why we go to therapists: because our lives aren’t making any sense and we need someone to help us sort it all out.

I suspect that for most of us, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. If we wake up one morning and have no past, we may have suffered a psychotic break. Or, in the case of people like Eckhart Tolle, perhaps we’ve had a massive revelation, a huge psychic shift that made us realize how absurd our previous thinking was.

For those of us who are neither psychotics nor enlightened spiritual masters, though, just tossing our pasts out the window isn’t an option. It seems we can’t just NOT think about it.

Which brings us to that tired, but still valid, word: closure.

We think of closure as having worked through a problem or a process in life until we’ve made sense of it, until it fits logically into our coherent narrative of what our lives mean. If we go through a divorce, for instance, we may go to a therapist and try to figure out why it happened. What was our role in the relationship breaking apart? What was our spouses role? What did we do wrong? What did we do right? What can we learn from it to make our future relationships better? Eventually, when we’ve talked through all of those issues, we start to achieve closure and we’re ready to move on from it. We haven’t necessarily thrown the stick away, but we’ve made it a hell of a lot lighter to carry.

There are other issues, though, that we can never seem to make any sense out of.

– If you were badly abused as a child, that doesn’t make any sense. You didn’t do anything to deserve it and there’s no logical or emotional reason it should have happened to you.

-If you’re an open and loving person and you got chewed up and spit out by a malignant narcissist, that doesn’t make any sense. You didn’t ask for it, you didn’t deserve it, and it shouldn’t have happened.

-If the new boss from hell fires you from your dream job because he’s a sexist or a sadist, that doesn’t make any sense. You were a great employee, there’s no justice in it, and it shouldn’t have happened.

So there’s a kind of a subclass of experiences that we all have that we could call, “doesn’t make any sense,” experiences. Those are the experiences that get really, “sticky.” Those are the experiences that we pick up and carry with us. We go over and over and over them, trying to figure them out, trying to make them somehow fit into our narratives, our story. But they never do.

“Doesn’t make any sense,” experiences are the ones that are most likely to wound us spiritually and emotionally. They keep us stuck. They keep us wounded. They keep us living in pain.

Oddly, though, they’re also the experiences that are easiest to let go of, if we think of them in the right way. If we’ve honestly, sincerely, conscientiously tried to figure them out and we can’t do it, we can just say, “Well, fuck it. This doesn’t make any sense.” And then we can put that experience in a nice, “doesn’t make any sense,” box, tie a brightly colored, “doesn’t make any sense,” ribbon around it, and toss it in the nearest river.

Maybe we’re not enlightened or smart enough to throw all of our, “sticks,” away, but we can throw some of them away. We can consciously choose which parts are valuable and which parts are worthless. We can drop some of the burden and make it a little easier to move forward in our lives.

And that’s a good start.

THE DEVIL CARD AND THE CONUNDRUM OF EVIL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD

An exploration of the notion of evil as it applies to anti-social personality disorders.

There are some people who seem to be just . . . evil.

It feels kind of icky, just making that statement. It seems like stepping into that whole judeo-christian tar-pit of demon possession and punishing, crazy gods and hell fire and damnation and sinners. We can see that idea illustrated pretty well in The Devil tarot card. Two nude people are chained to a black altar while a gigantic, scary demon bat/goat sort of a thing hovers over them. Yikes! They done been possessed by the devil!!!

Evil in that context seems like a very medieval, primitive sort of a concept. Something that you expect to hear coming out of the mouths of fundamentalist religious people who aren’t very spiritually evolved.

Still . . .there are some people who seem functionally evil.

Many of us have had the ill-fortune to encounter a few psychopaths or sociopaths or malignant narcissists. Usually – if we’re normal people – they take us completely by surprise. Many of them are extremely adept at concealing their inner natures, but they basically have NO EMPATHY. No sense of compassion. No kindness. No love living inside of them. Not even a little sprout.

It’s a shock, when we realize that. That these are people who appear to be perfectly normal on the outside (in fact, in the case of narcissists, they may be very attractive on the outside) but have nothing but a dead, arid desert in their hearts. What’s worse, many of them aren’t content with just being morally and ethically dead, they actually delight in causing harm to others. Sociopaths may be content to live and let live (as long as you don’t cross them) but malignant narcissists and psychopaths go out of their way to fuck people up. They don’t see other people as humans – they see them as prey.

It can still be difficult to get from that behavior to the concept of evil. We tend to view, “evil,” in terms of moral wrongness and choice. In other words, if we see a clear choice between loving kind behavior on the one hand and cruel, malicious behavior on the other and we choose to be cruel and malicious, then that’s evil. The evil lies in perceiving the distinction between the two behaviors and choosing the one that causes harm.

Psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists don’t seem to have that sense of choice. It’s not that they’re choosing to be evil rather than being kind, they simply have no concept of kindness. What’s more, they view that lack of a sense of compassion as a strength. They view normal people who have a conscience and try to be kind as weak and they go out of their ways to exploit that weakness.

So, in a classic sense of ethics, we can’t really see them as being evil, because they don’t have that capacity to choose between being a good human being and being a fucked up human being. They’re just fucked up. Period.

We may embrace the medical/psychiatric model and try to make excuses for them. We look at them from a normal person’s point of view and think, “How awful it must be to live in a world of no love and no kindness. Something horrifically traumatic must have happened to them to make them that terrible.”

Well, yes and no. Sociopaths, for instance, have brains that are measurably, physically different from those of normal people. They appear to have been born that way. Not all people who are born with that brain structure become sociopaths, however. It seems that something has to happen in their environment to trigger the brain into becoming sociopathic. It’s like they’re hardwired that way at birth, but someone or something has to throw the switch to activate the wiring.

Psychologists and researchers are still arguing about exactly what it is that throws the switch. It could be emotional trauma, physical trauma, horrible parents, malnutrition, all of the above or – in some cases – none of the above. A lot of sociopaths were born into wealthy, loving families. Somehow, though, they end up with NO feelings of compassion or empathy, with a total lack of the characteristics that make us fully human.

It’s important to note, though, that THEY DON’T FEEL THAT WAY. At all. They’re quite happy with the way they exist in the world and think the rest of us are fools. They don’t see themselves as lacking in basic human characteristics, they see us as weaklings.

It’s also important to note that there are apparently no, “cures,” for these disorders. There’s no way to magically change them into, “normal,” human beings. If you dig around on the internet you’ll find some theorizing that talk therapy may be effective in treating malignant narcissism, but when you ask actual therapists about that, they just shake their heads.

There is some evidence that the number of sociopaths and narcissists among us is actually increasing, but there are arguments against that. It could be that our methodology for detecting them has just gotten better. It could be that they’re just more visible because of our new world of social media.

In any case, there’s no question that they’ve always been among us. In fact, Austrian philosopher Karl Popper argued that what we call, “history,” is largely the record of the psychopaths of our species. We study people like Hitler, Napolean, and Genghis Khan, people who caused immense pain and suffering in the world and just didn’t care, but we ignore all of the millions of kind, loving souls who were trying to just get through life.

Although they are very much a minority, almost a tiny fraction of the population, they have an oversized effect on the people around them. Because of them, we tend to question the goodness of human nature. We see the world as a dangerous place and fail to see all of the love and compassion that exists in the majority of human beings.

Even worse, they frequently succeed in dragging us down to their level. Anyone who’s been worked over by a malignant narcissist will tell you that you emerge from that experience with a lot less trust of other people and with a constant question of whether the next person you become involved with will be a real human being or another monster in disguise.

So . . . we end up having to recognize that there ARE people living among us who have no empathy, no compassion, no sense of ethics, no internal moral compass, and who cause a great deal of suffering for other human beings.

We can’t really call them, “evil,” in the ethical sense of their choosing to be rotten human beings. And we can’t really use the medical model and say that they’re, “sick,” because many of them live normal, productive lives and appear to be quite happy, making everyone around them miserable. And, thankfully, we’re evolving out of that primitive model of thinking that they’re possessed by demons or they’re servants of the devil.

But there they are, walking among us like human question marks. How can you be a human being and exist in that space? If you DO exist in that space, are you still fully human? It’s truly a conundrum that currently has no solution. Until there IS a solution, they can at least serve as a contrast for the rest of us. We can look at them and realize, “That’s what I DON’T want to be.”

Dan Adair is the author of, “Just the Tarot,” available on Amazon.com at a very reasonable price.

Panic Attacks, Gas Lighting and The Moon Card

Have you ever had a panic attack?

They’re absolutely, 100%, no doubt about it, HORRIBLE. You can’t catch your breath, your pulse rate goes through the ceiling, your heart is like a jack hammer in the middle of your chest, and you feel like you’re going to die.

And it’s all an illusion. There’s really NOTHING wrong with you, at all, but it FEELS like the world is ending and vultures are sitting on your shoulders.

I had a series of them about ten years ago when my life partner was becoming seriously ill. One of the lovely things about them is that they seem to come totally out of the blue. With the first one, I was driving merrily along The Great Highway of Life in my little Honda and WHAM!!! “Danger, Will Robinson, danger, danger! Be afraid! Be very, very afraid.” I somehow managed to get myself to the local emergency room where they examined me and gave me an extremely professional shrug of the shoulders.

“Nothing’s wrong with you, man. Blood pressure’s normal, EEG’s normal, you’re incredibly sexy and good looking.”

Well, they didn’t really say the part about being sexy and good looking but I’m sure it was on their minds.

I couldn’t believe it. I was dying and it was just . . . in my head. Hmmmm . . .

Once I figured out what was going on I did a lot of research on panic attacks. There are some interesting theories out there about what causes them, but nothing definitive. Breathing into a paper bag can help. Benadryl can help. My favorite piece of advice was, “Think of something else. Sing something happy.” Oddly it works.

But I want to go back to the part about them being illusions. The Moon card is all about psychological illusions. As I said in my original definition:

Think of seeing the world under the light of the moon rather than the sun. Shadows and light blend into one another and our eyes and mind see things that aren’t really there. Or maybe they are.

There is a tendency for the unconscious, unexamined contents of our minds to come forth when The Moon is present.

What I eventually figured out about my panic attacks is that I was living in an illusion and my subconscious didn’t like it. Not at all. My partner was becoming increasingly, seriously ill and I was trying to stay very upbeat about it and reassure her – and myself and her children – that it was nothing to be concerned about, that if we just kept a positive attitude we’d get through it and she’d be just fine. My subconscious, on the other hand, was looking at it and saying, “Holy shit! Carol is really, really sick. You need to pay attention to this, Dan!”

And, when I didn’t pay attention to it, my subconscious said, “Okay . . . well how about this? How about if I throw an absolute screaming fit and make you FEEL like you’re dying? How about a nice big fat panic attack or three? Will you pay attention now?”

I paid attention. The panic attacks stopped.

The point is that there is something in our psyches that is always watching over us and warning us if we go too far off track, if we get too disconnected from reality. Eckhart Tolle calls it, “the Watcher.” Jeffrey Schwartz calls it, “The Wise Advocate.” I’m referring to it here as, “the subconscious.” It’s reality based, it’s dispassionate, and it will always blow a very loud whistle if we get too delusional about what’s really going on in our lives. Some of us may have panic attacks, some of us may start having inexplicable accidents or become very anxious and distracted or angry. It’s our inner guidance system saying, “Pay attention. This is serious.”

It’s also a great defense against narcissistic gaslighting. The term gaslighting is derived from the 1944 film Gaslight, where a husband tries to convince his wife that she’s insane by causing her to question herself and her reality. Gaslighting is standard operating procedure for narcissists at a certain point in their destructive relationships.

As Doctor Ramani explains in this video, narcissists will eventually begin to treat you like shit and betray your trust in every imaginable way. It’s what they do. BUT . . . just to make it a little bit worse, they will always tell you that you’re just imagining it.

They put you down in front of your friends – you’re just imagining it!

They devalue or ignore your opinions – you’re just being delusional!

They screw around on you – you’re just being paranoid!

There’s actually an old joke in Texas where a woman walks in on her husband while he’s in bed with another woman and he says, “Now, darlin’, who are you going to believe – me or your lying eyes?”

It’s a funny joke but that’s precisely the level that narcissists operate on. And it makes their partners crazy, just like in the movie.

But that’s a good thing. That’s our subconscious, our Watcher, our Wise Advocate, saying, “Something here is very, very, wrong. Pay attention.”

And, if we can manage that shift in perspective, if we can say, “Wait a minute . . . maybe I’m NOT crazy, maybe this really IS happening,” then our so-called symptoms are suddenly transformed into very healthy warning signs. If I’m depressed, if I’m angry, if I’m anxious – and, yes, if I’m having panic attacks – something is out of whack in my life. Something in my conscious life is out of synch with my Watcher and my Watcher is ALWAYS right.

When we do that course correction and bring our conscious perceptions back into alignment with our subconscious Watcher, the symptoms disappear. It’s not necessarily because anything in our environment has changed or gotten better, it’s simply that we’re being honest about what’s going on and there’s no longer a split in our consciousness.

We’ve achieved integrity as defined by the dictionary: the quality or state of being complete or undivided. Which is way better than feeling like you have an elephant sitting on your chest and you’re about to die. In the immortal words of Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Don’t panic and carry a towel.”

And you’ll be alright.

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 Magician, The Devil, and the Habit of Evil

Have you ever had someone in your life who was truly evil? I mean, beyond our usual descriptors of, “He’s an angry person.” Or mean. Or disturbed. Or selfish.

I mean, really, genuinely evil. Someone who consciously inflicts as much pain as they can, knowing that it’s wrong. It can leave you wondering about the world and about everything you believe in.

For most of history, human beings have been using a sort of, “argument from nature,” to excuse their worst behavior. They point to the world of animals where fangs and claws seem to rule, and pronounce that it’s either kill or be killed, the strong survive and the weak die, and, since we’re animals, too, those rules apply to us, as well. We HAVE to be cruel because it’s our nature.

Even leaving aside their totally disregarding all of the love and nurturing that we ALSO see in the animal world, it’s a bogus point of view. They are deliberately ignoring the fact that good and evil are choices and that where no choice exists no concept of evil can exist.

We might feel pretty squeamish watching a cat torture a mouse but we don’t think that the cat is evil because of it. We recognize that it’s the cat’s nature and instinct to hunt and kill and that the cat hasn’t made a conscious choice in the matter. There’s no evil because there’s no choice between good and evil and where there’s no choice there can be no morality.

In The Fool card, we see pure energy entering into the world. In The Magician card we see a human being directing that energy and choosing how it will be used. He or she can use it for benefit or harm, for good or for evil, and that’s the point where morality is born.

To a certain extent, those of us who have embraced the New Age movement are guilty of being a little goody two-shoes about the existence of evil. We try to live in the affirmation of love and caring and we try to NOT let negativity, malice, anger, and hatred into our lives or our consciousness. But, as Louise Hay said, “If you are going to clean the house, you have to see the dirt.” Pretending the evil isn’t there doesn’t make it go away.

The good news is that there’s probably a LOT less evil in the world than some religions would have us believe. If we recognize that true evil involves a conscious choice to hurt and cause suffering we can eliminate all of the animal world because they operate on instinct, not choice.

Psychotics – even serial killers – can’t really be called evil in the pure sense because they can’t make rational choices.

Serious alcoholics and drug addicts can’t really be called evil – no matter how much damage they do – because they’re driven by their compulsions and disease.

Sociopaths and narcissists get us into an interesting – and scary – gray area. Sociopaths actually recognize that other people make moral choices between good and evil but they have no internal moral compass themselves. They recognize the concepts but they just don’t care about them.

Malignant narcissists also recognize that other people make moral choices but they think we’re stupid to do so. They delight in manipulating people who have a sense of right and wrong and use those deceptions to enhance their own sense of being superior to everyone else. “See how I charmed you and lied to you and you were too stupid to know the difference?”

And that’s a strange thing to wrap your head around. If someone knows the difference between good and evil behavior on an intellectual level, but has no heart, no compassion, no empathy with others, are they actually capable of understanding the hurt and pain they’re inflicting? And if they don’t really understand it, are they evil or just very flawed humans?

I dunno.

Sadly, it seems that a lot of the evil in the world and in ourselves is a matter of plain old habit and rationalization.

The Devil card is very dramatic. We see two humans in chains with a literal Bat Out of Hell glowering above them. The riff on this from fundamentalists christians would be that there is evil everywhere and if you’re not careful The Devil can reach out and SNATCH you up, just like that!

But – again – evil is not something that is external to us; it’s an internal choice. In fact, it’s a series of choices. Despite the theme in horror films, no one is born evil. We just get comfortable with it. We CHOOSE to act wrongly, to react with anger instead of compassion, to indulge our rage instead of finding our love, until choosing to be a curse in the world rather than a blessing is a habit.

So the people in The Devil card aren’t just wearing their chains. They made them, one link at a time.

“Little by little a person becomes evil, as a water pot is filled by drops of water… Little by little a person becomes good, as a water pot is filled by drops of water.” – Buddha

Even Hitler was once someone’s beautiful baby boy. Choose carefully.